[Fiction] You Wouldn’t See Me If I Wasn’t Hereby Carolyn Fagan

You Wouldn’t See Me If I Wasn’t Here

by Carolyn Fagan

“You fucked up the cream filling again,” shouted Bobby, turning from the register while still sliding the alleged fucked-up Creamy^TM across the counter to the customer, a tall man burned bronze by the sun, the type of tan achieved only on the skin of Caucasian Floridian retirees intent on becoming more reptilian than human. Summer was barely cracking open, but snowbirds and wealthy weekend visitors were already bloating our New England town. Bobby and the man stood, each sweating, staring into my porthole. I moved right, just slightly, so that my face could no longer be seen. But my heart sped up while everything else slowed down. As if it were contagious, sweat began beading above my lip. My armpits moistened. I clocked the drip, cataloging the reaction to look up in my biology notebook at night.

Physiological fact number one: Stress sweat smells different than normal sweat.

I heard the donut bag crinkle, the bell at the top of the door chime: The man with the lizard-jerky skin had evidently accepted whatever cream-filled fate his future held.

I looked up from the strawberry-sprinkled donuts I was working on to Bobby’s face, fleshy with purple bags. Finger knuckles plugged with stiff blond hairs gripped my porthole at the edge. “You can’t keep overfilling them, Sooz.” My name thudded from his tongue. An eye-shaped sprinkle was stuck under the short nail of my right finger. I crushed it into confectionary powder with my thumb. Listening to Bobby felt like getting dragged into a body of water by a crocodile. I preferred to shut off my senses and let it happen rather than engage.

Lately, my disassociation method of choice involved asking myself, “What animal are you?” It was a question once used as an icebreaker during a session of Mislocated Anonymous. The group leader, Allison, had quickly corrected herself, “I mean, sorry, what’s your spirit animal?” The eyes of the people that formed the circle had lit up; the question allowed them a moment of childlike indulgence so endangered that they didn’t stop to question the appropriation of a culture for whom no representatives were physically present.

The mistake became a question that I asked myself at least once per day. I’d look in the mirror, my eyes roving the ropy muscles of my back while I twisted to pick at shoulder acne, and think, What animal are you? I’d move down the sidewalk, thighs rubbing together until they started to stick and sting, and think, What animal are you? Or, like now, as the prey of Bobby’s crocodilian gaze, I’d smell my own nervous stench and feel my stomach churning and think, What animal are you? How anyone overcame the sloshing physiology of their own body to function in the real world was a mystery to me.

Bobby, still standing there, blinked his too-black lashes at me. His massive hand, bizarrely large for his short stature, reached down and smashed one of the hot strawberry-sprinkled, flattening it through the grate that drained the donut grease. The hand slowed down without pulling back once the donut was smashed, lethargically determined to push every wet crumb through to ruins.

I turned to find the hand broom. Dreamy Creamy Moo Cows^TM were up next, and the sprinkles used on the strawberry donuts needed to be swept to separate the shapes of red eyebrows, pink eyelash lines, and hot-orange eyes from the cow-themed brown, white, and lavender sprinkles. The lavender sprinkle was shaped like cud. Bobby’s mess would take a half hour of station reassembling to clean up, but I didn’t want to prolong his presence by attempting to clean it now. As long as the sprinkles didn’t mix, I’d be in the clear.

I swept the bright sprinkles into the dustpan and turned it into the trash, staring at the pink eyelashes. I closed one eye, then the other, switching perspectives. My left eye was getting blurry. Everything it looked at was slightly underwater. Freshly off my mom’s spotty health insurance, I wondered how long I could put off an optometrist visit.

The kitchen-galley door swung open; the purposeless brass doorknob whacked me in the hip. Scarlet stood there, watching me rub it. Neither of us knew who should apologize.

Instead, I said, “I was just about to start the Dreamy Creamy Moo Cows^TM,” my frog voice croaking, realizing I hadn’t spoken the entire morning. Scarlet being there meant it must nearly be noon. My alarm chirped artificial bird noises at 4:30 a.m.; I’d been working long before the sun rose. Through the porthole, through the doors, the world looked full of daylight.

“Don’t worry about it,” Scarlet said, eyes flashing to my hip. “I can get them done.”

I started to say okay but didn’t feel like hearing my voice work through its own sludge again, so I nodded a bit and moved to pack up my stuff. My bag was on the ground. Next to it, Scarlet’s polka-dotted socks peeked through under cuffed jeans. For the first time all day, the nausea rolling waves through my stomach quelled. Interesting.

Physiological fact number two: Feelings of arousal dampen feelings of disgust.

The sun had been gleaming through the windows all morning after a week of slow rain, and I wanted to thank Scarlet for getting in early. All words seemed too small to encompass my gratitude, so I said nothing and walked out of the kitchen. Scarlet’s hair shone in the corner of my eye as the door swung behind me.

In the front of house, Bobby stood at the register. “Heading out?” he called. I wondered sometimes if he was as harmless as everyone claimed. The people that people describe as being “good guys underneath it all” were typically my least favorite people in the world. Even worse, people who would “give me the shirt off their back,” as if what I was asking for in a given moment was a shirt and not basic consideration.

 When I failed to respond, he yelled out, “Don’t forget your tips.” His stubby fingers pinched the pick-a-penny dish, tilting it on to the floor. I looked up at the ceiling, where a fluorescent light was twitching. For now, my day at the donut shop was over. I took a step, my head still back, when something stepped on my foot.

“Sorry,” a caramel-haired teen girl said, looking from her phone to the family that surrounded her. Other than the girl, they all had sweet, open faces. I didn’t want Bobby to maul their day. I could muster something.

I tried to raise my voice above a mumble. “Visiting from out of town?”

The family’s heads turned to me, bright but confused by the sudden sound. They blinked into recognition that it was in fact a person speaking to them.

“Yes,” the mother said, “we’re visiting from Pennsylvania. It’s our first time in the state, and Jenny”—her hand gestured toward the caramel girl—“has been talking about your shop since she found out we were coming here to visit the Eye. She saw your donuts on Instagram.”

I smiled. “A lot of people find out about us that way. Sometimes I wonder how the shop stayed open before teens could find cafés through hashtags,” I said, botching the words. Things I wanted to sound nice sometimes sounded like insults. The mom murmured a polite laugh. The caramel girl’s eyes jerked from the menu to my face.

She opened her mouth and asked, “Why”—the mom’s face tilted toward her—“are the strawberry donuts the Blue’s Eye donut, but the blue raspberry and the”—she pointed to the menu—“seawater donuts are not the Blue’s Eye donut?” I tucked my chin down. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the official Blue’s Eye donut be blue? Not pink?” Her arm fell to her side. She glanced at her mom, whose smile had faded from lucid engagement to lobotomized acceptance.

“You guys haven’t heard about how Blue, Connecticut, was founded, then?” I asked them.

“We just got here,” the mom said. “We thought it was named for the Eye.” Her teeth were so cleanly white that I paused too long. “The Eye?” she said, thinking I didn’t know.

“The ring of water in West Blue?”

“Yeah, no,” I stuttered, “of course, that’s what people usually think. Why wouldn’t the town be named for its defining feature, the blue ring of water. But no.” Every conversation with visitors made me feel like a tour guide. It never stopped feeling strange, viewing your entire world through someone else’s visit to it. As if you, too, were a temporary display.

On my bad days, when I had to man the register or walk donuts out, I would point to the two-by-two sign growing cobwebby in the corner which explained the town’s origin story. But I knew the spiel; it was the first thing you learned when you got hired, before you were even tested on the donut flavors. Plus, I had always lived in Blue—and barely ever left—so I’d learned and relearned it, annually, in school. It was as easy to repeat as the Pledge of Allegiance, and I had just as many qualms about it.

This family, though, was sweet, and I was leaving. A bolt of anticipatory energy, made wild by what was likely extreme exhaustion, coursed through me like ocean lightning.

Physiological fact number three: Adrenaline activates a part of the nervous system that causes neurons to fire faster in your brain, allowing you to think more quickly. Adrenaline can also make you forget you’re in pain.

“The pink donut is Blue’s official donut because of the myth about Lacey’s strawberry jam.” The family looked at me closer, like I was a specimen after all. I continued, “The town was founded in 1790, when a woman named Lacey Tulle got sick of New London and decided to leave. People had always liked her jam, though she didn’t make it often, but that’s how she decided she’d make money as a single girl. I mean, woman. So Lacey bought a big pot, picked her own strawberries, and started cooking.”

The family seemed to settle into what I was saying.

“She’d walk to neighboring towns, selling the jam all week. People couldn’t get enough of the jam or of Lacey. They called her Blue, because even though she was known for her strawberry jam, she preferred blueberry jam, so her lips were always stained blue. They weren’t willing to wait an entire week for the next batch, though.”

The family was smiling now.

“They started building homes closer to Lacey. The town filled up, with Lacey—Blue—at its center. So, Lacey founded the town. But when it came time to declare the town name, the men at the county office wouldn’t let a woman’s name enter the decision. Lacey didn’t expect acceptance, but her jam fans, her citizens, rallied behind her. They struck an agreement: The town could be called Blue as an official salute to the ring of water. So, yes, it is because of the ring of water. But it’s also because of Lacey.”

It wasn’t really an explanation that made sense but neither did the whole Nutmeg State thing. People still swallowed it politely. I think, by the end of the story, people were too disoriented to ask any questions.

The caramel girl, against all odds, nodded. “That makes sense,” she said, and marched up to the counter. The rest of the family smiled at me and followed her. I walked outside and let the sun punch me in the face.

#

Every fifth Tuesday, I went to the Mislocated Anonymous meetings. I got there early in order to be in place, like scenery, by the time everyone else came in. The new faces were always unrecognizable blurs of haircuts, skin, shirts. Until they spoke.

I’d eaten one of my neighbor’s cucumbers on the walk over to stave off hunger. Newcomers always stacked their plates high with bagels and cookies. They would subsequently spend the meeting audibly chomping and conspicuously brushing crumbs from their laps while someone spewed the heart-wrenching details of their life.

One man’s name tag seemed to assert that his name was Brapple. His pronunciation clarified nothing. He cleared his throat, hard.

“The ocean”—his voice scraped gravel—“is nice in theory. And I get it, people think beach and they think vacation.”

I prepared for terror.

“They don’t think of the job that’ll take up ten hours a day, that only gives five vacation days a year. They don’t think of how it feels to be stuck inside, just miles from the beach, on those scorching days. They don’t predict the likelihood that when you do get a day off, there will be clouds laughing at you, or that when you finally, finally get to the beach, it’s a fucking zoo. Sand in all your food. Water full of red seaweed that stinks and scrapes you raw. Bathrooms are rare to find, and if you can access one, it’s a wet-floored, toilet paperless wasteland. Little kids are screaming, and older kids are blasting music, yelling to their friends about how drunk they got the other night.”

The glacial air conditioning curled the hairs on my bare arms. Brapple continued.

“And in the winter, which lasts for about eight months, it’s useless. That’s when the truth comes out—the drunks, the opioid addicts, the seasonal depressives. None of it, I’m telling you, is worth its salt.” Brapple, leaned back in his chair, looked around slowly, defiantly. His icy eyes lingered on each face for a moment, but skipped mine.

“Brpl…” Allison, the moderator, murmured, “do you have a sense of where you would rather be?”

His bottom lip pulled into his thin top lip as he tightened his mouth, raised his eyebrows, nodding as if we all already knew his answer.

“Sure I do: as far from the ocean and all these bleached-out idiots as possible. I’m thinking North Dakota. Maybe Idaho. Something solid.”

A squirrelly girl in the corner, sitting on her hands, made the mistake of asking, “Have you been to North Dakota?” Her spine re-hunched as she stopped speaking, a prodded prawn curling in on itself.

Brapple blinked at her like he didn’t know something so small could be a person.

“Three years ago I convinced Sharon, my wife, to go with me for a few days’ vacation. Got quite a feel for the place. Real salt of the earth people.” I looked back at the squirrelly girl, but her face hadn’t changed.

“And what makes you feel like that’s where you want to plant your roots?” Allison asked, trying to keep her tone equally positive and serious so that Brapple wouldn’t strangle us all with his sand-hating hands.

“When you know, you know,” Brapple said. He looked like he wanted to spit.

Allison hesitated. “Is that not how you felt when you originally moved to Blue?” she asked, remembering to reinflate herself.

Brapple, again, looked each person (except me) in the circle (even squirrel girl) directly in the eyes.

“I came here because my wife loved it. Now it’s time for me to find some happiness.”

No one in the circle asked what that would mean for Sharon. I looked over my shoulder to check the back of my chair. Suddenly I felt that I was on a wooden roller coaster and my brain was being knocked out of my skull.

“Sooz,” Allison called out. She hadn’t done this in years. “Would you be comfortable discussing your situation?”

I’d seen people clam up. I’d even done it a few times. It never seemed fair, even when it probably was.

“Sure,” I told her, wondering how. “I love it in Blue, in Connecticut.”

Brows furrowed at me from every angle. A room of people who felt they were in the wrong place never wanted to hear why it could be right.

“It isn’t Blue where I feel out of place,” I said, not wanting to look at anyone, but not knowing how not to. “It’s in my own skin.”

The heads all tilted slightly, as if I was a mirror that had smiled at an unsmiling face.

“Please,” Allison said, “help us understand what you mean.”

I thought about it. “I feel like bodily reactions.” Weird to say out loud. Bad.

“Go on,” Allison encouraged.

I took a moment. “Mosquitos bite, and I itch until I bleed,” I told them. Last week, I’d counted twelve shin bites in the moment of a morning. “I try to sleep and I hear cars whizzing by, air shifting doors.” I thought of the streetlight that kept me up at night. “I try to go on walks—lose myself a bit—but then I sweat and I breathe and I feel like a bucket of sounds and smells.” I paused. “How can I be myself if I never lose myself?”

I wondered if these things I thought about quite often were what I meant to say to these people. “I think people only get to be who they are if they aren’t constantly thinking about what they might be.”

I wanted to keep breaking the silence, but I didn’t want any more of my words in the air. I wanted to know if Scarlet was able to get outside while the sun was still up. I wanted to know if the family today liked their donuts. I should have stuck around to listen to what the caramel girl ordered.

The ring of people shuddered, and I realized I’d rather be underwater. I tried to remember if I knew what my mom was doing tonight, if maybe she would have something to tell me about, because I was starting to remember that no one had said anything to me by choice the entire day.

#

“That seems like a good place to end,” Allison said, then kept saying more.

I was already wondering what had happened.

The street outside was dark where it’d been dim when I’d gone underground. The summer air was full of salt, heating up the hairs on my arms. When Allison was wrapping up the meeting, I had decided I’d go home to my mom. But the warm air wanted more.

I took a right down Pearl Street instead of staying straight. I could still get home pretty early if I didn’t stay at the Eye too long. If I didn’t swim to the center. My right hand shot up to my collarbone. I was wearing a sports bra—I didn’t have to swim, but I could.

I always forgot that summer heat didn’t mean night wasn’t dark. After veering out of the supermarket’s flickering parking lot light, the black overtook me. I crouched for a moment, willing my eyes to adjust. A boy a few years older than me had hanged himself in the parking lot when he was in high school. The streetlight reminded me of him, even though I wasn’t sure that was where he had done it. Even though I didn’t know almost any details about it at all, didn’t really know what he looked like, had only seen his younger sister tuck hair behind her ears in the hallway between classes.

Even in the dark, tiny white rose petals littered lawns like ghostly pistachio shells. I stayed close to the grass as I walked, looking down to watch for rocks or divots. I only stumbled every few steps.

It didn’t take long to get to the Eye, and by the time I did, my shirt was already in my hands. I dropped it next to a tree and put my shoes on top of it. I kept my track shorts on. I walked to the water and didn’t stop once I reached the edge.

The cold was brief, then consuming. I held my head under, reaching toward the sandy floor. I wanted to swallow it all whole. When I popped back up to gasp, I heard a girl’s voice say hello. I tucked my chin in, mouth underwater, and let my eyes narrow above the surface. Who was the crocodile now?

Something near the Pupil kicked, splashing. I could make out thin, tan legs. I didn’t see anyone else, so I swam towards them, drifting on my side with slow kicks.

It was the caramel girl. Of course it was. She glanced down at me with her 20/20 teen eyesight.

“Hello,” she said again.

“Hi.”

“The donuts were good.”

I dipped my closed mouth back under.

“We had one of each. I liked the sea-flavored one,” she said.

I didn’t ask if she was alone; she clearly was. I blew a bubble in the water, the way kids do when they learn to swim.

“I like that one, too,” I told her.

“I thought of another question,” she told me, “about what you told us. About Lacey. Blue.”

I kept looking at her.

“You said that she liked her blueberry jam the best. So why don’t you guys have blueberry donuts?”

No one else had ever asked me this. Not the workers, not the customers. I had asked it when I was younger, but no one ever answered.

“Your mom said you’re from Pennsylvania?” I asked. The girl nodded. “Do you like it there?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I like my friends, I think. I’d rather be somewhere else, though, when I’m older.”

Now I nodded. I must seem so old to her. When I was her age—probably not much more than six or seven years ago—I thought people that were my current age were real adults. Now that I was my age, I had no idea what an adult was. But it surely wasn’t whatever I was.

“We don’t have blueberry donuts, because Lacey didn’t ever make that jam for anyone.” I paused. “I think she wanted to keep something to herself after giving so much of herself away,” I finished, the theory I’d been harboring for years now floating in the air, above the water.

The girl’s face wasn’t clear in the dark. I felt like I was muddling it again. I didn’t know how to get the words out, and I felt sorry for this teen girl that she had to listen to a weird fake adult babble her way through something a real adult should know.

But the girl put out her hand, palm overturned, instead.

In the dark, I could see a hot-orange eye sprinkle on her pointer finger. I treaded water, kicking at the murk below, as the girl held the sprinkle at the tip of her finger up to her eye and winked.

Physiological fact number four: Only one-sixth of the human eyeball is visible.

Bio: Carolyn Fagan lives and writes in Rhode Island. She is at work on a short story collection, a novel, and a graphic novel.