Before You Knew My Name
Jacqueline Bublitz
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
REBECCA SOLNIT
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.
THEME FROM NEW YORK, NEW YORK
YOU WILL ALREADY HAVE AN IDEA OF ME.
There are enough of us dead girls out there. From a distance, so many of our stories look the same. That’s bound to happen when someone on the outside tells the story, speaks as if they knew us. They pick over our remains, craft characters from our ashes, and this is what the living get left with. Someone else’s impression of who we used to be.
If I tell you my story. If I let you know what happened to me. Maybe you’ll see who I was. Who I am. Maybe you’ll like the truth of me better, and maybe you’ll wish this for every dead girl from now on. The chance to speak for herself, to be known for more than her ending.
Wouldn’t that be something. After everything we’ve lost.
ONE
THE FIRST THING I UNDERSTAND ABOUT THE CITY I WILL DIE IN: it beats like a heart. My feet have barely hit the pavement, the bus that delivered me here has only just hissed away from the curb, when I feel the pulse of New York, the hammering. There are people everywhere, rushing to its rhythm, and I stand open-mouthed in the middle of the widest street I’ve ever seen, smelling, tasting the real world for the very first time. Though I am named for a girl who fell down a rabbit hole, I feel in this moment as if I have climbed up out of the darkness and left the distortion of my old life behind me. If you were to look back, you’d see all the four-way stop signs and the star-spangled flags of small-town America waving us goodbye. You’d catch a glimpse of untended roads littered with potholes, and windowless convenience stores set down on otherwise empty lots. You’d see rusted ice freezers next to sliding glass doors, and nine-dollar bottles of liquor on dusty shelves. If you looked hard enough, you might even find my name traced in that filmy coating, there between the expired packets of potato chips and the fading jars of salsa.
Alice Lee.
I am here. She was there. And then she ran away to New York City, leaving all that dust behind her.
The second thing I understand: I cannot fall back down that rabbit hole. Not even if Mr Jackson shows up at the bottom, his delicate fingers beckoning. I need to prove I can make it on my own, that I can survive just fine without him. I will not be like my mother, who forgave any man who said sorry. I have learned her own failed lesson, see. That when a man discovers where to hurt you, the way he touches you changes. He won’t be able to stop himself from pressing hard against that spot, no matter how many times it makes you cry.
I will never let a man make me cry. Not ever again.
Reaching inside my travel bag, I swing it to the front of my hip bone. I run my fingers over the black vulcanite of the old Leica buried at the bottom of the canvas, feel for the grooves of the detachable lens as I walk. I don’t know why I need this proof, when I have been feeling the weight of the camera, the bump and knock against my thigh, the whole journey here. It is not as if it could have suddenly disappeared from deep inside my bag, cocooned by my sweaters and socks and underwear. But I need to reassure myself the Leica is safe and intact, all the same. Because this is what I have left. This is what I brought with me, and it is a small triumph to know that Mr Jackson will soon realise what I have taken from him. If he does not miss me, he will at least miss how he used to look at me through that lens.
Everyone’s lost something, Alice.
Isn’t that what he told me, just the other day?
For three glorious weeks in the late summer of 1995, my mother appeared on a billboard in Times Square. In the months before I was born, if you were to stand out front of the old Roy Rogers restaurant, you could look across the street and see her beautiful face decorating the side of a tall, wide building, right there between ads for the Donahue talk show and a movie called Showgirls, coming soon. I know these details from my mother’s stories of that summer. How she ran away to New York after one too many beatings from her father, as if there was a magical number for the endurance of such things, and he finally exceeded it in her eighteenth year. And how, her lip still bleeding, she stole money from my grandfather’s wallet to buy a bus ticket from Bayfield County, Wisconsin, to New York City, the most faraway place she could think of. Her first night in the city, trying not to fall asleep in a back booth of some dingy 8th Avenue diner, she met a semi-famous photographer. Before the night was over, he had shifted her into his apartment, cleaned her up, and when she looked nice and pretty, he said he was in love with her. He wasn’t, of course, or he was for a time, but he loved his rich wife in the Hamptons more than he loved my mother, so he eventually left her. She was already pregnant when he snapped the picture of her smiling face that would end up reigning over Times Square those three sultry weeks.
‘You were there with me, Alice Lee,’ she would remind me. ‘Everyone looking up at us, as if we belonged there.’
I never knew if my mother told my father what he was really seeing when he took that picture. If he ever knew his unborn child was also there in the frame. The finer details of how I came to be were smudged, blurred out, by the time the story made its way to me.