ROOM 311
I am not a bad person.
Dear Valued Guest,
Thank you for choosing to stay at the Residence Inn Streamwood, our goal is to provide you, our guest, with exceptional service. Here in Streamwood, the weather can be very unpredictable at times. Temperatures ranging from 30 degrees to below 0 have a tendency to freeze water lines, to ensure that your water lines do not freeze, please follow the steps listed below:
Open the cupboard doors under your kitchen sink
Allow your faucet to drip with the handle set in the middle
We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, if you have any questions, please call the front desk.
Warmly,
The Residence Inn Staff
The light of the stove falling in order like army men down my spine. Snow glancing the windows whilst the fireplace spits. Ma cold in a hospital bed. I used to pray for times like this.
The steady trickle of the faucet. The steady trickle of the IV tubes running through her veins.
Epithelial Ovarian Carcinoma.
Morphine Sulfate.
.9% Sodium Chloride.
She was dead before she could close her eyes.
I knew her from/never recognized the red pupils and smoothed skin through the spotted glass. Crinkled by photograph, she had frills up her neck and ink smeared down the flats of her palms from annotating the John Donne book clamped to her chest. A pointed nose and thin face that leered over scrawled poetry, often sitting by lamplight writing stories naught to be published. She was human in the past glimpses of her life, the what-ifs, the wedding albums and report cards; “quiet yet clever,” always quiet yet clever. Teachers liked her enough to never speak to her, and throughout her eight years at St. John’s, the only time she touched a bible was pushing it to the back of hotel drawers.
Lenny and I had visited her school about a month before she died. The smell of watery perfume flush against skin and something vaguely female lingered on each cardstock poster, every stickered locker. The tiled hallways unfurled like women baring their powder-white necks to us, to which he commented “had great acoustics.”
Lenny was Ma’s nephew, I knew him from the years filled with chlorine-scented mouths and chocolate labradors nosing skinned knees. She never liked Lenny, thought him too reckless, too young. Ma didn’t know how close we were. No one knew.
He had ranted to me about some Lady Courtney Love, a Marlene or Michele who stole his heart and keyed his car.
This happened every time he cheated on them. If he never cheated on them, this would never happen.
He grumbled. “Doubt it.”
Room 311. Brazen lettering on rosewood. The constant dripping of a spigot into the metal basin of a sink. My purgatory. The CT scans, watching nebulas appear the harder I pressed on the screens. The bulge in her pelvis, the cyst in black and white—it could’ve been a Chaplin film. Why couldn’t Ma die during April? Sunlight pouring through the peachy hairs of my wrist, lazy mornings of silk pillows and cotton boxers, when the windows remained unfrosted. In January, I retreat into myself. The nerves behind my eyes pinched and nose runny, the pads of my feet sticking to cold tile. I’m Valued Guest, and Room 311 with the door-knocker, an ac unit stuck at 65 degrees. My face pushed into the floor, I exhale and the fibers of the carpet part. Plip. The thin jacket lying on the counter calls to me; I think I stole it from a laundromat in Albuquerque, with Lenny. Plip. I giggle. I force my body to turn to the cavity of the fireplace. There’s ice in my veins and my fingers darken to plum.
Ladyfingers. Mmmm.
In another world, the receptionist and I would’ve been friends. In another world, I would’ve endured her sordid demeanor and mousy hair because I found it endearing. In another world, she’s my valiant savior with horn-rimmed glasses and a sweater—the one to exorcise the devil from my kitchen.
I needed the faucet off. I really needed the faucet off.
“Turn off the faucet and we’re looking at a fine for $1,500 at least. And of course you’ll also need to account for negligence and water damage. It’s in your best interest to just… leave it running.”
I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.
“Register a complaint then.”
Everything’s plip plip plip
“Put a towel under it.”
The musk of airport sweat and the banana muffins flying off the counter. Those brown commercial napkins neatly dabbing at the corner of her lip soaked burgundy. Her ashy skin beneath my knuckles, her throat in my teeth. Hands wrapped around my wrists, fingers slipping against veins, begging, keening, because “insurance won’t cover this!”
Lady Courtney Love couldn’t do what I do. Molly. Mary. Maddie?
Maudie. She’d told me with my cheek pushed against the chill of my desk and arm twisted behind me. A codeine casanova, illuminated by overhead fluorescents and leopard print. Her ruby nails carving flesh was a choir, children singing hymns. My coworkers never looked at me the same. From forgettable to someone, I could make something out of the receptionist’s life more than Maudie could—out of the life of the stout gentleman smoothing what little hair he had left with foul-smelling hairspray, the wide-eyed intern with a chronic cough, the curmudgeon down the hall who leaves the tv on too loud. I could make something out of these people who made nothing of their lives, these warm carcasses: a headstone, a reception, an afterparty.
“Hello?”
She’s drumming her fingers against the desk, waiting for me to respond. Saints envy my restraint.
My thumb rubs against the thin white lines; if it wasn’t carved into my arm I’d think the name was pretty. The balding man tilts his head at me. People who made nothing of their lives. I look away. I am not a bad person.
There’s a printer whirring. Plip. My room doesn’t have a printer. Plip. The phone keeps ringing. It’s Lenny. Lenny coming to sweep me into his arms, Lenny coming to defend me from Maudie, Lenny coming to tell me everyone will forget like when we were kids, coming to tell me that everything will be okay.
Freshly shaven legs. Weak sunlight. Plip. Lenny.
Oh, god, I ache for it.
The blankets smell of laundry detergent, at least I can count on the Inn for that. I stretch against them and fire shoots through my abdomen.
Wet. Plip. My hands are wet. Saliva spills like glycerin from the corner of my lips; my face’s gone slack. Plip. Warm. Sticky. Your head’s running water and there’s plip blood coating the roof of your mouth. Spilling out across the bed sheets. Your face in the rug. Blood down the linen of your shirt. You cup your chin and it’s in the creases of your palm. Sticky. Metallic. Copper. Handprints smeared on the headboard. Caught deep in your lifeline—you’ll live a rich and prosperous life.
Your nose is clotted, limbs are lead. You stumble to your feet. Your face in the rug. You stumble to your feet. Breathing. Choking.
There must be a sink in the bathroom. Ma used to bathe you, separate from plip and wash your mouth out. Ma used to wash your mouth out with soap. plip.
You’re looking in the mirror. You’re ragged and your eyes are wells. You’re crying.
Go back to bed, baby, you must’ve bitten your tongue.
I never paid attention to Lenny’s breath when it wasn’t marlboros against chapped lips. Snowfall sank onto his eyelashes and dusted his cheeks rosy. Gasping furiously, air exited the shell of his body, the exhaust pipes of his nose. He pushed his hands up, mashing them against his face and rolling his jaw to thaw his skin. He shivered.
“Times like this, bet you wish you had hair, huh?”
Even with his hair buzzed so you could see the outline of his skull, his crooked teeth and the thick brows housing the eyes owled into the back of his head were the same as when he was a boy.
“Fuck off.”
He guided me away from St. John’s, that Catholic Tombstone. We squawked and crackled along to a Jo Stafford song we didn’t know the words to, stumbling into strangers and muttering apologies that were more for us than them. He held onto my elbow as we trudged past the slush of the curb, into his apartment reeking of rotten peaches and tin: american flag dolled up like a crucifix, used condoms curled in the corner like rattlesnakes. I’ll never forget the glazed look he gave me before pulling me down on the sofa, dragging his fingertips across the fluttering pulse of my neck, I dug my nails into the swastika above his knee.
I hadn’t intended on fucking him that night.
I am not a bad person.
Plip. It was just an ulcer. She didn’t know she was dying. Plip. Dead. Plip. Strung up to a bag. A middle-school science experiment. Plip. Eyes slid in two different directions. Plip. She looked nothing like her photograph. Plip. Hitler’s panting in your ear. You’re doing so well for him. plip
I unhooked the phone. Cousin keeps calling—persistent bastard. Plip. My coat’s back in Albuquerque with plip and I’m Inmate #311. John Lee Hooker singing Maudie. Plip. Resident three-eleven. Humans have three hundred eleven bones. Maudie in my arm. Plip. 311 bottles of beer on the wall.
My hands coated in dried blood, siphoned around the phone. Plip. Ma wants me to come outside. Out in the ice all alone. She doesn’t like being alone.
I visited her in the hospital with Lenny, spoon-fed her pale capsules ground into applesauce. She couldn’t eat, her belly a ripened fruit, fat and softened with bruises. Plip. The IV dripped rainfall in your ears, Lenny grabbing at your waist and you pushed him away to clasp your mother’s hands with your own. Her hands shook and you could feel her heartbeat in your mouth. Quiet yet clever, quiet yet clever. She knew. She wasn’t supposed to. But a glance from her daughter to her nephew solidifies it, and hot tears color her milky eyes pink. You never saw Ma cry and wasn’t sure if it’s because he’s a cousin or a nazi but Ma’s crying.
Lenny’s head rested limp against my shoulder, hands nestled around my thigh. Ma let out indiscernible murmurs through the plaster walls. She could’ve been praying; I never heard her pray. I gingerly lowered his body to the floor and pressed my ear against the steel door. She said my name. Cousin-fucker.
I tell myself she did.
You’ve never seen the snow before, it sinks into the pores of your nose. Mold. You’re naked and crawling, head lolling wildly off to the side. Your mouth’s open and gurgling against the valley of her collarbone. She wipes the spit off your chin, her stomach bare and bloated against your heart while she tucks your hair behind your ear. Don’t fuss, baby, Ma’s here. Everything’ll be okay and she loves you. You're not a bad person you’re her special girl, nothing you could ever do could change that. You’re nothing but a newborn suckling into her mother. And that’s all you ever need to be.
