Dear Old Dead(56)

Then there were the reporters, who had come out of nowhere after Rosalie van Straadt died and decided to stay. Julie was used to television cameras and print reporters with stenographer’s notebooks and tape recorders. Gang wars and drug busts got them uptown on a sporadic basis. She wasn’t used to this crazy kind of invasion, this siege. Julie slept in a dormitory bedroom with three other girls. The room’s two windows faced the street. On the mornings after Rosalie van Straadt died, she would get up early to look out. They were always there, two or three of them. Julie became convinced that they were waiting for a third death. What if there was a third death? What would happen then? The center had always seemed like such a solid place to her, like such a sure thing. Now it felt shaky at the foundations. Shudder and roar, shudder and roar, Julie thought. A breath of the wrong wind could blow it into rubble.

No matter how many things Julie had to blame the feeling on, though, the truth of it had nothing to do with Michael or murders or little gray men from the New York Times asking painful questions in the street. For years, Julie had felt like this all the time, day after day, minute after minute. When she’d first started whoring, the feeling would come to her as soon as she woke up. She could get rid of it by smoking a little dope or picking up a john. The johns had always worked better for her than the dope. The dope turned on her sometimes, spun her around and made her look at herself. Back in Rakey’s apartment—Rakey was her first pimp, the one her mother’s boyfriend sold her to, when she was eleven—Julie would stand in front of the cracked yellow mirror in the bathroom and watch the skin of her face turn into cockroaches and worms, black and dead and pulsing. That was how she saw the inside of herself. That was what she thought of the first time she went into a church and heard a priest talk about her soul. That was what she thought of the first time the social workers picked her up and put her in a program. The program had a “self-esteem workshop” all the girls had to attend, where a peppy brunette in low stack heels ordered each and every one of them to “love yourself! love yourself! loving yourself is the key to loving your life!” It wasn’t until Julie met Augie that she had begun to be able to pass her reflection without revulsion, that she had begun to have days when waking up had not meant a collision with self-hatred. It was Augie who had told Julie that a true Christian looks not only at the person but at the image of Christ in every person—and oddly enough, that had worked. Julie didn’t look for the image of Christ in herself, not even now, when the image of Christ in her mind looked suspiciously like Michael Pride. Christ was too much of a man to make Julie entirely comfortable with looking for images of Him. She looked for images of the Virgin Mary instead. The Virgin Mary was very important to Julie. The Virgin Mary had been poor, but she had also been untouchable. If she had also been black, she would have been perfect.

Julie kept a picture of the Virgin Mary standing on a cloud with the moon at her feet tucked into a corner of the small mirror that hung on the wall of her dormitory room at the Sojourner Truth Health Center. She used a plastic-covered bookmark with a picture of the Virgin Mary with streams of light coming out of her fingers to mark her place in her history text. On Thursday morning, days after Rosalie van Straadt’s murder, neither of these pictures did any good at all. She looked in the mirror and she saw herself, that was all, not the Virgin Mary or Christ or anyone else. Julie looked down at the palms of her hands and wondered how the johns could bear to have her touch them. Didn’t they see that she was dead? Any minute now, her skin would begin to slough off in ripples and folds. She was a walking, talking corpse, going to rot. The hand grenades in her head had coalesced into one big neutron bomb. It was feeling like this that had blasted her out of every other program she had been in.

It was seven o’clock in the morning. Julie’s roommates lay huddled in lumps and curls under blankets and around pillows. They hadn’t noticed that Julie had pulled up the shade and let in the sun. Julie pulled the shade down again. She had thrown away all her makeup. She didn’t have a single thing with which she could paint on another face. The other girls had lots and lots, grocery bagfuls, that they shoplifted from five-and-ten-cent stores on Broadway. Julie could borrow a lipstick from Karida and a blusher from KelsiAnne. Neither one of them would ever notice there was anything missing, and if they did they wouldn’t mind. Julie picked up her history books instead. This was a very delicate moment. This was make or break. If she put makeup on her face this morning, it was as good as over. She might stay at the center another day or week or month, but sooner or later she would be out on the street again, looking for another john, looking for another pimp. Thinking of what all that was like—of what wanting it was like—scared her, because by now there were times she did want it, even when she didn’t want it, it got all confused. It was as if “normal” was feeling dead and getting beat up. Feeling alive and not getting beat up was better, but it was also terrifying, Julie didn’t know why. She just knew that she had to get past it. The rational part of her, the sane part of her, the part of her she was actually coming to like, didn’t want to end up back on the street at all.