Iron Curtain
By Julia Marriott
It has been seventeen days since I last spoke. I mean really spoke—not just the mundanity of “Oh, Mrs. March, how are the little ones doing?” or “Betty, I just adore the lilies woven into your braids!” Who the fuck thinks it’s a good idea to ignore the black eyes on Mrs. March and her kids or cares about the flowers in Betty’s hair when she has been stealing the pain pills her mother got last year for her back surgery? No one in this town dares to mention the undesirable face of our humanness. God forbid anyone finds out what Mrs. March's husband has been doing with the sweet-little-thing from around the block, as if she was really just selling her fresh-picked cherries to the neighbors (well, that’s exactly what she was doing).
So here I am, living in a purgatory of blaring silence, breaking the endless days with block parties, casseroles, and the sound of clinking wine glasses; no earlier than 9:00 p.m. of course—they don't want to wake the kids. Some days I want to scream “I am Queen of the World!” from the rooftops, or waltz out of school in the middle of class and throw my fist in the air as the credits roll. Other days I realize that I watch too much TV. Besides, I was raised better—I am a lady and I need to learn how to act like one. Or so my mother says.
I usually spend classes watching how the wind blows through the trees outside, how the loose leaves fly with the current without looking back at their mother branches. The other students spend the hour passing notes between hands and chewing bubble gum until it loses flavor. The girls twirl their hair until it’s stuck in permanent curls around their fingers, and the boys watch them.
All except one.
Betty’s chair is empty today.
⚢
No one understands how temporary this life is until it changes. Graduation is just a couple months away, and yet people are convinced they’re in love and are already planning their kids’ names. If you ask me, I see no point in falling in love. I can live without the Sunday barbecues with mild acquaintances and fights behind closed doors (so the kids don’t see, but the kids still have ears). Of course, high schoolers don’t see it that way. They make every decision with their heart instead of their head. They feel the rush of sneaking around under their parent’s noses and fiddling with their thumbs because they don’t know how to kiss someone right and the build up to finally fuck in the backseat of his Jeep after prom (but that’s not the way she imagined it, and Pornhub never prepared him for her to say no).
Sometimes I think youth is wasted on us.
⚢
Graduation is a mere few months away and leaving the second after it ends won’t be soon enough. Pomp and Circumstance will play, mothers will sob, and I will run out the doors with my diploma straight to the airport. Small town life like this was never suited for me, no matter how hard my mother tried and tried to immerse me in it. Cotillion classes, block parties, forcefully introducing me to the boy next door when the other moms started to gossip (his palms were sweaty when he shook my hand, and he refused to look me in the eyes), none of it will ever speak to me like it does to the other girls. She wanted a girl that would be prom queen, get married at twenty to a nice boy, and have babies fly out of her until there was no more room in the house. She wanted a girl that would keep her mouth closed when she ate and rode horses on the weekend and whom her father would be proud to give away at her wedding.
⚢
If my mother had it her way, I would be walking down the altar at our church down the street for all the town and God to see. I would settle down here with my husband and raise my kids around the block from her and my father so they could tell me how to make them polite and respectful. I would die here and be buried here and leave my legacy as yet another suburban mom, here. The thought that my destiny might lie within these walls terrifies me.
Nonetheless, I keep seeing the boy next door after our first meeting. He is new in town (I made sure to share my condolences for ending up here). He talks to me at the supermarket and stops me in the hallway at school and throws pebbles at my window at night and looks at me with eyes that plead. I don’t know why I entertain his desires, because of course I can see what thoughts lie behind those eyes. I stop for him when he calls, I open my window when he knocks, I stare into his eyes when he locks with mine. I don’t know when I’ll stop. Maybe I’ll marry him.
⚢
Every night, I sit across from my mother at the dinner table with my father at the head to our right and eight more empty chairs to our left. My mother will have already set the table with every dish laid out aesthetically in front of us, fluffed and stirred as if she was creating a prototype for a perfect suburban family dinner. Nothing is ever perfect. Sometimes the peas are too cold or the mashed potatoes are too buttery or the turkey is too dry, and my mother will rush to fix the mess she made. She apologizes to my father for her incompetence.
Tonight, we sit in silence. The food between my mother and me is steaming. Little lines fly above the spinach casserole and join the streams from the white rice, and they both escape together. I watch until they disappear, probably seeping out of the air vents or an open window and into the sky.
“Where’s Dad?” I ask.
“He’ll be here in a moment. Get your elbows off the table, it’s rude.”
I draw my arms back and cross them, slouching back in my chair. My father comes down the stairs from his study and jerks into his reserved seat without a word. His lips are tightly pursed as he throws his napkin over his lap. I keep my head down.
“Hello, darling,” says my mother with a smile. She tries to reach for his hand but he pulls it away. They lock eyes, and for a moment, I can see my mother shrink.
“I’m starving,” he says. He immediately begins shoveling food onto his plate. My mother is silent for a moment, but that is broken by the sound of her scooping peas onto her plate.
“Yes, dear.”
⚢
I almost make it home from school with no incidents or altercations, but Betty’s mother is waiting at the corner of my block with flyers about the church’s latest social. Some sort of potluck, I’m sure; she can’t get through a whole year without bragging about her vegan “chicken” casserole. I even try to turn around and take the long way home (cross 8th at Radcliffe and sneak behind the dog park), but she catches me just before I make my escape.
My problem isn’t with people, per se. Don’t get me wrong, people are fine. As long as they don’t ask me about why I’m still single, or about how nice the weather is this time of year, or how I’m going to please a man one day with that attitude, or if they look at me with a sad it’s-a-shame-her-mother-didn’t-raise-a-better-behaved-young-lady stare. But people are fine. Except for Betty’s mother and her fake chicken.
I don’t need a lot of friends. I feel completely content in my selected isolation where I make all the rules. There’s a riddle where you’re trapped in a room with no windows or doors, only a table and a mirror. How do you get out? Why do you want to get out? Say you escape, where do you go? You have no idea how long you’ve been in there, everyone could have moved on already, your parents retired and moved to Florida, your “best friend” found someone else to gossip to, your crush is married with two kids (a boy and a girl, just like Grandma imagined). Why would you want to ruin them? I don’t remember the real answer, but you can always break the mirror and take yourself out of the equation. Riddle solved.
⚢
Betty is gone. She hasn’t been at school for almost two weeks now; I heard my mother talking on the phone about it. According to Betty’s mother, the grandparents had fallen ill, and Betty (as the angel she is) decided to drop everything to go help. The most selfless girl this town has ever seen, she says. Of course, her mother doesn’t know that we all heard the police sirens that night, and we all heard about the young girl spilling out of her car after wrapping it around a pole. She laughed and laughed, stumbled her way into the back of the police car, and let them drive off with her. Her grandparents are so lucky to have Betty, her mother says. I hope she says hello to the others, who were just angels too.
⚢
I sit alone at lunch, usually reading whatever novel suits my interest that week. Sometimes I lose interest and switch by Wednesday. At the moment, I am captivated by The Diary of Anne Frank: “It is the silence that frightens me so much in the evenings and at night . . . I can’t tell you how oppressive it is to never be able to go outdoors.” Tragic.
Sometimes on Tuesdays, there is a girl that sits at a table nearby. Every time she arrives, she practically runs to the table, plops down, and tears open her hole-ridden bag for a pencil and a small notebook. I entertain myself by trying to trace the way her pencil moves to make out the letters, but she is so aggressive and quick that I soon give up. Her hair sticks to her face, even in the wind, so as per her routine she ties it in a knot at the back of her head so she can continue to scribble. I find myself staring at the way she focuses on her pages of madness, the way she never looks up even though we both hear the snickers from nearby students, the way she bites her bottom lip as she writes, or how she nods and smiles when something good comes of her thoughts. I watch her until the bell rings for class.
Her focus is broken by the piercing bell, and as usual she shoves the notebook and pencil back in her backpack and snatches it from the bench on her way out the double doors. I catch a scent of lavender when she rushes by me, and I close my eyes to breathe it in.
The turkey sandwich on my plate that I never touch has gone cold, so I toss it in the trash and try to read on my way to biology.
I’ve lost interest in Anne Frank.
⚢
I’ve seen the girl from lunch every day this week getting on the blue bus off of 8th Street after school. That bus goes far, at least far enough away from this town to where you can’t hear the mothers gossiping or daughters’ windows opening to sneak out in the black of night. Lucky.
I’ve started taking that route to walk home from school. It’s only a couple blocks longer, and it feeds my hunger for change. It makes me wonder where she goes at night if it’s not the 7-Eleven rest stop on Main for Slurpees or the park behind the high school where boys take their girls after they crawl out of their windows. I wonder what she thinks of this town if she doesn’t live in it.
Today, she saw me.
I turned the corner on 8th Street as the bus pulled up at the stop. The girl had been there for some time as she sat folded up on the bench with her notebook in her lap. The brakes screeched, drawing the girl out of her writing trance, and she climbed the few steps to board the bus. She held up a line of people behind her, some rolling their eyes, as she dug through the bottom of her bag pulling out coin by coin for the fare. She found a seat in the first row and began scribbling once more. I could see every crease in her face, every slight shake of her head as her pen ran faster than her thoughts. Suddenly, her hand stopped moving—she looked out the window and caught my gaze. As the engine roared and tires leveled, she raised her hand holding her worn-down pencil and waved. I stood frozen on the corner across the street following the bus with my eyes as it pulled away, up the street, and out of sight, my hand still raised motionless next to my ear.
I take a different way home now.
⚢
Why do women have to wear tights under a skirt that already goes to the knees? I don’t get why a woman’s knees are just too sexy to see out in the open. Maybe they make kissy faces at the bad boys smoking on the corner when no one is looking, or they snicker at the people who “feel God” while they’re singing hymns. You can’t feel something that doesn’t exist. I guess that’s why we only go to church on Christmas and Easter. What would the pastor think, my mother says. Either way, I try to smother every inch of my body so my mother could give me her nod of approval for church. Instead, she scoffs and rolls her eyes.
“What are you thinking, wearing that?” She turns back to the mirror against her bedroom wall and resumes combing through her hair, not a single strand out of place. I see myself behind her reflection and examine my choice of a scoop neck black dress, but at least the hem goes past my knees.
“That neckline is far too low. Do you want to look like a whore?” she says, the pearls around her neck blend into the white of her cardigan. Her attention shifts to her whole body in the mirror, turning side to side to analyze every curve as one hand slides over her stomach, straightening her back.
“They’re just collarbones, Mother,” I say. She rolls her eyes.
“Hurry up and change, you don’t want to keep your father waiting,” she says. I don’t know if she is talking to me or the mirror.
“Yes, Mother,” I say. I taste blood in my mouth from biting my tongue. I can hear my father yell for her from downstairs, followed by my mother’s fast-paced clicking of her heels on the wood floor.
I changed into a high-collar floral dress. No tights.
⚢
I had sex with the boy next door again. We have a system forming: when either one of us gets horny, we open our bedroom windows and let the breeze blow our curtains like a flag. Last night, it was me that cracked my glass, which meant that he was to climb the tree next to my room and come in as silently as possible. No one is ever home, but this way is more exciting. Plus, secrecy is the other half of our agreement.
He came in later than usual. I was about to give up and take matters into my own hands, but just after my lights had dimmed and I covered myself with my bedsheets, there he was. He tells me that he has had many girlfriends before me, but the way he fidgets before he kisses me and fumbles while putting on a condom tells me otherwise. I forgive him for the way he lies, because I let him believe that I am satisfied when he’s done. He asked me to be his valentine. I said maybe.
He kissed me and climbed out the same way he came, and I was left to my moonlit room once again. I couldn’t sleep, so I settled on watching the shadows of my flag move across the wall until morning came.
⚢
It’s been weeks, but the girl finally comes to sit at her usual table. But there is no notebook in her hand, no pencil to scribble with, and no messy bun in her hair. Instead, she sits with her eyes closed and brows pinched, like she is waiting for something, hoping for something. She lets the wind stick her hair to her face, and she lets the people around us snicker. My stomach turns as I watch her. Where is the girl I had watched for so many months? The passion of her writing, the persistence of her routine? The clouds shade her upturned cheeks, but I can still see the way her jaw curves into the nape of her neck, and the way most of her hair falls behind her ears. I’ve read only a few pages of The Awakening for the last thirty minutes. Edna is in love with Robert, but she is still having an affair with Arobin. I don’t want to get there yet.
The girl opens her eyes and looks at me, and I quickly look back at my book. Edna is meeting Arobin—
“What are you reading?” she asks.
I lift the book without looking up. It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded.
“That’s a good one.”
I nod. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire.
“Edna kills herself, you know.”
My eyes rise to meet her face. Neither of us speak.
The bell rang. She snatches her bag and leaves. After a few minutes, I take a bite of my cold sandwich and keep reading on my way to class.
⚢
Acceptance letters came out today. Girls at school cried when their boyfriends committed out of state and ended their affairs; after all, long distance means no sex and that’s a deal breaker. Army men came to get signatures from the leftover scraps that either had no plans or no ideas. At least they’ll have no problem finding a wife before they’re deployed.
I’ve hidden mine in my backpack, unopened and untouched, waiting for the signal to change my life forever. I don’t want to give it that power yet. My mother doesn’t know I applied, and my father wouldn’t know unless I kicked open his study and put the finished application right in front of his work files. Either way, here I am with a bomb in my bag, ready to detonate.
I open it right before dinner.
The steam from the broccoli builds a wall between me and my mother at the table. My father eats quickly (he has a work call to get back to). My mother has to remake the salad; she should have known not to put raisins in it.
“Stop poking at your dinner,” says my mother, “that’s terribly rude.” She tries to ask my father about work, but he only grunts and nods at every other question. “Frances, what have I told you about the elbows?” She reaches for the vegetables.
“I’m going to Yale.”
My mother spills broccoli on the table cloth. My father curses. The moment feels like a century, yet somehow it is fleeting. She stands up and paces out of the room, my father soon to follow. The isolation of the dining room feels permanent.
“What did I do wrong?” I hear her cry.
I don’t know. The broccoli is going to stain, so I use my napkin to clean it as best as I can.
⚢
The boy next door told me he loves me. I didn’t say anything. I just let him kiss me and weep in my arms until I told him my mother might come upstairs soon, so he should climb back out. No one was home; he probably knew that.
Maybe I love him too. Maybe this is what love is? The silence of my moonlit bedroom is too loud for me to sleep.
⚢
Graduation is in two weeks, so all of our parents have been getting together to talk about the good old days and reminisce about our dependence on them. My mother tells people that I’m going out of town to help my aunt (she just had a baby, and she’s showing me the ropes). It’s not too far from Betty and her grandparents, maybe we’ll run into each other, she says. I can see in both our mothers’ eyes that it won’t happen, but they sip the wine in their glasses and nod and smile and sip some more.
⚢
This is the fifth Tuesday that the girl isn’t at lunch. I brought The Awakening again, but I don’t feel like reading. Edna is going to die soon. I want to save her last words.
⚢
Graduation is today. I have a plane ticket to Connecticut that leaves on Saturday; my parents had no objections to me leaving immediately. My mother and father lay in the audience somewhere smiling and laughing with the other parents, not daring to mention me or my disappointments. I’m sure my father’s arms are tightly knit around my mother’s shoulders, and I’m sure she acts like she likes it. We don’t speak at dinner anymore. We don’t have to. I listen to her cry at night and my father telling her it was her fault.
We are all in the auditorium now. Everyone is hugging and kissing and shouting that we are finally getting out of here, but most of them don’t realize that they will one day be back—almost everyone is. Except for Betty, her seat will be empty. The boy next door is here; he wraps his arms around me and tells me how excited he is for both of us. Him being off to Boston and me going to Connecticut, and all the space he will have when Yale doesn’t work out. I told him I loved him too.
I scan the crowd of graduates over his shoulder.
Our principal ushers us to our assigned seats, the boy next door leaves his arm around my shoulders as we settle into our two spots in the organized rows and columns. Parents and families enter the audience, only detectable by the sound of voices and shuffling behind the curtain separating us from the real world. The boy next door is talking to me, something about what party we’re going to hit up after this, or what he has in store for me tonight. I smile and nod, but my attention is focused more on the chaos of sounds from the stage. I can’t hear any scribbling; the stage smells like desperation. Soon enough, the strings start to play and the curtains jerk open to reveal the young adults about to enter the world. We all stand.
Our principal begins the ceremony with cliché lines and jokes that only make the parents laugh, followed by speeches from students using even more cliché kindergarten references. I overhear some of the girls behind me (the same ones who snicker at others in the hallways and frown at others who don’t starve themselves for the boys or smile through their passive aggression) gossiping about the empty seat in the front row of the stage. “—something off about her. I heard the ambulance last night.”
“Something about her grandparents. Her mother said—”
I hear only snippets, but tears start to well in my eyes. The boy next door nudges me to go to the podium, it’s my turn, he says.
The stage lights are too bright, and the crowd is too loud, but I manage to make it to the front of the podium to take my diploma and smile for a picture. She’s crying because she’s realized she made a mistake, my mother will think. That doesn’t matter anymore. My head is spinning.
I catch a glimpse of the empty seat in the front row, sticking out like a snowflake in summer, as I stumble back to my place in the beehive. The boy next door wipes my wet cheeks and kisses me. He says it will be okay, that he will miss me too.
I hope the girl says hello to Betty. They are so lucky to have such an angel, her mother will say.
The ceremony is over. Hats fly in the air as the curtains close.
⚢
Julia Marriott
6/1/22
Julia Marriott is a third-year psychology and sociology double-major at UC Davis. In the future, she wants to work as a forensic psychologist with the FBI. She is a student athlete on the cross-country and distance track team and also works with children as a behavior therapist at an autism learning center. In her free time, she loves to spend time outdoors, and when that isn’t an option, she loves to read and write!
