Free Charisma by Orania Papazoglou

and I didn’t have anyplace to go, I’d come down here too. It would be better than staying in the middle of town.”
    Andy stopped. He had to. Susan had stopped already. They were standing in front of a movie theater called the Snake Charmer. A poster in a frame beside the ticket booth showed a woman in stockings and garters and no underwear, her legs spread wide. She was holding her ass in the air with hands tipped by sequined fingernails. Her face rose in the background, not quite clearing the knobby mountains that were her knees. Susan stepped closer and read the teaser line, half-obscured by a wash of mud at the bottom of the frame.
    “ ‘They can’t get enough and they like their men rough,’ ” she said. “Wonderful.”
    “Wonderful?”
    “I was being sarcastic, Andy.”
    “You were getting suckered.” He took her arm again. “You can’t walk around this place and look at these people as if you were walking through a zoo. They won’t like it. And they’re not stable.”
    “I’m not looking at these people as if they were in a zoo. I like it here.”
    “You like the exoticness of it.”
    “That’s not true.” It wasn’t, either. Andy had dragged her along a little farther. They were standing in front of a shop door covered by a hinged iron gate. The gate had been pushed open a little and the glass door beyond it propped back. Susan came to a stop again, to watch a frazzled old woman push a rack of Indian print shirts out onto the sidewalk.
    Andy was getting angry. Susan knew that. She was going to have to say something, but she didn’t know what. She didn’t know Andy very well anymore. She didn’t know anyone. She’d gotten out of the habit of talking about herself. That was one thing nuns were never allowed to do. They were supposed to take the lives they’d lived in the world and lay them down on Christ’s altar, to burn them as sacrifices in the fire of religious meditation. God only knew she’d never been able to do that, but she had learned to fake it very well. Her self was in a box somewhere, buried out of sight.
    She started moving on her own this time, but slowly, so she could take it all in. She did like it here. In fact, she loved it. It was like a heart that never stopped beating, but pumped up, fast—a runner’s heart hitting its stride in a marathon. The music had changed into something that really wasn’t music at all, just a voice talking in endlessly relentless meter and a background of percussion sticks. A bookstore was opening across the street. A young man with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth and a black leather jacket torn at the shoulder seams was dragging a stand-up board onto the sidewalk. When he got it where he wanted it, he took out a handkerchief and tried to wipe it off.
    “Ever since I got here,” she said, “not just since I got home, but ever since I got back to New Haven—the whole place has seemed dead. At first, I thought it was just the house. I wasn’t even surprised. I kept asking myself what else I could possibly expect. I mean—”
    “You mean nothing.” Andy had his arm braided around hers now. He was doing more than just pulling her along. She resented the hell out of it. “The house is not dead. The house isn’t anything. You’re making all this up.”
    “No, I’m not. But when we got to the Green today, I changed my mind. It isn’t just the house. It’s the whole city. It’s as if sometime while I was away the place lay down and turned over and decided to sleep its way to the grave. It just decided to give up and check out.”
    “This is where people give up and check out,” Andy said. “This is Suicide Hill.”
    “Don’t pull me.”
    Andy stopped instead. In anger, he looked like their father. His face got as red as if he’d drunk a quart of vodka in the last half hour, straight.
    “I’ll tell you what they didn’t do for you in that convent,” he said. “They didn’t make you grow