Free Because They Wanted To: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Page B

like she was already miles away from the apartment. She padded quickly down the stairs. When she reached the next floor, she saw that the people in the apartment directly under Robin’s had left their door wide open. She looked in and saw a group of men sitting in shirtsleeves around the kitchen table, playing cards. They had big arms and broad, jovial faces. A woman with her back to the door was moving vaguely at the sink. The men laughed and drank as they played. “Excuse me,” she said.
    A man got up and came to the door. His face was pockmarked, with little whiskers in the pocks. “Yes?” He was foreign, she couldn’t tell which kind. He wore a red kerchief around his neck, and his nose was big.
    “There’s kids in the apartment right above you. I’ve been taking care of them all day, but now I have to go. I don’t know where their mother is. She said she’d be back, but she’s not, and now I have to go. Could you be sure they’re okay?”
    He put his hand on his chin and looked past her as if considering.
    The woman glanced past the man at Elise; from her expression, it seemed that Elise made no sense to her.
    “One of them’s only a baby.”
    “Okay,” said the man. He pointed upstairs and nodded. “I check.”
    When she got home, she found Mark sitting in the living room, sewing patches on his jeans. She told him what had happened. “What do you think I should’ve done?” she asked. “Do you think it was okay to leave?”
    He shrugged. “What else could you do? She didn’t come back.” He concentrated on his pants, very meticulously working the needle. “She shouldn’t have left you there like that.”
    Elise sat on the couch. “Well, but one of them was a baby.”
    “You told the neighbors. They’ll be okay.”
    “I guess.” She stared at the frayed old carpet. There were tulips on it. She felt grateful to be back in her living room, even though it wasn’t really hers. “The thing is, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t keep panhandling forever. I have to find work somehow.”
    “You’ll find something,” said Mark. “It’ll be all right.”
    She sat a moment. “I once blew a guy for money,” she said. “In San Francisco. It was a nightmare. He said he’d give me fifty bucks, but he only gave me ten, and then he hit me.”
    “Yeah?”
    “And he tasted funny too. Like there was something wrong with him.”
    “Elise, God, you shouldn’t let ’em come in your mouth.”
    “Well, I didn’t want to; it just happened.”
    Mark put down the pants and thought. “Well,” he said, “this girl who sells roses in Gas Town has been paying me twenty dollars to clean them for her. Like, take off the thorns and the old petals? If you wanted to help me, I could pay you five dollars. Do you want to do that?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.” She sniffed. “Thank you, Mark.”
    “It’s okay.”
    She went into the kitchen and raided the refrigerator. She got olives, cheese, tiny green peppers, and cold white rice from an old Chinese take-out box and put it all on a plate and carried it to her room.
    The next day she walked by the apartment building, on the opposite side of the street. There was no one sitting on the porch. She looked up at Robin’s window; it was open, as it had been when she left. She pictured Robin coming home and screaming, “Oh, my babies!” She pictured Andy and Eric at the foreign man’s table, eating dishes of ice cream. Then she turned the corner and headed for Granville Street, her rubber dime-store sandals hitting her dirty heels with each fleet step.

Orchid
     
    Margot had not seen Patrick for sixteen years, so it was a mild shock to run into him in Seattle, on the sidewalk outside an esoteric video rental store. She had stopped to halfheartedly examine the items of clothing a street vendor had arranged on a large blanket on the side-walk in front of the store, as well as on some auxiliary coat hangers hung on a parking lot fence. She