Free Under My Skin by Alison Jameson Page B

workshop. She had taken it on the first night he showed her around. She had turned it over and over in her hand and when he was not looking she did not put it back down. Then she took his black sweater and he knew about that. It was one of the regular transactions of love. Like the sock left in the bed. The undershorts on the radiator. Small symbols to reassure the other person that you intend to come back. Like all women, though, she marked these things down, and truth be told, Glassman was just careless and tended to leave his things lying around and Matilda, because she wanted to, mistook his untidiness for love.
    Then she began to forage and collect.
    And everything went into an old suitcase in the closet in the hall. A band-aid taken from the trash can in his bathroom. She treasured it. And a black silk tie from his wardrobe, never worn but taken out once and run through his hands. His empty meds bottles. The plastic caps prised open so she could smell inside. It seemed sad – but she had begun to associate a pharmacy smell with him.
    The first photograph she took was of his hands. Strong, long fingers. Made to draw things and carve wood. They were not a doctor’s hands at all. Much less a doctor working in theER. He would not know that one night she went there. That she got up and dressed at 3 a.m. and went out into the snow and walked twenty blocks until she found him, in green scrubs working on a traffic accident. She stood silently behind the glass and watched him give orders and move quickly and silently and all the time save lives and then she went home and masturbated to the thoughts of it. The next day she knew his patient had lived. He was always different when someone died. Not blaming himself but just looking puzzled and quiet and his eyes full of questions. It was always, ‘Why?’ With Glassman everything ended in ‘Why?’
    Matilda took the trash out. Fed her cat and ignored his sulks.
    ‘You think you have problems,’ she said, and they would not even meet each other’s eyes. Godot walked to the window and watched the snow as if it was new to him. He had seen it for two winters now and yet he sat with his back to her, his head looking up and down as he tried to watch each and every flake. ‘Another break-up,’ he would say, if Godot would ever talk. She did her laundry. Changed her sheets even though they were almost new. She opened her post and paid her cable bill. Then she checked her mailbox and her heart sank a little further when she saw there was no email from Hope. She tried to practise returning to her old life. And then she turned off her phone and went where she had wanted to go all along.
    Matilda kept the wig in the closet in the bedroom. It was short with loose curls and peroxide blonde. She painted her lips red in her favourite MAC colour, which was Rage. Then she put the wig on and took a pill and went to the walk-in closet in the hallway. The inside of the door was covered in black and white prints. Glassman smiling at a barbecue – he hated barbecues. Glassman with his favourite Ben and Jerry’s –Caramel Chew-Chew. Glassman on the beach – he got a great tan – and on the sidewalk after the concert in the Beacon. Then his hands again. His fingertips. His smiles. His face. His eyes – his eyes, and it all came together to make a montage and a shrine to Glassman.
    He had told her and was direct about it – and yet in a simple clear moment in her hallway closet she decided something else. He said ‘Yes’ to releasing her. He said ‘Yes’ to ending it. He said ‘Yes – yes – yes’ as she packed all her little things and ‘Yes’ when he followed her down the stairs and on to the street. It was
his
arm that went up for the cab and he breathed ‘Yes’ to the one that swooped into the sidewalk straight away. Glassman said ‘Yes – oh yes’ to the final goodbye of it, but high in the dark shadows of her closet, when Matilda could not manage the word, Marilyn said