The Schooling of Emery Dixon (Ending #2)

Rehab, or run away? I let readers choose between two endings to my story about Southern girls, good intentions, and bad choices—a joint project with Medium and Ploughshares. This is the ending you didn’t choose, and here’s an essay on why I’m printing it anyway.

Read the first part of the story here, the readers’ choice ending here, and lots more about the project here.

She lies in bed for two days. Through the window she can see: flies hurling themselves at the glass panes; the neighbor’s grass, browned from the sun; the eleven-year-old boy who pedals up and down the road, seemingly all day long; her father leaving for and returning from work in his BMW; her sisters coming home from a day at the pool with friends, bags slung over their tanned shoulders. They talk in an animated way, hands flying, picking at each other, pointing. She can see flickers of her old self in their faces and begrudges their lightness.

She’s spent hours lying still, mind racing, afraid if she moved she would run away or break something, and right now she’s already sick with shame and withdrawal. Hot, she kicks off the comforter.

Her mother knocks on the door, then enters. She has a sandwich on a plate. It’s a perfectly cut sandwich; so clean at the edges that Emery cannot tell what’s inside.

“I’m not hungry.”

Marge sighs. She’s wearing crisp blue crushed-linen trousers and a white button-up. Her gold jewelry looks heavy and Emery can’t imagine burdening her ears and décolletage with so much weight. Like Mr. T, she thinks, and almost laughs at the absurdity of it, and at how humor is so unwelcome now, so impossible.

“You need to put on some weight,” her mother says.

“That’s a first.”

“I want to talk to you about something before your father gets home.” Marge won’t look her in the eyes, and the tone of her voice gives Emery a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“You’re going to send me away again, aren’t you?” Emery sits up in bed, the sheets over her lap. Her hair is matted. She needs a shower. “Oh my God. You’re going to toss me out.”

“We’re not tossing you out. You need to be in a rehabilitation program.”

“But there are some in town. I could be an outpatient. God, Mom. Just slow down. Please.”

Marge stretches out her legs, gazes at her hands in her lap. Her nails are painted red, and Emery notices how old her skin looks next to the shiny, smooth lacquer. She thinks how strange it is that every woman reaches a point after which there is no more conventional beauty, only the process of decay. How does that feel? she wonders. Or do I already know?

“I need to be home,” Emery says, hoping she can reach her mother, who, to her, looks uncomfortable, conflicted. She senses immediately that she must convince her mother that there is something good and salvageable inside her, that she can be trusted again.

“Mom, you know I need to be home.”

“We can’t have you like this around your sisters,” Marge says, standing up. She looks rattled; her lips are trembling. “You understand.”

“No. I don’t understand.”

“You don’t know how hard this is on me!” Marge says, covering her face. She leaves the room. A minute later Emery hears the door to her mother’s bedroom slam shut.

But you’re not the one with the problem, Emery thinks. I am!

When she was sent away to boarding school, she saw girls who thrived there, girls who already knew who they were and what they wanted. She’d never been one of them. She was forced to cobble together some sense of self. Maybe it would have been better if she’d stayed in her dorm, studied the weather, and kept to herself. But there was always the part of her that wanted to be beautiful, that wanted to have fun, that had to try.

That night, all she can think about is cocaine. She sits on her floor and attempts to read a Jane Austen paperback from the English class she flunked; she can’t get past the first page. She clutches her knees and rocks back and forth until the carpet irritates her skin. She can hear her parents arguing.

“She needs a whopping dose of humility,” her father says. “And she’s going to get it. She’s going to work.”

Don’t you understand? Emery thinks. That’s the problem. I’ve had dose after dose of humility. I’ve had it shoved down my throat so long I’m spitting it back up.

The Jane Gray House is a two-story colonial, an upscale halfway house for girls, on a residential street near Cooley Academy.

“The familiarity will be good for you,” Marge says. “You know your way around the neighborhood.”

“Nothing here is good for me,” Emery says, looking at the dull furniture in the communal living room, the sign-out sheet by the door.

During the day a neatly dressed woman named Sue-Anne offers the girls nutrition and career counseling and, for the heroin addicts, a dose of methadone.

Emery works part-time at the pharmacy where she and Colby used to buy milkshakes with their pocket money. She works alongside a cross-eyed lady, whose name is Willa. She’s not as gentle as Emery imagined upon meeting her; later that first day she turns to Emery and says, “Did you open the motherfucking crate of soup yet?”

There’s a woman in her seventies who comes into the pharmacy wearing shirtdresses that seem handmade and must be decades old. She holds a damp, weak-looking cardboard box full of vanilla cakes, plastic wrapped so tightly that they take on strange, unappetizing shapes.

“Not today,” Willa says, looking up from refilling ketchup bottles.

“Fresh baked,” the old woman says, setting her cardboard box on the white counter. “I’ll give them to you for what I’ve got in them.”

“If we wanted cakes, we’d stir up some mix and bake them ourselves. We don’t need any of your smashed cakes.”

“You can have them for fifty cents each and charge a dollar twenty-five.”

“Not today.”

“Ten dollars for the whole batch.”

“No.”

Emery starts to blush. She feels humiliated for the old woman. She wishes she had money; she would buy the cakes, all of them.

“You crow! I’ll take my cakes and sell them myself.”

“Fine.”

Standing behind the counter in a white apron, watching the old lady haul her cardboard box down the sidewalk, Emery doesn’t feel just sober, she feels excruciatingly sober. It hurts to look out at the world this way. She’s been stripped down, bleached. Her chest aches.

Her anxiety is worse than it’s ever been. She sleeps with the light on, listening to the girl next door moan through what must be nightmares. In the halfway house she’s surrounded by erratic women, of which she may be one, but that doesn’t mean she wants their company. Birdie C. is anorexic and wears a pale blue belted trench coat, earbuds always in her ears. Anna D. dresses like she’s on safari and cuts blocks of uncooked tofu with her pocketknife.

When Emery gets home from work, Anna D. is pacing the living room, a wet-looking tofu container on the coffee table. Emery tries to ignore her and starts up the stairway.

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want to go driving with me?” Anna D. looks up at her. She’s pretty, long eyelashes and hazel eyes, the type of girl who tans easily.

“We’re not supposed to drive.”

“You don’t really end up at a place like this if you’re into following rules, right? My car is parked a block down the street.” Anna D. nods south.

All Emery can think about lately is getting out, and so she shrugs her shoulders and exits through the front door, behind Anna D. They walk underneath a row of oak trees to her car, which happens to be a white Volvo, like Marge’s.

“Sorry about the radio. I sold it a while back,” Anna says, sighing.

Emery nods. It’s getting cool in the evenings now, but the black leather seats are warm. She rolls down her window. Anna lights a cigarette as she pulls away from the curb.

“Do you care where we go?”

“Not really.”

“Good.”

And so they drive until they reach the highway, and then Anna takes 95. She seems like a confident driver, so Emery stops worrying, stops paying attention. She has a strange feeling, as if she didn’t care what happened to her body, as if she might not feel anything if the car were to hit a tree, roll onto its side. She might hear the wrenching and screaming of metal, but she wouldn’t feel it cut into her skin.

“I’m going to pull over at this rest station for a sec,” Anna says, unbuckling her seat belt before the car stops. “I have a delivery to make. It’ll be quick.” She reaches for a bag.

Emery knows she’s either selling or buying, and frankly she doesn’t care. She’s just happy to be out of control again, to let things happen on one of the last summer nights of the year. To have wind in her hair and eyes.

The next morning at the pharmacy, the old woman is back, but this time she has her daughter in tow. The daughter pauses at the window, looking outside at the street, her back to the lunch counter. At first glance Emery can’t tell how old the girl is. Is she a girl or a woman? Why is she dressed like her mother, in the same homemade dress?

“Don’t you come in here haggling again,” Willa says, scowling. “Bringing in that daughter of yours to scare up sympathy.”

Just then the daughter turns from the window. Her eyes are wild and she has drool coming out of one side of her mouth. “I like peaches, peaches, peaches!” she yells. She’s practically panting. The old woman turns to shush her, then goes back to showing her cakes to Willa.

Emery steps from behind the counter and walks over to the daughter, who must be thirty. She’s still standing there, mouth agape, large hands twisting and gripping each other, feet splayed out in white sandals. Emery can’t bring herself to say anything, but she smiles at her, and then goes to straighten a pile of napkins next to the condiments. Her heart is pounding.

The daughter sneezes and wipes her face with her hand.

“Jesus Christ, Rebecca!” the old lady says, digging out a handkerchief. “Wipe your face like a lady.”

Rebecca moans. Emery thinks of how this woman will probably never have sex. Has she ever read a book?

Your mother wants the best for you, Emery thinks, studying the girl, whose hair is cut blunt and short. But you can never become all that she wanted you to be.

Don’t you understand? Emery thinks, gripping the round plastic table in front of her. It hurts to look at you. Every day, every night, she lies in her bed and imagines that things turned out differently. And every morning, there you are, eating cereal at her table, shoveling peaches into your imperfect face. Every morning we are there, until one day we’re not. Until one day they are forced to admit that we will not have the lives they wanted for us. We are not the girls of their dreams. We never have been.