I’m the reason we live at Grandma’s. Me, and Vasili.
One early spring night Mom brought him home from the bar where she worked. I lay awake in my room, straining for the sound of the front door. Daphne and Jessie shared a room across the hall. It seems strange, maybe, that I, the middle child, would have my own room. But my sisters wanted it that way. They were tight. I was always the one on the fringes of their games. Through my door, open just a crack, I could see through their open door. I caught a glimpse of Jessie’s long legs sprawled across her twin bed, and the curve of Daphne’s back and shoulder. Science books stacked on the floor.
I heard a blur of voices outside. Mom’s throaty slur and a strange, deeper voice. Accent I couldn’t place. “You sure, Lena?” The hard, knowing core of me understood the man’s tender concern was bullshit, but some new, softer side of me swayed to the sound of his voice. Mom’s laughter: loud, like a heavy book dropped down a flight of stairs. The ranch’s front door banged. A thin bar of light fell into my room. Feet shuffled on the hardwood floor of the hall. My bedroom doorknob rattled and turned. The bar of light widened. I tensed. “This way,” Mom murmured. I imagined her tugging the man’s hand, this foreign man she’d let into our house. I listened to her door shut, to the soft laughter that came within. I strained to listen long after the laughter stopped. Either they’d passed out or they moved quietly, removing clothes, working with fingers and tongues, discovering new territories, while I lay in the dark and wondered.
It wasn’t the first time Mom had brought someone home from the bar. But always before, the men crept out before dawn. The next morning Vasili sat at the kitchen table looking like he belonged. Mom sat next to him, hunched over a cup of coffee, reading the Sunday paper. Daphne stood at the stove, stabbing the frying pan with a spatula. Eggs sizzled. The smell of onions filled the room. My sister always kept things running, making sure Mom had strong coffee after a bender and got to work on time.
“Um, hello?” I said, sidling to the bar that separated the kitchen from the table. Vasili looked up, looked down quickly. His eyes were the color of the inside of a glacier. He wasn’t embarrassed enough to put on his shoes and leave.
Jessie emerged. Her cat’s eyes widened when she saw Vasili. Daphne turned from the stove. A look passed from her to Jessie, like a bead sliding along a cord. Mom still stared down at the paper, but if her hangover was as strong as I thought it was, I doubt she read a word. Jessie veered off. I listened for the sound of the TV, but the family room stayed quiet.
Mom had not acknowledged Jess. I went cold. In that instant I knew Mom had had enough. She’d been a single parent for seven years, ever since Dad left, and she was flat-out done. Her jobs as a personal banker and bartender, her drinks and her men, were all she wanted. She wasn’t going to introduce us to her new “friend.” She’d dropped all pretenses. Daphne and Jessie and I were on our own.
Daphne set a plate of omelet in front of Mom. “Where’s mine?” I asked. Daphne glared at me. I glared back. She stepped to the cupboard, banged plates and rattled silverware, practically shoved the plate into my stomach. She inched a plate toward Vasili the way you might feed a feral cat you found in your backyard. Vasili looked right at me. “Cheers,” he said, raising his fork. Then he winked.
Vasili spent more and more time at our house that spring and summer. (Eventually we learned his name. Jessie called him “Vaseline” but not to his face.) Mornings after the nights Mom worked at the bar, I’d wake to find his white-and-turquoise taxi parked in our driveway. Once I nearly collided with him in the hallway. He wore nothing but a tank undershirt and briefs. I didn’t know where to put my eyes. A strange sensation bloomed at the back of my throat. It wasn’t lust, exactly. It didn’t feel entirely pleasant. But not unpleasant either.
On the nights Mom worked, I couldn’t sleep. I’d squirm and thrash on my mattress that was so old its springs dug into my back, listening for the front door, for staggering steps in the hall. I’d imagine what she and Vasili did once her bedroom door clicked shut. It wasn’t any kind of turn-on to picture their middle-aged bodies sliding against each other, tangled in dirty sheets. But I couldn’t stop.
One night, I messed around on YouTube and stumbled across my first ASMR video. ASMR stands for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” which is a long clinical name to describe a tingling sensation along skin and scalp, a feeling of drowsy bliss. An entire YouTube community has sprung up around someone’s desire to make others relax. I sat in bed, transfixed, as I watched a sweet-faced woman, maybe a few years older than Daphne, run sculpted nails over the pictures in a child’s book. My scalp started to buzz before she even opened her mouth. Her voice was as smooth as department store lotion, the kind no one in my family could afford. Tracing the illustrations with tapered fingers, she read a poem about fairies, the one about the little red-capped men who kidnapped poor Bridget and kept her for seven years. Grandma used to read me that poem. She’d run her fingers and up down my back as I snuggled close. I’d feel perfectly loved, safe. As I watched the woman on my laptop screen, her soothing voice floating through my ear canals, up into my skull, crisp pages crinkling as they turned, I felt a sense of peace I hadn’t felt in years. I was practically asleep before I could set my laptop on the floor.
My insomnia disappeared, but I watched ASMR videos nearly every night. I became fascinated by those people, alone in their bedrooms or living rooms, who could make their unseen audience instantly relax, sometimes just by whispering. I quickly developed preferences among the “ASMRtists.” Tina of Tina’s Tingles had a vast antique jewelry collection. As she traced white profiles on cameo pins with red lacquered nails, I pictured myself opening the tiny drawers of Grandma’s jewelry box, holding up her butterfly pins and garnet ring for my own invisible followers. Feathergirl, who’d made the first video I’d watched, was my favorite. Some of the others talked or moved too quickly, and the champagne-bubble tingles wouldn’t come. But Feathergirl was a pro. Whether she was reading fairy tales or pretending to be a hairstylist or crinkling up tissue paper, her soft voice and slow hands could transport me to peace, then sleep. What would it be like to have that sort of power? I wondered. A power to help, not harm, but power nonetheless. Like most almost-sixteen-year-olds, I was highly critical of my looks, but the mirror didn’t lie. I had straight, even teeth and big eyes and blonde hair. My voice was pitched slightly deeper than average.
One night, after I was sure everyone was asleep, I dug out Mom’s old digital camera, which she never used. We hadn’t had a family photo taken since before the divorce. I set it on the edge of my bed and sat on the floor. I cleared my throat, suddenly nervous. There was something about looking into that blank, black lens that made the whole thing seem important. “Hi, guys,” I spoke in a low, slow voice, imitating Feathergirl. “This is Sandra, of Sand Sounds … Welcome to my ASMR channel … Today … I have some horses to show you.” My Breyer horse collection was lined up in front of me: Appaloosa gelding, flame-chestnut Man O’ War, tiny white Shetland pony, and the rest, eleven altogether. Grandma had given me my first, the dapple-gray Arabian stallion which I held in front of the camera. “This horse is very special,” I whispered. “He came to me when I was only five. His name is Phantom.” I traced my finger along the arrogant arch of the stallion’s neck, his ridged mane, flared pink nostrils. A tiny movement in the hallway made me pause, fingertip frozen on Phantom’s single white foot. In the chink between door and doorjamb, I saw a body glide past. Flash of glacier eyes. How long had Vasili watched? My breath caught.
Gail Wallace Bozzano is a former journalist and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. She is a 2015 recipient of the Ragdale Rubin Fellowship and the 2016 winner of the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Grub Street, the Chicago Tribune, Cagibi, Chicago Literati, Cactus Heart, Hair Trigger, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and three children in the Chicago area.