Wilson - Nothing to See Here

For Ann Patchett and Julie Barer

In the late spring of 1995, just a few weeks after Id turned twenty-eight, I got a letter from my friend Madison Roberts. I still thought of her as Madison Billings. I heard from Madison four or five times a year, updates on her life that were as foreign to me as reports from the moon, her existence the kind you only read about in magazines. She was married to an older man, a senator, and she had a little boy whom she dressed in nautical suits and who looked like an expensive teddy bear that had turned human. I was working two cashier jobs at competing grocery stores, smoking weed in the attic of my mothers house because when I had turned eighteen, she had immediately turned my childhood bedroom into a workout room, a huge NordicTrack filling the place where Id unhappily grown up. I sporadically dated people who didnt deserve me but thought they did. You can imagine how Madisons letters were a hundred times more interesting than mine, but we stayed in touch.

This letter had broken up the natural spacing of her correspondence, precise and expected. But that didnt give me pause. Madison and I did not communicate except on paper. I didnt even have her phone number.

I was on break at the Save-A-Lot, the first chance Id had to read the thing, and I opened it to find that Madison wanted me to come to Franklin, Tennessee, where she lived on her husbands estate, because she had an interesting job opportunity for me. Shed included a fifty-dollar bill for bus fare, because she knew that my car wasnt great with more than fifteen-mile distances. She wouldnt say what the job was, though it couldnt be worse than dealing with food stamps and getting the fucking scale to properly weigh the bruised apples. I used the last five minutes of my break to ask Derek, my boss, if I could have a few days off. I knew hed say no, and I didnt begrudge him this refusal. Id never been the most responsible employee. It was the hard thing about having two jobs: you had to disappoint them at different times and sometimes you lost track of who youd fucked over worse. I thought about Madison, maybe the most beautiful woman Id ever met in real life, who was also so weirdly smart, always considering the odds of every scenario. If she had a job for me, Id take it. Id leave my moms attic. Id empty out my life because I was honest enough to know that I didnt have much that Id miss when it disappeared.

A week after I wrote back to Madison with a date that Id arrive, a man in a polo shirt and sunglasses was waiting inside the bus station in Nashville. He looked like a man who was really into watches. Lillian Breaker? he asked, and I nodded. Mrs. Roberts asked me to escort you back to the Roberts estate. My name is Carl.

Are you their driver? I asked, curious as to the particulars of wealth. I knew rich people on TV had drivers, but it seemed like a Hollywood absurdity that didnt connect to the real world.

No, not exactly. Im just kind of a jack-of-all-trades. I help Senator Roberts, and Mrs. Roberts by extension, when things come up.

Do you know what Im doing here? I asked. I knew what cops sounded like, and Carl sounded like a cop. I wasnt super jazzed about law enforcement, so I was feeling him out.

I believe I do, but Ill let Mrs. Roberts talk to you. I think she would prefer that.

What kind of car are you driving? I asked him. Is it your own car? I had been on a bus for a couple of hours with people who communicated only in hacking coughs and weird sniffs. I just wanted to hear my own voice go out into the open air.

Its a Miata. Its mine. Are you ready to go, maam? May I take your luggage? Carl asked, clearly ready to successfully complete this portion of his task. He had that cop-like tic where he tried to hide his impatience with a tight formality.

I didnt bring anything, I said.

Excellent. If youll follow me, Ill get you to Mrs. Roberts ASAP.

When we got to the Miata, a hot red number that seemed too small to be on the road, I asked if we could ride with the top down, but he said it wasnt such a great idea. It looked like it pained him to refuse. But it also looked like maybe it pained him to be asked. I couldnt quite figure out Carl, so I settled into the car and let everything move past me.

Mrs. Roberts says that youre her oldest friend, Carl said, making conversation.

That might be right, I said. Weve known each other a while. I didnt say that Madison probably didnt have any other real friends. I didnt hold it against her. I didnt have any real friends, either. What I also didnt say was that I wasnt even sure that we were actually friends at all. What we were was something weirder. But Carl didnt want to hear any of that, so we just rode in silence the rest of the way, the radio playing easy listening that made me want to slip into a hot bath and dream about killing everyone I knew.

I met Madison at a fancy girls school hidden on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. A hundred or so years ago, maybe even longer, all the men who had managed to make enough money in such a barren landscape decided that they needed a school to prepare their daughters for the eventuality of marrying some other rich men, moving up in life until no one remembered a time when they had been anything other than exemplary. They brought some British guy to Tennessee, and he ran the place like a school for princesses, and soon other rich men from other barren landscapes sent their daughters. And then, after this happened enough times, rich people in real cities, like New York and Chicago, started hearing about this school and started sending their own daughters. And if you can catch that kind of good luck, it holds for centuries.

I grew up in the valley of that mountain, just poor enough that I could imagine a way out. I lived with my mom and a rotating cast of her boyfriends, my father either dead or just checked out. My mother was vague about him, not a single picture. It seemed like maybe some Greek god had assumed the form of a stallion and impregnated her before returning to his home atop Mount Olympus. More likely it was just a pervert in one of the fancy homes that my mom cleaned. Maybe he was some alderman in town, and Id seen him all my life without knowing it. But I preferred to think he was dead, that he was wholly incapable of saving me from my unhappiness.

The school, the Iron Mountain Girls Preparatory School, offered one or two full scholarships each year to girls in the valley who showed promise. And, though it might be hard to believe now, I showed a fucking lot of promise. I had spent my childhood gritting my teeth and smashing everything to bits in the name of excellence. I taught myself to read at three years old, matching the storybooks that came with records to the words the narrator spoke through the little speaker. When I was eight, my mother put me in charge of our finances, the weekly budgeting from the envelopes of cash that she brought home at night. I made straight As. At first, it was purely out of an instinctual desire to be superlative, as if I suspected that I was a superhero and was merely testing the limits of my powers. But once teachers started to tell me about Iron Mountain and the scholarship, information that my mother could not have cared less about, I redirected my efforts. I didnt know that the school was just some ribbon that rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. I thought it was a training ground for Amazons. I made other students cry at the spelling bee. I plagiarized scientific studies and dumbed them down just enough to win county science fairs. I memorized poems about Harlem and awkwardly recited them to my moms boyfriends, who thought I was some weird demon speaking in tongues. I played point guard on the boys traveling basketball team because there wasnt one for girls. I made people in my town, whether they were poor or middle class, especially upper middle class, feel good, like I was something they could agree on, a sterling representative of this little backwoods county. I wasnt destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.