The First Time that I Killed Someone Because of What I’d Done to Them

Charlene Elsby

Mandy used to come around in the late afternoons. She’d finish up shift at the restaurant and knock on my door, take her sneakers off in the hall. When I answered, there she’d be, black socks on the thin hall carpet, smelling like salt and fryer grease. When she got in the shower, I always pictured that she got in with her clothes on, rubbed the bar soap over each piece, took it off to rinse and hang to dry a little bit while she kept going, washing the day off layer by layer until she got down to the skin she couldn’t show other people. She’d come out wearing the clothes she left behind the day before, which she’d find for her in the second drawer down, the one where the interface was coming unglued from the structure and would come off whole one day when it was done. Later on, I’d go into the bathroom and see what she had on this morning hanging on the towel rack, black socks on the heater vent, panties hung over a shampoo bottle, as if she felt that was polite, given that of all the things in the room, that bottle was the only one just hers. In the morning, I’d take them down dry and put them away in the second drawer, hers just because it was broken in the way it was. Mandy would come sit with me on the sofa, throw a pack of cigarettes on the table she’d took of someone at the restaurant. Or maybe that’s what she told me, so I didn’t think she’d bought them. There’s no pride in taking someone else’s cigarettes, unless they were someone else’s to start. Something we took off someone else instead of off each other. Much in the same way I’d always have too much food for some reason, and she had to take some of it, do me the favour. This one time, she let too much slip, told me that the reason she’d come that day was because she couldn’t go home, couldn’t stand to see the look on her Dad’s face when she looked around the cupboards for something to eat and couldn’t find it. How she’d have to pretend she wasn’t that hungry, just looking for something that tastes good, and then how she’d have to go on the rest of the night, until she could find some other excuse to go out, some way to feed herself that wouldn’t make him make that face. Broke my god damn heart to hear it. She’d stopped eating what they’d give her at work after the boss looked at her like it was too much. She figured if she wanted to keep the job, she’d have to pretend to be someone who didn’t need it. Tonight I made her boiled rice and cheese, and I even went out and picked the tops off of some of the green onions from the community garden, where they made the addicts grow food because they figured that was a good enough sense of purpose for them to have as any. I left it on the stove in the chipped ceramic pot, and I left some grains on the stove top for her to clean up, so she could complain about it. “Who never taught you to hold a dish close to the pot when you’re serving?” “Well, I used to think it was my mother, but now I guess it’s you.” As she was cleaning up after me, she’d have a bit, of course. Wouldn’t want it to go bad. “No one ever taught you to measure, either. You’re always wasting food.” “So call my mom and tell her I’m spoiled. I’m sure she would agree with you.” We’d laugh. She was thin, and you could see where she hadn’t always been. The parts of her body that showed would give it away, when at night we’d watch our shows, laying there on the couch. Her dress would fail to hide some bit of loose thigh, or her shirt would catch the couch fabric and fail to rotate along with her when she turned herself over, trying not to rot away. I sometimes asked her if she’d like to do anything else in the world, even just go outside, sit on the porch and watch the other tenants come in and out. And most of the time she’d say she was happy where she was. Sometimes she didn’t answer me at all. Sometimes, when she was tired from work or if she hadn’t been eating well, she’d fall asleep on the couch in the evening. Turn her face into the corner and tuck her knees up into her chest. Her ass would be facing out at me, and I could see the crevice that followed all her sensitive parts from back to front and all I’d want to do is fill it, smooth out the surface by filling in the divot, feel its warmth, its moisture. I’m sure sometimes she bled, and I don’t know how she hid it, but I’d imagine my hand in the crack and pulling it out, warm, wet, bloody red with the smell of copper and meat before it goes in the pan. Pieces of her we could share if we could only. But I wouldn’t. One night Mandy and I got to talking, and she shared aloud with me how much she loved what we had together, how it proved to her that in the world you could define for yourself what your relationships would be, how we could be something that wasn’t family, not love, but something all together our own, and that maybe it was a kind of love, but not the one she’d always been told to believe would always end in pain or death. My heart sung when she said all this—how special we were, how it was a kind of love. I wanted her to have everything in the world that I had, and I wanted to kiss her freshly washed face and ask her to never change. I wanted to tell her that no matter what, I’d always feel for her the same way I do now, that she could admit whatever she liked to me, and that it would only ever bring us closer to know her. I thought that once one secret had come out, she’d tell me all of them, and that every single secret she had would bring me the same amount of joy as this one. I thought that this conversation meant that something had now changed between us, for the absolute better, and that we could now be the people we were without the facades we put on for the world. That our evenings would now be all the sharing of secrets, that the television would stay off forever, and that now we had determined that we would rather sit on the floor together, facing each other with our knees crossed, Mandy tucking her hair behind her ears, admitting everything we’d ever wanted that we couldn’t tell before. And in that moment of joy (which was a weakness, as all joys are), I told her, and I immediately regretted it. I told her about how I thought our relationship was perfect, and that was why I’d never acted on my desires to touch her as she slept. How I held her in such high regard that I would never do such things, either with or without her consent. And I thought that by telling her this, she would be assured of my loyalty, of my absolute respect for her, and she would understand the gravity with which I had shared this secret, and appreciate how my many months of longing went unrewarded, for that was how much I valued her. She would look back on those months and how I could have behaved differently, but that I didn’t, because I wasn’t the sort of person who would do such a thing. But somehow, and this was my mistake, she understood the opposite. By some twist in words or logic, somehow Mandy understood not that I was what I said but what I said I wasn’t. All evening, all I could think of was how I should’ve listened to my mother, when I was 11 and got glasses. I was worried because we’d just seen How to Marry a Millionaire, and I remembered how Marilyn Monroe would hide her glasses, take them off when men were around, how she said that, “Men aren’t attentive to girls who wear glasses.” And my mother told me, “Nevermind that. They make you look smart,” which at the time I thought was a good thing. “Just don’t open your mouth and ruin it,” mom said. Which is what I’d done with Mandy. I’d opened my mouth and ruined it, ruined us, everything we had. And she pretended that I hadn’t. But when it came time to settle in for the night, she said that she was cold and asked if I had a blanket. As I took the old afghan out of the cupboard, I felt so ashamed, that I was so bad at expressing myself that she’d have to ask me for it. I felt betrayed, by her and by myself, her for not trusting me, and myself for having believed that I was good enough to love. As I handed it to her, she pretended not to see me crying, and as she lay down, she tucked it in around her waist, like she’d only gotten cold where I had threatened her. I slept fitfully in the recliner next to her, waking up every so often from dreams where she’d left me. In the morning, I went to fold her laundry into its drawer, and that’s when I noticed. No panties on the shampoo bottle. No tiny green triangle of fabric trimmed with polyester stretch lace, some of the elastic broken and free, white strands making it known they couldn’t be confined. The rest of Mandy’s clothes were where they’d always been, black jeans and grey t-shirt hanging over the bar in the shower, socks on the heater vent. But the only piece of adornment capable of showing her taste was gone. At first, I panicked, because after all these days that I’d been entrusted to fold her clothes, put them away before my own shower, make sure they don’t get rewet, I’d somehow lost the only bit that represented her personality. I opened the cupboard doors, moved every old bottle of cleanser, and found nothing but a dried-out dollar store sponge that I noted to use later, even amongst the chaos. Mandy would appreciate if I wiped down the tub tiles and the counter. I put the seat down over the toilet, sat on the lid, thought about what germs might have gotten on my hands, cried without touching my face. It would have been disrespectful to get up and wash them, so I could cry with the appropriate theatricality. It’s better, I thought, to cry absurdly, letting the tears stream down my face and then wiping them off with the fabric covering my own shoulders, leaving my hands to wave around in an open-air quarantine. The last thing I wanted was pink eye, some other reason for Mandy not to love me. The thought of it made me so concerned that I stopped crying, got up and checked the mirror. I would have to stop right now if I wanted to erase the evidence of emotion from my face before Mandy got home. That evening, I had no “extra” food prepared when Mandy walked in. We talked and turned on the television, and when her stomach rumbled, I ignored it. I ignored it for hours until finally she was forced to ask me if there was anything to eat, and I said, choosing my words carefully so that she wouldn’t know whether I was explicitly offering, “There are eggs in the fridge.” Of course, I had bought them so that they’d be here when she arrived. There was also bread and butter—real butter. But I had taken care to eat my portion before she arrived, and then to open the kitchen window so that the smell of the toaster would dissipate. I wanted her to feel the threat of something being taken from her, something that was not hers to begin with, but that she felt might be. I wanted her to feel safe, cared for, and as if that feeling might also fly from the window. Mandy stood over the stove while I sat at the table, maybe four feet away, on one of the two steel-legged chairs with brown vinyl seats. Neither was torn, and that was something to take pride in, something she should have considered when I started making the assumption, all those days ago, that one of them would become habitually hers, and the other habitually mine. Mandy’s self-conscious movements were not because of a lack of confidence in her cooking, in the way she chewed her toast, or because she thought I might be judging her caloric intake. We didn’t have to talk about it. Mandy could feel that she had done wrong, and she didn’t know how to make it right. I fully expected, when I visited the bathroom, either before bed or in the morning, Mandy’s other panties on the shampoo bottle. The pink nylon bikini with the sheer triangular panel in front. I tried, as best I could, not to look. I should wait, I thought, until morning, in order to resume our routine and not, with my eagerness, ruin the satisfaction I should get when, in the morning, I should look behind the shower curtain and discover that all turned out to be well after all. But during the night, my resolve dwindled, and when I went to relieve myself, I flicked at the navy vinyl curtain, trying to see behind it without causing the white plastic rings on which it hung to sound the alarm and alert Mandy to my curiousity. What I saw was devastating. As my mind rejected what I had undoubtedly seen, I attempted to perceive something different, something else, some state of affairs other than that I’d most certainly witnessed but only for an instant, which refused to take up residence in my consciousness as a memory, for the fact that it was so unreasonable. I looked again, all around the sides of the tub and on the silver faucet, up at the white plastic showerhead, and down again, in case I’d looked too quickly and missed seeing what was real. I pulled the shower curtain back—damn the sound!—to ensure that they hadn’t gotten stuck in between the vinyl and the tub. Finally, I poked my fingers in the drain to confirm by touching (because my vision had clearly failed me) that the panties weren’t down there, hadn’t fallen in and sunk far from view. I ran some water to ensure it flowed easily by, and I yelled, “Fuck!” when the shower head activated and sprayed water on the back of my head. Figuring Mandy would awaken and that the situation had ensured as much, I took comfort in knowing that the fates were on my side when I, spitting with rage, ran wet to the living room and shook Mandy the rest of the way awake, making sure my hair dripped on her face. “Where are they?” I screamed at her. While Mandy, fully expecting her sleep to be disrupted, had prepared her answer in advance, such that she was able to deliver it with superlative intention, apparent in her diction, as she calmly enunciated, “You’ll never see them again.” And if only she’d stopped speaking. But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “You pervert,” staring up at me from the couch. I felt the power of my position turn, how I became her immediate subordinate, and all the more awkward for the fact that I was badly placed above her, completely out of line with where I should have physically been, given her moral superiority. The shame of it was dizzying. I recognized that no amount of food, no warmth or other physical comfort, nothing that I could provide to Mandy would ever be in exchange for her integrity, her bodily autonomy, her love. For these things were of a different order, and there is no metric for the exchange of one for the other. The fact that Mandy knew this and that I didn’t—I felt at once stupid and also taken advantage of, like I had missed some key fact all along, this fact that Mandy both knew and kept from me—to what end? To win some toast and the use of a blanket? But these were things Mandy did not value. And so it seemed that not only would she not adore me, she would just as soon deceive me than give up these things she did not feel were worth anything. My honour even less valuable than the crumbs under the burner. And so I recognize that there were, in fact, reasons that I killed Mandy, and that there are those who might argue she was very much at fault. But in examining the chain of causality, I always focus on the things that would not have happened, if only I’d never admitted to her what I felt about her, what I imagined for us. Besides that, it is weak to kill someone because of what they’ve done to you, as not only did you allow it to happen, you also let them govern your actions from then on. I much prefer to think that when I sat on Mandy’s chest, when I held her nose shut with one hand and shoved the fingers of my other down her throat, that when I or the vomit was finally able to stop the flow of her air long enough, that it was because of something else that I had done.

Charlene Elsby is a philosophy doctor whose books include The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty, Violent Faculties, and The Organization is Here to Support You. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Bustle Books, The Millions, and the LA Review of Books.