Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello

Then she could have come back into the bedroom and gotten dressed and left like a woman entitled to be here, not like some perverted cat-burglar who takes to undressing in the homes of her victims and prancing about like a fool. Annette bursts into tears. It must be hypoglycemia. She has not eaten since half a tuna sandwich yesterday for lunch.
    By the time she emerges, the tears have only made her feel silly. From the way she bolted, he probably guessed she’d run cowering to the bathroom to bawl like a baby. It doesn’t matter now anyway. The window washer is gone.

    Every afternoon, the butterflies in her stomach are the same. The turning of her key in the rusty mailbox, the flutter rising up her esophagus as she sorts through envelopes, scanning for a foreign stamp. Every afternoon, so that part of her always thinks today cannot be the day—good things have to catch you unaware, you cannot be caught waiting for them. A watched pot never boils . Once, Annette forced herself not to check the mail for four days, certain that her self-deprivation would magically produce a reward, but it produced only more bills Brent had to help her with, a jury summons, a letter from the INS addressed to her grandmother who has been dead for twenty years and never lived in this apartment. The way her hands perspired when she finally allowed herself to check the mail—key slipping from her grasp like a slimy bar of soap—embarrassed her sufficiently, so that she resigned herself to indulging her daily fix of nausea and disappointment. Since Nicky has been in Ghana, the progression has been from frequent long letters to sporadic postcards. He has been gone two years. Even his mother has more sense than to spend every day expecting .
    Today is the day. Clutching what looks like an actual birthday card, Annette’s heart surges violently forward, the rest of her taking a moment to catch up. She is almost angry: usually Nicky’s holiday greetings arrive weeks late—now she will never know when to calm down. Unable to wait until she reaches the privacy of her own apartment, she rips open the envelope in the foyer, ankle-deep in discarded coupon pages, flyers, and advertisements. Netty Baby ! But after that, she—Annette—disappears amid: . . . we got them to donate some old computers and I’ve spent the better part of a month trying to sort them out, most were archaic . Is relegated to the role of blind spectator: I call our best student “Powder” because she’s always covered in dust lighter than her skin, but her father won’t let her come to school anymore since her mother had another baby and Powder has to take care of him while her parents work . . .
    When Annette got dirty as a child, Nicky called her Pig Pen. Her dirt—Chicago dirt—was not imbued with the drama of Africa. Her absences from school were not because her working parents made her take care of the home, but because they were too busy to know or care where she went—and so she went with Nicky. Maybe she was never enough of a victim for him; all the time she was struggling to keep up, maybe she should have let herself fall so he could rescue her. Maybe then he would not have needed to go halfway around the world to feel important. Maybe then “archaic” would be written with irony—with an implicit wink, Remember when we would’ve called that a ten-dollar-word ?—instead of carelessly, as though he had forgotten he was not addressing one of his Peace Corps buddies. Or maybe then they would just both be where they had always been: on drugs, in trouble, stagnant.
    How can she explain to anyone—her mother, Brent, least of all Nicky in his campaign to save the world through the civilized means of computer training—that she wishes the brutal, crazy race toward death they once shared had never come to an end?

    The window washer’s jaw seemed vaguely Czech, she realizes. Square and