Dara lives in a ramshackle white house on top of a steep hill. She is a potter—she works at the ceramics center in town—but her house is full of books: some novels, many thin volumes of poetry, collections of essays on feminism and psychoanalysis, Hungarian cinema, Soviet Jewry, Australian aborigines, Kant, the Kabbalah. Worlds upon worlds. She also has an extensive library of self-help books, which implies that, for all her intelligence and self-possession, Dara may have some problems. She is for sure a recovering alcoholic; one of the first things she told April P was that she doesn’t allow drinking or drugs in her house. Also, and she did not warn April P about this, Dara is a toucher. She keeps finding reasons to squeeze April P’s arm, pat her hand, give her a mini shoulder rub. Once, she invited April P to an opening at the ceramics center, a show of chili bowls by local artists. April P started a conversation with a woman her own age; then she saw Dara watching her with a furious expression, a gathering of crackly lines around the eyes, a pinching of the mouth, as though she would eat anyone who tried to be friendly with April P. Needless to say, Dara’s possessiveness makes April P uncomfortable. She has been in Rosendale for four months, and the only people she talks to are Dara, the guy at the vegan bakery, and Jenny, her friend at the club. She hasn’t done any writing at all.
Writing was supposed to be the point of this adventure. April P came here to start another life, one she had barely begun to imagine for herself and still wasn’t sure she deserved. She was going to become April P, the writer. The centerpiece of her transformation was a memoir called “Bar Girl,” about her time tending bar at a notorious Boston hotel. She wrote the first chapter in a memoir workshop at the community college where she was supposed to be studying business communication, and her teacher, Valerie, praised it to the skies. Then, without warning, April P’s heart began to emanate the exciting certainty that she would not stay in Boston. She asked Valerie for advice, and it was Valerie who suggested Rosendale and put her in touch with Dara.
April P moved to Rosendale in late November. At first she loved the town, with its odd shops—what kind of small town has a ceramics center?—and bookish, sober Dara, whose unfussy house had a view of the woods and the distant brown hills, but after a month she wondered if she had made the right decision. Without Boston shouting in her ear, she found it hard to think. The second chapter of “Bar Girl” crumpled into bits of paper in her wastebasket. She started to panic about money. Dara offered her a job at the ceramics center, but the pay was laughable; really, nothing in Rosendale paid anything. How did Dara get by? April P suspected her of sitting on a secret pile of cash, which she would never talk about but which kept her going.
Winter came. Snow fell heavily in the valley; everything turned slippery and dark. Rosendale started to look like a kind of hell, at least for people like April P, that is, straight girls from working-class families. Then one day at the vegan bakery she met Jenny, who told her about the club. April P had driven past it a dozen times without knowing what it was, an anonymous roadhouse on Route 32 that never seemed to be open. Jenny explained it to her. You could be topless or nude; on a busy night you could make two or three hundred dollars. It beats working at the Stewart’s, Jenny said.
April P drove out to the club and asked if they were hiring. After some icy awkwardness up front, the work turned out not to be that hard. You got undressed, you wobbled around—dance would be an overstatement. You sat in a stranger’s lap, you rubbed a little, but really it was just another service job, like tending bar or working at Kinko’s. So what if you were naked? The money was good, and the shifts were from six to two in the morning; April P had the whole day to herself. In fact, the hardest thing about working at the club was dealing with Dara’s complicated reaction. She was clearly trying to be O.K. with the fact that April P was a sex worker, but she was clearly also scandalized; at the same time, April P guessed that Dara couldn’t stand the thought that she took the stage nightly in nothing but a thong and that she, Dara, wasn’t there to watch. If only Dara had come to the club, some problems might have been solved—and others, doubtless, would have been created.
But this is all background information. The actual story of Rosendale begins on a rainy Monday evening in March, when Dara comes home and finds April P curled up on the futon in the living room, reading Dara’s copy of “Frankenstein.” Dara makes twig tea and talks about Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. They were all living together in Switzerland, she says, and one night they had a contest to see who could write the most frightening story. Percy Shelley, the great Romantic poet, and Lord Byron, the other great Romantic poet, and Mary Shelley, an eighteen-year-old girl who had hardly written anything. Guess who won? Dara pours the tea into thick handmade mugs. Mary Shelley’s mother was the great feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, but she died just after Mary was born, she says. When you’re reading “Frankenstein,” you have to think, This is a novel by a woman who never knew her mother. April P wonders what it would be like not to have known her mother. Kind of a relief, probably.
Anyway, it’s cozy, sitting there with Dara, drinking twig tea while the rain beats the house and soaks the forest. If only April P could have kept her mouth shut, there would have been no problem. But the spirit of mischief rises in her and prompts her to say, Let’s have a horror-story contest! Dara thinks about it for a long time, then says, O.K., but there’s one condition: they have to be stories with strong female characters. Strong female characters, coming up! April P says impishly.
They get out their journals and start writing. April P finds the task harder than she expected. She begins a story about a woman with no legs, but why does she have no legs? And what comes next? April P has never written a horror story before; up to this point, her stories have pretty much been based on things that actually happened to her. Still, she keeps writing, and after half an hour or so Dara says, I give up. Me, too, April P says, relieved. Read me what you wrote, Dara says. It doesn’t make sense, April P says, but Dara nags her until finally she reads it. Very interesting, Dara says. Read me yours, April P says. No, Dara says. Come on, April P says. Don’t be shy! Dara stands up. Her mouth is a thin straight line, and her eyes are narrow with anger. I’m not shy, but I am tired, she says, and stomps upstairs. April P picks up “Frankenstein” again, but she can’t concentrate, and after a few minutes she goes to bed, too, and just lies there, listening to the rain and wondering what she is doing in Rosendale.
In the following weeks, Dara works late, and April P doesn’t see her much. Then one morning April P comes downstairs, and there she is, pretending to tidy the living room but obviously just waiting for April P. Good morning! Dara says. What are you doing today? April P has no plans, and so after breakfast Dara drives her to the ceramics center, where something big lies on a table, under a beige sheet. What is it? April P asks. Aha, Dara says, and she unveils a giant clay woman. The figure is about nine feet from head to toe, with thick legs, huge breasts, and vestigial arms. Its face is a noseless trio of dashes. Its clay body is covered with fragments of fired pottery, orange and white and a heartbreaking blue-green that makes April P think of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the ugliest thing she has ever seen. Dara tells April P that she modelled the figure on the Venus of Willendorf, a likeness of the mother goddess who ruled the universe in times gone by. And of course it’s also a golem, a creature from the Jewish tradition. If I could get a rabbi to perform the right ritual, Dara says, maybe she would come to life! Ha-ha, April P says, horrified. She touches the golem’s mosaic skin and asks, Are these the chili bowls? Yep, Dara says. Wow, April P says. O.K., you win!
Dara pulls the sheet over the golem, and they go out for a cigarette—like many recovering alcoholics, Dara is a heavy smoker. It’s early spring; the creek is muddy with runoff from the hills. Tiny black birds agitate the trees. I feel so powerful, Dara says. She talks about a trip she took to Prague with her father, many years ago. They visited the synagogue where the original golem was supposedly constructed. Later on that same trip, Dara had a panic attack. She banged on her father’s hotel-room door. He was with a Czech prostitute, who was maybe seventeen. The fucker, Dara says. Then her mood lifts again. Holy crap, she says. I made a golem! She tries to imagine what such a thing might be good for. It could protect women from sexual assault, for starters. It could watch the ceramics center—there have been some break-ins. It could intervene in domestic-violence-type situations. It could give back rubs, April P says, giggling. I’m being serious, April, Dara says. She crinkles up her eyes. It’s clear that April P has ruined everything again.
Dara says that she has some work to do. Will April P be all right walking home? It’s two miles uphill, but she says, I’ll be fine. Without a golem escort, she doesn’t add. Dara goes back into the ceramics center, and April P climbs the street that leads eventually to Dara’s house. The sun is out. Green shoots rise from the mud in people’s yards. Screw Dara, she thinks. Why should I give someone like that the power to make me miserable?
That night at the club, though, it’s impossible for April P to forget that she is naked and other people aren’t. She gets flustered, and the customers sense it. All of a sudden, guys are touching her ass and telling her the gross things they want her to do. She rolls her eyes at Fred, the manager, but he pretends not to notice and goes on selling lap-dance tickets. What is it, she keeps asking herself. What is it? All she knows is that there is now an inner April P who wants out of the birthday suit, who writhes with self-consciousness even as the outer April P struts around in black vinyl boots.
When her set is over, she asks Jenny if she has anything to calm her down. Just Newports, Jenny says. April P smokes two of them, but they don’t help. Do you know where I can buy drugs around here? she asks. Jenny gives her the number of a guy she knows from high school, a friend of a friend. After work, April P drives up to Kingston and buys some crack cocaine, which is what Jenny’s friend’s friend sells. She smokes it in her car. It makes her feel invulnerable and gorgeous, as if she were wearing the night sky and all its stars. She drives back to Rosendale around 3 A.M. and falls into bed. When she wakes up, the sun is about to bump the western hills. She has just enough time to stretch and shower before she has to go to work.
April P goes out with Jenny that night and for many nights afterward. They sit around the apartments of Jenny’s high-school friends, drinking vodka and gossiping about other high-school friends whose lives are just as sorry as their own. These people are dismally familiar to April P: they’re like the ones she grew up with in Boston. Spending time with them feels like a kind of defeat, but at the same time she hears a voice telling her that they are her people, the best and only people she will ever have. When she can’t stand their Maxim dreams and TV jokes, she drives up to Kingston, puts on the suit of stars, and hurtles down Route 32, inviting an accident that for some reason never comes.
She hardly thinks about Dara at all, until one night the golem shows up at the club. It sits at the bar, and at first she mistakes it for a hugely fat guy in a sparkly brown coat. It’s only when she steps off the stage that she recognizes it for what it is. Its slit eyes look sightlessly at the girls; its enormous breasts hang in its lap. For an awful moment, April P imagines that it will ask her for a dance, and that, by the logic of the nightmare she is in, she will have to give the golem a lap dance, but this does not happen. Then she wonders if this is a prank. Dara could have hauled the golem up here in her truck, and installed it on a barstool somehow—maybe with a hidden platform. Only, how would April P not have seen it until now? And why isn’t anyone laughing? April P takes a breath. She walks right past the golem, goes through the back of the club to the parking lot, and fires up her pipe. When she comes inside again, the golem is gone.
No one at the club says anything about the golem. Maybe it was a hallucination? The problem with this hypothesis is that the golem keeps appearing. After that first visit, it shows up at the club roughly twice a month, as if to spend the paycheck from its golem job. (Which must not be a real paycheck; one of the things April P finds most frustrating about the golem is that it does not tip.) Sometimes it sits at the bar; sometimes it overflows a chair in front of the tiny stage. Its face is just those three dashes, but April P can feel it watching her. Once, as she walks past it—the layout of the club makes it impossible to avoid walking past the golem—she feels something cold and rough stroke the back of her leg. She spins around. Did the golem just touch her? It makes her want to scream. But, as before, no one else seems to notice that the golem is there, or, rather, no one seems to notice that it is a golem, and not just an oversized customer, with no cash and no real eyes, who reeks of wet earth.
At this point, April P begins to entertain some really dark thoughts. What if this isn’t the first golem to come into the club? What if Rosendale is full of golems? She wants to confront Dara, but she is afraid of what Dara will say: that her job as a stripper is damaging her psyche, that the golem is a manifestation of some old trauma that would be better worked out in a chapter of her memoir. Besides, Dara has been keeping to herself a lot lately. She works long hours at the ceramics center and holes up in her bedroom, listening to old punk-rock albums that April P would never have suspected her of owning.
Spring becomes summer. Rosendale is more beautiful than ever. The trees are wild with birds; the air smells like a garden. The mountains glow all day long. One night, Jenny says, Bring something nice to wear tomorrow. Why? April P asks. We’re going to a party, Jenny says, a fancy party. April P knows Jenny too well to believe that she is telling the truth, but out of loyalty she brings a pair of decent jeans and a silky sleeveless top she bought at Ann Taylor in a moment of deluded professionalism some years back. Jenny, on the other hand, wears a cocktail dress and preposterous red heels. Where are we going? April P asks. Jenny tells her that a famous magazine publisher is having a party at his mansion in the hills. His assistant came to the club, invited Jenny, and told her to bring a friend. Oh, April P says. Now she feels underdressed. They drive separately to the mansion, which really is a mansion, hidden at the end of a long driveway. It has a reflecting pool and a massive granite dolmen, behind which a rose garden sprawls. A man in a polo shirt parks April P’s car. I’ll bet Dara doesn’t know anyone this rich, she thinks, giddily.
Then they go in, and April P realizes that she isn’t so much underdressed as just wearing the wrong clothes. The guests are all dressed like retired skateboarders; in her stupid Ann Taylor top, she feels like a very young and innocent Boston girl. Jenny, beside her, looks like a hooker. No one talks to either of them, and after a while they drift away and give themselves a tour of the house. There are paintings everywhere: some are gashes of color and some are portraits of serious-looking young men and women with a sixties look. It’s like being in a museum without the guards. April P touches a painting, and nothing happens. She touches another painting. She bounces on a soft bed, switches a light on and off. Jenny puts a crystal paperweight in her handbag. They go to the bathroom and smoke crack with the fan on. Then they go downstairs again.
April P seizes a glass of champagne from a waiter. She approaches an old guy in half-glasses and a cardigan who looks like he might be the famous publisher and asks, So, what do you do? He works for a bank, which he says is very boring. Do you like these paintings? April P asks. Her frankness charms him; suddenly he’s talking about Venice, a silver tube, streamers blowing in the wind, the idea of objects, the rise and fall of boats in the water, Greece, seafood, the importance of not having a plan. April P thinks, This is a guy who has never been in danger. Listening to him is like stepping into a cathedral by daylight, all colorful and bright and still. The banker talks about England, childhood, omelettes, Spain, New Mexico, the beauty of deserts. April P keeps taking champagne glasses from waiters—at least, she thinks they’re waiters—taking one for herself and giving one to the banker each time, although she’s not sure he drinks them, and in fact they seem to be accumulating on a small round table behind him. But she wants him to keep going; she has never heard anything as rich as his stories, anything as ample or kind or wise. Then Jenny tugs at April P’s wrist. Go away, April P says. No, Jenny says, listen to me. We have to work. Work? April P says. She wants to cry. Work? I’ll talk to you later! she calls out as Jenny pulls her away.
The publisher’s assistant, a slim young man in a cornflower-blue shirt, leads them to a barn that has been converted into a home theatre. Many of the guests are waiting for them. They stand in front of these people, and, yes, they take off their clothes. They trot from sofa to sofa, perch on laps, tousle hair, brush hands away, and wait for tips that are not forthcoming. No one has told these people that they have to tip. Finally, they crouch behind the bar and get dressed again. Fucking assholes, Jenny whispers loudly.
They storm back to the party, and Jenny goes upstairs to look for something else to steal. April P takes another glass of champagne. She wants to find the old banker in the cardigan, to pick up their conversation and redeem the awful moment, but he has left. She takes another glass of champagne. The party begins to revolve like a carrousel, as if she were on a carrousel, watching the fixed earth go around past her. Someone asks if she is feeling all right. I’m great, she says. She thinks she remembers taking off her clothes again, later in the night. She has a disturbing memory of standing naked in the kitchen, letting someone spray her with water from an industrial dish-sprayer-type thing. Later still, she is in the rose garden, throwing up. The sky is a delicate blue-white. Jenny appears next to her, looking remarkably clean. It’s time to go home, she says. Can you drive? No, April P says.
Everyone else seems to have left. There’s just this one guy in an old T-shirt and shorts, trimming the roses. April P assumes that he is the gardener, but it turns out that he’s the famous publisher. Jenny drives her home. April P sleeps all day, and when she wakes up she feels cold and clammy. Even a long hot shower doesn’t help. But when she goes outside her car is parked in the driveway. It, too, has been washed. There’s an envelope on the passenger seat with five hundred dollars in cash and a note from the publisher, thanking her for her time. The note is on creamy paper, with the publisher’s name printed at the top.
After that, April P stops going out with Jenny. She can’t stand Jenny’s friends, because they aren’t rich and never will be. The mere thought of the publisher and his friends makes her sick. She stays in her room and works on “Bar Girl,” which she’s now thinking of calling “April P Bares All.” She fills one yellow legal pad after another with stories from her girlhood. She writes about grown cousins touching her little tits in her mother’s guest bedroom. She writes about a girl she knew in elementary school named Elsa Lundqvist, who was later murdered by a guy she was seeing, whom, it turned out, April P also knew. Valerie told her that writing these stories down would help, and Dara’s self-help books say the same thing. You have to get it out, the books tell her, put it down on paper! But the words she writes do nothing to ease her spirit; they just make her feel stupid and graceless.
Notice that we haven’t mentioned the golem for a while. Maybe it got tired of April P and moved on to another club? But the thing about horror stories is that they let you believe life has gone back to normal only in order to surprise you again. And so: one afternoon, April P is scribbling away at her desk when she sees the golem standing at the edge of the forest, a place where, on happier afternoons, she watched deer nibble the grass. She wants to throw up. Is the golem going to follow her everywhere she goes, for the rest of her life? What does it even want? April P tries to keep working, but it turns out to be impossible to write your memoir while a golem is watching you.
Hoping that it won’t follow her, she drives to Kingston, and spends a little of the publisher’s money. That’s comfort: not the night sky any longer, but definitely the best outfit in the world. So July passes, and August, too. The golem comes to Dara’s house nearly every day. What it does on its days off April P can only imagine: maybe it stalks another girl, or maybe it goes to the ceramics center and makes little effigies of itself.
On Labor Day, April P staggers downstairs around lunchtime to find Dara on the porch, a mug of coffee balanced on one arm of her Adirondack chair and the newspaper on the other. Well, if it isn’t the ghost, Dara says. What have you been doing with yourself? Nothing, April P says. The very question is unfair. April, Dara says, I haven’t wanted to say anything about this, because I respect your privacy, but I kind of suspect that you’re in trouble. Is it drugs? April P shakes her head. I know there’s a lot of that in the sex industry, Dara says. Cocaine and whatnot. I’m not doing drugs, April P says, although there’s nothing she craves more than a hit from her pipe. I want to tell you a story, Dara says, and she does. It’s about Dara as a young woman in New York City, getting drunk and fighting with strangers, sometimes verbally and sometimes physically. One of the strangers breaks Dara’s jaw, and she spends two days in the hospital. She has to eat and drink through a straw, but she gets a friend to bring her a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, which is completely prohibited, not least because Dara is taking both painkillers and antibiotics. When she’s alone in her hospital room, she takes furtive sips from the bottle, using her straw, and at some point while she’s doing this Dara realizes that she is killing herself. So she calls another, better friend, and this friend says, Why don’t you come up to Rosendale? Dara leaves the city. She attends her first A.A. meeting. Her jaw is still wired shut, so she can’t really talk, but she can sure listen. April, Dara concludes, do you need help? I can sponsor you for A.A., if that’s what it is, or if it’s drugs I can find you a sponsor. I know a lot of people in this town. Give us a chance, and we’ll take care of you.
At the thought that someone might take care of her, April P sniffles. She tries to make it into a cough, but her eyes tear up. Hey, Dara says, standing. Hey. She circles around behind April P and pats her hair. April P sobs. She wants not to be so afraid and not to have to pretend that she is not so afraid. She cries and cries; snot comes out of her nose, and Dara stands behind her, stroking her hair in a way that she finds strangely comforting. That’s good, Dara says. April, that’s wonderful. She digs her fingers into the muscles at the base of April P’s neck. It feels good, but, too soon, Dara’s fingers communicate a desire to take her shirt off and feel her up. April P wriggles away. Stop, she says. Stop! She stands up, furious. What’s wrong? Dara asks. Don’t touch me! April P screams. Oh, April, Dara says, you really do have a problem. I have a problem? April P says. What about you and your golem? My golem? Dara crinkles up her eyes and looks into the distance behind April P’s shoulder. April P is so spooked that she turns around. There’s nothing. Yes, your golem, Dara, she says. First it came to the club, and now it’s watching me through my bedroom window! It’s driving me fucking crazy! Wow, Dara says. O.K. Let’s take a deep breath. What are you telling me, April? Why don’t you just admit you want to fuck me? April P says. Dara’s face flattens. Are you high? she asks. Not yet, April P says. She grabs her shoes off the porch and runs to her car.
That’s more or less the end of April P’s time in Rosendale, although there’s one more incident we should relate. It happens the next day, just before Dara calls Valerie, and Valerie magically arranges for April P to enter the treatment center. That morning, April P wakes up uncharacteristically early. It’s raining, and the house is cold—it’s still summer, technically, but it feels like fall. Dara is out. April P makes coffee. She sits in the living room, trying not to think about anything. Then she sees the golem. It stands right outside the house, its face streaked by the rain that drips from the eaves. April P ignores it. She makes herself comfortable on the sofa and picks up Dara’s copy of “Frankenstein.” She had stopped in the middle; now she reads the monster’s story, and all the sad events that lead up to the final chase across the fields of Arctic ice. When she’s finished, she puts the novel down gently on the coffee table. The golem stands in the same place as before, looking much the worse for wear. Its shoulders sag, and one of its breasts seems to have fallen off. April P goes upstairs. She sits at her desk for a while, looking out at the trees, then opens her journal.
And this, for some reason, is easy: April P writes about being in love with a girl whose name is April P. She writes about travelling through the forest to watch April P dance nude at a club full of rowdy unwholesome men, and the heavy pain she feels when April P goes off to a curtained booth where the men are close enough to touch her bare skin. She writes, If only April P commanded me, I would gladly crush the men. I am bigger than any of them, and vastly stronger. I would rip the stage to splinters, mash the tables, smash the chairs, peel back the walls, and tear the roof apart, until nothing remained from which the club could be rebuilt, ever. She writes of the anguish the golem feels as she watches April P drive to the publisher’s party in the hills. If she said the word, I would throw his mansion into the valley and bury it in dirt. I could do it. I am mighty. April P writes about the golem’s rage and bewilderment. All she wants to do is to protect April P; it was for this purpose that she was created. But without a command from April P the golem cannot act. The law of the golem is absolute.
After months of this torture, the golem goes to April P’s house. She stands at the edge of the forest and watches April P in her bedroom. What is she doing? the golem wonders. Doesn’t she see me standing here? Why won’t she come out? Day by day, she comes closer to the house, until she stands right outside the window. Incredibly, April P just sits there. She reads a book, she drinks coffee from a chipped blue mug. She adjusts the collar of her bathrobe modestly, which makes the golem want to laugh. April P goes upstairs. The golem can’t see her, but she knows that April P is sitting at her desk, making herself unhappy. The golem doesn’t know what to do. Should she go into the house? Walk up the stairs and tap April P on the shoulder? But the command has to be given freely; it cannot be coerced. Hours pass. The rain becomes torrential, then lets up. The sun appears beyond the clouds. In the forest, a bird starts singing. And then . . .
April P puts her pen down. The story came to her so quickly that she can hardly believe it. And yet it’s late in the evening; her shift at the club began hours ago. April P doesn’t care. She wants to show Dara what she has written, but Dara isn’t home yet. She goes downstairs and puts on water for tea. The living-room windows are dark, and she can’t see whether the golem is out there or not. Possessed by a sudden curiosity, April P goes outside. She walks around the house barefoot, her feet chilled by the wet grass. In the light coming from the window, she sees the golem. Its body has been smoothed by the rain until it’s nearly shapeless: not so much a golem as a golem-size lump of clay, dotted with bits of blue and white and orange pottery. Oh, no, April P thinks. She kneels by the lump. She’s still there, kneeling on the lawn in her muddy bathrobe, when Dara gets out of her car, a bag of groceries in her arms. She drops the bag on the porch and runs to April P. Are you all right? she asks. What happened? April P looks up. Her face is wet. Dara, she says, you won’t believe it, but I won!
. . . then I hear the front door open. April P circles the house. I want to tell her to put on clothes, because the evening is cold, but I can’t speak yet. I wait by the window, my heart beating (I have a heart) with anticipation. April P comes close, she stands on tiptoe and whispers, Go. ♦
