Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  “Sir,” he hears again.

  This time he looks up from his not reading and sees a beat-up drink cart at his shoulder being slowly wheeled and badly steered by a beat-up flight attendant who looks way too old for the job. She must be fifty, easy, and pushing not only the drink cart, but the FAA limits on makeup and hairspray, as well. One look at her and everything about this airplane seems suddenly too old for the job. Even his armrest, Pimletz now notices, has logged a few too many miles. The worn plastic cushion is duct-taped to the rest at his elbow; the hole where the recline button used to be stares back at him like an empty eye socket; there’s muted, tinny sound spilling from twin headphone jacks. He takes in all of these things, wondering at entropy, at how circumstances evolve, in the same moment he works the exchange with the too-traveled flight attendant. He straightens, pulls his legs in from the aisle, leans away. “Don’t mind me,” he says, good-naturedly.

  She doesn’t, apparently. She’s in too much of a hurry to wait for Pimletz to finish rearranging himself in his seat, rolls the cart directly over his left foot, and scrapes the sharp metal corner against his pant leg, tearing the fabric and leaving a good-size abrasion on his calf.

  “Sonofabitch!” Pimletz whisperhollers, reaching for his wound, thinking what it’ll look like tomorrow. It doesn’t really hurt, not in a releasing adrenalin kind of way, but he is surprised. And indignant. Just the idea of it gets him. What kind of flight attendant rolls her drink cart into customers? This doesn’t happen to other people. This doesn’t happen to Ed Koch or Henry Kissinger. She’s already a couple rows up, hasn’t even turned to see if he’s okay. It can’t be she didn’t notice. How can she not have noticed? Pimletz doesn’t know what to do about it, if he should do anything, maybe contact this woman’s supervisor, keep the skies safe from runaway drink carts and beat-up airline employees.

  Indignant, Pimletz does nothing but sit and stew. What is it with these people? What is it with him? He wonders if maybe there isn’t something in his demeanor lets people roll all over him, literally and otherwise, if maybe he sends out some kind of signal, some show of weakness, some veiled Kick Me! sign he can’t quite make out. He thinks about this, rubbing at his calf, seeing if the tear in his pants is something Warren Stemble might notice, trying not to call any more attention to himself. Rubbing, he thinks that perhaps his musings on how the world has tilted since his last shuttle flight have more to do with him than with any dramatic shifts in air travel, that what really matters is how time has marched on without him.

  As the world turns, Pimletz holds fast. This is mostly true, even though he has changed in his own way. He has to remind himself. Absolutely, he’s changed. He just hasn’t kept pace.

  Last time he took the shuttle, Pimletz had a reason to get up each morning. He was not yet mired in complacency and routine. There was a God, and there was Eastern, and there was hope. Now everything’s all turned around. Yes, perhaps there still is a God, but Pimletz can strike the other two. Yes, he’s in the same job, and in the same apartment, and yes, he somehow manages to get up each morning, but it’s not the same. Last time he took the shuttle, he had something to look forward to.

  Pimletz doesn’t know when he became the kind of man with more life behind him than in front, when it started to matter, why it matters now. He doesn’t know what he did with all those years. Well, he does know, now that he’s dwelling on it: nothing, jack-shit, bupkus. It’s just that he doesn’t know how he got away with it for so long.

  Pet—milk-and-honeyed, fine-and-not-fine—steps from the shower and into a thirsty red towel, then onto a mocha and mauve shag remnant her friend seems to want her to use as a bathmat.

  Okay, so this is a given around here. For all of her finer qualities, Anita doesn’t keep much of a house, that’s for sure. Pet doesn’t want to say anything, but she can certainly make an observation. Like with this bathmat. It’s not just an isolated thing, she’ll have you know. Anita’s got this odd collection of carpet remnants strewn all over the place, in every fucking room, in colors and styles that have nothing to do with the rest of her decorating, and whenever Pet steps her naked feet to the synthetic fabrics, she wonders at Anita’s thinking. Also, she wonders at these used carpets, at their histories. Mocha and mauve! Who the fuck picked this one out in the first place? And, believe Pet, this one’s not the worst of them. The fact of them, now that she thinks of it, that’s the worst part. That they’re here at all. Nils salvages these scraps from his cleaning jobs, and Anita sprinkles them about like crumbs. Pet doesn’t get it, decides maybe it’s a New Hampshire thing, a thrift. And it’s a thrift gone to extremes. There’re more remnants than Anita knows what to do with. Nils keeps a pile of them out in the garage, squared and stacked, and somewhere in his head he’s got a story to go with each one. Don’t get him started. Either you’re stepping on a section of Mrs. Needle’s paisley weave, the victim of a frozen hot water pipe in the blizzard of 1993, or you’re on a piece of primary-colored, broad-loomed hopscotch board left over from an overly thorough delousing at Nashua’s cooperative nursery school. That’s how it is in this house. It’s just been a day, but Pet already has passed more than a few idle moments mapping her escape from each room. She’s got it figured so she can hopscotch over every square foot, like a child traipsing across stepping stones, without dipping her toes on any primary flooring, and when she tires of this she might also navigate her way in the negative, leaving the remnants untouched.

  Truly, Pet’s not much of a thinker—she’ll be the first to tell you—and here she is with too much time to think. This right here is the problem, but she can’t see what to make of it. There’s not much else to do but sit and think and wait, which is why she’s all for Nils’s idea of heading up to Maine. Why not? It’d be something to do, right? Some way to distract herself from the emptiness and uncertainty, get her mind off Norman and back on Wood, where it should be. God knows this shower didn’t help.

  She looks into the mirror and considers the lines on her face, the red in her eyes. She hasn’t been crying much, but she’s all bloodshot and flat. Her eyes don’t give her away, the way she’s been told they often do. Right now, they don’t reveal a thing; even she’s got no idea what’s behind them. And the lines! Jesus, she’s like one of those Hirschfeld caricatures, those drawings in the Sunday Times. She can count the fucking NINAs on her face. When did this happen? Where was she?

  She cracks the mirrored doors of Anita’s medicine cabinet and searches the shelves for facial cream. All she finds are some old jars of CVS house brand—another thrift!—so she leaves them untouched. Better to let grief and nature run their course than to risk what’s left of her skin to generic lotion.

  The medicine cabinet doors are accordioned in such a way that Pet picks up her reflection exponentially, and in the fractured images she grows confused, frightened. There’s more of her than she wishes to consider. She steps back from the mirror and lets the red towel drop to the ground. She examines her many breasts, refracted, not all that closely at first, but enough to catch the effect. She’s onto the idea of them, as much as she is the specifics. She wonders how many breasts she might find in the too many folds of mirror. She starts to count, but leaves off at twenty-seven, twenty-eight. She’s disoriented, can’t remember if she’s doubling back, if she’s covered this set already. She ends up with an odd number.

  It is a weird thing to see yourself like this, naked, over and over, into infinity. Pet has to blink her eyes to refocus, to step back farther, and finally to reach up and push the mirrored door closed before she bangs her head against the glass in frustration. There is just too much of her, too many. She shudders her head clear. Think, she coaches herself. Think.

  Thinking a little, she finds the switch to the makeup lights rimming the mirror, leans in close. She’s got the mirrored cabinet pressed flat; there’s only the one image now, but she wants to take it all in. The light is good. She needs to see what’s going on here, to really see. My God, these l
ines on her face are pretty much stenciled in, she notices up close. She’s way past the point where even the most expensive creams will do any good. And these tits! Christ, they look like they’ve been put through a fucking car wash and wrung dry. They’re the tits of one of her mother’s friends from down at the beach club from when Pet was a girl: Aunt Wynnie—not her real aunt, just someone who was always around. She’s gone all sorry-looking, Pet, all of a sudden, all over, but here is where it gets her. She can even spot hairs growing from the aureole of her left breast. Hairs! Five or six of them, not clumped together, but black as night and wiry as the frayed edges of a Brillo pad.

  Jesus.

  She cups herself with both hands, pushes up to where she’s her own personal WonderBra. She lets her imagination go. She casts herself as one of those Dangerous Liaisons actresses—Glenn Close (yes? Michelle Pfeiffer would be pushing it), only a bit younger, all busting out and ready for anything. She pouts her lips, like from the other era. Then she lets herself drop and her entire body seems to sag with the lack of support, the lips included. Her posture’s for shit when she’s deflated like this. She straightens willfully, rolls back her shoulders, juts out her jaw. People are always telling her she should have modeled, but here, at least, she adopts a model’s pose. There, she’s thinking. There. Okay.

  Actually not bad.

  Pet looks deep into the mirror and what she gets back is a face heavy with living, a body worn by time. It’s someone else, someone older, someone whose husband just drove off a cliff. She thinks back on the vibrant young woman she has always defined herself as and marvels at the transformation. She doesn’t remember looking like this yesterday. She doesn’t remember growing Aunt Wynnie’s tits. She didn’t sleep much last night, but it’s more than that. She wonders if it’s all Wood, the way she looks now, if the thought of him gone has sapped the glow from her appearance. Lately, she’s done a lot of reading on mood and body image and positive emotional health, and she’s thinking maybe this is the way she processes her grief. Maybe that’s all it is. She’s not weeping or wailing or anything, but the way she feels has manifested itself in the way she looks. This is how it happens with some people.

  Then it hits her: she doesn’t have to look like this. Wood, here or gone, wouldn’t stand for it. Pet doesn’t have to have lines on her face or hairs growing from her tits. She doesn’t have to drag her ass around looking like shit. It’s not the feeling like shit part that’s a problem, it’s how she looks.

  She comes up with a loose plan. She reopens the folding doors of Anita’s medicine cabinet. She’s looking for tweezers. She means to pull the wiry hairs from her tits, but she’s distracted by a disposable razor—black, it must be Nils’s—and an ancient-looking dispenser of Edge shaving gel, the rim at the top gone to rust. She moves to Loose Plan B. Where it comes from, she’s got no idea; where she’s going with it, only some. She reaches for the Edge, shakes the can, listens for the rattle, squirts some of the stuff into her left palm. Still works, comes out green and runny. She checks for a date on the can; she’s thinking maybe the congealing properties have somehow expired, but after it sits in her hand for a bit, the gel appears to harden. She works it until it turns white and creamy.

  Then she goes to it. She steps to the sink, close enough so her mound of pubic hair is pressed flat against the cold counter tile, and runs a slow stream of water into her cupped right hand, dabbing at herself, again and again, until she is wet enough to take the cream. She rubs the Edge into her hairs until she is well lathered, working slowly, careful not to make a mess of Anita’s bathroom. She needs another few dollops to complete the job, and when she is through, she steps back to admire her neat preparation in the glass.

  Well. Pet’s never seen herself like this down there: a near-perfect V, filled in. The German lady who waxes her works with a sheet and no mirrors, so this is a first. This is a one and only. Talk about weird. One minute she’s her mother’s friend from the beach club, and the next she’s one of her own friends at ten or eleven in the bath playing with Crazy Foam, waiting for puberty.

  She rinses Nils’s razor under the faucet until the water starts to steam. She leaves the water to run, hot. Then, almost without thinking and yet somehow with great care, she slides the blade in a straight line through the cream, then again. She worries if she should shave in a down-and-away motion or up and back, figures it probably doesn’t matter. Either way, it’ll do the job, long as she doesn’t cut herself. Actually, it’s her lips she’s worried about, the soft folds, so she’s careful to leave off just under the pubic bone. South of that, she’ll leave to a professional. Or just leave.

  She shaves until there is nothing left but a racing stripe down her middle, a Brillo-y line about one inch wide and running straight to her core. That’s how it strikes her at a glance, like she’s reaching down to find herself, to discover something. She rubs away what’s left of the cream, fluffs out her hair, steps back once more to examine herself in the folds of glass. Her next thought is she looks ridiculous, but she tries to come at it from another way. She looks at her stripe as a Mohawk, a genuine Down There Mohawk. In her head, she makes herself a fierce warrior, a savage. For the moment, to Pet, this radical pubic hairstyle is not just a fashion statement, but also a statement of purpose, a reflection of how she feels. How she wants to feel is empowered, ennobled, resolved, but she’s back to feeling ridiculous. Also conflicted, disbelieving, supernatural. She’s all over the fucking place, and, when she realizes her new ’do has done nothing to root her in one reality or another, she reaches again for Nils’s razor to finish the job.

  She reclaims a smear of already-gelled Edge and reapplies the cream to what’s left of her pubic hair. The used cream is runny, but she’s hoping it’ll do the job. This time she makes one last swipe toward the bottom of her long road—enough, say, to remove the ’stache from a Hitler or Chaplin—leaving off just where her mound of hair returns to full flower. She makes it like a firebreak cut into a hill: there’s this stripe of hair, then a bare inch or so, then the full-flower patch surrounding her pussy.

  Done.

  Now when she steps back the effect is startling. Now it’s something. She does a lousy model’s twirl, indicates her new bush like one of the Price Is Right girls displaying a wall of EZ-Brick, a Brand New Car! She steps one foot ever so slightly forward in a tentative pose. With the cream rubbed away and her hairs refluffed, it looks to Pet like she’s wearing a furry exclamation point. She smiles, finally. These things just happen to her. A goddamn exclamation point. How about that? Wood would basically shit. And that Hirschfeld character from the Times, he’d go just about blind, trying to hide his NINAs now.

  She’s pulled from her musings by a knock on the door.

  “Pet, honey, it’s me,” Anita calls, from the other side. “I need to grab a couple things. Looks like we’re mobilizing.” She flings open the door.

  “Hey,” Pet says, moving quickly to cover herself. “Some people knock, you know.”

  “Knock, knock,” Anita suggests, reminded of the endless childhood riddle.

  Pet plays along. “Who’s there?”

  “Anita.”

  “Anita who?”

  “Anita grab a couple things. Looks like we’re mobilizing.” She takes a moment to turn sardonic. “Stop me if I’m repeating myself.”

  “Real fucking funny,” Pet begrudges. “Like that’s the first time you ever used that one.”

  Anita turns serious and pissed. “You been in here for like a month.” Seriously pissed.

  “What, you want me to reimburse you for the hot water? Nils is outside reading the meter?”

  “No,” Anita says, turning to concern. “It’s just, you know, a long time. I was starting to worry.” Serious concern. She looks around. “What the hell you doin’ anyway, all this time?”

  Pet drops the towel in answer, and Anita turns in the direction of the heavywet thwomp! on the floor and sees her friend’s strange handiwork. Pet does another
pose, this time for an audience, only this time her hand gestures are closer to Vanna White than to the Price Is Right girls. This time, in her head, she’s a star.

  Anita struggles to understand everything that’s going on: her best friend naked, their husband dead, her family downstairs, all of them wondering how to move forward, when the rest of their life will kick in. There’s all this shit, all this not moving, and now, on top of it, there’s this unusually shaved pussy commanding her full attention. It stares back at her like a cheap toy.

  “Why an arrow?” she wants to know. She can’t think of anything else to say. She’s thinking maybe there’s some psychology to what Pet’s doing, maybe the arrow pointing down has to do with her spirits being down, maybe she’s laid out a map to reclaim her soul. Something.

  “What arrow?” Pet asks. “It’s an exclamation point!” She says this with the same emphasis she hoped to convey with her haircut.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, you know, ta-da! Exclamation point! Yes!” Another model’s pose, like at a car show.

  “So, this is a good thing?” Anita asks, making sure. “What you’re doing, this is a positive thing? You’re not going slowly crazy on me?”

  “Absolutely, it’s a positive thing. It’s my own little exclamation point. Since when is an exclamation point not a positive thing?”

  Anita steps closer to inspect the design. “You sure it’s not an arrow?” she says. “To me, it’s an arrow. That’s what I’m seeing.” In the brief moment she had to consider it, she felt sure this was the design Pet was after. Look, the way the hair returns to its natural mini-V, right there, where it matters. Definitely an arrow.

  “I should know if it’s an arrow or an exclamation point,” Pet insists. “Right? If anyone should know, it’d be me.”

  Anita steps closer still, touches her friend gingerly where her skin has been rubbed raw, where her hair used to be. “Jesus, Pet, you could have cut yourself,” she says. She notices her husband’s disposable Bic on the sink. “Could’ve at least found yourself a decent razor. Nils uses these things into the ground.”