Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  The dog hesitates, then opens its mouth and snarls at you. From over your own upflung arm you see its eyes glow. Starlight reflects off its teeth. Frantically you keep rolling, but then the dog turns and trots across the road, where the voice is still yelling, “Yo! King, yo!”

  Shakily you get to your feet. Mr. Dazuki strolls up, flicking cigarette ashes. “He get you?”

  Your jeans are tom at the knee. Your arm is bloody, but that’s from scraping the ground. “No,” you say. And then, “Yes!”

  “He break the skin?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re all right,” Dazuki says casually, and turns to leave. On the other side of the road he half turns. You can hear his grin in the darkness. “Don’t be such a wimp, boy. Dogs’re only afraid of you if you’re afraid of them.”

  You are shaking too bad to risk an answer. You force yourself to walk slowly. Back inside your house, you lock the door and then stand for a long time against the refrigerator, your cheek pressed to its smooth coolness.

  When your breathing has slowed, you go through the basement door down to the cellar.

  Forty years ago the cellar had been subdivided into a maze of small rooms. Some have concrete or plywood walls; a few are walled in hard, bare dirt. You go past the discarded furniture, the broken washer/dryer set, the chamber with the sad piles of frayed rope and rusted fishing poles and paint cans whose contents have congealed into lumps of Slate Blue or Western Sky. Nobody but you ever goes down here.

  At the far end of the house, in a cool windowless room that once was your mother’s fruit cellar, you turn on bright 200-watt bulbs wired into overhead sockets. The room springs into light. It is about twelve feet square, but less than half of the floor space is left. The rest is occupied by the dollhouse.

  It started with the fruit shelves. After your mother died, you ate one jar of her preserves every day, until they were all gone. Strawberry jam, apple butter, peach jelly, stewed rhubarb. Sometimes you got queasy from so much sweetness. Your stomach felt like a hard taut drum, and that made you a little less empty. But then the fruit ran out. The shelves were bare.

  You covered them with her collection of miniature glass animals: swans and rabbits and horses of cheap colored glass, bought at state fairs or school carnivals. They looked awful on the bare, splintery shelves, so you brought in weeds and rocks and made a miniature forest. On the central shelf you put some dollhouse furniture you’d found in a box at the back of her closet. It looked old. You wanted to make it look better, so you found a scrap of carpet for a miniature rug. You found a doll’s tea set at the Wal-Mart. You built a little table.

  When the fruit shelves were full, you had no more reason to stay down here.

  You built another row of shelves in front of the first. You’ve always been good with your hands, even at twelve. The shelves had a professional look. Making tiny furniture for each shelf wasn’t hard. The scale was easy to work with, easier than real furniture would have been. You found you could make it look exactly how you saw it in your mind.

  When you were fourteen, you read about a craft fair in the next town. You took your father’s truck and drove there, even though fourteen is too young to drive legally in this state. Already your father didn’t notice.

  Miniature dishes for sale. Pillows, mailboxes, tea towels, cat bowls, weather vanes, scythes, doorknobs, toothpaste tubes, televisions. Tiffany glass, carpenter’s chests. You couldn’t believe it. You had seven dollars in your jeans. You bought a package of Fimo dough, a pamphlet on electrifying dollhouses, and a set of three tiny blue canning jars filled with miniature jelly.

  By now the dollhouse is eleven or twelve layers deep. You built each one out in front of the next, with no way through except unseen doorways seven inches high. Official miniature scale is one inch to one foot. Each layer reaches to the ceiling and has twelve floors, with several rooms on each floor. Some rooms are furnished with cheap plastic dollhouse furniture you found in bulk at a factory closeout, dozens of pieces to the two-dollar pound. Some are furnished with simple, straight-lined beds and tables of balsa which you can turn out three to the afternoon. Some are elaborate period rooms over which you worked for months, with furnishings as authentic as you could devise or could buy mail-order. You work twenty hours a week at Corey Lumber for twice minimum wage, forty hours a week in the summer; Mr. Corey feels sorry for you. Your father never asks what you do with your money.

  Somewhere in the impenetrable maze of tiny rooms is a Georgian drawing room with silver chandelier and grand piano from Think Small. Somewhere is a Shaker dining room with spare, clean lines in satiny cherry. Somewhere is a Tidewater Virginia bedroom, copied from a picture in Nutshell News, with blue velvet hangings, inlaid table, and blue delftware on the polished highboy. You will never see these rooms again; they’ve been covered over by newer layers. You don’t have to see them again. You know they’re there, hidden and unreachable. Untouched. Safe.

  You pick up a piece of 32-gauge, two-conductor stranded wire and a 2 5-watt pencil-tip soldering iron from your workbench. You are wiring a room for a pair of matching coach lights. They go well with a six-inch teak table you found cheap at a garage sale. Some kid had thoughtlessly carved HD across its top, but you can sand and restain that. The three matching side chairs are also restorable. You have learned to reupholster seats one and a quarter inches wide.

  School lets out in mid-June. You work full-time at the lumberyard. Your father gets up after you’ve left the house for his drive into the city, where he works as a data-entry clerk. You get home before he does, fix something to eat, leave his food in a covered dish in the oven, and go to the basement. By the time you come up, he is sitting in the living room, lights off in the summer dusk, drinking. His speech is very careful.

  “Hello, son.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “How was work?”

  “Good,” you say, on your way out.

  “Going out?”

  “Gotta meet some friends,” you say, which is a laugh. But he nods eagerly, pleased you have such a social life. When you come home at ten or eleven, he’s passed out.

  This is the only way, you think, that either of you can bear it. Any of it. Most of the time, you don’t think about it.

  In July a girl comes into the lumberyard—not a woman looking for newel posts or bathroom tiles, but a girl your own age, with high teased bangs and long earrings and Lycra shorts. This is so rare in the lumberyard that you stare at her. She catches you.

  “What’re you staring at?”

  “Nothing,” you say. You feel yourself blush.

  “Yeah? You saying I’m nothing?”

  “No, I . . . no, you . . .” You wait to see if more words will emerge, but no more do. Now she stares at you, challenging and sulky. You remember that you don’t like this kind of girl. She is the kind who combs her hair all class period, gives teachers the finger, sneers at you if you answer in history, the only class you like. You start to turn away, but she speaks to you again.

  “You got a car? Want to drive me home after this dump closes?”

  You hear yourself say, “Sure.”

  It turns out she is Mr. Corey’s niece, sent to five with him for the summer. She works the register afternoons. You suspect she’s been sent away from her own town because her family can’t cope with her, and that Mr. Corey’s taken her in out of the same sympathy that made him pay you more than he had to. You’ve never known how to think about that extra money, and you don’t know how to think about Sally Corey, either. You still don’t like her. But she tosses her head at the register and rolls her eyes at customers behind their backs and sticks out her ass when she dances in place between sales, and you feel a warm sweet hardness when you look at her. By the end of the week you have driven her to a roadside bar where neither of you got served, out to the lake, and to a drive-through ice cream place.

  “Hey, let me see where you live,” she says, for the third or fourth time. “What are you, too poor
or something?”

  “No,” you say. At that moment, as in several others, you hate her. But she turns on the pickup’s front seat and looks at you sideways over the lipstick she’s smearing on her mouth, and maybe it’s not hatred after all.

  “Then what?” she demands. “What is it with you? You a fag?”

  “No!”

  “Then take me home with you. You said no one’s there but your old man.”

  “He’ll hear us.”

  “Not if he’s asleep,” she says with exaggerated patience. “We’ll go downcellar or something. Don’t you have a cellar?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, the backyard.” She lays a hand on your thigh, very high, and something explodes inside your chest You start the truck. Sally grins.

  At home, your father’s silhouette is visible through the living room window. The television is on; sharp barks of canned laughter drift into the night like gunfire. You lead Sally in through the kitchen door, finger on your lips, and down the basement stairs. You lock the basement door behind you with a wooden bar you installed yourself.

  In the first of the tiny cellar rooms, across from the broken Westinghouse washer, is an old sofa. You and Sally fall on it as if gravity had just been invented.

  She tastes of wild thyme, strawberries, mystery. After several minutes of kissing and wild grabbing, she pushes you away and unbuttons her blouse. You think you might faint. Her breasts are big, creamy-looking, with wide dark nipples. You touch them just as she reaches for the zipper on your jeans. You forget to listen for footsteps above. You forget everything.

  But later, afterwards, something is wrong. She rolls lazily to her feet and looks down at you, splayed across the couch, gloriously empty.

  “That’s it?” she says. “That?”

  You are apparently supposed to do something more. Shame grips you as you realize this. You can’t think of anything more, can’t imagine what else is supposed to happen. Her glare says this stupidity is your fault. You stare at her dumbly.

  “What about me?” she demands. “Huh?”

  What about her? She was there, wasn’t she? Does that mean she didn’t like it? That you—oh, God—did it wrong somehow? How? Can she tell you were a virgin? You go on lying across the sofa, a broken spring pressing into the small of your back, helpless as an overturned beetle.

  “Christ,” Sally says contemptuously. She drags her blouse across her chest and flounces off. You expect her to climb the steps, but instead she moves into the next room, idly flicking light switches and peering around.

  In a second you are on your feet. But you’re dizzy from getting up too fast, and your fallen jeans hobble your ankles. By the time you catch her, she has reached the fruit cellar and switched on the light.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” She stares at the looming density of the dollhouse. Only one shelf of the current outermost layer is still empty. “You do this?”

  You can’t answer. Sally fingers a miniature plastic chair, a stuffed cat, a tiny rolling pin from Thumbelina’s. She walks to your workbench. You have been antiquing a premade Chippendale sofa: darkening the fabric with tea, wearing out the armrests with fine steel wool. Vaseline, you have discovered, makes wonderful grease stains on the sofa back.

  Sally starts to laugh. She turns to you, holding the Chippendale, her face twisted under her smeared makeup. “Doll furniture! He plays with little dollies! So that’s why your prick is so itty-bitty!”

  You close your eyes. Her laughter goes on and on. You can’t move. This is the end of your life. You will never be able to move again. It’s all arrived here together, in this moment, under the 200-watt bulbs, in the sound of this girl’s ugly laughter. The kids at school who don’t know you’re alive (but they will now, when Sally meets them and spreads this around), your father’s distaste for you because you’re not good enough, the wussy way you’re terrified of King’s teeth, the endless days where the only words anyone ever says to you are “Twenty-pound bag of peat moss.” Or “Hello, son.” And the two are the same words.

  A howl escapes your lips. You don’t know it’s going to happen until it does, and at the sound of it your eyes fly open. Something has left you, gone out on the howl—you can feel it by its absence. Something palpable as the hiss of escaping gas under boiler pressure. You can feel it go.

  Sally is gone.

  At first you think she’s gone back upstairs. But the wooden bar at the top of the steps is still in place. You grope your way back downstairs and stare at the dollhouse.

  The plastic chair is tipped over, and the tiny mg askew, as if Sally had just dumped them contemptuously back into their miniature room. You look closer. There are tiny scuff marks on the floor beneath the far doorway, the one leading into the dollhouse’s inner regions.

  The next morning Mr. Corey meets you at the lumberyard gate. “Billy, what time did you bring Sally home last night?”

  You are amazed how easily you lie. “About nine-thirty. She wanted me to drop her off at the corner, so I did.”

  Mr. Corey doesn’t seem surprised by this. “Do you know who she was meeting there?”

  “No,” you say.

  The corners of his mouth droop. “Well, she’ll be home when she’s ready, I guess. It’s not as if it’s the first time.” After a moment he adds hopelessly, “I knew you’d be too good for her.”

  You have nothing to say to this.

  When you get home from work there is blood on the porch steps. Heart hammering, you start through the kitchen towards the cellar stairs, but your father calls to you from the living room.

  “It’s okay, son. Just a flesh wound.”

  He is sitting in the rocker, his hand wrapped in a white pillowcase gone gray from washing. The whiskey bottle is a new one, its paper seal lying on the table beside his glass.

  The glass is unbroken. Your father’s face looks pale and unhealthy. “I didn’t see the dog in time.”

  “King? King attacked you?” A part of your mind realizes that these are the first nonstandard sentences the two of you have exchanged in weeks.

  “Is that the dog’s name?” your father says blearily.

  “Did he break the skin?”

  He nods. You feel rage just begin to simmer, somewhere below your diaphragm. It feels good. “Then we can sue the bastard! I’ll call the police!”

  “Oh, no,” your father says. He fumbles for his glass. “Oh, no, son . . . that’s not necessary. No.” He looks at you then, for the first time, a look of dumb beseeching undercut by stubbornness. He sips his whiskey.

  “You won’t sue,” you say slowly. “Because then you’d have to go to court, have to stay sober—”

  Your father looks frightened. Not the terror with which he must have met King’s attack, but a muzzy, weary fear. That you will finish your sentence. That you will say something irrevocable. That you, his son, will actually talk to him.

  You fall silent.

  He says, “Going out, son?”

  You say, your voice thick, “Gotta see some friends.”

  On the porch, you start for the truck. Something growls from the hedge. King barks and breaks cover, rushing at you. You jump back inside and slam the door. After a minute, when you can, you pound your fists against the refrigerator, which rattles and groans.

  Your father, who must surely hear you, is silent in the living room.

  You go down the cellar stairs. You don’t even turn on any lights. In front of the dollhouse, you close your eyes and howl.

  The suffocating anger leaves you, steam from a kettle. Coolness comes, a satiny enameled coolness like perfect lacquer.

  From somewhere deep inside the dollhouse comes a faint, high-pitched bark.

  You turn on the overhead bulbs and peer inside as far as you can. It appears that three layers in, a wing chair might be overturned, but it’s hard to be sure. Two layers in, a hunting print from Mini Splendored Thing is askew on a wall.

  At the foot of the cellar stairs you notice so
mething white. It’s Sally’s cotton panties, kicked into a corner. You don’t remember the kicking. The panties aren’t what you expect from hasty scans of Playboy at the Convenient Mart, not black lace or red satin or anything. They’re white cotton, printed with small blue flowers. The label says “Lollipops.” You dangle them from your fingers for a long time.

  You go back to the dollhouse. You think about King hurtiing himself out of the darkness, the gleam of his teeth by starlight. Those teeth closing on your father’s hand. The speck of blood already soaked through the gray pillowcase.

  You close your eyes and concentrate as hard as you can. Afterwards, you peer into the mass of the dollhouse, trying to gaze through tiny doorways, past Federal highboys and plastic refrigerators. You see nothing. There is no sound. Eventually, you give it up.

  You feel like a wimp.

  The next day Sally is back at the cash register. She wears no makeup, and her hair is wrapped tightly in a French braid. When you catch her eye, she shudders and looks wildly away.

  “Where’s my dog?” Dazuki demands. “I know you did something to my dog!”

  “I never touched your dog,” you say truthfully.

  “You got him in there and I’m coming in to get him!”

  “Get a search warrant,” you hear yourself say.

  Dazuki glares at you. To your complete amazement, he turns away. “You damn well bet I will!” But even to your ears this sounds like bravado. Dazuki believes you. He doesn’t think you’d imprison his dog, whether from cowardice or honesty or ineptitude. There will be no warrant.

  You glance at the living room window, which was wide open. Your father must have heard how you told off Dazuki. Both you and the asshole were shouting. He must have heard. You go into the house.

  Your father has passed out in his rocking chair.

  Two days later, an upholstered Queen Anne chair on the fourth shelf of the first layer has been chewed. The bite marks look somehow desperate. But each one is only three twenty-fourths of an inch deep, to official scale. They are mere pinpricks, nothing anyone could actually fear.