Tiny Ladies

by Adam Klein

  ‘Are we gonna do this, or what?’ she asked my father impatiently.

  ‘Hold on,’ Jim said with derision. He hated her. I could see it.

  My father pulled a smaller case from his large duffel. He opened it on the front seat of the truck, and I noticed the powder-filled bag he’d already weighed out. He picked it up and pressed it into the woman’s hand. She looked at me inquisitively, then turned on her heels and started quickly toward the front door. She called out, ‘Remember, no returns.’

  The monkey was still on my father’s back, combing through his hair with black fingers. Seeing him that way made me suddenly want to touch him. Outside of the house, I could almost imagine him adjusted, flourishing in the light, the green of trees in the periphery. I took his hand in mine, my father bending at the knees so he could move from his shoulders to mine.

  ‘I love him,’ I said as he took hold of my neck for the first time.

  It was love mixed with sympathy, and it seemed to color the vast, blank sky a darkening blue.

  I step out of the bath and wrap a towel around myself. Check the mirror. I think: How many sleeping pills will it take me to fall asleep, make my mind a blank? But I don’t do that anymore. Tea. I’ll make tea. And if I had ironing to do, I’d do that too. Pushing back and forth, and your mind just emptying out. And the Iowa night is flecked with white, like the dust of disintegrating stars. It’s like the heavens were grinding the stars down, like the bones of some poor animal.

  The monkey mind sees blankets, darkness thrown over a cage. False nights that last days. Hands, big and small. The big hands pinpricked, trembling. The small hands greedy, touching you in good places, then withdrawing. A bowl of beer. The green of a screened-in porch. Behind that – real trees, real wind, real night. All of this withdrawing. Close up there are scabbed faces, beards, pupils wide as saucers or small as fleas. Laughter, screaming, muffled through the fabric. Old bananas, black skins. Patches that are wounds. Chicken wire wound around a baby’s bed.

  Under the bridge I pulled a boy’s penis from a pair of shorts, and with a curious impulse took it into my mouth. The boy had raspberry skin: pimply and lightly haired. He wore gym shorts with the junior high school eagle ironed on them. Underneath the eagle, a yellow box where he’d marked in his last name. For a long time I remembered the name. There had been no courtship, no first kiss or invitation to the school dance. I’d simply heard him sliding down the rocky side of the embankment, then saw him squinting into the darkness under the bridge where I’d been lighting matches and throwing them into the canal. I said, ‘It’s nice down here.’

  At home there were parties all the time. Usually just my father’s friends, men I’d known since I was a baby. I used to sit on Ernie’s lap, play with Donald’s watchband. His arm held me as firmly as a padded carnival seat. But the ride had changed. The drop deepened; the earth seemed to fall away at greater lengths.

  My father brought out Patches like a mascot, like the ram they trotted out at football games, saddled with a banner, fearing the crowd. Easier not to think my pet too much alive. Patches – for the wounds he gave himself. Why would you want to hurt yourself like that? The nurse was so caring, and so disgusted.

  They taunted him until he’d bite, then shove him back in the crib and cover it. My pleading didn’t help when they were at that point. I could hear Patches scream. It was a terrible, raging scream. It was inside me. I held two rocks in my hand, about the same weight and the same size. Crush a skull, or write the words Fuck, Fuck, Fuck over the sidewalk in front of our house.

  At one party, Jim and I talked in my room. He seemed nervous and stood by the door. I sat on the bed.

  ‘You can come in,’ I said.

  ‘I’m in.’ He didn’t move.

  ‘I still think about you,’ I said. Breathless girl, catch your breath.

  ‘Try not to.’ Then whispering, ‘It wasn’t right what we did. We can’t—’

  I just sat there, facing him. I remembered how he treated his ex-girlfriend, never acknowledged her. I felt no pity for her. She was messed up, no good. But I wondered if I wasn’t like her, whether he saw me older and changed. Because I had changed, my body alive with needs, so I did things I didn’t dare talk about. My face was still pink when Jim left the room, as though burned by a hot, bright light.

  I reached beneath the bed and withdrew a cigar box my father gave me. I removed the things I’d saved from our trip up north. I took the matches and coasters, drink umbrellas, hotel soap, and laid them on my bed. I stared at the image of ochre-painted judges on the lid of the box. Who were these men in historical gowns? I imagined them the arbiters of the memories I would keep or abandon. I would purge these memories of Jim, of the trip we’d made, and the judges would make it final.

  It was my mother who’d suggested only special things be chosen for the box, items somehow steeped in nascent recollection. The box allowed each item to seem distilled and essential, plucked from the flow of life and weighted against the rest. I kept these tokens in darkness beneath my bed. At night, I imagined the items I’d saved lifted from the box and floating before me, a dream I’d configured.

  I later learned the power of removing items. These were star deaths in my personal constellation. Anything loved could also be excised. I followed my mother’s example. Her boxes were pillboxes, and each pill – counted, cherished, anticipated, and consumed – helped her love and forget. The judges were silent.

  I gave the apartment keys to Victor. He looked down at them, back at me. So much gratitude in his eyes. I thought: He’s not a client anymore and it doesn’t matter so long as I can still help him. He can take every last thing. And he did. But he didn’t leave, even though he was ashamed. ‘It was the drugs,’ he said, after he sold my television. I forgave him. He had a beautiful, almost religious expression of defeat on his face.

  I smoked cigarettes with other girls behind the portables and had some minor popularity for a while based on a kind of fearlessness and worldliness I had about drugs. I spun tales about my relationship with a Vietnam vet. He had both legs, and loved me too much. I had a world of charms in my purse: makeups that I applied in the school bathroom, a wide brush for blushes that made my cheeks look sore.

  I carried groceries, mostly desserts, beers, and medicines, home to my mother. I took over lawn work, cutting away weeds, gathering rotting fruit from our backyard and dropping it into a trash bag. I came home from school at 3 P.M. and sat in a folding chair in the yard, face to the sun. I punched the big plastic buttons on my Panasonic tape recorder, listening to my father’s cassettes. I poured peroxide in my hair and watched it lighten in a hand mirror I laid in the grass. I got as much sunlight as I could, but then I’d have to go inside. Just my mother sitting quietly in the dark. If I confronted her, she’d say: ‘I’m happy, baby. For the first time in a long time, I’m really happy.’ And years later, I was still nagged by how resolute she was in that happiness, like someone grateful for a terrible accident.

  She had that spellbound look of all my father’s friends, as though life had just sped up. Everything around her was the same, but now she looked at everything as though it had lifted off the floor and begun to spin. She had the strange tics and sleepwalking movements of my father’s friends, their bland justifications, their forgetfulness. She was hardened but also thin-skinned. I called her ‘mother’ now, and the word would stiffen on my breath.

  ‘I’m failing school,’ I’d tell her. ‘I’m leaving you.’

  I’d changed, my face burned and lined like a survivor on a raft. The worldliness that had won me meager respect with the girls at school now seemed otherworldly. It was rumored I’d tried to commit suicide.

  On the contrary, I tried to live.

  Our first day together was after we’d been close in dreams, after we’d shared hell and heaven and all the places in between …

  I was singing along with Carly Simon when I saw a police car pull up by our backyard gate. I quickly shut off the tape a
nd made my way over to the officer.

  ‘I just wanted to ask you a few questions,’ he said. He wore reflective sunglasses.

  ‘How long has your dad been away?’ He seemed nervous asking me.

  ‘For a week.’ I was rubbing in the tanning cream, squinting up at him.

  ‘Did he leave with anyone?’

  ‘His friend Jim.’ It was that simple – talking to the cop – but I never told anyone about it.

  Victor is calm. It’s a calm I know can precede anything, but surely it precedes something. ‘You keep your mouth shut about this,’ he tells me again. ‘I did this for us, so we’d have the money. If you say anything about this, I’ll make sure no one can identify your body.’ He says this as he opens my shirt.

  The room was hot with bodies, pressed close over matches and cookers. They didn’t drink much these days, and I was glad about that. I got tired of picking up their bottles, dragging out hundred-pound bags to the curb. I stopped going to school and took the time to reinforce the patio screen with chicken wire from the shed so Patches could come out of his crib. They never used the patio anymore. And with those few extra feet of space, Patches became wild again. Even my father was afraid of him, so he became my responsibility. Despite his fearful presence, I pitied him. He was covered in large, infected wounds and wouldn’t let himself be touched or bandaged. When he escaped the first time, I felt happy for him. I hoped we wouldn’t find him. But a neighbor appeared at the door in the middle of the night, unshaven, clad only in a night robe, and clearly dismayed. ‘I think that’s your monkey making all that racket.’ He pointed down the street, and there was Patches perched on top of the STOP sign at the end of the block, banging it wildly as if disseminating an important message.

  Once out, it was harder to keep him. Like the old expression, give an inch. If I opened the patio screen door, he flew at it with the force of a grown man. My visits to the school nurse were always for bites; they were deep and slow to heal. ‘Carrie,’ the nurse said disconsolately, ‘most people get rid of pets they can’t control.’ But we weren’t most people, and she seemed to know that. My mother would threaten to have Patches put to sleep, but by this time she offered no real threat. Her involvement with the world went no further than the tip of her tongue. She lived as if by a dropper.

  My father weakly feigned affection for the monkey, as though it were a crucial choice he’d made and had to stick by. But his presence seemed to alarm Patches; and I was always called to intervene.

  But I wasn’t called that last night; the police were. Patches made his way out of the screen and was high up in the neighbors’ tree. Both husband and wife were in their mid-fifties and childless. Their faces were like small, hard apples.

  It was close to midnight and Patches must have awakened them. I could imagine the old lady looking out her bathroom window and seeing that face – so human, so horrible – and hollering and falling back as though it were her own reflection. Her husband had a broom that he was swatting the lower branches with. She came to our door spluttering with anger.

  ‘You’ve got to come now!’ She said this as though trying to wake my mother. ‘Your monkey’s escaped again.’

  I quickly ran to lower the music. My mother stood on the porch, speaking in her slowed, slurred, unconcerned way. ‘Honey,’ she finally hollered, ‘Patches is out again.’

  My father went out shirtless, sweating. He’d been up for the past few days on methamphetamine. He’d started to walk funny. Sometimes he heard voices and he’d tell everyone to quiet down. They were little voices, he said, in the walls and under the house. But usually he could be talked out of it, though you always sensed he was still hearing them, just not telling anyone.

  The old lady looked him over in dread. With no shirt on, you could see the mess he’d made of his arms. His body was thinned down, so his muscles looked like little knots. He was stammering, attempting to placate her, which seemed to make her more bewildered and disturbed than she’d been. And he’d begun to smell as strongly as Patches. He said he didn’t like the way water felt on his skin.

  ‘I’ll just go over and get him. Carrie, you better come too.’ I could see he was apprehensive. The monkey had turned on him. Everyone had turned on him.

  I followed behind them, surprised to see so many of the neighbors out, as though there’d been a fire. The old man was making such a ruckus; he’d turned on some floodlights over his garage and now the whole scene looked like a movie. I stopped walking when I started to see what the others saw. My father looked stiff and babbling in the light. He was screaming, ‘Shut those fucking things off,’ but the old man stood there with his hands crossed over his chest, his wife beside him.

  ‘C’mon down, Patches!’ my father hollered. He seemed incapable of standing still, turning strangely on one foot, the other behind his calf. ‘C’mon,’ he was pleading, now more to himself than the monkey. I wanted to intervene but I was scared. I felt the outrage, the disgust of the people around him. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I felt my face going red and realized I’d been holding my breath. I saw the police car moving slowly down the block, casually, as though they did not want to interrupt this community forum. I heard the voices of the neighbors, tiny voices, muffled and conspiratorial. Two police officers walked to either side of my father. ‘Are you intoxicated?’ one asked.

  That’s when Patches fled. We heard the rustle of leaves and saw him moving off to another tree, and another. The police made no effort to follow his movements. ‘Sooner or later he’ll grab one of those telephone lines and that’ll be the end of him.’

  The police asked to look through our house, and, as though my father had forgotten what he’d hidden away there, he complied. I sat scowling on my bed as they disrupted my room, opened my cigar box, my busted dresser. The smaller officer had pale skin and black, wavy hair. He talked kindly to me while the other searched. His questions bothered me, though. ‘Has your father’s behavior seemed unusual to you?’ he asked.

  I kept wondering what he was trying to know about me. Had I been damaged in some critical way? ‘Other people think so,’ I answered. But when I thought of the neighbors, I thought, no. Nothing so unusual.

  This is what I’d say to Hannah: Why do some survive and some don’t? I don’t know. Why do some that could survive just let go and stop trying? I don’t know. But there’s a trick to living, and you only learn it after you’ve done it.

  3

  Faith might he a good neighbor and hang fruit over the fence but something else was needed to wield the arsenic spray.

  Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

  ‘I shouldn’t have called,’ I say, cradling the phone while I light a cigarette. ‘I thought maybe we could get a coffee. I was just sitting here, and I realized I wasn’t thinking of anything at all.’

  ‘You must have thought of me,’ she says. ‘That’s kind.’

  I want to tell her it has nothing to do with casework. It’s not kindness, my calling her.

  ‘How’s your apartment?’ I ask. These walls talk, conspire …

  She hesitates for a moment. ‘It’s hard to come back here. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reminded myself, “You’re not crazy anymore. You can do this.” But I feel like a ghost here, like I died and I have a few moments to come back and inspect my things. I can’t bring myself to touch anything yet. Do you think that’s strange?’

  ‘No,’ I say. I look straight ahead and see a picture of my mother – the only one I’ve got – and she’s standing by the tarred stump of our orange tree, a glass in her hand, and sunglasses shielding her eyes.

  ‘Do you want to get out for a little while?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I don’t care where we go.’

  Hannah lives above a bakeshop in town, and she stands waiting for me in front of its humid glass. I smell the sugar when I crack my window. She is wearing a blue bomber jacket and a rabbit fur hat. Her hands are crammed into her pockets, and she’s bent forward, braced against the
wind. She runs around the car and ducks inside, quickly taking off her hat and muffler. She smiles, and it seems tinged with condolence, as though she knows what compelled me to call her in the first place.

  ‘Thanks for the cookies, by the way.’

  ‘Oh, it was nothing. I have an idea,’ she says, ‘about where we can go.’

  I look over at her just in time to see something mischievous in her expression.

  For a while, she gives directions and we do very little talking. She has a confidence I didn’t recognize in the office. If some of those caseworkers got out with their clients, they’d find someone wholly different from the person they counsel, and they would shut up with all of their suggestions. But it makes me uneasy, too, the way things change – people change – when there is no structure.

  ‘There,’ she points. There is nothing but plowed-up and frozen ground. It’s the vast construction site for the new mall coming in. The winter has been so bad there’s little work done. The area is a rough, glassy white.

  ‘Let’s get out here,’ she says. ‘Can I take this blanket?’

  ‘Sure.’ It’s King’s blanket, but that’s fine.

  I follow her. It’s barren and slippery in spots, so we walk cautiously, every so often reaching for each other’s arm. It’s silent, but not like the inside of my apartment. Inside and outside silences are different. She stops at a massive crane, and without a moment’s thought pulls herself up over its wheel and opens the door of the cabin. She puts the blanket down and reaches out a hand to me, pulls me up. ‘It can get a little cold in here,’ she says, sliding into the driver’s seat. ‘But we can put this blanket over our legs.’

  I close the door behind me. From the frozen windshield, and from this high up, we can see out over the entire lot, and it looks like a calm ocean, frozen still. She turns to face me. ‘What do you think? I come here sometimes just to get away. I fell asleep in here one night when it wasn’t this cold.’