by Kristin Bair
“Agatha, you know that’s not why I’m here.”
“Then get out.”
“Agatha, listen.”
She meets his eyes and gives him a withering look, one that makes it clear they are not going to be having the rational discussion about divorce proceedings he’d proposed via text the day before. “You get out,” she says. “Get out of this house.” Each word she speaks is quieter and more clipped than the one before it. “And do not come back here again unless you’ve got the boys and suitcases in the car.”
She can tell that this is the first time Dax is afraid of her. She’s seen him annoyed, pissed, flabbergasted, and frustrated, but until right this very moment she’s never seen him afraid. There’s a strange comfort in that, one she wouldn’t have felt a few weeks before.
He stands, keeping the table between them, and backs his way to the door. She knows he wants to tell her that his lawyer will be in touch with hers, wants to toss out that classic line they’d heard in so many movies, but for once he keeps his mouth shut. When the door clicks behind him, Agatha winds up and hurls her coffee mug at the refrigerator. When the pieces settle, she is shocked at how completely the thing has shattered—a gazillion brilliant shards glitter in the blast of sunlight shooting through the now-open blinds. “That’s your heart, Agatha Arch,” she says. “Your fothermucking heart.”
She stomp-storms to the junk drawer, yanks the Dax reflection doll from the tangled jumble of seashells, plastic sunglasses, kite string, rubber bands, pens, and whatnot, then puts him on the cutting board and glares at him. So many options, but still, the boys. She moves the bread knife to the sink, out of reach, the best place for it, then picks up the loaf of raisin bread and plops it on top of him. “Ha,” she says, “see how that feels.” But as she holds it down, she wonders, briefly, what happens when someone is no longer able to be the way they used to be. Maybe Dax could no longer be the Dax she knew and loved. Maybe this because of GDOG or maybe this not because of GDOG. Maybe this because of something deep inside that other people can’t see. Even so, she presses harder until Dax is completely enveloped in the raisin bread. He hates raisin bread.
She is barely breathing when there is another knock. She wipes sweat from her forehead, steps over the shards, and opens the door. A man in painter’s whites smiles and says, “Agatha Arch? I’m Isai Corona. The house painter.” His eyes flicker from Agatha’s face to the shattered mug and back. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says. “Accident?”
“Not really,” Agatha says.
Just as the Moms promised, Isai Corona is handsome. Very handsome. Lots of thick, curly hair. Not a hint of jelly-belly. Muscular forearms. And when he turns to walk down the steps, Agatha sees that their comments about his tush are spot on.
“I’ve got a problem with peeling,” Agatha says, leading him outside to the corner of the house, “and I want the house painted as soon as possible.”
Isai Corona is thorough. He looks at the peeling bit, then circles the house. “Just a touch up then,” he says. “The bulk of the house looks good.”
Agatha wags her head back and forth. “No, no, no. I would like you to paint the whole house.”
“The whole house?” he says. “But your whole house doesn’t need to be painted. You don’t need to waste your money. The whole house is a big, expensive job. Fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Money is not an issue,” she says. “Please paint the house. Can you start next week?”
Isai Corona eyes Agatha in the same way one might eye a hungry velociraptor squawking on a nearby rooftop. “I’ll have to juggle a few things, and I’ll need a check right away for the first third,” he says. “Then a check for the second third after we’ve sanded, and another for the final third when the job is done.”
“I’ll give you a check for the whole thing right now.”
Isai raises his eyebrows, but nods. She can see him reciting in his head, “The customer is always right. The customer is always right.” He seems like that kind of upstanding guy. “See you in a week or so,” he says. Before getting into his truck, he pats both oak trees by the driveway. “These are impressive,” he says.
Agatha nods, then texts Dax. “Getting the house painted. Pulled $15,000 from savings this morning. Happy weekend to you and GDOG.”
While Isai had come highly recommended by many of the Moms, a handful had criticized his work, saying he didn’t sand thoroughly enough and took long coffee breaks, but Agatha knew how to read between the lines. She knew they were really saying they didn’t like the fact that his skin was not white. It is dark. Dark dark. Much darker than some Wallingford women are comfortable with. He’s from the Dominican Republic and has a strong accent some say makes it tough to understand his words. But that’s just made-up crap from a gaggle of women who prefer their houses painted by white men. If you listen to his words the same way you listen to the words of a white painter, you hear him just fine.
Race is a tricky thing in Wallingford. Indians, the non-native kind, are A-okay to most Moms. Many have good-paying jobs, money to spend, and nice homes. Asians, the whole lump of them despite country of origin, are on the “accepted as long as they stick to the library, orchestras, and Chinese restaurants” list. But a painter with dark skin and an accent from the DR? That is too much for some of the Moms. For them, the DR is good for one thing and one thing only: high-end resorts in Punta Cana.
Agatha doesn’t care one way or another about Isai Corona’s skin color. Or his tush. She just needs a quick and easy way to gouge her estranged husband.
Revenge is sweet.
And bitter.
* * *
“What do you think?” Agatha asks the TreeLife guy.
The man scratches his beard and circles the oaks. He’s one of the many bearded millennials in the world today, so bearded that Agatha wonders if he knows anything about trees at all or if he has just been hired to play the part of Paul Bunyan.
“There are no visible signs of disease.” He pats the trunks of each oak. “Should be fine with just a trim. I’ll come back with the truck and my crew next week.”
Agatha nods. An hour later she drives to the grocery store, parks, and climbs onto Coop’s hood. Her eyes flicker between the sky and the Interloper. It’s a clear, crisp night, and the stars are as bright as they can be next to a well-lit parking lot. When the Interloper looks up, Agatha thinks about that thing Oscar Wilde once said—“Two men look out a window. One sees mud, the other sees the stars.” The same must hold true for two women, but, Agatha wonders, which am I?
Chapter Eighteen
Dax:
Agatha, I just saw the payment to the painter. It’s outrageous. We have to talk about this.
Agatha:
Tra la la
Dax:
Agatha, you can’t continue to spend money this way.
Agatha:
Just return the turquoise silk muumuu-maxi you bought for GDOG to replace the one lost during the shed incident. That should cover the painter’s fee.
Dax:
What I buy for Willow is my business. It has nothing to do with painting the house. Nothing to do with you.
Agatha:
Tra la la
Agatha thinks about Hubert Selby’s Tra La La in Last Exit to Brooklyn. She lives a brutal life but offers up some gems in the quiet spaces. “Getting laid is getting laid,” says Tra La La.
Maybe, Agatha thinks, but making love is making love. She misses that.
* * *
That night she reads an article about a man in New Hampshire who released his coterie of wild animals into the woods behind his house just before taking his own life. A lion. A grizzly bear. One strange anteater. A leopard. Seven giraffes. Three gorillas. Two tigers. Three hippopotami. Three flamingoes. One kangaroo. All cages were empty when the authorities arrived. Nothing left but piles of dried-up dung.
It is illegal to own such animals in this small town, but the man had gotten away with it for years. That’s New Hamp
shire for you. Live free or die.
Days after the man’s death, the police assure the public they’ve tracked, caught, and killed each of the animals. “The lion got as far as the Maine coastline,” a sergeant says. “We intercepted and extinguished him there.”
But who can know for sure if the police are telling the truth? Perhaps the trackers lost the lion’s scent at the Massachusetts border and gave up. Perhaps one of the two tigers slipped into the Piscataqua River and swam south. The White Mountains are dense with stone, and Mount Washington is known for its inhospitable climate, but once you get a whiff, freedom is powerful stuff.
Agatha imagines the lion sleeping next to the remains of the shed. Good god. As if life hasn’t been hard enough. Now this to worry about.
She wonders if perhaps the man had had more animals than outsiders had known. Has anyone considered that? A man with the balls to build a private zoo might not have been a reliable record keeper. Maybe there was a fourth gorilla. Or a lioness. A snow leopard. Maybe a grizzly cub snuck away unnoticed while the officers were shooting at its mother. Maybe that cub is slowly making its way to Wallingford, gorging on turtles and berries. Growing enormous along the way. Sharpening its claws on aspen trees.
There are so many maybes in the world. How does anyone live with them all?
Agatha saves the article in her Hard Truths file and turns off the light.
* * *
When she brings all this up in her session, Shrinky-Dink plunks it right next to the fear that caused Agatha to buy three window-smashing hammers for Coop. “One of these animals devouring me in Wallingford is as likely as me plunging my car into a body of water and not being able to escape,” Shrinky-Dink says. “I can’t waste time worrying about it.”
Agatha is always surprised when Shrinky-Dink so honestly shares her own feelings about something. That seems out of the realm of a therapist’s responsibilities.
“Shouldn’t you keep judgmental opinions to yourself?” she says. “Isn’t that part of your job?” She shakes her head and thinks about the Interloper. Shrinky-Dink doesn’t worry about that danger either.
“If we set aside the possibility of a lion lying in wait at the remains of your shed,” Shrinky-Dink says, “what is it that really upsets you about this situation?”
Agatha sighs. Saying it out loud will be excruciating. Holding it in even more so. “How lonely the man must have been to gather this gaggle of wild animals. To want to care for and be cared for. How alone the man must have felt to take his own life. How even his desperate gathering of living things failed to satiate him.”
Shrinky-Dink nods, but doesn’t speak. The two sit with that between them, silently thrashing the hell out of it.
A streak of tigers, Agatha thinks.
A sloth of bears.
A candle of anteaters.
A whoop of gorillas.
A leap of leopards.
A pride of lions.
A tower of giraffes.
A stand of flamingos.
A bloat of hippopotami.
A mob of kangaroos.
One lonely man.
Me.
* * *
Tap tap tippity-tap.
* * *
Run. Run fast. When it happens, when you’ve done the deed, run like the wind. Just like Ding, Dong, Ditch.
Agatha crouches behind a tree, not the oak tree in her yard, not the tree in GDOG’s yard on which she’d painted HEART, but the pine tree just beyond GDOG’s property, the tree in which she’d been caught spying, first by the boy, second by the boy and his mad mad mother, and third by the police officer who’d babysat her after the shed incident.
When Dax’s car pulls into the driveway, she waits for GDOG to step from the passenger seat. When she hears the door click shut, she envisions herself leaping out of her crouch from behind the tree, grabbing GDOG’s ponytail, and holding tight. She sees herself whipping scissors from the waist loop on her spy pants and snipping off all GDOG’s hair with one great snip. All of it.
Snniiiiiippp!
If she does this, if she follows through, GDOG will scream, and Agatha knows for sure, one hundred percent, it will be the shrillest sound Agatha has ever heard, shriller even than the scream of the fisher cat that hunts in her neighborhood after midnight, the one Kerry Sheridan complains about year after year.
Agatha presses her hand to the scissors on the waist loop of her spy pants. So damn much she wants that ponytail—that sleek blond plait—but moving from painting HEART on a tree trunk to cutting off GDOG’s hair is moving from annoyance to assault. She knows it, and as much as she longs to do it, all she can think is the boys, the boys, the boys.
Instead, she creeps back to Coop, drives home, and, in the kitchen, shears the hair off the GDOG reflection doll until there’s nothing left but stubble. It’s something. She runs her thumb over the bristly remains, then pulls her estranged husband from the drawer. “Look at her now,” she says, holding up GDOG and letting Dax get a glimpse of her stubbly, wubbly head.
Agatha sits like this for a long time, GDOG in one hand, Dax in the other, wondering where she’d be right now, in this moment, if she’d followed through and leapt from behind that tree and chopped off all that hair. This would be a very different moment, this one here. Maybe she’d be in GDOG’s yard being questioned by the officer. Maybe she’d already have been taken in to the police department, hands cuffed behind her back. Maybe she’d be staring out from behind bars.
Needing air, fresh air, she tucks the dolls back into their respective drawers and steps onto the porch. As she leans over to chat with the tomato plant, a police cruiser makes its way up the street, pausing in front of her house, as if knowing her intention, which is impossible, because she’d shared her hair-chopping plan with no one. Not Shrinky-Dink. Not even Bear.
When the cruiser is in line with the driveway, the window rolls down and Agatha sees the young officer, whose name she still can’t remember, looking at her. He smiles, waves, and holds up his copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God. She gives him a thumbs-up, gives herself a thumbs-up, then turns to go back into the house.
* * *
“You what?” Shrinky-Dink says.
“I almost cut off a bit of GDOG’s hair.” Agatha says it the same way she might say, “I cut the tags off my new dress.”
“With what? Please do not tell me a hatchet.”
“Scissors. Just scissors.”
“But you didn’t do it?”
“I didn’t do it. I just kept thinking about the boys.” She doesn’t mention the reflection doll.
“Thank goodness. That could have landed you in jail.”
“I know.”
“What were you feeling?”
Agatha rolls her eyes.
“What pushed you to consider going so far?”
“I was scared.”
“Scared?”
“And mad.”
“Mad as in angry? Or mad as in crazy?”
“You tell me.”
Shrinky-Dink leans back in her chair and makes a weird gulpy-wheezy noise in the back of her throat. Agatha has never heard a sound like this from Shrinky-Dink. It’s unexpected and unnerving. “Are you okay?” Agatha says.
Shrinky-Dink clears her throat. “I am.” Then she says, “You know, you’re not afraid like other people.”
Agatha cocks her head. “What?”
“You’re afraid of things, but you’re not afraid like other people.”
“What do you mean?”
“Many people—most people—who suffer from fears and phobias hide and cower and retreat. They turn inward when they’re afraid.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You do the opposite. You strike out.”
Agatha is quiet.
“When another person—let’s say a woman named Gloria—is afraid of the dark, she sits in a corner with all the lights on. You? You turn off the lights, grab a sword, and stab anything that comes close.”
Agatha no
ds. Sounds about right.
“When Gloria is afraid of strangers, she goes in her house, locks the door, and stays there until pried out by her family. When you are afraid of strangers—the Interloper, for example—you drive to where she is, take photos, yell at her through a bullhorn, blast the Beastie Boys, and put her on notice.”
Agatha half smiles, chuffed. This line of reasoning kind of feels like a compliment. Also kind of not.
“When Gloria is cheated on, she retreats. When you’re cheated on, you grab the nearest weapon—hatchet, spray paint, scissors—and go after the cheaters.”
“And you’re saying that most people are like Gloria?”
“Absolutely.”
“How boring.”
“Maybe, but they leave less carnage in their wake.”
Agatha thinks about the carnage in her wake. The shed. The tree. Almost GDOG’s hair. “And?”
“And I think getting mad allows you to avoid your true feelings.”
A chime dings quietly from Shrinky-Dink’s vicinity.
“What is that?”
“My new way of indicating that we’re at the end of a session. The clock felt too abrupt.”
Agatha smirks.
“For next time, spend a few minutes thinking about your relationship with fear and anger.”
When Agatha opens the door, the woman in gray is sitting, as always, in the small vestibule just outside Shrinky-Dink’s office. She’s staring out the window. “Gloria?” Agatha whispers as she passes.
The woman doesn’t look up.
