Me and My Manny

by M. A. MacAfee

  “I’m not some kind of doormat for Jason to walk all over,” she said is if releasing pent up anger. “I don’t just exist to fill his needs. I want more out of life.”

  Then an almost celestial light brightened Ruthie’s face. “You have no idea. My new vibrator is the latest in penetrating and sucking features. Want to see it?”

  “Not right now. Gotta run.” I sniffed the air. “I got pies in the oven. I don’t want them to burn.”

  “Drop by any time and I’ll show it to you,” Ruthie said. “My appliance and I have the perfect relationship.”

  “I’m glad for you… two.”

  Back in the kitchen, I replayed Ruthie’s account of her new vibrator in my mind. I began to see Jason’s issue. In some ways, it was similar to how Harry felt about my manny. The object was engaged in a takeover. Still, it wasn’t as if Ruthie had taken up with a stranger interested in casual sex. She was only flying solo. Yet good ole Jason would rather she’d crash than have a happy landing. I never believed Ruthie had intended to murder Jason, but I wouldn’t wonder why if she had.

  I slid the cookie sheet holding the potpies out of the oven and set them aside to cool. I took a sip of cream soda and giggled. Ruthie, a travel agent, had traveled the globe. I couldn’t help but picture her and her vibrating toy, drinking beer at Germany’s October Fest, sightseeing at the Coliseum in Rome, and lounging under an umbrella on a sun-kissed beach on the French Riviera. Talk about your retrofitted manny! I bet something like that would shake Harry up.

  Day after Halloween

  Halloween night came and went. While no one at my apartment house had built bonfires to scare off the walking dead, a few tenants had chased them away by the usual method. They carved ugly faces into hollowed-out pumpkins, set lit candles inside, and placed the flickering images on their front balconies. The ancient practice must have put the residents of Whitehall in a festive mood. Toward evening, they’d ordered a keg of beer and threw a small celebration in the game room.

  Around noon the following day, I tugged on my boots and hiked a couple of hours on the trails that meander through an eight-hundred-acre wildlife preserve known as the Redmond Watershed. Though only about four in the afternoon, the sky had darkened and the heavy clouds promised a serious thunderstorm. After driving back to Whitehall, I parked in my space and rode the elevator to the lobby. This being the first of the month, rent was due.

  “Did you see all the spooky jack o’ lanterns on the balconies?” I asked Lisa, sitting behind her desk munching on a chocolate square when I dropped by the manager’s office with my check.

  “Aren’t they great?” She started to make out a receipt. “I think the ones the gay guys made are the best.”

  I nodded, recalling them at last night’s party in the game room, both dressed in black leather vests and pants with codpiece crotches that could be unsnapped on a moment’s notice.

  Wolf and I showed up as elves in borrowed costumes that Lisa’s teenagers had worn last year after getting out of Monroe’s reformatory. We had whirled around in our turned-up slippers with bells on the toes until the music turned raunchy. The gay guys snatched Wolf from his wheelie-cart, sandwiched him between them, and ground their pelvises into his front and back.

  “Awesome,” Lisa had said repeatedly while watching the threesome perform last night. Then as now, her comment made me wonder if she had similarly regarded the gay tenants as she had Siegfried and Roy. Good thing the prudish Harry hadn’t been there to see it.

  I pulled off my parka. “Many kids last night?”

  “Not many,” she said.

  Children didn’t trick-or-treat in our neighborhood, I learned during my first Halloween at Whitehall. Not many kids lived in the building.

  “Since you’re here…” Lisa removed three mouse-sticky pads from a box beside her swivel chair. “By the way,” she then said, handing me the traps, “has Harry heard anything from the Coast Guard yet?”

  “No, not yet,” I said, surprised. I hadn’t known he’d even contacted the Guard. He still had a good seven months to go on his enlistment.

  She casually admired the clanging silver bracelets encircling her wrist. “I suppose you’ll submit to the urge to have a baby once he’s out of the navy.”

  “There’s not much of an urge.” Feeling threatened, I quickly stuffed my checkbook along with the rent receipt back in my fanny pack. “Talk to you later,” I said on the way out with my mouse traps.

  Submit, Lisa had said, and the word resonated. To submit meant to give up, give in, and ultimately succumb, as in a death, the death of the self.

  I pressed the elevator button and waited. The notion of submission aroused memories of my own parents. Mom submitted to Dad as instructed by biblical scripture. Her brainwashing aside, Mom’s alleged choices made her almost hostage under enemy control.

  The elevator doors dinged open, and I stepped inside. Then one day Dad ran off with another woman. From then on, money was scarce and deprivation plentiful. Things worsened around the holidays.

  I rode the elevator to the fourth floor, entered my apartment, and dropped the mouse traps on the console. Harry was in my den, filling out forms. I recognized them as papers necessary for his proper severance from the navy.

  “I thought you might reenlist. Attend Annapolis or some place.”

  “Me, officer material, ya think?”

  “No, I just said that for affect.”

  My feet had begun to ache from hiking the grueling hillside switchbacks in the watershed. Without further delay, I hobbled into the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and noticed a book with a bright yellow cover belonging to Ruthie on Harry’s nightstand. She gets all the travel guides put out by the Dummies Press. I pulled off my boots and counted four blisters, two on each foot.

  Harry entered the bedroom. “Any change in your tenuous hold on reality.”

  I looked past him, into the living at Wolf on his stand in a far off corner. The green elf hat he wore at the party last night was still on his head.

  “Actually, I just had a great idea.”

  Harry picked up a lighter on the nightstand next to a scented candle and clicked it as if to burn the manny.

  “I think mannys would make great holidays gifts,” I resumed. “People are always selling secrets. Secrets of eternal youth, untold riches, a happy afterlife. It all amounts to nothing, but getting swindled could be fun in a gimmicky sense.”

  Together, we looked out the doorway at Wolf.

  “No false expectations here,” Harry said.

  “What you see is what you get.” Though, I didn’t believe that. It’s just that Harry’s comment about my tenuous hold on reality irked me.

  For a moment, Harry remained nearby, watching me assess my blisters. “So what’s the dummy’s secret?”

  “Stick around,” I said confidently in attempt to hide my loss. “You’ll find out.”

  From my point of view, my manny as an object was a blueprint for the common good. But the way Harry saw it, the manny was out to eat him alive. Under the circumstances, I was confused whether to push the notion of a manny business any further.

  To Harry’s credit, human beings do tend to figuratively consume one another. They oppress, exploit, and tyrannize each other usually to gain social, economic, and biological advantages.

  On mulling over such details, I realized that Harry could be experiencing psychological projection. His urge to destroy Wolf—something he justifies through the reverse psychology of Wolfs wanting to destroy him— could be just an expression of his desire to get rid of feelings he dislikes in himself.

  Later, in bed next to Harry, I again thought it curious that he hadn’t told me about his plan to change careers. We were like the proverbial ships passing in the night, drifting farther apart. I wondered what was to become of us.

  New Friends

  The morning of the first Sunday in November, I carried the windup clock from our bedside into the bathroom where Harry stood before t
he mirror, running an electric razor over his face.

  “When changing the time, I always forget if you’re supposed to spring forward or fall back. If I’m wrong about springing forward, I’ll end up in the same time zone as falling back. But if I’m wrong about falling back, I’ll still be in the same time zone when I spring forward. What’s worse, if I don’t fix it, I’ll be two hours ahead of everybody if I spring forward or two hours behind if I fall back.”

  Harry stopped shaving. “Gimme that…” He wrenched the clock from my hands. “I’ll do it.” He then slammed the clock down on a towel.

  “You could try to be more supportive,” I whined.

  “I am supportive.”

  In the mirror, I glimpsed my bloodshot eyes from drinking too much leftover beer with Ruthie and Lisa while helping them clean the game room last night from the Halloween party the night before. “But?” I asked, taking the aspirins from inside the medicine cabinet.

  He continued running the buzzing razor up and down his throat, more carefully when crossing his cheek nearing his mustache. “But I can’t support your delusions. It’s like you’re asking me to help you sell ice cubes to Eskimos.”

  “Think they’d go for it?” I shook two aspirins into my hand.

  “No, because Eskimos won’t pay good money to get something they could just chip off their igloos.”

  “Mannys are chipped out of wood.”

  Harry shut the razor off. “See, that’s it. You can’t even see the lunacy in your logic.”

  “No, you can’t see that my manny does what it’s meant to. It sparks the imagination.”

  I trailed him into the bedroom. “Does this have anything to do with me being female?”

  “This is not about your gender.”

  “Picture this, Harry,” I started as a diversion. “Two ghosts are walking through a misty graveyard at night. And one ghost says to the other, ‘I ever tell you about the time I had a near-life experience. Wow, was it ever scary.’”

  After a long stare, Harry said, “You think that’s funny, don’t you.”

  “I did last night, down in the game room.”

  “Which reminds me.” Harry pulled off his T-shirt and took a fresh one from his bureau drawer. “The gay guys who live downstairs. They dropped by last night while you were out getting lit. They asked if they could take Wolf to some leather bar in Seattle.”

  “Not okay,” I said, now trailing Harry into the kitchen. “I hope you didn’t say it was okay.”

  Harry motioned toward the manny still on his stand in the shadowy corner beyond the doorway. “As you can see, he’s still here.” He sounded disappointed. “I told them the manny was your property, not mine.”

  “Good, Harry. You did good,” I said, shifting my eyes to Wolf still on his stand in shadowy corner beyond the doorway.

  I never get to do anything, I could almost hear him saying in his cartoon-like voice. Not when it comes to socializing, I told him. But those guys are my friends, he whined. It’s not them I’m worried about; it’s the public in general. You start engaging in unsupervised jaunts, next thing I know, I’m looking at cheap manny knock-offs.

  On reentering reality, I noticed that Harry had been hovering nearby, staring at me.

  “You’ve got to stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Talking to inanimate objects.” He circled the kitchen saying, “Imagine me shooting the breeze with the appliances.” He stopped at the oven. “Hey there, I really go for your hotsy-totsy self-cleaning. Or,” he then moved to the fridge. “Hey, ole buddy, let’s see you work that clunky ice maker of yours.” He paused as if he had another thought. “For all I know, the dishwasher might toss in a few words of its own. ‘Over here, dahhhling.’” He continued, this time with a lisp. “‘Feast your eyes on the flush buttons of my wondrous high-tech panel. Now there’s an array.’”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It’s exactly the same.”

  Harry’s comments threw me, not so much that he’d been reading my mind, but more like he’d picked up Wolfs train of thought. Once again, I began to worry that between the two of them some mystical exchange really could be taking place.

  Shifting Around

  In the living room with Wolf, I prepared to shorten his tan chinos to just above his ankles. I held one end of the measuring tape against Wolf’s pelvic region and the other end against his ankle. The inside of the manny’s legs measured twenty-four inches, plus or minus a notch. “Hey, big boy. Looks like you’ve done a little growing.” I held the tape up for his inspection. With his upturned nose, he seemed to be suggesting that we were no longer on speaking terms.

  “Was it something I said? Was it something I did? I said or did something, didn’t I? What was it?

  “Have it your way,” I then mumbled, returning to my chore. Wolf’s snub came as no surprise to me. Considering the way he’d been treated lately, he’s bound to feel put upon.

  My back to Wolf again, I stretched the trousers across the coffee table and with sewing scissors, cut a few inches off the bottom of one pant leg, then a few off the other. I was returning the scissors to the mending basket when I heard a creaking sound behind me. I spun around embarrassed that someone might have been standing there, watching me talking to an oversized doll. But I was alone and shrugged the feeling off.

  So carrying on my mending project, I lifted the pants to see if I’d shortened them enough, but hesitated. Something had changed; something was different. I examined Wolf’s clownish face. Maybe it was the poor lighting or my eyes playing tricks, but his lips seemed pursed in a raspberry, and his skewed eyes appeared set in a disdainful stare.

  Something else changed, too, something that made my heart race and my breath catch in a short gasp. Before I’d looked away, Wolf had been in an upright position for me to make a proper measurement. Now he was half off his feet, slumped sideways, and leaning against the brace at his waist like a drunk about to topple over.

  I tossed the pants aside and moved to adjust him, but as I started to extend my hands, I stepped backward instead of toward him. My arms up in an almost defensive gesture, I, for some time, eyed the manny, my blood pulsing loudly in my ears. It hadn’t moved… it couldn’t, I thought when suddenly the manny lurched forward and set my heart racing again.

  No big deal. The thing probably lost its balance and slipped. It couldn’t trip because it had to have moved to do that and—

  As if caught in an arctic blast, I felt my skin go cold. Only moments ago, the manny’s hands dangled at its sides. Now, one rested on the edge of my mending basket, next to the pair of glistening scissors. Tentatively, I reached out and grabbed hold of the basket. The manny’s hand, still hooked to the rim of it, followed as if he… it were trying to yank the basket back.

  I jerked the basket so hard that spools leaped over its edges. Again I tugged. I freed the basket from the manny’s grip, but in so doing, I had caused his wheelie-cart to bump forward. The manny began to roll toward me. Transfixed, I stood as the cockeyed figure wobbled closer, looking like some deranged puppet out of a second-rate horror film. Before it closed the distance, I jumped out of the way, watching as the mad thing barreled across the living room, hit the far wall with a thud, and crumple on the floor.

  In dazed wonderment, I looked at what resembled the bones of a mangled corpse. What was I thinking? Wolf coming after me, meaning to stab me with the business end of my serrated pinking shears? The manny was a brainless dummy, insensitive…deadwood, firewood, kindling. I had so often talked with it to amuse myself, that on some level I had forgotten it wasn’t real.

  Oh, yeah? Like actions don’t speak louder than words, a voice in my head said. This was not deliberate; it was an accident, I told the voice. An accident about as fluky as the time Wolf jabbed Harry with the wooden skewer, the voice countered.

  I picked up the spools that had fallen to the floor, put them in the mending basket, and set it on the end table. No, the manny had no
t come after me. The apartment building was old, its floors sagged, the fourth floor in particular. Up here, so many of the doors and windows were misaligned that they were permanently stuck closed. The floor was slightly slanted, that’s all. The manny just happened to wheel toward me.

  Unleashing Evil

  For a while after the incident with the mending basket, I sat on the sofa, looking toward the corner where I’d left Wolf standing at attention on his wheelie-cart. His face in the shadows glowed white from reflected moonlight, and his eyes shimmered like still pools where the waters run deep.

  I turned away and inhaled a ragged breath. I allowed that the manny had tapped into a new source of energy and that source was none other than Harry.

  My thoughts slipped back to the celebratory night before Harry went away, the night when in a seaside bar, where several old salts entertained me with spooky tales about possession. The following day, sickened on rum and tainted clams, I had been caught by Gippo as surely as if gaffed. From removing my manny from his odd looking crate, it was only a short step to passing it around and bringing others under its spell.

  My eyes again settled on the Wooden Wonder. He appeared as harmless as a colorful nutcracker on a department store shelf at Christmas time.

  For a while, Harry had resisted Wolf’s dark enchantment. He mocked the manny with words and gestures—once even a physical assault. Then, bit by bit, his resentment toward the manny began to wane. Harry became comfortable with the thing, and mysteriously began to accept it. Indeed, since living with the manny, Harry had begun to say and do many things out of character.

  At long last, things began to add up. Wolf was trolling for more than anatomical correctness, his pound of flesh, so to speak. He was angling for manifestation inside Harry’s skin, meaning that Harry was slated for the ultimate in an extreme makeover.

  The curious means by which I had obtained the manny and our ensuing interactions were hardly those of random chance. Harry’s concern over losing his soul might be right on. If so, that would make my manny a body snatcher. Similarly, Gippo had to be an emissary, as known in the parlance of demonology. No matter how I arranged the pieces, the picture did not look good.