These were the days before obsessive TV watching and I remember playing a game on the living room rug. I think the game must have been Clue because there was a silver-colored candlestick and a tiny bottle of poison with an X on it. I remember initially losing to my sister and the boy of the house, which humiliated me.
My sister: younger, prettier, unafraid of dogs. The boy of the house: dog lover, sandy-haired, freckled. I had fallen in love with him almost immediately, but it was my sister he favored. His dog, also favoring my sister, at one point decided to bite me.
I remember the pattern on the rug. Big faded pink flowers and a green vine threaded clumsily among the stems. I remember the dinner table with its heavy silver cutlery and the bedroom with its twin canopy beds. Those beds belonged to Mrs._____ and her sister, Nursie told us, and it was a special honor to sleep in them.
This was the first time I’d been bitten by a dog (though since then it has happened a multitude of times, countless times, and I have made peace with the fact that when dogs spot me their mouths begin to water and they become enraged).
The cow that required milking was brown and white, like a cow from a storybook. I had such a book at my own home, in my own room, wherever that was. That farm cow was called Deb and her udders dragged almost to the floor of the barn which was covered in tan hay. I stood outside the wooden door, one of those half doors with the top half opened to reveal Deb and her milkers: first the boy, Joe, then my sister, who boldly reached under the cow body and grabbed a fierce hold of one appendage after an-udder, ha ha. She, my sister, was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and a white cotton blouse. At that moment, if asked to picture my home, wherever it was, I would picture a child’s drawing of a tiny house on a vast dark background because that gives you the feel of it.
My real home was nothing like that, but my idea of home, at the time, was primitive and unformed, as if my mind could not quite reconcile the desolate notion of home along with its actual imprint on memory. The notion of home for me had always been difficult and lonely whereas my real home had been complex and bountiful with no smoke rising from the single chimney and no dark empty windows.
After the cow was milked we were each given a tin cup of warm milk which I did not care for. My sister’s eyes were bright, the boy Joe looked down at her fondly. The dog who would eventually bite me was nuzzling her calf. Outside the sun was like a child’s drawing of a sun, with rays shooting out in a circle. There was a fence and a field of cattle who were routinely slaughtered for the evening meal.
Steak, every night steak. Blood red and sizzling, then cold with the fat congealing in a thin film across the top. We were all given steak knives, very sharp with little teeth. Nursie cut our steak for us: tiny pieces as those you would feed to a kitten. I felt as though I were eating my kitten (the kitten I did not own and did not long for).
We had been playing Clue. I was conscious of my long, hideous face, my flat, dark hair, of the way my pajamas bunched up when I sat and the absurd, unfortunate design on those pajamas, which was of chickens and eggs. What could be more embarrassing?
Miss Scarlet in the library with the gun, I guessed and I was right. Joe shrugged unhappily but my sister, never a good sport, overturned the board, spraying the players and the cards and the weapons across the patterned rug. That is when the dog bit my arm right through the pajama sleeve.
After that, I was even less popular than before. The boy and my sister went off by themselves and even Nursie seemed to distance herself from me. I felt my life to be on a downward slide. I sat beneath the white canopy of my designated bed, feeling sorry for myself, tugging anxiously at the bandaid that covered the tooth marks of the dog and soaked up the blood it had drawn. In the closet I found a box full of dried corn-on-the-cobs marked Halloween and a box of photographs marked Vacations. I took two corns and a photo of a man pushing a wheelbarrow and a photo of a woman in an apron wearing glasses that made her look blind. I put these things in the zipper compartment of my suitcase, along with a white bottle and a box of silver thumbtacks.
By now everything has undone itself: it has been revised and reconfigured in that silly vat we call memory, in that ridiculous thimble we call history; it has been repressed then unearthed then made to look more tragic then made to appear happier, all yellow, as if it had never occurred except in morbid, self-pitying imagination. The dog, the boy, my sister, the nurse: all figures in a display I affix to the bulletin board in my study to remind me of my vanishing.
I have already lived many lives but this was one of the first.
DISTANT NURSE
On library card stock I have written either Distant Noise or Distant Nurse. The former, with its taint of oxymoron, suggests the story of an enchanted chainsaw marooned on a desert island. The latter evokes the severe hair and pointed chin of a person from my past.
THE RAT STORY
There was a story he liked to tell about a rat who wandered into a Japanese teriyaki fast food restaurant. This was no mouse, he’d say, This was—and here he’d pause to measure a length with his hands—as big as a newborn: a giant Norwegian rat. It was here in the story that she—since she’d heard it several times—would begin in her mind to confuse the image of a rat with the image of a baby. She imagined the rat, lying in a little wooden cradle, wrapped in a pink blanket, its eyelids fluttering, and breathing in a labored, dying way and at the same time she pictured a baby, dead like the rat, in a sad heap on the kitchen floor of a Japanese fast food restaurant. While her mind shuttled between attraction and repulsion, baby and rat, she studied his mouth forming the words of the story in a way that was simultaneously charming and off-putting. The rat headed for the kitchen, he reported, stumbling in a kind of stupor, and everyone in the restaurant got up and left. He, on the other hand, approached the counter to ask for a refund. Well, we don’t know, said the girls who were in charge. These were very young girls, he said, very wide-eyed and vacant-looking. We don’t know if we can give you a refund, they said. We’ll have to check. Do you know rats carry bubonic plague? he asked them. We know, they said. Well, it ran into your kitchen, he said. We know, they said. But it died. At this, their dinner guests usually laughed. Even she laughed, but her laughter felt automatic and insincere.
THE SKELETON IN THE CLOSET
They were awoken by a noise that sounded as if someone were being strangled, a kind of squeezed gurgle. My god, she said. I think it’s the air conditioner, he said. He was very tired, having not slept well for days. The AC was on the blink and the repairman was not coming until Tuesday. In the meantime, they suffered intermittently—according to the whim of the air conditioner.
He rolled over and placed a hand on her hip. His hands were warm and broad and generally she liked the feel of them on her skin, but at the moment, because hot, she was a bit repulsed. She moved away and wrapped the sheet around her, tucked the pillow under her cheek. Then the noise again: a brief strangulated cry. What the fuck, he said.
They lay in silence for a while, waiting for the noise to recur, but the noise when it came took them by surprise. They tried to listen carefully, but became distracted, each by their own thoughts. He was thinking of another woman, someone he knew and occasionally fantasized about. He imagined himself with her now, lying beside him, her elegant arms crossed over her small breasts.
She was thinking about her son, a heroin addict who’d recently written her a text message accusing her of demeaning him. Like all heroin addicts, he was a deluded person, she had not demeaned him, merely offered him help and encouragement, too much so, to the point of his taking advantage of her.
Despite the complications of their lives, they’d become lovers and now they lived in this house with a broken air conditioner and with many things that required fixing, repainting, tightening and so forth. Earlier in the day, they’d cleaned the shelves in the kitchen and tore off the shelf paper left by the previous tenants. She told him that no one uses shelf paper any more, a fact that seemed to astonish him. In gener
al, she felt she was a person who updated him, but she was not sure she wanted to be that person. She liked, moreover, to imagine him carefully applying shelf paper to the shelves. She preferred to think of herself as someone who didn’t meddle in the lives of others.
The noise again. This time a bit longer in duration, an anguished moan with a little glitch at the end, as if a person were choking on a rock. Should we investigate? she said. Yeah, he said after a pause in which he imagined the other woman had asked him to investigate, meaning investigate her. This woman was given to innuendo in all circumstances which is why she excited him. Also, she was long-limbed and beautiful and wore a simple white nightgown of a gauzy transparency which revealed her tiny nipples. I would love to investigate, he imagined himself saying to this woman.
There was a towel on the floor next to the bed. She’d dropped it there after her shower. Now she wrapped it around her body and stood for a moment in the grayish light of the room. In such light she could discern the expression on his face, his mouth set in a thin, downward-turning line, his gaze aimed at the ceiling: a million miles away. Are you coming? she asked him. It’s nothing, I promise, he said, irritated. But he was rising nonetheless, walking naked to the door and grabbing his bathrobe from a hook. It’s the AC. I could kill that guy. He was referring to the repairman who had said he’d fixed the air conditioner and then didn’t fix it, who had said he’d come and then failed to show up.
About moving in together, they’d each had misgivings. It was this type of thing—his annoyed response to a frightening noise in the middle of the night—which confirmed her misgivings. As if she were imagining things. She did not feel safe with him. For his part, he was wary of her thin-skinned nature, so prone to irrational fears, so quick to take offense. He felt she was perpetually on the verge of breaking down, capable of flinging his prized sword collection into the yard in a fit of pique.
I need a flashlight, he said. He led the way into the living room which was inhabited at this hour by the same grayish light of the bedroom; it trickled through the slats of the wooden blinds like, she thought, a poisonous vapor. When the noise came again, each of them startled and put a hand to their mouths, as if choreographed. This time, the noise was more of a wail, sounding uncannily human.
It’s a baby, she said, her voice full of wonder. Sounds like a cat to me, he said. Cat got caught in something, the AC motor, most likely. He laughed. But what if it were a baby, she said, would you laugh then? It isn’t a baby, my laughter one way or the other is a moot point. In the dim light he perceived their empty wine glasses from the previous evening on the coffee table and he picked them up by their stems and padded to the kitchen. I still need a flashlight if I’m to investigate thoroughly, he said.
Even if it’s a cat, she said. It would still be horrible. He was banging the doors in the kitchen, looking for a flashlight. God dammit all to hell, he said. In the car, she said.
Why she continued this relationship, she was unsure. He didn’t seem to care about her. He spent a good chunk of his time on the computer, surfing the web. When she tried to communicate with him she felt his eyes glazing over. The other disturbing fact was that, since they moved in together, she seemed saddled with the attributes of the sensible, practical party. She knew, for example, that a flashlight was likely to be in the car. With ease, she located his glasses, fetched the coupons from the drawer. She was beginning to remind herself of a disapproving housewife, counting pennies, keeping track of necessities. He got to be the free spirit, which she resented.
He returned from the car with the flashlight on high beam and this he swept chaotically over the furnishings. It’s fantastic, she said. What is? he said, but he knew what she meant and now he jiggled the beam over her towel-wrapped body. You should see yourself, he said. Do it in front of the mirror, she said, and they went to the full-length hall mirror to look. Little roving ovals of light jittered all over her, rapidly catching random parts—a hand, an eye, part of the bright green towel. It would be a good film, she said. Amazing, he agreed. We could set it to a text of some sort, she said. You could write it, he said. I’d love to write it, she said. It would begin: “They awoke to a strangulated cry.” “In the middle of an ordinary night,” he added. Atmospheric. Good, she said.
As if on cue, the noise erupted again; it had become higher pitched, wavering tonally and straining, with great effort it seemed to her, to articulate a few beseeching words. Wow! she said. Totally creepy, he said. Did you catch that? What? he said. Those words it was trying to say. Sounded like “oh no please” or like “go now” or “freeze” something like that. Don’t be ridiculous, he said. His bathrobe had come open and she could not help but admire the nice package of his penis and testicles beneath his flat stomach. You need to cover up in case there’s a person in there, she said. If there’s not a person in there you have to give me a blow job, he said. Deal, she said. This used to be their private negotiation joke until she discovered he used the same joke routinely with other women—as a kind of sexy tease, she supposed. Still, she didn’t mind giving him blow jobs.
The noise issued from the utility closet, as far as they could determine. This was indeed where the air conditioner was housed, among other things such as the furnace, cans of paint they’d not gotten rid of, a few boxes of books, a bicycle. When he opened the door, a wet, musty odor greeted them, as usual. Hello? he said, which made her chuckle and then made him chuckle. There was no light in the utility closet, which is why the flashlight had been required in the first place. And the roving oval of the flashlight beam with its modest halo did little to illuminate anything in the pitch black.
There’s something over there, she said, referring to a bunched shape in the corner of the closet. Oh that’s just the suitcase, he said, the big duffle bag. I stuffed it full of blankets. She regarded the shape; it was lumpy and irregular, not like blankets at all. Why? she said. Why what? he said. Why would you stuff the duffle full of blankets? He shrugged. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
She blinked a few times, a nervous habit she’d recently acquired. They’d vowed to always tell each other the truth, but he was a literalist and the truth for him meant not telling an outright lie. He felt it his right to have secrets. Why his proclivity for withholding things from her should occur to her at this moment, the moment when he told her about stuffing blankets into a duffle bag, she did not know. Certainly, blankets in a duffle bag were not something she needed to know. They did not constitute a secret.
On the other hand, this did not look like blankets in the duffle bag. She imagined blankets in a duffle bag would be smoother, less irregular.
Admittedly, she was sensitive to any implied secretiveness on the part of her lover since her son, the addict, had so often victimized her in this way. He never lied—he simply failed to say that he was using drugs under her roof, that he was shooting up in her bathroom, stealing money from her wallet. Once she’d found a needle on her kilim rug—it had kind of merged with the design and she almost didn’t spot it. It was full of something—heroin she supposed. She threw it into the outside trash and then she vomited on the ground next to the trash bin, unable to hold back.
The noise, when it came again, sounded exhausted, barely a trace of its former self, as if worn out by its previous efforts. It was hard to pinpoint from where it issued, this collapsed sound, this melancholic exhalation of air that even more than a moan communicated its dire unhappiness. It seemed to surround them, him and her, on all sides. Shit, he said. I think it’s the pump.
The AC is giving up the ghost? she said. That’s about the size of it, he said.
She wanted to say, It’s not my fault. But why would she want to say that?
Why would you stuff blankets in a duffle bag? she asked him. Hmm, he said. He appeared distracted, but perhaps deliberately so. It doesn’t look like blankets, she said. What? he said. His voice was sharp, irritated. Why are you interrogating me? he asked.
He could not help but compare he
r to the other woman, the one he occasionally fantasized about. That woman was blessed with an incredible calm. She was more down-to-earth than this one. He imagined that being with the other woman would be what it would be like to have a mature relationship. This woman, on the other hand, was childish, paranoid.
Once more he shone the light into the utility room and waved it, ineffectively, over the room’s contents. There were the paint cans, bicycle, furnace, the boxes of books, the bunched shape of the duffle bag. Then the noise which had at this point transformed itself into a sigh, almost inaudible, like the brush of a very light breeze, or an even smaller sound, like the brush of the tiniest movement of air imaginable, like the movement air makes when a person is weeping or even talking softly to him or herself.
I’m going to bed, he announced. He could not keep the testiness out of his voice. They were standing in front of the black rectangle of the closet door, the darkness creeping out to envelope them, as if to swallow them in its giant mouth. He shut the door.
The truth was that the longer she lived, the more hopeless everything felt. Her son the heroin addict, her boyfriend with his secrets, this house in its disrepair. She felt nothing would ever be mended, that no matter how hard she worked to remedy a problem, a new one would come along. In fact, the house was a metaphor for the rest of it—her son’s addiction, her relationship.
Monsters Page 2
