Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

  Another knock on the door.

  It was a roll of the dice. Geneva hoped for the best. She sighed heavily and said, “Come in.”

  

  The sound of Geneva’s arrival, doors opening and closing, had wakened Tatum, who had been dozing across the hall. Paris was gone. Tatum peeked over the top of Rachael, who slept beside her, and looked at the clock. 7:30 p.m. Paris must have gone to work. Tatum remembered that Geneva said that she would be gone for the night and wondered what had happened, why she was home.

  So she had slipped from the bed and out of her apartment, leaving the door ajar, and rapped a knuckle on Geneva’s door.

  Geneva answered after the second knock. Tatum stepped inside. Her eyes were drawn immediately to the jar of lilacs on the desk.

  “Oo,” she said. “Pretty.”

  Geneva looked at the flowers and nodded in agreement.

  “Where’d you get them?” she said. She stuck her face into the blooms.

  Geneva fingered the note that accompanied the flowers.

  “I met him at the coffee shop,” she said. “In passing. He doesn’t know I’m married.”

  “In-ter-est-ing,” Tatum said, enunciating each syllable.

  Geneva pushed the note away, picked up another slip of paper, and gave it a wave.

  “Got a ticket,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Speeding.”

  “How fast?”

  “Ninety-five.”

  “In a what?”

  “In a Saab,” Geneva said, for the second time that day.

  “Sounds like you’re a fast woman on all fronts.” Tatum crossed the room and flopped down on the sofa. “So who is he? What’s he like? Why are you home?”

  Geneva didn’t answer right away. Then, she looked at the bouquet like it was the flowers, as opposed to the man, that she was about to describe.“ He’s attractive,” she said but then corrected herself. “Handsome, in a soft and rugged way. He seems like a thinking man.”

  “Gosh,” Tatum said, “and the downside is?”

  Geneva shot her a look.

  “No one would blame you,” Tatum said.

  “Well, it’s not about ‘no one’ — whoever that is. It’s not about ‘everyone’ either. Just me.”

  “You’d feel guilty?”

  “I’d feel like a liar,” Geneva said. She tossed her speeding ticket across the desk.

  Tatum wondered if Geneva meant she’d be lying to Ralph, or the new guy. She was about to ask for clarification, but Geneva spoke first.

  “Even Rachael knows that rationalization is just lying to yourself.”

  Tatum didn’t understand how Geneva would be lying to herself and was about to pursue it, but again Geneva spoke first.

  “Tell me,” she said, pulling off her coat and deliberately redirecting the conversation, “how was your day?”

  The diversion worked. Tatum told Geneva about the day’s premiere drama, Rachael’s fall and the trip to the hospital. She left out the part where she had sat crying in the car while Paris took care of Rachael.

  “You should have seen Paris and Rachael on the way home,” Tatum said, remembering the two of them in the back seat, Paris’s arm around Rachael, Rachael’s cheek on his arm. “I think Rachael fell in love with Paris.”

  “Who wouldn’t fall in love with Paris?” Geneva said, offhandedly.

  Geneva’s words entered Tatum like they were something she hadn’t meant to swallow. ‘Who wouldn’t fall in love with Paris?’ The idea tasted of metal. It unnerved her, that she could be one of millions. ‘Who wouldn’t fall in love with Paris?’ She hadn’t realized it. Paris definitely didn’t realize it. She rose from the sofa and walked to the window. She knew for a fact that no one would ever ask who wouldn’t fall in love with her.

  “I think Rachael stole a picture of Vincent,” Tatum said, with her back to Geneva.

  Geneva reached up and clicked on the floor lamp beside the desk.

  “Paris really took the lead today,” Tatum continued. “Taking care of Rachael. Maybe that male energy is something she needs. Maybe that’s why she took Vincent’s picture.”

  “Did you consider asking her why she took it?” Geneva said.

  Geneva’s voice sounded oddly testy.

  “I have,” Tatum said, turning to face her. Then she corrected herself. “No. I asked her if she took it. That’s when everything went weird.” Tatum crossed her arms over her chest. She dropped her head and shook it. “She needs her father.”

  Geneva stood and wandered toward the kitchen.

  “I’ve really tried my best,” Tatum said, “but I don’t know. I just. You know, the truth is, I never even went in the hospital. Paris did. I sat in the car. . .”

  “Stop,” Geneva said. She was standing behind her kitchen counter.

  Tatum looked up.

  But Geneva just stood there, fingertips on the countertop. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t move. She didn’t seem able to.

  The silence made Tatum anxious.

  “Can I just ask you one thing?” Tatum said softly.

  “What’s that?” Geneva said.

  Tatum’s voice wavered.

  “I have to call Lee,” she said. “Insurance stuff. But I was thinking I should tell him maybe that Rachael needs him. I failed today in a way that scares me.”

  “Do what you need to do,” Geneva said.

  “I don’t know if it’s what I need to do,” Tatum said, taking a step toward the kitchen. “I just think Rachael. . .”

  “Have you asked Rachael what she wants in terms of her father?” Geneva said, stopping Tatum’s steps with her voice.

  “I was thinking I shouldn’t ask until I know I can deliver. That I should line him up first.”

  “What she wants has nothing to do with what you can deliver,” Geneva said. “Her answer to the question would be clarifying, perhaps for both of you.”

  “Well, yeah,” Tatum said, “but why get her all full of hope for something she can’t have?”

  “The point,” Geneva said, “would be that she wants it. Admitting it. Knowing it.”

  Tatum could feel Geneva’s frustration, and it confused her. It forged a convergence of feelings that combined made Tatum feel like she was something collapsing from the center.

  “What did I do?” she said.

  “Rachael’s been great for you,” Geneva said. “Paris adores you. You’re acting like . . . like some kind of reverse-Rumpelstiltskin, spinning gold into shit.”

  Tatum’s body cooled from the surface of her skin down to her core. She hadn’t seen it coming. Not from Geneva. Paris, maybe. Rachael, all in time. But Geneva? Time was up?

  The humiliation was always greater when it came as a surprise.

  

  Geneva’s face shifted as her attention was drawn over Tatum’s shoulder.

  “Rachael,” Geneva said.

  Tatum turned.

  “Rough day?” Geneva said.

  Rachael stood in the doorway, a bandage covering her right temple. She shrugged as though rough days were the norm.

  “Come let me see that,” Geneva said.

  Rachael walked to the kitchen. Geneva pushed back Rachael’s hair and examined the bandage.

  “Dang, dang, dang,” she said and then shuffled Rachael’s hair back into place.

  Rachael looked up at Geneva like she was waiting for her to tell some truth lurking in the moment. Geneva felt Tatum, too, standing there in hurt and confusion, exerting a pull, wanting comfort.

  But Geneva did not want to be there for them. She didn’t want to be there, in that place of hand-wringing and need, worry and questions. She had flowers on her desk and a speeding ticket. She had a husband who wouldn’t die. She thought that it was more than enough.

  “I had a rough day too,” she said.

  

  Their voices had been quiet. Rachael had been sleep
y. But still, she had heard. Not word for word, but key phrases and names. She filled in blanks not knowing they were blanks, creating sums from disparate facts. They knew she stole the picture. Tatum was calling her father.

  Her father. He was as shadowy as her mother. The difference was that he always had been. She and her mother had been one unit, and he had been another. Together they made their family. But without her mother, there was no unit. No family, and the not-there of it scared her. To imagine her father taking her away was like to imagine disappearing.

  Back in Tatum’s apartment, Rachael left the kitchen where her aunt was preparing a supper of soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. In her bedroom, Rachael unzipped her backpack’s side pocket and checked on Vincent. She pulled him out and tucked him up her shirt sleeve. She slipped quietly from her room.

  

  Spinning gold into shit. Tatum tried to remember the story. Rumpelstiltskin was a nasty troll, she recalled. He spun straw into gold on behalf of some girl who pretended she was the one spinning it. She had to promise her firstborn in return for the favor. The girl got out of it somehow, though, pulled off some kind of double-cross.

  Tatum flipped the sandwiches in the frying pan. Rachael appeared and slid into one of the chairs at the small table. Tatum spatula-ed the sandwiches onto plates, slid on an oven mitt, and poured the soup into bowls. She laid out the humble meal. They sat across from each other. Rachael’s bandage made a bulge above her brow.

  “I blew it today,” Tatum said. “And I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Rachael said, not looking up.

  “I know how much you wish she were here.”

  “But she’s not here,” Rachael said.

  Tatum looked down and saw two tears plop onto her plate.

  “I’m sorry.” She blotted the tears with a paper napkin. “I’m just a crybaby today. I miss Margaret, I guess,” she blurted, not knowing the words were coming. It was the truth, though. Her missing of Margaret was a missing that stretched back in time to long before her death. It was a missing of Geneva too, unfolding forward into the future.

  The snowball was rolling. Tatum knew she couldn’t do this. Not in front of Rachael.

  She sniffled and bucked up.

  “How’s your head feeling?” she asked.

  “The doctor said I was going to have a scar.”

  Their eyes reached across the table for each other’s. Tatum wanted Rachael to know she would not be like her.

  “It’ll be a little one,” Tatum told her. “People will have to look real close to see.”

  

  Geneva stood in her kitchen. History, she decided, repeats itself not because we forget, but because we keep remembering, chewing and reviewing, mindlessly re-invoking. Something had to change. She wanted something different than what she had, and so she knew she had to do different. Think different. Be different. She was tired of being a control freak who knew that the only thing she could control was herself. So she decided to start with that. She would disavow her history of taking responsibility. Blame was to be the new name of the game. She did not feel good about the way she had spoken to Tatum, but she decided not to feel good about Tatum instead.

  What else? She leaned on the kitchen counter, refusing to budge, not until she could make an original move. She blocked habitual thoughts and waited. And waited.

  The mind can be quieted, but the senses don’t sleep. The heady scent of lilacs snuck up again and licked at her. She involuntarily lifted her eyes to them, and it was as though a needle had dropped in a groove. She heard in her mind the distinctive opening guitar riff. The song was “Beast of Burden.” The band, the Rolling Stones.

  She let the music play in her head. It took a verse for her to dislodge herself, to stand up straight and follow the path from her kitchen to her bedroom, where she retrieved the phone number from her jewelry box. Sitting on her bed, she dialed it, and when John answered, she said, “I want to accept your dinner invitation because I need to know how I’d feel when I got there.”

  There was a pause. Then an audible shifting.

  “I understand your motives,” he said.

  Geneva believed that he did.

  “How ’bout tomorrow night?” he said.

  “That would be fine.”

  “Are you a woman who will eat a pork chop?”

  “I am.”

  “Six-thirty, seven?”

  “That sounds good.”

  There was a spot of silence.

  “Thank you for the lilacs,” Geneva said.

  John gave her directions, and then they said their good-byes and hung up their respective phones.

  Geneva sat there until a slow smile spread across her face. She rose from the bed and headed for the stereo. Her glass had been half-full for some time. But now, she wanted to pour that half down the drain. They say something is better than nothing, but Geneva did not think it was true. Sometimes, nothing is better than something. With nothing, there’s no thing to judge as inadequate. There’s no disappointment. Some glasses are only half-full because that’s all there is of the beverage. No sense in asking the bartender for more. An empty glass at least holds the potential of being filled to the top with that which one desires.

  Geneva dropped the needle on Some Girls. I want to be happy, she thought, and I don’t give a damn how I get there.

  34

  

  Dirt and dead flies cut the glare of the florescent lights. Paris moved from table to table sorting the sugar packets from the Equals in their caddies. By the feel and texture of the night, by the weight of the casino up front, the balance of bodies and sound, Paris could calculate the hour. The women should be arriving before long. Paris refused to look at the clock, however, and tried not to think of the progression of the hours, one day turning to the next. To distract himself, he purposefully filled his head with numbers. He added up his wages over two months, then three. He added them to the five-hundred-dollar bonus he was promised if he stayed until closing. Then he counted back the hours to when he was in Tatum’s bed, telling her about the women from the diner. In the telling, the number of facts he had omitted was one. Linda. He left out her entire existence, and the story suffered for it. He wanted to tell Tatum all of it, even what happened in the janitor’s closet. But he found it to be a weighty recognition that now, what choices he made for himself happened to Tatum as well. Even retroactively. Love, it seemed, dragged the past forward into the moment and the moment into the future by the promises implied. Perhaps by its nature, love was sticky.

  Having sorted all the blue packets from the white, Paris returned to the backside of the counter. There were no orders to fill or tables to clear. Undirected, his mind spit up another fact he had conveniently omitted when he told Tatum about the women of the Deluxe: Vincent had been there once in the diner among them.

  The lies of omission were stacking up.

  He grabbed the push broom and headed for the cooler. His eyes skimmed the metal shelves as he swept. How many days would the crate of tomatoes last, or the bin of sliced onions? He struggled to add up things other than lies. He bent to push the debris into a dustpan, and a carton shaped like a pizza box caught his eye. “Cheesecake” was stamped plainly on the side. Jerry had told Paris that the Deluxe was out of cheesecake and that they weren’t supposed to restock. It had already been dropped from the menu.

  Cheesecake reminded Paris of regular cake, and regular cake reminded him of birthday cake. The jig was up. He could no longer drown out the fact of the new day. His birthday. A date he tried to forget from year to year. It wasn’t a fear of aging. It was an exercise, just as some people did crossword puzzles or refused calculators in order to keep their minds sharp. Paris was training his brain. He figured if he could forget his birthday, he could forget anything. Then, if anything really terrible ever happened, he would know he could bury it in his own mind until it was no more. Knowing one’s birthday was somet
imes necessary, he knew, but need be, he could always look it up. Some years, he had forgotten splendidly. Other years, like this one, it refused to be repressed.

  Paris put the broom to the side and extracted the box from the shelf. He left the cooler and placed the box on the cutting board. Sliced up, the cheesecake would be eight good-sized pieces.

  He turned a large knife one way and then the other, creating wheel spokes across the yellow surface. The lightest reflex of a smile lifted the corners of his mouth. He had told Tatum about his ambition to forget his birthday. It was shortly after they had met. It had been her own birthday, and she had come over with a bottle of wine. They drank it from juice glasses Paris had purchased at the Salvation Army. Birthdays were the subject de jour, and Tatum had asked him, casually as could be, “When’s yours?” — a perfectly sensible question.

  “I’m trying to see if I can forget,” he had told her, though he hadn’t known her long. “I want to see if it’s possible.”

  “That would be hard,” she had said. She didn’t say “How weird.” She didn’t even ask why. It was a feat. She could see that.

  “You just gotta not think about it,” he told her. “When someone asks,” — he put his fingers on his temples and closed his eyes — “you just make a lot of noise inside. Drown out the answer. Yell, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’ inside your head.”

  “Interesting skill to cultivate,” she said. She swirled the red wine in the bottom of the cheap glass. “I’m scared to death of forgetting,” she said. “I feel like you have to remember everything in order not to make the same mistakes over and over.”

  Paris spatula-ed slices of cheesecake onto small plates. He would appease his birthday this year. Make it an offering so it would recede back into his subconscious without a struggle.

  He carried five plates at once toward the dining room, two in each hand and one resting in the crook of his left elbow. As he approached the swinging door beside the cook’s window, he sensed a new body in the room beyond. He frowned, unhappy he had neither heard nor sensed someone enter. He stepped out from the kitchen loaded down with cheesecake, and she was there at the end of the counter.