by Dan Chaon
For a long time afterwards, I felt ashamed of myself; there was something unmanly, there was some weakness, I guess, in letting someone rob you and just letting them go. I never told Susan about it. When my mother-in-law called early the next morning, I acted as shocked as the rest of them.
By the time I got back to the motel that night, they’d left. I’d just driven out a little beyond the edge of town and parked there by the side of the road, like Susan and I used to do. Euclid turned into Highway 30 just outside of town, and Highway 30 fed into the interstate, which stretched either way across the country, toward both coasts. Even as I drove past the city limits, the big chamber-of-commerce welcome sign, and the glow of the all-night gas station, I knew that I was not the type of person who could ever run off, except to a life of loneliness and sorrow. My fate was already mapped out—smooth straight lines of married and familial love—and I could see everything clearly: in a few days or weeks Susan and I would make love again, the first time in a long while, and everything would fall back in place; all would be well. Joan and Mr. Trencher would continue that slow strange dance they’d been engaged in, and I’d keep going to work, and the children would grow, and in a hundred years there wouldn’t be a trace of any of us. Maybe Rhonda and Kent would end up back in town, too, eventually, but I couldn’t be certain about them. What did I know about that kind of love, that kind of life?
CHINCHILLA
Arlinda had known for a long time that her mother was not like a real mother. She had seen mothers on TV, read about them in books. She had been at other children’s houses and had viewed the mothers on display there—fat mothers who made pies and cookies and cakes; beautiful mothers who wore long coats and jewels, who went dancing with fathers and would not come home till late; cross mothers who spanked and whose children had many chores and rules. But Arlinda’s mother was nothing like such women.
Years later, Arlinda would come to hate her mother. She would eagerly and deliberately seek ways to hurt her, and there would be a time when she would slap her mother and watch those thick glasses fly to the floor and shatter. And it would be even more years later before she would pause to find herself using her mother’s phrases and gestures, words, movements that had lain hidden inside her.
But all this was still a long time away. Now, Arlinda merely believed that her mother had a secret. Many secrets. This was how Arlinda became a spy and a thief.
It all started with her mother’s illness. Her mother had been sick almost as long as Arlinda could remember, but Arlinda knew very little about the actual sickness, only the symptoms, which were always changing: there were dull, angry pains that seemed to travel around her mother’s body, wherever Arlinda touched her—the legs, the back, the face. Her mother would wince when she was hugged. Her illness was as mysterious as the medicine that was meant to cure it—wrapped in tissue, hidden at the bottom of her mother’s purse like little colored beads, or hoarded in unlabeled vials. Once, Arlinda had found a nest of them in the crack of the couch, like little orange-and-yellow eggs. She had heard her mother saying their names in a whisper over the phone—Thorazine, codeine. They sounded like the names of cowgirls, or princesses. She had taken some of them, held them tightly in her dry hand, sure that no one had seen. Then, late at night, she’d studied them, found that the orange half separated from the yellow, and that there was a fine, bitter powder inside, which blew away as she drew near and breathed.
Her mother had come into her room later, demanding, “Were you digging around in that couch? Did you take some medicine?”
Arlinda denied everything, and not knowing what better to say, told her mother, “I saw Daddy! He was looking there.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “When?” her mother demanded. “When?”
“I don’t know!” Arlinda had cried, and her mother asked her more and more questions, until Arlinda began to believe her own lie, to defend it with tears and outrage, until it was hard to remember that she had taken them and buried them deep in the dirt of the jade plant in the kitchen.
But none of this was really a secret. Her mother had taken the pills and hidden them for as long as Arlinda could remember, it was a game played routinely, and the only secret was that she had stolen them that once. The real mysteries were shadowy, frightening—things she knew about her mother that could not be reconciled with what she saw.
When her mother was gone, in town shopping or visiting someone, Arlinda went exploring. She would creep around the house, sometimes crawling on all fours under beds, discovering hatboxes filled with unfinished embroidery napkins, stunning high heels of aquamarine and black lace, beautiful skirts patterned with scenes of forests and sunsets and palm trees. Hidden. These things were her mother’s, but she could never have imagined her wearing them. Her mother wore jeans, turtlenecks, plain colors, flat shoes. It was nearly impossible to imagine her as a lovely woman, bright lips, long hair, in these shimmering clothes, laughing or dancing, gliding through crowded ballrooms.
She would go into her parents’ bedroom and carefully open the dresser, gently lifting things out, one by one, discovering, underneath old clothes or check stubs, her mother’s most secret things.
At first it was her mother’s jewelry boxes that were fascinating. Arlinda would sort through necklaces and glittering earrings with just her finger and thumb. She knew when she touched something that she would take it for her own; she crouched, still as a rabbit, listening for the sound of her mother’s car approaching the driveway. And then she spirited the jewelry away.
She was not afraid of being discovered. Her mother never wore the jewelry, she would never miss it. What really frightened her was that her mother had some secret that should never be revealed, something as terrible as Bluebeard’s locked room, waiting. She had no specific evil in mind, just a tingling aura of dread.
Perhaps this was why she hadn’t taken anything since she’d found the photographs. She came across them in a white envelope, nestled at the very back of a drawer, so tucked away she hadn’t noticed it before.
There were five Polaroid pictures of her mother and father in their younger days. They were dirty pictures—in them, her mother and father were naked.
In one photo, her mother faced forward; there was a mirror behind her, and the light of a lamp was reflected in it, big and wavering, like the sun at dusk. Her mother’s hair was long, like wisps of dark smoke around her shoulders, and she had a vague, dreamy smile, her eyes half closed. Her mother was holding her breasts in her hands. In another photo, her father was stretched out on the bed with a knowing look on his face, the kind of look that he would give Arlinda when he was teasing her.
Seeing them like this, she felt a warm, liquid rush of fear run through her. They looked like ghosts or mystics, witches in some eerie ritual. Not her real mother or father.
So her mother’s secrets became only cloudier, more frightening, the more she thought about them—the opening of a drawer, the fitting of a hidden key into a lock, the quick glimpse of a hand behind a shutting door, the ciphers of muffled telephone calls. I am missing something important, Arlinda thought. But the truth was, no one seemed to know what Arlinda’s mother was supposed to be. She had heard her grandma, her father’s mother, whisper to a friend, “Pauline is a hillbilly, you know.”
Her father’s two sisters, Aunt Sharon and Aunt Beth, speculated on the subject often enough, when they came for a visit. Arlinda would hide and listen as they smoked their cigarettes and sipped coffee.
Aunt Sharon, the pretty one, with her big blond hair and her black lashes and fingernails that hurt when they broke, said that Arlinda’s mother was just a “loon. It’s all that inbreeding in that family.”
“I guess Harvey really must be a saint,” Aunt Beth said. “To put up with that. He’s so good to her. How did she ever get him?”
“Oh, I know how she got him,” Aunt Sharon said, and snorted. “It’s how she keeps him that I wonder.”
And Arlinda had seen strangers on t
he street turn to look at her mother—maybe it was the quickness with which she walked, almost stumbling fast, or the angry hardness of her face. Maybe they thought, from the way she held Arlinda by the arm, that her mother was a kidnapper. She’s not my real mother, Arlinda wanted to tell them, not really, she doesn’t belong to me.
But despite what Arlinda would have liked, she was bound to her mother by so many webs that she could never break free. Not only did she have her mother’s face, hair, eyes, but she also had the name, the awful name her mother had branded on her. She heard her grandmother once, laughing: “For the longest time I thought Pauline was saying ‘Our Linda,’ and I thought, ‘Well you don’t have to keep telling me, I know she’s your Linda,’ and then I found out that this was actually the child’s name. Where Pauline came up with it, I’ll never know.” I have the name of a crazy woman’s daughter, Arlinda had realized then. The memory still made her ashamed.
But worst of all, Arlinda was her mother’s accomplice. She was the one who knew all about the secret trips. During the summer, or when she was on vacation from school, Arlinda would go on her mother’s drives; and she knew that when she was in school, her mother went alone. Sometimes, Arlinda would be sitting in class, and the teacher’s voice would just fade away, and she would picture her mother driving, all the windows rolled down, her scarf flapping in the wind. She could picture the yellow dotted lines of the highway flickering through her mother’s sunglasses, her mother’s lips tightened.
They would always leave after her father had gone to work in the morning. They went many places—distant restaurants, doctor’s offices in faraway towns, no place sometimes, just down the highway for hours, then back. Most of the time, though, they went to the other grandmother’s place in the country.
It was the second day of summer vacation when Arlinda’s father told them he would be going out of town overnight, on business. And although her mother said nothing, Arlinda was not surprised to be awakened as soon as her father was gone.
“Get up,” her mother whispered. “We’re going to Grandma’s house today.”
The grandmother’s house was several hours away from Arlinda’s home, and Arlinda had hoped to spend her day sleeping and watching cartoons. But there was a stiffness in the way her mother spoke, and Arlinda knew better than to protest.
“Hurry up,” her mother kept saying, sharply, knocking on the door as Arlinda showered, standing, hands on her hips, as Arlinda pulled up her socks.
“Are you mad at me?” Arlinda kept asking, following after her.
“Of course not,” her mother said. But when Arlinda grabbed her around the waist and hugged her, her mother felt like a cat might when clutched against its will, and she closed her eyes as if to hold back a cry.
“God damn it, will you please quit yanking on me, Arlinda? I don’t feel good.” And then Arlinda backed away, shrugging.
“You’re always sick,” she said, looking at the floor.
“That’s because your father doesn’t believe in medicine.”
Arlinda slept in the car almost the whole way. Her face was pressed against the vinyl seat so that, when she awoke briefly, she could feel the indentation of the seat’s vertical design on her cheek, like a scar. She looked up sleepily, and she could see her mother’s head framed in the car window, and the gently sloping horizon, the telephone poles, the gray sky spinning behind her, dizzying, a fog of motion. For a moment there was something terrifying about the stillness of her mother’s face, the way she seemed to be hurtling through the rush of the world, the way she ignored the sky and hills and trees grasping for her, falling at her like stones or bullets and then spinning away.
Occasionally, her mother would become lost, and these were the most harrowing times. Her mother would begin to tremble, she would find it hard to hold the steering wheel, and the car would sway between the median and the shoulder, as if seeking escape. When they were lost, her mother would trace and retrace the same miles of highway, or drive around and around the same blocks, as if suddenly a fresh path would appear to lead them home. Then, desperate, she would stop the car and get out. In towns, she would ramble down the sidewalk with Arlinda following, stopping people—old women; leering, dirty men; even small children. She would beg directions from them, cringing as if she were asking for money. Once, they had been lost on the interstate, and Arlinda’s mother had tried to flag down cars, big semis rushing toward her with their foghorn howls, little bug cars swerving to go around her. Arlinda had screamed, crying, “Mommy, don’t . . . Watch out, watch out, watch out!”
But there had never been any problem finding the grandmother’s house, and Arlinda felt safe enough to sleep, safe until she woke to see her mother’s frozen face against the blur of the passing world, her fingers tight on the steering wheel. Then she sat upright.
“Momma?” she said. “Are we lost?”
Her mother glanced toward the backseat and then glared. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “What, do you think I’m crazy?” Arlinda looked down, and when she raised her head again, her mother’s eyes were still staring back at her in the rearview mirror. Finally, she lay down and put her arm across her face. When she sat back up, they were pulling down the long driveway that led to her grandmother’s house.
Arlinda’s grandmother’s place was miles outside any town, and it always looked abandoned. The grass around it was thick and long, and the high weeds grew into it on the edge of the yard. At night, the dark trees around the house hunched down, the shadows of their branches scuttling along its walls, along the dusty windows with their coverings of blurry plastic insulation. The only sign of inhabitants was her grandmother’s car: a big blue Pontiac, parked in the front yard.
For as long as Arlinda could remember, her grandmother had raised things; not normal animals like chickens or hogs but rather exotic creatures—hives of bees, peacocks, guinea hens, horned white goats, which she kept so she could sell their thin, sour-tasting milk. Arlinda had heard her Aunt Sharon talking in low tones about her mother’s parents: “From what I hear, they were like gypsies, they just moved from one odd job to the next, one con game after the other.” After that, Arlinda asked her father what Grandpa Bickers had done for a living. Her father had given her that teasing, secretive smile. “Oh, anything,” he said. “Like what,” she’d wanted to know, but he just shook his head. “That woman reminds me of a witch,” Aunt Sharon once whispered to a group of her cousins and their husbands, as the grandmother drifted past them at a Christmas gathering.
There weren’t any exotic animals around the house this time, though, as they stepped up the walk to the front door. And when the grandmother opened the door, there didn’t appear to be any animals in the house, either.
“Hi, Mommy,” Arlinda’s mother said, and they embraced.
Arlinda did not hug her grandmother, and she was glad that she wasn’t expected to. Her grandmother had a dull, sweaty smell, like old clothes, and her arms were wiry and muscled, like an old man’s, with blue veins that stood out above the skin, tracing across it like the branches of a gnarled tree. Arlinda merely took her grandmother’s hand.
“I’ve got something special to show you, princess,” her grandmother said, and didn’t release Arlinda’s hand, though Arlinda pulled vaguely away.
“What?” Arlinda said. But the grandmother only smiled.
“I’ll show you,” the grandmother said, and she led them through the smoky house, down the hallway.
At first, Arlinda thought they were birds. She could hear them behind the closed door, rustling and chirping, the whisper of wings in cages, of clawed feet against wire mesh. It was a sound she had heard behind doors in dreams, a sound that stopped suddenly when in the dream she opened the door and found it empty. Her grandmother took a skeleton key out of her sweater pocket. This is something secret, Arlinda thought, and she held back, letting the two women enter first.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Chinchillas,” her grandmoth
er said, and it sounded like a magic word.
The chinchillas looked like little squirrels. They were all in cages that lined two walls of the room, cages no bigger than a birdcage, stacked high to the ceiling. They were all quiet, staring with their dark, glittering eyes at Arlinda, her mother, and her grandmother, their noses twitching, their whole bodies quivering with the quickness of their breath. In the closet, Arlinda could see a large sack of food pellets, a pitcher of still water.
“Chinchillas for coats,” her grandmother said to Arlinda. “Beautiful, warm ladies’ fur coats.”
“Ugh,” her mother said. “They look like rats.”
“These ‘rats’ are going to bring in a lot of money,” her grandmother said. “They’ll all be yours, someday.”
“They’re filthy,” Arlinda’s mother said. “Mom, they’ll stink up the whole house. Look, they’re pooping all over everything.”
