by Lisa Levchuk
“How do you like my husband?” she asks.
She places a ton of emphasis on the word “husband,” probably to drive home the point that I could have no idea of the significance of what a husband is, and the truth is I don’t.
“He’s a good teacher,” I say.
She snorts like she thinks my answer is funny, but that snort is in no way anything like laughter.
“A good teacher,” she says. “I’ll bet.” She snorts again.
I want to remind her that my mother has cancer, that all of this happened more or less accidentally, and that I would gladly turn back the clock and give the entire situation some more thought if it were possible.
“You are both pathetic,” she snarls.
“I know I am,” I offer. “I’ve always been pathetic.” I attempt to laugh.
But answering her was a mistake, because now she looks like she might grab one of our groovy druggist statues and bash my head in with it. Then, in a flash, she looks almost embarrassed to be speaking to me and she practically runs out the door. On her feet are those brown pumps she was wearing when I was under their bed. Through the window behind my register, I watch her get into the yellow Trans Am, light one of her Newports, and peel out of the parking lot.
It takes me about half an hour to recover. Finally, the light on the phone goes off and I walk back to find Emory. He’s got a freshly made vodka and V8.
“Hey there, Smiley,” he says. “You look like you saw a goddamned ghost.”
“Want me to vacuum?” I ask. Suddenly I have the urge to clean.
“You want to vacuum?” he asks me. “Somebody call the Pope. This is a goddamned miracle.”
He bolts into the office and drags out the big old-fashioned vacuum cleaner with a red bag and a silver bottom.
“Don’t you challenge those paper clips again,” he says.
He says this because the last time I vacuumed I apparently sucked up about fifty paper clips and broke the machine.
“Old Smiley here,” he says to Dale, “she won’t pick up those paper clips, she challenges them.” He laughs.
I plug in the vacuum and start rolling it up and down the aisles. The carpet looks cleaner where I’ve rolled over it, and I experience a weird sense of accomplishment, something I don’t have very often. I leave each aisle cleaner than I found it. The noise is somewhat soothing as it drowns out the light FM station that plays Kenny Rogers and Christopher Cross songs over and over again. When I see a paper clip on the rug, I try to vacuum around it. The red bag puffs out as the powerful machine sucks up the dirt. I want to push that vacuum forever, but there are only six aisles and the gift section. Finally, Emory pulls the plug on me.
“Want to dust?” he asks as I wheel the vacuum back toward the office.
“Not really,” I say.
Emory laughs because he thinks it is funny that I won’t even do my usual fake dusting unless I’m in the right mood. I hate dusting. If there were a machine involved, I might like it, but I don’t like having to move things around.
The Happy Family Chinese Restaurant
“HAVE YOU LOST ANY WEIGHT YET?” I ask.
“Can’t you tell?” Mr. Howland sucks in his stomach. In addition to the burger-and-tomato diet, he had been running every day. Summer’s almost here, and he wants to get in shape. He stopped running because some kids in a car threw a cupful of ice out their window at him. Believe it or not, the shards of ice left little cuts across his forehead.
We are riding in Mr. Howland’s car. Even though we’ve been messing around for over two months now, this is our first night on the town. He is taking me out for dinner. He even called me from his own house to invite me; normally these days, I’d be at therapy on a Wednesday afternoon, but Dr. Chester rescheduled. I was glad I decided to answer the phone. Mr. Howland picked a restaurant way out on Route 88, so far out that the chances of either one of us knowing anyone are very slim. It is still daylight when we pull into the parking lot; the red neon Happy Family sign is beginning to glow in the darkening sky. Neon chopsticks blink on and off.
What I feel as we go through the door is terror. It isn’t quite as bad as the terror I felt under the Howlands’ bed, or in the car driving to the hospital with my father, but it is terror nonetheless. I am hallucinating that I see Patty and her mother and Mrs. Howland and even my mother sitting in a booth together over by the fish tank. But the reality is that the place is practically empty. We sit down across from the tank, which contains two or three skinny, sick-looking lobsters. Mr. Howland orders beef with broccoli, and I order wonton soup. My goal has changed from enjoying a night out with Mr. Howland to eating as fast as possible and getting the hell out of here.
“Guess what?” Mr. Howland says. He’s hogging the crunchy noodles and duck sauce, but I don’t say anything.
“What?”
“Guess who is going to New York City?”
“Who?”
“We are.” He smiles very broadly.
“How are we going to do that?” I ask.
“A class trip,” he says. “We’re going to see art galleries in SoHo.”
“Our class?”
“Yes, our class and Ron’s painting class.”
“When are we going?”
“Two weeks,” he answers. “So don’t forget your permission slip.”
“What about Patty?” I ask. “Does this mean Patty is going?”
Ever since the night at her house, I have developed a terrible fear of Patty. She won’t talk to me or look at me anymore, and I’m constantly worried that she is going to spill the beans. In addition, since that night, the phone at my house keeps ringing, but when I pick up, no one is on the line. I suspect someone is trying to drive me insane so that I’ll confess.
“Don’t worry about Patty,” Mr. Howland says. “I’ll turn on the old Howland charm for both her and Old Leather Head.”
Old Leather Head is Mr. Howland’s name for Patty’s mother.
“They’ll melt like butter.”
After we finish eating, Mr. Howland and I open our fortune cookies at the same time. I get a pretty good fortune. It says, “You will get everything you desire and more.” Mr. Howland looks kind of pissed about his. He hands it to me and I read, “Be careful of…” The rest of the words are blurry.
“Cheap Chinese ink,” Mr. Howland says.
I eat both cookies. Mr. Howland’s fortune does unsettle me because I’ve never seen a fortune before that you couldn’t read.
When we leave the restaurant, it is pouring; giant raindrops pound us and we are both drenched when we get into the car.
“Guess what?” I say.
“What?”
“Your wife came into the pharmacy.”
“She did what?” he asks, his voice sharp.
Rain is running down the windshield in sheets.
“She asked me how I liked her husband.” I laugh because telling Mr. Howland about it makes it seem less scary.
“Do you think she knows?” I ask him. The truth is I’ve been pretty worried since her visit.
“I don’t care what she knows,” he says. He says it quietly, emphasizing each word, but his face is red and he seems angry.
“I care,” I say. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
I realize now that I should have kept this information to myself because Mr. Howland looks even more upset.
“Why are you laughing about this?” He raises his voice. “Why are you even here?”
Mr. Howland is yelling now. His face is very red, so red it looks like the little cuts could break open.
“Do you give a shit about even one thing?” he asks.
“I guess I don’t,” I answer.
Mr. Howland punches the ceiling of the car three times. He punches it hard, as hard as he can. His fist leaves knuckle-shaped dents. If it had been my face getting punched, my head would be splattered against the passenger side window. This is a side of Mr. Howland I haven’t seen before.
&nbs
p; “Let’s go,” he says. He is barely able to shift gears with his right hand.
He peels out of the parking lot. We go down Route 88 faster than I’ve ever gone down Route 88 before.
My mind turns to the Dracula Principle. At this point it seems to me that we have lost our cloak of secrecy. Patty knows and Barbie knows and other people seem to suspect. Even Mrs. Howland knows something. The question is, Did the Dracula Principle work for Dracula, or was it simply that no one cared until it was too late? At what point did people know that Dracula was a vampire? Most important, at what point did they decide to drive that stake through his heart? Not that psychiatrists are necessarily experts on vampires, but it might be worthwhile to ask Dr. Chester a few questions during my session tomorrow.
By the time we get to the parking lot where I’ve left my car, Mr. Howland has calmed down quite a bit.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It just seems sometimes like this is all a big joke to you.” Rather than say anything, I kiss his sore-looking fist.
Head Shrinking
IT’S THURSDAY, not my normal therapy day, but as I said, Dr. Chester needed to change my appointment. As usual, he is sitting behind his big desk looking bored. It is now my seventh therapy session, and it’s becoming obvious to both of us I won’t talk about the stuff that interests him, like my brother, my mother, my sexual fantasies, or anything else that might give him some clue about what I’m really like. In fact, whenever he brings up sex I get insanely embarrassed for both of us.
“What do you know about Dracula?” I ask.
“The vampire?”
I want to say, What other Dracula is there? But I’d rather not start off on the wrong foot again.
At our last session, I sat there for thirty minutes without saying a word. My strategy was to see if he would talk, and he didn’t. I sat there waiting and waiting, examining the wooden voodoo statues and reading the framed certificates on the wall. After thirty minutes I started joking around about the statues, and then he got somewhat mad.
“Sometimes we use the therapy situation to play games that work in other areas of our lives,” he told me.
“Is that right?” I answered.
“Yes,” he said.
At that moment I hated his guts, and I got up and left. I walked out the door and drove away. I really didn’t think I’d ever go back, but here I am. What he said bugged me, and I don’t want him to think he won.
“Was there a real Count Dracula?” I ask.
“I believe it is a legend. Why are you interested in Dracula?”
“I don’t know.” I pause. “I’ve been wondering how he got people to trust him. I remember hearing somewhere that vampires can’t come into your house unless you invite them in. So, people must have invited Count Dracula into their houses. That means he must have been charming or something.” At that moment, the image of Mr. Howland standing outside the picture window at Patty’s house pops into my head.
“That is part of the legend,” Dr. Chester says. “And in the movies, Dracula usually is a very charming character.”
“But then he sucks your blood?”
“Yes, then he sucks your blood.”
“And you become undead?”
“Yes,” he says, “you become a zombie that, I believe, needs to drink blood to survive.”
“I don’t drrrink wine,” I say in a Transylvanian accent, because Mr. Howland says that sometimes when he is goofing around with me, pretending to give me hickeys and whatnot while we are drinking blackberry brandy.
“Do you know someone who reminds you of Dracula?” Dr. Chester asks.
I am beginning to catch on to some principles of psychiatry, and I realize that it will probably make his day if I say my mother or my father or even him, so I pretend to think hard about the question. Naturally, I haven’t told him one thing about Mr. Howland.
“Maybe you,” I say, playing along.
I can see him getting all hot and interested.
“How do I remind you of Dracula?”
“Because you don’t drrrink wine.”
He looks at me carefully.
“And because you’re going to suck my blluud,” I say.
“Is that how this feels to you,” he asks, “like I want to suck your blood?”
“Yes, that is how it feels.” I speak more seriously, without the accent. “You want to know everything about me so you can turn me into a zombie.”
“Why would I want to turn you into a zombie?” he asks.
“So you can control me.”
“What would I make you do?”
“I don’t know. Visit my mother.”
He waits a few seconds.
“Do you want someone to make you visit your mother?” he asks. “Would that make it easier?”
“You can’t force me to do that,” I say.
“Do you wish I could?” he asks. “Do you wish I had that much power?”
I’m trying to figure out where he is going with this, but I feel that I am a step or two behind him.
“You think I’m wrong, don’t you?” I ask. “You think it is pretty lousy of me to stay away.”
“Do I?” he responds.
“Do you?”
“I’m not here to make those kinds of judgments,” he says.
I want to explain the feeling I have that I am somehow behind everything, the cause of my mother’s sickness and of every other crappy thing that happens.
“I believe in Dracula,” I tell him. “I believe in many kinds of monsters.”
I feel the presence of the monster from my childhood nightmare, and then I tell him about it, about the being that drained the life out of me night after night. After listening to the entire dream and making me repeat key points, Dr. Chester reminds me that the monster always failed. He reminds me that I was stronger than the monster was, at least in the dream, and that it was the monster that needed me in order to survive, not the other way around.
By the time we finish, I am so exhausted I can barely drive without falling asleep at the wheel of my car.
Kippy
AT HOME, KIPPY IS THERE. She’s back from the veterinarian’s office, and naturally, she is sitting in the gold chair waiting for my mother. My father has left for the hospital, so I go to the kitchen to see if he left me any food. There is cold pizza in the refrigerator and a can of Mighty Dog on the counter. I decide to try to make a Mighty Dog special burger for Kippy. After watching Mr. Howland make about five hundred hamburgers, I feel qualified. I pack the dog food into a hamburger shape and put it in a frying pan and throw some cheese on top. Kippy must smell it, because I see her small gray shape coming into the room, sniffing the air like something familiar is happening for a change. After the cheese melts, I put the little burger on a human plate and blow on it until it cools down. Kippy is standing there at my feet waiting for her burger. When it hits the floor, she eats the entire thing right away, and then she even follows me to the bottom of the stairs. For a minute I think she’s going to come up to the second floor with me, but she licks her chops and goes back to the gold chair to wait.
Going to the Moon
IT’S FUNNY, but on Friday night I decide to call Barbie and try to do something with people my own age. Mr. Howland can’t get out of the house, and I don’t feel like sitting around alone while my father is in the city. Barbie is actually psyched to hear from me—she tells me to meet her at her house at around eight o’clock because everyone is going to the Moon, a place I’ve never been before.
When I get to Barbie’s house, we go into her bedroom because she needs to use the curling iron on her hair. Her room is the same from when we were little kids except for the fact that now her vanity has become something like what a movie star might use to get herself ready for a scene. Barbie really is a terrific-looking girl. It was weird, because until ninth grade no one even noticed her, but then her breasts doubled in size and she grew her hair long and the best-looking boys couldn’t stop talking about her. She’
s had a boyfriend each year since then. I flip through our old junior high yearbook looking at the people whose faces we put x’s through and the things we wrote next to pictures of people we hated.
“So how’s your boyfriend?” she asks as she uses the curling iron to flip back the front of her strawberry blond hair. “Or should I say your man friend?”
“His wife came into the pharmacy,” I tell her.
“You’re shitting me,” she says. She puts down the curling iron and stares at me.
“No, really,” I say. “She bought some cigarettes.”
“Does she know? Is that why she came in?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think she does.”
I’m sitting at the end of Barbie’s bed, on the soft worn-out quilt that she has always had. Grand Funk Railroad is playing softly in the background.
“Did she say anything?” Barbie asks.
“Yeah, she said some stuff about her husband, and then she gave me a weird look.”
“What kind of look?”
“Like maybe she hates my freaking guts,” I say. We both start laughing, but I can tell by the way Barbie’s looking at me that she’s worried.
I keep flipping through the yearbook until I see a familiar, round face.
“Remember Michael Parks?” I say.
“You mean that fat kid in the slow class?”
“Remember he always used to say that he was going to take you out in his five-door Cadillac?”
“What did we write?” she asks.
“It’s mean,” I say.
She sits down next to me on the bed, and we look at the picture of Michael Parks and what is written in black marker in a bubble over his head: “I am a moron.” But we laugh anyway.
I flip through some more until I find Tyrone Love. The print quality of the book is so poor that you can hardly see his face. At least we didn’t write anything mean over his picture.
“Are you scared?” Barbie asks as she pulls a soft baby-blue cowl-neck sweater over her head.
“Not really,” I say. “I don’t know what to be scared of.”
