This Is Not Chick Lit

by Elizabeth Merrick

  Wayne creeps up to the cabin. He can hear movement inside, and voices, friendly voices, spots of giggling. He presses his ear directly up to the cold, rough siding as though he were a doctor listening through a stethoscope for traces of lung disease or heart irregularities. She’d enabled her debating software. Jealousy wells up in him. He holds his breath.

  Ted looks up from his teepeed fingers at her while she speaks.

  “So what do you expect us to do? Plant vegetable gardens when we can just go down to the grocery store, or do you want us to live off other people’s trash? Dig through the garbage heap and that will make us happy?” she asks him. “I don’t think that will make me happy.”

  “The garden might.”

  “Yes, it’s true. The garden might.”

  She pauses for a moment before continuing. “Okay. So say we go ahead with your plan, build lots of bombs, kill all the machines. Say we get past the point of revolution, all the cities are gone, the interstates, all the strip malls, industrial complexes and health clubs are gone and we’re all using our bodies to work really hard again, tilling the fields, killing bears with rocks, living off of honeysuckle, building wigwams and igloos, hiding in trees, digging in the dirt for grubs, it still wouldn’t matter because somewhere there’ll be a spark in some youngster’s brain, someone who thinks, Hmm, if I build myself a gin I could sure pick a whole lot more cotton.”

  Her perfection is alarming.

  “It’ll just start all over again,” she says.

  And, in the cabin, Ted knows she is right. He hangs his head, defeated. He’d already thought of that youngster with the big ideas himself. He’d tried to ignore that youngster. In his head, in his plan, he only saw undulating fields of golden wheat and children playing hide-and-go-seek in the corn. He saw how the woods really are the poor man’s overcoat, with mushrooms, hazelnuts, a soft pine-needle bed, sweet maple sap, and a fire to reduce the sap to syrup on. So much has already been given to us. He just couldn’t believe people could want more.

  “What do you want?” he asks her, and she makes an expression that looks like thinking while her computers search for anything lacking. “Detonation” is all her computers come up with, but that result lies beyond her top-secret firewall, along with all the other essential truths about herself that she isn’t allowed to reveal, a glitch they’d had to fix after she said too much to that U.S. marshal in Reno. And so her computer instructs her to lie. She answers, “Nothing really. What do you want?”

  Ted stops to consider. His mug of coffee has reached the bottom but he doesn’t really want a refill. If he has too much caffeine he won’t sleep well tonight. He looks around. What does he want?

  “Do you want me?” she asks.

  But Ted is staring out the window, his theories slipping away from him. He lets her words pile up on his stomach like tiny asphalt pebbles. Beauty, even her beauty, has become something to him like a stone, a solid pit in his chest. His answer would have broken her heart if she’d had one.

  “Wayne, you were supposed to detonate me while I was there in his cabin.”

  “I know.”

  “You failed in your duty to serve the United States of America, Honor Code section four, paragraph nineteen.”

  “I know.”

  “There are consequences,” she says.

  “I know,” Wayne answers, and reaches out to hold her cheek in his hand. She doesn’t move away. She is programmed not to resist male advances. He pulls her down onto the floor of the van, beside the pool-cleaning apparatus. He nestles his face in her neck. He wraps his hand around her waist underneath her flannel shirt and pulls her closer, feeling the silicone lumps that are her breasts push into him. He smells the chalk of her scent while her arms remain limp by her sides. “Hold me,” he commands her, though he feels immediately ashamed, desperate. Still, “Hold me,” he repeats. She complies and wraps her mechanical arms around him while he speaks words of loving sweetness into her ear, the ones she’s been waiting to hear, hot breath against plastic. Wayne whispers the magic words that send a repressed tremor through the quiet night, an explosion that could only be described as American.

  Jennifer S. Davis

  On the way home from the hospital, Ava tells Charlotte that after her first husband was killed during a German air attack on Bari in 1943, she cried without pause for weeks, only to emerge from her stunning grief temporarily blind. She blames this temporary disability for the early demise of her screen career.

  “No one wants a real blind person in a film,” Ava says from the backseat of the Chevette. Charlotte watches in the rearview mirror as the old woman rummages through a Burger King bag propped on the cast that covers her leg from toe to hip. She tosses handfuls of salt and catsup on the floorboard, finally finds the French fries, shoves a handful in her mouth, then sighs.

  “Fake blind, sure,” Ava says with her mouth full. “But when you’re bopping off the set and knocking things over, well, let’s just say you draw the wrong kind of attention to yourself.”

  “You’d think it’d make you look more authentic,” Charlotte says, pulling into the narrow gravel strip that runs between Ava’s house and the neighbor’s to the right.

  “Nobody wants authentic,” Ava says. “We’re all so brainwashed that fake usually seems realer than real. Like if your kids never call or visit or send Christmas cards, and you go about your business, feeding the dog and making dinner, because you have to, because no one else is going to do it for you—those same kids might think that you don’t care, that you ain’t dying inside.” Ava points a limp French fry at her chest, mimicking a dagger slipping into her heart. “Now, if an actor in that situation on TV cried and threw things and called the children in the middle of the night begging for attention, something no one who thinks anything of herself would actually do, the people watching would say Wow. That’s real.”

  On the sidewalk, a toddler stumbles in circles. Braids poke out of the Tupperware bowl she wears on her head. Occasionally the girl whacks the bowl with a carrot she carries like a wand, and Charlotte thinks of Lucy, her long yellow pigtails, the way they glowed in the fading sunlight one afternoon at the beach, a long-ago memory that has fused into all the others.

  Ava’s neighbor, the toddler’s great-grandmother, is sprawled across a foldout chair on her front lawn, her thick legs mottled by the sun. She shakes a flyswatter at Charlotte’s Chevette, yells something in an indistinguishable European language.

  “The neighborhood is going to hell in a handbasket,” Ava says, rolling down her window. “I thought that was the whole point of the war, to take care of these heathens.” Then, to the neighbor, “I’ve told you, this is my goddamn driveway.”

  “I can park on the street,” Charlotte offers.

  “I got my sight back in an A&P,” Ava is saying to Charlotte as she struggles to reach over her cast-encased leg to open the back door. “That’s the God’s truth. I was groping along the produce bins when boom. I must’ve passed out, ’cause when I came to, I could see as clear as I’m seeing you, clearer even, since now I can’t seem to see a damned thing, and there was a sign hanging over me, Jonathan Apples, ten cents a pound, which wasn’t a bad price. Produce is outrageous these days.”

  “Hold on,” Charlotte says, getting out of the car. When Charlotte opens the back door, Ava begins scooting off the seat, her cast missiled straight toward Charlotte’s belly. By the time Ava is propped against the dented Chevette with her crutches under her arms, Charlotte’s new shirt is covered in the old woman’s makeup. Ava had refused to leave the hospital until Charlotte helped apply her “face,” the pasty, exaggerated mask Ava has worn every day of her adult life.

  The neighbor yells something garbled, something that sounds like whore.

  “The food.” Ava points into the car. Charlotte crawls into the backseat, grabs the Burger King, pops the greasy bag under one arm, Ava under the other, and they lurch-hop toward the house.

  “He didn’t mean to do it, you know
, ” Ava says at the front door while Charlotte fumbles for the keys. “Ralph’s a good dog. Not a mean bone in his body. He’d never hurt me on purpose.”

  “I know,” Charlotte says. Ralph lets loose a wretched, hollow wail from the foyer. For a moment, Charlotte regrets that she didn’t take Billy’s advice and dump the dog in the woods when Ava was in the hospital and she’d had the chance.

  “You’re a good girl, too,” Ava says. Charlotte doubts the truth of the statement.

  “How long you been living here?” Billy asks.

  “Four weeks,” Charlotte says. She’s sitting on the front porch, sipping a beer and smoking, watching Billy rake the leaves. Ava passed out after her fifth glass of wine, and Charlotte put her to bed. The sun is barely sinking, but Ava won’t wake up until morning. Charlotte considers herself off duty, although the agreement is she’s on call 24/7.

  “I’m just saying.” Billy pokes the pile of leaves with the rake. “I’ve been working around here for near ten years, and you don’t see her offering me any sweet deal. You know what she calls me? She calls me boy. Me—almost fifty. Might as well say nigger. Means the same thing.”

  “She’s old. Old people around here are set in their ways.” Charlotte thinks Billy might be good-looking if he weren’t so skinny, if he weren’t so angry.

  Billy stops raking, stares at Charlotte. His irises are almost as black as his pupils, and Charlotte finds it difficult to return his gaze.

  “Old,” Billy says, then snorts. “Are you an idiot, girl? You think that woman just has herself a light, even tan? That she won’t leave the house without all that makeup because she’s out to catch herself a man? You ever see her kids around here? Any of them? She’s got three, and the oldest owns this house. Now, why do you think he’d buy his momma a house in Florida when he lives halfway across the world in California? Not one of them kids ever visits. And you know why?” He pokes his arm out, points with one gloved finger at his dun-colored skin. “That’s why. Her kids didn’t come out light like her. They can’t pass. You see what I’m saying?”

  Charlotte isn’t sure what Billy’s saying, because Billy says a lot. For instance, he says that Zelda, the next-door neighbor, was married to a Nazi, and she’s hiding out here in Twilight Pines to keep a low profile. He says that the butcher down at the Piggly Wiggly woos boys into the freezer with Hershey bars and toy gadgets he steals from cereal boxes, that he’s seen this with his own eyes. He says that Clinton is a Russian spy who’s bent on ruining the country, which might not be such a bad thing, considering that the country has been going straight downhill since they elected the android actor from California.

  “She’s always been nice to me,” Charlotte says, which is not exactly true. She crushes her cigarette against the concrete porch and adds it to the pile beside the potted fern. “I was living in my car when she found me.”

  Charlotte wasn’t so much living in her car as passed out in it with nowhere in particular to go and all her things crammed into plastic crates in her trunk. She was considering going back home to Montgomery, where things were fucked up but at least in a way she understood. She’d stopped for a drink or two at the bar on the corner and woke up in her car in front of Ava’s house, Ava rapping on her window. The old woman took Charlotte inside, fed her, let her wash up, and after Charlotte repaid the kindness by listening to some of Ava’s life stories, which included the one where the handsome heart specialist with the diamond pinky ring and the uppity secretary told Ava she was going to die sooner rather than later, Ava offered Charlotte a job as a caretaker of sorts. She gets room and board, a weekly allowance, and, when Ava dies, a tidy bonus. Charlotte never considered saying no.

  “Mrs. Bean thinks you’re weak, that she can own you, that she’s on her way out and you’re her Hail Mary, her last chance to convince someone she ain’t the mean-hearted bitch she is,” Billy says. “You being white makes it all the better.” He cups his hands together, peers into the little cave he’s made, like there’s a trapped animal in there.

  Charlotte gestures at the crumbling Cape Cod behind her. “Things worked out good. She’s got someone to take care of her, I got a place to stay.”

  “I’m just saying.” Billy offers a slow, stretched smile, which makes him look younger than he is. “Mrs. Bean seemed to be doing just fine until you came around, and then bam, that little mutt pulls her down the stairs. Mighty convenient for you, don’t you think? You almost hit the big payday.” He walks toward Charlotte, rips a glove off with his teeth, covers her knee with his bare hand, the rough pad of his thumb moving in tiny circles. This is the first time a man has touched her in a year. “Maybe,” he says, “you’re smarter than she thought.”

  “Marlene Dietrich was a man-hungry bitch,” Ava says. “I had a good role in Destry Rides Again. Three lines. Long ones at that. But she was getting old by then, and she didn’t like the competition. They cut me. Not one ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

  Ava holds Ralph to her chest with one speckled hand; a cigarette dangles from the other. Charlotte is setting Ava’s long, thinning hair, and it’s difficult to get the uneven strands to stay wrapped around the rollers. Every time Charlotte’s fingers come near Ralph, he gives her a little nip, which makes Ava, who is past drunk, giggle. In front of them, over the kitchen table, hangs a full-length painting of a pale naked woman with three perfect breasts. Her nipples are accented with tinted glass shards. Ava says that it’s high art, that it’s Charlotte’s after she dies, that she’ll make sure of it.

  “I’ve got a daughter, you know,” Ava says as she fumbles ashes into a giant Chinese vase, which Charlotte knows holds the remains of Ava’s third husband, a man she refers to only as The Bastard.

  Ava’s hair feels silky against Charlotte’s hands, not like the wiry hair she expects on a black woman, and she thinks of the soft, yellow lock of hair she keeps in a Bible in her bedroom, the way it feels when she fans it against the sensitive skin of her eyelids.

  “So I’m content it turned out that way,” Ava is saying. “If Tina had to be one or the other, I’m glad it was smart rather than pretty. I was pretty and it got me nothing but trouble. She was smart and it got her a doctor from Malibu who can make her look like whatever she damn well pleases. If we’d had the same options when I was working Hollywood, there’s no telling how far I could have gone.” She dumps her cigarette butt into the vase, then peers down into its opening. “Looks like The Bastard is filling up. He always was full of himself.”

  “I think you still look beautiful,” Charlotte says. “How many women your age have hair like this?” She pats Ava’s hair, which in spite of being freshly washed, already reeks of cigarette smoke.

  “It’s funny, being blind,” Ava says. “Your senses get really sharp. I could tell what kind of fruit was in a bowl without touching it, only smelling. I could hear someone enter the room just by the breathing.” She pauses, scratches Ralph behind his ears. “And I can still smell bullshit from a mile away.”

  Charlotte’s hands stop mid-rolling. Sometimes, not often, Ava gets mean when she drinks. Throws things when Charlotte tells her it’s time to eat or go to bed. Shits herself out of spite. When she does these things, Charlotte almost wishes that when Ralph pulled Ava down the stairs, the fall had killed the woman instead of just breaking her leg, wishes she could take the money now and go somewhere new, start over right this time.

  Ava leans back in her chair, tilts her face toward Charlotte, stares at her for a long moment, her gray eyes shadowy.

  “You ain’t pretty neither,” she says finally, “but at least you try to be nice to a dying old lady. Nice is better than pretty any day of the week. That’s what I told Tina when she was little, but it just made her meaner. She’s never visited me here in Florida. Won’t even take my calls these days. Can you imagine, knowing your momma’s got maybe six months and not taking her calls? What kind of hate is that? The kind that kills you the long, hard way, that’s what kind.” She kicks the vase with her good foot,
and old Ralph releases an irritated bleat. “Just ask The Bastard.”

  Charlotte understands the complexities of families, and she tells Ava so. Then she begins sharing the story of her father, how he couldn’t keep his job at the mill. How he woke her mother up from a dead sleep when he came in after the bar closed, knowing she worked two full-time jobs, and forced her to make him breakfast, eggs and steak and bacon, the whole works. How he kept a lover, a tiny Vietnamese woman who did laundry, for ten years and two babies, not that he took care of them either. How he came to her mother’s funeral drunk and had to be dragged out of the cemetery by her uncle. How his hate didn’t kill him before he held up a convenience store and shot a widow straight through the eye for less than eighty bucks. How when Charlotte went to visit him that one time in prison to make things right after Lucy was born, after she understood what it meant to be a parent, to bring a child into the world, he refused to come to the visitation room, said he didn’t know anyone by the name of Charlotte.

  But Ava is snoring before she can finish, her hair only half rolled, the rest already drying in a long frizz.

  “She out?”

  Charlotte turns to see Billy standing in the doorway, twilight glowing behind him so that he’s haloed in russet gold, and for a moment, Charlotte cannot speak. She simply nods.

  Billy stomps through the kitchen, his dirty boots leaving tracks on the floor. He stops, stares at Ava.

  “I ain’t ever touched her before,” he says. “Not even to take my pay. She just leaves it on the back porch in an envelope.”

  “Why do you think she hired you then, kept you around all this time if she can’t stand to look at you? Why would she punish herself like that?” Charlotte grabs Ava’s half-finished bottle of wine from the table, takes a long drink, trying the whole time not to look at Billy, who’s staring at her like he might want to hit her.