“Why’d you rub blood all over your face?” she asked, puzzled and out of breath.
I’d forgotten about that.
“I don’t know. Nothing else to do.”
She nodded. “Why don’t you count something?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, leaves. Count the leaves. I’ve already counted them a few times. Let’s see if we get the same number.”
What a good idea. How could I have ever left her here? How could I have ever lived without her? What was I thinking? I felt more like my real self now than I had in weeks. Even though I was technically only half of myself.
She crunched over to me, reached into my pocket, and pulled out the bloody keys.
“You’re lucky these didn’t get crushed,” she said.
And made her way back up the side of the cliff and toward The House.
The First Bridle
After all the tunnel work was done, the real search could begin. The first tunnel led us through a million pictures of Phyllis the Fucking Bitch. One picture in a gradient of grays, Phyllis the focus in a white bathroom, half sitting on the sink; she couldn’t have been more than twenty, her blonde hair cut in a short bob, her body wrapped in a dark towel, her face turned away from us but visible in a bathroom mirror. She stares at herself with a finger under her chin, pushing it up, stretching her twisted neck uncomfortably. Her eyes are all admiring, her lips parted slightly, her face unnaturally relaxed considering the awkward angle of the rest of her body. It scared me to see her looking so young, to see how much she’d changed, but Julia kept looking. I insisted that we move on, so we did.
Then Julia said my name. I looked up at her standing next to Elizabeth’s equine inhaler. I think. A clear, plastic muzzle with a little opening for fastening an asthma puffer, and a leather strap so it stays on the horse’s head. An ornate, cursive E embossed into the thickest part of the strap, likely standing for Elizabeth.
“One down.”
Over the course of that day we uncovered Elizabeth’s gas mask, her respiratory measurement mask and her armor. Phyllis seemed satisfied with our progress. Over dinner she told us so.
“You’re actually not doing a bad job.”
“Thanks.”
“Think you can find the rest of them by Thursday?”
“I think so. We’ve got a whole system of tunnels worked out so that we can hit every square inch of that cube.”
“Cube?”
“The basement.”
“Right. How do you like your jam casserole?”
“It’s delicious.”
“Good.”
Phyllis drank the last gulp from her teacup, washed it, and headed upstairs to get ready for bed. Julia and I remained at the table.
“Easter? I’ve changed my mind. I want to do some-
thing nice for Phyllis.”
“Yeah right.”
“No really. Maybe she’s not all bad. We should do something good for her.”
“Why have you changed your mind?”
“The granola bars and the chocolate milk. She doesn’t want us to die down there. Maybe she just wants us to know more about her.”
“And for us to get those horse masks so that she doesn’t have to.”
“Well, yeah, but maybe, also, she just doesn’t know how to talk to us because she’s so weird.”
“Well, what do you want to do for her?”
“I have a secret plan. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”
“Couldn’t we just tell her that we want to be friends?”
“Oh yeah, she’d like that way more. What’s us telling her we wanna be friends going to show her? That we don’t care enough to actually do something special, that’s what.”
“Okay, what’s The Plan?”
The Plan
Julia and I dressed in black clothes: black tights with black sweaters; black socks and our dirtiest sneakers. We’d spent the whole day altering the antique horse bridles that we’d found so that they’d fit and put them on to disguise our faces. I wore the equine inhaler and Julia wore the equine respiratory mask. They were tight and the bit was fun to chew on. With our backpacks strapped firmly to our shoulders, we each took tiny tiptoed steps out the sliding door, which we left open behind us to make for a faster escape once we were finished with The Plan.
We moved quickly over Phyllis’s lawn like it was a hot rock and our feet were bare: picking them up fast, finding cool relief within the shadow of the sphincter-mouthed neighbor’s house. Pulling off our knapsacks and crouching against the wall; his bricks were night-cold against our warm backs. It was time to unload the goods. We reached in and removed four large bottles of bleach we’d found in the basement that we’d wrapped in clothes to prevent them from clocking against one another, a most certain consequence of Julia and me attempting to be nimble.
Each holding a bottle of bleach, we took slow, careful steps to the middle of the neighbor’s lawn. We looked at one another once, each smiling drool around our antique bridles.
With two gloved fingers, Julia twirled the tip of an invisible moustache, and before another moment had time to pass, the dance of the dick drawing was underway. Beethoven’s Third Symphony started blaring in my head. Not because I was really into classical music or anything, it’s just the only one I knew really well, and in that moment Julia and I reminded me of two figure skaters sailing across the rink. The sound of our feet shuffling and our heavy breath sputtering wet through the bridles completely drowned by the music.
We skated over the grass, bottles pouring, bleach swimming over the lawn like a living wave. It glowed in the darkness like some demonic crack in the earth, lighting us from the bottom the way that bright white ice might. We took a moment to look at what we had created. Long, straight shaft, a big pair of hairy balls. A perfect dick to start the show.
We each still had three bottles of bleach left and I was only in the second movement of the symphony, which continued to fill our ears as thick as liquid. So we decided to move on to the next lawn. The first dick had brought a shallow flood of illumination to the night. The next dick would make it even brighter. We would have to move faster than I’d first thought.
As we leapt to the next lawn I watched Julia in mid-air, saw her red hair whip in the wind, lashing her long white neck and then settling down immediately like a mink stole over her shoulders when we landed. Our bridles must have clanked loudly as we hit the ground because Julia struck out her lips with one gloved finger. I wondered if she could hear the music too. I’m sure she could because she moved to it as perfectly as I did. Two parts, swirling and twirling and gliding and bleaching together completely. I wanted this night forever.
Another beautiful performance by Easter and Julia. With Easter starting from the bottom and Julia from the top, the two girls meet in the middle of the dick and spin in unison, spraying a healthy smattering of speckled hair onto the perfectly round balls. These girls are masters of the bleach bottle.
For the next lawn, they move together, Julia behind with her hand on Easter’s waist. They move backward, shaping the head of the dick, both of their hands on one bottle. Now they leap onto either side with a double axle to begin on the balls. And yes, yes! They appear to be perfectly symmetrical!
Our last lawn. The third movement. We were tired, but there was just one more bottle of bleach and one more lawn to do so that the lawns on both sides of Phyllis’s had big, handsome dicks on them.
The last one we poured slowly, carefully. We didn’t want to slip up on the very last dick of the night. And we didn’t. Each of the hairs on this final pair of nuts we flourished with glorious swirls as we glided in circles around each other. Julia took hold of the reins on my horse bridle and I got a fist around hers; then we leaned back, pulling down on each other’s faces, forming the shape of those last balls as we spun along the same
circle. Over and over and over again so everything felt charged and electric and magic in dawn’s strange light.
My heart beat fast. Fast as the early morning squirrels as they wrenched flowers out of the dirt by their roots and threw them at our dewy, grass-stained sneakers. A few held up little bits of cardboard with tens drawn on them. A perfect score. Once we were done we took a second to bow to them, and we gathered a few of the flowers in our arms to show our appreciation.
As quickly and quietly as we had emerged from Phyllis’s tickled house, we returned, having closed the sliding door only once through the whole operation, Phyllis never even fluttering an eyelash as she slept. I worried for a moment that we might have let the wind out, but Julia assured me that it was still around, making an obstacle course of the candelabra in Phyllis’s dining room.
Both of us collapsed into bed, removing only our shoes and our bridles before we fell and smiled ourselves to sleep, the final movement of Beethoven’s third like water in a hot pan on my brain.
Our First
The next morning I awoke to the sounds of Phyllis laughing. A loud, rich laugh that excited the trapped wind. Pictures rattled, curtains moved. Without opening my eyes, I reached over to feel if Julia was still there. She wasn’t. Phyllis’s laughter was interrupted by a voice. I stepped out of bed and took off my black clothes. Julia must have already stuffed hers somewhere inconspicuous. Phyllis was responding to the voice and both of them were getting louder. I found a warm and rumpled nightie beneath the radiator and pulled it over my head, shushed my feet in a pair of slippers and snuck quietly down the hall to listen to the commotion. I kneeled at the top of the stairs. The voices were coming from the porch and the front door was open. The other voice was Norman from next door.
“I can’t believe you’re laughing at this,” quivered the voice of Norman.
He was in shock, I think.
“But Norman, it’s quite funny. Can’t you see how it’s funny?”
“For you, maybe. Yours is the only lawn unscathed!”
“Thank goodness for that.”
I peeked through the spindles of the banister and could see half of the back of Phyllis. She wore a tan, one-piece linen suit with a big white belt. It made her look like she was going on a safari. In front of Phyllis I could see half of the front of Norman. I could tell even from a section of his face that he was furious.
“Why, Phyllis? Why would your lawn be the only one without a—that hasn’t been defaced.”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone around here has a little crush on me.”
“Phyllis, this is vandalism, do you realize that? Vandal-
ism is a crime.”
My throat caught a ball of air.
“Imagine me, a grandmother for goodness’ sake, being charged with vandalism.”
“I don’t know how you can make jokes right now. When Dorothy and Al and the others see their lawns, it won’t be so easy to deny everything.”
“Norman, I haven’t done anything.”
“Tell it to the judge, Phyllis!”
“All right, Norman! Come by later if you want to borrow some fertilizer. It looks like you’ll need it.”
I heard Norman’s door slam. Phyllis turned around and walked inside. She looked right at me—could she see some part of me hanging out past the wall? Oh no. I moved back very slowly. I think she saw me. She definitely saw me. I braved the hungry carpet on my hands and knees, crawling back to our room, and tried to listen through the floor for any clue as to how Phyllis was feeling. I felt the beat of her heels against the kitchen floor as she paced. I don’t know what she was thinking down there, but her feet sounded angry. I waited until the breakfast invitation was officially fifteen minutes past due to realize that she probably didn’t want to see me at all today.
I decided it was best to hide until she went outside again, and then sneak down into the basement to spend the rest of the day.
After some rustling in the kitchen, I finally heard the front screen door close and the sound of Phyllis’s teacup settling in its saucer on the table next to her porch chair. I listened to her pick it up, drink from it presumably, then put it back down on the table again. This happened a few times, enough for me to feel as though she were safely settled out there for a while. I snuck down the stairs, careful to avoid the creaks. Just as I was about to open the basement door, I heard the screen peel from the doorframe and Phyllis’s foot hit the floor. I froze, neck stiff, shoulders pulled up to my ears.
“Good morning, Easter,” she said, already leaned over, pulling on her slippers, a steadying hand on the banister.
“Hi.” My top teeth settled into my bottom lip as I waited for her next words.
“Easter, look at me for a minute.”
So I turned and looked at her, and the faintest smile momentarily cracked her lacquered face, gone so fast I wasn’t sure if it was ever really there.
“You know I’m going to have to tell your mother about this. She’ll ask me about the lawns as soon as she comes in. And I won’t lie to her for you, if that’s what you were expecting. She should know, because I think you’re strange, and what you did was a strange thing to do.”
“I didn’t do it.”
Her face might have cracked again. My heart pounded, powered by the lie, filling my ears with blood, the sound of cupped hands.
“Easter, of course you did.”
“No, I didn’t do it. I mean, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do what?”
Goddammit, I should have opened with “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Julia would have thought of that—where was she? Phyllis nodded, walked past me, and proceeded with whatever it was she’d planned to do in the kitchen.
I turned around and entered the basement, closing the door behind me. I found Julia already in The Café picking at a plate of leftover jam casserole that she’d somehow managed to acquire.
“Where the hell were you this morning?”
“What?”
“We’re in so much trouble, Julia, I don’t even know what to do. We committed a crime out there. Those dicks are a crime!”
“Oh they are not. And they can’t prove anything either. I got rid of the empty bottles this morning. You’re welcome.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I can’t tell you. No one else should know but me.”
“All right, fine. But we’ve really got to find the rest of Phyllis’s bridles today so that she doesn’t hate us forever. We got her in a lot of trouble with Norman, you know. And probably the rest of the neighbors.”
“But she laughed. She liked it. It made her happy.”
“Maybe at first, but not now. Now she can’t possibly be happy with us—hey, where’d you get the casserole? I’m starving.”
“Phyllis left it for us at the door.”
For the rest of our stay, we worked as quietly as we could, careful to avoid Phyllis on the main floor at all costs, listening to the floorboards for the stress of her weight. And I uncovered my secret anatomy book. A large anatomy book with the cross-section of a tooth all yellow and pulpy on the inside. And could think only of our house, hard and smooth and normal on the outside but filled with unexpected squishiness on the inside. Unexpected interior soreness all red and ready to rot if exposed. Our house was a tooth, and I could see it so clearly in these waxy pages spread open in front of me. And suddenly the spine of the book felt like a cold snake between my thighs. So I closed it up promptly and shoved it deep into The Cube.
That same day we found a large metal ring covered in mink pelts, the ring feeding through the holes where their eyes used to be. They smelled cold, dust and leather and something else. Julia pulled the ring up around her leg like a garter belt, then stood up and turned from side to side to make the pelts spin and slap against her.
Then she held her leg out in fro
nt of my face.
“Pull it off,” she said.
So I did.
Then I put it on my own leg and Julia pulled it off. She dragged her fingers along my legs and made me jump, startled by the feeling. Her fingers were colder than usual.
By the time Thursday rolled around the entire cube was colonized, each room decorated to our liking, piles of stuff to look through. We even had a mystery on our hands that took the form of a shoebox full of wallets containing drivers’ licenses from all over the country, expiry dates going back to the early 1980s.
We were perusing the last receipts from each wallet, trying to find a clue as to why they were here in the basement. It seemed as though the last things these men purchased were flowers and boxes of chocolate, typical gifts of endearment for people that you don’t know very well.
Julia was beginning to formulate a theory most sinister when we heard Phyllis calling to us from outside The Cube. She would stick her head into the first tunnel and speak so that by the time her voice reached us it had accumulated a ghostly quality, heard perfectly and not at all. The Mother and Father were here to pick us up and it was time to say goodbye. We decided to leave the wallets, just in case they might incriminate us for some crime in the future. All the bridles had been found but one: the regular bridle still remained lost in The Cube. One final bridle that I would find years and years later, wedged between two rocks in The Woods.
Julia began to gather our jammed and crumby toast plates and with her back turned I reached into the spot where I’d shoved the anatomy book and pulled it out and slid it secretly into my red backpack, concealing the corners with rolled-up socks. I did this all very quickly, so quickly that Julia didn’t even notice.
I started making my way through the first tunnel off The Café, wanting to leave Julia before she could tell I had a secret. But I must have dislodged something when I removed the book, some very important structural item, because suddenly The Café began to shake and rumble like a space pod about to launch. Julia, her hands full of plates, whipped around and looked at me, terrified, before The Café collapsed and crushed her completely.
The Lonely Page 7
