The Lonely

by Ainslie Hogarth

  He also had a couple of old clarinets. He used to play in the band when he was in high school and sometimes I would sit at the top of the basement steps and listen to him playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” or some other high school band favorite. I pictured him with his full band-member uniform on: big black boots and a tasseled gold-trimmed hat on top of his head. But I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t wearing that. What was more likely was that he was sitting up straight in the well-traveled chair, his bare feet flat on the floor and facing outward. There would be an open window and an ashtray next to it, a cigarette burning down, snuggled into one of the specifically designed grooves along the side. Its smoke blew straight out the window, as though it had been directed beforehand as to where it should make its exit. He might be wearing his robe and he was definitely squishing one eye shut.

  I sat at the top of the stairs a lot, trying to hear what he could possibly be doing down there all the time. I wanted to learn something, anything, about him. Maybe even find something I could use to interest him. He might be breeding iguanas down there. If he was, then I could become an expert on crickets and help him find the best possible type of cricket to use to keep his iguanas strong and healthy. Then, when he sold them for lots of money, he would have me to thank.

  Now we had Mr. Ungula. A mutual friend, a personality we could both comment on, share and criticize and laugh about. But we didn’t.

  Sometimes The Mother would kneel down next to me and ruffle my hair with her hand, letting it linger for a few seconds on my warm skull, then use it stand up straight again and walk away. A few times she brought me snacks while I sat there. Quiet things like pudding or buttered white bread with sugar and cinnamon on top. Often I would occupy myself with Tetris, putting it on mute so that I could still hear. Only she could know how terrible it was to want someone like him.

  The Father makes a decent amount of money at a regular type of job at which he stays late, sometimes all night, and he has a secretary who’s always writing notes for him on slips of blue paper. The last time I was at his office I had to hoist myself up onto my tiptoes and make whites of my knuckles to look over the desk at what she was doing: filling out a list of appointments for June 16th. Her nails were long and scratched softly against the paper as she wrote in black ink. She was the kind of person who had a hard time looking people in the eyes.

  I’d once heard him say that he was just about the most bored person who’d ever lived.

  It used to be that we ate dinner together. And The Parents would fight and we’d go on drives to get ice cream or feed the ducks in the park and he’d hold my hand crossing streets and she would wear short skirts and pretty blouses and he would pinch the skin above her wrist. But something happened. And they stopped talking to one another and I ended up on The Mother’s side, somehow, while she unfolded slowly, her insides on the outside so she was nothing but a big fat sore: tender and infected and wincing and painful to be near. But she loved everyone so much that she couldn’t be alone. And he hated us so much that he couldn’t be near us at all. And I hated him for it, so I wanted to bother him. But actually I didn’t. I didn’t hate him at all. I loved him so much that I hated myself for it. And it was all her fault for making me this way.

  The upstairs of our house was even more strange; urgent with the smell of overripe pears all soft and grainy and sopping. About to turn, anxious to be eaten. Wetness settled in corners, curdled the floorboards and boiled the walls so bubbles expanded beneath the dark green paper, all transformed by the greasy heat of The Mother’s hot Sunday tubs.

  But the upstairs didn’t belong to The Mother the way that the downstairs belonged to The Father. It wasn’t shut off, or made exclusively hers somehow. There was just something very distinctly Mother about it. Something private and close to her. The steam of her broth lingering in the air, a visible vapor, like a cartoon smell with a mind of its own, the taste of bath oils and talc all through your mouth and lungs.

  We were all welcome up there, stairs wide open and inviting, a small, bare window spilling sunlight over the foyer. Dust emblazoned and twinkling in the rays. Almost too welcoming. Like the witch’s cottage in the woods. It might have been this dangerous openness that warped the paper on the walls.

  And though it was too welcome to us, it wasn’t at all welcome to outsiders. Whenever she found out that someone had been to our house, Phyllis usually, Amelia once, or from time to time a friend of The Father’s, she always asked, with air trapped, suspended in her lungs like a note, “They didn’t go upstairs, did they?” to which I would respond, “No, of course not.” And then she would exhale, a shallow, nervous cloud of cracked breath. A hand on her chest, relief on her face. No one could be allowed to see. Our house wasn’t like the houses in sitcoms.

  One afternoon The Mother’s voice sliced into the middle floor. Our most presentable pulp.

  “Easter!”

  “Eaaaaaaster!”

  “EAAAAAAAAASTER!

  “WHAT?” I screamed in reply.

  “Can you come upstairs please?”

  I was often angry on Sunday afternoons because it meant that I’d lost bathroom access. Or rather, she’d deprived me of it. Either way, I couldn’t satisfy my mirror habit. The Mother would be in there all night long, soaking up the heat from her bathwater until it was ice cold and then starting over again. Hours.

  Often she called me up to sit with her, which was a horrible tease. I indulged in the thought of pulling her out of the tub, throwing her slippery into the hallway, and locking the door. Then I’d wrap my head in a towel and scream until I puked. I hated not having that mirror all day. To press my face against and stare at.

  In a massive angry motion I grabbed my bandana from the couch cushion next to me, where I had been sitting playing Tetris for the past couple of hours. I wrapped it around my face and tied it tight in the back. This should be fine.

  The air became warmer as I grumbled up our wooden stairs, which made sounds to echo my exasperation. I opened the bathroom door, bringing a puff of cooler hallway air in with me.

  “Easter?” she said.

  The shower curtain was closed around the tub; she rattled it open with the backside of her hand and her eyes flicked to my bandana. A barely audible twitch in her throat shivered its way to her bottom lip, betraying that she wanted to say something about it, some criticism or concern. But she didn’t. Instead, she smiled.

  I could tell she’d been playing her favorite tub game: sitting as quiet and still as a mouse, trying her best to trick the water into thinking that no one was in it. She would sit with her head against the side of the tub, oddly cocked forward so that she could look down at the rest of her body, which was skewed and made to look strange by the movement of the water. She would look down at herself with her lips pursed, held in deep concentration, staring accusingly at the minute ripples which betrayed that there was a living, moving body in there.

  The Mother was a beautiful lady, that’s for sure. But she didn’t share any of those genes with me. She used up all the good stuff on Julia and left me with the scraps. I was forced to pick through the bargain bin of man genes that The Father had to offer. Not that he was disgusting, really, but in girl form he was kind of disgusting. Which I’m proof of.

  The Mother had a precious smile. And a lovely nose, sort of squared-off at the end like a tiny toy dice. Her face was a series of crisp lines, sharp cheeks and a high forehead. She was meticulous about her skin and it showed, glowing in a moonlit sort of way. Her hair was blonde and straight as an arrow. Her body long and graceful even when she was laden with groceries. Most of the time I was excessively, psychotically jealous of her. But The Mother loved me so shamelessly much that I felt guilty about it. It was like being jealous of your dog because he gets to sleep in.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “Just playing Tet
ris.”

  “Well, do you think you could play it up here for a while?”

  I transformed the action of putting down the toilet seat lid and sitting on it into a kind of irritated affirmative. What I really wanted to do was implode. Be sucked up in a hiccup of smoke, any trace of me inhaled by the muggy bathroom air. Not that I necessarily wanted to die, just to stop existing in that exact second.

  She looked at me and smiled, her face sticky. I pulled the bandana off my face.

  “Just so you know, I’m not responding to yelling anymore,” I said.

  Her smile disappeared.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it’s not civilized, Mom. Normal people don’t scream at each other like that.”

  “But you screamed at me. You screamed, ‘What?’”

  “That’s because it’s how I was raised. I can’t help it.”

  “Oh Easter, that doesn’t seem fair.”

  I shrugged.

  With my elbows on my knees, I resumed the game of Tetris I’d started on the couch. I wondered if she’d noticed the Game Boy. The Mother has this every-other-year-or-so habit of suddenly being overwhelmed by the clutter in our house. She’d get this horribly suffocated look on her face and begin indiscriminately strong-arming piles of books and papers and toys into hearty black garbage bags. Julia and I would have to chase after her and pull from her claws those things that absolutely had to stay. The Game Boy just barely made it a couple of years ago.

  Those things that linger too long unused, that find themselves settling into the cracks and corners of a house so familiar to its inhabitants as to become invisible, neglected toys and fridge magnets and oversized paper clips and cereal box treasures, all suddenly stood out to The Mother like blood stains. She hated the sight of things not touched, wearing the dusty evidence of their loneliness like a coat. She said she couldn’t relax, but I think it was more than that. The clutter made her scared. Uncomfortable. Like it might not realize that she wasn’t part of it and make her invisible too.

  I must have seemed all settled in because The Mother exhaled in a satisfied way. I guess she’d decided to take a little break from concentrating on her dead body. I suppose everyone needs a break. She had me now, at least for a short while, and you could tell she was happy to have another body in the room.

  “Easter’s Feature. If you ever open up a restaurant or a movie theater or something, that’s what it should be called. Easter’s Feature. I could see myself going there, or at least telling people that that’s where I was going.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind, I guess.”

  “You’ll forget it. But I’ll remind you if you ever call me up and tell me that you’re opening a family type restaurant, or a drive-in. Now that’s a good idea: a drive-in. I think it’s just about time for a drive-in theater to do well again. It’s in the vault, kiddo! I’ve got a vault full of good ideas for you.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Not a problem, Easter. You’re lucky because you’ve got two people working on your life. Me and you. A lot of people only have themselves to figure things out.”

  I tried to remember the last time she’d actually helped me out, wanted in fact to ask her when she felt as though she’d been helpful to me in any way, but I held back because I knew she was being sincere. I’d let her have this moment to relax. It wouldn’t last long. I could already feel a fight foaming in my guts. Hateful things that I wanted to unleash on her at some point today. There was something about her, maybe that wide openness which curdled the walls, that made it so easy to be mean to her. That made me want to hurt her so badly.

  “How was school last week?”

  Her eyes were closed and she had stretched her neck along the height of the tub. The plastic, nautically themed shower curtain was pulled open and tied to the wall with a hearty white rope.

  “It sucked.”

  “That’s a disgusting word, Easter. Sucked. Sucked what, that’s what I want to know. There is something very nasty implied there.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Anyway, I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”

  Her breathing was evening out, becoming shallower. She was preparing herself for another bout of stillness.

  I returned once again to my Tetris, feeling irritated that all she could come up with to ask me was, “How was school?” I replaced the bandana over my face and jabbed the buttons on the Game Boy a little harder than I should have. It was an antique, after all.

  “And how are you feeling lately?” she asked.

  She’d closed her eyes and stretched up her neck like an ostrich.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how are you feeling? Is there anything you want to talk to me about? Any questions you might have of someone as old and wise as I am?”

  She smiled very gently, careful not to move her neck too much. She always asked me these very annoying and obvious questions. She told me that talk shows told her it was her job to ask me questions like that. I told her I was special and that those questions didn’t apply to me and she laughed and said, “I know Easter.” What I didn’t add was that it was Julia who made me special. That I had Julia working with me, not The Mother. And in fact I didn’t want The Mother’s help anyway.

  “Mothers should really stop doing whatever talk shows tell them to do. Because apparently talk shows don’t realize how annoying it makes them.”

  My words, all muffled and warm beneath the bandana, smelled sour and angry. The Mother scowled.

  “When are you going to throw out that disgusting bandana?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “You shouldn’t have it on your face like that, Easter. It will give you pimples.”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  I agreed in a way that made her think I wasn’t listening, but I was listening, and later I’d scrub my face raw.

  She lay still, with the shower curtain wide open. After a little while the scowl melted from her face and her breathing became perfectly even. The water moved very slightly back and forth, back and forth, coming slowly to almost a complete stop. The Mother hadn’t moved a muscle, even her chest, in minutes, and the only thing bringing life to the water at all was the vibration of her blood pulsing through her heart and body. I looked at her hands, open at her sides, empty, aware, not laden with the heavy nothingness which fills dead or sleeping hands.

  I didn’t want her to fall asleep in there. At least, that’s why I told myself I knocked over The Father’s electric shaver so it smashed onto the floor in an explosion of jagged bits of plastic and exposed metal. Really, I wanted to see her cry. The Mother screeched and leapt so high in the air that I thought she might cling to the ceiling like a cat. Her eyes wide open, arms hooked over the lip of the tub; water splashed all over the floor.

  “Easter, what the hell was that?”

  She was breathing heavily and staring me in the eyes, my face telling her nothing beneath the bandana. I pointed at the shaver in pieces on the floor.

  The Mother’s jaw dropped, her cheeks grew red.

  “Oh Easter, no. No, no, no. Not his razor, honey.”

  Her face was the kind that moved to tears slowly, as though a key was turning somewhere in her brain, tightening, grinding.

  And I knew that it would make her cry. I knew that she would dread having to give The Father the bad news. I knew that it would reinforce all of the terrible things he already thought about me. Which were all true. And I felt awful about it. But I wasn’t going to say that. Easter, you’re an evil, fat little bitch.

  She rolled back over into the tub. Little waves were moving the water back and forth with her under them, grabbing at her plump cords of wet hair dangling just above the surface.

  The water now knew there was something very much alive in it.

  That night Julia and I lay in bed, staring out the
window. The sky looked like stretched fabric. So dark as to actually be there. I thought of the time she was crushed in The Cube. That I’d been the one who crushed her, really, when I pulled the book from the wall of stuff. I thought about Lev coming by again yesterday, and how he’d brought his cigarettes and we smoked them in the parking lot and I flicked a bug off his shoulder. The first time I’d touched him. And he was real, I could tell. Not something crawled out of the ground, despite the bugs and the filmy eyes. He asked me again if I’d ever had a boyfriend. And for the first time ever, I told the truth and said “No.” And he smiled and said that he’d never had a girlfriend either. I wanted to say that I wasn’t surprised because he was a gooey-looking, thin-skinned subterranean humanoid, but I didn’t. He’d been coming by a lot since I first took down his particulars, but Julia didn’t know that.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Julia said.

  “No you don’t.”

  “I do. You’re thinking you want to kill me.”

  “Julia, I am not.”

  “You are, Easter. How come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you want me around anymore? Don’t you love me?”

  “Julia, I love you more than anything. You’re my best and only friend. You know that.”

  “Then why won’t you let me come to work with you? And why are you thinking about killing me?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve gotta get un-lonely, Julia. Un-lonely for real. You make me do and think awful things sometimes. You wanted to cut up Amelia. I knew you meant it, Julia. And you can make me do things. And—”

  “You’re a psycho.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

  “No, not like that, Easter. You don’t want to be special anymore. That’s psycho. We could have a different life from everyone else.”