Pictures of Houses with Water Damage: Stories

by Hemmingson, Michael

  “Of course.”

  Audience applause.

  “He was monogo—monog—mono with me!” said Nemo, shaking her fist at the TV.

  Kate grinned.

  He's mine, she thought, all mine.

  “Do tell,” said the host.

  Ripped van Winkle looked into the camera. “Katey, my love, I know you’re watching, and I know you know how I feel about you. And our baby. I was lost out to sea, trapped in the Antarctic of my soul, and through you, I found my true self; I found my way home.” He took out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “When I was at Station 33, all those free hours, I read many books. One was the journal of Ernest Shackleton, South Pole explorer renown. He wrote this that I found profound: ‘No person who has not spent a period of his life in those stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole will understand fully what trees and flowers, sun-flecked turf, and running streams mean to the soul of man.’”

  Audience applause.

  “Beautiful,” said the host.

  “Bravo,” said Kate, wiping a tear from her eye.

  “Bullshit!” cried Nemo, standing up. “Look at you!” she said to Kate. “And look at me! It makes no sense! I simply do not understand!” she said.

  You never will, Kate thought.

  “Did you put a curse on him? Did he get brain damage down there? None of this makes a damn lick of sense! The world has gone mad! I have entered the Twilight Zone of my heart!”

  Nemo screamed and pulled at her hair. One of the extensions came out. He screamed some more

  “Sssshhh,” Kate said, wanting to hear her love on

  the TV.

  “Oh the hell with this,” said Nemo; “you two have fun playing house!”

  Nemo turned, stomped away in her high heels, and left the house. The tires of her car screeched outside, rubber that was pained and confused.

  Ripped van Wrinkle was still looking at the camera, peering into the living and into her being.

  “Kate, if you’re out there watching.”

  She went to the TV and touched it with her hand. “Yes, beloved.”

  He smiled.

  She smiled.

  Nothing needed be said after that.

  Oh yes—and they lived happily ever after, etc.

  1.Dr. Bernard Stonehouse first visited Antarctica in 1946 as a Royal Navy pilot for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (later the British Antarctic Survey). He studied penguins and seals on the Antarctic Peninsula, and king penguins on South Georgia. At the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, Mass., he edited the journal, Polar Record.

  What Happened?

  They are fighting. The couple upstairs: fighting, again, like they often do. They call each other names. They hit the walls. Their little baby cries and cries. Suddenly, things are quiet, too quiet. I read a magazine for an hour. I take a trash bag out and see her—the woman upstairs, mid-20s—sitting on the stairs, her pink t-shirt and arms and hands and face covered in blood. I know it is not her blood.

  “What happened?”

  “What?” she says.

  “Are you okay?”

  “What?”

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “What?”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Um,” she says, “huh?”

  “What happened?”

  “What?”

  “Forget it,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Have a nice day.”

  “You too,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I said…”

  “Forget it,” I say.

  “What?” she says.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  “What?”

  “Okay.”

  “All right.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  And that, as they say in the vernacular, was the end of that.

  Solid Memories Have the Life-Span of Tulips and Sunflowers

  I thought I saw a glowing disk in the sky, driving home. Actually I did, I saw it. I stopped the car and got out and looked at it. Other people also stopped their cars. Then it took off into the sky.

  I drove home, a bit numb; not because of the sighting, but the memory it brought back.

  My girlfriend, Anne, was home. She didn’t look happy. I told her about the disk.

  “I met someone,” she said.

  “I see,” I said.

  “I could be in love,” she said.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “We discussed this before, right? Am I right?” she said. “We discussed this. If either of us ever had an affair with someone else, we’d talk about it. I should’ve mentioned it sooner, I know. I didn’t think it meant anything at first. Now … it’s becoming something.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “You don’t know him. His name is Bill.”

  “Bill,” I said. “A solid name. I said I saw something.”

  “You’re not bothered?”

  “Only by my memories,” I said. “Sometimes I wonder how accurate they are.”

  She had an incredulous look on her face. “I could be leaving you!”

  “I know.”

  “David,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “If we’d gotten married,” she said, and said no more.

  I’d skipped my ten-year high school reunion. My folks had passed along the information, the invitation; the request for a small bio from me. I wrote back David Hawthorne is alive and well.

  I couldn’t go; I hadn’t become everything I’d set out to be. In fact, I’d become nothing. I was unemployed, my acting career was going nowhere: three failed sitcoms, a lot of bad plays, never the roles I really wanted, the roles I knew I could do. I didn’t want to see people I once knew; I didn’t want to see my former best friend, Mark, or my former girlfriend, Ginny, or the girl I really loved, Helen. If she was still on this planet.

  I was trying to remember the senior prom, and what really happened. It hadn’t actually come to mind until I saw the UFO; you see, the night of the prom I had seen a UFO—I think—and I think I saw Helen board the ship, telling me her real place was with her people.

  Or was this a dream? Prom night, thirteen years ago, and I can only recall patches—the rented tux, Ginny’s dress, the limo, the hillside party, the drinking, Helen’s green dress, Ginny’s pregnant belly.

  I’ve had dreams, over the years, that I was having sex with Helen. I’ve had dreams that I was reunited with Ginny and we were having sex as well. Sometimes I think about these dreams and wonder if they were not dreams, if they were really misplaced moments in my life that I’ve conveniently discarded.

  I went to see Craig, a psychotherapist friend of mine.

  “Hypnotize you?” Craig said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I want you to do.”

  “I’m not sure it’d be a good idea,” he said.

  “This is just between you and me. I’m not a patient. I’m your friend.”

  “That’s the problem. You’ll go from being my friend to being my patient.”

  “I have to know,” I said.

  “If you saw a UFO thirteen years ago?”

  “I saw one three nights ago,” I said. “I may have seen one thirteen years ago.”

  “Did you see aliens?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “I have a number of patients who claim to be abductees,” Craig said.

  “I wasn’t abducted,” I said. “And what do you think about these other patients of yours? Are they crazy?”

  “Something is going on,” Craig said. “Okay, look. We’ll set a time for next week. Until then, I want you to concentrate on your memories. We may not have to use hypnosis. If we do, we do. But for the next week, just think back. Focus on details. Try to map out the night in question, anything and everything you can recall. From the moment you woke up, until the moment the night ended.”

  I tried, a
nd I was afraid. I was alone, trying, and I was afraid. I’d come home and Anne wouldn’t be there. Some nights she’d be home, some she wouldn’t. She was with that person she talked about. Bill—the solid name. What had I done wrong?—all my life, what had I done wrong? This is why I didn’t like to dwell on the past: I always rediscovered my blunders and over-analyzed them.

  I was going with Ginny my last two years in high school. I had chased her; she wasn’t interested at first, then something happened, then we were boyfriend and girlfriend. I didn’t know what I was doing; she didn’t know what she was doing. We were making it up as we went along. We were kids. We were in love. (I think we were in love.) Yes, we were in love, as kids like us could be in love; but I wanted more. I didn’t know what “more” was. There was something missing. I think she felt it.

  We lost our virginity together.

  She had a horrible mother, a tyrant of a mother, like one of those wicked witch anti-mothers from children’s fantasies; the bad antagonist you must do battle with and overcome. Ginny and I certainly did battle with her. Her mother, who we called The Monster, hated me. She thought I was a bad choice of a boyfriend, and maybe I was; my parents were no one special, I didn’t have a job or a car, and my only interest in the future was acting. I wanted to be an actor.

  The Monster often hit Ginny in the face. “Hit her back,” I suggested once.

  “She would murder me,” Ginny said.

  “Like kill you?”

  “Once, there was this news item on TV,” Ginny said. “About a woman who stabbed her son to death. The Monster said, ‘I bet he drove her to it.’”

  Two or three times a week, The Monster would ask questions like: “Did you fuck him yet?” and “Are you pregnant yet?”

  Ginny answered in the negative; sex was our secret.

  Sex was a secret in high school, as well as fuel for gossip—who’s having sex with who, which teachers have had sex with their students, what wild thing happened one drunken night. The first item of gossip I’d heard about Helen was that she was drinking tequila in a car with two boys (this was at the movies) and she performed various oral sexual acts with both of them. When I looked at Helen, I couldn’t believe this tale of debauched drunkenness; Helen was quiet and demure, with pale skin and pale blonde hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She dressed in skirt suits and fine dresses, and held herself—when she sat, when she walked—like royalty.

  It was halfway through senior year that I was convinced I was in love with Helen. And I didn’t even really know her! She sat near me in my Spanish and Political History classes, and sometimes we talked (her soft, bird-like voice). I started to have dreams about her, which translated into daytime fantasies. The worst of it all was that I spent my time, then, with Ginny, when I really wished to be with Helen. And then Ginny got pregnant, and I really wanted to be with Helen; I escaped into my fantasies with Helen.

  Perhaps I just wanted to escape.

  When Ginny told me she knew she was pregnant, I went, “Oh.” Oh—oh I don’t know. I didn’t want to think about it. We didn’t talk about it. We went on like it wasn’t true. But it was there—her sickness, her body changes. She was six weeks gone. I was hoping it would go away. I thought about Helen a lot more; I created worlds of the future for us. She came to me in my dreams. She said, in my dreams, Helen said, “Open your eyes, David.” “They’re open,” I replied, “they are!”

  I didn’t want to go to the senior prom, which to me was scenes of horror and destruction in that movie, Carrie. You know, Sissy Spacek, the meek telekinetic, thought she was the sad little girl whose dreams had all come true, only to find out it was all a practical joke. So what does she do? She kills everyone. (I had a fantasy of Ginny getting those powers and doing to The Monster what Carrie did to her evil mother.)

  Ginny wanted to go to the prom, and my mother wanted us to go. My mother took me to be fitted for a tux rental; I thought I looked rather well in it, standing before the mirror, turning sideways, then spinning forward, my hand out like a gun, the James Bond theme running through my mind, the way impressionable young men dream of being heroes. My mother even rented a dress for Ginny, because The Monster certainly wasn’t going to lift a finger for this event. I don’t know what my mother was thinking, about Ginny and me. Did she think we were going to get married? What would my mother say if she knew Ginny was pregnant? The whole time I kept thinking these things—especially when she took me to get my finger fitted for a class ring. What would my mother say if she knew she were going to be a grandmother?

  Perhaps she would’ve been happy.

  I wasn’t happy.

  I was scared as all hell.

  Anne came home.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said. She wouldn’t look at me.

  “Home tonight?” I asked.

  “You want dinner?” she said. “I was thinking of making dinner.”

  I joined her in the kitchen. She was starting to make spaghetti.

  “I want a quiet night,” she said. Something was wrong, I could tell by her voice.,

  “What?”

  “Don’t ask me about Bill.”

  “I won’t. I wasn’t going to.”

  “Oh,” she said. “How’ve you been?”

  “Did you go to your senior prom?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Prom,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said, thinking. “Of course.” She stirred the noodles.

  “Who’d you go with?”

  “Hank,” she said.

  “Another solid name,” I said.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Meat sauce tonight?”

  “All we have is marinara.”

  “Did you love Hank?” I asked.

  “No, no,” she said. “He was a jock. Football. Someone to go with. He asked me, I said yes. He was a good lay, too. Now that I think about it. A good hard fuck.”

  “So, wait,” Anne said as we ate dinner, “you were with Ginny, but you didn’t want to be with Ginny.”

  “No.”

  “You wanted this Helen.”

  “I think so.”

  “You said you loved Ginny.”

  “I loved her,” I said. “Yes, I loved her very much.”

  “But you loved Helen.”

  “No.”

  “You were afraid,” Anne said. “Ginny was knocked up, you couldn’t deal with it, so you had eyes on Helen.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “Geez,” Anne said, drinking red wine.

  “It was a shitty thing.”

  “You were a kid.”

  “It was still shitty.”

  “What happened to Ginny?” Anne asked.

  “She’s married, as far as I know,” I said. “Two kids. She became a born again Christian.”

  “I hate it when that happens. What about Helen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Wait. Ginny has two kids?”

  “Last I heard.”

  “One isn’t yours?”

  “No,” I said. I realized that for all the time Anne and I had lived together, she didn’t know me. I didn’t know her. We’d never really talked about our pasts, like this.

  “What happened to your kid? She was pregnant.”

  “Well,” I said, “we didn’t have it.”

  “Just relax,” Craig said.

  “I’m relaxed,” I said. I was sitting in a deep, plush, comfortable armchair in his office. He stared at me with his abysmal blue eyes.

  “Just relax,” he said, “and listen to my voice.”

  I don’t know how he did it—I don’t want to know—but I went under. It’s a funny thing. First you think: I’m not really hypnotized, I’m aware of everything. Then you realize something is different: you have total access to the past, and it’s happening right before you. You’re going through the motions like you’re back there again; you’re that age. You can feel it; you can smell it.

&nbs
p; “Senior prom, thirteen years ago,” Craig said.

  “Ginny and I are in the living room of my parents’ house,” I said. “My mother is excited. She’s taking all kinds of pictures. I’m in my James Bond penguin suit and Ginny is in her dress. I keep looking at her stomach, I keep thinking about the life that’s growing in there. I’m afraid. How the hell will I tell them? Will they understand? They’ll understand, of course; it happens. But I’ll have responsibilities. I’m not ready for this. I don’t want this.”

  “Focus on Ginny’s face.”

  “She’s glowing. She’s smiling.”

  “What happens next?”

  “While no one’s looking, my father shakes my hand and says, ‘Have fun, kid.’ He has slipped a one hundred dollar bill into my hand. I’m surprised. He was against renting the limo. He’s been drinking, I see. I want to be drunk. I’ll get drunk later on, I know.”

  “Let’s move to the prom itself.”

  A hotel ballroom near the beach. It was a nice feeling, arriving in a limo, when few couples here had a limo. There was food, and Ginny and I had food. There was dancing, and Ginny and I danced. There was a photographer taking photos of all the couples, and Ginny and I stood in the line and we got our photos taken: she sitting in a chair, me standing beside her, one arm around her shoulder, one hand taking her hand.

  I saw Helen. She’d come stag, apparently, with several other girls. How could she not have a date? I wondered. She was exquisite in her green dress, black gloves that came to her elbows. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, and her blonde hair was bunched up, strands falling over her forehead and eyes. I think Ginny saw me looking at her—she cleared her throat. I forced myself not to look at Helen.

  Something felt empty, in me. Something felt wrong. I was in the wrong universe. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to happen, I wasn’t intended to graduate high school and go straight into fatherhood, maybe even marriage.

  I looked at Ginny, and for a brief moment, I felt resentment.