“Uh, well,” said Lyndi.
She knew how it was. Constant crying, state of shock, bags under the eyes, everything in disarray, feeling like you want to die, Valium. She was there to help her limp through the hard times. Lyndi could count on her.
Not knowing what else to do, Lyndi invited her in.
Her aunt entered, peeling off her gloves in the process, leaving her bags on the porch for Lyndi to lug in. She stood looking around the living room apprehensively.
“How delightfully quaint,” she suggested.
Then she plunged through the entryway and fully into the house, up the stairs straight to Lyndi’s parents’ old room, pushing her parents’ clothes all to one side of the closet and beginning, once Lyndi had brought up the suitcases, to unload her own things. She rearranged the drawers too, putting Lyndi’s father’s socks and underwear into the same drawer, then wedging all the rest of his things into her mother’s armoire. When Lyndi protested:
“My dear, you’ll have to face it sometime, you know. They’re dead. They’re not coming back.”
It was not that Lyndi wasn’t facing it, it was not that she didn’t know they were dead. It was the lack of respect her aunt was showing, the way she dumped her parents’ toothbrushes into the trash and emptied her parents’ half-full bottle of shampoo into the toilet so that when the toilet was flushed it foamed up and over the rim. She rearranged all the drawers in the kitchen—it’ll be good for you, dear, you’ve got to let go—so they matched her drawers in her house in California. But Lyndi had kept the drawers as they were, not as an homage to her parents but because she had grown up with them in a particular order. She could find things.
There her aunt was, peignoir-wrapped and sitting across the coffee table, or the postum table as she chose to call it in deference to Mormonism: avoid the very appearance of evil, her aunt would claim, strong drinks should be banned even from the names of household furnishings. They were having a chat, something her aunt liked to schedule from time to time and which Lyndi suffered through. The chats involved her aunt reciting gossip about people Lyndi had never met and whose names she could barely keep straight. There was Rod Fuller, a used car salesman who secretly drank. There was her aunt’s next-door neighbor, accused of acting rudely, Lyndi’s aunt carefully ticking off grievances against her: coming to the door with her hair in curlers, playing the radio in her garden, hanging her bras on the outside line to dry. There was Mrs. Miller down the street who had been married five times despite what her aunt called “a colostomy situation,” and who was now sleeping with a boy half her age.
“I’ve got homework to do,” said Lyndi. “May I be excused?”
“Homework, Hell,” said her aunt. “You’re in mourning.”
She had been doing fine, Lyndi told herself. It wasn’t easy, hadn’t been, she loved her parents, she loved her sister, it had been difficult to lose them, but she had been wading through. Wading through her aunt, though, struck her as a more difficult proposition, one she shouldn’t have to face.
“Half her age,” her aunt was saying, “if even that. Some folk find a colostomy bag exciting, if you get my meaning, but I’m not one of those people. Still, it takes all kinds and thank God for that, else all the weirdos and sickos and nuts would be after you and me both.”
Her aunt reached down to the coffee table, took a saltine from its plastic sleeve then commented on doing so, as if this act might be of interest to Lyndi, might even aid in her healing. She pronounced the last syllable like tines of a fork.
“You’ve got to go on,” she said, munching as if tranquilized. “You can’t let yourself fade from existence.”
Whatever, thought Lyndi.
Her aunt tugged at the hem of her dress.
“I’ve been married twice,” she said. “Actually three times, but the second one didn’t count because there was hardly any sex to speak of. So I know a lot about wanting to die.”
Then her aunt’s eyes were tearing up, the last corner of the saltine slipping from her hand. Lyndi looked around for Kleenex. There wasn’t any. Still crying, her aunt reached into the plastic sleeve for another saltine.
“Together we’ll make it through,” her aunt managed through tears, spitting cracker dust. “You and me against the world, kiddo.”
Dear God, thought Lyndi, kill me now.
It was hard to stay clear of her aunt’s chats, but once her aunt was chatted out, Lyndi was able to slip away. She would go to the library to read and do homework. She continued doing her homework though certain of her professors had suggested she’d done well enough so far; they were willing to just give her the grade she deserved to that point in the class, give her time to recover. This was recovering, she felt, doing things she would do if her parents were still alive, though her aunt claimed a better term for it was denial.
Whatever it was, she was doing it. Up at seven, showered, made up, making her own breakfast. Her aunt stumbled in to eat with her, rubbing her eyes, falling back on a terry-cloth robe once her peignoir was dirty. A glass of orange juice, and then her aunt would quiz her about the coming day. If she didn’t have her schedule sufficiently full, that was grounds for scheduling a chat; if it was too full her aunt would rattle on about denial, threaten to set up an appointment with a counselor.
“Not a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist”—her aunt didn’t believe in pseudo-scientific hoodoo—“but a good plain honest-to-goodness counselor, grain-fed on common sense.”
“Grain-fed?” Lyndi asked.
“Don’t you get smart with me, Missy,” her aunt said, wagging her finger. “Turn me against you and who else you got in the world?”
No one, it was true, but she wasn’t convinced that no one was a step down. Her aunt seemed more of a contradiction each day, an amalgam of many different anxieties in collision. Not a remarkable woman exactly, but a woman pieced together with more than a few visible seams. These seams all a result of coming to terms and not fading out of existence.
She placed egg, scrambled, on a plate.
Lyndi juggled the chats and the threats about counselors, walking a line that would allow her a minimum of the one and nothing more than the threat of the other. Her aunt seemed to regard Lyndi as an indentured servant, leaving all the meals to her niece, though Lyndi’s experience with cooking was minimal. The grocery shopping, too, was left to Lyndi and that, along with school and cooking and laundry, kept her busy enough that she was barely lying when she told her aunt she had a full schedule. The one task Aunt Debby reserved for herself was to give Lyndi what she called a complete fashion makeover.“A new you for a new life,” her aunt kept saying. As it turned out, Lyndi was an autumn and had been dressing all wrong for her coloration. Her whole wardrobe was disastrous, would have to be abandoned in favor of muted tones. Her makeup too wasn’t quite right; surely an Avon Lady lived in the neighborhood? You know, Avon Calling? When Lyndi claimed she didn’t know, her aunt shook her head. “Not to speak ill of the dead,” she claimed, “but your mother didn’t teach you a damn thing about what it takes to be a woman.”
There were trips to the mall, her aunt lamenting over Utah’s lack of high-end boutiques. Clothing at Nordstrom and JCPenney, most of which made Lyndi look like she was eighteen going on forty-five. Professional outfits straight out of realty ads, business skirts that buzzed against her thighs when she walked, pastel twin sets, sweater dresses with fringed sleeve ends. Her aunt was there, beside her, each time holding up something new and even less to her taste. Lyndi was sent, laden down, to the fitting room, made to come out wearing each outfit, twirl, slide on to the next. Then on to the Brass Plum, more wearing, more whirling, bags slowly accumulating with clothing that had nothing to do with her and that, if she wore them at all, would feel imposed, borrowed. Ahead: a makeup counter garrisoned with stick-thin women plastered with artificial faces, accessories clicking against each other like mandibles. Two sturdy women wandering the lingerie section, a man watching them surreptitiously from across
the aisle. A seeing-eye dog guiding a woman who was pale-eyed but who had none of the mannerisms of the blind. Lyndi’s hand grabbed, tugged onto a counter, palm up. Escalator halfway across the store, three children running up and down, treads clanking. A faint sensation at the extreme of her arm. “Tell me what you think,” a voice saying, but was it to her? An array of bottles, all hues. Light fixtures, circular, long broken lines. Aisles below, between sections and centers, jagged and strung about. “Do try, dear”—her aunt’s voice, bored—“do make an effort.” Near the escalator two children tipped over a mannequin, its grinning head rolling off. Watching her own hand coming off the counter and toward her face, as if propelled.
“Darling, whatever can be the matter? You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine,” she said, hearing her voice resound from a distance. She could not bring anything quite into attention, her eyes flicking rapidly from one thing to the next. The perfume was too strong on her wrist. “I need air,” she claimed.
“Shall I go with you, dear?” her aunt asked.
There were bags at her feet and she pushed through them, stumbled down the first aisle she came to. She half-turned and looked back, saw her aunt behind her smiling oddly, her mouth moving too slowly. The film of her life was running down. The aisle swerved abruptly out from under her feet and she found herself plunging through racks of clothing, hangers jangling, glints of light everywhere. An aisle again and she followed it around a curve to find herself at a perfume counter, staring at somebody’s aunt.
“I thought you needed air,” the aunt said.
“I,” she said, then clamped her mouth shut and pushed off again, going the other way this time and keeping to one path until it led her round and about and out of the store into the mall proper. A larger interior courtyard with hundreds of people milling about, a fountain, kiosks strung in all directions with sunglasses and blown-glass animals and temple replicas, strange solitary plants scattered and dying in awkward pots, arranged without pattern across a faux-marble floor. Paths to either side, no sign of air. Somebody beside her, asking was she all right, but she could not see him precisely and then she was off and away again, sloping right. Shops everywhere, neon glaring, another fountain, a food court packed with tables and chairs, crowded with people and bags and babies and food. Through them and out the other side, past rows of identical shops, face wavering in the glassed fronts, and then, at last, the end of the path, a set of doors leading outside.
Open air, light. It was dizzying. Standing on the edge of the sidewalk, under an awning, the parking lot slick with rain now past, its smell still strong in the air. Walking, starting up one row, cutting between cars, cutting back again until she was near a car that looked like hers but wasn’t. She looked around for her car, couldn’t see it. She felt her pocket for the keys, realized her aunt still had them in her purse.
She found a lamppost, sat on its base with her back against it, and waited. At first she covered her face with her hands and then, when her breathing steadied, she uncovered her face and stood again to look for the car.
And then suddenly she saw, passing by her in slow procession, her family: her father, dull-eyed and pale, his keys out and held awkwardly, his skin hanging open and gaping at his throat. He stopped and turned his eyes upon her briefly, then continued on. Her sister, nervous and birdlike, then her mother, slightly behind, pale. Behind them, gaze averted from her, was Rudd, holding his throat, limping.
She waited for a glimpse of the killer. When he didn’t come, she stood to look for them, saw them climb into a car that looked like hers but wasn’t. It pulled away. Yet when she went to where the car had been, it was still there. She stood staring at it. When she tried the door, it was locked.
She walked back toward the mall, where a taxi was parked just outside the nearest entrance. She climbed in.
“I need to go home,” she said.
“Where’s home?” the driver asked.
She started to offer her address, trailed off. “The hospital,” she said. “I want to go to the hospital.”
“Anything you say,” he said, looking at her in the rearview mirror. He started the cab, drove.
3
Her aunt returned to California, pronouncing Lyndi hopelessly self-absorbed and wading neck-deep in denial, threatening to come back at a moment’s notice if Lyndi should prove healable after all. Lyndi, bored and alone, started going regularly to the hospital and sitting beside the comatose Rudd. His throat was unpacked, the stitching removed to reveal a dribbled red scar slowly fading pale. She would sit with her hands in her lap, near the head of the bed. Once she pulled his eyelids open with her fingers. She saw a thin slit of blue under one lid, what was visible of a rolled-up eye. Under the other lid she only saw white.
They fed him from tubes. As the days went by he grew thinner, his cheekbones becoming sharply defined, the skin settling on his face. Sometimes she helped the nurse move him and change the sheets, saw the sores beginning along his legs and back. Sometimes too she would speak to him, ask how, or if, he had known her mother and father and sister. What had it looked like, she asked him, a man coming at him, covered in her parents’ blood, brandishing a knife or razor or sharpened rock or shard of glass? She imagined four men, one for each possible weapon, all of their faces obscured. Or perhaps the killer was a fifth man, with a different weapon, with no face at all. They all crowded in her head, jostling. Or perhaps the killer had approached from behind, she said, partly to Rudd, and he had had no warning—a sharp, hot pain at his throat and a rush of blood down his shirt.
He had survived, she told herself, and for that reason would have to stand in for father and mother and sister all at once. They were connected through violence.
Sometimes, if she was there still by early evening, Rudd’s mother would come. Once Lyndi tried to introduce herself, but his mother merely regarded her oddly, half-smiled, and said nothing. Are you deaf? Lyndi almost said. Instead, she got up and left, and from then on departed quickly whenever his mother arrived, going to get some dinner and then coming back once she was certain his mother would be gone.
In her head and sometimes out loud she had conversations with him. What did he like to do, what TV shows had he grown up watching, who were his favorite movie stars? “No,” she said, when he did not answer, “really? Me too.” How was high school life? Was he sorry to miss graduation? “No friends? No girlfriend? No one to visit you? What? A nice looking boy like you?” The policeman at the door sometimes stared in, watching her. Sometimes she drew the curtain around herself and Rudd, but still felt the policeman staring at her feet and ankles. She started sitting on the edge of the bed, which was high enough to keep her feet above the bottom of the curtain. She told Rudd about her aunt, about her parents and sister. She talked until the policeman came in at the end of the night to usher her out—“my shift’s over; nothing personal, but visiting hours are long gone”—locking the room door and going home himself. “My family didn’t even like the mountains,” she would tell Rudd the next day when she came back. “They hadn’t been on a picnic in years. You wake up one morning,” she said. “You decide to go to the mountains, on a whim, and you’re killed. What about you?” she asked. “Was it a whim for you as well? I can say anything to you,” she said. “Something utterly random. Pigskin,” she said. “You’re the only boy in the whole world I’ve ever been able to say pigskin to,” she said, and then wondered why she had said that, of all things. She traced the pink scar across his throat with her finger, pigskin, let her hand glide along his jaw and up to cup his ear. She had already spoken hours to him, why should she not touch him? She ran her fingers into his hair. What do you care about? she wondered. What do you believe in? Perhaps, she thought, he is not so different from me.
A nurse came in and undid Rudd’s restraints. She rolled his body to one side of the bed, the tube that ran down his throat tightening against his neck.
“Is that safe?” asked Lyndi, then held him steady as the nurse
undid the sheets on the free side of the bed, pushed them over to bunch under Rudd’s back. They rolled him back to the other side of the bed, over the hill of crumpled sheets, repeated the process to get the new sheets on.
“He’s your boyfriend?” the nurse asked.
“No,” she said. “Not exactly.”
“A friend, then,” the nurse said.
“No,” Lyndi said. “Not quite that either, to be honest.”
The nurse, smoothing the sheets, nodded slightly. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “what exactly is he?”
What indeed? Lyndi wondered. She hardly knew him, knew only what she had read about him in the papers, most of which was contradictory. What was he to her? He had survived, he had distinguished himself in that way, and for that reason would have to stand in for her family. But in the light of the nurse’s interest such reasoning seemed suspect. He had no obligation to her, didn’t even know her, had never seen her. Her interest, she tried to tell herself, was only a function of finding who her family’s killer was, of avenging them. He was useful to her. He could give her closure.
But she wanted more than that, she knew, realized that even though she did not know Rudd at all she felt closer to him than anyone else alive or dead. The next time a nurse asks if he’s my boyfriend, she promised herself, I’ll say yes.
She came one day, after algebra, and found the policeman gone. The door was open, the curtain drawn back. Rudd, hands still restrained, was lying as he always had.
She closed the curtain, pulled shut the door, went to the nurse’s station.
“The guard’s gone,” she said to a ponderous pale man with frizzy blond hair, obviously dyed.
“Excuse me?”
“The guard,” she said. “The policeman.”
The nurse pursed his lips. “What room, please.”
The Open Curtain Page 11
