Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin

  “I see,” Penny said, nodding. She was pinching the back of her knee, hard, trying to stay awake, but drifting back and forth between boredom and pain. She wished Tom were here; he was good at making excuses, polite yet direct, whereas Penny could go on nodding and smiling until she exploded into an obvious yawn. She wanted to ask Irene about her daughter, why she'd lied that Christine was in Boston, but couldn't see how to bring it up, especially given Irene's barrage of storytelling.

  Two weeks passed. At intervals irregular enough that Penny could never plan to evade them, Irene continued to stop by, always bearing a gift: banana bread or blueberry muffins or a potted plant or brochures from the local chamber of commerce with pictures and maps of area attractions. Sometimes she brought Henry, at whom she would occasionally shout—“Henry thinks so, too, don't you, Henry?”—to include him in the conversation. He nodded and smiled and then fell asleep with a nonchalance Penny could only envy. Irene's sense of the boundaries between landlady and tenant was eccentric. She was always telling Penny what a joy it was to have her and Tom renting the house, making it impossible for Penny to ask her to leave. She was too sweet, too lonely, too short and smiling, too stubbornly pleasant. In the evenings, hearing herself complain to Tom, Penny felt like a small, bad person. Once she'd aired them, her complaints dissolved so entirely that she couldn't even understand why she'd even been annoyed, until the next time.

  One hazy September day, Irene chatted through an entire afternoon. Penny had never met anyone whose conversation so clearly defined chatting. She tilted her gray head to one side, clucked her tongue, and chatted about how the doctor wanted to change Henry's blood pressure medication even though she couldn't see what the problem was with the current drugs. After she mused on this for a solid half hour she tilted her head to the other side and took up the subject of her own social security benefits—“It's all a mystery,” she said, “to your average taxpayer like myself”—and various problems she'd encountered in her dealings with the government, the intransigence of bureaucrats, the crucial need for young people like Penny to begin planning immediately for the long-term future. There were always special circumstances, she said, that you hadn't planned for but happened anyway, whether you wanted them to or not, so it was important to be prepared.

  Listening, Penny felt dread drizzling over her like rain. Was this what it meant to get old: your worldview blinkered, sexless, narrowed to administrative concerns? Taxes, medications, schedules and routines, a set of forms and formulae for the numbing worries that eased your transition to the final numbness of death? She thought about Tom, about the few gray hairs she'd noticed behind his ears, and she thought about the two of them in bed, her fingers moving through his hair in rhythm with their other movements. On the one hand was her vision of the two of them having children and growing old together; on the other hand, the idea that they might grow old like Irene and Henry made her want to scream. She found herself trapped between these competing feelings, each equally powerful and unexpected, with no sense of which one would win out in the end. It made her feel desperate and reckless. In her mind, overcome by the contest, she stood up and screamed the word “Motherfucker!” in Irene's face. She literally had to prevent herself physically—with more pinching—from screaming this in Irene's sweet, beaming, elderly face. Not because Irene was a motherfucker but because she so patently was not, because she was so permanently and rigorously removed from the world of motherfuckers. Penny trembled with the desire to do it. Then she really stood up.

  “Thank you for the delicious bread, Irene,” she said.

  Irene—interrupted mid-tip: “You can use a vinegar solution for that”—rearranged her spotted face from shocked to compliant. “Of course, dear,” she said. “Don't let me get in your way.”

  The books lined the upstairs shelves, and the wedding crystal glinted in the mahogany cabinet that was itself a wedding gift from Tom's aunt in California. She'd unpacked enough of the living room that she could take a break there and read a book without feeling distracted by the disarray. She was working on the bedrooms when she happened to glance outside and saw Guy standing in the yard, fiddling with his watch and checking the time as if he had somewhere more important to go. Which, it soon became clear, he didn't. He wasn't even tangentially involved in anything important. It was ten-thirty in the morning, and he was drunk, or had been drinking, anyway.

  “There's some guy standing on my lawn,” she said to him.

  He smiled in broad appreciation of this remark. His face had been lightly touched by the sun. His T-shirt today was a sallow, mustardy yellow, and his gut made the fabric blouse above the hips. “I was going to break into the shed,” he said, “but it's daytime.”

  “Why do you need to get in there so badly, anyway?”

  “There are some items in there I need to collect,” he said.

  “I think maybe you should talk to Irene about that.”

  “That old bag?” He was weaving ever so slightly, like a tall building in a strong wind, and it fascinated her to hear him talk about Irene that way. “She hates me,” he went on, “with a passion.”

  “Why?” she said, although it was not hard to imagine why someone like Irene would not be overly fond of someone like Guy. He was definitely a person who had at least a passing acquaintance with the world of motherfuckers. The treacly smell of hard liquor wafted from him like perfume.

  “Christine,” he said, “my love and life.”

  “You weren't the yard man for her, either, then.”

  “I don't know shit about yards.”

  Penny gestured to the plastic chairs on the front porch. “Would you like to sit down?” she said.

  Guy and Christine first met in high school. She was sweet and shy, wholesome and blond. She wore glasses and wanted to be a veterinarian. Guy was a loser—a kid who hung around the parking lot and smoked a lot of cigarettes all day long. “She was a square peg, and I couldn't even find a peg.” They both came home again after college. Christine didn't have the drive for veterinary school and settled for work as a kennel-tech instead. Guy got a job at a construction company and started saving money; he didn't know just what it was for, but liked the thought of it growing safely in his account. One winter afternoon, driving, he saw a tabby cat lying by the side of the road. Hit by a car, it was still alive, dragging itself, inch by painful inch, to the curb. He stopped the pickup and walked over. Its hind legs were red mush, but when he picked the cat up it clawed and bit him, then lay still. He put it in his lap and drove to the animal hospital, the cat's blood soaking his pants. Christine was on duty at the reception desk when he came in, and if the fluorescent hospital lights bleached her pale skin to white, then sight of the cat paled it even further.

  She was almost intolerably shy—he remembered this from high school—as she took his name, mumbling, and led him into an examination room. He laid the cat down on the counter. It was panting shallowly in pain, blood oozing from its open mouth. Christine came back with a veterinarian, a bossy, red-haired woman who said the cat would have to be put down. She asked if it was his, he shook his head, and she told him to leave the room, then she and Christine together administered the shot that ended the cat's life.

  He sat in the truck in the parking lot, waiting for her to get off work. When she saw him there, she turned around and went back inside. After a couple of minutes she came out again, her breath streaming in the cold, and got in on the passenger side. She had antibiotic lotion and bandages and cleaned his arm where he'd been scratched, and when she was done he drove her to the pub and they drank for an hour or so without hardly even speaking. Then he took her home.

  After this evening he would stop several times a week to wait in the parking lot for her shift to end. They would go to the pub, or down to the river to watch the water, and in this quiet, unhurried way, over one long winter, they fell in love.

  “Her hair,” he said to Penny, “was so blond and straight it looked like thread against the pillow.”


  According to Guy, Irene never thought he was good enough for her daughter (Henry's opinions on the matter could not be discerned, as he was even then fading out of the hearing world). But Christine didn't care. She'd inherited the red farmhouse from her grandmother, and she asked him to move in with her. They planned a future: a garden in the back, a dog and cats, children to run through the house.

  “This house,” he said, looking at Penny. She nodded.

  “Then, the accident. I was driving. I was not drunk—current appearances to the contrary. Irene blamed me. Maybe she was right to. I don't fucking know at this point, to be completely honest with you. All I know is that Christine got thrown from the car, and by the time I woke up she was gone.”

  Penny said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  “While I was still in the hospital, Irene packed up the entire house. She moved my stuff into an apartment. Christine's things,” he said, “she put in the shed.” Exhausted by the effort of talking, he leaned back in the lawn chair, still looking at her. His eyes were bloodshot. In the distance, the shrill wheeze of a lawnmower cut the air.

  Penny stood up. “Come on,” she said. With the key to the shed in her pocket, she led him down the grassy slope to the door and unlocked it. Windowless, musty, and hot, the inside of the shed was as orderly as you would expect from someone like Irene. Cardboard boxes, all the same size, sat stacked evenly against the walls. A few pieces of furniture—a loveseat, a desk, a standing lamp—were shrouded in plastic, looking ghostly in the light. Guy moved around, touching each item with the tips of his stubby fingers. This close to him, the smell of alcohol was even stronger, and it was mixed with an acrid, unhealthy odor of sweat.

  He pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his back pocket and began opening the boxes, setting each down on the floor before moving on, pulling some things out—a sweater, a doll, a book— and then racing on to the next, like a frenzied addict facing an unprecedented supply of his chosen drug. He heaved boxes aside and started in on new ones. At last he found one that attracted his full attention. First he pulled out a set of large books wrapped, like everything else, in plastic, then sat down in the midst of his mess and began turning the pages of one of them. It was a photo album. Penny came up behind him and looked over his shoulder, but for all he cared she may as well not have been there.

  A blond girl graduating from high school in a light blue gown.

  As he turned the pages she changed her hair and her glasses; had a vacation on a beach somewhere; went off to college and hugged a dog—her own or someone else's, Penny didn't know—and celebrated a birthday with three friends and a blazing cake.

  Guy touched this last photo with his right hand. “Will wonders never cease,” he said.

  Penny wanted to ask what he meant. That a girl's mother would pack away her entire life and leave it to molder in a shed? That the girl looked the same as he remembered her, or completely different? That he still loved her, was that the wonder? She could not ask. There was a scuffling behind her, and she turned—expecting a mouse—and saw Irene in the doorway of the shed, sunlight flooding in around her, looking tiny and betrayed. As her gaze moved from Penny to Guy, it took on the unmistakable shimmer of hatred. It looked exactly as if she were thinking the word motherfucker. He glanced at her and turned back to the album without reaction. It was clear to Penny, as he touched the photograph, that his dishevelment, his smell of liquor and sweat, his too-big watch reminding him he had nowhere to go, all these things were the consequence of the girl's death and not, in any respect, the cause of it. And it was equally clear that Irene's primness, her financial and domestic concerns, even her shouting at her husband, were also consequences of this death, instruments she used to wall off the tragedy of her life— her loss, and her cruelty—and keep it hidden.

  “Murderer,” Irene said. “Murderer.” She enunciated each syllable distinctly, evenly, and for the first time Penny saw her looking down instead of up.

  “Guy,” Penny said.

  “She'll have to drag me out of here,” he said matter-of-factly, “and I'd like to see her try.”

  After Irene turned on the heel of her orthopedic shoes and left, she disappeared from Penny's life for a long time, so completely as to seem almost imaginary. Penny sent the rent checks by mail and received no confirmation in return. She didn't see Guy, either. The shed was relocked, minus a few boxes, and she and Tom were busy. They were wrapped up in their life together, now finally and fully unpacked, and went to faculty dinners and took walks in the woods. On a quiet Wednesday morning Penny stood in the bathroom with the results of the pregnancy test in her hand, knowing that everything was about to change. When Tom came home that night she was sitting on the couch, where she'd sat, unmoving, for two hours.

  He put his leather bag down immediately, sat down beside her, and took her hand. “What happened?” he said.

  “It's now,” she said. “We'll be parents now.”

  He leaned over and kissed her forehead solemnly, then leaned down and kissed her stomach, too. After that, his smile broke open and stayed for days, and it was the confident smile she'd counted on. At various times in the past she'd been annoyed by his self-assurance, his ability to picture himself a success. When he'd asked her to marry him, she'd seen in his eyes that he'd never doubted she would say yes. He'd also known that he could ask Penny to follow him to this town; that she would understand the importance of his job. She'd felt he could use a little more self-doubt, a little humility, but now she needed his strength. And he was as sure that they would succeed as parents as he was about everything else. In his certainty about the future she was able to locate a confidence of her own, and to forget the radically conflicting desires that had been tearing at her. All desire to scream the word “Motherfucker!” in somebody's face evaporated. She knew they would have the life she'd constructed in her mind, in this house or another one like it, a house with a family.

  One day, returning to the farmhouse from a doctor's appointment with an ultrasound picture in her purse, she walked through the front door and felt two disparate emotions tumble strongly, suddenly, over her: happiness and guilt. The happiness was for her and Tom and the baby, the guilt was for Christine and Guy. She owned this life and they did not. She must be grateful, she knew, for the circumstances that had allowed her to imagine a future and watch it come true. Something had been given to her and Tom that had been taken from them, and there was no reason behind this gift. It was all mystery.

  Leaves dropped from trees; cold winds blew. Dark came early, and she and Tom often fell asleep on the couch by the fireplace, his hand on her lap. Some days she was tired and sick, but more often, as time went on, they lay in bed in the morning and Tom would run his hands over her body, its new contours; at these times she felt a strong, greedy pleasure that obliterated all other thoughts from her mind.

  But it was a small town. Once, on a freezing, hail-pelted January day, she ran into Guy. She was dropping off some dry cleaning, and the shop doubled as a laundromat. Guy was sitting on an orange vinyl chair, bent over a copy of Ladies' Home Journal. Above his head, laundry she assumed was his squirmed in a foamy circle. She laid her dry cleaning on the counter and watched him across the room; he didn't look up. At a certain point he put his finger on a page of the magazine—much as he'd touched the photos in the album that day—to examine a picture or help himself read, she wasn't sure which. His pickup truck was parked outside. For a moment she could picture him and Christine exactly: driving around town in that faded green truck, stopping for a drink at the pub, maybe heading down to the river to hang out and watch the river and kiss, pretending they were still teenagers. His hands on her neck, her shoulders, her waist; his lips on hers; her glasses fogging, her fine hair tangling as they moved.

  Penny left before he knew she was there.

  A few months afterwards she saw Irene, too, at the grocery store. Their carts almost collided in the cereal aisle. It was early spring but still cold, and Irene w
as wearing a long padded jacket and white boots; her eyes widened as she took in the sight of Penny's pregnant belly, bulging through her unbuttoned coat. When Penny said her name, the landlady looked up at her.

  “When are you due, dear?” she said.

  “At the end of May.”

  “Are you getting lots of rest? Rest is important, you know.”

  “I'm doing fine,” Penny said. She put a hand on her stomach, a gesture that had grown quickly habitual with her, a means of instant comfort. Watching tension twist the muscles of Irene's face, she knew what must be going through her mind: all the advice, the recommendations and recipes, suggested names, tips on feeding and baby furniture, the knowledge of years. The older woman's face was almost pulsing with the longing to share it. Penny steeled herself to receive the onslaught, balancing her weight on both feet, knowing she might be standing there in the aisle for a while. But Irene just stood there, smiling thinly, fixed to the linoleum.

  “How's Henry?” Penny finally asked.

  “He's been fitted for a new aid,” Irene said. “But he won't hardly wear it. He says he's gotten used to the silence. He says he likes the peace and quiet. Well, good luck, dear.” And with a pivot of her grocery cart she turned around and walked away. Penny was left looking after her, then gazing up at the rows of cereals and granola bars. She'd forgotten what she came into this section to buy.

  After this encounter, Irene did not call or visit. She must have thought about it, though. In fact she must've thought about it a great deal. Because in June, after the baby was born, she could not stay away. Penny was sitting by the window, enjoying the first warm breeze of summer while she nursed the baby, when a car pulled up in the driveway. She heard a door slam shut, and saw Irene coming up the driveway, carrying one of her baked goods, the sun reflecting brilliantly off the silver foil. Her shiny face was set in determination as she came to confront the unceasing wonders, the mysteries of sex and circumstance, that had brought her to the house again.