Heating & Cooling

by Beth Ann Fennelly

  I’d have lost anyway—did I mention he’d brought his own cue?—but now I had an excuse. Imagine telling someone that right before they break.

  WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHEN SOMEONE USES “PUSSY” AS A SYNONYM FOR “WEAK”

  At the deepest part of the deepest part, I rocked shut like a stone. I’d climbed as far inside me as I could. Everything else had fallen away. Midwife, husband, bedroom, world: quaint concepts. My eyes were clamshells. My ears were clapped shut by the palms of the dead. My throat was stoppered with bees. I was the fox caught in the trap, and I was the trap. Chewing off a leg would have been easier than what I now required of myself. I understood I was alone in it. I understood I would come back from there with the baby, or I wouldn’t come back at all. I was beyond the ministrations of loved ones. I was beyond the grasp of men. Even their prayers couldn’t penetrate me. The pain was such that I made peace with that. I did not fear death. Fear was an emotion, and pain had scalded away all emotion. I chose. In order to come back with the baby, I had to tear it out at the root. Understand, I did this without the aid of my hands.

  LOW-BUDGET CAR DEALERSHIP COMMERCIAL

  My high school theater troupe was offered the gig, fifty dollars each to play volleyball on the beach by Lake Michigan, with a giant pickup truck in the background.

  It’s shameful but I’ve always loved an audience. With the camera rolling I entered a never-before-and-never-again zone of skill and sass. At one point the camera guy ran to my side, whipping his black power cord behind him like a snake, and shot a close-up of my supplicant wrists perfectly bumping a ball to the center.

  Months later I saw the commercial. After the shot of my wrists, the camera cut to the triumphant, lightly misted face of a model with absolutely zero teenage acne.

  NINE MONTHS IN MADISON

  1.Snow churned and swirled, that December day in 1967, when the two-engine plane containing Otis Redding and his band, the Bar-Kays, took off from Cleveland. Just a few miles short of the Madison, Wisconsin airport, the plane crashed into Lake Monona. Three days prior, he’d recorded “Dock of the Bay.” It would become history’s first number one posthumous hit.

  2.Otis was twenty-six, two years younger than I was when I lived in Madison on a poetry fellowship. Sometimes I’d run around the lake and fret. Twenty-eight already! Where was my “Dock of the Bay”?

  3.I was running around Monona (thirteen miles) and later Lake Mendota (seventeen miles) because I was marathon training. Now I’m glad that I didn’t merely jog on a treadmill or endlessly loop a track, because one summer, years later, I returned, stood on the goose-shit-slick grass and took it all in, the bandages of fog snagged on the cattails, the buoys, the crew team unzipping the water, the Lego-sized houses on the far shore, and thought: I ran around this motherfucker. With my legs.

  4.I was lucky to have the fellowship, but each day felt dogged by anxiety. What was to become of me? I’d walk to the university to teach, down State Street, past the Capitol. Sometimes, to warm up, I’d loiter in the Lands’ End outlet, which sold catalog returns. Even discounted, the robes were more than I could pay. I pawed through the rack of even cheaper robes which bore botched monograms—would I rather sip my coffee as CLN or PL or MMB?—when there it was, my Christmas miracle, BAF, I shit you not.

  5.When Otis recorded “Dock of the Bay,” he and his cowriter, Steve Cropper, hadn’t finished the last verse, so Otis whistled, ad-lib. They planned to get back into the studio after the concert in Madison. You can almost see them at Stax, shutting down the four-track, the console, killing the lights, We’ll finish ’er up on Monday. Later, when Cropper, mourning, produced the song, he kept the whistling. Now it’s the most famous whistled passage in any song.

  6.Each day my fellowship was a day shorter, and I still had no “Dock of the Bay.” I’d applied to somewhere between sixteen and seventeen thousand bazillion teaching jobs. I, who hated the cold, had further materials requested from a school called Bemidji State. According to the website, the northern Minnesota town, right below Canada, was nicknamed Brrr-midji.

  7.What the marathon permitted was exquisitely calibrated pain.

  8.The robe wasn’t the only lucky thing. There was also the desk. In my cheap apartment, I’d rigged two milk crates to write on. Now, running around Mendota, I found a desk that someone had dragged to the curb. But there was nothing wrong with it: large, solid, a beautiful blond wood, with “Folsom Brothers, 1947” branded beneath. Back in my apartment, it pressed the floor away from my face with four strong legs. Some days it felt like the only substantial thing in my life.

  9.On lake runs, I wore Band-Aids on my frigid nipples or they’d bleed from chafing. But other blood stopped altogether: no period for months. Also, my big toenails popped off. I painted ovals of polish where my nails should’ve been.

  10.The crash also killed Otis’s pilot, his manager, and four out of five Bar-Kays. Plenty of others have drowned in that cold cold lake. Quite a few ice fishermen, for instance. The one yelling over his shoulder for his friends to stay back, testing the paunchy ice with an insulated boot. The one still gripping the handles of his snowmobile. Twin brothers in the red pickup, serenaded by the Eagles all the way to the bottom. Maurice Field, University of Wisconsin class of ’21. His Model T, furry with algae but in photos appearing perfectly drivable, rests only thirty feet down. The 1928 alumni newsletter states that Field drowned “trying to save a young girl in the backseat.” States that Field’s body was recovered and buried in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.

  11.I wanted to keep it forever, the desk, but at the year’s end, I had to give it up. I dragged it to the curb and labeled it, “Free to good home.” I walked slowly back inside and felt a pang—so many hours writing in my robe at that desk!—and lifted the curtain to say goodbye. It was already gone.

  12.The newsletter didn’t mention what became of the girl.

  13.The only band member to survive the crash was the trumpeter. He was the one who played taps.

  PROOF

  My mother seined the waters of our childhoods. She gathered everything into the nets of her fingers: schoolwork, artwork, mementos. My mother did not recycle. Nor did she dispose. She was indisposed to it. Gathered now, it seems a kind of evidence, but of what? Consider the card she saved from the nurse who helped deliver me: Second daughter! Looks like you’ll have to wait for next time to get that son! Consider my mother pasting that into my baby book. It would seem to imply I’ve been a disappointment since the moment I was born.

  THE NEIGHBOR, THE CHICKENS, AND THE FLAMES

  This tale begins with the chickens. Last April, my neighbor Lauren mail-ordered them, in the form of baby chicks. Those cool spring nights, she corralled them in her bathtub. When they grew, she moved them to her fenced-in backyard, to roam by day and, by night, to cozy up in the coop she’d built off the back of her house.

  These weren’t typical barnyard cluckers. Lauren had six exotic breeds, all hens: a brown pair with puffs of feathers at their ankles, like Clydesdales; a black pair with overlapping, iridescent, fish-scale feathers; a white pair, elongated like they’d been crossed with seagulls; etc. They were as impressive as Lauren herself. She’s British, her regal accent cutting through our Mississippi drawls. She’s a river erosion scientist, and when she isn’t saving our rivers, she’s transforming her modest backyard (the same dimensions as ours) into an Eden with white icicle radishes, red samurai carrots, beanstalks Jack would envy. Also, she powerlifts. When you look at her, you think “specimen” or “anatomical model.” You think rheumatology students with clipboards should trail her, muttering trapezius and rectus femoris as she lumberjacks around in sports bra and running shorts.

  Lauren’s children, too, are lean, strong, and sun-brown. They garden beside her all weekend. My ­children—soft, pale, unathletic nongardeners—play with Lauren’s children for short intervals, before needing a rest. My children are fond of Lauren, but, quick learners, they say, “No, thanks, I’m not hungry” when offered a
popsicle. Like my store-bought popsicles, hers are red and green. Unlike my popsicles, her reds and greens derive from beets and kale. My children are also wise to Lauren’s Easter Bunny. Last year, at her party, when the kids began shucking open the plastic eggs, they found either cut up strawberries or Frosted Mini-Wheats. Out of earshot of the children, she told me that she’d have preferred unfrosted Mini-Wheats, but, well, blimey, it was Easter, after all.

  So that’s Lauren. And those are her chickens, dining on heirloom-radish-top-compost, powerlaying matching pairs of pastel eggs.

  Yet they preferred us. Mornings, almost as soon as she’d bicycled off to work, her chickens would fly—though fly hardly conveys their fluttery, cumbersome heave—to the top of the chain-link. After perching, they’d swoop down to peck through our unmown grass for bugs. They’d chill with us most of the day, but by the time Lauren biked home, they’d be back in their coop. As if they, too, were a little scared of Lauren.

  One hen seemed particularly fond of our company. She had rust-colored feathers, quite long, ornamental-seeming. I liked to watch her quick-stepping in her feathery bolero, occasionally pausing as if to model for a weathervane. Once she flew to the platform of my kids’ swing set and peered at the slide. Instantly I knew I’d pay a goodly sum to watch her tuck her legs and careen down. I swear to God, she considered it. But my kids spooked her by running over.

  She seemed to be preparing for defection. Working at my desk one morning, I heard loud clucking. Glad for the distraction, I went outside and found, snug against our house, a bald patch where she’d breasted some woodchips away and left, like a calling card, a feather.

  The next day, I was sorta working when her clucking got louder, then louder yet. She was summoning me. When I got outside, she was waddling away, and in her roost lay a large sand-colored egg. I picked it up, palming its warmth.

  I intended to return it to Lauren’s coop, I’m certain. Yet somehow, I found myself carrying it to our kitchen, where I washed it, fried it, and fed it to my family while they watched cartoons. You wouldn’t think one-fifth of an egg would satisfy, but you’ve never tasted an egg curated by Lauren. The yolk was the hue of a marigold.

  That hen became our pet. The kids fed her Cheetos. We even competed to name her. Beyoncé is not what I’d have chosen, but we’d agreed before setting out Monopoly that the winner got naming rights, and Thomas had a hotel on Park Place.

  Each day, for three days, Beyoncé—like a hen from a fairy tale—laid me a golden egg. Each day, for three days, I—like the lazy commoner, the covetous neighbor—snuck it, fried it, then spooned it into the mouths of my loved ones. Did I realize I was stealing? Yes, of course, I realized I was stealing. Lauren had earned these eggs; she’d nursed balls of fluff, she’d bought their feed, she’d built the coop—the Taj Majal of coops—with her own tools and triceps, fortifying it to keep out raccoons and whatnot. She never guessed her neighbor was the proverbial fox in the henhouse.

  Then she did guess. We share a babysitter, so maybe the sitter ratted me out after seeing me with, well, egg on my face. Probably Lauren was already suspicious, each afternoon counting eggs in clipped consonants, nestling them in the Noah’s Ark of recycled cardboard, two by two, by two, by . . . one. Anyway, she never confronted me. She simply took matters into her own hands. She clipped the hens’ wings. She wouldn’t want them flying into the street, she said, and getting flattened by a car.

  What happened was way worse than a car. Last January, coldest night of the year, long after I’d gone to bed, I woke to my husband slamming open our bedroom door, yelling, “The neighbor’s house is on fire!” He grabbed his phone, began mashing buttons. “I’m calling 911!” I jumped up and ran outside. Over Lauren’s house, the night sky slashed with roaring orange, flames taller than her chimney. Yet her house was dark with sleep. I pounded and kicked at her door, and when she yanked it open, I yelled about the fire. She whirled and sprinted out the back. So I went in and pulled her sleeping children from their beds. They were frightened, and began crying, but I carried them to the front yard, all of us in our pajamas, and hugged them to comfort and to warm.

  Soon, more neighbors, and the siren, and the firefighters jumping down as the truck pulled to the hydrant. I left Lauren’s kids with my husband and ran around back, found her hosing down her house, her face glazed with tears which flickered orange in the flames. She’d kept the blaze from spreading. Now she let the firemen take over. We stood and watched them work.

  “I’m so stupid,” she said, after several minutes. “I didn’t want the chickens to freeze. I gave them a heat lamp. It must have caught the newspapers on fire.” She surveyed the coop’s cinders, her brick wall singed and smoking. “In another few seconds, our roof would have caught fire. The whole house would have gone up.”

  You might be thinking that it’s a pretty big coincidence that Lauren robs us of Beyoncé and then her chickens get flame-broiled. But it wasn’t like that. The two hens that escaped the blaze died from smoke. The whole neighborhood felt subdued, smelled charred. And the fire haunted me. For weeks, my nightmares crackled red with flames, flames, flames.

  The day after the fire, Lauren came by. She wanted to thank us, she said, for saving their lives. She gave us a gift card to the sweet shop. I’m guessing it was her first time there (“What is this thing called ‘ice cream,’ Mommy?”). She’d already ordered more chicks, though they wouldn’t ship until April.

  Grown now, they’re great producers, at least that’s what she says. But I wouldn’t know. I don’t even meet their eyes when they stand at the fence and cluck. I’ve been burned once. I know how that fairy tale ends.

  MARRIED LOVE, III

  As we lower onto the December-cold pleather seats of the minivan, we knock hands: both of us reaching to turn on the other’s seat warmer first.

  TWO PHONE CONVERSATIONS

  —I can’t find my wine glass. My favorite wine glass.

  —The one with the glass beads glued on?

  —That’s the one. I think the maid took it.

  —The maid didn’t take it.

  —Yes, she did. The Polish maid. She took it.

  —The maid didn’t take the wine glass, Mom. If she was going to steal, she’d steal something valuable. Jewelry or money. But she’s not stealing. And she certainly didn’t take your wine glass. You’ve misplaced it. It’ll turn up.

  —I found my wine glass.

  —Yeah? Where?

  —In the cabinet. She put it back.

  ANOTHER REASON I LOVE MY MOTHER

  At the baby shower, she rejects the pink M&Ms, because pink M&Ms are “unnatural.”

  GALORE

  She was an antique carpet merchant: another occupation I’d never considered. Maybe sixty, she wore a sleek silver bob and an embroidered cloak. We’d begun chatting as we tried to hail taxis. Christ, where were they? Icy wind zephyred off Lake Michigan and fingered between the buttons of my thin coat, wrung my neck like a muffler.

  “There are some very pretty mid-range carpets,” she said, in response to something I’d said, eyes on Columbus for a streak of yellow.

  The street cleared for a moment, the cars across the intersection drawn short at the light, impatient horses at the gate.

  “Mid-range?” I asked.

  “Fifteen to thirty.”

  I’d gone to the museum benefit with my friend because a guy we knew from catering could sneak us through the loading dock. Free drinks galore, she’d promised he’d promised. My red dress was a tight little number, but I was young enough that it didn’t look cheap. Wavering candlelight, unwavering regard of husbands over their wives’ shoulders as I’d slow-danced with my friend, my beautiful Latina friend. In the middle of the party she’d gone to the bathroom and hadn’t reappeared. I waited, watched a caterer skirt the dance floor, stumble on a chair leg. I knew they’d probably done whippets off the whipped cream canisters.

  Finally she turned up, giggling, trailing a man in a tux. She wanted to l
eave with him, I could tell, but felt bad that I’d have to take the el alone in my tipsy high heels. When he handed me a twenty for a cab, she practically sprinted to the coat check.

  Now I just wanted to be home. The taxi line at the museum had been so long I thought I’d have better luck around the block. The carpet merchant, I assumed, had assumed the same.

  A taxi appeared and I stepped forward, raising my palm, but it was occupied so I dodged the arc of slush. The carpet merchant hadn’t moved. She must have checked the “for hire” light. I always forgot to do that.

  Another pause in traffic. By Christ, it was cold. I’d lost my gloves so I shrugged my hands up in my sleeves. I probably looked like an amputee. Also, my borrowed stilettos hurt like a mother. Another full taxi streaked by, another, and then traffic cleared again. I crossed my arms, buried my fists in my armpits. “Tell me something about carpets.”

  She lifted a shoulder. “The best way to clean a fine carpet. Is simple, really. You carry it outside, and lay it top side down, on a fresh fallen snow.” I looked at her, hoping she wasn’t putting me on. For the first time I caught the spice of an accent, Eastern European maybe. “You leave it there for a day and a night and a day, and when you peel it back, the carpet is clean, clean, and the snow beneath dark as coal.”

  I could picture it all, a clearing between the snow-fretted pines, the servants squatting to tuck the knotted fringe, then crimping the edge, rolling it in, scrolling and scrolling, hand over hand, feet crunching through the shadow the carpet had shed. How they stand and count to three before heaving the felled tree to their shoulders, staggering briefly, then trudging back to the villa where, from an upper window, the countess observes.