“That’s all right,” the guest speaker says. “I’m on vacation. Why don’t you be my guide, show me what you do for fun?”
You smile in a measured way so that he not recognize how easily charmed you are. For fun you order Szechuan beef sometimes. You have accepted without complaint or question, though you hadn’t realized you accepted it until this moment, the absence of men attempting to charm you. But why? you wonder now. You feel anxious, like a guest arriving at a fabulous party several hours late—what will be left for you? “There’s a bar I once went to over on the Panhandle,” you tell him. This happens to be the truth. It is the only excursion out of town you have taken since your mother died—you met with your mother’s lawyer, signed papers, turned down his offer of dinner, and drank one gin and tonic alone at this bar. “They were so drunk and Southern there I could barely understand a word they said,” you say. “This man with a sunken-in face came up to me and said something that sounded like ‘Flip knot’ over and over. Then he went back to his stool and said, ‘If you see something you want, go for it,’ until the barmaid yelled at him and kicked him out the door.”
“Perfect,” the guest speaker says. “Love it.”
A moment later, he says, “So what do you think of human blood and suffering? Ever seen any?”
“What?” you say.
“Do you ever feel removed from it?” he says. “You know, being alive and all?”
You glance at him, but he looks like anyone, like everyone—there is no way of knowing a madman by his appearance alone. In his last book, titled Uh-Oh, he wrote about some children in Brazil who found glowing radioactive powder in a public dump and smeared it all over their faces, playing clowns and phantoms. How angry is he, exactly? you wonder. You think of the suspicious individuals making inquiries, you picture the guest speaker’s graceful angry hands around your throat. Traffic veers off an exit behind you as you speed recklessly ahead; the deaf couple—if they even were deaf—have vanished. Humdrum moments from your recent life crowd you, demanding payback. My God, you think, if I live through this, I must get busy.
But then he is unwrapping a stick of gum for you and apologizing. “I’m uncouth,” he is saying. He is charming again. You take the gum, and a deep breath. “I am highly visible,” he says. “I have a wife, children. But that’s all on the outside, you know what I mean?”
He is speaking again in sensible cliché, and you nod with relief, feeling your hair swing, the pretty hair of Alex Trotter. The real Alex was not kind. He asked, a day or two after your mother died, what you planned to do with your life, and when you told him that you had no idea, he said, “Well, get cracking.” His tone of voice reminded you of the way your mother would stand on the porch, holding open the screen door, waiting for the cat to decide whether or not it wanted to go out, saying, “Would you make up your alleged mind?”
“I’m forty,” the guest speaker says, “and I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never been in the hospital, never been to a funeral. Have you been to a funeral?”
“Yes,” you say, “but it didn’t seem real. It didn’t make anything seem any more real. Isn’t that what funerals are supposed to do?” You borrowed eyeliner from one of your mother’s friends in the funeral home’s rest room after the burial. Two chigger bites on your ankle itched furiously all through the service. The next day you bought a can of apple juice from the machine in your dormitory’s lobby, a can that had probably been placed in the machine before your mother’s death. Everything seemed impartial, improbable. “There was no human blood,” you tell the guest speaker.
He laughs. “You seem like a tough girl, Alex,” he says. “Do you want to wallow with me?”
“Maybe,” you say, smiling your new, offhand smile, Alex’s smile. And maybe you do. Maybe this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Go for it, you imagine your sexy blond father saying, though you know he is no longer blond, sexy, or even in Norway. You want for a moment to tell the guest speaker your real name, the real facts of your life, but, you rationalize, if what you are covering up is nothing of worth, nothing of much substance or purpose, you’re not really lying, are you?
• • •
Perhaps you know the story of the hundred-year-old woman and the ice cream, your father wrote to you one summer. The woman was asked what she would do differently if she could live her life over again, and she said, “Smell more wildflowers, and eat more ice cream.” The point is that if you go through life lying to please others, you are giving nothing to them or yourself. And if you lie to please yourself, the best you will ever have to call your own is a moment. You might as well be a ghost: you will move through the world, but you won’t be living. These are important principles and you are not too young to understand them.
You were fourteen and had just come home from the beach. Your friends Tutti and Chrissy were with you, and all three of you were excited because at the beach you had met some long-haired older boys who told you they were the members of Cheap Trick. The boys had stood in the surf a little farther in than you, grinning and beckoning, flexing their skinny chests, the waves darkening their cutoffs, and you and Tutti and Chrissy had come close to them, but not too close. You high-stepped through the rising and falling water, scared of stepping on a crab, not wanting to get too wet, picking at your bikini bottom and your hair. The conversation was not about whether they were telling the truth, as it would have been if you were all boys, but about whether or not you believed them. “I would know,” you told the boys, but you didn’t want to know, and it was not required of you to decide one way or another, since of course once you decided there would be nothing to talk about. This went on for hours.
The dim beige hush of your living room afterwards was stifling, but then you saw the letter, unopened, on the floor beneath the mail slot, and your face burned as though the sun, the boys, had sneaked in after you. You bent over to pick it up and your heart rushed as though you were stealing something. Your mother was still at work. “Who do you know in another country?” Tutti asked, and you said, “A guy,” and would tell them no more.
When your mother came home, however, you did not bother to remove the letter from the hassock on which you’d left it. She had given you permission so many times to keep secret your correspondence with your father—“or anything else you feel should be private,” she often added—that there was no point. He had only sent two or three letters, total, and never one like this—seven handwritten pages from a full-sized legal pad, talking about life and your mother and happiness—but after Tutti and Chrissy left you could not escape an odd sense of letdown, and the last thing you felt like doing was rereading it, or writing a letter back. What you wanted to do, and what you did, was to lie on your bed in the dark late, late into the night and imagine again the boys on the beach.
• • •
You take one of the county road exits and angle the creaking car onto a dirt turnoff that heads into plantings of young pine. A bleached wooden sign at the road’s entrance says SNACKS—1/4 MILE; otherwise, you have no idea what to expect. You have never been out this way. A breeze through the open passenger window brings you a whiff of strong pine and the guest speaker’s insidious cologne, probably purchased for him by his wife. You bump along in silence, taking little sips of the disturbing scent, until the road finally opens onto a dirt and gravel clearing containing two metal-sided sheds. One is set back in the high weeds and is the size of a doghouse or bathroom. The other has a door that looks like it’s woven of chicken wire, propped open against the back of a large, napping goat. The guest speaker says, “I love that.” You step over the goat, your heart pounding.
Inside are two short old women in jeans and flannel shirts and tractor caps, and, miraculously, the man with the sunken face. They are all sitting at a flimsy-looking, vinyl-topped card table, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer out of juice glasses. “You got to have that little flip, or your goddamn trowel sticks,” one of the women is saying. A cartoon of a lo
comotive bouncing out of control down the side of a mountain flickers on a small soundless TV on the bar, and a busy munching noise comes from behind the counter, down near the cement floor. You see the black and white hoof of another goat, like something on a keychain, poking out beside the leg of the bar stool on the end. “You looking for the sink?” the old woman talking about bricklaying says, and the sunken-faced man says, “Where you from, baby?”
“The bathroom?” you say.
“The sinkhole,” says the old woman. “Fifty yards down the path. You pay here.”
“Hey, where you from?” the sunken-faced man says again.
“How much?” the guest speaker asks the woman.
“Two dollars apiece,” she says.
“What’s down there?” he asks.
“Well now, you got to pay to see,” she says.
The sunken-faced man stands and strolls over to you. He stops when his collapsing face is just inches from yours, the yellow whites of his eyes gleaming beneath pale irises. “You know where you’re from?” he says.
“Yes,” you say. He can’t possibly know your name; you’re sure you never told it to him on the Panhandle.
“You’re from your mama,” he says. “You’re from your mama.”
“Thank you kindly,” the old woman says to the guest speaker, taking his money. They are smiling at each other like friends.
Gnats fly into your mouth as you and the guest speaker follow the path through the brush. The goat from the doorway has waked up and is trotting a few feet behind you, making worried human sounds. Every time you turn to look at it, it stops and turns its long, sad face away, as though embarrassed. At the end of the path the ground dips and runs into the very round, very dark pond, which looks hundreds of feet deep. Moss hangs from the cypress, breaking up the glare and shading a line of seven sleeping turtles at the water’s edge. “Ah,” says the guest speaker. His small hands move down his shirt, unbuttoning.
“I’ll go back and get us some beers,” you say, blushing. He just laughs. You turn your back and hear, rather than see, his splash. Back in the little bar you interrupt the women again. “You can only do it two ways, honest or dishonest,” one of them is saying. “You turn your hand, bring it down the line, and it’s boogety, boogety, all fun and games.” The other woman nods with satisfaction before they turn to you to see what you want. The sunken-faced man never looks up from his glass, just stares down into it, shaking his head as though agreeing with something.
When you return, the guest speaker is floating on his back in a patch of sun, his eyes closed. His boxer shorts balloon up around his legs like a tiny life raft. The goat is kneeling shyly beside the dozing turtles, nibbling sand. You wedge the cans of beer in the ground and roll down your panty hose, feeling ridiculous. It seems there should be a way for you to skip from dressed to undressed, traversing shame and fumbling and uncertainty, but there isn’t. At the last moment, you reach in your bag and turn on the tape recorder, thinking, This is the part I want to remember. Of course, there is no way the little machine will be able to record the two of you at such a distance, through corduroy. But you do it anyway. You are naked, but there are still things he doesn’t see, doesn’t know.
The solid cold of the water is shocking. Treading, you feel split in two, your scalp dry and burning and exposed, your body lost in the slow, deep cold. You try to relax, but beneath the surface you feel both invisible and vulnerable, almost itchy. You are afraid of little, sinister things: worms and weeds and biting fish, all of which are down there, sensing you in ways over which you have no control. Let me out, your twitching body seems to say, but the guest speaker says, “Come over here.” Stuck to his cheek is the wing of some large insect, a lacy oval that looks like a third eye, a ghost eye. You paddle closer, and as you do you notice for the first time how blue his real eyes are, as bright and deep as the springs. They are real, but they don’t look real. “Are you wearing colored contact lenses?” you ask.
He smiles his slow, remorseless smile. “No,” he says. “I’m just beautiful.”
“Oh,” you gasp. You cannot shake this coldness, this strange invisibility. Your body lists toward his, desire hurtling through you. But you wonder, Will I even feel it, if he touches me in this cold? And, if I can’t feel it, is it really happening?
• • •
“You know, even if your mother were still alive,” Alex Trotter once remarked, “she couldn’t tell you what it is you want. You’d still have to figure that out on your own.” He was sitting at his computer, his back to you, programming his resumé into a mail merge. It had been ten, eleven days since the funeral. “Even your perfect daddy couldn’t do that for you,” he said. His fingers never stopped moving, tap-tapping the keys.
“Why are you saying these things?” you said, your face growing numb.
Alex’s fingers paused and he turned his head halfway. You noticed the stack of wrinkles that formed in the back of his neck; they reminded you of TV MagicCards, the man who did the tricks in the commercial, so many years ago. “I’m only saying one thing,” he said, “and I say it because I care: Whatever you’re doing five years from now, you’ll have no one but yourself to thank or blame. That’s all I have to say.”
You stood and walked down the hall to his clean kitchen and opened his cabinet and got down a package of Hydrox cookies. You ate two quickly and dropped one on the floor, crushing it to powder with your boot heel before you went out the back door. The tap-tapping went on and on. “Goodbye,” you called, when you knew you were too far away for him to hear.
What kind of a favor had he thought he was doing for you? Advice has nothing to do with reality, your mother sometimes said. Live your life. But maybe that was just another way of saying what Alex was saying; maybe she and Alex were not so far apart in their views, after all. In the hospital, even, after her heart attack, she was efficient. Get my purse, she said, and You know which drawer I’m talking about, right? The last thing she said to you was, sensibly, “Good night.”
When she died, your father contacted you for the first time in years, a flowered card among other flowered cards, containing, as the others did, phone numbers. He also enclosed a photo of himself and his family: not an action shot, a team of glamorous blondes caught by the camera in the midst of their whirling pursuit of wildflowers and happiness, but four stocky, sweatered people set up against a false cornfield backdrop. On the back of the photo, in a confident, ballooning hand, was written, “Please phone us!” There has been no shortage, these past two years, of people offering you sensible solace, guidance through the real world. And, really, Alex was right: you can’t blame any of them for whatever it is you are missing now. It is not as though you ever thought to ask any of them—your mother, your father, Alex, Dr. Mime, Tutti, Chrissy, or anyone—why it was, in their opinion, that people bothered to go on living.
• • •
Monday morning you walk through the shimmering glass and leather lobby of MimeCo with the gait of a ghost or movie star. Your forearms, face, and scalp are sunburned, but the sting, disappointingly, is already gone; you keep touching the part in your hair to make sure. The chigger bites you had on your ankle at your mother’s funeral continued to itch for a week—whenever you had a chance that week you examined, picked, and scratched them, dabbed them with witch hazel, pulled off their scabs. When they finally faded you had the oddest feeling, as though they had deserted you.
Two silent, newspaper-clutching men from the promotion department step into the elevator beside you. As the heavy door hisses shut, you notice the lit panel of buttons—someone has pressed them all. One of the men says, “Crap,” and shakes his head. The other, who is shorter than you are and has bad acne, kicks the wall of the elevator with the toe of his loafer and says, “Whoever done that’s an idiot.” Neither man glances your way.
After the men get off, you go seven more floors, standing as though hypnotized through the rising and stopping, opening and shutting. You keep remember
ing something, playing it over and over in your head—not anything as real or definite as the guest speaker’s sharp, handsome face, but just a moment, a split second in the cool, conditioned dark of his hotel room, before you changed your mind and put on your clothes and went home. All you could see was the blackness, when against your neck he said softly what he thought was your name: Alex. You almost said What? but then you caught yourself, caught your breath, because he wasn’t going to tell you anything, he was simply speaking out loud what he thought was your name. And at that moment you realized you had made the leap, had swung over or past the wrong answer like a girl on a trapeze, that you were not even required to answer, but only to listen to a man who desired you speak your name in the dark. You might not have even remembered it but for the tape recorder, which picked up the word clearly, the first clear word in an hour of muffled rushing and bumping noises, faint, vaguely human sounds, like a record of poltergeists. You’ve erased the tape already, and the recorder’s safe in your bag, ready to return, probably never missed. It may have been, as your father said, only a moment. But it is yours, yours.
dream, age twenty-eight
Though I’m an adult, I’m in the neatly kept bedroom of my childhood. Nothing has changed—the yellow plaster walls, the single bed with its orange poly-fill bedspread, the lifeless walnut-framed intercom that was built into the wall in the 1950s, before my family moved in. I’ve been away for many years, far from here and alone, building my life as one would a house, warily, feeling the weight of every brick, lifting and placing each one, seeing the shape of the house rise up in the air before it is visible, before it even exists.
Here, though, nothing has changed. Outside my bedroom door the argument is getting louder and faster, gathering heat, billowing out of control like a fire. My sister, thirty, still lives here, but she’s telling my mother and father her plans to leave; she’s going to be an actress, an actress, she cries, and they scream back at her, Don’t be ridiculous, you will never make it, never make it, you are living in a fantasy, a fantasy. It is earsplitting, liable at any moment to burst through the hollow wood door and into my room, the shouting and running, the furious voices rising and bleating like the cries of animals, the quick heavy footsteps thumping past on the carpeted floorboards, back and forth, advancing and retreating, I’m going to be an actress, an actress; You are nothing, nothing. So fierce, so palpable is my mother’s anger that I can almost see her through the wall, about to explode in my direction like a small violent man, her fury bigger than her small body, bigger than any of us, swelling and filling the house like smoke and blowing down all the doors. Gingerly, holding my breath so as not to make a sound, I lean over and with one finger press the button in the center of the gold doorknob. The button stays down. I wait. It takes all my concentration to keep her on the other side of that door.
Large Animals in Everyday Life Page 13
