Interfictions

by Delia Sherman

  Evan Lee's room does not have curtains. He has taken his rebel flags with him to Chico State. A quick scan of the room reveals white walls peppered with nail holes, closet doors that hang open with a cobwebby emptiness. Evan Lee has left his bed behind, the ancient headboard covered with stickers and pocketknife art. Gouged wood, words carved deeply in the grain, have always reminded her of letters carved in wet sand with a stick, words eaten in stages by the surf.

  A sudden swell of black tide ripples across the white plush carpet of the master suite. The stench of rotting kelp drives her onto a window seat, where she huddles with her feet tucked up under the thick layers of her bulky clothing. The tide is impossible. It soaks the carpet, but it is and it isn't real. It wets the floor, yet leaves it dry as desert sand. Whenever this dark tide comes the giggling comes too, a watery, bubbling sound. To banish it, she has to scour something.

  But the carpet is freshly shampooed, and cannot be made any cleaner. To quell the oceanic stink, she scurries across the bedroom and throws open the closet. A single robe sits on the rail among empty hangers. It is a quilted satin housecoat—too warm for the weather—but Chloe pulls it on over the other garments anyway, and finds that she's unable to button it up. Twisted layers of fabric bunch up underneath her armpits, but the weight of the coat soothes her. She stands, eyes closed, and banishes the phantom tide. Gone, the tide. Gone away, for now.

  It's eight o'clock sharp when a van parks in front of the house next door. The driver sits in the idling vehicle, and examines the For-Rent sign with one ink-stained palm lifted like a shield to blot out the sun.

  Murder Most Foul

  The house boasts an arrangement of mission style furniture, red oak and red leather. These pieces are what Dean has always wanted, these upright, parallel objects that don't know how to cradle a person reading a good book. They are puzzle pieces, blocks of wood.

  Years before the attic purge, Chloe was putting things in order one day, trying not to think about the letter sitting on the table, wet with her tears. Like a lion-tamer with one balky charge, Chloe was trying to make an addition to the library—a serious Stickley rocker—without disturbing the geometric precision of the rest. She knew where the rocker was supposed to go, but if placed there it would edge out her old recliner. So she fussed with it until Dean came home.

  That recliner ruins the balance of the room, Clo, and the stuffing's coming out.

  I p—.—.—.—puh-hut a slipcover on it. It's the same c—.—.—.—c—.—.—.—color as the up-HOL-stery. And the duh-RAPES.

  See how it bunches up around the top? This cover's meant for a damned wing chair! We agreed the old recliner was going to the dump!

  If we're going to duh-HUMP it, I need a trip to the wwwwwoods.

  Oh, Clo. Come here, sweetheart. Wipe your face.

  SssssssTOP it. If I can't have the chair, I have to have suh—.—.—.—suh—.—.—.—something.

  In a perfect world, we could spend our lives writing in the woods, but we're not kids anymore. I have to work. No, don't use your sleeve. A Kleenex. Here.

  D—.—.—.—damn it, I duh—.—.—.—duh—.—.—.—duh—.—.—.—don't expect you to bbbbbbbBABYsit me. But I nuh—.—.—.—nuh—.—.—.—NEED—.—.—.—my story chair.

  Well. Let's put it in the attic room. We'll finish the walls and put in a pellet stove. Your own little studio. How about it, Clo?

  Later, while Chloe stood in the remodeled kitchen wearing her nightgown, her silk duster and fuzzy mules, scrubbing, peeling, chopping and braising, it was as if she were cooking dinner on a submarine tilted at a terminal angle. During Dean's monologue over five courses of Italian, she learned that the entire staff of Hammond Inc. had gone on a diet and henceforth Dean would only be eating things that were green: boiled kale, spinach pasta, seaweed soup, freshly shelled peas. Pistachio ice cream, for a treat.

  You can whip it up in the ice cream maker. Hand crank, but it's no problem, right?

  He'd been so reasonable about the recliner, and the wolves at Hammond could exert such dreadful pressure on him to toe the line, that she only smiled, threw her grocery list into the trash and pinned a new one on the refrigerator. When Dean kissed her goodnight and left her standing at the sink, she silently pictured his evening routine:

  He would undress in increments, folding each item before slipping it in the laundry chute. He would slide his round body into a Dior dressing gown and tie the sash in an elegant knot. He would look at his teeth, brush them hard enough to draw blood, and then floss, twice. He would check his hairline, and then his nose hair, patting anti-aging cream onto his crow's feet. He would set his alarm clock, slip into bed and lay his head on an ergonomic pillow.

  Dean would not snore in the night.

  Today, 8 a.m.

  It might be a man or a woman who climbs out of the vehicle to pose like a matador in front of the neighbor's house. The figure is attenuated in the light, motionless inside a billowing white cotton shirt. Black hair ripples. The shoulders are squared, the head is raised high, and one hand is raised to shield the face from the sun. A curious little smile tugs at the lips, as if in response to some private absurdity.

  Chloe shifts vantage points to track the stranger within Wanda-Next-Door's house, but the view from the parlor is obstructed by the rose arbors. Chloe stumbles from one room to the next, a fat bumblebee searching for a good place to land. But her heart can't take it, this pinging from portal to portal, and so despite the terror in her heart, she presses forth in her fluttering garments as if buffeted by a gale wind. She tugs open the attic trap door and pulls her ponderous bulk up the ladder.

  Parked at the curb is a white van of indeterminate origin, its sides mottled with patches of gray auto putty. The plastic of one taillight has been replaced by a red cellophane gel, affixed with silver tape. On one window is a large vinyl decal with a pop-art interpretation of the Birth of Venus; through the adjacent window peers a face. It is smooth and motionless, the mouth a red Kool-Aid smear, the eyes cornflower blue. The face twists, gives an ugly, gap-toothed leer, and presses into the glass to do a blowfish—red lips stretching, cheeks puffed and quivering with air barely contained. Slithering from the pulsating orifice, the tongue probes the glass, undulating like an enormous slug in a mason jar.

  The binoculars slide to the sill with the hollow thump of knuckles on a coffin lid. Chloe fumbles at the lenses, and strangles a sob. The white face, the searching tongue, the fingerprints on the sink—the images cling to her skin like plague germs, threatening to launch her on a death-march of scrubbing and scouring and disinfecting. She hauls the binoculars up to take one last look, but the leering face is gone.

  Chloe scrabbles through a box of clothing marked for Goodwill, untangles an old necktie, and ratchets it down over her housecoat in a cumbersome double knot. The pressure crushes the breath from her lungs, and helps suppress the tears pooling in her eyes. She hitches a few breaths and refocuses the binoculars on the invasion. At forty minutes past eight, the stranger opens the doors of the van. There is no child inside, no ghosts or goblins, just a naked mattress, a kerosene lamp, and a heap of paint-spattered tarps. The stranger unloads a green duffel bag, a goose-neck lamp and a stool, a tackle box, a stack of frames and a TV tray made of rusty tin.

  He—it—she (there's no reason to think it's a she but for an opinion Chloe has that Wanda-Next-Door would not rent to a he) she transports this equipment to the front porch in stages and when denied entry by the Lady of the Manor shifts them to the long drive, where the attic room can be accessed by a rough, wooden stair. She returns to the van for a folding easel, which she slings over her shoulder as if marching into battle.

  Battleground

  Dean and Chloe once lived in an apartment decorated with hand-me-down rugs and other furnishings they'd gleaned from flea markets and yard sales. Dean liked to say the sitting room was an ode to bad taste, that its timeless kitsch was a statement: macramé plant hangers, drapes of gingham, oran
ge-crate tables and faded chintz sofas, all ringed with bookshelves done in fence slat and bricks. Grief was out of the question in that crazy room, even for Chloe, who spent hours curled up in the lopsided recliner analyzing rejection notices.

  She was fiddling with a notice one day when Dean stormed in with three bags of groceries, a paycheck from Johnson-Williams-Brownell clenched in his teeth like a pirate's blade. His high GPA had earned him a sign-on bonus and he'd brought home three kinds of sugar, a mortar and pestle, a bag of flour, a can of shortening, a bag of lemons, a lemon zester and a pastry cutter. A bottle of vinegar, a box of eggs, and a rolling pin made of marble.

  With a triumphant smile, he said his paycheck would change everything and she could take her time with the novel, dip back into poetry—or put the whole thing away for a while. Instead of living in the recliner scribbling all day she could do fun things, now that life no longer depended on her advances, which were infrequent and had never been generous.

  Their college wardrobes and the crap in the living room could finally be replaced! Had she ever heard of Arts & Crafts? Not the hobby, the movement, silly girl. Such lines! Such precision and mathematical simplicity! They could go right away and select something nice. Did she like the Good Housekeeping cookbook? The recipes are a little complicated, but won't it be fun not to have to be so anxious? Just whisk up a meringue once a while?

  Clo! Hey, Clo? Want to make a vinegar pie?

  Don't cry, light of my life. I'll take care of you, always.

  Today, 9 a.m.

  She's holding the binoculars in one limp hand and she can't believe she's in the attic. This fusty old tomb, this mausoleum. With her eyes shut, she slides around obstacles as if walking on a tightrope. She translates the escape route with her slipper-covered toes and descends the ladder through the trap door, which she shuts with one sweaty hand. It's nine o'clock, Monday morning. It's nine, nine a.m., and time for the Weed Holocaust.

  Because she won't go out front where the sky is too cerulean, too wide, Dean has installed a rock garden there. But in the back of the house, where fences and neighboring homes provide a comforting enclosure, there's an assortment of bulb flowers and blooming perennials that she must care for by hand. Tulip season is over, the bulbs have been retired, but there are still irises to thin, gladioli and hyacinths to stake, fifteen varieties of tea roses to spray for aphids.

  She performs these duties in gardening clogs and her heavy house clothes, gauntlets and a beekeeper's veil. As she sways among the arbors, as unwieldy and slow as a hippopotamus, her skin hums. The open sky on her skin is so buoyant, so anti-gravitational, that without the layers she's certain she would soar into the clouds, ascending through the atmosphere into open space, where she would tumble, freeze-dried, for eternity.

  "There you are.” A voice comes from Wanda's side of the fence. There's a strange slice of face hovering over the slats: brow fierce, eyes dark. “I've been knocking."

  Chloe panics. The garden gate is very far away. She can't move a muscle in that direction because that gate leads to the front yard where she can't bear to go. Another escape beckons—the door to the covered porch—but to access the porch she must scramble past the stranger. Trapped, she shrinks into a ball on the ground and says, “H—.—.—.—h—.—.—.—hello,” to her hands.

  "I have newspaper. Wanda says the boy threw it bad, and you won't come to get it.” There is some sort of accent—Baltic? Greek? There is the smell of linseed oil, dark flash of black eyes, smear of indigo—a smile. “You are Mrs. Larroway, yes?"

  Hot terror smells like crimson and vermilion; it crackles from the ends of Chloe's hair in scorching red filaments. It ripples like a backdraft along the surface of her skin, and all at once there is no earth, no gravity, no downward and no upward, only the sensation of the newspaper in her hand as Chloe explodes like a comet past the stranger, past the roses, over the porch, through the dining room, up through the trap door, and back into the attic, where she stands panting like a rabbit. In her clogs and beekeeper's hat, she stands in the eye of a cobweb storm. The newspaper is heavy in her hand, a double coupon edition.

  Chloe is giddy. “Thuh—.—.—.—thuh—.—.—.” she says, addressing the attic window, the shimmering glass, the yawning eye of Evan Lee's room. The For-Rent sign has been taken down.

  "Thuh—.—.—.—thuh—.—.—.—thuh—.—.—.” Chloe says, the corners of her mouth twitching, twisting.

  She takes a step toward the window. And after a while, she takes another. And another, and yet another, until she can see the stranger peering through the fence.

  "Thuh—.—.—.—thanks,” Chloe whispers. Her breath fogs the dirty window. The dark head snaps up. The dark gaze penetrates the glass and skewers Chloe through the forehead.

  The world turns into crystal. Chloe's heartbeats crash against her ribs, like the echo of waves battering the pilings of a pier. A memory comes of a little girl, frolicking, and around this dream child, insults drone and dip like angry hornets. There is the smell of salt. If Chloe tries very hard she can pretend the insults are just the sound of a gull flying low over the house, that the smell of the sea comes from the moist, hidden parts of her own body.

  The air in the attic glistens, particulate.

  Sparring Partner

  Until her junior year in college, Chloe had avoided the library, dashing off pages of poetry while nestled deep in a lopsided recliner in the corner of her dorm room. After she fell for Dean Larroway (Applied Physics, Seat 26) she spent her nights on the library balcony, wedged against a magazine rack where she could secretly watch him work. The library was a marvel of steel and glass, and in the evening hours with the lights dimmed and the carrels quiet the overarching trees seemed to step inside, turning the reading room into a wild wood.

  Dean spent his evenings in a study room building fabulous machines from balsa wood and string, piano wire and mirrors, prisms and shiny ball bearings. He sat and made detailed notes for each machine in a stenographer's pad. He used a lettering guide to carve long lines of text into a composition book—blocks of number-free copy that looked nothing like applied physics. He was an engineering student, but also a poet, his sonnets inspired by the mathematical splendor of the flashing, swaying, bobbing sculptures he built with hands as delicate as a girl's.

  One night Dean's activities were discovered by a wandering pack of students. They circled him like hyenas, knocked down the delicate, swaying machine, scattered Dean's books and notes. They pushed Dean against the glass wall of the study room and took turns pretending to kiss him. They lectured him about “big boys’ toys,” cars, and airplanes, and trains and bridges, until they got bored with his lack of resistance and gave up. A whirlwind of hiking boots and denim, they spat in their hands, rubbed it in his hair, punched him in the arm and stalked off into the night.

  Rumpled, bruised, flushed, Dean bent to pick up his broken machine.

  Chloe folded a poem into a clunky paper airplane and flew it down to ping the windows of the study room. Startled, Dean looked around, took it up, unfurled it like a starving man peeling an orange. When he spotted her where she sat wedged like a mouse between magazine racks he smiled a shy, grateful smile. His eyes were the green of the overhanging wood.

  It was love between them, then and thereafter. They sat together on the library balcony dreaming under the conifers and wide-reaching oaks. He complimented her work, and he didn't correct her stammer or finish her sentences. Happy to sit, Dean waited for her to express herself on her own time. When they finally touched, finally embraced, finally kissed, her undisciplined, impractical poems grew measured and majestic. Dean began to write epics as if he were the first man to fall in love with a beautiful woman. He cut a lock of her hair and made a braid—carried it in his pocket. Chloe fell, and fell, and fell. She lost herself, and was glad.

  Dean could hear the heavenly music.

  Today, 10 a.m.

  Chloe is in the attic. Spiderwebs undulate with her breath like u
ndersea vegetation. A delicate fuzz coats the surface of boxes and baskets like plankton and her writing tools are on the arms of the chair, sleeping under a shroud of powder. The room wants to be aired and scrubbed, to be arranged and alphabetized into submission. But Chloe drops into the recliner and watches dust spurt in a mushroom cloud. She sheds her clogs, strips off her gauntlets, hat and veil—hurls them into the boiling dust balls on the floor. Her heart, still giddy, sends blood to her limbs and a blush to her cheeks.

  The window is hazy, but she wrenches it open and takes a breath of fresh air. Tucked into the recliner she can see signs of habitation in Evan Lee's room. Shirts are hanging in the closet. The goose-necked lamp is clamped to the nightstand. The easel is an origami crane with a tablet of newsprint in its beak. Red chalk, artist's gum, and sticks of charcoal are a jumble of kindling on the tin TV tray, waiting for the spark.

  The artist approaches the easel with a stick of black chalk. She stands as if balanced on a precipice. A breeze from the open window ripples the paper, lifts her hair, toys with the hem of her white shirt. She closes her dark eyes, and her lips begin to move. The artist is summoning something from within, drawing the cloak of artistry around her, that veil of incandescent power. She stretches her arms, rolls her head to loosen her shoulder muscles, pulls her elbows across her chest one at a time, and then bounces lightly on the balls of her feet.

  Hear me, she mouths. Come to me, spirit.

  Three strokes hit the paper then the sheet is savaged from the pad. Others soon follow, to collect in a drift around the easel like crumpled gray snow. As she moves, her light cotton shirt flutters and undulates, collecting smears of charcoal at the cuffs and the hem. Lost in the work, the artist shrugs the garment away, baring a broad, strong back. She winds the cloth around her palm to use as an implement, her naked shoulders curved into the page. Eyes narrow and fierce, she smudges the paper with her thumbs, her wrists, her fingers. She swipes over the paper with elbows, forearms, clumps of wadded-up shirt. She leans into the tablet as a lover curves into an embrace. As the power of creation hits her, the artist tucks her dark head low and the strokes on the page become violent and wild. Her lips move and it's as if she is singing some ancient ballad as her marks impale the fibers of the page with lethal energy, crow's wing black, burnt crimson, bone white. Bright-eyed and gasping, she finishes the piece with a flourish. She brushes a wild strand of hair from her damp face and steps back to examine what her labor has wrought.