Why Did I Ever

by Mary Robison

  This room has yellow wallpaper with a rodeo cowboys pattern. There’s a lamp whose base is a lucky clover.

  “Man, we gotta get a drummer, that’s all there is to it,” says one of the guests out there.

  “Yeah, shit,” says another. “I’ve been thinking that same thing.”

  “Is this a money issue, Charlie, because that fuckin’ sucks,” says a third voice.

  “I’m the drummer,” Dix says.

  “How’re we supposed to advertise, let alone get any promotion, hopefully, in the future, when we’re not a fuckin’ band ’til we get somebody.”

  “I’ve always been the drummer,” says Dix. “Been there, been the drummer.”

  “No, you know what we are?” someone asks. “Or what we friggin’ look like we are? A coupla Teds.”

  There’s snickering, shifting around. Maybe they’re getting set to leave. I hear shoes scraping, hands slapping, mumbling, I hear the door.

  “Dix, are you there?” I call out eventually. “Come on back to the bedroom and talk to me a second.”

  “About what?” he says, leaning in the doorway. Here is a person who wishes he were dead.

  I look up, frowning for him. “People think they’re being clever sometimes and it’s mean,” I say.

  “Could be right,” he says. His hand goes to the doorframe and ticks at a splinter piece there.

  But I’m not really his girlfriend and I shouldn’t be commenting. And for kindness and comfort, he could find far better to turn to than me.

  445

  I’m at my desk, and, for his script suggestions, writing out a pretty hefty check to Hollis Tarryton Lamar.

  Wad Up the Instructions and Just Figure It Out

  Standing in the shower, just after I’ve stopped the spray, I hear a sound like a torturing psychopath crawling along the little hallway. I’m frozen here, naked and wet, waiting for the sound again or for nothing.

  “And that,” I get to say, “was just a sample.”

  What I need is something to fuss with and right here, bath mats lacking labels and mistakenly filed on the lmnop shelf of the linen closet.

  447

  “Armando will be the best witness,” says Garnet. “When I try to depose him he just weeps.”

  “Where can I be during the trial?” I ask.

  “Uh, you should stay in the witness room with Paulie. Until it’s time. And then an officer will escort you. We’ll place you opposite the witness stand. That’s also in view of the jury. So, it’s all right to react? Nothing exaggerated. You’ll keep it natural.”

  Get the Bugs off Me

  I say to myself, “We got a new day. Let’s just walk around the house and put shit where it goes.”

  A lot goes down the disposal after I’ve warned the cat, “Stand clear.”

  Batteries Running Low

  “Wait, wait,” Mev says as we’re moving her bookshelf. “This has to wall against the up ago.”

  “They’re your books,” I say.

  At the screen door is Sasha, Mev’s birthday dinner date. He looks a little like Ross Perot. Which is a look that not everyone could carry off.

  “Where’d you say you want this?” asks Hollis, walking bent over with Mev’s green armchair balanced on his back.

  She gestures at the screen door. Sasha lets himself inside.

  “Same place as before the rug,” she tells Hollis.

  This red-and-rust-patterned Navajo rug is a birthday gift from me. I was in a trance for hours buying it—I went to several places, had trouble deciding, thought the rug was overpriced, wasn’t sure Mev would like it, wasn’t sure if it would go.

  450

  Now she and I are sharing the washroom, rinsing our hands, streaking on makeup.

  “Will you please try to be nice to Sasha?” she asks me.

  I lean into the wall mirror and, with my mouth opened slightly, stroke vitamin-E cream below my eyes. I say, “Well, but that usually comes off pretty much like it sounds. In my experience.”

  Mev cranks the hot-water faucet slowly on, and off, and on again. “He’s someone else from the Methadone clinic.”

  “Ugh,” I say.

  “All right, then I don’t want to do this,” she says.

  “No, I don’t want to do this,” I say. “This is like—”

  “I know!”

  “Like someone’s—”

  “I know,” says Mev. Which is just as well.

  She says, “Goddamn it, Mother. I wish you’d think of Methadone maintenance as a good thing. As therapeutic.”

  “Why do you wish that? It’s not!”

  Mev’s glance in the mirror leaves me and she’s off in thought. She’s still facing the mirror but with her eyes locked. “I didn’t set it up,” says she.

  451

  Back in Mev’s living room, Hollis is leaning off his seat on the sofa, unboxing the red fire extinguisher that is his birthday gift to Mev.

  And if I’m not mistaken he’s telling Mev’s dinner date all about David and Goliath.

  “No, it’s different from what you heard,” Hollis says. “It was for financial gain, is how it started, and to get his family exempt from taxation. But then there’s weird parts, that’re even gross. Like, King Saul starts fucking with him and says, fine, hotshot, then you bring me a hundred Philistine foreskins. So what’s David do, brings him two hundred.”

  We’re here, the three of us, standing silent and in a row. “Well, lookit,” Hollis says, a little flustered. “I can think this stuff or share some of it. You people choose.”

  Sometimes I Find My Place in Selves I Shouldn’t Be

  Mev is visiting, seated on the carpeting with her knees up and her feet planted and pointed out, today in a shirt that’s stitched with the word “Tuna.”

  “What’ve we got here?” I ask, joining her on the floor.

  She lifts the lids of her different metal tins for me, pokes into one and stirs the ingredients. “It’s craft shit, Mom. Beads and the like.

  “But I did wanna show you this from Grandma,” she says, presenting a pretty blue envelope addressed in my mother’s hand.

  I say, “A card? Or, from my mom, I bet it’s a card and a check.”

  “No, but a fat—yes, there’s a card in there. But I mean, a disgracefully nice check. For no reason but a birthday.

  “I’ll pay her back!” Mev says, and sniffs and smooths tears away with her finger.

  “Oh, sweetpea,” I say.

  I say, “One time, a while ago, I made up a thing to declare about myself, and kept saying it, over and over. It went, ‘I’m very lucky, I never get sick, I always—’”

  “You don’t ever get sick.”

  “I think this is why.

  “Whereas you . . .”

  “Listening,” says Mev.

  “Are surprised when somebody’s good to you. Or you expect to fail at everything. You’re always sure you’re gonna get fired.”

  “I do get fired.”

  I say, “I think this is why.”

  But Now I Really Must Go

  The Deaf Lady’s standing at the sink, water running full blast and now the disposal. “No, I hear you,” she says. “Get to the part where you run into your lookalike.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Perhaps I’ve told this one before.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  454

  My flight to LA feels very downhill. There are a great, great many people from the South crammed into this plane. The overhead luggage compartments are bulging. My feet are trapped. There’s nowhere to put my arms but crossed in front of me. In fact, all the passengers I see have their arms crossed in front of them.

  Here come the attendants with a beverage cart they’re forcing down the aisle. They’ll be fatigued and debilitated and out o
f Diet Coke before they ever get to me. And why not put into service a cart that fits?

  Movie People

  Here’s a tin of cookies Belinda sent over for me—hard and sandy with sugar. You could file your nails with these.

  No Sloppy Seconds

  Evan is about the same age as Dix—over thirty, under a hundred.

  “I’m ignoring you,” I say, but he climbs into bed with me, nonetheless.

  I remember the last time we tried this. It was drudgery, a chore. In fact, Evan’s interest in me has been a chore. Where his eyes follow me compulsively and he will exhaust himself complimenting me down to the buckles of my shoes.

  I Think I Hear My Mom Calling Me

  “This isn’t good,” I say beneath him.

  I say, “Compared to almost anything. Compared to being at a company picnic, where we would, each of us, be having a better time.”

  “You mean if we,” he says, “broke apart from the main group . . .”

  458

  “Hell,” I say to Belinda. “I’m sure you have reasons for what you do.”

  “I have problems,” she admits.

  We’re in the tea room in A Building, where the tables are covered with cloth and the baskets still have a few crackers.

  Belinda wears a Burberry that’s size Huge, that perhaps she borrowed from a bigger woman. A gray suit. The jacket’s hankie pocket is defective and gaping and for that, I imagine, her browbeaten tailor was made to adjust his price. Dark red leather shoes I’ll find fault with, given more time and a better view.

  “What sort of problems? Like, from where they’re repaving, you got tar on your car?”

  She blinks, glances off.

  “Or . . . ,” I say, “you missed a premiere. You’re coming down with a cold—”

  “Shut, up,” she says to me.

  She ate nothing. She trashed her dessert cake; knifed it to crumbs.

  I ate even less, of my—bird skeletons, I think it was, under the aspic.

  459

  We’ll sit here. I’ll sit. I’ll wait, and look like I’m just waiting and as though naturally what I prefer to do is be pinned here with no book and smokeless while I sit back and wait.

  Let’s Get This Over With

  “So you’re the South,” says Hamfield, who lowered into Belinda’s seat after she gave it up. He’s bringing a sandwich from his knapsack, also a pint of Choco-Soy. We worked together over at Fox, he and I. Brandon Hamfield. His glasses are thick and his gaze is trading around behind them. He chews his nails. Otherwise, I’m content to talk to the man.

  “No, my home’s in the South,” I say. “I don’t represent it.”

  “What do you represent?” he asks, low, and now I remember why I detest men.

  “You know they call me RM,” he says, “for Rich and Mysterious.”

  Abhor, despise, and hate them.

  Would Anyone Happen to Know

  I find myself at the producers’ meeting a minute early. In this long, anonymous room with its blinds and sisal matting. What is wrong with me? And I know that something is wrong because all the feeling just went out of my feet.

  I Have a Little Diary, Too

  The executives arrive at once, chuckling and chatting. They’re groomed, blown, prepped, toned. They take seats in the high-backed chairs around the table. Belinda settles next to me.

  And here’s Penny, rolling a chair out, and sitting down across from us.

  I’m watching as Belinda draws items from her tote bag—each item bearing the logo of a nightclub or salon.

  I ask, “How did you get away with swiping all that stuff?”

  “You said what?”

  My hand is out, palm up, pointing. “All this great stuff that you filched.”

  Belinda is horrified that I’ve spoken to her this way. And why don’t I learn? Penny winces, drives a hand through his hair.

  “I too,” I say in an effort to repair, “am the same way. I regularly see things I want to steal.”

  “Don’t purshue this,” says Penny.

  I can’t stop. I say, “Out in Fairbanks, those signs that read, ‘No Shooting from the Highway.’ Now those, I wanted to steal.”

  “Yeah, the shines,” Penny says, irritated.

  “But they were all shot up,” I say.

  He says, “Exshackly!”

  463

  I’m in the Chateau Marmont, for the moment. And that is the Belushi Death Suite in there. I recognize it from Wired. Penny’s here and I’m asking him to tell me honestly what’s happening to my mind. “It’s going,” he says, eyebrows raised.

  464

  Whatever the impression I gave, my confession was about temptation. Places I go, things I see, I have the urge to just take them.

  Who Are You, Really

  Evan’s back living with his wife. Which I’m anticipating he’ll mention. I can wait days, though. Nothing else but work to do.

  He walks over here, now over there, his hands folded and pressed to his mouth.

  “Squirrels,” I say.

  He says, “Interesting.”

  “Caused the calcium to drain from my body.”

  I bet I could say things about kerosene and wire cutters and Evan’d keep nodding like that.

  466

  What it takes to survive out here is order, I realize and say to myself, “Divide the day into equal periods. See this travel alarm? You get up, don your uniform, move according to the bell.”

  467

  I’m wondering—in this restaurant with sidewalk seats and yellow sun umbrellas, terra-cotta floor tiles, a wait staff in blue-and-white seersucker—how old could the couple behind me be? “We can’t do that drive at our age,” they say. “Or even sit, for any period of time, not with our backs.”

  Just Came to Watch

  Here’s a man in his forties, with a sideways smile, in black-and-white bartender’s clothes under a red satin vest.

  Coming along after him, a fellow with an anxious face. He wears baggy fatigues and a John Lennon T-shirt.

  Over there is a foolish-looking motel, its long porch lined with metal rockers that have never been and will never be rocked in.

  There, a parked station wagon filled with newspapers and beside it, a woman in a tight-cinched apron, making change.

  Sorry I Said Anything

  Armando is Portuguese. He works for a jeweler, I believe, repairing watches and clocks. He wears polo shirts, usually, cardigans, leather moccasins.

  I called him earlier this evening, and talked to him at his place of work.

  He said, “Pleece, Mrs. Bread-on, don’t bide my head off.”

  He said, “I only specked to him on the phone too. Heat’s not like aim standing there.”

  470

  “I was a moron. That’s all they’ll talk about in court. How it was my own fault,” Paulie tells me.

  I say, “I don’t really think that would work as a defense.”

  “Why not, if it’s true? I let the guy in!”

  “Because—”

  He says, “You’re just ignoring the parts here you don’t like.”

  He says, “All I thought was, he was nicely dressed. He looked like a businessman. He needed a restroom. And there is nothing, if you knew the area, nothing anywhere on Cowley or on St. Croix.”

  I say, “Paulie, if you can hear me.”

  “No, you may believe there’s someplace, but there isn’t.”

  “I don’t care,” I say. “None of this. It doesn’t matter. You let him in, you married him, gave him sandwiches, I don’t care. He still! Does not get! To hurt you!”

  “The week before,” says Paulie, “I saw a guy trying to defecate into a paper sack.”

  471

  Yes, and down there is Sunset Boulevard, and
no, I don’t care about that either.

  472

  I’ve kept my cab waiting. The driver’s out of patience. “You the right one or not?” he calls when I appear.

  I hold him up even longer, trying to answer.

  “Just get in, get in,” he says. “Where you going?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute,” I say.

  After exactly a minute, he says, “You decide yet?”

  He looks around at me. “No,” he answers for himself. “You don’t wanna go nowhere?”

  He pulls over, counts to three, pulls out. “Then it’s back to where you came from.”

  I don’t argue.

  He peers at me in the rearview. “What’ve you got?” he asks. “Man trouble?”

  “My son,” I say, ashamed of myself before it’s out of my mouth.

  Could Stand Here for Hours

  Belinda is hurriedly destroying the three-page outline I wrote this morning—crumpling it, tearing it, batting the papers into the trash.

  She’s a small woman, clear-eyed, an equestrian in her free time, very blond, teeth the size and whiteness of Chiclets.

  Her chair’s a little high for her, I notice. Her pale blue pumps are an inch off the floor. She speaks with her neck arched forward, her jaw flexed.

  “Listen to me carefully. When I tell people they’ve made mistakes with a script, they make every effort to do better. You can decide about that for yourself, but your attitude—don’t interrupt me. I’m perfectly right to speak.”

  With both hands she grips the edge of her desk. She says, “This is demoralizing. Have you thought about that? It makes what I’m trying to do impossible.”

  On a tray near the door here is the Hawaiian fruit platter Belinda had for lunch—twizzled citrus rinds, a scraped melon hull, a teensy vine plucked of all but a few grapes.

  Her blue pumps have stopped moving. She sits now with her hands clutched tightly. “It makes me crimson with rage to have to submit this revision. If we had another day, by damn, I wouldn’t. With this newsreel preposterousness, and these Chinese. I deleted that demon character, yet here he is again. Bombing raids on the phone company? I can’t imagine what the studio’s response will be. I only regret it reflects on me. You don’t see this, do you? No, I thought not.”