Ms. Hempel Chronicles

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Beatrice put down the receiver. She felt damp all over. Standing in the dim light of the radio, she stroked the telephone. She stroked her pocket diary, and then the radio itself. He had been terribly kind to her. That’s what she would say, if she ever met him—she would meet him, she decided, they would become friends and then go out together and live in an apartment—she’d say, “You were so nice! That first night we talked, you were so nice to me.” She practiced saying it aloud Then she practiced saying it in an English accent.

  As she glided back to her bed, she stumbled upon something warm and human. She gasped, without wanting to, for she already knew who it was. “Calvin,” she said. He was playing Cat Burglar.

  She heard him slide into a sitting position; she heard him

  sigh with satisfaction. “That was a long time,” he said. "Mayb a record.” Though she couldn’t see him, she knew what he was wearing: their mother’s ancient turtleneck, the kind tha was black and stretchy and had two long tongues that reached down and snapped together between the legs; black tights; black knitted gloves; a beret that their father had brought back from Montreal. The purpose of Cat Burglar was to slink into Beatrice’s room without her noticing. Any burgling was incidental. Calvin had developed this game entirely on his own. For Beatrice, the most enjoyable aspect was suddenly switching on the light, because Calvin seemed to believe that making himself flat was the same as making himself invisible and it was interesting to see him pressed into the floor, limbs spread, as if a cement roller had traveled over him, or else smushed against a wall, trying not to breathe.

  She didn’t turn on the light now. If she did, then all would be lost; she would see the flowers blooming on her bedspread; she would see the little porcelain lampstand man leaning toward the lampstand lady, his tiny porcelain lute in hand.

  “Go to bed,” she told Calvin. “You’re feeling very, very sleepy.”

  “Who’s English?” he wanted to know. “Who were you talking to?”

  “Shred,” she said, and despised herself for saying it. Her book jackets, her sweaters, her new pointy shoes, the toes already scuffed: she couldn’t keep anything nice for longer than a minute. “He’s not English.”

  “Who's Shred?”

  “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Beatrice said, and moving her hands through the darkness, she found something shaped like Calvin. She guided it toward the door. In the radio’s dim light, she saw the pair of sunglasses he had added to his disguise.

  These combined with the beret, gave him the appearance of a strange and chic little person, like a boy whose parents are glamorous performers, and who spends his whole childhood drinking ginger ale in nightclubs. Beatrice filled with the intoxicating feeling of her brother being unfamiliar to her.

  And then the radio spoke. It said, “This song goes out to the girl who wanted to hear some Angry Samoans.”

  "That’s me,” Beatrice whispered, to no one in particular.

  Her other nighttime activity often enthralled her so completely that she would still be awake when Shred announced it was one o’clock in the morning. She would look up miserably at the lampstand man casting his puny reflection against the black squares of her window. Having the light on in the middle of the night was a million times gloomier than having it off. But she needed the light to see what she was doing.

  This other activity involved a pair of tweezers she had found in the first aid kit beneath the sink. In a slow but gratifying way, her eyebrows were disappearing. Everything else, meanwhile, was running amok. She seemed to have passed into another country, a place where it was impossible to remain intact: you found yourself shedding crooked snowflakes of skin, leaving squiggles of short, dark hair on your sheets. You were always leaving something behind. And it scared Beatrice, the thought that some excessive bit of her might detach itself and then be discovered by a tidier person. On a bar of soap, or in the collar of a sweater she had borrowed. The tweezers were not much help, in this unpleasant new country she had crossed into unawares; it would have been easier, maybe, to empty her bathtub with an eyedropper. But she kept them close at hand, inside the drawer of her bedside table, and at night she put them to furious use.

  She was busy, but so was everyone else. They all had their projects. In the rooms below, her father was pushing furniture across the floor. Her mother was snapping rubber band around handfuls of bobby pins, loose colored pencils, rolls of pennies. They opened and closed drawers. They raised and lowered their voices. They moved things around. And even Calvin was awake sometimes, splayed across the rug in his room, creating accord among his action figures. Beatrice could hear him murmuring, she could hear the chair legs scraping she could feel the whole house ticking with their solitary habits, so it was no wonder then that in the mornings, her family they did not look their best.

  One night, late, the telephone rang.

  “Hello?” Beatrice said.

  “Hey!” a voice said, sounding pleased. “How you doing?" “Good,” seemed the right way to respond. She said it again. “Good.”

  The person chuckled. “You don’t know who this is.” “Sure I do!” Beatrice protested. “Of course I do. So how are you?”

  “Happy to hear your voice.”

  “Well,” she said. “I’m happy to hear yours.”

  He asked, “What are you doing right now?”

  Beatrice dropped her tweezers onto the bedspread. “Nothing,” she said. She tucked them back in their drawer. “Listening to the radio.”

  Her bed made a squeaking noise as she stood up, ready for the next question. He would ask, Can I talk to your dad for a minute? and she would pound down the four flights of stairs; she would get, on her way back, a fruit roll-up from the kitchen- When the bed squeaked, she wondered, did it sound like she'd farted?

  She waited for the question.

  “That’s funny. I’m listening to the radio, too”

  "Oh."

  “Maybe we have a psychic connection.” And he chuckled again, to show that he was kidding.

  As he said this, she realized that she did not, in fact, know the person she was speaking to. But it seemed too late to tell him that. And too late to feel alarmed. He was not an obscene phone caller, that much was for certain. She had received an obscene phone call before. Waiting for her brother on the steps outside the public library, she had heard the telephone ring from inside the telephone booth. When she answered it, a voice asked, Is your pussy very hairy? and though it would never have occurred to her to use those exact words, she did think to herself, as she slowly brought the phone down on the receiver, How did you know?

  The person coughed on the other end of the line. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m getting over a cold.”

  The cough did not sound like it belonged to him. It sounded childlike and delicate and dry, like that of the rich little boy in The Secret Garden, who is wheeled about in a wicker chair with a blanket on his lap. He behaves peevishly until his better nature is revealed by someone poorer.

  Beatrice said, “Bless you,” as if the person on the telephone had sneezed.

  “That’s all right ” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed by now? Don’t you have school in the morning?”

  “No,” she said, without irritation. For he hadn't asked in a mindless way. And he wasn’t looking for her father or her

  mother. Somehow she knew now he wasn't going to ask f them, ever.

  “No,” she repeated. “I’m not in school anymore." She closed her eyes to the bookshelves, and the pale blue bedside tabl She said, "I’m in a band.”

  “Like the Bangles?”

  “No!" she shrieked; in embarrassment, in dangerous-feeling delight. He thought it was true. “Like the Butthole Surfers” "Haven’t heard of them,” he murmured deferentially. “They’re obscure,” she said. “A lot of people haven’t.’’

  This seemed a good time to mention her fuzzbox. Like a vocabulary word, she had to use it in a sentence: “I’ve got a fuzzbox” was all she could manage, which wouldn’t
have passed muster on a quiz at her school. But who was keeping score? She heard herself suddenly saying aloud a number of things that until then she had only been able to say silently, as an experiment in her head.

  She also learned about a profession she hadn’t known of before: landscaping. It involved the pruning and mowing of other people’s yards. This was what he did, the person with the dainty cough on the other end of the phone. Her parents, she thought, could use a landscaper. Their own yard was wild and overgrown, and a great source of contention. Her father believed that lawns were not ecologically sound; her mother believed that this was an excuse. But Beatrice mentioned none of this. She had already created the impression that she no longer lived at home, and that she belonged to the kind of family who didn’t even own a yard.

  She detected something slithering across the floor. “Can you hold on a moment?” she asked, and clamped her hand over the mouth of the telephone.

  “Calvin!” she said. “Please go burgle somewhere else!”

  Something slithered away from her. Her bedroom door racked open, and then it closed.

  "Sorry," Beatrice said into the telephone.

  "Can I ask you something?”

  "Oh yes," she said.

  “Who’s that yelling?”

  It was Beatrice’s father. He was downstairs somewhere, thundering. Most likely the house was upsetting him. They had moved in more than three years before, but still their house hadn’t ceased to surprise them: it flooded in the springtime, ushered in hosts of flying ants, attracted the attentions of feral cats and raccoons. The chimney collapsed; the pipes burst; one windy afternoon, a red Spanish tile came flying off the roof and nearly hit Calvin on the head. The house was always in need of an expensive and immediate repair, the accumulation of which had begun to deeply discourage their father. He seemed to have pictured repairs on a much smaller and more charming scale, repairs that could create camaraderie within a family. Everyone gathered together, genially refinishing a banister, not scores of heavy-booted workmen, clumping through the house like a marauding army. “This is not what I imagined!” their father would bellow, a sound both terrifying and wounded. It was a sound she imagined an elephant might make when captured, its trunk curling up toward the sky. But she couldn’t figure out what he was saying now, with four long flights of stairs between them.

  Beatrice took another chance. "It’s my boyfriend,” she said.

  The person on the other end of the telephone paused.

  "Should I hang up? Is he going to be mad?”

  She pressed her mouth against the phone. “He already is mad.”

  “He is? What’s he going to do?”

  "I don’t know," Beatrice whispered. “Wait—"

  "What? What’s that noise?"

  From outside her door came a long and low-pitc^ hum, similar to the sound people make when they’re cold Brrrrrrrrrrr.

  “I think he’s turned on the—” Beatrice inhaled sharply "I have to go now.”

  She put the telephone back into its cradle. Click! And lifo that, he was gone. He had risen up from some unfathomable place, and now he had sunk back down again, like Champ, 0r the Loch Ness monster, about which Calvin was building a diorama. Beatrice herself felt waterlogged, as if she had stayed in the bath for too long.

  Outside her door, the beautiful wooden box vibrated steadily. Calvin, in his extreme stealth, was probably pressed up against the little button in one of the rooms downstairs. Beatrice stretched out on her bed and listened to the bell hum, imagining herself a lazy servant. But she did so halfheartedly. According to the rules, she was never the servant. Just as she was never the pupil, but always the teacher; never the person who discovers the dead body, but always the body, lying cold and immobile on the floor. How did these rules come about? Although she had invented them, they made no sense to her; they were arbitrary yet inviolable. She knew, for instance, that the telephone would ring again, maybe not this night but another night, and that when it rang she would say, “Hello?” and that the rules would then take over: he asking her questions, and she dreamily offering answers. He would be a landscaper, and she would be a guitar player in a band.

  Calvin came into her room, not slithering this time. She felt him breathing on her. "Why didn't you come?” he asked.

  “Were you ringing for me?” Beatrice said.

  "Yes!” Calvin said. “Why didn’t you come?” pie turned on her bedside lamp and appeared, in his be-t and sunglasses and gloves. Far beneath them, their father

  bellowed.

  "Did the toilet explode again?” she asked.

  Calvin frowned. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I couldn’t tell. I tried ringing you.”

  "I thought it was by accident,” Beatrice said.

  "I made it through the kitchen, with the lights on. They didn’t see me. I snuck across the entire kitchen,” Calvin said. "Then 1 snuck into the Butler’s Pantry. I was waiting for you—I kept ringing the bell.”

  “I didn’t understand,” Beatrice said. T thought you were pushing the button by mistake." ^

  “Never mind,” he said wearily. “Too late now.”

  He peeled off the black knit gloves and handed them to her. “You can have these back."

  “Don’t you need them?”

  “No,” Calvin said. “I don’t. I’m done with that game.” Without his gloves, he didn’t look like a cat burglar anymore. He didn’t even look chic and international. He looked half dressed and forlorn in his turtleneck and tights, like a girl someone forgot to pick up after tap dancing class.

  Now that he had abandoned Cat Burglar, Calvin threw hi* energies into becoming a nosy person. It was as if all his passion for going undetected was now transformed into detecting something sneaky or amiss in Beatrice’s life. He pestered her constantly. Standing outside the bathroom door, he would repeat, tonelessly: “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?”

  Usually, Beatrice was practicing. Practicing lighting a

  cigarette, or driving a van and lighting a cigarette at the time. Practicing talking with a cigarette dangling out the side of her mouth, or talking while gesturing with a cigarette in one hand. She had no cigarettes with which to practice, so she rolled up a little piece of paper and held it together with Sc tape. Sometimes it was easier to use an invisible cigarette ^ when she practiced sticking her cigarette between the tuning pegs of her guitar, which was also, at this point, invisible, "What are you doing?” Calvin repeated.

  "I'm smoking!” Beatrice shouted.

  A moment of silence from outside the door. Then: “Bea trice...” Calvin said in a threatening tone. And when she ignored him: “Beatrice ... ?” he said, sounding afraid. "You shouldn’t be smoking. You know you shouldn't be.”

  She flung the door open and glared. “I’m kidding. Ha ha. I'm only kidding.”

  Calvin also began taking an unhealthy interest in the Rock Hotel. “Is it on yet?” he would ask, hovering beside the radio. “Tell me when it’s on,” he ordered Beatrice. Anytime a voice came onto the air, even if it was only the weatherman, Calvin would say, "That’s Shred, right? That’s Shred.” He pretended that he liked listening to the music, | closing his eyes and nodding to the frenzied sounds. “I love that song,’’ he’d say.

  But Beatrice knew he was only pretending. For sometimes he would turn away from the radio, blink a few times, and ask musingly, “What are they so angry about?” He was still young enough to think in the same fretful ways as adults. In more charitable moods, Beatrice would say, “One day, Calvin, it will sound different to you.” One day he would be able to tell, like she could, when a song was by Dag Nasty or Minor Threat,

  before Shred said anything. “You will be able to tell the difference,” she told him, "between being angry and being alive."

  It was a distinction she tried to impart to the person on the telephone.

  “Why is your boyfriend always yelling?” he asked.

  “It’s just what he does,” she
said. It had become what she did, too: shut her bedroom door and sing along to the Rock Hotel in a strained voice she didn’t wholly recognize. That’s when I reach for my revolverI she would yell, and it made her feel exhilarated, alert, terrifyingly capable. She couldn’t wait until she could drive in a car and yell at the same time.

  “Doesn't it bother you?"

  “I don't take it personally,” she said.

  “Why don’t you leave him?" the person asked. “Try someone new.”

  “You make it sound easy.” She didn’t like when the conversation sidled off in this direction. “When it isn’t easy at all. Leaving is the hardest thing a person can do,” she said firmly, and then reminded him: “We live together”

  “I guess that’s true,” he admitted. “You get attached, I guess.”

  “And we’d have to break up the band."

  | “But you could start a new one. An all-girl band.” Beatrice sighed. “It’s not that simple. I would still have feelings for him.”

  And she wondered at the ease with which she could talk about relationships, having never actually had one herself. It was amazing what practice and imagination could accomplish. By the time she went to her first show, moved into her first apartment, smoked her first cigarette, it would seem, she

  supposed, like she had been doing it for her entire life. Maybe by the time she had her first boyfriend, even, she would already be tired, having rehearsed so long for all of that trouble.

  She explained, “Sometimes we don’t have a say in who we love.”

  Even though she said it patiently, she had a feeling that he still didn’t understand, and that he would persist in being obtuse when it came to this subject. There was a willful streak in him, a doggedness, as if he’d picked up the personality of a dandelion or a patch of crabgrass. He asked the same questions every time he called. He asked them in the same tentative, mournful tone. She was trying to break him of the habit.

  “Tell me about your day,” she demanded. “Tell me something interesting.”

  “Oh god,” he moaned. He was stumped. "That’s impossible.”