THE SUNDOG LADY shows up at the wrong time of year for vacuum sales. Now the rain falls steadily and instead of leaf crumbs what you have is mud against which the Denby is powerless so long as the mud stays in liquid form. So this is what occupies your day: waiting for the mud to dry so that it can be sucked. You haven’t the heart to tell the Sundog lady that not two months ago you bought a Denby. Instead you are thinking about all those years with just the carpet sweeper, and now this glut of vacuum salesmen — salespeople. How strange life’s feast or famine.
Still, the Sundog lady importunes on you to let her give you a demonstration—“then you’ll know what I’m talking about.” Brown-skinned and wearing great padded silver boots, the Sundog lady responds to your invitation across the threshold: “Honey, if you don’t mind, I think I better get these moonboots off my feet.”
Underneath, she’s wearing pantyhose, and you walk her quickly to the carpet. You’ve noticed that she has no vehicle, and she explains that she walked from the crossroads where her husband dropped her off, with the intention of demonstrating — she calls it “demo-ing”—the Sundog along the way. She has the vacuum strapped to a rolling luggage cart with a complicated web of bungee cords that she untangles. Then she shows you how the Sundog has a water reservoir through which the dirt gets sucked, even the mud will be sucked, believe you me. And though you just this morning ran the Denby over the shag carpet, still there’s a brown film wobbling on the surface of the water reservoir after she makes one swipe.
It sort of sickens you: how hard you fight the world, how the world keeps coming in.
The Sundog lady sees you frown and understands — and is grateful — that you are genuinely interested and not just letting her go through the motions. She also knows she’s got a live one on her hook, and so do you: you could buy a vacuum and spare this woman any further trudging along the shoulder while the cars spray rooster-plumes of mud into her face. You have that power. You are that well off, really: if you were a more reliable sort of wife you’d be sure to have a car. And you could build a fire and let the Sundog woman spend the afternoon in her stockinged feet with a mug of tea. No doubt she would find your husband’s furniture odd and sterile: not much there to cushion her meaty bones. Instead the two of you will have to lie on the shag, underneath the old quilts that smell like your dead mother, eating Oreos on salad plates until the light grows dim and she calls her husband to come fetch her.
As she navigates the vacuum around your living room, the woman speaks in the reassuring tones of farther south, those sunny places that you talk to on the phone from Castle Ethel. She’s admitting that you are the first person today to let her in. But she does not seem disheartened: “Ain’t had the chance to get out in the country much,” she says. Because you ask, she offers that it’s pretty, but that she would be afraid to be alone out here at night. “Too much space with nothing here,” she says, “and I’d always be feeling like it was up to me to fill it up.”
REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES
Having never smashed any plates before, I was surprised by their substance, how they made the copper skillets sway on their hooks over the range, jeweling the kitchen with those shards of orange light. Then I wadded the curtains in my fists and threw my weight back against them.
Okay, I’m leaving, Jimmy says. You can take your tit out of the wringer.
Then there’s the telltale snarl of his car in retreat, a mufflerlessness out of place in this neighborhood, where the rest of our vehicles were manufactured by the timid Japanese. And then it’s quiet, the kind of quiet that’s hard work to remember, as I lie in the kitchen, still gripping the curtain rod like a ceremonial sword.
Soon Jill comes in the door that he left open — she’s been outside walking her sheltie with all the other neighbors dragging their dogs around until their bowels empty for the night.
You should have shut the blinds, she says. Unless you really did want everyone to show up here tomorrow with a casserole, she adds.
So what was the fight about this time?
You mean what’s the name this time.
Okay, what?
La-riss-a.
She humphs: Now you need to get some holy water and sprinkle it around the house.
Her next bit of advice is that I shouldn’t clean up right away: instead I have to spend time basking in the wreckage I’ve wrought, since in it will appear the phoenix rising from the shards of my old life. But suddenly the phoenix just looks like broken plates, the good set of Spode that belonged to my mother, and when I whack myself with the curtain rod, the dusty curtains are reluctant to part company with the mucus on my chin.
Oh, come on, she says. Name one way that you’re not better off without him.
Money, I say finally.
Then Jill digs through the junk mail on the counter and pulls out the credit card applications. Here, she says. Here’s plenty of money, and you didn’t even have to leave the house.
So we bask for a while, but Jill thinks I’m not trying hard enough, and when she’s listened to about as many of my sobs and slobbers as she can stand, she says, Forget it, and starts sweeping up the kitchen. She has to work around the patch of floor where I’m regressing to my fetal self with the Harvey’s Bristol Cream. She bends the rod in half and shoves the whole thing — curtains and all — into the garbage. Meanwhile I’m watching her feet from eye-level, the hems of her slacks, her cable-textured trouser socks. And I’m also thinking about how, before she married the old man next door who died and left her with an ample trust, she told me she used to go around robbing mini-marts.
Tell that story again, I say.
Which story?
The one where you’re in the car with the boys back East, and the boys have the gun.
She harrumphs a little, says, Why don’t you tell it? Since you’re the one who’s always bringing that old warhorse up.
But I wasn’t there.
Jill lets the contents of the dustpan clatter. I wasn’t there either, she says. My brain was never in the same time zone as the parts of my body below my neck.
Jill’s the only woman my age I know who has a hairstyle that requires curlers — in her sweater and pearls, she could be Lassie’s mom. I offer her the bottle, but she insists on making herself a proper drink, her back turned to me, the glassware clinking against the counter.
So you walk into the gas station. . I say to get her started.
I was never the one who went into the gas station, she corrects. I was always the one who drove.
Okay, I say, you’re driving. You’re in Amish country and it’s midnight. And the boys are in the back seat, bouncing the gun around like a hot potato. They’ve just come running out of the mini-mart with a big stack of money.
You got it. See? You don’t need my help.
Jill stirs her drink with a cocktail fork. An olive floats like a tiny zeppelin between the ice.
That’s it? I ask, thinking there must be more to it than that.
That’s it.
You’re driving?
Hey, I’m driving fast as hell.
She drags a chair over to sit near where I’m curled up on the floor. Jill’s sheltie, whose name is Lois, has all this time been lying in the entryway, on the mat that’s made of woven weeds. She’s been to obedience school, and the way she locks up on command for some reason frightens me. When Jill whistles, the dog instantly unfreezes. Dragging her red leather leash, she trots over to lie against Jill’s shins.
So what about when you drive by one of those Amish guys? I ask. One of those Amish guys riding along in a buggy.
You don’t worry about them, she says as she reaches down to scratch Lois under the collar. You pass them in the oncoming lane and leave them in the dust.
But what about the horses? Weren’t you afraid of scaring the horses and making them bolt in your path?
Jill shrugs. Sometimes you’d look out and straight into the eye of the horse and you could see yourself as you went zooming past. But
this would take place in the flash of an instant. And you couldn’t really tell if you were just so high you were imagining it.
The kitchen falls quiet again, except for the sound of the baby upstairs on his planet far away, his cries coming in a language that I do not speak. All I can decipher is that he has one idea and that idea concerns rescue, and he knows how to bypass the brain and shoot straight for the glands, producing two wet spots on the front of my blouse that I don’t want to think about quite yet. I’m still trying to imagine myself in the car, with the boys and the gun and the money and the horses, and this means stepping out of my whole life.
I think you’re going to explode, Jill says, pointing to my shirt.
First tell me how the story ends.
It doesn’t end, she says. You use the gun to get the money. You use the money to get the drugs. You use the drugs to get the boys. You use up the drugs and need more money. So you get out the gun and you do it again. It goes on and on and on.
Lois’s tail thumps on the floor. Her one idea is happy happy happy.
But it ended, I say. I mean, you’re here.
I just got old is all, and then Jill laughs. She is, after all, almost thirty.
But here’s one thing I remember, she says more brightly. Here’s one thing I never will forget. Once we were driving through this tiny town outside of Chambersburg; the only thing this town’s got going for it is a pool hall sitting directly across from the courthouse. The boys are in back and they’re scared, because tonight for the first time they’ve had to fire the gun. They had to let the clerk know they were playing for real, so they fired a shot over his head and broke one of the plate-glass windows, which hung for a split second before it fell like a sheet of ice sliding off a barn roof. And then we lit out down the state road, which before long led us through this tiny town, where they’ve got the speed limit bumped down to twenty-five, only we’re cruising through at fifty. And all this time I’ve been trying to talk the boys down, when suddenly we pass the pool hall with its door flung open on a rectangle of light. It looks sort of like water, and there’s this girl standing in it, wearing one of those filmy Amish caps, the ribbons untied and dangling around her breasts. She must have ditched the rest of her Amish gear after she left her parents’ house; she’s wearing a green dress that’s short and slinky, her legs bare underneath — made me wonder why on earth she kept the hat. Something about wanting to flaunt the way all the rest of us think that we’re stuck with the cards that we’ve been dealt, but I don’t have time to work it out because I’ve got to concentrate on driving because suddenly there’s cars parked along both sides of the street. There was a guy running his hand up her leg, only I couldn’t see the rest of him; everything but the hand was cut off by the doorframe. And she was smoking a cigarette and looking straight at me, like she’d been standing there all her life, waiting for someone like me to come along.
Then suddenly Jill stops talking, her fingers buried in the dog’s deep fur. I can hear the baby, my Martian, making the noises that are making me leak. To him I am just a bag of milk, I know this. A giant milk bag, with a pink-brown bull’s-eye at its center.
So how does she fit in? I ask, wanting to get back to the girl though it’s too late — I know she’s gone. My question will only cause Jill to uncross her legs and smooth her wool slacks before taking up the leash.
I just think of her often is all, she says. You were the one who asked.
A GHOST STORY
This happened back in the days when the girl was working as a flagger, which paid ten dollars an hour back when ten dollars an hour was a lot of money, though perhaps the job was damaging what we would now call the girl’s “self-esteem”—she’d just graduated from college, she’d not expected that she’d have to stoop to flagging. Which meant standing for hours with a sign in your hand, one side saying STOP and the other SLOW, the same two speeds she saw her life operating in. She wasn’t even allowed to make the decision about when to show the STOP and when to show the SLOW; the boss, who mostly stood at the edge of whatever hole they were making, leaning on a shovel, decided that.
It was the kind of job the girl couldn’t function in unless she was wasted; she tried a few times and by the end of the day the cartilage inside her knees developed a serrated edge and her arms filled with ball bearings that rattled down against her lungs whenever she lifted the sign above her head. By three o’clock she’d be pounding on the door of the Port-O-Let until whichever of the guys was in there let her in and toked her up. Then suddenly the texture of everything became more vivid; an oily puddle could occupy the better part of an afternoon. And she was proud of the fact that she never killed anyone, though perhaps this was only a matter of luck. Luck and the fact that the girl was willing — whenever she sent people down the road SLOW when the sign should have said STOP—to throw herself onto the trunks of cars, sounding a thunk loud enough to make them halt.
This happened a couple of times, the driver glancing back in terror to discover the flagger girl splayed across his rear windshield. This was how she met the man she dated briefly that summer, who had a convertible in whose tiny jump seat she ended up, screaming, “Look out!” because there was a mail truck approaching the other way.
“Don’t worry, I see it,” he said. After swerving around the traffic cones while the truck went past, he continued down the street.
“Are you always this hysterical?” he asked, when she finally managed to sit up. She explained to him how she had simply made an error for which she was taking the responsibility by rectifying it herself. Not hysteria but self-reliance. As in Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“We’ll go for coffee,” he said; then, “No wait a minute, you don’t want coffee. What you want is a drink.” Yes. The man was nice-enough-looking. He had one of those big mustaches like the good cop in a TV show. So the girl stashed her hard hat and orange vest in the trunk of his MG while they went for a drink in one of the seedy Chinese restaurants downtown, which were just opening for lunch. She wasn’t too worried about leaving the job site — it was a state job and the infraction process was so complex that basically she would have to commit a felony to get the boss to work up sufficient energy to fire her.
And now, after all these years, the girl can’t remember much of the dialogue that passed between them. Except that at one point she asked what he did: just filler, a substitute for an actual thought. But he used what she said as a springboard for his own interrogation: “Why is everyone so obsessed with ‘do’? Why is it assumed we all need to ‘do’ something? What exactly do you mean by ‘do’ anyway?”
She said, “Just forget it.”
Then he teased one of her legs off the stalk of the barstool and used it as a lever to spin her around. “Let’s just say I’m a househusband,” he said. “Without the wife. Without the house.” And while she found this slyly sexy, even in the dim of the bar she could tell that the man had used a blow-dryer to style his pepper-colored hair. And in those days blow-drying was a quality she distrusted in men.
But nothing happened: the man simply paid for their drinks and then drove her back to the job site, where the boss grumbled about her explanation — that she’d gone to the emergency room to be checked out after the impact — but did not contest it. “You gotta be the worst flagger girl ever,” he said.
A few days later, the man drove by again around quitting time and took her to dinner at a chic French place. They went dutch, which the girl made a big stink about, though privately she resented his not lobbying harder for the bill. But it must not have been a sufficient degree of resentment to keep her from inviting him home, which in those days was what you did after a date, which you did not call a date. The sex you called “fucking,” which was supposed to prove you were a woman who had torn the veils from her eyes. The girl called herself a woman, although the word felt like a thistle in her mouth.
As for the man, he was old enough to be one, with a thicker body than those few college boys whom she’d seen in
the buff. And the sex was thicker too when it parked itself atop her like some not-quite-solid mass. She assumed this was one of natural consequences of aging, that the whitewater of sex would slow to a dribble, giving one time to get the adult work of life accomplished — like making grocery lists or calculating the number of days to the next paycheck — while the act itself took place. And when it was done he fell asleep, which the girl counted as an improvement over the college boys too, who afterward would crank up the album Aqualung and drop a couple more hits of acid and then want her to come outside with them to toss around the moon-glo Frisbee.
But later, when the darkness was rolling itself back up like a rug, she woke to find the man on top of her again. It was actually not the weight of him that woke her, for he was trying, she could tell, not to disrupt her sleep, but the fact that the room itself was shaking. All she had for a bed was a mattress under which she could feel the floorboards flex. When the square of frosted glass dropped from the fixture on the ceiling, the man flattened himself on top of her.
“Earthquake,” he muttered.
“What are you doing?”
“I was just trying to keep you from being cut.”
“No,” she said, when the trembling stopped. “I meant before that.”
“What? I didn’t want to wake you up.”
He got up to sweep then, a gesture that she knew was supposed to make her grateful while at the same time giving him an excuse not to have to meet her eyes. And if he had asked, he queried as the pile of glass clinked along the floor, wouldn’t she have gone along for one more round? Probably, she admitted, but he didn’t know that for a fact. In essence, he had raped her.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I certainly did not. That was a hundred percent consensual”
“How do you know that?”
He said that it could be inferred from her behavior earlier in the evening. He assumed she’d be willing, and what was the point in her losing sleep over something he could take care of on his own?
Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories Page 5
