You Should Pity Us Instead

by Amy Gustine

  “Mom!” Emma complains. “You ruined it!”

  “What were you doing?”

  “We were trying to see if there’s a God,” Sarah says, then sees her mother and goes pale. “I mean, I was proving it to Kate.”

  Emma brushes off the seat of her pink shorts and rolls her eyes. “Adoo says snakes are special and making friends with them gives you magical powers.”

  “No,” Sarah objects, “I did it because Kate is afraid of snakes. I told her if God doesn’t want you to die, nothing can kill you.”

  Elizabeth and Molly exchange a glance, then Elizabeth sits down and pulls Sarah into her lap. “That’s not quite right. You still have to be careful. If you purposely do dangerous things, that’s like testing God, okay? And we can’t test God. That’s wrong.”

  Kate looks at Molly, the need in her expression plain. Molly puts an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t mess with snakes. Wild animals are unpredictable.”

  Though she knows it’s only her grandfather’s recorded voice—“Molly, it’s Grandpa. I need help”—in the haze of four thirty a.m. the digitized sound summons the altered voice of kidnappers demanding ransom and stalkers knitting terror. In her panic, Molly makes it as far as the garage before remembering Simon is out of town, she’ll have to bring the girls.

  It’s a ten-minute drive if you go like a bat out of hell, take the freeways and catch all the lights. Molly doesn’t catch the lights, but she clocks ninety on the interstate and once, after slowing and looking, runs a red. She thinks mostly of what she’ll find at the house. Did he fall down the stairs? Another broken vessel, this one’s flow too generous for a bread bag to contain? If he had to use the emergency button that means he can’t get to a phone. Molly doesn’t know what to do about the girls. What if he’s already blue? For several minutes before Molly’s grandmother died, she would stop breathing, then her whole body would shudder and she’d grab a single, long breath as if trying to capture something going by. Molly cannot get that shudder and gasp out of her mind.

  She skids onto the loose stones. “You girls stay in the car. I’m locking it.”

  “No!” Kate protests.

  “It’s too dark,” Emma agrees.

  The darkness isn’t what bothers Molly. It’s the pink-orange of the sodium lights across the street in the cheese plant’s parking lot. They remind her of The Twilight Zone. Nothing is safe, nothing can be anticipated, even in the end everything remains a mystery.

  “Okay, but you girls sit in the kitchen. Don’t move. I have to help Grandpa Hank.”

  Key in the lock, Molly hears movement and the door is opened from inside. Her grandfather has on an undershirt and khakis. “Oh, shucks, I tried to call you. I’m just fine. Relax.”

  Molly looks him up and down. No blood, no palsy. He’s had time to put on socks and shoes. “I must have rolled over on the button while sleeping. I tried to call you, but the phone was busy.”

  Molly guesses she left it off the hook.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” Emma says.

  “Hi there, little one. Your mother got you out of bed this time in the morning?”

  “We had to come. Daddy’s out of town.”

  There’s already water boiling for tea. “You want some eggs and toast?”

  “No thanks, tea’s good.”

  “I think what I’ll do,” he says as he gets out a bag of the girls’ favorite cookies, “I’ll take that thing off at night. Then it won’t be causing all this trouble.”

  Molly reminds him he could fall out of bed or forget to put it back on the next morning.

  “I won’t forget,” he says. “The old noggin still works pretty good.”

  The girls want more cookies. Molly nods, too tired, yet buzzed on adrenaline, to deal with complaints. She stares outside. The pink-orange sodium lights cast an alien glow over her car. Assimilation is the mortar and pestle of humanity. That’s what Simon said when she told him Elizabeth was having second thoughts about bringing Adoo to America. Suddenly, Molly feels sure he won’t make it. The modern world will swallow him. Maybe not at fourteen, or eighteen or twenty. But it will. Does that mean they should have left him in the jungles of Peru? It seems to her if you don’t belong where you’re born, you’ll never belong anywhere.

  Grandpa Hank sits down with his eggs and toast, asks again doesn’t she want anything. Molly shakes her head. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “Well, sure I am. Next time don’t be rushing out so quick. I don’t want you getting hurt hightailing it over here.”

  Of course, one of these times he won’t be okay. But most likely she won’t get a call. At the morning or night check, his answering machine will pick up. Molly will wait ten minutes, then call back in case he’s in the bathroom. After the second call, then one from her cell on the way over, her car will crunch onto the familiar stones, but she won’t feel the familiar relief. She’ll put her key, hand unsteady, into the lock, and lift the warped door, her grandfather’s name already vibrating on the air. “Grandpa Hank? It’s me, Molly.” She’ll step up to the vinyl booth, proceed through the narrow kitchen and into the future without expecting an answer. One thing she has learned—death is like God: it answers every question with silence, but that doesn’t mean it’s not waiting for you.

  AN UNCONTAMINATED SOUL

  It is a hot day in June when Lavinia returns from the market, the scent of burned diesel in the air, sun shining on her house with a glaring light that does it no favors. She rolls her groceries—canned fruit, bread, peanut butter, milk, coffee, spaghetti, tomato sauce, forty cans of wet and three bags of dry cat food—behind her on a rickety dolly. Every few steps she stops to be sure the bungee cords are still secure.

  For thirty years Lavinia and her husband Carl lived in apartments, moving whenever the appliances broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix them. Then, five years ago, long after their son Christopher had moved on, Lavinia inherited her mother’s house at the corner of Newton and Wade, just across the street from where three tracks converge at the Amtrak station. Brown and gold asbestos shingles cover the outside, as if someone used roof tiles for siding. The front steps are crumbling, pried away from the sill by fifty years of freeze-thaw cycles. A plastic pot of geraniums, gone to twigs three seasons ago, slumps from a rusty bracket.

  Lavinia turns up the gravel path between her house and old man Pultwock’s—no garages in this neighborhood—and trudges to the back door, coming to a breathless stop on the five-foot-square patio Carl laid. Propping the screen door open with a bag of cat food, she unlocks the main door. Taped above its lock is half a used envelope: At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.

  With the door barely ajar, Lavinia reaches in to dispel the cats and grab the baby gate. “Shoo, get, go. Back, you beasts, back.” She’s locking the gate into the opening, hissing at Casey, Wallace, Rodeo Roy, and several others trying to escape when Jason, a sneak with a white-masked face like the killer in the Friday the 13th movie, leaps, passing through her reaching fingers silky, muscular, untouchable, already gone.

  A nail protruding from the metal weather stripping gouges Lavinia’s finger. “Dammit, Jason!” She gets the storm door shut, then trips down the stairs, sucking salty, warm blood from her hand.

  Jason has stopped, a bit dumbstruck, in the middle of the yellow yard. A rotting privacy fence barricades his route to Newton Street and a thick stand of yews in front of a chain-link obstructs the alley behind, so Lavinia positions herself between her house and old man Pultwock’s, barely six feet apart. “Here kitty kitty, here.” She crouches seductively. “Come on, Jase. I got food in the house.” He plops on his side, turning his black body in the warm grass as she stoop-walks toward him, cooing, “Here kitty kitty, come to Mama.”

  Just when she gets close enough to touch him, reaching out with a tentative, inveigling rub of her forefinger and thumb, old man Pultwock’s screen door whacks shut. Jason darts toward the back fence and disappears inside the yews.

  Pult
wock slaps down his steps in scuff slippers, waving his finger. “Mary, you let that damn cat go! That’s what we need, a mass exodus, a diaspora!”

  Lavinia is the name of Emily Dickinson’s sister who liked cats. Mary started to think of herself as Lavinia after Carl killed himself.

  She scowls at old man Pultwock. It’s a bad omen, this old man knowing the word “diaspora,” her just learning it last week. She read it in a book she bought at a garage sale about a Jewish woman forced to put her cat to sleep when Hitler forbade Jews to own pets. It struck Lavinia as the most horrible thing she’d ever heard about Nazis. It was one thing to want someone dead, but the capricious, petty denial of even this love? That seems altogether a different class of cruelty.

  “I know what you got in there,” Pultwock says.

  “Sh!” Lavinia flashes over her shoulder, finger to her lips.

  “Let him go. Probably be happier free.” As he leans to peer into the yews, a gap opens in Pultwock’s robe, revealing the inside of drooping, white thighs, like raw chicken on a hook.

  “Walter, he’s not going to come out with you there.”

  Old man Pultwock straightens up. “Be for the better. What would your mother say to this? You think she’d approve?” He flicks a cigarette nub into the gravel between their houses, where at least fifty others lay scattered like toy infantry after a fire bombing. When Lavinia’s son Christopher was a child he made up whole army divisions from their ashtrays. Carl’s butts were the brown army, Lavinia’s the white. When she wore lipstick, the opposing army became communists.

  Lavinia parts the yews, calling “Here kitty kitty kitty, here,” then holds her finger to her lips again and listens, hoping to locate Jason by a telltale rustle, but a train becomes audible just then. The ground vibrates and Lavinia raises her voice, going further along the fence line, toward Pultwock’s yard.

  He follows, complaining. “I saw you take my paper on your way to work last night.”

  Lavinia clerks nights at a convenient store ten blocks down on St. Claire. “Yep,” she says. “You know I need those.”

  Pultwock always puts the papers on the top of his garbage cans, then hauls the cans to the curb, pretending to know nothing about what Lavinia needs.

  “I see you got boxes this morning. What’s them for?”

  Lavinia has a new plan for the basement, so she brought home several empty cardboard boxes from the store. She’s not surprised Pultwock saw her. He has always made a point of knowing her routine.

  To get rid of him, she lies. “I’m using them to pack some things up, you know, clean house.”

  “You? Clean?” Pultwock’s saliva trembles on his thin, red lip, one bubble balanced on the tip of a chin whisker. The bubble’s utter unlikeliness, its dogged persistence, galls Lavinia. She imagines grabbing Jason out of the bushes and tossing him—claws fully extended—at that chin.

  “Would you please go inside, Walter? Jason’s never going to come out with you here.”

  “Shit, I don’t see as he’s going to come out with or without me here. What do you think? He appreciates you? Cats are stupid animals. Now dogs, they’d know what they got. A dog would come back.”

  Lavinia returns to her own yard, still stoop-walking to peer into the yews. Pultwock follows. “That dog your mother had, he was something. He could shake hands and if you held up a hot dog he’d dance like a goddamn ballerina.”

  Lavinia is annoyed by the mention of her mother’s dog. She took him to the pound after her mother died, mainly because Carl had just gotten her Fritz and they were not getting along.

  Lavinia continues to croon for Jason, on her hands and knees now.

  Pultwock laughs. “Jesus, Mary, look at you? You think that cat would care if you lived or died?”

  Lavinia stands up and brushes off her jeans, belatedly aware of how her rump must have looked from Pultwock’s view. “Shut up, Walter. Just shut up.”

  “So you going to tell me why you really got them boxes?”

  “I’m sending some things to my son and his wife, okay? The family china.”

  “China, uh!” Pultwock guffaws. “You and that girl are on the outs, right? I sure don’t see her come round here after that fight a while back.”

  “They’re busy,” Lavinia says. “They’ve got little kids.” Patti was pregnant last time Lavinia saw her. She would have had the baby by now.

  Suddenly Pultwock shouts, “You’re moving, aren’t you? That’s what they’re for. You’re moving out!” He says it with shock and anger, as if they were lovers.

  Lavinia trudges up the back stairs. “You caught me, Walt. I’m leaving you.”

  Just as the door shuts she hears him mutter, “Crazy bitch.”

  The corner of Newton and Wade is an island of five houses cut off from the adjacent neighborhoods by the interstate, the Amtrak station, an empty warehouse, a bar called The Rusty Tavern, a boarded-up building still advertising on a wooden sign “Bait and Grocer” in cracked red paint, and a few oddly contemporary businesses—ZZ Graphics, a brand-new post office. On the far side of the warehouse the High Level Bridge rises across the Maumee. Its blue-gray steel is lit all year round with white lights.

  Of the five houses on Lavinia’s street, she and old man Pultwock are the only permanent residents. The house on the opposite side of Pultwock is boarded up and the two on the far side of that are rentals, their occupants changing each year, sometimes in the course of a few months.

  Lavinia’s mother bought the corner house with life-insurance money from J&M Stamping, where Lavinia’s father worked as a machine operator for better than thirty years. Her parents, Catholics, had ten children, and could never afford to own until her father died. By then all but one of Lavinia’s siblings had moved out. Her brother Luke went all the way to Texas. He made money in the concrete business and built a huge stucco house that reminds Lavinia of a cult compound, with its two wings and guest house clutching a courtyard where he and his wife installed a Jesus fountain. In the pictures they sent, Jesus stands on the middle of an enormous concrete lily pad, hands outstretched, geysers of frothy water shooting from his palms.

  Later Angela, the youngest, went to Idaho on a college scholarship and lost touch. Lavinia’s brother Todd moved to Detroit and died of pneumonia in the mid-’80s. As for the rest, Lavinia has argued with all of them over the years, and now that their mother is no longer a common thread, no one bothers making it up.

  Inside the tiny kitchen white oil paint, long yellowed, flakes from the walls. Exposed wooden shelves hold Corelle plates. In the middle of the room, a Bakelite dinette set with green vinyl seats scored by claws into patterns like the veins on a leaf. Lavinia shuffles around forking canned Friskies onto two dozen plates.

  The gluttonous—Adrienne, Plato, Camus, Ginger, Peter, Wally, Fyodor—dominate the plates while she stands at the sink waiting for Pultwock to go inside, but he seems to have settled in for the duration on his back steps.

  When Lavinia’s mother died it was Luke who called. Apparently his phone number was the first on the yellow scrap of paper her mother kept affixed to the fridge with a plastic Virgin Mary magnet. He said a neighbor found her. Lavinia had never thought to ask how the neighbor got in, or who it was, but it flashes to her—Pultwock, of course, even though before today he’s never said a word about Lavinia’s mother. Until this moment Lavinia would have said they hardly knew each other, though that would be nearly impossible with the houses so close, their backyards the only grass for blocks around.

  Emily, an all-white stray who regularly disappears for days in the basement rafters, jumps up and butts Lavinia’s elbow. She pets her in a circular motion between the ears, a light touch the skittish cat prefers. “Be patient, Camus is almost done. Can’t you see his little belly swelling?”

  On top of the fridge Fritz wails. Lavinia drums the counter. “Come on down, Fritzie. Come on. They’ll be done. You and Em can eat soon.” Fritz meows with increased pitch, a formal complaint against her coldnes
s. “No, you don’t need help. You got yourself up there, now get yourself down.” Nonetheless Lavinia shuffles amid the swirling bodies and offers her arms. Fritz hesitates, then leaps, his claws piercing her shirt and the tender skin of her breasts. She grips him to her.

  Several of the cats have clogged tear ducts, so every day she wipes the corners of their iridian eyes free of a brick-colored ooze which, left untended, would stain their delicate faces. She scissors out matted clumps of fur or dried feces caught in errant, long-haired tails. When brawls occur, she applies first aid with a lightning swipe of a damp paper towel and a glob of Neosporin. After Rodeo Roy, a clumsy gray tabby, broke his leg falling between the back of the couch and the wall, Lavinia made a splint out of popsicle sticks and caged him to heal in a kennel fashioned from a cardboard box. For circulation, she cut out the words “Get Well” on one side and “Be Careful” on the other.

  Lavinia shoos Peter and Virginia away from one of the plates and installs Fritz, then shuffles through the living room to peer out the front window. The cats, fifteen or twenty at the moment, dominate the furniture like a collection of stuffed toys in a store window. The answering machine is supposed to be on top of the TV, but today it’s wedged behind, knocked off by Lucifer, who crouches on the warm set, which Lavinia rarely shuts off.

  She rights the machine. Its light isn’t on, but Lavinia pushes the “play” button anyway, holding the little box as if to coax something from it. What if the light has burned out? No. It’s the same message, unerased by future calls for over a year. “Hi, Mary, look, after what happened today I just don’t think it’s a good idea for the kids to see you for a while. It’s…” Christopher says something in the background, then a child laughs, and Patti resumes, speaking more quickly, her voice lowered. “It’s better if we just don’t come down for a while. Better for Hannah, you know, and maybe, you could just be reasonable, and get rid of some of them. Just some. Not all. Anyway, I have to go. I really do.”