Writing to Angela is another one of those things that Patsy has taken on herself. None of them visit Angela anymore, not since that single, scarifying occasion when the children were still genuine children. Patsy makes sure to send special cards on Angela’s birthday and at Easter, and gifts at Christmas, sweaters or scented talcum powder or calendars or extra-warm socks. Patsy has struck up a friendship with Diamond, who is one of the nurse’s aides at the hospital. Diamond and Patsy talk on the phone on a regular basis, and Diamond tells her that Angela is about the same, poor soul. “Why they call that place a hospital I surely don’t know,” says Diamond. “Not nobody’s leaving there cured.”
Although they always begin by talking about Angela, Patsy and Diamond are in the habit of staying on the phone and chatting. They are about the same age and they share certain attitudes, such as their frequently expressed observation that the world has changed, and not for the better. They lament the failures of the body that come with aging and they compare maladies. Diamond has a husband, Willie, who has his own absorbing health problems, and four grown children and numerous grandchildren and an abundance of other relations, cousins and great-uncles and her cousins’ kids and everybody’s mates and ex-mates. All of them enter the conversation with regularity, so that talking with Diamond is like following a particularly well-populated television series.
Patsy wishes she had more to contribute than Leslie and Jack, who never really do anything worth repeating, or even complaining about, except in static and uninteresting ways. Compared to Diamond’s stories of hernias and diabetes and asthmatic babies and trips to the emergency room and domestic disturbances and the inadequacies of health insurance and landlords and law enforcement personnel, Patsy feels as if she has no right to her own unhappiness, as if she’s never lived at all.
And that’s ridiculous, because of everything she’s been through with Angela. It’s a tragedy, and if someone hadn’t experienced it themselves, you couldn’t hope to describe it and do it justice. True enough, but everything’s already happened, hasn’t it, and there’s no longer any urgency in it. It’s like a war fought a long time ago that everybody’s forgotten, and that’s so unfair. “Our Lord holds us all in the palm of His hand,” says Diamond, finishing her account of large and small misfortunes, indignities, setbacks, taking comfort in the profession of faith. And Patsy hurries to agree. But does she believe it? So much of life is unfairness. God could fix it in an instant if he wanted. A wave of his enormous, God-sized hand, and evil and sickness and death would be banished. God is supposed to love us, but sometimes it seems like he’s just not paying enough attention.
Patsy takes out a new sheet of paper. Dear Angela. The wine makes her writing spiral out and out, uphill and downhill. Are you glad you went crazy? I don’t mean you did it on purpose because I don’t think people can choose to be that way. And even if they could if you laid it all out for them the parts about hospitals and not looking very attractive after a while they’d say no. That’s because they aren’t crazy! But say once you are good and crazy you might find some advantages to it like you don’t care what anybody else thinks and say you felt like a thing or didn’t feel like a thing say you feel like you’re a scream walking around on two legs
Patsy stops because this is foolishness, she’s a fool. She can’t even drink enough to sneak up on crazy. Her body is a clock that says late late late and it is the outrageous truth that your whole life can turn out wrong sad wasted and no one else will think twice about it.
It sucks, Jack tells himself, that he can’t get cable out in the garage. There’s some way to hook it up without the cable people knowing but he isn’t sure what that is. It’s not worth the trouble because he won’t be living here very much longer. He’s on the brink of something new. His life, his real life, is about to start, he’s positive. Tomorrow or the day after or the day after that, anyway, not long. He felt like this when he was getting ready for the navy but that was only a practice drive, a test run, and now he’s ready for the real, the serious kick-ass version. Leave his loser self behind and step up to the plate. “Loser” is a little harsh; “non-player” is more accurate. Never got his head in the game, but that’s about to change big-time. He’s going to surprise a few people.
Nobody who knows him would think he’s ambitious but he is, in a secret-identity sort of way, like Spider-Man. He wants people to say, “You’re kidding, the same guy we went to school with?” The way Jack figures it, everybody starts out not famous, and his odds are exactly the same as everybody else’s.
Of course the best thing would be if he got famous for doing hero stuff, like the firefighters, or say he managed to get into the military. You were always hearing about guys in the military who were heroes because they saved their buddies or killed especially large numbers of the enemy in spite of personal danger. Sometimes he has a whole movie going on in his head, where he’s a navy SEAL on a special-ops mission, crawling on his belly at night over rocky ground. It’s an ambush and everything depends on keeping the muscles of his body under hair-trigger control. His mind is calm, zero calm, because he’s trained himself to be emotionless about a kill. Take out the target. Do it by the numbers. Part of it’s training but part of it’s instinct, and he’s a natural. Even the old-timers acknowledge this, the hard-asses who never have anything good to say about anybody. But he doesn’t let this give him the big head because you can’t use up brain space when every cell has to focus on the moment of contact, impact, killing pressure…
Jack snaps out of it to find himself on the couch with his dick in his hand and the television yelping and it’s embarrassing, really. He needs to get the hell out of this rut he’s in, and that should be easy, he’s thought it through a million times so why can’t he just do it? What’s it going to take, what’s wrong with him that he can’t pry himself loose, execute, act? It’s late, he’s not sure how late or if it matters, and when he opens the door to the kitchen the house is quiet. He walks a circuit from the kitchen and the den and the living room where no one ever lived and the dining room where none of them ever dined. Again and again, the same track, letting his fingers brush against the walls like he’s still a kid, a dumb little kid who doesn’t know anything.
The walking hypnotizes him and when Leslie comes out of her bedroom saying, “What? What is it?” he jumps.
She’s standing in the doorway, she has on the same old stretched-out T-shirt over a pair of underpants, what she always wears to bed, and he tries not to look at the soft parts of her body, she’s his sister, for Christ’s sake, but he can’t help noticing what he notices, and that makes him feel weird, like now there must be something else screwed up about him, he’s a pervert. He calls to mind certain images from porn sites so as to redirect his sensations.
He says, “Nothing, go back to sleep,” though he knows she hasn’t been asleep, none of them sleep anymore, not normal sleep. The puckered skin just below the elastic of her underpants draws his gaze. Although Leslie isn’t fat, there is a fatty look to this part of her leg, like a chicken drumstick, what’s wrong with his head? He has to quit being a total freak.
“What are you doing?”
“Exercise,” he says. “Cross-training.”
“Funny guy.” Leslie starts to scratch her ass through her T-shirt, then stops, as if she just figured out she’s putting on a show. “Are you OK?”
“Super.” What is he supposed to say? I’m way fucked.
She yawns. “It’s too hot in here. The whatsit, the attic fan, broke. Like, shorted out.”
“Yeah?”
“Guess who says it’s not worth fixing and we should just wait until winter.”
“Figures,” Jack says, and for a moment their old alliance against Patsy unites them. But he’s never hated Patsy like Leslie does. He doesn’t feel one way or the other about anyone anymore. “Sorry I got you up,” he says, ready to stop talking.
“Hey. What’s going on with you? I mean, really.”
“Not
hing. Relax.” What happened that I can’t remember? Why am I the way I am? Was I supposed to be different? Was I supposed to be a hero? All of a sudden it seems stupid, the hero stuff, everything’s stupid, and you might as well cut loose, rip the world a new asshole, because it sure as hell isn’t going out of its way for you.
“Nothing,” he says again, and smiles his goofy smile to reassure her, see, it’s only me, little brother, the flake, the screwup, the one nobody thinks is ever paying attention.
Leslie has chosen No Pill tonight, which she decides was a mistake. Although there’s a good chance that Pill would have been a mistake as well. She’s too tired to sort it out, this puzzle that has no solution or right answer. She’s too tired to worry about Jack, who seems even spacier than usual. He needs to get his act together, get out of the damned garage, and most of all quit prowling around the house in the dark, which always spooks her because of Angela. Even after all this time, footsteps in the dark remind her of Angela.
One two three ten twenty thirty eighty ninety one hundred. Counting sheep or anything else never works, neither does rolling from her left side to the fresher territory of her right, or rearranging the flattened pillows. She’s going to be a zombie at work. Plus tomorrow (today?) is Friday, and in addition to work she’ll have Wes to deal with.
Deal with: that’s not romance talking. But this thing with Wes has been going on for months now. She wonders if she should start looking for a new job. Affairs like this never come to good ends, she knows that from her magazines. Surely it won’t be long before Wes comes to her, sprinkling tears, and tells her how bad he feels about everything, how it’s killing him to live a lie, and even though she’s the most incredible, amazing girl, etc. etc. blah blah blah. It’s a scene she really wouldn’t mind missing. First, though, she should check and see how many vacation days she has coming.
Angela said, “It is the natural order of the world for children to devour their parents.” She was eating a bowl of chocolate pudding that Leslie brought her and Leslie can’t stand to watch the way she sucks and tongues to get the pudding down her throat, it’s disgusting, and it’s disgusting to have to listen to this kind of talk.
“You’re nuts, you realize that,” Leslie said. She felt free to say whatever she liked to Angela, since it was always just the two of them.
“Life uses up life,” Angela said. “And that is the essence of hunger.” She had a ring of chocolate pudding around her mouth.
“Nuts,” Leslie repeated. “If you weren’t nuts, you’d wash your hair once in a while. And get out of bed long enough to change the sheets.” It felt righteous to be scornful. She wanted nothing to do with anyone so revolting. It was odious, beyond belief to think that she had once grown inside Angela’s body, like a stone inside a swollen fruit. She had all the normal squeamishness of a girl her age and then some. It made her ill, ill, ill to think that everyone walking the earth had parents, and all the fat old boring old moms and pops had done vile, naked things to each other.
Everybody she knew complained about their parents and thought they were gross, but none of them came home to Angela, none of them had mothers whose scalp showed lines of dirt, like a planted field, or who forgot to flush the toilet. Her father was no help. He acted like nothing was ever his fault. Angela began leaving her bedroom at night to prowl the house. She was quiet; it was the smell that woke you.
“If you don’t get in the shower I’m going to take you out in the yard and spray you with the hose,” Leslie threatened. It was always just the two of them. Leslie hated being this close to her. She hated breathing the same air Angela breathed. “Would you like that, huh?” Angela smelled of something rotten being burnt, not just sweat and musty hair, something more, as if all the sugar inside her was subject to combustion. Leslie turned the shower on, set the hot water drilling, made Angela peel off her crusted sweaty pants and underpants and sweatshirt and nasty yellow ropelike bra. “Soap,” Leslie said. “Tell me you still remember what soap is.” Angela’s abdomen hung down in loose folds, like something tied around her waist. It was outrageous, all the different things that could be ugly about the human body.
One of the advantages of the hospital where Angela now resides is that minimum standards of hygiene are adhered to. Attendants in raincoatlike gear guide the patients into chutes resembling those used to handle livestock. Every surface is tiled, and nozzles set at different levels spray jets of water and soap. By the time Patsy took Leslie and Jack to see Angela in the hospital, they had scrubbed her down to nothing. She was dressed in the pink and white pajamas they had sent her for Mother’s Day. Her skin had broken out in acne, patches of it on her chin and forehead, and her hair had been cut short. Someone had parted it in the middle and secured it with two pink plastic barrettes. She was shapeless, like a lump of cotton stuffing left out in the rain.
It was the medication that made her skin break out. There were always side effects, but they were minor and controllable. At least, this was what one of the nurses said to Patsy in a loudly whispered conversation while Angela was quiet in a chair and Leslie and Jack sat at a table playing cards.
By then they had been told that Angela was sick, that she couldn’t help the things she had done, and they must be patient and understanding. It was implied that their positive attitude and support would be an important part of Angela’s recovery. Leslie couldn’t stand hearing it, one more installment of Patsy’s sappy Christian noise, always insisting on the way things should be and ignoring the way they really were. At such times she felt an unwelcome kinship with Angela. Who would have thought it, after everything. But in this at least she was her mother’s daughter: she knew the power of hatred. The card game she and Jack were playing was go fish. Leslie had just asked Jack for all his sevens, and he’d said, “Go fish,” so tickled that here was a game he could win at, when Angela flew without wings from her chair and threw a set of grinning upper and lower dentures on the table like a party trick and Leslie screamed and screamed. Every one of Angela’s decayed and festering teeth had been extracted.
What are little girls made of, what are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice. Leslie remembers someone singing that to her when she was very small. Was it Angela? Had she ever done mother things, held and rocked her, sung songs, counted her fingers and toes? It’s nothing Leslie can call to mind, but she thinks it must have happened. You had to know a thing in order to miss it. Her mother is the thing lost, the shape of her hunger.
Sugar and spice and. Maybe she used to be. Sweet. Dimples, curls. Not anymore. She’s a blowtorch, a barbed wire fence. At work she takes phone calls from policyholders who have suffered insurable accidents: car crashes, trees fallen through the roof, flooded basements, ruined furniture, injuries, theft, loss, disaster. The women speak through clogged tears, the men are often testy, irritated, rigid with worry. Leslie is always polite, she always uses expressions of sympathy, but none of it touches her. That’s the breaks, folks. People need to toughen up. Not every loss can be repaired or compensated. Some things are best left ruined.
Leslie gets out of bed to go to the bathroom. She listens hard, but the house holds its breath.
Once she gets back in bed, she means to stay awake. There’s not much point in sleep so late/so early. She wants to stay alert, vigilant, guard against sleep, because there is an expectation of something about to happen. There is always the expectation and dread of things that come to you when you are asleep. Leslie’s closed eyes begin to see dream pictures, little cartoon scraps of things, and she fights to come awake. The pictures go grainy and slide away and she’s alert, waiting, her heart gulping and her skin tight.
When the burnt smell reaches her, she says, Stop, Stop it, because she knows it’s Angela. She rolls away and flails her hands, but it’s like moving through glue, and sleep is still holding her down. Or no, it’s Angela crushing Leslie beneath her weight and stink, Angela on a night ten years ago and how many nights since. Angela’s teeth rip a long
piece of skin from Leslie’s collarbone, then worry the flesh farther down, the place where Leslie even now has scars, rubbery welts and ridges, she is being eaten! What are little girls made of, what are little girls made of? She doesn’t feel her own blood but she sees it on Angela’s mouth, black like pudding, in this her dream she can see in the dark. Angela says, You are my perfect food, and Leslie knows it’s true, she is only perfect when she is a part of Angela.
Leslie has sobbed herself well and truly awake by now. There’s a little gray light outlining the edges of the windows, and she stares at this, her mind floating.
But the burnt smell is still there, and Jack is pounding on her closed door, calling her name. “I’m awake,” Leslie says, as if that is the most important thing.
Jack is rattling the doorknob but it’s locked. When Leslie opens the door she sees him looking both scared and important, and a moving, shifting darkness behind him. “What are you, deaf?” he says. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”
“Crap.” Leslie stares into the smoke-filled hallway. She can’t come up with anything better to say and that bothers her. She pulls on a pair of jeans and her shoes and looks around her, wondering if anything here is worth saving. She finds her purse and her keys and fills a pillowcase with stuff from her dresser and desk drawers, she doesn’t stop to think what, and takes the blanket from the foot of the bed and later there’s probably more she’ll miss but everything is right now.
Jack pulls her by the hand down the hallway and through the thickening air. In the middle of everything she marvels at how large her brother’s hand is, how big and manlike he’s become: when did all that happen? The house is talking. There is noise like a hailstorm, popping and banging. Fire is trying to break through the walls. The smoke reminds her of an amusement park ride, the kind meant to scare you, clouds of it rushing up or falling back, and if Leslie isn’t scared it’s because nothing seems more natural than the house burning.
Throw Like A Girl Page 20
