by Alex Behr
Copyright © 2017, Alex Behr. Released under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Printed and distributed by 7.13 Books. First paperback edition, first printing: October 2017
Cover design: Gigi Little
Cover photo: Lewis Watts
Author photo: Heather Maxwell Hall
ISBN-10: 0-9984092-2-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-9984092-2-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944227
This collection is available in a variety of electronic formats including EPUB for mobile devices, MOBI for Kindles, and PDFs for American and European laser printers.
www.713books.com
Advance Praise
“Alex Behr’s imagination is wild, rigorous, and totally unique. I haven’t been able to decide if her stories are comedies intercut with horror or horror stories leavened by comedy, but when they’re this entertaining, who cares?”
— Tom Bissell, author of Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
“Alex Behr’s Planet Grim turned me inside out. No, really, these stories of eros and ids getting loose, inner contradictions and desires crashing into each other like marbles, brutal instances of violence up against a moment of tender beauty, the people and lovers and mothers and families in this book are carved from the guts of us. What sits dead center at this hybrid of self and other is, mercifully, an unbeaten heart.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children
“Alex Behr’s characters are conflicted, uncertain, and pained. What’s so compelling about her fiction is how she honors that conflictedness, explores the uncertainties, and examines the pain until it reveals itself as irreducibly human and therefore a kind of grace.”
— Dan DeWeese, author of You Don’t Love This Man and Disorder
“In Alex Behr’s funny, poignant stories, the kids are sharp, fearless, and insatiable, the parents conflicted, lustful, and tough. The meaning of family and love is an epic game nobody can win or stop playing.”
— Mary Rechner, author of the story collection Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women
For Eli Zheng
We vibrate in space
Lent
Conseillez-vous soigneusement
Munissez-vous de clairvoyance
Seul, pendant un instant
De manière à obtenir un creux
Très perdu
Portez cela plus loin
Ouvrez la tête
Enfouissez le son
—Erik Satie
Slow. Advise yourself carefully. Arm yourself with clairvoyance. Alone for an instant. So that you obtain a hollow. Very lost. Carry that further. Open your head. Bury the sound. Gnoissienne no. 3 (1890).
Contents
White Pants
Wet
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
Teenage Riot
Fairyland
The Passenger
This Is Not a Love Story
Some Weird Sin
The Tenant
Observations of Punk Behavior
The Garden
What Do I Get?
A Reasonable Person
My Martian Launderette
Sentient Times
The Shrew of D.C.
The Scorpion
Hospital Visit
The Desperate Ones
Cuckoo
Zài Jiàn
Prelude to a Kiss
Angel Dust
Exit
Sex Bomb
Fallen Nest
Afterword
Feedback
Credits
Acknowledgments
About the Author
WHITE PANTS
I’m envious of anyone who can wear white pants. I’m much too broad and slovenly. That’s not to say I didn’t give them a chance. In sixth grade, we liked wearing cotton painter’s pants, the ones with the hammer loops and tool pockets. We accessorized them with cowl neck shirts and heavy clogs. I don’t know why that look became popular—maybe in the hopes a boy would stick his hand in a loop and pull you toward him? And if you didn’t like him, you could stomp him like an angry horse?
One day in April, I stood with my class in the school auditorium. Our school was in southeast Portland, near Mount Tabor. I swung a hand bell and sang the lyrics to “Oregon, My Oregon.” On portable bleachers, everyone sounded pure and clean. None of the boys’ voices had changed yet, but we were devious monsters. I kept a long comb in my side pocket, but didn’t want to use it afterward, for fear of finding someone’s spitball.
Menstrual cramps pinched the sides of my stomach, and Bobby’s body odor made me woozy. I stared at the clock, wishing it would get a shot of adrenaline and push the day to its conclusion. Bobby stood next to me, and I inched to the edge of the bleacher, one clog half covering the other. Bobby wore the same sweatshirt most days, blue with the wristbands cut off. He rarely bathed.
Every school had at least one stinky kid. Some you might not guess were stinky until they banged you into a locker, but this kid had a sour milk smell like a devil swirl. It was the stink of being poor. I had that prejudice then, but now I know better. It was probably just some soap I didn’t like. I was so arrogant.
My name is Tara, but Bobby said “Tata,” right in my ear. It didn’t matter that kids were singing. I could hear it over the xylophones in front and patriotic songs all around. His words could be any volume, and I’d hear that name.
Onstage, my Love’s Baby Soft deodorant mixed with tangy menstrual blood. Or so I feared. My nose played tricks on me. I believed I could feel the blood seeping through the double-stitched seam of my white pants. Truly a curse, to be a “woman” so young, not even twelve. We had only one song to go. Hoping the stain wouldn’t spread, I held my song folder over my crotch.
I talked to God, pleading. I stared into the red and green stage lights, as if punishing my retinas would get God’s notice and have Him reactivate the magma beneath Mount Tabor. I could run offstage, but the fifth graders waited in the wings, making farting noises into their elbows.
Bobby stared at me, not bothering to sing. He put his bell down and pulled off his sweatshirt. “Take it,” he said, as if we were about to snowball at the ice rink. “I don’t need it.” I shook my head, my leg rattling the bleacher. Brenda and Vanessa turned around to look at me, wide-eyed, as if I didn’t remember they had lice in fourth grade and had to have their hair chopped off.
A kindergartner in a green jumper sat cross-legged on the floor and pointed at me. I had noticed her earlier. She picked a scab from her knee and ate it. She would learn shame soon enough. Maybe she knew shame already, but not this female loathing. I dropped my hand bell to the stage, as if by accident, and jumped down, landing on my knees with my rear sticking up. The music teacher tapped her stick on the lectern. The kids on the bleachers clapped with her, as if she were doing a rhythm exercise. She had hairy arms so we called her a lezzy. She hated us. “Tara,” she said, interrupting the music. “This isn’t an acrobatics class.” She pointed to the bleachers and ordered me to finish the program.
I crouched with my turquoise shirt pulled over my knees, wondering whether to skitter across the stage like a rabid fox. The kids on the bleachers kept clapping. I felt something on my shoulders. Bobby had dropped his sweatshirt on me.
It must have been his dad’s or his older brother’s. It smelled like cigarettes. I put it on and it fell to my thighs. I hobbled to the side of the stage, past the fifth graders and my old teacher, who looked at me with pity.
I went to the school nurse and had her call my mom. Bobby, in trouble again, sat next to me in the secretary’s office. I took the sweatshirt off and handed it to him. Kids might see us when they walked past the
open door, and I didn’t want anyone to think we were dating. I found my social equal, and he had a wart on the fleshy part by his thumb.
“I like you, Tata,” he said. “You’re OK.” The secretary ripped the page out of the typewriter and told us to be quiet. She had a shag and wore long feather earrings, which I coveted. I knew she felt sorry for me, because she gave me a corduroy skirt to put on from the lost-and-found box. She said she couldn’t reach my mom, so I could wear the skirt.
I pushed Bobby’s arm away and told him not to touch me. But I know this now: Bobby was the first of many guys who found me pathetic, who saw me as a project.
I didn’t think of him for years, because he moved away—his new stepdad was in the Air Force and got stationed in Mountain Home, Idaho. He sent me a letter, though. He sent me a bunch, which got progressively stranger, even though his spelling improved. He told me he wanted to take out my eyes, which are green, and put them in a jar by his bed. He meant it as a compliment.
In tenth grade, I started cutting school. My mom had left us for a boyfriend in California, so I had to help my dad at his store. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, because my mom was barely there to begin with. Well, I hated her at first, but what good did that do? She couldn’t feel it from such a distance. She sent me fortune cookie messages, which I pasted on the slats of my bed. I didn’t want my dad to read them.
One afternoon, I saw a crow’s head on the sidewalk. I thought it was part of an electric shoe brusher, like my grandpa had in his bathroom: red bristles on one side and black on the other. I couldn’t figure out why the brush would be left outside. Then I noticed the beak, curved, ready to pierce. The head lay on the damp pavement, by rock walls sprouting moss and ferns and a rhododendron thick with buds.
This crow’s head didn’t get a proper burial, because its body and wings were missing. I ripped notebook paper from a binder and picked up the head, making sure I didn’t see any maggots. I put it in my backpack and crossed matted leaves from the storm the day before. The leaves, twigs, and mud covered the sidewalk as if reclaiming a piece of the forest understory. Slabs of rocks stood upright in front yards like nameless graves.
On the way to my boyfriend Ebin’s house, the sidewalk was stained brown from crushed leaves. I passed a billboard in a fenced-in yard, with only a couple of PBR cans for company. It used to advertise Virginia Slims cigarettes, but now the peeling layers looked like an eviscerated patchwork quilt.
Outside Ebin’s house, the lower halves of the trees were painted white with red diamonds. Beside the trunks, Ebin had nailed dominoes around a telephone pole, like a strange Morse code. Portland tolerated eccentrics. Plastic trolls, Barbie dolls, and a horseshoe surrounded a red fuse box nailed in the center. He’d written on its door, “Only the pure of heart may enter.” I opened the box, but it was empty. I put the crow’s head inside. I had seen Ebin with another girl; I found a note from her in the vest I’d lent him. I had lent him almost all my savings so he could get his cab license, and he screwed me over. I walked away from the box, hoping no one saw me.
I skipped the last class to help out my dad. He needed to keep his junk shop going, if only to keep his mind off my mom, and he couldn’t afford a real worker. To lure in customers, my dad had put a Holy Qur’an in the front case by the dime store paperback Lady, That’s My Skull. He thought he would meet someone who could explain the synchronicity between the books, but so far, no one had. Inside, I greeted the lawn ornament, a boy holding a lantern. My mom, before she left, wrote a sign for him: THIS STORE IS FULL OF OLD, FRAGILE, SHARP, AND UNCLEANED CURIOUS GOODS. BUYERS BEWARE. I interpreted her words as a message to me, that I was fragile, and I dreamed of heading south to San Francisco. If it was good enough for my mom, it was good enough for me. At least I would be free of Ebin.
From the rafters hung dolls and coats—some from Goodwill and some from customers careless enough to leave them behind. No longer in white pants, I wore black most of the time, like a cutoff flannel nightgown, dyed with RIT in the sink. I turned on a Kurosawa video to watch on the TV behind the counter.
Outside, a city worker used a concrete saw to access the sewer main. Throughout Portland, people obsessed about water—either what fell most of the year or what poured into the river in barely filtered pipes. That’s why I dreamt of San Francisco: for its concrete and fog. The low, grinding sound filled the store. The grunting samurai on the TV screen could not compete, so I put it on mute.
I ripped out photos from an album that we’d gotten from an estate sale. They dropped into a barrel for sale at fifty cents each. I fell in love with the family whose history I disassembled, like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse. The birth announcement in the front of the album said they lived in Aloha, Oregon. Their boy, Martin, posed in Marlboro and whiskey boxes or crouched by a bunny. Martin aged in the photos, often holding toy guns, first pointed at the anonymous photographer, and now at me.
I didn’t like friends visiting the store, much less Ebin. I didn’t want them to think my dad was a pervert, instead of a smart businessman. Randy, my dad, sold stacks of photos from the 1960s of women who had hoped to get into Playboy. Answering ads at the back of dirty magazines, the women or their boyfriends sent in nudie pictures with the models’ anxious smiles, bangs, boobs, ass, and the rest all displayed on vinyl lawn chairs, or on beds with chenille bedspreads, maybe teddy bears behind them.
One time Ebin had found a pamphlet for a Canadian nudist colony; the cover showed a fir tree with the picnic table blocking the father’s dick and the daughter—maybe twelve years old—looking as if the tree trunk was growing out of her head. I’d read enough Freud to be both disgusted and amused. The girl folded her legs and arms up to be modest, though I wondered about that—wasn’t the point of a nudist colony to have no shame? I didn’t like the thought of all this porn around my dad; it was gross. But he said this soft stuff sold well to collectors. Ebin took the pamphlet, as if dating me meant a stake in the store.
The sewer workers finally stopped, and the doorbell rang. I dipped my hand into a bag of Cheetos, wiping orange dust across my lips. My dad’s friend Tim came in holding a cardboard box. “Is your dad here?” he asked.
I preferred not to answer him, but he wouldn’t give up. “He’s at the bank,” I said. “Come back at five.”
He put the box on a stool, leaned on the counter, and pointed to a stack of postcards under glass. “Can you get those out, ma’am?” he asked.
The cards were taken in World War II. I couldn’t stand them. “You look at them yourself,” I said. I went back to the photo album from Aloha, with the family posing at Cannon Beach. The grandma in her dark overcoat dwarfed the little boy. Once again, he held a toy gun in his hand. The muzzle faced me.
“How do you like this one?” Tim asked. He held up a postcard of beaten American soldiers in a Japanese prison camp. One man wore a black scarf around his eyes, as if he were facing execution.
“Put them away, please,” I said. I wished I had a cigarette to blow smoke in his face. He hated the smell.
He took a Cheeto from my bag and put the box on the counter. I gave in to curiosity and looked inside. I saw a pieces of bone, dusty bowls, and spear points.
Tim slapped the postcards down. “This stuff I got is authentic. I’ve got people working for me. You wouldn’t want to know them. Let’s just say they’re better my friends than yours. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be your friend.” He placed a paperback on the counter—Hong Kong Madam. “Put that toward my credit.”
I ignored him. I tore out a picture of Martin sitting on Santa’s lap. He held his fingers together in the shape of a diamond, under silvery decorations.
“These are valuable artifacts,” he said. He picked up a bone from the box and handed it to me. “It’s a real kneecap. Think about it. Those Indians worshipped this shit. It’s dug up from a grave in the desert. Someone went to the trouble of burying this poor fool hundreds of years ago, not knowing it’d turn a profit someday.”
I traced the edge of the kneecap and glanced at my own, behind the counter.
Then Randy came into the store and Tim greeted him. He was taller than Tim, taller than most people, and wore a suit and a bowler hat from the 1940s. He had a long moustache that he greased into points. He tried to look eccentric so people wouldn’t think he was smart. It helped him make better deals.
Randy pointed to the pile on the counter. “That can’t stay here,” he said to Tim. “Let’s take it in the back and see what you have.” He winked and handed me a ten-dollar bill. “Keep the change.”
I slammed the door as I left, disgusted. I had Martin’s photo with Santa. It had their address on the back. I contemplated going out to Aloha. His childhood house had a clothesline out back and fields of corn. But Martin was an adult now, and that store Santa was probably dead.
I went back to Ebin’s neighborhood. The crow head was still inside the fuse box. I gingerly removed it, holding my breath. It started to rain. I tossed the head under a bush. I put the photo from Martin’s album in the box instead, next to a child’s birthday candle shaped like a clown. I wrote on the back of the photo for Ebin to call me. Remember, these boy-men believed they could save me, and part of their pity made them come back, eventually.
Ebin and I moved to San Francisco, ending up in a rehabbed school bus, out in China Basin. I had to leave—my dad started selling more stolen relics and I had to either call him in or call in his friend—I chose Tim and I was afraid. I never told anyone, but now he’s stuck in jail. I didn’t have to testify because the detectives found boxes of shit he’d stolen at his storage unit. It turned out that Tim had speed freaks to work for him. They got loaded and worked for hours, combing the desert. A couple even smashed dusty museum cases up the Columbia River.
