Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  A man with a dollhouse! He looked like a giant. He had not bought a ticket for the house, so he only slowly and with much looking around decided it was safe to move it off his lap to the seat next to him. He quickly took it on his knees again when the driver turned to show his long, sad, dung-colored mustache. Somewhere between Hollywood and Agua Sucio Mama asked to touch the door with working handles, the chimney with the flue that opened, the toilet with its tank and little chain. Maybe their hands met like two beasts in the bedroom.

  Who can resist a dollhouse? With working hinges…tiny mahogany doors with tiny brass latches…a miniature book with only four pages? The dollhouse had two halves that swung open to reveal the rooms inside. Two dolls could be side by side in a room and the next moment at opposite ends of the house. How marvellous! The furniture was elegant, if higgledy-piggledy: the sofa stuck sideways in the stairwell had tasseled throw cushions. Mama stuck the tip of her baby finger in a ceramic potty with painted-blue ducks in the bowl, felt warmth flood her cheeks.

  A man with a dollhouse on his lap, that’s not a sight you see every day. His thighs tensed underneath it, keeping it stable despite the lurching bus. He had to sit a little sideways to fit, so the dollhouse blocked her view of his face, and she felt free to examine the big scuffed shoes set firmly on the floor, the shapeless dress pants that were hitched a little high, the white ankles, thick and knobbly, with pale hairs that stood straight out, the square fingers spread gently around the cornices.

  But the dollhouse deserved closer attention. It was grand. A house of tinkling tea parties, cut flowers in vases, sealed envelopes on a silver salver. Silver salver? my mother wondered, distracted by the off-rhyme. Maybe salver was the wrong word. In any case a house of snowy aprons with big crisp bows, a Boston or a Philadelphia house. The kind of house she would want to settle into, had she not settled on, remember (she told herself, sternly), a gayer life, in every sense, actors and sexual perversity and little flats with noisy radiators and portable cocktail bars, political discussions and sophisticated humor and yes, a certain amount of tragedy, maybe not in her own life, but in some life close by. Hushed conversations over bad coffee in late-night New York delis where the pies languished under fluorescent lights and the dishes were too loud, the waiters huge and perfunctory, the napkins papery and flimsy as toilet paper, so they stuck to your lip in bits when you blew your nose—no, your despairing friend blew her—his nose and you had to reach out your hand and remove the tag of paper, a simple gesture but eloquent.

  The dollhouse had real glass windowpanes. She had been staring at them for some time, trying to make out behind the glass the shapes of chair backs and mantelpieces, before she noticed an eye watching her through the dollhouse. This was possible because the windows lined up, front and back. She let out a little scream, and went to the bathroom to spritz perfume on her cleavage.

  There was a vagrant on the side of the road, flagging the bus, her greasy black-walnut-colored hair sticking out in blades from under an unseasonable woolly hat. Improbably, the driver stopped for her—did he know her?—and she made her way down the aisle, accidentally-on-purpose banging a few shoulders with her ratty knapsack. Sitting down in the aisle seat next to Mama, who was not yet anyone’s mama. They looked down at their respective laps. On the one hand, we have the crisp yellow dress. On the other, the dingy jeans going to threads in the scuffed patches, a three-cornered tear disclosing a patch of surprisingly innocent leg: clean, slightly downy.

  The vagrant reached across the aisle and knocked whimsically at the tiny front door of the dollhouse.

  “Knock knock!” she said.

  Papa flinched at the black, cracked nails tapping at the tiny glass panes.

  While she glared at him, the tapping stopped. “Knock knock, I said!”

  Papa cleared his throat. “Who’s there?” he said.

  “Interrupting cow.”

  “Interrup—”

  “MOO!” shouted the vagrant, and laughed loudly. She plucked open the tiny door. Mama found herself sharing a pained look with Papa, as the dirty hand hooliganned through the downstairs. (Much later, Papa discovered something was missing: a tiny canary in a filigree cage, perhaps.)

  Mama began to suspect she had wound up on the wrong bus, as the sealed hum of its progress down the interstate gave way to the old-ladyish squeaks and exclamations of a chassis asked to cope with stretches of—can this possibly be a dirt road?—hard ruts and cattle guards, as it flounced heavily through what seemed to be the tiniest burgs in creation. Mama, a Brooklyn baby, had never seen towns, uh, hamlets like these—you could only call them towns in contrast to the practically interstellar emptiness around them. One toaster, an armchair, and a standing lamp would look like Manhattan against, for example, the salt flats they’d passed a while ago, where a small dog pointed out by her smelly seatmate as a “ky-ote,” though it looked like any old mutt to her, had looked back over his shoulder at her, one paw raised, stopped in mid-trot on some important but not too pressing errand by the spacecraft passing through. It was a memorable look, both knowing and disinterested, a look Mama would like to try out herself in other circumstances. Now, in town, “town,” they stopped in the middle of the street, engine running, while the driver sloped off into the tinted blue deep end of the windscreen and disappeared, probably into a bar, as Mama thought gloomily, while her strange seatmate (but Mama wasn’t scared of her, she was from New York, she was used to characters) said it right out loud, “Probably gone for a tall one.” It didn’t look like much of a bar, it was a long low building with a heavy overhanging roof like a shoebox with the wrong lid on it, and the few letters still dangling from the signboard outside, B, W, didn’t spell anything that made any sense to her. The bus was rumbling under her like a hovercraft. She was awfully high, she could look right over the scattered trailers and, well, she’d call them bungalows, they weren’t houses (houses looked like the one the nice man opposite was holding in his lap), and while they were hovering there, there was time for a lone tumbleweed to enter town by the same road they’d come in on, naturally, since it was the only road, bounce, flop, flirt, and whirl the length of the main street, pass them, pause, and with a single madcap bound continue on its way out of town eastward into the gathering dusk, while her seatmate sang in a cracked voice, “Drifting along with the tumbling tu-ummmbleweeds.” Or was it “tumbling along”?

  After this the bus drove interminably over a bad road in what looked very much like the wrong direction, to let out, late that night or early the next morning, one passenger (Mama recognized him; he’d boarded the bus back in town, some kind of local business, a favor, the bus driver didn’t think they’d notice, but you couldn’t fool a Brooklyn girl, savvy to tricks and gimmicks) in the middle of nowhere. She could make out the metal legs of a small water tower in the headlights but nothing else besides the innumerable bugs and larger things—bats?—that flashed through the light too quickly to be identified. A few passengers let out wordless squalls of protest, out of the dark maternal interior, and then settled down; the jouncing was soothing, and most of them fell asleep as the road rewound.

  Sometime in the night she awoke and saw the dollhouse’s black silhouette against the almost black, maybe deep purple windows, then with a start she caught a glint from Papa’s eyes and realized he was looking at her. I suppose it must have happened then, but what about the tramp, who is in the way where I’ve placed her, even if (as one can easily imagine) she has drooped and slid down in the seat and is now scarcely more than a bundle of rags, over which Mama can easily clamber (holding onto the back of her seat and the seat in front) in order to get to Papa. Our conception was a deadline she had to meet. In retrospect we can say it was now (tonight, on the rocking bus) or never, despite the inconvenience and even unlikelihood of it. What luck that Mama (a Brooklyn girl and a bohemian) had never been shy, least of all now (it’s easy in the dark) as she directed him with signs and whispers to move the dollhouse onto the seat beside him. Ha
d he really held it on his lap all night, dozing, with an empty seat beside him? Well, yes, it’s an heirloom, and he’s a punctilious man, and what’s one night of sleep? He liked the forked silhouettes of the saguaro cacti against the sky, and the orchestra of sleepers around him. But now, without hesitation, he did what the lady asked, though to protect the guttering of the dollhouse against the metal back of the seat in front of him he first wedged his jacket between them.

  Mama took the place of the dollhouse in his lap, looking back over his head into the resonant interior of the bus. The idea that some of the dark forms back there might be watching quickened her breath. Papa closed his eyes and felt her collarbone warm and hard against his lips. He dared to kiss it, then ducked his head to reach the warm hollow under it, concentrating on this and not the operation Mama was performing blind on his belt buckle, though he did raise his hips when she tugged down on his trousers. Her fingers slipped on the elastic of his boxers, which snapped smartly against his erect cock. He sucked in his breath, felt her dress softly cleave to his mouth. They both froze, listening. Snores, the creaking of the bus. It occurred to him that she would go back to her seat now, and that this might be a relief. But she gave him an intimate, apologetic pat, drew his boxers carefully down, shuffled forward, and fit herself down over him, one knee jammed against the metal joint of an armrest. Deep in her throat, he heard a tiny, unself-conscious grunt. Suddenly he was happy. He bit her dress, grinning. Mama didn’t see this. She didn’t think about much as she moved, smiling calmly into the darkness. She felt invisible, impossible, free. She could do anything, be anyone. She didn’t know what we know, that she was becoming something permanent and necessary as an astrological sign, right now—yes—wait—yes, right now: my mother.

  My mother climbed back over the vagrant into her own seat and slept a little. My father took the dollhouse on his lap again and continued his vigil. At three or four in the morning the bus stopped at a gas station in another podunk town, for another endless wait above the simmering engine, while bugs crazed by the pump’s lone fluorescent light pinged against the windshield and bats strafed the windows. A few passengers roused themselves and trudged to the bathroom. The vagrant revived and let herself out the back door. Mama craned her neck around in time to see her receding form briefly silhouetted against a distant bloom of pink neon. Then she turned back to Papa. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “What’s your name?” They both laughed, ruefully on his part, joyfully on hers. What a life she had, honestly. What adventures.

  She hooked her finger familiarly through the front door of the dollhouse, and they told each other their stories in murmured snatches. Then the bus driver eased himself back into his seat, and the bus threw itself onto the freeway again, and the hum and the rocking started up again.

  They all woke at once at what was not quite dawn yet, with the impression they’d been summoned somehow, or that a big celestial palm had dealt the roof of the bus a clap, and the interior slowly filled with the sounds of people adjusting and with quiet grumbling surmise. The bus driver kept driving, unmoved. An orange-pink stain spread across the sky. A strange high plume of cloud raced northeast above them. Something streaked the dark shapes of yuccas, saguaros, cattle. The bus driver put his wipers on. But it wasn’t raining, it was snowing. In summer? Silvery particles spilled off the sides and top of the windshield.

  The sun rose and the banked heat of the desert flared up as if worked by a bellows, but still the snow that could not be snow sifted and ran along the windows of the bus.

  THE HOUSE OF VOICES

  There, we exist. A half-teaspoon of ink, and already, much to regret. The bus could have been a train. My mother could have been wearing jeans, not a dress. The vagrant: maybe a figment. Does it matter? Only Blanche knows.

  I stood in the dark, listening. A mewling cry floated down from above. I slid my foot forward through a slick litter of envelopes until it bumped a carpeted bottom step that I knew to be a particularly bilious green, though with the front door closed and my eyes still jazzy from the dance diagrams of the sun, I couldn’t see it. The cry came again. It would have been an eerie sound had it not been so familiar. Audrey was an experimental filmmaker and taught part-time at the Art Institute, but she made her real living doing phone sex. So did Trey, so did I. The house was always moaning, whimpering, sighing, as if it were alive and in heat. We called it the House of Voices.

  The Mooncalf, Audrey’s chocolate lab, appeared in silhouette against the dim light at the top of the stairs, her ears held stiffly out and down with pleasure. She danced from paw to paw, indecisive, then bustled down the stairs to greet me.

  “Moony! Moon-unit! Looney-tune!” I stooped, meeting her cold nose halfway, and scrubbed the chronic itch at the base of her tail while I swept my other hand over the carpet, gathering the mail by feel. Mooncalf followed me up to the kitchen, frolicking. I slid the letters onto the red boomerang-patterned linoleum table, slung the oranges into the hanging baskets. There was a mug (“DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS”) with a dry tea bag in it on the counter by the stove. I lifted and shook the kettle, which twanged and hissed, turned off the gas, set the kettle on the back of the stove to cool.

  I tapped lightly on Audrey’s door as I passed. My room was at the other end of the apartment. It had once been the living room, and connected to Trey’s, the former dining room, via great, heavy sliding doors. These we kept closed, though sound passed right through. Across the gap on my side hung a thrift store painting of a purple cow. On his side, a picture of fashion designer Craigy Craig torn out of W2 Weekly.

  The cow uttered a loud trill. On the other side of the wall, Trey picked up the phone in mid-peal. “Yup. OK. Got it.” Then his voice changed registers. “Hello, Professor,” he gurgled. “’Course I remember.” Trey, “she-male” over the phone (Candi Cornhole!), was in person hollow-chested, artfully bearded, and, theoretically, straight. It was a treat to watch his goatee hop while he described his full red lips, his flawless skin.

  I got down the Manual from its place on the mantel and took it back to the kitchen. Audrey was at the table, waiting for me.

  It was pure luck that I spotted the sign. It was a foggy day, the sky was the lifeless color of aluminum, I had been a college graduate for all of three weeks and had been in San Francisco for two, looking for a room, and I was fed up. In Noe Valley, which turned out to be yet another hill, a woman in a teal workout suit had told me that the collective had agreed that they didn’t want couple energy in the house, and they felt they should stick to that even if the couple had only one body. In the Mission two girls in woolly hats and nose rings had said they felt really positive about me and my, uh, significant other, and they really hoped to learn from us to overcome their unconscious prejudices and become more, like, truly aware individuals. Stalking back to my sublet I stopped to catch my breath and watch a wind-filled plastic bag bound soundlessly by. It mounted, trembling, and threw itself into the arms of a quince, where it collapsed. In the window behind its shimmering corpse was a hand-lettered sign reading “Room for rent twofers WELCOME buzzer 2.”

  Buzzer two rang the upper floor-through of a shabby white Victorian. I heard a distant trill, then throaty barking, descending an invisible flight of stairs. When the door cracked open, a grinning chocolate lab looked out, held back by a foot in a dirty tube sock, jammed firmly against the lintel. “Shut up! Hi,” said the woman who now took the dog’s place at the door. She wore a vintage purple print with a big drooping bow at the neckline and a ripped seam under the arm through which I could see her black bra strap and was, in my twenty-one-year-old assessment, much too old for that candy-red hair, which came to gel-stiffened points along her jawline. “I’m Nora,” I said, forcing her to ask, and when she did I said, “Blanche,” without offering further explanation.

  She didn’t ask for any. She ticked off the features of the apartment in a perfunctory way, banging cupboard doors. The Mooncalf followed us
, tail waving gently. In the bathroom there were big plastic jugs through which the greens and blues of mysterious unguents glowed dully, in the kitchen there were gallon jars of beans and sunflower seeds and nameless beige grains. She bought in bulk, she explained; this seemed to me to be a sign of maturity and investiture in processes I had hitherto ignored. Later I confessed to Trey how much the hand-labeled containers in the fridge had impressed me, and he said, “My father once had to save his pee in the fridge for urinalysis and my aunt thought it was lemonade and took a big swig of it. There is a dark side to everything.” He pondered, then added, “Of course I’ve heard there are yogi who drink their own pee as a discipline, so the dark side had a bright side too.”

  “Want some tea?” said Audrey. I said yes though I didn’t really, had not in fact even tried tea since Granny’s sun tea long ago, a nosegay of Lipton’s bags slowly staining the water sepia in a jar by the front door. Then I had to make a choice between Lapsang souchong and Earl Grey when I did not know the difference. I picked Earl Grey as being easier to pronounce. I drifted to the kitchen window as she started filling the kettle. The weedy ground behind the house fell away sharply, affording a dizzying view of rooftops plunging stepwise toward the distant bay. Skeins of fog whipped by at eye level. I could follow their shadows toward the east. The house seemed to be leaning into the hurtling emptiness. I drew back; coming from the desert, I had not yet gotten used to seeing the sky not above but beside me.

  “Milk?” asked Audrey.

  “Yes,” I guessed. She took me into the front room, the one that would be mine, where balls of dust and dog hair scudded around the skirts of an old pink sofa. The seat was soft and hairy, like an old man’s lap. I sat down gingerly. Wiry articulations deep within the cushions twanged and shifted under my butt, and my knees rose and clobbered me gently in the chin. Chins. The Mooncalf, finding me suddenly at her level, aimed a sloppy lick at my mouth. I ducked my head, and she got Blanche instead.