Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  Where my hand clasped my notebooks, they grew damp. I was sweating, but the hot wind took it off me and left my forehead improbably cold. Already my throat was dry. I should have carried water. The chill around the roots of my hair made me feel sick. I had put my dirty dress back on, I didn’t have anything else, and my own smell hung around me.

  The day got gradually hotter and brighter and more fretful, as if some kind of pain-killer were wearing off. The Mooncalf’s tongue hung out. I toiled upward. I no longer wanted to look up at the sky, which I sensed lowering menacingly toward me. The birds quieted as the long haul of midday began.

  When I finally turned off the freeway onto the road into Too Bad, which was still dirt (on the map it was marked “Improved,” which it was I suppose, though barely—its ruts had been filled with gravel, the round shoulders braced with dry-laid rocks), I felt something invisible pushing against me. I moved forward anyway, and then everything was lubricated and running and gently chuckling. How absurd it was that the jojoba bushes still confidently raised their tiny round leaves to the light, that ants truckled back and forth about their business, dying and being born and everything in between without checking in with me. How absurd, that grease-stained yellow wrapper doing a frivolous hopping dance around itself on the side of the road and then collapsing in a soft heap, as if it would have done that anyway, yesterday, or ten years ago, whether I came or stayed away. There was no trace, not even around the edges of things, of that waxy amber-colored medium that seemed to preserve the moments of my past in scenes that looked plausible but forbade entry, like the boxes in the Potter Museum. Everything looked subject to revision, temporary, without gravity.

  It’s the same, I thought, and I felt a strange spreading and softening all around me, as if all this time I had held myself tense against the thought of having lost it by staying away. But here it was, not different. It looked like the past and it was the past—that’s what we mean when we say, “I’m back”—and yet nothing held me from it, not the thinnest plastic wrap. I could touch it. I bent over and scrabbled my finger in the still damp, orange dirt. I could be dirtied by it. I could—I scraped a hair-fine pricker out of the tip of my finger—be hurt by it.

  Too Bad, the business concern, was just getting ready for the day. There were a few cars in the big gravel lot, and one of the saloon’s swinging doors was propped open by a big greenish chunk of silver ore. That rock was as intimate evidence of my father as his footprint or the smell of Old Spice.

  I saw a human silhouette through the door. I stumbled noisily and the shape turned and a pair of glasses caught the light and goggled out at me. I kept going. No one came to the door. Maybe it was not Papa; the ghost town was successful enough now to hire employees.

  The house looked shoddy and small. The two halves had slid farther on their opposite paths, and the gap between was covered with a strip of plastic tarp duct-taped to the walls and roofs of each half. Someone had attempted to seed a patch of lawn beside the house, and in the center of it a hose was running into a shallow moat around a spindly tree. The Mooncalf drank noisily from the moat and then lay down in it.

  I stepped onto the Astroturf landing pad, all its faded green blades now flattened one way like a dog’s coat, and considered the fuzzy underthings of a moth that had applied itself to the other side of the screen door at the level of my face. I reached out for the catch—then ducked to the left into the mesquite there. Wait, wait. I stooped there, listening. I heard nothing but my heart stammering. I had scratched my arm. You do not “dive into the underbrush” in the desert. I licked up the thin line of blood. I decided to walk around the house before trying the door, and try to figure out whether anyone was home.

  I had to pick my way through the bushes that had crowded up to the walls, thriving on the runoff from the roof. I got grit in my shoes. Protected from the wind, my face grew hot and my thighs squeaked together. I could see the shine on my nose. I raised myself above the sill to look in the kitchen window and felt a weird twisting in my chest to see the familiar plastic cups of dirt and vermiculite with ailing baby cacti in them, the dusty chunks of copper ore, quartz crystals, peridot, Apache Tear, hematite, spar, pumice, obsidian. There was nobody there. Nor could I see anyone through the plastic tarp when I reached it, nor the bedroom windows in back. The pebble-glass bathroom window betrayed no shapes, and I heard nothing through the walls.

  By the time I reached the other side of the tarp-covered split, I felt sure there was nobody home, and I had an idea. I could pry up the edge of the tarp where it was already loose from the patient interventions of the weather, and I believed that then, if I turned myself sideways, I could slip between the two halves of the house and in this way enter without drawing any attention. This I carried out.

  Once inside, I felt like laughing. I seemed to be too tall and in danger of toppling into the cool dark spaces that kept unfolding themselves before me with a sort of silent merriment, like a magician’s trick. I careened through the rooms, few as they were, giggling and coldly sweating. Maybe I already had what Granny called “a touch of sun.” Everything was familiar but exaggerated, like a cartoon. Doors were angled slabs cadged from Stonehenge. A doorknob was a huge silly form, and my hand too seemed huge, turning it.

  Our old bedroom door opened only partway, bumping against a stack of boxes. The room had become a storage space, heaped high with cardboard boxes and filing cabinets, and there was a metal desk wedged into one corner on what had been Blanche’s side of the bed. Nothing of our room as it had been remained, except the Alice in Wonderland curtains, though the Cheshire Cat was much faded.

  Where was the dollhouse?

  I rummaged. It was not in the closet. It was not in my parents’ room, or in their closet, or in the kitchen, or in the sitting room, neither behind the TV nor atop the wardrobe. I went back to the bedroom and looked in the closet again and found it. I had not noticed it because it was encased in a double layer of green heavy-duty trash bags fastened with twisties, and spare pillows and winter coats were heaped on top of it. But one chimney pot stuck through the plastic and gave it away.

  I got a kitchen knife and sliced open its cocoon. The plastic sank back; the dollhouse gave me a knowing look.

  There it was, demon of so many dreams, my first home.

  THINGS THE DOLLHOUSE CONTAINED

  Wheeled baby walker

  Playing cards

  Corkscrew

  Bowl of apples

  Pair of spectacles resting on an open book

  Bust of Sterne

  Mousetrap with a mouse in it

  Sash windows, most of which still moved

  Salt cellar (out of scale)

  Half-finished watercolor of a bucolic scene (cow in field) on an easel

  Rolled napkins in napkin rings

  Library with books by Burton, Johnson, Diderot, et al.

  Wax boar’s head on a platter

  Candlestick with a flame all of blown glass

  A wreath woven of hair around a funeral portrait

  Monkey in a cage

  Toy horse on wheels

  Pictures with tiny labels “Christ Betrayed,” “The Unhappy Marriage”

  A wax miniature of Mother Shipton the Yorkshire witch

  An ivory backscratcher in the shape of a hand

  Punch and Judy theater

  A serving plate with molded oysters

  Was anything missing?

  No.

  Yes.

  The dollhouse had held something else once, something important.

  DONKEY-SKIN

  The morning after we shot Dr. Goat something scrabbled at our window and showed a tiny pink claw. We crept over and saw a monkey’s old face under hair white as penicillin mold. We opened the window and popped out the screen and took hold of the bony wrists she held up. She weighed no more than a cat. We had to lift her only partway, then she spilled over the sill, onto the floor.

  “Is she going to get up?” said Blanche.

>   “Come on, get up. Don’t be weird.” I touched the cleanest part of her with my toe. She flinched and began to warble quietly at her knees. Odors mustered up.

  “Am I hurting you? I’m not hurting you. Get up!”

  She rose like a mist, as far as our waist. She could not stand up straight, and seemed afraid of the center of the room. We encouraged her as far as the bed, where she made herself scarce: a pinch of knees and elbows. “Do you think she’s hungry?” Blanche said. We padded quietly to the calm, dark kitchen and put some slices of squashed bread on a plate and tried to stretch them out a little. We had to climb on the counter to reach the peanut butter. As we were climbing down again, someone screamed in our room. We got there just after Papa, still holding the greasy jar. Mama was in our room, and Donkey-skin was in the dollhouse.

  She occupied the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Her hand stuck through a door into the pantry, which had preserved that dividing wall. The others were flattened. The second floor was bowed over her back. Even so, she should not have fit there. Donkey-skin was—thirteen? Fourteen? But she was starving. Her skin, “luminous,” we had fancied, “phosphorescent,” we had embroidered further, was dull and flour-white between the blooms of filth. Her eyes were crusty. She watched us with a look that reminded me of a chuckwalla’s when it has wedged itself in a crack and nothing short of a crowbar will pry it out. It was the sanguine eye of a lizard, unemotional. It would look just the same in the beak of a redtail. Her frock, rickrack trimmed, cack-edged, was a foul frill around her waist, and the hair between her legs was sick yellow, like grass trapped under a cow pie, and her toenails were yellow too, and curved like claws.

  Mama gulped and ran outside, though she was still in her pajamas. I heard the front door slam, the crunch of footsteps, diminuendo.

  “Do you know who this is?” said Papa.

  “Donkey-skin,” said Blanche. “Princess Donkey-skin.”

  Papa nodded. “Would she like to come out?”

  She would not. She did not feel like coming out for a very long time. Papa went away, and we heard him on the phone. Mama came back, but she left us alone too. We sat next to Donkey-skin and Blanche croaked and honked at her in the language of the animals. After a while we could tell she was listening. At last, almost inaudibly, she said, “Cunt.”

  She slid out. Even then she crouched and held her arms tight against her body, as if she were fitting herself in a small, invisible box.

  We took her down to the Time Camera to find her some clothes. We took her picture first. It’s lost, but I remember that her eyes are closed, or caught in a blink. Her waistband is riding up under her arms, and the bodice puffs out emptily above it. Her bent legs are too thin, her head in its nimbus of etiolated hair, too big. She looks like Tweedle-Dee in a dress.

  We didn’t want to touch the shitty dress, so we cut it off her with scissors. She crouched on the floor while we ran her bath. She didn’t seem to know what to do with it, so we climbed into it with her. She settled down into the steam, swearing softly. She looked like a skeleton. I did not think we could have combed her hair even if she had let us try, but we rubbed shampoo in it and dipped her skull underwater, and watched her pale hair swim. She would not let us clip her toenails.

  She stood perfectly still, though her body formed the shape of a question mark while we dried her. We had to pick up her arms ourselves to poke a bunched towel at the tufts under them. We didn’t attempt the patch between her legs. After her hair fuzzed dry we put her in it: the dress, the most beautiful dress. It was blue velvet, midnight blue, with a full skirt and a bustle, and lace around the neck. She could hardly move for the weight of it, but she followed us down to the Time Camera and stood for a long time looking at herself in the mirror we keep for the tourists. She whispered something and then let us tow her in front of the camera. That picture’s lost, too, but I remember she was standing up almost straight, her white shoulders rising out of the blue, like a water nymph rising from a pool, preparing to pull you in and keep you there forever—No.

  Like a princess.

  We took her back to our room and let her crouch in the corner while we read. We were a little bored with her. After a little while we noticed a clear puddle advancing across the floor. “She peed!” Blanche said, outraged. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t the one who had let her out. “We aren’t going to keep her, are we? She’d have to go to school!”

  She didn’t have to explain: at the mere idea, my neck and ears burned. After a while we heard a truck rattle up to the house, and the front door open and close, and Granny’s voice alternating with Papa’s in the kitchen. Shortly the door opened and closed again, and Max joined the conversation. Mama broke in from time to time with a sort of wail, but the low reasonable rumbling of the others soon resumed. Then Papa came and got us and led us by the hand out of the room past Granny and Max and Mama and out the door and up to the end of the road to look for a vulture he said he saw who might have a hurt wing and need some help and maybe a splint we could help him make with balsa wood and strips of an old towel. We could not find the vulture, and when we came back to the house Granny was gone, and so was Donkey-skin and the beautiful, beautiful, pee-wet dress.

  “Where did Donkey—the princess go?” Blanche said.

  Mama smiled. “She ran down the stairs, and all that was left was one tiny glass slipper.”

  “No, I mean really,” said Blanche, and I was amazed. For Blanche there had never been any “really.” But Mama didn’t seem to hear. We sat down at the kitchen table and began to play the erasing game, drawing things and erasing them, drawing and erasing. We played industriously and with few wasted movements like workers in a factory that produced ghosts.

  Blanche was worried about infrastructure. “We should draw roads for them to walk on,” said Blanche. “Water. Food. Toilets. Toilet paper. And—how do the erased people talk to each other?”

  “Very quietly,” I said.

  She shrugged slightly, and thought. “How do you spell silence?”

  Mama, automatically: “S, I, L—”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She drew a princess with her mouth open in a big O. She drew a speech balloon with no words in it. She erased the princess, leaving just the speech balloon. Then she erased that too.

  How do you spell the loudest noise you ever heard?

  Papa exchanged a look with Mama, and ran out the door. Mama sat still a moment, then whirled up. “You stay here,” she said fiercely, and, leaving the door ajar, ran down the street after him. I saw Papa lean out of the office door, telephone receiver at his ear, and beckon her in.

  The roof started knocking and rattling. Something hit the kitchen window and a crack shot across it and glass tinkled into the sink. Something struck and then swarmed over the roof like a wheelbarrowload of marbles. Something that might have been a saguaro cartwheeled past the door. We ran into the bathroom and crouched in the empty tub, waiting for the world to end.

  But the world didn’t end. The rattling subsided to an almost inaudible sifting and soughing and then stopped altogether. A little embarrassed, maybe even a little disappointed, we got out of the bathtub, sat back down at the table, and started drawing again. I heard the car starting up and the sparge of rocks as it spun out. Mama came to the door and squinted in at us, monochrome with dust, nodded, and left again. Through the cracked window I saw her marching up the hill, hunched and purposeful, digging her toes into her daisy-trimmed flip-flops. A long time later I heard the car come back and Mama’s voice, asking a question I could not hear. Papa said something. Mama gave a little cry. Papa spoke some more. Then he came in with a strange careful look on his face. I ducked my head.

  “Girls—”

  Sometimes our local drugstore displayed a wire bin full of defective toys for cheap. Lots of our toys came from this bin: plastic models with no instructions and dried-up paint pots, Pepto-Bismol-pink baby dolls that drank from their bottles but didn’t pee, so they grew heavy and leake
d from all their joints. Once we picked out a book of scenes with parts missing. You were meant to fill in the blanks from the sticker page, but the sticker page was missing too. Still, it was easy to tell from the outlined shape what went there: a dog, a fire engine, a plume of smoke. The vacant outlines had the look of objects only just departed or arriving presently. That’s how absence ought to behave, turning up on time to do what the missing thing would do in its place: if smoke, then billow; if fire engine, then speed keening through the streets; if puppy, then bounce around the feet of the absent onlooker. You ought to be able to recognize what’s missing by the shape of everything going on around it. But “Impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened,” said the paper. “All evidence was destroyed in the catastrophic explosion.” A match, a cigarette, or a bolt of lightning could have started it off, or spontaneous combustion in a pile of rags left near the gas pumps, which might have been leaky, if not properly maintained. (As if Granny would permit piles of rags. Or leaky pumps.) When the underground tank caught, the gas station blew, just like Granny always said it would. Sky-high.

  ORDINARY THINGS

  I had too much to carry. I unlatched the dollhouse and stuck my rolled notebook in the nursery, where it immediately expanded to fit. I had to set the dollhouse down to open the front door, then hold the door open with my foot while I picked the dollhouse up again and backed into the squeaking frame of the spring-loaded screen door, feeling with my foot for the step down. The prematurely closing door banged into the dollhouse, which hit the door frame and recoiled, driving its eaves into my clavicles and its base into my groin. The kitchen knife I had put in my pocket dug into my side. The baggy screen behind me had pulled out of the frame at one side and snagged my dress.