Lexie rode the subways. She became involved with an artist and slept in his studio in a neighborhood
optimistically called Williamsburg, actually miles east of Williamsburg. A Hasidic stronghold. If it had a name it was spoken privately among the men with beards and hats and pungent full-length coats in the middle of July. The artist claimed that Orthodox couples had sex through a hole in a sheet. Lexie longed to make eye contact with them, but when she sat next to them on the subway in her tank top and shorts, they shifted away.
Then artist’s parents cut off his account at Pearl Paint. He was flirting with actual poverty. He asked Lexie to what extent she thought the artness of art depended upon its material existence.
Lexie considered what answer he might want to hear.
“Anyone can make things,” she said. She told him how her mother made things. Her hobby was making pickles out of other pickles. There were vats of pupating pickles in cabinets and under stairs. The license plate on the Volvo: “PICKLED.” On the Mercedes: “PICKLD2.”
“Whoa,” he said, “Pickles into pickles? That’s a total mind-fuck.”
“I think of it as a symbol of futility,” said Lexie. You could say things like that in this section of Williamsburg. Hopeless dispatches from the Land of Lawns.
Her parents were Protestant. They hardly ever told Lexie they loved her. They barely spoke to each other. When things were especially bad or especially good she was taken out for ice cream. Lexie suddenly thought fondly of that old scene, a suburban Baskin Robbins, bubblegum ice cream on a cone, her father awkwardly congratulating her on her A’s or explaining that Bobo Dog could not come back from the vet this time. He tried not to say so, but her dad was clearly disgusted with the way she methodically spit the crunchy little tiles of gum into a napkin, saving them for the end.
She did not know if her father had been given ice cream when his own mother died; he might have been too young. Lexie’s paternal grandmother was some kind of refugee, Laotian or Vietnamese, but she had died early. The grandfather had remarried a woman named Barb who sold snowman figurines at craft fairs. Grandma Barb was the only member of the family Lexie liked, so she’d never asked about her predecessor.
Lexie wandered away from the artist and went back to Jenn and Leora for a few days. At least there she could drown herself in expensive bath products, the same kind her mother used to buy when an impersonal present was called for. Long baths helped Lexie to consider her next move. Which should probably take place before the water bill arrived.
The Rogers build a deck and throw a party to celebrate. It is to be mock-casual, Gwen tells Tanga.
“Gourmet versions of casual food,” Gwen explains before the guests arrive. As an example, she cites the sausages, which are of the imported Spanish variety rather than the traditional American grilling sausage, which is actually Italian or Polish in origin…here Gwen’s brow creases. It is complicated. She asks Tanga to sample the sausage. Tanga approves.
The Rogers have not specifically asked Tanga to serve their guests, but, as usual, she has uncanny powers of intuition. Tanga circulates food and drink with downcast eyes, invisible in plain sight. The guests are impressed, but say nothing to break the spell.
Still, the party is not all the Rogers had hoped. The sangria is not strong enough. Conversations seem grounded. A moth has died in the olive tapenade.
When they have a moment in the kitchen, Joe comments that Alice Blair was more fun when she drank.
“She’s pregnant, Joe.”
“Maybe she could make an exception? She used to be the life of the party.”
Gwen shrugged, “The party will have to find a new life.”
“How about you?” Joe’s tone is bitter. He heads to the deck with a tray of cheeses and sliced rustic bread. Gwen mentally tabulates his beer consumption.
Back outside, Joe steps through the invisible shield and offers Tanga a glass of sangria.
Tanga looks at the deck below her feet and the dying grass below the deck. “I do not drink…wine.” She excuses herself to check on Jessie. In Tanga’s culture, children are not sent to the periphery of a social gathering with a coloring book and washable markers.
Gwen has an inadvisable third sangria. She shares an inadvisable confidence with Lorie Murphy, who could get her fired. She wants to be fired.
There are things people do not know about Gwen Rogers. Before she met Joe, a man she was dating had dumped her on the eve of a holiday weekend. While he was away, she turned up the heat in his house and placed raw tuna steaks between his couch cushions. She had always wanted to tell someone this story, but knew it fell in a certain category. Certainly she had never told Joe, who allegedly admired her cool-headedness.
The sangria is stronger than it tastes. The floating orange-slice garnishes become repositories of alcohol. Gwen is fishing oranges out of her cup and eating them with red-tinged fingers. Tanga takes her gently by the elbow and guides her away from the party, up the stairs to the big yellow room. When Tanga returns, she helps steer the party toward a graceful conclusion without drawing attention to Gwen’s exit.
After clearing the party debris, Tanga puts Jessie to bed with another traditional Malanesian legend, the one about the princess who grew wings. When Joe peeks in, Tanga pauses in her recitation, having apparently forgotten which princess this story is about. She turns toward the figure in the yellow square of doorway and smiles apologetically.
“You’re doing great,” he says. “Really great.”
He gives a little wave and retreats to his side of the house. The story can resume. Things do not end well for the princess with wings, but the tale is very long and by the end Jessie is asleep, dreaming, beyond caring that her mother is vomiting and crying many rooms away.
Without warning, Lexie picked up Jersey Transit. She was in Penn Station, trying to buy cocaine for a party Jenn and Leora were throwing. She enjoyed buying drugs; it was a skill someone like Leora would never master. You had to have an eye, an ear, and a way with people if you wanted buy what was not supposed to be for sale.
Then the female voice with its strange automated inflictions drifted through the station, “Rahway, Lyndon, Princeton Junction…” She went to track three and got on.
The train popped up from beneath the Hudson in a part of Jersey that was mostly abandoned factories half-sunk in marsh. Not the Jersey she was headed back to, the one where gently curving driveways led to spacious garages, the one where the refrigerators teemed with fruit and bottled water.
She was determined not to go back to her parents, but there wasn’t much in her bag. An Altoids tin of mushrooms, a borrowed sorority t-shirt, some journals she was planning on throwing out because most of the stuff in them was nonsense she wrote in altered states. Instead she starts a new page: Foods I Would Eat if I Had $50. Then a list of possible ways of getting 50 dollars. She crosses out her only previous work experiences: cleaning the litter box for an allowance and selling marijuana that was stolen anyway. Next, she tries a list of her skills. Once she crosses out typing and filing (both lies), the list does not resemble a viable resume. Which is not really fair. There must be something she can build from lies and kisses and the good little girl she used to be.
Last year the Rogers went on a cruise. Jessie was occupied every day with activities advertised as educational fun: swimming lessons, arts and crafts. She was allowed to make her own sundaes and stay up until nine o’clock.
This summer they take her to a red building on the perimeter of the mall, where cheery teens smash any candy you want into full-fat ice cream.
“No wonder Americans are so fat,” Gwen regards the ice cream paddles with a look usually reserved for cat vomit.
Joe glares at her and puts his hand on Jessie’s back. He orders chocolate with two kinds of smashed candy bars in a cone the size of a trombone. Jessie gets the same. She is going through what Gwen calls A Daddy’s Girl Phase.
They sit near the back and tell Jessie the truth. Gwen i
s getting an apartment in Manhattan. Daddy and Jessie will stay in the house, which is in a phenomenal school district.
“Will you send Tanga away?” a rivulet of chocolate traces Jessie’s chin, ending in a single drop that won’t fall.
“Tanga’s not going anywhere,” says Joe. Gwen’s eyes flicker with disgust, even though they have agreed not to interact inappropriately around Jessie. It is their mutual hope that Jessie is too young to be harmed. At her age there are no causes, only events. Like those babies who don’t even notice if you throw them in a pool.
All is quiet as Joe pilots the SUV back to the house. Gwen reaches to turn up the air conditioning, and Joe tells her to leave it alone.
Sometimes, when it is night in the big kitchen, Tanga goes there to sit. The only light is the gleam of the appliances, the only sound is their hum. She sits on the bar stool. Sometimes she drinks a bottle of beer or smokes One of My Special Cigarettes. Her time in the Rogers’ house has made her more attractive. Her cheeks are less hollow. Her eyes no longer dart defensively.
Joe has never asked Tanga to do the cooking, but she likes the big kitchen. It is hers now. The whole house is hers, even the soft side of the big bed when she wants it. She ruminates on her unlikely path to good fortune as she stirs the saucepan of halpa.
Halpa is one can of sloppy-joe starter, one jar alfredo sauce, and a half bottle of Tabasco. Tanga invented it when she was a runaway girl in New York, stealing jars from bodegas and writing utopian journal entries about a land called Malanesia.
Dear Aunt Gwenda: Summer Circus Edition
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
My dead old mom keeps knocking on the door late at night. She’s never there in the morning but she recently left me a note saying that if I open the door she’ll split the royalties from her new memoir—I’m An Octogenarian Zombie!—with me. Thing is, she hasn’t written it yet and I am afraid she wants me to do it. I’d kind of like to hear her story but I know if I let her in it will be all “Aunt Janice says hello. Your Aunt Mimi looks wonderful. And my, I am hungry.” Any suggestions on what to do?
Earpluggedly yours,
XD
Aunt Gwenda: It seems to me that you’re sitting on a golden ticket. Since the Walt Disney Corporation likes to keep the profits of its own shuffling (and more spry) zombiekind, it turns out the law is quite clear on this issue. While dead old mom (what a way for a child to refer to a parent!) may still hold the copyright for 75–150 years of undeath, the royalties belong to her beneficiaries. What need have the dead for money? They just eat the brains they want, and never think to pay for them.
Wait a second. I know you what you’re thinking:
Why don’t I just put her out of her misery? Then I will be both copyright and royalty holder? Mwahaha. (I hear your Mwahahas. Oh yes, I hear them.)
You are a terrible, terrible child. In a different time, you might have ended up in a comic book, running an asylum for the criminally insane. Have you forgotten all she’s done for you?
I’m opening the door for her tonight myself. Please disregard the above advice. Follow this: Don’t wear a hat while you’re sleeping, but instead slather your scalp with peanut sauce.
I’m sure zombie mom and I can come to an arrangement on the royalties. Merchandising ideas include: a touring circus of the octogenarian damned and a workout video.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
I have this horrible feeling I made a mistake.
Best,
Scott Walker, Wisconsin
AG: That horrible feeling is your soul. Trying to get out while it still can.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
When I got to work last Tuesday all the candy bowls had been switched out for candy jars. Now to find out what’s in them I have to stop and actually talk to people. I think I may either stop eating candy all day at work or start bringing my own.
Yours,
Grazing While Typing
AG: Two words: Baseball bat. Of course, with the easier access to the candy this method provides, as well as an incentive to run post-bat and grab, you may soon find yourself on the unemployment line.
You could also try dressing as Willy Wonka. I guarantee no one will try to talk to you.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
I am always 24 hours from being caught up but never quite get there. Help?
Yours,
Not Getting It Done in Texas
AG: Boy, can I relate.
Even with the circus of the octogenarian damned (they’re hard workers), a polydactyl criminal mastermind cat named after Ernest Hemingway, two dogs named after Shakespeare and Austen characters respectively, and a flock of murderous bats that do my bidding, I can’t keep up these days. What I can tell you, in confidence, is that I keep dreaming of doppelgangers. Holograms, robots, cyborg clones—call them what you will, but they are coming.
And when they do, we will be way too busy battling them to retain control of our lives to worry about little things like deadlines and bills.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
I would like to be re-elected to the mostly ceremonial position of head prefect in the White House School for Recalcitrant Politicians but I cannot get the people to pay attention to me now that I am no longer the outsider running on dreams. I’m thinking of handing my cap over to Dennis Kucinich and going for some beach time but I keep thinking surely this job is worth something, right?
AG: Given recent events, the coming rise of the machines, and the touring schedule of the Octogenarian Circus of the Damned (towns near you, prepare: they are hungry!), I say why bother trying to get people to pay attention to you? Why not focus your attention on developing the bionic carrier pigeons we’ll need once we can no longer trust electronics equipment? Why not help that poor guy in Texas meet a deadline or two? Why not take Dennis Kucinich hostage for a weekend of nothing but Goldie Hawn movies, including the disturbing patriotic emu film Protocol? Even zombies don’t run on dreams.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
I’m so bogged down in anniversaries I can’t celebrate the moment.
Yours,
AK
AG: Again, I hear you. This one’s easy though. Have others do your celebrating for you. Why, what’s that, I hear? It’s no longer you, it’s the sound of many loud (oh so loud) octogenarian zombies clapping and cheering the most important anniversary of the year. I speak of the tenth anniversary of Small Beer Press, of course. As disconcerting as they are, still, their songs are lovely.
You won’t want to open any mail from them though, especially if the packages are damp. Brains don’t travel well, what with the heat death of the sun coming on and all.
I promise you the tickets to the circus are worth every penny.
About these Authors
Joan Aiken (1924–2004) was born in Rye, England. After her first husband’s death, she supported her family by copyediting at Argosy and worked at an advertising agency before turning full time to writing fiction. She wrote for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, and Women’s Own, and over a hundred books—perhaps the best known of which are the dozen novels in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She received the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards for fiction, and was awarded an MBE. “The Sale of Midsummer” was first published in Ghostly Grim and Gruesome (Helen Hoke, ed., 1976) and was recently collected in The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories.
David Blair’s first book, Ascension Days, was chosen by Thomas Lux for the Del Sol Poetry Prize. He teaches at the New England Institute of Art.
Gwenda Bond lives in Lexington, KY, with her husband, the writer Christopher Rowe, and a number of pets, chilled bottles of champagne, books, and just the right number of screwball comedies.
Carol Emshwiller’s most recent books include The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1, a novel, The Secret City, and a collection, I Live with You. To see her interviewed go to carolemshwillerproject.blogspot.com. She lives in New York City.
K. M. Ferebee was bred, born, and raised in Texas. Currently
she lives, more or less, in New York City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer and The Brooklyn Rail. She has a strange obsession with the geography of London, and no great gift for gardening.
Sarah Heller received her BA from Bard College and her MFA in poetry from NYU. She teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and was the Executive Director of the Authors League Fund from 2000–2010, where she now serves as Executive Advisor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in RealPoetik, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pembroke Magazine, NextBook, The Temple/El Templo, Thin Air, The Apocalypse Anthology, The Literary Companion to Shabbat, and Hayloft. She has received fellowships or awards from the Drisha Institute, MacDowell Colony, Virginia Council for the Creative Arts, Centre D’Art I Natura (Spain), Vermont Studio Center, and Soul Mountain Retreat. She is on the Board of Directors of Nightboat Books and Triskelion Arts.
Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in anthologies and in dozens of literary and speculative publications from Alaska Quarterly Review and Arts & Letters to Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Weird Tales. She has published two novels and a short story collection, and has won an O. Henry award. She lives in New York City with her dog, Booker Prize, and cat, Pulitzer.
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