Hum: Stories

by Richmond, Michelle

  “Expecting what?” she said when the ex told her the news.

  “You know,” he said, sighing the exasperated sigh that characterized most of their exchanges during the final year of their relationship. “Expecting.”

  “But you said you never wanted children,” she reminded him. “You said children have nothing to offer. You said they would cause undue wear on your hands. The diapers, remember? The preparation of nutritious meals. The assembling of swing sets.”

  To which he replied, “You always were so negative.”

  ***

  The week after the funeral she received a call from the astronomy professor. He was weeping. “I have to see you,” he said. “I need to talk to someone.”

  They met at the diner by Lake Merced. It was a cool day, college students were rowing through the fog on the lake. The afternoon special was chicken salad on rye served with a side of hash browns. She had the special, he had coffee, he confessed he had been deeply in love with her sister.

  “My sister was only seventeen,” she said. “You’re a married man.”

  His eyes were so small, his hands so small, his beard so short and bristly, she wondered what her beautiful sister could possibly have seen in him.

  “Did you know her dream was to map the distance between Earth and the nearest sentient life-forms outside our solar system? Yes, she was young, but she was working on a mathematical formula that could quite possibly have changed the way humans view our place in the universe.”

  She looked at her hash browns and shook her head dumbly. “No, I didn’t know.”

  “What I’m saying is, to you she was a seventeen-year-old girl. To me she was a great scientist in the making.”

  And a lover, she wanted to add. And you’re married. But she didn’t say it. It occurred to her that perhaps her sister had tapped into something good but indefinable—a kind of connection that she herself was still waiting to experience.

  ***

  Although a number of schools have opened to serve the vast number of hopefuls flocking to the new profession, formal training is not required to sit for the exam. Nonetheless, she briefly considered enrolling in a local certificate program in order to validate the respectability of her chosen path, but when she looked into it she discovered the costs would be prohibitive. Three thousand dollars per semester, and that didn’t even include the lubricant.

  Anyway, what she knows about hand jobs could fill a textbook. She gave her first at fourteen, to a banker’s son named John Zephyr, in the living room of her friend Ramona’s house during a party at which no adults were present. Everyone had been drinking Seagram’s and Seven, and John Zephyr was passed out on the sofa. Someone sent her to wake him up, it was long past his curfew. She tried slapping his face, pulling his hair, talking loudly into his ear, but he just kept on snoring.

  Then she saw that his pants were unzipped, a fact that was not entirely surprising given the haze of marijuana and alcohol that wafted through the house. She opened the fly of his boxers and gently took him in her hands. She had not planned on doing it; it just happened that way. Soon he was awake and proclaiming his undying love. She was surprised by the pleasant stiffness in her hands, and the way this boy who had paid no attention to her before succumbed entirely to her control.

  After that, she was very popular at parties.

  When she tells the ex about her new direction, he says, “You always were good at that.” He has a way of turning every compliment into a stinging insult, just by his tone of voice.

  ***

  Sometimes she lies awake late into the night, thinking of her sister. The image is always the same: her sister stepping up on the windowsill, looking back one last time at her bedroom. The woods around her blaze with firelight. In her brilliant mind, she calculates the distance from windowsill to ground. She considers the probabilities of her survival. The ground beneath her window is soft, the first floor of her house is burning, it only takes a few seconds to die of smoke inhalation. For some reason, she does not factor in the brand-new brick border framing the geraniums.

  ***

  When people ask why a nice copywriter like herself is making such a dramatic career shift, she mentions the good pay, the flexible hours, the geographic mobility. She does not mention that she has always been at ease when giving a hand job. She never admits that she finds it comforting, the feel of her palm against giving flesh, the way she can control a man’s face and his emotions with a simple shift in speed or rhythm. She doesn’t say that she enjoys the moment of intense tightening just before he lets go, and then the quick, hot stream of semen. She never mentions these things because she fears that perhaps she is a little strange, to find peace and wholeness in such a simple, primal act.

  And she tells no one what goes through her mind while she is working on her practice subjects. Occasionally, she tries to concentrate on rhythm and technique, speed and accuracy. More often, though, her mind wanders, and she finds herself thinking about everything except the job at hand:

  • Will she see her ex, the software engineer, and their new baby on the street? If so, what will she say?

  • If, on that day at Albertson’s, she had known she were seeing her sister for the last time, what would she have said?

  • Did her sister believe in an afterlife? Does she herself believe in an afterlife? If there is an afterlife, will she one day in the distant future be able to locate her sister there?

  • How do her parents manage to pass the endless days in that enormous, immaculate house in the Los Altos hills, and does her mother still tend the geraniums?

  ***

  The day of the exam arrives. She goes to a nondescript building on Polk Street, rides the elevator to the twelfth floor, and joins thirty-seven other hopefuls for the written exam. She uses a number two pencil and finishes half an hour early, certain that she has aced it.

  The oral exam is more difficult. Her test subject is extremely attractive. She resorts to an old technique she has of slightly crossing her eyes in order to blur her vision. This way, she does not have to look at his beautiful green eyes, his perfect face. He reads from his script in a convincing way. When he says, “I’m so ashamed to be here,” she says, “There is nothing to be ashamed of. This procedure is a medically sound method of relieving upper back pain.” A few minutes later, following the script, he says, “You fucking whore,” to which she replies, “Please refrain from making comments which may interfere with the treatment.” As she is leaving the room, she can hear murmurs behind the two-way glass. She spends half an hour in the waiting room, flipping through Popular Mechanics.

  Finally, the administrative assistant calls her name and says, “Please proceed to room 1237 for the manual portion of your exam.”

  She finds her test subject in a large room containing nothing but two hard-backed chairs. The room is painted white. To her great relief, the test subject is a fat man in his mid-fifties with a receding hairline, complaining of excruciating leg cramps. She takes a pair of disposable surgical gloves from a box by her chair and gets to work. It only takes three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

  The next day she receives her final results by phone. A sleepy voice of indiscriminate sex says: “We are calling to inform you that you have passed all three segments of the Manual Medical Caregiver examination. You were in the top third percentile of your exam group. Congratulations, this is the beginning of an exciting new career in medicine.”

  ***

  A few weeks after she passes the exam, her mother calls and says, “You never came to dinner.”

  Meaning, of course, that she is a lousy daughter, that she quite possibly caused the fire, that it should have been she who died instead of her younger sister.

  Her mother says, “Your father wants to talk to you.”

  Her father comes on the line. “Who is this?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Oh, hello, I heard through the grapevine that you’ve become one of those whatchamacallits.”<
br />
  “Manual Medical Caregiver.”

  “Yes, how do you like the work?”

  “It’s good, not too stressful, it pays the bills.”

  She can hear her mother whispering something in the background. “Sweetheart,” her father says. “Your mother wants you to return the necklace you borrowed from your little sister.”

  “What necklace?”

  More whispering, then, “The one with the rhinestone rhinoceros pendant.”

  She has to think for a minute, and then she remembers it. “That was five years ago.”

  Her father sighs. It has been a long and arduous marriage. She knows this for a fact: he never wanted children. He never even wanted a wife. Before he got her mother pregnant, he’d been planning a solitary career in forestry. “Your mother wants it back,” her father says. “I can’t say why. Just do this one thing for the sake of harmony.”

  “Sure,” she says.

  Months pass. She never finds the necklace, she never goes over for dinner. She cannot bear the thought of her mother’s cautious hug, the polite pat on the shoulder, the inevitable point in the evening when her mother would remind her, “Your sister took after me, you know. You’re the spitting image of your father.” After dinner she would help her father in the kitchen, while her mother retired to her sister’s bedroom, which is where she sleeps these days.

  She advertises her services on the back page of a reputable local magazine and gradually builds her clientele. She rents a small office in the financial district. The office contains a couch, a chair, a pillow, a desk on which she makes appointments and keeps the books. She paints the walls a pale, hospitable blue and maintains a large supply of Kleenex. She always wears scrubs to work, in order to underscore the message to patients that this is a serious medical establishment. She finds the work relaxing. She sleeps fairly well at night. Her patients depend on her, she is providing a valuable service to the public. Slowly, she begins to feel connected to the world.

  But there is one thing that bothers her, one horror she can’t shake: the image of her baby sister standing on the windowsill, preparing to leap. She purchases several books about the afterlife. Each night before falling asleep, she attempts unsuccessfully to channel her sister’s ghost.

  ***

  Oh yes, of course it happens this way. She runs into the ex on the street. He is pushing a stroller, and the software executive is beaming. The software executive has gotten a perm and a thousand-dollar pram. “I quit my job!” this woman says, unprovoked. “Motherhood is so fulfilling!”

  Consequently, the ex has taken a full-time job for the first time in his life. He has given up his career in hand modeling for something more stable, something in sales. He looks haggard, possibly insane, and she knows he is ready to jump ship at any moment. When the software executive runs off to change the baby’s diaper, the ex says, “Would you like to have coffee sometime?”

  “I don’t think so.” She does not even feel the slightest emotional tug, the slimmest pang of nostalgia-lust.

  One thing she never told anyone about her ex: he did not masturbate. Ever. He was concerned about repetitive stress injury to his hands.

  ***

  Nearly a year after she passes the exam, the astronomer shows up at her door. It’s late on a rainy night, and she’s wearing her nightgown, watching old Westerns on TV. She has not seen him since that day at the diner.

  “May I come in?” he asks.

  He is wearing a yellow raincoat in which he looks very small, no bigger than a boy. She steps aside to let him in. She offers him coffee and a bagel. Still wearing his wet raincoat, he sits down on the sofa. She sits on the other end. His face has the gaunt, prematurely aged look of someone who has given up food for cigarettes.

  “I can’t get her out of my mind,” he says.

  “I know,” she says. By which she means, “Me too.”

  “I’ve left my wife,” he says. “I’ve quit my job. I’ve been spending a lot of time at sports bars.”

  She is thinking about her sister, how one young girl with an infinite stream of numbers coursing through her brain could have caused so much grief for so many people simply by ceasing to exist. She doesn’t know what to say to him, so she tells him a story that she only recently remembered.

  “I remember this one time,” she says. “My sister was six years old, and I was home from college. It was 1986, and Haley’s comet was passing by. She’d heard about it in school, and she was desperate to see it. I drove her out to Pt. Reyes, and we camped out on the beach. I remember it was this bright baseball of light with a fuzzy white tail. We lay on our backs, watching. My sister took a few pictures with a Polaroid camera, but none of them came out. When I woke up the next morning she was sitting down by the water’s edge. I asked her what she thought of the comet. ‘It was cool,’ she said. Then she asked me the strangest thing. ‘How far away do you think they are?’ she asked. ‘Who?’ ‘The other people,’ she said. ‘How many light-years do you think it would take to get to the nearest planet inhabited by people?’ I said I didn’t know, but there’d be plenty of time for her to figure it out.”

  The astronomer is looking at her with extreme concentration, as if waiting for some clue, some consoling fact, that will allow him to get on with his life. “Yes, I remember when Haley’s comet passed by,” he says. “Do you know it won’t return until the year 2061?”

  They sit for a few minutes in silence. John Wayne’s voice emanates softly from the TV.

  Finally she says, “Why are you here?”

  He leans his wet head against the sofa. “I don’t know.”

  It occurs to her that she need not let him suffer. It occurs to her that he has come to her for a purpose, even if he is unaware of this himself.

  “I am a licensed medical professional,” she says, sliding closer to him. “Manual manipulation has proven extremely effective in treating patients who suffer from long-term mourning.” She is using her most professional voice. She touches his hand first, in keeping with protocol. He flinches slightly, but does not move his hand away.

  He lifts his head and looks at her. “It’s very kind of you, but I don’t think that will help. Nothing will help.” His hair is dripping on her sofa.

  “At least we can try,” she says. “I won’t charge you.”

  “Okay.”

  She goes upstairs, puts on her scrubs, and gets a bottle of lotion. When she returns, he has taken off his raincoat and laid it over the arm of the sofa. He has unzipped his pants and is sitting with his hands in his lap. “What now?” he asks nervously.

  “Just relax.”

  She reaches for him and begins to work. He is so soft, so small. As she is working, she thinks about the universe. She thinks about planets spinning. She sees cold moons and burning suns. She thinks about the year 2061, and she is pleased by the thought that, when the comet passes again, she too will be nothing more than particulate matter.

  Soon, the astronomer shudders and lets out a great sigh. He opens his eyes and says, “Elizabeth.” For a moment she forgets the rules and leaves her hand in place. For a moment she is not alone in the world, she is connected to some greater thing. It is the first time she has heard her sister’s name spoken aloud in many months.

  LAKE

  I was in Golden Gate Park watching the gentlemen race their model yachts on Spreckels Lake. I used to go there a lot to take my mind off things. The scene was always the same: a dozen or so men in their seventies, eighties, even nineties, decked out in fishing caps and khakis and sneakers, pacing the sidewalk, remote controls in hand. The men were always in a hurry, scurrying to keep up with their yachts, but the yachts themselves never went very fast. The yachts were so slow, in fact, not even the ducks seemed to be bothered by them.

  It was a small lake, man-made and gracefully shaped, seductively curvaceous like the amoebae one studies in grade school. The lake was surrounded by a wide sidewalk. Along the edges of the sidewalk were several wooden benches wit
h little brass dedication plaques in loving memory of this or that person; there was even a bench devoted to someone’s cat. The character of the lake changed from day to day, depending on the weather. On this particular afternoon the placid surface was covered with a thin green film.

  There was a new guy at the lake. He was tall and broad, probably not a day over 65. His boat was brand new, bigger than the others, with a showy red hull beneath the billowing white sail. He was very tan, as if he’d spent the last twenty years of his life in Florida, and he wore a blue baseball cap instead of the regulation fishing hat. He was being aggressive, pulling all sorts of bogus maneuvers. At one point he swung his yacht around and slammed into a smaller one that was attempting to pass.

  “Please get that monstrosity out of the way,” said the fellow with the smaller boat. He had an old-fashioned mustache and dyed black hair, and he wore an odd pair of white gloves with pearl buttons at the wrists. Every time I went to Spreckels Lake—I’d been going twice a week for several months, ever since my husband left—this fellow was there. He had always struck me as meek, so I was surprised to hear him challenge the new guy.

  “What did you say?” the new guy asked.

  “This is a gentleman’s sport,” the fellow with the white gloves replied. “There is a protocol. Kindly move your boat.”

  That’s when the new guy said, “Fuck off,” and pushed the gentlemanly fellow into the lake.

  The man disappeared beneath the water for a few seconds. Then his head bobbed up, his knees, the white tips of his shoes, and he began to float.

  As soon as the men of the model yacht club realized what had happened, they started steering their boats in and calling out for help, everyone except the new guy, who apparently still had his sights set on winning the race.

  By now the fellow had floated several yards out. “Should someone go in to help him?” one man asked. The others shrugged their shoulders. I got the feeling none of them went in for much physical activity. Plus, the water was green and slimy. I was the only other person at the lake, so they all looked my way, but they quickly dismissed me, because I was obviously very pregnant. Thirty-eight weeks, to be exact. Two weeks to go, give or take. I was in no condition to jump into the lake and save the floating man. We all just stood there for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. It was clear that no one else had a cell phone or a rescue plan.