The Sabotage Cafe

by Joshua Furst

  “How 'bout we don't,” I said. “Because she's already told me. She wants to be Sarah.”

  “Stop that.” He was scared now, his tone tentative. He had that look on his face that said, Don't do this, don't spin away from me, please. But he was angry too, violently angry. “Listen to me,” he said. “I will absolutely not allow you to name this child Sarah. I won't. I'm not going to let her spend the rest of her life trying to live up to your myth of that woman. My daughter deserves to be her own person.”

  The loathing that lunged out when he said that woman shocked us both, but he didn't apologize. Giving me one more sad, lingering look, he reeled from the room. He went to his parents' house in Duluth and didn't come back for three days.

  When he returned, he was tearful and contrite, but no more compromising than he'd been before. He wrapped an arm around my waist and showed me a daguerreotype his mother had given him. A barrel-chested woman wearing a black gown, a starched frilly bib snapped tight around her neck, stared out from the weathered cardboard. She looked coarse and rugged and very frontier. Cold. I didn't like her—or, more to the point, I could tell she wouldn't have liked me.

  “What's this?” I asked.

  “Cheryl Sturm. My great-great-grandmother. The one who came over in the covered wagon. She was tough. She hid Indians in her potato cellar and taught in a one-room schoolhouse out in Sheldon. She'll be a good protector.”

  I'd pushed the subject as far as I could. “Sure,” I said. “Fine.”

  But, secretly, I continued to think of Cheryl as Sarah. I was convinced some part of my sister would reemerge. My daughter would be open, not like this ancestor of Robert's. She'd be somebody I could talk to and trust. I just hoped Sarah would be waiting to watch over her when she learned how closed the world could be.

  For Cheryl's sake, I tried to convince myself life was simple: you built your nest and performed your function, continuing the generations-old cycle, fortified by the knowledge that your husband loved you, that he would provide as long as you nurtured and whatever sacrifice you might think you were making was, in the long view, less important than the gift of seeing your child grow up in your image. If you found yourself experiencing a momentary crisis of faith, you could always slip next door and visit with a neighbor who'd remind you that you were part of a community, that we were all the same, that the humble walked hand in hand with God. Sometimes I believed it and sometimes I didn't. What I knew was that the other way hadn't worked for me.

  We lived in a starter home in a neighborhood of small drab houses, burrowed like ticks inside the northeastern edge of St. Paul. The children here, Cheryl included, wandered free. They played hopscotch. They jumped rope. They told each other secrets and invented worlds. As long as they stayed within the four square blocks of row houses, they didn't need adult supervision. Everyone knew everyone else and someone was always watching through the window; if there was an accident or an unforeseen crisis, rescue was always a few steps away.

  By the time she was six, it was obvious that Cheryl's body was developing not into the willowy mold of Sarah's but into the stocky, broad-shouldered dimensions of the women on Robert's side of the family. She was growing into her name. But like the pictures I'd drawn while locked up in Woodlawn, she contained hidden traces of Sarah. She grinned a lot and she'd walk up to anyone, whether she knew the person or not, engage them in fantastic stories about the ladybugs that lived in the flowers and the machinery they controlled there, cords to open the petals, buttons that triggered spritzing mechanisms, brightly colored levers that, when pulled, produced a variety of scents. She was open.

  I didn't point this out to Robert. He would have misunderstood. He'd have worried about me, and I worried enough about myself. Control it. Contain it. That was my credo. Mask all signs of difference. Make yourself disappear. It was like living in Willmar but with less privacy.

  People liked me this way. They told me their secrets. I knew who was being beaten by her husband, who'd had an affair with the dentist and why. I knew who was addicted to sleeping pills, and who was addicted to crank. Every anorexic and manic depressive around made it into my living room at some point. They didn't even have to come to me in person. I could hear them through the walls, sobbing and shouting and throwing coffee mugs, threatening to kill each other or themselves. Their voices climbed in my windows at sunrise, shook me awake. When I tried to shut them out, they became angry. They filled me up and took over my days and stole the little bits of me I had left.

  Once upon a time, I would have told Sarah. She would have listened without talking back. Now the only person I had was Robert, and I worried that if I let him in on what was happening, his concern for me would subsume my needs. He'd try to console me, but in the end I'd be the one consoling him.

  So when the voices grew so loud and constant that they made me nauseous and wouldn't let me sleep, it was to Debbie Stone that I risked exposing myself. She was a transplant from the suburbs of New York and we shared the same relatively esoteric interests. When the big Broadway musicals came through town and I took Cheryl to see them, Debbie and her son, Daniel, were our dates. On the way home, we'd stop at Chi-Chi's for Mexican hot chocolate and fried ice cream. She'd introduced me to bagels and lox when these foods were still novelties in St. Paul. We liked each other in a cordial, tentative way.

  Plopping into a chair in her immaculate kitchen, I threw my arms across the table with what I hoped was ironic flair. “I think I'm losing it,” I said. She was busy with her cleaning, fidgeting with a wire brush over the caulking around the tiles of her counter. “Well, maybe not losing it, but …” I took a sip of the iced tea she'd poured me when I'd arrived. “It's frustrating, you know?”

  “What is?”

  “Do you ever—”

  “Damn it,” she said, turning toward me, shaking her fingers out. She wanted to listen, I knew that she did, but now that I had her momentary attention, I wasn't sure what to do with it. Clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, she said, “Bleach. That's the only way,” and started digging in the cabinet under the sink. “Do I ever what?” she said over her back.

  “I guess nothing. It was just a thought.”

  She pulled out a jumbo-sized bottle of Clorox and started filling a bucket with steaming water. Rapping her fingernails against the counter, checking every second or two on the grime, she hardly noticed me. I was just a chattering voice in the background, like the radio, a sound passing through her day. And this was my best, my only, friend. As she resumed her attack on the counter, she hummed to herself—a song with no melody.

  For a long time, I just watched her. The differences between us were suddenly excruciatingly apparent. She was at war with the material world, defending herself and her family from entropy, and I knew if I told her my secrets, she'd feel the need to scrub me away too. When I finally did speak, these words croaked out: “I miss my sister. I wish Sarah was here.”

  Debbie dropped her scrub brush into the bucket and leaned against the counter to watch me cry. I felt like a specimen, a mutant in a lab. She seemed afraid to reach out and comfort me.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  She didn't stop me.

  Later, when she called to see if I was okay, I got Robert to tell her I couldn't come to the phone.

  After that, everything was cursory between us. Which isn't to say I wasn't sad to lose my friend. I missed the social things I'd done with Debbie. It's just, we'd reached the end. People arrive in your life and then disappear, and with every leaving, a little bit more of you goes away with them.

  Okay. I'll say it. In 1986, a couple months after I met Robert, I was hospitalized again, this time for nine weeks at St. Paul-Ramsey The doctor there, Sanjit Rahajafeeli, diagnosed me with Schizotypal Personality Disorder and told me things would always be difficult for me, that I'd have to take medication forever if I wanted to function in anything close to a normal way. His voice was upbeat, as though he was telling me I'd just won a prize, and
he'd taken off his glasses, a gesture meant to soothe me and gain my trust but that instead confirmed my suspicions about him. He believed all the things he'd read in his books, and with enough observation and cross-referencing, he could label and delimit any amount of chaos. The possibility that I'd merely been through some nasty things, that I'd broken down, and was now getting better—there wasn't room in his verdict for this.

  He put me on Thorazine and set me free. I took it for a while. I tried. I did. But its most salient effect was to make me constantly want to kill myself. It hollowed me out and gave me the shakes and swallowed my personality whole.

  Robert cared that I lived. When I told him I couldn't, not and take the drugs, his face furrowed into a tight fearful smile. “We'll work together,” he told me then. He promised we'd learn to recognize the warning signs, and if we were vigilant, faithful and courageous, if I checked my reality sometimes against his, we'd figure out how to reconstruct my world in a way that allowed me to experience it. “We'll manage,” he said. I loved him for this.

  I got better.

  For ten years, I held on to myself, and throughout Cheryl's life, I'd always been normal.

  But now I had to admit this wasn't true. I wasn't normal. I wasn't better. And having failed with Debbie, the only person I could tell was Robert.

  “I know they're not there,” I said. “I know they're not there. But I hear them. They seem so real. And every time I leave the house to escape them, I see these people and they look so suspicious and they start saying things that make no sense to me. Like they know and they're mocking me in some kind of code. And then their voices mix with the other ones and stick in my head all day. It's—I don't understand what I did to these people. I didn't do anything. I'm a good girl.”

  Robert held himself very still. He listened closely, nodded along. Solemn. When I ran out of words, he tapped his lip and held me gently with his eyes. “Well,” he said, “what do you think we should do about it?” He took great care to show he wasn't daunted.

  “Leave,” I said. “I can't stand it here.”

  And to my surprise, he said, “Okay. Then we'll leave.”

  My panic began to recede just like that. Six months later, we were in Plymouth and it was gone completely. I started a garden and a compost heap. Instead of using the dryer, I hung the clothes outside on a line. I taught myself how to bake bread and cookies and stripped the complicating factors—other people—out of my life. The houses here were spaced far apart and everyone minded their own business.

  Cheryl loved it; all that space—two acres of land, with our own private aboveground swimming pool. And the birds: robins, barn swallows, goldfinches, cardinals, even the crows were exciting to watch. Deer sometimes tramped through. She chased bunnies and poked sticks at turtles and frogs. After we saved Gremlin, our ancient, arthritic cat, from the Humane Society, she'd follow him as he stalked through the backyard haplessly searching for gophers.

  In the summers, we sped through the chores, skipped dusting and vacuuming, cleaning up only the most glaring messes. Then we'd laze around the pool all afternoon, keeping each other company. I'd tell her stories—first about a brave Indian princess, then, when Cheryl reached the age where the hold princesses had on her imagination became embarrassing, I switched to stories about my sister and, sometimes, myself.

  She was my best friend. She listened, and like Sarah, she believed I had something of value to give the world. “Mom,” she once told me, “I want to be just like you when I grow up.”

  She was happy. Believe me. Happy and loved.

  And some of the other Cheryl—the one in the photograph Robert had held out in front of me that day—was lodged in her too, like buckshot. She was passionate, fiery and, I hoped, much tougher than me.

  I SAT ON THE BACK DECK in the Adirondack chair, listening to the darkness and holding my body absolutely still so the motion detector wouldn't register me. The air was chilly but I'd changed into a sweater and jeans and draped an afghan over my shoulders. Crickets churned on the lawn like a sea of high-wattage electrical current. The toads were bellowing down near the stream—their voices had a texture like mourning.

  A couple years before Cheryl left, she and I found a dead timber wolf down there. She'd been going through her photography phase and she made me wait while she took pictures. One of them still hangs framed on the family-room wall, the wolf dusted with frost, its tongue frozen and twisted out of its gaping mouth. I was thinking about that day, about how excited Cheryl had become and how unperturbed she'd been by the sight of death.

  When Robert pulled into the driveway, it was almost twelve. The house lights were all off, and I listened silently as he tromped from room to room turning them on, calling out, “Julia? Cheryl? Hello-hello?” In the kitchen, he saw me through the sliding door and asked, “What are you doing out there in the dark?”

  “Don't move. The light will come on,” I said, but it was too late. He was standing behind me, his hands on my shoulders, and the sensor popped, the flat blue-white bulb washing out the darkness.

  “Where's Cheryl?”

  I shrugged. He'd arrived so late that whatever need I'd had for his comfort had dissipated in the lethargy brought on by my Risperdal. “She's at Jessie's house. They're having a sleepover.”

  “Jessie?”

  “Jessie … Clowen, I think?”

  If he'd considered for two seconds what I'd said, he would have realized I was making it up. Cheryl hadn't been friends with Jessie Clowen since ninth grade, when Jessie had started fawning all over some slack-jawed baseball player out to borrow her homework, the kind of guy born with a smirk on his face. Cheryl's recent friends had been artsy, sickly types, either that or boys with skateboards.

  Robert looked me up and down like he was taking inventory. “You gonna stay out here all night?”

  “Maybe.”

  He lingered for a moment, suspicous.

  “Do me a favor and turn the lights back off,” I said.

  Once it was dark again, I shut my eyes and sat as straight as I could in the chair, praying or meditating or what you will. I was hearing things, fragments and whispers and curses and sobs. They all had the hoarse texture of Cheryl's voice, and though they were faint, I understood them. I was seeing things too: where she was, what she was doing.

  She'd refilled her water bottle from a backyard hose. It was empty again now and she was thirsty. She hadn't eaten since cutting through the Four Seasons Mall, where she'd picked up a chili dog and an Auntie Anne's pretzel, a meal that had cost her almost seven dollars, leaving her with three and change in her pocket. Running in a panic to an ATM, she'd gutted her bank account, and since then, the five twenties she'd shoved into her sock had grown damp and begun to itch at her heel, reminding her with each step how little she had.

  The list of things she never wanted to go back to kept growing. There was me. There was Robert. That had been it at first. But we lived in a cushy suburban locale, organized around keeping children safe. She was sick of safe. There was no such thing as safe. The security Plymouth offered was as plastic and hollow as a straw; the fantasy it peddled couldn't protect you from a father who saw his wife as a problem and who didn't see you at all. Plymouth couldn't protect you from a mother who, when you said anything, the slightest, small thing, began crying and ranting incoherently about people she'd known way back in the eighties, who took whatever you said and made it hers, as though your only role in life was to affirm her. Plymouth couldn't protect you from anything, not from the shiny, smiley idiots at Armstrong in their Lucky jeans and their Abercrombie and Fitch, who swallowed everything the advertisers told them and couldn't imagine a better life than this, nor from their parents, whose moral codes were built on real estate.

  She hated all of it and she hated that she was complicit in all of it, that through no fault of her own she'd been given things, a nice house, years' worth of useless music lessons, as many CDs as she could think to buy, and before that, enough toys to dam th
e Mississippi. None of these things had ever been enough. Why did she care so much whether she had a Discman or an iPod? What did it matter? When she was in middle school, she'd thought the road to happiness led through the shopping mall, through buying more and better things than her friends, but she'd figured out quickly the way this game worked: there was always a bigger mall somewhere down the road and she'd always know someone who shopped at that one, and this person's happiness came not from owning whatever stupid thing it was she owned but from seeing the jealousy on Cheryl's face as she realized she'd never have baubles that big. Even understanding this, she couldn't stop herself from resenting the limits we set. She'd rather have nothing now. Nothing is what she believed she deserved.

  Throughout the evening, she'd trespassed on various types of private property, the groomed grounds of corporate headquarters, industrial parking lots, one-family homes and apartment complexes. When she needed to pee, she squatted behind a bush in someone's yard or held it until she found a Caribou Coffee. Public space was nonexistent. Everything was owned and freedom was a lie. This pissed her off too, and outrage spurred her on, spiked through her veins and nullified her fear.

  Eventually, her knees burning from the miles she'd clocked and a blister starting to swell where the twenties had continually jabbed at her ankle, she found a spot to collapse behind a string of retail stores. She built a little fort out of some cardboard boxes that had been piled next to MusicWorld's back door and climbed in. It was like playing make-believe, pretending to be homeless, except the terror of being discovered, of being disturbed and roughed up and knifed, was real.

  She peeled off her socks and hooked them into a flap on one of the boxes, hoping they'd dry by morning. Stretching out was impossible, but she was eventually able to fix herself into an awkward horizontal position. Her blister demanded to be squeezed and prodded; to resist required all her self-control. A marbled pattern of dirt had ground into her socks, and as she lay there, she stared up at them, hanging like banners above her, and studied the glowing swirls where the cotton was still white. She smelled something funky, rotting vegetables and rancid meat—it was coming from some dump-ster down the strip—but after a while she got used to the scent, started almost to like it, could almost see herself stumbling toward it in search of sustenance.