Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  But he never asked her to leave. Soon she was reading the TV Guide (which arrived in paper each week) and watching whatever went up on the screen. He worked as a something something for the USDA at a poultry processing plant, which meant he spent his days inspecting dead bodies. She slept until noon in the room he “set up” for her—blow-up mattress on the floor—and then she prowled the apartment until he came home. She went through the closets, the drawers, the sticky cupboards, looking for what? Evidence. Not only of his failure as a father but as a person, of which there was plenty: his enormous saggy shirts, his rusty nail clippers, his bent shoes, expired cans of soup, not a book in the place, not a photo on the wall. Each day at 4:50 p.m. he turned up at the apartment, stinking of offal and carrying a bag from the same cheap IHOP restaurant filled with the same items off the menu for them both. He kept plastic gallon milk containers full of water in the refrigerator and drank from one while he ate.

  Her mother left daily messages. Should Janey be skipping school like this? Did Janey know her Malcolm X paper was due? Did Janey recall the regional debate was next week, after all her hard work and her debate coach was … Well, she’d missed the end of school, was she proud of herself?

  She watched him stooped over the sink or lifting plastic plates out of cupboards with shaky fingers. She wondered what her mother had seen in this guy. And then she stopped wondering because obviously her mother had seen nothing and that’s why she left and why Janey had been kept away from him all these years.

  The old Janey had, if memory serves, rarely fought with an adult, but the new Janey had a mouth on her and said what she could to gall her father, or hurt him, or get any word out of him at all. The new Janey and the truant father had some spectacular fights. Once she barricaded the door. Once she threw his clothes out the window and onto the parking lot where they looked like globs of color on the hot blacktop until he eventually went down and gathered them, stabbing them up with a long cooking fork and dropping them into a bag like the convicted doing their service.

  Oh why had she left home? Surely it was excusable—a girl wants to meet her father, right? People quest. People roam.

  She could see her other self, her imaginary twin, the old Janey, skipping down the stairs to the street, high-fiving the janitor on the way (this was an elaborated detail, since she’d rarely spoken to the janitor, but her coastal self was beginning to seem cooler and kinder than the actual Janey had ever been).

  Her mother’s messages became longer. She talked about growing up in that small Iowan town, how her own father had come to the US as a teen, worked ag, become a citizen, and embarked on a (mostly failed) mission to unionize farmworkers in different parts of the country. He’d leave for months, return for a few weeks, and again leave, until one day he didn’t come back. Her mother worked ag admin, spoke English, raised her daughter to never love a wandering man. But Janey’s mother turned out to be the wanderer, a woman with her mother’s tongue, her father’s heart and name. Four months pregnant, nearly nineteen, she’d packed her suitcase and trained it alone to New York. She’d buy Janey a plane ticket whenever Janey was ready. She’d fly out herself and pick her up. She wasn’t going to force her, didn’t want to push her, but she loved Janey and missed her and was sorry …

  It was July now and the mosquitoes had gotten so bad, the air so moist, Janey barely left the apartment. The claustrophobia was making her and her father yet crazier. She was so lonely, she thought she could hear her mother calling to her. Was it her fault she’d slept with this clod? her mother seemed to be saying. At least she’d gotten Janey in the bargain.

  One night, her father hadn’t said a word in hours and Janey thought she’d explode. She came out of the kitchen, cupped her hands, yelled, “Anybody home?”

  He glanced up, then back at the TV.

  She was inexplicably enraged. She grabbed his phone off the table, first as a gesture of invasion of privacy, then, when she realized she didn’t know his password, as a threat. She ran over to the sink, turned on the water, and held his phone an inch from the stream. “Give that back,” he roared. He jumped up and, in a rare fit of retaliation, went for her phone on the coffee table, dropped it to the floor, his foot raised above it. They paused, horrified. She dunked. He stomped.

  He had no landline, so neither one had a phone anymore.

  He turned off the TV that night and they slinked phoneless through the quiet rooms, more alone together than ever. The sound of cicadas came in through the panes under the long breath out of the air conditioner. Janey sat on the sofa, arms wrapped around her legs. He went into his bedroom and shut the door.

  The next morning she was still waiting for him on the sofa when he came out. She followed him into the kitchen, taunting, “You can’t believe I’m still here, can you? You have no idea how to run me off. Not as easy as running out, right?”

  “I wish I knew how to run you off!” he said finally, his arms raised around his head in protection. “I’ve got a wild animal loose in my apartment. Why don’t you just go home?”

  She stopped. Through it all, he’d never asked her to leave. That one sentence left unuttered she’d thought proof of something, however thin, but here it was at last. Go. I never wanted you.

  “Guess what!” she screamed back. “You’ll never run me off!” (Little did she know.) She slammed out the door.

  She sprinted at first, then slowed. She wanted her mother so badly she could almost touch her. She could see her mother’s retreating figure.

  Her mother! Without a phone she hadn’t heard her voice since yesterday. How Janey must have hurt her by leaving, by not returning her calls, by being the worst daughter one could have given birth and devoted one’s life to. Her mother had been right to leave this town, Janey growing inside her, brave to set off across the country the opposite way Janey had come. She’d been a child, not much older than Janey then, and she’d left out of love, for Janey, while Janey had left out of rage, at her mother.

  Janey ran to the Shop Stop and called her mother from the last pay phone on the planet. (Of course it would be here in this crap town.) She got change for a few crinkled bills. (How had it come to this? She didn’t even have a phone anymore? And she’d gone through all her savings?) Her mother didn’t pick up and Janey left a voice mail. “Hey, it’s me.” She leveled her voice, steadied it, didn’t want to sound too desperate, some sliver of pride still not sloughed off. “Call me as soon as you get this.” She left the number of the pay phone.

  She hung up and sat on a cement parking divider a few feet from the phone and waited in the summer sun. She’d seen all she wanted. She’d made her point a few times over. She was done. She wanted to go home. Her mother would buy her a plane ticket, leaving in a few hours, and Janey wouldn’t even stop by the apartment for her bag. She’d go home without a stick that she’d come with but the clothes on her body. She’d walk, if she had to, to the airport, take off, fly over the land, and she’d never see that asshole, her father, again. She waited. The phone rang. It hadn’t been twenty minutes. She lunged for it.

  “Janey?” a woman who wasn’t her mother said.

  “Judy?” said Janey. Judy, her mother’s friend, the neighbor. “Judy, where’s my mom?”

  “Janey, thank God. We’ve been trying to reach you and your father all morning. We were about to call the police.”

  “Our phones broke.”

  “Both of them?”

  “I …”

  “Janey, listen. There’s been an accident. Where are you?”

  “An accident?” said Janey.

  Her mother had died instantly. No one in the other vehicle was hurt.

  So Janey flew home that day after all, though not in the way she had expected, her father driving her to the airport, murmuring apologies she couldn’t hear through the roar, could only see those detested lips move in her peripheral vision. Her father, seeing her through security, handing her some twenties for a cab on the other end, cash that she dropped into the tr
ash in the women’s room, not wanting anything from that man. She sat through the wake, the funeral. People placed plates of food in front of her and removed them. People passed into her sight, touched her shoulders, looked earnestly into her eyes and moved their mouths. She was still frozen, had not even begun to thaw when, two weeks later, child protective services turned her around and shipped her right back—to her father. He was her father, after all, and he said he’d take her. She’d been living with him at the time of the accident (that turned out to be the damning fact: she’d been living with him) and she agreed to go, had to, because there was no one else, no other family. Her mother’s will had named Janey’s grandmother, who was now in a nursing home upstate and Janey saw her twice a year for a day. Other than that there were a few cousins in Mexico whom Janey had never met, and why hadn’t her mother ever gone to Mexico and gotten to know them? So she went back, numb and barely speaking. Neither she nor her father seemed to know what to do about school, so she didn’t go. She wasn’t enrolling in the hick high with the shiny-faced locals unless someone made her. Then a social worker came by and made her. Her father enrolled her as a junior in the local high school.

  The first couple of years Janey was so put down by grief and guilt and her sense of no options that she couldn’t come out of her numb state without exploding. Her object was to stay as absent as possible, which was plainly like her father. But what else was she supposed to do?

  It seemed a bit harsh that for the rest of her life she’d have to pay for one childish mistake she made at age fifteen, the sort of mistake anyone could have made. Surely if she’d been in New York no one would have made her go live with a father she’d never met, who’d never contacted her, never paid support. Surely they would have pawned her off on a friend of her mother’s. Other people do stupid things at fifteen and it’s no big deal. They have to retake a class, or work winter break to pay for what they broke or stole or crashed, or they have to stay in every weekend for a month, or go to rehab. But her mistake was catastrophic.

  It was this understanding, of her mistake, that led her to develop the game, or what was mostly a game. She’d think about the old Janey, the original, and the life with her mother she would be leading—the one where she hadn’t left and therefore her mother hadn’t been in the car that day (theoretically) and therefore was still alive, and everything had stayed the same between them and around them. What would the old Janey, the original, the real one, be doing right now?

  SHE WONDERED THIS at her new high school, where her teachers halfheartedly instructed from halfhearted textbooks, though the old Janey had learned those equations two years before and the new Janey really didn’t give a shit about school anymore. The new Janey had a long list of things she no longer gave a shit about: debate team, chess club, clubs of any kind, students of any kind, sports and all its subcategories, college, the future in general. The teachers left her alone after the first month, the students after the second. News of her bad luck spread and the whole school parted before her. Death-marked, city-stamped, only a quarter Latina, but not middle-American white either. She might have found a place for herself had she made an effort, but she did not. She walked the hallways in a bubble, sank into the back row. She dispensed with her virginity early and unceremoniously (four months into sixteen with a grocery clerk). Meanwhile, the old Janey, the original, was back at her original high, surrounded by chums—chums who at first wrote to the new Janey every day, but soon less, as Janey wrote less, and within a year stopped altogether since neither side was sure what to say.

  She wondered what the old Janey would be doing her senior year. The new Janey (“new and improved” was her little joke) had only half a senior year. She finished early, took the exams in December with the morons who had failed the year before, got out of there fast, and wound up with a job at a massive shipping and trucking facility (at least it wasn’t ag). She made the same repetitive movements nine hours a day, four days a week, while all over the country people clicked buttons and summoned to their doors pink backpacks, noise reduction headphones, discount T-shirts, sets of wooden spoons, and it was Janey’s job to ensure that trucks took off across the land, drove through the night, to deliver these products with the priority citizens deserved. The new Janey contemplated the old Janey, who would be applying to colleges with her friends, her mother taking her on walking tours across quads and into gothic buildings, to sample classes at her top “choices” (that word was infected now, had pulled a nasty prank on her) and her “safeties” (that word, safety, too).

  She wondered it when she reached the legal age to vote. At that age her mother had left this town with Janey inside her, to find a richer life for them both, but Janey was now back, unenriched, in possession of as much as her mother had had a lifetime before—a high school diploma and a fake ID—but not enough inspiration to follow her mother’s ghost.

  Meanwhile, the old Janey boarded a plane (the new Janey tracked the old in her mind, saw her walking down the JFK corridor), headed for a precollege summer in … Morocco! where she learned French and (finally) Spanish (after all her mother’s urging), learned two languages in four months, plus a few decorative phrases of Arabic, wandered the architecture of a foreign land, fell in love for the first time, and so much more. The new Janey contemplated the old’s smarts and passion.

  The new Janey, who was now “this Janey,” or just “Janey,” or “same great taste” (her joke when she went home with men and the occasional woman she met online), still lived with her father. When she wasn’t assisting the egress of urgent items for the public, she sat on the same sofa she’d sat on that first night, sat and watched football with her father because, well, who knows why. He passed her buckets of fried meat, coleslaw as a “healthy side” for his daughter, and enormous soggy containers of diet soda. This, while the original Janey, what should have been the real one, finished her first year of university with a perfect GPA, had an apartment in the cooler borough with her three best friends, and, oh, the fun they had. At night the old Janey rambled over bridges and down sidewalks and through the streets. During the day she pursued her dreams, which were sharp, not blurry, though the new Janey couldn’t quite see them. The old Janey, sophisticated yet romantic, joined the communal spirit of the city’s emergencies—the hurricanes, the blackouts, whatever wars that managed to touch the city’s skirts with its black fingers, whatever causes the New Yorkers took over the streets over. She still saw her mother every week. They met at art openings, ate at sidewalk cafés under the awnings in the spring, her mother dispensing wisdom, Janey half pretending not to listen, but taking in every word.

  Janey was most interested in when the two Janeys might intersect. It was a game she played. For example, what if the old Janey and the new would have said the same word at the same time? What if both Janeys said, or would have said, the word hey at the same moment, 2:04 p.m. CST / 3:04 p.m. EST? Or what if they said in harmony the same name? She said the names of the men she met—“Bill,” “Shorty,” “Bus”—said them a time or two extra, though she doubted the original Janey would have ever met, much less slept with a man named Bus. A woman, “Vicky,” with long black hair. She whispered the woman’s name into her hair. “Vicky, Vicky, Vicky,” thereby giving the original Janey three extra chances to connect.

  She thought it each evening when her supervisor, Manny, emptied his coffee at the sink. “’Night, Manny,” Janey said. She sang the name aloud a few more times under her breath as Manny waved and left, “Manny, Manny, Manny,” as if calling to the other Janey, urging her to seek out someone by that name on her crowded far-off island and thereby fasten a link between them.

  “Did you need something?” Manny said, ducking back in.

  It was the opposite of sci-fi. She wasn’t interested in those alternate worlds where you do one thing different and the lives forever splinter off onto distant paths. Janey had done that already and was suffering the consequences. She was interested in when you do one thing different and
the lives remain exactly the same.

  It must happen constantly. Think of all the repetitive actions you would perform anyplace you were. All the craps you’d be taking anywhere in the world. All the shoes you’d put on and take off. All the idiots you’d say hello to. All the lies you’d make up to make people like you. All the hallways you’d walk down, all the times you’d write your name. Think of the inanities you say all day long like a song on repeat. Sentences uttered could flicker in and out, meeting and diverging and meeting again. Considered in this way, most lives are nearly identical.

  She was wondering about this one night on her father’s sofa, a talk show running along on the TV, her laptop open to JobLizard. Manny had quit or transferred or dropped dead or moved several towns away from her when, after six consecutive Tuesdays in a motel off exit 67, he’d offered to leave his wife and Janey had laughed. By winter she’d been fired “with cause” for insubordination by his replacement. She scrolled through the jobs site, down and down, all the inconceivably shitty work she could do, an untrained, uneducated woman, twenty years old, who had once been in chess club, on the debate team, who had …

  There was a third life, of course, which she occasionally considered and which came to mind now: the one where Janey would be dead. In that life she had not gone off on that thirty-hour bus ride. She’d never met her father. He’d remained a mystery in her heart. (Would that have been so bad? she wondered, looking over at him, the slug. He could be counted on to be there with hamburgers and sodas, if nothing else.) She’d instead gotten into the car with her mother that day and they had been killed together on the highway going over the bridge. (Where had her mother been going? Janey had thought about that so many times and never been able to fathom. Only Ikea lay on that vast stretch of land.) If she’d died that day with her mother, the world would be silent of both Janeys. (Would that have been so bad?)