“Oh, Sheila.” Mom sighs and shakes her head. “Sheila wasn’t well.” And leaves it at that, as if that were enough.
Kat is the only one willing to talk, but of course Nenny has to ply her with compliments first. Your crimp looks really cool and your outfit is amazing, also who’s Sheila Collins? It’s a few hours later because Kat’s been at the mall. They’re standing in the kitchen, and when Nenny says it, a look moves over Kat’s face like she’s seen a ghost, and maybe she has.
“Why?! Is she here?”
“No, she died. It was in the paper.”
The look passes and a new one appears. Kat’s teenage mouth goes agape, and Nenny can see all the brackets and silver shining inside.
“She died? Sheila fucking Collins died?”
“Yeah. But who is she?”
“How did Sheila Fat-Ass Collins die?”
“I don’t know. Di-a-something or other. You eat too much sugar and then your liver explodes. It was in the paper. Who knows.”
Suddenly, Kat throws her head back and laughs. “That is so perfect! That is so fucking perfect!” she howls. “That fat whore ate herself to death!”
“Yeah but, Kat…who is she?”
Kat leans back then, crosses her arms and puts her hip against the counter. This is the most she’s talked to Nenny, ever. She thrusts her neck forward and swings her head so there’s a little punch in all her words.
“Sheila Collins is a no-good, white trash, nasty, disgusting pig bitch.” She lets these words sink in before delivering the final blow. “And I’m fucking glad she’s dead.”
Nenny, on her life, has never heard such a stream of vitriol and filth before. Also, it’s quite possible there’s some sisterly bonding going on.
“What did she do?” Even though she’s already hanging on Kat’s every word, it’s important for Nenny to show that she’s hanging on Kat’s every word. She bugs her eyes and lets her arms kind of dangle at her sides, like that cartoon wolf that’s always picking his jaw up off the ground. Kat lives to have someone—anyone—hang on her every word.
“I’ll tell you, but make me a sandwich first.” Oh, she’s good. Real good. The sandwich: turkey with lettuce and cheddar and a dash of (swear to God) Marshmallow Fluff. Nenny holds her tongue and delivers the sandwich on a plate. She watches, pained, while Kat makes a big show of eating. They both know this is part of the game, but Nenny plays along. She observes Kat with feigned patience, like pretending to watch a god eat when it’s more like feeding time at the zoo. Damn if Kat can’t drag things out.
“How ’bout some juice?” she says, so Nenny scrambles to get that too. Kat takes long, slow glugs, breathing through her nose, then leans her head back and lets out a sky-shattering belch. She picks up her napkin and dabs the corners of her mouth in false demure.
Finally, the story begins.
“Dad met Sheila at the hospital, working nights. She was somehow miraculously in charge of the nurses’ station—I guess they wanted a fat retard in charge in those days. Who knows. Anyway, for some reason that’s impossible to explain, he started dating her. I doubt he asked her out—she probably stalked him all over the halls begging him for a date, and he finally said yes because he was desperate and lonely. Mom had already divorced him and had a new boyfriend, so he knew he may as well move on—”
“Wait, she divorced him?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, I just thought…” Nenny trailed off. For some reason she thought it was the other way around, not that it matters.
“Do you want to hear the story or not?” It’s best to shut up because, knowing Kat, she’ll just up and walk away.
“Anyway. Where was I? Oh yeah—so Sheila was dumb and crazy and followed my dad all around with brownies and movie tickets, begging him to go out with her, so he finally said yes. She was always buying me and Charles stuff, clothes and toys and things—but I knew right away she was loony tunes. She was always screaming about something or crying for no reason. My dad asked her to move in, and she’d do stuff like that—burn a lasagna and then smash the dish and mope about it all day. And she loved Charles—she was batshit for Charles like you would not believe. It’s probably because she couldn’t have kids of her own. That’s pretty common with fat ladies, you know. Anyway, she just oohed and aahed over him. Like he was some kind of angel or something. Gross.”
She leans over and spits in the sink. Other things too: Sheila was horribly lazy and she didn’t have any friends. A Sheila-shaped crater started to grow in the couch. She’d watch show after show and stare with her mouth slack, like it was real life and not TV. A week would go by and she’d do nothing, not a thing. Dishes would pile up in the sink and there’d be a greasy gleam to her hair. Other times she’d bolt out of her stupor and shout, “Everybody up! Let’s go!” waving a mop around like some crazed majorette. There was a mouse that lived under the sink—they could hear it at night rustling through the trash—but Sheila said, “No way, José,” and set up camp with a mallet and some cheese. No one bothered to stick around and watch—not even Charles, who lives for that kind of thing—because what was she gonna do? Hammer it to death? But later, who knows what time, they woke up to pounding and pounding and pounding. She couldn’t hit it just once. She had to smash the thing into the floor. Even Charles was grossed out.
Then, suddenly, there’s a place near the fridge that Kat is staring into, and Nenny knows she’s not in the room anymore. Nenny, the kitchen, the house, all of it, have been sucked into some swirling black hole. Everyone knows memory is like that. Memory is a flood that overwhelms you. It crashes through windows and topples over walls, sweeps you away in a tide of furniture, photos, clothes you kind of hate, animals struggling to breathe.
“There were these kittens,” Kat starts, but stops there.
“Kittens?” Nenny ventures. She’s not heard anything about kittens before.
“Yeah,” Kat says and looks at Nenny for the first time in a long time. Everywhere she’s sixteen except her eyes. “Anyway.” She turns back to the sink but doesn’t spit this time. She doesn’t really have to. “I’m glad she’s dead.” The house is quiet again. Nenny can hear the blood moving in her ears.
The rest Nenny finds out, but only slowly, over the years, because that’s the way some stories go.
* * *
In June of 1984, Citrus Valley Community Hospital’s board of directors voted unanimously to suspend a hiring freeze because, it turned out, they were dangerously understaffed. Patients were being left to die in the halls, nurses’ stations were abandoned half the day. There was no one to run labs, change sheets, draw blood. And so on. Among the new hires were Sheila Collins, ER nurse, and Rick Wallace, respiratory therapist. They met at an all-staff training, and from then on Sheila pursued him like a hound. Whether or not he pursued her back is the only part of the story that remains unclear.
Boxes of donuts. Seven-layer nacho dip. Meatloaf or casserole at least once a week. Some Silly Putty and stickers because she knew he had kids. And what was he supposed to do? His wife had left, or anyway they weren’t together anymore, so whatever walls he had built were wearing pretty thin.
Within a month she’d moved in. She wasn’t exactly his type. Other women, including his wife, were all narrow and tall. They had wrists like thin branches and careful, sculpted cheeks. Their breasts were tender swollen dollops, their sweat smelled of sweet turning lime. They smoked pot, they did macramé, they believed in animal spirits and the energy of the third eye. They were happy to make love in abandoned warehouses, on piles of quilts, in the back seat of his car. They were angels, rising and falling each time they breathed.
Not Sheila. Sheila lay beneath him shivering like a frightened animal whenever they made love. She’d never smoked pot, had asthma, wore scrubs and housecoats, couldn’t see without her goddamn glasses, had handwriting like a six-year-old’s, periods that crippled her and gave her the shits for days, a bum shoulder, failing hips, weak knees
. Sometimes all she did was cry. She was prone to incomprehensible fits of rage, tearing through the house with murderous intent. Once, Charles found some kittens at school, nestled in the outside trash. He brought them home cupped in his shirt, trembling with the fragile weight of the things, but Sheila said, “Kittens? No way.” She filled a bucket with water, and that was the end of that.
What then must Rick feel, now that she’s dead? Discreetly, Nenny watches him when he gets home, watches as he comes in and sets down the mail. He glances at the obituary on the table, which Mom had clipped and laid there. Nenny watches as he reads. She waits for something, anything, a headshake, a sigh. But he just sets the article back down and pours himself his evening glass of wine. He takes his shoes off at the bottom of the stairs and goes to change out of his scrubs. At dinner, no one says anything about it, not even Kat. They do the dishes, watch TV, get ready for bed. Still nothing, not a word, no sign that there’d once been a woman named Sheila and she’d—
Except, maybe, for this: in the morning, Nenny sees the obituary, covered in coffee grounds and part of a banana peel and bits of scrambled egg, crumpled up and soggy in the trash.
Tell It to Me Slowly
BOOTS IS having her ninth birthday party at Shakey’s Pizza, and Rick drives Nenny because he’s going to San Bernardino and Shakey’s is on the way. There’s a house in San Bernardino that he owns and rents out, and sometimes it requires repairs. Rick and Nenny don’t spend much time together, which is fine with Nenny and probably fine with Rick. Here’s the thing: he’s not a jerk, he’s just, like, not nice. Not mean, but you know—not nice. He’s the kind of grown-up who can’t relate to kids, or be bothered to learn how. Most grown-ups will at least try, asking you about your friends or what you’re learning in school. It’s transparent, and boring, and dumb, but at least they try. Not Rick. It’s obvious he thinks of childhood, the state of it, as something to be got through, something to begrudgingly endure—that maybe once Nenny’s grown they might have some stuff in common, they might even get along, but for now let’s just get this whole thing over with: your adolescence, your youth.
Which is to say: it’s something of an awkward drive. A big quiet fills the car, practically sprawling across the seats. It’s clear Rick wants to ask her things, ask about her life, if only for something to say—but he doesn’t know how. Nenny thinks to ask about Gramma B but stays quiet, staring out the window instead. They drive down Dearborn, which is apparently the slowest street in the world, excruciatingly full of stop signs and red lights. Finally, Rick can’t take it anymore and turns the radio on.
It’s the oldies station. The DJ’s name is Stutterin’ Stan, or anyway that’s what he goes by, St-St-St-Stan!!!, which is probably pretty insulting to people who actually stutter. He’s annoying, for sure, but better than sitting in silence with Rick.
“N-n-n-next up! The Z-Z-Zombies!” It’s a song Nenny’s heard before. It starts with a confident bassline like a man strolling into a room, then a quick exhale, a sound like t-ah to follow the rolling bass. The voice, when it comes, is eerie and slow, like singing from the bottom of a well. It’s the ti-ime of the season…She’s heard this song before—everybody has. It’s always in movies about the sixties, played over scenes of teenagers smoking drugs or young men marching off to war. It’s a haunting song, heavy with mood. It’s one of those songs that creeps up on you, hiding its intentions in cheesy organ riffs and layered harmonies. Nenny can’t tell if she loves it or hates it—it’s that kind of song.
“This song reminds me of Windsor,” Rick says, out of nowhere, which is maybe an inappropriate and gross thing to say. Like, what are you even talking about? But when Nenny looks at him, it’s clear he’s not really talking to her at all. He taps out the rhythm on the steering wheel, whistles along. The thing about grown-ups—or, heck, even just other people—is that they spend a lot of time talking, but it’s not to you; it’s to themselves or something else entirely, something not even in the room.
Mysteries abound when you are young. Some unravel and reveal themselves over the course of your lifetime, but most remain unresolved. What was it, for example, that dissolved between Windsor and Rick? When Windsor comes over, their interactions are friendly and polite, as if the decision to end their marriage involved little more than a handshake and a mutual agreement to walk away. It’s a kind of measured, mature interaction worlds away from what passes between Mom and Dad. Dad drops them home at the end of his visits and never, ever comes to the door. A number of his sentences begin “Tell your mother…” as if he can’t just pick up the phone and tell her himself. To conjure Mom and Dad engaged in polite, adult conversation—to think of them sharing a handshake or a hug—is like trying to rearrange the contours of the universe. It simply cannot be done.
When they get to Shakey’s, Rick says, “Okay, see you at five!” all cheerful like a normal person, like he doesn’t spend most of his time somewhere between grumpy and annoyed. Guess that’s the power of music for you.
The pizza parlor is jangly with sounds and lights. It’s early afternoon on a Saturday, kids in soccer uniforms chasing each other around, their parents sitting together and sipping beer. Loud music, the smell of pizza, cars looping a racetrack on a giant TV—but really, the details are inconsequential, because Nenny won’t remember any of it: not Boots’s boisterous public-school friends, not the pizza, not the gifts, not the candles or the cake, if that was the party where some girl puked in the bathroom or if any of them cried. It’s a pretty standard birthday party, as far as birthday parties go.
She will, though, remember that song, the ghostly voice and driving in the car with Rick. Not right away, but she’ll remember it. It’ll be one of those strange, belated memories that everyone has, like looking behind you and remembering something you didn’t even know was there.
Let Down
A FEW Saturdays later Windsor comes to take Charles and Kat to the county fair. She was supposed to come last weekend; she didn’t. It’s impossible to know what happened, because Kat didn’t say, just slammed the phone down and stormed upstairs. Later, though, Nenny overheard her on the phone—“I hate him. He’s a pig.”—so she guesses it has something to do with Gabe.
Now Nenny and Charles are in the living room, otherwise ignoring each other while they read. Mom announced a gardening day, and everyone else is outside, except Kat, who’s still upstairs. Nenny’s on the Baby-Sitters Club #5 again, Dawn and the Impossible Three, because she forgot the newest one at Dad’s. That’s another thing about divorce: you pack things and forget things and lose things all the time. There’s a trail of your stuff like crumbs wherever you go.
It’s impossible to concentrate anyways. Nenny knows Charles is still angry, even a week later, his leg bouncing as he testily flips a page. And why shouldn’t he be? His mom made a promise that she didn’t keep. Anyone would be mad. It occurs to Nenny that there’s going to be a fight, and she’s not about to stick around for that. No way. She’ll change for gardening day and join the others outside.
But halfway up the stairs the doorbell rings, and there’s no time to make it all the way. Charles answers the door, and Nenny is stuck on the middle landing. She ducks quick and hugs the wall.
Though she can’t see it happening, Nenny is still pained by Charles and Windsor’s exchange. She hears Windsor’s bracelets as Charles opens the door. Windsor says, “Hi, baby!” then there’s a punctuated pause as she registers his mood. Silence, some whispered words, and Nenny pictures Windsor kneeling before Charles, begging forgiveness with her hands on his shoulders, with her shamed and supplicant eyes. Nenny can’t help it: she steals a glance. She leans over and peeks quickly through the banister bars, catching a fast glimpse of Windsor’s face. She looks exhausted—tumbled around and worn-out, with dark circles under her eyes and a pale, sagging quality to her skin. Nenny shrinks back. An excruciating amount of time passes. This isn’t the first time that Windsor has failed to come. In fact, it seems like it happens ever
y couple of weeks. Eventually, though, Charles must decide that he doesn’t want to bear a grudge, it’s not worth it, because finally Nenny hears the unmistakable sound of Windsor pulling him in for a hug. Nenny stays where she is, pressed to the wall, until she hears them go outside. Charles opens the back door and yells, “We’re leaving now!” and Windsor laughs and says, “Honey, that’s not polite.” Nenny exhales only when she’s sure they’re outside.
But she doesn’t get up right away. She clutches her book and hugs her knees and sits for a minute on the midway stairs. She knows what it’s like to anticipate something, then to have your hope shrivel like a deflating balloon. Every time she goes to Dad’s she expects something will have changed, that maybe this time he’ll ask how she is, if she’s happy, if anything’s wrong, but he never does. He’s so whacked and floating in his own world of grades and naps and dumb historical facts. The house could be on fire and he’d just sit there, with his cup of coffee and his stack of papers and his pile of red pens.
Then again, he always shows up. He’s never not shown up. That’s a different kind of disappointment entirely.
Geode
IF YOU think it isn’t lame to have gardening day while your stepbrother and stepsister are at the fair—well, you’re wrong. It sucks. Well, maybe it doesn’t suck, but it hardly compares to the county fair. There’s an ancient curse on the fair because it was built on an Indian burial ground (it’s true, ask anyone), but besides that they’ve got a petting zoo and a carousel and fried Twinkies and music shows. Nenny knows because the newspaper is always filled with giant ads.
But gardening isn’t really even gardening, just pulling up a bunch of weeds. Mom says they’re “prepping the soil,” but Nenny’s not stupid: they’re weeding. Weeds are called weeds because they’re stubborn as heck, snapping away from their own roots like Nice try, sucker! They’re relentless in their will to live. There’s pill bugs everywhere and daddy longlegs that scurry across your patch of dirt, and occasionally you’ll find weird, oblong pebbles that turn out to be some cat’s turd.
Every Other Weekend Page 7
