by Lydia Millet
The windows of our room weren’t open, since the temperature was below freezing; the heater thrummed, so at first I didn’t hear his words. But his voice got louder; he grew agitated as the call went on.
“That’s not fucking relevant,” he snapped. “Can we not do this analytical bullshit? If I wanted an analyst I’d lie on a couch and jerk off for two hundred bucks an hour. Hell, put me in a Skinner box. Fix me! … I couldn’t give a fuck.”
I glanced at Lena to see if she was paying attention. But the bathroom was farther away from the door than I was, in my homely armchair backed up to the heater, and bobbing in front of her was a waterproof MP3 speaker shaped like a yellow duck and playing sea shanties. She was impervious to the young mogul’s call, dipping a rubber whale toy in and out of the water as it consorted with the duck.
“It has nothing to do with that crap. I’m telling you. My mother was fine. My father was fine. They were both fucking fine. They’re still fucking fine. Everyone should have such fucking decent and doting parents … no pervert uncles! Jesus Christ.”
I swept a drape aside to look out, making a sour mother-face that went unseen. If he moved off before Lena caught on I’d be relieved—and it wasn’t so much the swearing that annoyed me as the force of his anger. He stalked by in his elegant leather coat and kicked one of the square wooden posts that was holding up the overhang.
“Well yeah. I told you that already. Not so much now. Before. Doing coke raises your chances of that shit. Plus oxy … what? Harvard. Aren’t there brain scans? Some other radioactive shit?”
I decided to join Lena in the bathroom, where I shut the door behind us and ran in some fresh water to rinse the shampoo from her hair. I was thinking the young mogul would be bad news for Kay, if she submitted to the sitcom pickup tactics.
I don’t know if Kay needs an angry young mogul.
ON TV THERE were numerous “exposés” of small children remembering past lives. One two-year-old boy was born with the memories of a fighter pilot shot down in World War II, they said, and repeatedly enacted scenes of the pilot’s fiery cockpit death. He showed a high level of competence at identifying bombers used on the Western Front. A girl of four painted watercolors apparently based on her great-aunt’s early life as an orphan in Minneapolis, although the two had never met before the great-aunt perished of cirrhosis.
Their parents had been skeptical at first, the voice-overs told viewers, but over time had clearly seen no other explanation fit the bill.
“Young Alex’s parents are highly educated, modern professionals,” intoned one narrator. “They did not wish to accept the evidence that past lives are real.”
A FEW DAYS before Christmas my car stalled out so I left Lena with the Lindas and got into the cab of a tow truck, where I sat beside a driver who pulled my car into the only car-repair place in town. Imagine my displeased surprise—although I shouldn’t have been surprised, since after all the town is small—when I was greeted by the beefy man from the diner.
He was the owner, apparently, since he wore a button-down collar shirt while the other, thinner man behind the counter wore polyester-mesh with the name of the franchise appliquéd. The beefy man—John—reclined with his arms crossed in a posture of managerial ease; I stood across the counter and smiled wanly. I felt the discomfort I always feel in car-repair places, the low-level dread of condescension followed by cost inflation, and wished to call upon my considerable expertise on the workings of internal combustion. Unfortunately I had none.
Waiting for the man to finish typing and Beefy John to finish watching him, I looked around at the walls, at ugly posters for automotive service packages, tires, motor oils.
One poster was markedly different: it was for something called American Family Radio. I peered closely at it, an airbrushed-looking photo of a plump, pink-faced man in headphones, shining smugly. Inscribed beneath his face and what I guessed was the name of his radio show were the smaller words The AFA Works to: (1) Restrain Evil by Exposing the Works of Darkness …
“Ma’am?” said Beefy John, finally.
I tore myself away from the fine print.
“Hey there, and how’s that pretty little girl of yours? What can we do you for today?”
“My car keeps stalling out,” I said. “A Honda. It’s a Civic hybrid—getting a little old, maybe. But it’s always been pretty reliable. I can leave it overnight.”
“A Honda, huh? Well sure, we can take a look at that rice burner for you,” said Beefy John, and his smile said he was bestowing a favor. “B.Q. here will help you with the paperwork.” He smiled again before he clapped the underling on the shoulder, tapped his forehead in my direction in a mock salute and disappeared into the back office.
“B.Q.?” I asked.
“ ’At’s me,” said the underling, typing.
“What does the Q stand for? If you don’t mind the question.”
“Quiet,” he said.
“Quiet?”
“Be Quiet. Always saying that to me when I was a kid.”
B.Q. looked up from the keyboard and grimaced. His teeth were a rotting brown from the gums up, old-bone yellow and tobacco brown.
Handing over my keys I realized Don wasn’t due to pick me up for almost half an hour; it was bitterly cold outside and I needed to be warm while I waited. But Beefy John in his satisfied recline, his crossed arms, the words that pretty little girl of yours, the jagged mossy teeth of B.Q.—they made me uncomfortable. The words land shark came to me as I signed the work order, B.Q. leaning forward unnecessarily from the other side of the counter, so close that I could smell the residue of cigarettes. B.Q. wasn’t a shark, surely, he seemed more ruined than fierce, but the teeth … I considered whether his meth use was current or past, whether teeth ravaged by meth could be reclaimed. Then I pivoted and walked out into the winter, pretending to have a goal.
Once I was on the sidewalk I slowed down and ambled, watching my breath fog and feeling the cold on my cheeks until I fetched up in front of the library and went in. I hadn’t had that goal in mind, of all the thousands of possibilities offered by libraries no single one presented itself to me, but there, right away, was the librarian I was attracted to. I had nothing to say as he looked up from the front desk, nothing at all. And yet I felt better already.
“Sorry, just coming in from the cold,” I blurted.
“What we’re here for,” he said.
I couldn’t think of any more small talk so I wandered along the shelves looking at titles, plucking out books at random. I seemed to be in a section either for children or for adults who were childlike: true-life accounts of balloonists, explorers. Pictures of famous caves. Prehistoric animals turned to fossil—trilobites that looked like beetles, ammonites that looked like snails. Real-life Monsters. Haunted Houses of New Orleans. The more I looked at the variety of subjects, the more hopeful I felt.
Maybe we could travel, I thought. Not just in my small car—across the world. To the Himalayas, say, jungles, dormant volcanoes with crater lakes, those acid lakes that shimmer turquoise in the sun … we stood on the decks of ships, rode camels over Saharan dunes toward the pyramids, wandered the Prado, the Great Wall of China, treaded the paths of picturesque ruins. What, in the end, would keep us from the world? I’d planned to give her a solid, settled childhood, where she could have the same friends for years and run through the same backyards, a childhood much like my own. But maybe she didn’t need that. Maybe we could sail away, out of this chill into a summer country.
I hadn’t thought of the voice in a while, I thought (suddenly thinking of it). These days a memory of it will flash through me and what I notice is myself forgetting, the rarity of that flash. It’s like sickness—the whole world when you’re in its grips, but once gone, quickly dismissed. Within days you take good health for granted once again.
“We only have a fake log,” said the librarian, behind me. “It’s not as warm as the real thing.”
Privately joyful that he’d spok
en to me, feeling as though I’d performed a small but neat trick, I followed him to a reading room. In the hearth an electric log glowed orange behind its fiberglass bark. The chairs were overstuffed, the high ceilings dark, but still I noticed, trailing after him, peering with difficulty at the fingers of his left hand, that he wore no ring, and I was pleased. I felt like a cliché noticing, a woman who read glossy, man-pleasing magazines, a member of some predatory horde … he had broad shoulders, an elegant posture.
“I’m so glad there is a library,” I said. “In a town this small. With only one gas station and no fast-food chain.”
“The building was a gift from a wealthy benefactor,” he said. “He made his fortune in lumber. His wife died young and he never remarried. He died without anyone to inherit his fortune. Brokenhearted, they say.”
“Oh.”
“So he left his house to the town for a library. In short, his tragedy was our gain,” said the librarian.
“Oh,” I said again. “Yes!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Luckily he smiled at me.
When he went back to his desk I sat gazing into the glowing seams of the artificial wood and wondered whether to ask him out. I wasn’t sure I could. It’d be a cold call; I had nothing.
And yet I might be restless enough to do it, I thought, I was bored and agitated at once these days. I was constantly aggravated by the open question of the gathering of motel guests, frustrated by the problem of their continuing presence—and then, bookended with that problem, there were the limitations of my existence and the tedious routine of our schedule. I felt drawn to the librarian but at the same time ambivalent about the prospect of not being alone, that is, not being alone with my daughter, the two of us a capsule … the two of us close together after the leave-taking of the voice and our running away from Ned.
Of course it was premature to speculate, I knew nothing about him, but still, I thought, why actually try to know someone if you don’t wish to know anyone at all?
Still, in the end you seek out company again. After the noise has passed, after the great clamor’s hushed and the crowds have thinned—then a silence descends upon your room.
And though at first the silence is perfect, the silence is thought and peace, after a while the silence passes too.
IT WAS EMBARRASSING to ask him out and I had to buoy myself up with bravado: it didn’t matter if he said no. I had nothing to lose. The worst that could happen was that my life would remain the same.
In the few moments after, waiting for him to decline the invitation as I rested my fingertips on the edge of his desk, I thought of a girl from high school: she’d been average-looking and not particularly good-natured—in fact she was manipulative, crude, and often picked on easy scapegoats, the poor kids with hygiene problems, the loners. Despite this she always had a boyfriend, and her boyfriends were kinder and far better-looking than she. Waiting for rejection, I remembered her clearly.
Years after high school was over, when I was home from college on vacation, I ran into her on the street. We stepped into a nearby bar for a drink. I had an awareness of being only half there, as though the other half of me had continued along the sidewalk without acknowledging her presence. But we had caught each other’s eyes, we hadn’t flinched and glanced away in time—so there we were, perched on adjoining barstools with little in common.
We quickly ran out of old friends to mention and teetered on the brink of leaving, but we eventually succumbed to inertia and ordered more drinks. On the third she told me the key to men was that they always wanted sex but rarely had the luxury of expecting propositions. And they were tired of always having to be the ones to ask, she said. From the day they hit puberty they wanted to lay that burden down, so all you had to do, she said, was suggest sex and they would take you up on it. This applied equally with most married men, she said—to be honest, with any of them. Failure was rare, she said, and tipped back her glass all the way.
It was admirable, the ease with which she approached the question. It didn’t change my own behavior, however, which in that arena was passive; possibly this was part of why I found myself married to Ned.
In fact, looking back, you could say my passivity in that arena was the start of my greatest failure.
But seeing her unremarkable face in the bar mirror, I felt awed by her attitude, part aggression and part simple confidence. I believed someone should shake her hand or pin a medal on her lapel, but that someone would not be me: for I, even as I was impressed, felt a lucid dislike.
Then the librarian said yes, and I was grateful to the girl from high school.
STILL, THOUGH, EVEN if the bogus exposés and hair-sprayed New Age gurus hawking their bestselling books about past lives had a point, there was no explanation I could find for my having heard the voice. There was no reason I should have had to hear anything at all, if little Lena had contained a reborn soul.
It wasn’t as though she herself had spoken, like the little boy with his encyclopedic knowledge of Mosquitos and Messerschmitts. She’d painted no old-fashioned watercolors depicting orphanage memories from 1934.
“I’VE BEEN WONDERING,” I said to Don as he drove me back to the motel, his backseat a neat row of paper grocery bags. “I was thinking this place would be quiet over the winter. I don’t get the draw for all these people in the off-season. I thought you only ever had a full house in the summer, but now it’s almost Christmas. Did you—I mean, just out of—were you planning on all of them arriving?”
Don was silent for a few moments as we ascended the long, slow road that leads up to the bluffs, changing from pavement to gravel as it goes. He reached out a gloved finger and scratched the side of his nose, shrugging lightly as he spun the steering wheel with the other hand.
“I’m trying to help them out,” he said.
On the expanse of ground beside the parking lot Lena was playing, wearing her hot-pink earmuffs. She appeared to be piling the previous day’s graying snow onto a grim effigy vaguely suggestive of a snowman. Around the dumpy figure was a large impact crater where she’d scraped snow off the dead grass.
Main Linda watched her from the doorway to her room, her hands around a steaming mug, ensconced in a parka with a furlined hood like she was Peary at the North Pole.
I realized the light was leaving: a long, knife-thin shadow was falling toward the sea from the dirty pillar of the snowman, which had frayed sticks for hands, pieces of trash stuck on its torso for decoration and what appeared to be a rusty zipper for a mouth.
I didn’t like the look of it.
She ran to greet me when I stepped out of Don’s car, her nose red and running profusely above her scarf, bundled-up arms flung wide. She’s always excited to see me again—though if I’m being honest, as long as she has someone else to talk to, she’s almost equally excited to watch me go.
Though the U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian country … 24% of the public overall and 22% of Christians say they believe in reincarnation—that people will be reborn in this world again and again. —Pew Research/www.pewforum.org
AT DINNER in the motel café I took a census of the guests. Lena was making the rounds; having lost interest in her food quickly—for her, food is never the point of a meal—she was stopping at every table, talking to each guest, leaving me alone to watch her progress and consider the obliqueness of Don’s answer.
There were Burke and Gabe; there were the Lindas, Main and Big. There was Kay, eating at a table with the angry young mogul who, less shaven every day, was leaning across the table to talk to her confidingly. Before long he’d be sporting a full mountain-man beard. There was Don’s father, sharing a large table with Faneesha while Don cooked and the waitress served, and there were the newest guests of all, an arty couple from New York, maybe in their early forties, who had the room right next to Lena’s and mine at the far end of the row. They dressed tastefully and didn’t seem to talk to anyone.
And then there were the regulars from
town, including a woman who dressed in multiple shades of blue and always ordered the chicken pot pie and an old man who, before Don opened the café, had eaten only frozen meals since his wife died, Lena said. But I was interested in the motel guests, the motel guests only and why they were here.
Don couldn’t have meant to imply his help consisted of letting friends stay for free—the young mogul needed no such help and the chic couple had arrived in two separate gleaming cars, each of which had to have cost six figures. So that couldn’t have been what he meant.
On the other hand Kay was distressed, Burke was distressed, the young mogul was distressed too.
Maybe Don offered some other form of assistance.
IT TOOK ME till this morning to ask the Lindas. I asked while Main Linda was driving me to the auto shop; I asked her with no subterfuge.
“So why are you guys here?”
“My cousin took early retirement after some work-related stress,” she said briskly. “Down in Orlando, where she lives. She’s on her own, mostly, her ex-husband lives in Vancouver, the sons have grown up and left the nest. I get a long winter break. The two of us have been close since we were ten. I brought her up to make her take a breather.”
“But why here?” I asked. “Specifically?”
Main Linda cocked her head.
“Our family used to have a house in the area. Not on the beach, inland. Came up every summer. We shared the place with the cousins. There was a candy store, we walked there every Saturday. Jawbreakers. Gobstoppers. You remember those? Giant round hard candies you could barely fit in your mouth, started out black and you went through all the colors as they shrank? Disgusting actually, kids taking the things out of their mouths all the time to look at the different rainbow hues, then sticking them in again. Filthy. Dyed tongues. Saliva. Yeah, we loved it though. Also, there were those Atomic Fireballs.”
