The Family Unit and Other Fantasies

by The Family Unit

  Nights followed with no more sign of her cat. Faye kept putting out food, but slowly it began to resemble another ritual, like lighting candles for the dead, one that conjures nothing and just commemorates. She began to avoid most travel, except to work and home again, began even to shop in bulk so she could emerge from her apartment less. (Though this was the way most sensible people shopped in town, doing so in short spurts had been a way to remind others of her existence and her of theirs—a way to say, here’s one more chance to know each other—so she had stopped.)

  She didn’t mind, because Doug, the new waiter at work, had provided her with pills that were even better than pot (or made pot better when they were added to it). He had begun by giving them to her, but soon she realized he expected an exchange of services, so to speak, and that wasn’t going to happen, no way. So he started charging, and now she had to take on extra shifts if she wanted more of them, and she did.

  They were sedatives, not stimulants. Doug explained the most effective order in which to take them (or pieces of them, to be frugal): first, the Klonopin, then the Xanax, then Valium. Faye quickly forgot the names and went by their colours alone—first the blue, then the white, then the red; they were a mixed-up and ass-backwards America, Doug said, profoundly—going by simple signs, almost by instinct. If she could have just sniffed them before swallowing, she would have. And in this way, she could finally relax at night, expect nothing, and sleep.

  One night in early October, the seasons seemed to finally hint they were changing, as much as they ever did these days. Faye turned off the air conditioning, which she now used for the express purpose of drowning out sound. As she lay in bed wearing only a T-shirt that wore its own layer of dust and smoke, she marvelled at the quiet. It seemed strangely vital and interesting, though existing dimly, as if in another dimension, or like a (silent) song from a neighbour’s apartment. In her new state, everything felt like this, far away yet compelling, and the quiet was just one more thing.

  Soon, strangely, it was interrupted. A cry was cutting through it. It was familiar yet brand-new—it sounded like a cat, but also the bay of a wolf, a baby, and an old man—all ages through the evolution of need. It drew Faye like a—what did they always call it, and what did it mean?—siren song from her bed. She didn’t walk but floated to the glass door, a vague memory of something she wanted propelling her.

  Setting down again, Faye opened the door. She looked at the patio. There she saw, on all fours, Ed Koch, stuffing pellets of dry food into his mouth and spitting out the ones he could not fit. At the same time, impossibly, he was wailing in a language that was universal but that no one could ever understand.

  THE UNEXPECTED GUEST

  He had never buried anything before, not even in childhood, when kids put cats or turtles or hamsters under headstones in backyards. He had no idea how far down to dig, had always had poor spatial judgment, and couldn’t tell by sight or any other sense two feet from six. He was working, in other words, by an instinct he didn’t possess, the same way he cooked: “Add a little salt,” someone better in the kitchen—all right, his wife—would tell him; he’d reply, testily, “Just tell me how much to put in,” knowing his anger was really embarrassment, for he hated feeling incapable and hadn’t really wanted to cook in the first place, had only offered to be accommodating (always a mistake), and the whole thing would invariably end in a resentful fight.

  Tonight, of course, he had had no choice but to start digging, yet he still found himself veering mentally off-subject (which was again how far down to go): worrying about his health, whether he might have a heart attack after he ended his exertion and moved from the cold air of the woods back to his warmer car, the way millions of middle-aged men drop dead after shovelling snow and then entering a heated house. And he knew this was true—there was the maître d’ from Formaggi, the Italian place in town, remember?

  He decided to take rests after one or two swings of the shovel, then realized at that pace he’d be at it all night (and Michelle would wonder where he was or maybe even call the cops—the worst case scenario), so instead he thought he’d finish it all up in one shot. He was amazed at how exhausting it was to work so fast and finally figured he’d split the difference and settled on using leaves as a cover for what he could not conceal with the dirt.

  Before he stopped, he remembered an episode of an anthology horror show he’d seen as a teenager in the seventies. John Carradine played an old farmer who told kids to dig in a field and they’d get a “surprise.” After they’d spent all night at the job, reaching, it seemed, the bottom of the world, they found a coffin. When they opened it, inside impossibly was Carradine, who said, “surprise!” Joe was unnerved at how, decades later, working in a dark wood in which he seemed the only living human inhabitant, the story still scared him.

  Joe had watched and ragged on the show, he remembered, with his friend, George, who had been his and Michelle’s dinner guest that evening. He and George had grown up around the corner from each other in the suburbs and stayed in touch, even while attending separate colleges and graduating and getting jobs. In more recent years, Joe had married Michelle and moved ninety miles north of the city, where they had their son, Tad, now eight. Joe had opened one, then two, then three independent bookstores in the area, all called Left Brain—no mean feat in a country ruled by chain stores and conglomerates. George, for his part, had stayed single and in the city.

  They had had George to dinner because Joe had not actually seen him for two years, the longest such gap in their lives. George had never been to the house; they had stayed in touch only by phone or by email, and Joe didn’t want to lose touch with him entirely. He was aware that people with kids tended only to see other people with kids, and he was alarmed to learn that he had fallen into this pattern and become this cliché. Still, he was surprised at how hard it had been to arrange the dinner. George, who owned no car, had acted as if leaving the city and travelling ninety miles by train was the most difficult thing he had ever done, agreeing to and then cancelling date after date, and needing Joe to read him the train schedule very slowly over the phone and then writing down where to transfer so painstakingly he seemed to be struggling to communicate in a second language. (There was no question, of course, about Joe and Michelle going down to see him; that would have been impossible.)

  Michelle and he had fixed up the guest room, more than happy to have George sleep over. Joe had even looked forward to staying up late alone with him, shooting the bull and maybe even watching and mocking old science fiction and horror shows on TV, as they had growing up. There were whole stations now showing this stuff, in some cases the same exact shows they’d seen as kids—like the Carradine one, what was it on, the new Night Gallery or something, or one of those endless resurrections of The Twilight Zone with Rod Serling, colourized like a painted corpse in an open casket. That was what George had said, Joe remembered, while passing a joint they almost enjoyed dreading Joe’s mother (and it had been in his house, he was almost positive) would come down and discover. Joe had even scoured the TV listings to see what was on, to set the whole evening up.

  But George had sounded as if sleeping over was like agreeing to live at the bottom of the sea, or taking up residence in a space station—the most complex and wrenching decision a man could ever make—and after what seemed a half an hour of going back and forth with so many pros and cons that Joe began filling out tax forms he had been avoiding while George was talking, he came to the conclusion that no, thanks, it would be better if he took the train back that night; well, maybe, now what if I, no, no, it would be better, but thanks, anyway, no, really, thanks.

  Joe was so hurt by his attitude—that George considered the offer so exotic, and also by his over-courteous consideration of it—that he threw out the TV section he had circled. Michelle wondered where it went and Joe lied and said she must have lost it, and then he changed the subject.

  When Joe picked up George
at the station, his guest described his experience on the train in amazed and extensive detail, as if he had been on the Orient Express during WWI and not on Amtrak. Joe blocked out his commentary, but he was distracted anyway by how George looked. It had been a while since he’d seen him: the rings beneath George’s eyes had become crevice-like and put Joe in mind of Storrow Lane in town, where the snowstorms this winter had worn semi-circles in the street that were yet to be re-paved (and that should be an issue in this year’s council election, Joe believed, for he followed such things, and had even thought of running himself before he chickened out).

  But it wasn’t that George looked bad—in fact he looked great, at least for someone his—their—age: as thin as a whippet, with actual definition in his chest and arms. Getting older had given him gravitas in his face, too, which had always been a little beaky and, well, bird-like in appearance. His hair may have gone grey but in that salt-and-pepper way, and it was still there, seemed not to have thinned or fallen out at all, and was set off by a haircut that looked cutting-edge without being a transparent attempt to imitate youth. He wore a sweater over a T-shirt and jeans above an attractive leather blend of sneaker and shoe. The look was relaxed yet not sloppy; if clothes could seem confident, his did. Not arrogant—there was a difference. In short, George looked handsome, not a word Joe or anyone else would ever have applied to him earlier in their lives, and one, which Joe had to admit, he himself did not deserve to this day.

  Not that Joe looked bad exactly—but glancing at himself in the rear-view mirror, he acknowledged that he just looked normal. He had lost most of his hair and in the worst way possible, starting from the front and shedding it up his scalp, as if baldness was a lawnmower and his forehead a hill. Excess weight had settled below his belt, so that it—again, predictably—almost obscured his crotch. He had to peek over the flab to see it, as if he was taking a photo of a tiny town way down below from a mountaintop that was slippery and slide-y in the mud. Even his teeth—and he bared them now in a sudden “smile” that looked leonine or maybe just demented—were yellow, no matter how much he brushed and flossed, while George’s were purely white, as if never stained by food or drink. They seemed even whiter than the last time they met, for, after all, Joe had not noticed them then. As for Joe’s clothes, he wore his usual plaid button-down shirt over belted pleated pants hiked up, he knew now, too high, for he had heard the high school girls who worked the registers in his first flagship store giggling about his pants one day when he walked in.

  The point was, he was a normal man and time had taken a typical toll on him, set upon and beaten him up a little bit each day, and he hadn’t resisted, had accepted its thrashings and their cumulative effects on his head, gut, and gums, grateful to at least be let to live, as if this disfigurement was the price he paid for going forward. George, on the other hand, seemed to have—and he liked this analogy, so he continued it—one day stayed the hand of his attacker, maybe even bent its arm back until it agreed to if not reverse at least not continue these assaults, leaving him looking appealingly “aging” without actually aging at all anymore.

  It was, in a word, unnatural, that’s what it was, and Joe today found himself both envying and resenting his old friend. It was the first time he had ever had either of these feelings about him.

  “Thanks so much for picking me up,” George said, passionately, as if Joe had driven across the country over broken glass to get there.

  “It’s no problem,” Joe said, trying not to be annoyed. “It’s only a mile and a half away.”

  George shrugged broadly, smiling and implying that rural directions and distances were all mysterious and arcane to him. “Anything to do with cars. . . .”

  Joe tried to show how quick and convenient the journey could be by driving home at a high speed, intending to shave time off the only ten-minute trip; however, he hit a patch of ice that sent his car skidding across the narrow, two-lane, two-way road and forcing a frightened “Jesus!” from George before he withdrew into wordless, quickened, and audible breathing for the rest of the—now twenty-minute—ride.

  When they entered Joe’s house, George responded to the place so emotionally—wow-ing and whoa-ing over everything from a rocking chair to a dog door to a refrigerator magnet—that he sounded like a parent hearing his child’s first witty remark, or a senile relative’s rare correct recollection.

  “It’s just a house,” Joe said, again trying to laugh away irritation, but he couldn’t help it—it was just a house.

  “I can’t imagine living in such a place,” George said. “If I lived in a place like this, half the rooms would be unfurnished. There’d be a chair in one room, a table in another, a bookshelf in a third. It would be like my one-bedroom apartment spread out over three floors, the way a starving man makes one meal last a month.”

  First George had overreacted to the house; now he had turned it into a little monologue about himself, one filled with imagery more palatable on a page than coming from a man’s mouth. George was a poet, one who—beating all the odds in human existence—actually supported himself in a field as dead in America (as far as the paying public was concerned) as a Civil War soldier or a suffragette or a crusty old cowboy. In his bookstores, Joe even split the “Poetry” section with the “Drama” (another long-embalmed art, if sales were any indication) and George’s books had become, in the past two years, among the few that appealed to anyone. Joe had neglected to stock the books at first, until his high school girl helpers, who carried copies of them in their bags and backpacks, asked innocently, “Hey, where’s sexy Rabelman?” which was George’s last name. (Had Joe neglected him on purpose? Had he even invited him tonight so as not to be forgotten by him now that, in their time apart, George had grown famous? These questions flickered across and then faded from his mind like lightning in a storm that never happens.)

  George was continuing to reflect on the contents of his imaginary house—which would of course pale in comparison to this one, which was so quaint and beautifully designed: “Just look at those wet boots lined up on the mat, like in a fantastic still life”—when Michelle came up from the basement, carrying a bottle of the wine they kept down there.

  It was hard to say what riveted George more now, the “fantastic” red or the “incredible” Michelle herself. He linked one subject to the other, contrasting favourably the choice of wine with the appearance of the woman, even reciting a poem Joe assumed was one of his own before (to his embarrassment and grateful he’d kept quiet) George identified it, off-handedly, as “obviously, you know, Yeats.”

  They went into the living room, where Michelle had placed cheese and crackers on a plate. Joe turned on music to drown out George’s effusive tribute to the plate, the design of which seemed to him “so utterly American,” but which really just had a pattern so ugly the set had been sold for nearly nothing at the Buy ‘n’ Fly. Adoring the plate led George back to praising the woman who’d chosen it. Joe couldn’t deny that Michelle seemed to be enjoying George’s compliments, nearly beaming at him, wiping cracker crumbs much more delicately from her mouth than usual. She accepted George’s refill of the “luscious” wine with a girlish nod—a new gesture for her, or maybe an old one, unused since youth. It maddened Joe to see this, not because he was jealous but because he had no cause to be: it was obvious that George’s attentions to her were sexless. His one and only glance below Michelle’s neck resulted in a secret (he thought) and appreciative recoil, as if he were watching a walrus emerge—and keep emerging and keep emerging—from an ocean. Wow, he seemed to be thinking, what a walrus. Joe knew that Michelle had put on weight, just as he had—put on even more weight, become by any measure (and use any word you want, be nice or not—it didn’t matter, she was his wife) fat. But that was no reason for George not to flirt with her, to instead treat her as he had their unremarkable home, to marvel at her and, since marvelling was not merited, to put in relief her mediocrity. He did it again when she
said she sold real estate—and successfully; this was a booming area, getting bought up. George listened with open-mouthed wonder then repeated, quietly, “Real estate,” as if she’d said “sword swallowing,” and then he had, too.

  In earlier days, Michelle had dismissed George as an amiable dork, whose company she endured because he was Joe’s old friend. Now she seemed to actually like this new George, one who, as Joe saw it, had stopped physical time and, during its suspension, become an accomplished person who had kept living while everyone else was doing the normal thing and passing away.

  George didn’t stop during dinner—which was an okay pot roast and potatoes; Michelle made no claims of being a great cook—reacting with giddy disbelief that they still ate red meat, a choice he thought “brave” and “bold” given all the evidence against it. The whole time he served himself only one thin fat-free sliver of the main course while filling up on salad, vegetables, and (unbuttered) bread.

  George sat next to young Tad, whose plate held food in exactly opposite proportions: 80 percent meat versus 20 percent (heavily buttered) baked potato and (even more heavily buttered) bread. While it had taken Joe and Michelle twenty years to officially join the fat club, Tad had done so in a mere eight years, seeming to start energetically applying right after birth, with no tactic by his parents—discouragement, admonishment, encouragement, threats, doctors’ visits, strategically placed diet books, sports playing (with Joe pulling every muscle he had after throwing and catching a football for the first time in his life), love—succeeding in slowing him down. Add to that his difficulties reading, writing, making friends, or even having any actual relationships with people not imaginary and existing only in a video game, and Tad was a large and obvious next target for George’s enthusiastic applause. Busy eating his low-calorie meal, however, their guest restricted himself just to giving him glances, complete with approving head nods and smiles.