Taking It

by Michael Cadnum

  I was unable to say anything, unable to so much as twitch.

  This was not the teardrop scarf. This was another scarf entirely, one I had never touched.

  3

  “I’ve never seen that scarf before,” I said. My voice came out sounding really bad, crinkly and childlike, a nine-year-old about to cry.

  She waved a finger, dismissing this remark.

  But it was true. It was going to be wonderful, perfectly great, I raged silently at myself, if after years of toying with this little sport of mine I got into real trouble over something I had never even put a pinky on. This was a scarf with little yellow triangles, a nice scarf, but not the one I had picked up.

  The manager considered the scarf in her hands, and my new driver’s license, which she had lined up so that the card fit the corner of her desk exactly. Anna Teresa Charles, my license read, with my weight now inaccurate by two pounds and my hair too blonde. I use a rinse to keep it dark.

  I must be losing something, I thought. It happens. Or, even more likely—I’m deliberately screwing up.

  They’d love nailing me, a daughter of one of the Big Names in town, always getting his photo in the Chronicle over a few column inches describing an out-of-court settlement. None of the stores had ever got where they could hurt me. I suddenly hated this woman with her lip-colored lipstick, and her tasteful mascara, done so right you wouldn’t think she was wearing any.

  I was seventeen years old. It was time to give up stupid childish things. I never really committed a crime. I never even came close. But what if I made a Freudian goof, tucked something in a pocket when even I wasn’t looking?

  I was sweating and cold. There was a sour taste in my mouth.

  “You can understand why we have to be careful,” she said. She was not acting like any of the other managers, like she had me, and I knew she didn’t.

  I said, “Your security man put his hand on me.”

  “We have it on video,” she said.

  Like that proved something in their favor, not mine. “I didn’t do anything.”

  She was fingering her way through a Rolodex. She found what she wanted.

  “You can’t keep me here,” I said.

  What she said next made me shut up. She wasn’t talking to me, she was talking into the phone. She was identifying herself, giving her name, Jane Murray, speaking in one of those Genius Android voices that tell you the time.

  “I’m fine, Hal,” she said, calm and looking at me with an expression almost kind, but not quite. “But I think I can do you a favor.” She listened, and laughed, not loud—kind, thoughtful, regretful. If my Dad wasn’t with one of his personal therapists, he would be clearheaded enough to know what was coming.

  How did she know him?

  I could hear his voice, reduced to a fly-size buzz. It was him, no question. “Yes, very personal,” she said, sounding a little sexy, the way my dad got every woman to sound, sooner or later.

  Every time I feel like this I think if I close my eyes I can imagine what it’s like to be a thousand miles away, in the middle of a desert. I can picture it, cactus, sand, ants. Or a thousand miles up, cold, ocean down there, big clouds, my skin ice.

  “Your daughter is here,” she was saying into the phone. “Right here in my office. I think we need to talk.”

  4

  My brother says that we don’t know anything about anything. He said the Greeks knew how to think. He says all we are doing is filling out the questionnaires they left around, Examine Your Life and Make It Worth Living, those Twenty Questions That Will Improve Your Sex Life quizzes you see in magazines.

  I hurried past shops, and didn’t bother watching my reflection in the windows I passed. Don’t think, I told myself. Just shut up and walk.

  The Bay Area Rapid Transit stations are sometimes surrounded by people who look like trouble, people with nothing to do but look at you hard and ask for money. But when you take the escalator down into the subway station, you’re in a different world. The light is bright, and steel machines take your dollar bills when you feed them into a slot and then give you a ticket.

  Sometimes one of the dollars is too wrinkled, and the machine won’t swallow it. Then you have to stand there trying to straighten out the wrinkled piece of money. People line up behind you, but they tend to act patient and a little bored because this happens to everyone.

  I took BART back across under the Bay, heading east and not thinking, reading a Chronicle I found on the floor, the horoscope saying my romantic life was on hold. I looked for an article by Adler, one of his columns on how to live a better life, but I couldn’t find anything but want ads and a weather map.

  Sometimes it’s hard to breathe as the train roars through the tunnel under the Bay. You might not see sunlight again.

  I got out of the BART station, the machine spitting out my ticket with twenty cents left. I gave the ticket to a man with a cat tied to a long piece of red yarn.

  I got into the Mustang, which I should have taken across the Bay, except that I was trying to conserve gasoline the way we are supposed to, and the last time I tried driving in the City, I scraped the chrome off the right front bumper getting out of a parking place in a hurry.

  Dad gave me the car because of my grades, a ’67 automatic transmission with a new paint job and new vinyl interior, but the car had an old, tired smell, and I had already gotten a ticket for going eighty through the Caldecott Tunnel, although that was not my fault. Stu was with me that night, pissing me off talking about how I should get more exercise, take up jogging.

  I had to stand there in the BART parking lot, yanking at the door. It wouldn’t open. I was tugging at the car so hard the chassis was rocking. My feeling was that the car was in a collision at an earlier point in its history, and that it never entirely recovered.

  I finally got inside, and then I had to wait for the interior of the car to cool. The steering wheel was too hot, and I don’t have one of those cardboard windshield screens. I tried to crank down one of the windows and it would lower only about one-fifth of the way.

  “You look strange,” said Maureen.

  I wanted to tell Maureen what had happened, but one look at her told me she had her own problems, as usual. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said. I stood peeking through the living room curtains of her house. My own house was across the street.

  “You look …” Her voice faded. “Anxious.”

  I wanted to tell her all about the manager, how she and my father had a nice long talk while I was asked to go sit in a room full of computers, one thin old woman there looking at me like she was typing up a police report. She was one of those scary-looking old women, all string and dyed hair, and half-lens glasses, typing two hundred words a minute into a computer.

  “You’re the one who looks like a disaster area,” I said.

  “I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut,” said Maureen.

  We were both afraid to talk to our fathers that night. What I had done was much worse, but Maureen isn’t used to trouble. Maureen’s mother was always gone, away on business. Her family left notes for each other, Post-Its with smiling faces all over the fridge.

  “You’re proud of how much you suffer,” I said. Some friends play tennis. Maureen and I argue.

  “You have no basic appreciation for what I’m going through,” she said. Maureen was lying on the sofa in the front room, wearing gym shorts and a LOVE ANIMALS DON’T EAT THEM T-shirt. She moved her head around on the pillow, looking for a position that was comfortable. She gave up and threw the pillow onto the floor.

  She had dropped one of her father’s favorite vases, a black clay flower container from Mexico. I had helped her sweep the black bits of it into a dustpan and suck up the rest of it with a portable Eureka Maureen kept in her room.

  Maureen’s family has cute art from all over. A yellow giraffe was one of my favorites, and a little blue frog on the fireplace always caught my eye. You could make a National Geographic special abou
t these shelves, “Handmade Treasures from the Jungle.” The carpet was worn from the kitchen to the dining room, and the TV had an old-fashioned remote, one you had to push hard to change channels, but it was plain where all the money went.

  Maureen was talking, but I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking that maybe someday I’d have a house like this, pretty art, visitors dropping by to see how interesting I was, cheerful notes reminding people to put out the recycling.

  “On a day like this I even wish it wasn’t summer,” said Maureen. “I’d rather be in school.”

  “Even in Mr. Hewlett’s class?” I asked.

  Maureen couldn’t help laughing, shaking her head. Mr. Hewlett was an English teacher whose favorite phrase was “Let’s take a second and review.” He taught right out of the Words and Usage book and never skipped a page. He was so boring you were sure there was something wrong with him, something medical, genetic.

  Maureen said, “Remember that time you told him he could go home if he wasn’t feeling well?”

  Maureen and I always sat together when we shared a class. She doodled a lot when she was bored, filling her notes with stars and planets.

  We were quiet for a moment, enjoying each other’s company. Half the time I couldn’t stand Maureen, but the rest of the time she was like a force of nature, terrible weather that could turn sunny and then, after a while, turn back again.

  “The pain I feel,” said Maureen, “is real.”

  “You agonize more than anyone who ever lived,” I said. I meant it as a kind of compliment. “Seventeen years of torture.”

  “I saw a woman on television who looks the way you’ll look in a couple of years,” said Maureen.

  “Beautiful woman, right?” I wandered away from her. There was a smell of yeast in the kitchen, and dough drowsed under the plastic dome of a bread machine. There was a bunch of purple onions, and a row of small-to-machete knives on the wall. Maureen was the only person I knew who made yogurt, and her father sometimes made hand-cranked ice cream.

  Back in the living room, Maureen was waiting for me, and started in again. “She had these big pores, you could see even on the TV screen. Too much makeup, the skin not being able to breathe.”

  And then I remembered. I felt sick.

  I had forgotten my mother. She was waiting for me at Nordstrom’s, all the way across the Bay. I was two hours late.

  Three hours late by now.

  And nobody makes my mother wait.

  5

  “Also, she was really gaunt and her hair was all over the place.” It took me a moment to follow what Maureen was talking about, some person on TV. I was standing there looking at a ceramic poison-arrow frog and realizing that I was losing my mind.

  I could call Nordstrom’s, I thought. I could have my mother paged. I could make up a story, a flat on the Nimitz Freeway, the AAA tow truck stuck in traffic. I could tell her I got sick, stomach flu. But my mother would have gone home by now, or over to Gump’s to buy another gold fountain pen to add to Adler’s collection.

  I don’t believe in astrology, but sometimes I can feel what is happening out in space, how it pulls on my insides one way and another, like tides. By now my mother was thinking of ways to kill me.

  It would be like the old days, real fury. It must be like this when you realize you’re getting Alzheimer’s disease. Little things go wrong. Or even worse, it must be like this when you start to go insane.

  “Do you want to know how the vase got broken?” Maureen asked.

  It was a relief to be able to keep talking. “You said you dropped it.”

  I went over to a mirror on the wall, the glass framed with carved purple bananas.

  “That’s not what I said,” Maureen replied.

  Nobody could tell by looking at me what I was feeling. I gave Maureen one of my best expressions, a sophisticated woman faced with someone less fortunate than herself. Inside I was shriveling. “Tell your dad that I picked it up and threw it at you.”

  “I’m not so afraid he’ll be angry,” said Maureen. “It’s more like—I can’t bear to see the look in his eyes.”

  I wanted a cigarette, but Maureen wouldn’t let me smoke in her house. It gave her asthma. Her father was a professor at Cal at the school of optometry, and her mother helped write the bar exams used by each state. She was always calling from distant hotel rooms, lecturing in Milwaukee or Tucson. None of them smoked, but they left big red and purple ashtrays all over, Aztec-style pottery you could stub out your Marlboro in.

  Maureen lifted her head again. She was looking right at me, and she had no idea how I felt. “I get these cramps when I’m upset,” she said. Maureen and I had been in the same ballet class about a hundred years ago.

  Maureen is pretty but she doesn’t care about her looks, lets her eyebrows grow in so they meet, making her look serious all the time, like some kind of thinking animal. And it makes her look pretty anyway, the way a raccoon is pretty.

  “I’ll tell you what really happened,” Maureen was saying.

  She paused so I could ask, but I had trouble reading my lines for a second.

  “Lincoln did it.” She said this like it was a major revelation. She added, “I’m not supposed to let Lincoln into the house.”

  I had to feel compassion for Maureen. She didn’t think about things—she experienced them. If she was depressed, she got sick. If she laughed too much, she peed.

  “Poor Lincoln,” I said. “Chained up in the backyard all the time.” I heard my own voice, and reassured myself. I couldn’t be a total mess if I could make conversation.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” asked Maureen.

  I peeked out the living room window. “The pool man’s here,” I said. “I can see his truck.”

  “I bet he has a tattoo, somewhere where you can’t see it,” said Maureen.

  “He does not,” I said, laughing. Maureen and I had both agreed we loathed tattoos on men.

  “But you don’t know for sure,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her that I didn’t know anything for sure.

  As always, Lincoln was excited to see me, and barked, and yelped, the animal trying to make words but not able to, having a snout and not a mouth. He was a big, dark dog on a frayed leather leash. A choke collar looped around his neck, a glittering chain.

  Lincoln licked my hands, making them all hot and sticky. Lincoln’s leash had worn all the grass from that part of the garden, and he bounded around on the bare dirt.

  Maureen’s family had chosen Lincoln at the animal shelter. He was nervous around strangers and had a strong dislike—even a fear—of anyone in uniform. He was perhaps the only dog in the world to actually flee into a distant room when the mailman approached.

  I was fond of Lincoln, but I’m not crazy about dog spit. I let myself out through the side gate and washed my fingers off on a faucet beside the Boston ferns.

  The blue pool truck was parked right behind the Mustang. I tried to like the white, sporty thing, but it was not a car I would have chosen myself. It was hard to park, and I felt a little guilty about wanting a car that didn’t use so much gas.

  I opened the front door and called out, asking if anyone was home. Maybe my mother was here, I thought. She had taken the day off so we could spend some time together. She might be pacing up and down, chewing her fingernails.

  Maybe Dad had come home early, thinking that he had to talk to me, find out what was wrong with me, make an appointment for me to talk to someone in family counseling. I couldn’t face him, not the way I felt now.

  There was no one there. I listened hard and there was only the sound of the pool man whistling a tune to himself.

  My fingers were cold, the way they get if I smoke too much. I took out the hoops and went to put in the gold posts. I don’t like to swim wearing big earrings—they tend to drag in the water. I had trouble finding the holes in both lobes.

  6

  The pool man comes twice a week. He wears those shirts you b
uy that already look old, thick cotton with three buttons you leave undone if you want to show off your tan.

  The pool man was crouching beside the water, one of those men with blond hair and muscles. He was losing his hair a little. Some men get bald and they look bony and too big for everything, like they’re running out of hair because there is so much skin to cover.

  But this guy always looked like a tennis instructor, one of those guys with white teeth who show you how to put a little backspin on the ball and you say, “Oh, gee, I think I see what you mean, can you show me again,” so he’ll put his hand on one elbow and stand close, showing you the right grip.

  He had a little tray of what looked like test tubes, fluids he poured into the pool, one after another, screwing the caps back on tight. Then he stirred the water with his hand and used the water vacuum to suck up the dirt and dead stuff that sits on the bottom.

  The pool looks pretty at first glance, but the grill at the bottom is rusting and black, the chrome flaking off. Sometimes I would go out by the pool and stand there, impatient, like he’s wasting my time and I have to be somewhere for supper, like all I want to do is swim my laps and pop into the shower.

  He would look at me and say “hi,” or “what’s up?” but you could tell he would rather stir chlorine into water than get involved with someone ten years younger than he is. Even when I wore the Day-Glo green two-piece he would just kind of squint at me, as though the sun were behind me and he couldn’t see me very well.

  His squinty grin made him look wrinkled. If he kept making this expression he’d look as bad as my aunt in a few more years, but I needed to talk. I get that way from my mother, inherited her need to talk, and my dad says I even sound a little like her, although I can’t hear this myself. I like excitement, but sometimes I can’t shut up.

  “Did you always want to work for a pool company?” I said.

  He was over by the end of the pool, where the hot water flows out. I was nowhere near the sun, he could see me fine, but he only looked up once. When you’re in the pool, you can lean against the hole in the wall and the water wells out and feels like a big muscle working there. He was looking down into the workings of the pool heater, a machine that looked like all those pieces of equipment do, pipes and vents, covered with a little dust.