Taking It

by Michael Cadnum

  She makes me nervous. I suspect she is quietly disapproving of something about me, who knows what. I fold my dirty clothes, put them in the hamper like clothes in a suitcase, and don’t like to leave dirty dishes in the sink, signs that we eat and have lives.

  Talking to the policeman had convinced me that I was going to have to straighten out my life. That’s all I had to do. Just a little mental housekeeping, that’s all.

  I would start with a little real, hands-on housekeeping, cleaning up my room. It was wonderful to have something to do, dirty socks to bunch up, old magazines to put in a pile.

  I was cleaning up, picking up the book about the mustard gas and the guy going back home, saying hello to people in his neighborhood, hearing them say hello back in a strained way. Sometimes you can only tell that you have something really wrong with you by how your friends act. I would hate to be blind.

  I was getting two pimples at the corner of my mouth, a mother pimple and a baby. I kept looking into the mirror and hating my bad luck, but there they were. I dabbed some flesh-colored concealer on them, but that made them look even worse.

  I was folding up my fuchsia jogging outfit, thinking I should get one in some other shade, not red, because it fades so fast. I felt something in one of the deep pockets.

  My hand slipped into the pocket and came out with something hard and gleaming, a blue object with painted-on eyes. At another time the thing would have looked cute. The thing did not belong here, trespassing in my room.

  It was true that I had no memory of hiding it in my pocket. But I knew exactly how it had found itself there, and why it was in my hand at that moment. It was a part of Maureen’s father’s collection of exotic art.

  The ceramic frog did not warm in my hand, the way so many things do, picking up body heat. It stayed cold.

  16

  I sat in my room, a figurine safe in a big doll’s house.

  I arrayed my Tuscan tabac eye shadow and my Amalfi sunrise overblush and the long blue Princess Borghese eye accent pencil, and touched up my face, working carefully, thinking about Stu and the way he would feel me all over, inside and out, and it was like I was the clothes and he was the human, trying me on for size. I kept screwing up, one eye looking like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

  I put my hand into my ballet slippers, and there it was, the blue frog with its fake eyes. In real life the hunters kill the frogs, dry the skins, and season their arrowheads with the frog powder.

  Right now Mother and Adler were probably in a rented car, air-conditioned, although they probably didn’t need it. They would be arriving late at the hotel, probably, their room waiting, with maybe an ice bucket of Mother’s favorite champagne, Mumm, the French kind, not the kind from Napa.

  It was night, and there were trees.

  Stu put his hand on my breast, and his touch was warm. I turned away, though. We were done, and I didn’t want him touching me anymore.

  It was like when we first used to come up here. We would look at the view, the glitter, the tiny movement of cars, from our private place behind the environmental control unit, all to ourselves.

  We were up behind the Lawrence Hall of Science in the dark, the concrete space-age buildings looking hopeful and out-of-date. The lights of Berkeley were a cluster of whites and yellows, and then there was the Bay, darkness.

  “You act like my mom before the doctor took her off those pills,” said Stu.

  “What kind of pills,” I said, not even bothering to make my voice sound like I was asking a question, just hitting the ball back.

  “They made her like a robot.”

  “Thanks.”

  He zipped himself up, partway. It got stuck. “The thing I always liked about you—you weren’t ordinary.”

  He was trying to be nice, but he was using the past tense. “That’s a blazing compliment.” I sounded like someone who was bothered by nothing.

  “You used to tell me about funny things you saw on the news,” he said.

  “It takes someone like me to make plane crashes and massacres sound funny.” I couldn’t see him very well. He was up on one arm, looking down at me.

  The environmental control unit was a squat concrete abutment with metal slotted vents. Hot air flowed out of it with a quiet hum, a big fan circulating the air from the buildings in the distance. The fan was suddenly silent, and the quiet startled both of us for a moment.

  “You used to laugh,” Stu said, but the feeling was gone from his voice. “You used to tell me what you saw in your dad’s trials, imitate witnesses.”

  It was an unspoken understanding between Stu and me that I was going to be a lawyer and he was going to design space labs. I started to cry, I couldn’t help it.

  “Are you all right, Anna?”

  I almost told him—really talked to him.

  “Just because I’m going away doesn’t mean we’ll be out of touch,” he said. “We’re still friends.” He said something about E-mail and how there weren’t any places anymore, how every place was one point on the plane. Distance didn’t matter.

  “What kind of person am I?” I asked.

  The question made him think. “A very interesting person,” he said, picking his words carefully.

  I wanted to ask him: Am I a thief?

  I wanted to ask him: Can you look into my eyes and see my mind dying?

  Instead he sounded shaken that I cared so much, not understanding me at all. He was talking about computer modems. He was saying he would write letters. He thought I was going to miss him. I felt sorry for him. I pinched his nose and gave it a little twist.

  We used to rent Three Stooges videos and watch them while Stu’s parents were in Europe, and it was a routine between us, grabbing an ear or a nose and saying Why, you in that sadistic mean-kid way.

  “Your dad’ll send you away to college,” he said. He made himself sound optimistic. “Life will be wonderful.”

  I like the way we simplify the world when we want to cheer someone up. Life and wonderful, balloon-size, Disneyland words. Stu was worried that he was responsible for me needing Kleenex, blowing my nose.

  I said, “I’m afraid.”

  “Reality’s confusing,” said Stu. He considered his words and must have recognized how pointless he sounded. “A state of flux,” he added. We were veering into areas Stu didn’t like to discuss. He was going to talk about the laws of thermodynamics, telling me that systems devolve, that chaos is at war with structure.

  “Have you ever been to Banff?” I asked.

  Stu didn’t even know where it was.

  17

  My dad was on the phone.

  I could tell as soon as I was through the front door. He was talking to one of his girlfriends, wandering the house, phone to his ear. He was using his special sexy voice, reassuring, warmhearted.

  I tried to shut the door quietly. I stood still, right where I was, eavesdropping. He was telling someone everything would be all right. He was telling someone what a wonderful person she was. “You’re an exceptional human being,” he said to the person on the phone.

  But he had heard the front door shut, despite my efforts, and it was crimping his style. He put his head around a corner and said he’d call right back.

  He put the phone down in the dining room. Then he stood looking at me with his hands on his hips, the way one of the policemen had looked at me, blank.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “Out with Stu.” I flung myself into his chair, the big recliner. I picked up the mail off the side table. There was nothing for me.

  “Leave a note next time,” he said.

  “I thought I’d be back before you were. As usual.”

  “Did you eat anything?”

  “A little cold spaghetti before I went out.” It was still in the fridge, a large cold brain of pasta.

  He sat in a dark, wooden piece of furniture, an antique, like a chair’s skeleton. My mother had bought it when I was in preschool, light-years ago. “Did you have
a good time with Stu?” my dad said.

  “Stu’s a lot of fun.”

  He didn’t know how to take this. He took his handheld tape recorder out of an inner pocket. He ran it fast-forward, the voices high-pitched. It might be someone confessing to raping his own daughter, and there his voice would be, sounding like a demented rat.

  He got to the place he wanted in the tape. I had the oddest feeling that he wanted to record our conversation. I experienced that shiver of self-consciousness I often feel when someone pulls out a camera.

  He put the recorder down on a leather folder at his side. He had work to do that had nothing to do with me.

  “I’m thinking of going with you, like we used to as a family.” When he saw that I didn’t know what he was talking about, he said, “Kaiser Hospital, family counseling. If you want me to.”

  Poor man. Orbiting some distant legal sun. “I don’t think it would do any good,” I said.

  “You might as well express it, Anna.”

  I thought: He can read your mind.

  “Express what?” I heard myself say.

  “Your anger with me.”

  “Am I angry with you?” I wasn’t being coy—I didn’t know what my lines were supposed to be.

  “You should be.” He took a moment, getting ready to say it. “I’m not much of a father.”

  This was painful. The look in his eyes, the roughness in his voice. He had it all backwards.

  Or maybe he expected reassurance. Maybe the recorder was turned on after all, and he hoped to get my voice on tape: No, you’re a wonderful dad. I’m not surprised so many women fall in love with you.

  The chair fought with me. I could not climb out of it. My skirt got hiked up, and I felt like one of those photos you see, an actress getting out of a limo, struggling.

  My father looked away, maybe not wanting to see his daughter with her skirt up over her face. I was finally out of the chair, and I felt like kicking it.

  The aquarium gurgled, and a vague, colorless creature, the coolie loach, crept out from around a ceramic rock. My father followed my gaze and got up to peer into the aquarium.

  “How are your fluid levels?” he asked, not looking at me.

  “I had them topped up,” I said. He was referring to the car. Sometimes you need a manual to understand what Dad is trying to say.

  “Have them use nondetergent forty-weight,” he said. He turned to see if I was still there and I saw a strange expression in his eyes, wonderment, worry, as though he saw me for the first time after a long trip somewhere, as though I was descending from an airplane instead of climbing the stairs to my room. “An older car like that can overheat,” he said. “You could have a real problem.”

  I continued up the stairs.

  “What did you do today?” he asked.

  I stood at the top of the stairs. I could only see his shiny black shoes. “I almost got a traffic ticket,” I said. “But I didn’t.”

  He stepped to the foot of the stairs, where I could see all of him, looking up at me. “Did you talk your way out of it?” he asked. He would like that, the two of us with the same natural talent.

  There was a moment when we enjoyed each other. “Maybe I did,” I said.

  I could see him thinking that this was good. I could talk my way out of trouble. I had a future.

  Then I added, “Do you really think I’ll be happier living with Mother?” And Adler, I didn’t say. With Mother and Adler in their new house in the Marina.

  “I can’t help you,” he said.

  When I could talk, I said, “What happened to the guy who vanished?”

  “Still gone,” he said. “That was his wife on the phone.”

  “You’re talking to this guy’s wife with that sexy voice?”

  I think they learn it in law school, that dead look. It’s almost as good as a cop’s. Then he gave me one-tenth of a smile, confiding, wanting to be friendly.

  I could see it: With me out of here, his life would be so much simpler.

  At the age of eight, I wanted to be a ballerina. They were those creatures on television, the ones drifting across the stage, women so beautiful nothing could hurt them.

  My parents took me to a few ballets at the Opera House in San Francisco. They looked on politely, clapping when it was time to applaud, but I think they looked forward to the intermissions, the white wine, the chance to see friends.

  Ballet lessons were not at all what I had imagined. There were too many tarnished mirrors floor to ceiling, too many other students. The woman who taught the classes was one of those beautiful swans. I think she stayed thin by not wasting time being nice to students. Glide, Maureen—glide, not stumble.

  I felt for the ceramic frog in the ballet slipper. Maybe I was hoping it had vanished on its own.

  I could hear my father’s voice downstairs, on the phone. I could hear him laugh affectionately.

  In Canada now, in the far north, my mother and Adler were together. Maybe it would be a cold night, the stars everywhere, reflected in the lake. Mother and Adler close together, huddling for warmth.

  18

  The days passed.

  I watched myself in shop windows, my image rippling along, changing shape.

  I felt giddy, fluttery. Maybe I would sneak the frog back into Maureen’s house. After two or three days, giving it back would have been like giving Maureen and her family a gift, offering a present to all of them.

  It would be a confession, even if they didn’t see me slipping it back into place. But the frog wasn’t the problem. The problem was: What little surprise would I pull next?

  Besides, if I forgot about it, it wasn’t there.

  I kept busy, dropping by the Berkeley Municipal Court to watch a trial or two. A woman had been arrested for soliciting. She perched there prim and calm, next to her cool, gray-haired woman lawyer. The assistant district attorney fingered his pen and talked about the laws against prostitution, how a community has standards, how these standards go back to the beginning of what we call morality.

  Night after night I didn’t sleep so much as lie there. I got blue circles under my eyes, and the color drained from my face. I didn’t look that bad, if you like dead bodies.

  Over the days I spent a lot of time with Maureen.

  Sometimes she couldn’t talk much, depressed because of a news story. Hordes of emus in western Australia killed themselves running into an electric fence. In France twenty cows were burned alive when lightning struck the barn where they had drawn together for safety. To Maureen these misfortunes were evidence of the callousness of human beings. We could go on about our lives while things like this happened.

  Sometimes she was gleeful over something she had just taught Lincoln to do. He fetched the chewed-up tennis ball out of the closet when she said “ball.” He snouted the mail out of the mailbox when she gave the order, if the mail carrier was far enough away from the house.

  She and her father and her mother did not seem to notice what was gone.

  It was a freedom I didn’t want.

  We were in the backyard, in the big bare place Lincoln had worn in the grass. It was late in the afternoon, shadows, a chill in the air. My caramel purse was leaning against a tree, not far from Lincoln’s plastic water dish. Mother and Adler would be back from their trip tomorrow.

  The Frisbee had a crack in it, and it glided badly, rolling along the ground. All the tennis balls were chewed to yellow-green bits. I felt the homey pleasure of Maureen’s family, leaving each other notes reminding each other to water the coffee plant.

  I was trying to get Lincoln to give me a fragment of red rubber ball. He wouldn’t let me have it.

  “Give,” commanded Maureen. She was wearing a huge blue T-shirt that showed her bra straps. There was a faded image on the shirt, a University of California Golden Bear.

  Lincoln wouldn’t let her have it, either.

  I couldn’t stop myself. I heard myself say, “Maureen, I did something I shouldn’t have done.”r />
  A part of me wanted to stop and hit rewind, but it was too late.

  Sometimes she can look so stupid. “Like what?”

  I was very fifties, capris and a polka-dot blouse and teeny Italian sandals. The brand-new sole was so thin I could feel every pebble, every leaf, underfoot.

  “Take a look in my purse.” I had hoped to toss this out in an offhand way, but I didn’t think I managed to sound very confident.

  She stopped looking at me, turning to Lincoln, holding out her hand for the ball.

  I let a moment pass. I wondered if I could just shut up and let the subject die. Maybe Maureen wasn’t even listening, thinking about something she’d heard on the news, listening to music in her head.

  I heard myself say, “I think you’ll be surprised.”

  I was wasting my time. She wasn’t paying much attention, yanking the chewed-up ball out of Lincoln’s teeth. The ball looked like raw hamburger.

  Okay, I told myself, I’ll forget about it. Case closed. It was almost a relief. I confessed and no one heard, no one cared.

  Her glance was a question. She wasn’t in the mood for me today.

  I gave her a little unsteady smile. She would have to see for herself.

  She picked up the purse.

  “Open it,” I said.

  She worked the snap, one knee on her jeans torn, a pair of rubber sandals on her feet, one toenail with just a trace of red polish.

  It was in her hand, a bundle of tissue paper held together with Scotch tape, neatly. Maureen sniffed the scented paper, and gave me a look.

  “Are you okay?” she asked without much interest.

  “Open it,” I said.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, vaguely impatient with me, like all this was an interruption she could do without.

  I waited.

  She tore the tissue paper, and tore it again until she could see what was there, nestled in her hand.

  I didn’t say the words. I just let her figure it out.

  It took her a moment, but she got the point.

  At last she said, “It’s no wonder.”