by Lydia Millet
How to honor his memory? That was a question the grief counselor had suggested. Sometimes the woman used words that reminded her of Marnie, expressions her sister relied on such as get clarity and self-actualize. “Do you consider yourself self-actualized?” the counselor had asked. “I don’t know what it means, so I guess no,” she’d said.
They’d had a meeting with an insurance salesman lined up. Lynn had wanted them to have life-insurance policies—mainly him, so that she’d be “taken care of.” She’d thought it was old-mannish and smiled when she said yes. But then he died. What she had now was her job. Technically, it was all she had. That, a rented house and a leased Mercedes SUV she spent hours in every day and didn’t even like. A gas-guzzler.
Lynn had loved her the way she was, he always claimed, but without him she wasn’t even the way she had been. He wouldn’t love her how she was now. Staying in at night and watching bad reality shows. She watched a show about people who had romances with inanimate objects: one woman claimed to be involved with a carnival ride. It was a semi with the ride attached on a crane-like mechanism, and the woman had candlelight dinners inside the truck. She set a place for the ride, a plate with food on it and a goblet. There was also a man who introduced his father to his red sports car; the car was his fiancée, he said. The father was visibly uncomfortable. The man kissed his car on camera, proclaiming his engagement, then using his tongue. He also “made love” to it, as the narrator said, but that part was pixelated.
At the office they claimed the show was faked, but she wasn’t so sure.
Another show featured people who consumed non-food items. One woman ate the stuffing out of her furniture. Whole mattresses and couches disappeared. Another snorted talcum powder, bowls and bowls of it every week. Been doing it for years, the narrator said. Her living room was covered in a dusting of white like new-fallen snow. They took her to the doctor to show her how unhealthy the habit was, but her lung scans came up clear. The doctor couldn’t believe it. The furniture-eater was unimpressed. It was understandable—her lungs were pink as a baby’s. She’d go on huffing the powder, she said, in that case. Why not?
Lynn would not be proud of how she spent her evenings. And yet—it was a blanket. It was a dull roar. He didn’t know how much she missed him, how sharp the hurt but thin and dull the knives.
If he knew, she told herself, he’d forgive her.
This would be her eighth showing of the vampire house; the homeowner was absent, thankfully, off at her job in the Valley, which seemed to be either in phone sales or sex work, unclear which. Maybe both. How she’d afforded the house in the first place was also unclear. Twice she’d insisted on being present at showings, always a bad idea but very bad when the seller was a vampire. The first time, she opened the door to Nina and the clients in a black-latex bodysuit. She didn’t say much—that was a plus—but the prospective buyers, two men from Encino with blond brush cuts, spent the whole tour looking at her cleavage, or alternately at her ass. It was a joke from the get-go.
The second time, after Nina requested—at least—please, less distracting clothes, she wore a white robe and dangling earrings with ankhs the size of lollipops. The robe was harmless, but then there were the fingernails—red, three inches long, and curved. That time the potential buyers were an elderly, retired couple. The wife kept looking at the talons nervously.
These prospective buyers were hoping to flip it: you couldn’t beat the location. They said they had Chinese investors, which the VOF supported. But they were late. She’d give it fifteen more minutes, then call or text. She had to be at another house by two.
The kitchen was in minor disarray—a puddle of coffee on the counter, a bowl in the sink. She wiped the counters down, washed the bowl and put it away, stuck some forks and knives into the dishwasher. She took a wadded dishrag into the laundry room, threw it into the hamper, and went back into the kitchen to inspect her handiwork. Presentable, though not sparkling.
Opening the fridge to make sure it was tidy as well—she typically shoved the blood jars behind a carton of OJ; apparently vampires needed vitamin C—she saw the padlock on the freezer above it was dangling open. Reflexively she put her hand up to click it closed, but as her fingers touched the cold metal she stopped.
Slowly she moved her hand to the edge of the door. Slowly, looking over her shoulder once, almost superstitiously, she pulled it open.
A gallon carton of ice cream, Rocky Road. Behind it, mounds of Ziploc bags. Brown inside. She reached for one, pulled it out. It had a date in red marker. What, a wig? She turned it over in her hands. A furry head. A face. Closed eyes.
It was a squirrel.
She practically threw it back in. As she pushed to find a place for it on the heap, other, smaller bags fell forward, slipping over each other onto the plastic edge. She grabbed at them to stop the collapse. A flattened rat; she saw the tail. Several white mice stuffed into a single bag, their minuscule pink feet. Behind the cascade, something larger. She didn’t have to touch it to see what it was: a tabby cat. Orange stripes. Horrible mouth, pulled rigidly open.
The doorbell rang, its chime the deep toll of a church bell.
She stuffed them back in and clicked the padlock.
At least it hadn’t been severed human limbs, she told herself as she went to open the door. Could have been worse. The cat, though. Could you order them online? Maybe you could, for science class or something. Dissection lessons.
The prospects were impatient, although they were the ones who’d been late. They took the tour, but mainly were interested in the house’s footprint. They held blueprints and walked around pointing at walls, talking rapid-fire in what she assumed was Mandarin. Although it might have been Cantonese. Lynn had taught her the difference, that one was spoken in mainland China, the other in places like Taiwan. The Chinese liked Lordy’s music. The prospects barely noticed the décor. Couldn’t have cared less about the knife-pierced Goths or stuffed bats in the corners of ceilings—bats she’d thought might be alive the first time she saw them. They hung from the ceiling beams the way she thought living bats might hang and were very large—flying foxes, the vampire said, shipped from Australia. She’d tried keeping live bats, she told Nina, but it turned out they were disease vectors. Plus the guano. They’d shitted everywhere. And then they died. Maybe she wasn’t giving them the right food, maybe she’d got the diet wrong. Some bats ate insects, said the vampire. Others preferred ripe fruit.
When the potential buyers finally left—no decision yet—she had to race to get to her next appointment. It was the house belonging to the woman who imagined midgets; the woman met her in the front yard, saying she didn’t go inside herself anymore. The house had been emptied by the moving company.
“I realize they’re probably not in there right at the moment,” the woman told her. “But it would just be so awkward if I saw them again. You know?”
“OK,” said Nina. She’d never seen anyone in the house but two painters she’d hired on the seller’s behalf. And the cleaners.
They had some papers to sign, which they accomplished on the hood of Nina’s car. Then the woman drove off, leaving Nina to meet with an inspector and later an AC repair guy.
There was a hatch to the attic, and Nina followed the inspector up the drop-down ladder, mostly for the hell of it. The roof hung low over them; she could stand upright but the inspector had to stoop a bit. The attic hadn’t been cleaned out. A plaid blanket was spread in the middle of the floor, with some bedrolls neatly rolled up at one end of it. Coolers were stacked on the other side.
“Like someone had a little picnic here,” said the inspector. “I’ll tell you what, though: the sub-roof needs replacing. This thing’s forty years old if it’s a day. You see how the OSB is warped? That piece right there looks like a boomerang. You tore it off and threw it, it’d probably come right back to you.”
She nodded as he ticked a box on his handheld device. The woman who saw midgets was in a hurry to sell an
d wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the markdowns.
Driving home she took surface streets, as she almost always did since Lynn died on the 10. Tomorrow would be tough. First thing in the morning she had to meet his sister and brother at the house, help them to divvy up the last few sticks of furniture. The only bone of contention so far had been their father’s gold record from his Motown days; they both wanted that. In the end they played rock-paper-scissors. Best of three. The brother won.
She’d shown Lynn’s house with most of the furniture still in it, and it had sold surprisingly fast. Multiple bidders. She didn’t know enough about the neighborhood to know how typical that was, but she’d never been so relieved to sell a property. Walking through the rooms, listening to clients dismiss the place offhand, disparage its contents—it wasn’t the only time she’d hated her job, but it was the worst. After the second showing she’d acquired the habit of popping a Valium before she went in and telling them right off that the house had been in her family until a sudden recent death. That shut them up, more or less. Luckily it didn’t stop them from bidding.
After that she had to go to a hotel in Playa del Rey. The first day of a self-help seminar her sister wanted her to do. She wasn’t looking forward to it, but she would endure it and after she endured, she would call Marnie. She’d know what to say, armed with the right jargon. Marnie had made it a condition: if they were to be close again, she had to do the seminar.
What had the website said? Redefine your future in three days, something like that. Discover new possibility. Well, OK, good. It would be a pleasure.
But she didn’t relish the thought of the nametags. Or the tearful disclosure of personal stories. She didn’t know if such storytelling would occur, Marnie had never told her how it worked, but that was the way she pictured it.
Marnie didn’t even know about Lynn. Had never met him or even heard of him. Marnie would never know what she’d lost.
She was going in her front door when her cell rang: the vampire was calling. She was so tired. She almost didn’t pick up.
“So did they make an offer? The Chinese?”
“Not yet,” said Nina, dropping her bag on a chair and moving through the living room to the kitchen. She’d have to open a new bottle for her evening glass; she grabbed one from the fridge door, phone couched awkwardly between her ear and shoulder. “They’re considering it as an investment, but there’s no offer yet. I would have called if there had been, of course.”
“Yeah. I guess you would.”
“I can tell you right now, if they do make an offer they won’t be meeting your asking.”
“I know. We counter, then we compromise. I know the drill.”
Pause. Nina had learned not to speak into the silence of clients.
“So, my freezer. I left it unlocked.”
“I noticed that,” said Nina.
“I was so, so late,” said the vampire. “The alarm like didn’t go off at all.”
“Well, I locked it,” said Nina. She put down the bottle because her neck was hurting.
“Did you look?”
Now was the time to lie; anyone would. But honestly, she could stand to lose the listing. Let someone else sell the taxidermy bats. A shame, right when she had the first serious interest. But still. It wouldn’t be the only time she put in legwork and got zero payout.
“I did,” she said. “Rats. Squirrels. A tabby cat. Is that legal?”
“You weren’t supposed to look.”
“The buyers were late and I was doing cleanup in the kitchen. I do apologize.”
There was a long pause. In the background, Nina heard music.
“Look, I used to be a purist,” said the vampire. “Human blood only, right? That’s the mainstream. But I branched out recently.”
“OK,” said Nina.
“It’s thinking outside the box. That’s all.”
“I’m not judging,” said Nina.
“All right. So let me know if they make an offer.”
She hung up without answering the question about dead cats.
Half relief, half disappointment. Maybe the vampire planned to drink her blood later.
She uncorked the wine, poured a glass and went into her bedroom, stood before the altar. Looked at his picture and felt that she’d never deserved him. She’d said to the therapist, full of pathetic self-pity, “The world knew that. So it took him from me.” “Right,” said the therapist. “Because the world revolves around you.” She’d been properly shamed.
She knew it, when she thought logically. No one had singled her out.
But when she lay alone in her bed, she saw the cold symmetry. She saw the balancing of the scales.
Tonight’s line came from a dog-eared anthology of war poets, its ruff of yellow page edges softened by his hands. Some evenings she tucked it under her pillow. When she wanted to go to sleep but couldn’t, she lay thinking of his face. How it could never be repeated. There might be similar faces, the curve of a lip that was the same, a rough approximation of features. Never the whole.
And the face was fading. She looked at his picture to remind herself, but still it was fading.
What had been behind the face, though. That didn’t fade so easily. The invisible part she wouldn’t forget.
“Whatever hope is yours, is my life also,” she quoted, and drank. For all the wine he’d never drink.
Her phone rang again. She heard it in the kitchen and hurried out of her room to check it: the woman with the midgets. Felt a bit unsteady as she hit accept. She should drink less. Eat more. Lost fifteen pounds since the accident.
“I went to the house!” said Delia. “I got this feeling, like I had to say goodbye to it. Like face my fear. So I drove up. And there was a light on. In the attic! Because they were there!”
“OK,” said Nina warily.
“I swear! No one believes me. They were there! You have to go over. You have to see them! They’re squatters!”
“But even if I did,” said Nina, “what would that do?”
“Please,” said the woman. “Please. I even took a picture! I took a picture of them!”
“You should call the police,” said Nina. “If there are really illegal squatters in the house, then you should call.”
She couldn’t drive right now. Unfit. Certainly not at the whim of a disturbed client.
“Could you call, then? At least call the police for me?”
That she could do. If it would soothe the woman.
“I’ll report it for you. Yes.”
They hung up, Delia still agitated. Was it worth a 911? No. Call the local precinct.
She looked up the number, called it in. The dispatch said they’d send a squad car over.
It wasn’t till later, when she was getting ready for bed, that she got a text ping. Delia again. She swiped and looked at the photo. Enlarged it. Just the dim outline of a roof, and in the center a small square of yellow light.
STOCKHOLM
They had some Swedish chick lined up to be the au pair, all qualified and shit. A grad student in child development. But she bailed at the last minute. Back in Sweden her mother got leukemia. Was that the country where they all wore clogs? Lexie pictured the mother, bald and clog-dancing sadly in some tulips. Wearing a chemo turban. But Google said tulips and clogs were Dutch—a country with dams they called dikes, which a boy once put his finger in. No joke. They had a legend about it. People rode bicycles. And drove clown cars.
Holland looked lame on Google, like a creepy fairy tale with all the tulips and windmills, but Sweden seemed normal. And friendly. Probably had to be, so people would keep living there when it was shit-cold all the time.
Jem told her the au pair thing would be a sweet deal. The house was killer, the food was free, and how much work could a new baby be? She’d babysat a couple of babies. They didn’t do much for the first four months, basically lay there. Sometimes crying. When you picked them up, you had to support their heads. Their necks were rubbery. If
you didn’t hold up the heads they could roll back. And then what? Would the babies strangulate? She looked it up. Enh. Didn’t happen that much. Their deal was sleep, cry, drink milk, shit. The baby shit barely even smelled bad, people said. Looked like mustard.
After that she figured she’d cut out anyway, get her own place. Six months max. When babies turned six months old they started to do stuff. She didn’t want to be around for that.
He said to tell them, when she called to set up the interview, that she had trouble at home. Which was true: a perv stepfather counted as trouble. Jem’s dad’s new wife would give her points for that. Like, she’d count as help for the baby, but also count as charity. Fine. The wife was a ditz but pretty nice, said Jem, and also might have come from a sketchy background, since his dad had picked her up in a strip club. He said to act innocent and mega-sincere, but tell them she’d helped to raise her brothers.
And she had, if stepbrothers counted. Who were older than you and ran a pretty decent-sized meth business. A few times she’d had to slap them down. That counted as helping to raise, didn’t it? She’d taught them a lesson or two.
She wanted to be an actress, so act, said Jem. You dream of being a theater major. Maybe UCLA. It’s hypothetical, said Jem. He used big words.
His grandma was a risk factor. He said she used to be a professor, was perceptive and could smell bullshit. Also, don’t fuck with her, he said. He was fond of the old lady. I want her taken care of, he said. With her, don’t be fake Christian, she’s Jewish, well, kind of, but she was raised by some kind of missionaries so she’ll see through it. Tell her about your trashy family. I mean, don’t mention the Internet sex biz, that being how we met and shit, but other than that, just try to be a straight shooter. She won’t mind the white-trash part, as long as you’re smart and not rude. She likes an edge but she really doesn’t like rudeness. Treat her with respect, she’s had a hard life. Her whole family died in the Holocaust when she was six.
