The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  “Why would he teach at a law school?”

  “Because he’s a lawyer.”

  “Cam would never be a lawyer,” I declared.

  “Read it yourself,” she said. “He’s a tax attorney in Seattle.”

  FOR HIS FIRST-EVER photo project, my brother had stolen pictures from Mert’s closet box and photocopied them. He cut three different versions of our sister (laughing on the sunporch, frowning in the tree house, eating a slice of sugar cake) and glued them on a page. Photocopied again. Again cut them, this time chopping the sisters into halves and arranging them on a new page. Again copied.

  The result was, to him, mesmerizing.

  He bought a frame at the drugstore. He went to Belfry Street and showed it to Cam, who said too quickly: “That’s really good.” Riley’s snake photograph was already on a nail in the red hall; he hoped we might want to hang this up, too. When I came home, he waited for me to notice what was leaning on the mantel of the not-working fireplace. I brushed the rabbit off the couch so I could lie down. Finally Riley pointed and said, “Do you like it?” and I looked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but it’s kind of—obvious? Death, fragmentation, distortion, blah blah blew. I get it, but I don’t want to get it so easily, you know?”

  Cam was nicer. He paid attention. On Sundays at the diner he would instruct the waitress: “This one will have the rye toast, please!” and Riley loved the pun. On the bed Cam asked, “Do you have a crush on anyone?” and Riley, facedown on black sateen, mumbled no.

  “Oh, come on, there must be somebody. In your grade? Any cute girls?”

  Riley rolled over onto his back. “No, not really.”

  “Aha!” Cam lit a cigarette, shook the match. “Not really means yes.”

  “Oh, no, I meant not really as in there aren’t really any cute girls at…”

  “Get your hand off your mouth!” He pulled Riley’s fingers away. “Now what’d you say?”

  “I don’t like anyone,” my brother said.

  BEFORE DIALING HIS number I imagined Geck, golden mane and dents in his cheeks, belly astrain against polyester loungewear. He’d probably left his meeting early tonight. His mother went to the bother of cooking supper, the least he could do was not make them wait to eat it! When he limped in, she would ask her usual How was it, sweetie? and he would answer his usual Same. Worse, he might add, enraged by how relieved she looked.

  He would reach the spaghetti bowl down from its shelf, lay out three tomato place mats, a good son.

  The bowl he had left for her several months ago had not been a good-son bowl. The guest bathroom packed to its porcelain gills, brimming with at least four sits’ worth of runny dump he’d been too dodge-sick to bother to flush—imagine her delight. It was possible she had not discovered the diarrhea until days after they’d driven him to Canterbury, by which time the stink—well, yeah. She’d never said one word. She would visit him on Sundays with foil-covered puddings and crisps. These he had chosen not to share with the other patients.

  “Supper in five minutes!” his mother said, and he sat up with effort, punching off the blanket. His leg was killing. Where was the penis cane? He’d need it soon. He was forty on a flowered couch.

  They had just hit the table, napkins lapped, spoon driven into the pile of red-sauced spaghetti, when the phone rang.

  “Telemarketers,” his mother said dejectedly.

  “Leave it go,” his father said. “Those criminals need to learn you don’t interrupt people while they’re eating.”

  Geck rose, shaking out his stiff knee. “Someone could’ve died,” he pointed out.

  “Oh, Jonathan…”

  “Hospitals notify day and night. Speak!” he crooned into the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Quinn?”

  “Am I interrupting anything?”

  “Shit no,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I wanted to tell you something,” I said.

  “What, that you can’t curtail your sexual daydreams of me?”

  “Shut up. It’s Cam. He’s back.”

  “IF THE PRESIDENT had died from the bullet, would you have cried?”

  “Cheered.”

  “I wouldn’t cry either,” said the youngest, “but I don’t think he should be dead, maybe.”

  “Quinn’s just saying that,” said the middle, “because Mert and Fod hate the president—she doesn’t know crap about him.”

  “Are you kidding me,” said the oldest, “I read the newspaper!”

  “CRAZY-TOWN,” GECK AGREED. “Are you going to call him?”

  “What? No.”

  “We could organize a reunion.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Wull, I mean, why not? Have a few cold ones; reminisce.”

  “The terms on which we parted,” I reminded him, “were not happy terms.”

  “He might’ve forgotten by now.”

  “Geck, he lost every single finger on his left hand.”

  “So? He’s had time to get used to it. Maybe his nickname is Fisty.”

  Why had I gone looking for water in the driest of wells?

  “THE IRONY OF it,” our father said. “The fucking irony.” We watched the moving men tie blankets around the dining-room table. The August sky was hard white. I kept my hands in my pockets. “Moving into the city to get—” But Fod didn’t say safer because that wasn’t really the right word. We were moving to get away from the house, from the neighborhood. My parents had chosen Edinburgh Lane in the first place because the public schools were better out there; now nobody gave a crap about schools. When Riley asked, “Where am I going to go?” Mert whispered, “That’s not important right now!”

  But it was to Riley. And to me, though I didn’t say, because it was embarrassing to worry about a new school when you were as old as tenth grade. Coyote could worry, because he was only starting sixth. He insisted: “What school will I go to?”

  “I have no idea,” Mert said.

  “When will you have an idea?”

  “Goddammit,” she said, “I don’t know.”

  “But next month is September.”

  “Riley, this isn’t the time, it really isn’t—”

  “When will be the time, Mert?”

  I admired him.

  On our second morning at Observatory Place, Riley licked me awake. “Come down,” he whispered, tugging my wet ear. In the front room was a television more massive than any of my friends had. We stood shocked. The house law had always been none whatsoever. Rots the gray matter, Fod said, and Mert said, You have better things to do with your lives.

  “Now if a plane falls into the river we won’t have to go next door,” Riley pointed out.

  I was thinking only of the music channel—videos after parents asleep—

  “Squidlings, this is not going to be a free-for-all,” Mert announced at breakfast in her most clenched voice. “There will be limits, but…” She looked at Fod.

  “We thought it might help everyone relax,” he explained.

  It was a bigger basement than Edinburgh Lane’s, though the house itself was smaller because now we were four. I took the longest knife from the wood block and went down to slice the top box. I wanted my sister’s notebooks, but this one had little shirts and jellies and ankle-zip britches. Where you are going, clothes won’t help. They smelled like nothing, least of all trees. She’d had the better nose and I the better ears (or the worse, because in their acuteness they bothered me more). When she whispered That man smells bad she did not mean his odor, but that he did evils. She could smell in a yard if a cat’s bones were buried there. She could smell at a bedroom door if the person who slept within had good dreams or sad. From the library she checked out a history of scent. It was once believed, she copied into her notebook, illness could be detected from how a person smelled—that diabetes smelled of sugar; measles of freshly plucked feathers; the plague of
mellow apples; inflamed kidneys of ammonia. Yellow fever smells of the butcher shop! she sang in the kitchen, watching Mert pare white rinds off pink meat.

  “WILL MY BREASTS be bigger than yours?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “When I’m a teen,” Mink’s daughter explained.

  “Only time will tell,” I said.

  “Yours are really small.”

  I’d liked her better before she learned to speak.

  “Small but fierce!” I said.

  Meli squinted. “How can a breast be fierce? I think mine will be big since my mom’s are. Do you think I should get a bra?”

  “You’re eight.”

  “A girl in my class has a training.”

  I laughed. “What would it be holding up on you?”

  “You wear one,” she said.

  “I need to go ask your mother something.”

  I was sitting on the toilet when Mink wrenched the bath taps, groped for a towel.

  “What the eff,” she said. “Why are you in here?”

  “She was insulting me.”

  Mink hollered toward the door: “We need to leave in five minutes, okay?”

  A faint yell of assent.

  She patted the towel up between her thighs. The summer I caught the glingles from Lad, Mink had been ready with instructions. It wasn’t a big deal, she had explained, if you cleaned downstairs with a medicated soap.

  “Insulting you?”

  “No, nothing. I just came in to say hello.”

  She stared into the cloudy mirror, fingering her forehead. “I have new wrinkles.”

  “Don’t be a cliché,” I said.

  “That line was not there before.”

  “Don’t be a wife-magazine article.”

  “Oh, like you never worry about it? I read about this eye cream,” she went on, “that naturally unclenches the skin so that it lets go of each wrinkle—but it’s sixty-five dollars a jar. I have to buy her summer clothes soon, she’s growing out of everything. She wants to go to sleepaway camp because her two best friends are. That’s not going to happen, let me assure you. Two minutes!” she shouted.

  No response.

  “Did you hear me, Meli?”

  No response.

  Mink slapped on lotion. “Of course you worry about it.”

  “I don’t know where my fisher boots are,” the girl complained through the door.

  “Then wear your sneakers.”

  “I need my fisher boots.”

  “You don’t need them, you want them. Different.”

  “Same!” she whined.

  “The car is leaving,” Mink said, “in one minute.”

  How was Mink going to be ready in one minute?

  “Fine then I’m staying here.”

  “Put your fucking sneakers on!” yelled Mink.

  In the truck, wipers churning, Meli between us blinked fast against her tears. Her lashes were tasselly. “Why’s it raining again?”

  “Because that’s what it does,” Mink said.

  “But why?”

  “Because the sky grasshoppers are taking their bath.”

  On the radio they were speculating about the Democrats’ chances, the election mere months away, time at last to evict from the White House its death-happy emperor.

  Meli reached for the dial.

  “Wait,” Mink said, “I want to hear this.”

  “But it’s boring.”

  “It’s important, because we have a bad situation on our hands.”

  “We do?”

  “Remember we’ve talked about the war, and how so many people in the Middle East are dying—”

  “Yeah I know but Mrs. Pargiter says we had to do it to topple the madman.”

  Mink’s foot banged the brake.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  “She said the invasion of Iraq was good?”

  “I don’t know,” Meli said carefully.

  “Her teacher supports the war,” Mink said to me. “That’s fantastic.”

  Meli screeched, “Don’t tell her I told you, she’ll be mad at me, okay? Okay, Mom?”

  “I won’t, bee.”

  Mink’s forehead-prodding vanity was understandable. Earned. In the day, she had been gorgeous in a way that made guys do extreme things. She’d once had a boyfriend who kept three of her pubic hairs in his pocket watch—a nod, only half jesting, to the medieval custom where a knight wore his lady’s private locks into battle, a way to maintain the discretion required by courtly love—and Mink had liked that he did this, although when he first plucked and set aside the hairs she thought it was weird, didn’t know him well enough yet to trust that he wasn’t one of those guys who run used-panty mail-order businesses out of their basements. Sometimes, she told me later, they’d be sitting around with a bunch of people and he would take the watch from his pocket, rub it with his thumb, and smile at her.

  I was not across-the-room beautiful. Never had I felt the way Mink had been able to feel on a regular basis: that your face and body forced eyes to go in a particular direction. A conjuring act, to have your shell be so arresting that all motion in other people was halted. I used to get furious—not at Mink, because it wasn’t her fault, but at the fact that a girl’s best weapon was her casing. Rare to run across one who played an instrument well enough to be noticed for the playing and not for how cute she looked while playing it. Voices, yes, could astonish—you’d find girl singers who used their vocal cords for paranormal purposes—but the cords were in their bodies; they were not foreign objects to be mastered. And for every hundred boys who played like crap, not masterly at all, there was a boy you could point to and say He has powers, whereas you could hardly ever point to a girl.

  We licked soft-serve cones, supervising Meli’s playground moves. “So he hasn’t gotten in touch with you,” I said.

  “For the third time, no. And I doubt he will. It’s already the middle of the semester.” Mink yawned and tongued ice cream off her lower lip. She was able to switch her mind entirely to NOW. Give every inch of attention to her daughter’s teacher, to a cone of ice cream, to refilling glasses of beer. For Mink, it seemed, there was no past. No guilt.

  “And then in May or June he’ll just, what, go back to Seattle? Just like that?”

  “What else would he do?” she said.

  DEAR CAM,

  We wonder do you dye your hair because you look like you would naturally have lighter hair and you and Mink would make a great baby we think a Pure baby whereas the singer looks like a JEW. We know it is difficult to discuss these matters in the current climate of Pro-Semitism in this country but we feel you should know that you and Mink have our unwavering support and we hope that you will issue a child who can carry on the vital work of our Race. We are disappointed that you would play music with a JEW (or possibly two JEWS, we are not sure of the origins of the guitar player) so you would have our support in striking out on your own with Mink and forming a group which is more Pure. If you are interested in receiving additional information in addition to the literature we have enclosed, please contact us.

  Yours in Struggle,

  The Youth Corps of the

  American Alliance for the

  Preservation of Aryan Culture

  YOU WERE A shipwrecked sailor. A plague had fallen upon your boat, and your sick mates, believing the sea was green fields, had been throwing themselves overboard. Water, water, everywhere. The delirious captain had just set the deck on fire and lain down screaming in the blaze. You, untouched by malady, floated alone on a life raft.

  One by one the creatures arrived: a trio of dolphins, a baby octopus, a circling shark, a vulture dripping bits of illness from its beak. And one by one the hurdles: lightning, hailstorm, tidal wave. A computerized voice intoned: Slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout, the death-fires danced at night; the water, like a witch’s oils, burnt green, and blue, and white.

  The joystick wasn’t very go
od for swimming with, or ducking lightning, or plucking the pearl from its shell, which made it a maddening game—all this water and monster and weather and so little influence upon them. I was playing badly, drowned in the first round and eaten by a squid in the second.

  COLD RAIN AND we have no place as usual to be until tonight so we take our time finding breakfast wandering 5mph round cancergarden of a town nobody can agree on where. If I eat any more grease I will die of bad skin! is mantra of M who’s got skin of Ukrainian supermodel and G keeps bitching he has no $ because we’re not paying him enough and finally C who doesn’t ever yell yells We never said we’d pay you so shut the fuck up!

  Finally we end up at some egg place econo enough for G and I wait for C to slide in beside me but he stands there until only seat left is way on other side of booth then digs in about sloppiness last night. We can’t even order b/c he’s droning on about this and that like, such as, M why do you keep going on the one instead of the two in Northern Direction? and G stop growing your fucking hair, the solo in Floors is way too long! and nobody says anything because when he gets hatey there is no stopping him (so far, so usual) but then knives come for me: you sounded like you were choking last night, why aren’t you drinking lemon, how can we even play if you sound like that? etc etc etc and M says I think you’re being unfair which sends C on fresh roll—You always defend her why is that? Coalition of vaginas? —which pisses M off and she snipes at the waitress Where’s our fucking ashtray? and I see clumps of fresh snot shot onto our breakfasts immediately before serving.

  I’D SEEN A darkness on my underwear the night before, and hoped it was only from dinner. Asparagus made your pee smell so maybe it stained your underwear too. In the morning I couldn’t pretend it was a vegetable’s fault because the blood was so bright—a metal red on the sheet in the shape of a short, thick worm. Oh no oh no oh no. A burnt smell plugged my throat. Oh no. Her crusty eyes opened: See? and her voice said, The uterus is a pouch! and it said, A bullet is pennies in your mouth and a bullet tears flesh with the ease of a—I ripped the sheet from the bed, balled it, saw the worm had soaked through to the mattress pad so pried the pad off as well. The mattress showed a vague brownishness, hardly noticeable, but I flipped it over. Hid the sheet and mattress pad under the bed and tied a sweater around my waist. In the kitchen Mert asked what the trash bag was for and I said, A project. See? See? I kept the bag of stained cotton in my closet for three days until it was trash night, and waited until Fod had dragged the laden can to the curb before running out with my secret bag and stowing it at the very bottom, under the grinds and shells.