Heart-Breaker

by Claudia Dey

  He reaches behind him. Finds the sample-size bottles of Old Spice, Drakkar Noir, lights a cigarette, blows smoke rings, and then looks at me. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  * * *

  DEBRA MARIE PARKS her truck beside Traps’s truck, which means she parks on our front yard. I watch her open the driver’s side door and step down from it. She is wearing my mother’s low blue heels. She does not walk so much as shuffle. She glances up to my bedroom window. I pull the curtain closed.

  I remember my mother giving the shoes to Debra Marie at our party. This was five years ago. I was ten, and when I was falling asleep that night, I asked my mother why she gave away her second pair of good shoes to Debra Marie Linklater. They didn’t even really fit her. My mother had such narrow feet, and Debra Marie’s were a different shape altogether. “I could tell she liked them,” my mother said. When she spoke, my mother smelled like alcohol and cigarette smoke. She put her fingertips on my back and she drew things. She leaned over me and brushed my hair away from my ear, moved it to one side and whispered, “I don’t think she has been given very much. Without people expecting something in return.” I wanted my mother to stay. And she did. In her party dress, her white heels. She lay down beside me and pulled me close. The hallway light was on, and I could hear the music downstairs. The adults’ laughter came up in waves. It sounded like they were putting on a play. They all knew what would happen next, how it would end. All of them were together in the same world for a night. All of them except my mother.

  Debra Marie steps over my mother’s coat and into our living room. Traps moves to kiss Debra Marie’s cheek. It lands on her chin. She keeps her shoes and coat on and holds a hand to her mouth as I come down the stairs.

  I still have the hunting glasses on. I wear my mother’s DAY OFF sweatshirt and her tan pantyhose. My hair is parted deeply to the right, and on the left I have a single braid. It hangs down to my hipbone, and only ten steps away, just upstairs in my bedroom—seventy square feet, color scheme is black and white—I have over one thousand dollars stored in my disease book between (loose translations) “Sad Lower Quarter Derangement” and “Lust of the Neck Skin.” Someone get me a Camaro. Sign me to the teen channel. Get me my own show. Teen Hustler. Teen Fainter. Someone get me a dark room with a mattress in it and a deadbolt on the door. I am so tired. Fainting does not equal sleep. I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Someone said this once.

  “Hey, Debra Marie.” I lift a hand, a weak, starved wave. “Hi.”

  “Hello, Pony.”

  “How’s tricks?”

  “Have mercy.”

  “I will. I will totally have mercy.”

  It is then that I see, for the first time, what has become of the bungalow. With Debra Marie Linklater in it. Her straight spine, her powdered face. Her angry, gray eyes. Knives, bowls, and plates are piled high on the counters. Cupboards strain from their hinges. Some of the cupboard doors have fallen to the floor. Spilled dog food. Black bedcovers. Black towels. To walk from room to room is to kick things out of the way. “Debra Marie,” my father greets her as he hurries past her to the front door. It is then that I see what has become of The Heavy. His bloodshot eyes, his chapped lips, his densely haired neck. Agony, with its high pitch, having set into and lined his skin. “Oh Heav,” she says, looking after him as he exits our house and gets into Traps’s truck. “Heav,” she says to herself when he is gone, her eyes now drained of anger. I have never heard anyone else shorten my father’s name. Only my mother. “Heav, short for Heaven,” she loves to say. “Heaven.”

  * * *

  AFTER SHE CRASHED our truck, my father confronted my mother a second time.

  “Were you trying to kill yourself?”

  “No, Heav.”

  “Were you trying to kill yourself?”

  “I said no.”

  “Because it looks to the people of the territory like you were trying to kill yourself.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “First the scene at final resting. Now, this. Maybe you were trying to kill yourself.”

  “I just, I needed a break.”

  “So you drove into a tree.”

  “Yes, but not hard enough to kill myself.”

  “We’ll need to get a new truck. Is that what you wanted, a new truck?”

  “No.”

  “You wanted to go to Fully Loaded?”

  “No.”

  “Is there something happening between you and Traps?”

  “Traps?” My mother’s voice was spiked with hate. I had never heard it like that. “If you track my movements, if you climb your ladder and stand on your platform, and you stalk me, you will see I have not been to the truck lot for some time.”

  “You know I hate to hunt, Billie Jean.”

  I listened from the hallway. There was a long silence, and I could tell my father had another question, but felt he couldn’t ask it. I moved to stand in the half-open doorway. My father was looking from my mother to the dog, like he expected the dog to speak. He pushed the dog off their bed, and he cleaned my mother’s bandage. I watched my father stanch the bleeding and dress the wound. The dog sat with her attentions on my mother. She would have none of The Heavy when my mother was in the room. Even though my father credits the dog with saving his life. I had only minutes left, The Heavy told me, and she stayed by my side and she spoke to me. The dog wouldn’t let me go, Pony. She made me hang on. She’s a nurse. She’s a killer.

  * * *

  TWO MONTHS BEFORE she crashed our truck, I could see my mother was compensating for some new fragility. Surely, this was temporary, I told myself. Nothing of my mother’s nature. My mother with her hard grip, her athlete’s grip that had broken in two a frozen side of caribou. But, even though she still dressed and moved with purpose around me and toward me, I could feel her withdrawing.

  I watched her as she went through her days, putting on her gold hoop earrings, taking blood at the Banquet Hall, climbing into our truck, stepping down from it, carrying the stew from the stove to the table, carrying the pot from the table to the sink, but it was as if she was filled with small hurts. And, she was preoccupied. Dishes would crash to the floor. She developed a problem with time. She would iron a pair of The Heavy’s jeans for an entire afternoon. Braid my hair for an entire morning. Once, she stood in the middle of our kitchen holding a dish towel that was on fire. I took out the disease book from the Lending Library but could find nothing. My mother’s ailment was internal. Undocumented. I would have to track it.

  I started to lie under my mother’s bed. I had at least three inches above me, and as she thinned, and I thinned, four. She had no idea I was there. Swimming with her in the reservoir had taught me to control my breath. The dog knew I was there, but she allowed it. Did not nose around. Did not make a sound. She had watched my birth, watched my childhood. I guess this made for some kind of loyalty.

  “If I had to choose between a man and a bear, being in a confined space with one of them, I would choose a bear.” Who was my mother talking to? Shona Lee? I would *69 the number later. “I fear if a man walked onto the property, he would murder me. Murdered women are found in wooded areas”—she laughed a contained laugh, not the laugh I knew—“I am living in nothing but a wooded area.” She was still in her pale blue workdress. I could see it falling over the side of the mattress.

  I missed the sound of my mother’s voice. Her low voice. Her pronunciation was just slightly off mine. Especially when she was tired.

  My mother told me when I was a baby, she used to pace the upstairs hallway with me in her arms for hours. Then she would pace the whole house. Up and down the stairs, into the living room, my bedroom, her bedroom, the bathroom, and back along the hallway. She could not get me to sleep. I didn’t cry and fuss; that was not it. I was a passionate baby, my mother said. Social. I just wanted
her company. Didn’t want to miss a moment. And this made it so difficult for me to fall asleep. Finally, one night—she was almost hallucinating, she said, she thought she was going to die, just die if I didn’t close my eyes—my mother put the telephone receiver to my ear. She said the dial tone calmed me immediately. It put me right to sleep. She described the dial tone as eternity. Nothing happens there, Pony. You won’t miss anything. For the first few years of my life, my mother said she, The Heavy, and I slept on top of their black bedcovers with the telephone receiver between us.

  “What is going to get me? Exactly.” My mother spoke quickly, and then she fell quiet. “What is going to get me.” I waited for her to hang up. And then I remembered the bedroom telephone was broken. The Heavy had torn it from the wall and ripped it apart with his bare hands.

  * * *

  FOUR THINGS shortly before 11:00 A.M.:

  1. It was Traps’s number that was the last to call when The Heavy tore the phone from the wall.

  2. Now it is in pieces on our front porch beside the broken refrigerator and the hand-painted 88 sign on chipboard.

  3. My mother was speaking to the dog.

  4. And it was the dog my mother heard speaking to her.

  * * *

  DEBRA MARIE OPENS our living room window, then clears an area for herself on our couch, and sits with her outerwear folded on her lap. Her name, DEBRA, at her neck, in rust. She is in her pale yellow workdress, a black leather fanny pack at her waist. I know it is full of tape and gauze. She must be due later at the Banquet Hall. She puts her outerwear back on. I find my mother’s red ski jacket and sit beside her.

  “Traps thought it would be best if I stay here with you.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “Necessary,” she says, and she looks ahead, not to me, her breath cutting through the frost.

  I know Debra Marie thinks disorder is a weakness in character. A mess is weakness. Even a stain on a dress. A run in a stocking. I know she parts the world into the weak and the strong. I know she is trying to place me. To place us, the Fontaines. “You cannot imagine how much cleaning I have already done today, Pony Darlene,” she says, “and how much I still have left to do.” Her hands are raw. They rest on her knees. I can see the edge of her face powder, at her hairline, where she left off this morning. DEBRA. Twenty years of Traps Linklater. Two mysteriously beautiful children. And now only one. A minus sign for Debra Marie. The most unbearable minus sign.

  After her youngest died, I would see Debra Marie in town. Parking in front of the Banquet Hall, getting takeout at Home of the Beef Candy. You good? You good? I know a human heartbeat has an irregular rhythm, and a sick heartbeat a regular one. Debra Marie’s sick heart. Her dull, regular heart. In our living room with the sun between us, I consider touching Debra Marie.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Debra Marie. “I’m so sorry.”

  My eyes glass over. And then I start to hyperventilate like I do in my sleep. And Coach tells me to calm down. Wipe your face on your sleeve. Chin the fuck up. Okay, okay. Love does hurt. Debra Marie does not stroke my back. Does not pull me close. Does not do any of the stuff my mother would.

  Instead, she springs from the couch. She walks over our things like she has conquered them. Her hands to the walls to steady herself. When she finds the living room phone, she wipes it down with the cuff of her outerwear and starts dialing. “Mercy.” I hear her use this word over and over, call after call, her mouth against the receiver, and then thinking better of it, mouth pulled away, “We have to help. Something has gone very wrong here.” As if I am not animate on the couch, and cannot hear her. “The house reveals the woman,” Debra Marie goes on, cupping the receiver. Then in a sharp whisper, “She must have been very disturbed when she left it.”

  Debra Marie hangs up the phone and turns her wild attentions on me. She has a plan. She is executing her plan. She is plan oriented, fiercely so, and I will comply.

  “Settle yourself there in front of the television.”

  “I already totally am.”

  And Debra Marie flicks it on, and I see sex clearly, graphically and professionally lit for the first time. “What can I say, I am hot for dick.” My mother and I had watched The Heavy angle the antenna on our roof, like all the territory men, move it this way and that, while we kept an eye on the television through our living room window and would shout when he got it right and run back in to our night soaps, and let The Heavy get down from the roof on his own.

  I did not know we got the dick channel. I did not know bungalow 88 had that kind of reception. Then I remember Traps slept on the couch last night. “All I can think about is dick. Dick gives me a fever.” The woman in the intense outfit goes on about dick to the man, shined with oil, standing over it. “Have mercy. Where’s your mercy?” And Debra Marie searches the room as if God too dwells here, then she shuffles in front of the dick, waving her hands, fanning her outerwear, dropping a blanket over the television, finding the socket and unplugging it, but not before I feel I am really starting to understand something about men and women and dogs and myself.

  * * *

  “BLACK TRUCK, white dog, woman driver.” The Delivery Man reviewed my question, draped his bar-fight hands over his jean zipper. “Hmm. Let me think on that one.” And then his hand and its environs stiffened, and he looked at me with eyes that said, I’m dying, and I said, “Ew.” No. No way. I was not going to lose my virginity to the Delivery Man. That would close my very small window once and for all. Pregnant, married, pastel dress. Oh wait. I could do the Mother Trick. Oh wait. No mother to do it with.

  * * *

  “YOU HAVE NEVER seen anything like it.” Debra Marie makes her last call. “Not even on that show, you know the one. The hoarder one. Where they found the old sister and the old brother. The house was so crowded with things they couldn’t even fall to their deaths. They had pianos and boats in the house, shoes of every size. To get from room to room, they had made tunnels. The sister was found sitting in a chair. The brother was stranded in one of the tunnels. The tunnel had collapsed on top of him. Beside him there was a tray of food. The sister was waiting for her dinner, and the brother was bringing it to her. It took a full month to find the body of the brother in the tunnel. A full month even though the brother and sister, when they died, were only a few feet apart.”

  I want a brother who brings me dinner.

  I want a brother I can die with.

  The last Fontaines.

  * * *

  RUSHED—WAS SHE IN a panic?—my mother had worn her waterproof makeup to the burial of Debra Marie’s baby. In the graveyard, no mascara spilled down her face. All around us, the territory women fell to the ground. The men got them to their feet and stood behind them, held them up. Riding shotgun to the Banquet Hall, they called my mother heartless. A woman with no heart, the women sobbed, and they smoked with their windows rolled down, wind thrashing their trucks. Then at the Banquet Hall, my mother broke the territory rules; she made a scene in front of the portrait, and she continued to make the scene when her turn with the black square ended and the next territory mourner stood before it. Debra Marie. Noble Debra Marie, still as a headstone. The Heavy had to drag my mother away from the black square, her large dark dress folded in his arm muscles. She had animals coming from her throat. “Let’s go, Pony,” he said to me. “Now.” The women of the territory watched us leave. They watched my mother’s unbeaten face with their electric blue ones.

  “What are you staring at?” I yelled at them. “She’s sad! You’re sad! What’s your fucking problem?”

  “Enough,” The Heavy said, not raising his voice, and he urged me then pushed me out of the Banquet Hall and into our truck, and we drove home in silence, and that was the moment my mother slipped away from us, from me.

  Soon after, my mother stopped sleeping at night and sl
ept only during the day.

  “You’re all turned around,” The Heavy said to her.

  “Daylight is obscene,” my mother said back.

  And I tried to see how daylight had become that for her. She used to attack a mess, but she had stopped being able to do things in the daylight. She would do her circuit, scanning the rooms, but not do anything about what she saw. If a room needed straightening or a meal needed to be made, she couldn’t do it. When The Heavy asked, “Why?” she said searchingly, “I don’t know.” Then she put her hand on the hot stove top and said, “See, nothing.” She pulled a knife from the drawer and put it through the skin between her thumb and first finger. “See, nothing.” She pulled at her hair. “See, nothing.” And hit herself in the face.

  “My wife has a disease.” The Heavy bent his large body forward and spoke quietly into the living room telephone.

  “You had better tell her that,” One Hundred said gently. And The Heavy hung up, stared into our empty fridge, his face held by the rectangle of light, and then he ripped the door off it.

  “She is lost,” he tried again with One Hundred. The next day One Hundred painted a large 88 on chipboard and dropped it off on our front porch, beside the broken fridge and the partial telephone. She left a casserole, and with it, a note that read, To help your Billie Jean find home.

  * * *

  NIGHT BECAME my mother’s time. She could wander. Night didn’t ask anything of her. It did not shame her. I was under my black bedcovers, and The Heavy was under his. The house was dark. There was nothing to be done to it. I would hear her bedroom door open, her quick footsteps on the carpet, and then she would do her circuit: down the stairs, around the kitchen, into the living room, into the basement, and back up the stairs. The sound of her walking helped me fall back asleep. With every circuit, her footsteps slowed. And then I would wake up scared because she would be standing above me, her hands on my chest, checking my breathing. Or sometimes, just her face so close to mine.