The Blurry Years

by Eleanor Kriseman

  WHO WE ARE TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit dedicated to reaffirming the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.

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  COPYRIGHT→ © 2018 BY ELEANOR KRISEMAN

  ISBN→ 978-1-937512-71-2

  Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

  SOME RECOMMENDED LOCATIONS FOR READING THE BLURRY YEARS: Curled up in the window seat of a cross-country flight; at a quiet bar on a weekday afternoon; on the couch in an apartment you’re housesitting after you’ve brought in the mail and watered the plants; in the passenger seat of a sandy car with your feet on the dashboard while someone you love enough to be quiet with is driving you home; pretty much anywhere because books are portable and the perfect technology!

  ANYTHING ELSE? Unfortunately, yes. Do not copy this book—with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews—without the written permission of the publisher. WE MUST ALSO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.

  —from Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  01

  We could hear them in the walls before we saw them. My mom said she thought it might be mice. We were eating dinner in bed. We would have eaten dinner in the kitchen but the bedroom was sort of the kitchen too, and anyway we didn’t have a dinner table. “Mice,” my mom said. “Shit.”

  I spilled my little cup of spaghetti on the bed. I quickly piled the noodles back into the cup but it was too late. The oil from the margarine left a smear on the sheets. “I just did laundry,” my mom said, but she only sounded distracted, not angry.

  “What are we gonna do?” I asked her. She shrugged her shoulders. Her mouth was full of pasta. She swallowed. I watched her swallow, watched it go down her throat. I couldn’t stop watching her. “I don’t know,” she said. “Ask ’em to leave?” I didn’t want to finish my pasta because it had sheet crumbs and little specks on it from when I spilled. My mom said to finish it or I’d have it for breakfast so I just took it to the sink and rinsed it off instead. It was cold but it wasn’t dirty anymore.

  The chirping started to keep us up at night. At first I was scared, but then I didn’t care because it made me feel cozy. Like we had all the luck, getting to be there together under the blankets, warm and soft while they were stuck scrambling inside the walls. I traced the letters mice on my mom’s back, hoping she’d wake up, but she didn’t. So I just listened. “They’re in there; we’re out here. We are warm and sleepy,” I whispered to nobody. I wanted her to wake up but I didn’t because I knew she was working the opening shift and she’d be mad.

  The noise started to wake both of us up. We stirred when they got real loud, and just as we were drifting back to sleep they’d start dancing and scrabbling in the walls again. “The super won’t answer his phone,” my mom said to no one. I was doing pigtail braids in the mirror, even though we were already late for school.

  My mom was at the counter, making a sandwich for my lunch. “Fuck,” she said. “They got into the bread.” She held up the bag so I could see from my spot in front of the mirror. There was a big hole in the side, and teeth marks had stretched and spotted the logo. She wrapped turkey slices around cheese slices instead, and poked them with toothpicks to make them stay.

  That night we stayed up until dawn, waiting to catch them in the act. “Sit real still,” my mom said. “I want to know what we’re dealing with.” She was pretending like there were maybe just a couple of them, but I was guessing more. We heard them but we still didn’t see them and we fell asleep slumped against the wall. In the morning our backs were aching and there was cereal spilling from a hole in the bottom of the box of Fruity O’s. I scooped a handful off the top before I threw the rest away. “Keep everything in the fridge from now on,” my mom said.

  I walked home through the alleys like I did when I wanted to find things. I was good at finding things. My mom called me the treasure queen. Every day on my way home from school I found things. That was how we had the tape deck and the guitar case with the smooth velvet insides that I couldn’t help stroking every time I opened it. I found heavier things too but I couldn’t take them home by myself.

  This time I was looking to build some traps, or maybe some weapons. I pulled at some old pots that were fine except for the enamel was scraped off the insides. I found some rope and a bungee cord that was maybe not garbage, holding two trashcans together, but I thought we probably needed it more. I picked up sticks to test them—good sticks were hard to find, the ones that were straight and thin enough to bend but thick enough not to break, but I found them.

  When I got home, my mom’s friend Bruce was there. Sometimes he brought me treats, like colored pencils or packs of Juicy Fruit, so I liked him. Bruce was bent over, looking at the place where the walls met the floor. “I think this is where they’re coming out,” he said. My mom was leaning over too, and she had her hand on his back. I dumped my treasures on the floor, and the pots clanged as they fell. “I’m building traps,” I said. “Or maybe weapons. I haven’t decided yet.”

  Bruce smiled. “I think I can take care of this,” he said. I sat in the far corner with the knives and the toolkit and some duct tape while Bruce finished plugging up the hole in the wall. “That should do it,” he said. “They’ll go out the way they came in; they’re too smart to die in there.” He gave my mom a long kiss on the mouth and told her to call him if she needed to. I could hear him clomping down the stairs in his work boots. I was deciding what to use as bait. I decided on cereal because they’d eaten it before.

  My mom didn’t say anything when I set up the traps on the kitchen counter that evening, but when she saw what I was taking to bed with us, she said, “No way. You’ll kill us all with those—what are those things? Were those the kitchen knives?” I was proud of my weapon. I waved it around like a wand. In the end she said I could keep it as long as I put it on the floor instead of under my pillow. We hadn’t washed the sheets yet and my face was resting on the stain from my pasta. It was too dark to see but I could still smell it, salty and oily.

  Soon we could hear them, scrabbling and squeaking. We stayed still. We heard tiny scratches coming from inside the oven and the cabinets on the other side of the curtain. Then a pot clattered on the counter and I jumped up, grabbing my weapon from the side of
the bed. My mom sat up, half-asleep. “What is going on?” she asked. I darted over to the counter and she followed me.

  They were shimmering in the colored glow from the traffic lights on the corner, silver and sleek, changing hues as the light switched from yellow to red to green and back again. One was on the counter. Another one peeked out from behind the oven. A little one was catching drips from the faucet in the sink. Their eyes were dots of black paint; their whiskers were fishing line. I wanted to rub their ears but I was frozen, knife raised high in the air. They were shivering. I moved closer, just to look, and they scattered, disappearing into the darkness. My mom put her hands on my shoulders. “I’ll call Bruce again in the morning,” she said, and led me back to bed.

  When I got home from school the next day, the apartment was covered in glue traps. My mom’s eyes were bright and darting. Her cheeks were flushed, a perfect pink. She was beautiful. “It’s not going to be pretty, these next couple of days,” she said. “But we’re going to win this battle.” I didn’t really want to win anymore. I’d untaped my weapon, put the knives back in the kitchen drawer. It was something about how little they were, and how soft their fur had looked. And how they were maybe one big family, lots of little brothers and sisters and one mom who was taking care of them all and when I thought about it that way maybe we could share our cereal with them as long as they were a little bit quieter at night when we were trying to sleep. But I didn’t say any of that to my mom because once she had that look in her eyes she was past listening. So we left the glue traps out and ate some pasta and went to sleep.

  Little squeals woke us at dawn. A baby mouse had gotten a front paw stuck on a trap, and a bigger one was gnawing on its leg. It was trying to help the baby, trying to make it free, but the baby didn’t know that and it must have hurt like crazy, worse than the time my mom got mad and slammed my hand in the door and it swelled up and turned purple. We didn’t know what to do so we just watched. My mom had her hand over her mouth. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. The bigger one finally snapped the bone with its teeth and the baby screamed and it sounded more like a tiny human scream than any noise an animal should make. Then the bigger one dragged the baby by the fur on its neck into the hole that Bruce had tried to patch. The chewed-off paw was still stuck to the glue trap. I felt a little sick.

  We just lay there in the half-dark for a long time, not talking, listening to each other breathe.

  02

  We moved in with Bruce a month later. My mom said she loved him. I loved him because he had a dog. Her name was Shadow and she was a shaggy mutt whose fur was the same color as my hair. Bruce lived in a real house with a backyard and everything. He had his own landscaping company, and a big truck with his company logo painted on the side. He didn’t cook but he liked to grill and on cool summer nights after my mom got home from work sometimes we would sit outside on the patio while Bruce flipped burgers and flipped the pull-tabs from his beer into the grass. He used to pay me a nickel for each one I could find.

  I had my own room at Bruce’s. I missed sleeping next to my mom but I liked being able to close my door, to decorate my room with all the drawings I did in art class. I mostly drew pictures of Shadow. Unless my mom was working weekend shifts, no one was there when I got home from school, and I would let Shadow out to pee and give her some water and a treat and pretend she was mine. Bruce used to keep her in the yard at night, but I started sneaking her in before I went to bed, when they were drinking on the couch in the TV room. Shadow was scared to jump up on my bed at first, but I kept patting the mattress and soon she got used to it, started whimpering at the door at night if I didn’t let her in. One morning my mom came to wake me up for school and saw Shadow and instead of getting mad she just laughed and then it was okay. I could never tell if she was going to laugh or get angry when I did something and it always made me nervous.

  We were out on the patio and my mom was at the table, cutting up iceberg lettuce and tomatoes for a salad while Bruce grilled. I was brushing Shadow’s fur. Bruce and my mom were always tired when they got home from work. My mom said she would kill for a job where she didn’t have to be on her feet all day, where she didn’t feel like all she did her whole life was serve people food. “At least my customers tip,” she said, “and I’m not even making their food.” Bruce said nothing, just added more lighter fluid to the grill. Flames burst up from between the iron bars, and the meat crackled.

  “Who’s making you dinner right now?” he said. “Who went out and bought your fuckin’ ground meat on the way home from my own job, which isn’t exactly a picnic for me either. At least you get to be inside all day.”

  My mom slammed another head of lettuce on the cutting board to get the core out, and the knife slipped off the table and landed on her toe. “Goddamn it!” she shouted, and hopped over to the steps by the back door to look at her foot. “Someone grab me a paper towel, please?”

  Bruce kept flipping the burgers.

  “Seriously?” She glared at him. “Cal, please? Kitchen?” I dropped Shadow’s wire brush and slipped by my mom where she sat on the steps, grabbing a bunch of paper towels and wetting them carelessly in the sink, bringing her a sopping bundle to wipe up the blood.

  “Thanks,” she said, distracted, then, “Bruce—you gonna come look? See if I’m dying?” She waved the streaky red paper towels in the air like a flag. “Losing a little bit of blood here.”

  “Skin’s thin on your fingers and toes,” he said. “How many times do you think I’ve sliced my hand open on the job? Surface cut’s gonna bleed like crazy even though it’s not bad. Go inside and put your foot up. Can’t just walk away from the grill here.” She didn’t respond, but she stood up and made her way inside, unsteadily. I could tell it hurt. I went in after her, feeling like a traitor for not going right away, and Shadow followed.

  She was on the couch already, clean paper towels stuffed around her toes, leg up on a pillow. “God, he is such an ass sometimes,” she said. I didn’t know what to say so I just held the paper towels in place for her. “Grab my drink for me, Cal?” she said. “I left it on the table.”

  I ran back outside. “How is she?” Bruce asked, then looked at the drink in my hand. “Tell her she shouldn’t be drinking if she’s bleeding as much as she says she is. I’ll bring in the burgers in a minute.”

  “I don’t think she’s bleeding that bad,” I said, knowing it was the wrong thing to say, not knowing if there was a right thing.

  One night when everything was still good, Bruce sat on the edge of my bed before I went to sleep and told me the story of how he’d found Shadow. “And that was it. She sat on my lap on the drive home, whimpering, and I set her up on a towel in the kitchen with a soup bowl for a water dish.” Shadow was eight or nine when he told me the story, and I tried really hard to imagine her as a puppy. She was older than me. “C’mere, girl,” Bruce said, and patted the side of the bed, and she ambled in, licking his hand. He ruffled the fur on the top of her head. Then my mom came and stood in the doorway, and the light in the hall shadowed one side of her face and made her hair glow. “All my girls in one room,” Bruce said. “I’m a lucky guy.”

  When Bruce left us a few months later, he took Shadow with him. He didn’t even say goodbye to me unless you count that phone call he made a week later from his new house. I could hear a football game on the television in the background, and a woman—my mom said her name was JoAnn—saying she was going to the kitchen and did he want another Bud. Shadow barked and my breath caught in my throat and I couldn’t talk. I didn’t know what his new living room looked like, so I couldn’t picture him on the other end of the line. I wondered if the woman’s couch was full of crumbs and coins nestled in the cracks like his old one. I wanted him to describe it to me, but all he said was, “I’m sorry, Cal. You know this has nothing to do with you. You’re a good kid.” I felt like he was looking at the television when he said it.

  I missed Bruce a little bit, but I missed Shadow more. Sh
adow hadn’t left my mom and me. My mom hadn’t caught Shadow in the kitchen late at night, whispering I miss you too baby into the phone. All I wanted to do was call her name and hear the click of her paws on the linoleum, on her way to me. We got to stay in the house until Bruce’s lease was up, which wasn’t for another couple months. We had the backyard and the real kitchen and I had my own bedroom but now I didn’t even feel like sleeping alone. It was hard to sleep without Shadow. At night, I missed the heat from her body. She used to sleep on the inside of the bed, between me and the wall, curled up next to my hip, and I could feel her shift and settle throughout the night, still there when I woke up.

  After Bruce left, I heard a lot of things my mom said on the phone when she thought I was asleep. “I don’t know, Deb,” she whispered, curled up on the couch. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do when we have to move out.” I tiptoed out into the kitchen and she sat up and angled her body in front of the bottle on the side table. “Cal, I didn’t know you were still up. Debbie, I’ll call you back later.” Or the hissing voicemails she left for Bruce. “How’s your pretty little JoAnn, you fucking bastard?” Even I knew leaving a message like that wouldn’t make me want to come back, if I were Bruce. I wondered if JoAnn drank a lot, if she was nice, if she liked dogs.

  I came home from school a couple weeks after Bruce left, expecting an empty house. But my mom was home, drinking a beer in front of the TV. “Bruce is being a shithead,” she said. “We’re going to get that damn dog back.” She looked like she had an idea but not a plan, which made me nervous.

  I didn’t say anything on the car ride over. I sat in the backseat, chipping glitter polish off my nails. There was an open can of beer in the cup holder and my mom wanted to steal a dog and I was pretty sure both of those things were against the law. It was August and the AC in the car was broken but I was shivering. This wasn’t something adults did. Bruce had broken a lot of rules but they were adult ones, ones that got broken all the time, on television and in real life.