“Die Daumenlutscher,” said Dean. “I think it’s ‘Little Suck-a-Thumb’ in English, but I don’t get the connection.”
“Sembles makes his living with scissors. He kept hiding his thumbs every time he got nervous—wrapping them up in his fists, shoving them under his arms. That story’s the perfect threat to keep him quiet. I should have put it together. It’s just I wanted it to be some bad guy’s name. A substitute for Lapthorne.”
“It’s time to tell the cops.”
“No.”
“Bunny, there isn’t any question. This has to be your cousin. The rose thing is German, too. Brothers Grimm.”
“I think it was the cop. Not Lapthorne.”
“You just don’t want to see it.”
“If you’d been there, with Sembles . . . he was totally fine until I mentioned the cops. That’s what freaked him out. Before that, he was just calmly denying he remembered anything. The minute I said ‘police,’ he lost his shit.”
“And some upstate cornhead cop is so fixated on German literature he runs around killing people to enact children’s stories?”
“Some upstate cornhead cop with a name like Schneider? Why the hell not?”
Dean flinched.
“What?” I snapped.
“Schneider.”
“What about Schneider?”
“It’s the German word for ‘tailor.’”
“Ha!”
“Bunny . . .”
“So there,” I said. “Neener neener neener.”
He dropped his arms. Stepped away from me. “Bunny, Jesus Christ . . .”
“I was right. You’re just pissed because I was right.”
He turned on the lights. “‘Right’ doesn’t come into it.”
I put my hand up to shield my eyes. “But don’t you see how this—”
“You have to tell the police,” he said. “Tomorrow. I’ll come with you. We’ll go down and give them the goddamn dog tags.”
“Are you crazy?”
“This is too goddamn dangerous. I don’t care who did it. I don’t care what happens to your cousin. This is way over your head. It’s time to tell the cops.”
“Schneider’s a cop.”
“Not anymore.”
“Like that would make a difference . . .”
“Let it go. Let them sort it out.”
That would be when I told him to rot in hell.
He went to bed.
I didn’t.
CHAPTER 16
I was still pissed the next day, not to mention cranky and self-indulgent and freaked and brooding. Too little sleep. Too much coffee. The whole subjective-depressive Tar Baby.
Plus I had that live-action Howard Cosell interior voice-over going, in stereo, telling me what a jerk I was for feeling like such a jerk. Couldn’t snap out of it, even when Mom called me at work to announce that her invitations had gone out, that Lapthorne had already RSVP’d a firm acceptance, and that she’d decided at the last minute, holy crow, to make the thing a costume party.
But it was my last afternoon with Dean, probably for weeks. I was so utterly devastated by the prospect of my beloved’s impending absence that I left work a little early. I got all choked up and teary on the drive home, swearing up and down that I’d send him off with a kind supportive word and a smile on my face, even if it freaking killed me.
I found him just finishing off his packing, and invited him to come with me to shop for the makings of a little home-cooked meal before it was time to hit the airport. We’d be cutting it tight, so I decided to drive up to this place on Butternut—a market I’d dubbed The Outpatient Grocery Store. It was always like shopping in a methadone clinic, but it was the closest.
The owners knew most people in the neighborhood couldn’t afford a car to get to the nicer, cheaper stores out in the burbs: the solidly clean P&Cs and Big Ms, the Wegmans in DeWitt with the big “international” cheese section. So, just because they could, these guys stocked The Outpatient with nothing but nasty old crap at lunar-colony trade-embargo prices.
I muscled past Dean and yanked a rattle-wheeled cart from the front-door pileup. The handle was greasy and the kiddy-seat basket thing was rusted shut, but it made a great battering ram. I smashed it through the busted “Automatic CAUTION Door,” into the fuck-you-you’re-on-food-stamps reek of Pine-Sol and cheap fish, badly refrigerated.
Pretty much every supermarket in America is designed to make you go right when you come in the front door. My cart pulled to the left, balking when I tried to maneuver it over the pitted, sticky brown flooring.
I fought that cross-eyed axle with all my weight, hell-bent on the produce aisle.
Dean walked ahead, hands in his pockets. When he had about ten feet on me, he turned around to wait, resting a hip against the cantaloupe bin.
It was at this point that my husband casually mentioned how he wouldn’t be back from Canada in time for Mom’s party, which was fine with him because it was a really stupid idea.
I just said, “Oh?” and smiled at him, while body-slamming my cart toward the lettuce.
“Yeah,” he said. “Bernie from Speer-O-Matic told me yesterday. I forgot to mention it.”
I was determined not to let my pus-filled mood infect our last few hours of blissful togetherness.
“Hmmm,” I said. Calmly, honest to God, with absolutely no inflection that could be construed as negative in any way.
I gave up on the cart and just walked the rest of the way to the lettuce.
“Of course they have nothing but iceberg,” I said, slapping one of the sad little brown-tinged balls. “Like nobody’s ever heard of romaine, let alone endive.”
“On-deev,” echoed Dean. “Who died and made you Marie Antoinette?”
“Heh heh,” I gamely chuckled, “like you’d condescend to eat this shit even with a gun to your head.”
I waved my hand over the aisle’s gallery of deflated oranges, wizened turnips, and beets that had seen better days.
“This could make you give airplane food five stars,” I said, still the very model of lighthearted spousal repartee. “Chef-Boy-goddamn-Ardee wouldn’t shop here. My mother wouldn’t shop here.”
“Of course not,” he said. “There’s no dented stuff on sale.”
I whipped a head of iceberg at his chest as hard as I could.
He caught it one-handed.
“I am just so sick of this town,” I said. “It’s like some mental dust bowl filled with people who didn’t have the gumption to get in the goddamn truck with Granny and the chicken coop strapped up top so they could drive the hell away. What are we doing here? What will we ever be able to do here?”
“This is real life. You just don’t recognize it because you got brought up in pretty little Disneylands. You wouldn’t know real life if it fell out of the sky and knocked you flat on your ass.”
“You are just so—”
“Look,” he said, calmly, “I don’t want to fight with you. You’re just spinning your wheels with this whole murder thing.”
He was right. But I felt so defeated and horrible I couldn’t admit it. Couldn’t let it go. I looked at him and snapped, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Your cousin, this party at your mother’s . . . I won’t even get into how goddamn stupid it is, how goddamn dangerous.”
“Good. So don’t.”
“The rest of it . . . above and beyond . . . You’ve been completely unbalanced since the whole deal with the dog tags came up. The house is a sty, you’re not concentrating on your work—everything is falling apart and I don’t even know what’s in it for you if you figure out who killed those chicks.”
Nothing was in it for me, because there wasn’t a chance in hell I could figure it out. I was a big fat loser, and all I could do was make us both miserable until I caved in and said so out loud. Except of course I was too miserable to do it.
“Maybe it’ll be my ticket out of here,” I said.
“Bunny, d
on’t cry. . . .”
“Maybe if I’m writing about something that matters, I could get a job someplace other than bumfuck upstate.”
Okay, so I was crying . . . right in the middle of the stupid grocery store.
“I used to be good,” I said, wiping a sleeve across my nose. “In high school, in college. I was generally recognized as having wit and talent. Now I’m an unemployable piece of garbage in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing that matters to you is that I’m not wearing a starched apron while mopping the goddamn floors all day.” Which was patently unfair of me to say, as he always did the mopping, stripping off his shirt while blasting “Ride of the Valkyries.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you meant,” I said. “I am not happy here. I’ve been telling you that for two years and you think I’m an idiot because of it. I’m not an idiot and this place does suck. Admit it, because you know it’s true.”
“The trouble with you is you think if your existence isn’t being documented in Town & Country it doesn’t count, and now you’re spinning out this Lapthorne thing so you’ll have something to talk about at cocktail parties.”
“In Syracuse? Vienna sausages out of the can and warm Labatt’s do not a cocktail party make, no matter whose garage you’re in.”
I was disgusted with myself even as the words left my mouth. What the hell was I doing?
“I just think,” he said, thankfully ignoring that cheap shot, “that you’re messing around on the edges of this thing because you want some thrill to lively up your existence. This isn’t it. This is just ugly and dangerous.”
“Are you listening at all? I meant it when I said I wanted to find out just enough to know whether I should give the dog tags to the police. Let’s just go to the stupid party at Mom’s and see if Lapthorne means anything . . . that’s all I’m asking. That’s not dangerous—”
“I can’t take off for some party,” he said.
“But you can go to freaking Canada?”
“That’s work.”
“Yeah, yeah, ‘you’re burnin’ daylight.’”
“And you want to move someplace else because you think you’ll like yourself there,” he said. “Doesn’t matter where you live. It’ll still be you.”
“That’s just great. That’s just goddamn beautiful.” And absolutely true.
A vested biker with two kids in his cart took one look at us and opted for another aisle, horrified.
“If you’re so set on pursuing this bogus crap, why haven’t you told them at the paper?” he retorted.
“I did,” I said. “I have an assignment, as of yesterday.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you didn’t goddamn ask me. Because nothing I do matters.”
“Everything you do matters to me, Bunny,” he said. “That’s why I can’t understand this. I just want you to be happy. We have a good life. This project is going to make it better. . . .”
“Please stay,” I said. “Just a few days. We could go out to STD’s on the weekend and talk to Schneider . . . the Kingsnakes are playing.”
“I can’t. You know I’m right.”
I did indeed. And I also knew that I was married, that I had made my bed, that every moment for the rest of my life would be spent beating my fists against a reality I would have enjoyed if I’d been a better, deeper person.
I didn’t want to be my parents, to throw it all to the winds if it ceased to entertain, to go for the highs of newness over and over again. But Syracuse forever?
Standing there, staring at that stupid pile of lettuce, I thought about how there was only an hour left until I had to drive him to the airport.
So I apologized. I meant it absolutely sincerely, and despised him for it anyway.
By the weekend I wasn’t pissed anymore, just numb and tired and lonely. Dean hadn’t called from the road.
Of course not. I was such an asshole, I wouldn’t have called me either, not for a million dollars.
There I was on the sofa, Saturday night, reading The Big Sleep and eating a WASP-soul-food dinner of Ruffles out of the bag with sour-cream-and-onion-soup-mix dip in a cracked bowl.
My latest mix tape was cranked way the hell up: Puccini interspersed with the English Beat, the Kingston Trio, and Jello Biafra’s “Viva Las Vegas” cover. Lou Reed was singing “Wild Side” but would get interrupted halfway through with the price of gold at the London fixing because I’d forgotten I was making a tape and switched the stereo over to NPR for a second.
This was all designed to keep me from putting Joni Mitchell on, because I was depressed enough as it was. My worn cassette of Blue kept winking up at me from the picnic basket of tapes near the stereo, saying “You know you want me,” and I was weakening even though the opening bars of her lament for distant California would put me over the edge.
I mean, look out any window in Syracuse and see if you can keep from losing it while somebody starts singing “Sitting in a bar in Paris, France.” You’ll go through an awful lot of Pernod just thinking about it.
I never listened to Joni when Dean was home, because he said he could feel his chest hair falling out. It was sort of a pact between us—her and Judy Collins on my side and Captain Beefheart and the Stooges on his, to be played only in each other’s absence.
Maybe I deserved a good tear-filled folkie wallow, though, since I was stranded on my plastic Green Street sofa, missing out on the chance to question Schneider.
Or just missing out on the chance to screw up questioning Schneider.
If I were a better person, I thought, I’d either have gotten to know a bigger gang of local people upon whom I could call in such emergencies or have developed the social courage to head out to a bar by myself.
And right then there was all this pounding on my front door. “Madwoman! Open up!”
“Ellis?” I said, getting up off the sofa.
No one but Ellis ever calls me Madwoman.
CHAPTER 17
Ellis breezed into the room, a dark-haired green-eyed gamine, coltish in the summer rich-girl uniform of the eighties: white linen shorts, white T-shirt, black lamb’s-wool Eurotrash sweater vest, black loafers.
She was a Cheever girl, a Salinger girl. She should have been stepping off a fall-game-weekend New Haven train in a long squirrel coat, or contemplating a young-married affair on some moonlit club terrace.
“So,” I asked, “what brings you to fashionable Syracuse?”
“I was in Utica, breaking up with Alec at his dad’s. I mean, what’s another hour on the thruway once you’re in this godforsaken neck of the woods. Got anything to drink? My teeth are wearing sweaters.”
Alec, the coke-dealing stonemason. Into Eckankar. I grabbed two beers out of the icebox while she plucked the bottle opener from a long-familiar drawer near the sink.
“This place really is the asshole of nowhere,” she said. “I mean, what are you, like three hours from Williamstown and six from the city?”
“Alec is really history?” I said.
They’d been living together for over a year, had broken up four times already but she always gravitated back to him out of inertia or loneliness or the need for bill consolidation. It was like watching a small and very beautiful bird fly over and over again into a plate glass window.
In between times she’d show up here with interchangeable slicky-boy tennis players. Dean and I categorized them by their training programs—Goldman Sachs, First Boston. None of them keepers, but the world was short of Cheever and Salinger boys.
She looked at the ceiling. “‘History’ is such a big word for such an infinitesimal man. Let’s just say he’s over.”
“Alec was over before either of us slept with him.”
“Well,” she said, “at least you had the perspicacity to do it first, and only once.”
“Perspicacity would have involved keeping my clothes on.”
“You were young and drunk,” she said.
“I liked him, and he gave me a place to live.”
And her father had just died when they moved in together. I handed her the beers.
Ellis opened them, gave me one, and jumped up onto the counter. She crossed her tan, pretty legs and swung a loafered foot.
We have the same tattoo on our right ankles, a cent sign. I got mine first, after my sister got a dollar sign.
Ellis’s was backwards, as she didn’t trust the tattoo chick to draw it “the right way” and made her redo the trial sketch before it was inked. She came up with the best reason for them, though, saying we stood “for change.”
“Hey,” I said, “he’s okay. It could have worked.”
“Oh please.” She looked at me, generous mouth turned up at one corner. “Saying Alec was a shitty boyfriend is like saying ‘this toothpick made a lousy sword.’”
“Here’s to good boyfriends,” I said, raising my bottle.
She clinked it. “Here’s to swords.”
We had no hometowns, no permanent allies—nothing but the involuntary vagabond’s glib knack for establishing beachheads at each pause in our parents’ orbits.
They’d deployed us cash-free into top-notch trust-fund schools, short of socks and warm-enough winter coats. We drank too much and never just-said-no to anything, a pair of pretty, fatherless girls who most often saw a hard-on as an applause meter.
Then I met Dean: right guy, wrong town. Now the world pulled at me, and the promise of a real haven beckoned to Ellis. We wished each other across that divide.
The phone rang. I balanced the handset under my chin. “Hello?”
“Hey, Bunny,” said Dean through a load of static. “Wanted you to know I got up here okay.”
“Hey, Ellis just walked in.” I twirled the phone cord on my index finger. Neither of us would mention the fight, we always just picked up a different conversation.
“Oh great. . . . You know when you guys get together it’s like a couple of frat boys with tits.”
“I’d like to think slightly smaller and funnier.”
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