Hypnotizing Chickens

by Julia Watts

  The guest bedroom was small, just big enough for a double bed, a dresser, and a little walking space between them. A poster for a university production of Fences in which Aaron had starred hung on the wall. A handmade quilt was on the bed, along with a dozing Celie, Aaron’s long-lived calico cat.

  “Now Miss Celie thinks of this room as hers,” Aaron said, “so she may be a little pissy about sharing her bed at first.”

  “I’m sure we’ll get along fine,” Chrys said. She liked cats and had owned one back in North Carolina, a tortoiseshell named Djuna who eventually became “Junie.” But Meredith was allergic, and so Chrys had given Junie to a friend who still emailed her pictures from time to time. Chrys added Junie to the growing list of Things She Had Given Up to Be With Meredith.

  Chrys changed into the T-shirt and shorts Aaron had loaned her and crawled under the quilt beside Celie. She must have used up her daily allotment of tears because none would come, though she felt no less sad than when she’d been sobbing. Sleep wouldn’t come either. She lay there, stroking Celie, wondering if she was destined to stay awake all night feeling this empty ache.

  But then there was a soft knock at the door and Aaron whispering, “You want some company?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Scoot over.”

  They curled up together like kittens in the same litter, and finally Chrys slept.

  Chapter Three

  It only took three car trips to move her stuff from the house to Aaron’s apartment. The first trip had been to haul her clothes, the next two her books. After she filled her car with the last load—six liquor store boxes full of literature and a couple of shoe boxes of CDs—she took one last walk through the house. She knew it would make her cry, but she had to do it anyway.

  She passed through the spacious, butter-yellow kitchen with the granite countertops where she and Meredith had stood, chopping vegetables and laughing. She ran her fingers over the oak table in the dining room where the two of them had shared meals from coq au vin to peanut butter and jelly.

  The bedroom was the last stop. It hurt too much to look at the bed where they had not only made love but talked and slept and tended to one another in sickness. She turned away and caught her teary reflection in the mirror. She took off her diamond earrings and set them on the dresser. Meredith would probably tell her to keep them, but what was it Ophelia says to Hamlet? “Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”

  She dropped her house key on the dresser next to the jewelry and walked out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and out the door.

  It was exhausting to haul all those book-heavy boxes up the stairs to Aaron’s apartment. Once she dragged them all into her room, it wasn’t clear what to do with them. Should she go ahead and buy a bookcase or just fashion a hobo-style one by turning the boxes sideways and stacking them? Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t doing it now. She flopped on the bed next to Celie, who seemed to be occupying the exact same spot she had this morning. Maybe the cat had the right idea. Sleep was a tempting escape. She closed her eyes, only to have them open at the ringing of her phone. She picked it up to see her mom’s number. She had given herself the deadline of Sunday night to tell her mom about the breakup, but it looked like the time was now. She took a deep breath and answered.

  “There you are, Chrystal!” Her mom’s voice was cheerful. “I tried your other number first, but there wasn’t nobody home.”

  Chrys ignored her mother’s double negative. She had gone through an arrogant phase in high school during which she had insisted on correcting her family members’ grammar, but it had only led to arguments and tears. “Yeah, well, there’s a reason for that.”

  “Your rich lady friend forget to pay the phone bill?” She laughed at her own joke.

  “Actually, my rich lady friend broke up with me.” As soon as she said it, she started crying like she hadn’t since she was a little girl.

  “She did what? Wait—you don’t have to answer that, I heard you the first time. I just don’t believe it.”

  “She met somebody else. Younger, naturally.”

  “Now what is the advantage of being with a woman if she’s just gonna run off and act like a man?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe that she couldn’t get me pregnant before she left me?”

  Her mom laughed. “You’re funny even when you’re sad. Well, I reckon you know how I always felt about Meredith. I never thought I could trust her as far as I could sling her.”

  “Apparently you had better sense about her than I did.” Chrys was lying back down now, letting her mother’s words comfort her.

  “Well, I wasn’t blinded by sex,” her mom said. “She wasn’t my type.”

  Chrys let herself laugh a little. Her mom’s views on Chrys’s sexuality were complex. On the one hand, she would’ve liked for Chrys to be straight because she thought it would be easier for all concerned—easier for Chrys who wouldn’t have to fear homophobia, easier for the family who wouldn’t have to explain why Chrys had never married or reproduced. On the other hand, Chrys’s mom believed that a leopard couldn’t change its spots. Some people were just made “that way,” and Chrys, apparently, was one of them. And at least as a lesbian, Chrys wouldn’t do what her straight brother did—move back to the family homeplace with a too-young wife and a toddler whom, he assumed, “Memaw” would be more than happy to pitch in raising.

  Chrys figured that when it came down to it, her sexual orientation was just one item on a long list of things about her that her family found baffling. Her parents lived in a holler off a dirt road in Piney Creek, Kentucky, a “town” which had only three places of business: a sawmill, a miniscule post office and a gas station/mini-mart. Chrys’s dad had worked in the sawmill until an accident left him one-armed and disabled, and Chrys’s mom worked sewing uniforms at a tiny factory in Morgan, the nearest real town. They lived in a little wooden frame house that had once been white but had turned gray with age, and Chrys’s grandmother, called “Nanny” by all, lived in a similar but even smaller house further up the holler. As a young child, Chrys had gone to the six-room Piney Grove Elementary, but when she reached middle school age, she had to wait for the bus that would come before dawn to take her to Morgan, picking up other country kids on the way.

  Even as a child, Chrys had known that her future was not in the holler. She had too many interests that couldn’t be pursued there. Her parents were supportive but confused. They were glad to have her there but weren’t sure where she’d come from. They looked at her like a friendly alien who had descended from a spaceship to live with them. They were proud of her achievements, though, and her mom was always supportive. When Chrys was in fifth grade, she had decided that she wanted to be a Famous Author, and her mom took her to Morgan to get her a library card, making it a point to take her to the library every two weeks.

  Years later, when Chrys’s dissertation was published, her mom had said, “Well, when you was a little girl, you said you wanted to be a famous author, and now you’ve gone and done it.” This was sweet but also hilarious. The print run had only been five hundred.

  Today, as always, Chrys’s mom was supportive. Even if she didn’t fully understand, she understood enough to know that rejection hurts.

  Once Chrys had sobbed out her whole sad story, she realized that she had been behaving with the self-absorption of the recently dumped. “I’m sorry. I haven’t even asked how you all are.”

  “We’re all right, I reckon. Today Peyton got the bright idea to try to jump off the porch roof onto the trampoline. Thank the Lord she has good aim. For somebody that calls herself a princess, she’s tough as a cob.”

  Chrys’s brother Dustin’s desire to name his firstborn after his favorite football player hadn’t been dimmed by the fact that she was a girl. Peyton, he and his wife Amber had decided, was just as good a name for a daughter as for a son. “And is Nanny okay?” Chrys asked.

  “Yeah, about the same. She tries to wait to take her medicine
at night so she’s not so dopey during the day, but you can tell she’s hurting. She’s got a new girl staying with her now, though, so that helps a lot.”

  Chrys’s grandmother was in remarkably good shape for her eighty-nine years, but a damaged hip and chronic arthritis kept her in a state of bearable but constant pain. Pain medication helped but made her spacey and forgetful, likely to leave the stove or an iron on. As a result of her mobility problems, it was a good idea for someone to stay with her, though Chrys knew Nanny found this loss of independence frustrating.

  As was always the case, Chrys’s mom summed up how everybody was without once saying how she herself was. It was like she was a cog in the machine of the family, and if the rest of the machine was all right, then she was, too. But a little worry crept into her voice at the end of the conversation. “You call me if you need anything at all, even if it’s just to talk,” she said.

  “I will, Mom. I love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Chrys set the phone down. She had people who loved her. Her mom. Nanny. Aaron. But the absence of Meredith’s love made her feel hollowed out, like a fish that’s been gutted so it looks normal from the outside, but upon closer inspection, is an empty shell.

  * * *

  Waking up on a Monday morning to teach an eight o’clock English composition class was always a certain level of misery. But doing it in her current emotional state plumbed new depths. She shut off the alarm and lay there, barely awake, her mouth cottony, her hair unwashed all weekend, wondering how in the hell she could channel the teacher persona that answered to Ms. Pickett. She dragged herself out of bed, grabbed some clean clothes, and headed to the bathroom just as Aaron was heading out of it. He was wearing two towels, one around his waist and one around his head, turban-style. “No talky before coffee,” he said, and Chrys nodded mutely.

  She brushed her teeth, showered, brushed out her hair, and put on her old reliable light blue floral print dress. Applying her usual holy trinity of makeup—powder base, mascara and lipstick—helped her puffy eyes and pale complexion a little but not enough. She couldn’t figure out why she felt like something was missing until she remembered the diamond earrings she had left on the dresser at the house. She was going to have to dig out the silver hoops that had been her go-to earrings before Meredith.

  Aaron was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a bagel. “I left the bagels out if you want one.”

  “No, thank you,” Chrys said, and to her embarrassment, she felt tears spring to her eyes, threatening her freshly applied mascara. “To be honest, I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “Eat breakfast? Well, it is optional, though rumor has it it’s the most important meal of the day.”

  “No, I don’t think I can do any of this.” She gestured vaguely. “Go to work. Function. Talk to people.”

  “I’m people, and you’re talking to me.” Aaron slathered the other half of his bagel with cream cheese.

  “Yeah, but you’re my sister. How do I talk to co-workers and students?”

  “It’s called acting, honeybun. Pretend you’re in the thea-TAH. You’re playing the role of an English professor who doesn’t feel like she just had her heart stomped on by Godzilla.”

  Chrys filled a mug with coffee and wasn’t reassured to see how much her hands were shaking. “You’re the one who’s good at pretending.”

  “Oh, you know better than that. How long did you manage to convince yourself you were straight despite ample evidence to the contrary?”

  Aaron never forgot anything Chrys had told him, no matter how much wine they’d both had at the time of the telling. “Until I was twenty-two.”

  He smiled. “And how many more years after that did you let your parents think you were straight?”

  “Eight.” She had come out to her mom, and shortly thereafter, her dad, right before her thirtieth birthday, having decided that she didn’t want to enter the third decade of her life as a de facto liar.

  “Exactly! You’re plenty good at pretending. And you won’t even have to try that hard. Most people who look at you will see what they want to see anyway. And your students are probably too busy texting and updating their Facebook status to notice anything. Unless you collapse weeping on the podium when you’re supposed to be giving a lecture on commas.”

  Chrys didn’t tell Aaron that collapsing weeping on the podium seemed like a distinct possibility.

  * * *

  She pulled into the faculty parking lot, took a deep breath and said, “I can do this.” Then she took another deep breath and said it again. When after the third time of saying it she still didn’t believe it, she said “Fuck it” and opened the car door anyway.

  She muttered good morning to a couple of colleagues she knew only in passing, a guy from the business department and a woman from nursing. Easy enough, but she knew once she entered the shared General Studies office, conversation would be unavoidable.

  The only other instructor in her department with an eight o’clock class was Susan, who had the thankless job of teaching Introduction to College, which covered useful but hardly riveting topics such as study skills and time management. Susan was in her fifties, kept her hair cut short, and had the slightly butch quality of a high school gym teacher. In Chrys’s opinion, Susan would have made an excellent lesbian, but appearances to the contrary, she had a husband at home.

  Susan looked away from her computer screen, which was currently splashed with celebrity photos and lurid headlines. “How was your weekend?” she asked.

  Chrys struggled for an answer. The easy way out would be to say fine, how about yours? But Susan was her best work buddy, one of the few people at Hill College who had genuinely shown an interest in her life. “Do you want the polite answer or the real answer?”

  “Since when have you known me to be interested in the polite anything?” One of the objects on Susan’s desk was a needlepoint sampler of the Alice Longworth Roosevelt line, If you can’t find anything nice to say, come sit by me.

  Chrys twirled around in her desk chair to face Susan. “Okay, then. I’m waiting for the government to declare my weekend a national disaster. Meredith broke up with me.”

  Susan looked genuinely shocked. “She did what? After you moved down here for her? What is she thinking?”

  “She’s thinking she found someone younger and prettier.” Chrys felt a knot form in her throat. “But I can’t talk about it much right now because I’ll cry. And I can’t cry because I have to teach.”

  “The students will just think you’re crying because their papers are so bad. Seriously, though, I really am sorry. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

  “Thanks, but I can’t think of anything.”

  “Me neither.” Susan turned back to her computer.

  * * *

  When Chrys walked into the classroom, she was privy to the usual pre-class student chatter, some of it about sports, some of it about family stuff, some—as was the case with the two girls in the front row—seemingly devoid of any content at all.

  Girl 1: He did not!

  Girl 2: He did!

  Girl 1: Shut up!

  Girl 2: I know, right?

  The first time she said “Good morning,” Chrys’s voice came out weak and quavery. She took a deep breath and tried again. This time she was loud enough that the chatter started to die down. She felt the students’ eyes on her. Don’t cry, don’t run, she told herself. “I want to go ahead and collect your descriptive essays,” she said, trying to sound as calm and businesslike as possible. “Pass them down to the end of each row, please.”

  “Miss Pickett?” A furtive-acting student was standing beside her. Her green-shadowed eyes were shifty, and she was chipping at the hot pink polish on her fingernails. “Um…Miss?” She trailed off. “I did my paper, and I got it on my flash drive, but I can’t open it on the computers here?” This student was clearly enrolled in the Rising Inflection School of Excuses.

&nb
sp; Chrys knew at this point she was supposed to make some sound of agreement, but she chose not to.

  “So I was wondering if I could turn it in tomorrow?”

  “You may, but I’ll have to deduct five points for lateness.”

  The girl put a pink-nailed hand to her chest as if the shock of this injustice was causing heart palpitations. “But I did it! It’s on my flash drive!”

  “And if you can get it off your flash drive and to me by five o’clock today, I won’t take off any points.” Sometimes she thought back fondly to her early days of teaching when students couldn’t use technology as an excuse for not having their papers ready on time. Back then they had to think up real excuses—sick grandmothers, paper-munching dogs. At least they had to be creative.

  Today her task was to introduce The Great Gatsby, of which her students had allegedly read the first thirty pages. She turned to the dry-erase board, mouthing “I can do this” once her back was turned, and wrote The American Dream in big letters. She turned around. “So, what are some of the things you think of when you hear the phrase ‘the American Dream?’”

  Silence except for the sound of the girl popping her gum in the front row.

  Chrys wasn’t in the mood to work this hard. “Okay,” she said. “You’re all here in a college classroom this morning instead of being cozy in bed, so you must be here because you’re working toward some kind of goal. What are some of the goals you’re working toward? Might any of those fall under the heading of the American Dream?”

  Finally, after an uncomfortable silence, a girl in the back named Chelsea said, “A nice house.”

  “Yes,” Chrys said, writing the answer on the board. “A nice house is always part of the American dream, right? Preferably with a white picket fence.”

  Haltingly, a few more students pitched in with “nice things,” “plenty of money,” and—from a gentleman in the back row—“a hot wife,” which Chrys wrote on the board as “a desirable partner.” Finally, some of the quietest students in the class pitched in with some more abstract ideas: happiness, security, love.