by Kate Wisel
I’M EXAGGERATING
SERENA WORE A NAVY two-piece suit, sensible flats, twisted-up hair, a buttoned collar over the wrist—read the faded blah blah blah script. Her first flight was to Wichita, and she had asked Niko if he knew what Wichita looked like from the sky. She wanted to hurt him. For him to picture her cloud-height, off the ground, sixteen hundred miles to the middle, untouchable.
She scooped ice and twisted bottle caps. Balanced her palms on headrests during dips. The aisle a tightrope. It rattled: the overheads, the ice, her fingers. Sometimes the pilot and the copilot looked like the cops who rapped on her door the month before. In the cockpit, their hands on the gears against the bright, complicated look of the control panel. The backs of their heads against the bright, complicated look of the sky. She cracked the front door, chain off the bolt, swollen eye. Her smile a cross, index finger against her lip. Niko was passed out in boxers, in the bedroom, in a deep sleep. The cops pushed through, ignored her.
“I made a mistake,” she said. She paced, the blood in her hair graffiti orange and stiff. Blood on the white table, sprays of droplets from huffs where her mucus went loose under the break, her wrists twisted back.
“I’m exaggerating!” she told the cops, then recognized it as something he would tell her. Right in her ear like a basketball coach fighting the sideline.
“Get up,” Niko would say. “You’re faking all of this.”
Wichita was not what she’d thought. Little Rock, Providence. Nowhere she’d been, or belonged, but all familiar. She had a day off in Spokane. Bumpy wheels of luggage by her heel, she roamed down Division Street, smokestacks spilling filth up towards an ocean-colored mountain. Janis Joplin on a brick wall, fingers outstretched. Towards the river, the smell of spoiled milk and a sign: Near Nature, Near Perfect. Pine trees that could see inside homes and for miles.
Back on the plane she found passengers to their rows. Locked in the Clorox blue of the bathroom, she fingered her new insignia, a wing pin she wore like a crucifix and to sleep. And on the dark seat, facing backward, going forward, she thought of what to do. This she thought of terminally. What was down there. What wasn’t. There was no losing of a baby or liters of liquor in desk drawers.
Maybe there was a lost baby; to be exact is to lie.
She had enough money to run up a credit card. There was a lease, the stain of their signatures, one under the other. Hers under his, as if he could hold her down with ink.
Somewhere above Lake Superior she heard an infant’s cry. It was a saltwater gargle, as disturbing and rangy as a vocal warm-up. She walked down the aisle, nearing the sound, and found a mother dozing in the seat. She lifted the infant from the sleeping mother’s arms. Her T-shirt was splotched with milk at the nipples, her slump vaguely sexual, like she’d been slipped a mickey.
Serena strode the aisle with the infant in her arms, its wail an emergency. It filled the cabin with an engine-like force, though those fat-ringed thighs kicking against her stomach went nowhere. She watched as a businessman’s eyes popped open. She gazed at them, felt his shock upon waking. Midair. Midshriek. She palmed the little one’s wet head, the mask of a soft, wet scalp under her eyes. The seam of her lips by an ear the size of a bottle cap.
She whispered, “Hey there.”
She whispered, “Don’t be quiet.”
She whispered, “Keep screaming.”
RAFFA
WHAT COUNTS
I HAVE A CHANGE jar. Washed-out salsa jar on my windowsill. Pennies are there, dirty dimes, backs of my earrings, quarters for the subway if I’m desperate. I’m sifting through the change on the hardwood when Mickey comes in. He says, “Let’s get everything.”
In the supermarket, he steers with his backwards hat and the imprint of his wallet in his pocket.
“You like these?” he asks, then tosses chips into the cart. We stride down the aisle, kissing, but with his ten million arms whirling in more, like a fan in motion, I barely notice.
Later in bed, I try to talk to him about taxes. They take out a bit each month. But because his job selling insurance is better, a bit is big. “But isn’t it relative,” I say, “if everyone has to pay?” I can tell he’s still thinking about it like a pie chart—what’s missing—which reminds him to surprise me with some kind of next-level dessert soon.
But sometimes I have to admit: he looks good, with his fresh cut and his aviators and his Burt’s Bees lips. No argument here. I’m waiting for him to come out of the dressing room in his tangerine pants. He looks so happy. Like there’s a monkey on his shoulder. I can see him in his swivel chair.
“How do you pronounce BVLGARI?” I ask, fingering the glass over the glasses.
Mickey says, “You don’t.”
I don’t get it. It’s like we’re a special effect. I don’t know why he brought us here. The lighting is low. I’m checking my savings under the table and it’s not saving anybody. Mickey, like a tug on the wrist, a fast grab, says, “We’re on vacation.”
I say, “No, we’re not.”
We’re confusing the waitress: “I’m great with water!” Mickey, through teeth: “Just get the drink.”
I don’t get it but I do.
On our walk home I say, “I’m picking up lucky pennies to embarrass you.”
“Mickey, look, another one! One more.”
I close my fist around the coins. Every second counts. Like before his company holiday party, our first fancy invitation on the fridge. Mickey comes in with a thirty and a few snowflakes on his shoulders. I’m clapping under my chin, in the kitchen by the ironing board. He kicks the door shut, then twirls me to the counter, where we crack beers, the iron hissing through teeth behind us, then burning. I turn Béla Bartók up on the speakers and say, “Mood music,” when he asks what the hell this is.
He lays ties out on the bed, then me, his neck wet with cologne where I bite it. We fight for the shower, and the mirror, our arms scribbling on fast-forward with blow dryers, combs, and cans, holding out hangers and ChapStick. We twist to zip. He’s mouthing, We’re late, on the phone with the cab as he slurs our address, and I shrug, make like I’m slitting my throat, run over to squeeze him. He watches the clock on his wrist by the door as I click around with a blank look, searching for better heels, tearing through closets, tilting to stab earrings into closed holes. His whole Christmas thing is coming. I want more than he knows.
And then that night I have this dream. I’m squinting and I can see him, at the end of the aisle. With his skinny tie and his chewing gum and his tilted fedora. It’s taken me twenty hours to get ready. Heel by heel, lash by lash, I go to him. The crowd gasps. We bow our heads to whisper, and negotiate.
For dinner, Rice Krispies, and every guest must take the SATs on a damp napkin. I forgot the DJ we hired was from New Jersey and the cake we bought was a burlesque show, as the photographer snaps him winking. A slow song comes on and the dance floor turns into a trap door, screams echoing endlessly down a baby’s dirty mouth.
I yell in the cold parking lot, my voice carried away like a banner behind a helicopter. Just out of time, it comes back for me, the wind from the choppers blowing my dress up over my head. On the mountain, the seconds turn like the rain that’s turned to snow. Nothing else to do but strip down and use myself. Make my heels ice picks to chip away and climb, noticing how things are from far and farther away.
MICK’S STREET
I THROW THE KEYS at the mirror and they crash, a pitcher of water shattering during a high note. Applause-worthy. Mickey says I fight ghetto, and I always say, “That’s right,” like I’m proud of who I am.
“Why are you doing this?” I say.
“I’m not the one doing it,” Mickey says. He nods to the pile of clothes beside the suitcase. What I hear is “the one.” What I hear is the wind outside, snapping branches. Mickey says I’m a liar, that I hide things from him, from myself, too. He slips out a pack of 100s from his pocket, then slow-claps them against his palm.
“Goin
g through my stuff?” I say.
“That’s my suitcase, Raffa,” he says.
What I hear is “my.” What I hear is our wedding song, Elvis Presley. Mickey picked it and I panicked. New Year’s Eve. I watched Serena’s face till she blurred into Rima’s, my head chained to his chest.
“You told me to leave!” I say.
I throw myself onto the bed and try to cry desperately into a pillow. It doesn’t work, not at all. I hear him blending a protein shake in the kitchen. I want to be a list. Things that haven’t been done yet on paper. Possibilities.
But then I pick up the keys. Mickey has a rental house on the Cape. We went there last winter and had sex in the loft, drunk and crying about things we’d never once talked about. I’d steal off to smoke on the porch, my hands shaking like Rima’s, the keyholes of her fingers. I felt him watching me from upstairs.
Now Mickey’s standing on the front steps in his huge parka with his hair slicked back like a real estate agent. I roll my suitcase past him. At him. Why has he done his hair for our breakup?
Just get out, Mickey mouths.
He runs forward to catch up. He’s in sneakers, and I’m thinking that he’s worn these on purpose, to chase after me.
Now that I’m going, Mickey shouts, “Where are you going?”
“I could run you over,” I say, rolling down the window. Mickey throws his hands up. Then they’re on his waist as I jerk the wheel, counting my luck that there’s no one caught behind me as I swerve out. In the rearview he’s already gone.
My car. The only thing in my name. One long stretch of highway, Xanax-smooth and soundless. The Cape, a weird place to go in winter. The Sagamore Bridge waiting in the distance. The water beneath it mirrors the sun, cracked as hairline fractures on X-rays. There’s so much traffic, everyone honking and inching up. Profiles in the windows switching like a show of mug shots. I cross the bridge, pressing the window down for a smoke. The cold has teeth.
Cape houses are deceiving from the outside, little Monopoly pieces, all roof and rectangle. I’m carrying a twelve-pack of Heineken under my arm. I can smell my armpits even through my coat, some kind of hot sandwich with onions. I haven’t showered since Friday, ever since Mickey sent me the divorce spreadsheet.
I remember the shrimp cocktail we ate, so fat the veins popped between my teeth. The night I said yes. And the way Mickey looked, self-possessed, satisfied. I snuck a cigarette out on the balcony. But where could I have crawled if not back to the table? If I were a movie, the credits would have been rolling up my face.
On the front drive, I take the wheezy steps of a Martian, sensing the quiet. Then I have to drop everything on the crushed shells of the driveway to search for the key Mickey leaves in the fake rock. The grass is cut but dead from the late March snow. A green hose is hidden behind the bushes. Water trickles out of the metal head, a sound like gasping. The knob is freezing and it screeches as I twist it off. Below it is the rock, gleaming plastic, broken open. Someone’s been here.
I knock the top off a Heineken on the kitchen island, size of a paddleboat and flecked with sparkling granite. If we get divorced, I’ll get nothing. Maybe I’ll get a couch, the piano Mickey bought but never plays. Where the fuck would I put a piano? I want a Steinway smashed through these floor-length windows so I can watch it hit, disturbing the skin of the lake.
On the dock, two boys with their backs turned are casting lines into the water. With their hoodies up around their heads, their figures are small and slumped as shepherds. From the dock, the path is soft dirt up the hill to the house. I’m not afraid of whoever has been here.
After I check the fridge, tuck my clothes into the stained oak drawers, bring the mound of newspapers inside, spread out the obituaries, then light a ghostly fire, I zip my coat and trudge down to the basement for a smoke. The glass glides open onto the gray slab, but the screen is torn and taped shut with Band-Aids. Fresh butts litter the edges of the concrete. Newports. I collect each one as I watch the boys, still standing with their backs to me on the dock. I shout to them and they turn, their hoods framing their faces.
“This is private property,” I say, motioning to the floating raft they’re standing on. The raft is anchored deep down in the muck. The lines are anchored to the boys, and their feet to the raft. The birds to the branches, their heads still as assassins. The boys gather their rods, leap from the dock to the shore, kicking sand on their way back up past the kayaks.
When they pass, I see their faces, one so pale he glows. He looks down at my hand, at the cigarettes jutting out of my fist. It’s only when I’m inside that I see it, a backpack, slumped in the corner of the basement. It sits by the mantel, right under the antique Nude Beach sign with its arrow facing the lake. The bag is just there like a basket outside a church.
I pick it up by the shoulder straps, then stomp up the stairs. It’s a black JanSport, jagged teeth for a zipper. I’m emptying its contents onto the kitchen island. I hold up an Angry Birds T-shirt, then bring it to my nose like I’m sniffing a carton of milk on the sour. It smells like wood chips and musk. I lay it flat.
In the front pocket is a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Newports, nine of them left. I splay each cigarette out under the shirt’s sleeves, skeleton fingers with a pinkie missing. There’s a pair of gardening gloves, and I scoop out candy wrappers and loose Band-Aids littered at the bottom, separating the Band-Aids from the candy and placing the wrappers in the palms of the stiff gloves. Two lottery tickets, scribbled silver at the scratch. I set them down, slide them as if across a Ouija board beneath the gloves. Backpacks are for addicts.
In the basement, I’m a PI. From here, I can see the curved wooden couch legs, electrical sockets. I crawl closer. There’s a Samsung charger snaking out of the wall. I march back upstairs and pull open drawers at random. I drop the charger into a Ziploc, seal it shut, then hold it up to the light. It’s just a phone charger. It goes straight onto the counter with the rest of the things. On the counter, the whole of the mound focuses into the shadow of a running man, a scarecrow smoking his own fingers.
Back downstairs, I pull on my winter driving gloves, which I never actually wear when I’m driving. The couch has a skirt and I flip it. It’s damp and smells like Lysol. I reach out for a Coke can. In the natural light, it’s dented and pocked, aluminum melted into a lip-sized hole. I seal it. It goes on like this: a side glance at a single-edged razor in an open puzzle box, gleaming there against all the colored pieces. Next to it, a torn Suboxone packet, which in my palm looks like a blue pack of two Advils you’d find in a hotel lobby, all the medical letters like a miniature résumé on the back.
When Benny overdosed, I found Suboxone wrappers crumpled and hidden in his closet. I studied the back, Rx only, then buried myself in his sheets. Once, numb from vodka, I brought Benny up with Mickey. There was a bread basket set between us, two knives. He told me to get over it. It’d been nine years since high school. He sipped his water at me, his eyes still, the ice rattling.
“Would you be over it?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. Mick makes so much money selling first-rate health insurance. He doesn’t give a damn about anyone else’s life.
It’s not everything. I’m back on hands and knees, a beach crab. In the floral basement bathroom, the shower curtain is askew. Slumped on the tile is a white towel. Under the sink, a spoon bent at the neck with a melted cotton swab in the center. An empty foil blister pack of Percocet. An oversized Ecko jacket in the dryer, the hood lined with sopping fur, folded aluminum tucked in the pockets, bright in the center with a gleaming burn. I seal it with the last Ziploc.
A Heineken cap cracks against the counter and I slug it. I tuck the T-shirt inside the Ecko jacket. Long arms, long torso, arms stretched out flat, cross-like. Through the floor-length windows, the lake swirls a sunset, Nyquil pink and pulsing. I rearrange the squatter’s stuff, put his cigarette finger up by his shirt’s neck. He’ll be back. His things are here. I turn out the lights, the lake dividing it
self into darkness.
In the morning, I go for a drive. Where is this guy? He could be anyone, but not anyone exactly. He’s XL tall. I know that for sure. He buys lottery tickets. I pull into the parking lot at Liberty Liquors. I stay an extra minute before getting out, watch the clerk haul trash into the back bins. I have an insane thought. Is that his father? I hoist my twelve-pack onto the counter. The checkout girl’s bangs block her eyes. It smells like powdered doughnuts in here.
“Is this it?” she says. I point to the Marlboro 100s. Then toss a Snickers into the mix. The surveillance is grainy and slow. The trash guy comes back behind the counter, and his neon vest flashes like a caution sign. He undoes the Velcro.
I drive all the way to the ocean and sit in my car. I chew the Snickers and tap ashes out the window. I knew Benny was high when he ate sweets, but towards the end it was better that way, seeing him at peace, the lifelines of his palm glowing orange. Cheap off-season candy corn in the big bag, the waxy teeth in his palm. He’d eat them one by one, eyes closed and red-rimmed.
I roll up the window. I lied before. The water scares me. It’s different from the lake, which stays the same. Maybe the squatter will be there when I get back. I’ll have to shut off my car a few houses down, tiptoe in. Maybe he’ll be shooting up in the shower, his hair dark and his tongue pearled in froth. His eyes too far gone to look distraught when I kneel down to touch his cheek.
In my windshield, the clouds hang low. I’m not scared of addicts. Real estate agents terrify me. Housewives, cheerleaders. I turn up NPR so it feels like someone is talking to me on purpose. Below, on the tiers of slate, the ocean rolls forward, a foaming mouth, then pulls back into itself. Such restraint. One more smoke. I roll the window back down a finger, tapping more ash onto the hardened sand of the lot.
I drive through Falmouth, unmarked roads. Trucks on blocks in driveways made of crushed white shells. Deserted restaurants, abandoned bookstores, old white churches, buoys on the lawns. A hangover starts late, the current blooming behind my eyes. By now I know my way around, so I’m just speeding down the narrow roads till I turn onto our street. Mick’s street. Everything Mick’s. I remember when he held my hair up to his face with his fist after I swore I’d quit. You can only smell nicotine on people who aren’t you.
