by Alix Ohlin
* * *
—
In the dark basement at Tim’s house, he and Aziza sit with consoles in their hands. They don’t talk, but Aziza doesn’t mind. She has played the game before. People don’t expect it from a girl—Tim, who invited her under duress, clearly didn’t expect it—and she uses this to her advantage, playing timidly at first as she susses out his skill level, then venturing into a side canyon and stealing his stone weaponry when he least expects it. Some guys would freak out but Tim only glances at her with respect.
They break for soda and chips, which his mother brings downstairs on a tray. The look she gives Aziza broadcasts sharp betrayal; she wanted Aziza to lure Tim outside, instead of joining him here in artificial reality. But Aziza can imagine nothing more artificial than the reality outside, the hum of vehicles disappearing into garages, the angry wheeze of leaf blowers operated by men in masks, like a gardening militia. Here in the basement, her thumbs bent and ready, she feels invisible. Sweat gathers under her arms; she has to pee. She’s more comfortable than she has been in weeks.
Only when Tim’s mother comes back and tells her it’s time to go does she understand that hours have passed.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Outside, it’s somehow still light. The walk home is only three minutes but Aziza drags it out as long as she can, scuffing her new running shoes against the curb until the rubber frays at the tip. She dreads Tamar’s cheerful cruelty and the long hours until Albert comes home. She’s been treated worse—at school, when she first came to Sweden, girls asked if they could touch her hair and then whispered about it afterward. Once a boy in her class told her excitedly that he’d found a picture of her family in a magazine. It was a pack of dogs. But there is something particularly painful about Tamar’s sugary care, her wide smile and dead eyes, her constant, unstated insistence that Aziza should be and look and act different than she does.
Can she dash straight from the front door to her room without seeing Tamar? She can only try.
But Tamar isn’t home. No one is home. It’s the first time Aziza has been alone all summer. Set free, she drifts around the house, snooping. Vaguely now she remembers Tamar saying she’d be working late, and that Aziza should help herself to the cashew nut casserole in the fridge. All the food Tamar makes is vegan and gluey, and anyway Aziza is pleasantly full of chips. She wanders into Tamar and Albert’s bedroom. They have an adjustable bed. Tamar’s half is propped higher than Albert’s. It makes Aziza think of her mother’s bed at the hospital, and she averts her eyes from it. Instead she runs her hands across Albert’s shirts—he owns a ton of them, in endless variations of blue and white. She doesn’t know what he does, something online; she pictures him in a loft office, cracking jokes with his employees, casual but businesslike with his sleeves rolled up. He looks like a nicer version of the Alvin she remembers. He’s younger and fitter and also not bald, and his eyes are kinder and more wrinkled from smiling. She wishes he would put his arm around her sometime. She wishes she could curl up next to him like a cat and be petted, her body tiny like a cat’s is tiny, tucked into itself. She would purr.
She runs her fingers through Tamar’s jewelry, opens her bedside drawer: magazines, costume jewelry, lipstick. On Albert’s side, the nightstand is covered with coins and crumpled dollar bills. She takes nothing. She knows she’d be suspected. She knows Albert and Tamar’s carelessness is just a show they put on for themselves; they pay more attention to little things than they let on.
* * *
—
There had been some talk, over email, about her enrolling in summer classes, maybe something with computers, that might help her in an eventual career. But deadlines were missed and paperwork unfiled. “I don’t know what kids around here do,” she hears Tamar telling Albert one night. Her tone is exasperated. “How am I supposed to know?” Albert’s answer is low and unintelligible, as always.
Aziza decides to try babysitting. At the market with Tamar, she has seen flyers on the bulletin board, so she puts up her own, listing the number of the cell phone Tamar got her. Soon she has more work than she can handle; the parents are desperate, even willing to overlook the fact that she doesn’t drive. She takes the bus all over, drags kids away from flat-screen televisions, makes them play in their lush backyards. She has no particular affection for children, but isn’t scared of them either. “You’re no-nonsense,” a mother says to her. “I like that.” Aziza repeats this term whenever she meets a new parent, despite not entirely understanding what it means. “I’m no-nonsense,” she says. “Understandable, given where you’re from,” a father muses, and she doesn’t answer. She has found that not answering is usually the best answer. Soon her own nightstand drawer is filled with bills, which she keeps tied in a rubber band; she has nothing to spend the money on except candy, which she buys from the convenience store and eats on the bus, the cheap chocolate dissolving fast on her tongue.
One evening, trudging home from the bus stop, she is accosted by Oszkar, who is out front spraying his flower beds with a hose. “My lady,” he says to her, and she says nothing. It sounds sarcastic. He’s a short hairy man wearing what look like pyjama pants, striped and floppy, and a T-shirt that hangs over his jutting belly like an awning over a porch.
“How’s it going over there? You surviving the dungeon masters?”
She nods. He’s trying to get her to admit something or confess something. She has seen him, at night, standing at his bedroom window, trying to see into Tamar and Albert’s house.
“If it gets too much, feel free to come over and hang with me and Tilda. Pop a beer or whatever. Let off some steam.”
“Okay,” she says.
“You making any friends? Meeting any boys?”
“I’m quite busy,” she says, and something about this—her accent? her gravity?—makes him laugh. His eyes graze her body hungrily. She’s been flirted with before, but never quite so brazenly as this. It wouldn’t be true to say she likes it; indeed she finds him disgusting. But she would like somebody else to look at her like Oszkar is, ravenous and direct. She’d like to hold somebody’s attention so tightly that they can’t look away.
As if sensing her desire, a car speeds fast around the curb and hurtles into the open maw of the garage. Albert gets out and heads straight for them, his face red and furious.
“Hey neighbor!” Oszkar waves.
Albert ignores him. “You all right?” he asks Aziza.
She nods. Albert puts his arm around her, a pressure on her shoulders turning her towards the house. Oszkar is unperturbed. He flicks the water across the heads of his pansies and grins at Albert.
“Don’t forget what I said,” Oszkar calls after them, and when Albert asks her what it was, Aziza tells him she can’t remember, which only makes him scowl more.
* * *
—
Albert is drunk. He’s brushing his teeth too hard, which always sets Tamar on edge. He killed most of a bottle of wine over dinner and Tamar watched Albert quiz Aziza about the creepy neighbor, what he’d said and done, while the girl grew first flustered, then sullen. Albert never knows when he’s gone too far, doesn’t understand that he’s acting less like a protective patriarch than his own brand of creep.
“Let it go,” she told him, only to have him turn on her.
“Like you care,” he said, and she could tell from Aziza’s brief, crumpled smile that she agreed. An army of two, massed against her. Tamar stood up, carried her plate to the sink, and left.
Now Albert sways as he gets into bed, lying on his side away from her. She places a hand on his shoulder and he doesn’t stiffen, but he doesn’t move either. He’s numb to her. She lies on her back, looking at the red curtains, the dark blue wallpaper. They’d picked these things out together, years ago, when they still shared the same taste. In this bed she’d lain after the third miscarriage
and told Albert she was done trying. No more. He’d nodded and held her hand, and she’d thought he understood, that he would not be angry. But she was wrong. In this bed, before that, she’d lain after sex, when they first married, astonished that he was her husband, and she was his wife. She’d wanted him so badly, had in fact stolen him from her roommate Brenda and burned up that friendship with zero regrets. I got what I wanted. Even after the wedding, she was still amazed. Now in this bed she lies still and feels him revealed as the stranger he’s been for so long. He rustles and settles, snoring. She almost feels tenderly towards him, out of a habit of trying to keep loving him; then understands that the person she feels tenderly towards, the object of all her compassion, is herself.
* * *
—
Tim knows Tamar and Albert don’t keep the back door locked, just as he knows that Oszkar keeps a spare key under the doormat and Mrs. Cooper has an alarm system sign that’s just for show. He used to go through all the houses in the neighborhood when he was in high school, an anthropologist of the ordinary. Creepy gamer kid is a cliché to which he strenuously objects, but sometimes he just got so bored. His sister Tanya came with him once, in between expeditions to smoke cigarettes in underpasses with her Goth friends, but all she wanted to do was look for booze and drugs and sex toys. He told her that her mind lacked subtlety and she rolled her eyes at him and left, which was how most conversations between them ended.
It’s been a while since he visited the houses, but meeting Aziza has sparked his curiosity again. He wants to see her room, her clothes, the whatever-secret-inside she keeps hidden beneath her calm exterior. They’ve spent hours gaming together but still rarely talk. He needs a clue, some wedge of information he can use to pry her open.
The house smells dead inside; not dirty but too clean, uninhabited, despite the three people living here. In the recycling bin are a surprising number of empty wine bottles and a couple of pizza boxes. Tamar and Albert’s bedroom is the only messy part of the house, with dirty laundry on the floor and dressers littered with crap. He picks up some stray dollar bills, a necklace, a tie, and stuffs them in his pocket. He doesn’t want these items for themselves; he wants to have taken, to have rearranged the air around their possessions only enough for Tamar and Albert to sense the disturbance.
In Aziza’s room he sniffs the air for the solution to the riddle of her. But he finds nothing. Her clothes lie neatly folded in drawers. She keeps no journal, reads no books. The place is emptier than a hotel room. She has perfected her own absence. He liked her before, but now, seeing this rigor and demarcation, the discipline of a ghost, he swoons.
* * *
—
This time it’s Tamar’s turn. She actually forgot about Cindy and Mike’s party and had a drink or three at home after a long day at work. This guy Ruben, one of her regulars, was such a dick to her—he always was, grazing her body as she leaned over him; once he’d even stuck out his tongue and licked her hip. All he got was a mouthful of the apron where she stashed her lotion, so what was even the point? Being a dick was the point. She complained to her manager, Beth, and all Beth said was “Business isn’t great, Tamar,” and that was that. Today Ruben actually pinched her butt and she wheeled around and said, “What in the everlasting godforsaken fuck? I mean what fucking year do you think this is, Ruben?” and stormed out of the spa without finishing her shift. She probably didn’t have a job to go back to tomorrow. So she’d downed some gin and chased it with tonic, too upset to even mix them in the same glass, and then, when she saw Oszcar and Tilda parading past her house, their goddamn fruit platter—did they ever bring anything else?—held aloft like an offering to the gods, she remembered. Albert was supposed to meet her there and who knew about Aziza; she kept her own hours these days. Tamar had asked Albert once, in the early morning, just how long the girl was going to stay, but things between them were so frosty that he hadn’t even answered the question. She couldn’t skip the party because then Cindy would ask why and if there was one thing she couldn’t stand it was Cindy’s Wrinkled Brow of Concern. Once, at the grocery store, she’d caught Tamar smiling at a toddler riding in a cart, and she’d placed her palm on Tamar’s forearm and said sympathetically, “Albert told Mike about your trouble. It must be so hard,” and Tamar, dark with heartbreak, had said, “Actually I’m relieved. Kids horrify me,” and Cindy frowned with the greatest look of pity Tamar had ever seen. She can’t go through a scene like that again. She must be unassailable. So she puts on a short-sleeved polka-dot dress and gels her hair into curls and walks very steadily down the street, carrying a bottle of wine in a silver gift bag.
In the yard, plastic sheeting covers the picnic tables, onto which Cindy is throwing down crabs and boiled corn. Albert and Aziza sit together at one end, wearing bibs and expressions of pliant misery. Tamar has never been less hungry, and she escapes to the kitchen, where Oszkar is mixing martinis. When he sees her, he leers, as he usually does; she has never actually seen him with a woman other than Tilda, whom she suspects is more a hired housekeeper than a girlfriend, so she doesn’t take it seriously. She deposits her wine and picks up a martini instead. They cheers.
Tim and Tanya drift past, glance outside at the party, and refuse it, the girl going upstairs, the boy down. To Tamar’s surprise, Aziza wipes her hands, comes inside, and follows the boy downstairs.
“Young love,” Oszkar says knowingly. “The hormones do the talking.”
“Don’t be gross,” Tamar says.
“What you call gross, I call beauty. Sex is nature’s most beautiful invention.”
“That’s also gross,” Tamar says irritably. “Where’s your handmaiden?”
“My what?”
“Tilda.”
“She went home to get more fruit.”
“Of course she did,” Tamar says.
Oszkar is standing very close to her, his spittle bursting against her ear. “You look very nice,” he says.
“Are you hitting on me?”
“I’ve been hitting on you for years.”
“Shameless.”
“I notice you don’t say gross.”
Tamar flushes. Oszkar is disgusting, potbellied and scruffy bearded. To this party he has worn shorts that fall below his knees and a yellow T-shirt that reads “silence is golden. duct tape is silver.” Looking at him, she thinks about people interviewed on the news after their neighbor commits some terrible crime, saying, “He seemed like a nice guy. You would never suspect.” Oszkar is not such a person. You would suspect him of anything.
Outside, Albert is talking to Mike, waving a crab leg around as he makes some point. He has become the kind of man who makes a lot of points, who cares about the winning of unwinnable arguments. Oszkar is kissing her, an attack on her person that she observes more than participates in, though she does not object. I mean who even cares at this point. There are arms around her, there are lips moving against her neck, her cheek, her earlobe. The sleeve of her dress slips off her shoulders. Over Oszkar’s back some movement catches her eye, and she looks up to see Aziza and Tim watching her, both of their expressions neutral. Without saying anything Tim opens the fridge door, takes out two cans of soda, and leads Aziza back downstairs.
* * *
—
Later, at home, they fight. “This is like some kind of parody,” Albert hisses. “Suburban wife misbehaves. Is it a joke to you?”
“Yes, it’s a joke,” she says grimly. “It is beyond hilarious.”
She wants to tell him that this is what adulthood is, to embody a role and not be able to escape it. Self-parody is inevitable. Instead she sits on the edge of the bed with hands folded contritely in her lap, a posture that also feels like self-parody, even though her grief and shame are real.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Albert says, and goes to sleep on the couch. But he can’t sleep, and stays up too late watching
talk shows. At a certain point Aziza pads into the living room wearing a hooded sweatshirt and yoga pants. He sits up and makes a space for her on the couch. She doesn’t look at him or talk to him, just stares at the TV as if spellbound. He is not glad of the company. He has been mortified enough today.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I thought this summer would be better for you.”
She shrugs. “It’s no worse than at home.”
He laughs. “You’re a real diplomat.”
She tucks her knees up under her chin, and he sees he’s hurt her. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I appreciate your honesty.”
She doesn’t answer. On TV, an actress tells a story about eating too much cheese. The host guffaws. It’s not a funny story, but Aziza smiles with what looks like real delight, the blue glow of the screen lighting her face with a spooky fire.
* * *
—
Tamar’s hangover is extreme. She lies beneath the blanket as if entombed in concrete. Albert came into the room just long enough to dress, and then the front door closed a second time, when Aziza left. Now she stills in silence, her head deep in the pillow like a fossil in the dirt. She is bleached and dry; she is the long-ago dead. It’s seriously time to stop drinking. Groping blindly she finds her phone and lifts it to her face. A text from Beth says, Meet me at 10 if you want to keep your job.
In the bathroom, she makes herself throw up, then swallows four Advils and a Ritalin. She can do this. She armors herself in makeup, then stops by the nightstand for her favorite necklace, the garnet pendant she inherited from her mother and which isn’t there.
It is the absence that wakes her up. She stiffens, ransacks her jewelry box, calls Albert, who says he hasn’t seen it. “It’s probably in a pocket somewhere,” he says.
