by Alix Ohlin
* * *
—
On Tuesday we go back to work. For this shop we have to buy something at Target and then try to return it without a receipt to another store, to see if they’ll give us cash. They’re not supposed to give cash no matter how much of a fuss we make. The instructions include a whole script to follow but they never change it and it sounds totally wooden and the people who work there are onto it by now, so I tend to take some creative license. Aunt Ava doesn’t like it when I do this but I tell her it’s better than us getting busted as mystery shoppers—the cashiers go all rigid and smiley and follow every rule to the letter, while secretly seething at us for wasting their time—and she knows I have a point.
“Cassie,” she says as we park, “just don’t go too far, all right? No tears. No dead people.” This is a reference to a previous story I made up, about a toilet plunger I claimed, in the heat of the scene, had been bought as a gift for my late grandfather before he died—“and he never even got to use it!” (They gave me the cash, the triumph of my career to date in service intelligence.) I’m not great at real-life emotions but fake ones can be pretty enjoyable. “If they remember too much about it, they can contest the report and we don’t get paid.”
“Okay,” I say. She takes a picture of the item—which is a phone—on her phone, and I make a joke about the meta-ness of taking a picture of a phone with a phone, which is humor that works better in an academic context, and she rolls her eyes at me and then we go in. She has to make notes while I’m doing it, about how many people are working, who talks to me and what they say, how long it takes for me to get service. All this goes in the report. And she can’t get busted by the store workers while she’s doing it, so she winds up just muttering into her Bluetooth while pretending she’s super interested in lawn furniture or whatever.
As I walk up to the counter I’m rehearsing my script in my head, coming up with a plausible scenario, and I’ve got some adrenaline going and I sort of do feel like a spy for at least a couple of nerve-jangling moments, and I’m so engrossed in my task that I don’t notice Monica until she’s right in front of me and I can’t escape.
“Cassie,” she says. “Cassie Kranz! There you are!” She says this in a high-pitched, singsong voice, as if I’m a kitten that’s been hiding under her couch. I know her from school; we’re friends, I guess, in a glancing way. Once Karen asked me about my friends, and I said I had lots but not many I liked, and she asked how I could have friends I didn’t really like and I said, “I’m sorry, have you ever been around girls?” and she laughed in a tone that made us both feel sad. Anyway, Monica and I used to do Zumba together sometimes. She’s a theater major and an air-kisser.
Sure enough she gives me a big loud mwah that pops next to my ear like a tiny firework. “Where have you been this semester?” she says, still looking for me under the couch. I glance over at Aunt Ava, nervously—this encounter is messing up all the timing information we’re supposed to write down in our report—but we’re also not supposed to communicate with each other, so she just glares at me and I don’t know what to do with that. “The operation has been compromised,” I would say if I were an actual spy. “Abort. Abort.”
But unfortunately I’m not an actual spy. So I just say, “Hey, Monica. What’s up?”
What’s up is a greeting that doesn’t require an answer but people like Monica never realize it. She launches into a whole thing about coming home to visit the dentist and soon she’s opening her mouth to show me the bloody gaps where her wisdom teeth used to be and I’m saying that I’m in a hurry and I start to edge away.
Monica purses her lips in a pouty, little-girl frown. “Let’s hang out this weekend since we’re both here! I never see you lately.”
“I’m not in school anymore,” I say, which I mean to end the conversation but of course it’s a mistake because her jaw drops open like a drawbridge.
“Why not? What happened?”
Behind her I see Aunt Ava pointing at her watch, although she doesn’t wear a watch, she uses her phone like everybody else, so she’s just fingering her wrist where a watch would be.
“I don’t believe in it anymore,” I tell Monica, and then I say I have to go, and she looks confused but I realize, as I approach the exchange counter, that it’s the best reason I’ve given anybody so far.
I wind up following the script exactly and I don’t get any cash.
On my way out, a receipt for store credit in my hand, I run into Monica again. She picks up as if we never stopped talking. “You know who was asking me about you”—and I’m so worried she’s going to say G that I mutter, “Yeah, I know,” before she can get the word out and I grab Aunt Ava’s hand, something I don’t think I’ve done since I was five years old, and Aunt Ava gives me a weird look but doesn’t ask why, and she walks with me fast, holding my hand, all the way back to the car.
* * *
—
Karen the counselor wanted to know why I didn’t report what happened. She talked a lot about owning your experience. “I do own it,” I’d say. “I just don’t want to have to prove it.”
“It’s like the trolley problem,” I told her one time. I explained the whole setup to her. “You pull one lever and somebody dies, and you pull another lever and other people die. Either way somebody dies.” What I meant was, there are no good options.
“So for you,” she said, “reporting is like pulling a lever that would kill either him or you?”
I shook my head. “You don’t get it.” I was trying to convey how the whole thing had made me feel like a bystander to my own life, to my own body, even when I was in the middle of it. A person watching an accident, a runaway trolley moving fast on the tracks. What happened was this. I was pregaming with my friend Lauren at her apartment, and a bunch of guys came over, including G. That’s how I think of him, because I don’t even like to have his whole name in my head, only a letter, and if you’re wondering it’s not the real first letter of his name; I like to pretend he was George or Gerald, both of which are terrible names, and that pleases me despite being what Karen would call an inadequate coping mechanism. He was in my Voices on the Margins lit class, though I’d never talked to him before. We all went to a party and we were dancing and it got really hot and then G suggested that we break into the pool and go swimming. So four of us headed over there but somehow by the time we got to the pool it was just him and me. I don’t remember the walk over there too well so I don’t know where Lauren went, or G’s friend. When the pool water hit me I sort of woke up with a shock and G had my arms twisted behind me and he was laughing like it was a game and I was sputtering and trying to get out. “Okay,” he said, “okay.” I was so relieved. He picked me up like I was a princess in a movie and carried me over to the bleachers and laid me down. “I don’t feel good,” I said, or think I said, and he kept saying, “It’s okay,” as if it were reassuring, what was happening, and each time I turned my head away or put my arm up he’d just move someplace else. There wasn’t enough of me to stop him.
I woke up in the women’s locker room with my hair wet and my clothes in a pile. I never told Lauren what happened. I never told anybody, except Karen, and even she only got the sketchiest details, mostly because sketchy details were all I had myself.
“Help me understand,” she said after I brought up the trolley problem. “What goes into your decision to pull the lever?”
I was exasperated. “I’m not the person pulling the lever,” I said. “I’m the fat man.”
She nodded in the way that meant she was confused but hoped if I kept talking we could clear it up. She was an expert at nodding: she had the understanding nod, the sad nod, the appreciative nod at some lame joke I made, the nod that said Let’s go deeper, the nod that said Our time is up. I made fun of her nodding but she was really nice, Karen. I liked her. I only stopped going to her because she wasn’t making me fee
l better, and besides some of our sessions conflicted with when Boy Meets World was on.
* * *
—
We have a dull week where the scheduler sends us around to stores to photograph merchandise and make small purchases, like a dollar or less, and I don’t even know what the point of it is. There’s no script and no adult beverages and it’s tedious but at least no one gets fired. A couple of times we have to drive past the burger place, and we both avert our eyes like it’s the scene of a car accident or something. After a while Aunt Ava gets so bored that she starts telling me about the celebrity news she reads about, the divorces and babies and affairs. She gets mad when I don’t know who all the minor celebrities are, so I act like I recognize everybody and am shocked that their marriages aren’t turning out well. Aunt Ava likes to weigh in on their choice of spouses. “There’s already one baby in that marriage,” she’ll say. Or: “Of course it didn’t work out. They both need to be the center of attention.”
She has a lot of opinions about marriage in general, for someone who’s single. I wonder what she thinks about my parents’, but probably it’s better I don’t know. She doesn’t even really need me for these shops—she could do it all herself, and not split the money—and it saddens me to realize that she’s probably lonely.
We’re driving by the burger place again—funny how I’d hardly ever noticed it before and now it seems like every route in town takes us past it—when she says, very casually, “You know, I used to be married.”
“You were?” I had no idea. Aunt Ava living next door by herself is a constant of my life. She has spent every Christmas with us, every New Year’s Eve, every Fourth of July. Sometimes she goes on dates but it never seems to work out. My mom says she has high standards, and my dad says something different but under his breath.
“I knew you wouldn’t remember him. You were so little when he left. You liked him though. Jack. He threw you up in the air and almost dropped you. Of course you didn’t know he almost dropped you. You thought it was delightful.”
I search back in my mind for this, but I don’t come up with anything. I read somewhere that our memories aren’t really our memories; they’re actually composed of stories other people tell us about our lives. So everything I know of my past—the holidays and vacations, the trips to the zoo and family movie nights—is what my parents told me about our life, and there’s no Jack in it. It’s pretty creepy, as if childhood is just one big thought experiment performed on you by your parents.
“What happened?” I wonder if she got rid of him just like she got rid of her cat.
“We got divorced,” she says in that abrupt way of hers. She acts like the question is stupid, but I don’t know why she brought it up if she didn’t want to talk about it.
After a while she seems to relent, and goes on. “He wasn’t a trustworthy person. At all.” We’re parked in front of a strip mall now. I’m supposed to go in and try to buy cigarettes at a convenience store while Aunt Ava documents. But she’s still sitting in the car, staring straight ahead at the store window, as if it’s a puzzle she’s trying to solve.
“He took a lot of my money,” she said, “and he slept with another woman. It broke my heart.”
It’s weird to hear Aunt Ava say something like “It broke my heart.” What’s even weirder is that she’s crying. Not a lot, not sobbing or anything, but tears are wobbling in the corners of her ears, tiny and fat. I don’t know why she’s telling me this, either, and why right now, in front of a convenience store.
“It happens to everybody,” she says. “Even movie stars. Everybody gets their heart broken sometime.”
I see what she’s saying, what she’s trying to do.
“I’m not heartbroken,” I say. “I’m full of rage.” Which is something I never said to Karen, but as I say it I know it’s true. I am at capacity, from my toes to my heart to my eyeballs to my brain, so replete with rage there’s no room in me for anything else.
She looks at me like she’s seeing me for the first time. “Okay,” she says.
We get out of the car and hit the store, ready to make our mystery purchases, and I go up to the cashier and ask for some Camel Lights. She’s a tired-looking lady with frizzy brown hair, wearing a red smock over her T-shirt, and I bet she smokes herself so you’d think she’d be sympathetic. She looks me up and down says, “Are you a minor?”
I shake my head, and she asks me for ID.
“I’m old enough,” I tell her.
Sometimes people say “The law’s the law” or “I’d like to but I can’t.” But this woman’s tone is like acid when she says, “Honey, you’re just a kid. I can’t help you.”
“Thanks for nothing,” I say bitterly, forgetting the script, and she laughs at me. Her teeth are yellow and mossy. I want to spit. I’m angry and I feel like I will always be angry, there is nothing outside of my anger and no place to put it, and Aunt Ava follows me silently out to the car.
She puts her seat belt on, but doesn’t start the car. Then she says, “I am also full of rage.”
The way she says it, so serious and stilted, makes me laugh. It’s an angry laugh though, not a happy one, and Aunt Ava seems to get this, because she doesn’t laugh back, only nods. We sit in the car together, an aunt who isn’t an aunt and a kid who isn’t a kid, a tiger and a fat man, shoppers and spies. I put my headphones on and Aunt Ava turns the key in the ignition and doesn’t say where we’re going next.
We drive.
Taxonomy
tax·on·o·my noun /tak-̍sä-nә-mē/: the system or process of classifying the way in which different living things are related by putting them in groups
ring-tailed lemur (kingdom: Animalia; phylum: Chordata; class: Mammalia; order: Primates; family: Lemuridae; genus: Lemur; species: Lemur catta)
On the way to Lancaster, he stops to buy his daughter a gift.
It’s a residual habit from long-ago business trips, though Meredith is both far away and past such things. But this trip is for her, or at least undertaken on her behalf, so it feels right to get her something, a talisman from the journey, as he would have when she was young. welcome to amish country says the sign in the little country store attached to the gas station—though surely the Amish themselves would never erect a sign like that—and inside are displayed butter churns, quilts, dolls, and pies. Picking up a wooden spatula, he notes that it’s made in China. The man behind the cash register smiles vaguely out the window, his mouth hung open to reveal small colorless teeth.
At the back of the store, he spots a basket of stuffed animals. At twenty-four, Meredith hasn’t cuddled a teddy bear in years, but the selection here is startlingly varied: gorillas, monkeys, snakes, and something that, if he squints and holds it at an angle, might be a lemur. What these animals might have to do with the Amish, he doesn’t know, but a lemur is a perfect gift, since that’s the animal Meredith is studying, in Madagascar. Studying and saving, or trying to save. As a budding conservation biologist, she’s researching the many species and subspecies of lemurs, along with their vanishing habitat. So she has explained to Ed—in frankly a bit too much detail—in passionate, jargon-heavy emails.
A lemur it is, a long-limbed tube of fur with wide plastic eyes.
After paying for the toy and the gas, he gets back in the car. The GPS sends him north on one road, south the next, a route so erratic he can’t help but wonder if the calm robotic female voice is messing with him. But the landscape quiets his irritation: eastern Pennsylvania in July, green hills dotted with small farms, is a place of tidy safety. Not like Madagascar, which has seen a sharp rise in attacks and robberies, particularly crimes against tourists. When he copied the US government warning link to Meredith, she sent back a message that began: I’m not a tourist. I’m a scientist.
Always very self-serious, his girl, very conscious of categories. He’s glad she has a se
nse of purpose, if one he struggles to understand at times, and that he wishes hadn’t sent her halfway around the world.
Meredith loves animals, her work, her friends. She loved Christine, with a complicated intensity that belied the fact that they weren’t biologically related—they fought almost daily until Meredith was seventeen, and then the skies cleared and they grew so close he sometimes felt like an outsider. She loves the lemurs. She loves him, at least he hopes she does. About the errand that has brought him here from Philadelphia, and the woman who was her biological mother, she seems to care nothing at all.
cow (kingdom: Animalia; phylum: Chordata; class: Mammalia; order: Artiodactyla; family: Bovidae; genus: Bos; species: Bos taurus)
* * *
—
Following the GPS directions, he passes through a small, well-kept town (diner, consignment shop, fruit stand) and then it’s back to farms. The cows are curled up in the fields, legs beneath them, dozing, placid hulks. This is Phoebe’s world, the place she couldn’t wait to leave and then returned to, the trip equally frenzied in both directions, which was how Phoebe lived her life. Their time in Philly was short: first romantic and dramatic, then terrible and dramatic. It was like living in a tabloid, every conversation a shouted headline, every scene a sensation. They met in a bar, got married in a hurry, had Meredith, then commenced hating each other as if this had been their goal all along. Ed had grown up in Quakertown, the son of an accountant and a school librarian; he’d always been a quiet person. Sure, he liked to go out drinking with his friends, but who didn’t, at that age? He had a college education and was saving for a house. Then suddenly with Phoebe he was drinking whiskey in the afternoon and calling his wife a bitch and a cunt while his sweet little baby slept in the next room. He used those words; he did those things, and worse. The fact that Phoebe goaded him to it, that she turned out to be as purely, irredeemably crazy as a person can be, did not excuse him.
