Life Among the Terranauts

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “Okay,” Olav said agreeably, smiling back. He’d apparently brought an extra beer with him into the living room, and he offered her the unopened can on the coffee table. She took it, snapped it open.

  “Skål,” Olav said.

  “I know that one,” Annika said. “Skål. Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” Olav said.

  She watched them drink in the reflection in the dark window. She could keep the house or try to rent it, come back for vacations. Let the deer eat the flower beds. She could leave a bowl of buttered porridge in the shed and hope for the best. There was a rustling sound outside—a chase of leaves in the wind, or a light-footed troll, a softhearted nisse.

  Through the screen doors a breath of wind came, moving the yellow curtains. Annika heard it like a voice. Go, her parents whispered to her. Go.

  Gå, she imagined her grandmother murmuring. Gå.

  “Yes,” Annika said. “I’m going.”

  Sun City

  They floated into the afternoon in their little stucco submarine, blinds shut against the sunlight and the swamp cooler whistling on the roof. In the artificial air the two women wrapped jewelry in tissue paper and placed it in the compartments of egg cartons. Bev sat on the couch, Rose knelt on the matted carpet, and Cline, Bev’s guinea pig, wandered under the coffee table. Rose had had this idea, the egg cartons, on the plane to Arizona, and it had made her feel organized. In the aftermath of her grandmother’s death, at least there were omelets to be made. When she’d realized just how much stuff her grandmother had owned and how little of it Bev wanted to keep, Rose should have come up with a new plan. Instead, they just kept eating eggs.

  “It’s Cline after Patsy Cline, you know,” Bev explained for the fifth time that week as her cassette tape clicked to silence on the stereo in the hallway. She heaved herself off the couch and over the child gate that confined Cline to the living room. Bev was majestically huge. The lift of her legs over the gate reminded Rose of dockyards, cranes and I-beams, vast weight swinging dangerously free. If the house weren’t a concrete box laid flat on the dirt, the floors would shake. Rose, solid herself, envied this size; Bev looked armored, untouchable, as if nothing could come at her that wouldn’t bounce straight off. Grandmother Vera’s death, the dispersal of her possessions—at the end of the week, Bev would step over it all and disappear into some other hallway of her life. She’d step straight over Rose and never look back.

  “They eat these, you know,” Rose said, scooping Cline off the floor. “In South America.”

  “That’s disgusting.” Bev swung herself back into the room, and Patsy Cline went walkin’ after midnight on the tape deck.

  Rose moved Cline’s front legs in a little dance. “It’s a delicacy. There’s a painting of the Last Supper in some church in Peru where Jesus eats guinea pig.”

  Bev lifted Cline onto her shoulder. “No one’s going to eat you here, sweetie. We aren’t savages.”

  “They roast them whole, eyes and toenails and everything.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Bev cuddled Cline defensively.

  It was a real question and Rose felt sheepish. “Sorry,” she said, and she held up a pair of clip-on silver birds, still on the plastic store backing. “Are you sure you don’t want these?”

  “I don’t need Vera’s old costume crap. I’ve got enough junk of my own.”

  Rose agreed with her there. The house bulged with it, cowboy figurines and Kokopellis and lots of monotonous Southwestern art, cheerful brown children in brown pueblos. Bev’s own cheerful white grandchildren smiled from every wall, the frames shaped like hearts or guitars or kitten heads, the pictures cut off at awkward angles inside. “This pair’s real silver,” Rose offered.

  “Take ’em for yourself. Take anything you like. We’ve been through this.”

  “I wear pierced, not clip.”

  “I noticed. Five times in the one ear, four in the other.” Bev peered closer at the pair of bird shapes. “She never wore those. Your mother sent them to her one Christmas. She hated them.”

  “Okay, then. To the consignment store.” Rose tried to tuck them in an egg cup, but the plastic backing didn’t fit. The birds eyed her resentfully, protruding from among the coiled necklaces, quiescent little serpents.

  Bev wore almost no jewelry, just a tiny cross with a diamond in the center. The gem caught the light and blinked at Rose like a beacon from Bev’s oceanic chest.

  Vera had lived here for eight years, a long quiet twilight filled with card games at the neighborhood clubhouse, a bowling league, classic-movie channels. Vera and Bev were both retired and didn’t seem to miss their jobs. They’d both been widowed and made it known that they didn’t miss their husbands. Vera had been a secretary for a company that made plastic garbage cans. Bev had been an electrician. She wore her hair short and played softball and, in the photos Vera sent, wore overalls until her weight ballooned and she switched to housedresses. They cowrote their Christmas letters, trading off every paragraph to crack jokes about each other. They included pictures of themselves at the botanical garden or a Diamondbacks game, their full names—Vera Beasley and Beverly Morrison—written on the back. They filled the frame, these two old ladies, one large and one lean, smiling and pressing their cheeks close.

  Say hi to Bev, Rose wrote in every note to her grandmother, the postcards or the thank-you notes for the five-dollar bills that still came on her birthday. Each time she felt like she was winking, their eyes meeting over the decades, seeing something true in each other.

  Rose had once dated a woman who’d had a whole other life, a marriage, two kids. “You’ve always known who you were,” she’d said when Rose had talked about mixed spin the bottle in seventh grade, high-school girlfriends, coming out to her mother while high on painkillers in the car going home after a tonsillectomy. Her mother just pulled into a drive-through to buy her a milkshake and said, “Oh, sweetie, I know. We’ve known for a while, haven’t we?”

  “I envy that,” the old girlfriend had said. “It must have made life so much easier.”

  “It’s never easy,” Rose said, referring vaguely to life in general, or romance, or sex, or relationships. She’d realized only later that the woman had simply meant self-knowledge, and that had been easy for Rose; it had come plainly and she’d never wanted to deny it, never felt she could. Vera’s story was beautiful and sad to her, how long it had taken her to find Bev, to find herself. After Vera died of a heart attack, about as suddenly as a seventy-three-year-old woman can die, Rose flew in from Portland for the week. Partly because she knew her mother wouldn’t, and she thought Bev would need somebody’s help, and partly because that story had allowed Rose to love her grandmother less complicatedly than her mother had ever managed. Probably to love her better, Rose thought.

  Rose had rented a car at Phoenix Sky Harbor and driven to the house in Sun City. Bev showed her to Vera’s room, but there was only one person’s clothes in the closet and a tightly made single bed with rough white pillowcases. “I’m across the hall,” Bev said, then peered closer at whatever expression was on Rose’s face. “She didn’t actually die in here, you know. It happened at the hospital.” Bev explained that she’d already paid for a booth at a local consignment store; Vera’s stuff had to be out of the house by the end of the week. “I’ll need another roommate,” Bev said. “The HOA fees out here are something else.” Vera herself was in a brown box on the dresser, blank and cardboard and dangerously like part of the pile of mail left sitting beside it, the sales pitches and charity pleas that had arrived after her death. “I suppose you’ll be taking this back to Portland,” Bev said, holding the box up for inspection. Rose hadn’t realized a crematorium would even let you walk away without an urn, with an entire person contained in a fragile paper box.

  “Unless you want it here,” Rose offered carefully.

  “You’re family and it’s yours. And why would I?”

  Roommate. Rose had assumed in those Christmas letters that
it was a euphemism. But maybe it wasn’t.

  The other bedroom door had been closed since Rose arrived. Bev disappeared into it every night after dinner to listen to the most miserable country album Rose had ever heard. A woman’s lone howl crawled out from under the door, singing about love and death, and Rose thought if she listened hard enough she’d eventually hear Bev crying along. But Bev popped out each morning clear-eyed and so brusque Rose couldn’t imagine just asking her, putting her question into words that Bev could laugh or take offense at or just deny.

  Bev gave up on a tangle of necklaces and pushed the clot of metal across the coffee table. “I’m going for my swim,” she announced. “You said you’d call U-Haul about her furniture.” Rose picked at the clasps until she heard the sliding door to the backyard open and shut. Then she sneaked to the kitchen window. She hunkered down, her arms in the sink, her head as low to the windowsill as she could get it.

  Bev couldn’t actually swim. She got from one side to the other somehow, but with wild movements of her arms, great gasps of breath. Sometimes she turned onto her back and shot a plume of water into the air like the spray from a whale’s blowhole. At each side, she pulled herself up with an elbow, the flesh of her upper arm spreading against the concrete. She caught her breath, practiced a stroke one-armed, hung on to the edge, and kicked her legs. Put her face into the water and blew delicate bubbles. Then she set off back across and it looked exactly the same, her strokes a broken windmill, her hips swiveling, water spraying three feet up on the concrete deck. It was the worst swimming Rose had ever seen, worse than she had imagined possible without the swimmer drowning, and it was the best entertainment of the past three days.

  After fifteen minutes Bev climbed out of the pool and Rose ran back to the living room, dropped to the carpet, and grabbed the necklaces. “Doesn’t look like you’ve made much progress,” Bev said, closing the sliding door behind her. A gulp of outside air came in with her, hot enough to reach Rose in the living room but already dissipating, a flame thankfully snuffed. Bev stood in her swimsuit, dripping a puddle onto the tile floor. Rose shrugged, listened to the water drop and the swamp cooler straining on the roof, and realized the Patsy Cline tape had stopped. Bev tucked her towel around her waist and stood, arms akimbo, outside the child gate. “The swimming. Can’t ever stop learning. That’s when you die. Anyway, you going to make us some dinner? Something other than eggs.”

  Rose wanted to protest—why was it her job to make dinner?—but Bev was already down the hallway. Behind the bedroom door, the miserable country album started up again. A banjo twanged and the singer howled. Rose thought of her first girlfriend. She’d left lyrics in Rose’s locker written out like poems. Some were about love but most were about suicide. They’d put on a CD and smoke pot and try to feel more than their lives at the time had given them to feel. They thought listening to the right song might let them squeeze themselves so tightly, something ugly would come welling out. Rose listened and pretended she was the girl her mother must have envisioned, giving her the name she did. She imagined the beauty, imagined the thorns. Dark things were deepest. Every teenager knew that, gay or straight.

  The singer in Bev’s bedroom shrieked like something was biting her. “I’m going to the store,” Rose shouted.

  Bev had the single track on repeat, too loud to hear or answer, and Rose thought that if she’d owned this album as a sixteen-year-old, she might have hurt herself for real.

  Rose’s mother worked at the U.S.A. Dry Pea and Lentil Council trade group. She was the kind of lifetime admin who prided herself on being able to merge five distribution lists, kick the vending machine in the right place to free a stuck soda, and fix a paycheck all at 4:55 p.m. on a Friday. Iris had worked fifty weeks a year for thirty-five years and counting. One week of her two weeks of vacation she used to take Rose somewhere edifying, a national park or historic battlefield. One week she would go to Cabo San Lucas alone. There were plenty of men in her life, usually one at a time for a few months each, but they never went with her. Rose wondered sometimes if she’d modeled this part of herself on her mother without realizing it. The series of women, a few months each. Iris had used Rose as her excuse—single parenthood, the need not to let her little girl fall too hard for men who might not last. But Rose never fell too hard, not so hard she couldn’t walk away when she wanted, and she usually did.

  During Iris’s solo vacations, Rose stayed with Grandma Vera, who took her bowling and made cookies with ingredients seemingly left over from the last time Rose had visited, the brown sugar crusted into jagged points at the bottom of the bag.

  “What does your mom do all week in Cabo? I mean, the same vacation every year. If I had the money to go somewhere, I’d try to actually see something. I’d see the world.”

  Vera handled the dough like she was annoyed with it, rolled it into balls, and pressed them on the baking sheet so firmly Rose knew they’d spread too much and burn. The first batch was already out of the oven, brown and crispy. Rose ate them anyway.

  “Your mother’s wasted her life,” Vera said. “She was a smart girl and she’s wasted it with those pea people.”

  Rose went very still, chewing her cookie as quietly as she could. She felt like a wild animal was coming into view, a shy specimen her mother knew but Rose rarely saw. She imagined the hushed voice of a nature-program narrator excitedly announcing the find. The old Vera had been a drinker. The old Vera had been sharp-tongued, quick to insult, frequently cruel. Iris avoided talking about this angry version of her—she could acknowledge Vera’s newer self without quite wanting a relationship with it or believing they could manage one. When Iris shared her memories of Vera, she described howling fights, words that sliced true, and wounds that never quite scabbed over. Rose would watch them float from her mother’s mouth and settle like spores on the car dashboard or kitchen table. She imagined her mother saw them too, because she always changed the subject immediately, denying them soil to root, to darken Rose’s mind against the grandmother she adored, the one who baked her cookies, even though they were burned, who called like clockwork on Sundays. It was only later that Rose realized that Vera called punctually, predictably, so that Rose would be the one waiting at the phone, no need for her to talk to Iris, no obligation to try and fix something broken.

  “Don’t you waste your life too,” Vera used to tell her. “Not like your mother.” And Rose just nodded.

  She didn’t think she was wasting her life, but she suspected Vera might have thought so; Rose was in her mid-twenties, tending bar, no college degree, no marriage, no children. Her mother had sent Vera the reviews of all the places Rose worked. They almost never mentioned the drinks, but her mother would find something, like “attentive service,” to run a pink highlighter across. They had all figured out a way to live around rather than directly with one another—the restaurant reviews mailed to Vera, the notes of congratulations that Vera then sent to Rose, the careful dance around one another’s loyalties. The most recent review was in a still sealed envelope on Vera’s dresser with the rest of her mail. Rose was mentioned by name in that one, as the “mixologist and mastermind behind the exquisitely crafted cocktails.” Rose opened the envelope, stuck the review in the mirror frame, and pretended her grandmother had had the chance to read it. Looking at it, posted above the blank brown box, she felt both vindication and disappointment.

  Whatever big goals Vera might have had for herself remained a mystery. She didn’t seem especially proud of any one ability or accomplishment, her family included. Her moving in with Bev had seemed like an explanation: transgression, courage, forbidden love—that was a story that might justify everything, misbehavior and devotion both. But if Vera was alone at the end of her life, surrounded by Kokopellis and pictures of someone else’s grandchildren, a roommate, a guinea pig, an estranged daughter, then what was her excuse? How angry was her life, and how small, there at the end, if it was without love?

  In late afternoon, the heat was a bla
st furnace, every possible cliché: oven, kiln, campfire, house fire. Rose’s jeans were swampy before she’d even pulled out of the driveway, and at the Safeway she lingered as long as she could, buying food and a two-dollar pair of flip-flops. Her feet were suffocating in sneakers.

  Her mom called while she was stalling in the magazine aisle, actually reading Us Weekly instead of just flipping through the pictures of celebrity baby bumps. “I still don’t hate myself,” Iris announced as soon as Rose picked up. “I’m still not coming.”

  “Okay.”

  “How are things?”

  “Weird.”

  “Is Bev there? Can you not talk?”

  “I’m at the grocery store. Did you know they didn’t—”

  “My therapist says he thinks it’s fine if I don’t go. He said people grieve in their own way. Or don’t. I don’t know yet if I’m grieving. But I’m not coming down.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to.”

  “You don’t know what she was like.”

  “No.” Rose put Us Weekly back on the rack. “I didn’t. I really didn’t.”

  “I just wanted to check in. I have aerobics. I’m outside the studio right now.”

  “Then go inside.”

  “Okay, I’m going. I’m going,” she said, and hung up.

  Rose, delaying, looked for a circuitous route home, which wasn’t hard. Sun City was a giant suburban hamster maze. In one of the strip malls Rose spotted a giant red sign reading BEVMO. She turned into the parking lot. She could get Bev something with the name, even just a labeled bag or business card. Maybe Beverly Morrison would find it endearing. Maybe she’d tell Rose the truth. The store turned out to be a giant liquor emporium, and Rose felt foolish asking for a bag alone, so she grabbed a bottle of vodka. There was no liquor in Vera’s house. Rose had looked.