White Dialogues

by Bennett Sims

  We spent the last few weeks as we had the first, avoiding one another. I boxed up all my books and clothes and moved them to a friend’s apartment, leaving the bookcase for a day when I could borrow a truck. However, the weekend before I left I came home to find it—the bookcase—dragged into the hall and lying on its side. Fredricka was waiting for me again in her bedroom. I asked her, you know, what the hell, and she explained that Janey wanted the bookcase now that I was leaving. In a calm voice I told her no, the bookcase wasn’t hers to give. She insisted that it was—after all, she was the one who’d found it—and I laughed at her: ‘It’s street trash! You found it on the street. I’m the one who brought it up the stairs.’ To which she screeched: ‘My neighbor gave it to me! Janey is my tenant, and I am giving it to her!’ Fine, I said. Janey could have it. But she’d have to wait until I left. I’d paid rent for one last week in what was supposed to be a furnished room—I was almost shouting at this point—and I’d be damned if I was going to let her sneak in while I was gone and haul my furniture away. She couldn’t drag my bed out into the hall, so why did she think she could commandeer the bookcase? Fredricka muttered, through literally clenched teeth, that I wasn’t even using it. This was true: all my books were already gone, and the shelves were empty. Oh, I assured her, I’d find something to put on it all right. A coffee mug. Socks. Maybe some spare change. The whole week I had left with it, I planned to make the most use of it I could. When I turned to leave, I heard the bedsprings creak, then her creaking voice: ‘Don’t you dare touch that bookcase! You’ll be sorry!’

  She followed me down the hall. And when I started to pull the bookcase back into my bedroom, she grabbed the opposite end of it. Still wearing her nightgown, her withered arms straining and shaking, she glowered across at me. I tightened my grip. Honestly, I did not even want the bookcase. Not this much. I just couldn’t stand the thought of letting her have it. And somehow, even then, part of me recognized that this moment was more narrative than life—that what was happening, what I was experiencing, was already material, an anecdote I would be regaling friends with for years: ‘That Time I Fought An Old Woman For A Bookcase.’ And so I was willing to do almost anything—not just to win the bookcase, but to make it a better story. If she wanted a tug-of-war, I was not too proud to give her one.

  I planted my feet and heaved the bookcase backward, wrenching it free from her grasp. She scratched at its sides, hobbling after it, trying in vain to reclaim some purchase. After a sloppy lunge, she dropped to the floor, and I froze in horror as I braced for the sound of her hip shattering. But almost immediately she was on all fours, scrabbling at me fast. Her face was ferocious and determined and she was making a beeline for my ankle, which for a deranged instant I thought she was actually planning to bite. But instead she swerved left, crawling into the bookcase. It was still lying on its side, so she wedged herself between two shelves, curling into a semi-fetal position. I tried to keep dragging it, but it was too heavy. ‘Oh, I hope you’re happy with yourself,’ I hissed at her. ‘I hope you’re truly comfortable in there!’ She didn’t respond. I imagined her smiling, smugly hugging her knees, like some hippie chained to a tree. Invigorated with hatred, I hunkered down over the frame and tugged, exerting my entire body against her weight. The bookcase jerked backward, an inch across the floor. I kept at it. In this way, inch by inch, I managed to haul her down the hall. She held tight to the shelves, her knuckles bloodless. And even after the bookcase had come to a halt—safely back in my bedroom—she refused to crawl out.

  I wouldn’t allow her to win this way—not by attrition, not just by sitting in there until I grew bored and quit. If she wouldn’t come out on her own, I’d smoke her out. And so, pitilessly, I began rocking the bookcase, teetering it from side to side like a carnival ride. Whenever it listed floor-ward her frail arm shot out as a buttress, palming the ground to keep her from sliding free. I rocked it at more acute angles, so that she’d have to support more and more of her weight; then I stopped abruptly, letting the structure jolt. I heard her thud heavily against the backboard. She was too proud to scream. I began beating on the bookcase. For five straight minutes I drummed a tattoo with both hands, repeating ‘Get out, get out’ in rhythm with the beats. I kneed the side of the frame, knowing she’d feel the shudder all around her. I berated her. How long, I asked evilly, did she think she could stay in there, with her old woman’s bladder? I could wait all night. I told her she was being childish. I told her she was acting like a child. For someone who had lectured me on maturity, I said, she sure was behaving like an infant. Is this how she’d raised her son? I asked. Crawling into bookcases until she got her way? Still too proud to respond, she remained silent. I goaded her: Is it? Is it? Is this how she’d raised her son? Finally she shrieked back at me. I can’t replicate the shriek. It was prolonged and high-pitched and hateful. But what she screamed was: ‘MY SON IS DEAD!’

  This actually did chasten me, somewhat. I grew quiet. She was not, or not only, the antagonist of my personal story. She had a past of her own, pockmarked with loss; she was a human being. Yet as quickly as this empathy rose in me, I stifled it—I swallowed it back like bile. Now would be the perfect time to try rocking the bookcase again, I realized. She would not be expecting it. So, gripping either end, I careened it left and right as forcefully as I could. While the memory of her dead son was still fogging her mind, I tried to heave her onto the floor.

  It was then that Fredricka’s hand darted into her nightgown pocket. I watched with dread as she fumbled—I felt sure of this—for a pistol. But what she withdrew instead was a cell phone. Still huddled inside the bookcase, she dialed a recognizable three-tone number. She just wanted me to know, she announced, she was calling the police. Excellent, I said, wonderful. What was she going to tell them? ‘The truth. That you’re abusing me.’ So, I thought. She would portray me as the Violent Criminal, with her as the superannuated Damsel. I heard only her end of the conversation, which she conducted in a screechy, beleaguered voice: ‘Yes, physically… No, not hitting me… He’s been rocking and dragging the bookcase… Yes, I’m inside the bookcase…’ Et cetera. You can imagine how it sounded. When the officers arrived, I went downstairs to meet them. They were two guys, not much older than I was, and from the moment I began recounting the conflict—delivering, as it were, a first draft of my monologue—they asked the same kinds of sympathetic, incredulous questions that I have since come to expect: ‘You brought it in off the street all by yourself?’; ‘She broke into your room and just took it from you?’ I corkscrewed an index finger around my temple, signaling dementia, and they nodded in understanding. Poor college kid, senile landlady—what were you gonna do? The officers assured me that the bookcase was rightfully mine. The shorter one asked whether she was still inside it, like at this very moment, and when I nodded he bounded up the stairs with a boyish grin on his face, exclaiming, ‘This I gotta see!’

  You know how this ends. Here’s the bookcase. The officers made Fredricka agree to relinquish it, and I took it with me when I moved. It’s funny: at this point it doesn’t even seem like ‘lawful property’ anymore—more like some big white trophy, a laurel the police awarded me. If you’ll direct your attention now to the bookcase, between those middle shelves, you can see where she was huddled. Picture a crone cramped inside that space. Hugging her knees, glaring out at us. I’d do it all over again, if I had to.

  4.

  Ira Glass arrived at the apartment that Saturday. The interview took place in the living room, with Michelle and me on the sofa, and Ira on the ottoman opposite. Across the coffee table he aimed a silver baton-sized recording device at us: a shotgun microphone. Its sides were grooved with slots, and near the battery pack at the base was a blinking green light.

  ‘So we’re rolling,’ he said, smiling bashfully. He seemed apologetic for the presence of the microphone in some way, as if it were intruding on a conversation between friends. He wasn’t wearing the suit I’d associated him with—from
Showtime’s short-lived television version of This American Life—but was still dressed professionally, in a white button-down and charcoal slacks; and he leaned forward in a relaxed posture, elbows on knees, training a frank gaze on me through his trademark blackframe glasses. His salt-and-pepper hair belied his boyishness. He encouraged me to speak freely: any infelicities or flubs would be edited out in post. The green light blinked.

  ‘Carleen told me about the bookcase,’ he said. ‘It sounds like a wild story.’

  Behind him the bookcase stood empty. I’d removed all its contents earlier that morning, so that he could get a sense of its dimensions. But now he sat with his back to it, the desolate white shelves framing his shoulders.

  ‘You have to hear him tell it,’ Michelle said, nodding to me. ‘I’ve heard it so often I could almost tell it myself. But his is the definitive version.’ Ira smiled at her with a slightly quizzical expression. She continued: ‘I’m just here as the prompter. In case he forgets anything. Under the floorboards, murmuring his lines.’

  That seemed to be my cue. ‘It was for my first apartment,’ I began.

  Ira relied initially on light questioning to guide me: how old was I, where was I working at the time. Soon, though, he lapsed into silence, simply letting me recite my story. I told him about the flat, and about my first chilly interview with Fredricka. I told him about finding the bookcase, and about her passive-aggressive Post-its. For the most part Michelle sat quietly by and nodded. But when I got to the note about the ‘undies,’ she interrupted suddenly, patting my thigh.

  ‘Tell him about the cats!’ she said.

  Ira turned to her and made a piratical, throat-slicing gesture with his index finger, indicating the microphone below. She was impenitent; he’d already explained that interruptions could be deleted. ‘Do the cats,’ she whispered.

  Ira pivoted back to me and said, in his soft voice, ‘So what’s this about the cats?’

  In truth, I’d forgotten about the cats. Over the years I had gradually edited this incident out of the story’s rising action, and it must have been edited out of my memory as well. It was just another tiff with Fredricka, superfluous, because it never seemed as funny or absurd to a listener as it did to me. Not long after I’d scandalized Fredricka with my undies, I found a typed message on the bathroom door: a notice that the shower would be mostly ‘out of service’ for the week. It seems Fredricka had volunteered to look after some kittens from a neighbor’s litter, a half-dozen or so sick ones that needed to be quarantined from the rest. Until they perished from their rare and contagious feline blood disease, Fredricka would be housing them in the shower. From eight to nine, the note promised, both morning and night, Fredricka would remove the kittens, giving us all an hour to bathe.

  The point of that anecdote, when I’d originally included it, was that Fredricka was a ludicrous hypocrite. She takes me to task for hanging my swimsuit to dry: that is thoughtless; that is an imposition. Then, not a week later, she dumps a heap of diseased kittens into the shower, letting them writhe on the porcelain in a dying pile, pissing and shitting all over themselves. The little pellets of their pestilential feces collected in the drain, clogging its silver colander; rather than cleaning it in advance of the posted hours, Fredricka simply swept the feces to one corner of the shower floor, creating a mound of waste. She would clear the kittens out, but I would still have to tiptoe around this disgusting dunghill while I bathed, its runoff muddying the suds at my feet. Whenever relating this anecdote, I’d let my voice grow loud with outrage here, hammering home how absurd the situation was.

  With Ira, however, I didn’t get a chance to make this point. The moment I mentioned Fredricka’s note on the door, he interjected: ‘Well, that was nice of her.’ He meant, taking in dying kittens. Caring for animals. He thought that this was her nicer side and that that was the whole point of the anecdote: that it was a counter-characterization, a humanizing exemplum, meant to deepen Fredricka or complicate my caricature of her. And since I didn’t contradict him—I cut the episode short at the door note—that is in effect what it became.

  Five minutes later, when I got to Fredricka’s next Post-it—the one offering dishwashing lessons—Michelle patted my thigh again. ‘Tell him about the note on the refrigerator.’ Her voice was casual, but I could tell that she was driving at something. Ira glanced between us inquisitively.

  ‘Which note?’ I asked.

  ‘You know. The one… “I’m sorry if I’ve seemed—”’

  It had been years since I had thought of this note. As with the kitten incident, I had eliminated it from the monologue for reasons that were themselves now difficult to remember. I even found Michelle’s freakish recall of the original version unnerving, under the circumstances. What happened was that, about a week before I decided to move, Fredricka left a Post-it on the refrigerator door, apologizing for her recent behavior. That was all. She never discussed it with us or posted a follow-up clarification. If she seemed grouchy or crotchety, the note read, she was sorry—she was experiencing a tough time and had to work through something.

  Ira stopped me. ‘Wait wait wait. What does that mean? “Work through something”? What, was she dying?’

  I didn’t know what it meant, and I told him so. I did know that I didn’t like the tone in his voice one bit: that affected softness, its spittly lilt. Michelle had correctly identified it as Ira’s sympathy voice, and I worried that the story was getting away from me. If I wasn’t careful, Fredricka would emerge as too human a character—the kitten caretaker, the cancer victim—and I would look all the more monstrous for rocking the bookcase. Glossing over Ira’s questions altogether, I skipped straight to the brokenplate scene. Her worst moment, for my money.

  I’d recounted the bookcase debate, the tug-of-war, and her fall to the floor when Ira interrupted again. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You’re telling me she crawled inside the bookcase?’ His voice cracked with mock shock. He affected an incredulous smirk and leaned over the coffee table, pointing the microphone at me. Carleen, of course, would have already told him every detail. But to humor him, and for listeners’ benefit, I said yes, as if he were hearing it for the first time—yes, she crawled inside. ‘May I?’ he asked. He stood from the ottoman and walked over to the empty bookcase, eyeballing it as he laid one hand on its top. Then he tilted the frame toward him and lowered it all the way to the floor, so that it was lying on its side. Finally—and this I was not prepared for—he got down on hand and knee himself, as if to inspect the crawlspace, and without a word he crawled inside. Hugging his knees to his chest, just as Fredricka had, he looked out at us. He’d taken the microphone in with him, and the way he held it up to his mouth gave him a strangely solemn, buried-alive aspect: like a mountain climber in an avalanched cave, recording his final testament. ‘So,’ he said, ‘to all you listeners out there. I just want you to know that I’m sitting inside the bookcase. Right now. My whole body. I’ve crawled inside, just like poor Fredricka. And I’ve gotta tell you: you would have to really want this bookcase to do something like this. It’s cramped. I feel silly. My—uh—head’s pressing against the top here. No dignity at all. And just think about doing this at seventy, eighty years old.’

  ‘And don’t forget,’ Michelle said, ‘that he was rocking it.’ She stood from beside me and joined Ira at the bookcase, grasping the frame. Fredricka had wanted it enough not only to crawl inside, she said, but to stay there at the risk of injury. Michelle rattled the bookcase, in demonstration. Then, looking at me, she said: ‘Show him.’ I didn’t move. ‘Come on. Show him how you rocked the bookcase.’ I glanced to Ira, scrunched between the shelves. His knees jutted to either side of his face, and his eyes looked wide and frightened, uncomprehending. Is this what Michelle wanted me to see? To understand that the fear in this face is what I had inflicted on Fredricka? In Ira’s terror-widened eyes, was I supposed to see myself as Fredricka saw me? My worst self reflected back.

  Before I had a cha
nce to react, Ira recomposed himself, angling the microphone toward me and proceeding with the interview. ‘Then what happened?’ he asked. Evidently he was planning to stay in the bookcase. I would have to address the story to his hunched form. This seemed to be what he wanted—like a director he was drawing a lively, naturalistic performance out of me. Recognizing my hesitation, he smiled. So I strode over and glared down at him. I impersonated myself goading Fredricka: you’re acting like a child, I recited at Ira—you’re being childish. How much longer do you think your bladder will even hold? Is this how you raised your son? Ira smiled again and made waterwheel motions with his free hand, encouraging me to keep it coming. ‘Is it?’ I asked. ‘Is it? Is this how you raised your son?’ When I reached Fredricka’s climactic shriek—‘MY SON IS DEAD!’—I actually did the shriek. In a scratch-throated witch’s voice I lamented at the top of my lungs that ‘my’ son was dead, then started coughing uncontrollably. Ira and Michelle both laughed.

  ‘Oh no!’ Ira said. ‘She actually said that? You must have felt awful.’