by Meghan Tifft
Lucinda feels her breath pixelate. Her mind recoils. “What does he do?” she says.
“He’s a fireman.”
Lucinda hardly hears. She wants to remind Lauren that she has a boyfriend, and he’s Dracula.
As Lauren goes into the bathroom Lucinda stands primly, unsure how to occupy herself. Lauren’s duffel is tumbled into the narrow space at her feet and everything’s coming out of it. Behind the door is another bed, jammed on the opposite wall. Lucinda can see how more than one person might live in here. In the bathroom Lauren is running the hair dryer, and Lucinda picks up a book.
Pages flutter past her—group shots of grinning girls, boys jumping in inexplicable unison, those sucker-punched portraits of teens in their endless grids, all blending together. It’s a yearbook. Most likely to make trouble! someone had written over a smudged face. Love you girl! The face is oval with an apple bulge of cheeks, waxed to a high shine. The mouth is all but mauled by a false sinister grin, and the eyes lost under a scribble of pitched brows. Is it Lauren? Somehow she thinks she’s seen her before.
When Lauren comes out she’s put the book away, and Lauren fluffs her damp hair, unaware. She doesn’t look like the girl. Lauren is wearing her medieval tunic, the Peter Pan thing she wore before. “Come on,” she says, slightly more perky. Lucinda follows. Outside, they sit shivering on a frigid covered bench while Lauren paints her nails on a wooden box. It’s for the play. For weeks she has been applying layer after layer of the inkiest blue black, so that it looks like lacquered dabs of armor on her fingers. The rest of her is slumped in that grain-bag brown.
“Aren’t you cold?” says Lucinda, who is at least wearing her parka over her shifting layers of corn silk. Rory didn’t give her a chance to change after rehearsal.
Lauren shrugs. They are facing inside the house where a single lamp spreads a dim amber glow over the silhouetted furniture. It looks like a cozy parlor in hell.
“So, what is that dress?” Lucinda says, trying to put it politely. She doesn’t really think it is a dress. She wonders if Lauren’s mother made it, just like the sack.
“Oh, it’s my other costume,” says Lauren, flashing a smile. Lucinda is about to ask what she means when the front door opens and the low light picks up two dim forms. “Rory went to pick up my mom from work,” Lauren says. “Now we’ll have dinner.”
Lucinda was not sure she wanted to have this dinner and now she is quite certain she doesn’t. When they come inside she sees that Rory is holding a baby. She perches on his forearm with queenly poise as she gives Lucinda a groggy, hostile stare. The mother is as tall as Rory and looks like the woman in the painting, except she has yellow dyed hair down to her waist. Despite her height she seems withered down and collapsed. Her chest is concave and her shoulders round forward like they are trying to protect it, and her lips are smothered in a shiny, medicinal-looking jelly. She seems to be afflicted with some atrocious malady and Lucinda has trouble looking at her. Rory stands behind her holding the baby and watching Lucinda react. Despite the mother’s appearance she moves into the room with a rough and terrible energy. Lucinda finds herself plowed back against the wall as the woman plunks her purse on the couch and moves over to Lauren.
“Are you messing with your brother?” Her voice is dry and husky, like the croak of a long-term smoker.
“Oh please. Did he tell you that?”
“No. I can just tell. I can always tell these things, honey.” She clutches Lauren by the arms and presses their foreheads together in an intimate stare-down. “I think you’ve hurt his feelings,” says her mother.
At this Rory mutters something over the head of the baby that sounds very ugly. He rams past them and grabs a piece of plastic crosshatching from the wall and flicks it one-handed into a pen for the baby. The mother looks meaningfully at Lauren and moves off into the kitchen. Cabinets bang open and shut.
“What do you three want for dinner? Eggs?” She sticks her head out and looks at Lucinda. “I don’t suppose my daughter is going to introduce us. I’m Deena.”
Lucinda manages to produce her name. Eggs for dinner does not sound good to her.
“It’s nice to meet you. Lauren could have warned me. I look like shit you know, Lauren.”
The baby reaches out for Lauren. Lauren drifts into the kitchen and puts her head on her mother’s shoulder. “Hi babe,” her mother says. “Where you been?”
Lucinda stands where she is, not sure where to rest her eyes. Rory reaches for the remote and bullies the buttons until the TV is on. He stands over the baby, watching it, but not really. The baby watches Lucinda, with little red-brown eyes buried close to the center of her face, like candied nuts in dough. Lauren murmurs something to her mother. Lauren’s mother pets down her hair. “Don’t be like that,” she says, “I’m not dead yet.” She leaves her to open the refrigerator and Lauren murmurs, “You will be.”
“Well shut up,” her mother says over her shoulder. “You certainly know how to make a woman feel good about herself.”
Rory slams down the remote and takes three huge steps toward Lauren and shakes her. “What is your problem?” He looks right at Lucinda and points. “You shouldn’t have brought her. Why did you bring her?” He seems on the verge of doing some violence to her, and she gives him a disdainful look through hooded eyes.
Lucinda feels weirdly like she is in a play, watching it unfold from right in the middle of it.
“Oh, come on!” says the mother sharply. She points at Lucinda with the knife in her hand. “She’s company! Do you want me to ask her to come in here with me or can you be nice in front of her!” They all stare in silence. The baby lets out a peal of sound that is either enthused or agitated. The mother holds her long hard look a moment longer and clucks at the baby and turns back to the counter. Lauren dips her fingers into the playpen to fondle her hair and walks to the couch and sits. Rory glares and leaves the room. Lucinda wonders what she should do. Lauren nibbles at the sleeve of her dress.
“Should I go?” she says. “I could take the bus. It’s not far.”
Lauren barely looks at her. “No. I want to show you something.”
Reluctantly, Lucinda follows Lauren back into the hallway. Lauren puts her hand on the knob of a closed door and looks at Lucinda with eyes that Lucinda realizes are exactly like the baby’s.
“Whose baby is that?” she says.
Lauren appears to be listening through the door. “Rory’s,” she says, eventually.
She opens the door and Lucinda is not sure she believes her. She is so tired of learning or not learning things. She thought Lauren was somehow incapable of lies—at least the blatant kind.
Now she has a view of the room. It is a black, tiny box that seems completely filled with a medical bed and machinery. In the bed is a long hump. “Mo,” says Lauren, crossing into the room. Her voice is stiff and careful and then the curtains part and let in the backyard floodlight. The room is oddly slanted down, with paneled walls that seem to exude a trailer-park flimsiness. Lauren casts a grim look at Lucinda and sinks toward the bed to stroke the hair of its inhabitant, which lifts in brittle clumps and falls back down. A thick, sluggish sound issues from the man’s throat. “I know you can hear me.” She pushes a button and the top half of the bed begins to elevate. There is the head of a mummy. All the skin is pulled back taut and he doesn’t seem able to close his mouth. It dangles stiffly, with one tooth inside of it.
“Mo, it’s me. I came to see you.”
Mo fumbles at her with his hands. She holds her arm out for him and he puts it in his mouth and bites it. Lucinda steps back. Lauren merely pulls her arm out of his mouth and hoists him to a sitting position, and he sits like a man petrified, his toothless grimace aimed blankly upward. One of his eyes is blinking frantically.
“How do you expect to hurt me? You have no teeth you goose. Now come on. It’s Lauren and I’m here to see you because I love you.” Her voice is chipper and clear, more like the Lauren Lucinda knows from t
heater class, and as she speaks the eye becomes less frantic and the mouth clacks with mucus and the man begins to take large, panting breaths broken by one word at a time.
“I-didn’t-see-you. I-didn’t-know-you. I-was-having-a dream,” he mutters.
His voice is a gritty gale.
“It’s all right, Mo. Come on, get your breath.” She sits next to him and props him up and arranges him at a slant against her body. “Comfortable?” He is breathing in a choked, spastic way, as if she is cutting off his oxygen, and Lucinda finds herself clutching at her throat. His gaze falls somewhere at her knees and his mouth stretches into a slightly wider grimace, as if he is registering something and smiling. She feels her heart swivel and curtsy.
“Oh. Light-of-the-cross,” says Mo.
Lucinda’s knees buckle. Why is he saying her line? Why has she been brought in here, like a piece of statuary, she is realizing. She hasn’t been brought to see him but to be shown to him. Lucinda finds herself backing into the hall, still hearing Lauren speak to him in muffled tones. The baby is making unhappy murmurs on the other side of a door behind her. Rory must have moved her. Lucinda stands in the hall and feels trapped between two extremes of misery. She can hear the mother clattering dishes out in the kitchen. After a few minutes Lauren comes into the hallway and gives her a vacant look and closes the door.
She draws in an audible breath. She stares at a picture on the wall. “I took the coffin from the play,” she says. “I just wanted somebody to tell.”
Lucinda realizes she’s not surprised. She finds herself following Lauren’s gaze. It’s so simple and bare, the statement. Yet, she struggles to understand. “For—?” she says. “You mean—?” She stops.
“For Mo,” Lauren says.
Lucinda nods. She has never seen death before. Not in a live human being. Is the coffin even real enough for that? For actual death? “Where is it?”
Lauren points. “Out there. I painted my nails on it.”
“I didn’t even notice.” Lucinda thinks about Vanessa.
“Yes—I noticed that,” Lauren says, smiling. She shrugs. “We can’t afford one, or anything. Mom’s medicine is really expensive.”
Lucinda nods. This is her friend, she thinks. Her friend is confiding in her. The last friend she had is dead now. She has to be careful with this one.
“It’s good construction. It’s not like we need fancy.”
Lucinda finds herself wondering if the funeral industry has rules. If certain materials and dimensions are compulsory. Does it have to be airtight? Chemically treated? Is there an industry-approved half-life for decay? What about a lining? Wouldn’t the wrong thing kill the grass or make a sudden garden patch?
“Come get your grub!” says Lauren’s mother.
Lucinda and Lauren look at each other. Is that it? Lucinda is still a little stricken by all the input and yet starting to feel a little relieved. It seems like something has been aired out between them, the tension thinned.
When they get out of the hallway, Lauren’s mother is putting plates down on the table.
Lucinda feels her stomach go to lava. She realizes that there are a few reasons for her to feel too sick to eat, and yet it would be too rude to use any of them. Better to nibble and say nothing. Rory stalks down the hall and thrusts the baby down in the high chair and goes around the table to sit beside his mother. The mother sits with the portrait of herself on the far wall behind her. A portrait of an ugly dog is beside that, baring its teeth under a grubby rug of fur and balancing on a circus ball. It looks like Vlad, except for the expression. Lauren sits beside the baby and pats it on the back. She seems perkier after her confession. Lucinda thinks about how perky Rory and Lauren usually are, at and after class. She wonders how much of it is a self-sustaining act.
Lucinda is either at the foot of the table or the head of the table, and she can tell that nobody ever sits here.
The configuration produces a certain effect. Lucinda realizes that Rory looks exactly like his mother and the baby looks exactly like Lauren. Family is a strange mangling. Rory picks up his fork and eats his eggs the way a dainty voracious bird would eat eggs. In addition to eggs there are pieces of jellied toast. The only light in the room is the one right above their heads.
“Breakfast for dinner,” says the mother, “Rory’s favorite.”
Rory seems too mortified or too morose to answer. Lucinda still can’t help wondering if she’s here because of him. Even though Lauren said it was because of the coffin. And Rory said it was because of Lauren.
“Do you want to know who that is?” Lauren asks the baby, and points at Lucinda. “Look over there.”
The baby looks. Lauren’s eyes glitter. “That’s Lucinda. Can you say Lucinda?” The baby gives a little rat-fanged smile and makes a loud nasal eruption that sounds like “Cinder.”
Lucinda waves. The baby is dressed in something different now. Lucinda tries to remember what it was wearing that made her think it was a girl. Now it looks like a boy.
“So Lucinda,” says the mother, reaching for her fork. “What do you do?”
“Oh,” says Lucinda. As she’s trying to figure out how to answer this, Rory cuts in. “Let Lauren ask her. She’s her date.”
“Shut up, Rory.” Lauren lofts her eyes at Lucinda in exasperation.
“She has a boyfriend,” he says.
It’s not clear if this is directed at Lauren or his mother. Lucinda feels a glancing kick under the table. Was that meant for her? Rory and Lauren glare over their forks.
“Oh?” The mother feigns polite, if not perplexed, interest, her eyes ping-ponging between them. Clearly she is trying to figure out who Lucinda is here for. Or why it should matter that she has a boyfriend. So is Lucinda.
Rory smiles. He grits his teeth and his big ham unhinges. “He’s Dracula.”
Across the table Lauren buckles in silent agony.
Lucinda sits way back, tucking her legs beneath her chair. What is going on here?
“Oh, that’s funny,” says the mother, taking a bite of eggs. She’s smirking, presumably at the show.
Lucinda is looking around at all three of them, trying to get her bearings. What is she supposed to say? Slowly, she is realizing something. Everyone at the table is wearing a costume. Even Lauren’s mother. Lauren’s mother, she realizes, is wearing a wig.
“I am too,” says Lauren’s mother, smiling and chewing at the same time. “You are what you eat,” she says.
It’s what she says and also the way she says it that makes her seem sinister.
The Hat
Dracula wonders if he should be making himself scarce. If perhaps he should have planned a little camping trip. Make like a tree in the polluted wood, as the saying goes.
Somebody will surely come looking for him. Should he tell Lucinda? Should he present her with a scheme for meeting? He doesn’t think she’ll go for it. He doesn’t think they’d last on the lam.
If somebody came looking for him, who would it be? A liability lawyer from UPS? A law officer? Charges, he knows, would have to be filed. UPS, he knows, would have to oblige. Information he falsified would be divulged. Then indictments and arraignments, whatever that means. That’s about as far as his television expertise takes him. He has begun to watch the mail very carefully. And the door.
Tonight, in recompense for his vigil, he found a letter already stashed in the slot. He looked down the breezeway for a mailman who was surely long gone. It was 6:00 P.M. The last mailman Dracula had seen was in late fall, smiling inside a thick strap of beard when he delivered the mail at 4:45. Lucinda hated how dark it got this time of year. She hated how cold and closed in it was. Dracula felt a little bruised by this. Winter should mean more time with him.
Dracula brought the letter in. As always is the case, it is addressed to Lucinda. In big block script. It’s been idling beside his foot on the coffee table while Dracula watches TV. Now he picks it up. Inside, signed in the gruel of Richard’s hand, is her final pay
check. It seems a little late for such farewell reparations, even by Dracula’s sense of timing. He still wonders why she quit.
For a while, Dracula sits folding. The table jams his legs apart as he leans into the abstraction of his thoughts. He likes to fold mail. He doesn’t know why, but the tight creases satisfy him, the breaking fibers under his thumb, the planes and pleats bowing to his brute suggestion. He got a calendar for his birthday once—every day a new origami shape. There was a pig, a balloon, a sailboat. Why does he remember? The paper was colored variously and coated with a satin sheen. There was a smell too, a clean, distant plume of it, loose light on morning horizons. Dracula doesn’t really know loose light on morning horizons, but the idea slips in nicely like some well-worn trespass, something else learned from television, another false and guilty refuge in the unknown and inapproachable. At times like this, Dracula wonders where his thoughts come from. He is folding without pause, steady and insistent. All this hit and miss. Lucinda isn’t here again. He supposes it’s possible that he can wait like this forever, pulling tight the rigging of his remaining days in some dumb, perishing act. Somehow, folding takes him way out past his own thinking. Always to that slow, oiled horizon, those watery mirages of dread and mystification. He juts into the dim clairvoyance. The envelope in his hand is tamped down to a thick, unwieldy slab. It’s a bird. Some flightless fossil he’s left behind.
Then Lucinda comes home.
“Hi.”
“Where have you been?” says Dracula.
“Act two rehearsals.” She sits like a splash of acid. Dracula senses he was supposed to know this. “Four hours long.” Lucinda scrubs her face. “Why haven’t you gone out?”
She means for his breakfast. Dinner as she accidentally calls it. Dracula finds himself stabbed with a wicked soreness. Here he has been waiting all this time and she wants him gone. He can tell from the way her tone curls.
“I just—” He almost says that he knows something. He almost lies and says that he knows everything.