Oh, I didn’t know that.
I didn’t know. I found out a couple weeks ago. My dad told me.
Just now? She sips from her mug. How do you feel about it?
I don’t know. The weird thing is my sister doesn’t know. My dad didn’t tell her.
Are you going to tell her?
I don’t know.
She purses her lips and says, I don’t understand that kind of indecision.
Why complicate things?
I don’t know, so you can have an honest relationship? Her face is guileless. It makes her look younger, the strain of her everything-is-easy persona now shed, as though she had also disclosed a secret.
You think you’re always honest with people?
I don’t lie, she shrugs.
That’s not the same thing.
Still, I don’t lie.
Never? He’s almost laughing now.
I might question later whether or not I actually believed something when I felt it, but I always believe things when I say them. Why pretend?
You’re so weird.
I know! She smiles and it grows deeply into her face.
He puts his hand on her thigh.
* * *
WHEN ADAM RETURNS HOME, his sister is smoking in the armchair at the foot of her bed, knees to chest, hair in a loose mass atop her head.
Aren’t you supposed to be at work? he says.
I took a sick day.
Adam looks at her bed, stripped of its sheets, the comforter crumpled on the floor.
Everything okay?
Fine.
You sure?
She nods.
You seem a little—
I’m fine, really. Her voice is calm but firm, her face clean of emotion.
You have a cut, he says, stepping closer, putting a finger to his cheek.
There’s a red line within the half circle of skin beneath her eye. She turns and exhales her smoke toward the window behind her, the sun coming in white-hot.
Sandy, did you hear me? He stops just next to the chair, letting his thigh lean onto the arm. There’s a little red—
She turns back, looking straight at him. Adam, there’s a little red all up and down your back. And your legs and your arms. It’s all crusty and pus.
Well, you know what that’s from.
It’s disgusting.
She gives him a sardonic, distanced smile. Sometimes she meets up with a woman from work, for drinks or dinner, or treats herself to a movie, but every couple of months she goes out on a bender. She winds up drinking too much and yelling at someone or blacking out and not remembering a thing. She used to call Adam the next day crying, embarrassed and depressed. She’d say things like, I’ve just been having such a hard time lately, My life is a mess. She rarely went into detail. He imagines her sitting alone in the apartment, drinking a bottle of wine and falling asleep. Cutting herself. He sees an alternate, fuller story to the one she gives. A smile creeps onto her face.
Where’d you stay last night?
* * *
SANDY ARRIVES HALFWAY THROUGH the final night. Her pace is slow and intentional. He would recognize her on the other side of a wall, Adam thinks. She gives him a discreet, hip-high wave when she first looks up, then continues her circle around the room’s perimeter. She finds Alex almost immediately. They shake hands and stand awkwardly apart—Sandy’s body erect yet contained, Alex hunched and folded in.
He has liked being a part of Alex’s design, but probably not as much as she has enjoyed having him there. An attractive man strung up for her vision, her pleasure. Next week, she’ll take the pieces down one at a time and have them delivered to her loft, but it won’t be as easy to fit them back in as it was to take them out.
As in weeks past, Adam’s initial pain from the cables changes into a pressurized weightlessness. The sound below downshifts to an abstract hum. Adam sees his body as hairless, slowly moving away from him. He thinks of an exhibit in which a man gets smaller and smaller. Except it’s a man and then a young man and then a boy. Somewhere there is a man and a woman, together or separate, blocks or miles away from Adam’s father’s house in Fort Wayne. People who might think of Adam, a nameless man and woman just as Adam is nameless to them. A man, maybe only a woman, who said, I will not be tied to another. I will commit to no life, not even my own. Adam was just out of school when he started at the graphic design firm. He did good work, went out every night. He’d joke with his coworkers and call all the girls sluts and the guys lame and dickless. Years this way, feeling as though he were skating above people—small people—dropping down like a seabird to pierce a fish, having a good time until the girl he was into told him that he was an asshole and a punk, that no one thought he was funny or clever or talented. She’d delivered to him a controlled, angry monologue. He started going out less and less, and when he did, he’d talk slowly out of the side of his mouth. Then he lost his job and moved in with Sandy. He thinks about it sometimes, how he used to be a completely different person.
The crowd thins and vanishes. The lights reflect off the blond-wood floor in fuzzed circles. Adam can hear the mechanical echo of the lift from a far corner of the gallery. It inches into view, with Guy behind its tiny black wheel. After tonight he will have to find something to do with himself, maybe pick up some freelance work. He should find a job like Guy’s. An occupation that means nothing more than what it shows itself to be. A driver, a housepainter, a clerk. He should move heavy objects from one place to another, wear a uniform. Alex and Sandy stand just below Adam, their voices shooting up before dropping back down to the close talk of conspirators. They step out of the way as Guy parks the lift before them. Sandy tilts her head down toward Alex, who is whispering something into her ear. Their sharp laughter rises to meet him, cracking like a firework before dissolving into an echoey silence. Then, as if they planned it all along, as if sisters who’ve spent their lives finishing each other’s sentences, they call up to him: Time to come down.
DANNY GIRL
DANNY IS UPSTAIRS in her father’s house throwing herself around. She falls on the gray-white futon, rolls, and gets up, breathless. Her shirt’s off. Her breasts are nubs. The room, halved by stairs, holds a twin bed covered in an afghan on one side, the dirty futon on the other. The wood beams of the sloped roof are bare, and cobwebs palm their corners. Last weekend Danny saw a movie where a couple was fighting; then they kissed. They kept kissing and were still angry. Danny is fighting with a boy-man. Then she is the boy-man, shirtless, straight jeans at her hips. Next she’s a cowboy wrestling a calf; then she is herself again, surprised and violated by the boy.
Her father is downstairs, her sisters and stepmother and stepbrothers too. On the weekends, they form a loose, shifting mass. Each sits or lies or sleeps away from the other, spread out like jacks. The wood-burning stove heats the living room too hot, though upstairs Danny can feel the wind, thin and cold, coming through the walls. She is panting, working herself into a feeling. She smells her own sweat and a new, deeper fetor, that salty, sour smell of the school locker room, where last week a pair of girls said she should start wearing a bra—two girls, one tall and rail-thin with bug eyes, and the other with blonde, fluffy bangs and breasts that she presses out with an arch in her back. You need to wear a bra, the blonde one said, just like that.
When Danny finishes, she puts on her shirt and goes downstairs. In the parlor beside the living room stands a wooden bar, hulking and lacquered, and across from it the black stove. All day it smells of woodsmoke. Danny’s mother told her and her sisters that their father was an idiot for the stove, that all it does is make the rest of a house colder and angry that it doesn’t get the same heat as the other rooms but that it’ll get sick of the hot rooms eventually too. Danny’s mother had said this in the kitchen, clicking her fingernails on the countertop in dumb Morse code.
But he can do whatever he wants, she said. He can do whatever he wants, and we can do whatever we want—right, ladies? she said, rai
sing a glass of pink drink to the three of them. Danny’s younger sister had used both hands to put her sippy cup into the air. Danny is thirsty; it is so warm near the stove. She walks into the living room, where on the television a white-blonde-haired girl is whispering into the ear of an old man in striped pajamas. Lying in a bed, he makes his face big, his eyes wide; he is shocked or pretending to be shocked over what the girl is telling him. Danny cannot hear what she says, the girl’s lips curling slyly as she whispers; the words don’t matter as much as her sneaking mouth. Her nonsense sibilants tickle Danny’s ears, running down her neck and back, and now the man is playfully reprimanding the white-haired girl, talking to her like a teacher making an example. Then the girl is skipping down a sunny sidewalk in a mass of other girls, arms linked, their faces stretched out in rubbery laughter.
Danny’s father and stepmother are on the couch, but Danny cannot see them. They’re grayed out, smudged, as when a woman takes her top off on TV. Her father smokes all day, and the smoke drapes a curtain around him, the air heavy as velvet. Under the blast of television girls, Danny says she’s hungry, and then there is money in her hand, and she and her sisters and stepbrothers are running across the road to the twenty-four-hour gas station, where they buy sour gummy slugs and deep-fried hot dog buns and burst jelly donuts. They return and divide everything up in the hot space behind the bar, where there are no bottles, only paper and pens and old magazines and jars of change, from which the sisters have fished out the silver-colored coins. They eat, kneeling, and when the youngest starts to cry, Danny’s older sister gives her more sour slugs, and she shoves them into her wet mouth by the fistful. From the television, Danny hears a girl or woman curse, spitting the words out breathlessly, as though she’d just finished running.
* * *
AT HER MOTHER’S HOUSE, Danny gets a letter in the mail from her old classmate Margaret. Margaret tells her that it has been hard adjusting to the new town where she and her family moved last summer. The girls at school don’t talk to her, she says. The school is bigger than she’s used to. Margaret has a twin brother, and when she wore his clothes—velour shirts in anemic browns and navy-blue tennis shoes with Velcro straps—she became a lanky, slouching boy. Her hair formed the dirty top of a mushroom, and she talked slowly out of the side of her mouth like it had been numbed.
Margaret wishes she could come back. You’re my best friend, she says. Am I your best friend? Danny used to get excited for the letters. She never gets mail. Now she gets annoyed. She can feel Margaret asking her to feel bad for her, wanting it too plainly. Danny hardens against the want, refusing to feel sorry for Margaret, but then feels bad for not feeling sorry, then feels angry that Margaret made her feel that way, and a different, twisted feeling stands up and falls down inside her stomach. Margaret says maybe Danny could visit her some weekend. It’s only five hours away, she says. Could her mother drive her? Please write back soon, even a postcard. Danny puts the letter in a shoebox under her bed.
* * *
THE NEXT WEEKEND, Danny follows her stepbrother into the crawl space off his room. Leave a crack, he says, and she pulls the door closed behind her without shutting it all the way, as the handle is on the outside. The space is wedged beneath the sloped ceiling and has the same unfinished walls as the rest of the upstairs. Danny sometimes dreams that something bad, a faceless person or thing, is coming to the house and everyone needs to hide. There is very little time. Her sisters and stepbrothers and dad and stepmother all hide elsewhere, and she hides there, inside that tiny room, closing the door all the way shut then piling garbage bags of old underwear and bras on top of her. The dream ends with the thing opening the door, a blade of light cutting into the small, dark space.
The walls are covered with pictures of naked women ripped from magazines—their hair blonde and feathered, their genitals fleshy and blank. Danny pretends she cannot see them then stares. Their eyes are sleepy. Their mouths coo the O lip shape of babies who’ve just had their pacifiers tugged out. Everything is soft.
Where’d you get these pictures? Danny asks.
Daddy, her stepbrother says, but Danny doesn’t know if he’s talking about her dad or his. Cardboard boxes crowd behind him, some tops flapped open in flat shrugs. Sitting cross-legged, he lights a fat candle between the two of them. He pulls out a red bottle of cologne from the back of his jeans. It’s Danny’s father’s.
Watch it, he says, and sprays a long pump into the candle, the flame whooshing large, licking Danny’s knee, then disappearing. She scoots back.
The power is mine. Eat my fire, he says, mimicking a superhero with round, rubbery muscles and small candy-red underwear. The cologne smells rotten and sweet. He sprays it again. With each flame’s breath, Danny’s chest flares then cools, the paper women on the wall rising and falling with soft sighs. The cologne darkens a small, damp circle around the base of the candle like a sweat stain.
Her stepbrother moves the candle aside and takes out his small gray tape recorder and slides one of his tapes in. It’s a bunch of songs from a cartoon full of cussing that he and his brothers watch. The first song is the cartoon people singing a cover with the words changed. The song bounces and turns and stretches. It’s a funny song, and Danny smiles when her stepbrother begins to squeal with laughter, the song’s plasticity unhinging her stomach. The troublemaker character buzzes in one ear then the other, delivering his defiant catchphrase, a chaotic hammering of short, blunt words. It makes her think that the world could turn upside down at any moment, and the cartoon character would think it was all a game. When the tape grinds then clicks to silence, her stepbrother sighs and looks up at the pictures on the wall, then he looks at Danny’s chest—dull-eyed, his white-blond hair buzzed into a square, his face infested with freckles. He stares, and Danny feels hot and hushed, as she did the other day with the girls in the locker room. There was nothing to do but stay very quiet.
* * *
THE WEEK BEFORE Margaret’s family left town, Margaret’s mother had brought her over to see Danny. A bright, summer Saturday. The two of them had gone into Danny’s mother’s bedroom and sat on the bed—a slice of light coming through the window around the drawn shades. Danny had wanted to go outside. She never went into her mother’s bedroom during the day, only sometimes at night when she couldn’t sleep. Danny’s legs dangled off the side of the bed, almost touching the floor. Margaret told Danny that her family was leaving because Margaret’s father was bad. He had shown her a video. He had taken her into a bedroom just the two of them and sat her next to him on the bed and watched the video. He did not touch me, Margaret said, but he sat her beside him and he snorted drugs while they watched. Danny likes to forget the story. She likes to forget the story, and she thinks that Margaret likes to forget particular pieces of the story. It’s only reasonable, Danny thinks. But Margaret’s letters remind her. Danny had listened to Margaret’s story silently, the two of them sitting on the bed’s edge, Danny looking down at Margaret’s Velcro shoes. Danny kept her hands folded neatly in her lap, thinking, This is a very adult conversation we’re having.
* * *
WHEN HER HAIR COMES IN, Danny takes her father’s electric razor and, sitting on the toilet in the downstairs bathroom, gets rid of it all. The razor crunches, her mouse-brown hairs falling light as ash into the bowl to rest on the water’s surface. She blows the hair crumbs out of the razor’s foil. She is so smooth. She pets herself, closing her eyes, tired. The bathroom, just off the kitchen, is cool, and she thinks about taking a bath, when there is a bang on the door.
What the hell are you doing in there? Son of a bitch, her father says.
Danny can hear the wet cigar wedged in the crook of his mouth. She flushes the toilet, pulls up her pants, and unplugs the razor, stuffing it in the cabinet under the sink. Danny opens the door, but her father is gone. There is only a pot of sauce on the stove, spitting red on the white walls. Her jeans rub her differently now. She walks upstairs into the second floor’s coolnes
s, then down into the parlor’s heat. Up and down again. As hot as a stripped wire, her mother would say. Or, Ooh la la. Or, like the time her older sister rubbed lipstick on before school, Look at this hot bitch! Her sister had then erased it with her shirtsleeve.
The following week, Danny’s hair comes back itchy, poking out straight through her underwear. Son of a bitch, she hisses. She scratches herself, leaving red fingernail tracks amid bumps and ingrown hairs. She squeezes one until glue-colored pus pops out. Son of a bitch.
* * *
MARGARET HAS A SURPRISE. She has a surprise, but first she has to tell Danny the whole situation. Margaret says the walk home from school has been longer than it was at home, which at first was really annoying. It was so annoying I could not even believe it! Her mom can’t drive her because she has to take her younger sister, Elle, to ballet after school. Elle, a yellow-haired pixie, once told Danny that the freckle above her lip was not a freckle as Danny had said but a “beauty mark.” Danny never believed she and Margaret were really sisters. Margaret’s mom calls Elle the prima ballerina, Margaret says. Whatever that means. But anyway, the only thing that makes the walk better is that there’s a boy, an older boy who is not in school anymore who talks to her on her walk. He drives a car, she says, and sometimes he drives it alongside her, but the last time, he parked and walked next to her. Do you want to know what we talk about? I’ll tell you if you want. Just write back and ask. Danny rolls her eyes and puts the letter in her box.
* * *
DANNY SHOWERS in the upstairs stall, even though it is cold. She feels closed up inside it, as in a spaceship or submarine. The light is dim, the walls a textured plastic—small, raised bumps that she pretends are diseased skin. At her mother’s, she stays in the bath for hours, topping the tub off with steaming water that weights her head so heavy that she pretends she’s been drugged. She swirls her hair out in the water and pretends she’s a sad woman or a dead girl in a movie. Sometimes she falls asleep and wakes up in the cold water and pretends she’s a crazy woman, shivering uncontrollably. Eventually her mother will tap on the door, open it one shy creak at a time, then come in and sit on the toilet. Danny will add more water and bath syrup and cover herself with the bubbles. I’m bored, her mother will say. Your little sis is sleeping and your older sis is reading and will not be disturbed, and I have no one to talk to. Danny will emerge and sit in her terry robe and listen while her mother asks that she suggest to Danny’s father that she’s been spending a lot of special time with so-and-so from the such-and-such. The hunky one with the big boots, she’ll say. Real big boots. Danny will only pretend to listen. Instead she will think of a boy, a faceless boy who pushes her then kisses her then pushes her again. The shower gets hot at her dad’s house, but the stall’s accordion door doesn’t close all the way, leaving an inch-wide line of light running from ceiling to floor, where cold air streams in. Her stepmother has had an Indian woman visiting, and her conditioner makes Danny’s hair smoother than it’s ever been. She rinses it out and puts more in and thinks how her mother is dumb for not knowing about nice things. Last week, the two girls found Danny again in the locker room after gym when everybody had left, and the soft blonde one with the real breasts beneath her big white T-shirt told her that she should start wearing deodorant.
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