Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  Karen wanted all of those things very, very much.

  “I can’t,” she heard herself stammer. “I have—a date.”

  “Ooh-la-la,” Pam whistled. “Do you want a little color?”

  Before Karen could ask what that meant, Joyce had unfolded the plastic chair and Pam was pushing her into it. Both women took a tactile inventory of Karen’s face. Their fingertips were cool and smooth, as though softened by turning the pages of so many books.

  “She has great bone structure. Very Nordic.”

  “What does Nordic mean?”

  There were huge gaps in Karen’s education. Though adequately intelligent—more than adequately, according to some tests—she had been relegated to special education classes her whole academic life because of disturbing, intractable emotional difficulties (tantrums, talking out of turn, obsessive attachment to inanimate objects in the classroom, inappropriate physical boundaries with fellow students, truancy). She could name the entire pantheon of Greek gods as well as list their salient character traits, but she could not locate Greece on a map. She knew what the word perihelion meant, thirsted for any opportunity to use it in conversation, but had only realized a few years ago that animals that lay eggs, such as birds, cannot also give birth in the mammalian way. For years she’d reasoned that chickens laid eggs for eating and then gestated baby chicks for progeny inside their stomachs. Karen’s quest for knowledge was largely self-directed, and her interests were celestial, not terrestrial. She attributed this to having been born under a Libra sun.

  “Your foremothers milked reindeer in the Laplands,” Joyce said. “They knew the direction of the wind according to the pitch of its howl, and could smell an approaching bear. When they smiled, these marvelous cheekbones of yours had the power to stop Vikings dead in their tracks.”

  “I like that story,” Karen said. “Tell me more.”

  “We don’t know that she’s Lapp, Joyce. She looks Irish to me.”

  “Jesus, Pam. You think everyone’s Irish.”

  Pam didn’t argue the point. She rooted around her cavernous pocketbook and removed a pair of patent leather tap shoes, a flashlight, and the collected works of Philip Larkin, until at last she found a tube of hot-pink lipstick. She applied layer after layer on Karen’s bow-tie lips, making her blot them on a tissue she procured from inside another of her hidden pockets. When Pam was satisfied, she dashed blush across each of Karen’s ethnically contested, though highly esteemed, cheekbones. “You look hale,” Joyce admitted.

  “Go get him, tiger,” Pam said, smiling.

  THE SUN WAS blinding. The highway appeared to crumble atomically in its relentless light. Even with sunglasses, Kurt squinted to see, relying on reflexes to pull off the highway in the right spot. They passed a mini-golf course terraced into the hill that overlooked the highway. A long line of people waited to be admitted for eighteen holes of fabricated whimsy. Sarah could not contain her disgust.

  “Who the hell would want to spend Last Day playing mini-golf?”

  “Takes all kinds to make a world.”

  Kurt lived in a trailer park behind the mini-golf course. It was a shame to his proud, hardworking family, who subscribed wholesale to the American dream of ever-upward mobility, that their only son would elect such a conspicuous downshift.

  “Fiberglass is for Gypsies,” his mother had muttered over her steaming cup of tea when Kurt showed her the brochure for the home he’d bought for himself. “Your father is rolling in his grave.”

  His father had been a shipbuilder, a member of the guild, as had his father and grandfather before him. Kurt’s two sisters, one older, one younger, had both gone to college and gotten jobs their parents could be proud of. The elder sister was a middle school math teacher and the younger managed all the food vendors at Fenway Park. Kurt was the name bearer, and what had he done with that name? Dropped out of art school after one year, then foundered for a spell as a gas station attendant before the accident and the stint in jail. He’d assumed his family would be happy when he was released early, but his homecoming had been treated as a silent disgrace.

  Kurt was proud of his double-wide. He owned it. Bought it with money he’d earned himself. And he liked his trailer park neighbors, only a small fraction of whom identified as Romany Gypsies. There was a self-reliant economy here in which many outside needs were conveniently provided. Pot, plumbing, rat extermination, childcare, elder care, pirated internet, discount Indian reservation cigarettes, taxidermy, and tattoos were all bartered with a fluidity and friendliness that Kurt knew his self-reliance-loving family would respect if they could relax their classist hypocrisy. That hypocrisy was exactly what Kurt had been fleeing when he’d made the decision to buy his double-wide.

  The bike motored up a short steep hill into the neighborhood. People were gathered in clusters around smoky grills, ambling in and out of each other’s homes, celebrating the holiday. His neighbors waved and nodded when Kurt passed by on his bike, the men cocking an eyebrow at the helmeted young lady behind him. A pack of small boys were practicing bike jumps off a homemade ramp. When they saw Kurt approaching, they got serious and rode faster, popping wheelies. Kurt revved his engine in approval and the boys with their squinted eyes and sideways smiles raced off.

  Sarah had never been on a motorcycle before. She’d never been to a trailer park, either. This day was taking an unusual shape, and though she was desperate to know Kurt’s plan for them, she was playing it cool.

  “They look like regular houses,” she remarked, noticing the shutters on the windows and the hedges out front. She was expecting something bedouin, a vast network of corrugated metal huts and merchants on the road selling beaded jewelry and stolen cellphones. Most of the double-wides looked new. Their white siding was laced with a yellow fringe, the same buildup of pollen that plagued the wooden shingles of Sarah’s house. It seemed like a requirement to fly a flag from the front door. The faded colors of many sports teams and veterans’ groups and the good old red, white, and blue hung motionless in the thickening air. A couple of people had even hung Last Day flags, the tacky gold flame encircled by white doves set against a lavender background.

  “They are regular houses,” Kurt said. They’d pulled up into his driveway. He also had a flagpole extending obliquely from the front of his house, but no flag was hanging. A giant spider web connecting the naked, outstretched pole to the side of the house sparkled in the early afternoon sun.

  “Wow, that’s the biggest spider web I’ve ever seen,” Sarah said as she removed her helmet and got off the bike.

  “It’s a beaut, isn’t it? Been there for weeks.” He got off the bike with a little hop and started walking across the street. “I’ll be right back,” Kurt told her. “Go on in. Door’s unlocked.”

  Sarah crouched in for a closer look at the web. Nothing, not even a gnat, was ensnared in the twinkling, translucent fibers. She flicked her fingers against the thickest spot and a spray of moisture flew into her face. A boy ambled toward her. He was barefoot and chubby, around eight years old, Sarah estimated. His hair was a curly mess. He looked at Sarah as though assaying her worth.

  “Hello,” Sarah said, creeped out by his silent stare.

  The boy clicked his tongue in a soft, patient rhythm. “Tich, tich, tich.”

  Sarah wondered if the child was a special-needs case, though admittedly, she’d never been very good with children. Not even when she’d been a child herself. Suddenly the green underbrush sprouting around Kurt’s front steps shivered and a small brown rabbit hopped out. “Tich, tich, tich,” the boy continued, and after a moment of consideration, the rabbit hopped straight into the boy’s arms.

  “Arturo the Fourth! He’s still among the living?” Kurt said, returned now from wherever he’d gone.

  “Arturo da Fift,” the child lisped.

  “Sorry. Arturo the Fifth. Josh’s mother keeps
getting these rabbits for him, but they always escape their cages and get smooshed by cars. Josh isn’t standing for it, though. He went on a campaign, didn’t you, kimo sabe?”

  The boy pressed his face into the rabbit’s fur and inhaled deeply. “I made signs.”

  “Posted them everywhere.” Kurt pointed out the white scabs of paper still clinging to a few trees and lampposts. “Arturo the Fifth is an agent of change. He helps keep the speed limit down in this neighborhood.”

  The rabbit leapt from Josh’s arm and disappeared into the shrubbery behind Kurt’s trailer.

  “Can I please have a cigarette for my mom, Kurt?”

  Kurt tapped one out of his pack and tossed it. Josh caught it midair and ran away. The bottoms of his feet were pitch black except for the arches.

  “He’d be a good runner if someone trained him,” Sarah observed.

  “Not a chance,” Kurt said. “He’s going to smoke that cigarette himself once he’s out of sight.”

  “How can you let him do that?”

  “You can’t raise other people’s kids.”

  He gave Sarah a little tour of his home. The kitchen was wood-paneled and underused. The living room was a dumping ground of pizza boxes and beer bottles. Clothes were strewn all around the floor of the bedroom. There was a damp, skunky smell that Sarah connected to the joint Kurt was rolling for himself and not to the cleanliness of his home, which was about average, she guessed, for a man like him. Though she had no idea what a man’s home ought to look like, let alone smell like. Terrence’s bedroom was the only categorically male space she’d spent any time in, and he suffered from the most tragic, strangling OCD she’d ever seen. Pens and pencils were stored in separate identical Lucite boxes that Terrence cleaned once a month with Q-tips and rubbing alcohol, and all the venetian blinds on his windows were calibrated to hover at the same fraction of an inch above the sills. If there was an odor to his room, Terrence masked it with the earthy-smelling cones of burning incense that he arranged on a porcelain Japanese dish with painstaking, ritualistic care.

  Poor Terrence. She wished that he were here with her now. It was such an odd longing, when confronted with a new romantic possibility—to want to retreat to an older, more familiar (though unfulfilled) one. Terrence was so safe. She never felt awkward when she disappointed him, because she could trust he would always forgive her when conflicts came up. His face would twitch and he wouldn’t look at her, but within an hour he’d relax and everything would be okay again. It had happened like that a million times with Terrence. She could count on it. Not so with Kurt. She was so uneasy in his presence. He made her want to plumb unfamiliar parts of herself and present them to him as offerings. “Here is my secret fear of children,” she might say, “here are my self-important prophecies, my latent, possibly nonexistent, sexuality. Have them. Have them all….”

  “It’s way bigger than I expected” is what came out of her instead.

  Kurt chuckled. “What were you expecting?”

  “I guess an Airstream. Something you hitch up to a truck and go camping in.” She tucked herself into the small bench behind the kitchen table, glad that half of her weird, spastic body was hidden for the moment.

  “People live here. Permanently.”

  “So weird not to have a cellar.” Was this a classist thing to say? Was she classist? It had never occurred to her before that she could have blind spots in her ultra-embracing worldview. She tried to recover. “But then again, cellars are, like, all about symbolic fears and rats. They’re totally overrated.”

  She hoped this sounded supportive. She was taking this man as her lover, her first and maybe only lover, and though the trailer park was underwhelming, it was definitely memorable, which was a relief. In fact, this whole experience was already imbued with iniquity and enchantment. She would not screw this up.

  “So here’s the plan.” Kurt pulled out a kitchen chair and leaned over his lap to face Sarah. It was something Dr. Vasquez-McQueen did during office hours and smacked of condescension. “I’m going to shave and change my clothes and collect some things for this amends I need to make. I would offer you a beer or a joint, but since you’re underage, that is illegal for me to do. However, if you help yourself while I’m not looking, that’s fine with me. You catch my drift?”

  “I hate that phrase, but yeah. And I don’t smoke or drink. Not, like, puritanically, I just, real life is weird enough, you know?”

  “You’re amazing, sweetheart.” Kurt lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles, then hopped out of his guidance counselor posture and headed into the bathroom. Sarah sat at the table a moment, the fingers of her left hand still ablaze from his touch.

  Kurt had rinsed and lathered his face when Sarah knocked on the bathroom door. “Can I watch?”

  “Uhhh, sure.”

  She lowered the seat and the lid of his toilet, which was so disgusting she only allowed her eyes to skim the surface before sitting down. She watched in a happy trance as Kurt plowed away paths of speckled white to reveal the smooth pink skin underneath. She envied the way men could bear such totally different faces to the world in a matter of weeks. Kurt had an impressive scar on his chin, a deep diagonal line that glowed a little pinker from the brief attention of the razor.

  “That’s a cool scar.” Sarah pointed.

  “Hockey game.”

  “Actors always talk about having a good and bad side of their face, and I always thought that was stupid, but you actually have two distinct sides of your face. Like you’re two different people.”

  “I am a Gemini,” Kurt told her.

  Sarah suppressed a groan. If she were a guy, her penis would totally deflate right now. She didn’t know what the female equivalent of that was, but her brain was certainly losing its boner. Astrology was so, so unforgivably dumb. And ten times dumber when straight guys talked about it.

  Kurt wiped his face clean, a new man. He patted Sarah on the head and went into his bedroom. She followed him, feeling bolder. Standing there as he sorted through the piles on the floor, she took off her sneakers, then crawled onto his bed.

  Kurt ignored this and continued rummaging around the mess. Time for that later, he thought, if that was going to happen at all—she was just a kid, after all. He was still on the fence, still hoping that after his impending confrontation, where this girl would act as his buffer/guardian angel, something much better would work out for both of them independently later on in the night, and they’d part ways happily. And if they did end up in bed together, then, well, disappointments were better faced in the dark.

  Sarah continued to lie in Kurt’s bed, her anxiety growing by the minute. Was it her job to seduce Kurt, she wondered, or was she supposed to wait for him to move toward her? The rules of all this were confusing at best, unfair at worst. She lay there, trying to look cool. A full retreat, such as jumping off his bed, would give this moment a case of whiplash. Besides, her socks reeked and she needed to hide them under his blankets. She angled her body in what she hoped looked like a sexy pose and pretended to take a nap. There were more clothes tangled in his sheets. Errant socks and a pair of boxers she avoided touching.

  It wasn’t supposed to feel like this, Sarah thought; or maybe this was exactly how it was supposed to feel?

  “Hey, I could use your help a minute,” Kurt said.

  He had gotten a hammer to take down an Indian tapestry nailed to the windowsill. The elephant god Ganesha sat on a golden throne in the middle of a woodland scene, proffering his own broken tusk in one of his many hands.

  “I don’t want it to get all ripped or frayed if I can help it.”

  Sarah climbed out of the bed. She caught the cloth as it fell and shook out the dust.

  “Why are you taking this down?”

  “I need to return it today.”

  “You’ve had it for a long time.” She shaded her
eyes against the light from outside.

  “Yeah.”

  Her ponytail had gotten limp and a lock of hair fell into her face. Kurt reached over and smoothed it behind her ear.

  “Okay,” Sarah said, an answer to a question he didn’t ask, her voice feathery and strange.

  Kurt made a pile on his bed of things that he was collecting for his amends. The tapestry. A field guide to North American mushrooms, its pages waterlogged and crispy. A coffee tin that he sealed with a plastic bag and rubber bands.

  “Are those—ashes?” Sarah asked.

  “Some of it, yeah,” Kurt answered.

  Sarah was about to ask whose ashes they were when something stopped her. She heard a thump overhead and gazed up at the skylight. A mass of pollen and dirt had whorled together, looking kind of like the Milky Way. A cat scurried over the roof. The bottoms of its paws pressed into the window, leaving behind tracks in the thick yellow film.

  Kurt moved his bed away from the wall and reached behind it to pull out a small painting mounted in a cheap gilt frame. It was a pinwheel of blue and green wings flying away from the center point, an ersatz mandala. Sarah judged it to be the work of a precocious but untalented teenager, someone her age but not as smart. She was hoping that was the answer. The signature at the bottom said Mary. Maybe a long-lost niece?

  “My old girlfriend,” Kurt corrected.

  “Oh,” Sarah said. “Did she die tragically?” She couldn’t believe how much she wanted this to be true.

  “Everyone’s death is tragic.”

  * * *

  —

  MARY HAD BEEN the one bright spot in Kurt’s life after he’d dropped out of art school. Kurt was nineteen when he met her and Mary was a sophomore in high school. She was a gorgeous earth child with large brown eyes and dark, gleaming hair, the kind of girl who wore sandals with wool socks in the dead of winter, who smoked like a chimney but wouldn’t touch a plate with meat on it. She thought Kurt’s illustrations of dragons and heroes were genius and she loved his family as much as her own. She hailed from a long dynasty of semi-important Americans—the last of whom was her uncle Bear, an astronaut—WASPs clutching desperately to relevance as their storied past collected more and more dust in the annals of local libraries.