Touchy Subjects: Stories

by Emma Donoghue

  One Christmas, early on, she remembered, her mother had been loud in complaint. "Nothing but a card!" The postmark was from LA, no address on the back of the envelope. Dark inked words inside, scattered like seeds across the printed message. Happy Christmas folks, hope you're all well—was that it? Or Take care of yourselves, love A.? If Niniane had known it was going to be the last message, she'd have read it more carefully.

  A year later, there was no card, and her mother said the American postal system was known for its deficiencies. But Niniane suspected Arthur had forgotten. Men without wives were notoriously bad at keeping in touch.

  The following year, no card, no comment.

  A friend from the office, waiting by the photocopier, asked after that handsome big brother of Niniane's she'd gone to a college ball with. "My god, how long has it been?" And then, brutally, "Don't you miss him?"

  Niniane had felt an immense weariness and walked away.

  On the rare occasions Arthur came up in conversation at home these days he was like a figure in a children's book, frozen in time. When neighbours asked, her mother always said that her son was on the West Coast and doing very well. But after tea one New Year's Eve, alone with her father in the kitchen, Niniane had finally asked it, that question without a verb: "Any word from Arthur?"

  Her father had said nothing,just kept drying his hands on the dishcloth. The dishwasher was pumping and he was slightly deaf these days. She liked to tell herself that he hadn't heard what she said.

  There were some people splashing round in the motel pool already. As soon as Niniane was dressed she walked out to the railing and squinted down. She didn't have anything to swim in, and besides, the pool looked so small, it would be like floating in a petri dish. These toffee-coloured girls and boys with their candy-floss hair would flinch from her pale Irish body.

  The man at the desk asked where her car was; she really should have rented a car. "I can't drive," she told him, smiling placatingly. It was obviously a sentence he'd never heard before.

  Back home in Limerick, Arthur had been the one who was always borrowing the Fiat to drive to godknowswhere and leaving the seat pushed too far back. Niniane was the one who had stayed in with their parents and made tea and toast in the intervals of The Late Late Show. If there were only two of you, things got divided up that way.

  She walked out into the shiny street. The morning sun was strange on her skin. She considered buying a clean T-shirt from a stall, but they all had palm trees on them, or Elvis. She'd never known heat like this, so thick you could slice it, so heavy the streets seemed to waver. But she looked up at the glassy sky and for a moment caught that feeling. Songs with the word California in them wandered through her mind. If ever a place was the polar opposite of Limerick, this was it. Once you got here, how could you ever go home? Which reminded her of the key, back in the hotel in the ashtray. But it could wait a few hours more. She had come here for herself, really, for a break from ordinary life. She could be a tourist like anybody else.

  Only Niniane didn't look like anybody else, as she sat at the very back of the Stars' Homes tour bus. Her skirt was three feet longer than anyone else's, hot on the back of her knees. Her jumper was knotted round her hips. Her black vest revealed tufts of hair at her armpits, which was just about as unacceptable as leprosy in this town; she kept her elbows clamped by her sides. She sang grimly in her head: Take me back to the Black Hills, the Black Hills of DA-KO-TA.

  As the bus wormed its way up a steep avenue, she was pressed back in her seat. She'd stopped listening to the commentary a while back, after Boris Karloff and Marlene Dietrich. Most of these mansions looked the same, anyway: lush trees protruding over twenty feet of security fence. She tried to imagine Arthur behind one of these shaded windows, sipping wheatgrass juice.

  Niniane tried to follow the little red stars on the map, but they danced before her eyes like chicken pox. It was too hot to sit still.

  The speaker behind her head crackled. "That was Vincent Minnelli's and now look to your left, you'll see coming up at 713 North Crescent Drive, the lovely home of Miss Doris Day."

  She pressed her cheek to the glass, but there was a eucalyptus tree in the way. The prickling air was closing in around her. She couldn't bear this any longer. She lurched to the front of the bus.

  "Take your seat, ma'am," the driver said. "No standing while the bus is in motion."

  "Would you stop the bus, please?"

  "We gotta respect the privacy of the stars."

  "Let me off, I can't breathe," she bawled. She had never shouted at a stranger before.

  As the bus drew away from the curb, leaving her standing on the shoulder, Niniane felt almost wonderful. The grass under her feet was unnaturally plump. The sun went behind a cloud for a moment and the air seemed a little cooler. There wasn't another human being in sight; only high walls and hedges, and the soft whirr of sprinklers, and the bark of a pedigree dog. Maybe Arthur was a gardener. Any minute now he would stroll along the path with a sack of clippings in each hand.

  She walked back as far as No. 713. It looked like all the others. The light bounced off the sidewalk like a chorus line. Maybe Doris would come out in a minute, wearing yellow, with that toothy smile. Niniane had a look at the plush lawn and sang in a whisper: "Please, please, don't eat the daisies." Then, all at once, she was so tired she had to sit down on the curb. Her face cream was melting into her eyes; she seemed to be wearing false lips made of paper.

  When she looked up, a police officer was getting out of his car. On his hip was a huge gun, the only one she'd ever seen in real life. Niniane stood up so fast that everything went black before her eyes.

  "I was walking," she said in answer to his questions. "Just walking, and I got tired."

  He put away his notebook and opened the car door for her.

  "I wasn't going to hassle her or anything," she repeated as she fastened the seat belt.

  The police officer asked who she meant.

  "Doris Day."

  "Miss Day hasn't lived in that house since 1975, ma'am."

  He drove her all the way back to the Hollywood Hills Hotel. There was one moment, when they paused at a red light, when she thought of asking how long a person, a family member, would have to be gone before he could be reported as missing. But then the lights changed.

  She apologized for putting the officer to the trouble and asked him to let her off anywhere, she could walk, but he told her this was not a walking kind of city.

  Such an odd word for it, missing, she thought as she sat on the thin hotel mattress. Maybe Arthur wasn't missing them at all; maybe he was incommunicado. Now there was a grand phrase. Maybe her brother was alive and well in his condo,just around the corner from the Hollywood Hills Hotel, and living such a wonderful new life that he couldn't be bothered to write home about it. Selfish bastard.

  A shriek, outside in the street. The window was dusty above the air conditioner; she pressed her face to it. On the street two young men on Rollerblades were greeting each other with loud cries. The black guy had short white hair. They kissed on both cheeks, then slid off in opposite directions.

  That wasn't it, was it? Not enough of a reason to never come home. Niniane had always known Arthur wasn't the marrying kind, even though it had taken her nearly thirty-five years to put words on it. She had tried to bring it up once, but he'd changed the subject, which was fair enough. And their parents must have known, too, in their way. Nothing was said, but they never nagged him with questions about girlfriends.

  Maybe Arthur had somebody over here. Maybe that was enough for him. A chosen family—that was the phrase, she'd read it in a magazine. But he was kidding himself because you couldn't unchoose your old family. You couldn't just walk away, not when they'd never done anything to deserve it.

  Niniane had always thought her brother liked her. But how little he knew of her anymore. He'd been away for her breakup with Mark, and her promodon, and that time she had the ovarian cyst and for a month
thought she was dying. Whereas, to give them their due, her parents had always been there. Sunday after Sunday. Always on the same sofa in the same front room in the same terraced house on the same street in Limerick, the same sofa both she and Arthur had clung to when they were learning to walk. Her father getting balder and more taciturn, her mother rather more irritable since her hip operation, but both still there, in their places. And so was Niniane. Her own job, her own flat, but a daughter still, a daughter till the end.

  She put her few possessions in her bag and went outside to hail a taxi.

  The worst pictures always came when she was only half awake, or stuck in traffic. Arthur in prison, crouched in the corner of a cell. Arthur shooting up in an alley, his hairless arms pockmarked with holes. Arthur hawking himself on a street corner, bony with disease. What was it, his mystery? What was so bad that he couldn't lift the phone?

  It occurred to her for the first time that he was dead. Doris Day's only brother died of epilepsy when she was thirty-three. These things happened. Was that relief Niniane felt, that curious surge in her throat? It couldn't be. She felt sick with shame. She pressed her face against the sweaty glass of the cab window.

  Light-headed, she walked through the white corridors of LA Self-Storage. Fluorescent strips crackled overhead. The only sound was the pant of the air-conditioning. She thought if she turned a corner and bumped into a stranger she might scream. But who else would come here on a Sunday evening? She whispered the chorus of "Hotel California" to give herself courage. This place was like a prison for misbehaving furniture.

  She came to 2011 at last; it looked like all the other doors. The key was in her hand. What could furniture tell her? Arthur always had good taste, but there wouldn't be some vault of treasures. There wouldn't be a film of the missing years.

  For a moment, as she slid the key into the door, she hoped it wouldn't open.

  Niniane felt for the light switch and flicked it on. The locker was about ten by ten by ten feet of nothing. She stepped in, as if to search the bare corners. Nothing at all. She shut the door behind her back and for a moment feared she'd locked herself in. She was more alone than she'd ever been. There weren't even gaps in the dust to hint at whatever Arthur had once kept here; not even the marks of his size-thirteen feet from the day he must have taken it all away.

  Niniane let herself slide down the door till she was sitting on her heels. She began to cry, slow and grudging, like loosening a tooth. The hard walls multiplied her breath. In between sobs she kept listening for footsteps.

  At the pay phone, various options ran through her head as the receiver played "Greensleeves" in her ear, but each seemed more improbable than the last. If she missed this flight home, she had no way of paying for another. If she went to the police, they would look embarrassed for her and tell her to come back with some evidence that a crime had been committed. No known associates. No last address.

  "But I'm his sister, I swear," she told the voice at the other end of the phone. "You must still have his address, because he's paying for one of your storage lockers, he must be, or else you'd have changed the lock, wouldn't you?"

  The voice sounded computer-generated.

  "Will you at least take my address in Ireland?" she butted in. "Just in case. I don't know, in case he ever stops paying or something. I'm his sister," she repeated, like a bad actress from a soap. "He'd want me to know where he was."

  Which was a lie, she thought, as she jammed the phone onto the hook. She had no idea what Arthur wanted. Most likely she would never find out if the empty locker meant that he was dead, with his bank account slowly draining, or that he was living high on a hill with all his chairs and lamps around him, rich enough not to mind paying for an empty locker, too careless to remember where he had left the key.

  "The airport, now, please," she repeated to the taximan, who was barely visible behind the smoked glass. Niniane lay back against the sticky leather and let the traffic draw her into its slipstream. LIVE NUDE GIRLS, said a neon sign, NOW HIRING. NOW there would be a quick way to change her life.

  The sky was full of planes, crisscrossing like fireflies. In the far distance she caught a glimpse of the famous white letters lit up on the hill. If she hadn't known they said Hollywood she would have had no idea: No Food, she would have read, maybe, or Hullaballoo, or Home Now.

  At the airport, Niniane was told that her bag had just arrived from Pittsburgh. She stood in line to pick it up, then queued again to check it in for Shannon. In Duty Free, she bought her parents a $19.95 gilt Oscar that had a hopeful, dazed expression. She would bring it over next Sunday. It would give them something to talk about so they wouldn't have to talk about Arthur. She would see it on the mantelpiece every Sunday for the rest of her parents' lives, and someday she would have to decide whether to give it to Oxfam with the rest of their stuff or take it home and put it on her own mantelpiece.

  She had a window seat. All night she stared out at darkness or read Proust. When the sun came up over Shannon, hurting her eyes, she had finally got as far as the bit about the madeleine.

  The American pilot announced that they would be landing momentarily. Niniane's head shot up out of her doze; for a second, she misunderstood his use of the word and believed him, thought the plane was only going to dip down like a bird onto the runway, gather strength for a moment, then wing away to somewhere else entirely.

  When she emerged from Customs there were people waiting with cardboard signs held against their chests like X-rays. None of them had her name on. Trunks and totes spilled along the conveyor belt, climbing over each other at corners. She edged into the crowd, watching the procession of bags. A sign over the conveyor belt said in red letters, ALL BAGGAGE LOOKS THE SAME, BE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR OWN.

  Necessary Noise

  May blew smoke out of the car window.

  Her younger sister made an irritated sound between her teeth.

  "I'm blowing it away from you," May told her.

  "It comes right back in," said Martie. She leaned her elbows on the steering wheel and looked through the darkness between the streetlamps. "You told him to be at the corner of Fourth and Leroy at two, yeah?"

  May inhaled, ignoring the question.

  "Fifteen's way too young to go to clubs," observed Martie, tucking her hair behind one ear.

  "I don't know," said May thoughtfully. "You're not even eighteen yet and you're totally middle-aged."

  That was an old insult. Martie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, well Laz is so immature. Dad shouldn't let him start clubbing yet, that's all I'm saying. When I heard Laz asking him, on the phone, I said let me talk to Dad, but he hung up."

  May flicked the remains of her cigarette into the gutter. Somewhere close by a siren yowled.

  Martie was peering up at a dented sign. "It says 'No Stopping,' but I can't tell if it applies when it's two a.m. Do you think we'll get towed?"

  "Not as long as we're sitting in the car," said her elder sister, deadpan.

  "If the traffic cops come by, I could always drive round the block."

  May yawned.

  "I guess Dad was feeling guilty about being away for Laz's birthday, so that's why he said he could go clubbing," said Martie.

  "Yeah, well the man's always feeling guilty about something."

  Martie gave her big sister a wary look. "It's not easy," she began, "it can't be easy for Dad, holding everything together."

  "Does he?" asked May.

  "Well, we all do. I mean, he may not do the cooking and laundry and stuff, but he's still in charge. And it's hard when he's got to be on the road so much—"

  "Oh, right, yeah, choking down all those Texas sirloins, I weep for him."

  "He's not in Texas," said Martie, "he's in New Mexico."

  May got out another cigarette, contemplated it, then shoved it back in the box.

  "Are you still thinking of giving up the day after your twenty-first?" asked Martie.

  "Not if you remind me about it even one more tim
e." May combed her long pale hair with both hands.

  Silence fell, at least in the old Pontiac. Outside the streets droned and screamed in their nighttime way.

  "Actually, I don't think Laz gives a shit that Dad's away for his birthday," remarked May at last. "I wouldn't have, when I was his age. Normal fifteen-year-olds don't want to celebrate with their parents, or go on synchronized swimming courses or whatever it was you did for your fifteenth."

  "Life Saving," Martie told her coldly.

  "The boy wants to go to some under-eighteens hiphop juice-bar thing where they won't even sell him a Bud, that doesn't seem like a problem to me, except that he better get his ass in gear," said May, slapping the side of the car, "because I've got a party to go to."

  "I said you should have called a cab."

  "I'm broke till payday. Besides, Dad only lets you use the car when he's away so long as you give me and Laz rides."

  "You could use it yourself if you'd take some lessons," Martie pointed out.

  "There's no point learning to drive in New York," said May witheringly. "Besides, next year I'll be off to Amsterdam and it's all bikes there."

  "Motorbikes?"

  "No, just bicycles."

  Martie's eyebrows went up. "What are you going to do in Amsterdam?"

  "I don't know. Hang out. It's just a fabulous city."

  "You've never been," Martie pointed out.

  "I've heard a lot about it."

  Martie tapped a tune on the steering wheel. "It'll be weird if you go."

  "Not if. When."

  "When, then."

  May yawned. "You're always complaining I never clean up round the apartment."

  "Yeah, but when you're gone, there'll still be Laz, and his mess will probably expand to fill the place."

  "Oh, admit it," said May, "you love playing Martyr Mommie."

  Martie gave her elder sister a bruised look. Then she scanned the street again, on both sides, as if their brother might be lurking in the shadows. "This thing you're going to tonight," she said, "is it a dyke party?"