The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  The paint is flaking off the penguin; the black has gone white about the eyes and feet, making what might have been cute a little ghostly. It floats above itself, is hollow-eyed.

  Judah digs a fingernail into it. “So, this is weird. It’s wax.” There is something about his inordinately long fingers. I do understand why girls go for him.

  “No,” I say. “You don’t make a lamp out of wax. That doesn’t follow.”

  “Yeah,” said Judah. “Yeah, I know. She works in weird materials.”

  “Who?”

  “Valerie Weston. The girl who wouldn’t talk to me. The artist who lives with her aunts on the two top floors.”

  I shake my head. I want to explain to Judah that he’s wrong, that no art school girl made this penguin. Why we went across the roof for it is its history, its finger grease of time and use. But even if it’s old, that doesn’t explain the material, why anyone at any time would make a lamp of wax.

  We are waiting at the next intersection, but the lights just blink yellow. “Is this crazy, or what? We’re the only ones out here.”

  “It makes me want to loot or something,” I say.

  He laughs. “Would you pack me a bowl?” He fishes a bit of soft felt from his front pocket. It’s a Crown Royal bag and inside there’s a baggie of weed, and a little wooden box which opens up to be a cleverly contrived pipe.

  I’ve been around it; I’ve absorbed some drug skills osmotically. As we swerve around the tree limbs, I manage to pick out a few buds without scattering the drugs all over the floor. He, on the other hand, is an expert smoker. I admire everything about how he does it, the way he cracks the window, the way his feet continue to work the pedals, the seconds his lungs can hold the smoke.

  “There was a storm like this one night at camp, do you remember?”

  “Camp?” I can see a bit of Judah’s tattoo script at the collar of his shirt. She or Shall. —Broken heart___Sh (e) (all) ___Live in vain

  “Sure. We took the canoes out in the middle of the lightning storm. It was freezing, idiocy. They were all watching something, some big international news event we kids didn’t care about, and we took advantage. Camp director flipped, later. We all got sent home. But, just drifting there, watching the lightning crack against the sky, thinking it could never come for us.”

  “Was that the night it happened?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. You know it was Andi?”

  “I don’t remember,” I say. There is a strange sense about this whole episode, that it’s been removed from me, carved off, that I will not recall it in years to come. “There’s a picture of you from then in your living room.”

  “God, yeah.”

  I laugh. “You look different.”

  “I know this sounds arrogant, or whatever, but it was better. It was easier before I grew into myself. A lot of girls are available to me, now.”

  I laugh. “Sorry. You do sound arrogant.”

  He laughs, too. “I know. But, isn’t it easier to be good when you don’t have the opportunity to be a shit? I’d like to live with myself for a while, but I’m such a hungry fucker. I can’t even behave for a few days. Do you get that?”

  I shake my head. “Myself, I’m trying to be more of a shit,” I tell him. But, I know there’s an intersection between what he’s trying not to do, and what I’d like to do more of. It’s about appetites, about starving versus gorging, but I can’t make the idea into something I can say.

  He smiles, pats my leg in a not-sexy way. “Is that why you’re friends with Nancy?”

  “She’s not a shit,” I say, but I’m not sure I mean it.

  “Maybe not,” he says. “I get a sense she’s trying to look out for you.”

  “Sometimes,” I say. “I think when she seems like a bitch, it’s because she’s trying to protect me.”

  “Protecting people is a mess,” says Judah.

  As we pull into the Village Fens, I hear the wind beginning to pick up. The sky is growing dark again. We angle into the parking spot in front of the crack house. Garbage cans lids rattle. It’s hard to open the door against the force of the returning storm. Leaves sail through the air.

  The crack house is bright, lights blazing, the black paper over the basement dormers pierced with lamp glow. We knock hard. A person is facing off against us as the doors opens, arms crossed. My first impression is that it’s a little kid, some younger sibling I’d missed on my first visit. She wears an adult’s pajamas, rolled up at the ankles and sleeves, but then, my eyes adjust for scale and I realize it’s only Andi. She allows the door to fall open. Judah smiles. I’m a part of the backdrop, not really relevant here.

  “Do you want some tea?” Andi asks Judah. Her voice is high, manic. “I’m making tea.” The kettle sings in the background. “But we don’t have honey, and we don’t have sugar, and the tea is kind of gross.”

  “Come on,” he says. “Put that down. Let’s go out and look for her.”

  Andi shakes her head. “I’ve checked all the usual places. Post office is closed. Donut shop. Periodicals at the library.”

  “Still,” he says.

  “I shouldn’t have asked you,” Andi says with her clenched jaw. Even in those pajama pants, even with that expression, she is truly lovely. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  Judah gives me the barest of glances—see? Women, right? And I thrill.

  “Anyway, she’s probably been picked up already. Or she’s sitting in some Samaritan’s kitchen, eating their cake, and sobbing.” She moves around the kitchen carefully so as not to step on the cuffs of her pants, pouring water from the kettle into the teapot, and then lighting her cigarette off the burner to smoke while the tea steeps. The set is beautiful, china, pink and filigree, with delicate fluting.

  “Who would pick her up? Ambulance?”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of fascist. They can nab you for looking weird. Actually like wearing a winter coat in summer or something.” Her voice remains high, tense, but maybe this is just how she speaks. “Plus, non-English speakers.”

  Andi begins to transfer the tea things to a red plastic cafeteria tray, the cups clattering together, then she picks her way toward the TV room. Judah watches her closely. In the hallway, we step around the mailers and packages which are so thickly collected on the carpet, it’s hard to navigate.

  Truth? I am thinking of cloud, of the segue that will allow me to get my mouth on a spoon.

  Between the television room and the entryway, something thrown or dropped has left a violent brown spatter. It’s recent, since two days ago. Andi and Judah glance at it, some shared understanding passing between them, and then he’s taking the tea things from her and she sidles into his arms.

  I back away from the pair and locate the telephone. There’s a vague need to call my mother, to let her know how I’m weathering the storm. I hear Judah murmuring to Andi.

  Nancy’s stories often light on Andi and her mother and I collate some of these half-ignored bits of gossip now with the details the home reveals, the china and the mailers and the tea-drinking. The mom is a chronic catalogue shopper, no defenses against capitalist urges. It’s a communist country they immigrated from, Eastern Bloc. There’s something horrific about the dad, too, a failed refugee escape or a bomb, something with a shade of historical import. Anyway, he’s dead. Cloud, crack, whatever they cook down there: it’s a piece of how they make ends meet now. Judah’s mixed in there, too, drops in with cash for groceries or to deal with the landlord, whatever. Part of how they hold it together, and part of the problem, too. There’s a kinship, Andi and her mom, me and mine, but it still feels alien to me.

  I get a long, low drone on the phone, though whether it’s from delinquent payments or the storm, I don’t know. I think what Nancy will say, if my mom calls looking for me, whether she’ll cover. I can picture her and Paul laughing, like it’s an alliance, them against me. That’s what has had me feeling unfinished all day. I want to eat cloud, make the feelings slink off.
r />   A terrific crack from outside brightens the living room before me. The eye has passed, and the storm has returned in force. Andi stands apart from Judah, staring at the black square of the sliding door, the drops crawling sideways across the glass. Andi’s X’d tape across the pane, but it’s the wrong kind of tape, nothing that will hold against the impact of debris. Judah touches her.

  “It’s OK,” he says. “This isn’t your fault.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “But it’s my fucking problem.”

  Judah is holding their coats.

  “I don’t know. What if she comes back, and I’m not here?”

  “Mellie can stay,” Judah says.

  “You don’t mind?” Andi asks. This is the first she’s acknowledged my existence this evening. She and Judah are putting on their coats.

  “I’ll keep an eye.”

  The sky splits behind them as they open the door, splits again as Judah throws his arm around her and they step out into the rain.

  I feel a nonspecific yearning, to be with a person who would face wind like that with me, or it’s Paul and Nancy who by now, facing facts, have obviously ditched me to be together. It’s something like that that has been eating me all day. Like that I’m Nancy’s second-best friend. My mother, last night, something about her not being loyal. And, there’s a sense of something red and shiny, lipstick colored, a wall, thumping music. Of train tracks, and rain drizzle, and wrists flicking beneath too-short sleeves. I want to be the first choice.

  G-d, I think. I suck. It seems obvious to me that no one will ever like me that way, that I’m unlikeable, that I’m detestable, and then it becomes more urgent for me to find some cloud, and I wonder if this is why Judah has left me here, so I can score without having to count my grubby bills and be someone who is buying drugs from a girl who can’t pay her phone bill, whose mother is missing in the rain. I listen. The silence deepens, though it is textured with an electric sizzle at the back of it.

  I try the basement door, but it’s locked. I am in the kitchen. Nothing’s on the stove, no cooking, but the room still smells of gas leaks and the carbon monoxide of chemical fire. I remember the bulkhead door.

  The air outside cuts, little slivers of sleet mixed in, and I have to push back against the wind as I make my way over the boggy ground of the unfinished compound. I shoulder into the weather until my shoe finds the basement door.

  In the makeshift sitting area before the TV, there is evidence of work. There are stacks and stacks of bills from catalogue companies, neatly slit open, and on a piece of binder paper beside, dollar amounts written into sums. A shoebox of Xeroxed letters, I am writing kindly remove from your list. There is evidence of trying to help out, trying to fix things. The divider curtain is pulled aside and by the blue light of a gas burner, I make out the armature of photographic clips strung on wire between the insulated pipes, two ice-filled Rubber Maid bins, and about four dozen spoons cooling in metal utensil trays. There’s the cloud, cloud enough to soothe ten of me through the slowest of hurricanes.

  At that moment, there is a loud crackle, a burst of light, and then the house goes dark.

  The flame is about ten feet in front of me, but the darkness between is complete. It feels as though there might be deep holes, or the walls might have collapsed, like I might be in the midst of nothing. I take a tentative step, and then another, and I’m too scared to walk, and I drop to the floor.

  I see my future. All the filthy carpets I’ll find myself on, all the times I’ll crawl, just to get cloud. My scraped hands drag through filth and decayed spider web as I move toward the blue burner light. Someone should come. My mother, or Nancy, a policeman or a teacher. Someone should pick me up, and get me straight before it’s too late. But I keep crawling, and then I’ve got my hand on the spoon, and—

  —pop—

  I am sucked in like a breath and exhaled. Everything turns easy. When Andi and Judah arrive home, rain slick and raw-faced from the pelting wind, I am in the living room babbling with Mrs. Auslander. She’s speaking Estonian or whatever, and I’m not making much sense either, but she’s got a towel wrapped around her, and I have eight spoons of cloud in my pocket. Andi’s coat drops from her shoulders; the still-open front door closes behind her and she rushes forward to hug us both.

  “Slow goblin,” I say, aware that cloud is gumming my speech, but Andi’s too grateful to care, and I have a hero feeling, like it’s all been fixed. I’m the person who fixes things. Judah collects Andi’s coat off the floor, and holds it up, shaking off the rain, while Andi fetches her mother’s medication.

  I think, I will write this all down, before it slips off. It’s becoming a habit.

  Twenty minutes later, Andi and Judah stand in the hallway, not touching. He tries to pass her the wax penguin, but she’s putting him off.

  “I want to think about whether I want it. I’ll try to come by your place after if she looks like she’s sleeping OK.”

  “I know,” says Judah. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Aren’t they all, always?”

  Judah is a full foot taller than she is, but he slouches and she straightens her spine, and you could easily ignore their differences. The fact of a kiss is a possibility that hangs in the small space between their bodies. Unacted upon, it is nonetheless material, exists like a charge in the air. That’s how I feel, too, like something about to ignite.

  The secret knowledge rests next to my awareness of my eight spoons of cloud. I could eat them all tonight, or parcel them out to myself over months or save them for some unpredicted, unbearable pain. No one can tell me what to do with any of it.

  In the car, penguin perched on my lap, I listen to Judah’s breath.

  “Do you think she’s really going to come? Did it sound like she meant it?”

  “Could go either way,” I say.

  “Yeah, but what’s your instinct?”

  “Sure,” I lie. I’m sorry for him, which is not what I expected.

  “Girls,” he says. “The whole coquette thing. No offense. But just for once, I’d like someone to just tell me to fuck off. If that’s what they want.”

  He turns his blinker on and looks over at me while we idle at a blinking stoplight. “Hey, are you OK? You look, like, pale or something.”

  “No,” I say, cloud sloshing over me. “I’m great.” And I am. The streets are empty, the traffic lights dead, the asphalt glistening with rainwater. Dead leaves and filth rush in the gutter, but the wind has stilled. The moon is out, the stars. The storm has moved out to sea or inland to New York. Still, the night is empty.

  “You always wear those glasses,” says Judah. “Can you really not see?” It is after midnight and I feel relaxed. I slip my oversized frames off my face and stash them in my book bag.

  “It’s like being blind,” I tell him. Everything becomes a corona of its own colors, a halo of light on the surface of the dark.

  “You look transformed,” he says. “Like a new person.” We roll the windows down and turn up the volume and drive home through the blurred and flooded world.

  Eight

  Brookline & Roslindale

  2010

  For a long time, I sit across from the Longwood T Station gazing at the scattered scraps of paper on the car seat beside me. When I look up, the clock on the dash reads six thirty.

  For a moment, I can’t credit the numbers on the display. Because six thirty would be an hour and a half past my daughter’s pick-up time from the sitter. But then I add the evidence of the sunset, my phone’s notifications. My texts are full and the ringer is on silent and the battery is almost dead. I’m late for Juni. Then, an explosion of mother-panic startles me into motion.

  This is how it goes on my reality show, for a mother in meltdown; the apocalypse in intervals between the appointments, the crisis rerouted by the sudden cry.

  The caregiver is sitting on the porch with Juni coughing beside her. As soon as the woman sees me, she hoists the pink shopping sack which is se
rving as Juni’s diaper bag, tucks Juni under her free arm, and waddles toward me. “Your emergency contact number is in a foreign country. They speak Spanish.”

  I had given her my mother’s number in Belize. There hadn’t been anyone else.

  I take the pink sack in one arm, and Juni in the other. My daughter buries her face in my sweaty armpit and releases a raspy breath.

  “I had tickets,” says the sitter. “We had Sox tickets. Get it? The game starts at seven ten.”

  I see that her boyfriend and son are already in the truck, the engine running.

  She taps her sandaled foot while I write her a final check, then climbs in the back, and leans her head out the window. “Don’t be calling thinking I’m going to change my mind. You know she’s brain damaged, right? Not just anyone would take her. I’m serious. Most moms would be grateful to me.”

  In my arms, Juni begins her beautiful cloud song. “Apple. Peach. Potato heart.”

  The sitter peels out of the driveway, eyes averted. She’ll make the second inning, maybe even the first. But my daughter, in my arms, is on the edge of crying. It feels as though there is a long, dark fall beneath me, jagged rocks and frozen waters. Wyle E. Coyote time. Time for the plummet. I nuzzle my little girl, who smells of sour diaper and missed dinner. I am in my body, still. I have not used yet. I can make it until bedtime.

  But just. The bits of paper on the seat beside me lift as the air leaks through the cracked window, as I lurch over train tracks. To distract myself, at the stoplights, to keep myself from licking the leather interior of my car, I write what I remember of the afternoon in my paperback, the driveway man’s nonsense talk. Old residents. Going by the deed. West Coast time. The buildup. The come on. The coming ha ha attractions. They want to see how it turns out. There are things outstanding, Apollo. It’s the middle that’s gone and the middle is the alarm. Kefeselyay. Wakes up again, blue. Bright big future. You know how to find it. Then a horn honks, and I am driving again.