by Jen Beagin
MONA HAD MET THE HOMEOWNER six months ago when things weren’t going so good. Her only friend, Jesus, had moved hours away and three of her best clients had sold their houses. In her grief, she’d contracted an existential flu. This one had been hard to shake. The blood vessels in her eyes kept bursting, an unbearable scalpy smell lingered in her nostrils, and her insides felt dirty and ravaged. For the first time in her career, she’d canceled her clients for the week, and for three days she didn’t see or speak to anyone, not even Yoko and Yoko or Terry Gross.
On the morning of the fourth day, she remembered drinking Pepto Biz from the bottle while reading the quote taped to the refrigerator: “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Africa, which she’d never read. The movie, however, was among her favorite period dramas to blubber over. But, as was her custom, only during her period. Still, she decided to take the woman’s advice. The sea was off the table, obviously, so she would try tears and sweat, possibly simultaneously.
The tears did not come easily. She gnawed on her hand and produced a few drops of salt water, but, strangely, only out of one eye. The self-pity she felt at having to chew her own flesh made the other eye water. She stuck her head in the closet and cried. It had always been easier to cry in confined spaces. Closets, shower stalls, certain compact cars. She wept silently with her head in the shirt section of her hanging clothes. You’re okay, cookie, you’re okay, she told herself. There, there, cookie, let it out.
She’d never called herself cookie before.
Later, seeking salt water from sweat, she’d forced herself to run laps at the high school track. The place was deserted and dimly lit. She ran holding her tits to her chest, as the only bra she owned was an ancient padded thing with loose straps. Someday, and soon, hopefully, she could buy a real sports bra. Cupping her chest was a little like running in handcuffs, but obviously preferable to her tits flopping around.
She wasn’t running so much as trudging. Her so-called running shorts were high-waisted, brocade, the wrong shade of pink. Thigh-chafers. She wore her hair in two long braids, one thicker than the other, which tilted her equilibrium. Still, she managed five laps in the middle lane. When her back began to bother her during lap three, she took to skipping. Forward, backward, sideways. It slowed her down but was somehow more satisfying than jogging. In her fantasy, skipping became an Olympic sport for which she’d won the bronze. Twice.
“No gold?” Terry asked.
“If I had a sports bra,” Mona said. “Maybe.”
She repeated the salt water cure the following day. When she arrived at the track, a woman around Mona’s age was running in the outside lane. Then Mona noticed a long white stick tipped with bright red. The woman ran with it held out in front of her. Mona squinted at her face. Those weren’t sunglasses, she saw now. The woman’s eyes were covered with a kind of blindfold.
“Have you ever seen a blind person run?” she asked Terry cautiously.
Terry didn’t answer.
“I’ll take your silence as a no,” Mona said. “But let me tell you, Terry, it is really something. Honestly.”
From the bleachers, Mona quietly watched the woman. She was a better runner than Mona, and in better shape overall. She didn’t falter once, and her stick barely touched the ground. The fingers of her free hand fluttered as she ran, which Mona found endearing. Her gait was steady and confident, as if she were being pulled along by a large, invisible dog. A dog she adored and trusted completely.
“Or God?” Terry offered.
“God, dog, palindrome,” Mona said.
Mona coughed loudly as the woman passed for the third time, but the woman didn’t flinch. She was also about three and a half times prettier than Mona.
“Five and a half,” Terry corrected her.
Mona was handsome and vaguely ethnic looking. The blind woman was not ethnic looking. Nordic, perhaps, and highly desirable to a certain kind of man. The tall, rugged, Mr. Man type. The Mr. Man type was rarely attracted to the likes of Mona, which was a shame because she was often attracted to Mr. Men.
She began a slow slog in the opposite direction. Her legs felt sluggish and unresponsive, as if she were running in a dream. She and the blind woman were alone on the track. Each time they passed each other, the woman turned toward her slightly and smiled, as if sensing Mona’s unease. Her smile was a tad rapturous. It seemed to say, “I am not actually blind. I can see you perfectly. I know you’re holding your tits, for example, and I think you’re wonderful.”
Mona smiled back nervously. She felt this way around some toddlers and dogs: convinced they knew her darkest, most corrupt thoughts. Like the urge to trip the woman and watch her fall on her face. To distract herself, she started skipping.
“There are certain types of people you encounter over and over in life,” Mona mused to Terry. “Recurring types. For some people, it’s drunks. For others, it’s drummers. Or doctors. You know? Or redheads, chefs, amputees. People with herpes—”
“I get it,” Terry said impatiently.
“For me, it’s the blind,” Mona said.
This was a lie. She wasn’t sure why she was lying to Terry, of all people, but the concept was intriguing. She closed her eyes and continued skipping. She counted to five and was terrified, but she kept going. Then she felt something strange lapping at her ankles. A warm, knowing tongue. The tongue was doing something incredible to the backs of her knees. Now it rested in the crack of her ass. She felt suddenly and acutely blessed.
“The tongue of God,” Mona announced to Terry, “is currently parked in my butt crack.”
“It’s euphoria,” Terry explained. “Triggered by endorphins.”
Mona opened her eyes, but only long enough to negotiate the corner. She continued skipping, eyes closed. She felt the woman pass her again. The tongue of God transferred itself to her brain and began licking her cerebral cortex. She laughed for several seconds. Then she found herself crying, which was just as pleasant.
“The cure for anything, it appears, is skipping blind,” she told Terry.
“Doesn’t sound as, uh, insightful as Isak Dinesen’s quote,” Terry said, and giggled.
It was always good to hear Terry laugh. Mona laughed, too. Then she tripped and fell hard on her right forearm and knee. Her knee was crunchy to begin with and began throbbing. Mona quickly hobbled off the track to the grassy middle. The woman slowed to a stop, ear cocked, listening for something. Coyotes? Mona listened, too. She realized the woman was listening for her. Mona.
“Hello,” Mona called out. “Are you looking for me?”
The woman waved and began walking in Mona’s direction, tapping her stick.
“I’m on the grass,” Mona said uselessly, rubbing her knee.
Now the woman was standing too close with her face pointing the wrong way, as if examining Mona with her left ear. Her earlobe was covered in tiny hairs. Mona checked the woman’s legs—same deal, only longer.
“I believe the term is ‘peach fuzz,’ ” Terry said jovially.
It was not unattractive. In fact, it was titillating, the thigh hair in particular. It also made sense. If you’re blind, are you really going to bother shaving?
“I heard you stumble,” the woman said, turning to face Mona. “You okay?”
“Oh yeah, I’m fine,” Mona said. “Thank you! You didn’t have to stop—”
“I’m blind,” the woman said quietly, and looked toward the ground. “Not deaf.”
“I’m shouting!” Mona shouted.
The woman gave her an amused frown. Mona frowned back, and then kept frowning. It felt good not to have to fix her face. The woman wore the sort of blindfold one used for sleeping. An eye mask. Mona envied it for a few seconds. She wanted her own eye mask.
“It’s funny,” Mona said, clearing her throat. “You kept turning your head toward me when we passed each other, and for a second I thought you were checking me out.”
“I
was,” the woman said. “I was smelling you.”
Since the woman couldn’t see her, Mona went ahead and sniffed her armpit. Smelled like deodorant.
“How’d you know I wasn’t some creepy dude?” Mona asked.
“Dudes don’t skip,” the woman said. “At least, not around here. And you don’t smell like a dude.”
“What do I smell like?” Mona asked.
The woman seemed to mull it over while holding her stick against her chest.
“Suicide,” she said at last.
Mona gulped. She’d reached a personal high of 7.8 on the Sui-Scale that very morning. The Sui-Scale was a number reflecting her desire to end her life. Like the Richter, a difference of one represented a thirtyfold difference in magnitude. She’d spent over an hour researching suicide methods on LostAllHope.com. She settled on the gas-and-bag method, which had struck her as most affordable and least messy, and which the site warned was not for gestures. Helium was the preferred gas. Mona had imagined breathing in the helium and then talking to Terry in a squeaky helium voice, the bag over her head. They called it an “exit bag,” which she’d very much liked the sound of.
“What does suicide smell like?” Mona asked nervously.
For a second she expected the woman to say helium, even though helium was odorless, as were suicidal thoughts about helium. And thoughts in general.
“Strawberries,” the woman said, deadpan, as if it were obvious.
Mona heard herself laugh, startled. The woman was fucking with her. As she hadn’t been fucked with in forever, she’d forgotten what it felt like. It was . . . arousing.
“I’m kidding,” the woman said at last. She stared absently at Mona’s tits. “You smell clean,” the woman said. “Not like bar soap, but like . . . something else.”
“I’m probably sweating Windex,” Mona said. “I’m a cleaning lady.”
The woman left her mouth open when she smiled. She had the unrestrained, slightly goofy expressions of someone who’d never studied herself in a mirror.
“When I was in high school,” the woman said, “my mother shot herself in the kitchen. We got a cleaning lady after that and the whole house reeked of Pine-Sol for years.”
Mona glanced at her watch. Five minutes hadn’t passed, yet the woman was revealing her most intimate secrets. Often, after Mona copped to cleaning toilets for a living, people took it as a cue to be candid. People probably did that with prostitutes, too. But this might have been a blind thing. Wasn’t it easier to be intimate in the dark?
Or maybe this wasn’t so intimate. Maybe the woman was simply from California.
“Are you from California?” Mona asked.
“Colorado,” the woman said.
Close enough. In any case, there would be no need to censor herself. This was clearly someone to whom you could say pretty much anything, a quality Mona valued highly, after having spent a decade in New England.
“Sorry about your mother,” Mona said. “That sounds super shitty.”
“You should immerse yourself in nature,” the woman advised. “You know? To counteract the cleaning chemicals.”
Mona nodded vaguely, even though the woman couldn’t see her. It occurred to her that there was probably a lot of talking involved with the blind. “Well, I used to take long walks in the woods. I even collected leaves at one point, but I kept . . . leaving them places.”
“What about you? Are you from California?”
“Los Angeles, originally, but I was shipped to Massachusetts when I was thirteen.”
“Yikes,” the woman said. “Why?”
“Bad behavior,” Mona said.
“What brought you here, to the high desert?” the woman asked.
“Love, sort of,” Mona said. “I called him Mr. Disgusting. We met at a needle exchange in Massachusetts. He was clean when we met, but of course he relapsed six months later. In his suicide note, he suggested I move to Taos. He said he’d always dreamed of living here, in an Airstream near the Rio Grande. Except his body was never found. So, I followed his suggestion and moved here in the hopes that he was alive and waiting for me. But, he wasn’t waiting. Because he’s dead.”
Summarizing had never been her strong suit.
“Sorry to hear that,” the woman said.
Why did she look so radiant and joyful? It was more than just her skin. Was it her chin? No—it was her mouth. The corners of her mouth turned up rather than down. Mona touched her own mouth. Her corners did not turn up.
“Is there a new Mr. Disgusting in your life?” She seemed to relish saying the word “disgusting.” “A New Mexican version?”
“I met someone a few months ago,” Mona said. “We flirted for fifteen minutes and it felt like a carnival ride, and then he vanished and I never saw him again. I didn’t catch his name, so in my mind I just refer to him as Dark.”
“Was he black?” the woman asked.
Was she joking? There were no black people in Taos.
“It was more of a personality thing,” Mona explained. “He wasn’t dark as in dreary, though. His darkness had a spark. It had a charge you could feel on your skin.”
“A dark spark,” the woman said. “I know the type.”
* * *
NOT EVEN TERRY KNEW ABOUT Dark. Their fifteen minutes had taken place at the bookstore in town. It had been more than a few months ago—closer to six or seven. She’d been standing in one of the aisles reading a few pages of Invitation to a Beheading, and he’d been sitting on the floor a few feet away. He’d put aside The Composting Toilet System Book, finally, in favor of Thoreau, which seemed about right, as he looked like a tax resister who lived alone in the woods, in a cabin he’d built with his own hands, and he had a beard. She could smell him from where she stood. Sweat and sawdust. He kept glancing up from his reading and blinking at her. She blinked back. They did this for several minutes, and then he stood and scanned the carpet as if he’d lost something. He was one long sinew with scissor legs, and his legs scissored toward her.
“Excuse me,” he’d said, “but I seem to have lost my contact, and I don’t have my glasses.” He pointed to his eye, which was the color of wet bark. “Do you mind checking—is it on my face somewhere?”
Searching his face felt somehow more intimate than kissing. She restrained herself from fingering his beard—she wasn’t a monkey—and located the contact on the collar of his flannel. She picked it off his shirt, passed it to him like a joint, and then adjusted his collar unnecessarily. He put the contact in his mouth before placing it on his iris, and she realized she wanted to lick his eyeball. She’d never wanted to lick anyone’s eyeball before. He asked her if she knew that humans used to have a third eyelid. She said no, she didn’t know that.
“That’s why we have this little fold in the corner,” he said, and rubbed his eye. “One of our vestigial organs.”
The word “LOVE,” she noticed, was tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand, a letter on each digit. His other hand was in his pocket.
“Love and what,” she said, and pointed to the hidden hand.
“Guess,” he said.
She guessed rage, pain, sick, and hoped it was none of those.
He took his hand out of his pocket and made a fist, and then held up both fists together.
“MORE LOVE,” she read, and felt herself blush.
He lowered his hands and studied her face. “You have a nice voice.”
Say more about love, she wanted to say.
“You’re reading Nabokov,” he observed, “and wearing an apron.”
Her face felt hot. She fanned herself with the Nabokov.
“Read me a sentence,” he said, and scratched his beard with his MORE hand.
She scanned the open page and selected something short: “ ‘I suppose the pain of parting will be red and loud.’ ”
He had a way of smiling and frowning at the same time. “We do need to part,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’m on my way to the airport.”
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She asked him where he was going.
“Alaska,” he said, “but I’m going to think about you in your apron.”
Then he plucked the Nabokov out of her hands, placed it inside his jacket, and strode out of the store.
* * *
“NOT TO PUT YOU ON the spot or anything,” the blind woman said, “but I’m actually looking for a housekeeper. Are you available, by any chance?”
As usual, it took Mona several seconds to recover from her Dark thoughts.
“Depends,” she said at last. “How dirty is your house?”
“Don’t be a dick,” Terry whispered, directly into Mona’s ear.
“Well, it’s big,” the woman said. “So, I’m always cleaning. Problem is, I’ll be vacuuming in one room and then the phone will ring in the other room and so I’ll answer it and talk for a while, and then it takes me an hour to find the vacuum again.”
“So, you’re, like, totally without sight,” Mona said.
“I see patterns of light,” the woman said. “Always. Total darkness is something I long for. It’s what I pray for. I’d give one of my fingers for it, and two of my toes.”
“I thought maybe you were an actor preparing for the role of a blind person. You know, like a Method actor,” Mona said. “I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, but you’re extremely attractive.”
“Are blind people usually unattractive?” the woman asked.
As it could have passed as a rhetorical question, Mona didn’t answer. She looked down at her slightly swollen knee, which had finally stopped throbbing.
“I’m a therapist,” the woman said.
“Ah,” Mona said.
Of course, you had to watch out for therapists. She’d cleaned house for two or three. Not only were they crazier than their patients, they’d all been chronic slobs. Same went for professors. But you couldn’t be a slob if you were blind, could you? You’d never find your way out of the house.
“What do you care about?” Mona asked. “In terms of cleaning.”
“Well, my old housekeeper always left grit in the bathtub,” the woman said, “and a waxy kind of residue on the floors, and the counters never felt quite clean. She had a habit of not putting things back exactly where she found them, and so I would waste all this time searching for the toothpaste, or the cumin, or a dish towel. She was obsessed with bleach. Obsessed. So, I had to get rid of her finally.”