by Jen Beagin
Luckily, it was Sunday. But she had two houses tomorrow and, naturally, each required her entire right hand. She decided a visit to the ER was in order, even though she had no insurance.
She drove herself to Holy Cross, shifting gears with her thumb and forefinger, and saw Martin in the waiting room. Not the M name she was hoping to find. She and Martin had met at the Laundromat where she washed her cleaning rags. He’d been reasonably attractive and reading a book by Alice Munro—impressive—and had caught her smiling at him. He jotted his name and number on the cover of The Beggar Maid and handed it to her before leaving. Nice touch. On their coffee date, which Terry Gross had talked her into, she discovered that the book hadn’t belonged to him. It had been left behind at the Laundromat, possibly by Mona herself. Also, he preferred tea. She detested tea drinkers. In the parking lot afterward he’d said, “If I can guess which car is yours, I get to kiss you.” She’d laughed and said, “Don’t try to rom-com me, dude. I’m too old.” He’d ignored her and pointed to the wrong car, thank goodness. Now Martin was three rows away with his arm in a sling. She kept her head down.
Twenty minutes later, a doctor examined her finger. Old guy in his seventies. White hair and eyebrows, kind eyes, a bit of eczema on his chin and forehead. He introduced himself as Dr. K.
“Trigger finger,” he said, after ten seconds.
“What?” she said.
“Trigger finger,” he repeated.
She laughed. “You mean like an itchy trigger finger?”
“Does it itch?” he asked, smiling.
“No,” she said.
“ ‘Trigger finger’ is the medical term,” he said. “It just means the tendon is irritated. Are you hard on your hands?”
“I treat my fingers like little barbarians,” she said.
“So, you hold things with a firm grip for long periods of time?” he asked.
She nodded. My despair, she thought. And my vacuum. Oh, and my shovel.
That’s probably what did it—the shoveling. On Saturday she’d spent several hours digging a grave in her backyard. A baby grave for her portfolio, which she’d placed in a trash bag and then buried. There had been no eulogy.
Dr. K prepared a syringe of cortisone, which he hid behind his back like a magician. She told him she wasn’t afraid of needles. He presented the syringe with a flourish and inserted it directly into her finger, which came instantly back to life. He ordered a splint and recommended limited use for three days.
She was ready to leave but Dr. K put his large, pillowy hands on her throat and massaged her glands. Any tenderness? A little, she said. She liked the feel of his hands on her neck. Open your mouth and say ah, he said. He shined a light down her throat and then up her nose. She imagined him finding the elusive M name lodged in her nostril. Meryl, he might say. Malkovich. Marlon. Mia. McDormand.
“Mother of God,” he said instead. “What’s going on up here?”
Dreadfully, she knew what he was referring to. Weeks ago, she’d woken up unable to breathe through her nose. She’d cleared the passage before, but the crust kept growing back thicker each time, and she took a keen but relaxed pleasure in hacking at it with trimming scissors. Sometimes her nose bled for a few minutes. The taste of blood had complemented her morning routine for weeks now.
How long had this been going on, asked Dr. K. A fair question.
“Couple days,” she mumbled.
He abruptly excused himself and left. She inserted an exploratory pinkie into the tiny cave with broken limestone walls. So hot and dry in there! She inserted her other pinkie into the right nostril. The cavity was smaller on that side and in desperate need of excavation. At home she would have been dig, dig, digging, pausing only to tilt back and swallow the blood.
Dr. K returned with two wiry Indian physicians wearing lab coats and mustaches. Drs. Narahjan and Mehta, he said. The ear, nose, and throat specialists at Holy Cross.
Indians from India in New Mexico? They took turns looking up her nose while she tried not to laugh.
“Okay,” one of them said.
“Yes,” the other one said.
They twitched their mustaches at each other.
“You have a serious staph infection,” the first one announced.
“If you had let this go much longer, the infection would have entered your bloodstream,” the second one said.
“Do you know what that means?” said the first.
“Trouble?” she offered.
“It means you would have died,” Dr. K interjected.
How close was I to death, she wanted to ask, but the Indians were looking at her funny. Not at her face, but at her feet. She was wearing old Vans high-tops held together with black electrical tape.
“What did you think was happening?” Dr. K asked.
She shrugged. “To be honest, I blamed it on the climate. It’s so dry here, my face is falling off. And it’s wind season so I’m dealing with a lot of dust.”
They seemed to mull this over.
“If it doesn’t start to clear up in forty-eight hours you must come back,” Dr. K said. “Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
He splinted her finger and prescribed something called Levaquin, which she filled at the hospital pharmacy. She swallowed the first pill in her truck in the parking lot, followed by a few stale Oreos. As she turned the ignition, she felt immediate, palpable relief. The name that had been eluding her was suddenly there, right in her goddamn mouth. The name—God help her—was Mommy.
Not Mom. Not Mother.
Mommy.
Not a name that typically escaped a person. Neither obscure nor hard to pronounce. She felt so basic and ordinary. She also felt the sudden urge to eat something out of a bowl—cereal, yogurt, ice cream, anything—and swerved into the parking lot of a Smith’s grocery.
Unearthed, the name infected her vision. Mountain High Mommy Yogurt. Chunky Mommy. Sweet Mommy and Cream. She left quickly. Back on the road, it inserted itself into bumper stickers:
I’d Rather Be Mommy
One Mommy at a Time
This Car Climbed Mt. Mommy
Practice Random Acts of Mommy
Mommy Loves You
At home watching television, she ate an entire pint of Chunky Mommy left-handed, which took forever.
“Like masturbating with your nondominant hand,” she told Terry.
Terry didn’t laugh.
“Whose mommy?” Mona asked Terry. “Any ideas?”
No answer.
Not her mother, she decided. Not for a very long time had she heard the word “Mommy” or “Mom” and thought of her mother. She repeated Mommy, Mommy, Mommy out loud, testing for buried thoughts and feelings. Nope. All it seemed to give her was the munchies.
Perhaps it was time she followed the advice of that drip Eckhart Tolle, author of a self-help book she liked to call The Power of Poo, a book for which several of her clients had had a total boner a few years back. She’d reluctantly read a few pages while sitting on their toilets. His basic advice was that she spend less time in her head, identifying with her stupid, ego-driven thoughts, and more time in the rest of her body, and to take in the goddamn surroundings as much as possible, blah, blah, and to just live in the Now. If she were fully present and unattached to her “pain body,” she wouldn’t feel the need to devour an entire pint of Chunky Mommy. According to The Power of Poo, everything she needed was already there, inside her.
Back in bed, she listened to the wind tearing through town. Right now, it was groping her pink linen curtains. It blew the curtains into the room and then sucked them against the screen, over and over. It occurred to her that the words “wind” and “window” were probably related, something she’d never considered before. She fetched her laptop and looked up the etymology of “window” (from an old Norse word meaning “wind-eye”), which in her mind earned her a short visit to Pornhub.com.
Now she was in the Czech countryside, watching some lady with s
ad tits get banged by strangers on the highway. Dogging, it was called. The strangers stood in line with their pants unzipped, waiting their turn, and they were all grubby and potbellied and could barely see their own dicks. The man dogging her wore a business suit and a black mask over his face. The woman—early fifties, maybe older—was bent over the open trunk of a sedan, which was parked next to a cornfield, of all things, bracing herself against the spare tire. She had wet, dirty blonde hair and splotches of mud on the backs of her dimpled thighs. Mona had expected hooker boots, but the woman wore bright yellow rubber rain boots, also splattered with mud. That’s someone’s mother, Mona thought. And that’s someone’s corn growing in the field. Is that someone’s phone ringing?
She muted the volume. The ringing phone, buried under the comforter, was her landline, which meant it was a business call. She brushed the hair from her face and cleared her throat.
“Bee’s Knees,” she said. “Mona speaking.”
“Do you clean crime scenes?” a woman asked nervously.
Mona sat up and put her feet on the floor. Crime scenes, she repeated to herself. Did she clean crime scenes?
“You there?” the woman said.
“Are you with the, uh, police department or something?”
“No,” the woman said slowly. “I’ve just committed a crime.”
Mona pictured the woman from the video, her yellow rubber boots splattered with blood rather than mud. In the trunk, where the spare tire was, the man in the business suit and face mask lay bleeding from the throat.
“Hellooo,” the woman said again.
“Is this a joke?”
“No,” the woman said, and let out a quiet sob.
“I’m sorry, but may I ask where you’re calling from?”
“My house,” the woman said. “I just killed someone. With a hammer. Boy, is there a lot of blood—”
Mona sighed loudly. “Hi, Mom.”
“I get a ‘Mom’ for once,” Clare said, amused. “Hallelujah.”
Mona had been calling her mother Clare for years, which everyone thought was weird. Especially since her mother’s real name was Darlene.
“I’ve been thinking about you lately,” Mona said, closing the lid of her laptop. “Sort of.”
“How do you sort of think about someone?” asked Clare.
“I didn’t recognize your voice at first,” Mona said. “You sound . . . different.”
“I found the Lord,” said Clare calmly.
Fuck, Mona thought, another goner. It was a goddamn epidemic.
Clare laughed. “Relax,” she said. “I sound different because I’m sober. For the first time in sixteen years. I went to rehab, finally, for a whole month.”
Fuck, Mona thought again.
“Say something,” Clare said.
Mona sighed. Clare sighed back. Sighing had always been their secret language.
“You got my letter, I guess,” Mona said.
About a year ago, she’d sent Clare a letter explaining that Sheila, the woman who’d adopted Mona as a teenager, had retired and moved to Florida, and that Mona had fallen in love with Mr. Disgusting, who had died, and that she’d pulled a geographic to start over.
“Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,” Clare said. “I realize you probably hate me.”
You want me to hate you, Mona felt like saying. You’re a masochist, and my hatred would give you something with which to sodomize yourself, over and over and over.
“I don’t hate you, Clare,” Mona said softly.
“You’re still calling me that,” Clare said. “God help me.”
Mona smiled. “It’s my pet name for you.”
“Pet names are supposed to be cute,” Clare said. “What’s cute about ‘Clare’?”
“It rhymes with ‘teddy bear,’ ” Mona said dryly.
And “electric chair,” she thought. And “warfare.” And “despair,” of course—don’t forget that. She walked into the bathroom, where the wind was rattling the window.
“Listen,” Mona said. “The wind keeps sucking my pink curtains out the window and then blowing them back in, but the window is screened, so the curtains don’t fly out the window. They cling to the screen.” She looked at her face in the mirror over the sink. “What does that remind you of?”
“Are you stoned?” Clare asked.
“Maybe,” Mona said.
“I kept my eyes closed when I pushed you out,” Clare said. “Took me four and a half hours. When I finally opened my eyes, you weren’t there. You were off in a corner getting cleaned up, and the doctor was still between my legs, wiping blood off his glasses. The nurse standing next to him had blood on her blonde ponytail, and there was blood on the overhead light, and I was terrified to see your face. I was worried you’d have my birthmark.”
“But you love your birthmark,” Mona said.
“Love-hate,” Clare corrected her.
Clare had an oddly beautiful port wine stain on her face. The stain was heaviest on her left cheek, but it spilled down her neck and trickled over her collarbone. As far as Mona remembered, Clare had always embraced the stain. She wore lipstick and nail polish the exact same shade of red, along with belts and shoes, and made the stain seem like the perfect accessory for any occasion.
“Listen, Frank and I are renewing our vows,” Clare said, “and we both want you to be there.”
Mona was startled to see her eyes water in the mirror.
“Also, I’m getting rid of my apartment and you have some stuff in the closet.”
Clare and Frank had eloped over a decade ago, but they’d always kept separate apartments on the same block. In practice Clare didn’t really live in her apartment. She used it as a storage space and psychic refuge. It was the one place she could truly relax and be herself. Strangely, she only needed to reside in this authentic state for an hour or so every couple of weeks. The rest of the time she spent at Frank’s, cooking his meals, watching his television, and sleeping in his ancient waterbed.
“Why get rid of the place now?” Mona asked. “After all these years?”
“Every time I set foot in there I want to weep,” Clare said. “Also, Frank’s hours have been cut. Seems silly to pay rent on two places.”
Clare made a very good living as a technical writer but spent most of her money on Frank’s expensive hobbies: medium-stakes poker and motorcycle racing.
“Your stuff won’t fit at Frank’s,” Clare said. “Do you want to come get it, or should I toss it, or what?”
Her stuff, as far as she remembered, was all in one box. Photo albums, drawings, paintings, diaries, some other odds and ends she couldn’t recall just now. Clothing, maybe. Some jewelry.
“How about you send it to me,” Mona suggested. “In the mail.”
“How about I give it to Bill,” Clare said. “Your homeless friend.”
“You mean Billlll?”
Clare was referring to the handsome schizophrenic who lived in the alley behind Frank’s apartment. “My name is Billlll,” he’d said when they’d first met. “With five Ls.” He liked to wear wetsuits on dry land, but as far as she knew, he was petrified of the ocean. He told Mona that her name translated to “white wave” in some language she couldn’t remember, and that she would die in a tsunami when she was in her late fifties.
“He’s still alive?” Mona asked.
“Disappeared,” Clare said. “About a year ago.”
“Bummer,” Mona said.
“Look, I’ll buy your plane ticket,” Clare said. “Okay?”
“I can’t leave town, Clare,” Mona said. “I’m self-employed.”
Wait a minute, Mona thought, for the first time ever. I’m the boss. I can leave town whenever I want.
“The ceremony’s in three weeks,” Clare said.
“I have trigger finger,” Mona said.
“Does that mean you’re suicidal?”
“It means the tendon in my finger is inflamed,” Mona said. “I just got back fr
om the ER. I also have a staph infection that almost killed me.”
“When you were little you used to splatter yourself with ketchup and tomato sauce and then lie in the bathtub until I walked in,” Clare said. “Sometimes you waited hours alone in there until I got home from work. I wonder what a psychologist would call that.”
“Neglect?” Mona said.
“I just hope you can get here,” Clare said softly. “And I’d love it if you said a few words at the reception. You know, like a toast? But casual.”
“How’s Frank?”
“He’s fine,” Clare said. “He’s laying out on the lawn.”
Sunbathing was Frank’s other passion. Rather than go to the beach half a block away, he preferred laying out on the yellow lawn that belonged to the apartment building. When Clare got off the phone, she’d probably slather his back with baby oil and then water his feet with the hose for ten minutes. Mona heard water running and wondered if Clare already had the hose in her hand.
“Where are you?” Mona said.
“In the kitchen, feeding Takoda and Wahkan breakfast.”
Takoda and Wahkan. Mona’s vicious stepbrothers. They were hand-fed Malt-O-Meal for breakfast and took their morning dumps in the kitchen sink. They were a pair of treasured African gray parrots. Takoda, whose name was Sioux for “Friend to Everyone,” was friend to Frank alone. Wahkan’s name was Sioux for “Sacred,” but, again, the bird was sacred only to Frank. No one else could stand the little fucker. Although African grays were gifted talkers, Wahkan had a heavy lisp, so much of what he said was unintelligible. Takoda’s specialties were electronic and nonhuman noises—car alarms, ringing telephones, microwaves, coffee percolators, dripping water, barking dogs, etc. Takoda’s only human impersonation was the sound of Clare sobbing. It was pitch-perfect but conveyed a deep, soulful pathos and sense of penitence missing from the real thing.
“I miss Howard,” Clare said. “He’s on vacation for two weeks. He really helped me in the hospital. In fact, I don’t know how I would’ve survived without him. He got me through the worst of it.”