Vacuum in the Dark

by Jen Beagin

  “Who’s Howard?” Mona asked. “Your shrink?”

  “Howard,” Clare repeated, as if Mona had mispronounced the name.

  “Oh God,” Mona said. “I forgot about him.”

  Clare was referring to . . . Howard Stern. He’d been her steadfast companion for over twenty years. They’d never met in person, of course, or even over the phone, but Clare had been listening to Howard religiously since 1986. She talked about Howard and the other cast members of his show as if they’d all grown up together.

  “I’m worried about Artie,” Clare said. “Apparently, he tried to kill himself again, poor baby.”

  “How’s Robin?” Mona asked.

  “The same,” Clare said.

  “As Artie?”

  “No—she’s the same as always,” Clare said.

  “Hey, let me ask you something. Do you talk to Howard when he’s not around?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, in your head,” Mona said.

  “Of course not,” Clare said, and laughed. “I’m not nuts.”

  * * *

  TWO WEEKS LATER, ON A drizzly September morning, Mona wrapped her suitcase in a trash bag and loaded it in the bed of her truck. She heard footsteps on the gravel and saw Yoko and Yoko approaching. They were wearing knitted ponchos over their pajamas and their eyes and noses were red.

  “You’re not moving, I hope,” Nigel said nasally.

  “Nope,” she said, and smiled. “I’m catching a flight to LA for a few days. My mother called—finally. She’s downsizing, and I have a couple boxes in her apartment—you know, from when I was little—so I’m going to fetch them before they end up in the garbage.”

  “Boxes,” Shiori repeated.

  “Yeah,” Mona said. “My stuff. From childhood.”

  They looked apprehensive suddenly, as if she’d said the boxes contained a deadly virus or meth.

  Nigel licked his lips. “Have you read Homer yet?”

  “You gotta stop asking me that,” Mona said.

  He’d given her a beautiful edition of The Odyssey two years ago. She’d read a few pages here and there but could never fully commit.

  “Don’t open the boxes while you’re there,” Nigel warned.

  Shiori nodded. “Wait until you’re back here. Safe.”

  Mona rolled her eyes. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Beware of Aeolus, master of the winds,” Nigel said with a straight face. “He gave Odysseus a leather pouch containing all the winds—”

  “Except the west wind,” Shiori reminded him.

  “Right,” Nigel said. “But Odysseus’s men opened the leather pouch thinking it was gold, and all the winds escaped and blew the ship back the way it had come.”

  Mona nodded gravely.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Nigel asked.

  “These boxes definitely don’t have gold in them,” Mona said. “Or wind.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Nigel said, and sniffed.

  “PS, my mother and her husband are renewing their vows and want me to make a toast,” Mona said. “Apparently, they know nothing of my lifelong fear of public speaking. But I wrote the speech and it’s quite touching. It’s all about how I worshipped my mother as a child, how she was the center of my universe, Jesus reincarnated, et cetera. Then I hired an Indian man to read my speech in a Hindi accent.”

  “Pardon?” Nigel said.

  “An Indian man,” Mona repeated. “From India. I found him on the Internet. He’s a grad student in Minnesota.”

  “I’m confused,” Shiori said. “You hired an Indian man to accompany you to the wedding? In Los Angeles?”

  “No, no, no,” Mona said patiently. “I paid the man seventy dollars to make a recording of himself reading my toast in an Indian accent, which I will play over a loudspeaker at the reception.”

  Nigel frowned. Shiori fiddled with a hole in her poncho.

  “It’s supposed to be funny,” Mona said, and shrugged. “Do you want to hear it? His voice breaks beautifully at the end, like a little boy’s, and I love the way he says ‘Mommy.’ Gives me goose bumps.”

  Nigel ran a hand over his buzzed head. “It’s a strange choice you will come to regret,” he said finally.

  * * *

  NO ONE WAS WAITING FOR her at LAX. But, a breathless voicemail from Clare: “Mona, this morning I realized that I haven’t driven on the freeway sober in twenty years. I don’t think I can do it, honey. If I take surface streets, it’ll take me forever to get there, so—I don’t know—can you get a cab? I’ll pay you back as soon as you get here. Is that okay?”

  It was fine. She rolled her suitcase over to the taxi stand. “Where you go?” said an older Asian man. She told him Hermosa. “I take you,” he said, and flung her suitcase into his open trunk.

  She looked out the window. The sky was a bland baby blue and not saturated enough. The streets were all too wide. It was strangely comforting to see palm trees again, but, as usual, their leaves weren’t close enough to the ground for her taste, and there was too much vertical space between the tops of the palms and the tops of the buildings, which were all too short. She felt a sudden fondness for stucco, for some reason. Fuck adobe.

  “For a culture obsessed with being thin, there’s a startling number of donut shops in Los Angeles,” Terry pointed out suddenly.

  “Tell me about it, Terry,” Mona said. “I’ve counted eleven since El Segundo. It’s like, who the fuck’s eating all these donuts?”

  “Your mama,” Terry said, and laughed.

  As a kid, most of Mona’s weekends had started with a maple bar binge. She and Clare split half a dozen in the car, a rich brown Buick Riviera with cream leather interior. It was like eating a maple bar inside a maple bar. Between bites, Clare complained bitterly about how fat she was, and called herself Lard Ass every five seconds. She even slapped herself across the face a couple of times, and then asked Mona to verify that she was indeed a worthless lard ass. Clare had a demon in her that fed on outside confirmation, needed it in order to survive, and the demon was hungriest on weekends.

  “My thighs look like cottage cheese . . . don’t they?” Clare would ask slowly.

  Mona usually gave the demon what it wanted. “Not cottage cheese,” she’d answer. “Creamed corn.”

  Fueled with donuts, they’d head to the gym for the second, equally enjoyable part of the routine: a prolonged fit of exercise bulimia. The gym was posh and near the beach. Their routine consisted of two aerobics classes back-to-back, a round of weights, laps in the pool, and finally the sauna.

  “I could deadlift a hundred sixty pounds at age eleven,” Mona bragged to Terry.

  “That seems strange to me,” Terry said.

  “I did it to impress Clare,” Mona said. “Also, there was a French model I was trying to seduce. I can’t remember her name, but she starred in several music videos for ZZ Top.”

  “Who was your mother trying to seduce?” Terry asked.

  “Frank,” Mona said. “Frank was a major gym rat. That’s how they met.”

  Frank was extremely tall and broad-shouldered with a mustache and big muscles, but he wasn’t gay. He was divorced, unattached, and infatuated with Clare. Clare, on the other hand, was still married to Mona’s father. Mona’s father did not have a mustache. Or big muscles. He had two legs but only one arm, and he didn’t work out because he was a plumber. And he liked to drink a little.

  * * *

  THE AIRPORT TAXI PULLED UP to Vista Del Mar, a three-story pink stucco building just a block and a half from the beach, one of the few left over from the 1930s. Mona still liked how starkly it stood out among the cookie-cutter condos lining the street. She tipped the driver five dollars and he popped the trunk. As soon as she pulled out her suitcase, he peeled away as if being chased.

  Clare lived on the second floor. She knocked but no one answered. She opened the unlocked door.

  “Hello?” she called out.

  Everythi
ng was a sad, muted mauve. Clare hadn’t started packing yet. Dozens of books were stacked haphazardly on floating shelves, most with their spines facing the wall. Literary novels, mostly, one or two Oprah books, some National Book Award winners, nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of the covers were torn or missing, the pages cockled and chocolate stained. Clare loved chocolate, especially while reading.

  The apartment was a scary mess. The silverware drawer held three butter knives, tangled jewelry, and a pile of utility bills. Where were the spoons and forks? In the nightstand drawer with the linty gummy bears. She kept an iron, of all things, in her underwear drawer. Old tax returns, her birth certificate, hospital bills, and other important paperwork—all of which were splattered with beige liquid foundation—filled the sock drawer. In what should have been the pants drawer lay six empty cans of feminine deodorant spray.

  As a young girl, all Mona wanted was to live here. This was back when Clare and Frank first started dating. Clare picked this place for its proximity to Frank’s. The plan had been to sleep at Frank’s one or two nights a week, but to live here full-time. Instead, they ate dinner at Frank’s every single night. Mona ate every bite of his terrible beef stew, endured hours of cop shows on TV and lame Neapolitan ice cream. They never went home to their own apartment. At night, Mona was stuffed into a sleeping bag, alternating between the thin, bumpy carpet and the slick Naugahyde couch. Why not let her sleep in the empty apartment, she’d wanted to know. It was only a block away!

  “You’re only eleven,” Clare had said.

  “I feel like I’m a hundred and eleven,” Mona had said. “My back is killing me.”

  “Do some sit-ups,” Clare had said.

  So, Mona invented Wendy, her new best friend at her new school. Wendy was a fraternal twin, she told Clare, and a straight-A student, and a pretty good cellist. She lived in this really cool condo—you know those condos on The Strand?—and her parents thought Mona was great, so was it okay if she slept at Wendy’s this Friday and Saturday?

  The charade worked flawlessly. Part of her wished Wendy were real, but despite her loneliness, she was happy to have the place to herself. She kept the curtains drawn and stayed up watching late movies on cable, ate whatever she wanted, taught herself to dance to Soul Train reruns, and slept diagonally in her mother’s big bed. When bored or lonely she sometimes spent the afternoon in one of her neighbors’ apartments. In time, she’d ventured beyond and visited fancier apartments right on the water.

  She’d been confused by the term “breaking and entering” because she never broke anything. It was just entering, in her case. People either left their doors unlocked or they hid a key. Inevitably, she’d tripped a silent alarm in one of the fancy apartments and the cops showed up. They seemed disappointed by what they found in her bag: antique scissors, a pair of underwear with unicorns on them, an embroidered pillowcase. “Look, I don’t even like unicorns,” she explained. “I’m not here to take things.” Then what are you doing here, they wanted to know. She couldn’t articulate it at the time, but she felt it must be some variation of the Goldilocks Principle: she was searching for a place that felt “just right.” Except, unlike Goldilocks, she never cared for the middle one, or the one between opposites. Rather, she was searching for a place that felt “not quite right” or “just weird enough,” and it didn’t seem to be in Hermosa Beach.

  When she gave Frank’s address, the patrolmen laughed and removed the handcuffs. Frank’s father had been a decorated detective, so these officers were friends. They escorted her to Frank’s and he entertained them in the living room for a while. After they left he turned to her. “Never use my name again,” he said. “Next time you get caught don’t give them this address.”

  She was back in the sleeping bag after that. And there were rules, lots of rules, and she just didn’t have what it took. No discipline. No self-restraint. She couldn’t get her act together, as her mother kept saying. And then a few weeks later, that thing happened with the neighbor, and soon after she was on a plane to Massachusetts.

  * * *

  THE BATHROOM SMELLED LIKE OPIUM, Clare’s signature scent. A green-and-white G-string hung from the doorknob. The first panties Mona ever sniffed had belonged to Clare. The effect had been immediate: bracing, restorative, unforgettable. She remembered the underwear (peach-colored nylon with bright orange trim), where she was standing (in her parents’ creepy walk-in closet), and what she was looking at (a heavy, industrial-looking iron with a turquoise cloth cord). Daughters were supposed to have a thing for their fathers, but Mona’s thing had always been for Clare, and Clare alone.

  A bottle of Xanax was in the medicine cabinet. Only two left, but Clare’s pills were like cockroaches—if there were two, there were twenty. She placed one under her tongue and pushed aside the shower curtain. Mold in the grout near the window. She hit it with Tilex from under the sink and went back to the living room.

  She waited ten minutes and then walked over to Frank’s. He lived five buildings down, in a two-story contemporary called the Fountainbleu. The eponymous fountain wasn’t bleu, however, but beige and filled with dirt and dead leaves. The building had four units, a small front yard and a bigger backyard. Frank lived on the bottom floor facing the street. The shades were drawn. She rang the doorbell, twice. No answer.

  Then she heard a vacuum running. She tried the knob—unlocked—and let herself in. The place smelled like fake citrus. Clare was wearing workout gear—red leotard, shiny black leggings—and vacuuming the dining area. As usual, Takoda was perched on Clare’s head. He looked handsome from a distance, his wings purplish gray, his tail as red as Clare’s birthmark and leotard. He seemed aware of Mona’s presence and she expected him to make his usual big-rig-backing-up noise, but he was too preoccupied with keeping his balance.

  Clare was vacuuming with a vintage upright Eureka 1428. Mona loved the color combination: the motor was encased in hard pink plastic, the bag in perforated red-and-orange plaid vinyl. Almost as beautiful as Clare herself.

  “Clare!” she shouted.

  Clare turned, startled, and tripped over the cord. “You’re here!” she said, and smiled. She was lightly sweating and looked stunning, but why was her hair blonde? She gave Mona a stiff, one-armed hug, and then backed away when Takoda started barking.

  “Shh!” Clare said, and stomped her foot. He abruptly stopped. She crossed her arms over her chest and smiled again.

  “You weren’t at your apartment,” Mona said. “So, I came here.”

  “You wouldn’t believe what a pigsty this place was three hours ago,” Clare said. “I wanted it to look nice for you.”

  But I’m not staying here anymore, Mona wanted to remind her. Remember?

  “What on earth did you do to your hair?” Mona asked.

  “Highlights,” Clare said.

  “You’re like, fully blonde,” Mona said. Like every other bitch around here.

  Clare shrugged. Takoda trained a baleful yellow eye on Mona’s face. When he fluttered his wings, she saw patches of missing feathers. He was a chronic self-plucker. If Mona had had feathers she’d probably have plucked them out, too.

  “He’s been mutilating himself again,” Mona said, and, to her surprise, he started weeping, a low, broken moan just like Clare’s, followed by some sniffling. Clare reached up, brought him to her face, and kissed his beak.

  “I had a feeling he’d start crying,” she said between smooches. “Does Takoda want a Pop-Tart?”

  “You should feed him some of your Zoloft,” Mona said.

  “I’m not on that stuff anymore,” Clare said. “He’s crying because I hugged you. Still jealous after all these years.” She gave his beak another peck. “Aren’t you, Sugar Bear? Yes, you are. Mommy loves you.”

  Mommy Loves You. One Mommy at a Time. I’d Rather Be Mommy.

  “He’s really boo-hooing,” Mona said.

  “He’ll calm down in a minute.”

  “Looks like he needs a back rub,” Mona sai
d. “He carries a lot of tension in his neck and shoulders.”

  She was joking, of course, but Clare massaged his neck with one of her fingers. “He’s been really exhausted lately,” she said.

  “I’m just thankful he hasn’t punctured my face.”

  Clare laughed. “Don’t worry—I clipped his wings yesterday.”

  His last “love bite” had made her lower lip bleed for hours.

  She was just about to compliment his good behavior when he flung himself at her. He landed on her right hand, which she’d instinctively brought to her chest, and sank his beak into the tender meat between thumb and forefinger. He loved pressure points. Mona screamed and shook her hand around, throwing him to the floor, where he skidded on his side before getting to his feet. He looked dazed but quickly regained his bearings and scuttled under an end table. He was quiet for a second before the fake sighing started.

  “Phew!” he said.

  Mona gaped at the hole in her hand. It was star shaped and bleeding steadily.

  “Phew!” Takoda said again.

  “You’re okay, you’re okay,” Clare said, looking from Mona to the bird and back.

  Who was she talking to? Clare glanced at Mona’s wound and picked up Takoda carefully, with both hands, and cradled him like an infant.

  “He hates this,” she said.

  It didn’t look that way. His eyes were closed and he seemed completely at ease. Mona hoped she’d given him a concussion. She hoped his little brain was swelling.

  “Have a seat, honey,” Clare said. She put Takoda in his cage next to Wahkan’s and motioned to Frank’s hideous orange and purple love seat with its printed Southwestern-style coyotes and cacti. On the wall loomed a huge longhorn skull with polished horns. If someone hadn’t airbrushed a fake desert landscape across the forehead, it would have looked semicool.

  Frank identified as Native American, but he was mostly white and Hispanic. Francisco was his real name. He was an ex-marine and used to be a professional bodyguard; now he worked as a detective for the Carson school district. He never left home without his Glock. He wore triple-starched Ben Davis shirts, Wranglers with a heavy crease, and engineer boots. To be fair, he did have a drop or two of Navajo on his mother’s side, but he hadn’t embraced it until after he’d met Clare. It started with a painting, a tasteless double portrait of a wolf and a windblown Native American princess, with a full moon in the background. The painting seemed to revive an atavistic American Indian aesthetic. He soon adorned the walls with five lifelike human masks marked with face paint and wearing elaborate headdresses made of real fur, antlers, and feathers. His collection grew: sand paintings of wolves, eagles, and buffalo; vision seekers and warriors on horseback; ceremonial peace pipes; bows, arrows, knives, and other weapons; kachina dolls by the dozen; humongous dream catchers—or dust catchers, as Mona called them; and granite rocks painted with desert landscapes. His apartment looked like a Native American gift shop off Interstate 40. Some people find Jesus, others find the Universe or their inner child, but Frank had found his inner chief.