Vacuum in the Dark

by Jen Beagin

  His inner chief had always wanted a son. Mona faked an interest in cars, memorized parts of a V8 engine, did pull-ups, challenged him to arm-wrestle, accompanied him to the shooting range, and accepted his dare to eat a habanero chili without drinking water. She ate two, just to show him who was boss, and then stifled her fear when he said she’d need a seat belt for the toilet the next day. In the end, her efforts were futile. She was too emotional to pass for Frank’s son, and too attached to wearing burned-on eyeliner and fishnet, and to masturbating to pictures of Prince from the seventies.

  He’d grown up with the nickname Pancho, which Mona had discovered by accident, the one time she’d made the mistake of answering his phone.

  “Could you please pass the peas, Pancho,” Mona remembered asking at the dinner table later that week. His face had turned crimson, as if she’d just called him Cholo or Beaner.

  “My name’s Frank. How would you like it if I called you Moron, Mona?”

  “I’d love it,” Mona said.

  His revenge was having noisy sex with Clare on his waterbed that night. The walls were paper-thin. Mona could hear them looking at each other. She could hear them thinking about it.

  Should we do it?

  Do you feel like it?

  Of course.

  She had listened carefully, holding an unnecessary glass to the wall. As usual, their lovemaking birthed huge swells, both in the waterbed and inside herself. She felt seasick and out of control, yet unable to stop listening. When it got to be too much (three minutes), she pounded on the door with both fists. Apparently, she had a demon in her, too.

  “Get a room!” she screamed.

  But they had a room.

  She should have screamed, “Get me a room!”

  When she heard Clare roll off the waterbed, she tiptoed into the bathroom and hid in the tub. She sat hugging her knees to her chest, something she’d seen women do in the movies when they were upset, usually after they’d been raped or cheated on.

  Clare flipped on the light. “Why are you in the tub?”

  “I’m a twat waffle in a douche canoe,” Mona said, repeating something she’d heard on the bus.

  “No, you’re not,” Clare said, and tugged her bathrobe closed.

  “What’s with the getup?” Mona asked.

  Clare was usually either fully nude or fully clothed. Mona had only seen mothers in bathrobes on television.

  “Frank’s modest.” Clare smiled as if modesty was suddenly this super-adorable quality. “He doesn’t believe in walking around naked,” she added.

  “I know what ‘modest’ means,” Mona said. “You moan whenever he touches you, even if it’s on the arm.”

  “You’ll moan someday, too,” Clare said. “Trust me.”

  “Gross,” Mona said.

  * * *

  “WHERE’S FRANK?” MONA ASKED NOW. She picked up a peace pipe and dropped it when she saw that it was fashioned from the limb of a hoofed animal.

  “He’s at the race track, but he’ll be back in a bit and then we’ll have dinner.”

  “Can’t we go out alone? I haven’t seen you in over three years.”

  Clare blinked expressively. “You haven’t seen him, either,” she said. “He’ll be hurt if we eat without him. He’s pretty sensitive, you know.”

  “You have bird shit in your hair,” Mona pointed out.

  Clare shrugged. “Why are you wearing all black? I thought you’d grown out of that.”

  “I’m regressing,” Mona said. “Do you have any beer?”

  “Aren’t you hot wearing those tights?”

  “I’m chubby,” Mona said.

  “Well, what are you eating?” Clare asked seriously.

  “It’s baby weight,” Mona said.

  Clare grimaced. “Is it your time of the month?”

  It wasn’t. Embarrassingly, she’d spent much of the plane ride imagining the two of them locked in a bear hug, Clare smoothing the back of her hair and whispering, Welcome home, my little nutcase. I’ve missed the shit out of you. Your face is prettier than I remember, and that shirt looks perfect with your hair. And I love how your hair looks.

  “I’m sweating,” Clare said. She picked up an issue of Bird Talk magazine and fanned herself. She seemed nervous suddenly. “You’re going to make a toast at the reception, right? It would mean a lot to me.”

  “Where is it?” Mona asked.

  “At our favorite Mexican restaurant,” Clare said.

  Mona’s stomach dropped. How would she play the Indian man’s recording at a Mexican restaurant?

  “Will there be a DJ?” Mona asked. “My toast requires a loudspeaker.”

  “Mariachi band,” Clare said.

  “Fuck,” Mona said.

  “What’s the big deal?” Clare stopped fanning herself. “God, I wish you lived closer. I don’t understand why you chose New Mexico, of all places. Seems so . . . random.”

  “It’s the Land of Enchantment,” Mona said. “And I was very disenchanted in Massachusetts.”

  “I know,” Clare said.

  Did she?

  The guy who’d raped her in Lowell had been covered in ink, but the most vivid tattoo in her memory was on his abdomen, a dick eye-fucking a skull draped in a banner reading “HOME OF THE WHOPPER” in wild-style graffiti. She thought of Mr. Disgusting, whose chest tattoo had been an ancient wooden ship with a banner that read, “Homeward Bound.” She remembered Dark ravaging her with MORE LOVE, which had felt like its own kind of homecoming. Perhaps her preoccupation with home led her to terrible things—rape, murder, addiction, suicide. If homesickness really was a sickness in and of itself, then perhaps she needed a separate and very specific course of treatment.

  Or maybe she just needed to get over it already. She gazed at the Eureka, still parked in the dining area.

  “Where’d you find that vacuum?”

  “It’s Frank’s,” Clare said. “Probably older than you are.”

  “How’s the suction?”

  “Good.” Clare placed the magazine on the coffee table. “How’s your love life?”

  “Speaking of suction,” Mona said. “I fell in love with a married man—a client—but it’s over now. His wife was blind . . . like, literally.”

  She considered herself over and done with Dark, and yet, when asked to create a new password, she always chose “SPANISH.”

  “Are you still in touch with Sheila?” Clare asked tentatively.

  Clare never knew how to talk about Sheila, the woman who’d unofficially adopted Mona as a teenager. The takeover had been arranged by Ginger. Sheila was single, sexually repressed, and sober. She’d made Mona the center of her universe for six years, introducing her to therapy, psychiatry, the twelve steps, the cleaning business, and Chinese food, among other things.

  But Clare and Sheila barely knew each other and never spoke, so Mona never discussed Clare with Sheila, or vice versa. When Mona tried to imagine the three of them in the same room together, she felt like she was trapped in a salad spinner.

  “We talk once or twice a year,” Mona said, examining her wound. Still bleeding a little. “I should wash my hand. I don’t want to get bird disease.”

  Mona walked down the short hallway toward the bathroom, pausing at the doorway to their bedroom. The waterbed was still there, neatly made as usual.

  She washed her wound. You’re here, she told herself. You’re home. You got your wish.

  The wish was stale. A decade too old. It was as if she’d finally gotten that cashmere sweater she’d wished for at fourteen, but now the sleeves were too short and it was some weird New England colonial pumpkin color.

  Six days, she told herself. Go to the wedding, get your stuff, and then get back to the desert.

  * * *

  HER SUSPICION HAD ALWAYS BEEN that Clare and Frank used the birds to avoid intimacy with her, but now it seemed they used the birds to avoid intimacy in general. This she discovered later that day. It was six o’clock—their dessert
time, strangely—and Mona expected the usual: Frank and Clare tangled together on the love seat, watching television and feeding each other ice cream from the same bowl, pausing occasionally to make out.

  Instead they were sitting in separate recliners, each with a bird on their shoulder and a bowl of ice cream on their lap, pausing occasionally to . . . feed the birds out of their open mouths.

  “You guys used to make out with each other,” Mona said from the love seat. “Now you make out with your birds.”

  “Oh, we still make out,” Clare said quickly, and glanced at Frank for confirmation.

  But Frank was too busy narrowing his eyes at Mona. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with palm leaves on it and jewelry made of melted-together gold nuggets.

  “Are you in a cult?” he asked suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked.

  “That thing around your neck,” he said.

  He was referring to the ankh pendant she’d bought many years ago after seeing The Hunger. In the film, Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie are vampires and they wear ankh necklaces that pull out into little knives, which they use to slash people’s throats. Mona wished her ankh pulled out into a knife, but alas, it did not. It was still beautiful, though, and very old.

  “It’s Egyptian,” Mona said. “Symbol of life.”

  “It looks satanic,” Frank said.

  “I think you’re thinking of the pentagram, maybe.”

  “We have some devil worshippers at Carson High right now, so.”

  Frank was essentially a narc, though he also dealt with teenage gangs. And devil worshippers, apparently, which struck Mona as a little quaint. She was about to ask how many devil worshippers there were but was distracted by Wahkan, who kept poking Frank’s cheek with his dry, black tongue.

  “Your bird’s tongue looks satanic,” Mona said. “Like a satanic . . . phallus. But just a phallus symbol, not like an actual evil mini-penis.”

  Clare smiled, but Frank looked disgusted.

  “A parrot’s tongue contains bones,” Frank explained for the five hundredth time. “And has the dexterity of three human fingers.”

  Frank passed the bird a nut from a nearby bowl. The bird rolled the nut around on his tongue for a few seconds, then dropped it and bit Frank’s earlobe.

  “Ow!” Frank yelled.

  “Honey!” Clare said. “Are you okay?”

  Frank winced. “I’m fine,” he said after a few seconds.

  “His ridiculous bird bit him,” Mona whispered to Terry. “He’s bleeding. From the ear.”

  “Maybe his bird is your inner child,” Terry suggested.

  “My inner child isn’t a biter,” Mona told Terry.

  Frank blotted his ear with a napkin. “He’s never done that to me before,” he said. “Never ever.”

  “Need a washcloth, hon?” Clare asked.

  Frank waved his hand. The bird had climbed off Frank’s shoulder and was hanging off the front of Frank’s shirt. Frank seemed fully recovered. He placed the bird back on his shoulder and went back to eating ice cream like nothing had happened. The bird did some fake coughing and sneezing.

  “How do you know these high schoolers worship Satan?” Mona asked.

  “They come out and say it,” Frank said, and shook his head. “They’re proud of it.”

  “What else do they do?”

  “One of them has been asking people—strangers—for locks of hair, so.”

  “Paintbrushes,” Mona said, nodding. “They make paintbrushes with human hair and then paint their walls with the blood of Christians.”

  He was silent for a minute.

  “You think you know everything,” he said.

  Clare sighed, stood up, and walked into the kitchen. Mona listened to her unload the dishwasher.

  Frank cleared his throat. “I actually end up saving some of these kids, you know.”

  From what? Mona wondered. Making art?

  When she was twelve, she’d written I will not sniff Liquid Paper exactly one thousand times in a notebook and then presented it to Frank in private as a gift, thinking he’d be pleased and impressed. This was after he’d caught her rolling around on the floor, not two feet from where they were sitting now, a sock saturated with Liquid Paper wrapped around her face, the empty bottle dripping in her hand, her eyes still watering from laughing. She’d even wetted her pants a little without realizing it. He’d pulled off the sock, sniffed. His head snapped back in surprise and disgust.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  “Wipeout,” she said, and laughed. “I mean Wite-Out.”

  She could tell he wanted to slap her, but he did nothing. He didn’t even mention it to Clare. A girl she knew at school had been made to write Stop repeating what others say five hundred times by her parents, so Mona took it upon herself to do the same, only double.

  “What is this?” he asked, when she handed him the notebook.

  “My punishment,” she said.

  She wanted him to look at each page. She wanted him to marvel at her penmanship. She hadn’t merely scribbled her penance pell-mell—she’d printed carefully, perfectly, with a set of high-quality colored pens. And she’d made doodles in the margins—good ones. She’d sketched in pencil before tracing the final doodle in pen, and then erased the underlying pencil lines. It had taken forever. The doodles were tiny masterpieces as inspiring as the illustrated scrolls of medieval monks. A significant work of art, in her opinion.

  He glanced at a page or two before closing the notebook. He looked scared, confused, and suspicious all at once.

  “I never asked you to do this.”

  “I know,” she said. “But isn’t it cool?”

  He shrugged and handed her the notebook, and they never discussed it again.

  But maybe the whole thing had gotten under his skin, she thought now, which was why he became a school cop. Was it narcissistic of her to think that? Terry?

  “Don’t ask me,” Terry said. “Ask him.”

  In the kitchen, Clare kept dropping silverware—deliberately, willfully, as if tapping out a code. It took Mona a few seconds to decipher the message. Would it kill you to just be nice? Frank scraped his ice-cream bowl with his spoon. The sound grated on her. She could feel it in her teeth. She focused on the pink handle of the Eureka standing in the hallway.

  “Frank, I have a confession,” she said.

  He stopped scraping and gave her a startled look.

  “I’m in love with your vacuum,” she said quickly.

  He spooned the last of the ice cream into his mouth. “What?”

  “Your vacuum,” she said. “I love it. Where’d you get it?”

  He opened his mouth, allowed Wahkan to drill his teeth for a second, and then wiped his face with a fresh napkin. Wahkan wolf-whistled from his shoulder.

  “You’re so weird,” he said.

  “How much you want for it, chief?”

  He snorted and looked at her like she was crazy. “Not for sale.”

  “Fair enough,” she said.

  He drummed the armrest with his fingers and then picked up the remote and flipped through the channels.

  “How many years you been working for the Carson school district?” she asked pleasantly.

  “Too many,” he said, and belched softly. “Nine and a half.”

  “Were you assigned that job or did you have to apply for it?”

  “I applied, but,” Frank said.

  “Does it pay the same as being a bodyguard?”

  “I took a cut, but, well, the hours are better, so. And I wanted to work with kids.”

  He settled on a Charles Bronson movie. Death Wish III. A group of gangsters were sitting around, repeating, “They killed the Giggler! They killed the Giggler!” Frank watched the screen with a placid, satisfied look on his face. Wahkan made a kissing noise and polished his beak on Frank’s shirt.

  “I’m pretty good with them, you know,” he said without looking at her. “The kids,
I mean. Most of them, anyway. Some are too far gone—you know—beyond help—but.”

  He had a new habit of ending his sentences with “but,” “and,” or “so.” A verbal tic. Sometimes he strung them all together. “Well, yeah, so, but, and.”

  “But what,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Some of them are beyond help, but . . . what,” she prompted.

  He looked over at her and shrugged. “You can’t save everyone.”

  * * *

  MONA DUCKED INTO THE LIQUOR store for wine, a corkscrew, and her favorite West Coast candy bar, Abba-Zaba, which she ate on Clare’s couch. Terry wanted to know if she was more in love with the candy (white taffy, creamy peanut butter filling) or the wrapper (yellow and black checkerboard taxi pattern). Or was it equal?

  “Who the fuck cares?” Mona asked.

  “Emotions are stored in the body,” Terry said. “If they’re not released, they cause illness. Boredom, for example, is a lower-frequency emotion—”

  “Boredom is stored in my butthole,” Mona said.