Evening News

by Marly Swick

  He takes a sip of his Coke and looks out the window at the clouds. It looks as though you could step out of the plane and walk on them like white stepping-stones. The plane isn’t very full. He is in the front row by himself. When they aren’t busy, the stewardesses take turns sitting next to him for a minute, as if they feel sorry for him. He has spread his Goosebumps books out in the empty seat next to him so that they can see he isn’t a baby who needs to be entertained. He is content to be left alone. Both stewardesses, the blond one and the black one, asked him the same questions in the same order. How old are you? Where are you going? Do you have any brothers or sisters? He said no. He didn’t know if that was a lie or not. If it was a lie, he figured it was a white lie. Because it would make them feel bad if he said his sister was dead.

  He is the only kid on the plane who is traveling by himself. He checked it out on his way to the bathroom. There aren’t a lot of kids on the plane, period, and none who are his age. They’re probably all still in school. He would be sitting in school right this minute if he hadn’t taken the pills.

  He doesn’t remember much about the hospital. All he really remembers is lying in bed waiting to see what it felt like to be dead. On TV he’d seen people talking about this beautiful white light, like a bright tunnel, with dead relatives smiling and waving at them. He could remember wondering if he would see Trina and if she would be mad at him for shooting her. He doubted it. She wasn’t even old enough to understand. She would probably be thrilled to see him, just like she was in real life. He doesn’t remember any white light. He must have fallen asleep before anything happened.

  His father was mad at him when he found out. Everyone else was tippytoeing around him, speaking slowly and softly. But when he picked up the phone receiver, his father shouted in his ear, “Jesus Christ, Teddy, how could you pull such a dumb-ass stunt?” His mother, who was eavesdropping, tried to yank the phone away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. He liked hearing his dad yell and cuss. He was tired of everyone trying to be nice when they didn’t mean it anyway. By the end of the phone call he and his dad were joking around, laughing. His dad asked him what it felt like to get your stomach pumped, and Teddy said how should he know, he was asleep, but his throat hurt from the tube. And his dad said he’d kill him if he ever tried anything like that again.

  His mother just shook her head and rolled her eyes at what she could overhear, which was probably everything, since his dad had a loud voice on the phone, as if he thought long distance meant you were in the next room. Teddy knows that his mother doesn’t think his father is all that smart.

  The black stewardess picks up his empty Coke can and asks him if he would like anything else. She smiles at him with bright teeth and purple lipstick. She is wearing silver hoop earrings so big he could pass his fists through them. Teddy says no thank you. As she walks away, he wonders if someone in her family was ever shot. A brother or sister. On the news black people are always getting shot and killed. Every day. He thinks maybe if they were black — his mother and stepfather and sister and him — they wouldn’t have fallen apart. They would have handled it better. On the news black people are always singing in church. His family doesn’t go to church. They don’t even believe in God. When he asked his mother what religion they were, after Chandra Patel had informed him that she was a Hindu, she had said they weren’t really anything. At the time it had bothered him. He didn’t like being nothing. But now he is glad. Now that he’d killed his baby sister. He doesn’t want to go to hell or be reincarnated as something disgusting like a rat or cockroach. Which is what Catholics and Hindus believe happens to you when you die if you’ve done something bad. If you are nothing, nothing bad could happen. You just turn into air, he thinks, looking out the window of the plane. They are flying through a thick white fog. It looks like they are flying through nothing, flying through some huge white lie.

  On the way home from the airport, on impulse, Giselle went into the Family Cutters in the strip mall. It was next to Drug Fair, where she had stopped for toothpaste. She had packed off the last of the Crest with Teddy, as if Ed wouldn’t have toothpaste — even though Ed had perfect teeth, big and white like toy piano keys. He always kept a yellow box of baking soda by the bathroom sink; he swore by the stuff years before they started putting it in toothpaste. Unfortunately, Teddy had inherited her teeth. Twenty-one cavities by the time she was ready for braces. The name, Family Cutters, struck her as ironic. She pictured a family of paper dolls being scissored apart.

  “Just a trim,” she told the anorexic receptionist with the platinum crew-cut. Giselle held up her thumb and index finger about a quarter of an inch apart. Seeing the look of skepticism on the receptionist’s face, Giselle widened it to half an inch. All the beauticians sported short, spiky hair in various unnatural hues. To give herself courage, Giselle thought of Martha Goodman’s new haircut, how much younger and lighter she’d looked — unburdened somehow. Giselle’s own hair hadn’t changed since junior high school, when she had insisted on growing it out of the ugly pixie to down past her shoulders, where — as if at the end of its rope — it refused to grow any longer. Her mother had insisted that Giselle’s light brown hair was too fine, too tangle-prone, and should be kept short and neat. “Yvonne’s hair is different,” she had told Giselle, whom she knew was just copying her older sister. “It has a completely different texture. Plus Vonnie has a wider face.” All of which made Giselle even more determined never, ever to cut her hair, no matter what.

  But something came over her as she sat in the chair with her hair dripping wet and the pink plastic cape draped like a gigantic bib. She was so tired of being herself. “I’m ready for a change,” she heard herself telling the hairdresser, who hardly looked old enough to be playing with such sharp scissors. “What do you think?”

  The hairdresser, Cindi, said, “Great. Just leave it to me.” As she snipped away, she chattered on about this trip she just took to Club Med in Belize. She asked Giselle if she’d ever been to a Club Med, and Giselle shook her head.

  “Please keep your head still,” Cindi chided her, frowning.

  It was like at the dentist when the hygienist insisted upon asking you all sorts of questions with her hands stuck in your mouth. The stylist switched the subject to her stepdaughter, Noelle, who was visiting from Bakersfield for the month, and suddenly Giselle’s stomach clutched. A lump swelled in her throat. She knew what was coming next. She wanted to rip the plastic cape off and run out of there with her hair half cut.

  “Do you have any kids?” Cindi asked her as she casually unclipped another clump of Giselle’s hair and began snipping away. Giselle knew that if she answered yes, the next question would be “How many?” She thought about lying, just saying no, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, as if it were bad luck. As if it could cause Teddy’s plane to fall out of the sky.

  “I have a nine-year-old son,” she said. “He’s on his way right now to visit his father in Nebraska.”

  “Oh, really?” Cindi shook her head as if coincidences never ceased to amaze her. “My brother-in-law’s from Omaha. His name’s Jim Leggett, maybe you know him?” Cindi looked surprised when Giselle shook her head, as though everyone in Nebraska was on a first-name basis.

  “Omaha’s a big city,” Giselle said. “Relatively speaking.”

  “He thinks Nebraska’s great. Clean air, no crime, great place for families and all that. He keeps trying to get my sister to move back there.” Cindi rolled her eyes. “Me personally, I’d rather die of emphysema in California.”

  Giselle smiled and nodded. She knew she was off the hook. She marveled at how easily the crisis had been averted. Then, just as the lump in her throat began to subside, she said, “I had a twenty-three-month-old daughter, Trina, but she died. In April.”

  Cindi’s face crumpled as if Giselle had punched her in the gut. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry. Really, I’m so sorry.” In the mirror she could see that Cindi actually had tears in her eyes, which made Gi
selle feel both better and worse. She fished into her jeans pocket and handed Cindi a tissue. Cindi thanked her and blew her nose. Still sniffling, she unclipped the last clump of Giselle’s hair. “Was she sick?” she asked in a meek, reverent voice. Underneath her burgundy hair and skin-tight minidress, she was actually a sweet, tenderhearted girl. Giselle felt bad for having ruined her day.

  “No,” she said. “It was an accident.”

  ***

  Later that evening when her brother arrived to take her to dinner, he didn’t even recognize her at first. She was outside watering the moribund flowers that edged the front of the house; she had planted them herself with great enthusiasm just the spring before last, thrilled to be living in her first house, even if it was only rented. “Geez,” he said, “I thought you were the baby-sitter.” Annoyed, Giselle didn’t bother to point out that there was no one to baby-sit for. He knew that Teddy was in Nebraska. “It looks good. You look like Tinker Bell. You know, in Hook.”

  He took her to dinner at Ed Debevic’s, a hip diner with valet parking, where they avoided talking about anything heavy, and she was home by ten o’clock. She was surprised to find a message on her machine from Ed. Teddy had called her that afternoon to say that he had arrived safely and that everything was fine. They were watching a movie and waiting for a pizza to be delivered. When she heard Ed’s voice, her heart stopped — she thought something must have gone wrong — but as if reading her mind long-distance he said, “Everything’s A-OK here. I just thought you might be feeling lonely, so I called to say hey. And to say what a great kid he is.” Ed paused for a moment and picked up again at lower volume. “He seems to be doing okay, you know, considering. He looks kind of pale. We’re going fishing tomorrow. Take care of yourself.”

  Despite herself, she was touched by his thoughtfulness. She supposed he knew better than she did what it felt like to miss Teddy. When she had first noticed the blinking light, she thought the message was probably from Dan. They were going out to dinner tomorrow night. She had thought maybe he was calling to cancel. Or calling to say he couldn’t wait, he wanted to come back tonight. She didn’t really know what was going on. In the past couple of days they’d had a couple of decent conversations on the telephone. He had apologized about the book, admitted he’d been wrong not to tell her, and said he was reconsidering the whole project, although he wasn’t making any promises.

  She walked into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror, trying to get used to her new hair, wondering whether Dan would like it, then thinking, So what? Why was she so eager to forgive him? If she had been as eager to forgive Ed his failings, they’d probably still be married. But then she had never worshiped Ed from afar, felt honored when he bestowed a smile upon her, or imagined various scenarios of bumping into him outside of the classroom. The first time Dan had touched her, held her hand in the dark, crowded parking lot at the Hollywood Bowl, she felt her whole body light up like a neon sign. Most of Dan’s toiletries were still neatly arranged on his shelf. She opened the bottle of Grey Flannel, closed her eyes, and inhaled. Surprised by a twinge of lust, a quick power surge from the vicinity of her womb. It had been a long time since she felt horny. Not that she felt exactly horny now. It was more like a nostalgia for sex, a desire for desire. She slipped out of her dress and ran the water in the tub. A warm bath was about as much sensuality as she could take these days. She didn’t really want to feel that much. Her emotions were all connected, like a complex switchboard with no circuit breakers. The very thought of an orgasm terrified her. All those fuses blowing out in the dark.

  As she eased herself into the warm water, she wondered if it was different for Dan. All her life she had been told that men were different. Ed had certainly seemed to be. His penis had seemed to be totally lacking in introspection, like a big friendly dog always ready to play. It was Dan who had educated her to the idea that men and women weren’t really all that different. For several weeks after his father’s funeral, Dan had trouble sustaining an erection. He seemed to crave physical affection — lying in bed holding each other’s naked body — but not sex per se, which was what she had been led to believe was all that men were really interested in. Fucking. The first couple of times his hard-on wilted, she had been alarmed. She had taken it as a sign of his flagging ardor. The beginning of the end. But in fact the opposite was true. It was the beginning of the beginning, as if a pane of glass that she hadn’t even known was there suddenly slid away.

  And now it had slid back again.

  ***

  The next morning Dan did in fact call, bright and early, before she was even awake. Although she had gone to bed early, she had not fallen asleep until dawn. He wanted to know whether they could push back dinner to 7:30. Something about the racquetball court schedule. She was too groggy to protest. But now, as she drank her coffee, it occurred to her that she didn’t know how she was going to fill up all the empty hours until dinner. She felt as if she were in suspended animation. What would she do if the marriage was truly over? Where would she go? Who would she be? In September she would turn thirty. A two-time loser. But maybe there was still hope. There was still time to salvage the marriage. The dust had barely begun to settle. Even her brother, Teddy’s loyal champion, had said to cut Dan some slack. It was too soon to give up. A thought that made her feel even more hopeless since it seemed to require some action on her part, some energy. When all she wanted to do was sleep. And she couldn’t even do that. At night the demons stood in line to shake her hand.

  It was unseasonably hot for early June. She dragged a decrepit chaise longue into the backyard and lay in the sun. When she was younger, a teenager, she had elevated tanning to an art form. Applying suntan lotions of various strengths, rotating at precise intervals, ever vigilant against unsightly strap marks. But now she didn’t care. It was only skin.

  On the plastic end table next to the chaise was a bottle of sparkling water and the cordless phone. On Sunday mornings her parents called. She didn’t feel like talking to them, but she would have to answer the phone if it rang. It might be Teddy, saying he was homesick. Then she remembered they were going fishing; they would have been up and out by sunrise, hours ago. Once Ed had taken her fishing when she was pregnant with Teddy. The rocking of the small boat and the smell of fish had made her nauseous. Ed rowed her back to the shore, where she spent the afternoon lying on the grass, slapping away gnats, wishing she had brought something to read, wishing she weren’t pregnant.

  They had considered abortion, at least she had. Her best friend, Laura, had urged her to do it and offered to make the arrangements. All she had to do was go to Planned Parenthood on O Street. “It’s like going to a matinee,” Laura said. “Two hours.” Thinking back, Giselle really couldn’t remember why she didn’t do it. It certainly wasn’t her religious faith; she had stopped going to mass as soon as she moved into the dormitory. Even before that, she would sometimes convince her parents to let her attend a later mass and then spend the hour browsing through fashion magazines at the drugstore. Her thinking was confused and contradictory, as if scrambled by hormones. As far as she could recall, it wasn’t so much a decision to have the baby as indecision about doing something else.

  And Ed seemed easy either way. They could have been discussing what movie to see, what restaurant to go to. It irked her, she remembered that much. She remembered yelling at him. “This is a baby we’re talking about. A lifelong commitment. It’s not a fish you can throw back.” The only opinion he had ventured was that he wasn’t keen on adoption. “Why not?” she’d challenged him. “What’s wrong with giving your baby to a good family?” She remembered clear as day how he had closed his eyes as if searching for the right answer cribbed on the insides of his eyelids. Finally he shrugged and said, “It’s like Oedipus.” She knew he was referring to the play they had read in English 101 the year before, their freshman year of college. “It has to do with destiny.” She had snorted and rolled her eyes and scoffed, “You think the kid’s g
oing to come back and sleep with me?” “Never mind,” he had told her, the picture of wounded dignity, “just forget it.”

  She heard someone call her name. She opened her eyes. Lois was standing at the fence in her bathing suit. “I was wondering if you felt like company.”

  Giselle stood up too quickly. The blood rushed to her feet in a dizzying swoosh. “Are you okay?” Lois asked her. Giselle nodded and walked over to help Lois drag one of their fancy padded chaises across the stubble of lawn. “Do you want the other one?” Lois asked, pointing to the matching padded chaise. Bill’s chair. Giselle shook her head. She liked the way the frayed plastic webbing of the cheap lawn chair mortified her flesh.

  “I guess you saw,” Lois said as she positioned herself to catch the rays. “Bill moved out.”

  “I saw the U-Haul truck,” Giselle admitted. She had, in fact, watched from the kitchen window as Bill and a big burly guy made several trips back and forth between the truck and the house, loaded down with stuff. She knew that Eric was at soccer practice on Saturday mornings, conveniently out of the way. She had watched, mesmerized, as Bill carried out the fancy stereo, bought for a great price in Singapore, followed by his buddy holding aloft a pair of skis and ski poles.