The Done Thing

by Tracy Manaster

  I did up my eyes. I powdered my skin. I daubed on lipstick, a dignified rose. Why don’t you put on red? Barbra asked. She was always ten years behind. She liked to watch me put my face on. Red lips are cheap, silly. We sat up in my room before a high school dance, some spring or winter celebration, I don’t remember. I should have paid better attention. Lida wears war paint, Barbra singsonged. She whooped about the room. Barbra Barbarian. We heard the doorbell. Are you going to marry Martin? If you don’t, can I?

  Don’t make me laugh. You’re just a kid.

  I won’t be, not always.

  She was always ten years behind. And then eleven, twelve, sixteen. Coming up on thirty now.

  I applied a second layer of lipstick. I couldn’t bring the tube into Stemble; I wouldn’t get a chance to reapply. Good thing I knew the trick. A layer of rouge across my lips for staying power. I emptied my purse. Traveler’s checks, address book, aspirin, my compact, a jewel case full of baby teeth all piled on the bed. I’d be back long before they came to change the sheets. My bag felt empty with just my birth certificate, license, and the single car key that Stemble allowed.

  A Visitation Officer searched my car when I drove into the lot. In their yellow protective gloves his hands moved like a mime’s. Some previous renter had left behind a map of New Mexico.

  There was no line at the registration desk. The woman doling out the forms had lost neither her baby face nor her acne. She looked bored, bland as caulking, even when she read who it was I’d come to see. She took her time with my papers. She wore a studded rubber thimble to help her sort the pages. She spoke into a callbox. “One for sigh you.”

  “Sigh you?”

  “SIU.”

  Special Isolation Unit. The Death House. A van arrived for me, large enough to seat ten. The driver wet his nervous lips the whole ride over. There were no seatbelts; a lawsuit waiting to happen.

  A loud blare and I was admitted to the Death House. A long hall. At its midpoint a guard sat inside what looked like a tollbooth. I should have worn flats. My heels tapped as I approached. I passed my purse through the slot. He checked my face against my ID. I had a good five years on the photograph and hoped it didn’t show. He returned my things without comment and nodded down the hall. Another door. Another clang. It opened on a long shoebox room. Dull, flecked linoleum. Plain walls. It smelled of recent cleaning. Lit like a good hospital, except for the cages built around the long bulbs. Those fluorescents must be miserable to change. Two guards stood near a metal detector. One asked me to turn out my pockets. They were still sewn closed. He let me use my car key to pop the stitches. I stepped through the arch. Something buzzed, somewhere deeper in the building. I hadn’t set off the alarm; I’d been careful getting dressed. I wore a soft cup brassiere, no wire whatsoever. It would only be a handful of hours, and no sense kidding myself. I was closing in on sixty-five. Whatever had a mind to sag was going to. The guard ran some sort of wand over me. The other officer had a leashed dog that never moved from its haunches. When Pam came through here yesterday she must have had a thing or two to say about the white gunk in its eye.

  Another clang. Loud as a siren but only half as shrill. I was glad to hear them now, for practice. I wouldn’t startle, hearing one, with your eyes upon me. The officers escorted me to a windowed door. A glance from the one with the dog prompted his fellow to speak. He scowled before opening his mouth. His face was scored all over with lines.

  “You have one hour. I will be right at the door. Do not give the inmate anything.” His scowl deepened; Stemble, I saw, didn’t offer much by way of dental plans. “Keep two feet back from the glath at all timeth.” The other guard choked back a mean grin. I stuck out my hand. Westin stared, oatmeal-brained, like his mother never taught him shaking hands is what people do. He stepped aside. The door clanged and I went in without having touched him, his hand that knew the way you crumpled at a fist.

  The visitation room could fit in my kitchen. A floor-to-ceiling wall of glass sliced it in two, its panes shot through with bracing wire. The wires made a grid that looked like picnic gingham. The walls were pale but not quite bright, like the paint had been over-thinned then layered over a much darker color. A single bar of light screwed into the ceiling above me. The cage around it flaked tetanus red. I approached the glass. My reflection stood black-suited on the other side, amorphous in the dim.

  Another clang and your door opened.

  46.

  You have to know that I spent years imagining this.

  My brother-in-law before me, guard-flanked and hangdog. A ghost already, in his ghost chains.

  Never once did I imagine you would come into the room laughing. If your chains—linked foot to foot to belt to cuffs—scraped over the floor your laughter masked the sound. You had a better laugh than Barbra. A good one in its own right. Rich and somehow damp, almost like gargling. That sound the wettest thing in all of Stemble. Still laughing, you raised your cuffed hands and wiped your forehead. You moved well for all that hardware. Your laughter stopped. You hadn’t shaved as well as I’d thought before. Stubble roughed your skin in lichen patches. Gone mostly gray now, so I hadn’t been able to see it at a distance. Your skin had a gray tinge too, as if it couldn’t hide how close you were to being meat. You let the silence turn thick as stew between us. I adjusted the fall of my skirt. You grinned. One of your canines had gone red-brown as gravy. You spoke. “If you see her again, if there’s some sort of afterlife coming, Little Sister’s going to be pissed.”

  What I should have said was: at me?

  Or: you are the one that killed her.

  Or: say hi for me. You’ll see her soon enough.

  You know I didn’t say that. I only said hello.

  “You kind of sold Little Sister out.”

  I should have said: Barbra never was your sister. Or: don’t think for a minute I did it for you. I stood before you like a lump, like the eye of a potato.

  “Not that it did me any good.”

  “No,” I agreed, “it didn’t.”

  Sweat ringed your jumpsuit collar, bled out from the armpits.

  “First courthouse this county put up they built over a burned-down brothel.” You smacked your lips. “Goes to show.”

  The kind of thoughts you had, Clarence, when things didn’t go your way. “That isn’t true,” I said. And here was another something for Barbra to forgive. Instead of my sister I thought of Georg Ring, whose widow said he loved the law.

  “Well, you’ve got a whole life to prove me wrong. A whole damn life.”

  It would take half a shake to find out online. You had no idea. “I’ll check it out.”

  “While you’re checking things out, you might want to look up the law that says it’s wrong to fuck with the mail. You might want to ask Peter Kershaw. His caseload’s about to lighten.”

  You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself. You don’t get me to feel sorry for you. Quit your bellyaching, I should have said. Instead: “You were right about Kershaw. He really is one of the fattest men I’ve ever seen.”

  “Maisie’s the girl I told about that.” You were sweating in streaks now. You looked like you’d come from the sauna. You arched your back and I heard your spine crackle. Except for the hair, you were getting much less gray. “Maisie Keller. Maisie Fucking Keller. The wife always said you were too boring to live. She said you had to have this secret other life.”

  Barbra red and gummy lipped, getting into the basement cherries.

  Barbra finding constellations for homework. Barbra, bored, inventing new ones.

  Barbra wrestling a suitcase closed.

  Barbra fever-handed with Lawrence Ring; Barbra touched the way I’d never again be touched.

  What I should have said was: Trust me, Clarence. You don’t want to know what she used to say about you.

  Even if it would have been a buck-toothed lie. The last time we spoke Barbra imitated one of her students, who’d sputtered when she caught him fudging his midterm. Your n
ame never passed her lips. I loved my sister, absolutely. But she was a cheat and I knew maybe ten real things about her.

  “You never apologized,” I said. Barbra was gone. There was nothing left for me to learn. “Not even a word.”

  “I never had anything to be sorry for. I never did a thing to Maisie.”

  “I don’t mean to her.”

  Your laugh. It was getting uglier than Barbra’s. “Maisie was a rotten thing to come up with.” Nastiness brought your color back. No gray. You were the color of just undercooked poultry. You don’t get to judge. Not me, not anyone. I almost said it, but you spoke first.

  “I liked you better when you were boring. But Barbra would have been proud. So we’re at odds. Maybe Pam can be the tiebreaker.”

  “Now wait. I did ask them not to, tomorrow.” My tongue felt crusted over. Don’t dither, I taught Pamela. If you want something, straight up ask. It’s unbecoming to hint. “You heard me in that room.” I was hinting. “You heard me. You were there.”

  “Cut the simpering, sister. It wouldn’t even have worked for her.”

  I’m not your sister, I should have said.

  Your smile grew and grew. You must have looked down on Barbra like that, wide and cruel-toothed. And she’d have looked up at you, bleeding. From the ground that iron smirk must have looked like a horseshoe hung for luck.

  “Don’t.” Cowards beg. “Don’t tell Pam.”

  “Say please,” you said.

  I should have said: that brown tooth is dying, Clarence. There’s blood in the tubules. It’s predeceasing you.

  “Please,” I said.

  You stood before me luminous. It couldn’t all be sweat. “Maybe.” Your cuffs gave just enough space for you to crack your knuckles. You know I’ve never liked that sound. “It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with you if I do. Knowing what you are won’t do Pam any favors.” Your voice slid into a whisper. “You know how it feels.”

  I almost didn’t hear it. I was too cowardly to ask what you meant.

  “Please.”

  “Keep your pleases. Just know I made you say them.” Your laugh returned. “‘Please’ won’t change a thing between us. If I let you off the hook it’s cause I want Pamela thinking at least someone who had a hand in bringing her up was actually good.”

  Maybe I should have defended Barbra. Maybe I should have defended myself. What I said instead was the one thing in our conversation I’m actually proud of saying. I spoke my husband’s name. “Frank. You forgot Frank. My Francis was unquestionably good.”

  A silence, and then: “I’m a lucky man. She loves me.”

  “She loves me too.”

  “She loves me knowing the worst I ever did.” You smiled like Marjorie now, the half her face that could. Tired, not sure if you could quite manage it. “You’ll think about that, Lida.” My name in your mouth was thick and sweet as pancake syrup. “You’ll think about that and you’ll owe me the rest of your life.”

  “The rest of my life. However long that may be.” I forced a grin of my own.

  “Lida, don’t try. You can’t do worse to me than you’ve done already.”

  “It was letters, Clarence.” Even if you loved her. “Don’t be a baby.”

  Your face contorted. It broke like the yolk of an egg. “You got my kid. You came out ahead from all this. You got to be the one who made sure she turned out so good.” Your voice cracked and soared high, like it was hormones and you were young and hadn’t yet made this happen.

  Clarence, I’ll have the wide rest of my life to think of should’ve-saids. I’ve thought of them, words that could have wrung remorse from you like juice. You know I couldn’t find them then. But even in that moment I think we both knew what needed saying.

  Thank you, I should have said, for Pam.

  And, Clarence, you should have said the same.

  You didn’t say it either. I watched you recompose your face. “You never got that kid,” you said. “The one you wanted. From Asia.”

  “Korea, Clarence. Korea is a country. Asia is a continent.”

  “But they never gave you one. Pamela was it.”

  “Pammie was it. Is. Is it.”

  “You’re sick in the head. You know what I thought when I figured out about Maisie? I thought—that pink girl—I thought it was part of your messing with me, making me think about my kid’s sister just because you could.”

  “Maisie’s twenty-three. You shouldn’t have been thinking.”

  “I don’t think you’ve got the moral high ground here.”

  A squirming, silent moment.

  “They matched us. The agency. Right after—right after your trial. A little girl. We said no. We had to be there for Pam. She was everything. Everything.”

  A dry cluck, almost matronly. You were enjoying this. One of the last pleasures your life had in it. “Poor thing.”

  “We did absolutely right by Pam.”

  “I meant the other. Left behind in the rice paddies. Dirt poor.” Your voice was fawning, lazy. A lover’s voice. “Married off at—what, twelve, is that how they do it?”

  “Korea is an emerging superpower,” I said. “You’ve been away a long time, Clarence. They have the best free education in the world. American kids would kill for a spot in their programs. They’re on the cutting edge of robotics and microchips and—and gene splicing. And they’re leading the way in gender equality. Their last three prime ministers have all been women.” You had shaped my life more than anyone else in it, Clarence. More than Pamela. More than Frank. You and your bullets, horrible but true. And here we were. You would die the next morning. We would never speak again. Of all the things I’d meant to say to you. I knew nothing about Korea. It would take a solid minute for me to find it on a map.

  47.

  Housekeeping hadn’t yet come to my room. I picked up the nightstand phone. The Touristay was bound to bleed me for long distance, but such was life. Then one for out of state. The area code for St. Louis and the rest of Kath’s number. Three rings and a pick-up click.

  “I just saw him,” I said. “It was awful. I hardly said anything right.”

  “Hello?” Kath’s voice, confused.

  “I’m sorry. I must have dialed wrong.” I didn’t want to discuss it after all. I hung up. I should have been the aphasic one, not Marjorie. I should have been born that way. I flopped out across the bed, right in the middle of the purse mess I had made that morning. You know what I am, Clarence, but at least there’s this: I was glad there were the beds in forty-nine other states where couples stole each other’s covers and didn’t know what was to happen tomorrow in Arizona. I shut my eyes. Bright still pulsed behind my lids. I fumbled for the velvet jewel case. Pam’s milk teeth rattled inside. I opened it. Eyes still closed, I put my hand in.

  By its nubbed points I knew the molar she’d lost biting into a pear. A canned pear, all mush pulp. With a tooth loose we’d never have given her hard fruit. And here was the hard shovel shape of a lateral incisor. That one had gone the same day her little first-grade boyfriend lost one of his. Here was the canine she spat into my hand two years and four days after the death of her mother. And a molar she lost at twelve, saying, really, Lida, I’m too entirely grown-up for this kind of thing. I touched teeth lost at the zoo with Ma, lost in P.E. and recovered from the grass, lost in line for the ladies’ room, lost while recuperating from strep. A whole childhood here, save three central incisors that had come out in your care. I should have thought to ask you. How they wriggled free, if Pam was scared, how much you put beneath her pillow. The fourth central I had. I tucked it into my palm. My little favorite, the first one we saw come out. Frank used a cotton ball to stop the bleeding, not knowing how the fibers would stick. Pam, just under a week in our home, worried the tooth fairy wouldn’t be able to find her. I phoned the mothers of five classmates to best gauge the going rate.

  I opened my eyes. I looked at the white little nub. It probably budged first on your long car ride. Pam’s legs s
winging. Pam safely strapped in, bored with landscape. She had her crayons, but this tooth was interesting. More so than the telephone poles she’d been counting, at least as high as she could count. Her tongue found the tooth again and again. It worked hard until the sirens came. And then, later, Pam in her best dark clothes. Legs still swinging, funeral benches much too high. Her tooth was still there, wet old friend. Her tongue wiggled, grateful. Not everything had changed.

  I would wait outside for Pam. She would come straight to the pool. When they kicked her out of Stemble, Pam would come. I took her best tooth with me, pressing it into my palm. It was sharpest where it had attached to the gum. It didn’t seem fair to Pam that in this hard world all her sharpness turned inward.

  Great clouds of gnats swarmed the pool edge, drawn to its false wet. They’d brought in the evening. The ground bruised. The air purpled. I hoped Pam had brought sunglasses. Coming home from Stemble she’d be driving straight into sunset. No matter how hard I pressed, her tooth was too weak to break my skin.

  You and Barbra didn’t save her teeth. If Barbra hadn’t died this one would have made its way into your trash bin then off to some arid landfill. In another life I would never have held it. In a better life, I suppose. I shivered despite the Arizona sun. Barbra should have lived. This tooth should have been lost here. Lost and thrown away. I had no business keeping it. I had a right to Pam now, yes, but something of hers would always belong in Arizona. I let the tooth fly. It entered the pool with a quiet plink. I bit down hard on my cheeks, like Pam used to. I watched the tooth’s outripples.