Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  One of Vanessa’s childhood rituals was unscrewing the doll, then opening the next and the next, then lining them all up on her bureau until the very last one, too tiny to be painted but for two black dots for eyes, lying on its side.

  Now, perched over the den toilet, Vanessa Goldstein thought of that doll, its bucket shape cut in half at the stomach, a face drawn intricately by thin shavings of jewel-colored wood. Looking at them in a descending line, she would wonder if all these pieces together constituted one doll, or if they were really twelve different ones, with separate selves and souls.

  Vanessa stayed in the bathroom so as to avoid her mother, who had stormed up from the basement in a rage. “I’m going to the bathroom, Mom,” she said through the door, though it was a lie.

  “Where are all my crab cakes, Vanessa?” Sharon banged on the door. “They were all here yesterday. I need them for my event tonight.”

  Vanessa heard her mother cursing beneath her breath as she went back into the kitchen. Vanessa flushed the toilet, splashed her face with the cold water, and leaned into the mirror. Her face was blotched red, and tiny blood vessels, barely visible hairline stars and signs, a galaxy beneath the surface of her cheeks, seemed to break open just below her eyes.

  Vanessa wanted a cigarette and to sit at her window seat, blowing smoke out of the screen and into the backyard. For ten years she had hovered like a spirit, unseen above her mother’s parties: This paella is divine, Sharon. Everyone seemed to have one line they screamed over and over, all night long: Impeach the fucker, is what I say! She could see the torches now, burning in the backyard on the evenings Roberta Flack floated up from the stereo, the adults growing more and more loose and wild, their laughs heartier. Their political arguments—who believed more sincerely in the importance of banning discriminatory housing in the South, or the absolute relevance of the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, who was the most adamant about getting the soldiers home. Right. Now—always grew more fierce as the night faded into the blue-gray of early morning.

  Vanessa wouldn’t be able to smoke in the house now, she thought, as she sprayed Binaca in her mouth, then shot two short blasts into the air. Besides, it was freezing outside. I am a cowboy! she thought, holding the small bottle up into the air like a smoking gun in one of her grandfather’s old movies. Bang bang.

  She walked out of the bathroom and down the stairs. “Well, the crab cakes are not in the bathroom, Mom,” she said coolly. “Are you sure you didn’t take them to the office kitchen already?”

  Sharon stood in the doorway, the mustard-, brown-, and orange-striped wallpaper of the kitchen to her back. “Don’t you do that, Vanessa,” she said, wagging her finger. “I’m sure I did not.” Her pinkie moved a stray hair from her face in a manner that suggested she had been handling meat and had not yet washed her hands. “You’re being very unfair to me, Vanessa. I had everything carefully planned, and now we’ll have to find another appetizer. I don’t have time for this.” Sharon closed her eyes and breathed slowly in and out, in and out.

  Last year, there could have been Vanessa’s brother and all his soccer friends to blame for the missing food, those teeming almost-man bodies that wanted only to eat, play with a ball, and fuck. And it wasn’t until Ben left that she could really have used his help; September was when this unbreakable cycle had begun in earnest. Up until then, it had only been occasional, too much of her mother’s quiche and beet salad this night, a day of hot water with lemon as compensation, the next an empty day after school filled with cheese and apples and crackers and frozen blintzes she’d sauté with sticks of butter and slather with sour cream.

  Vanessa watched her mother breathing, clearly summoning strength from elsewhere, running over her Essential Training: I must take action; I must not avoid; I must transform. Her mother used to say these mantras aloud, as if they were an argument she was having with herself. Then, when she realized it was not about conflict, but breaking through, she took to muttering her anchors nearly soundlessly under her breath, like the Orthodox women Vanessa saw on the Metro, bowing their heads and touching their well-worn prayer books with the tips of their fingers.

  Her father found LEAP! to be anti-intellectual, anti-political, anti-theoretical, anti–everything we stand for in this family, he’d say when Sharon got up from dinner to take a fellow Leaper’s call. At best, he said, it’s a clever pyramid scheme. Her father with his gloom-and-doom global-starvation stuff. Far as Vanessa could tell, we were stopping the shipment of grain; it wasn’t as if we’d dropped a bomb. All anyone at school wanted to discuss was the hostages in Iran. Today was day sixtytwo, and there were bets on how long those diplomats could possibly be held. Each night Vanessa went to sleep imagining the release of prisoners destroyed by torture; their return to Washington, violence in their hearts. She pictured official-looking men—like her father’s friend Len—unlocking their handcuffs, their bent heads rising, eyes as full of hate as Manson’s.

  Vanessa felt a little sorry for her mother, who was so clearly forced to turn to this random group of strangers to feel better, to these freaks who would call during dinner, wanting more and more of her time. Vanessa understood it a little. Some kids at shows Vanessa had been going to with Jason were big on PMA. A positive mental attitude, or not letting shit get you down.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vanessa said to her mother now, knowing full well that she had taken the puffs from the freezer and shoved them into her mouth frozen, two and three at a time. That’s what she did while she was waiting for the crab cakes to heat up in the oven.

  “Please, Vanessa, you have to stop this!” Her mother reached for her wrist, her short nails grazing the tender inside.

  Vanessa pulled her hand away sharply, not sure if her mother meant to comfort or punish. Vanessa walked into the living room: off-white sofa, off-white pillows, stark white blinds, ivory walls, but once it had been filled with worn, red Oriental carpets, Russian jewelry boxes and nutcrackers, Fabergé egg reproductions that sat with other schlocky miniatures in a tiny wood-and-glass cabinet, a chandelier Sharon had bought at a flea market in Paris, and Vanessa’s grandmother’s Sheriff of Sundown movie poster, the only decent western Herbert ever made.

  The austere room seemed whitewashed, defying a past, but it had always made Vanessa think of blood, most likely due to what had happened there when she was a kid.

  When they’d settled into the house, Sharon threw a tea for the neighborhood women. Ben was already in kindergarten, but Vanessa was still home, and her mother had let her shove her little hands into the bowl of ground meat to squish together the Swedish meatballs. Her mother set her wedding rings on the counter as she too dug her hands into the mixture, grabbing Vanessa’s pinkie beneath the meat. And she remembered the crooked pink hairline spine of the shrimp, placed on silver trays with the deep red clotted cocktail sauce in a bowl at the center that her mother had set out for their new neighbors. Of course, there had been the broiled pineapple so she could scream with dismay—once there were purple pineapples on these gorgeous wood floors, if you can believe it!

  Just before the guests turned up, Sharon was always at her best. Waiting suited her, and today was no different; she was relaxed and ready to win strangers’ hearts.

  Until a neighbor showed up with her Great Dane.

  “Oooh,” Vanessa squealed from inside the hallway.

  Sharon straightened.

  “Hi. I’m Elaine Rudwick,” the woman said.

  Vanessa tried to run and pet the dog, but her mother blocked her from leaving, and the dog and its master from entering, in one sure gesture.

  “Hi, Elaine, so nice to see you, but there sure are a lot of kids here.”

  “It’s okay.” Elaine smiled at Vanessa. “Natasha is very friendly.”

  Sharon let Vanessa pet the dog, her fingers straight and tense along Natasha’s broad nose.

  “I know,” Elaine said to Sharon, her shoulders dropping in a show of just how
much this knowledge weighed on her. “I’m so terribly sorry to spring her on you, Sharon, but she just hates to be left behind. Looks really are deceiving with these guys, they’re just big ol’ babies. Is it okay?”

  Vanessa and her mother could not see the women who had already arrived behind Elaine, crossing their arms and shooting one another knowing glances.

  “I suppose it’s okay, but you will keep her tight on that leash, right?”

  “Absolutely,” Elaine said, holding up the thick leather lead and smiling.

  Children raced through the downstairs as their mothers tried to control them, attempting also to eat, drink, and have conversations of their own. Vanessa heard the same talk she’d always heard. “I just can’t do it all,” Mary Farrell, who had given up teaching when she had her first child, said. “I mean, I’ve read Betty Friedan and I’ve got the same problems my mother did. Only she got to take Valium.”

  “God, I would love some Valium,” Ella Larson said, getting up wearily to get her son to stop hitting Mary’s daughter.

  Vanessa turned from this just in time to see five-year-old Trudy Macintyre, whose long blond hair Vanessa already knew enough to envy, holding a meatball up to the Great Dane’s nose. Natasha was fixated, drool streaming from both sides of her great jowls, and just as the girl brought it back toward her own mouth, the dog lunged for it. She got the meatball, and part of Trudy Macintyre’s face, in her enormous mouth. Blood poured down stunned Trudy’s cheeks.

  “It’s her eye!” one woman screamed, and several mothers dropped to the floor, patting the carpet to see if the eyeball, large and hazel when it had been in the girl’s socket, had rolled near them.

  “She was going for the meatball!” Elaine said more than once to the room, though no one was listening. Then she looked directly at Vanessa. “Children should never tease dogs with food. She just wanted the meatball, it’s only natural!”

  Vanessa nodded slowly. “Okay,” she said.

  The dog’s ears slammed back as a distraught Elaine took her from the house.

  “That dog should be shot,” one woman said before Elaine had closed the door behind her.

  * * *

  Eventually Sharon, who had gone with Mrs. Macintyre and Trudy, called from Sibley Hospital to let the waiting party know that the injury was not to the eye itself, but merely the right-hand corner of the eyelid. Trudy’s sight would remain intact, but still, Sharon wept as she tried to clean up the awful mess.

  “It’s like Myra Hindley was here,” Vanessa’s father said upon walking into the house and scanning the living room.

  “That’s not funny, Dennis,” Sharon said. She was still scrubbing the tiny bloody handprints from the freshly-painted-just-moved-in walls that made it look as if Trudy had been trying to escape.

  “I know. I know. How terrible.” He put his briefcase down and loosened his tie. “What can I do? Should I go talk to the dog owner?”

  Sharon shook her head, talking at the wall as she scrubbed. “I already have. It was an accident.”

  “But it happened here. They can sue us.”

  “I don’t think they will. They wouldn’t!” Again Vanessa’s mother began to cry. “It’s just such a terrible way to move to a new neighborhood!”

  Vanessa couldn’t see her father’s face as her mother went to hug him, the scrub brush, now bloodied, sticking out from behind her father’s head as she leaned in.

  No one sued the Goldsteins. The dog was not put down, as many of the women had suggested, and Elaine—not the Goldsteins—was the one vilified. Those who had witnessed her crime walked with hands placed firmly on their children’s shoulders to the other side of the street whenever Elaine walked by with the dog. As Trudy grew up, five houses down from the Goldsteins’, her perfect face, fringed by nearly white bangs, was informed by a jagged scar along the right side of her eye and cheek. Vanessa feared her, the same way she feared a friend of her father’s who had been stabbed. They had gone to visit him at home after he’d been robbed and knifed on Capitol Hill, and Vanessa had refused to go inside. Instead she sat waiting on the front stoop, imagining the knife coming out of this man’s side, a wound oozing pus and blood. There was something terrifying about seeing someone’s insides, the effect of one man undone by another. Ben had made fun of her, but then he too had held back until Sharon put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him inside the house. Later, she brought Vanessa a paper plate of red peppers and carrots and onion dip, and she set it down between them on the stoop and put her arm around her. When you’re ready, we’ll go in, she had said, and Vanessa had leaned into her chest.

  After the dog incident, the living room that had just been redone from the previous owners to display the eclectic household riches went stark white. Replacing it were the neutral-colored paintings purchased at the Torpedo Factory, where artists’ studios were opened to the public each weekend. Dennis harrumphed that Sharon was so willing to shell out money for these amateur works, artists validated only by the amount of rent they paid for a place to paint, while his paintings were warping downstairs, stacked in the moldy basement.

  “I could rent a space here and sell to the public too,” Dennis had said to Sharon upon leaving a potter’s space, fat brown mugs with swirled handles (Sharon would end up buying several), heavy magenta and black plates, and large mustard-colored bowls lining the walls on lopsided wooden shelves.

  “They’re very discriminating about who they rent to, hon,” Sharon had said. “There’s a board and a committee and all kinds of applications.”

  “These are crafts, Sharon, not art.” Dennis squeezed Vanessa’s hand. “Daddy’s an artist too, you know,” he told her.

  “He is,” Sharon said, nodding her head affirmatively. “Absolutely.”

  As her mother agreed with him so readily, Vanessa knew instantly that what her father had just said was not true.

  Several hours after Vanessa’s confrontation with her mother, after Sharon had sped off in a fury to her catering event, after her father had listened over and over to his recording of Carter’s grain embargo announcement—who records Carter?—her mother called and demanded she get over to the Epsteins and help out, now. There was no getting out of it, and as Vanessa came downstairs, she paused, looking again out onto the living room. Only last year Ben would have been here, feeling up some freshman on the couch before their parents got home. Vanessa forgot for a moment how she’d been disgusted by the parade of girls her brother brought in, each one so comfortable with her body and what she was about to let him do to it, and she longed to feel less alone in this house, less inflicted upon by their parents. Last year, Ben could have gone and helped their mother at her party, which everyone would have preferred. Vanessa positively dreaded the prospect of an evening serving her mother’s uptight food at some political event. Not only would the people be hateful, but Vanessa wasn’t good at balancing a lot of trays and smiling as she picked up used glasses and crumpled napkins. And she didn’t like to be around so much meat and sour cream.

  She remembered the night of the dinner in August, before Ben left for school, how he had come back from hanging out with his friends and had drunkenly wandered out back, where Vanessa swung alone in the hammock, thinking of her ride along Rock Creek Park, a ravine waiting to swallow her and Jason up were they to tip and fall. Ben had climbed onto the hammock with her and lay on his back, and he smelled like a mix of beer and sickeningly sweet Love’s Baby Soft, and Vanessa had curled onto her side and watched his lashes touch down to the skin below his eyes and then rise up again. They’d made fun of their mother’s jars of wheat germ and the way she’d slipped while carrying a sack of bagels for some ladies’ brunch. They laughed at her wobbly ankles and her obliviousness to stones and fallen branches that had always made her stumble as if she were having a seizure. Vanessa did not bring up how she had recently begun to wonder what would happen when her mother got older, her bones more fragile, bird’s bones, hollow and delicate despite all that obsessive atten
tion to nutrition. They’d ridiculed their father’s T-shirts and folk-music posters, his beat-up car that made him believe he was still a sixties radical, which they weren’t sure he had ever been anyway. Vanessa had cupped Ben’s shoulder with her hand, and he had stretched out his arms and placed his hands out in front of him, the leaves of the trees blocked by his splayed fingers.

  Wait for me, Vanessa had thought as she’d watched her brother throw his final duffel into the backseat of their mother’s car. Her parents drove him away, and she stood alone with her four grandparents.

  “There he goes,” Tatti had said, sniffling. “Off to see the world.”

  “Oh, please,” Helen had said. “The poor kid’s going to Massachusetts.”

  Vanessa felt absolutely wicked for having eaten her mother’s party food. Would her mother be consoled or mortified to know she hadn’t enjoyed it? That her jaw actually hurt now from chewing through the frozen pastry dough and the sharp cheese sticks?

  “I’m going to help Mom,” Vanessa screamed up the stairs to her father, both hands on the banister. “I’m taking the car, okay?” She heard her mother’s tightly wound demand: Now, Vanessa, right this minute, do you hear me? and she’d felt a pang of regret that Jason had taught her to drive stick, weeks and weeks of jerking the car down these suburban streets and still she hadn’t completely mastered it. “Okay?”

  “Sure, just leave me stranded here.” Dennis dipped his head into view, then turned back to his bedroom.

  “Me too,” Vanessa said softly, grabbing the car keys from the bowl in the kitchen, pulling on her grandfather’s old, heavy black coat from the front-hall closet, and heading out the door.

  After stalling twice while backing out of the driveway, Vanessa zoomed up the block, opened a window, and lit up a Camel—finally. She lost interest in controlling the music and just clicked the radio on: Once I had a love and it was a gas. Soon turned out had a heart of glass. The song was so many layers, fused to form this perfect whole. Blondie’s bubblegum voice was somehow also edgy, the lyrics savage, drums driving hard behind her. Vanessa drove in the direction of Dupont Circle, along Connecticut Avenue, thinking of breathtaking Blondie, enviably blond, beautiful, and strong.