by Meg Wolitzer
You are svelte and well shorn. You can be bright and kind but it took a long time for you to realize that those traits wouldn’t make anyone actually like you more or less. Of all the bars you manage, you like the one by the harbor the best, despite all the tourists it attracts. You work the late shifts, and when it’s closed and the crew is mostly gone, you stare at the water. It is here where your mind becomes its most acrobatic, its most macabre and fantastical. You imagine the bodies of the dead in the bottom muck; you imagine sunken boats and cars and guns rusting, breaking down; you imagine sick, rugged, bruised fish, no-nonsense and one-eyed. You imagine walking among the fish, joining them, just stepping off the edge and plunging into the water, and the fish swarming you, using the hooks of failed fishermen to snag your skin and drag you down to live in the metallic postapocalyptic landscape they’ve created among the skeletons of people and machinery. They will eat you, bit by bit, and it won’t hurt at all, and you’ll be just a few little pieces, feather-light and scattered across the waters of the harbor and the Patapsco and the Chesapeake and the Atlantic. And one day, you’ll rise, evaporate into a cloud, and rain down on anyone who ever said they loved you, cling to their hair and drip into their ears, explore the thickets and tunnels of their minds for every thought they’ve ever had of you. You think about this all the time, enough that you’d alarm people if they knew it. You like alarming people because it’s so unlike you.
At the harbor, over the groan of water taxis and the soft night traffic of Baltimore, you also think of the girl on the dock, more than a dozen years ago and hundreds of miles down the coast in northern Florida. Some nights you think: Rush me back to the red riverbank and let me tell the girl on the dock that she can’t let us steal her tackle box. Let her know that if she lets us take it, she’ll let anyone take anything from her.
You don’t know this, but that’s what happened two decades later when she is just-turned thirty, living in a house in coastal South Carolina with a yoga instructor, a chemistry teacher, and a hairdresser. She will let them take her food, her money, her car, her dog, her clothes. After a year of it, she will finally confront them, and they will all admit, yes, they ate her asparagus, and yes, while she was in class at the culinary school, they borrowed her car to go to the beach and didn’t invite her. And yes, they took her Labradoodle with them. It was a bright March day and lovely. Her roommates tell her they left the beach when the storm clouds rumbled in off the water and the cold front hit the shore. This conversation shames her because it means they aren’t even frightened enough to lie to her, and she runs outside into the hail and slips on the slick wooden porch and bangs her head against the edge of the step. It wouldn’t have been a fatal blow if it had struck just a little lower or just a little higher, or to the right or to the left. It was just perfect.
She rests in a grave overlooking the river near her family’s home. The dock is rotted and buried at the bottom of the river. Even the red dirt is covered by maidencane and trees of heaven, as the girl’s parents lost interest in going to the river and neglected the dock once their children grew and left them. Now they simply prefer to look at the water from the comfort of their balcony. The girl’s sister, who gave her the purple galoshes, grew up to sit in large rooms with large windows and contemplate the skyline and say, this is what the city is now and this is the way it should be, and then parks and hospitals and schools and roads are built, and she nods and checks a list and frowns and bites her nails and says, “More.” She married a man from New Jersey with the same last name as you. All of this you don’t know.
On any given day, you think more about that girl on that rickety dock than about your own family, who seem more like characters in a favorite book you lent out but never got back than people you’re supposed to know. Sometimes you think of her as your sister even though she was pale and red-haired and the furthest thing from you. You only talk to your boyfriend about her, about the day your family halved like an orange. You tell him everything you remember—the old dock, your brother’s cassette tape, the hook in your thumb—because he is the most patient person you know. You tell him, in so many clumsy words, that in your child’s mind, losing your brother and your mother was a punishment for having stolen the girl’s tackle box. The child-you believed this and locked it inside your brain, and your adult mind grew up around that idea like a tree that grows next to a barbed wire fence, its trunk expanding year by year, ring by ring, burying the barbed wire deeper in its bark. It’s a silly notion, you say, and your boyfriend says people have believed sillier things. Sometimes you think that you’d like to go see the dock. Maybe figure out how to track down the girl, apologize for snatching that tackle box from her. Because even if she did just get another tackle box and everything turned out fine for her, it was still one thing she could never get back, a cherished thing, a piece of time and a piece of her that was just gone.
Your boyfriend is supportive, but then you talk yourself out of it, because is the dock still there? Who is there? Your father moved on, remaining in Florida but going farther south where he married another Cuban woman who is not your mother. And you don’t remember the name of the girl on the dock and you’re not in touch with anyone from those days who might know her. And if you could remember how to get to her house and climb those blue-painted steps and cross beneath the hanging ferns to her family’s front door, which you’ve never seen but only imagined, what would you say? What would you find? Once or twice, you’ve dreamed about that front door: you’re standing in front of it, mosquitoes buzzing around your neck, the air smelling of rain and smoke, and you tremble as that door eases open to furniture and stair bannisters and light fixtures all coated thick with dust. A shadow plods towards you, but before it reaches the door, you wake up.
Your boyfriend nods and kisses your hand. You shake your head, signaling the end of this conversation, and ask him what he’s doing for the day. He says he’s going to wash his car. He washes his car a lot, and if he’s not doing that, he’s reading, and if he’s not reading, he’s planning lessons. He teaches middle school history. You admire the way he refuses to talk shit about his students, even the ones that deserve it. He is tall and plays soccer with his brother and cousins on weekends because they are all very close and remained in Baltimore.
While your boyfriend washes his car, you call your girlfriend and then take the dogs for a run in Druid Hill Park. Since you’re not in a hurry, you let them splash in the lake. Soon your girlfriend arrives on her bicycle, and you sit, knees touching, while you get her opinion on your new cocktail ideas for a few bars around the city. Your girlfriend lives in an apartment that is beach-themed because she grew up in Iowa and always dreamed of the sea, and her salt and pepper shakers are mermaids she named Daphne and Adelaide. She writes computer software and runs social media campaigns, and she is quick to tell people that they are two very different skill sets. She fixed your boyfriend’s laptop once, and you told him it was a coworker who’s good with computers.
She tells you now that she’s just learned that her parents, after seven years of being divorced, are getting remarried in a few months, and the rest of her family seems happy about it, but for her it seems like they all must suddenly dig up the skeletons and the garbage they’d only just finished burying. You scratch her back and say you get it, and you do, because how disorienting, how messy, how exhausting it can be to drag from the depths what should remain settled at the bottom. You offer to go with her to the wedding, and she says she’ll think about it, but maybe, probably, yes.
The dogs finish their play and shake the water from their necks, and you imagine drops flung from a taut line, and you wonder where the girl on the dock is now and if she ever got more hooks and lures and how many fish she caught. You and your girlfriend stand and brush the grass off, and she asks if you’ve thought any more about a new tattoo. You say you don’t know, but you’d like to take her fishing sometime. She lowers her sunglasses over her eyes, straddles her bike, and shrugs, but you k
now this idea pleases her.
The girl from the dock did get more hooks and caught plenty of fish. Some she froze for later, and her roommates stole them. Others she prepared immediately, gutting and stuffing them with fresh rosemary, lemon, and onions, never thinking of you.
It’s your birthday, and you’ve arranged to spend the day with your boyfriend and the night with your girlfriend. He is making mimosas for you both when your brother calls and by chance you finally answer.
Two decades drop away. The past and the present spring together like a clap. Your brother’s voice is clear and high, so unlike you imagined it would be. It’s like a long, airy, nervous laugh. He wishes you a happy birthday and says he’s tried to reach you before but never felt right just leaving a message out of the blue. You say you understand. You ask him who he is now. He’s a music teacher, he says. You tell him that your boyfriend is a teacher, too. This prompts your boyfriend to step from the kitchen with his ceramic mug of mimosa and sit across the room from you on the couch, smiling encouragingly. He wears boxers and one of your sweatshirts.
You and your brother talk about your parents and all the things you don’t know, and you give him your father’s phone number, and he offers your mother’s information but you say you have it. You ask him what he remembers about that day, that last day. He says, “You first,” which is something he always did when you were young and he wanted to see you try something before he dared to. So you tell him about your mother crying over the poor, mutilated fish and your dad throwing the broken cassette and your infected thumb and the SpaghettiOs and your mother slowly explaining the plan.
“Well, that’s kind of how it happened,” he says. He tells you that, yes, you’d each caught a fish and brought them home, but it was you two who cleaned them on the kitchen table. No newspaper or towels down. Neither of you had ever cleaned fish before, but that didn’t stop you. The two of you did a terrible job, hacked them up, covered the table in guts. He laughs. “Then Daddy and Mama came home from wherever they’d been, fighting and making their plans, and it was Mama that pulled the tape from the stereo and she threw it into the mess on the table. Daddy blamed me, mostly. He was like, ‘You butchered a perfectly good fish,’ and then pointed at you and said, ‘And you butchered a perfectly good thumb.’ We all got in the truck and took you to the doctor to get a shot, and after that they bought us McDonald’s, and Mama told us what was what while she cleaned the table with the windows wide open to let out the stink of fish. Daddy sat in the corner, like he was pouting. I don’t remember us trying to run away, but it would make sense. Maybe we should’ve.”
He laughs, and so do you. You’re a little disappointed that his memory isn’t the mirror image of yours, but that’s how memory works, you realize, and you’re just glad the basics are right, and you can share this with him, and you feel close to him suddenly. You throw a grin at your boyfriend, and he winks supportively. There’s a comfortable silence, you think, between you and your brother, and then in a rush you ask him if he remembers the girl in the purple galoshes on the dock. You stole her tackle box, and it was covered in mud that got all over you both. He laughs and says no, he doesn’t remember much more about those days at all, mostly just the sun, the constant sun. You tell him in the most sardonic voice you can manage that you used to think that your parents’ split and your separation from him were karma for stealing her tackle box. You explain this to your brother, and he just says, “Our parents were two weeds strangling each other out.”
You describe the girl more, almost breathlessly: how she lived down the river from you, in a big blue house, and she was in your class, actually, and on the last day before summer break, she drew an octopus and you told her you liked it, and she said thanks and asked if you wanted to come fish with her, and you said yes, but he—your brother—said no, let’s just take her stuff and go somewhere else to fish and bring home a catch for Mama and Daddy so maybe they’d be less angry about everything. You never saw the girl after that. When school started again in the fall, someone told you her parents sent her to a private school or something.
He still doesn’t remember, and you ask him, “Where did we get the fishing gear, then?”
“Who knows,” he says. “We were always scavenging junk from one place or another.”
You persist, saying it was the girl.
“It was a long time ago,” he says, and you imagine him rolling his eyes or flicking his hand dismissively, the way your father did when you were growing up. You feel embarrassed, as if you’ve foolishly believed something for a long time and suddenly your brother has revealed to you what maybe, just maybe, everyone else has known all along: the girl on the dock does not exist and your brother never thought much of you and you are more broken than you ever understood.
“Never mind,” you tell your brother. Across the room, your boyfriend looks at you with such pity, as if, he, too, has always known during all of your stories and memories and confessions that you were misguided, silly, a fool. That look of pity, which you’ve never seen on his face before, at least not for you, feels brutal, like a betrayal, like a hook snagged in flesh. You want to hurt him.
“Sorry,” your brother says. “If that’s how you remember it, I’m sure that’s how it was.”
“Never mind,” you say again. You feel now that there is nothing left to talk about. You think that most likely you’ll never talk to him again until one of your parents dies.
He asks if you would like to Skype sometime. You say you don’t know much about it—you’re a bit of a technophobe—but your girlfriend could probably help you out. Your brother is puzzled now, and your boyfriend slurps from his mug with a violent smirk and pats one of the dogs come to sniff his bare feet. You repeat yourself, and your brother asks you to explain it—having a boyfriend and a girlfriend both—and you say that it’s a tale for another time, a cliffhanger, so he’ll have to call again to hear the rest of the story. You hang up the phone and say your boyfriend’s name. He continues to pat the dog, and when you say his name again, he speaks with the same calm, flat voice he uses when disciplining a student. He has an idea for a tattoo for your right arm, if you still insist on getting one: a cassette with the tape unraveled and a fish tangled in it, gasping for breath.
T. C. BOYLE
Are We Not Men?
FROM The New Yorker
The dog was the color of a maraschino cherry, and what it had in its jaws I couldn’t quite make out at first, not until it parked itself under the hydrangeas and began throttling the thing. This little episode would have played itself out without my even noticing, except that I’d gone to the stove to put the kettle on for a cup of tea and happened to glance out the window at the front lawn. The lawn, a lush blue-green that managed to hint at both the turquoise of the sea and the viridian of a Kentucky meadow, was something I took special pride in, and any wandering dog, no matter its chromatics, was an irritation to me. The seed had been pricey—a blend of Chewings fescue, Bahia, and zoysia incorporating a gene from a species of algae that allowed it to glow under the porch light at night—and, while it was both disease- and drought-resistant, it didn’t take well to foot traffic, especially four-footed traffic.
I stepped out onto the porch and clapped my hands, thinking to shoo the dog away, but it didn’t move. Actually, it did, but only to flex its shoulders and tighten its jaws around its prey, which I now saw was my neighbor Allison’s pet micropig. The pig itself—doe-eyed and no bigger than a Pekinese—didn’t seem to be struggling, or not any longer, and even as I came down off the porch looking for something I could brandish at the dog I felt my heart thundering. Allison was one of those pet owners who anthropomorphize their animals, and that pig was the center of her unmarried and unboyfriended life. She would be shattered, absolutely, and who was going to break the news to her? I felt a surge of anger. How had the stupid thing got out of the house anyway, and, for that matter, whose dog was this? I didn’t own a garden rake, and there were no sticks on the law
n (the street trees were an edited variety that didn’t drop anything, no twigs, seeds, or leaves, no matter the season), so I stormed across the grass empty-handed, shouting the first thing that came to mind, which was “Bad! Bad dog!”
I wasn’t thinking. And the effect wasn’t what I would have hoped for even if I had been: the dog dropped the pig, all right, which was clearly beyond revivification at this point, but in the same motion it lurched up and clamped its jaws on my left forearm, growling continuously, as if my forearm were a stick it had fetched in a friendly game between us. Curiously, there was no pain—and no blood, either—just a firm insistent pressure, the saliva hot and wet on my skin as I pulled in one direction and the dog, all the while regarding me out of a pair of dull, uniform eyes, pulled in the other. “Let go!” I demanded, but the dog didn’t let go. I tugged. The dog tugged back.
There was no one on the street, no one in the next yard over, no one in the house behind me to come to my aid. I was dressed in the T-shirt, shorts, and slippers I’d pulled on not ten minutes earlier, when I’d got out of bed, and here I was caught up in this maddening interspecies pas de deux at eight in the morning, already exhausted. The dog, this cherry-red hairless freak with the armored skull and bulging musculature of a pit bull, showed no sign of giving in: it had got my arm and it meant to keep it. After a minute of this, I went down on one knee to ease the tension in my back, a gesture that seemed only to excite the animal all the more, its nails tearing up divots as it fought for purchase, trying, it occurred to me now, to bring me down to its level. Before I knew what I was doing, I balled up my free hand and punched the thing in the head three times in quick succession.