Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  “How do you know?” the car salesman said.

  Now, this was not the sort of response I expected from a car salesman. It seemed a simple question, but anyone could hear how it reverberated with concerns about consciousness, the possibility of interspecies empathy, whether one can ever acquire experience beyond the circle of self. “I guess, I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But the question is, really, does the fish know?”

  The salesman looked in at the fish. He tapped his pink eraser on the bowl. The fish, who was hoovering up the flakes floating on the water, suddenly darted away, then hunched at the bottom of the bowl.

  “The fish knows,” I said.

  The car salesman sensed he had a loony tune on his hands, or, better yet, a loony tune who had not done her homework. He suggested to me a car with a strange-sounding Arabic name, a Yemeni or something like that, massive, four-door, with a dashboard it would have taken a tech school education to interpret. I knew as soon as I saw the Yemeni that it was not my car, not my life, but I agreed to test it anyway. I hurt my back trying to get in. When you are in your forties, your back becomes your front; you feel it all the time, it snaps and whistles as though it is possessed of intestines. In my case, I have occasional sciatica.

  I turned the key in the ignition and the car did not so much roar as whoosh into life. It was a sunny day, our own sun, a star in midlife, burning in the blue. The car salesman had fastened a license plate to my prosthetic butt and I sped down the road, all new and huge, my name not Lauren but Jeb11. As Jeb11 I felt groundless. I felt like a fish in a broken bowl. The glass cracks and suddenly all the world is yours, if you can breathe it in. As Jeb11, in Jeb11, I saw the streets spiraled out across the world and I could, if I wanted to, drive and drive. I could steal this car in a snap. I could go to Vermont, or Oregon. I could feed any fish I wanted. I could stop writing and become a painter. I could sell houses in Silicon Valley. I could swim with the dolphins and feel their suede-gray skin set everything in its place, right the tilt to the world. As Jeb11 I saw the truth as it exists for women like me in today’s day and age. I may be dying, but I am also just coming alive. In 2005, my chances of living another forty-two years were pretty good. Now I’m sure I’ve jinxed myself and that I’ll be dead tomorrow, knock wood. But I no longer need be superstitious now that I’m forty-two. I can take testosterone and grow zits and muscles; I can take estrogen and brightly bleed. I can join a gym. I can play the piccolo. I am in my midlife, and this has many possible meanings, one of which is that the glass is half full.

  In any case, I did not buy the Yemeni because, in both the long and short run, I am not Jeb11. I decided on a used car, one that would allow my kids a college education. Besides, there was no need to rush what was fast becoming an enlightening experience of self-redefinition. Why should I buy a new car when I am used? Shouldn’t a used person get a used car? Should not a car reflect who you are, not who you wish to become? Yes, yes. Of course.

  Not far from where I live is a used-car lot with a shack slumped at the side, and on the shack a sign saying “Charlie’s.” I’d seen this place for years but never had I considered that someday I might go there. I went there. The cars were crammed into the lot, so you had to pick out the aisles between them and squeeze through. Every sales tag pasted on every windshield had an exclamation point after its price. Every car sported a sporty flag, red or green, snapping in the wind, lending the vehicles a feeling of animus, as though they might begin to tap-dance on their tires. Charlie was a pudgy, mustached man who spoke mostly Portuguese, which seemed for some strange reason to enhance our communication rather than limit it, despite the fact that I speak no Portuguese. I speak only English. In high school I took German, French, and Latin, and in elementary school I knew Hebrew, but those languages have vanished from my life, leaving barely a trace of their shapes, a ghostly half-fogged alphabet. I know this because recently I have tried to reclaim my languages. I tried reading a child’s book in German, a book that once would have been well below my Brecht reading level, and practically the only words I recognized were Welt and Kindergarten. I tried reading Camus in French, something that was once a breeze for me, and the little black words squirmed all over the page like parasites. People say that once you learn a language you retain its traces in your gray matter, a kind of print in perpetuity, a cortical calligraphy. This is not true for me. If my brain ever had a forever archive, a little locked trunk where feathers and fantasies and memories and words were stored in an airtight space, that trunk itself is gone now. Things disappear. Whole languages go back into the black hole that is your head. If you look at a picture of brain cells, you can see there are spaces between the synapses, little slits like trash chutes in apartment buildings.

  Charlie was speaking to me in Portuguese and pointing to a teal-green Subaru, a car that appeared very relaxed, like a green lizard snoozing in the sunshine on the lot. The sign in the windshield said seventy thousand miles, three thousand dollars. At one point, when I was thirty-three, seventy thousand miles would have been too much for me. Who would buy a car on its last legs? But that was when I was thirty-three, almost a decade ago, and time has a way of altering its values. When I was six, twenty-six was impossibly old. Now that I’m forty-two, seventy is spry! I try to convince myself of this. If there was ever a need to learn physics, it occurs at midlife. All those questions about traveling in a rocket ship at the speed of light, gone for what seemed like two seconds, only to return to earth and find that thousands of years have passed, and you are alone—this is a midlife metaphor. How can time move so fast and so slow? Why do a feather and a stone fall at exactly the same rate? Am I feather or a stone, and does it matter if the plummet is singularly so swift? What is a light year? What is light? What is a quark? I have begun to sense the utter oddity of the natural world. Nothing is what it seems. Stare for a long time at your yellow wall. It dissolves into thousands of pieces of particles, and the yellow itself breaks down, releasing its compressed components of bright white and lime green and purple. The world comes apart, and it is lovely.

  This time, I did some research. My friend Elizabeth had a Subaru, and she said it was a great car, even though she gave it up for a minivan. Consumer Reports gave the Subaru five stars, except for the 1988 Brighten, which had some mysterious steering-wheel malfunction. I test-drove the car. It had a strange murmur in its engine, but Charlie communicated to me that a car murmur is not much different than a heart murmur—no beeg deel. He would have it fixed.

  “I want you to change the brake pads, change the oil, get it inspected, check the tires, change all the fluids, and if it pans out, I’ll take it.” Charlie agreed. I left the lot after that last exchange feeling high and mighty, feeling suave and smart. I drove a hard bargain. I was not to be fooled.

  That night, my daughter’s hamster, Fid, escaped from his cage, and I rescued him by carving through the heating ducts with a steak knife and yanking him triumphantly from the jagged rip. Before bed, I took out my pastels and used their blunt tips to draw rich blue lines and ochre spirals across the white paper. I went to bed happy. I woke up happy. I thought I could draw the sun; I thought I could see its blackness and its brightness all in one. I went to the bank and got a bank check for three thousand and some odd dollars, and then I brought the check to Charlie, and then I bought the car. A new car! Congratulations!

  For three months, I drove it happily. Spring turned to summer turned to fall. In October, the highway shone before me like a swath of hammered silver. The trees on the sides of the road were a deep midnight green; the birds, bright flecks in the branches. The hill before me, suddenly before me, ascended sharply, at its rounded top a soft smudge of clouds. I climbed and climbed. After three good months, I had confidence in that car. I had confidence until the moment I saw smoke tendrilling out from beneath its clamped hood.

  “Smoke,” I thought. Sometimes you see things and they don’t register as they should. I saw the smoke, but I did not react. I marveled at its
purple tinges, its wooly texture. Then, in a snap, that smoke turned black, and faster than abracadabra the car caught fire in a sort of vehicular temper tantrum, coming out of nowhere, spewing in public. I didn’t have time to be scared. I must have pulled over to the side of the road, although I don’t remember doing this. I do remember yanking the hood release, and I do remember that the hood release broke off in my hand.

  I stood on the side of the road, then, and watched my new used car burn, holding the hood release, feeling as humiliated as I was frightened. Someone in a passing car must have called the fire department, because I don’t have a cell phone. With their tough rubber hoses the firemen smashed the flames flat until all that was left of my purchase was a charred hull. I got it towed. The firemen gave me a ride home. I had never ridden in a fire truck before. I did not feel good about it. The firemen seemed to think the broken hood release was especially funny. One used it as a back scratcher. “Time to get a new car,” they said to me. I picked at the canvas skin of a hose coiled next to me. “That was my new car,” I said. When the fire truck pulled up in front of my house, all my neighbors came onto their porches to see. They did not expect to see me, climbing down the chrome steps, helped by a man in a trench coat and hip-high rubber boots. “Thanks,” I said. I waved good-bye using the useless hood release, holding it high.

  I wandered around my house for a while after that, dazed, and then I called Charlie. “Too bad,” he said to me in what seemed to be remarkably good English, “too bad, but your ninety-day warranty has expired.”

  Expired. Ninety days. I have been had. I am sucked on, sucked down, sucking, and I cannot stop. If you were to look at the planet Earth from far enough away, you would see the grids of gray land and the haze of creamy clouds, and also you would see what seemed to be snow, an always storm, falling not down but up, and you would wonder why a snowstorm was falling up, a snowstorm that defied gravity, until you realized that was not snow but souls, billions of them every second dying and rising and swiftly being sucked into the atmosphere. And I am mad. I, like my car, have a temper. My husband frequently says he refuses to buy life insurance due to my temper. He is a little afraid I might get mad and shoot him for the money. “But honey,” I have tried to explain to him, “that’s so premeditated. I’m not the type to kill in a premeditated way. I’m more the type to do it on impulse. So I think you should buy the life insurance.”

  Charlie, beware. I was mad. I am woman, hear me roar. But the roar was not about gender or rights. It was a roar into the darkness, the cheapness, and the fire. I went to my closet and got all dressed up in my very best suit. I had a plan that I had not really planned. It had just come to me, roaring, an insane inspiration. I would dress up like a lawyer and go down to Charlie’s slumped shack, disguised, and do something threatening. But what? I buttoned my whalebone jacket. I zipped up the silk-lined skirt. My heels were high and sharp and sounded like scalpels on the glossy wood floor of my kitchen. This was noontime, the husband at work, the kids in school, no one to witness this insanity. It was insanity, because no matter how much makeup I put on my face, I still looked like Lauren, not a lawyer. There is a great gulf between Lauren and a lawyer, I realized, frantically dabbing foundation on my face, that even Clinique could not bridge.

  Eventually I stopped this madness. But I was not calm. My fingers still smelled like soot from the burnt car. A few hours later, towards the end of the day, still dressed as a lawyer but only halfway hidden, I went to the phone and called Charlie.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “This is attorney Frances Bacon from the law firm Cabot, Cabot, and Lowell calling on behalf of my client Lauren Slater.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Lauren Slater,” I said, and saying it made me real. “Her name is Lauren Slater and she bought a used car from you that caught fire and thus violates statute 345 and 822bca regarding the condition and safety of used vehicles in the state of Massachusetts.”

  Charlie didn’t say anything. I had him, hooked. My hook.

  “My client is here with me now and planning to sue for damages on several counts,” I said.

  “I told her,” Charlie said, “I told her, I told her I would take back the car, give her a new one.”

  “My client reports a very different story,” I said.

  “I have a nice red station wagon,” he said.

  “My client demands her money back and five thousand dollars restitution or she will proceed with a lawsuit,” I said. I sounded so unlike myself. I sounded so official, so lawyerly, so multivoiced and tonally complex. It was like learning a new way of speaking, new kinds of consonants, knowing all the while the knowledge was friable. I became a lawyer and the lawyer brought me Lauren, with her laws and limits and humor.

  The next day, I took my two children, Clara and Lucas, with me to Charlie’s to collect my refund plus “bonus.” I wanted Charlie to see that he could have killed my kids. Looking back on it now, I see the gesture as melodramatic and insulting, not to any one person so much as to motherhood itself. My kids are beautiful, and they are not symbols but skin. Motherhood, like life itself, is never clearly drawn, while melodrama always is. I had suffered, but so had Charlie, of course. I was a good mother, but I also was not, of course. My kids, in any case, did not cooperate with this ploy. They were obnoxious in the slumped shack. Lucas, my two-year-old, kept trying to honk all the horns. Clara, my six-year-old, kept saying, “Let’s get a four-wheel drive!” Lucas found the water dispenser and, unbeknownst to us, turned on the tap and caused a small flood. I left, check in hand, apologizing for my mess. This is as it should be. Strong and sorry both.

  I have not yet bought a new car. I am now, thanks to Charlie, five thousand dollars richer than I was. And I don’t think I’m going to get a new car after all. I think I’ll save my profit and instead use it to get a gown or a motorbike, or take a trip to Osaka, where my sister is living, and dying, eating seaweed, learning a new language that for a short time anyway will not replace the old one; she will have two languages. Two ways of talking. Two different words for grief and gladness, old and young, beginnings and endings. Hello and good-bye.

  17

  Dolled Up

  I have an idea. It’s not a new idea, as people from time immemorial have been suggesting that your inner state—happiness, serenity, and so on—depends at least in part on how you look. But I’ve always disregarded any advice that has to do with sprucing up, preferring to rely, instead, on chemical concoctions to tamp down or even transform my depression, which has been with me for so long now I know it like a friend. My depression, for instance, inhabits my heart and takes the shape of a small speckled stone worn smooth by my body’s currents, its contours changing over time while its weight remains precisely the same. My depression does magic. Poof! It always, reliably, disappears around four or four thirty in the afternoon and then slam! Bam! It returns each day at dawn, settling in all morning and for much of the afternoon, sapping my energy, stealing colors from trees and leaves and socks and spoons, so even my miniature teacup, a relic from centuries past and painted the most delicate resonant yellow, even that falls flat while I watch my world drain down and out until, in the end, everything looks like a carbon copy of what it once was, still and silent, as if under some spell.

  I’m not complaining, or if I am I don’t mean to be. Thanks to antidepressants I now have seven hours more or less of good, clear time, and I try to use it well, ticking off items on my to-do list, trying to tie up my business, so when disability comes at least my things will be in order. Still, seven waking hours is not a lot, a mere fraction of the fifteen or so most “normal” people have in a day. Last year I spent eighty dollars on a huge silver-rimmed clock from Pottery Barn, the kind of clock they once had in old- fashioned train stations, with big black hands and ticks so loud it’s as if each one comes with its very own exclamation point. My family complains about my clock, which I have hung in the hub of our house, the library, the place for play a
nd reading, but I need it there, right where I can hear it best, a constant reminder of my dilemma and its demands.

  Given my very tight timeline, it should come as no surprise that many things in my life fall to the wayside. My taxes, for instance, are always, always late. I cannot indulge in frippery and frills, in long soaks in a tub full of beads or bubbles, or spritzes of perfume pumped from a crystal bottle, the mist landing lightly on the pulse in the nook of the neck. I do not adorn myself, no necklaces or bracelets, no earrings, despite the fact that each lobe is perfectly pierced. I shop for my children’s clothes, flying through Target as fast as I can, ripping from the racks the pants and shirts and skirts that society demands they wear. As for myself and what I wear? I’m embarrassed to say. Right now I’m dressed in a pair of pajama-like pants, the hems frayed, the elastic gone loose at the waist so the pants slump down and sit on my very abundant hips. On top I’m wearing a floppy gray shirt stained here and there with various seepages and spills. My hair is two-toned; the bottom, an anemic yellow—think faded paper, think sepia. The “roots” are now halfway down my head, wiry grays, the occasional silky dogwood-white. On the windowsill in the bathroom sits an unopened box of colorant, “pure brown” the box reads, while pictured above the words is a woman with hair seal-smooth and swinging. I keep meaning to dye my strands, but I never have the time unless, of course, I could somehow make use of those stone-still hours of grief that daily descend on me, sending me straight to my bed, a quilt over my head.

  The truth of the matter is I’m a schlump, a frump, my clothes second-hand and utterly without style, dirt in my otherwise nacreous nails, like a line of toner at the base of the beds, the nails themselves without shape, their excess hacked off every few months, making my already stubby fingers look still more so. Once, what seems like many moons ago, a publicist insisted I purchase an Ann Taylor suit for a CNN interview about a book I’d recently written. I remember the mall, empty that Sunday morning, and in the store how the tiny suit fit my then-tiny form just so, making me look more like a lawyer than the frumpy writer I was. For a while I loved that suit and even wore it around the house, but, like most transformations, it all went up in dust after the novelty wore off, and the suit was retired to the back of my paint-peeled closet, where it hangs today covered in a plastic pouch.