Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin

  “It's not fair,” Luz said. Her shoulders shook and she started to cry.

  “I know,” Marie-Claire said, putting a hand on her shoulder while her father watched. “I know it's not.”

  Lone told her about the accident. He was twenty-one, at the height of his Evel Knievel years, and was coming down a hill in the Laurentians high on cocaine, shrieking his head off out of pure joy, when he took a curve too fast and smashed sideways into a truck coming in the opposite direction. He woke up in the hospital, and the doctors told him there hadn't been anything below the knee for them to try to save.

  “What happened to the guy driving the truck?”

  “Goddamn it,” Lone said. “People always ask me that.” He slamed his beer down on the table.

  They were in his motel room, a Days Inn off the Trans-Canada. He wasn't staying with Manny because his apartment was a third-floor walkup.

  “And I say hey, you know, I've been stuck with this prosthetic fucking leg ever since, what about that?” He grabbed his leg with both hands just where, it looked like, the real part ended, and shook it a little bit, for emphasis.

  “So what happened to him?”

  “He was fine,” Lone said. “He walked away. Unlike some people I might mention.”

  “Oh, you mean you.”

  “Yes, I mean me. Very funny.”

  “Ha ha,” Kelly said solemnly. She took a swig of her beer, swallowed and sighed. “Anyway.”

  “Anyway,” said Lone. “So, do you want to see it?”

  “Do I want to what?”

  “Do you want to see my leg?”

  Kelly shrugged. The truth was that she did want to see it, badly. “If you want to show me.”

  “Well, I only want to show you if you want to see it,” he countered.

  “Then show me.”

  Lone reached down, undid his left shoe and pulled it off, then his white athletic sock. Underneath was the pink plastic foot, toeless, curved, as delicate as a woman's shoe. He started to roll up his jeans, then stopped. “You know what? This would be easier if…” he said.

  “That's fine.”

  “Okay.” He took off his other shoe and sock, then stood up and undid the buttons at his fly and balanced himself with one hand while he pulled his jeans down with the other. When he sat down again he pulled them off completely and sat there in his boxer shorts.

  She found herself looking back and forth between his face and his legs, as if this were somehow the most polite approach to the situation. He leaned back and rested his arms on the sides of his chair. “That's the prosthesis,” he said.

  She nodded, and leaned closer. It was attached to the end of his leg with a brown strap. “Can I touch it?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She started at the ankle, which wasn't really an ankle at all, no bone, little contour, just a thinness above the foot. The plastic was scratched and peeling in places, having been through God knows what trouble. Her fingers went from the ridge of the plastic onto Lone's real skin, which felt weirdly, almost wrongly soft. She rubbed her fingers up and down the hair on the side of his leg, and Lone exhaled a little laugh. She lifted his leg a bit with her left hand and slid her right hand underneath. They were sitting close together now.

  “That tickles,” Lone said.

  She unbuckled the strap that held the prosthesis to his leg and set it gently on the table next to the beer bottles. On the stub of his leg the skin was rippled and folded, as if the doctor had wrapped it like a present, and she slid her fingertips over the bumps. Some of the ridges were red, like welts. “Does it hurt?” she said.

  “No.” Lone put his hand on her shoulder.

  While they kissed, she kept her hand on his leg.

  Up in her room, Luz watched Marie-Claire walk away. She couldn't breathe without crying. Marie-Claire swung the leg back and forth as she walked, like a baseball player warming up with a bat. After she turned the corner, Luz climbed under her desk and pulled the chair in as close as she could and sat with her knees up to her chin. One of her knees had a scab from when she fell at the park a week ago. She scratched it off and watched blood well up through the skin. Hearing her father moving around downstairs, getting a drink out of the fridge, she knew he was going to sit down at the kitchen table and open the mail. Then he'd read the newspaper because he never had time in the morning. Then he'd call her downstairs and have her sit in the kitchen while he made dinner, asking her questions about what the day was like, and then she could watch TV for an hour before she had to go to bed.

  She pushed the chair away, softly, and crept out from under the desk. She could feel dry tears crinkling her cheek. She went into her father's bedroom and smelled the soapy smell that was always in there. When the floor creaked she stood still, but he didn't call upstairs or anything. Very slowly and quietly, she opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand, lifted the stack of Macleans, and pulled out the tin box. She put the joint in her pocket, closed the box and the drawer, then went into the bathroom and shut the door and looked at herself in the mirror. First she wanted to practice, to make sure it looked right when she said, Marie Claire showed me how.

  Afterwards, they were lying in bed, drowsing in and out of talk and sleep, when Lone murmured softly, “God, you know it's so true.” He shook his head.

  “What's true?” said Kelly, looking at him. His eyes were closed.

  He put his arm around her and stroked her hair. His skin was hot and sticky against hers. “Girls love the leg,” he said.

  She slept for an hour or two. When she woke up, Lone was breathing steady and slow, his hand on his chest. She got out of bed and dressed. Starting for the door, she stopped at the table and picked up the leg. She was afraid someone might ask her about it, but there was no one around. At the parking-lot pay phone she called a cab to take her back to her car at the Edge-water. There was a suggestion of light in the sky, nighttime opening up and letting go. She guessed it was around four.

  Back in her car, she put the leg on the dashboard. Then she put it on the seat beside her, the foot dipping down over the side of the upholstery, but no matter how she placed it, the leg looked splayed out, violent, accidental. There was no point, she decided, in keeping it.

  She got out of the car and walked behind the bar to the water, where waves splashed and foamed, swirling detritus around the rocks, and heaved the leg into the lake as hard as she could. It bobbed a few times before floating beyond her sight. This action felt deeply satisfying, as if it were a part of her own self she wanted to leave behind. Driving home on the highway she saw dawn lifting into the horizon, though it was still far off and had a long way to go.

  Wonders Never Cease

  The house was isolated and charming, and though they'd looked at other rentals, the first sight of this one was all it took. It was a red farmhouse at the very end of a country road, ten minutes from the small, picturesque college town, and behind it spread a hill covered, at the time they moved in, with lazy, late-summer wildflowers. The first floor had a fireplace, green wallpaper with a pattern of vines, and old-fashioned wall sconces with electric bulbs; the second floor was a warren of small bedrooms. Penny moved through the place gingerly, touching her fingertips to the wallpaper and wooden door frames, planning where things would go. Everything, for now, was still in boxes.

  When Tom went off to school every day, she unpacked, starting with the kitchen. Then, upstairs, she made herself an office, for the freelance graphic design she'd arranged with her former employer, but had a difficult time focusing on it. In the back of her mind—or, more properly, in the back of her body, a warm liquid sensation, almost like sickness, a fever that threatened but never did descend—lurked other ambitions, shadowy yet insistent plans. This was the year they would start having children.

  Sitting on an unpacked cardboard box, drinking a cup of coffee gone cold, she heard a car in the driveway. She was still used to city living, and it took her a second to realize that any vehicle this far down th
e road had to be coming to their house. Through the window she could see Irene, the landlady, getting out of her station wagon, holding something wrapped in foil. They were the first people she had shown the house to—it belonged to her daughter, who lived in Boston—and she'd taken an immediate shine to them. Shine was her word—“You're going to take a shine to this area,” she'd said—and she was shiny, too, her small, plump face glossy with August sweat and dappled with marks left by the sun over the course of her seventy years. She came, she said, from farming people.

  “I don't need to show it to anyone else,” she told them that first day. “I know you're the right people for this place.”

  “We're definitely the right people,” Tom said with his usual confidence, and Irene bestowed on him a beatific smile that revealed small, brown teeth.

  Today was warm, and Irene was huffing visibly as she came up the driveway. She was a short woman, at most five feet, and the way she beamed up at the world made her look like a character in a kids' book, some smiling, helpful gnome. Penny opened the door before she could knock.

  “I came to see how you're settling in,” Irene said, once she'd caught her breath. In the morning sunlight, the spots and wrinkles on her face stood out in bright relief. “And to bring you a housewarming present. It's my special zucchini bread.”

  Penny offered her tea, which was accepted, then sliced the bread and laid it out on a plate. When she and Tom answered the ad in the paper, they'd received a tour from Irene and her husband, Henry, an equally shiny and tiny farmer wearing overalls and a panama hat.

  “My husband's deaf!” was the first thing Irene said when Penny and Tom got out of her car. Beside her, sweat pouring down from beneath his hat, Henry nodded, as if he agreed completely.

  “He can't hear a thing!” Irene went on, yelling in their direction with an enthusiasm that seemed entirely misplaced. Henry smiled. Through the rest of the tour he walked behind Irene as she showed them what she called the grounds: the house itself, the hillside next to it, and the shed at the bottom, which she said, with a rueful shake of her head, was full of her daughter's old things.

  “How's Henry?” Penny said to her now.

  “Deaf as a post,” Irene said, and grinned. Penny felt obliged to offer, in return, a conspiratorial giggle, as if she, too, had a deaf husband somewhere around the house and fully understood just how vexing it could be.

  “It makes some things hard,” Irene said. “But it certainly makes some things a lot easier!”

  Penny laughed again, out of obligation. The late-morning light was gathering force, turning toward noon, and she was conscious of time passing, of all the unpacked boxes. But Irene was settling in, rubbing against the straight-backed chair, as if that might make it more comfortable, stroking the arms with her spotted hands.

  “It happened two years ago,” she said.

  From the fairy-tale rhythm of this sentence it was clear that her story would last a long time, and it did. But its gist was simple: Henry's hearing disappeared slowly, over a year, each day turning fainter and blurrier, like a repeated photocopy. She woke up in the middle of the night and found him sitting outside in the cold, looking at nothing, and when she spoke his name, he wouldn't answer. She thought he was distant, that maybe he didn't love her anymore.

  “I considered therapy,” she said. Penny imagined these two sweaty, gnomish farmers sitting together on a therapist's couch, working through their issues. “I kept saying, ‘Henry, it's like you can't even hear what I'm saying.’ And it turned out to be true. Absolutely, literally, true.”

  “I'm glad you got that sorted out,” Penny said.

  For a moment, Irene just stared at her, as if she could tell Penny was trying not to laugh out loud, then she beamed again. “I am too, dear,” she said.

  She stayed at the table for two hours and half a loaf of zucchini bread, telling anecdotes about the early years of her marriage, explaining how to scrub the delicate porcelain of the upstairs bathtub, urging Penny to call as early as possible to order heating oil for the winter. She was offering, in her shiny, organized way, a complete manual for life.

  That night, when Tom came home, Penny told him about Irene: the tea, the countless slices of bread, the endless advice. “Two hours disappeared,” she said, “just like that.”

  “Don't worry about it,” he said, leaning back in the same chair Irene had taken earlier in the day. Unlike Irene, he was gaunt and angular and very tall, and he could have reached across the table, without any strain at all, and touched her face with his long fingers, or her hair or her shoulder. “She's just making sure we're still the right people.”

  Feeling guilty for complaining about this harmless, doughy woman, she asked Tom about the students. This was his first real teaching job—if he did well, he hoped the appointment would be extended beyond a year—and he was beside himself with the satisfaction of being a real professor, finally, his own office in the history department building. Yesterday he'd taken out his wallet and shown her, with real pride, his faculty ID card.

  The moment Tom paused, she stood up and reached for his hand and led him upstairs to bed. She'd been doing this more and more lately, and was surprised by her own agenda. Things she'd never known she needed had recently crept up and shocked her with their force. She felt a sharp hunger for a certain kind of future. That is, she wanted Tom—as she always had—but she also wanted to own a home like this, with him, and for their kids to grow up in it, too. This need was mysterious and pure, like instinct or sex. It was as if someone had flicked on a light switch and suddenly she saw what was in the room with her, the room of her life, her heart.

  In the morning she found herself alone again, unpacking, working through the many boxes of books upstairs, and it took her a bit longer to hear the car in the driveway. For someone living in the country, she was getting a lot of visitors. She came downstairs, expecting to see Irene again, but someone else stood at the door. He was around her age, thirty, and about her height, wearing a green T-shirt, jeans, and work boots. His short, curly hair was receding at the temples. She lingered behind the screen door.

  “I'm the yard man,” he said.

  Beyond him, parked behind her car, was an old pickup, faded to the same color as his shirt. The morning was very clear, and in the distance she could hear the faint rush of the brook. His face was lined, and he had the smoky, too-sweet smell of someone who spends a lot of time in bars.

  “I didn't know there was a yard man,” she said.

  “Well, there is.” He gestured vaguely at the grass in back of him. He was wearing a bulky, too-big metal watch, and it slid up and down with the gesture. “The service comes with the house. Didn't Irene tell you? I just need to get the mower out of the shed and I'll take care of the place for you.”

  “Irene didn't tell me any of that.”

  “The mower,” he said stubbornly, “is in the shed. Otherwise I'm going to have to break off each individual blade of grass by hand, and that's going to take a very long time.”

  As an argument, it was less than convincing. Penny stepped outside into the cool shade of the porch. She did in fact have the key to the shed, although Irene had made it clear she was not to use it. The shed was storage space, for the daughter in Boston. The man shifted his weight back and forth, from one boot to the other. He needed a shave. In their tour of the house Irene, with Henry silently sweating by her side, had gone over the minutiae of the rental contract, including the watering schedule of the plants, the idiosyncrasies of the washing machine, the tendency of the third stair to inflict slivers on unsuspecting feet. These codicils took hours. There was no way she would've neglected to mention a yard man.

  “You're not the yard man,” she said, and sat down on a plastic lawn chair on the porch.

  The man shrugged, giving up without any struggle, and sat down on the other chair. He smiled resignedly. “You don't believe me,” he said, as though it happened to him often.

  They sat for a minute in almost
companionable silence. He had thick, stubby hands he folded carefully in his lap. Penny should have been afraid—a quarter-mile at least to the nearest house, and his car parked behind hers—but she wasn't.

  “What do you want?” she finally said.

  “I used to do some work around the house,” he said. “I'm guy.”

  She didn't understand. “Excuse me?”

  “My name is Guy,” he said, “although I'm also a guy. It's confusing, I know.” He held out his hand to shake, which she did; the large watch slid down his arm, toward his elbow, like a bracelet on a woman. “My friends used to call me Some,” he said. “As in, ‘There goes some guy.’ ‘Who was there last night?’ ‘Some guy.’ ”

  Penny laughed, politely. “That's funny.”

  “In a limited way,” Guy said.

  She still wasn't sure what he wanted. “So you worked for Irene's daughter? The one who's in Boston?”

  Guy snorted, then looked down at his feet. “Christine's not in Boston,” he said. “That old lady—Jesus. She's tough as nails, isn't she?”

  “Where is she, then?” Penny said. “Christine.”

  “She passed on,” Guy said, giving her a moment to register what this meant. “Car accident. A year ago now.”

  “I'm sorry,” Penny said, conscious of the rote stupidity of the words.

  Guy shrugged again, and stood up. The watch slid back down to his wrist. “You won't unlock the place,” he said.

  “No.”

  “All right, then,” he said. “Thank you for your time.” Once more he held out his hand.

  She'd barely gotten back to the books when Irene came by again, this time bearing cranberry-walnut muffins and “a wedge,” she said, “of fine local cheese.” Penny sighed; the days were getting so crowded that she hardly had time to think. They sat in plastic chairs on the front porch, and the strips cut into the backs of Penny's thighs as Irene launched into an exhaustive anecdote about the amount of state taxes she and Henry had to pay that year. The story was complex, with figures and equations, and footnotes and appendices would not have been out of place.