by Alix Ohlin
“No, it's not. It's not what I need to learn at all!” He curled his hands into fists and beat them against Erica's chest. Gayle flinched. He was hitting hard.
“Okay, that's enough,” Erica said. “You're taking a time-out.” She scooped him up by the waist and carried him inside, his legs thrashing behind her like he was swimming. Gayle wondered what she'd do when he got too big for her to pick him up. The head alone would soon be too big, at the rate it was growing.
While her sister and the kid were waging the mac-and-cheese war inside—she could hear, through the sliding glass doors, the muted arias of his continuing screams—Gayle sat down in a lounger by the pool. A mountain laurel hung over a corner of the shallow end, its blue flowers bent down, as if drawn to the blue water. It was a brilliantly sunny day in early April, eighty-five degrees, the perfect season to be back in Texas. She always tried to line up sales conferences in sunny places this time of year: Florida, Arizona, southern California. There were conferences going on in every state, every weekend, at every hotel, and Gayle sometimes thought it wasn't sales that kept the economy going, wasn't in fact any particular industry or service, but the conferences themselves. She'd chosen this one so she could see her sister and family, a decision she knew she'd regret almost immediately but had made anyway, because her parents would have wanted her to.
The glass doors slid open, then closed, smooth on their runners. Erica's husband came outside, carrying two glasses, and handed her one.
“Henry Higginbottom,” Gayle said, and took it. “Hank.” In the eight years he and Erica had been married, Gayle had never gotten tired of saying his name. They hugged. Henry was wearing khaki shorts and a button-down shirt and he sat down in the lounger next to her. His legs were pasty white. He had a job teaching biology at the university. All the Higginbottoms were nerds: teachers, lab technicians, civil servants. They all wore glasses, too, and in the wedding photos—taken on a day as bright as today—their eyes were often hidden behind the lenses, which caught and reflected the Texas sun.
“So, how's the conference?” he said.
“Oh, you know.” Gayle sipped her drink, which was gin, and enjoyably strong. “Power Point slides, vendors, cocktails. The usual. It's nice to take the afternoon off.”
“Always be closing,” Hank said. “That's the extent of what I know.”
“That's pretty much the gist of it.”
“So have you been? Closing?”
“Sure.”
“I'd suck at it. Schmoozing and handshaking.”
Gayle shrugged. “It's easy if you don't take it personally. It's just your job, you know? It's just the things you sell. It's not you.”
“So basically you're saying you have no soul.”
“I leased it to the company,” she said, “in exchange for a thing called money.”
Hank laughed, and she smiled at him. The two of them had always gotten along.
In the distance, the kid kept on screaming. Then, in an instant, he stopped, and behind his glasses Hank raised his blond eyebrows.
“She used the secret weapon,” he said.
Moments later, Erica and Max came outside holding hands. Max had a pacifier in his mouth, and the redness of his face was paling to a moderate rose.
“I thought we were trying not to do the pacifier thing anymore,” Hank said.
“Were you in there just now?” Erica said.
“Okay,” he said.
“I'm going swimming,” the kid removed his pacifier to say. He ran to the other end of the pool, where the steps were, and sat down on the top one. He was still wearing his regular clothes, a T-shirt and shorts. He had Higginbottom coloring, light blond hair and alabaster skin. Without looking at them he started splashing quietly around the top step, humming to himself, seeming perfectly happy. It was as if Erica had given him a quickie lobotomy inside the house.
“Drink, honey?”
“No, thank you,” Erica said tightly. She pulled up a lawn chair and sat down next to her husband. She'd gained a solid fifteen pounds since the last time Gayle had seen her, and her dye job had grown out so her hair was now half blond, half dark brown: half Higginbottom, Gayle thought, and half Swanger. She wasn't working these days, and Gayle had hoped maybe she'd be more relaxed than usual, but this was not the case. She was staring gloomily at Max, who was making a boat capsize in the water, over and over again, and imitating, in his high, delicate voice, the siren wails of imaginary people being thrown overboard. He'd taken out the pacifier and set it on the cement amid a scattered rainbow of toys. Gayle waited for Erica to say something about this, but she didn't. The three of them just sat there watching the kid play, as Gayle had noticed parents often did: too exhausted to maintain their own conversations, they gazed at their children as if they were television.
“He's sure gotten a lot bigger,” she eventually said.
“Shockingly,” Erica said.
Gayle and Hank exchanged looks.
“Max has been having some trouble at school,” he said. “It's been a little rough around here lately. We keep getting these calls.”
“I keep getting these calls,” Erica said. “Hank doesn't get the calls.”
“Young rebel,” Gayle said. “What's going on, exactly?”
Hank glanced at Erica before answering, but she was still staring at Max in the pool. “There's been some aggressive behavior, I guess? I'm sure it's not a big deal. Happens to lots of kids, I think.”
“Aggressive behavior,” Gayle said. “What kind?”
“Well, one thing, most recently, is that he pulled a teacher's pants down. She was telling him that he had to pull his pants down to go to the bathroom, and he insisted that she do the same thing.”
“Only fair,” Gayle said.
“That's what he said. But she refused, and I guess he just grabbed her waist pretty hard and pulled her pants down, and her underwear came down too, so she was exposed in front of like twenty kids. She wasn't very happy about it.”
Gayle snorted. “I bet not.” She looked up at the blue Texas sky. She was wearing a skirt—she'd come straight from a lunch meeting—and the sunlight hit her shins with a pleasant weight. “The little monster. Must be the Swanger in him.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come on, Erica.”
“Come on where?” Erica said, opening her eyes wide. The skin beneath them was puffy and dark.
“Well, we had our own issues, I guess, is all I'm saying.”
“We did not.”
“We did too.”
“What kind of issues?” Hank said.
“I guess in today's parlance you'd call it aggressive behavior,” Gayle said. “Kicking, hitting, biting.”
“Biting?”
“That was you,” Erica said, “not me.”
“Well, the biting was.”
“You bit people?” Hank said.
“Just Erica,” Gayle said. “Sank my teeth right into her flesh.” She hesitated for a second, knowing that telling this story would make Erica mad. Although virtually everything Gayle did made Erica mad. All their lives it had been this way, and even more so since their parents had died, leaving the two of them abandoned, undiluted. They'd died within months of each other—both of cancer, as united in illness as they'd been in marriage—shortly after Max was born, and Gayle and Erica had just barely made it through the funerals without arguing. Yet Gayle still called her sister, still wrote and visited, the same as when they were kids and she wouldn't stop going into Erica's room, even when her parents told her to leave well enough alone.
“Why'd you bite her?”
“She had my doll. My Cabbage Patch doll.”
“I remember Cabbage Patch dolls,” Hank said. “Vaguely.”
“She took the doll, and the birth certificate, and everything.”
“You weren't taking care of her,” Erica said. “There was mold growing on her back.”
“That was because of the air-conditioning uni
t,” Gayle said. “Not my fault.”
“A responsible parent would've noticed.”
“I was like eight,” Gayle said. “So anyway, I went into Erica's room and took the doll back. And okay, I took some of her stuff, too. Her My Little Ponies and Strawberry Shortcakes.”
“She took all my toys,” Erica said.
“It's okay, honey,” Hank said, and put his pale hand on her arm. Gayle wondered what was with all these honeys. Judging by Erica's reaction, or lack of one, it was a completely useless endearment.
“And I arranged them in a, uh, tableau, would you call it, Rica?” she said.
“I wouldn't call it anything.” She turned her entire body toward her husband. “It was the most sadistic thing you ever saw in your life. Those poor dolls. Some of them were hanging in little nooses from the bookshelf. And the other ones, Strawberry Shortcake and Raspberry Tart—they were being, you know, molested by the ponies and stuff.”
“Raspberry was a tart,” Gayle said, “and Strawberry wasn't as innocent as she looked, either.”
“You are sick,” Hank said.
“She always has been,” Erica said. “I bet Dino finally figured that out. What happened to Dino, anyway, Gayle? I thought you two were engaged.”
Gayle gazed at her levelly, choosing not to blink, just as she would at accounts who tried to string her along, get free drinks and lunches without ever committing to the deal. “He ordered a child bride from the Philippines instead,” she said, and Hank laughed. “Anyway, so Erica took back all the toys, plus the Cabbage Patch doll and Aerobics Barbie, and set them on fire in the backyard.”
“You did not,” Hank said.
“I was very upset,” Erica said. “You should've seen that tableau.”
“The smell of burning plastic was all down the street. It was intense,” Gayle said. “We had this babysitter who always took naps, and when she woke up the stuff was already melting. She never worked in that neighborhood again, I'll guarantee you. We both got into a lot of trouble, and our parents locked us in our rooms while they tried to figure out what to do with us. I was so mad at Erica for burning my toys. I've never been so mad in my whole life. To this day I don't think I've ever been that mad. Our parents unlocked the doors when we went to sleep that night, and I crept out of bed in my nightie and went into Erica's room and put my teeth on her arm, and I didn't stop until I tasted the blood in my mouth. She screamed like you wouldn't believe.”
“Jesus,” Hank said.
Erica sat rigid in her chair.
The wind blew coolly against Gayle's cheeks, and she realized she was flushed. In her memory she could taste the blood, its unmistakable metallic warmth, this liquid iron at the back of her throat. Over the years she'd tasted her own blood plenty of times—chapped lips, hangnails, paper cuts—but never anyone else's, except Erica's.
“Aerobics Barbie?” Hank said after a while.
“She came with a little radio,” Gayle said.
“You never told me any of this,” he said to Erica.
She reached out her forearm and showed him the scar: a jagged half moon sunk forever into the skin.
“I always thought that was from a shot or something,” he said.
“Nope,” Gayle said. “From me. So anyway, maybe that's where Max gets it from, his Swanger blood.”
The kid had gotten out of the pool and had his pacifier back in his mouth. He had a different toy in his hand now, something in flesh-colored plastic, and he was spinning by the edge of the water to make it fly around his body in circles.
“Will you stop saying that?” Erica said.
“She's only kidding, honey,” Hank said. “Don't take it so seriously, okay?”
“Don't tell me what not to take seriously, honey,” Erica said, standing up. “I've had about enough of you telling me not to take things so seriously.”
Hank put his drink down on the concrete patio. “I only meant—”
“It's not like the Higginbottoms are God's gift to the world, you know,” Erica snapped. “Every single one of them would rather have a drink than an actual conversation with an actual human being. It's not like they're so perfect.”
“I didn't say they were,” he said. He stood up with his glass in his hand. “I'm going to get another drink. Gayle, do you want another drink?”
“No thanks,” Gayle said, although no one was listening to her.
“Don't walk away from me,” Erica ordered. He did. “Max, stay out here with your Aunt Gayle.”
If the kid heard this, he didn't show it. The glass doors slid open and closed, twice.
Gayle kicked off her sandals and sat down by the side of the pool, sticking her legs in the water. Max was on the other side, sitting on the steps of the pool again, making noises that sounded like gunfire and bombs. He'd taken his shirt off, and his skinny little chest was as white as office paper.
“Hey, Max,” she called, “what are you playing?”
He ignored her, focusing instead on his symphony of explosions. It was a war zone over in the shallow end. His fair hair was plastered to his big head. Gayle's thoughts moved, listless with gin and sunshine, to Dino. The child-bride thing wasn't actually that far from the truth. Although the girl was not technically a child; she was twenty. Old enough to be legal, young enough that she wouldn't give Dino a hard time about marriage and children.
“The perfect woman,” Gayle had said, and Dino had only nodded; he was always honest, which was supposed to be one of his good qualities. “I don't know why you were with me in the first place,” she'd told him, “if that's what you want.”
“No, you're great, Gayle. But—you push too hard. You can't let things, I don't know, unfold.”
“I put my cards on the table. What's wrong with that?”
“Nothing, I guess,” he'd said thoughtfully. “You just sometimes have the wrong cards.”
“Oh, I could kill him,” she said now, to herself but out loud.
This made the kid look up. “Kill the beast!” he said. He was holding up the flesh-colored toy: a figurine of a man with muscular arms, wearing a red shirt. One of the arms was partially extended, the other bent, but whatever he was about to shoot someone with had gone missing. “I'll lock you and your father in the cellar, unless you marry me!” the kid said.
“No offense, Max,” Gayle said, “but I don't really know you that well. Plus we're related and everything.”
The kid's eyes were glazed and unfocused and he kept shaking the figurine at her, its one arm extended; she understood it was the figurine who was supposed to be speaking. “Kill the beast, chase you with wolves, lock you up!”
“The beast?” she said. “Like Beauty and the Beast?” The figurine nodded its whole body wildly in agreement. Leave it to this kid, she thought, to concentrate on all the most violent parts of the fairy tale. In his hands, it wasn't a story about love; it was an action movie, a mob scene, a hostage-taking. “Do you really want to kill the Beast? Isn't he a good character in the end?”
“Not to me!” the figurine said loudly.
“Well,” she said, thinking of Dino, “I guess I know how you feel.”
The kid made a strangled, wordless noise and threw the figurine in the water, where it floated on its back, its muscular arms extended toward the bottom of the pool. Then he threw a plastic ship at it, and the two toys rippled slowly forward, spinning as they floated toward Gayle. For a moment he stared at her, a look of shock and desperation on his face; he hadn't intended this to happen. Then he stepped farther into the pool and started splashing the water in an ineffectual attempt to turn the toys back in his direction. Actually he wasn't splashing the water so much as slapping it, hard, all the while making animal sounds of frustration. Just as he had slipped into a happy mood earlier, he seemed now to have lost, in an instant, all ability to form words.
“Max,” Gayle said, but he ignored her. The toys he'd flung away were suddenly the only ones he wanted, and all the others lay abandoned behind him. His
face was getting redder and redder, and a pink flush was spreading down his white chest, too. The sun was hot and strong and he was going to get a burn, she thought; so was she. She dipped her hands in the pool and splashed her face. When she opened her eyes, the kid was all the way in the water, paddling frantically toward his toys, having difficulty holding his huge head above the water, and terrible gasping noises were coming out of his nose and mouth. He'd moved about three feet into the center of the pool, out of the shallow end, but the wake of his awkward swimming had only pushed the toys further away from him.
“Max,” Gayle said, “can you swim?”
The kid's eyes—pale blue, unfocused, Higginbottom eyes— moved toward her, his lips moving soundlessly, and his arms flailing around in a circular movement that didn't look even close to the crawl. Gayle saw the enormous blond head sink lower and lower until it was beneath the surface of the water, and his pale, small feet were kicking in a sideways frenzy that wasn't going to do him any good at all.
She jumped into the pool and swam over to him. The kid was spazzing out in the water, his limbs going in all directions, and when she reached him he kicked her in the stomach, hard. She kept trying to grab his body, but his skin was slippery and each time he wriggled out of her grasp. Her skirt twisted itself around her waist. Something scraped her leg—a toenail? a toy?—and she couldn't see clearly, the water so frothy from all the commotion. Finally she got hold of his midsection and heaved herself up. The kid was scraping his hands up and down her arms, and she broke the surface saying, “Ow, damn it, Max,” and he was screaming with what she thought was panic but then realized, as his arms kept extending behind her, was rage: he was still reaching for his toys and couldn't get them. In his anger he kneed her in the chest and she choked and sank down, the two of them wrestling. She couldn't believe how strong he was, how capable he was of pulling her down. He'll kill me, she thought for one crazy second. Then, with a last push, she got him into the shallow end and carried him out. There was a piercing sound in her ears, which, she now became aware, had been going on for some time. It was her sister, who tore Max out of her grasp and wrapped him in a towel and her own arms, shrieking all the while.