Dr. and Mrs. Karlofsky, their eyes sad, look at their son, then at me, then at Paul’s blue corpse.
“Such a vaste,” says Mrs. Karlofsky, and for the first time I notice that there are thin, white scars all over her body. Dr. Karlofsky nods his head and says something in another language, because he can’t speak English.
Igor wipes his booger-nose on his sleeve. “If we only had a fresh brain,” he says. “I think I could use parts of it to replace the cancer and make him live.” He stares longingly at Paul’s corpse. “If we only had a fresh brain.”
I gaze at Paul on the table and my heart breaks, and flutters, and blooms. It’s Paul. He’s right there. So close, and I can have him back because the Karlofskys can bring him back. All they need is a fresh brain and Paul will be with me again and I’ll be happy.
We’ll be happy.
“There’s a fresh brain right downstairs,” I hear myself say, and I don’t care. Not one bit. “It’s a girl’s brain. Does that matter?”
M is for Maura
Who Builds a Partition
MAURA HATED HER LIFE.
She hated her dim-witted mother and her cheating father.
She hated both her fat sister and her stick-figured sister with the nervous tick. She hated her bully brother and she hated his friends, especially when she was departing a room and they whispered behind her back, calling her names like Stone Cold and Ice Queen.
Maura hated her looks, too. She didn’t care that she was asked out repeatedly and often, or that the captain of the football team stuttered when he was around her. It didn’t matter that the assistant gym teacher with the tattoos covering both arms and the brick ass often offered to drive her home in his convertible.
On the rare occasions that sixteen-year-old Maura caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, all she saw was mousy hair, too much curl, the angular face of her father and her mother’s nose. She hated the thing that stared back at her.
To Maura, it was monstrous.
Hatred was the driving force in Maura’s life and it consumed every waking moment. She hated her teachers and she hated her classmates. She hated the lunch lady with the mole on her face the size of Iowa, and she abhorred the hare-lipped custodian who smiled at her whenever she passed.
Maura even hated the family cat. Sometimes it pissed on the beanbag chair in the corner of the basement. The stench made Maura’s nose tingle. She dreamt of dispatching the beast dozens of times but her dreams remained unrealized. Besides, her fat sister would only cry for another kitty, and her sister with the nervous tick would be so overcome with emotion that she would quiver like a poodle with white dog shaker syndrome.
Her bully brother would want another pet, too, just so he could have something new to torture.
Maura hated them. She hated them all.
However, on her very long list of hates, there was something that Maura hated above all else.
Her bedroom.
Although her family’s home was unfathomably large for a family of six, her parents had long ago placed all three girls in one room on the second floor. The room was enormous—big enough, in fact, for three.
The lack of privacy in their shared bedroom was deafening and Maura pined away for a room of her own, but to no avail.
Maura suffered through her twitchy sister’s incessant tap-tap-tapping of one foot while reading teen glamour magazines, and she cringed each time her fat sister crunched on cheese corn or an equally annoying food like potato crisps or pretzel sticks.
Maura would sit beside her bed with her back up against the wall and her legs drawn in, hugging herself with her monster arms while slowly rocking back and forth, praying for her bedroom sentence to be repealed. Her warden parents, however, were resolute in their belief that all three girls would fare much better together.
She hated them for that, and her hatred burned like the sun.
When that Monday morning arrived, the day that she planned for everything to occur, she left for school ten minutes early. Her sisters didn’t care. They never waited for Maura as they walked, one shaking and the other waddling. It was easy for Maura to slip behind a neighbor’s hedge and watch them pass.
Five minutes later, her brother, along with three others boys equally as noxious, sauntered by as well. They had no book bags in hand and were passing a cigarette between them.
“I hate you all,” she whispered under her breath as they disappeared down the sidewalk. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
Ten minutes later her parents drove by in their shared mini-van on their way to work. Her mindless mother would spend the day performing repetitive, meaningless tasks at the local deaf school where no one had to suffer through her inane chatter. Her cheating father would head off to his real estate firm. No doubt when he got there, his first order of business would be to lock himself in a closet with his administrative assistant, Amber, before finagling his first listing of the day.
“I hate you, too,” she whispered when they passed, her eyes narrowing into pumpkin slits.
When she was sure no one was left to notice, Maura quickly slipped out from behind the hedge and ran back to her enormous house. The key was under the front doormat like it always was and she easily slid it into the lock, opened the door, and reached to disarm the alarm.
The password was as hateful as it was loathsome. It was her father’s pet name for her mother. Maura sneered as she punched in the letters: C-U-D-D-L-E-D-O-V-E.
Was that what he called Amber, too, when they were locked in an illicit embrace? Maura threw up a little in her mouth as the tiny light on the alarm went from red to green.
Five minutes later, after she brushed her teeth three times, she went to work.
Out of the basement, in the farthest corner from where the accursed cat piddled on the beanbag chair, she took a small hammer from her father’s workbench. Up on the second floor, she pulled her shiny, pink piggy bank down from her bookcase. Maura always hated the pig with its stupid grin and rosy cheeks. Her hatred only helped quicken her resolve to end its existence.
She spread a towel out on the thick carpet in front of her bed, tilted the fat, pink, porcelain glutton on its side, and unceremoniously wacked it with the hammer. One time was enough. Its guts ruptured, spewing silver, copper, and green entrails onto the terrycloth.
Maura didn’t care about the coins. She only cared about the green. Even though she knew how much was there as a result of being a consummate saver, she eagerly counted it anyway. Sixteen years’ worth of birthday gifts, Christmas stocking change, and the occasional babysitting stint where she was never asked back for a second time, garnered her $817.00.
“Good,” she said, as she looked up at the clock. It was just 8:30 in the morning. He would be there soon.
At ten minutes to nine, while Maura sat midway down the center staircase and mentally tallied how many things in the world she hated from apple pie to zoo outings, the doorbell rang. She slowly stood, her hand on the banister, and descended the steps like she owned the place.
Fingers McGroper was at the door. The bald-headed man with perpetual stubble and terminal plumber’s butt was wearing suspenders to keep his considerable stomach from pulling down his baggy pants. He wore a wife-beater stained with something that might have been mustard. Maura didn’t want to think about the other things that may have caused the brownish-yellow streak. Mustard was gross enough.
The disgusting little man lived behind Hung Lee’s Chinese Take-Out in a teal-striped trailer on the Irish side of town. He had earned the name Fingers McGroper years before, owing to a rumored penchant for things that are barely whispered aloud. Suffice to say, he was never asked back to play Santa Claus at The Eastfield Mall over on Boston Road.
Enough said.
Fingers McGroper hadn’t dressed like the Kringle man in a long time. He never lost the nickname, though, as practically everyone in town knew his predilections. Children were taught never to look him in the eye should he cross their path.
Fingers McGroper now made his living as a handyman. Not many people would hire him, so it was common knowledge that he would do things on the cheap and even cut corners when building codes were involved.
Maura hated him.
He was perfect.
“Okay,” said Fingers McGroper as he let his eyes goop all over her. His ogling only fueled the special brand of hatred Maura nurtured for him. “Where’s your bedroom?”
“Second floor,” she said then led him up the grand staircase and down the long hallway to where she shared the enormous room with her fat sister and the one that twitched.
“Nice place,” slurped Fingers McGroper as he pretended to peruse the triple accommodations while he actually surveyed the pretty sixteen-year-old in front of him. He licked his lips and noticeably readjusted himself in his baggy pants. “Where do you want it?”
Maura clutched the wad of money in her hand. “Over here,” she whispered with faux huskiness, and pointed to her bed.
Fingers McGroper stared at the girl’s mattress, then at Maura, and back at the mattress again. She knew what he was thinking. Even though she hated her looks and her body and everything else about herself, she knew others did not. With predatory stealth, she quietly unbuttoned the top two buttons on her blouse and sat down on her bed. She didn’t even bother to cross her legs.
Humbert Humbert would have been very pleased.
“Show me,” he oozed with a voice fueled with the oily grease left over from a double order of pork spare ribs.
Maura, hating everyone and everything, reached under her pillow and pulled out a can of black spray paint. She smiled and shook the can with vigor as the little marble inside clinked this way and that.
Then she started spraying.
The black line she made was thick and straight. She let the paint penetrate the deep piled carpet as she backed up, showing her rounded bottom to the filthy man. Maura was fully aware that he was probably standing there with his mouth open wide and his chin glistening. The hatred boiled in her stomach, but she continued drawing until she had outlined a small square around her bed, just enough for one person to be alone.
Maura had cornered off far less square footage than she was allotted, but that was okay. She was hateful, not greedy. “I want you to build the wall here,” she told Fingers McGroper. “And you promised you’d be done by four.”
“Easy peasy,” he gurgled as he unclipped one of his suspenders. “You don’t mind if I get comfortable do you?”
Maura turned away from him so he wouldn’t see her exaggerated roll of the eyes. “By four,” she said and that was all.
Throughout most of the morning, even the hour Fingers McGroper left to fetch more cinder blocks, Maura sat on her fat sister’s bed and suffered through the stench of rotted junk food coming from the mattress. At one point, the accursed cat sauntered into the room and Maura glared at it with such venom that the hair rose on its back and it capered away in that humpy, nimble way that cats do when they’re threatened.
“Good,” she said as it fled. “I hate you.”
At noon, Fingers McGroper, with sweat pouring from his wide, flat face and the sour stench of dirty clothing and Moo Goo Gai Pan rolling off of him in waves, told Maura that he needed a lunch break.
“How much is this job?” she asked, her legs uncrossed and her buttons tight against her sixteen-year-old breasts.
“Seven hundred,” he said as he leered at her again.
Maura undid another button on her blouse and moistened her lips. She looked down at the wad of twenties and tens in her hand. “I’ll pay another hundred if you can power through.”
Fingers McGroper only snorted and said, “Fine.” Under his breath he mumbled something else that Maura wasn’t sure if she was supposed to hear or not. “I’d like to power through, all right,” he muttered.
Maura hated him that much more.
A little after two, the gross little man took a step back.
“What about paint?” Maura asked.
“What about it?”
“I want it painted,” she said. “That’s what we agreed.”
Fingers McGroper had just finished installing a sturdy, metal door with a lock. Maura’s bed, with a few feet to spare, was completely cornered off. If it weren’t for the lack of paint, it might have looked like the wall was always meant to be there.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not today.”
“Why not?” asked Maura as she unbuttoned a fourth button on her blouse. “I have money.”
“I don’t want your money, little girl,” said Fingers McGroper, as he drew his chunky arm across his nose. A string of snot stretched from nostril to wrist for the briefest of moments.
“I see,” said Maura, her hatred boiling underneath her cold skin. She got up from her fat sister’s bed, a stale Fritos smell clinging to her, and sauntered past Fingers McGroper. Maura slipped through the heavy door to her new closet-of-a-bedroom and slinked over to the bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress, her bra showing through the spaces where she had opened her blouse. “I’m sure we can work something out, can’t we?”
Fingers McGroper slowly rubbed his stubbly chin as he peered through the new doorway at Maura. He looked over his shoulder, although there was nothing and nobody to see except for maybe a cat. Then he smiled and said, “Okay.”
The fat little man with one suspender hanging loose and his pants riding low underneath his girth walked through the doorway, framed in cinderblock like the rest of the wall, and went to the girl who was sitting on the bed. She was leaning back, watching him, one hand gripping her Strawberry Shortcake comforter, and the other slightly hidden under a fluffy pillow that had pictures of unicorns and rainbows on it.
Fingers McGroper licked his lips with his fat tongue, smiled, and kneeled down in front of her.
That’s how he died.
The little hammer that Maura had used to murder her piggy bank then subsequently stashed under her pillow was used once more. This time, however, the stuff that came out of the smashed and ruined object was pink and red. Maura thought the noodle-like mass, covered in swirls, was almost pretty. She didn’t hate it at all. As a matter of fact, she liked it.
How strange. The art of liking something was new for her. Maura’s world had always been defined by hate. To make sure that this new sensation was real, she brought down the hammer again and again.
“Yup,” she said to no one because there was no one left to hear her words. “I like that. I like that a lot.”
By four in the afternoon, when her sisters and brother came home from school, Maura had roughly slapped paint onto the wall and locked the metal door. It wasn’t a finished job. It was sloppy and dirty, just like the man who built it, but Maura didn’t care.
By five in the afternoon, after she had blotted out her siblings’ wrath at how horrible she was, Maura positively basked in the new sensation of liking something. She blocked out their ranting as she reveled in what she could only describe as the opposite of hate. Maura sat there, next to the new door on the new wall, with a slight smile on her face. It maddened her brother so ferociously that he slapped her once, then again, but she didn’t move. Her new feeling glossed over every other sensation.
By six in the evening, when her parents were standing in front of her, raging like she had just committed the ultimate sin, she finally looked up.
“What is behind that goddamned door?” her mother screeched.
“Who did this?” her father seethed.
Maura’s siblings stood behind them. Her fat sister was devouring a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Her twitchy sister’s left eye jerked up and down in its socket. She could barely hold on to the foul cat in her stick arms.
Her bully brother was fondling an unlit cigarette between his fingers. He was probably gauging this as the most appropriate time to tell his parents he liked a drag now and then, because anything he could do at that very moment was overshadowed by what Maura had done.
Finally, she stood up and produced a key from her pocket. “I’ll show you,” she said, and sank the jagged teeth into the dark orifice in the center of the doorknob.
With a click, the door swung open and her entire family raced inside, sandwich, cat, cigarette, stupid mother, cheating father, and all.
Maura slammed the door closed behind them, turned the key and pulled it free from the lock.
Throughout the next several days, Maura dutifully answered all the household phone calls, told her mother’s work that she had to go out of town on a family emergency, lied to Amber, saying that her sugar daddy was nursing some sort of genital pox, and told the school that the flu was making the rounds in their household.
By the following Sunday the screaming had completely stopped. Besides the lack of food and water, she supposed it had something to do with the duct tape she slathered against the crack at the bottom of the door. Maura could never be sure how much air was actually inside the room, but obviously her fat sister took up a lot of it while her twitchy sister’s nervous panting probably took up some, as well. Still, to make sure, she periodically peeled back the duct tape, poured yellow rat poisoning against the small space between the door and the floor, and blew it into the dark room with a hair dryer. Coughing and wheezing sometimes came from the other side of the door when she did that, but it diminished throughout the week.
She liked the growing silence. She liked it very much.
The following Monday morning at a little before nine, Maura took her place on the center staircase again. She clutched the wad of money in her fist and waited for the man from Craigslist.
She hated him the moment she saw him.
“I’m here to dig some holes in your basement,” he said to her, staring a little too close—looking a little too hard.
“Right this way,” said Maura, as she locked eyes with him for a moment too long.
Then she led him to the cellar door, her piggy-bank hammer behind her back, for when the job was finally done.
N is for Nancy
Who Questions Tradition
Little Killer A to Z Page 10