by Carol Anshaw
When the spider-kids have squealed at the scary bowl, taken candy bars, and begun their retreat toward the sidewalk, Cate, holding the bowl, says, “Just think. This was someone’s job. She got home from the casting call and told her husband, ‘Honey, I got a gig today.’ And he said, ‘Oh baby, that’s great. What’s the play?’ And she said, ‘Well, I won’t be on a stage, it’s more of a dramatic-narration thing.’ ”
“ ‘But with a big impact on the audience,’ ” Neale says.
* * *
Neale goes inside, then brings out a couple of Coronas. They each eat a fun-size Snickers. Sailor gets a Milk-Bone, then Neale says, as she does quite often, “I’m a terrible parent.” This time it’s about Joe’s lunch. He’s been getting the one they sell at school. “He insisted. It’s apparently social death if you bring a sandwich in a bag from home. I never thought to ask what the school served. I guess I was thinking of the old cafeteria with ladies in hairnets ladling out vegetable soup, but now it’s premade meals, and I asked if they offered vegetarian options and he gave me the look of welcoming me to the planet, and so I gave in and now I just pay for the lunches at the beginning of the week. Then he started getting zits and I asked if the lunches had any fried foods in them. He said a better question would be if they had any unfried foods. Like yesterday it was fried chicken tenders. What are those even? Chicken rectums? The vegetable was fries and the dessert was fried apple pies. I’ve got to figure out some other way. Maybe I fix him a lumberjack breakfast and he just brings an apple for lunch, then I fix something intensely nutritious for dinner. Something with kale. Why didn’t I twig onto this sooner? I know why. Because just handing over the lunch money was the path of ease and ignorance.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Cate says, and brushes her two knuckles across Neale’s cheek.
There was a time when this contact would have been way too loaded with subtext. Cate and Neale have been friends since ninth grade, through Cate’s straight years, then her fake straight years, then her coming out after holding on to the secret a little too long. She was already sleeping with women by the time she told Neale she thought she might be interested in sleeping with women. Their friendship for a time became tentative, folded around confusion, hovering over its former version. They had to not talk about whether Cate had been in love with Neale, which of course she had. And whether Neale aided and abetted that, which she probably did. Now all that is far behind them. While she can remember particular events, Cate can’t call up the emotional content anymore, even though there was so much of it. This, she supposes, is the drape that closes off pain so everyone can get on with the rest of life.
“Do you think this is the worst house on the block?” Neale says.
“No. The green house is the worst.”
“Because they keep chickens in the back.”
Neale’s neighborhood is changing, bettering itself, but slowly. Tonight they get a few upmarket kids, like Frida Kahlo in a body cast with a chubby Diego Rivera. But there’s still a steady traffic of dispiriting visitors. Earlier, a homeless sort of couple showed up—a large, lumbering guy with a childlike face and a cartoon—Cate couldn’t make out the character—tattooed on the side of his neck. With him was a small, wiry woman, eerily tan and smelling of washable parts that hadn’t been exposed to daylight or water in a while. “Trick or treat,” they said, in tandem, with absolutely no human inflection. Candy-seeking cyborgs. Sailor growled. Cate distracted him. It’s embarrassing when your dog growls at people because they are poor. Or in wheelchairs. Or fat, which sometimes happens, and who knows what that’s about.
And there are still more to come—whole families, children and adults, none of them in costume. One has just arrived, each member holding out a thin plastic grocery bag.
Trick or treat, hahahahaha!!!! the witch’s hand screams at them.
None of them squeals or laughs or smiles or even seems to take notice of the writhing hand or its crazy talk. They appear beleaguered. All of them have combed but extremely dirty hair. They are wearing super-cheap sneakers that appear to be made from cheesecloth and Styrofoam. Maybe this family has just arrived from someplace where they have already been seriously scared, not just by a crappy rubber hand. Each of them, including the mother and father, takes two Snickers, and then they all turn around to trudge off to the next house.
“Hey!” Neale shouts after them. “Hold on for just a sec.” She raises her index finger, then gets up and goes inside and is back with her wallet. She pulls out a couple of twenties and pats them onto the father’s palm. Both parents look at the money and nod, then leave. Cate knows how improvident this is, given the financial situation of someone who owns a yoga studio and cannot count on as much as she’d like for support from an ex-husband who lives in Pondicherry, where he has put aside material concerns. But it’s no good scolding someone for her generosity.
Neale looks in the bowl. “They’ve cleaned us out of candy. I’ll go get more.” She ducks just inside the front door and grabs what’s left in the bag of Snickers, dumps it all into the bowl, setting the hand off on its entire litany of proclamations.
THANK you!!!! Trick or treat, hahahahaha!!!!
Come here, take some candeee!!!!
The flow of trick-or-treaters starts to wind down. The hand screeches on. It seems to be on a roll—maybe there’s a short in the circuitry. The two of them stare at the hand as though it’s a hysterical friend, and then Neale reaches underneath and switches off the bowl. Now seems like a good time for Cate to bring up the matter of Maureen and Maureen’s sister.
“So, you know—Maureen?”
“Well actually, I don’t. And I think I’m going to need to sometime soon. Give her the gimlet eye.”
“Right. We need to set up something.”
“What? What were you going to say about her?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing, really.” Nonetheless, after a little more holding off, she winds up spilling the beans. She’s using Neale as a litmus test. She’s the most principled person Cate knows. So it’s surprising when Neale says, “Oh, that’s nothing. That taboo was put in so people didn’t have babies with pinheads. I think when it’s between sisters, it’s not really a problem.”
“Really?” Cate says, so grateful.
“No, not ‘really’! What are you even saying? She had sex with her sister? For years?!”
“Well, only a couple, I think. Years.”
“The sister who’s a weaver?”
“Quilter.”
“Oh well then, okay.”
“It probably took care of that boring lull after holiday dinners,” Cate says.
“She never should have told you.”
“Well, I’m meeting her tomorrow, the sister. She’s in town. We’re all going out for tea.”
“Nice. Very Jane Austen.” Neale stands to look at a house down the block, which still has creepy fog rolling out its front windows and door. “I know this goes against reason, but I felt better about you when you were with Dana.”
“You were totally against it! Remember? ‘Afflicting someone’s relationship.’ ‘The sleazy nature of an affair.’ ”
“I know, I know, but I was impressed at the amount of connection you had with her. It’s what everybody wants.”
* * *
There are levels, a lot of people don’t see that. You can live around here and still have self-respect, work a job. Have a good lawsuit going. But there are also people out here existing on a lower level. They no longer make any food. They eat tamales cold from the can. Or dinner can be Hershey’s Kisses. When the gas company shuts off their heat they burn wood in the old fireplace. The flue doesn’t work right anymore, so the living room is usually filled with smoke. And then on top of that they themselves smoke, cigarettes and weed and hash and crack and meth. Whatever’s around. I’m talking about Irene, of course.
You have to think of her as someone who’s going to be moving on; think of her heading for the West Coast, or Ala
ska. The leaving she’s actually doing is dying, but in a beautiful kind of slow motion. There’s a little less of her every day.
Where I see myself is a level or two up from her. I have regular work, nights at the Citgo. I can make a spaghetti dinner, with a salad. Plus, I am just stronger for being a man, and younger, and into drugs only recreationally, not as a total lifestyle. This is how I am able to help Irene, to push a soft pillow between her and the hard ground when she falls.
We are in bed in the back room of her place eating Halloween candy. Snickers from those good-looking babes in the run-down house. By now the mattress has gray, shiny marks where our bodies lie through the day. We fall again and again onto these reserved places. When it gets too gross, we’ll just bring in another mattress—the alleys are filled with them. If it’s full of bugs, we toss it and find another. This afternoon we are bug-free and happy under a pile of old quilts someone left behind. Things turn up at Irene’s, and also disappear. The quilts might be gone tomorrow, but there could be a new sofa (new to us anyway) in the living room. I have no idea about the flow of all this stuff. It’s like there’s a hole under her rug and a steady cargo comes in through it and then goes out again. We use a lot of what are scraps to most people. We haven’t gotten any help like education or rich relatives. We have to make our own help.
“Are you still with me?” she asks. She has just shot up. This has moved her to a space not really here. Near here. I watch her and eat a packet of candy corn.
“I’m staying under the covers until I can make myself get out and dressed. That might be about Tuesday.” We are on the near edge of November. Although we live in a city, we are also on the Great Plains. The fierce weather doesn’t care much about our little human constructions. And now there’s no rhyme or reason to the jumble of hot and cold, or the extreme ways they show up.
“I’ll check in with the Administrators. See if they can crank up the heat a little.” We have gas again, but Irene is stingy with it. She is joking about the Administrators controlling the heat, but she also fears and worships these personal gods. The Administrators are all women. Irene believes in them along with dark magic of all kinds. She thinks cards can tell your future and crystals can heal you, and that everything interesting is happening inside electric air that hovers around us. She thinks the dead have things to say to us, especially those who are dead by our hands. I have killed one man, and it was to make an important point. Irene has killed three people, at least that she has told me about. These were freelance jobs she did for money when she was younger and had her act more together, her hands steady. She’s long past that sort of thing now. She’s old and weak and lazy. Still, her past does make me keep an eye on her. Sometimes she will pull her gun from under the mattress and stick it in my shorts, and if it were someone else, I’d know it was just part of a game, but with Irene, I stop whatever we’re doing and say, “Baby. Put it away.”
femininitea
Rain from a sudden storm hammers against the huge windows of the classroom. Cate walks among the bent heads of twenty students. None of them has hair that is completely an actual hair color, as opposed to green, or blue. A few years ago, every one of them would have been wearing a hat. And none of them—she doesn’t know why not—ever turns the lights on. They work by the light of their desk lamps, like old accountants. “Can someone flip on the ceiling lights? Raven?” Fluorescents flicker to life and Cate turns her attention back to a student’s computer layout of today’s assignment—the office set for Glengarry Glen Ross.
“You have to keep checking against your drawings for scale. This would be a desk for Paul Bunyan. And his blue ox.”
The student, Dequan Chang, looks up, blinks a couple of times, then asks, “Who’s Paul Bunyan?”
Cate is grateful to have this adjunct job. She only has two courses a year—one grad and one undergrad section of set design. The school is prestigious. Georgia O’Keeffe went here. Claes Oldenburg. Elizabeth Murray. The architecture department has interesting faculty and attracts talented students. It plugs her into the design community. She could not live on the salary, but it does come with health insurance. It provides her with the closest thing to a financial floor she has ever had. A full-time, tenure-track position would make her totally solvent, but then she would have too little time to design sets, a chronic dilemma.
* * *
From class she rushes north, surfing a water-lashed Lake Shore Drive, happy she let her father talk her into all-wheel drive, nice and grippy. With cars, she takes his advice along with his family discount.
At a red light, she checks in the rearview to make sure her face doesn’t have any glue smears or patches of sawdust from the classroom. She circles around Andersonville, looking for a parking spot in the baritone thunder, branch-cracking lightning. She texts Maureen.
parking nightmare. b there soon.
Maureen looked so good in terms of early impressions. She came with so many features, like one of those knives that are also bottle openers and screwdrivers. She’s financially solvent. A little older than Cate. Hot in a restrained way, which is to say, hotter than unrestrained. The play they worked on together was about the last days of Marie Curie, as she pressed on with her science even as she weakened from radiation sickness. Cate loved that Maureen spent an entire day hunting down a particular shade of green rubber for Madame Curie’s lab apron. A professional perfectionist. Everything happened so quietly, a small collegial friendship that opened into an attraction. A lucky break for Cate. She’s not much good at making the first move. She’s a lot better at standing still and waiting for whomever to show up and make her desire half of a coincidence.
In addition to their work, she and Maureen have a few ready-made, overlapping interests. They both love the same TV show, about a married couple of undercover KGB agents. They’ve started talking about a trip—Maureen’s treat—a small-ship cruise to the Inner Hebrides. Now, though, there is the sister to factor in. Maureen has arranged for the three of them to meet up this afternoon at Kopi; she loves the hippie atmosphere of the place.
Because of the storm, the place is underpopulated. She sees Maureen with a woman quite a bit blowsier, but definitely bearing a family resemblance. They are sitting at a back table, by the travel store that occupies the rear third of the place—racks of hemp clothing, shelves of Lonely Planet guidebooks, a stand of jaunty felt hats. As Cate approaches, Maureen’s sister stands and opens her arms. Frances is from Oregon; Cate has noticed a north-coastal (both coasts) phenomenon of unwarranted hugging. She tries to duck the incoming embrace.
“I’m afraid I’m a little wet for hugging.”
“Nonsense,” Frances says, a little too loud for how close she is to Cate’s ear. “Where I come from, this is a sprinkle.”
Maureen says, “We’ve been on the couch last night and today.” Cate can see she doesn’t mean for this remark to be alarming.
“We watched two seasons of Mad Men, which I never saw before,” Frances says.
Frances is in Chicago on her way south and east. She sells quilts as well as restores them. This expedition is a search for hidden troves, mint-condition quilts tucked away in hope chests for a hundred years, saved for “good,” a day that never arrived. Arkansas and Pennsylvania have been high-yield states for her on earlier scouting missions.
Frances is what Cate would describe as recently pretty. Her long hair, brown as opposed to Maureen’s red, is pinned up with clips of silver and feathers, then falls in other places onto the shoulders of a wraparound sweater. Everything about her clothing is complicated, swaddling. It’s hard to see where one garment leaves off and another begins. Vaguely spiritual jewelry is also involved, a shimmery shell on a leather string around her neck. Deep purple shoes with turquoise laces, and the ends of the laces have charms dangling from them. She appears to do most of her shopping at Renaissance fairs. Cate was expecting someone else entirely, someone sullen with something about her that could, with the right lighting, be irresistible
. Patti Smith maybe.
Frances is very different from Patti Smith, also very different from Maureen. Cate thought maybe Kopi would be a little too corny. But it turns out to be perfect for Frances; she even orders one of the teas Cate and Maureen make fun of. Femininitea. She laughs at herself for ordering it. She’s a good egg. It’s hard not to like her.
Cate imagines Frances’s house, which Maureen refers to as a cottage. Woodland tones throughout, that goes without saying. An already overstuffed sofa further cushioned with large pillows, a couple of heavy throws. A rough-hewn table, its top a repurposed barn door. Set out on this would be an arrangement of rocks with words etched into them.
harmony. acceptance. purpose.
Two plump cats and a carpeted kitty condo. Cate doesn’t particularly like herself when she sums up strangers like this, by their decor—especially when it’s decor she’s imagining for them—but this doesn’t stop her from doing it.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Frances says, taking Cate’s bad hand, turning it over, rubbing it between her own thumb and middle finger. “What happened here?”
This almost never happens. People are usually too polite, or squeamish. Or they don’t want to risk hearing something gruesome. But Frances inhabits a sharing culture; she has probably offered up a lot of her own private stuff in group therapy sessions and sweat lodges and the tents of tarot readers. By now, she probably expects returns on her investments.
“Workshop accident. When I was a kid,” Cate says.
“Oh, honey. That must’ve been the worst day of your life.”
“Really the worst day was when the fingers came out of the dressings, and the grafts hadn’t taken.”