by Carol Anshaw
“Oh. I’m so sorry,” Frances says, covering at once the accident, its aftermath, and herself for bringing it up.
“It’s an old story by now. And I can do almost everything with what I still have.” She picks up her teacup, sets it down as a little demonstration. “My two big pieces of luck were not losing the thumb and that it happened to my left hand.”
Maureen comes back from the counter with two enormous pieces of carrot cake. “I thought we could share,” she says to Cate, who’s wondering how three people are supposed to share two pieces of cake. Then she says to her sister, “What did you think of that yellow quilt on the back wall?”
Cate is distracted by the carrot cake, one piece of which she is already tearing away at. She worries that she eats like someone in a federal prison. Table manners are just one of a list of small social concerns she should probably have sorted out by now, but hasn’t. Interrupting is another. As soon as a conversation is behind her and she’s alone, she goes over it like she’s casting runes. She worries that she was finishing everyone else’s sentences, or lurching wildly off-topic. Also she often, after the fact, takes herself to task for the darkness of her humor, for not gauging if it will be welcome in the circumstances. Maybe this or that ironic remark was taken seriously. Or, worst of all, maybe she has bad breath. She never forgets this about someone; it always haunts her memory; she doesn’t want her breath haunting anyone’s impression of her. So she checks along the way of a day, breathing into her cupped hands to see if anything’s amiss, asking Neale, if she’s nearby, to take a whiff. She pops mints. No one is going to run into ambient garlic while in conversation with her. Or worse, that steel-mill aroma she sometimes picks up off others; she assumes this comes with heavy vitamin regimens.
While Cate is mired in these shallows of self-loathing, Frances freewheels into a long, extremely dull story about the difficulties of restoring an 1840s cross-stitch baby quilt. The problem is getting yarns to exactly match the historical colors. From the sound of things, Frances either gives away a lot of her work or trades it for firewood or honey or massages. Her house has only a woodstove for heat. In a way, hers seems a life full of small adventure; looked at from another angle, Frances seems to be about one step shy of slipping off the grid entirely.
If Cate met her with no backstory, she would only find Frances a sunny, placid woman hanging on to a ’70s lifestyle that was mostly over before she was born. She tries to catch a glimpse of some spark between the sisters, but can’t see anything. She tries to fit their affair inside a box labeled “stuff that happened years ago,” but that doesn’t neutralize it. The sisters are kind to each other; there doesn’t appear to be any rivalry. Which is nice to be around, but now, of course, tainted.
By how, and how often, they refer to their childhood, it’s clear this was a happy place for both of them. Their parents were in the movie business in L.A. Their mother was a seamstress at Disney. At home, she made clothes for her girls, often matching outfits, as though they were twins. Frances threatens Cate with home movies of them riding in their own Mad Hatter teacups, spinning around and around in a scaled-down carnival ride their father—a metalworker, a fabricator of special effects—set up for the kids in the acre of desert that was their backyard.
“Whee!” Maureen trills.
Cate can’t tell if they are being ironic about the teacup ride, or not. “Do the teacups still exist?” Cate asks.
Frances says, “Exist?! We still ride them when we go home. Round and round we go.” Cate assembles a mental picture of this, but she can’t make it a good picture.
“Danny refuses,” Maureen says. “He thinks it’s infantilizing.” Danny is the brother with a silly-seeming but fierce addiction to aerosols. He huffs. Maureen has barely mentioned him. Cate suspects there’s a fair amount not to mention.
So here’s a new piece, Cate thinks. She envisions Maureen and Frances, now too big, stuffed into their teacups, their brother high, spinning in his own way, in a lawn chair. She needs more anecdotes, more evidence on Maureen. She’s looking for extenuating circumstances. She’s not sure if the teacups are redeeming or damning.
Frances gets a call on her cell. The picture that pops up is of a guy in a camouflage balaclava. “My old man,” she says. “I’ll take it outside.”
“White Water Jack,” Maureen says, once Frances is outside. “He’s a guide. In a town as small as Maupin, he counts as a celebrity.”
Cate pictures Frances and Jack together in a yellow blow-up raft, shouting happily as they roar down the middle of a river.
“Can you come over tonight?” Maureen asks this shyly.
“Oh boy,” Cate says. “I’d feel a little uncomfortable, I guess.”
“Don’t. You don’t have to. Frances won’t mind.”
“Well, yeah? That’s the bad part, that you have to say that. That there’s a reason she might.”
“Oh, I think the teacups are worse than that thing. I honestly thought I was using good judgment not telling you about the ride.” She is speaking softly, close to Cate’s ear, and the smell of her breath—clove and smoke—is arousing. Cate has noticed this aroma during other intimate moments with Maureen, but only just now does she realize what it means. Maureen is a secret smoker. Or tobacco chewer, although that definitely seems less likely. She employs some clovey cover-up. She stands in the alley behind the Lyric exhaling plumes of smoke, in the company of her cohort, her shrinking demographic. Cate can see her so clearly, having a conversation in the alley with the theater janitor and a nerved-up soprano who’s one of the townspeople in the second act.
Something about her breath and the soft brush of her mouth against Cate’s cheek and the emptiness of the café and Frances being outside in the snow prompts Cate to turn to kiss Maureen, and then kiss her again. Maureen is a world-class kisser. Put that in the plus column.
Cate tells her, “I could probably kiss you all afternoon. Make a little spectacle in here. But instead I’m going home. I need to reflect.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
* * *
As they stand on the sidewalk outside Kopi, Cate looks down and notices the purple of Frances’s shoes bleeding into the turquoise of the laces. Chicago is tough on whimsy. A small van speeds by, splashing them as it goes. The van is from Toaster, a diner quite a ways down on Lincoln (way out of this neighborhood) owned and operated by Dana, who is supposed to not be contacting Cate. This little bit of stalking is interesting, and should be annoying. Discouragingly, Cate is more flattered than annoyed, but then she doesn’t have time to be either, as the van keeps heading north up Clark and her phone starts ringing in her parka pocket. A 212 area code. Cate assumes it’s Love Salvage, a Manhattan prop house. They have the real 1950s venetian blinds Cate is scouting for the drill sergeant’s office, and they’re cheap. Of course the fat kind are being made again, but they look historically phony. The old ones are yellowed from all the smoking done in the offices where they once hung, their tapes nice and grimy. It’s a look that’s hard to create retroactively.
“Work call,” she tells Maureen and Frances as she gives them fist bumps, as a jokey good-bye to avoid hugging. “I’m going to have to take it.”
* * *
“Hey, Cate.” Not the salvage place. It’s Ty Boyd, artistic director of Ropes and Pulleys, a very good off-Broadway company. She’s met him a couple of times in her previous life as Graham’s wife. He tells her they’re putting up a play about Vita Sackville-West. “Do you know who she is?”
“Virginia Woolf’s girlfriend, yes? Lived in a castle? There. I’ve run out of knowing about her.”
“Woolf was just one in a long string of willing victims. Vita was a serial cad. It’s a good story. Lauren Mott wrote the play and so Molly Cracciolo is directing. They both liked what you did for Marie Curie. They wonder if you could come out and talk with them about doing the sets.” This is one of the eerie aspects of theater. You never know who’s blowing through town, dropping in on your pla
y.
“Well, Jesus. I’m flattered to be called. They’re my idols,” Cate says. “Ever since Gauntlet.” Cate stands in awe of art that can work people into a lather of love and hate. That would be every one of Lauren Mott’s plays.
“Well here’s your shot at working with them. I’ll send you the script. We’ll need ideas for four sets. Just as a way of starting the conversation. They’ll be talking with a couple of other designers, so it’s a tryout of sorts, but a friendly one.”
She thinks, this is how the wind shifts. “Sure. I can push some other stuff out of the way.” This other stuff is pure invention. She has no further commitments, no employment for the foreseeable future. She was just about to hit up her father for a “loan.” She knows he will never turn her down. Because he loves her, but also because of her hand. She hates using this, even though it’s only ever tacit. But she does do it. If she actually gets this job, and the play goes big and that gets her more work with these two icons—
She’s way ahead of herself.
* * *
“Hey Nathan.”
I don’t know who this guy is. He’s just somebody coming out of the john, one of the too-many people living here. Irene likes company. She also likes her dope delivered. People know to not show up empty-handed.
Inside I lock the door, take a leak, then sit on the toilet with the lid down. The tub has a dry, ancient atmosphere. No one has actually taken a bath in this room for some time. The bar of soap in the little soap dish in the wall looks like a piece of bleached bone. The scum that rings the inside of the tub has also aged into something hard and permanent. This room is a sort of religious sanctuary, a tabernacle of what is worshipped here. On the lip of the sink, I lay out a line from a private stash of brown. I don’t have enough to share with anyone in the living room.
I can hear Irene from all the way down the hall, through the door. She’s holding forth, wandering down memory lane. “During my heyday…” Her voice has the sound of maracas, as though little beads are rattling inside her throat. I tune out the rest of what she’s about to say, which will just be one or another story about her musical career, singing torch songs in what she calls cocktail lounges, but the truth is they were really just dives. The Bad Alibi. Whiskey Heaven. Places that didn’t even have a piano. Irene brought a boom box. Basically she was doing karaoke and passing the hat. Irene holds on to this image of herself that is not really long gone, more like it never really existed in the first place.
She has an audience for these stories, though. Tonight it’s the guy from the john, plus the Mexican father and son, and Betty, who has been in that chair for a couple of weeks now. She must get up to go to the bathroom, but every time I come into the living room, she is still in that chair. Betty’s aspiration is to become a cocaine addict. This is a financial matter; at the moment, she can only afford to be a tweaker. She is one of the few people I’ve known who enjoys both uppers and downers. She’s happy either way. Her mind is pretty well gone by now, along with her teeth.
I have to leave for work. I help out financially. I’m Irene’s helper. Before me, she had another guy. Dusty. Before him she had Lois. Both of them are dead now, Lois OD’d and Dusty fell asleep behind a truck that backed up and rolled over him, then rolled over him again going forward. She enjoys the tide of people who come in, then seep out of her life, the life around her. It’s her house; it belonged to her parents. She pays taxes out of stuff we steal, then sell. Because she’s the owner here, she calls the shots.
—Get me some nuts, she’ll tell me and I’ll come back with something nice, mixed nuts in a can. Not just a bag of peanuts. I know not to get her crappy nuts.
—You’re a sweet man, she’ll say. I like her to boss me around.
She says she doesn’t know why she is still alive. She hasn’t had a sober day since high school. She has taken some kind of drug most of those days. Even as a teenager, she and her mother took speed as a way of dieting and feeling like superheroes. The two of them vacuuming at midnight, or coloring each other’s hair or painting each other’s nails, each nail a different color.
After her parents died, Irene had the house to herself. She caught a lucky break. Some of us have never caught a lucky break. A lucky break could have made a big difference for me. I’ve had to make it with no luck at all. It’s okay. I’m not complaining. Most of the people here haven’t had any luck either. The drugs even the playing field; when we’re high, we have huge futures and big plans to fill them. The stealing is just to get the money to buy the drugs. Plus I try to only steal from the sort of people who do have luck.
When I get to work, a few of the fluorescent bulbs are flickering over the pumps, but fuck, it’s like ten degrees out with the wind. Those suckers are going to have to get changed another night. I’m busy anyway, thinking amazing, important thoughts. I haven’t had a customer in maybe an hour when I hear the thumps of a huge sound system. I don’t like the looks of the guy getting out of the pimped Camaro. Too skinny, weird beard. Also, I don’t like the neon piping beneath his door. I set my face into something like a big stone as the guy pushes a twenty into the pass-through. He wants fifteen dollars of premium and two Kit Kats. I keep my eyes locked on his as I push the candy through and punch in the amount on pump five.
I’ve never been held up at the station. This is my value to Sabir. He can leave me in the booth, go home, and get a good night’s sleep knowing no one will ever try to rob me. I weigh probably three hundred pounds. I’m six foot two. I have no muscle or strength, but you can’t see that from outside the booth. From outside the booth I am someone you would not want to mess with. I enjoy this about the job, my power. Also, I love the smell of gasoline.
a very bad day
“Tragic buffet table. Those hot dogs were in that slow cooker for at least a couple of days before we got there.” This is Arthur, Neale’s father, sitting in the front passenger seat, critiquing the food at the campaign office. Cate sits beside Neale, both of them slouched across the back seat of Arthur and Rose’s menacing Dodge Challenger. They are politically progressive and concerned about the environment, but they are also from Detroit, and have always driven union-made American muscle cars like it’s part of their belief system.
Cate sits behind Rose, noticing her long, salt-and-pepper hair tied in an elaborate knot at the back of her neck. She has worn it this way since Cate has known her. At one time she was pretty in a hippie way, like those small women folk singers who wielded big, acoustic guitars. Over time, particularly time spent trying to mend a broken world, her features have loosened. Her eyebrows, which used to be dramatic, are now caterpillars. The lid over her right eye now sags. When she was younger, Cate wished Rose could have been her mother. She was so not-Ricky. She was the first woman Cate knew who had tattoos. From where she sits, Cate can see the fading peace symbol on the side of her neck.
When she met Neale, Cate loved to go to her house after school. Rose would be there, ready with her stripped-down version of the mothering shown in TV commercials. She wouldn’t bake cookies, but she stocked rolls of Pillsbury dough in the fridge so the girls could bake their own. While they waited, she’d get out a globe so old several countries had to be redrawn or renamed with a marker. They went through the New York Times until they found a story. Indira Gandhi, assassinated. Why? It was Rose who gave Cate the idea of a larger world, and that even if she was only a teenager in a smug suburb, she was part of that world. Because of Rose, Cate has volunteered around elections since she was in high school.
They are heading back to Chicago after getting out the vote in a town in western Michigan. The town is really poor. A lot of the voters on the Democratic rolls there live in rural versions of projects—town houses with dirt front yards, nobody outside, not so much as a potted plant in any window. Cate isn’t sure if they are really going to make it to their polling place today. It’s hard to counter their apathy.
“Good cake, though,” Arthur says. “The poppy seed.”
&
nbsp; Rose is driving in her usual limit-pushing gear. She has spent her entire adulthood fighting for civil rights, opportunities for women, justice for the wrongfully imprisoned, open arms for refugees. But once these humans are behind the wheels of other cars, they become, if not the enemy, at least the competition. They need to be tailgated out of the fast lane, encouraged with a quick, prompting honk just before the light changes, flipped the bird when they try to cut into the front of a line she feels they belong at the back of.
Cate settles into her portion of the back seat, which is to say a burrow she has made in a high drift of lawn signs and door-hanger cards whose usefulness has just expired. On the other side of this (now) litter, Neale is eating half a tuna sandwich she grabbed off the food table at the headquarters. Cate is playing Toon Blast, a game on her phone that has already sucked away months of her life when you add up all the bits of hours she has played, lured in by big rewards like a smashing-hammer icon, or a power-drill icon to destroy color cubes.
But although they are tired, none of them is worried. The outcome is in the bag, isn’t it? Other Democrats in less dispirited places will carry the day. Still, Cate is nagged by the subdued atmosphere in the campaign office.
* * *
They go to the apartment of Rose and Arthur’s friend Maury, where there’s to be a gathering of the faithful. Maury orders Thai, opens a bottle of wine. Five of their union-organizing friends arrive. Everyone settles in.
The returns are disturbing from the start.
“Red states,” Rose says, dismissing them.
* * *
“I think I’ll head out,” Cate says an hour later, when she has begun to get queasy. “I’m going to the pool. That trick worked for me the night the Cubs won the Series. Things weren’t looking good, but by the time I swam, then got back, they were on their way to the win.”