by Carol Anshaw
“It was a dumb play anyway,” Joe says once he and Neale are backstage. “The door just made it a funny play.”
“Just put it behind you, honey,” Neale says, bracketing a hand around the back of Cate’s neck. “Come by in the morning. We’ll cheer you up.”
“We can make pancakes,” Joe says, which causes tears to loosen in Cate’s eyes.
Behind Neale, Cate notices Graham go by, toward the dressing room. What’s he doing here? But before this thought gets to its question mark, she knows it’s Eleanor.
“Nothing you did made that play any worse than it already was.” This is Maureen, who has found her way into the small huddle. Cate introduces everyone, then puts a stop to the general consolation. “I know the sticky door wasn’t my responsibility, but it was part of my set and that makes me look bad. If I keep working on plays this terrible, plus doing such a terrible job on them, I’ll probably eventually be banished. Lightly. Casually. I’ll have to do dinner theater in the Wisconsin Dells. Or dinner theater in the round. Where the stage revolves. Do they still have those?”
“In Florida,” Maureen says. “I think they still have them in Florida. But you won’t have to go there. This is just a small reversal, a small erasure on your résumé. You’re lucky it didn’t happen anywhere important.”
Cate thinks it’s good that Neale’s first impression of Maureen is seeing how kind she is, but almost immediately the moment evaporates and Neale is steering Joe outside, home to bed, waving over her shoulder as they go.
* * *
“I’m going to draw you a bath,” Maureen says once they’re at her apartment. Maureen has taken a particular direction with her apartment decor—Midwest by midcentury. Furniture blond as Doris Day. Breakfast nook in the kitchen. Rooster-print wallpaper. Cate flatters herself that there’s a subtle but distinct difference in the ways the two of them have taken up themes from the recent past—that she, Cate, is paying homage to the ’40s as a significant period in design while Maureen is just fooling around, being lightly ironic, stylistically winking. Cate knows she can be a terrible snob along these lines.
“You’ve started getting the Times delivered?” Cate notices a copy on the kitchen table, still folded in its blue plastic wrapper.
“Not really. Just I like that Thursday Styles section, so on Thursdays, I pick one up. You know, from someone’s doorstep.”
“Someone was doing that to me once in a while, so I got up really early one day and brought my paper in. I slipped it out of the wrapper, unfolded it, sprinkled a nice layer of cake flour onto the surface, then carefully folded it back up and slid it back into the wrapper. Then put it back on my doorstep. If the culprit picked it up I figured he wouldn’t open it until he was nice and settled in his bus seat.” Cate is trying to head off Maureen’s celebration of her shabbiness by gently implying that someone suffers in a small way from having their paper taken. This has no effect at all. Her reply is, “Oh, you sly devil, you.” And from there she quickly gets back to coddling Cate.
“A proper bath is just the thing when you’re upset. I’ll put in some soaking crystals I got the other day from Merz. Blueberry Blossom.”
“I don’t think blueberries even have blossoms, do they? And I never really take baths. I’m kind of a quick-shower person.” The prospect of getting undressed and into water is not, right now, particularly appealing.
“Come on. Give it a whirl.”
When Cate is finally obediently in the tub, Maureen sits on the toilet lid and de-pills an old sweater. She has a little shaver for this purpose. Maureen is encyclopedic in matters of fixing things. Her phone holds a compendium of go-to people for every possible small problem. She is also encyclopedic regarding do-it-yourself tricks, household hints. Many of these are from old books she has lifted from libraries and the kitchens of her friends’ mothers. So many of the fixes are for problems that no longer exist. No one really needs their hat blocked anymore (whatever that was), or their clothesline strengthened for extended use. No one has time to flameproof Halloween costumes by dipping them in a bucket of water and boric acid. On occasion, though, you might be interested in getting chewing gum off the back of your pants (soften with egg white, then put in the washer), and Maureen’s there for you.
When she’s done with the sweater, she brings out her stash of weed. Scrawled in marker across the top of the baggie is
WHITE WIDOW
She sits on the edge of the tub and sifts a teaspoonful of finely ground weed into her vape. When it’s ready, she takes a long, slow pull, then tilts the mouthpiece toward Cate.
“Thank you for all this,” Cate says, then takes a hit.
“I’m trying to do right by you.” She scrubs Cate’s shoulders with a puffy net thing. “I’ve misspent too much time on my way to you. You are a delightful person. Kind and thoughtful and, most important, you are not mentally ill. So I’m making a big play for you. I am squandering my blueberries.”
“What happened tonight just seems part of the everything going wrong in a larger sense. Maybe this new America won’t be as bad as I’m worried it will—”
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be worse. But we’ll work at getting in the way.” In Maureen’s worldview, everything is fixable.
* * *
Cate lifts the comforter to get into Maureen’s expensive Swedish bed, and a sultry aroma escapes. Maybe she sprays her sheets with a signature perfume. Sexually, Maureen is more advanced than Cate, or maybe more jaded. Certainly more artful. Because she handles fabric all the time, the pads of her fingertips are rough as a dog’s paw. This is a nice feature she comes with. She also has a nightstand with a drawerful of lubricants, sex toys in lurid colors, with tricky protuberances. In their abundance, the toys embarrass Cate. They make her think of oppressed Asian women pouring hot-pink silicone into penis-shaped molds. Some of the toys are also a little scary. They look like they’d take you to a different place than a regular orgasm. Tonight Cate prevails and they have sex with just their bodies. Cate is too worried about her faltering career to get into it, although she pretends. She never wants anyone to feel bad in bed if she can help it.
Maureen’s affair with her sister is fading and blurring. There were, of course, mitigating circumstances, although maybe it’s just that circumstances usually mitigate. Frances is five years older than Maureen; she was off to college while Maureen was finishing up middle school. They almost didn’t grow up in the same family. Then, when Maureen was just out of CalArts, she got a job doing costumes for a summer theater production of South Pacific in Eugene, Oregon. She stayed on with Frances after the play opened. They went to a sweat lodge, also a massage workshop. That’s when the monkey business started.
And at that time Frances, from photos Maureen has shown Cate, was not seductive exactly, but had a definite ragged blondness to her. And the whole thing seems to have had very little carryover into the years since. It’s not like Maureen was molested by an archbishop, and ever since has had to get her sexual partners to wear vestments. What Maureen and Frances did was a now-and-then thing, a way of hanging out together like other sisters share jewelry or bleach each other’s hair. Except that it was having sex. That Cate is working so hard to find Maureen’s dark secret diluted by these additional facts probably means they are going forward.
* * *
She gets a text from Graham, who for no given reason—meaning he has hooked up with Eleanor—says he just took Sailor for a walk, but will be out for the rest of the night, can she get back soon?
“Can’t you stay over anyway?” Maureen says, reading the message over Cate’s shoulder. “It’s too cold out to go back to your place.”
“I can’t.”
“What would happen if you didn’t? Just this once?” The question is accompanied by Maureen placing her hand on the left cheek of Cate’s butt and gently pulling her closer. Cate sees she’s being subjected to a little test of her affections.
“Well, he’d probably hold it as long as
he could, then he’d pee on the floor, which would shame him. And then he’d totally panic because I still hadn’t come home. But that’s not going to happen.”
It’s little stuff like this about Maureen, more than the sister business, that makes Cate slow down and take a harder look at her.
* * *
When Graham comes home two days later, all Cate can say is, “Oh, please.”
“I can explain.”
“How can you be doing this? After the rat? After telling me that what you really wanted was to hack her to pieces, then spread the pieces over a parking lot on a hot sunny day, then shovel lye over the whole mess?”
“It turns out we weren’t as far apart on things as we thought. Mostly it was a small cluster of misunderstandings. And it’s not like we’re getting back together. We’re just exploring the territory.”
Cate can’t see any point in bringing the discomforts of reality into this smoothed, burled vision. It would only mean a few tiring, reasonable conversations where he’d act as though he was listening and then go back to Eleanor anyway. Cate can smell a reunion a mile off, but there’s nothing to be done about it. It does say a lot about her opinion of Eleanor that she thinks Graham going back to her would be worse than him continuing to hole up in her spare room Skyping with Lucille Rae. Worse than him peering through the night at downloads in that tiny white type on a black background, what lives behind the smooth interface of the regular web. A marginless scroll of speculation.
pleasant travel
“Scary.” Neale notices a new beauty shop/reflexology place called Bionic Hair. This particular stretch of Broadway has businesses that seem to have slid in from a parallel universe, or a lost time. Pleasant Travel. The Double Bubble bar. The Loving Hut vegan restaurant. Neale is riding shotgun in Cate’s car, twisted into a position that would only be comfortable for a yoga teacher. She’s swiping photos right and left on her phone. She’s on several dating apps. So far, none of this activity goes beyond her thumb. Although she’d like to be having sex with someone, she’s leery of bringing home random guys from the internet, especially with Joe there and all the complications around that. Who she’d like to be with is Claude, her ex, Joe’s father. She is still hung up on him; this puts a definite crimp in her forward momentum.
“What do you think of him?” She holds the phone out toward Cate at the next red light.
“He looks like Conan O’Brien. I mean, the exact hair thing.”
“Which would be okay, unless he’s deliberately trying to look like Conan O’Brien. That would be a problem.”
They’re running errands. They enjoy driving around together, which they’ve been doing since they got their driver’s licenses in high school. Today they start out at Cermak, a global supermarket with extremely cheap vegetables.
“If we knew what these were, we could save a lot of money by eating them.” Neale takes a picture with her phone of a hairy, dark brown root that’s on special. Cate gets bok choy and head lettuce, cherries, then lingers in the Indian aisle picking out a frightening jar of mango pickle for Graham, who’s a hot-pepper addict. They drop off a pair of Neale’s boots for new heels at the shoemaker on Damen, then head down to Costco for paper towels and laundry soap. Dog food. Small vats of yogurt. By midafternoon they are smug with thrift.
Neale doesn’t exactly know how much more crucial the penny-pinching is for Cate, doesn’t know that Cate routinely takes cash advances from her viable credit card, while another carrying scarily high interest is maxed out. Financial management that’s barely a step up from going through the couch cushions for loose change. If Cate didn’t have the adjunct position, with its benefits, she wouldn’t even be able to dangle where she is, off the edge of the middle class. If she weren’t subsidized by her parents, she would only be living in one of the higher echelons of poor.
For her pride’s sake, it’s especially important that her parents not realize how crucial their support is, how cheese-paring her personal economy is. So today at Costco Cate splurged on a shrimp cocktail platter as her contribution to her mother’s Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. As soon as they’ve left the store, she regrets the purchase. Instead of retro-glamorous, Ricky will see it as outdated, a sad attempt at irony.
Neale says, “Thanksgiving seems antithetical to everything about your mother. I mean first of all, Ricky doesn’t really eat. And I’ve never seen her particularly thankful for anything. Whatever she has, she got it herself, with her bare hands. Hands and claws. And I have to say, she has never seemed particularly sympathetic to Native Americans. Or Pilgrims, for that matter. Holidays are just shit, aren’t they? But look. All you have to do is make an appearance. You’ve got your shrimp, your expectations are low. You’re good to go.”
“No. I can already hear the force field of her disappointment, waiting up there. Buzzing.”
“Yes. Of course. I can see her pulling her expression into place. That little twitchy thing she does around her mouth. The way she folds her expression into something that subtly implies diminished expectation. Slightly disappointed is her neutral, resting state.”
“I think most of her disappointment is around my being queer.”
“Oh no, it goes way beyond that. She’d also like you to have some sort of regular job. She’d like you to be working on Broadway shows. But if you were, she wouldn’t like the particular show. And she doesn’t care for your hair. She told me you look like a boy from an English boarding school. She’d like for you to go long and ombré.”
“The hair thing.” Cate runs a hand through it. “At least I won’t have to have another depressing conversation about the election. It’s only been a couple of weeks. There’s a possibility my mother hasn’t heard yet that there was an election. Why do you get to have warm, friendly holidays?”
“Well, friendly, yes, but you know parties at my parents’ aren’t exactly warm. More like spirited. All those old lefties in a small, enclosed space. All those saggy sweaters, all that corduroy. This year it’ll probably be a wake, a funeral for democracy. My parents have worked their whole lives for equality and diversity, the good of the common man. What’s coming is going to be a total teardown of all that. That guy’s going to come in thrashing at everything decent and good. Thrashing with a machete.”
“I know.”
“There’s going to be a women’s march. Around the inauguration. My mother’s working on it. It’s going to be big.” Then she puts a light, restraining hand on Cate’s arm. “I need to talk with you about something. It’s Joe. I need you to tell me what to do.”
“What is it? God, I hate to ask.”
“I went through the browser history on his laptop.”
“Porn.”
“Well, of course. I mean, he’s twelve. And I wouldn’t worry about busty babes, or even blow jobs. But what I found was Czech Fantasy 8—Part 3.”
“Oh, I really don’t want to hear this, do I?”
“I’ll be vague. It’s a glory hole sort of situation. Wandering guys with their dicks poking out of their jeans. Naked women are behind the walls. The guys wander around trying out one hole, then another. Like they’re shopping. Then the camera switches behind the holes to where the women are lying on their platforms. They are deeply bored. Like they’re thinking they don’t get paid enough to do this. Like they wish they’d brought their phones so they could play Toon Blast while they’re getting banged. They’re not attractive or aroused. Neither are the guys. Everyone has skin problems. They all look like they’ve already given up hope for anything good. Doesn’t this seem like too sad an idea of sex to have at twelve?”
“He probably just tripped over it cruising through regular videos.”
“But maybe not. Maybe all his fantasies are Czech. Maybe he’s already seen numbers one through seven. Maybe because he doesn’t have two happy parents to model healthy sexuality for him. And I don’t know what I can do about that. I’m in a business that’s like ninety percent women. I’m never going to find anybody
new. Anybody good. I’m worn out. And too alone. I hate going down in the basement to replace fuses at night. Not to mention living in a house that’s so old and unrenovated that it still has fuses.”
“Don’t they have internet locks so kids can’t get to that stuff?”
Neale pushes this advice aside. “I can see it’s a problem that I think of him and me as buddies. I hate when he’s gone way off-road on his own and I have to come down hard as a parent. And I don’t really want to let him know I’ve been snooping.”
“Oh, but you really have to. He can’t watch that stuff. Think of who he’ll be at thirty if he does. You’re going to have to have a talk.”
“I hate when you’re strict with me.”
“You don’t. You love it. And you know I’m right. As usual.”
Someone driving an ancient Lincoln Town Car glides from the right lane across the middle lane, into the left-turn lane in one long move, then doesn’t turn left, just slides back in ahead of a by-now-frantic reassembly of traffic. Cate lays on her horn, just to assert herself in a situation over which she has no control.
“Major drugs” is Neale’s guess, which is always her guess about these sorts of drivers—extremely calm but totally clueless. Cate takes a quick left at the super-cheap car wash (and wristwatch outlet, if you count the guy with a few hundred of them pinned to the inside of his coat). Next door is her branch of the public library.
“You haven’t mentioned Maureen today. Have you moved on?”
“Oh no. I’m actually kind of pinning my hopes on her.” Cate hasn’t mentioned Dana at the beach. Even saying Dana’s name gives her a level of reality Cate can’t bear.
“Really!?” Neale sounds surprised, and not pleasantly.
“I don’t want to still be looking for a relationship at fifty in what are probably going to be reduced circumstances.” What she doesn’t say is what she found out on the dog beach—that it is still possible she could retreat into a life lived in someone else’s back pocket. Going around with frostbite on her hands from making time-pressured love in the freezer at Toaster, haggard from nights of euphoric insomnia. Dana is Cate’s narcotic. Huge highs. Crash landings where she finds herself alone in an empty room. Yet here she is thinking about Dana even as she’s talking about Maureen. She has totally disconnected from this conversation. It’s like she’s speaking through a ventriloquist’s dummy. The dummy sounds confident saying, “I think if I put in all my little details, the algorithm on any dating site would come up with Maureen as my best match.” She pulls up in front of the library. “I just need to stop here for a minute. Maybe only thirty seconds.”