by Susan Perabo
“You want to knock on a stranger’s door at three in the morning?” Rob asked. “Every single house within ten miles of here is inhabited by a William Faulkner character. You want to take your chances on which one you get?”
“Caddy smells like trees,” Andy said, emerging from the backseat.
“We’re gonna have to walk up to the highway,” Rob said. “It’s probably only three or four miles. Then we’ll wave down a truck or something.”
“Three or four miles which way?” I asked.
“North,” Rob said.
“Which is which way?”
“Up,” Andy said. “North is always up.”
“That way,” Rob said, pointing into the blackness on his left. “We passed a little road just a minute ago. We’ll backtrack and then head up that road. It might even go all the way to the highway.”
He leaned into the car and cut the lights, and we were plunged into blackness. I couldn’t see the car, couldn’t see my friends, couldn’t see my own feet on the ground below me.
“Flashlight?” Andy asked hopefully.
“Don’t think so,” Rob said.
For a moment no one said anything, but I could hear them breathing, so I knew I wasn’t alone. One time, years ago, we’d been in Buzzards during a summer storm and the lights had cut out. We’d sat there for hours drinking pitchers by the glow of our cigarettes and I remember thinking how lucky I was to have friends to sit with in the dark, to not be in a quiet apartment searching for candles all by myself.
“Turn the headlights on,” I said. “We’ll be able to see that way for a while. You’re gonna have to come back with help anyway, so you can just jump the battery.”
He flipped on the lights and we could see again. We started walking down the road the way we’d come.
“Now it’s a story,” Andy said. “You can do the retarded brother thing, but I’m taking this part.”
“It’ll be boring,” I said. “It’ll be three idiots walking in the dark talking about stories. You think anybody’s going to want to read that?”
“Maybe a bear’ll show up and maul one of us,” Rob said. He poked me in the arm. “Probably you.”
“What’s that story where that kid goes camping with his father and the father dies and the kid carries him out of the woods?” Andy asked. “You know what I’m talking about?”
“David Quammen,” Rob said.
“Oh, yeah,” Andy said. “He came here, like, maybe our second year? He was cool.”
“I hate that guy,” I said.
Rob laughed. “What’d he say to you? You might want to consider describing what something looks like every once in a while? Just to mix things up?”
“Overrated,” I said.
“Would you guys carry me to the highway if I died right now?” Andy asked.
“Not a chance,” Rob said.
“What if we both died out here, me and her, and you had to eat one of us to survive? Who would you eat?”
“How many times have we played this game?” I asked. “I mean it, Andy. I swear I’ve answered this question thirty times.”
“Who Would You Eat? never gets old,” Andy argued.
“I’d eat whichever one of you had showered most recently,” Rob said. “So I’m thinking it would be her.”
We reached the turnoff for the road going north. There was still a little light from Rob’s car, but up the road it was pitch-black.
“You think we’ve gone a mile?” I asked, following them into the darkness.
“No way,” Rob said. “Half mile, tops.”
“I have to pee,” I said. “I’ve had to pee since we got in the car practically.”
“Didn’t your parents teach you anything?” Andy asked. “You always pee before you get in the car.”
“But I didn’t have to then,” I said. “It’s just that, you know, freaking gallon of coffee I just drank.” I stumbled on some loose dirt and pitched forward into Andy’s back.
“This is no time for flirting,” Andy said, steadying me.
“Go on and go,” Rob said. “We’ll wait on you.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said. “I’m not a guy; I can’t just—”
“I know it’s not that easy, but it’s not brain surgery. I mean surely in your life you’ve had occasion to—”
“Never,” I said. “I mean, latrines, Girl Scout camp, sure. But not actually, you know, outside outside.”
“Well, then,” Rob said. “Looks like today you’re doing something new.”
“I hate new,” I said.
“We can’t see anything,” Andy said. “If that helps.”
“Just keep walking,” I said. “Just go on up ahead and I’ll catch up.”
Their feet scuffed ahead. Andy said: “I showered today. Just so you know.” Rob said something back in a low voice. I stepped to the side of the road. No reason, really; it wasn’t like anyone was coming, or could see me. But I felt like a bush or tree was necessary . . . at the very least some tall grass. I shuffled forward, waving my arms in front of me until I bumped into some type of shrubbery—it could have been anything: poison ivy, a grove of Venus flytraps. I started to pull down my shorts, but stopped.
It was quiet. I couldn’t hear their voices anymore. It had only been a minute, maybe two, but the road—the whole world, from where I stood—was silent. There were no crickets, no rustling leaves, no boys, no stories. It was as dark and still as a grave.
“You guys?”
Nothing. How far ahead could they have gotten? Had it been longer than I thought? Time could go like that, when you weren’t paying attention. Maybe I’d shuffled around for five minutes, an hour, half the night. One of my knees buckled slightly, and I struggled to stay upright. I was Neddy Merrill in “The Swimmer,” I thought, certain that it had been only a single afternoon when really it had been weeks, months, even years. I was the old woman in “A Worn Path,” circling and circling, time compressing and expanding like an accordion. No, worse, I was Connie in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, a girl alone with nothing to defend herself, nothing between her and a maniac and the soft earth but a flimsy screen door.
“You guys?”
This time it was a whisper, because that was all my airless lungs would support. My friends were gone, had conquered the road in the dark without me, and I was alone. And I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself. All I could do was stand there on my quaking legs, rooted to the spot, unable to move or even formulate a plan for moving. I didn’t have to pee anymore, but I could not convince my feet to turn back toward the road. My lower lip trembled, and it had been so long since I’d cried that for a moment I didn’t even recognize what was happening. I hadn’t cried in years, and I was furious with myself for being so weak in the face of solitude. Nothing could break me. Nothing! Except of course the end of “The Dead,” which in that moment blew through my bones like a ghost:
The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.
“BOO!” they shouted, leaping out from the bushes.
“Assholes!” I yelled. “You guys are assholes! I hate you both! You stupid, idiot assholes!”
“Were you scared?” Andy asked.
“Aw, she wasn’t scared,” Rob said. “Nothing scares her. She was probably happy we were gone.”
“Did you pee?”
“No,” I said. I was still shaking, and thankful for the dark. “I don’t think I have to anymore.”
“Sorry if we freaked you out,” Andy said.
“We didn’t freak her out,” Rob said. “Right? Right? You’re tough.”
I gathered my breath in my lungs. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I said.
“So let’s go,” Andy said. I felt a hand on my elbow. “Blind leading the blind.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, for real. I can’t do this anymore. I’m telling you, I’m gonna get out of this town.”
“Who said that?” Andy asked, his hand falling away.
“Ni
ck Adams,” Rob said. “In ‘The Killers.’ ”
“No, I said. “No, it was me.”
LIFE OFF MY E
The object in question unspooled from the upstairs bathroom wastebasket as I was going about my Thursday morning duties of emptying the trash. The object in question had been tightly wound in maybe five feet of toilet paper, a tiny, pee-soaked babushka with a plastic grip, a truth-telling window, and a minus-sign face.
“What the fuck?” I said. Which is not the way I usually talk, even to myself. That’s how surprised I was.
My sister, Lizzie, and I shared a two-story town house in a quiet and well kept “town house community” on the edge of the suburbs. We had finally finally finally finally finally finally realized our dream of being left alone to play Scrabble for the rest of our lives. Not only were there no men in the picture, but there was no chance of men, no dreams of men, no fears of men, hardly even the mention of men, but for the occasional fond recollection of our long-dead father, or the ongoing young Harrison Ford vs. old Harrison Ford argument. We were done with men, and it was officially Scrabble time. But then there was this, this thing, in the wastebasket.
That afternoon I played “BABY” off her B, with the Y on a double letter score. We were sitting at the kitchen table and it was pouring rain outside, a furious, driving rain, a killer of picnics. I watched Lizzie closely, but she didn’t miss a beat, just revised the total under my name. She was forty-three years old, so the chances of her being pregnant didn’t seem great. But you never know. “Life finds a way,” a famous scientist once said, right before the dinosaurs took over all operations at Jurassic Park. Not that I’m comparing my sister to a gender-switching frog. My sister is lovely. She has long jet-black hair and her skin is flawless. Her students regularly fall in love with her. She is five years older than me but looks five years younger.
We had been living together in the town house for about ten months, having both within the space of a year extracted ourselves with the jaws of life from awful marriages, hers an eleven-year boozy carnival ride, mine a six-year house arrest fostering angry, unadoptable dogs. Between us we had exactly zero kids. We also had zero parents and zero other siblings. We had some aunts and uncles and cousins. We each had some good friends. We had steady jobs; we were both spinster teachers now. She taught ninth grade English at a prestigious private school; I taught eleventh grade civics at a sparkling mega high school that looked like a shopping mall. It was mid-June and we had two glorious months of summer in front of us, nonstop Scrabble and Netflix and iced coffee, except for in-service days and workshops and all the other summer hoop jumping required of us to continue raking in those huge paychecks in return for our thirteen-hour days the other ten months of the year.
“So I have to ask,” I said, flipping over my newly drawn letters, two Cs and a J. Useless.
She peered at me over her half glasses. They were a recent addition and she looked like a 1950s librarian, which I mentioned whenever I got the chance. She even wore them on a thick silver chain around her neck. “What?”
I chickened out at the last second. “Are you checking your math?”
She leveled the look that made it clear she would not dignify the question with an answer. “One-sixty-four, one-twenty-six.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you’re sure.”
She beat me roughly 80 percent of the time—the 20 percent of games I managed to win were due to dumb luck drawing of stellar letter combinations and, very occasionally, if she had a really bad sinus headache. I was no slouch, but it had always been understood by everyone that Lizzie was smarter than me, that Lizzie fell under the category of creepy smart. This had never bothered me, even as a child, because I always felt like being creepy smart was a burden, a lumpy rucksack of encyclopedias you had to carry around with you wherever you went, something that people would know about you the instant you opened your mouth. I didn’t particularly want people knowing anything about me the instant I opened my mouth.
She made the clicking noise with her tongue, which meant she was about to extend her already sizable lead, then neatly laid down “TOMORROW” off my O—with a blank for one of the R’s, but who cared because she got the fifty-point seven-letter bonus.
“Good one,” I said. “Nice.”
And I meant it. The thing about me that no one ever believes is that I do not have a competitive bone in my body. I honestly do not care if I win, at anything. Lizzie can’t understand how a person can not be competitive. Once, after I lost twenty-three consecutive games of Othello in a single weekend and remained a good sport about it, Lizzie told me I should apply for disability on the basis of my sustained indifference.
I watched her gleefully update her score and tried to create a list of suspects who could have knocked her up. There was a man two doors down, Kenny. He had recently embraced his bisexuality and now, in his living room, which you could see clearly from the Town House E parking lot, there was a painting of two naked men lounging on chairs in a garden, as naked men often do. There was the PE teacher at her school, whom we had once had dinner with, a man with compact little twelve-year-old muscles and a thin mustache who called everyone by their last name. There was the guy who served us at the coffee place we frequented, the born-again Christian, who always said, “How’re the girls doing today?” and gave her (but not me) a little wink. I couldn’t imagine it was any of these men, but I couldn’t think of any other options.
“Are we playing or not?” Lizzie asked me. “We’re not getting any younger.”
Late the next morning I rummaged through the bathroom wastebasket and there was another test, another minus sign. This one was buffeted by at least half a roll of Charmin. Fearing we’d eventually go broke buying toilet paper, I rolled it back up and went downstairs holding the whole thing in my hand. It was about the size of a small rabbit.
She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper with her half glasses. She read all the time when we were kids. I mean all the time. The only thing she’d give up books for was board games, which is why—at five or six—I’d started playing them in the first place. Otherwise who knows how many years might have passed before she talked to me.
I stood there holding my toilet paper bundle until she looked up at me, and then at the bundle in my hand, and then back at me.
“I know,” she said, after a moment. She removed her glasses in the manner of one who is about to be punched in the face. “Okay. I know. Go ahead.”
“Go ahead what?”
“Go ahead and tell me. I know it’s ridiculous.”
Throughout the last couple awful years of our awful marriages we’d played a never-mentioned-but-completely-understood game called I’m Going To Tell You What You Already Know About this Situation, and I’m Going to Pretend I Don’t Know that You Already Know It and Just Aren’t Acting On It.
I sat down across from her. “Who is it?” I asked.
“A guy from AA,” she said.
Of course! Why had I not considered this? She had been sober for over three years, but still made frequent voyages to the top-secret planet of AA, the parallel universe that hovered just outside the existence of the common, non-anonymous majority, the little world within the big world. Sometimes at the coffee shop, or just walking down the street, I tried to catch my sister’s eye contact with, her flickering acknowledgment of, other alcoholics. Sometimes I wished I had a secret society for the things that had ailed me in life, perhaps a group for others who had been repeatedly attacked by dogs in their own living rooms.
“What’s his name? How old is he?”
She sighed. “Jeremy. Thirty-six.”
“Thirty-six! He’s younger than me!”
“So what? We’re all adults. It’s not like he’s eighteen or something.”
“Does he have a job?”
“He’s a magician.”
I sat back in the chair. “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” I said. “I asked if he had a job.”
<
br /> “Ha ha.” She put down her coffee. “Magician is a job.”
“Magician is a job for like two people in all of human history,” I said. “Houdini and David Copperfield are the only people ever to put ‘magician’ under ‘occupation’ on their tax returns.”
“That’s so not true,” she said. “What about, like, you know, like, what about Karl Wallenda?”
“Karl Wallenda was a tightrope walker,” I said. “As you well know.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then she grinned. “Do you think he put that on his tax return? God, I hope he did.”
I smiled also, picturing the impeccable, precise printing of the tightrope walker on the 1040—tightrope walker—and then realized she was trying to change the subject.
“So are you dating him or what?”
“Just or what, I guess. It’s not really that serious.”
“Serious enough that you’re taking a pregnancy test,” I said. “Serious enough that—wait, are you trying to get pregnant?”
She turned red. Bam—three seconds. The blush rose from her neck and just rolled up her face. It was the perfect blush, humiliating and undeniable, the kind I normally only saw on high school boys.
“Oh my god, you’re trying to get pregnant.”
“Not trying trying,” she said. “I’m not guzzling cough syrup to thin out my vaginal mucus or anything.”
“What? What? You are trying! Only someone trying would know that that was even a thing! Vaginal mucus?”
“I know,” she said. “It’s stupid. It’s . . . never mind. Forget it.”
“No,” I said, suddenly feeling like the worst sister in the world, dismissing both a love interest and an innocent little baby in the space of thirty seconds. “No, Lizzie. I just mean. No, it’s not stupid, it’s just a surprise. Are you in love with him or something?”
She shook her head. “I’m not in love with him. He’s just nice. He’s, you know, really sweet. I just thought . . .”
Her eyes moved to the Scrabble box on the table. Aversion? Or an answer?
“You’re sick of playing Scrabble with me?”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not. I just got it into my head that maybe I wasn’t done after all.”