Dinosaurs on Other Planets

by Danielle McLaughlin

  Dinosaurs on Other Planets is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Danielle McLaughlin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories were originally published in The New Yorker: “Dinosaurs on Other Planets” (originally published as “The Dinosaurs on Other Planets”) (September 15, 2014) and “In the Act of Falling” (September 7, 2015).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  McLaughlin, Danielle

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Dinosaurs on other planets: stories / Danielle McLaughlin.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9842-9

  ebook ISBN 978-0-8129-9843-6

  I. Title.

  PR6113.C523A6 2016

  823'.92—dc23

  2015026648

  ebook ISBN 9780812998436

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Emily Mahon

  Cover photograph: Bob Croslin

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Art of Foot-Binding

  Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate

  All About Alice

  Along the Heron-Studded River

  Night of the Silver Fox

  Not Oleanders

  Silhouette

  A Different Country

  The Smell of Dead Flowers

  In the Act of Falling

  Dinosaurs on Other Planets

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Begin on the feast day of the goddess Guanyin, that she may grant mercy. Or on the cusp of winter when the cold will numb bones splintered like ice on a broken lake. Begin when she is young, when the bones are closer to water and a foot may be altered like the course of a mountain stream.

  It is Tuesday and the woman who comes to clean has been in, leaving the hall smelling like the inside of a taxi, a synthetic pine fragrance called Alpine Spring, though it is the first week of November. Janice unbuttons her wet coat, hangs it on a peg. She has thought to mention that she dislikes the scent, but she and the cleaner rarely overlap, and, written down—I do not like the air freshener—the complaint seems trivial, almost petty. There is also the fact that the woman cleans for a number of other mothers at the school. Janice already senses a hierarchy of allegiances, suspects minor betrayals and indiscretions.

  Music is coming from upstairs, a heavy thud of bass that vibrates through the ceiling: the sound of Becky skipping hockey practice. Mrs. Harding from next door will be around. She will have been sitting by her front window, watching for Janice’s return, and will now be struggling into her ankle-length fur, lacing up her shoes, ready for the assault on Janice’s front steps. She will complain how the wet leaves make them slippery, as if Janice has set a trap, and then, the music stopped, she will sit for an hour at the kitchen table, sniffing a cup of tea and talking.

  As she climbs the stairs, Janice pauses on the half landing to rearrange the collection of crystals, miniature figurines of birds and animals. They are displayed on a table by the window where the light shows them to best advantage. Every Tuesday, the cleaner removes them to dust the table, and every Tuesday returns them in reverse order. Today, inexplicably, the table appears not to have been dusted, and still they are out of position.

  In her daughter’s bedroom, a row of stuffed toys gazes from a shelf. The years haven’t been kind, each toy suffering its own peculiar disability: a ragged tailless Eeyore, a molting one-eyed teddy bear. Becky scowls when she sees her mother. “I told you to knock,” she says, switching off the music. She turned fourteen the previous July, and has suddenly grown taller and broader. Her face, already too round to be pretty, has become rounder, and she has taken to wearing her long brown hair, her best feature, in a tight bun. She is sitting on the bed, still in her school blouse and skirt. Her shoes and her gray woolen socks have been removed, and she is winding a pair of Janice’s tights around her right foot, the nylon already laddered where it stretches across her toes.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Janice says.

  “Binding my feet.”

  Janice watches her daughter attempt to curl her toes underneath her foot, watches them spring back up again. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “It’s for a history project with Ms. Matthews. Basically, it’s about how women suffered long ago.”

  “I still don’t understand why you’re binding your feet.”

  “So I can em-pa-thize?” Becky says. “So I can see what it was like to be oppressed? Basically.”

  “How old is Ms. Matthews?”

  Becky doesn’t answer. She is winding the tights in a band around her toes. Just below her ankle is a silvery pink scar where she caught it in a door as a child, and the skin has grown back a shade lighter. She takes a strip of white material from a pile beside her on the bed and begins bandaging her foot, winding the cloth round and round, until the foot is a white stub.

  Split the belly of a live calf and place her feet in the wound, deep, so that blood covers the ankles. If there is no calf, heat the blood of a monkey until it boils. Add mulberry root and tannin. Soak the feet until the skin is soft.

  THE ROOM IS COLD, and Janice makes her way across the debris on the floor—underwear, magazines, aerosol canisters—to close the window. Tampons in brightly colored wrappers spill like sweets from a box on the dressing table, beside eye shadows and lip gloss. They seem out of place, these adult things, as if a child has been playing with the contents of her mother’s handbag. The bedroom is toward the back of the house and overlooks a narrow garden that slopes to the river. When Becky was small, Janice had worried that she would wander away and drown, and one summer Philip constructed a fence from sheets of metal nailed to wooden stakes. It has served its purpose but is an eyesore now, the metal sheeting buckled and rusted. Once spring arrives, Janice thinks, once the days are longer and the weather milder, she will dismantle it. She shuts the window and draws across the curtains.

  Becky is still busy with the tights. Beside her on the bed are several sheets of paper, including one headed “The Art of Foot-Binding,” a poor-quality facsimile of a handwritten manual. Next to it is a page of photos and diagrams, some accompanied by instructions: Rub the feet with bian stone, or a piece of bull’s horn. Janice does not immediately recognize the thing in the photographs as a foot. It is a grayish-white lump, toes melted into the sole like plastic that has been left too near a fire. The owner of the foot smiles shyly out at the camera. There is something grotesque, almost sordid, in the way she displays her deformity, like a freak act from an old traveling circus, and Janice looks away, back to her daughter’s feet. As she watches Becky winding the strips round and round, she recognizes the delicate scalloping of the Egyptian cotton pillowcases from the guest bedroom.

  “Damn it, Becky! Have you any idea how much those cost? Couldn’t you have used something else? Anything else?”

  “I searched everywhere,” Becky says. “There was nothing else. If you were home, I could’ve asked you for something else, but you weren’t.”

  “Maybe I should explain to Ms. Matthews the oppressive cost of pillowcases.”

&
nbsp; Becky scowls, stops winding the bandages. “Why are you being such a bitch about Ms. Matthews?”

  “Haven’t I told you not to use that word?”

  “What word?”

  “You know what word. And for the record, I’ve no problem with Ms. Matthews. I just think she’s got weird ideas about homework.”

  “You hate her,” Becky says.

  Janice takes a deep breath. “I don’t hate her,” she says slowly. “I’ve never even met her.” But as she says it, she remembers, from the open house two years previously, a slight red-haired woman with a choppy asymmetrical hairstyle and Ugg boots, though she had thought of her then as a girl because she was barely distinguishable from the gaggle of teenagers flocking around her.

  “If you’d gone to the parent-teacher meeting you’d have met her. Dad met her. Dad likes her.”

  Janice considers this, decides to let it go. She begins to pick up clothes from the floor and hang them in the wardrobe.

  Becky continues bandaging her foot. “Ms. Roberts hates her, too,” she says, “but Ms. Roberts is jealous because Ms. Matthews is a dote and everybody thinks Ms. Roberts is a cunt. Which she is, basically.”

  “Becky!” Janice stops gathering clothes. “You are never to say that word again. Do you hear me?”

  “Ms. Matthews lets us say anything we like.”

  “I’m warning you, Becky….” There comes then the sound she has been hoping for—the sound of the house phone ringing. “We’re not finished with this, Becky,” she says, wagging a finger at her daughter. “Not by a long shot.”

  When the skin is smooth, break the four small toes below the second joint and fold them underneath. Take a knife and peel away the nails. They may creep like Mongolian death worms into the darkness of the heel and that way a foot may be lost.

  THE EVENING BEFORE, SHE had gone with Philip to a fortieth birthday party in a restaurant in Douglas village. Angela, the birthday girl, was an old college friend. More precisely, she was an old college friend of Philip’s, because although they had all been part of the same set once, Janice had never liked her. Angela’s three teenage daughters were there, afflicted already with their mother’s mannerisms: the coy, flirtatious giggle, a tendency to stand too close and engage in unnecessary touching. They had rushed, shrieking, at Philip, and one of them, the middle one, had called him “uncle” and kissed him.

  In the car on the way home, Janice said, “I think Angela’s got too thin. It’s showing in her face.”

  “I thought she looked well,” he said. “She didn’t look forty, that’s for sure.”

  Janice was driving. She glanced at him in the passenger seat, but he was staring out the window. “Know what her sister told me?” she said. “Angela has them all on diets. Those poor girls. That little one can’t be any more than twelve.”

  “Fourteen,” he said. “Same age as Becky.”

  “That’s still way too young, Philip.”

  “She’s banned crisps and chocolate,” he said, turning to her. “It’s hardly a human rights issue.”

  They were approaching a junction and she braked sharply. “And that’s what you and Angela were discussing?” she said. “Holed up together at the bar all night?”

  He sighed. “Angela likes you,” he said. “She’s only ever tried to be a friend. I wish you’d give her a chance. We were talking about Becky, actually, about how she’s put on weight.”

  “I don’t believe this,” she said.

  “Come on,” he said. “You must have noticed, too.”

  “I’ll tell you what I noticed,” she said. “You sweet-talking plastic Angela all night. If it wasn’t Angela it was one of the daughters. Don’t think I didn’t see. That blond one had her hand practically on your ass at one stage. She’s worse than her mother.”

  “Let me out,” he said. “Let me out here. I’ll walk home.” They were stopped at traffic lights, and he rattled the car door but it was locked.

  “Big fucking gesture, Philip—we must be a whole five minutes away.” But she was crying, wiping her eyes furtively with the back of her hand. He could have reached across and released the lock, but he remained in his seat, and when the lights changed she drove on. He didn’t speak again until they pulled up outside the house. She was sobbing now, tears running down her cheeks. He unfastened his seatbelt.

  “Did you ever think our lives would turn out like this?” he said.

  Prepare bandages of white silk or cotton, ten chi long and two cun wide. Break the arch of the foot and wind the cloths in figures of eight, knotting at instep and ankle. Do not be unsettled by the cries: The breeze that sighs at night about the lotus bulb, by morning gives way to petaled sun.

  SHE HURRIES ACROSS THE landing to their bedroom and picks up the phone. “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi.”

  These postfight conversations have the quality of a folk dance, a complicated system of advance and retreat, executed with varying degrees of grace. Perform the correct movements, in the correct order, and eventually they will be returned to the point they departed from. “Listen,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said those things last night. I’m sorry.”

  “We were both tired,” she says. “Angela always puts me on edge. I don’t know why I let her get to me.”

  “Angela has a way of getting to people,” he says. “It’s her special talent.” And she knows he doesn’t mean it, knows he likes Angela, has possibly even fucked her at some point, but she understands, too, that he is offering Angela up by way of apology. She lies back on the bed and closes her eyes.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she says. “What you said last night, about Becky’s weight? I’m going to have a word with her.”

  “Don’t, please,” he says. “I was out of order.”

  “No,” she says. “You weren’t.” Mostly because it was expected, but now that she has said it aloud, she wonders if perhaps he mightn’t be right.

  “I’d hate her to be upset,” he says. “She’s a great kid. But whatever you think is best.”

  “It wouldn’t do her any harm to lose a few pounds.” She waits for him to say something else, but he falls silent. She senses he is preparing to wind down the call. “Will you be home for supper?” she asks, while she tries to think of something else to say, something to hold him.

  “I’m afraid not. I have to take clients to dinner.”

  “Where will you take them?” she says, but already he is saying “bye, bye, bye,” and then he is gone.

  She returns the phone to its cradle and sits a moment on the edge of the bed. These calls usually act as a sort of poultice, the fact of them more than anything that might be said. This one was different. It was the way he hurried to say goodbye, she thinks, the way he managed to take leave of her so very easily. She goes to the mirror to fix her hair. Her hand flies to her throat when she sees Becky in the doorway. “Goodness, Becky!” she says. “You gave me a fright.”

  “Was that Dad on the phone?”

  Janice nods. How long has the child been there? she wonders.

  Becky begins rhythmically kicking the doorframe, five kicks with the right foot, five with the left, her feet encased in wads of white pillowcase. “Is he coming home for supper?”

  “No, he’s meeting clients.” She points to the bandages on her daughter’s feet. “Take those off and go do the rest of your homework.”

  Becky shakes her head. “No can do. I’ve only just put them on.”

  Janice goes over and tugs at a loose end of cloth on her daughter’s right foot. The girl yells and kicks out, catching her mother on the wrist. She turns and heads in an odd, stumbling gait toward her own bedroom, arms held out from her sides as if negotiating a tightrope. One of the bandages comes loose, unfurling behind her as she walks.

  Janice rubs her wrist. “That’s it, Becky,” she says, following her across the landing. “I’m going to the school tomorrow. I’m going to see Ms. Matthews.”

  Becky has reached the door of her own bedr
oom. “That’s a coincidence,” she says, “because Ms. Matthews wants to see you.” She pulls a piece of paper from the pocket of her skirt and, crumpling it in a ball, flings it at her mother, striking her in the chest. Then she goes into her room, slams the door, and turns the lock.

  Janice picks up the piece of paper, smooths it out. It is an appointment slip headed with the school’s blue crest, the spaces for day and time left blank. A handwritten note in large, looped writing, little circles over the i’s, asks her to telephone to arrange an appointment. There is nothing else, no clue as to the nature of the meeting sought, only a signature in the same looped script: Madeleine Matthews. The slip is dated two days previously. Janice bangs on her daughter’s door. “Becky,” she says. “Why does Ms. Matthews want to see me?” But there is no answer. When she tries again—“You’re being childish, Becky. We need to talk about this”—Becky still doesn’t reply. But when Janice is halfway down the stairs, she thinks she hears her daughter say something, something that sounds very like “bitch.”

  If a foot is large, or the toes fleshy, place among the bandages shards of glass or porcelain. This will bring a rotting of flesh which, in time, will drop away, leaving the foot smaller and more pleasing. Bind at least twice a week, or, if the family is rich, every day. Soon, a valley will form between cleft and heel, dark and secret as a jade gate.

  DOWNSTAIRS, SHE POURS A glass of wine and sits at the kitchen table. She thinks of Philip, in a restaurant somewhere, eating attractive food served by attractive waitresses with soft, glossy mouths. She shuts her eyes, but instead of disappearing, the waitresses come into clearer focus, a troupe of smiling, agreeable young women. And as the image sharpens it begins to morph, the women layered one on top of another, until they merge into one, a woman with red choppy hair, incongruously, for a restaurant, standing before a whiteboard. It is Ms. Matthews. Happy, unbroken Ms. Matthews, glowing with that singularly youthful emotion: hope. Oblivious Ms. Matthews, reaching back through the centuries to find herself a bit of trouble. And though Janice knows it is a trick of the mind, still it unsettles her.