My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

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  the work of Anaïs Nin. We hoped that she was not the way she sounded on the phone. Not poor, not old, not willing to pay for the company of anyone who would drive all the way out to Nehalem, population 210.

  Pip and I walked down the gravel path toward a small brown house.

  There was bad food being cooked, we could smell it already. And now a woman stepped onto the porch, she was frowning. Her age was hard to determine from our vantage point, a point in our lives when we could not bring older bodies into focus. She was perhaps the age of my mother’s older sister. And, like Aunt Lynn, she wore leggings, royal-blue leggings, and an oversized button-down shirt with some kind of appliqué on it. My mind ballooned with nervous fear. I looked at Pip and for a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.

  She waves and we wave. We wave until we are close enough to say hi and then we say hi. Now we are close enough to hug, but we don’t. She says, Come in, and inside, it is dark, with no children. Of course there are no children. Pip asks for the money right away, which is something we decided on beforehand. It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever.

  We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting. Leanne tells us we are younger than she expected and to sit down. We sit on an old vinyl couch and she leaves the room.

  It is a terrible room, with magazines piled everywhere and furniture that could have come from a motel. We don’t look at each other or anything that is reflective. I stare at my own knees.

  For a long time we don’t know where she is, and then, slowly, I can feel that she is standing right behind us. I realize this just before she pulls her fingernails through my hair. I didn’t think she was the sexual type, but now I see that I don’t know anything. It has begun, and every second we are closer to the end. I say to myself that long nails equal wealth; the idea of wealth always calms me down. I pretend I smell perfume. What if we all used expensive shampoo. What if we were kidding all the time and cared about nothing. My head relaxes, and I do the exercise where you imagine you are turning into honey. My mind slows down to a rate

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  that would not be considered functional for any other job. I am alive only one out of every four seconds, I register only fifteen minutes out of the hour. I see she is standing before us in a slip and it is not really clean and I die. I see that Pip is taking off her shoes and I die. I see that I am squeezing a nipple and I die.

  On the long ride home, neither of us said anything. We were kites flying in opposite directions attached to strings held by one hand. The money we had just made was also in that hand. Pip stopped to get a bag of chips on the way home, and now we had $1.99 less than our rent. It seemed obvious now that we should have charged more. Pip put the

  money in an envelope and wrote Mr. Hilderbrand on it. Then we stood there, apart, bruised and smelling like Leanne. We turned away from each other and set about tightening all the tiny ropes of our misery.

  I ran a bath. Just before I stepped in the tub, I heard the front door close and froze midstep; she was gone. Sometimes she did this. In the moments when other couples would fight or come together, she left me.

  With one foot in the bath, I stood waiting for her to return. I waited an unreasonably long time, long enough to realize that she wouldn’t be back tonight. But what if I waited it out, what if I stood here naked until she returned? And then, just as she walked in the front door, I could finish the gesture, squatting in the then-cold water. I had done strange things like this before. I had hidden under cars for hours, waiting to be found; I had written the same word seven thousand times attempting to alchemize time. I studied my position in the bathtub. The foot in the water was already wrinkly. How would I feel when night fell? And when she came home, how long would it take her to look

  in the bathroom? Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone? And even if she did realize that I had done this impossible feat for her, what then? She was never thankful or sympathetic. I washed quickly, with exaggerated motions that warded off paralysis.

  I paced around our tiny room. It didn’t even occur to me to go outside; I had no idea how to navigate the city without her. There was only one thing I couldn’t do when she was with me, so after a while, I lay down on the couch and did this. I closed my eyes. In all the well-worn memories, we were between the ages of six and eight. We were under the

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  covers on her mom’s foldout sofa, or on the top bunk of my bunk bed, or in a tent in her backyard. Every location was potent in its own way.

  No matter where we were, it began when Pip whispered, Let’s mate.

  She scooted on top of me; we clamped our arms around each other’s backs. We rubbed ourselves against each other’s small hip bones, trying to achieve friction. When we did it right, the feeling came on like a head rush of the whole body.

  But just before I got there, I noticed a clicking noise in the air. It was distractingly present, quietly insistent. I looked up. Above my head, our five Chinese paper lanterns were slightly rocking of their own accord.

  As I reached toward them, I suddenly realized why, but I was too late to stop myself. I shook a lantern, and from the hole in the bottom, cockroaches came pouring out. They were crawling even as they fell. They were planning the conquest of wherever they landed even before they touched down. And when they hit the ground, they didn’t die, they didn’t even think of dying. They ran.

  When Pip finally came home, we agreed that the Leanne job was not worth the money. But a few days later, we saw Nastassja Kinski in the movie Paris, Texas. She was wearing a long red sweater and working in a peep show. I thought it looked like a pretty easy job, as long as Harry Dean Stanton didn’t show up, but Pip didn’t agree.

  No way. I’m not gonna do that.

  I could do it without you.

  This made her so angry that she did the dishes. We never did this unless we were trying to be grand and self-destructive. I stood in the doorway and tried to maintain my end of our silence while watching her scratch at calcified noodles. In truth, I had not yet learned how to hate anyone but my parents. I was actually just standing there in love. I was not even really standing; if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.

  I won’t do it, never mind.

  You sound disappointed.

  I’m not.

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  It ’s okay; I know you want them to look at you.

  Who?

  Men.

  No, I don’t.

  If you do that, then I can’t be with you anymore.

  This was, in a way, the most romantic thing she had ever said to me.

  It implied that we were living together not because we had grown up together and were the only people we knew, but because of something else. Because we both didn’t want men to look at me. I told her I would never work in a peep show, and she stopped doing the dishes, which meant she meant she was okay again. But I wasn’t okay. In the last ten years, we had touched only three times.

  1. When she was eleven, her uncle tried to molest her. When she

  told me about it, I cried and she hit me on the chin and I curled up in a ball for forty minutes until she uncurled me. I kept my eyes shut as she pulled my knees away from my chest and I could feel her looking at my body and I knew that if I kept my eyes closed it would happen and it did.

  She slid her hand under my tights and felt around until she had located the thing she knew on herself. Then she shook her finger in a violent, animal way that quickly gave me the old rush. When it was over, she told me not to tell anyone and I didn’t know if
she meant this, with me, or about her uncle.

  2. When we were fourteen we got drunk for the first time, and for about nine minutes, everything seemed possible and we kissed. This encounter seemed promisingly normal, and in the following days I

  waited for more kissing, perhaps even some kind of exchange of rings or lockets. But nothing was exchanged. We each kept our own things.

  3. In our last year of high school, I momentarily had one other friend.

  She was an ordinary girl, her name was Tammy, she liked the Smiths.

  There was no way I could ever be in love with her because she was just as pathetic as me. Every day she told me everything she was thinking, and I guessed that this was what most girls did together. I wanted to talk about myself, too, badly, but it was hard to know where to begin. She was always so far ahead of me, in the minutiae of poems she had written

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  in reference to dreams she had dreamed. So I just hung out, in a loose imitation of Pip. Pip did not think much of Tammy, but she was mildly intrigued by the normalcy of the friendship.

  What do you guys do?

  Nothing. Listen to tapes and stuff.

  That ’s it?

  Last weekend we made peanut-butter cookies.

  Oh. That sounds fun.

  Are you being sarcastic?

  No, it does.

  So she came along the next time I went over to Tammy’s house. This made me a little nervous because Tammy had these parents who were always around. Traditionally, parents did not know what to make of Pip, who looked much more like a boy than a girl, and somehow made mothers feel flirtatious and fathers feel strangely threatened. But Tammy’s parents were watching a movie and just waved absently behind their heads when we came in. As predicted, we listened to tapes. Pip asked if we were going to make peanut-butter cookies, but Tammy said she didn’t have the right stuff. Then she threw herself down on the bed and asked us if we were girlfriends or what? An appalling emptiness filled the room. I stared out the window and repeated the word “window” in my head, I was ready to window window window indefinitely, but suddenly, Pip answered.

  Yeah.

  Cool. I have a gay cousin.

  Tammy told us that her room was a safe space and we didn’t have

  to pretend, and then she showed us a neon pink sticker that her cousin had sent her. It said fuck your gender. We all looked at the sticker in silence, absorbing its two meanings—at least two, probably even more.

  Tammy seemed to be waiting for something, as if Pip and I would obediently fall upon each other the moment we read the sticker’s bold command. I knew we were a disappointment, meekly sitting on the bed. Pip must have felt this, too, because she abruptly threw her arm over my shoulder. This had never happened before, so understandably, I froze.

  And then very gradually recalibrated my body into a casual attitude. Pip

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  just blinked when I sighed and flopped my hand on her thigh. Tammy watched all of this and even gave a slight nod of approval before shifting her attention back to the music. We listened to the Smiths, the Velvet Underground, and the Sugarcubes. Pip and I did not move from

  our position. After an hour and twenty minutes, my back ached and my numb blue hand felt unaffiliated with the rest of my body. I politely excused myself.

  In the powdery warmth of the bathroom I felt euphoric. Being alone suddenly felt wild. I locked the door and made a series of involuntary, baroque gestures in the mirror. I waved maniacally at myself and contorted my face into hideous, unlovable expressions. I washed my hands as if they were children, cradling one and then the other. I was experiencing a paroxysm of selfhood. The scientific name for this spasm is the Last Hurrah. The feeling was quickly spent. I dried my hands on a tiny blue towel and walked back to the bedroom.

  I knew it the moment before I saw it. I knew I would find them

  together on the bed like this, I knew I would be stunned, I knew they would spring apart and wipe their mouths. Pip would not look me in the eye. I would never talk to Tammy again. I knew we would all graduate from high school, I knew that Pip and I would live together as planned.

  And I knew she did not want me in that way. She never would. Other girls, any girl, but not me.

  Now that we had paid the rent, we felt entitled to mention the cockroach situation to the landlord. He said he would send someone over but that we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

  Why not?

  Well, it ’s not just your apartment; the whole building’s infested.

  Maybe you should have them do the whole building, then.

  It wouldn’t do any good; they’d just come over from other build-

  ings.

  It ’s the whole block?

  It ’s the whole world.

  I told him never mind then and got off the phone quickly, before he could hear Pip hammering. We were making some renovations; specifi-

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  cally, we were building a basement. Our apartment was tiny, but the ceil-ings were tall, and there was a tantalizing amount of unused space above our heads. Pip thought lofts were for hippies, so even though our studio was on the second floor, she had sketched out a design that would allow us to live on a low-ceilinged main floor, and then, when feeling morose, descend a ladder to the basement. We would leave the heavy things down there, like the refrigerator and bathtub, but everything else would come upstairs. We could both picture the basement perfectly in our heads. It had a damp, mineral smell. Warmth and seams of light seeped through the ceiling. Up there was home. Dinner waited for us up there.

  One of the many great reasons for building a basement was our

  access to free wood. Pip had met a girl whose father owned Berryman’s Lumber and Supply. Kate Berryman. She was a year younger than us

  and went to the private high school by Pip’s grandma’s house. I had never met her, but I felt glad that we were using her. We practiced a very loose, sporadic form of class warfare that sanctioned every kind of thievery. There was no person, no business, no library, hospital, or park that had not stolen from us, be it psychically or historically, and thus we were forever trying to regain what was ours. Kate probably thought she was on our side of the restitution when she struggled to pull large pieces of plywood out of the back of her parents’ station wagon. She left them in the alley behind our building, honking three times as she drove away. At her signal, we strolled out of the building, pretending to take a walk, sometimes even stopping to buy a soda, before arbitrarily, on a whim, deciding to amble down the alley. We hauled it upstairs, feeling fairly certain we had hoodwinked everyone.

  We were always getting away with something, which implied that

  someone was always watching us, which meant we were not alone in

  this world.

  Each morning Pip made a list of what we needed to do that day.

  At the top of the list was usually go to bank, where they had free coffee. The next items were often vague— find out about food stamps, library card? —but the list still gave me a cozy feeling. I liked to watch her write it, knowing that someone was steering the day. At night we discussed how we would decorate the basement, but during the day our progress

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  was slow. Mostly, what we had was a lot of pieces of wood; they leaned against the walls and lay across the couch like untrained dogs.

  We were trying to nail a post into the linoleum kitchen floor when Pip decided we needed a certain kind of bracket.

  Are you sure?

  Yeah. I’ll call Kate and she ’ll bring it.

  Isn’t she in school?

  It ’s okay.

  Pip made the call and then went to take a shower. I continued hammering long nails through the post and into the floor. The post became secure. It was a satisfyi
ng feeling. It wouldn’t withstand any kind of weight, but it stood on its own. It was almost as tall as me, and I could not help naming it. It looked like a Gwen.

  The buzzer rang, and Pip ran damply to the door. It was Kate. I

  looked up at her from where I was sitting on the kitchen floor. She was wearing a school uniform. She was not holding the brackets. Maybe she had hidden them up her skirt.

  Where are the brackets? I asked.

  With panic in her eyes, Kate looked at Pip. Pip took her hand, turned to me, and said, We have to tell you something.

  I suddenly felt chilled. My ears felt so cold that I had to press my hands against them. But I quickly realized this made me look as if I were covering them to avoid listening, like the monkey who hears no evil. So I rubbed my palms together and asked, Are your ears cold? Pip didn’t respond, but Kate shook her head.

  Okay, go ahead.

  Kate and I are going to live together at her parents’ house.

  Why?

  What do you mean?

  Well, I’m sure Kate ’s dad doesn’t want you living in his house after you stole all that stuff from him.

  I’m going to work at Berryman’s Lumber to pay him back. I might

  even make enough money to get a car.

  I thought about this. I imagined Pip driving a car, a Model T, wearing goggles and a scarf that blew behind her in the wind.

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  Can I work at Berryman’s Lumber, too?

  Pip was suddenly angry. Come on!

  What? I can’t? Just say I can’t if I can’t.

  You are purposely not getting it!

  What?

  She raised Kate ’s hand, clasped in her own, and shook it in the air.

  Suddenly my ears were hot, they were boiling, and I had to fan my hands at either side of my head to cool them down. This was too much for Pip; she grabbed her backpack and marched out of the apartment with Kate following.

  I could not let her leave the building. I ran down the hall and threw myself on her. She shook me off; I locked my arms around her knees. I was sobbing and wailing, but not like a cartoon of someone sobbing and wailing—this was really happening. If she left, I would become mute, like those children who have witnessed horrible atrocities. No one would understand me but those children. Pip was prying my fingers off her shins. Kate knelt to help her, and I was repulsed by the touch of her pudding-like skin, I wanted to puncture it, I lunged at her chest. Pip took this moment to scuttle down the stairs, and somehow Kate was behind her. I was holding Kate ’s cardigan. I ran after them, watched them hurry into Kate ’s car. Before they pulled away, I shut my eyes and hurled myself onto the sidewalk. I lay there. This was my last hope—