by Julia Slavin
“Backyard,” one of the men huffs.
I tear around the house. Mitzy Baker is standing with two starch-haired helpers who are packing up our patio furniture. The three women are looking at our table umbrella and shaking their heads at our carelessness. The right gust of wind could lift the umbrella out of its stand and skewer the entire family on its pole.
Mitzy Baker peers up at me from her clipboard. “Hello, Mr. Peel.” She smiles. “Sarah took Caroline to the park.”
“They’re packing my darkroom,” I say. “Make them stop.”
“All those chemicals,” one of the women says.
“The heavy equipment,” the other says.
Mitzy Baker closes her eyes. “Mr. Peel,” she says. “The contract you signed specified that we remove any and all potential dangers from your house, and that includes your darkroom.”
“Well, we can just forget that part of the contract.”
“No, we can’t, Mr. Peel. We do it all or nothing at all. Otherwise imagine the liability. We’d be out of business in a day.”
“Fine. Nothing. You’re out of here.”
She closes her eyes again. She’s said this to a thousand clients before me. “You signed a legally enforceable contract, Mr. Peel, which provides severe remedies for breaches.”
I stand out in front of our house and watch all my framed New York Times front pages being carried out to the truck: the day we landed on the moon, the day the Mets won the pennant, the day Nixon resigned. Then comes my darkroom: my enlarger, my dryer, boxes of solutions and tongs and timers, bags of undeveloped rolls of film I took of Caroline. I want to strangle everybody. But I’m late getting back to work. I head to the car.
The skateboarders have chosen our front wall as a new meeting place.
“Pardon me,” I say. “Your skateboards are nicking our brickwork.”
“Oh, sorry, sir,” one of them says, the big one with premature facial hair cultivated into a Fu Manchu and goatee. He salutes, shoving his board under his arm like a rifle. “We’ll never do it again. Sir!”
I turn to get in my car. I hear him say something behind my back, and the others begin to laugh.
“Have a nice day,” he says.
“Good-bye,” I say. Their girlfriends at the end of the wall giggle and light new cigarettes. I hope they’re gone when Sarah and Caroline come back.
After work I drive up to the house and see Sarah and Mitzy Baker hugging on the front stoop. I keep driving. I wonder if my wife is having an affair with Mitzy Baker as I drive around the block. Then I realize how preposterous that is and pull up in front. My wife is crying, and Mitzy is holding her hands. I rush out of my car up the walk to Sarah and stand between her and Mitzy Baker. “Where’s the baby?” I ask frantically.
“Inside,” Sarah says. “The baby’s fine.”
“Then what is it?” Sarah sobs in my arms. “My God, what is it?” I look at Mitzy Baker, who’s smiling her embroidered-kitten smile, her hands folded at her waist like a restaurant hostess.
“Mitzy thinks—” Sarah cries. “Mitzy says you should move out for a while.” She stops crying. “Just until the house is done, Walter. It won’t be for long. Just a few days.”
I let go of my wife and straighten my back. “I’m not leaving.” I’m unable to bear the sight of Mitzy Baker anymore. “This is my house.”
“Mr. Peel,” Mitzy Baker says, “you’re paying Baby Safe four thousand dollars to make your house danger-free, yet you’re standing in our way. Does that make any sense?”
“Caroline and I will come to see you every day, wherever you are,” Sarah says.
“Forget it.”
“Sarah and I are trying to come up with creative solutions, Mr. Peel. That’s what motherhood is all about.” Motherhood. That exclusive club. “Motherhood is about creativity.” Mitzy Baker smiles as she crams me in with the rest of the worker ants who merely perform tasks and die early.
Caroline and I spend a few precious minutes together on the dining room floor while Sarah and Mitzy Baker stand outside talking. Mitzy Baker has said something to make Sarah laugh so hard she’s holding her stomach, and Sarah’s come back with something that causes Mitzy Baker to close her eyes and shake her head. The dining room smells like disinfectant and there’s an echo. I notice the chandelier’s gone. I look down and see Caroline crawling over to the liquor cabinet. I start to move toward her but stop myself. Let her go. She puts a little hand on the doorknob and rises up on her knees. Then she pulls on the door. The latch catches and the door locks with a loud click.
“Ha!” I say. “Gotcha!”
I’d stay in a hotel, but Baby Safe has made me so cash poor I have to ask my older brother to help me out for a few days. “Sure, Walt, mi casa, su casa.” Though it’s not his casa at all. It belongs to Larissa, his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, which is how my brother has managed to live since graduating from college twenty years ago. “She doesn’t know who Rap Brown is,” he whispers proudly, as we watch her string beads on one of the macramé belts she sells at accessory conventions.
Peter has worn a black nylon and Velcro back brace around his middle ever since he threw his back out moving his stuff into Larissa’s. But I think it doubles as a girdle, since his age has started to hit him in the gut. “I’ll never have sex standing up again,” he says, and he’s not joking. I don’t know what young girls see in older men, especially Peter. He’s no provider. He snores. He’s got skin flaps.
I sit on Larissa’s couch and watch Peter’s documentary about Chilean miners on a TV set that I can’t help noticing is precariously balanced on an old Korean chest. Larissa brings me a wine cooler and sets it on a glass-top coffee table with sharp edges. Then she turns on a wobbly floor lamp and flips over a log in the fireplace with a pair of iron tongs. There are matches on low tables. There are house plants on the floor and hanging from the ceiling, their poisonous leaves shedding like fallout and no poison-control hotline number pasted to any of the phones. Cords hang from Levolor blinds on all the windows like nooses at a mass lynching. There are plastic cleaning bags hanging in open closets, pennies and beads spilled on the floor, bleach and dishwasher detergent on a low shelf by the kitchen sink. I ask Peter if all the pilot lights are lit on the stove.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he says.
“The stove’s electric,” Larissa says.
“That’s good,” I say. “Electric stoves are good.”
“I prefer gas,” Larissa says.
“Shh,” Peter says, and holds up a hand to quiet us while his image accuses the mine owner of exploiting his workers.
A noisy group of people walk by the door of the apartment. I notice there’s only one dead-bolt lock. “A woman was held up at gunpoint right around the corner from where we live,” I whisper to Larissa.
“Quiet,” Peter snaps.
“Just two weeks after she’d moved out from the city to get away from all that,” I continue. “A guy in a jogging suit. She didn’t get a description of his face. She remembered the gun, though. Got a good description of the gun.”
“Oh, my God,” Larissa says.
“That’s what happens in the suburbs,” Peter says. “Suburbs are the most dangerous places in the world. Sarajevo’s safer.” He clicks the remote control with an angry jerk of his arm and the screen goes black.
“So,” Larissa says, after a long silence. “How’s the baby?”
“Fantastic,” I say, and I’m not three minutes into all the incredible things Caroline does when I see Larissa’s nostrils flare in a suppressed yawn.
“Well, you should really bring her over sometime,” Larissa says.
“Love to,” I say. Not in a million years, I think, noticing the paint peeling from a windowsill, the uncovered electrical outlets.
I spend the night in a canvas hammock listening to my brother snore and wheeze while Larissa hits him with a pillow to shut him up. They won’t last. She’ll grow tired of the snoring, the skin flaps, the moles, and t
he backaches.
I don’t go to work the next day. My back hurts from the hammock. I haven’t slept. I don’t have my own shower or a good-morning kiss from my wife and a cuddle with my daughter. I’m thrown off-kilter. I call Sarah to come meet me in the park, but she says Mitzy Baker told her it was best not to see me while the house is being done. I eat a hot dog at ten in the morning and decide to go to work after all because there’s no place else to go. My secretary has a stack of fifteen messages, but I don’t call anyone or read anything or take any calls. I put my head down on the desk and wake up in time to have another hot dog for lunch in the park. I call Sarah to see if I can come home.
“Hang on,” she says. She puts her hand over the receiver, and I can hear Mitzy Baker’s sanctimonious voice muffled through the phone. “No, Walt, I’m sorry,” Sarah says.
“But I’m not feeling well,” I say. “I think I’m sick.”
“Mitzy thinks you’ll influence me.”
“I want to see you, dammit,” I say. “I want to see my daughter.”
“Hang on,” Sarah says. I hear more muffled discussion. “Okay, but just for a little while. We’ll come to you.”
We arrange to meet by the duck pond. I walk through the park. Four or five squad cars have driven over the grass and are scattered around at the top of the hill leading down to the creek, doors open, radios blaring static. Something bad’s happened. The police are talking to a guy in jogging shorts and Nikes. He keeps wiping his forehead with a balled-up Kleenex. His lips are blue. He bends over and puts his hands on his knees. A cop brings a space blanket from the trunk of one of the cars and wraps it around the jogger’s shoulders. He clasps the blanket at his neck. It covers him to the bottom of his shorts, so it looks like he’s naked underneath. He’s seen something horrible. It’s always the joggers who find something bad. They’ve become our disaster scouts, the shock messengers of the metro page. Plainclothes cops are walking up the hill and going over. A crowd is forming. I don’t want to know. I keep going. We moved here to get away from this sort of thing.
I stand by the duck pond waiting for our blue Volvo 850 station wagon to climb over the hill. When I see Sarah, I’m going to hold her so hard she’ll push right through me. I’m going to swing my baby up in the air and twirl her around and kiss her until she’s soaked with spit. Just when it feels like I’ve been waiting forever, Mitzy Baker’s Lexus peeks over the top of the hill. I see my wife in the back next to Caroline, who’s strapped in a car seat. Mitzy Baker drives up slowly next to me, her black-gloved hands clenching the wheel. She doesn’t look at me; she keeps her squinted eyes on the road. Sarah puts her hands against the window. I put mine against hers on the other side. The car keeps rolling. I jog alongside. “Hi, honey,” I say. I see Sarah mouth “Hi” through the soundproof glass. “Hi, sweetheart!” I yell to Caroline, but she’s occupied with a stuffed clown, a present from Mitzy Baker, and doesn’t notice me. Sarah tries to get her attention as I try to open the door. It’s locked. Caroline looks up at me but doesn’t seem to recognize me. Sarah smiles sadly and shrugs. Mitzy Baker peels away and speeds off. I race after the car. Sarah is turned around in her seat with her hands against the back window. I tear after them. Mitzy Baker disappears around the corner with my family.
Larissa’s sick of me. If she were in love with my brother she could possibly put up with my whining about not seeing my wife and baby and my chortling on and on about Caroline’s first tooth and how I drove five miles an hour home from the hospital on the highway after she was born. “So I said to Sarah, ‘Don’t they know we have a baby in the car?’ As everybody honked and passed me and flipped me the bird.” Larissa smiles sweetly and sips her wine cooler, wondering when I’m leaving. Peter has fallen asleep on the couch.
In the morning I jump out of my hammock as excited as I was the day Caroline was born. I get to go home today! I go for a jog and shower and head into the office with renewed enthusiasm for my work. At three o’clock I give my secretary the rest of the day off and head home.
The skateboarders have rolled around the block to the Mallorys, in search of a bigger, more difficult wall. Let them nick the Mallorys’ brickwork for a while, I think, relieved they’ve moved on. There’s a moving van outside the house where the woman was held up at gunpoint; two club chairs are being loaded into the back. I never even had the chance to introduce myself.
I turn onto my street. Something feels strange. It’s hot here. It used to be noticeably cooler than the rest of town. No one’s outside. The sun reflects off the hot pavement, the glare so strong I pull down my visor. All I can hear is a dog barking on the next block.
I pull up to my house, which I recognize now only by my neighbors’ houses. Our trees are gone, our beautiful old beech trees with their umbrellas of leaves that kept us cool in summer and dry in the rain, where birds and squirrels lived. Pachysandra and ivy that once flowed down our hill to the street has been plucked out, ripped away. Our lawn looks sick and lonely, like a disastrous haircut. A couple of crows peck around at what’s left of the yard. I almost expect to see blood on the tree stumps. I stand over the biggest stump—the one that used to be the tree that gave us leaf piles to jump in, shade in which to cool off, shelter from the rain, where I’d promised to hang a rope swing someday—and count the rings to see how old it was. I count sixty-three. Not old for a tree. It was in the prime of its life.
Then I’m hit with panic. I race to the front door. I need to get inside. But the door’s been replaced with a solid titanium slab with five locks. I bang on it with my fist. The door’s so thick it barely makes a sound. I feel my chest tighten. I’m going to die of a heart attack right here on my front stoop if I don’t get in. I kick the door, throw my body against it. “Sarah! Sarah!” I press my ear to the door and listen. Nothing. I move over to look in the window, but all the windows have been plastered over. “Sarah!” I scream again. Then I hear the sound of a dead bolt turning. Then another. And another. Two more.
The door opens with massive reverberations and there is Sarah, holding the baby and peeking out from behind the door. “Walter!” she cries.
I push open the door and step inside. Sarah’s wearing a stained terry robe, which is open, and she’s naked underneath. The baby’s wearing only a diaper. Sarah puts her free hand to her mouth and starts to cry. I wrap my arms around them both.
“Walter, I was so scared,” she says, in a little whimper. “I thought someone was trying to break in.”
“It’s okay, it’s me.” I hold them tighter. “Everything is fine.”
“They took the trees.”
“Shhh.” I look around our house, which is empty except for a few large soft toys. The windows are now continuations of the walls, the fireplace is boarded up, the furniture is gone. The banister and staircase have been replaced with an impassable barrier, and why not? There’s no need for an upstairs anymore. I’m sure there’s no bed for the baby to fall off, no shower or bath for the baby to drown in. Our house looks more like a cave than an English-style cottage. This is, in fact, how cave people lived: two people who mate for life taking care of, and protecting, one baby. That’s why our species has survived so well.
The three of us sit on the cushy floor, covered with Mitzy Baker’s foam padding. Sarah chose toffee, which makes the place dark but cozy. It’s a nice product, just as Mitzy Baker said. Caroline can drag herself up on her toys and fall and not feel a thing.
I pull my wife and child into me as hard as I can and feel the need and ache of togetherness, the relief of being inside. Tomorrow we can wake up and relax, finally. Tonight we can sleep without dreaming.
Dentaphilia
I once loved a woman who grew teeth all over her body.
The first one came in as a hard spot in her navel. It grew quickly into a tooth, a real tooth with a jagged edge and a crown, enameled like a pearl. I thought it was sexy, a little jewel in her belly button. Helen would bunch up her shirt, undulate like a harem dancer, and I’d be rea
dy to go.
Then one day I came home from the mill and Helen called for me to come upstairs. She sat at the foot of our bed wrapped in a towel, still wet and shiny from the shower. She lifted her arm. I felt around. With her arm raised I could make out the outline of a row of upper incisors pressing out just under her skin. My God, I thought, the soft underside of her arm would soon resemble a crocodile’s jaw. She said it’d been itching and painful there for some time. I told her not to worry. It was nothing. It would go away. I even managed to make her believe me long enough for her to go to sleep and for me to lie awake all night wondering what the hell to do. But in the morning, when she scratched my thigh with a molar that had sprouted in the crease behind her knee, I called Dr. Manfred.
“Yes, well … yes, well …” Dr. Manfred murmured as he examined Helen’s body with a small magnifying glass that looked like the kind jewelers use to appraise diamonds. With each “yes, well” my chest expanded, tightening my shirt at the buttons. I thought my ribs would burst out of my shirt and pile up on the floor like sticks.
“Well, what?” I asked.
He drew the glass away from his eye and smiled a phony smile. “I can see how you thought they were teeth.”
He produced a little scalpel from his white coat and began to scrape away at one of the teeth on the inside of Helen’s elbow. It came off in thin translucent strips like the layers of an onion. Helen squeezed her lips together but didn’t complain. She was brave when it came to pain. In a metal bowl, he ground the tooth with a marble pestle into a fine white powder like sand.
“You have calcinosis, my dear,” Dr. Manfred said. “It’s a calcification condition.” He pushed up on a turquoise soap dispenser and rubbed his hands into a fat lather cloud. “Sometimes there’s a buildup of calcium deposits in the body,” he said, over running tap water. “We don’t normally see the calcification externally, perhaps a plaque in the dermis, a deposit in the nodule. Not a worry, though.” He shook his hands dry in the air. “We’ll run some blood, check the thyroid. These things usually just go away. Poof!”