by Jeffrey Ford
“Good,” she said, holding up her latest attempt. “Look, I’m getting really close.” She laid the picture down next to the one taped to the board. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re making progress.” To be honest, it looked to me like she was even further from the mark than when she’d started. I said good-bye, but she was already beginning on her next scribble and didn’t acknowledge my leaving.
That evening, when I returned home, I found a blizzard of copier paper covering the floor around the drawing table; the box was empty. The original day-care drawing and the small suitcase she’d packed the night she came to stay were gone and so was she. For the first time since I’d moved in there, the apartment felt empty. I left and ran over to her place. When she didn’t answer, I buzzed for Jenkins. A minute later, he was sticking his head out the window above.
“What do you want, Shay?” he called down.
“Have you seen Esme?”
“Yeah,” he said. “A few hours ago. She had a pile of suitcases, right there on the curb. A cab came and got her.”
“Buzz me in, man,” I said to him.
When I got to her apartment, I found the door unlocked. She’d left her computer and all of her books. I wondered if that meant she’d be back. Lying on the floor in the corner, I found the picture of her mother. It’d been taken out of its frame, which lay nearby in a pile of broken glass. I picked up the photo and brought it closer. Then I noticed that the face of the severe-looking woman had been covered with a scribble.
I went religiously to the Palace A every Sunday morning for a late breakfast, but she never joined me again. Later on, I learned from one of the professors that she’d dropped out. Making a phone call home, I told my mother to keep a lookout for her in town in case Esme’d decided to return to her father’s house. Finishing that semester was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. At the eleventh hour, when it looked like I wouldn’t be able to come up with any new paintings for my final review, I had a breakthrough one night and dashed off a portrait of a little girl, sitting alone by an open window. Outside the sun is shining and the sky is blue. She’s drawing at a table, and although the pencil in her hand is drawing a scribble on the paper before her, her eyes are closed. I called it The Scribble Mind. It was only one piece, but it was good enough to get me through the semester.
After graduate school I kept painting, year in and year out, with a show here and there but never to any great acclaim. When I was younger, that bothered me, and then I forgot about it, and the work itself became its own reward. Still, in all of those hundreds of canvases I’d covered not one ever gave me a hint as to what my true purpose was. Living without knowing was not so bad, especially after I’d married and had two daughters. I had all the purpose I needed in my family, and the art was just something I did and will always do.
I did see Esme one more time, years later. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten her—that would have been impossible—but more that I’d packed that time away and painted through it. I was in a small gallery down in SoHo in New York City, where I had a few pieces in a show. I’d gone in that afternoon because the show was over and I had to take my work down. The owner of the place was back in her office, and the gallery was empty. I was just about to remove a painting from the wall when the door opened and in walked a woman with a young girl following. As I turned to see who it was, the woman said, “Hey, Pat.” I noticed the black hair and her eyes and something stirred in my memory, although the expensive coat and boots weren’t right. “Esme, what are you doing here?” I said.
She laughed. “I live uptown, and I saw an announcement for this show and your name and thought I’d come down and see what your paintings looked like. I never suspected you’d be here.”
“It’s great to see you,” I said.
She introduced me to her daughter, who stood by the front window, looking out at the people walking by. Her name was Gina, and she seemed to be kind of a sad kid. I said hi to her and she turned and waved. She must have been about six.
I showed Esme my work and she praised it unconditionally; told me how glad she was to see I was still painting after all these years. We talked about a lot of things—the Palace A, our hometown, the university, the fact that she no longer bothered with her computer art—but neither of us mentioned the scribble or the night involving Dorphin or what happened afterward. It was strange dancing around those memories, but I was more than happy to do so.
Finally she said she had to go, and she leaned close to me and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for coming,” I said. Before she called to her daughter and they left the gallery, though, she made a kind of dramatic pause and brought her hand up to trace a quick scribble in the air. Then she winked at me and said in a whisper, “Pat…I remember.” I put on a face of envy and excitement, though I felt neither. I knew she was lying, because the whole time she was there, the kid never came within eight feet of her. There are some mysteries in this world you can learn to live with and some you just can’t.
THE BEDROOM LIGHT
They each decided, separately, that they wouldn’t discuss the miscarriage that night. The autumn breeze sounded in the tree outside the open kitchen window and traveled all through the second-story apartment of the old Victorian house. It twirled the hanging plant over the sink, flapped the ancient magazine photo of Veronica Lake tacked to his office door, spun the clown mobile in the empty bedroom, and, beneath it, set the wicker rocker to life. In their bedroom it tilted the fabric shade of the antique floor lamp that stood in the corner by the front window. Allison looked at the reflection of them lying beneath the covers in the mirror set into the top of the armoire while Bill looked at their reflection in the glass of the hand-colored print, Moon Over Miami, that hung on the wall above her. The huge gray cat, Mama, her belly skimming the floor, padded quietly into the room and snuck through the partially open door of the armoire.
Bill rolled over to face Allison and ran his hand softly down the length of her arm. “Today, while I was writing,” he said, “I heard, coming up through the grate beneath my desk, Tana’s mother yelling at her.”
“Demon seed?” said Allison.
He laughed quietly. “Yeah.” He stopped rubbing her arm. “I got out of my chair, got down on the floor, and turned my ear to the grate.”
She smiled.
“So the mom’s telling Tana, ‘You’ll listen to me, I’m the mother. I’m in charge and you’ll do what I say.’ Then there was a pause, and I hear this voice. Man, this was like no kid’s voice, but it was Tana, and she says, ‘No, Mommy, I’m in charge and you will listen to me.’”
“Get outta here,” Allison said and pushed him gently in the chest.
“God’s honest truth. So then Cindy makes a feeble attempt to get back in power. ‘I’m the mommy,’ she yells, but I could tell she meant to say it with more force, and it came out cracked and weak. And then there’s a pause, and Tana comes back with, ‘You’re wrong, Mommy. I am in charge and you will listen to me.’”
“Creep show,” Allison said.
“It got really quiet then, so I put my ear down closer. My head was on the damn floor. That’s when I heard Cindy weeping.”
Allison gave a shiver, half fake, and handed Bill one of her pillows. He put it behind his head with the rest of his stack. “Did I tell you what Phil told me?” she said.
“No,” he said.
“He told me that when he’s walking down the street and he sees her coming toward him, he crosses over to the opposite side.”
“I don’t blame him,” he said, laughing.
“He told you about the dog, right?” she said, pulling the covers up over her shoulder.
Bill shook his head.
“He said the people who live in the second-floor apartment next door—the young guy with the limp and his wife, Rhoda—they used to have a beagle that they kept on their porch all day while they were at work.”
“Over here,” he said and
pointed at the wall.
“Yeah. They gave it water and food, the whole thing, and had a long leash attached to its collar. Anyway, one day Phil’s walking down to the Busy-Bee to get coffee and cigarettes and he sees Tana standing under the porch, looking up at the dog. She was talking to it. Phil said that the dog was getting worked up, so he told Tana to leave it alone. She shot him a ‘Don’t fuck with me’ stare. He was worried how it might look, him talking to the kid, so he went on his way. That afternoon the dog was discovered strangled, hanging by its leash off the second-story porch.”
“He never told me that. Shit. And come to think about it, I never told you this…. I was sitting in my office just the other day, writing, and all of a sudden I feel something on my back, like it’s tingling. I turn around, and there she is, standing in the doorway to the office, holding Mama like a baby doll, just staring at me. I jumped out of my chair, and I said, like, ‘I didn’t hear you knock.’ I was a little scared actually, so I asked her if she wanted a cookie. At first she didn’t say anything, but just looked at me with that…if I were writing a story about her I’d describe her face as dour—an old lady face minus the wrinkles…. Then, get this, she says in that low, flat voice, ‘Do you Lambada?’”
“What the fuck?” Allison said and laughed. “She didn’t say that.”
“No,” he said, “that’s what she said, she asked me if I Lambada. What the hell is it anyway? I told her no, and then she turned and split.”
“Lambada, I think…,” she said and broke out laughing again. “I think it’s some kind of South American dance.”
“What would have happened if I said yes?” he asked.
“Lambada,” she whispered, shaking her head.
“Phil’s got the right strategy with her,” he said.
“But I don’t like her coming up here in the middle of the day uninvited,” said Allison.
“I’ll have to start locking the door after you go to work,” said Bill.
“This place…there’s something very…I don’t know.” She sighed. “Like, you ever lean against a wall? It kind of gives like flesh. Almost spongy,” she said.
“That’s just the lathing…. It’s separating away from the Sheet-rock cause this building is so old. I know what you mean, though, with that eggshell smoothness and the pliancy when you touch it—like you said, spongy-weird.”
“There’s a sinister factor to this place. The Oriental carpets, the lion’s-paw tub, the old heavy furniture—the gravity of the past that was here when we moved in. I can’t put my finger on it. At first I thought it was quaint, but then I realized it didn’t stop there.”
“Like melancholy?” he asked.
“Yeah, exactly—a sadness.”
“Just think about it. You’ve got Corky and Cindy down there, hitting the sauce and each other almost every night. They must have had to buy a whole new set of dishes after last weekend. Then you got the kid…nuff said there. What about next door, on the other side, the guy who washes his underwear on the fucking clothesline with the hose? That guy’s also classically deranged.”
“I forgot about him,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “let’s not forget about him. I watch him from the kitchen window. I can see right down through the tree branches and across the yard into his dining room. He sits there every night for hours, reading that big fat book.”
“I’ve seen him down there,” she said. “Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and go into the kitchen for a glass of water, I notice him down there reading. Is it the Bible?”
“Could be the fucking phone book for all I know.”
“Cindy told me that when they got Tana that yippie little dog—Shotzy, Potzy, whatever—the kid was walking on that side of the house over by the old guy’s property, and he came out his back door and yelled at her, ‘If I find your dog in my yard, I’ll kill it.’ Now, I know Tana’s demon seed and all, but she’s still a little kid…. Cindy didn’t tell Corky because she was afraid he’d Cork off and kick the crap out of the old guy.”
“What, instead of her for once? Hey, you never know, maybe the old man’s just trying to protect himself from Tana’s…animal magic,” said Bill. “You know, Cindy swears the kid brought a dead bird back to life. She just kind of slips that in in the middle of a ‘Hey, the weather’s nice’ kind of conversation.”
“Yeah, I’ve caught that tale,” said Allison. There was a pause. “But do you get my overall point here?” She opened her hands to illustrate the broadness of the concept. “Like we’re talking some kind of hovering, negative funk.”
“Amorphous and pungent,” he said.
“I’ve felt it ever since the first week we moved in,” she said.
“Does it have anything to do with the old woman who answered the door with her pants around her ankles?”
“Olive Harker?” she said. “Corky’s illustrious mom?”
“Remember, Olive hadta get shipped out for us to move in. Maybe she cursed the joint. You, know, put the Lambada on it.”
“It wasn’t her so much,” said Allison. “I first felt it the day the cat pissed in the sugar bowl.”
“Right in front of me—between bites of French toast,” he said. “That cat sucks.”
“Don’t talk about Mama that way,” she said.
“It baahhhs like a lamb and eats flies. I hate it,” he said.
“She’s good. Three whole weeks gone and she still came back, didn’t she? You shouldn’t have thrown her out.”
“I didn’t throw her, I drop-kicked her. She made a perfect arc, right over the back fence. But the question is, or at least the point is, if I follow you, how strange is it that she pissed right in the sugar bowl—jumped up on the table, made a beeline for it, parked right over it, and pissed like there was no tomorrow?”
“That’s what I’m getting at,” said Allison. “It fulfills no evolutionary need. It’s just grim.”
“Maybe it’s us,” he said. “Maybe we’re haunting ourselves.”
“I saw Corky digging a big hole out in the yard the other day,” she said. “His back’s full of ink—an angel being torn apart by demons…. I was more interested in the hole he was digging ’cause I haven’t heard any yipping out of Potzy for a few days.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m ready for him.”
“How?” she asked.
“The other day, when I went out garbage picking, I found a busted-off rake handle. I wound duct tape around one end for a grip. It’s in the kitchen behind the door for when Corky gets shit-faced and starts up the stairs. Then I’m gonna grab that thing and beat his ass.”
“Hey, do you remember that guy Keith back in college?” she asked.
“McCurly, yeah,” he said. “He did the apple dance. What made you think of him?”
She nodded. “Every time he flapped his arms the apple rolled off his head, remember?”
“He danced to Steve Miller’s ‘Fly Like an Eagle,’” Bill said. “What a fuckin’ fruitcake. I remember O’She a telling me that he ended up working for the government.”
“Well, remember that time he was telling us he was reading The Amityville Horror?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“McCurly said that one of the pieces of proof that the author used in the book to nail down his case that the house was really haunted was that they found an evil shit in the toilet bowl. Remember that?”
“Yeah.”
“You said to him, ‘What do you mean by an evil shit?’ And McCurly looked like he didn’t get your question.”
“But what he eventually said was ‘It was heinous.’ I asked him if he could explain that and he said, ‘Really gross.’”
They laughed.
She touched his face as if to make him quiet, and said, “That’s the point. We paint the unknown with the devil’s shit to make it make sense.”
“Heavy,” said Bill. A few seconds passed in silence.
“Right…?” she said.
&
nbsp; “Amityville was only like two towns over from where I grew up,” he told her. “New people were in there and it was all fixed up. I’d go out drinking with my friends all night. You know, the Callahans, and Wolfy, and Angelo, and Benny the Bear, and at the end of the night we’d have these cases of empty beer bottles in the car. So around that time the movie came out. We went to see it and laughed our asses off—come on, Brolin? Steiger we’re talking. One of the things that cracked us up big time was the voice saying, ‘Get out. For God’s sake get the hell out.’ Steiger and the flies…baby, well worth the price of admission. So we decided we’re gonna drive to the Amityville Horror house and scream, ‘Get the hell out,’ and throw our empties on the lawn.”
“That’s retarded,” she said.
“We did it, but then we kept doing it, and not just to the Amityville Horror house. Every time we did it, I’d crack like hell. It was so fucking stupid it made me laugh. Plus we were high as kites. We did it to people we knew and didn’t know and we did it a lot to the high school coaches we’d had for different sports. There was this one guy, though, we did it to the most—Coach Pinhead. Crew cut, face as smooth as an ass, googly eyes, and his favorite joke was to say ‘How Long is a Chinaman.’ He was a soccer coach, a real douche bag, but we swung by his house every weekend night for like three months, dropped the empties, and yelled ‘Pinhead!!!’ before peeling out on his lawn. We called the whole thing a Piercing Pinhead.”
“Could you imagine how pissed off you’d be today if some kids did that to you?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But get this. I was talking to Mike Callahan about five years later. When he was working selling furniture and married to that rich girl. I saw him at my mother’s funeral. He told me that he found out that Pinhead died of pancreatic cancer. All that time we were doing the Piercing Pinheads, screaming in the middle of the night outside his house, tormenting him, the poor guy was in there, in his bedroom, dying by inches.”
“That’s haunted,” said Allison.