The Case of Lena S.

by David Bergen

  Lena kissed Mason on the mouth. “Shut up,” she said. “I want to do everything with you. Whatever you want. If we do everything there’ll be no reason to go elsewhere.”

  “I won’t go anywhere else.”

  “And I don’t want you to. Aren’t there things you’d like to try? You said you liked to be inside me.” She put her nose against Mason’s cheek and breathed in. “Hmmm,” she said. “Do you want to try other places, like my bum? Does that interest you? You must have thought about it. Haven’t you?”

  “Maybe. A little. But not with you. It’s like there are girls out there who do that kind of thing but not the girl I’m with. You know? It just seems weird and kind of embarrassing.”

  “Doesn’t have to be. Only we will know about it.” Lena was curious. She told Mason that and then she said that there was nothing wrong with anal sex and if she was ever going to do it she wanted it to be with him. She unbuttoned his jeans and put her hand down his shorts. “Look how hard you are. Come on.” She zipped him up and took his hand and pulled him out into the kitchen. Mrs. Crowe was eating cheese and crackers and reading. She looked up at them and Mason said, “We’re going down to my room. Just for a bit. Lena has to go soon.” Mrs. Crowe smiled and waved a knife at them.

  Mason told Lena to go ahead, he’d be right there. She went downstairs and lay down on the bed and looked at the ceiling. Her feet were still cold from the walk over. She went to the basement washroom and washed herself. Saw her hipbones in the mirror. She put a bit of toothpaste on her tongue and sucked on it. She went back to Mason’s bedroom and took off her jeans and panties. Left her top on. Her head rested at an angle on the pillow and she could see the door and her legs and the hair at her crotch. She thought she should be scared but she wasn’t. She heard Mason and his mother talking upstairs, then Mason’s steps on the landing. Mason came in and looked at her and looked away. “Don’t have to use a condom,” Lena said. Mason still would not look at her and this made her feel stronger. He had a tube of lubricant in his hand and she took it from him. His hand was shaking. She opened the lubricant and spread it on herself and put some on Mason’s cock. She could hear him breathing. She kneeled on the bed, bent forward and rested her forehead against a pillow, and said, “Fuck me, Mason.”

  Even with the lubricant it hurt. Mason asked, “Does it hurt?” but Lena said, “No.” Her face was pressed against the blanket now and she could smell laundry detergent and the sweet fruity scent of the lubricant and she thought of the air outside and Mrs. Crowe eating crackers upstairs and her own father back home preparing a punishment for her. When Mason came Lena turned her head to look at his face and his eyes were closed and his chin pushed up and sideways and he seemed disgusted.14

  In mid-December, Lena went Christmas shopping and bought Mason a CD, a Hank Williams III. She hated the holiday season; the songs, the cheer, and the panic she felt. Over the past week Lena had wanted to phone Mason but she forced herself to wait, and when they did finally meet again, outside of The Nook on a cold day, Mason said, “I haven’t seen you. Where have you been?”

  Lena looked away. Across the street an old woman walked a small dog. A car honked. Lena said, “On Monday I slept, on Tuesday I bought a new coat, on Wednesday I thought I saw you on the street but it was someone else, someone with a goatee and long feet, and on Thursday I thought about you for a few minutes. Today is Friday. Here I am. I’m aware of you now because you’re in front of me. It’s funny. I think, Oh, I’d like to see you, but then I see you and I wonder why I wanted to see you.” She said, “We have all kinds of problems. Even if I love you I have to push you away. There is my world and then there is yours. You know nothing about me.”

  To all of this Mason made no reply.

  The holidays came and on Christmas Eve Lena’s family went carolling, the six of them walking over to Lions Manor. They gathered in the lobby around the grand piano and sang to old men and women. Lena envied their lack of restlessness, their simple needs. She hadn’t wanted to go but her father said, “You must.” She wore an oversized army coat with a high collar, her father’s boots, and the Russian hat with the fur flaps. Her sisters, Rosemary especially, were giddy and silly. They linked arms and, three abreast, sang sharply, as if to please their father. Later, the girls circled the room, shaking hands with the extended claws, calling out “Merry Christmas” and “Happy holidays.” What joy.

  On Christmas Day they had a turkey dinner. Nana came. Mr. and Mrs. Schellendal had also invited a poor single mother and her two children, a girl of three and a boy of eight. The boy smelled like someone who had diarrhea. Lena sat beside him at the table and had to excuse herself. She went up to her room and lay down and looked at the poster of Jim Morrison.

  Rosemary knocked on her door. Said, “Lena?”

  Lena didn’t answer. Rosemary came in and said, “Mom wants you downstairs.”

  “Sure, she does.”

  “We’re having carrot pudding.”

  Lena shrugged and said, “Junior there smells like shit.”

  “Poor little kid,” Rosemary said.

  “I hate being the missionary family,” Lena said.

  Rosemary lay down on her stomach beside Lena. “Mason called again.”

  “Yeah? I figured he would.”

  “He sounds so lost.”

  “He is.”

  “Why don’t you see him?”

  “I don’t know. He just wants to have sex? I’m a bitch?”

  “Dad answered the phone yesterday. He was mean.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said you were indisposed.”

  “Do you want him?” Lena asked. She turned on her side and took Rosemary’s hand. “He likes you. He said you were the best of the Schellendal sisters. The most honest.”

  “You don’t own him, Lena. He’s not a present to give away.”

  “I do though,” Lena said. “He listens to me. I could do anything to him and he would forgive me.”

  “He said I was the best?”

  Lena nodded. Put her hand on Rosemary’s neck. “He’s a great kisser,” she said. She pushed her nose against Rosemary’s chin. They were lying against the pillows and facing each other. Lena kissed Rosemary lightly on the mouth. “Remember when we were younger and used to practise. Boys are harder than girls, you ever noticed that?” She kissed Rosemary again, pushed her tongue into her mouth and Rosemary let her. She closed her eyes and then opened them again and held her hand on Lena’s hip. Lena pulled away and saw her sister’s wet mouth. “He likes to do that until it hurts.”

  Rosemary rolled off the bed. “Don’t want a hand-me-down,” she said.

  They went back downstairs together and Rosemary sat beside the fecal-smelling boy while Lena slid in beside her mother. They ate carrot pudding with a nutmeg sauce while the woman who was visiting told the family about her nose infection. Lena slowly ate her pudding and looked at the hairs on her father’s fingers. When the woman was done speaking Lena laughed. Her mother pushed the back of a hand against Lena’s thigh. “Don’t,” she whispered.

  Lena was facing the woman. She said, “My parents think I’m mad. Do you think I’m mad?” The woman was thin and weak and Lena thought that there was nothing sexual about her. She couldn’t imagine any man wanting her.

  “Lena.” Her father, across the table, raised his head quickly.

  The woman looked at Lena, at Mr. Schellendal and then at her own children.

  Lena continued, ignoring her father’s glare, “I’m going to go away to some place and in that place I will be healed and then I’ll come home again. Right, Dad?”

  Margot giggled. She’d placed her chin on the edge of the table and watched the scene.

  “What are you talking about?” Mr. Schellendal asked.

  “Yes, what are you talking about?” her mother said.

  Lena snorted. Laid her spoon down beside her bowl. She addressed the woman. “If your son was troubled would you send him away? Would you call
up some doctors in white coats and say, ‘Come pick up my son. I don’t want him any more’?”

  Lena could see that the woman was flustered and this pleased her. Her father said, “Stop this, Lena,” and her mother was pinching the flesh on her upper arm.

  “Ouch,” she said, and she pulled away. She faced the visitor. “Would you like more carrot pudding? It’s everybody’s favourite here. Especially my father’s.” She looked at her father who had pushed away from the table and was suggesting a move to the living room. He was demanding it, Lena could see that. And so the group moved away from the table, but Lena remained seated, refusing her mother’s entreaties to join the others, hearing the squeals of Margot and Emily and, once, the stinky boy came back into the dining room and stared at Lena and she stared back. “Boo,” she went, but he didn’t budge and then she whispered, “Piece of shit,” and his face twisted and he backed away and returned to the living room.

  Then, without calling ahead, Mason came over that evening. Lena came down and stood outside with him in socks and a sweater. Together they exhaled plumes of fog that mingled and rose upwards. “You’ve got a lot of guts, coming here,” Lena said. “What if my father sees you?”

  Mason shrugged. “What’s he going to do? Flog me?” He handed her a package. “Here,” he said. “I got this for you. Merry Christmas.”

  Lena took it. “It’s a book.”

  “Maybe. Or it could be a box of chocolates disguised as a book.”

  “You can’t come in,” Lena said.

  “I know.” Mason pushed his hands into his pockets.

  “I don’t have a present for you,” Lena said. She looked behind her, thinking about the CD. She turned back.

  “It doesn’t matter. That’s not why I gave you that.”

  She wanted to put her arms around him. Say his name. “Bye,” she said.

  “Bye.” She stood there and watched him step down the stairs and she wanted to call out to him but she didn’t and this pleased her; that she would have the strength to deny herself something that she actually wanted.

  The book was A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. It was black and old and smelled of Mr. Ferry’s house. Inside, on the cover, was the name Hyam Ferry. “You stole it,” Lena whispered.15 She was in bed. She was wearing long underwear and a cotton nightgown with Pooh characters on it. She was alone. There was no inscription to her in the book, in fact, Mason had not left a card or said anything in a note. For several weeks after that she carried the book around with her. At breakfast, she laid it beside her plate and when she watched TV she held it on her lap. Her father asked her at dinner one night what that black book was. Lena said it was a gift from a friend. It was rare, she said, and worth a lot of money. Her father looked at her mother, who shook her head and asked the girls if they were ready for dessert.

  She still refused to see Mason, who called twice a day. Once, he showed up at the door and said he was taking her to a movie. She said, “You can’t. Besides, these days I’m ugly and fat.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mason asked.

  “Take Rosemary,” Lena said, and she went upstairs and got her sister and sent the two of them on their way. Mason’s lack of protest and Rosemary’s visible giddiness produced a brief bout of jealousy in Lena, who spent the evening in her room, waiting and looking out at the street. At one point she sat on her bed and took her journal, her art book, Portrait, a photo of Mason and her sitting on Mason’s front steps, a bowl of shells collected on Vancouver Island, and she studied and fingered all these objects. When Rosemary came home Lena went to her room and watched her undress and she was surprised at how beautiful Rosemary’s body was, the tautness of her stomach, the padded bra, the tiny panties, and she said, “Did he kiss you?”

  “No. He talked about you the whole time.”

  “Did he?” Lena was pleased.

  “You’re stupid,” Rosemary said.

  “There are more important things than love,” Lena said.

  “See? Stupid.” Rosemary turned away.

  “He didn’t touch you? Hold your hand? Even suggest it?”

  “What do you want?”

  Lena didn’t answer. That night she came to Rosemary’s bed and crawled in and asked, “Is this okay?”

  “Sure,” Rosemary said.

  Lena curled into her sister. Put one arm over her waist and the other under her own head. Played with Rosemary’s hair and pressed her face against her neck. They didn’t say anything, just fell asleep like that, and in the morning when Lena woke, it seemed that she was outside of herself, looking down on the scene of two sisters lying in bed together; there was a door and if Lena were to open the door she would find herself on the other side, only she did not know how to open the door.

  Death. The idea of it was there. One afternoon when she was alone in the house she went out into the garage and found the box her father had built for killing small animals. It was the size of a small TV and it had a door with a rubber seal and a hole and a clamp where the hose snapped in. The box had a small window. Once she had watched her father asphyxiate a squirrel. “You must be careful,” he had explained as he attached the hose to the tailpipe, “That no exhaust leaks into the garage.” Then he had turned on the car’s ignition and they had watched together. “See,” her father said, “It just falls asleep.” And this was true; there was nothing ugly or violent about the squirrel’s death. Her father had killed Pontoon, their cat, in the same way. Lena had watched and when it was over she looked down at Pontoon who was laid out on the cement floor like a small rug. She saw her father’s large hands and the black pipe and she saw her own feet, her grey runners. “We should put him on a blanket,” she said.

  Her parents had argued that night. Lena heard them beyond the dining room door.

  “He wasn’t sick,” her mother said.

  Mr. Schellendal muttered something.

  Mrs. Schellendal said, “You got tired of him. You got tired of his shit, of cleaning up after him. You couldn’t train him so you killed him.”

  “He was suffering.”

  There was silence for a while and then her mother’s soft voice, impossible to understand, and then a low groan and her mother said, “I hope I never get sick,” and her father chuckled and her mother said “Here,” and then Margot came running into the room.

  At that moment, that age, she had loved her father. His scent, the hairs on his fingers, the pull of his suit jacket across his shoulders, the clip of money in his pocket, the dark shadow of bristle on his jaw at 7 p.m. She liked to sit on her father’s lap and plant kisses on his forehead and mouth, especially when her mother was watching. She protected her father. Made certain he had nothing to worry about. She made him a little card every night and placed it on his plate and when he got home from work, he’d bend to kiss her and ask, “How’s my big girl,” and maybe, if he was happy, he’d nuzzle her neck.

  From the first days when Lena began to work at The Nook, she and Julianne had tried to guess customer’s occupations. Julianne would slide into the kitchen and call out the order for the real estate lady, the one with the copper hair and the stiletto heels. “Money,” Julianne said.

  Lena was better with the men. There were the hospital workers but there were also insurance salesmen and computer guys and carpenters and plumbers and salesmen and bar owners and teachers and accountants and dads with kids. Musicians were easy, especially the young ones who dreamed of glory. They rarely tipped. One time an older man in a black overcoat and a hat and black gloves had come in and stamped his feet and removed his gloves and took off his hat and sat himself in the back booth. “Limo driver,” Julianne said.

  “Banker,” Raymond, the cook, said.

  “No, no,” Lena said, “Believe me, I know about bankers. He’s a CEO of some company.”

  Lena served him. He had nice hands. His hair was grey but his face was younger. Lena figured he was about fifty. He ordered poached eggs on rye, no butter, and tea. He spoke softly and w
hen he was done he folded the menu, handed it to Lena, and said, “Thank you.”

  Lena brought him his tea. He said, “Thank you.” She placed his eggs and toast before him and he said, “Thank you.”

  She went to the back and said, “He’s very polite.”

  Julianne wondered if he had money and if he did, was he married.

  “He’s wearing a wedding band,” Lena said.

  Later, Lena brought him the bill. She laid it on the table and said, “This might seem impolite but Julianne Jefford, the other waitress who works here, and I, Lena Schellendal, were curious about your occupation. Julianne thought you were an actor and I said you were a banker because my Dad’s a banker and he dresses like you, very nicely, but we were wondering, you know? Is this rude?”

  The man looked at the bill. He raised his eyebrows. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his wallet. He stood and put on his coat and then his gloves and he removed a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to Lena and said, “Thank you, Lena,” and then he took a business card from his wallet, laid it on the table, and he left.

  “He drives a fucking hearse,” Julianne said when Lena showed her the card. “So cool.”

  “A funeral director,” Lena said, “That’s what it says. He doesn’t drive, he prepares the bodies. You should have seen his hands, they were beautiful.”

  “Creepy,” Julianne said.

  Lena didn’t think so. She waited for him to come back, but he never did. She imagined him slipping out of his black coat and putting on a lab jacket and touching the naked body of some girl who had died too young. Did he look at the girl sexually? Was that impossible? He had seemed so polite and for a few weeks, waiting for his return, Lena had wondered how one became a mortician. Lena told Julianne that the whole concept of jobs and careers and work was depressing. The everyday flow of humanity to offices and work sites and then the flow back home. And for what? Julianne said that people needed to work. There was nothing else. Take away a person’s job and they were lost. She said that for every job there was a need. People needed to crap and read and drive and eat and watch TV and run and sleep and borrow money. The problem, Lena responded, was the stupidity of the jobs, the mindlessness.