Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

by Danielle Evans

  It was the Post reporter that did them in, the Post reporter and the free makeover Esther was supposed to get on her official prize pickup day. He figured it was back-page news, and anyway, Esther was so excited about it. They would paint her nails and take some pictures and give them the tickets, and that would be the end of it. When they walked into the store a week later, there was a giant pink welcome banner that proclaimed CONGRATULATIONS ESTHER! and clouds of pale pink and white balloons. All of the employees and invited local media clapped their hands. Annie was there, beaming at them when they walked in, like she’d just won a prize for her science fair project. The CEO of Glitter Girl, a severe-looking woman with incongruous big blond hair, hugged Esther and shook his hand. Mindy’s music played on repeat over the loudspeakers.

  There was cake and sparkling cider. The CEO gave a heartfelt toast. Annie gave him a hug and slipped her phone number into his pocket. One of the other employees led Esther off. She came back in a sequined pink dress, a long brown wig, fluttery fake eyelashes, pink lipstick, and shiny purple nails. People took pictures. He was alarmed at first, but she turned to him and smiled like he’d never seen a kid smile before, and he thought it couldn’t be so bad, to give someone exactly what she wanted. Finally, the CEO of Glitter Girl handed them the tickets. She said Esther had already received some fan mail and handed him a pile of letters. He looked at the return addresses: California, Florida, New York, Canada.

  “Is there anything you’d like to say to all your fans, Esther?” shouted one of the reporters.

  “I want to say,” said Esther, “I am so happy to win this, but mostly I am so happy to have my daddy.”

  She turned and winked at him. She smiled a movie-star grin. There was lipstick on her teeth. For the first time, he realized how badly he’d fucked up.

  It was two days later the first story ran. Esther had told the Post reporter her mommy worked at the Ruby Tuesday on Route 7, but when the reporter called her there to get a quote, Lanae had no idea what she was talking about, said she did have a daughter named Esther, but her daughter’s father was in Texas and had never been in the army, and her daughter wasn’t allowed in Glitter Girl or at any Mindy concert.

  She called Georgie on her break to ask him about it, but he said it must have been a mix-up, he didn’t know anything about it.

  “You’d damn well better not be lying to me, Georgie,” she said, which meant she already knew he was.

  That night he called the number Annie had given to him, wondered if she could meet him somewhere, pictured her long legs wrapped around his.

  “Look,” she said softly, “I’m sorry. I was being impulsive the other day. You’re married, and I’m engaged, and I’m really proud of you, but it’s just better if everything stays aboveboard. Let’s not hurt anyone we don’t have to.”

  Georgie hung up. He went downstairs and watched television with his mother, until she turned it off and looked at him.

  “You know I watch the news during my break at the hospital,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Georgie. “They’re not still shortchanging you on your break time, are they?”

  “Don’t change the subject. Other day I coulda swore I saw Esther on TV. Channel 9. All dressed up like some hoochie princess, and talking about her daddy, who was in the army.”

  “Small world,” said Georgie. “A lot of coincidences.”

  But it was a lie, about the world being small. It was big enough. By the time he drove to Lanae’s house the next morning, there was a small crowd of reporters outside. They didn’t even notice him pull up. Kenny kept opening the door, telling them they had the wrong house. Finally, he had to go to work, walked out in his uniform. Flashbulbs snapped.

  “Are you the one who encouraged the child to lie, or does the mother have another boyfriend?” yelled one reporter.

  Georgie couldn’t hear what Kenny said back, but for the first time in his life, Georgie thought Kenny looked brave.

  “Did you do this for the money?” yelled another. “Was this the child’s idea?”

  All day, it was like that. Long after Kenny had left, the reporters hung out on the front steps, broadcasting to each other. Lanae had already given back the tickets; beyond that, she had given no comment. He could imagine the face she made when she refused to comment, the steely eyes, the way everything about her could freeze.

  “How,” the reporters wanted to know, “did this happen?”

  Their smugness made him angry. There were so many things they could never understand about how, so many explanations they’ve never bothered to demand. How could it not have happened?

  At night, when no one had opened the door for hours, the reporters trickled off one by one, their questions still unanswered. Lanae must have taken the day off from work: her car was still in its parking space, the lights in the house still on. Finally, he made his way to the house and rang the doorbell. She was at the peephole in an instant. She left the chain on and opened the door as wide as it could go without releasing it.

  “Georgie,” she said. She shook her head, then leaned her forehead against the edge of the door so that just her eyeball was looking at his. “Georgie, go away.”

  “Lanae,” he said. “You know I didn’t mean it to go like this.”

  “Georgie, my five-year-old’s been crying all day. My phone number, here and at my job, is on the Internet. People from Iowa to goddamn Denmark have been calling my house all day, calling my baby a liar and a little bitch. She’s confused. You’re confused. I think you need to go for a while.”

  “Where?” he asked.

  He waited there on the front step until she’d turned her head from his, stepped back into the house, and squeezed the door shut. He kept standing there, long after the porch light went off, not so much making an argument as waiting for an answer.

  The King of a Vast Empire

  Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my sister called to tell me she’d decided to be an elephant trainer. At first, the only thing I could think of elephants being trained for was the circus, which we had never been to as kids, so I pictured cartoon elephants balancing on giant plastic beach balls, like in Dumbo. I thought for a second that Liddie was dropping out of school altogether to wear sparkly spandex and chase them around with a baton, which seemed unlikely on any number of counts. My sister liked college, had once been banned from the local Fluff N Stuff pet boutique for trying to liberate a show poodle, and hadn’t been near a stage since she quit dance school, in the sixth grade, after calling its photo display of smiling ballerinas the hall of kiddie porn for voyeurs without the balls to be real pedophiles, in front of the academy’s male director. Liddie was not running off to join the circus. What she actually had in mind was working at some kind of conservatory for elephants with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  “Elephants experience trauma the way humans do,” she informed me. “They’re fascinating animals.”

  “Humans aren’t that fascinating,” I said.

  What was happening with me right then was, the first woman I’d been with for longer than a year had left me, my car had died unexpectedly, and someone named Carlos was stealing my identity and improving my credit in the process. I’d found out the last bit while trying to buy a used car, and had yet to do anything about it because I kind of liked the idea of someone wanting to be me. If I were my parents, I’m not sure Liddie’s the kid I’d worry about, but maybe they’d given up on me.

  My mother called three days after Liddie had.

  “Terrence,” she said, “you need to talk to your sister.”

  “I just talked to my sister,” I said.

  “Well, talk to her again. She’s changed her major to some sort of comparative biology nonsense, and she’s not coming home for Thanksgiving this year.”

  I thought of last year, when Liddie had come home for Thanksgiving with her white anarchist poet boyfriend and caused my mother to glare at me every time Liddie referred to Thanksgiving as the Day of Native Resistan
ce, as if I were somehow responsible for this. I’d played a drinking game that involved taking a shot of whatever was convenient every time a glare happened, and was utterly shitfaced by the time Liddie drove me home and told me that I ought to watch being drunk around our parents on holidays because it obviously upset them, as if she’d been Marcia Brady all night.

  I wasn’t too broken up about scaling back Thanksgiving this year. Liddie and I did better with each other on our own terms. When I talked to her, she said she wasn’t mad or anything, it was just that changing her major from ethnic studies to comparative biology meant switching into a lot of classes late in the semester, and she had some catch-up studying to do. Liddie seemed OK to me, or at least she’d had way more alarming phases. I figured the elephant thing would end, as had the summer she converted to Judaism and the year she stopped eating cooked food.

  Difficult phases notwithstanding, Liddie was the most together person in my life, which says maybe more about my life than Liddie’s togetherness. I was a mess before I met Gabi, but it got worse when she left me. We’d had something like a fight the week before she took off, but nothing compared to the worst of them. Fighting with Gabi, I’d thought, was like fighting with Liddie: at the end of the day she wasn’t going anywhere. Gabi, understand, was addicted to bad news. Every morning she read five newspapers in three languages, and if she couldn’t get to a newspaper, she’d start shaking and looking for the nearest television. On really bad days she binged and purged on old microfiche the way bulimic girls I’d known in college did with food, sucking it all in and then hurling it back out into the world at the first opportunity. The worst of the news she thought was appropriate to share in the middle of sex, and when I say worst I mean: dismembered child soldiers, bomb victims burned beyond recognition, elderly women beaten and raped, and when I say middle I mean we’re naked and sweaty and I’m inside her and it’s really not the time. The last time I stopped and said she was fucking weird and perverted.

  Without bothering to put clothes on, she’d proceeded to explain to me, not for the first time, that really, all pleasure was perverse, that it was perverse to ever enjoy anything in such an awful world, that any moment of happiness was selfish when infinite horror was always happening somewhere else.

  “Tell me,” she’d said. “Tell me, Terrence, how you can ever be happy about something as stupid as sex, in a world where children are beheaded for no reason. Doesn’t that make you really fucking sick?”

  “You make me really fucking sick sometimes, Gabi,” I said.

  She silently walked into the kitchen, still naked, opened the cabinet, and proceeded to line up my cherry-red drinking glasses and one by one throw them at the living room wall, waiting for the last to shatter before reaching for the next. When she finished she looked up.

  “If you’re going to call me crazy, I’m damn well going to act it,” she said.

  Technically, I hadn’t called her crazy. I did not, in fact, think she looked so much like a crazy person as a quite rational and calculating person behaving the way she thought a crazy person might—a prospect I found significantly more frightening and not entirely unattractive. I said nothing, went for a long drive, and returned to find the glass swept up and a new set of glasses lined up on the kitchen counter. I thought it was a peace offering and not a good-bye.

  I never paid for the newspapers after she left and most of them stopped coming, but the German paper still came weekly. It was a week behind the present and in a language I didn’t speak, but I read it religiously, reveled in its deliberate and drawn-out words. I thought that so long as you didn’t understand a thing, it was a goddamn lovely world.

  Two months after that I bought the new car, and Jane the credit bureau lady, who somehow managed to give her voice the blank intonation of a dial tone, informed me that my credit report had been red-flagged for an unusual amount of activity and I ought to review it to make sure it was all mine. I didn’t; I was vaguely flattered. Plus, I had to consider the minuscule improvement in my credit score. I’d almost forgotten about it by the time the cops showed up a month later. I’d had the day off from the bookstore, and was stretched out in bed in my boxers and a T-shirt when they knocked. I answered the door just like that because even after the breakup, the only person I could think of who’d drop by in the middle of a weekday afternoon without a phone call was Gabi. The sight of two of Fairfax County’s finest was a disappointment.

  “You Carlos Aguilar?” they asked.

  I tried to squint at their badges, wondering whether it was a trick.

  “No,” I said, after a second.

  It was cleared up pretty quickly. I may have been brown, but my Spanish was pathetic, and I had a wallet full of crap with my name on it: license, employee ID, college ID, ID from the university where I’d pretended I was going to get a master’s, library card, Giant discount card, Hollywood video card, et cetera. Enough to prove that I never let go of things, and that I was not who they were looking for.

  According to the cops, Carlos was in serious trouble. He was facing several counts of credit card fraud for impersonating other people, some of whom now owed thousands of dollars. Carlos had also been selling people’s Social Security numbers on the black market. Mine he was using to be a good citizen, getting the cards he paid on time, apparently renting an apartment in my name. The cops left me with a number to call in case I had any more trouble. I thought about Carlos during the next few days, feeling a certain solidarity with him. I knew most likely I’d just been careless with some kind of important paperwork, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been chosen for a reason.

  Bored and curious, I spent a lunch break doing an Internet search for myself and pulled up six addresses, one of which was my parents’ house, one of which was the shithole apartment I’d had in college, and one of which was my present address. The most recent of the other addresses I thought I recognized as an apartment complex just over the Wilson Bridge, in Maryland. I considered going there, maybe to introduce myself, maybe just to watch for a while, to see if I could pick this guy out of a lineup. The possibilities of such a situation seemed limitless, but the fear of having to explain myself put a stop to most of them. I thought about giving the cops the other address I’d found, but I figured they had people who got paid for that. I’d never even bothered to file any of the things they told me to. I had an imaginary conversation with Gabi about it, in which she told me this was the physical manifestation of my existential crisis, and I told her to stop talking bullshit and then left the room.

  While I was having imaginary conversations with my ex-girlfriend, Liddie was finishing up her first semester of junior year at Harvard. It was no wonder that even people who’d known me for the three years that she didn’t exist often mistook her for the older sibling. I always thought it was because of the accident, the one she swore that she remembered in perfect detail. Driving us back from the city, Dad had slammed into a car stopped in the middle of the highway. I was nine and sleeping and was carried out of the car in perfect health. Liddie, six and wide-awake, was hit by a piece of flying glass and put in the same ambulance as the children in the other car, two of whom died on the way to the hospital. Liddie was released a few hours later with twenty-five stitches across her forehead. They left a faint scar when they came out.

  When Liddie was twelve, a plastic surgeon neighbor mentioned to my mother that Liddie’s scar could probably be surgically corrected.

  “Great,” Liddie said, before my mother could respond. “And when we’re done with that, why don’t you just give me a boob job? Is there anything else you see wrong with me?”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman murmured. “I know it’s a sensitive subject.”

  “We were in a little accident a few years back,” said my mother. “I think Liddie wants her battle wound.”

  “It wasn’t a little accident,” Liddie said.

  “She was six,” my mother said, as if this proved something about Liddie’s reliability
.

  The truth was we all trusted Liddie’s memory, and she knew it. Anytime Liddie wanted a favor from me or wanted our parents’ permission for something she had no business doing, she’d lift her hand and push her hair back ever so slightly, so subtly you couldn’t call her on it. I blamed her—sometimes—for my mother’s cheerful denial of everything that was wrong with us, and for my father’s whiskey habit and nightly disappearances into his study. Without her, it might have been easier to forget what had happened. It was Liddie who knew most of all how fixated our father was on the accident, because she regularly brought him coffee and food at night, even during that year when she was boycotting cooking.

  “Don’t you think he goes in there with the door locked because he wants to be alone?” I’d asked her once when we were teenagers.

  “I’m just trying to get his mind off it,” she said. According to Liddie, our father had a drawer full of clippings about the accident. Alone in his office, each night, he drank and read them over and over.

  “Maybe he wouldn’t dwell on it so much if you weren’t always throwing it in his face so you could walk all over him,” I said. She’d done it at dinner that night: flashed her scar at our parents when they started on her for mouthing off to her history teacher.

  She looked at me, exasperated more than angry.

  “It’s called love, shithead. You hurt people, and then you make it better.”

  Every woman in my life had a screwed-up philosophy about love. My mother’s was that love was built on a series of unbreakable formalities, which was her excuse for buying me a train ticket from DC to Boston so that Liddie wouldn’t spend Thanksgiving alone, which I had understood to be the whole point of her not coming home in the first place. Gabi had spelled hers out in the note she left me: Terrence,