by Ted Sanders
“Your door’s open,” she says in that voice, and she steps up and slams that one shut too, one little foot lifting. She cocks her head at me. I go ahead and look down at her outright then, because you can’t go on not looking. I’m cool about it, I think.
“I do apologize again for that awkward car ride,” she says. “I hope you understand. Those fucking airbags, I’m serious to god.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s a complication. And it’s out of kilter already.” She moves her hand between her chest and mine, like she’s singing. She had to sit in the backseat because she’s so small, an airbag could kill her—just the concussion of the thing. According to her. Back at the bus station, she checked my dashboard and excused herself to the backseat, and that’s how we drove. Hence all the apologies. Back at the station, she said, “They inflate by controlled explosion, did you know that? Like rocket exhaust.” She kind of half jumped at me and threw her little stick arms out, and went “FOOMP!” which with that painful squirt of a voice—an unbelievable voice, really—sounded like an animal noise of alarm. A little dog, or a monkey. I don’t know if she noticed my flinch.
Now Dorlene smooths her tiny dress, a rust and brown plaid thing with pleats. A little kid’s dress, probably. Her sandals are the size of butter dishes, and inside them her naked feet look long-toed, almost like hands. And her hands? I don’t look at any of her for long.
I’m caught up in Tom’s idea of a joke, I know that much. Picking Dorlene up at the station, driving her out here to Tom’s farm for the party, him not warning me and all. At the time he said he just needed someone who’d have room for her in the car. A joke all right, but at the time I took it differently. What with Lisa and all, I mean. And Triti. Plenty of room in the car these days. So I said I’d pick this friend up, this former student, really, this Dorlene, despite my nerves about driving out to the farm with a stranger, a woman. All that bedeviled conversation. When I asked him what she looked like, he gave me this: “You’ll know her when you see her.” And when I wanted to know what the hell that meant, he just laid me one of those closed-lip grins of his, his eyes fairly fucking twinkling. “You’ll know her when you see her,” he said again, all sphinxy.
I nodded at him like I got it. I figured it’d come to me. People give you that line, and then the thing—the thing you’re supposed to know when you see it—starts to take on the color of a surprise. Something you’d appreciate, or hate. And you start to wonder what kinds of things those are. So at the station, as I was waiting for Dorlene beside the bark-filled flower beds by the ticket window, I was mostly on the lookout for somebody spectacular—attractive, I mean—or maybe somebody hugely fat. Maybe both. If I’m honest, by the time the bus showed up, a half hour late, I could’ve drawn a picture of the woman I was waiting for, like Lisa, only taller, and fiercer, a tank of a girl with long dark hair, or red, a real killer.
So I didn’t even notice Dorlene. I mean, I saw her get off the bus, but like anyone would I dismissed her as a kid—a very together kid. She had a miniature suitcase, with the trombone-slide handle and the wheels. She made a beeline for me, but I was looking past her for the thing I’d know when I saw it, until she got close and I saw she was holding up—figure this—a greeting sign like you see in airports in the movies, white and rectangular. Big black letters read: DAVID BRESLIN. But I was so invested in the bodies still trickling from the bus that for a second I didn’t recognize my own name. Or I recognized it, but I think I thought it belonged to somebody else in this particular case; I laid my eyes on her, and the sign too, and went right back to the bus—just for a second, but still: I feel a little stupid about it.
Dorlene tittered about my confusion all the way out here to the farm—her in the backseat on account of the airbag, her little suitcase in the front seat on account of all the stuff still in the trunk, all that miscellaneous crap I claimed from the house last time, I don’t even know what all anymore. I drove—humming past nearly done fields of corn and soy, passing every little while through gritty brown blooms thrown up by combines—and Dorlene chattered, apologizing for the seating arrangement, teasing me, talking about herself. The fact she’s willing to joke about it shows you she’s not shy. She tells me all kinds of things, like how the reason she looks the way she does is because her particular kind of dwarfism—this is her word, dwarfism, like it’s a religious movement or a philosophy—just makes her all around tiny. She looks like an actual miniature person, so small she might be a toy. Or like something you haven’t ever seen before. Her body’s not stocky. She’s well proportioned, willowy, even. Her hair is brown and straight and ordinary. Mostly it’s her nose that’s off—long, and built along the same plane as her forehead, giving her face a rodenty slant, but not in an unpleasant way. Her eyes are extremely dark. Plus she’s got that voice, high and nasal, almost like her voice can’t make it through her mouth and so instead resonates out from somewhere behind that nose. Sometimes I can hardly make out what’s she’s saying. And it doesn’t help that her voice is smudgy around the edges, like a deaf person’s voice. I figure it’s her throat: maybe her vocal cords don’t come together, or apart—whichever would make her voice so high and displaced. I’ve seen pictures of vocal cords before, but I’ve only got a dim idea how they work. They’re extremely vaginal looking, if you want to know the truth, but that’s a whole other thing.
And now that we’re finally here, Dorlene is still apologizing with that voice. She props her hands backward on her hips and sticks her chest out, says she’s sorry again about the backseat.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“Well, it doesn’t seem okay. I mean, you seem pissed. You’ve seemed pissed this whole time, David, I’m serious to god.”
“No, no, I’m not pissed. Why would I be pissed?”
“Well, you don’t talk much.”
“I’m not much for small talk.” That’s what I say.
Dorlene doesn’t bat an eye. She peers down at herself and pokes her belly with a tiny finger. “Christ, I’m hungry,” she keens. She looks back up at me. “That’s all right, then. I make you uncomfortable.”
“Not really.” Up at the house, Tom goes by carrying a white plastic bottle. I start to wave, but he’s far off and not looking our way. No sign of Triti anywhere, not really. I decide I will say something like the truth. “Or, okay, I guess. Unsettled, maybe.”
“Unsettled.” The word leaks out of her like a squirt of air from a balloon. And here’s what I mean about her voice: unsettled, when she says it, only has two syllables. “Okay, that’s good.”
“Is it?”
“So ask me something.”
“Ask you something.”
“About me. People tend to be curious about me. It’s a curious thing. You’re not curious?” She says: cyuh-yuss.
And here’s the thing: I am curious. I’m pretty fucking deep in already, if you want to know the truth. I’d really like to ask her something like: So is it that your vocal cords never split, or that they never met? Or maybe is that a doll’s dress, or why are your toes so long, or can you swim, or where do you keep your crackers, but I don’t want to ask a question that could be taken the wrong way. I’m beginning to doubt that Dorlene is the easy-to-offend type, but you just never know. “I guess I wouldn’t know what to ask you,” I tell her.
“Ask me how old I am. No one ever asks me that until later.” She gazes up at me, cocking her little head again.
“That’s because it’s not polite.” I haven’t even thought to wonder about her age—not because I’m polite, but because she’s outside the yardstick. My best guess figures her for about twenty-eight, but honestly I wouldn’t be shocked to hear it swing ten years in either direction. Thirty-eight would put her in my range, and I guess that’d be a comfort.
“Polite,” she says, and laughs, pressing both her hands across her belly: oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. She rocks back on her heels. “That’s quite funny of you, David.”
I don’t know
what’s funny, but she seems to mean it. “Well,” I say. “I guess we should go on up.”
“Cigarette first,” Dorlene says. She wiggles her fingers at me.
“What?”
“Cigarette. You smoke, don’t you?” She grabs at the air between us.
I haven’t lit up this whole time, not even when I was alone on the way down to the bus station, on account of who I might be picking up. It comes to me slow now, looking at her little grasping hand, that I shouldn’t have bothered. Dorlene wants to smoke.
I fish the rumpled pack out of my jacket, swimming in the very idea. I pass her down a cigarette. It’s huge in her hand, as big around as her fingers and half again as long. It’s ridiculous, of course, completely absurd. She snaps the filter off and then she starts to twist the paper, pinching as she goes, squeezing tobacco out the ends. Both her hands bend into tiny teacups. Tobacco sprinkles down around her feet. Some sticks to her palms. She’s a real pro at it, you can see that right off. In no time she’s got it twisted down to the thickness of a juice straw. She holds it up to me. “It’s better when I can roll my own, but this’ll do in a pinch.”
“I guess it will,” I say, and I hear a little squeaky shine in my voice.
“Now, will you light me, please? We’ll smoke, and then we’ll go up.”
I’ve no doubt that’s what we’ll do. I light us both up, and we smoke here in the little splintered herd of cars piled in the crook of the L-shaped drive. Dorlene smokes her tiny cigarette like she won’t get another. She even does a Frenchie now and again, smooth as a cat. I wonder—because of the cars all around us—if I appear to be alone.
“I’m thirty-two, by the way,” she says abruptly.
I nod like I don’t care. “That’s older than I would have guessed.”
“My, you are polite.”
Lord Jim starts barking, far off. His usual big, deep, warning barks. He’s somewhere past the outbuildings, deeper in the southwest corner, at the unmown end of the property. I can’t spot him, but I get a little chill. Down around my legs, Dorlene listens too. She has her nose up in the air, like she’s scenting. She looks mousier than ever. Or something more sleek and keen than a mouse—something more in the middle of the food chain. And I can’t believe that I haven’t thought of the dog yet at all, all the way here. That I’ve neglected to imagine the spectacle coming down the pipeline, I mean.
“You know about the dog?” I ask Dorlene.
Dorlene drops her nose and starts to crack her knuckles, prissing her cigarette way out at the tips of two bent fingers. Underneath the far-off pound of Jim’s barks and the swells of talk from the house, her fingerjoints pop and click—tiny little sounds just her size, like beans being snapped. “I’ve seen pictures.” She looks toward the barking, but she’s surrounded by these cars she can’t begin to see over. She doesn’t sound worried, exactly, but there’s trouble in her voice. Lord Jim goes on hammering the air. “What’s it? Lord Byron?”
“Jim. Lord Jim.”
She arches her eyebrows. “Well, that’s not even real.”
“He’s something,” I say, but I don’t even know what I mean. He lopes into view just then, way off in the lowlight along the cropline—a huge and bobbing white square. He disappears into the high, faded corn.
“I do like dogs.” She puts her emphasis on the word like.
“I do too.”
“I never thought Mr. Shamblin would get another dog after Willa died.”
Mr. Shamblin, she says. Willa. I don’t know much about Dorlene, just some of Tom’s wet-eyed ambiguities about this repeat girl in the Seattle summer program, his favorite student. I don’t know how much she knows. She still has her head tipped aside, listening, though the barking’s stopped. Her neck is long and sweetly bent, her slight shoulders round with muscle in the ordinary places, and beneath her collar, across her chest, the fabric of her dress snugs across the swell of breasts. I hit my cigarette and cross my eyes down at the glow. I wonder if she knows how Willa went deaf and blind at the end, how that good dog became a doddering, snuffling husk. “I wouldn’t say Jim really is Tom’s dog. He came with the farm. He’s more Triti’s than anyone’s. She’s crazy about that dog.”
“Triti. She’s the caretaker?”
I start to laugh at that one—partly because Dorlene’s soft r when she says Triti’s name makes it come out Tweedy. But also, that there would even be a caretaker. That Triti would ever be called something like that. And it seems like Dorlene ought to know better, but maybe not. It’s not even clear why Tom took the farm in the first place. It was the kind of place he and Helen might’ve wanted for themselves, but Helen had been dead five years when Tom closed on the farm. He makes noises about the day he’ll move out permanent. Instead he comes out only for emergencies, or for mundane pleasantries like mowing. Or for the rare party like this one, when he invites the students and the faculty and a few outsiders like me. The rest of the time, it’s mostly just Triti. Triti and the animals. I shake my head. “Triti? No. She just, I guess, wanted to live out here, and Tom let her stay for cheap. I mean, she does take care of the place, but it’s not a job or anything. Someday she’ll get tired of not giving up on it, and she’ll go someplace else. Or Tom will finally realize he’s never giving up the house in town, and he’ll sell the farm. Either way, Triti will leave. I don’t know what she’ll do then. She would hate to leave the dog, at least.” I suck on my cigarette. I feel like I’ve said too much, or said the wrong thing. Plus listening to myself talk, I’m not sure caretaker is the wrong word for what Triti is out here after all, these days. Her and her steely presence, her patience, her sobriety.
“Why did Triti want to move out here?” Dorlene asks me.
I shrug. “It’s away.”
“I heard you had a thing.”
I don’t let her see my surprise. “We did, yeah,” I tell her, and hope that’ll do. A broad bubble of shouts and laughter arches onto us from over past the garage west of the house. Peopleshapes amble back and forth. I half expect to see Triti go ironing by up there just then, but the sun’s got everybody backlit. I don’t feel much like heading up yet, and I guess Dorlene doesn’t either, because we just stand there a while longer, letting the cigarettes go slow.
We finish about the same time. I try to pace the last finger of mine to hers, kind of eyeing it, but I get this feeling like she’s doing the same to me, and maybe that’s what made them last so long. This hits me somehow, levels us a bit, I’m not sure why.
We go up to the house. I make my steps small. No one’s out back except a few of the grads. We both get looks, me by association, but whereas I ignore them, Dorlene actually nods and tosses out hellos. We walk on by the kitchen, where slabs of massed talk flicker out an open window. Past the house, on the west side of the lawn, where a big tree went down in the spring, Tom and a bunch more students encircle a big pile of brush: Tom’s promised bonfire. Ernest stands in the front leg of the driveway alone, watching them. The kids are his too, of course, but they avoid him as devoutly as they flock to Tom. Tom plays the piper down below, his voice rolling up the lawn, round and slow and smiling. The fallen tree’s mostly sliced up now, but a patch of trampled, unmown grass makes a chalk outline for where the carcass has been. All the dead twiggy stuff has been dragged out into the short grass, and that’s what they’re trying to light. A stack of burnable logs sits off to the side. Several of the biggest slices of trunk have been rolled out for seats.
In the drive, Ernest’s got a rolled-up newspaper in one hand like a baton. He beats it against his thigh now and again. The sight of him is a little jarring—we used to be neighbors, after all. Friends, in a way. But he’s the only person I see that I know besides Tom, so I start over toward him. I don’t know what the hell to do about Dorlene—I don’t know if she knows anybody either. But she stays close, like we’re together or something.
When we get up to Ernest, he says, without looking over, “They’re using lighter fluid.” I get the impr
ession he knows he’s talking to me, but I don’t know what I did to announce myself.
I nod. “Lighter fluid, huh?”
“They went through a whole bottle already. And on to a second,” he says, real flat.
“Oh my,” squeaks Dorlene, and when Ernest hears that, he does look over. He bends at the waist with his arms still crossed.
“You’re Dorlene,” he says in that same tone of voice.
“I am.”
“I heard about you.”
She doesn’t even look over at him. “Did they really use a whole bottle?”
“I’m Ernest Baines,” Ernest says, like using both names will mean something to her. But Dorlene just walks off toward the brushpile, her ankles disappearing into the grass. We watch her go.
“Holy god,” Ernest says when she’s out of earshot.