by Ted Sanders
After they go, I consider dumping the yellow crud back into the dish, but I don’t want to get caught. Instead I push it as far to the side of my plate as I can, making a gooey skidmark. I spy a plastic-wrapped plate of Triti’s cookies that no one’s busted into yet, and I slip a cookie out from under the wrap. I take a handful of Cheetos and a few of the red chips. I take a cluster of green grapes. I stand there and I eat the cookie and I stare into the yellow stuff, imagining the swayback girl in different stages of allergic disfigurement or death—nothing personal, just a thing she’s got me wondering about—and after a minute she and her guy go prowling across the lawn outside, headed down toward the brushpile, her lifting grapes and taking them into her teeth. I steal another cookie.
I take some stuff I’m pretty sure is tabouli, and two of the round purple things, which are so slippery they’re instantly problematic. I take some cheese squares, a few crackers, a wobbly blob of Jell-O salad that I fussily quarantine for its own sake. I get a clear plastic fork.
And now I’ve got my plate, loaded in a way I’d never load a plate for myself, and hell if I know what I ought to do next. I feel sort of stranded. From the kitchen, Tom’s voice still booms, and I have trouble even beginning—mentally, I mean—to orchestrate the act of taking the plate on in to Dorlene.
I venture into the butler’s pantry, up behind Bob Everitt. I lean into a shadow. I don’t know if Dorlene’s even thinking of the mission she’s got me on. In the kitchen, Ernest is talking to a woman in a sagging tan. Tom stands at the laundry room doorway, and just over the hump of Bob’s shoulder I see Dorlene beside him. I shift a little and then I freeze because there is Triti: she’s kneeling in front of Dorlene. She’s gotten right the fuck down to her knees, eye to eye, just like I suspected Clara Pope wanted to. I can’t see Dorlene’s face, or Tom’s, but Triti’s shines with pleasure as she chatters and nods, looking for all the world like some chirpy preschool rah-rah gushing to a toddler about her fingerpaints or her teddy or whatever. She kneels like you would kneel for a dog. And as I watch she looks over at me, finds me. Her eyes are dark with glee, sharp and deep.
I turn and leave. I pass Triti’s room again. I head out the front door and onto the open porch. The presence of the porch swing surprises me—I don’t know why—but I go ahead and take a careful seat on the peeling slats. I eat a cracker and swing a little and look out over the lawn. Nobody’s gotten the brushpile lit yet. The kids down there look to be lost between tries, an idle cluster talking and glancing stupidly around. Somebody upwind’s got some weed going, somewhere out of sight. A round of Triti’s laughter comes bulldogging out the kitchen windows, down the house, big sudden heartfelt hunh-hunh-hunh’s. Tom’s voice rides it loud, unintelligible, undercut by a sharp trill from Dorlene. And then, fleeting but plain—bobbing momentarily to the surface of that sea of noise—I hear my name slip from Triti’s lips: Dave.
And I suddenly just feel a thousand, feel spread thin and sick again, retrograde. I can’t figure out how I ended up back here. Here on this swing, here at this house, here with Triti nearby at all. This is not what I wanted. And look—even though I maintain that everything that crumbled would have crumbled no matter what, still I can’t help nosing at the rubble I’m crawling through now. I nose at it and I hate like hell the freedom of suspecting that different flavors of ruin might have been available to me. I doubt that Triti can say the same. The Cheetos on this sad plate I’ve put together look like sickly little neon turds, embarrassments. I pick one up and flick it out into the grass. I expect it will alight and glow there, but it disappears.
I swing. I eat the pineapple. I light a cigarette. I go ahead and toss more Cheetos into the lawn. Whatever they’re talking about inside, I imagine Triti’s got Dorlene fooled by now. And Tom’s a lost cause, of course. Not that you can’t trust Triti, but you do have to mind the gap between what she says and what she’s thinking, because of her stranglehold on it all. She has magnificent control, I mean. Her telling me just now that her towels were gone, for instance: it’s no surprise that her first words to me after five months weren’t a greeting, any reminder of my absence. No, she squeezed those words out smooth for me, like pearls. And that is maybe her exact nature, now that I think of it—pearl-making. It comes to her like breathing. And I guess I don’t know after all how you can trust a person like that in the long run. I’m going to say I can’t—not in the long run, I don’t think so. I doubt anyone will warn Dorlene.
The slippery stuff on my plate has been sliding around, slopping together; the Jell-O is compromised and mostly inedible. I pluck grapes from the mess of my plate, some of them frosted in the yellow stuff. They go into the lawn, too, one by one. They bounce and tumble in and out of the grass. I give myself points when one reaches the gravel drive that leads back to the road. I watch the sun drop toward the hill out west and I listen to the house leaking sounds, words I still can’t quite make out.
Jane
HE KEEPS YOU. HERE IN THE NIGHT ABOUT THIS BED, YOU find yourself thickening down out of dark, gathering in his thoughts, shaped by his insistence. Ask him what you are. You resemble pain, a pressure rising, a scent, a sound his heart breeds in his ears, anything that thrives on attention. But it misses the mark to say you are in his thoughts. Better to say you are of them, or even better: that you are his belief in you. And as he lies beside his silent wife and burns you to life—teaching you your body, dictating the way he means your limberness to move—slowly you learn that possession is the sinew of ghosts.
You haven’t walked in this place, this sleepy house of his. Because every ghost is restricted to its most vital paths, your territory here is no more than his devotion to you. And his devotion is a narrow, brimming well. You’ve touched nothing here, not really, not by your own hand. You haven’t let slip a single sound, but that’s to be expected: because he doesn’t ask you to speak, you cannot. He doesn’t wish to hear you utter certain things, wouldn’t like to hear you suggest, for instance, that your claim to each other is the old one between men and women, a concession. This is a secret of sorts. He keeps it as killably small as he can.
A mirror rises from the dresser across the room. You are not in it. The mirror multiplies the dressertop clutter—a wooden box, two tilting picture frames, the squat jar full of hair clips and bands, jewelry mounded in a shallow basket, this coffin-shaped bottle of perfume. The mirror casts back a swatch of the dark room, too—the window above the bed, curtains closed across the night; the green bedside clock, its numbers turned to hieroglyphs and lies; laundry accruing amorously in the corner. And of course the bed itself beneath you in the dark, that draped country. On one side of the bed, a thick sweep of fair hair curls. But nowhere do you see yourself, not you—you don’t believe so. At most, perhaps a swell in the shadows describes you, or there: a deviation in the square of the room. You can’t be sure; every conviction is his. He teaches you instead that what you cannot discern, you must allow him to believe. See how you learn.
HE DEMANDS THAT YOU BE BEAUTIFUL; HOW COULD YOU deny him? As if this flesh, now, could be disowned. Swelling upon him here in the dark, over the clouds of his breath settling across his shoulders, you are entirely composed of the paints that comprise him. He colors you, believing he does you a disservice. He thinks of your face like riverstone, like fine wind-shaped sand, and your eyes full of color, hazels and coppers and others too, as varied as the shapes of shadows in a rockfall. He fathoms the structure of your nose, a delicacy, ended in a fleshy tip that talking draws down and releases, like a rabbit’s, but he is mindful of how if you are to talk to him, he must watch your mouth because your lips—you mouth it: my lips. You tear them apart cleanly where you open for him, like water itself around flesh, and he will agonize to watch them linger, to know that he will never discern the tiny noise they make at parting. Your hair is a rainbow-black snake. It is a curtain or an exquisite spill. It is ink somehow spun into thread, into rope, into a limb, all these things—tonight or another, another.
God the hair on you, he might say, and he doesn’t say now but thinks how you might pull yours around between your breasts, how it might lie there, an enviable pet, and how you might stroke it, knowing you are seen, the inside of one wrist grazing your nipple through your shirt. He imagines your legs, trailing behind you, sloping into the floor, knit like a mermaid’s. Where your thighs thicken, your skin recedes dark up under your hems. Or you have no hems, no anything, only bare skin up and up, sculpted soft around a curving god’s eye of shadow, deep in your naked lap. From your hips, your curling torso rises—a long smooth segment of an undescribed coil. You drape your weight onto one sapling arm, your naked fingers thin and kicking slowly across the carpet, your elbow overstraightened into a tender, bent-back swell. Your other arm reaches up, reaches out, reaches maybe for your cigarette, for hairs fallen into your face, for a gesture in the making, for this. You shift beneath the liquid of your shirt, liquid yourself. Or of course you are shirtless, radiant, waxing dusky in the places where a woman should, down your face and your front—these, and these, and these, and here. You spill heat like breath onto the carpet between your thighs.
The folded sheets sag between the quiet wife and him. This has been your way, yours and his—you occupying him so soundly that you consume this landscape. Outside you in this room, so many dearly foreign things abound: cold sluicing down from the window, the clock’s clean slanted green, the expansive sounds of a furnace, the texture of a wall, a door’s tilt and shadow, a wife’s breath and pliability. But you come between him and all of it, all of this, becoming as he admits you—a lens, or a shape-stealing shadow, or a trapped slab of air between panes of glass.
You listen first to his breathing. Or if you do not listen, exactly, you espouse its rhythm. Perhaps you are unable to listen, just as you have been unable to speak. He fixes you here with these rules, rules he makes but doesn’t know. For instance: you have mass, but may exert no force; you are hot, but fail to rise; you are meant to be filled, but cannot truly surround. The only physical law you obey is his gravity, and the only freedom he grants you is the attitude of your compliance. And so as he lies beside his wife and thinks of you, you do this, you do: you willfully abide becoming full.
You understand him. It is easy. You are answers to everything. You must be. You become the limit of his fascination, a towering and rapacious thing. And you might imagine that you make yourself canyon walls closing where rapids rise, that you are rich flora arching over a sodden path, that you thicken like the surface of a wound, that above all you insist he go only where you allow it. Imagine you could accomplish such a feat. You can. You are weak and strong because of your faith that things are just so: that you are the turn of the knife that carves you.
All of this is given. All of this is given. And of course it cannot be forgotten that you are an accumulation of moving parts. You know what this means to him, to you. He has collected his thoughts of you, compelled by all the possibilities of blood pooling, and you unlimber gladly into them. You do this because he obliges you. For example: you may stand crooked over a bed, your dark hair tumbling down around your lit face, all your sullen, waiting parts exposed. Your back gleams, a story pouring through the shapes of shine your skin makes. And him, he may draw you against him, asking you to be brazen and trembling, mutable and firm. This you can do. You are the sight of you, the touch of you, your scent and sound and will—or in a given instant: the mettle of your body’s rootbone, taken in the heavy hooks of his fingers. See how you learn. He forgets everything he knows about restraint, surrenders to you your voice, and certainly now you could confess to him: I cripple you, you do, and this is what binds you, this old deed—these slow drooping strings of salt and blood and marrow.
AND AFTER, MUCH AS HE HAS BEFORE, HE LIES JUST SO—JUST so he lies. You curdle dearly from his skin. Now you truly are smell and sights, warmth, the thick sweet air of a sequestered room; he breathes you slow but slight. You have already begun to dissipate, had always been meant to begin, pushed apart by a coldness, or by little more than some named heat’s absence—and what is your name? As for him, his need dwindles, all his insistence sagging now, not now. You begin to rise from the bed, going surely to rags, thinning into threads, into dusted beams of cobwebs. Beneath you, the clock burns. The curtains hang. The mirror yawns. The wife there breathes and breathes.
There is no name for the jagged thoughts that tumble into the space you leave; as you now exist—sad to say—you are not precisely an element of such imaginings. But first and last you pretend—as you drift and fade into some dark corner made for you, or for which you are unmade—you pretend you know how in the night as you unspool, this wife watches her husband where he lies feigning, lies hoarding indifference, his hands casket-crossed on his chest. You wonder what has been traded for this. You see and suspect, despite all your blindnesses, the way her eyes shine in silence like bones in the dark.
Putting the Lizard to Sleep
I WAS A DAY TOO LATE PICKING UP THE LIZARD; HE WAS ONLY dead, but I was late anyway. I set a tiny bell tinkling as I came in the door on the third day, and I loitered stupidly beneath it as it rang down around me and away.
A broad woman in a broader navy suit had commandeered the counter, talking to the vet girl from the other day. The woman nodded and leveled heavy hums at the girl, who stood there starched into her white top—thick, farmy arms and a thick, farmy neck. I tried to recall her name—something fluid with g’s and v’s. Like Guinevere, but not that. Neither of the women looked up for my bell. The broad lady leaned against the high counter, an anchor-rope arm curled across a cat carrier. I watched her bend over it, heard her pour a few sweet sounds into it. She wasn’t giving any of that to the vet girl. I listened to them talk. They said hairballs and medication and intestinal, and a lot of other words that went down at the end. Mostly they said hairballs.
I fingered through a rack of the clinic’s business cards on a stand by the door. I tried to look purposeful. Eight different compartments for the cards, but only two different names among them. Dr. Kipp wasn’t one of them. I let myself get suspicious. I looked through them all.
“I can help you here, sir. Can I help you?”
I jerked around, knocking over a column of cards like dominoes. Another girl sat behind the high counter. She stretched herself to see me, craning her neck, tendons carved out of her skin there—it seemed like it would have been easier for her to stand. She smiled at me. She wore glittered eyeshadow.
“I didn’t know you were there,” I said, fumbling to right the business cards. I made a bad job of it. I went to the counter, slipping between the wall and the lady with the cat. The lady glared and didn’t move down, but she corralled her cat carrier in a little closer to herself. Her cuff buttons scuttled across it.
I looked back at the girl and shrugged. She blinked.
“Can I help you?” she chirped.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m John. Collins?”
“Like the drink,” she exclaimed, straightening in her seat and sparkling her eyes.
“What?”
“Like the drink. You know. You must get that all the time.” She covered her teeth with her lips. She became mannequin serene—like she could move only while talking. She sat frozen. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I told her this was the first time. I said, “Actually.”
“It wouldn’t be the first if you were hanging around with my crowd.” Then, wagging a finger at me: “We must be hanging around with different crowds.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Can I help you?” she said again. Fresh as the first time.
“I’m here for Rafael.” I spelled out the name for her. She clicked at the computer. The other vet girl told the broad lady that she’d be right back with her medicine. The lady nodded imperiously, said she’d be waiting. I flattened against the wall as she veered away from the counter; she walked through the space I’d been occupying. I watched her vet girl head down the hall—Genevieve?
“Lhasa
apso?” said mine.
“What?”
“Rafael Lhasa apso?”
“No. Rafael lizard.” She clicked once. Again. I felt a little weird. I wondered what Rafael the Lhasa apso had been in for. Worms, maybe.
“Oh, okay,” she murmured after a minute, her voice suddenly funereal. She pushed herself away from the counter on her wheel-footed stool, still looking at the screen, her wrists perched on her wristpad and her red nails straining up off the keys, hands like scared spiders.
“So did you want to pick up his remains today, then?”
That’s what she said: remains. I came at the word a little slowly, in that oblique way you do for a word you weren’t expecting—a way that can make you realize a thing you hadn’t before. Remains, right—that’s what stays, the mess you leave. What a bold little novelty it was to try to imagine Rafael torn from his shape that way. I wondered what Evan would think, whether he would understand. I plucked at my pants and said please.
The girl got up, squeezing me a sympathetic, lipless smile, and came out from behind the counter, saying, “It won’t take a minute.” She was hugely, startlingly pregnant. She swayed down the hall the way the other girl had gone, through the last blank door a long ways back. I caught a glimpse of a garish, laminated poster beyond, a swirling and colored cross section of innards.
I took a seat across from the woman with the cat. The woman’s jacket was bunched up behind her neck, rising above her hairline, making her look hung up by something, rigged. She’d taken the carrier out from beneath the towel and was hunched over it again, sticking a carrot through the wire.
“It’s a rabbit,” I said, watching. She looked up at me.
“He is a rabbit,” she said.