by Ann Pancake
“Do you think you could go down there, Janie?” Uncle Bobby rocked faster now, she could feel a little breeze off it. “What if you got to go down there?”
“And she says there are still dressing rooms somewhere behind the stage, and under those, a bunch more rooms that are caving in.” Tommie Sue had spoken of snakes, which Janie didn’t mind so much, and of rats, which she did. “Tommie Sue says sometimes the rats get so bad they have to shut the theater down for a few days and spread poisoned popcorn all over the floor.”
“Ooooo, Janie! That’s awful! That’s just awful, now!”
Janie let go of Tina, turned her head to the side, and propped it on an elbow. That’s when she noticed that the laundry E.T. no longer occupied the place of honor on the maiden aunt’s jewelry box. That E.T. now sat on the surface of the dresser itself, and on the jewelry box sagged a second E.T., a cheaper version made of a smooth synthetic material, well-used, with shiny black streaks. An E.T. that had never seen the inside of a washing machine.
“Tell me about the cat shit,” Uncle Bobby was saying, then pealing into giggles.
“Where’d you get that E.T.?”
“What?” The giggles collapsed.
“Where’d you get that new E.T.?”
“Oh.” He paused. A cloak fell over his voice. “Friend of mind gave it to me.”
“What friend?”
“Oh. Just a friend of mine.” Now he’d recovered himself, retreated into exaggerated nonchalance. Janie watched his face. “You don’t know ’em.” He wasn’t looking at her. “You don’t know ’em, Janie.” His brow furrowed. His lips moved. Just a friend of mine. You don’t know ’em. The shadow say.
A place in Janie’s chest twisted. She pulled the liner notes out of the album nearest at hand, Tommy, and pretended to read. Only once had she slept in this room, in Uncle Bobby’s bed. She was ten years old, and her great-grandmother had died. The house was overfull with relatives home for the funeral, and Uncle Bobby had been moved to a couch because his bed would hold three children. Janie slept there with her two younger cousins, them five and six at the time. When she’d been told of this arrangement, she’d feigned annoyance, but she was secretly relieved because she suspected Great-grandmother’s ghost might be coasting the house at night.
A generous and bony woman who’d grown skinnier and skinnier until there wasn’t enough to her to hold her up, Great-grandmother had lived in a small brick house in the city and wore dresses like those the other old ladies in Remington wore, but Janie’s mother had told Janie many times that Great-grandmother had grown up in “dire poverty.” Up a dirt road out in the country, the daughter of a pipe-smoking woman and a half-Cherokee man with the un-Cherokee name “Alan.” “Dire poverty,” her mother would say. “Your great-grandmother would take me out there to visit them when I was little, but your grandmother was ashamed of them.” “Your great-grandmother only went to the third grade,” her mother also told her, this the most fascinating piece of all, especially because when Great-grandmother died, Janie was in fourth grade so had passed her.
After Janie’s mother turned out the light the night she slept in Uncle Bobby’s room, Janie drew as close to her little cousins as she could without raising suspicions. Then she prayed.
She hadn’t known she’d fallen asleep when a rapping woke her. She snapped to, rigid in every digit and limb. At first she thought she’d imagined it, she’d been told since she could talk that her imagination was too big, but then the rapping began again. Against the window pane, an insistent, a confident tack tack tack. She had jerked the covers over her head and was reciting “God is Great” when she heard a call-hiss as loud as a voice can get and still be under breath: “Bobby!”
“Who’s that?” blurted her cousin Ellie, her voice as clear as though she’d never been asleep, and then she was crawling over Janie towards the window.
Janie followed instinctively to protect her and so as not to appear more cowardly than a kindergartener. Ellie was now pulling back Uncle Bobby’s plaid curtain and rising to her tiptoes, Janie huddled behind, both of them leaning forward. And then looking down into the upraised and shocked face—she could see one side of his face quite well in the light off the back porch next door—of a blotchy, tubby man with greasy graying red hair.
Before he wheeled and sprinted around the corner of the house, Janie saw he carried a yardstick.
The other cousin slept through the whole incident. Ellie did not mention it in the morning or ever again as far as Janie knew, which made her wonder if Ellie had really been awake after all.
Janie never told anyone either. Although she was even more naive about sex than other ten-year-olds in 1975, an unsettling part of her that occasionally knew things ahead of her mind, a part that felt like memory when Janie knew the things remembered had never happened in her life, that part seeped into her heart an unnameable and untraceable shame for Uncle Bobby and for herself. As she got older, that night at the window would sometimes resurface, and each time it did, she understood more with her brain and she shoved it harder away. But now, here on Uncle Bobby’s bed, behind her a new curtain, still plaid, and Uncle Bobby and the shadow-say—
There came a tap on the door. Janie jumped.
“You all ready to help set the table?”
AFTER THE DAY at the lake, Nathan stopped varying their night rides. Now she only saw him very late, after her evening shift or after she and Uncle Bobby had already been out. On work nights, Uncle Bobby liked to be in bed by ten because he had to get up at five to walk to the hospital. Nathan would go out, too, during those earlier after-dinner hours, to where, she did not know and never asked. She’d lie, her body strung tight, on the porch swing, with Uncle Bobby before ten, without Uncle Bobby after, waiting while pretending not to wait, until she’d hear, a quarter-mile away, the Yamaha turn onto Kentworth Drive.
When it slid into the driveway across the street, Janie would lift up just far enough to glimpse through the hedges Nathan rip off his helmet and stalk into his house. Not long after, he’d resurface, float gray across his lawn, then hers—he who had to start work at 7:30 AM, almost as early as Uncle Bobby, but who never seemed to need sleep, as though the perpetually sleepy look he wore when he wasn’t angry was rest enough for him—and fetch her. Sometimes he didn’t even speak.
He’d hell-bend them out of Remington, using the back streets behind the art museum, past the extravagant turn-of-the-century mansions there, a neighborhood Janie’s grandmother had showed her when she was little, and when she was little, they didn’t even make her envious. The mansions were still what she could grow up into. Then, abruptly, they were in woods—how quick the city stopped and the country began—and then in fields, and then in woods again, it could almost have been McCloud County except these hills were smaller, growing gradual out of the Ohio Valley. Within minutes, Janie would be lost, and the first time and even the second, although she must have seen the little house in the corn, the impression didn’t stick. But she must have registered it because the third time, when they actually stopped near the house, memories of passing it earlier returned. Still, even that third time, Janie believed it was because Nathan liked the ride. By the fourth, she knew different.
That night, she decided not to wrap her arms around him; she clutched the sissy bar instead, to punish him for his aloofness. If Nathan noticed, he didn’t show it. By now, more than a week after the incident at the lake, Janie understood that whatever had been between her and Nathan—and she still couldn’t name it; neither of them had ever said “girlfriend,” much less “love”—had peaked, and there was nowhere to go but down. When she was anticipating being with him instead of actually with him, she could sometimes bury that understanding. When they were together, like now, the burying did not hold. As they sledded the hills, Janie pushed deeper into the sissy bar, made space between them, closed her eyes, and tried to be with only the smells. The smells so much louder in the night than in day, and Janie pulled them around her,
envisioned them as a screen between her and Nathan. Eventually they surged up the highest hill of all, almost a mountain, then down into a straight along a creek, and finally up a smaller hill. At the crest of it, Nathan killed the engine.
They coasted down in the whine of the wheels, the after-roar of the engine still vibrating in Janie’s ears. They coasted as far as momentum would carry them into a bottom full of hip-high green corn. The bike stopped well short of the house, but with the house in clear sight. Nathan didn’t heel the kickstand. They stood there with their feet on the road holding the weight and the heat of the bike between their legs.
The house sat lonely in a tiny lot stamped out of the corn, a single outbuilding behind it. One-story, small, porchless, no white clapboard or aluminum siding, there was nothing farmhouse about it. Stucco, of all things, like a bewildered transplant from town. The hills bulked in the near distance. Janie inhaled the McCloud County odor of corn just beginning to tassel. Her thighs were starting to strain. In dogless silence, the house was lit on the outside only by a cloud-scarped moon, on the inside by one illuminated room. Two tall, pointed shrubs flanked the porchless front door.
Standing there in the humidity without the wind of the ride, she felt under her sweatshirt the perspiration bead in the small of her back. Nathan, still straddling the bike, reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a joint. He pushed back his face shield, slipped the joint between his lips, and thumbed the lighter. Janie waited, suspended between outrage at his not admitting her existence and a heart-craning hope that he would. Nathan passed the joint over his shoulder. Janie took it, tasted the moisture of his mouth on it, and she drew deep and returned it. Nathan’s face did not waver from the house. Janie stared, too. Wondering if she was coconspirator or afterthought.
She gulped the second drag, all the smoke her mouth and throat could hold. She knew it wasn’t Melissa’s house, Melissa lived in an apartment near Rees Park, Uncle Bobby had pointed it out one time, and Uncle Bobby was never wrong about that kind of thing. She looked for Melissa’s car, she knew that, too, from before Nathan and Melissa broke up, but the only car was a newish Ford truck. She wondered was it something to do with one of the belt-thin boys, maybe a falling out or, more frightening, an argument with a dealer. And then an image bloomed in her mind, and as soon as it did, she felt so foolish her face flushed. The hard brown handsomeness. The grooves from his nose to his lip. His fear anyway.
They smoked the roach until it seared their fingernails. Nathan flipped the last of it onto the berm. He snapped down his face mask and turned the key. He rotated the bike, unrushed, his feet still on the ground. Then he leaned into it and they were smooth-moving, the corn, the flat, the stucco house falling fast behind.
THE NEXT TIME Uncle Bobby left without inviting her along, Janie waited ten minutes, then headed to the Coin Castle.
The Coin Castle had not a single castle attribute, not even a fake turret or a crenellated facade, was nothing but a cube squatting in a black asphalt lot. From the edge of that sun-fired lot, Janie squinted at the open door, the Coin Castle’s interior as dark as a midday tavern. She hesitated again on the threshold. The games sizzled and flashed in that dark, they cheeped and sang, she recognized their voices, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and Ms., she’d played them all, always in bars, never sober. A pack of boys under fourteen jostled each other and the machines, the place ripe with the aroma of grape gum blended with the high, sour odor of prepubescent boy sweat. When she finally slipped in, she pulled off to the side and willed herself unnoticed. As soon as her eyes adjusted, she spotted Uncle Bobby.
He stood beside the counter where they got their tokens, bought their candy, complained when their money was lost. He was fresh from his after-work shower, and now that she saw him, she could detect Old Spice floating through the grape gum and boy smell. His thinning hair neatly combed, his polo shirt tucked into his too-tight shorts—in perpetual denial of his weight, he insisted on buying them one size too small—Uncle Bobby rocked on his heels. And beamed at the woman behind the counter.
A woman shaped like a planet with fine brown hair that fell straight to her shoulders like a thin fountain, making her face look rounder than it was. She wore over brown double-knit pants a smock top of Holly Hobbie fabric. And she was speaking, Uncle Bobby urging her on, “Mmmm-hmmm. Mmm-hmm.” Uncle Bobby attentive, enthusiastic, close to euphoric, now he was convulsing into laughter over something she’d said—“Oh, c’mon, Tessa! C’mon, now! You’re kidding me!”—and Janie shifted to where Uncle Bobby could see her.
When he did, not a trace of embarrassment invaded his face. Not a trace of shame. After a short surprise, his face held only pleasure, and not just pleasure, Janie saw, but also pride. He stuck out his arm towards Janie. “Tessa, this is my niece, Janie. She works at the thee-ay-ter.”
Tessa turned to Janie, smiling, and extended her hand. Janie stepped towards her, and as she did, she was startled by how badly she wanted this for Uncle Bobby. Two boys slammed between her and the counter, slapped money down—“A pack of red hots!”—and Janie was reaching over them, taking the plump warm hand, saying, “Nice to meet you.” And while she was usually too nervous to look a stranger in the face for more than a few seconds, this time she looked longer. Because she wanted so urgently for it to be, even though right under that she knew someone like Uncle Bobby could never run a video arcade. Janie took the hand, looked in the face, and saw, first, tiredness. Then patient kindness. And finally, intelligence. Janie saw in Tessa everything was right there.
IT WAS THE very next day that her grandmother had arranged for her to pick up Uncle Bobby from work after lunch and take him to his dental appointment. She’d accidentally made it for an afternoon when she was teaching Bible study. “Thank you so much, honey,” her grandmother had said. “You’ll have to go in and get him. He won’t know what time to come out.”
Janie decided to drive the back way to the hospital, to follow Uncle Bobby’s walking route, two and a half miles each morning, no matter the weather and in the dark in the winter. She imagined Uncle Bobby in his down-to-business get-there gait, his head pitched forward, his arms swinging, his shoulders and butt rocking side-to-side with so wide a sweep you feared he’d lose his balance. But he never did, Uncle Bobby borne upright by momentum. Once in a while her grandmother picked him up in the afternoons, Janie had ridden with her many times, and since she’d gotten her license two years before, Janie had picked him up a few times, too. So for years, Janie had waited in the alley outside the service employees’ entrance until Uncle Bobby torpedoed through the door at 3:16. But this was the first time she’d been inside.
She slipped into an empty yellow hall splitting into other empty yellow halls and not a sign anywhere besides EXIT. Wandering right, she ran into a woman resting with a mop bucket in an alcove under the time clock. The woman’s chin sloped long off her face like a scoop. When Janie asked her for directions to the laundry room, the woman laughed, the scoop shimmying. She heaved herself out of the chair, Janie saying, “Oh, no, don’t get up,” the woman laughing at that, too, and the woman led her around corner after yellow corner to a set of solid double doors.
Janie thanked the woman, then pushed through them. And her breath stopped.
All these years (he’d been promoted from housekeeping to laundry a decade ago) when Janie thought of Uncle Bobby at work, which she often did, she saw—not imagined, but saw—a cheerful, clean, brightly lit room, a platonic ideal of a Laundromat. But now she stood on the edge of a sprawling, windowless dungeon, somehow both low-ceilinged and cavernous, lit only by intermittent yellow bulbs, and the light stopped before the room did, the room’s edges running off into spaces she couldn’t see. The giant machines thudded in her torso, tingled her hands, now all their beats at cross-purposes, now synching into harmony, now out again, just above her head a convolute of ducts and vents and tube, and she wondered if Uncle Bobby had to stoop. The humidity more tropical than outdoors—another c
haracteristic of the platonic Laundromat, Janie realized, was that it was air-conditioned—and the damp heat clotted cottony in her mouth, a taste of lint and used soap and gray water, that already made her want to spit.
She strained to make out Uncle Bobby among the dim shapes pivoting between a row of mammoth front-loading washers and a row of mammoth front-loading dryers. The dryers emitted eerie light, brighter than the ceiling bulbs when the light wasn’t obscured by the fabric the dim shapes pulled from the machines, scrubs, gowns, sheets, like fishermen hauling in nets, hand over hand, to find nothing at their ends. And for some reason she suddenly remembered another Uncle Bobby story the family told. How as a five-year-old, uncoordinated, he’d stumbled into a heater, and he still carried faded scars on his arms and hands.
Then she did see Uncle Bobby. Because he had seen her first and had pulled away from the others. He was fast-gathering his lunch bag from a shelf. She stepped towards him, and now Uncle Bobby was passing the metal manager’s cage, hurrying like he always did, when a voice called from the cage over the din, “Hey, Bobby.”
Janie turned to see inside the steel latticework the supervisor, his legs crossed at his ankles and propped on his desk, his left shoe almost touching the shredded lettuce protruding from a half-eaten sub. He was dangling from his hand what looked like a gold chain. “Ten days are up. I guess it’s yours.”
Uncle Bobby ducked in. He took the chain from the supervisor at a speed just short of a snatch and mumbled “Thank you”—Janie saw his mouth move, she could not hear it. Then he shoved it into the pocket of his skintight work pants.
In the car, after she turned on the ignition but before she put it in gear, Janie said, “Who you gonna give that necklace to?”
She’d asked him directly last night if Tessa had given him the black-streaked E.T. doll. He’d nodded. “It used to belong to one of her kids.” Then he’d added, matter-of-factly, “Me and her might move in together.”