The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  My eyes stop when they get to the messy patchwork of newspaper clippings that Mary and I put up with the little black magnets she stole from the dime store. Off to one side is a lime green religious tract that an old lady once handed me on the street. I lie on the cold linoleum listening to the refrigerator hum and Barney sleeping and go over and over the words:

  You probably had a normal childhood. No major worries; no struggle for existence. And there were some high points: the first job; courtship and marriage; a new home; the first child.

  But now days pass by in monotony. So you shop aimlessly or watch TV or find hobbies. Some try divorce or alcohol. But nothing is solved.

  You see the neighbors in the same rut. There’s no future except routine, then old age. Then death. And that’s scary!

  I was still lying there with Barney when Mary came in. It was just starting to get light. She’d used her key, not wanting to wake us. She’d just got back and couldn’t wait to see Barney. Mary didn’t say a word about finding me naked on the kitchen floor, she just leaned down (which wasn’t very far for her) and kissed me on the cheek. Sleepy Barney suddenly jumped up and started dancing around her, his toenails making a racket of little clicking sounds on the linoleum, snuffling and snorting and making whining noises as Mary petted him.

  “Go get your clothes, and we’ll take Barney for a walk. How’s Gio?”

  “He’s okay.”

  “What happened to all the furniture? Never mind. Your TV’s sitting on my coffee table. At least you still have the Saturn chair and the dinette. My God, I’ve got to be able to sit down somewhere when I come visit.”

  “Mary . . .”

  “You know what I wanted to do? I wanted to come in this morning, see Barney, and then crawl into bed with you and Gio. I missed you guys so much. You’d have been so surprised. I don’t know, though, I might not have had the guts. I’ve never even seen Gio naked. Wait a minute, yes I have, that night I brought over the martinis and he was in the tub so we went in and sat around drinking martinis. That was so fun. How could I forget it. I even told my mother about that. I told her all about you two.”

  Barney trotted along in front of us sniffing invisible things of apparent importance. He hardly ever looked up; his eyes were always glued to the two inches of ground in front of his nose. It was cold out, leaves on the path. I hadn’t realized that in the last forty-nine days the seasons had begun to change. It seemed like summer the last time I was out. Perhaps knowing I hadn’t spoken in a while, Mary did all the talking, rattling on, jumping from one subject to another, then back to a previous one. When she really got going, you had to know Mary pretty well to follow. When Giovanni first met her, he’d ask me later what she was talking about. I’d tell him how she got to topic K from topic Z, and what K had to do with H, and how she got to H from A. Once you got to know Mary’s mind, how quickly it moved, you learned to follow. You had to adopt her logic. If I’m around Mary all day I sometimes notice that I’m starting to think and sound like her. That means no one else will be able to follow me except Mary and Giovanni. Maybe Barney—I’m not so sure about him. But they’re the only ones I talk to anyway.

  I’m thinking about this as we walk and Mary continues to rattle. She hardly stops for a breath, occasionally reaching—she doesn’t need to stoop—to give Barney a pat. After forty-eight days in the apartment, the streets are almost unbearably beautiful. I finally manage to speak, wedging in when Mary takes a breath. I tell her about Barney waking me up to show me the mouse in his water dish.

  “He’ll never drink out of that dish again. He’s like that. Once he found a cricket swimming in his old dish and that was it. He never went near it again. Too bad, that Yogi Bear dish was pretty cute too.”

  Then I tell her about Giovanni throwing out all the furniture except the Saturn chair. Mary laughs and when I say “No, I’m really kind of concerned,” she stops walking and takes both my hands.

  “Listen, that’s just Gio. He needs a change once in a while. He goes to work five days a week. He likes his work but gets a little freaked playing Mr. 9-to-5 sometimes, that’s all. Didn’t you ever think he maybe needed to do something to compete with your spells? He loves you. If you go crazy he’ll take care of you for the rest of your life. And it’s not just a physical thing—all that killing and reviving you talk about—it’s deeper. He’s not a talker. He just wants to feel it and do it. He doesn’t say it, he shows it. And that’s pretty great. So don’t worry. The apartment’s beautiful empty, you have to admit—good floors, good light. It’ll fill up again. I’ll fill it, slowly so as not to cause a stir, one thing at a time. My place is so crammed I’ve got to farm the stuff out somewhere. Besides, I’m giving up my storage bin at U-Haul. I’m sick of paying the damn rent on it.”

  I didn’t even know Mary had a storage bin. Then she lowers the boom. She thinks it’s time for me to get a job. Her words send a stinging sensation of violent fear up my spine to my head. A shiver runs through my brain, vibrates off the top of my head, and is gone.

  “Just something part-time, no big deal. I’ll help you find something in the neighborhood to start with.” The fact is Mary already knows of a job opening at the place where we buy our coffee. This seems perfect to her because the hours wouldn’t conflict with our morning visits. And we’d also be able to get free coffee. Mary, in her own way, always thinks things out logically.

  “But what about The Flintstones in the afternoon?”

  “Come on, I think we’ve seen enough of those to last a lifetime. Really, don’t you think you’re ready for this? I do. You can’t do thirty-two days in this apartment again.” (I didn’t tell her it had actually been forty-eight by this time, more or less.) “You needed to do that, that’s okay, but now you’re through it. Let’s face it, it’s time, sweetie.”

  Unbelievably I somehow found all this making some kind of vague sense. I quietly began mulling over the image in my mind, picturing myself behind the coffee-store counter, wearing one of their dark green aprons, measuring out fresh beans into the grinder. In my mind, the other people who worked there seem pretty hip. And the place always smells good. Mary took my silence as a good sign and shut up for a while.

  By the time we get back to the apartment, Giovanni’s gone and I’ve pretty much snapped out of my forty­-eight-day torpor. It happened that fast. I show Mary the tract on the fridge that possessed me the night before.

  “Hmm, maybe we should drop that from the collection. It gives me the creeps.”

  The espresso pot’s already rumbling on the stove. This causes Barney to retreat into the other room as usual. Once we’re settled in at the dinette with our coffee, Mary begins again:

  “You know she’s not coming out this time, my mother. Our Jackie doesn’t look too good. By the time I got there she’d already gone back into the hospital. I went in and—you know, she’s not really our Jackie anymore at all. She’s lost a lot of weight. She’s got about four inches of gray roots showing. Almost white. In the last six months she’s aged about ten years. Somehow she got old. Somehow I didn’t think that would ever happen.

  “She was asleep. I sat with her a long time. Then she woke up and we talked for a while. She’s pretty weak but she was really happy to see me. She asked about you and Barney and Gio. When it was time to go I told her not to worry, she’d be out in a couple of days. She said, ‘No, honey, not this time. I’m going to die soon, Mary. If I get out I won’t get out for long.’

  “I’m going back down in two weeks, after I get things squared away here. Will you come down with me, at least for a while? She wants to meet you. I told her about us reenacting the Jackie-at-the-dinette scene and she thought that was hysterical. I’ve got to go. She doesn’t need me, it’s not that, she’s still the totally self-contained phenomenon she always was. It’s just—I don’t know, she’s the one I always wanted to be. I want to see her a little more before she’s finished being
perfect.”

  Giovanni comes too, and Barney. For the weekend. Then I have to get back to start my new job. It’s only part-time. Giovanni looks on it as an amusing experiment. He really doesn’t care if I do it, he just wants me to do what I want to do. But I’m ready, and Mary wants me to do it. She made me promise to at least give it a try. I also have the job of painting her apartment while she’s gone. I suspect it’s just a ploy to keep me busy. She’s going to give me $200 and I’ll buy Giovanni a VCR for Christmas. Then we can all watch The Flintstones and Our Miss Brooks reruns at night. Except Tuesdays, cheap beer night, Gio’s pool night.

  Lust

  Susan Minot

  Leo was from a long time ago, the first one I ever saw nude. In the spring before the Hellmans filled their pool, we’d go down there in the deep end, with baby oil, and like that. I met him the first month away at boarding school. He had a halo from the campus light behind him. I flipped.

  Roger was fast. In his illegal car, we drove to the reservoir, the radio blaring, talking fast, fast, fast. He was always going for my zipper. He got kicked out sophomore year.

  By the time the band got around to playing “Wild Horses,” I had tasted Bruce’s tongue. We were clicking in the shadows on the other side of the amplifier, out of Mrs. Donovan’s line of vision. It tasted like salt, with my neck bent back, because we had been dancing so hard before.

  Tim’s line: “I’d like to see you in a bathing suit.” I knew it was his line when he said the exact same thing to Annie Hines.

  You’d go on walks to get off campus. It was raining like hell, my sweater as sopped as a wet sheep. Tim pinned me to a tree, the woods light brown and dark brown, a white house half hidden with the lights already on. The water was as loud as a crowd hissing. He made certain comments about my forehead, about my cheeks.

  We started off sitting at one end of the couch and then our feet were squished against the armrest and then he went over to turn off the TV and came back after he had taken off his shirt and then we slid onto the floor and he got up again to close the door, then came back to me, a body waiting on the rug.

  You’d try to wipe off the table or to do the dishes and Willie would untuck your shirt and get his hands up under in front, standing behind you, making puffy noises in your ear.

  He likes it when I wash my hair. He covers his face with it and if I start to say something, he goes, “Shush.”

  For a long time, I had Philip on the brain. The less they noticed you, the more you got them on the brain.

  My parents had no idea. Parents never really know what’s going on, especially when you’re away at school most of the time. If she met them, my mother might say, “Oliver seems nice” or “I like that one” without much of an opinion. If she didn’t like them, “He’s a funny fellow, isn’t he?” or “Johnny’s perfectly nice but a drink of water.” My father was too shy to talk to them at all unless they played sports and he’d ask them about that.

  The sand was almost cold underneath because the sun was long gone. Eben piled a mound over my feet, patting around my ankles, the ghostly surf rumbling behind him in the dark. He was the first person I ever knew who died, later that summer, in a car crash. I thought about it for a long time.

  “Come here,” he says on the porch.

  I go over to the hammock and he takes my wrist with two fingers.

  “What?”

  He kisses my palm then directs my hand to his fly.

  Songs went with whichever boy it was. “Sugar Magnolia” was Tim, with the line “Rolling in the rushes / down by the riverside.” With “Darkness Darkness,” I’d picture Philip with his long hair. Hearing “Under My Thumb” there’d be the smell of Jamie’s suede jacket.

  We hid in the listening rooms during study hall. With a record cover over the door’s window, the teacher on duty couldn’t look in. I came out flushed and heady and back at the dorm was surprised how red my lips were in the mirror.

  • • •

  One weekend at Simon’s brother’s, we stayed inside all day with the shades down, in bed, then went out to Store 24 to get some ice cream. He stood at the magazine rack and read through MAD while I got butterscotch sauce, craving something sweet.

  I could do some things well. Some things I was good at, like math or painting or even sports, but the second a boy put his arm around me, I forgot about wanting to do anything else, which felt like a relief at first until it became like sinking into a muck.

  It was different for a girl.

  When we were little, the brothers next door tied up our ankles. They held the door of the goat house and wouldn’t let us out till we showed them our underpants. Then they’d forget about being after us and when we played whiffle ball, I’d be just as good as they were.

  Then it got to be different. Just because you have on a short skirt, they yell from the cars, slowing down for a while, and if you don’t look, they screech off and call you a bitch.

  “What’s the matter with me?” they say, point-blank.

  Or else, “Why won’t you go out with me? I’m not asking you to get married,” about to get mad.

  Or it’d be, trying to be reasonable, in a regular voice, “Listen, I just want to have a good time.”

  So I’d go because I couldn’t think of something to say back that wouldn’t be obvious, and if you go out with them, you sort of have to do something.

  I sat between Mack and Eddie in the front seat of the pickup. They were having a fight about something. I’ve a feeling about me.

  Certain nights you’d feel a certain surrender, maybe if you’d had wine. The surrender would be forgetting yourself and you’d put your nose to his neck and feel like a squirrel, safe, at rest, in a restful dream. But then you’d start to slip from that and the dark would come in and there’d be a cave. You make out the dim shape of the windows and feel yourself become a cave, filled absolutely with air, or with a sadness that wouldn’t stop.

  Teenage years. You know just what you’re doing and don’t see the things that start to get in the way.

  Lots of boys, but never two at the same time. One was plenty to keep you in a state. You’d start to see a boy and something would rush over you like a fast storm cloud and you couldn’t possibly think of anyone else. Boys took it differently. Their eyes perked up at any little number that walked by. You’d act like you weren’t noticing.

  The joke was that the school doctor gave out the pill like aspirin. He didn’t ask you anything. I was fifteen. We had a picture of him in assembly, holding up an IUD shaped like a T. Most girls were on the pill, if anything, because they couldn’t handle a diaphragm. I kept the dial in my top drawer like my mother and thought of her each time I tipped out the yellow tablets in the morning before chapel.

  • • •

  If they were too shy, I’d be more so. Andrew was nervous. We stayed up with his family album, sharing a pack of Old Golds. Before it got light, we turned on the TV. A man was explaining how to plant seedlings. His mouth jerked to the side in a tic. Andrew thought it was a riot and kept imitating him. I laughed to be polite. When we finally dozed off, he dared to put his arm around me, but that was it.

  You wait till they come to you. With half fright, half swagger, they stand one step down. They dare to touch the button on your coat then lose their nerve and quickly drop their hand so you—you’d do anything for them. You touch their cheek.

  The girls sit around in the common room and talk about boys, smoking their heads off.

  “What are you complaining about?” says Jill to me when we talk about problems.

  “Yeah,” says Giddy. “You always have a boyfriend.”

  I look at them and think, As if.

  I thought the worst thing anyone could call you was a cock-teaser. So, if you flirted, you had to be prepared to go through with it. Sleeping with someone was perfectly normal once you had done it. You
didn’t really worry about it. But there were other problems. The problems had to do with something else entirely.

  • • •

  Mack was during the hottest summer ever recorded. We were renting a house on an island with all sorts of other people. No one slept during the heat wave, walking around the house with nothing on which we were used to because of the nude beach. In the living room, Eddie lay on top of a coffee table to cool off. Mack and I, with the bedroom door open for air, sweated and sweated all night.

  “I can’t take this,” he said at three a.m. “I’m going for a swim.” He and some guys down the hall went to the beach. The heat put me on edge. I sat on a cracked chest by the open window and smoked and smoked till I felt even worse, waiting for something—I guess for him to get back.

  One was on a camping trip in Colorado. We zipped our sleeping bags together, the coyotes’ hysterical chatter far away. Other couples murmured in other tents. Paul was up before sunrise, starting a fire for breakfast. He wasn’t much of a talker in the daytime. At night, his hand leafed about in the hair at my neck.

  There’d be times when you overdid it. You’d get carried away. All the next day, you’d be in a total fog, delirious, absent-minded, crossing the street and nearly getting run over.

  The more girls a boy has, the better. He has a bright look, having reaped fruits, blooming. He stalks around, sure-shouldered, and you have the feeling he’s got more in him, a fatter heart, more stories to tell. For a girl, with each boy it’s as though a petal gets plucked each time.

  • • •

  Then you start to get tired. You begin to feel diluted, like watered-down stew.

  Oliver came skiing with us. We lolled by the fire after everyone had gone to bed. Each creak you’d think was someone coming downstairs. The silver loop bracelet he gave me had been a present from his girlfriend before.