Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House

by Неизвестный

  She dragged Versailles Kentucky through the door of the bathroom and leaned the limp body over the tub’s lip. Grabbed the iguana. Put it on the bathroom floor. Arranged Versailles Kentucky in the tub, first one leg and then the other, folding her down on top of herself.

  Next she got the air mattress out of the garage; the noise was worse out there. She filled the mattress halfway and squeezed it through the bathroom door. Put more air in. Tented it over the tub. Went and found the flashlight, got a bottle of gin out of the freezer. It was still cold, thank God. She swaddled the iguana in a towel that was stiff with Jason’s blood. Put it into the tub again. Sleeper and iguana. Madonna and her very ugly baby.

  Everything was clatter and wail. Lindsey heard a shutter, somewhere, go sailing off to somewhere else. The floor of the living room was wet in the circle of her flashlight when she went to collect the other iguanas. Either the rain beginning to force its way in under the front door and the sliding glass doors, or else it was the canal. The three iguanas went into the tub too. “Women and iguanas first,” she said, and swigged her gin. But nobody heard her over the noise of the wind.

  She sat hunched on the lid of her toilet and drank until the wind was almost something she could pretend to ignore. Like a band in a bar that doesn’t know how loud it’s playing. Eventually she fell asleep, still sitting on the toilet, and only woke up when the bottle broke when she dropped it. The iguanas rustled around in the tub. The wind was gone. It was the eye of the storm or else she’d missed the eye entirely, and the rest of the hurricane as well.

  Light came faintly through the shuttered window. The batteries of her emergency radio were dead, but her cell phone still showed a signal. Three messages from Alan and six messages from a number that she guessed was Jason’s. Maybe Alan wanted to apologize for something.

  She went outside to see what had become of the world. Except that what had become of the world was that she was no longer in it.

  The street in front of her house was no longer the street in front of her house. It had become someplace else entirely. There were no other houses. As if the storm had carried them all away. She stood in a meadow full of wildflowers. There were mountains in the far distance, cloudy and blue. The air was very crisp.

  Her cell phone showed no signal. When she looked back at her house, she was looking back into her own world. The hurricane was still there, smeared out onto the horizon like poison. The canal was full of the ocean. The Splinter was probably splinters. Her front door still stood open.

  She went back inside and filled an old backpack with bottles of gin. Threw in candles, her matchbox, some cans of soup. Her gun. Padded it all out with underwear and a sweater or two. The white stuff on those mountains was probably snow.

  If she put her ear against the sliding glass doors that went out to the canal, she was listening to the eye, that long moment of emptiness where the worst is still to come. Versailles Kentucky was still asleep in the bathtub with the iguanas, who were not. There were red marks on Versailles Kentucky’s arms and legs where the iguanas had scratched her. Nothing fatal. Lindsey got a brown eyeliner pencil out of the drawer under the sink and lifted up the sleeper’s leg. Drew a birthmark in the shape of a battleship. The water in the air would make it smear, but so what. If Alan could have his joke, she would have hers too.

  She lowered the cool leg. On an impulse, she picked up the smallest iguana, still wrapped in its towel.

  When she went out her front door again with her backpack and her bike and the iguana, the meadow with its red and yellow flowers was still there and the sun was coming up behind the mountains, although this was not the direction that the sun usually came up in and Lindsey was glad. She bore the sun a grudge because it did not stand still; it gave her no advantage except in that moment when it passed directly overhead and she had no shadow. Not even one. Everything that had once belonged to her alone was back inside Lindsey where it should have been.

  There was something, maybe a mile or two away, that might have been an outcropping of rock. The iguana fit inside the basket on her handlebars and the backpack was not uncomfortably heavy. No sign of any people, anywhere, although if she were determined enough, and if her bicycle didn’t get a puncture, surely she’d come across whatever the local equivalent of a bar was, eventually. If there wasn’t a bar now, then she could always hang around a little while longer, see who came up with that bright idea first.

  LYDIA MILLET

  Snow White, Rose Red

  I met the girls and instantly liked the girls. Of course I liked the girls. A girl is better than a feast.

  This was before the arrest, before the indictment and the media stories.

  The girls were sisters, as you may know, and lived, during the summer, in one of those upstate mansions built by the robber barons who made their fortunes off railroads and steel and unfair business practices. It was in the Lower Peaks of the Adirondacks—the southern part with glassy lakes and green slopes and white-spotted fawns. The girls, who were innocent in the glut of their wealth because they’d never known anything else, called their summer house “the cottage” to distinguish it from “the apartment,” which was a ten-thousand-square-foot penthouse on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square Park.

  Their father was in real estate, but no one ever saw him. Correction: from time to time we caught sight of him briefly, the girls and I, getting in or out of a long, gleaming car. Once, from the woods, I spotted him walking down to the dock in a pale-gray suit, his phone held to his ear.

  He looked like a groom doll on a wedding cake. I wanted to tear his legs off.

  At twilight, on the grounds of the massive yet log-cabin-style robber-baron mansion, dozens of deer stood around, their graceful necks lowered, eating the grass. There’s an abundance of deer up there, due to the hunters who’ve killed off all the animals that were supposed to be preying on them. So the deer.

  And the girls, equally graceful with their light, carrying laughter and long limbs, spun glow-in-the-dark Hula-hoops or played croquet with ancient peeling mallets as the purple dusk fell. The older one had honey-colored hair and blue eyes; the younger had brown hair and her eyes were a shade of amber. They hardly looked like sisters, but they were. The blonde was called Nieve, Spanish for snow, and the brunette was Rosa, but she went by Rose. Their mother—a former ballerina from Madrid who was both anorexic and mentally slow—had named them but often she forgot their names.

  We only met because I came out of the woods one night. I came out of the woods and walked right across the rolling lawn, scattering the Bambis. The sun was setting over the lake and a slight breeze rippled the water.

  I admit the girls appeared frightened. What Rosa told me later was this: those first few seconds, they actually mistook me for a bear.

  They’d never seen a homeless guy before—they were that sheltered, even though they lived in downtown Manhattan; trust me, it can be done—and though I wasn’t technically homeless I had that same dirty, hirsute aspect. I’m not a small man but tall and barrelchested, and that June evening I wore filthy clothes and a long beard and needed badly to bathe in the lake.

  I had a home in the forest, or a temporary shelter, anyway; but to girls that pampered and young there’s no perceptible difference between an aging hippie and a transient.

  So they were frightened at first, but I held up my hands as I walked up to the porch. The cottage had a wide wraparound porch, stone-floored, with swings, chairs, rugs, and potted plants. The girls retreated partway up the stairs and stood there uncertainly on the steps in their simple cotton frocks, clutching a Frisbee and a skipping rope. I held up my hands like a man who was surrendering.

  I was lucky the help wasn’t around and the mother, as usual, had gone to bed early. If anyone else had been there—the cook, for one, who was a domineering type—they probably would have run me off.

  I’d had too much to drink, of course. It was my pastime then—the summer before my divorce, a strange and isolated time. I
was camped out in an old airplane hangar on one of the smaller lakes and now and then I hitchhiked into town, bought booze and groceries, and prayed not to run into my estranged wife. We’d had our own, more modest summer place nearby.

  What I’d done was, I’d disappeared. I didn’t want my wife to know where I had gone. It was the only trick I had left: hiding and vanishing. I got some meager satisfaction from an idea I had of her not knowing whether I lived or died—her wondering if maybe, defying all her expectations, I’d left my dull old self behind and flown off to a distant and unknown country.

  Those girls were good. Plenty of rich girls aren’t, we all know that. But those two girls were innocent. I don’t know how they turned out that way, with the mother who wasn’t all there and the father who wasn’t there at all. That goodness came from them like milk from a rock.

  Snow, as I came to call her, because I couldn’t be bothered to pronounce her real name, mostly liked books, and sat in the shade of the porch on afternoons, reading. Her sister was more social and spent her time talking to everyone. She rode her bicycle to an old folks’ home most days and helped the people there.

  As I stood on the lawn looking up at them, I noticed something I hadn’t seen from a distance: the girls’ skin glowed. Both of them had this luminous kind of skin.

  That clear, young skin is part of what makes girls look so edible.

  I asked them not to be afraid. I told them my name, and after a few moments they seemed to relax, and told me theirs. They had a dog, an old Irish setter who lay around and barely raised his tail even for flies. I sat down on the steps and petted the dog, after a while.

  So we were friends. Of course, I wouldn’t have had a chance if the girls hadn’t been left on their own so much. Now and then a friend their own age came up from the city to visit and I didn’t intrude upon them then.

  But those visits were rare. Often at dawn or dusk, when the deer and the girls were out, I was the only company they had. I kept a low profile and did not throw the Frisbee back and forth with them, in case someone could see us from the house. Usually we stood together and we talked, a little out of sight. Once or twice they sat on the end of the dock and trailed their feet through the water, and I swam, only my head above the darkening surface.

  From the high bedroom windows of the cottage’s second floor, that wouldn’t have looked like anything.

  The girls were kind to me. They let me use the canoes in the boathouse, even encouraged me, and some mornings I would row out into a hidden bay and sit and drift, trying idly to fish in the shade of a red pine. There were some old rods in the boathouse, and since I had none of my own I used to borrow them.

  Snow would leave me sandwiches or sometimes bring a bowl of ice cream onto the porch. Rose offered small hotel bottles of shampoo and told me to use them.

  These girls were both honest. Once Snow said to me, “You smell not too good. Did you know?”

  I told her that I washed my clothes whenever I could, in the coin laundry in town or the lake. I also tried to swim and use soap on myself, but now and then I lost track and missed a day or two.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” said Snow wistfully.

  My back hurt from sleeping on the cement floor of the hangar and I ended up asking the sisters for aspirin. For several days my back and neck had been sore, and the pills took the worst edge off the pain but that was all. Then Rose said I should sleep in the cottage, which had more bedrooms than could easily be counted. There was a certain servants’ part of the house, they said, which had its own entrance, and none of the help used it. I could sneak in at night and sleep in the comfortable bed, which had down pillows and high-thread-count sheets.

  I protested at first; I had some fear I’d run into one of the other members of the household. But it was silent when I snuck in there at night, after the girls had gone to bed. It was so quiet that it almost seemed to me they lived there by themselves, and food and water were furnished to them by invisible hands.

  The bed was a nice change from concrete floors, so nice I almost questioned my recent course in life—hunkering down in the hangar, unshaved and unwashed, hiding from my soon-to-be-ex-wife. But then I came full circle; the hiding couldn’t be so wrong, for it had brought me here, to this great mansion with its soft sheets and gentle girls.

  After that I often slipped in by the servants’ narrow stairs and slept in my private room, tucked up under the roof. I set my wristwatch alarm and crept out at the crack of dawn. The cottage doors were never locked during the summer months; the family was always there, the family or the staff. I watched them from the shadows whenever I could. The Mexican groundskeeper rode around on his lawn tractor uselessly, mowing nothing, happy to sit aloft. The live-in maid smoked cigarettes near the garden shed and sometimes slipped away to have sex with the groundskeeper in the bushes.

  One day the mother had a brief flash of life and donned her sparkling tennis whites. She ran outside and hit a few balls feebly with Rose on the clay tennis court. Meanwhile Snow, on the sidelines, took snapshots for the family album.

  It was a rare occasion, to see the mother outside in the sun, acting alive like that.

  But only fifteen minutes passed before the mother went inside again, apparently angry or depressed. She threw her racquet down and blurted something that I couldn’t quite make out. I saw the girls’ faces as they watched her go. Their faces were both sad and calm; the girls were resigned to this beautiful, semi-retarded mother with her spidery limbs and odd tantrums.

  Perhaps she was never a ballerina, I thought to myself. There aren’t too many retarded ballerinas in this world, is my perception of the thing, although there certainly are a few who, like the mother, starve themselves.

  That evening, around dusk, the girls came swimming with me in the lake; Rose lathered my hair up with shampoo. It was one of the only times I felt the sisters’ touch. They weren’t too prone to physical contact. They hadn’t grown up with affection, and also, I was an older, often bad-smelling man, quite unattractive to them. No doubt they were afraid that any touching would be mistaken for an invitation.

  But on this occasion, beyond the end of the dock, Rose ducked my head under, laughing, and when I came up spluttering and trying to catch my breath Snow pushed my head under again, and both of them were playfully drowning me.

  We were happy.

  Then Rose said, “What would he look like with no beard?”

  Snow looked at me, too, considering, and then climbed up onto the dock, toweled off, and ran into the house. She came back in a minute with shaving equipment. She even had scissors—clearly no razor, by itself, would be up to the task—and an old hand mirror of heavy silver.

  Snow cut off the part of the beard that hung. Then they watched while I sat in the shallows and, with Rose holding up the mirror, shaved off the stubble that was left.

  “He’s not that bad,” she said, when I was done.

  I dipped my face under and came up again, wiping the water away from my eyes, the flecks of girl-scented shaving foam floating.

  “He looks like that actor,” said Snow, cocking her head. “You know, that big French one with the crooked nose.”

  “You look like that actor,” concurred Rose, nodding.

  “He’s sort of ugly,” said Snow. “And you have to like him.”

  “Exactly,” said Rose. “Ugly, like you.”

  “But also likable,” said her older sister.

  “Girls,” I said ruefully, “you’re going to have to find a way to tell the truth a little less often.”

  “Why?” asked Snow.

  “Well, for one thing, it hurts people’s feelings.”

  “We’re sorry,” said Rose. “We didn’t mean to.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know. And B, if you get in this habit of telling men the truth, you’ll never find true love and get married.”

  “I won’t get married anyway,” said Rose.

  “I won’t either,” said Snow.

 
“How do you know?” I asked.

  “It seems really stupid,” said Snow.

  “Like cutting off your leg,” said Rose.

  “Every marriage is different,” I said.

  “Get out,” said Snow.

  “Well, you’re supposed to be married,” said Rose. “But now your wife likes someone else better.”

  “So soon you won’t be, anymore.”

  “More or less accurate,” I conceded.

  “Then why are you defending it?” asked Snow.

  “Once you were practically normal,” added Rose. “But now you carry a roll of toilet paper around in a greasy disgusting backpack,” and she shuddered visibly.

  “We’re just saying,” said Snow, almost apologetic.

  It was then that we heard a rare sound—at least, rare to us in the tranquility of those summer evenings: car tires crunching on gravel in front of the house.

  “No way,” breathed Snow.

  “Daddy,” said Rose.

  “It’s the third time this whole summer,” said Snow.

  “The first time lasted for an hour,” Rose told me.

  “The second was on my birthday,” said Snow.

  “He stayed fifteen minutes.”

  “He brought me a gift certificate.”

  I tensed up, worried I’d get caught with them. My clothes were heaped on the bank, except for the boxer shorts I wore. There was a clean line of sight, if he came around the corner. But I had other clothes in the hangar so all I had to do was swim away—swim across to the part of the shore that was hidden from the house by trees, and from there retreat to my hangar.

  “I should go,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll totally distract him,” said Rose.