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

by Неизвестный

  After a while, Beverly began to wheeze, touching her chest while she breathed. Then she announced that “peak cancer hours” were open for business and that she was going for a little break action. She rubbed oil all over her body and left the trailer, a shaft of light entering like a laser when she opened the door. She carried a folded aluminum chair under her arm.

  Gordon continued working, glancing at Miss Pretty now and then, first at half-hour intervals, then every five or ten minutes. He couldn’t stop molesting her with his eyes. They traveled up and down her petite body, from plastic shoe to nylon hair.

  He said, “Stop staring at me, you little witch.”

  And then, a while later, he said, “I’m not afraid of you, you tiny fucker.”

  She knew him. He had always been a coward.

  She liked to think of herself as beautiful—she had the kind of cool, abstract beauty of Norwegian royalty, an ice queen who betrays almost nothing on the surface. She still pictured herself as she had once been: perfect, Mint in Box. But the years and the heat had taken their toll on her complexion, some kind of molded plastic that might outlast a planet’s worth of organic material but not without cracking somewhat in the interim. As she came to terms with the fact that her freckles had faded, Miss Pretty began to feel more worldly, exotic. She was left with a faint brown wash over her button nose, like sun-bleached calico, a fetching effect. No wonder he kept looking at her. As she watched Gordon work with his chemical paraphernalia, a tune entered her mind, velvet and slow. She hummed it to herself.

  “Why do you keep looking up there?” asked the woman. She’d set up the aluminum chair inside the trailer and sat in it, stinking like a piña colada.

  “Baby doll.”

  “Come again?”

  “Baby doll’s freaking me out.”

  The woman wrinkled her lips. “You need to let me know when you’re going to be testing the product, okay? Could you do me that courtesy? I do not need to be out in the middle of nowhere with a hallucinating person.”

  “I haven’t tested,” Gordon said. “That baby doll’s face is demented.”

  Miss Pretty scoffed. She was not a baby doll. This was a well-known fact. She stood on her own two feet; she did not loll on her back as baby dolls lolled. She was a companion doll, manufactured to look like a complete little girl in and of herself, eighteen inches high from molded foot to pigtailed head. Well, the pigtails had transformed into something more like dreadlocks at this point but she could live with that if she had to. A certain amount of wear was acceptable, as long as she could recover her panties and her shoe. Completeness was more important than condition.

  Down below, she noticed, the woman had switched into a little-girl voice. “Do you love me?”

  Gordon looked away. “I don’t like the L word.”

  “Then say it the way I told you.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Abby says any man who can’t say it is a pig.”

  “Okay,” said Gordon, “I adore you.”

  “What was that?”

  “I adore you.”

  “Oh great.” She rolled her eyes. “I adore you too.”

  At night, Gordon and Beverly pulled cots down off the wall and swaddled themselves in sleeping bags. After a brief fight over security vs. ventilation they threw open the doors and Miss Pretty watched lizards and scorpions crawl into the trailer as the night deepened. They didn’t touch each other, except for once when Gordon left his cot and tried to crawl in with the woman. She mumbled at him to get off her, and burrowed deeper into her bag. Gordon sat on the edge of his cot for a long time, chewing tobacco and spitting it into a soup can between his feet. After a while he shuffled over to Miss Pretty and shone a flashlight on her face. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt made of a very light material that seemed to float on top of his chest hair. He whispered, “I remember you, you little gnome. You wee, fucking midget.”

  She watched a scorpion scuttle toward his ankle, its tail bursting with venom.

  Neither of them seemed to change their clothes, or wash, though the woman’s skin had begun to turn a deep, glossy brown. She held out her limbs and admired them and encouraged Gordon to do the same. Gordon nodded and stared away blankly. He’d begun to chew tobacco constantly. If he wasn’t doing that, he ate candy bars and tossed the wrappers into the greasy paper bag they used as a trash can. The woman requested that he get back to work—her hair lank and falling into her dust mask. They didn’t have all the time in the world, she warned, for him to gaze around this godforsaken trailer—fucking gaze—while it took her an hour and a half to drive to the nearest town for a hamburger. She hadn’t gone to Wellesley for this shit.

  The next time the woman left the trailer, he moved the chair next to the shelf and climbed up on it. He leaned his head in close to Miss Pretty until she was marinated in his vile, sour breath. He whispered: “I don’t remember your name, but you were her ally. You were against me then, and you’re against me now. I remember you,” he said, tapping his forehead to emphasize the concept of memory.

  He was such a jerk. Of course he had forgotten her name, but Miss Pretty hadn’t forgotten him. It was her genius to remember everything.

  She remembered the toupee he wore for a week while Tina’s drug-addled mother called him a goddamn used-car salesman and a gentleman’s valet and a lounge lizard and a fucking embarrassment.

  She remembered him punching his fist through the wall while Tina’s mother swayed on her feet and whispered, “Just ignore him.”

  She remembered how he touched a cigarette to the back of Tina’s hand, then said, “Oops.”

  She remembered everything he wanted to forget.

  The man and woman unfolded a table in the middle of the trailer. They divided the tabletop into four sections with strips of cardboard anchored with masking tape. They used this as a device for sorting capsules according to the color and texture of their contents.

  “I have a feeling this is my most profound batch yet,” Gordon said, shaking a bag of capsules. “This stuff is going to show those poor suckers the face of God.”

  “I just want something to keep me thin,” Beverly said, and stared at him for a while.

  Then, as if something had clicked, Gordon said: “What are you talking about? You look great.”

  Miss Pretty tried to ignore them. She hated the shelf. She preferred to be the center of attention, prized for her beauty and charisma. When she swept into a room, heads were supposed to swivel. The music found a sultry groove—yeah, that’s an alto sax, buddy. Husbands dropped their hands below the table and screwed off their wedding rings. Women felt suddenly deficient, ashamed of their sequins and pearls, because nothing could shine as brightly, no one could be as effortless and gorgeous, as Miss Pretty in her prime. The cinnamon hair, the dainty face, world-weary and lined—they didn’t call it age in her case, they called it “vintage,” a far sweeter concept. She was it. She was the doll. When she sang she would hold her body very still, like Peggy Lee, but she had something Peggy Lee never did—an iron confidence, a ruthless pride. She would be no one’s doormat, no one’s little victim. Never ever.

  So much energy had crept into her limbs. She felt them buzzing like a beehive. She was awake now. She remembered so much.

  She remembered a girl, her girl, being pulled out of school in the middle of the morning and put into the back of a car. Then Tina was driven away from all her little friends so that Miss Pretty was her only friend in the whole world. In those days she’d slept and awakened and slept again. Every time her eyes opened, Tina was there, staring back.

  She remembered being dropped into a sandbox and abandoned with one shoe shucked off, buried with a spoon. Ants swarmed under her dress, into the hollow of her mouth, but Miss Pretty endured it, because she knew Tina would always come back for her. She knew Tina didn’t have anyone else.

  When they had finished sorting the pills, the woman again rubbed oil on her limbs and exited the trailer. Gordon
planted himself on a chair below Miss Pretty. He stared at her and she stared back. “It’s not my fault,” he complained. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Miss Pretty gazed at him, unperturbed. She had begun composing a song in her head, a sensual ballad:

  Wouldn’t take much

  To topple you in

  To a high, rushing river

  Where you’d flail,

  But couldn’t swim

  You think I won’t do it

  But I will . . . but I will

  Maim and hurt you

  (Though you struggle)

  And dismember

  And kill

  In the chair below her, Gordon scratched his armpit and muttered, “I saw that. I saw you move.”

  Finally it seemed that the chemistry action was coming to an end. The man and woman gathered up the empty bags and the plastic containers that had held powdered chemicals, and liquids, as well as the boxes and bags that they were packed in, and dragged them out of the trailer. A while after that, Miss Pretty smelled the sharp, acrid smell of peculiar substances burning, and later she identified the terrifying odor of scorched plastic. Gordon combed his hair back with a wet comb; the woman put on a tight, expensive dress that toggled her appearance from that of a dissipated, over-tan bag lady to a bored socialite just back from the spa. They spoke to each other politely, on their best behavior, as light slanted through the trailer’s high, dirty windows. They began to pack the capsules into various objects that seemed to have been modified to serve as containers. There was a hollow radio lined with felt. There was a six-pack of cola with bottoms that screwed off, leaving only a hairline seam. There was a down jacket with a series of small, ingenious pockets sewn into the puffiest sections. Miss Pretty watched from her perch as the pills were packed away, all but a handful or two.

  Beverly was smiling. “Let’s go to one of those islands where natives feed you pineapple on silver forks.”

  Gordon glanced up at Miss Pretty. “What do you want to do there? Work on your tan?”

  Miss Pretty gazed down at the people made of meat. Gordon couldn’t keep his eyes off her. He gave her that casual squint. Yeah, buddy, cherchez la femme. He obviously had a crush on her. So she was relaxed, in control; she wasn’t anticipating any trouble when Gordon pulled up the chair and grabbed her. He swept her off the shelf. He used the claw to hook up her dress—her blue dress with the nautical collar that had been reduced to a stained and shredded remnant over the years, but was still sort of cute in a ragamuffin way—and he jerked it over her head so her bottom half was completely bare.

  He went in via the wedge-shaped opening in her belly, where he’d forced his way through at knifepoint once before. Little Tina had patched the area with masking tape that had decayed with age, but enough stickiness remained to encourage the formation of a membrane of hair and lint. Gordon plowed through that and cracked the entrance wider with spreading motions of the claw. He held her open and shoved a baggie full of capsules into her as though she were his private receptacle, a thing to be handled whatever way he saw fit.

  No one’s little victim. Never again.

  Gordon laughed and said, “See? I told you she’d come in handy.”

  He handed the doll to the woman, who had again donned her dust mask. She snickered and whipped the dress back down with a flick of her wrist. Inside Miss Pretty’s body the capsules settled, along with the terrible injustice of being inert and silent and tampered with and used. For a few seconds rage seethed inside her like bubbles in a beaker. And then, without thought or reflection of any kind, Miss Pretty did what she’d been born to do. She crooked her little head downward and bit a hunk of flesh the size of a crab apple out of Beverly’s arm.

  Beverly howled and sank to the floor. She stayed there gasping, gripping her arm while a puddle of blood spread around her like a skirt.

  Gordon started to laugh. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew I saw her move!”

  KAREN RUSSELL

  The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach

  The gulls landed in Athertown on July 10, 1979. Clouds of them, in numbers unseen since the ornithologists began keeping records of such things. Scientists all over the country hypothesized about climate change and migratory routes. At first sullen Nal barely noticed them. Lost in his thoughts, he dribbled his basketball up the boardwalk, right past the hundreds of gulls on Strong Beach, gulls grouped so thickly that from a distance they looked like snowbanks. Their bodies capped the dunes. If Nal had looked up, he would have seen a thunderhead of seagulls in the well of the sky, rolling seaward. Instead, he ducked under the dirty turquoise umbrella of the Beach Grub cart and spent his last dollar on a hamburger; while he struggled to open a packet of yellow mustard, one giant gull swooped in and snatched the patty from its bun with a surgical jerk. Nal took two bites of bread and lettuce before he realized what had happened. The gull taunted him, wings akimbo, on the Beach Grub umbrella, glugging down his burger. Nal went on chewing the greasy bread, concluding that this was pretty much par for his recent course.

  All summer long, since his mother’s termination, Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails—and then right at his nadir, he’d agreed to an “avant” haircut performed by Cousin Steve. Cousin Steve was participating in a correspondence course with a beauty school in Nevada, America, and to pass his Radical Metamorphosis II course, he decided to dye Nal’s head a vivid blue and then razor the front into tentacle-like bangs. “Radical,” Nal said dryly as Steve removed the foil. Cousin Steve then had to airmail a snapshot of Nal’s ravaged head to the United States desert, $17.49 in postage, so that he could get his diploma. In the photograph, Nal looks like he is going stoically to his death in the grip of a small blue octopus.

  Samson Wilson, Nal’s brother, took his turn in Cousin Steve’s improvised barber chair—a wrecked church pew that Steve had carted into his apartment from off the street. Cousin Steve used Samson as a guinea pig for “Creative Clippers.” He gave Samson a standard buzz cut to start, but that looked so good that he kept going with the razor. Pretty soon Samson had a gleaming cue-ball head. He’d cracked jokes about the biblical significance of this, and Nal had secretly hoped that his brother’s power over women would in fact be diminished. But to Nal’s dismay, the ladies of Athertown flocked to Samson in greater multitudes than before. Girls trailed him down the boardwalk, clucking stupidly about the new waxy sheen to his head. Samson was seventeen and had what Nal could only describe as a bovine charm: he was hale and beefy, with a big laugh and the deep serenity of a grazing creature. Nal loved him too, of course—it was impossible not to—but he was baffled by Sam’s ease with women, his ease in the world.

  That summer Nal was fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself. He and Samson played a lot of basketball on summer nights and weekends. Nal would replay every second of their games until he was so sick of his own inner sportscaster that he wanted to puke. He actually had puked once—last September he had walked calmly out of the JV tryouts and retched in the frangipani. The voice in his head logged every on-court disaster, every stolen ball and missed shot, the unique fuck-ups and muscular failures that he had privately termed “Nal-fouls.” Samson had been on the varsity team since his freshman year, and he wasn’t interested in these instant replays—he wanted the game to move forward. Nal and his brother would play for hours, and when he got tired of losing, Nal would stand in the shade of a eucalyptus grove and dribble in place.

  “It’s just a pickup game, Nal,” Samson told him.

  “Quit eavesdropping on me!” Nal shouted, running the ball down the blacktop. “I’m talking to myself.”

  Then he’d take off sprinting down the road, but no matter how punishing the distance he ran—he once dribbled the ball all the way down to the ruined industrial marina at Pier 12, where the sea rippled like melted aluminum—Nal felt he couldn’t get away from himself. He sank hoops and it was always Nal sinking them; he missed, and he was Nal missing
. He felt incapable of spontaneous action: before he could do anything, a tiny homunculus had to generate a flowchart in his brain. If p, then q; if z, then back to a. This homunculus could gnaw a pencil down to a nub, deliberating. All day, he could hear the homunculus clacking in his brain like a secretary from a 1940s movie: Nal shouldn’t! Nal can’t! Nal won’t! and then hitting the bell of the return key. He pictured the homunculus as a tiny, blankly handsome man in a green sweater, very agreeably going about his task of wringing the life from Nal’s life.

  He wanted to get to a place where he wasn’t thinking about every movement at every second; where he wasn’t even really Nal any longer but just weight sinking into feet, feet leaving the pavement, fingers fanning forcelessly through air, the swish! of a made basket and the net birthing the ball. He couldn’t remember the last time he had acted without reservation on a single desire. Samson seemed to do it all the time. Once, when Nal returned home from his mileslong run with the ball, sweating and furious, they had talked about his aspiration for vacancy—the way he wanted to be empty and free. He’d explained it to Samson in a breathless rush, expecting to be misunderstood.

  “Sure,” Samson said. “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do?”

  “From surfing. Oh, it’s wild, brother.” Why did Samson have to know him so well? “The feeling of being part of the same wave that’s lifting you. It’s like you’re coasting outside of time, outside your own skin.”

  Nal felt himself redden. Sometimes he wished his brother would simply say, “No, Nal, what the hell do you mean?” Samson had a knack for this kind of insight: he was like a grinning fisherman who could wrench a secret from the depths of your chest and dangle it in front of you, revealing it to be nothing but a common, mudcolored fish.