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

by Неизвестный

  “Oh God,” he groaned. When he saw what he was holding he almost dropped it. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  It was nothing, really. It was just a dull knuckle of metal. A screw.

  Nal closed his fist around the screw, opened it. Here was something indigestible. It was a stop screw—he knew this from the diagram that had run with the local paper’s story “Allegations of Nursing Home Negligence,” next to a photograph of the two-inch chasm in the Paradise window made lurid by the journalist’s ink. They’d also run a bad photo of his mother. Her face had been washed out by the fluorescent light. She was old, Nal realized. It looked like the “scandal” had aged her. Nal had stared at his mother’s gray face and seen a certain future, something you didn’t need a bird to auger.

  He wouldn’t even show her, he decided. What was the point of coming back here? The screw couldn’t shut that window now.

  Nal was shooting hoops on the public court half a mile from Mr. McGowen’s house when Samson found him. A fine dust from the nearby construction site kept blowing over in clouds whenever the wind picked up. Nal had to kick a crust of gravel off the asphalt so that he could dribble the ball.

  “Hey, buddy, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Mom says you two had a fight?”

  Nal shoots, whispered the homunculus. He turned away from Samson and planted his feet on the asphalt. Shooter’s roll—the ball teetered on the edge and at the last moment fell into the basket. “It was nothing; it was about college again. What do you need?”

  “Just a tiny loan so I can buy Vanessa a ring. Mr. Tarak’s going to let me do it in installments.”

  “Mr. Tarak said that?” Nal had always thought of Mr. Tarak as a CASH ONLY!!! sort of merchant. He had a spleeny hatred of everyone under thirty-five and liked telling Nal his new haircut made him look like the Antichrist.

  Samson laughed. “Yeah, well, he knows I’m good for it.” He was used to the fact that people went out of their way for him. It made strangers happy to see Samson happy and so they’d give him things, let him run up a tab with them, just to buoy that feeling.

  “What kind of ring? A wedding ring?”

  “Nah, it’s just . . . I dunno. She’ll like it. Tiny flowers on the inside part, what do you call that . . .”

  “The band.” Nal’s eyes were on the red square on the backboard; he squatted into his thin calves. “Are you in love?”

  Samson snorted. “We’re having fun, Nal. We’re having a good time.” He shrugged. “It’s her birthday, help me out.”

  “Sorry,” Nal said, shooting again. “I got nothing.”

  “You’ve got nothing, huh?” Samson leaned in and made a playful grab for the ball, and Nal slugged him in the stomach.

  “Jesus! What’s wrong with you?”

  Nal stared at his fist in amazement. He’d had no idea that swing was in the works. Wind pushed the ball downcourt and he flexed his empty hands. When his brother took a step toward him he swung wide and slammed his fist into the left shoulder—pain sprang into his knuckles and Nal had time to cock his fist back again. He thought, I am going to really mess you up here, right before Samson shoved him down onto the gravel. He stared down at Nal with an open mouth, his bare chest contracting. No visible signs of injury there, he saw with something close to disappointment. The basket craned above them. Blood and pebbled pits colored Nal’s palms and raked up the sides of his legs. He could feel, strangest of all, a grin spreading on his face.

  “Did I hurt you?” Nal asked. He was still sitting on the blacktop. He noticed that Samson was wearing his socks.

  “What’s your problem?” Samson said. He wasn’t looking at Nal. One hand shielded his eyes, the sun pleating his forehead, and he looked like a sailor scouting for land beyond the blue gravel. “You don’t want to help me out, just say so. Fucking learn to behave like a normal person.”

  “I can’t help you,” Nal called after him.

  Later that afternoon, when Strong Beach was turning a hundred sorbet colors in the sun, Nal walked down the esplanade to Mr. Tarak’s pawnshop. He saw the ring right away—it was in the front display, nested in a cheap navy box between old radios and men’s watches, a quarter-full bottle of Chanel.

  “Repent,” said Mr. Tarak without looking up from his newspaper. “Get a man’s haircut.”

  “I’d like to buy this ring here,” Nal tapped on the glass.

  “On hold.”

  “I can make the payment right now, sir. In full.”

  Mr. Tarak shoved up off his stool and took it out. It didn’t look like a wedding band; it was a simple, wrought iron thing with a floral design etched on the inside. Nal found he didn’t care about the first woman who had pawned or lost it, or Samson who wanted to buy it. Nal was the owner now. He paid and pocketed the ring.

  Before he went to catch the 3:03 bus to Vanessa’s house, Nal walked back to the pinewoods. If he was really going through with this, he didn’t want to take any chances that these birds would sabotage his plan. He took his basketball and fitted it in the hollow. The gulls were back, circumnavigating the pine at different velocities, screeching irritably. He watched with some satisfaction as one scraped its wing back against the ball. He patted the ring in his pocket. He knew this was just a temporary fix. There was no protecting against the voracity of the gulls. If fate was just a disintegrating blanket—some fraying skein that the gulls were tearing right this second—then Nal didn’t see why he couldn’t also find a loose thread, and pull.

  Vanessa’s house was part of a new community on the outskirts of Athertown. The bus drove past the long neck of a crane rising out of an exposed gravel pit, the slate glistening with recent rain. A summer shower had rolled in from the east and tripped some of the streetlights prematurely. The gulls had not made it this far inland yet; the only birds here were sparrows and a few doll-like cockatoos along the fences.

  Vanessa seemed surprised and happy to see him. “Come in,” she said, her thin face filling the doorway. She looked scrubbed and plain, not the way she did with Samson. “Nobody’s home but me. Is Sam with you?”

  “No,” said Nal. For years he’d been planning to say to her, “I think we’re meant to be,” but now that he was here he didn’t say anything; his heart was going, and he almost had to stop himself from shoving his way inside.

  “I brought you this,” he said, pushing the ring at her. “I’ve been saving up for it.”

  “Nal!” she said, turning the ring over in her hands. “But this is really beautiful . . .”

  It was easy. What had he worried about? He just stepped in and kissed her, touched her neck. Suddenly he was feeling every temperature at once, the coolness of her skin and the wet warmth of her mouth and even the tepid slide of sweat over his knuckles. She kissed him back, and Nal slid his hand beneath the neckline of her blouse and touched the bandage there. The Grigalunases’ house was dark and still inside, the walls lined with framed pictures of dark-haired girls who looked like funhouse images of Vanessa, her sisters or her former selves. An orange cat darted under the stairwell.

  “Nal? Do you want to sit down?” She addressed this to her own face in the foyer mirror, a glass crescent above the door, and when she turned back to Nal her eyes had brightened, charged with some anticipation that almost didn’t seem to include him. Nal kissed her again and started steering her toward the living room. A rope was pulling him forward, a buried cable, and he was only able to relax into it now because he had spent his short lifetime doing up all the knots. Perhaps this is how the future works, Nal thought—nothing fated or inevitable but just these knots like fists that you could tighten or undo.

  Nal and Vanessa sat down on the green sofa, a little stiffly. Nal had never so much as grazed a girl’s knee but somehow he was kissing her neck, he was sliding a hand up her leg, beneath the elastic band of her underwear . . .

  Vanessa struggled to undo Nal’s belt and the tab of his jeans and now she looked up at him; his zipper was stuck. He was trapped inside his pa
nts. Thanks to his recent weight loss, he was able to wriggle out of them, tugging furiously at the denim. At last he got them off with a grunt of satisfaction and, breathless and red-faced, flung them to the floor. The zipper liner left a nasty scratch down his skin. Nal began to unroll his socks, hunching over and angling his hipbones. It was strange to see the splay of his dark toes on the Grigalunases’ carpet, Vanessa half-naked beyond it.

  She could have whinnied with laughter at him; instead, with a kindness that you can’t teach people, she had walked over to the windows while Nal hopped and writhed. She had taken off her shirt and unwound the bandage and was shimmying out of her bra. The glass had gone dark with thunderheads. The smell of rain had crept into the house. She drew the curtains and slid out of the rest of her clothes. The living room was a blue cave now—Nal could see the soft curve of the sofa’s back in the dark. Was he supposed to turn the light on? Which way was more romantic? “Sorry,” he said as they both walked back to the sofa, their eyes flicking all over one another. Vanessa slid a hand over Nal’s torso.

  “You and Samson have the same boxer shorts,” she said.

  “Our mother buys them for us.”

  Maybe this isn’t going to happen, Nal thought.

  But then he saw a glint of silver and felt recommitted. Vanessa had slipped the pawnshop ring on—it was huge on her. She caught him looking and held her hand up, letting the ring slide over her knuckle, and they both let out jumpy laughs. Nal could feel sweat collecting on the back of his neck. They tried kissing again for awhile. Vanessa’s dark hair slid through his hands like palmfuls of oil as he fumbled his way inside her, started to move. He wanted to ask: Is this right? Is this OK? It wasn’t at all what he’d imagined. Nal, moving on top of Vanessa, was still Nal, still cloaked with consciousness and inescapably himself. He didn’t feel invincible—he felt clumsy, guilty. Vanessa was trying to help him find his rhythm, her hands just above his bony hips.

  “Hey,” Vanessa said at one point, turning her face to the side. “The cat’s watching.”

  The orange tabby was licking its paws on the first stair, beneath the clock. The cat had somehow gotten hold of the stop screw—it must have fallen out of Nal’s pocket—and was batting it around.

  The feeling of arrival Nal was after kept receding like a charcoal line on bright water. This was not the time or the place but he kept picturing the gulls, screaming and wheeling in a vortex just beyond him, and he groaned and sped up his motions. “Don’t stop,” Vanessa said, and there was such a catch to her voice that Nal said, “I won’t, I won’t,” with real seriousness, like a parent reassuring a child. Although very soon, Nal could feel, he would have to.

  JULIA SLAVIN

  Drive-Through House

  A pair of twin boys in a Porsche Boxster drove into the house, skidding to a stop in the middle of living room, where I picked up Pabst cans and McDonald’s bags off Mother’s hand-knotted rug.

  “We heard there might be a viewing . . .” the driving twin said.

  “Of the body,” the passenger twin completed.

  “No viewing.” I beat the dust from Mother’s sampler pillows, their ethereal particles falling like dandruff on the road.

  “Do we still gotta pay?” the driving twin asked.

  “It’s a donation,” I said. “We never ask folks to pay.” The boys sped off through the gift shop without leaving a cent. A few minutes later I was surprised to see the Ladies of Tuesday Antique Auto Club rolling through the kitchen. Miss Cutler’s ’52 DeSoto still smelled like Holsteins on a clover diet at dusk. I walked alongside the car as she inched through the front hall and parlor. She used the old hand crank to roll down the window.

  “You were good to come,” I said. “And on a Wednesday, no less.”

  “You won’t sell to Walt Sleigh, will you?” Miss Cutler asked.

  “I’ll go under the steamrollers before that,” I said. Miss Jones took my hand as her Hudson Wasp rolled through Mother’s bedroom. Pink spread, pink dust ruffle, pink pillows and rug.

  “Yogis say pink is the color of compassion,” Miss Jones said.

  “She was a cranky old bag,” Miss Lowry said out the window of her ’59 Cadillac, tail fins like two sharks stalking a stingray. “Never satisfied. And did she ever hate this house. Would have signed those papers weren’t it to piss off the Sleigh men. But we will miss her.”

  “You will come back?” I asked Miss Bradley. Her Lincoln Mark II made the kitchen look like a billionaire’s showroom. “Even with Mother gone?”

  “Unless the Lord stops making Tuesdays.” She then pressed a burgundy leather-clad Bible into my hands. “Read this, Shell. It helps.” The ladies drove out through the laundry room. I waved good-bye, mourning the passing of each car, until they were swallowed up by the thick, wet heat mirage hanging over the road ahead. Sprigs of crabgrass came through cracks in the back lot, the lines delineating spaces now faded. I looked at the house, which seemed to lean west, wanting no part of the thuggish sun that beat it down day after day. Hoping for relief, I turned to the north, only to face more sand-swept road. But then through a wavy aura I saw the shape of a walking man. At first I thought it must be Sheriff Walt Sleigh, coming with the papers his grandfather had failed to get my grandmother to sign so many decades ago. But Walt would come in the county-issued Nova, never on foot. Soon the heat stopped pulsing and I recognized the gait from more than fifty years before.

  As soon as my brother, Sinclair, was old enough to avoid the war, he had pulled himself out of his sickbed and joined the merchant marine. Every few months we got a photo of him in good health, with writing on the back that read, Here I am by the cargo hold, and look, Ma. No car sickness! And another, Here’s me and my buddies, port o’ call Tokyo, and how ’bout that? A belly full of ship fumes and not one case of the cars! Mother scoffed at each one, saying Sinclair had become better-than-thou, that travel was supposed to broaden but in his case it seemed to have narrowed. As he stood before me now, I tried to find a point of reference in his face, anything I knew.

  “You got old on me, Shell,” my brother said.

  “How long can you stay?” I asked, wanting him to leave.

  “I’d like to see Mother,” he said.

  “She’s at Stokley’s getting taped up.” I took a broom from the back porch and swept sand. “It wasn’t a clean job, I should tell you.”

  “Never is when you get run down. And in our own home.” He looked the house over disapprovingly, taking hold of a post on the porch to help him walk straight. “Smells like fumes. I’m carsick already. Where is everybody?”

  “Things have changed since you left, what with the highways. We still get the Ladies Club on Tuesdays. The shit-faced shift starts at eleven. It’s picked up a smidge since Mother . . . folks wanting a viewing. As though they deserve it for patronage.”

  “Maybe they do.” He limped down the center of the road, careful not to cross the yellow line, to the parlor, dropping his duffel by the card table.

  “I can warm some leek soup,” I offered.

  “God no,” he said. “I’ll take a sucker if you got one.” He dropped himself in a folding chair, crossing his arms over his middle and hanging his head with a case of the cars.

  I walked down the road to the pantry. A lady in a Grand Prix once suggested that Sinclair suck on hard candy when he was sick from fumes. Calcium, magnesium, potassium, a tincture of brewer’s yeast, and fresh-grated nutmeg, nothing worked. I searched the larder but the only suckers I could find were horehound in the old tin box we’d been given for Christmas decades before. Sinclair moved the candy around in his mouth, the stick wagging out of his lips like a mouse tail. “Tastes like something I don’t want to remember.” He coughed, then looked around at the rotting floorboards in the parlor and the smudged paint on the walls.

  “We may have seen the best of this house.” He’d been home a matter of minutes and already I wanted to break his teeth.

  “The past thirty-plus years I’ve don
e nothing but walk Mother to the can, collect food stamps—”

  “Don’t get yourself tied in a clove hitch. I’m going over to Stokley’s to see Mother. Come if you like.”

  “I have seen enough of Mother.” I clicked the TV on to the Triage channel and lit a pipe of Captain Black. Sinclair was shocked. “Not used to seeing a lady smoke?” I asked.

  “Not used to seeing a lady anything.” He turned his attention to Triage. “He won’t live with his organs out like that,” Sinclair commented on the latest casualty brought into the green zone.

  “You would be surprised at what they can fix,” I said. A 1971 Chevelle SS drove through in a blanket of smog so thick that black particles covered the furniture.

  “Ever heard of the Clean Air Act, buddy?” Sinclair coughed into a handkerchief. The car screeched through, leaving tracks on the road.

  “Don’t you talk to my customers that way,” I snapped at Sinclair.

  “That muscle car gets eight miles to the gallon.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “And that’s my customer too.” He stepped into the road, walking like a cardboard puppet, a full-body jerk with every step.

  “Wait and hitch a ride,” I said. “The lost come in at noon. This heat will bury you.”

  “The house will kill me first.” He headed north. If we’d had a door I’d have told him not to let it hit him on his way out.

  “Rise and shine, Miss Valentine.” Miss Chatwin leaned out her window and switched off Triage. I could hear the high pitch of her engine running too fast. People always seemed so satisfied to find me asleep in a chair in front of the TV. Embarrassing moments kept the Drive-Through alive, like the time Mother got caught hooking on her minimizer. Business picked up a thousand percent when they saw me kiss Sunny-Side Up McCray’s image on Rock ’n’ Roll Hoopla.