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

by Неизвестный

  “Now, Shell,” Miss Chatwin began. “About the viewing. I’ve been driving through two times a week since you were crawling. Christmas, Thanksgiving . . .”

  “Even for you, Miss Chatwin,” I said.

  “A lot of folks are sorrowing,” she said. “Would help seal ’em up if they could see her.”

  “I cannot soil Mother’s memory by allowing folks to gawk at her crushed bones. You’re running hot as well as fast, I should tell you. Would you like a Drive-Through hair coloring? I could cover up those roots in a jiff.” She screeched out through the pantry in a blue cloud of exhaust. Jeffrey from the grocer drove into the kitchen right after. I handed him the envelope of food stamps. He passed me the bags out his window. The skin on his hand had become so transparent you could see the blood traveling through his veins, white and red cells stumbling over each other, barely able to make the trip. I gave him the very last of the Drive-Through cookies. “Come for a ride with me, Shell,” he said. “It’ll do you good to get away for an hour.” But I had never left the Drive-Through. I had no need. Nothing existed out there but contestants buzzing in and people eating spiders in order to survive. No thank you.

  I waited for Sinclair before eating lunch but he had still not returned at two. I gave his tuna fish sandwich to a lady driving through to her grandson’s graduation in Keensville who was too afraid to go on the north-south highways. We ate our sandwiches and drank iced tea as she idled in the parlor, talking about the best routes when I-98 was jammed. We watched Triage and wept together when they brought in a boy who fought so hard and then didn’t make it. I gave her a mini-manicure and she drove on, her puff of exhaust leaving me with a melancholy so black I put on my eye mask and went to bed, waking each time a car came through, the passengers so pleased at catching me lazy. At five, Sinclair had still not returned. Maybe he’d hitched a ride back to the merchant marine. But then at seven, Mr. Michael from the hardware store stopped his GMC half ton in the parlor and set about unloading supplies.

  “I didn’t order any of that,” I said.

  “Sinclair was in.” He made two even stacks of long boxes. “Says he’s doing some fix-ups. Happy to have your brother back?”

  “So happy.” I picked a poppy seed out of my front teeth.

  I woke after midnight, leaning out of bed to look up the road. Sinclair and Mr. Lennox from Stokley’s were talking beside a gray Tundra parked in the mudroom. I tried to go back to sleep but all night Sinclair and Mr. Lennox hammered away outside the parlor. When the banging stopped, I drifted off only to have it start right up again. I woke at five to wonderful silence and though it was still dark, I got up to enjoy the peace. But I was not alone. I looked up the road and saw cars backed up to Darnesville, another line coming from the north. No one noticed me as I stepped out into the road in my nightgown, skittering down the curb like a terrier.

  “Now you just hold on to your seat, Mr. Camry,” I shouted at the car that slammed on its brakes to avoid me. I could see that all the fuss was over a large glowing box outside the kitchen that Sinclair and Mr. Lennox had spent the night building. I smacked the rear of a Volkswagen Bug that ran right over my foot, and then hopped to the Plexiglas box. “Mother!” I cried. And that was all I could say, because no words could adequately express my horror and delight besides a scream like a badger pulled from its set. “Mother.” She lay half-curled to one side on a large quilted cushion, her reading glasses in her hand, Gulliver’s Travels nearby. Sinclair had prepared her as she had been years before I came along, when she was already old with stiff joints, and near blind. Her hair was copper again, not the white I had known, blown back in loose curls, and her peach-colored face was once again smooth. She wore a tweed pencil skirt and green sweater, no shoes. Maybe this is what my father saw, I thought, the day he drove through and gave her a ride, back door to front, honking the horn as he left. Sinclair stepped up beside me.

  “I got a plastic surgeon down from Greensville. Stokley did her nails.” He then became shy. “I did her hair. I was okay at haircuts in the merchant marine.”

  “Okay?” I said. “Virtuoso.”

  “You never knew her like that, Shell, but that’s who she was, what my father saw when he drove through the house.” I could easily have put my knuckles in his eye for a footnote like that but now I put my hands against the Plexiglas and again, from the deepest space inside me, whispered, “Mother.” But soon the cars began sounding their horns.

  While Sinclair worked at restoring the drive-in theater, I dug in at the ovens, trying to re-create Mother’s Drive-Through-House cookie.

  “We are making mon-ey!” Sinclair slammed an overflowing crate on the kitchen table, fives, tens, and twenties spilling onto the floor. I put a cookie in his mouth.

  “A little pulpy,” he said. I began again, this time with less candied fruit and a higher concentration of sugars.

  “Chalky,” Sinclair said. Less sugar and a higher concentration of fats.

  “Stringy.” Sinclair spit into the trash.

  “Damn it to all hell and under.” I smashed the tray into the sink. Then we looked into the road where two men stood, blocking traffic. Nobody dared blow a horn at Sheriff Walt Sleigh and his cube-shaped deputy, Alan. They looked over Mother in the case. Then Walt had the cube-shaped deputy produce a document.

  “We’re not selling to you, Walt,” Sinclair said. “Build your freeway elsewhere.” People in cars cowered, looking for ways to back up out of the house. Walt Sleigh was known to lock folks up for busted taillights. He spit the shell of a sunflower seed onto the pavement.

  “I’d like to see your license and permit,” Walt said.

  “We don’t charge people,” Sinclair said. “We ask for donations. For the upkeep of this historical dwelling.”

  “The Glover Historical Society does not have the Drive-Through House of Horrors in its register, my carsick friend,” Walt said. “The only place you’re likely to find the Drive-Through House listed is in the textbook of the sick and weird.” The cube-shaped deputy bent back from the ribs and let out a horselaugh. Walt took out his pad and wrote two citations: “Code violations.” One for “maintaining a non-living human in a residentially zoned neighborhood” and another for “displaying a non-living human female without appropriate license.”

  “A charm, your little theme park here.” Walt handed over the tickets to Sinclair.

  “Theme, attraction,” Sinclair corrected.

  “My home,” I stepped in. Sinclair glared at the two of them, hocking carsick bile onto the road.

  “That corpse will begin to rot,” Walt said. “You bury it. We got laws against stench too. But I been letting that slide for years.” Walt and the cube-shaped deputy headed through the house to the townissued Nova parked in the lot. As they drove off we saw yellow paint on the tires from where they’d driven over Sinclair’s newly drawn lines for the drive-in theater.

  A bad day. Got caught dressing in the lights of a Mercedes and then a Land Rover broke down in the kitchen. I sensed it was the serpentine belt but Mother had been the mechanic in the family and I had mechanical shortcomings. “Fixing a ship is not like fixing a car!” Damn, Sinclair was defensive when I asked him for anything traditionally male. We had to get a tow to back up through the house, which filled with fumes so thick I had to put Sinclair in a cold bath. I noticed Mother’s hair was coming in white and her manicure was growing out. Sand kept piling up on the road and all night the shit-faced shift cars kept getting stuck. Mr. Lennox and I had to push them out since Sinclair was sick and no use to anybody. The cookie recipe wasn’t coming along either. “Sandy,” Sinclair said. “Dusty,” Sinclair said. “Tastes like the inside of a bass fiddle.” I prayed that the pencil I threw would gore him in the neck but he was already down the street to finish work on the theater.

  “Any good?” I asked Mr. Lennox, who sat on the front stoop with the flask of whiskey that hadn’t left his side in a lifetime.

  “Killed Mother Theresa,” he said.
I took a hard swig, then looked up at the sky to see a pelican that had made the catastrophic mistake of flying overhead.

  “Oh my,” I said. “Such a wrong, wrong turn.” The bird would never live in this heat.

  “Best not to look.” Mr. Lennox stared at his work boots. “Stew these meats too long, you get a pot full of crust.” I lit a pipe, offering a puff to Mr. Lennox. A woman drove up in a Civic and handed me a recipe for Drive-Through cookies she swore Mother had given her. I said thank you, I’d been looking all over, knowing full well the recipe had never been written down or spoken.

  “People want something bad enough, they’ll find a way to believe it,” I said. Mr. Lennox toyed with a loose tooth in the front of his mouth and inhaled some pipe smoke.

  “Some boxes come in for the gift shop.” He took a few gulps of whiskey. “Globes, but mostly playing cards.”

  “Mother’s face is starting to fall,” I said.

  “Got some new shelving. Stainless, but Sinclair wants wood.”

  “Only so far formaldehyde will take you,” I said. “When God calls it’s an order, not an invitation.”

  “I got no feeling in my feet,” Mr. Lennox said. He stood to go back to work. I could hear every bone in his body snap back into place. He headed down the road. Empires have risen and fallen, stars have been born and turned to supernovas, in the time it took him to walk to the gift shop.

  That Tuesday we buried Mother. We had no choice. Walt Sleigh was right. Even the living rotted in the heat. A dozen or so cars shined their headlights on our ceremony. Mr. Michael from the hardware store gave the eulogy.

  “She . . . ordered a lot of lumber. I’ll sure miss her.” Then the men from Stokley’s lowered her into the sand. The ladies of the Tuesday Club waved handkerchiefs out their windows and beat on their horns in celebration of, I don’t know, a life, I suppose.

  “Got something you might want to try.” I slammed a plate of cookies down on the card table in the parlor, where Mr. Lennox and Sinclair sat playing canasta after the funeral. Sinclair was untrusting, but took a bite anyway.

  “Not a cookie man,” Mr. Lennox said, turning down my offer. We sat and watched Sinclair chew with his front teeth. After a pause a smile stretched across his pale face.

  “I do believe you have done it, Shell. Tastes just like half a century ago.”

  “Ex-actly,” I snarled. “Mother did give out the recipe. There was no secret.”

  “You live in a drive-through house,” Sinclair said. “You don’t know about secrets.”

  “I got secrets.”

  “Mother wrote to me in the merchant marine.”

  “She didn’t read minds.”

  “Apparently yours was spread wide open.” He attempted a private laugh with Mr. Lennox.

  “Let’s put the cookies in the grave, Shell,” Mr. Lennox said. “Your momma is crossed the bar, dead and gone, lost her teeth, metaphorically speaking.”

  “Old Sunny-Side Up McCray.” Sinclair wouldn’t drop the issue.

  A yellow Skylark with volunteer-fireman plates jerked to a stop beside us. “You think you pick from a higher tree?” the man in the Skylark yelled at Sinclair. “I know what goes on in the merchant marine.”

  “Move on, pyro.” Sinclair swung his arm in the direction of out.

  “Draft dodger!”

  “You call getting torpedoed nine times draft dodging? Who brought you ammo and food? How’d you get the boots on your feet?” The Skylark man spit on Sinclair’s shoes. Sinclair kicked his hubcap.

  “Take this, Shell.” The fireman tossed me a white Bible. “When you live in a drive-through, the vermin get in.” He sped off. Behind the Skylark the Ladies of Tuesday came through. Miss Cutler offered her hand, white as bleached cow bones.

  “The most exciting news, Shell,” Miss Cutler said. “They opened the new north-south freeway. Hapsburg to Coolfont in six minutes!”

  “Twenty for us, but who’s counting?” Mrs. Lowry laughed. I moved car to car, grasping each lady’s hand.

  “You’re not built for the freeways. None of you.”

  “Oh, Shell, you worry yourself blind.”

  “The statistics,” I begged. Then, seeing there was no dissuading them, I let go of Miss Cutler’s hand, sitting back on my bed and weeping.

  “There now, Shell,” Miss Cutler said. “We’ll always have Tuesdays.”

  “Since the day you were born,” Miss Jones said. “In an invasion of headlights. Our grillwork smiling down on your birth.”

  “You’re our girl,” Miss Lowry said. I walked the ladies down to the gift shop, giving them each a key chain and a few decks of cards. But then I became aware that Miss Jones’s Hudson was idling rough. I could hear air sounds from the Lincoln. The DeSoto was running too fast.

  “Miss Jones, you need to clean your throttle bore. Miss Bradley, please.” I chased them as they zoomed out of the gift shop, across the theater lot. “Your spark plug wires!” I cried. But they disappeared deep into the heat.

  While Sinclair was busy with the theater I took the precious time to sit in Mother’s rocker, read, and smoke a pipe of Captain Black. Toyota, Toyota, Toyota, Honda. Where had the Americans gone?

  “Whatcha reading?” A man stopped his Lexus in the parlor.

  “It’s a book about a man with an endless memory,” I answered.

  He looked away, thoughtful.

  “I don’t remember a thing,” he said. “Not one little thing. Whatcha reading?”

  “It’s a . . .”

  “I’m giving you the left-handed yank. Come to the show with me.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t.”

  He drove over to the theater. Cars drifted by, revving their engines in flirtation, and then speeding up toward the theater. All night long I heard men’s voices, pistons slamming in their cylinders, glass breaking. Around two, I tiptoed out on the back porch, leaning around a post. From here I was able to view the screen from a twenty-degree angle. What I saw made no sense. Pinkness, moving like an impeller with arms and legs attached. After a pause the scene clarified into the shape of a man, pushing, like he wanted to break down a door, into a woman on her knees. The woman squeezed a mattress, her knuckles turning white, to keep steady for the man’s insistence. I backed up and hurried down the road.

  “Oh, unfurl yourself,” Sinclair said, though I had not said a word when he came back into the house at three. He shopped in the fridge for something to eat, approving of nothing. “You were living on week-old bread when I came back. Some thanks.”

  “I guess that’s what goes on in the merchant marine?” I asked. “Besides moving crates?” He slammed the refrigerator door. “I spent six days in a life raft—”

  “I don’t want to hear about that life raft anymore.”

  “People are tired of watching Triage, Shell. Folks are sick of head injuries and doctors saying, ‘He fought hard.’ We are supplying a service, unloading a ship full of goods.” Sinclair fell back into a chair, taking short breaths to keep from upchucking.

  “I can make you some eggs.”

  “I’m going to bed. Go clean the back lot.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” I said.

  “And we never close,” Sinclair said.

  Every night from my hiding place on the back porch I watched more of the movie. The scenes always involved forcing and hanging on for dear life. Sinclair and I went about our days without a word sometimes. He worked the gift shop, I manned the ovens, leaning out the kitchen window, passing out bags of Drive-Through-House cookies like I was offering kisses to sailors. But throughout the day I became impatient, checking the height of the sun, breathless at dinnertime. By dark my heart was pounding. After a certain number of scenes, I was able to piece together a plot. Women from the tenth planet had come to Earth to have sex with humans and take home their offspring. It worked out for everybody. The men got sex, the women got the kids. And every night Sinclair came in sicker and
more irritable than before, accusing good people of stealing globes from the gift shop, calling Mr. Lennox “slow as stalagmites in a drought.” I was ready to bust my seams, the way he left a spoon on top of the peanut butter, cleared his throat all the time, and said, “Whoop-whoop-de-do,” when he read the society page in the Gazette.

  “Quit singing ‘Heave Ho, My Lads,’” I hissed as we dumped Hefty bags into a Dumpster.

  “You got no sense of country, Shell.”

  “I live in a drive-through house, Sinclair. I got a pretty good sense of country.” I pushed down the bags in the Dumpster to make room for more. “Only thing we do right is air-conditioning.”

  “Your problem is, you’ve never been to sea, never unloaded in wartime, never spent six days in a—”

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH . . .”

  “You can hear me.”

  “AHHHHHH, no I can’t. AHHHHHHHHH . . .” When I took my fingers out of my ears and opened my eyes, there was a sackful of garbage that Sinclair had picked up and dropped in front of me to dispose of.

  It was a white, sunless afternoon, too hot for the kitchen. Sinclair had gone to Glover with Mr. Lennox for supplies and the Drive-Through was gloriously empty. Through the wet-road mirage coming from Darnsville, I saw the black Lexus, license plates blue as a deep crater lake.

  “How’s that book you were reading?” the man asked.

  “What book?” I asked.

  “The book about the man with the endless . . . aw, now you’re giving me the left-handed yank.”

  I stepped down from the porch. The man moved the front seat back far enough for me to get on his lap, facing the windshield, leaning my head back. But then he pushed me forward, my chest against the steering wheel. “This is the only road I know that goes through a house,” the man said. I grasped the wheel to keep from sounding the horn. When we got to the gift shop, I untangled myself and eased out of the car. I gave him a snow globe and two packs of cards. He asked for some cookies. As I walked down the road to the kitchen, I noticed my gait was off, as though my right foot carried a ten-pound weight, and my eyes had trouble focusing. And then a gigantic thump of nausea that came with only one diagnosis: car sickness.