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

by Неизвестный

  I tried a horehound sucker but it gave me bad memories. A puff of Captain Black made me so dizzy I had to lie on the floor.

  “Try this.” A woman in an Odyssey gave me a roll of antacid tablets. It worked for a second but then I was retching into the kitchen sink.

  “Call the doctor,” I told Sinclair as he knocked sand out of his boots on the porch.

  “The only cure for motion sickness is to stop moving,” he said. “And we ain’t.”

  In the morning, as I scraped up condoms and Pabst cans from the theater lot, sucking on a grape Jolly Rancher to ease my case of the cars, Sinclair shuffled out the back. I could tell something bad was up.

  “Mr. Lennox crossed the bar,” he said. Cars sped by us, not even slowing down to examine the house.

  “Well,” I said, dragging the Hefty toward the Dumpsters, my sandals making sucking sounds on the black tar. “Folks will be wanting a viewing, I suppose.”

  “That’s all you got to say?” Sinclair asked. “Our old friend?”

  I dropped the trash bag. “I shoveled six feet of sand out of the gift shop this morning. I got a case of the cars so bad I can’t swallow. Mr. Lennox got out of the heat, went inside for a cool drink.”

  “I’m going to Stokley’s.” Sinclair headed up the road.

  “Hitch a damn ride, Sinclair. You’ll fry in the sun.” He didn’t get far, because Walt and his cube-shaped deputy drove up, circling around us twice. Walt got out of the car and stood facing the movie screen, twisting his back side to side, like an athlete before a triathlon. His cube-shaped deputy then produced a copy of an ordinance.

  “Section 10b-5,” Walt said, “which prohibits the public display of pornographic images without redeeming social value. Wouldn’t that be a barn burner of a headline in the Glover Gazette.”

  “Come on, Walt,” Sinclair said. “It’s just folks doing what folks do.”

  “With the curtains wide open,” Walt said. “Consider your blinds pulled.” Sinclair lifted his hands in objection, but then let them fall gracefully to defeat. “How ’bout it, Sinclair?” Walt said. “Let’s close the house down. Do it for your sister if not for your ramshackle self. They turned the old glove factory into three-bedroom assisted-living units. You could afford ten of those. The streets are full of boutiques. Shell could update her style.”

  “We’re not selling to you, Walt,” Sinclair said.

  “Suture yourself,” Walt said. “But pull the plug on the theater, Canker Sore, and board up the gift shop. Unlawful sale of memorabilia carries a thousand-dollar fine. Now, I would just love a bag of those Drive-Through-House cookies that made Shell so famous.”

  I headed down the road to the kitchen. Sinclair limped up behind me.

  “Give him the pulpy ones,” he whispered. “Let him pull the strings out of his razor teeth.”

  But I picked out ten fresh cookies, the ones with the handsqueezed cane juice and not one thread of bagasse.

  “What did I miss?” Sinclair came in the living room as I watched a rebroadcast of Triage.

  “Six wars, a hundred thousand casualties,” I said.

  “Some of us work during the day and don’t get to watch first run,” Sinclair said. “I wanted to see that dead kid come back to life and I’d have seen the first run if I hadn’t been busy unloading in the damned merchant marine.” He put his head in his hands.

  “Are you crying, Sinclair?” I asked. “Sinclair?”

  “I should never have taken that deferment.” He rocked himself on the wicker footstool. “Whether that war was right or wrong. If boys my age were going, I should have gone.”

  “We’re old now,” I said. “War’s up to the young.” He staggered through the room.

  “I need to leave this house.” He stepped into the road and began heading north.

  “You’re in your pajamas,” I called after him, chasing him up the street. “It’s two o’clock in the damn morning, Sinclair.” I sped across the back lot in pursuit, begging him to wait. He walked out into the desert. I stood at the edge, calling to him, and just before he walked into the black I summoned the courage. My feet sank to my ankles in the cold sand as I trudged through the darkness. This land used to be a shady street, vital with front porches and kids racing door-to-door for buttered bread before the road cut us in half.

  “Sinclair.” I found him in the sand on his back, spread like a starfish.

  “Put me in the ground in this spot, Shell. No closer to the house. No farther away. Lean down sometimes. Tell me secrets.”

  “Nobody ever died of car sickness, Sinclair. Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, halfway back.” He stared up at the stars. “Sinclair?” I leaned over him. He wasn’t moving. “Are you dead?”

  “Maybe a little,” he said.

  “Damn it to hell,” I said. “Now I got to get up again.” I helped him to his feet. We headed back to the house. On our bad knees and backs, nothing was simple.

  “There are folks,” he said, “who feel a need to spread untrue stories about the merchant marine.”

  “Is that right?” I noticed cars were backed up at the kitchen, wanting their cookies. They’d have to settle for bags from the deep freeze.

  “I can tell you there is not one case on record that we refused to unload. No matter what the danger, we’d unload.”

  “I thought Mr. Lennox would go on forever,” I said.

  “Me too,” Sinclair said. Finally we got to the porch, out of breath and overheated. “After you,” Sinclair said.

  “You go first,” I said back. Even indoors, the road is a lonely place.

  Walt handed a check to Sinclair, who looked at it like it was an artifact from an archaeological dig that he couldn’t identify.

  “My road will be so wide in parts you can’t see from one curb across to the next,” Walt said. “Think of the Nile and the life it gave to the Egyptians.” The last car to drive through was a white Infiniti.

  “The Nile was filled with snakes,” I said.

  “Snakes that slid up next to the body for warmth at night in the frozen desert.” Walt took my hand. I remembered Sunny-Side Up McCray, on The Mitch Barker Show, saying that you could tell that a boy liked you if his hand got damp when he held yours. Walt’s were dry as cornmeal in the sand.

  “You’d have to be mighty careful getting up in the morning,” Sinclair said, “without waking those snakes.” Down our road I saw the fleet of steamrollers come out of a migraine of heat, the leadman waving his arm like a rodeo cowboy.

  “Mother,” I said.

  “You can’t climb down in the grave with her,” Walt said.

  Sinclair and I got in the back of Walt’s Nova. “Take a last look at the miserable remains of your house,” Walt said. “Synchronize your watches and over the hills we go.” The cube-shaped deputy began to drive.

  “Assisted living,” Sinclair said.

  “I could use some myself,” Walt said, “what with my degenerative-disc disease.”

  “I supposed we could knock down a few walls in the units?” Sinclair asked.

  “Your place,” Walt said. “Do what you want.”

  “And we’d have plenty of assistance, wouldn’t we.” Sinclair made rude gestures behind Walt’s back. I turned so I was facing away from Sinclair, out toward the desert. On the horizon I saw a city. As we got farther from the house my car sickness seemed to subside and Sinclair too had more color in his face. After a while, Sinclair began to kick the back of Walt’s seat. Just lightly, not enough for Walt to ask him to stop but enough to make you crazy and never know why. Farther along, Sinclair put pieces of torn tickets on Walt’s head—again, not enough to notice, just enough to make him uneasy. Walt whipped around to find out what was funny. And still, the scraps of paper clung to his last three strands of hair.

  GINA ZUCKER

  Big People

  One afternoon, a small man came to my apartment. He looked in some ways like a dwarf and in other ways like a midget, though he claimed to be
neither. When I opened the door to his knock, I looked straight over his head at first, not seeing him. I noticed him finally when he fluttered his hands in front of his face. He was short all over, except for an outsized head shaped like an egg. He appeared to be wearing a jester’s suit underneath his regular clothes, the one-piece kind with a harlequin pattern.

  Also he had an issue with his left foot. To say he had a “clubfoot” does not accurately describe the state of it, although that’s how he referred to the problem. For all anyone knew the foot itself could have been okay, if it wasn’t stuck inside a metal bucket of cement that had apparently hardened around his ankle. I didn’t question him about the bucket other than to ask, as I let him into the apartment, if he needed help getting it off. I suggested calling the fire department, but he said, “It’s my clubfoot, there’s nothing anyone can do.” It seemed to me this man had enough on his plate, what with the jester suit and his large head and his small body; from that moment on I decided to ignore the foot problem.

  We sat down at my kitchen table and I offered him a cup of coffee—I’d just brewed a fresh pot. He accepted, thanking me. I could see at once that he suffered from depression. He kept his head down when he drank his coffee and kicked his free foot rigidly under his chair. The other foot hung low, pulled by the weight of cement. I asked him some questions about his present circumstances; he answered in vague, meandering sentences from which I gathered he was unemployed, living in a flophouse, and without family. He said he’d quit the circus about six months ago to try theater, and when that didn’t work out, television, but wherever he went he was typecast.

  “They didn’t want me,” he said, raising his eyes to mine. “They just wanted a dwarf, which I’m not. You know: Look, a dwarf, everything’s all peculiar now.” To emphasize his point, he swiveled his eyeballs around and wiggled his fingers, like on an imaginary keyboard. “It is a lazy way for artists to make a statement,” he said. When he spoke, his voice seemed to pitch from octave to octave, one word high and squeaky, the next guttural, as if he were going through puberty. He was not; he told me his age: twenty-five, the same as my own. “I had to get away,” he said. “I wanted to be . . . I wanted . . .” He trailed off, sighing, and looked down.

  I patted one of his hands. Moon slivers of dirt lined the inside of his fingernails.

  “It’s not what I imagined for myself,” he said.

  “It sounds like you did what you had to do.” I spoke gently.

  “I suppose,” said the small man. He squeaked a little and swiped at his nose with a fist. “I’m hungry.”

  I gave him a yogurt; he ate neatly and without hesitation, yet also with an air of shame about him. When he’d finished the container of yogurt I put some cheese and crackers on a plate and set it between us. I picked at a cracker, wanting him to feel we were sharing the food, though in fact he ate everything.

  We kept talking, and as we warmed to each other I found the small man a thoughtful, if somewhat slow, conversationalist. He had a sweetness about him that made me feel protective.

  I left him briefly to check on the baby. Caroline was still napping vigorously, her pink fists resting on either side of her head. Her chin made an adorable crease that I had to restrain myself from tickling. She wore a one-piece suit, pink. It’s true, what they say about having children: you love them so much it can take your breath away.

  When I returned to the kitchen my guest was sitting just as I’d left him. We drank another cup of coffee, and he asked about me.

  “What you see is what you get,” I said.

  “I like that,” said the small man. “You seem to be a very nice, nonjudgmental person, the kind of girl I would have liked to marry.”

  Blushing at this bald compliment, I asked quickly, “Have you ever been in love?”

  “Oh.” The small man took a deep, shuddering breath. “Tara. She had little black pigtails. I liked to watch her do aerial somersaults, she’d flip around so fast she looked like a spinning yo-yo, with braids. We did everything together, we sang, we napped, we ate our sandwiches on the grass. One day, out of nowhere, she said she wouldn’t see me anymore. I said, ‘Why?’ She just cried, and said she couldn’t explain. I called her a pantywaisted coward. She went to work for the Flying Trotsky Sisters. I saw her perform for the last time when our troupes crossed paths at the Champlain Valley Carnival. At the end of her routine she took a great leap and floated through the air, high above the straw, and when she landed on the shoulders of Ivanovya Trotsky she flung out her arms as if to invite the love of the whole world. And from the sound of the people screaming and clapping, it seemed the whole world did love her. That’s how I remember Tara.”

  “It’s sad,” I said. “That you couldn’t be together.” I didn’t want to state the obvious.

  The small man grimaced; his teeth, large, square, and white, startled me. “I will love again.” He squeaked on the word “love.”

  “Yes, you will,” I said. I looked around. Everything in the kitchen was in order: the spice jars on the spice rack, arranged by use, with those I used most frequently on the right and those I used the least on the left. My new set of copper pots hung from the ceiling. The stove top gleamed from the bleach solution I’d scrubbed into it earlier in the day. My maturation as a homemaker was progressing in fits and starts: sometimes I did the errands and cleaning and cooking and had Caroline to bed by seven, and if Gordon was home early, he’d look with sly pleasure at the laid table and the open bottle of wine. But more often than not I didn’t manage to get it all done, especially the cooking—though it didn’t matter so much since Gordon rarely made it home in time for dinner anyway. On bad days I didn’t even leave the apartment, let alone shop for groceries.

  The small man’s story had put me in a melancholy mood. When I heard my mother’s key in the lock I was surprised at how much time had passed. She always came promptly at four thirty—at least two hours had gone by since the small man had arrived. “She comes every day to see the baby,” I explained, over the sound of my mother rattling hangers in the foyer. This was true, though my mother didn’t limit herself to grandmotherly duties—sometime between the death of my father and the birth of Caroline she had decided that I needed daily reminders on how to conduct myself and run a household. Ordinarily I didn’t mind giving her something to do. Now I could hear her in the dining alcove, rummaging through the mail on the sideboard; then she moved on to the living room, calling out in her ringing voice if I had done the things on my to-do list. Had I picked up my prescription at the drugstore? I had, not that it was her business. Had I called Dr. Iger to reschedule the appointment for the baby? I had. Had anyone remembered to retrieve the clean clothes from Moon Laundry? I decided not to answer that, as the dirty clothes had not as yet been dropped off. As usual, she didn’t bother coming to find me, preferring to yell through the walls to be heard.

  The baby woke up and began to cry; immediately I heard my mother scurry down the hall to the nursery. Although every particle of my being wanted to go to the nursery myself, I decided it was better to let Mother be distracted. I pressed my teeth into my bottom lip, hard. My guest had gone still. Before I could apologize for the intrusion and all the racket, a strange thing happened. I heard another key in the lock: Gordon, my husband. I knew it was him not only because he was the only other person with a key to our apartment, but from the absolute stealth with which he moved, the quiet click of the door closing, the whispery step of his smooth leather soles on the foyer rug. My husband might have been a dancer or a spy, he moved with such grace. In fact he practiced corporate law at a firm where recently he’d become one of their youngest partners. Gordon never came home this early—something had to be wrong. I excused myself to the small man, who was now blinking rapidly. He had long eyelashes, I noticed. Clearly, he sensed my anxiety, and I could tell this had counteracted the therapeutic effect of our conversation.

  “I’ll be just a moment,” I assured him.

  My guest made a f
luttery-sweeping gesture at the door, urging me along.

  I stepped into the foyer. “Gordon!” I said. “What a surprise!”

  My husband smiled at me, then walked straight by, flinging his coat at the carved-mahogany secretary we kept next to the closet (the coat slumped to the floor—an uncharacteristically careless move for Gordon). He strode through the dining alcove into the living room, sat down in one of the matching armchairs, and began to read a magazine.

  I followed him partway into that room; we had decorated it after our wedding two years ago with a combination of aesthetics, mine and his, that worked well together, we thought. I was responsible for the handwoven rugs from Morocco and Egypt (from my travels with my parents), the exotic plants and small objets d’art placed on side tables; he’d hung on the walls a series of framed satirical cartoons from eighteenth-century newspapers, featuring bulbousnosed men with wigs, and donkeys, pigs, and elephants with sacks of coins, that he’d bought at auctions. He had also designed the floor-to-ceiling bookcases flanking the fireplace. The shelves were lined with hardcovers sorted by genre and, within genre, alphabetically by author. He had arranged the spices on the spice rack as well. My husband’s knack for putting things in order inspired many people to say he had a good head on his shoulders.

  “Gordon?” I hovered next to a bookcase.

  He looked up from his magazine and sighed. His face, though a little gray from winter, struck me now, as it did each time I saw it, as more handsome than I remembered: his features, like his thoughts, lined up in perfect relation to each other, as right as a professional portrait artist could have designed, with its wide forehead, straight eyebrows, upturned nose, and square chin. His only flaw was that his eyes became slightly bloodshot at times, particularly when he was tired, but even that looked good on him.