by John Jodzio
“I’m screwed,” Jill said. “No way that’s gone before tomorrow.”
Phillip picked the barnacle off the floor and handed it to me. I felt the thing start trying to attach itself to my palm.
“Get rid of it,” Phillip said.
I was going to throw the barnacle on the highway and let a car run over it and be done with all of this, but for some reason I couldn’t. I looked at its knobby shell and for some reason throwing it on the road felt cruel and inhumane.
“I’ll be back,” I said.
I crossed the highway and made my way down the path to the beach. When I came to the water’s edge, I stripped off my clothes. I ran into the ocean and swam out past the surf, to where the water got calm and glassy.
I wanted to say something to the barnacle then, something about how I was giving him a second chance and that he should use it wisely, but everything I thought of saying sounded stupid. In the end, I decided not to say anything. I just pulled him off my palm and dropped him into the ocean. I treaded water and watched him sink down into the murk.
I swam back. When I got close to the beach I saw Phillip waiting for me. My calf had cramped up and I sort of rolled out of the ocean and flopped down into the sand.
“You okay?” Phillip asked.
I nodded. Phillip had brought a blanket, and after I’d caught my breath, I stood up and he wrapped it around me and we walked back up to the house.
All that night, my brother put moisturizer on Jill’s butt. Every moisturizer we had in the house—burn creams, facial masks, wrinkle removers—all night spreading stuff on that mark. Massaging it into Jill’s skin. Hoping that ass hickey would disappear before the morning.
When I went to bed, the mark was so purple that I didn’t think there was any chance that it would go away. Jill wasn’t going to win the bikini contest with that.
I slept like the dead, tired from the swimming. When I woke up in the morning, I went out to the living room to check on the progress. Phillip was still rubbing.
“I’ve been up all night,” he said. “Somehow she slept through most of it.”
Phillip’s huge hand was still covering up the spot, but then he lifted it up suddenly, like he’d performed a magic trick.
“Ta-da,” he said.
The hickey had nearly disappeared. All that remained was a faint brown circle. It looked like a birthmark now, something that you could not help, something that over time might just fade away.
HOMECOMING
We were going to brunch, but my mother came down to the hotel lobby still dressed in her hotel robe. Her hair was all ratted out and she was limping, her left leg dragging behind her right.
“Jesus,” I said. “You aren’t ready yet?”
My mother was in Ann Arbor for homecoming. This was an annual thing. Every year her group of divorcees took a party bus from the Upper Peninsula on Friday night and then on Saturday, before the football game, they got hot stone massages and pedicures. After the game, they drank tequila and flashed their tits to any frat boy who yelled loud enough.
“There’s a bit of a situation upstairs,” she told me. “I need your help.”
She grabbed onto my arm and leaned on me as we made our way to the elevator. The elevator was glass and as we rose I stared at her reflection. Our faces were nearly identical, my mother’s and mine. Even though we looked so much alike, I had always done certain things with my hair and clothes to try and make sure no one realized this fact. This morning, my bangs were swept up into something that looked like a cresting wave and I had a black silk scarf tied very tightly around my neck.
“What’s with that awful scarf?” my mother asked me. “And who told you those bangs worked?”
“No one told me anything,” I said.
We got off the elevator and walked to her room. One of the lights in the hall was flickering and there was a high heel sitting in the middle of the floor. My mother slid her key card into the lock and swung open the door.
“Over there,” she pointed.
The blinds were closed, but in the darkness I could see something huge lying on the bed. When I stepped closer, I saw that it was a naked man who had a gigantic exclamation point painted on his chest.
“I thought he would be out of here before now,” my mother told me. “But this fucking whale just won’t wake up.”
I was in love with an architect named Gary. He was married and he had a beautiful seven-year-old daughter named Samantha. Recently, I’d met Samantha without Gary’s permission. This was the reason I was wearing the silk scarf around my neck.
I had gone to Samantha’s school a couple of times. There was a playground with a tube slide and some climbing ropes. After school, the kids who did not take the bus home waited there until their parents picked them up. Samantha was a pretty girl with a thin upturned nose and long skinny legs. She looked like her mother and not Gary, who was short and had a large nose and a barrel chest and who thought that when he yelled he was talking in a regular way. I liked to watch Samantha on the playground. She ran up and down the slides, flipped expertly along the monkey bars.
I usually drove over to Samantha’s school and sat in my car and pretended like I was reading the newspaper, but I had recently purchased a very realistic looking fake baby off the Internet and had begun to put the baby in a stroller and sit on a bench near the playground. The baby was quite heavy and had eyelids that would stay closed if you wanted them to stay closed. If you picked up the baby, it flopped around like a real baby did.
The other day when I went there, I sat near where Samantha was playing on the swings. At one point, she walked over and stood staring at the fake baby.
“Babies sure sleep a lot,” I said. “Way more than you might imagine.”
There were other kids around, some of the school staff, other parents. I had dressed the fake baby in a pink onesie and put a sunhat on its head to cover up most of its face. Samantha came closer. She crouched down and tried to see the fake baby’s face underneath the hat.
“Can I hold her if she wakes up?” she asked.
“Of course you can,” I said.
Samantha kept on crouching lower and lower to try to get a better look at the baby’s face.
“What’s her name?” she asked me.
I had not named the fake baby yet. I had not even thought of naming it because in the end, what was the point of naming a fake baby? Still, a name came to me very quickly.
“Her name is Samantha,” I said.
I sat down on the desk chair in my mother’s hotel room. I readjusted my scarf. My mother rolled up a dirty pair of her pants and stuffed them into her suitcase. She took a brush and started to comb it through her gnarled hair.
“Just so you know, I’m not going to apologize,” she said. “I have needs, just like you.”
It felt like the scarf was slipping down on my neck and so I got up and went into the bathroom. I locked the door and I untied the scarf and looked at myself in the mirror. The bruises on my neck looked much more purple than they had earlier that morning.
“What are you doing in there?” my mother asked through the door. “Are you puking again?”
I climbed up on the toilet and looked out the tiny bathroom window. I thought about all of the movies and television shows where people climb out of bathroom windows to escape some uncomfortable or dangerous situation. Sometimes people got caught trying to climb out of them. Or sometimes they got stuck because their butts were just too big. Sometimes they made it, though. Sometimes the person in the hotel room broke down the bathroom door and the person they thought was going to be there had disappeared from their lives forever.
“I don’t do that any more,” I yelled back. “Remember? I’m cured of it.”
I heard my mother’s hoop earring scrape against the wood of the door. I retied the scarf tighter around my neck, tight enough so I could feel my pulse in my teeth.
“Where did he come from?”
I asked her.
“There were a bunch of them at the game,” my mother said. “They all had letters painted on their chests. When they stood in the right order they spelled out ‘Go Wolverines,’ with an exclamation point at the end. And this beautiful soul was the exclamation point.”
Samantha’s mother did not pick Samantha up from school that day she first talked to me. Gary drove up in his convertible. Gary had told me earlier in the week that he was going to Sacramento on a business trip, but here he was, not in Sacramento on a business trip. When Gary saw me on the playground, standing there with the stroller, he did not come over to me right away. First he called out to Samantha and got her safely into his car. Then he jogged back over to where I stood.
“Are you trying to fuck everything up?” he asked.
Gary was angry, but he had a grin on his face the entire time, so that anyone looking at us would think that we were old friends, chatting about tax cuts or baseball.
“I come here sometimes,” I told him. “It’s no big deal.”
Gary knelt down and lifted the fake baby’s sunhat off its head. He took his car key and poked it into the baby’s skull. The baby’s skull puckered inward, but when Gary pulled the key away the baby’s head returned back to normal.
“What the hell is this?” he asked.
“I can stop,” I told him. “I can stop coming here if that’s what you want.”
Gary was wearing leather driving gloves and he began to clench and unclench his hands. He looked back over at Samantha. then he looked back at me. Then he jogged back over to his car and drove away.
When I came out of the bathroom, my mother wrapped her arms around me. It was supposed to be a hug, but I just stood there limp-armed while she squeezed. She brought her nose right near my mouth, sniffing my breath like she did when I was younger. All the enamel had come off my teeth and she had paid for veneers. She never let me forget it.
“What’s this new one’s name?” she asked. “The architect.”
“Gary,” I told her.
The blinds were drawn, but the wind pushed them away from the windowsill and the room lit up around us.
“He sounds made-up,” she said. “From the stuff you told me, he sounds too good to be true.”
I was suddenly worried that she was going to make me prove that Gary existed. I didn’t know if I could. There were no photos of us together. He never left me any voicemails. He’d never emailed or texted me. As far as anyone knew, Gary did not know that I existed. No one knew whether or not he loved or even liked me.
My mother limped over to the bed slowly, holding her hip with her hand.
“Dumbass here was on top of me for part of it,” she said. “Big mistake.”
She stood over the man with the exclamation point and then she smacked her hand on his belly. It echoed through the room, but the man did not stir. His penis was stuck to his thigh and he had these tiny nipples the size of dimes. It looked like if you rubbed them hard enough you might be able to rub them right off. My mother grabbed a disposable camera from the end table. She curled up on the bed next to the man. She threw her leg over his stomach and snapped a picture.
“All the ladies will want details,” she explained. “And I don’t want to disappoint.”
Gary came by my apartment late last night. Instead of leaving the fake baby in the trunk like usual, I had carried it inside. It was lying facedown on my coffee table. Gary picked it up by the leg, shook it at me.
“I don’t even know where to start with this,” he said. “I really fucking don’t.”
Gary had redecorated my apartment for me. We’d gone to a furniture store one afternoon and he had picked out everything that I should buy. He was a modern architect, which meant that everything looked nice, but when you sat down on something it made your butt hurt.
“I just wanted Samantha to get to know me,” I explained. “I wanted us to get acquainted before you and I are together for good.”
After I said this, Gary walked over to me and ran his hand down my cheek. He did this very tenderly. He brought his other hand up to the back of my neck and began to massage my shoulders.
At first I thought all was forgiven, that we would be able to forget this incident and move on. I imagined that Gary and I would end up rolling around in my modern-looking bed very shortly. I decided that I would put on those garters that Gary had bought me and show him how much I loved him by doing that thing that he liked me to do but that I did not particularly like to do.
While I was thinking these things, Gary stopped massaging me. He brought his hands together around my throat and squeezed. He lifted me off the ground and pressed me into the wall. I tried to scream, but nothing would come out of my mouth.
“This is all your fault,” he said before he dropped me down onto the carpet. “You couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could you?”
My mother got into the shower. I sat down by the window and stared down at the street. There was a huge truck with a hose mounted on the front spraying down the sidewalk. I looked over at the exclamation point on the man’s chest. From where I sat now, the exclamation point was upside down. It looked like some sort of ancient symbol, something painted on a cave wall that needed to be deciphered.
My mother came out of the bathroom dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. She had her hair slicked back. She picked up the disposable camera off the table, put on her jacket.
“There is a one-hour photo place across the street,” she said. “I’m going to run over there quick.”
“I’ll go with you,” I told her.
“Just stay here,” she told me. “Stay here and make sure he doesn’t steal anything.”
I didn’t want to stay, but I didn’t really want to move either. I had tied the scarf too tightly. I was having trouble breathing. My body felt exhausted, my body felt like it was fading away. I felt like I was a capsule of cold medicine and someone had split me open and was dumping all my colorful innards onto the floor.
“Fine,” I told my mother. “Hurry up.”
When my mother left I untied my scarf. I walked over to the mirror by the dresser and looked at my neck. The bruises had turned from purple to dark black.
I was massaging the skin around my windpipe when I heard the man with the exclamation point cough. I turned toward him and he sat up. He looked around the room, his eyes watery and unable to focus. He arched his back, his stomach puffing out.
“Where is this?” he asked.
“This is Ann Arbor,” I said.
He blinked his eyes, rubbed them with his palms. He scratched at one of his tiny nipples.
“I slept with my contacts in,” he said. “I can’t see for shit right now.”
I did not want to look directly at him, but for some reason I did not want him to know that I would not look directly at him, so I focused on the painting that was just above his head. It was a landscape of a wheat field with a red brick house in the distance. It was harvest time in the painting. I tried to look inside the windows of the house, but there was nothing there, no lights or candles, just darkness.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The street-cleaning crew was across the street now. I was not going to tell him anything about me. I was not going to explain to him that it was my mother he’d fucked, not me. I was not going to explain to him that my mother was gone now, getting some photos developed that would prove this fact, that when she got back here he would see just how badly he was mistaken and that no words of apology would be enough to make me forgive him.
“Okay, that’s cool,” he said. “I get it. No names. We’re on the lowdown.”
The man slid over and sat on the edge of the bed. His stomach doubled over and part of the exclamation point disappeared into the folds. When he saw the bruises on my neck, his face pinched up and his eyes narrowed.
“Did I do that to you?” he asked.
There was a group of men pushing their brooms
down the sidewalk, three men side by side, finishing off what the hose had already started. The streets below were clean. Like there had been no game, like no one had cheered and jumped up and down, like no one had drank and yelled until they’d lost their voices.
“Did I do that to you?” the man asked me again.
I retied the scarf around my neck and walked across the street to the one-hour photo place. I found my mother sitting in a chair by the counter. I sat down in a chair next to her.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“How did you get rid of him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I just did.”
As I sat there, I watched the photos slide out of the processing machine. The overhead lighting brought out all my mother’s flaws—the forehead scar that looked like a frown, a black hair that was growing inside her ear.
I went into my purse. I’d stuck the fake baby’s head in there and now took it out and handed it to her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I found it on the way over,” I told her.
She turned the baby’s head over in her hand. She studied it closely. She played with the baby’s eyelids and ran her finger inside its ear.
“It’s creepy looking,” she said. “It looks so real.”
I laid my head on my mother’s shoulder. She ran her fingers through my hair as I sat there and watched the photos slide out of the developer and fall on top of each other, again and again, until they were in a big pile.
PROTOCOL
At the cusp of the first switchback are the leg traps. They’re hidden under pine straw, jaws still set. Occasionally, you’ll find something caught—a raccoon or a grouse—and carry it on up.
For the gauntlet of trip wires near the salt caves, you stretch onto your belly and scuttle through the red clay. Up the path, your breath gathers in front of you in tiny fists. You slip the cattle gate, move past the blue tarp that covers the woodpile. Protocol here is to push the doorbell mounted on the gatepost, but you keep your hands stuffed inside your parka and walk on. You hawk a loogie onto the septic tank and slink up the rickety porch stairs.