A Different Bed Every Time

by Jac Jemc

  Think the orphanage of newspapers on the subway, compare it to Dutch elm disease, remember how easy it is to become a skilled liar.

  “Minnie,” he moans, “tell me to take you home right now. I’m a mess.” Minnie squints at him and asks what’s wrong. Daniel’s forehead lands on the edge of the table with an “I don’t know.” Minnie smiles attentively, but she’s thinking, “Is this what I’m like?” Their food arrives. Daniel pulls himself together for the waitress, lifting his head and blinking at the light. Minnie stirs the chocolate into her milk and takes a big gulp. She licks the syrup off her spoon. Daniel pours lots of cream and sugar into his coffee and smiles at Minnie. She places the spoon in her mouth and sucks it even after no chocolate remains. Though it appears as if she is relishing it, her eyes nearly tip their reserve of tears.

  Think the way going to see a shrink would be irreversible, compare it to the incapacitation of a fireplace with no chimney, remember the easy happiness you gained from dinosaurs as a child.

  Daniel hands Minnie a black-and-white composition book. He tells her she is the first to see it. Minnie feels honored and skeptical in equal parts as she begins flipping through. The first thing she finds is an unfinished letter to his ex-girlfriend, telling her he misses the way her heels dug into his calves. Something twists inside her. She’s sure this isn’t where she’s supposed to be at all, but she stays. Minnie pages through the notebook, thinking she should have gotten this out of her system in high school or college. Daniel can tell she’s distracted and makes Minnie read a story aloud because he thinks she’s not actually reading.

  Think the way you skip tedious sonnets to get to “For I am shamed by that which I bring forth / And so should you to love things nothing worth,” compare it to being wrong about something you fought so hard for, remember how a friend of yours told you he used to run through Central Park in the middle of the night to test fate.

  Two hours later, Minnie is arranging silverware into architecture. Daniel talks about Hegel and the waiter bussing the table across the section appends Daniel’s reference, eager to show he is more than a night-shift employee. The waitress brings the check, and Daniel takes it. Minnie decides not to quibble over the price of chocolate milk. Daniel pays the bill while she runs into the bathroom. A moment later, she looks at her bright face in the fluorescent mirror. She smiles, exaggerated and toothy, and then her face unfolds itself into blankness.

  Think of scars from impatience with scabs, compare it to the exhausted, disoriented genius of the last minutes of a football game, remember how you can now completely ignore the ceaseless purr of electricity everywhere.

  Daniel is talking to the cashier when Minnie comes out of the bathroom and she waits for him to finish his conversation. Minnie’s biceps tense to cross her arms as Daniel holds the door open for her and she explodes into a sprint to the car. Daniel takes his time finding his keys and easing into the vehicle.

  Think Aesop’s character foils, compare it to the tackiness of the concept of souls, remember the tension of condescension.

  Minnie watches him reach across the passenger seat and unlock her door. She thanks God he doesn’t pull the handle. She jerks in as the cold quickly immobilizes her joints. The engine starts and they drive in silence until suddenly the CD kicks on again and it’s the same sappy pop song. Minnie laughs. Daniel says earnestly, “This is the saddest song in the world.” Minnie can’t help herself and disagrees. Daniel says they will drive around until she admits how depressing the song is.

  Think the swipe of a credit card, compare it to the minor distortions of the shadow of bricks on the mortar separating them, remember how this song was sappy the first time you heard it and some things never change.

  Around the fourth rotation, Minnie finally admits the song is heartbreaking because it’s 6:30 in the morning and she never seizes moments this easy. Daniel takes her back to her apartment. Minnie sits in her seat silent for several minutes. He asks her what she’s thinking. Minnie says, “Really?” and Daniel just looks at her. “I was counting the number of times you said the word pertinent tonight.” She smiles tentatively. He frowns and turns away, nodding. Minnie takes her time getting out of the car. Daniel says nothing.

  Think needing permission to be happier, compare it to stopping yourself before you say something stupid and then saying it anyway, remember all you’ve wanted in this world is for one person to call you “home.”

  Minnie disappears into the vestibule door for the second time tonight and calls his house before he gets home. On his answering machine she reads a story about being able to figure out what’s good and what’s bad.

  Think telling someone he shouldn’t jump off that ledge for your sake instead of his own, compare it to the invasion of an epitaph, remember bedtime stories.

  Hospitable Madness

  A chatelaine so full of tools delicate to a task should reveal what said person does with her measured time.

  And yet, along with the tiny snips and bucket of a thimble, there hung a compass, a pocket watch, a skate key, a touch wood, and several other metallic objects of antiquity.

  “The worst attraction,” she said, settling carefully onto the settee, “is to the everyday.”

  We nodded, attempting careful equations behind our eyes, hoping our guest wouldn’t notice.

  “My work is not why people die.”

  When our gaze returned to her, she seemed closer.

  “Tonight, I carry out a plan of nervy education.” She pulled a felt-wrapped bundle from the carpet bag at her feet.

  The host took my hand in his. Each word was a surfacing fin. We were surrounded.

  “When I die, I will die happy, because I will die doing what I love.” She began to unroll the felt. With the first tumble, a knife stretched out. With each subsequent movement of her hand the felt unfurled another blade.

  She stood, grabbing handfuls of knives. “If something goes wrong, don’t tell me.” Her fists hung at her sides and she breathed deeply. Then, like nothing at all, the daggers were in the air. They framed her like rays of light surrounding a saint. As they fell, she caught each one and sent it back up. She danced and the chatelaine tinkled sweetly, lightening the mood of the knives’ silent flight.

  The host released my hand and began to clap vigorously. In each slap of one palm against the other I heard his relief, but I’m sure she listened only to the pure praise she desired so. The host elbowed me, urged me to do the same, and yet I was still quite certain this would not be the end.

  Prowlers

  On the radio we’d heard about a trend in nature in which wolf packs were growing larger and larger—expanding into super packs. The packs were impossible to fight off. They’d attack one small animal and share the meat among them, then find another prey. It was like the wolf version of small plates. These super-packs were forming everywhere. There was one apparently on the prowl right in the area we were driving through. The car protected us, but we’d need to stop for gas some time.

  We drove from Chicago to Albuquerque. This was the time I caught a ride with a friend of a friend of a friend—someone far enough removed that you’d doubt the truth of any of their stories, were I to tell ’em. As luck would have it, though, twenty-two hours passed with neither of us finishing a thing we had to say. We kept getting interrupted by roadside attractions, something on the radio, a cop pulling us over. Tale after tale cut short, so there’s no reason to retell ’em or to disbelieve ’em.

  This friend of a friend, people called him “Coot.” I was too embarrassed to ask him his real name, and what would it have mattered?

  We were both victims of well-wrought curiosity. Coot wanted to make his way to Sedona to see about some crystals. I heard about the chance of a cheap ride, and the word Albuquerque tripped off my tongue. I gave a rent check to my roommates and packed a bag full of fluorescent jean shorts and T-shirts covered in paint-soaked handprints. It was that decade. Coot and I displayed our suspicion of each other plainly, but the
price of gas would be halved, and my friends of friends vouched for both me and him. I wouldn’t run off with the car or rifle through his belongings. He would get me there.

  I had a boyfriend who’d just broken up with me, but that wasn’t unusual. He and I loved in a way that was always between talks, punctuated, alive. This might get old for some people, but it kept us going. His name was Wade, but I called him Wader. He hated it for being a homophone, but liked that I’d awarded him a nickname. When Wader heard about me spending twenty-two hours in a car with Coot, he begged me to stay, but even his sobbing didn’t drag me closer to him. The ten inches of black space between us on the couch stayed constant, until I hoisted my duffel onto my shoulder at the sound of Coot’s car horn. “I’ll write when I get there, Wader,” I said and he looked up at me, always dramatic, and said, “Well, if those don’t sound like dying words.” Trying not to let that sentence dot my mind, I threw my bag in the back seat and forced a smile at Coot.

  Empty plastic bottles covered the floor of the car. “What do you say I pitch all of these the next time we stop for gas?” Across the dashboard, Coot had lined up twenty-two cat figurines. I counted ’em. “I know we don’t know each other so well, but there are exactly as many cats as there are hours we’ll be in this car.” Coot grunted and kept his eyes on the road. I would learn that he wasn’t one for believing in coincidences.

  In the glove compartment I found a pistol that felt heavy, but Coot scoffed at my foolishness, telling me it was a toy. My stomach dropped down into the pile of plastic bottles, but Coot said, “Go ahead. Fire it at me. That’s how afraid you should be of that thing.” I refused his offer, and clicked the compartment shut again.

  When it was my turn to drive, I counted the seconds between signs on the highway to stay awake. In more populated areas, I waited for the negative light of the sodium streetlamps to shine in on us, catching glimpses of the filth coating every surface of the car and our skin.

  I tried to talk Coot into telling stories, but he’d trail off and pass out in the passenger seat or get himself distracted behind the wheel. I’d try to tell him stories, but he wasn’t much of a responder, so I’d get bored and flip the radio on, and he’d never complain that he wanted to know what happened. How did I get home that night? What was in the water? Who was at the door after all? Then on the radio, that story of the wolves came on. I couldn’t tell if Coot had heard it, but I grew nervous. When I switched the station to something I could sing along to, Coot shut the radio off. I could take a hint.

  My friends back home wondered why I was going to Albuquerque. It couldn’t just be for the name, they said. “I need to feel some control,” I’d admit. I’d become so accustomed to stinking and failing that I wanted to set a goal I couldn’t fuck up. I could mess up a job opportunity easy. I could complain that I’d never get a painting just the way I wanted it. But to move my body from Chicago to Albuquerque and back felt like an easy and satisfying thing to do. “What will you do when you get there?” friends of friends asked. “Find a little proof and head on home,”

  I’d reply, and more often than not, they’d say they were going to grab another beer and ask if I’d like one. When they returned with the two bottles, they’d have a story to tell about some quarrel they’d had earlier that day and we’d drift away from the need to understand why I was leaving.

  I asked Coot questions, and mostly he remembered he didn’t care to talk to me. But a few times he responded automatically. He’d been convicted of a felony, a fact I think he was trying to scare me with. He told me it was better I didn’t know what. I said I thought it was my right to know, and he said, if anything, what he was convicted of made this car ride safer. I asked if he’d been in jail, and he said, “Um, that’s how that works, yes.” I was still pretty certain there was some wiggle room there, but if he wanted to play it like the two were unavoidably linked, then that was his call.

  That same radio story came on about the wolves again. I shut it off and pulled out a sketchbook to doodle: several young boys tied to railroad tracks, a dirty man on a city apartment stoop, a full train showing a man with an empty seat beside him. Coot glanced at the drawing and said nothing. I tried to tell him a story about how I almost died. How I’d gotten very sick and how long it had taken me to notice how sick I was. How by the worst point I hadn’t showered in weeks, and I’d stopped leaving the house. How I didn’t notice that no one was calling me and I wasn’t calling anyone either. I waited for Coot to ask me what had been wrong, but I quieted down, and his voice never emerged. He filled with refusal. I learned that a skull doesn’t equal a mind.

  I was still sleeping when Coot pulled into a roadside motel in Albuquerque. I heard the gravel of the lot locating itself beneath the car, and my voice caught. “Where is this?” I asked, and Coot said, “This is where we part.” I climbed out of the car and walked toward the office. He called after me that I’d forgotten my bag. I’d thought he would at least wait for me to be sure I could get a room, but I was meek, and I pulled open that sticky back passenger door and grabbed my belongings. As the door to the office tinkled open, I heard his tires squeal back onto the road.

  That afternoon I wrote Wader to let him know I was safe in Albuquerque. I signed the letter “Love, Jovey” because that’s what I felt at the time. When I returned to Chicago everything would be muddier, but that sign-off felt clear and true that morning.

  I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and mostly, I’ve been able to recognize them as such. That drive, though, something was wrong, and I’ve never been able to figure it out. There’s an old Hitch-cock movie where all of the violence happens behind a curtain. A man pulls a woman behind heavy velvet and tries to rape her. The camera shows her hand fumble out grasping for anything to defend herself, until her fingers land on a knife left out on a cheese board, and that, too, disappears behind the curtain. And then, the lumpy, unseen struggle subsides, and you see a male hand flop out, over the arm of a chair, and the terrified heroine emerges, wondering how what just happened could have happened. All that confusion and she was the only one to survive to tell the story. No one could make it clearer for her. She had all the answers there could be.

  Filch and Rot

  We started out as petty thieves, picking up the mulch-worthy crabapples from neighbors’ lawns. We poured water into the vodka bottles in the basement. We took swipes of our brothers’ deodorant to cover up our sour smells because it had a better scent than anything the pharmacy had to offer us young ladies.

  We fished the tubes of lipstick out of our teachers’ purses. They all wore the same brand: CoverGirl TruShine. In a town with so few options, why were they ignoring the other brands in the drugstore aisle? Surely some teacher with some popularity had spread the word that TruShine was the best product and all of the other teachers had trucked over to the Walgreens or the CVS to smear samples on the thumb edge of their hands.

  While our parents watched movies or failed to listen to each other in arguments, we tucked out the back doors. We set up shell games on the street with the lipstick. We’d uncap the tubes and spin out the shades.

  Mrs. Ball wore muted Powderpink Shine and applied hers until the waxy stick ended in a flat plateau. Mrs. Pullman wore Blushberry Shine and rounded off the tip of her tube. Finally we flashed Ms. Withers’ whorey, bright crimson Valentine Shine with the perfectly maintained diagonal. Cosmo had told us this shape of lipstick proved that Ms. Withers was the moody, daring role model we all hoped she was, riding around town with the young shop teacher, his hands rough and smelling of oil, his eyes full of promises and splinters.

  We’d cap the tubes and lay them down on our piece of cardboard outside the Circle K. Our hands would move fast, sliding the tubes around each other. “Powderpink Blushberry Valentine!” we’d call like we were conjuring something. Cash had been laid down. How our parents never heard about the con girls shuffling lipstick outside the Circle K, we didn’t know, and thanked the Good Lord above out loud, but in each of our
minds we thought, “Someday they’ll hear and they’ll need to confront us, and would that be so bad?”

  We were fast with our hands. We’d rotate in Rosy Shine and Mauve Shine that looked so much like Powderpink Shine. We’d shake our heads sadly when the mark picked the wrong shade every time. “Just tell me how you do it,” Bobby’s father asked us, but we knew if we didn’t tell him that he’d come back with a theory, empty his wallet again.

  It wasn’t long before we started picking up other people’s orders at the fast-food chain. One of us would order a soft drink and we’d sit with our backs turned to the people line. We’d wait to watch a harried mother pass us to settle her children in before the food was up, and when that number was called and the mother was still pulling off her children’s coats and digging up one more booster seat, three of us would file out. One would go smile sweetly at the young pimpled boy who went to school in the next town over and wrap her neatly manicured fingers slowly around the top of the bag, and say, in a voice so breathy it would blow through the boy’s twitchy dreams, “Thank you,” and meet us outside where we’d walk to the forest preserve and eat the bits of chicken and plain hamburgers ordered for the kids and the fish fillet sandwich the mother had fooled herself into thinking was a favor to her health.

  We had been the smart girls, but we’d started getting pretty and thievish. We used our smarts to find workarounds instead. If we only had time to write two pages of a five-page research paper, we printed out the pages we had and then stapled them to three blank pages, and ripped those pages off, leaving a jagged triangle of paper where no more research had been. We’d slide this paper into the middle of the pile, and by the next day or the next week when the teacher had sorted through the papers, she would have to tell us she was so sorry, but it appeared some of the pages of our reports had been lost, could we please reprint them and turn them in ASAP, and we said we’d bring them the next day.