by Lydia Millet
“The rainforest thing?” asked Susan.
“Malaysia. Malaysian Borneo.”
“Oh,” said Susan.
“And it would be a lifesaver if you could take her again. Her and the dog. Both of them.”
“Her and the dog,” repeated Susan.
“And T. says we could pay for someone else to live with you here and help her. A new Vera. So you wouldn’t have to do much in the way of like, care or whatever. Just let her stay here, just give her one of the bedrooms. Because we’ve got her to come out of her own room finally but she’s still shaky. And there’s nowhere else she’ll willingly go.”
Casey leaned forward suddenly and clasped both of her hands.
“Please,” she said. “Please?”
Susan was gazing at her, confused and slightly panicked, when there was a knock behind them and the jackhammer guy clomped in from the back, covered in dust and leaving white bootprints all over the ancient rug.
“You got a manhole in your backyard,” he said.
“A manhole?”
“Problem is, the cement was poured right onto the plug, you know, the metal lid on the hole. I got most of it off but you still got that metal plug there, and the thing’s not moving. Possibly rusted over, maybe locked from the inside, hell if I know. If you want to open the lid you’re gonna need to bring in something like a backhoe and dig up the whole deal. Or blow it up. Hell. The drill won’t do any more for you than it’s already done.”
“Oh. Well. Thanks, though,” said Susan, disappointed.
“Is it like a city manhole?” asked Casey. “It should have that stuff written right on it, right? Like initials or something? Seems to me the city would need to deal with it, not us. What if there’s some high-voltage line or shit like that under there? Or toxic raw sewage?”
“No letters I could see,” said the jackhammer guy.
“I’ll call the city anyway,” said Susan. “OK. So. Thank you.”
“I still gotta load up the truck. I’ll come back in when I’m done. Be a hundred fifty,” said the guy. “Cash or check.”
When he was gone they were back in their awkward pause—Casey’s request hanging between them. Susan flashed back to their last such pause, or the last one she had noticed, in the minutes before they found out Hal was dead. They had been standing in the airport beside the baggage-claim thing, the particular luggage conveyor belt always shaped, come to think of it, like a bell curve. There’d been a poster of a high-rise on the wall, in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or some other far-south city where there were beaches littered with half-naked women in thong bikinis and the apartment buildings were white. Now when she thought of the phone sex, of Casey and phone sex and her maternal anxiety, she would always think of tall white buildings. There was nothing she could do about it; the association was simply lodged in her mind. Neurons firing the same way repeatedly, carving out a deep rut—it was what happened, they said, with clinical depression. In a rut could be literal, could happen to neural pathways in your brain.
It struck her that she felt free to ask, finally.
“You’re not doing that phonesex job still, are you? Now that you’re, you know, married and all that?”
“Nah,” said Casey. “It was a momentary thing. Fun while it lasted.”
“So I know this sounds like a mother and all that. But what can I say, I am one. Have you been thinking about what you want to do career-wise? I don’t see you living off T.’s money. I don’t see you just, you know, indefinitely flying around the world with him, handing out Evian at whale strandings.”
“No,” said Casey. “No. Not indefinitely.”
“So?”
“Well, shit. I’d like to have an answer for you. I’d like to for myself. But the truth is, I don’t know yet. So I’m going to give it some time. I’m going to have this honeymoon period. I’ll go anywhere. I’ll do anything. I’m free-floating. Say for a year. And then I’ll decide.”
“I see,” said Susan, nodding.
“What the hell is that,” said Casey, and gestured. “An armadillo or something?”
“A nine-banded armadillo,” said Susan, surprised. “Of course. What did you think?”
“It’s weird-looking,” said Casey. “It’s basically a freak.”
“I really wouldn’t say that,” said Susan.
She felt annoyed.
“It’s like a giant pill bug with a rat head and a long, ratty tail,” went on Casey. “You know, those bugs that roll up into a ball? Or doodlebugs, some of the kids used to call them. It’s like one of those, but bigger and uglier.”
“If you’re trying to get me to do you a favor, you shouldn’t insult the collection,” said Susan testily.
“Wow,” said Casey. “You really like the thing.”
“It’s not a question of liking,” said Susan, but she felt increasingly agitated. “And it’s not a thing. Or it wasn’t. Anyway. I’m going to the kitchen. You can come with me or not.”
Casey followed, past a lone sea turtle in a case with a some fake kelp and a couple of lobsters.
“I dig the tortoise, though,” she said, in a clear attempt to curry favor.
“It’s not a tortoise at all. It’s a green sea turtle,” said Susan.
“I was just trying to get your goat,” said Casey. “I do that to T. too. I know what a sea turtle is. I watch the nature shows.”
“Uh-huh,” said Susan.
“But he doesn’t love all animals. He’s mostly interested in the ones that are about to go extinct,” went on Casey.
“Nice,” said Susan.
“The more common they are, the less interested he is.”
They were in the kitchen now, Susan opening the freezer to get a can of lemonade concentrate.
“I didn’t mean to piss you off,” said Casey.
“I know, because you’re trying to get something out of me,” said Susan. “So that would be a tactical error.”
“Listen. For whatever reason, she’s comfortable with you,” said Casey. “She feels safe when you’re around. And face it, I mean, the cousins are assholes, no question. But it’s true this place is enormous. You probably wouldn’t have to even see her that much at all, if you didn’t want to.”
Susan turned and leaned back against the counter, the thin coat of frost on the cardboard tube melting swiftly against her fingertips.
“So because I’m single and live in a big house, all of a sudden I’m in loco parentis to your senile motherin-law. You think I have no life of my own, right? I’m some kind of convenient middle-aged caregiver?”
“Not caregiver,” said Casey. “That’s why we’d hire someone. More of a hostess. A rich relative offering room and board.”
“Huh,” said Susan. She peeled the white ring from around the lid of the tube and dropped it into the sink.
“It makes sense,” said Casey. “You have to admit.”
“For you it does, sure,” said Susan. “Yes. It works out perfectly for you. Then there’s me. If Angela decides she doesn’t like the woman you hire, she’s my responsibility. And I’m basically up a creek. Like with that nice girl Merced. Angela ran away from her because she didn’t like her footwear. Did I tell you that already? She accused her of wearing shoes a hooker would wear. And then she showed up here in the middle of the night in a taxi that cost me like two hundred dollars. She left her wallet at home. Of course. I mean Jesus. I’m fond of T. and all, but I’m not the one who married him.”
“She won’t show up in the middle of the night, though, because she’ll already be here.”
Susan turned. She was holding up the tube, letting clumps of concentrate drop into the pitcher.
“I think you’re missing my point there, Case.”
Casey just gazed up at her, large-eyed.
“Fucking fine, then,” said Susan finally. “God damn it.”
Casey crowed with delight and threw her arms around Susan’s waist.
•
After Casey l
eft she went out to the backyard and through the trees. The jackhammer guy had left a gray moon of dust on the trampled grass around the manhole cover. She knelt beside the lid, traces of cement still adhering to the grooves, and studied it: no words, only a diamond pattern that reminded her obscurely of pineapples and beehives. Couldn’t she just lift it up? But there was no handhold, no opening.
“Backhoe,” she said to herself.
Certainly it was a fool’s errand. Still, she would make some calls to the city.
Jim rented a U-Haul and drove his few possessions from the house he had shared with his wife in Palos Verdes, which Susan had never seen, to a small dove-gray bungalow in Silver Lake.
She went over the morning he moved in, carrying tall cups of coffee for both of them, and stood on the covered front porch with its square stucco columns. She liked the view out the uncovered wing of the porch, down to the bottom of the hill where the narrow street of cottage-like houses, about as quaint as you got in L.A., gave way to a dirty wide street of businesses and fast traffic. Rows of palms like truffula trees, with blowzy tops and spindly, bending trunks, stood out against the sky.
She liked the house, which was a finer, older version of the one she and Hal had lived in back in Santa Monica. It had more style but some of the same elements: the burnished-looking hardwood floors, the well-carved mantel over the fireplace, dark beams on the ceilings that crossed each other to make rectangle patterns against the white. She was impressed by the spareness of the rooms that contained Jim’s pared-down life, the neat stacks of folded shirts, the three small cases of law books.
•
That afternoon the new caregiver took up residence in the big house to prepare for Angela’s arrival the next day—a stout woman in her early sixties with dyed black hair and lipstick the color of traffic cones. It strayed over the edges of her lips.
Casey had decided to hire an older woman, essentially an imitation of Vera since her motherin-law’s brief track record with young women was poor. In fact she had chosen another Eastern European lady, this one hailing not from the former Yugoslavia but from some obscure yet quite large district of the Russian Federation, one that sounded like a mouthful of half-chewed nuts. Her name was Oksana and she brought with her a tall bamboo cage, two zebra finches inside.
Angela would sleep in the bird room, which Susan regretted since it would no longer be free for Jim and her. But it was the only room on the ground floor that was set up with a bed and its own bath; Casey had said that Angela got up at night, not sleepwalking but wandering around bleary and half-asleep without the capacity to notice her surroundings. She thought the second floor would be dangerous. Oksana needed a location nearby but the best Susan could do was the drawing room full of raccoons and minks, a few doors down.
T. brought in a daybed, which they set behind a pair of the old man’s decorative screens, scenes of mallards swimming on glassy lakes with bulrushes in the foreground. Oksana hung up her cage, set up a small portable television with T.’s help, and unpacked her suitcase into the room’s narrow closet.
“We don’t know how long we’ll be,” he explained to Susan, as she surveyed the mounts.
She had to fix them in her memory. She wouldn’t be able to go into the room whenever she wanted to now and she resented it, though admittedly Oksana asked for almost nothing. The Russian even lacked her own bathroom; she’d have to walk down the hall to use the toilet or take a shower. The house was large but it wasn’t set up for assisted living.
Item 1: A coatimundi from Arizona needed repair; insects must have gotten to it recently because parts of the face looked mangy. Could be the larvae of carpet or fur beetles … and there was mold on it, she guessed, either mold or mildew; ask the repair people, install a dehumidifier if need be. Item 2: One of the minks was incorrect, she had learned from a reference book in the library. The teeth were not its own. Possibly they had belonged to a housecat. Replace. Also the eyes were bulging. The wadding inside had likely expanded: another humidity problem.
“So I’ve paid Oksana’s wages in advance,” he was saying. “Angela has an ample allowance. Let Oksana handle her food, her bills, all that, the same way Vera did. Here’s hoping she’s capable. I’ll take a look at the debits and credits when I get back, but you shouldn’t have to be involved at all. That sound OK to you?”
“Fine, sure,” she murmured. She wondered if Oksana would be disturbed by the flash of canines at night, if, say, a car passed outside and illuminated the crouching raccoon. It held a half-bitten slice of lurid fuchsia watermelon, made of vinyl chloride.
Then again, she’d noticed, some people didn’t notice the faces; to some, like the young architect girl, the taxidermy was nothing more than a design element, albeit a misguided one.
“Where we’re going,” he said, “there won’t always be reliable telecommunication. Casey doesn’t want you to be worried.”
“I promise,” she said after a minute. “This time I won’t send anyone to track you down.”
•
Jim was spending more nights in the big house now. While he did not seem overjoyed by the arrival of Angela and Oksana, he was not displeased either; he liked the arbitrariness of their encounters, Susan thought. He was amused by the sight of Angela wandering into the kitchen at some odd hour of late night or early morning, her hair twisted up into a peach-hued turban, matching kaftan floating out behind her as she walked and a muddy facial mask with holes around her eyes and mouth. He smiled at Susan when Angela summoned him into the bathroom to remove a stray hair from the sink. He enjoyed her sporadic remarks about the hazards of all-American dining chains like Denny’s, to which she objected strenuously. It had to do with the portion size and the dominance of fried foods, apparently. Also the fact that the menus contained large photographs of each selection and were covered with plastic.
He found her humorous, Susan thought, despite the fact that her comedic value stemmed from mental decline. He was not worried about the moral dimensions of his entertainment.
Oksana also amused him. She represented an enigma.
“What’s with the lipstick all over the place,” he said after dinner one night, when the old women had gone to bed.
He and Susan were drinking wine in the backyard, watching helicopters cross the sky and listening to a chorus of far-off sirens. Jim liked the sound.
“Does she do it on purpose? It makes her look even crazier than the other one.”
“I think it was the fashion once,” said Susan. “To kind of draw on the contours of your upper lip. To make it look like you had, you know, these Cupid’s-bow lips.”
“Cupid’s bow?”
“With two, kind of, bumps on top? Like Lucille Ball or someone.”
“She wants to look like Lucille Ball? She looks like a bag lady. Seriously. With the dyed black hair that gets gray at the roots and the day-glo lips. We have a bag lady living with us. Are you sure she’s a nurse?”
“She’s not exactly a nurse. I don’t really know what she is.”
She dropped one of her shoes on the ground and trailed her bare toes in the pond water. She wondered if the fish would come nibble at them.
“Nothing wrong with a bag lady. It’s not a criticism, per se,” said Jim. “I’m just saying.”
“Yeah, don’t ask me,” said Susan vaguely. She was feeling the water, soft and cool as her foot swept through it. “All I care about is that Angela likes her.”
“So far,” said Jim. “Don’t get too comfortable.”
•
The dog came last. Casey and T. dropped her off the day before they left. They were booked on a series of flights to get to Borneo—through Hong Kong, Taipei, and Jakarta.
“I still don’t get what you’re going across the globe to do,” said Susan to Casey, standing talking to her through the window of the parked car while T. took the dog inside.
“His deal is, poor people that need to make a living, and then these dying-off animals,” said Casey. “He
wants to make it so people don’t have a good reason to do things that kill the wildlife. So what there is, over there, is some kind of jungle forestry project. Community harvest of non-timber products is what they call it. It sounds so wonky, right? He’s trying to help these local guys set it up so the people can live off this one forest without cutting it or burning it down. There’s animals living there that need the forest. This Sumatran rhino that’s practically gone. Also orangutans and pygmy elephants. He loves those little fuckers.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“We’ve got this cabin lined up,” said Casey. “It’s primitive. No indoor toilets. But you can send faxes from this town that isn’t so far away, you just give them to the driver who comes out with food deliveries. Two times a week, they said. And sometimes we’ll go into town for errands and I can call you then. So my job? I’m going to handle the paperwork, to start with.”
“Huh. No toilets?” said Susan.
“Other priorities.”
“But what if …”
“What if what,” said Casey.
“Health concerns,” said Susan. “The lack of pavement.”
“Oh please,” said Casey.
Susan saw her wheels caught in rainforest mud, her chair sinking into quicksand. It seemed wrong.
“All settled in,” said T., opening his car door and sliding behind the wheel. “She’s in my mother’s room right now.”
“T. How’s Casey going to get around, in Borneo?” asked Susan. “I’m serious. She has to have her independence. What about emergencies? Seriously. The jungle?”
“Listen,” said T. “We don’t want you to worry. We bought her an all-terrain wheelchair. A power chair with these big wheels. She’s been practicing on it at the beach. But more to the point, the facility where we’re staying is part of a research-station complex. It has gravel paths between the buildings. A couple are even paved. It’s not all dirt.”
“It just doesn’t seem like an appropriate setting,” said Susan after a few seconds, anxious.
“Fuck appropriate,” said Casey.
“I don’t—”
“And fuck setting,” said Casey. “I’m not a lawn ornament.”