Maniac Drifter

by Laura Marello

Mary entered the room and set her black gym back on the other bed. She was dressed in a t-shirt and her hair was damp around the edges. She climbed into the other bed, took off her watch and set it on the nightstand.

  I asked her if I were in the wrong bed. She said it didn’t matter. In a few minutes Mary was asleep in her sister’s bed, lying on her side, facing the window. I lay on my side for a while, then the other side, then I gave up and turned over on my back where I could watch Mary sleep. I could not sleep. I was in a strange house, with Mary’s parents downstairs, and Mary asleep in the bed next to me. And I was in Mary’s bed.

  At ten the next morning, I gave up the idea of sleeping, and went downstairs into the kitchen where Mary’s parents had been talking since nine. I told them I was Kate and that I had driven Mary up.

  Mary’s mother said it was awfully sweet of me. She introduced herself as Ellie and her husband as Tom. We chatted about Provincetown and then Ellie and Tom went back to their bacon and eggs. Ellie had a pink curler cap on her head, and she was wearing a blue flowered smock. Her left arm was swollen. Tom had thick white hair, and a handsome face. He was short and stocky, smaller than Ellie, it seemed.

  Ellie explained that she wore the cap to hide her hair, which was falling out.

  After her shower, Ellie came out of the bathroom in her street clothes, without her curler cap, and showed me her thinning hair. I said it didn’t look so bad. There were two crosses on the side of her head. They looked like targets.

  After Mary and I had showered and changed, we went to her sister Celia’s. When we got there the grown ups were congregated in the kitchen cleaning quahogs. Celia said hello and her husband hugged Mary. Ellie introduced them to me. She asked them if I wasn’t sweet to drive Mary up there to see them. Celia and her husband nodded. I wondered why they had such peculiar expressions on their faces.

  The two younger kids were playing video games, and I could hear them shouting in the living room. An older boy sat out on the enclosed porch watching the Red Sox game. I was opening marinated vegetables when the little girl came running in from the living room. She grabbed my hand and asked if I would play with them. Ellie warned me not to let her exhaust me. The girl dragged me out of the kitchen.

  They were playing a video game where a gorilla at the top of the screen rolls basketballs down a slope. The player controls a little man at the bottom of the screen who tries to walk up the slopes, jumping over the basketballs the gorilla is rolling at him. I tried my best but I never got the little man past the first or second slope before the gorilla zapped him with one of the basketballs. The little girl and her brother could get the man all the way up the slopes to the very top. I tried a few more times, then I gave up and went out onto the porch to watch the Red Sox game.

  Mary and Tom were out there with the older boy. Mary was asking the boy which video movies he wanted her to bring up from Ethan’s Pharmacy the next time she came. All three of them were drinking beers. Tom offered to get me one. Mary told him I didn’t drink.

  I sat down next to Tom. He offered me one of his Lucky Strikes. I said I didn’t smoke.

  Tom asked Mary where she found me and offered her the pack of Lucky Strikes. She took one and went in the house to find her water filters. Tom leaned over and whispered to me, “And you don’t go out with boys?”

  I did not know what he meant so I smiled politely and, feeling it was my responsibility to reveal a vice, confessed that I was addicted to chocolate.

  Tom laughed. He said I would grow out of it. He said Mary had the same problem until she worked at the Necco factory. He asked me how old I was anyway. I said I was almost 30. He said I was ten years younger than Mary and he was seven years younger than his wife. He said it was an outrageous thing to do in those days, marry a woman seven years older than you. Now people did all sorts of outrageous things and nobody minded. He asked me if I was sure I didn’t want a cigarette. I said I thought I should take a nap. Tom got up and showed me to the guest room. I lay down on the guest bed, and went to sleep.

  When I woke up the little girl was shaking my arm and asking me if I wanted to play Pac-Man. She said it wasn’t as hard as the gorilla and that she would teach me. I sat up. Mary was standing in the doorway. Mary told the little girl I had to go now. She said I would learn Pac-Man next time and winked at me.

  When we were out on the highway, I asked Mary how they seemed. She said that her mom was in much better spirits. Her dad wasn’t pestering her mom as much to eat right, but she was worried her dad was going to be miserable once her mom was gone. He wasn’t used to being alone. She thought maybe she should go to Boston for the winter. When we got back she said I could borrow the car anytime mine was broken down or needed service. That was all. Nothing happened at all. Now I was sitting at Mary’s breakfast table in the middle of Harper Martin’s Benefit week, staring at a protein shake.

  “Harper’s pre-trial negotiations are underway,” she said, pointing to the television. “There’s hope for a pre-trial settlement.”

  I nodded and looked down into the glass of brown liquid. As far as I knew, I had now done something truly unusual, and I had no idea what it was like. It gave me an odd feeling, a mixture of regret and awe.

  Mary sat down at the table. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry if what I said last night was blunt, but I really can’t have a one night stand. It really is what the gay boys do.”

  I looked up at her in wonderment. So we didn’t sleep together after all.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “there I go repeating the blunt thing I said. But it’s true, and we had a nice talk, didn’t we?”

  I wondered what we talked about. I started to cry. I wondered why I couldn’t remember anything if nothing had happened.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. “Please don’t cry. I’m glad you told me about your mother. It makes things easier for me.” Mary held me and stroked my hair. “The whole time I was in Boston I kept thinking I wanted to see you, I wanted to talk to you, because your mother had died, and I knew you’d understand how I felt, and you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable around me. You’d know how to act around me, without trying to baby me or apologize.”

  That was the most Mary had ever said to me.

  “Have you stopped crying now?” I nodded. “So you’re alright?”

  “I’ll be alright.”

  “Drink your protein shake,” she said, and pushed the glass of brown liquid under my face.

  “You know it looks disgusting.” I sniffed at it.

  “It doesn’t taste bad. Try it.” I took a sip. “You have to learn to forgive yourself.”

  “That’s what you keep saying.”

  ***

  When I returned to my apartment, the door was ajar, and Gabe sat on the day bed in the kitchen, gazing up through the skylight. When he heard me come in, he leapt off the bed and shouted: “I have an idea!” Then he stopped, tilted his head to one side and looked at me inquiringly, the way a deer will, as if it understands what you’ve said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to ask,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t even want to know.”

  “What’s the idea?”

  Gabe pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, sat me down in it, and sat down across from me on the day bed. “Phenylethylamine,” he said. He pulled a newspaper article out of his pocket and unfolded it. “The chemical that’s in chocolate. It says here that 70 percent of depressed patients have lower than normal levels of phenylethylamine in the brain.” I took the article and started to read it. “You’re always eating chocolate. Maybe your phenylethylamine levels are too low. The phenylethylamine in chocolate makes you feel like you’re in love. Maybe that’s why you sleep with everyone.” He pulled out another article and handed it to me. This one was about chocolate addiction.

  I looked at both the articles and shook my head. “So what do you propose?” I said.

  “We find a doctor to give you phenylethylamine.”

  “No doctors,” I s
aid, and handed him the articles.

  “But Kate — ”

  “First off, I wouldn’t pass the test for being depressed. It says here you only pass if your cortisol isn’t suppressed following an ingestion of dexamethasone. Mine is. They tried that at Lahey Clinic. And even if I did pass, they don’t give you the drug to cure you. They use ‘successful therapies’ to bring the phenyl level back up. Read what it says.” I pointed to the article.

  “So what’s a successful therapy?” he asked, reading the article I had given back to him.

  “They just talk to you and try to cheer you up. I’m telling you it won’t work. Did you talk to any doctors about this?” He nodded. “Well, what did they say?”

  “They said they wouldn’t do it, but I bet if I found one who sympathized with your case, and thought this was a good idea — ”

  “You’re not going to find anyone, Gabe.”

  He got up and went to the kitchen window. He leaned over the sink to look up at the sky, and watched the gulls fly overhead. Then he looked down into the yard, where the landlord was stacking window frames by the side of the house. “If I do, will you try it?”

  “Gabriel, try to be sensible. No one is going to give me phenylethylamine. Do they even make it?”

  “If it’s present in chocolate, and present in your brain, they must be able to make a synthetic version.”

  “This is ridiculous. I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie or something, the one in outer space.”

  “Sleepers,” he said. “Will you try it?”

  “No. It’s too farfetched.”

  “The problem is farfetched. He turned around and looked at me. Then he came back and sat down on the day bed. “You don’t want to be cured, do you?” He put his hand on my knee. “Please?”

  “No doctor will go along with this plan. This isn’t the twenty-first century. Look, why argue about this when you haven’t even found a doctor?”

  He stood up and shoved the articles into his pocket. “Forget it,” he said. “You don’t want to be cured. I’ll find something else. Maybe I’ll have to trick you.” He looked at me to see how I would react to this, but I had gotten up and put my head through the skylight to look out. Gabriel emitted one of his world-weary sighs, and left the apartment.

  In about ten minutes he was back. “Kate, Kate,” he said. He took both my hands in his and led me from the bedroom into the kitchen. “This is Eleanor,” he said, indicating the Voodoo Woman, who was sitting on the day bed dressed in her scarf outfit, and adorned with bone earrings, tooth necklaces, eel-skin belts, and bronze bracelets stacked on her wrists. We shook hands; hers was bony and unusually warm. I had never heard her called by her Christian name before. It sounded unnatural. “I’ve asked Eleanor if she would hypnotize you, and she’s agreed.”

  “The doctors tried that at the Clinic. It didn’t work.”

  “This isn’t the same kind of hypnosis,” he said. He looked at the Voodoo Woman.

  “I was initiated by a Shaman into the healing mysteries,” the Voodoo Woman said. Then she added matter-of-factly: “I can talk to the gods. I’ve met them.” She jangled the bracelets on her wrist, as if she were calling to them to show themselves and back up her claim.

  “I won’t do it,” I said.

  Gabe walked over to the sink and looked gloomily out the window. “How can I help you if you won’t try anything?”

  I joined him at the window, lifted up on my toes and whispered in his ear: “But she’s Looney Tunes.”

  Gabe whispered back: “She can’t hurt you. Maybe she really can do something.” He turned around and addressed the Voodoo Woman. “She’ll do it,” he said. “I’m going now. I’ll be at the restaurant.” Then he kissed me on the forehead and left before I could say anything.

  “You were at Hatches Harbor,” the Voodoo Woman said. She jangled her bracelets again, and then pulled on one of the teeth that were hanging around her long neck.

  “You saw me?”

  The Voodoo woman nodded solemnly. “I felt your presence. But don’t worry, I was the only one who did.”

  “Were you helping them?”

  “I tried to bestow the crates with a blessing of safe passage, a protection by the gods, but they stopped me.” She looked up through the skylight as if she expected to see something there. “They shouldn’t have stopped me. That’s why the crates were taken away. An unfinished spell, even a good-intended one, is like a curse, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. It sounded like an apology.

  The Voodoo Woman got up and stood next to me. She looked out through the window, then bent over slightly to lay her wrists on the porcelain sink, as if to cool her blood. “You’ve been with Getz,” she said.

  I studied her face. I did not know if this were alright to confess. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It is a good thing to have been with Getz. He is indelible. He leaves his mark. That is because he knows the gods.”

  “How does he know them?”

  “He met them in the sea, one morning very early, when he was diving for lobster. He was down very deep, when he went too far, and got lost. They came to visit him then. He is very lucky to have met them.”

  “Raptures of the Deep. Euphoria.”

  The Voodoo Woman nodded.

  “What about Harper?” I asked. “Does he know the gods?”

  The Voodoo Woman looked out the window for a long time. Then she went back to the day bed and sat down under the skylight, so when the gulls flew over, they cast a shadow across her body. “He has their mischief,” she said. “He seeks their blessing.”

  “And myself?” This seemed more like a tarot reading than hypnosis.

  The Voodoo Woman lay down on the day bed, scattering the teeth necklace into her maze of hair. She lifted her arms up toward the skylight, sending the bronze bracelets clanking down against her elbows. “You have a magnet inside you,” she said. “It’s made of longing. It draws people to you.”

  I thought about this. “How did the magnet get there?”

  “Something happened a long long time ago, that caused the gods to put it there.”

  “Why did they put it there?”

  “I’m not sure. To protect you, maybe to punish you. Or to guide you.”

  She was extending her fingers toward the skylight, as if she meant to draw something in through the Plexiglas dome.

  “And you?” I asked. “How did you meet the gods?”

  “The Shaman made a hole through my tongue. And he gave me a string of thorns. I put the string of thorns through the hole, and tied it, so it became a circle. Then I pulled and pulled the ring of thorns through the hole in my tongue, pulled it around and around, until the gods came to me.”

  I shivered. It made my bones ache to think of it. I looked up at the skylight. That strange quality of light that drew painters to the Cape seemed to have descended on the window in my roof. The whole room had become a luminescent silver blue, as if it were submerged in water, where it hovered just under the surface, the sky above bright and beckoning. Then the glare increased, the room turned more and more silver, and then white, until I could only see the outline of the Voodoo Woman lying on the day bed, like a line drawing etched into a white space. A breeze began to blow softly, like the flapping of wings, as if a gull had flown through the skylight and was trapped in the apartment. The wind picked up, and the flapping increased, as if a whole flock of gulls and flown through the skylight, as if the entire space of the room had been overcome by the motion of wings, flapping around my head and arms. I found the kitchen table and sat down at it, bent forward and put my hands over my head to protect my face. But someone grasped my wrists and brought my hands away.

  I looked up. It was my mother who had taken hold of my wrists and was standing over me. I could barely make her out in the silver glare and the rush of wings, but I knew it was my mother. She bent down in front of me, took my hands in hers, and kissed the palm of one and then the other, holding them against her
cheek afterward, and leaning against them as if she sought some kind of rest there. Then she placed her head in my lap and began to cry.

  “What do you want?” I said. I rested my hand on my mother’s back, as if to test her breathing. “What do you want?” But my mother didn’t answer. She just cried.

  The next thing I knew the room had become its normal color again, the skylight was closed, and the Voodoo Woman sat across from me on the day bed, with her head cocked like a bird. “Who was it?” she said.

  “My mother. I asked her what she wanted.”

  “Did she tell you?” I shook my head. “Was she a very quiet person in life? Didn’t give much away?”

  “She was very restrained. She would never say what she was feeling.”

  “People don’t change after they die.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I wish I could help you more.” The Voodoo Woman rested her hand on my shoulder.

  I looked up at the skylight, as if I half-believed my mother would come back, and I would get another chance to talk to her. I had not expected her the first time. “Will she come back?” I asked. “Can you bring her back?”

  “No. She won’t come again.”

  “I wasn’t ready. You should have told me she was coming.”

  The Voodoo Woman got up to leave. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I only bring the light. I don’t know what will come inside of it. That is up to you.”

  After the Voodoo Woman had left, I went into the bedroom and retrieved the skin-suit man from his hiding place. I sat for a long time and watched him, resting in the palms of my hands. I tried to imagine how it felt to be inside someone else’s skin. I tried to imagine my skin wrapped around another. I thought, And this is how he gained his magic. This is how he let the god inside him.

  ***

  It was just past noon when I walked out on the wharf to board the whale watch boat. The water glittered all around me; the sun seemed especially bright against it and hurt my eyes if I tried to look at the reflections. Someone stood on the dock waving at me. If I squinted into the glare, I could barely discern his dark form, dusted grey in the middle, like a charcoal drawing of a man whose face has been rubbed out. But I knew it was Gabe; he was waiting for me.