by Matt Burgess
“What kind of death trap?” Jimmy asked.
“You have got to start whispering,” she whispered.
“Sorry!” He asked her again what kind of death trap, softly this time, and when she couldn’t think of anything, he said, “Well, what’s she most afraid of?” He rolled a pencil between his palms as if trying to kindle a spark. “You see what I’m saying? We need to figure out her biggest fear first, then we’ll put her in some sort of thing that’s like that. Like if she was afraid of water, we’d put her in a shark tank, except not that because it’s been done a million times and would be sort of hard to draw.”
Biggest fear, biggest fear, biggest fear. Right at that moment? Losing her virginity, not losing her virginity, doing it wrong, crying halfway through or otherwise embarrassing herself, getting pregnant, catching one of the cauliflower-like STDs from the school nurse’s slide-show presentation, the dreadful possibility that Jimmy Gellar might once again leave this room without even attempting to kiss her. But in addition to her obvious reluctance to voice any of these biggest fears, she also felt they’d make for poor death traps. She looked out the window again. She looked around her room, at the tired green carpet, the wooden dresser in the corner. Okay, how about this? She was afraid of not living up to one of the handwritten quotations thumbtacked to her wall: MAKE NO SMALL PLANS; THE CREDIT BELONGS TO THE MAN WHO IS ACTUALLY IN THE ARENA, WHOSE FACE IS MARRED BY DUST AND SWEAT AND BLOOD. She was afraid that something—a failed physical, a botched lie-detector test—might prevent her from one day becoming a police officer. She was afraid she’d grow up to live a spectator’s life. What else? Ghosts. She was afraid of ghosts. What else? Spiders and cramped spaces. Cramped spaces with spiders.
“Okay, what if she’s claustrophobic?” Janice said. “And we put her in like a coffin or something? Or like a room that keeps getting smaller?”
He groaned at the triteness of it, a groan potentially misinterpreted by her father, who charged into the room wearing only his boxer shorts and holding a bottle of Pathmark-brand seltzer water. He had, apparently, woken up thirsty. The bottle put a crater in the wall above Jimmy’s head. Without thinking, Jimmy tried to scramble under the desk, as if a portal to safety lay waiting for him there, but her father’s thick, hairy fingers caught him by the shoulder. Nigger this, nigger that, her father said as he dragged Jimmy down the stairs. If I ever see your face round here again, blah bitty blah blah. She was picking bits of plaster from the wall when her father—already crying, his shoulders trembling—came back into the room to have a conversation about her future.
Her future: she was grounded into perpetuity, a sentence Vita quietly reduced to eleven days. The front door, though, would remain forever locked on the assumption that it would be significantly harder for Janice or her sister to sneak boys in through the back door, which opened and closed beneath the master bedroom. Thanks a lot, Judith said. The following fall Janice enrolled at the Townshend Harris magnet school for gifted kids whereas Jimmy stayed on at Richmond Hill High. They never finished Captain Richmond Hill #1, he never applied to Cooper Union, and the last she’d heard he was a junkie who had spent a few long hours locked up in the trunk of some drug dealer’s car.
And here she was: covered in cat hair and urine.
“Oh my God,” he said, releasing her from the hug. “How long has it been? Like years, right? I can’t even believe it. You look … good.” He took his sunglasses off and clipped them to his shirt collar, a relief for Janice, who when staring at him had seen only her own ridiculous rictus grin reflected and doubled in the wide silver lenses. “So what’s going on?” he asked. “How have you been?”
“How have I been,” she said.
“Hey!” he said. “You’re a cop now! Marwan Mehta told me. Just the other day. Right here, matter of fact. Congratulations! What you always wanted, yeah? Officer Itwaru? Man, that’s crazy. Well, not crazy. Hey, listen, are you doing anything now? I got my brother’s car here if you need a ride or whatever.” He turned his head toward her, as if about to confide something, or as if volunteering his ear for secrets of her own. “Your father’s not gonna kick my ass, is he?” he said. “Ha-ha, just kidding. You need a ride, though? Seriously. My brother’s car is right there.”
The smoker Tevis had been working on slunk away down an alley that separated the clinic from a computer repair shop, but nobody followed him. Two separate skinny white kids lit up brand-new menthol cigarettes. A leashed poodle tried dragging its owner, a buff-looking Chinese guy who had stopped to look around as if he sensed the sudden good mood all around him. Except for him and his dog and Tevis and the third old man, everyone was smiling at her.
“I think maybe what you heard got a little twisted,” she told Jimmy. Not like this was her biggest problem right now, but because she had brushed her teeth with her finger that morning, she tried speaking without really moving her lips. “I was gonna join the police,” she said. “I tried, but I got flunked on the drug test, so …”
The second old-timer, the one who’d laughed at her earlier, laughed again, a caustic bark that seemed to jolt Jimmy. At least widen his eyes. Yank him away from the recovering drug addict’s natural habitat—the Garden of Nostalgia—and plop him down into his gray-and-white sneakers, on this cold panel of sidewalk outside the clinic. For the first time he seemed to notice all the happy staring faces.
“Oh,” he said.
“You know, I really wish we could catch up,” she said, speaking into her cupped palm. “But I got an appointment. My mom. I gotta take her to the doctor.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “You know what? I think Marwan? Yeah, I think Marwan told me you, like, applied. Years ago. And I guess I just assumed. I’m sorry. About your test.”
“I’ll see you around, okay?”
She felt fairly certain that of her two parents he had met only her father, and only that one disastrous time, but as a way of saying good-bye he asked Janice to say hello to her mother for him. He hoped the appointment wasn’t anything too serious. And again, he was sorry. Super sorry. He jaywalked across the street and got into the idling Volvo with the bearded black man who apparently was his brother. Janice put her head down. While the Gellars drove east, toward the darkly malignant snow clouds, she went the other way, headed for the Impala around the corner on Jamaica Avenue, leaving her meth clinic spectators without a word of farewell. The second old-timer, the laughing man, had already snapped her picture with his cell phone camera.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Puffy said on the drive back to the rumpus. He was eating her bialy because she didn’t have the appetite. “These sorts of things happen.”
“It’s not your fault,” Richie told her. “You shouldn’t be sent out to make buys in your own neighborhood.”
“Totally,” Puffy said.
“They’ll probably post your picture on the Internet,” Gonz told her. “On some cop-killing site. That’d be my guess, at least.”
“Not funny,” Tevis said.
“Oh, I’m not trying to be funny.”
Later that afternoon, when she came home from work—from two days of work—her mother attacked her. Janice had just walked through the back door into the kitchen, where the microwave was heating up what smelled like leftover goat pepper pot. Power-drained, the ceiling’s fluorescents burned at half strength. Tap water rushed into an electric kettle. The radio blasted the day’s news: Hillary Clinton had won the Texas presidential primary, surprising the pundits. And with an open palm Vita hit Janice in the mouth. Then caught her again, flush on the ear, the blows surprising Janice more than they hurt her. Vita fought too spastically, with flailing noodle arms, to inflict any actual damage, but still something seemed to come loose in Janice’s chest. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before. When Janice grabbed her by the wrists, Vita stopped fighting and started crying and Janice did, too. They pressed their fingertips beneath each other’s eyes, an old ritual, to trap the tears between the lashes, but it di
dn’t work. It never worked. Dark reddish brown henna stained Vita’s hairline. Her hands, of course, smelled like the lavender lotion she reapplied as often as her lipstick, which was bright red even though she probably hadn’t left the house in days. Janice worried that her mother—who started everything early: marriage, pregnancy, dementia, dinner prep—had deteriorated to the point where she had mistaken her for an intruder.
“You didn’t call,” Vita said. “You always call. Always. Two days, Janny. I thought you were dead.”
“Oh my God, I’m so, so sorry,” Janice said, painfully relieved. “We had to work a double. My phone died. I didn’t even … I got distracted.
I’m so sorry.”
“You always call.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
“Ding,” said the microwave, and the kitchen lights brightened.
As if embarrassed by the slapping, the crying, the sincerity of her daughter’s apology, Vita went to go turn off the tap, while an equally embarrassed Janice locked the back door just to have something to do. And of course to keep out the ghosts. They couldn’t enter a house through a closed door, not even through a keyhole or under a crack. For a little extra insurance, Vita permanently kept on the back porch a pair of Brother Itwaru’s old boots, their laces triple-knotted and slimy with rainwater, their soles, like Brother’s own, completely corroded. She knew that ghosts—by design, naturally peripatetic—couldn’t resist a pair of broken-in shoes. She also knew they’d spend all night trying to put the boots on, in vain, never quite able to do so because ghosts, or at least stupid West Indian ghosts, didn’t have any feet. Janice wasn’t sure how much of this her mother actually believed. Janice wasn’t sure how much of this she believed herself. It was a game. Like calling Eddie Murphy Eddie Murphy. Like answering the phone when she was seven with “Analytic Systems, how can I direct your call,” because her father had told her he’d started a fake company so he could declare bankruptcy on it and collect relief money from the government. Was he serious? Was Eddie Murphy? Perhaps alone among cops, Janice and her fellow uncles felt comfortable not knowing. The man on the radio reported that after Texas some of the experts who’d doubted Hillary thought she now had a chance.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” Vita said without turning around from the sink. “That’s unacceptable. It’s insane. I’m going insane.”
“You’re not insane,” said Janice, who had no place to sit because there were stacks of mail on all the chairs, and no place to set her purse because lipstick-stained water glasses covered the countertops. “I should’ve called.”
“Yeah, but now I’m worried maybe you did call.” For what might’ve been the thousandth time in the last two days, she looked at the whiteboard on the wall, which said, pick up detergent and think positive, both in Janice’s hand. “And maybe I forgot to write it down. And now you’re telling me you didn’t call because you’re trying to be nice, blowing smoke, and I can’t tell which way is up.”
“Since when have I been nice?”
After showering, Janice came back downstairs to eat an early dinner with her mother. They moved mail stacks off chairs so the two of them could sit at the kitchen table. They talked about pepper pot always tasting better the next day. They talked about the basil Vita wanted to grow in the front yard. That their neighbor Mr. Hua hadn’t done anything crazy in a while. That this movie star was now dating that movie star. Eventually, inevitably, they got to the weather. Their spoons clanged their bowls. All their rhythms seemed off. Usually Vita had gone to bed by the time Janice came home and Janice would eat a toasted waffle over the sink, unplug the teakettle, put away as many lipstick-stained water glasses as she could find, write an I’m alive! note on the whiteboard, turn off the porch and kitchen lights that were always left on for her, and walk past her mother’s door loud enough for Vita to say Janny? and Janice to say Ma? and that was their night. Now they had hours to kill. After dinner, Janice threw her clothes in the washing machine. Vita—who’d spent last night with the cordless next to her bed, and this morning calling hospitals and listening to 1010/WINS for news of a dead undercover—took a nap on the couch.
But she woke up in plenty of time for Wheel of Fortune. Janice sat next to her on the couch with their shoulders touching while Pat Sajak did his heroic best to conceal his boredom. Like Bananagrams, oily fish, pumpkin seeds, and folic acid, television game shows were supposed to fortify Vita’s brain, and so Janice was forbidden to solve any of the puzzles out loud or make sarcastic comments about Vanna’s plunge line or really say anything at all until the commercials, when Vita muted the television with the remote, which lately she’d been calling the picture-stick. At the first commercial break they debated whether the middle contestant came across as cocky. (He totally did.) At the second break, Janice asked her if she wanted to go to the Salvation Army that weekend to pick out crackhead clothes.
“By the way,” Vita said. “I talked to your sister earlier. Supposedly”—because anything Judith-related needed to be spoken of conditionally—“she’s coming to visit tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Seriously? And you’re just telling me this now?”
Her red shining lipstick cracked when she smiled. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I got … what’s the word? Distracted. I guess I got distracted.”
Janice knew that Judith’s cell phone would ring the instant she walked through the back door. Her ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, her former coworkers at White Castle, the friends she used to tag lampposts with, the overpierced sixty-year-old she’d met at the Shambhala Meditation Center, they would call her one after the other, as if they could smell her organic perfume—was there such a thing?—floating in the air above Queens. And then she’d be gone. Carved into skinny wedges and doled out. K.I.T. See you next Christmas.
“How long is she staying?” Janice asked.
Less sad than bewildered, Vita explained that supposedly Judith could get enough time off only for the weekend—she sold soap at an alternative supermarket in Scranton, Pennsylvania—and supposedly she intended to split her visit between the parents. Vita’s phrasing, which must’ve been Judith’s phrasing: the parents. From when she’d get in late Thursday night to mid-morning on Saturday, she’d stay in Richmond Hill. After that—and this was unprecedented—she’d take the LIRR out to her father’s house, where he was supposedly throwing himself a fiftieth-birthday bash, even though everyone in his first life knew he was really turning fifty-one. Wheel of Fortune came back on before Janice could ask how Judith had even heard about the party. It was possible, she guessed, that they sometimes talked on the phone. Or were maybe Facebook friends. The cocky middle contestant, who’d reached the bonus round, received gratis five consonants and one vowel, but they didn’t help him any because of course the game was rigged. Against protocol, Janice announced that she’d solved the puzzle, even though she hadn’t yet figured out the final word. Add it to her list of lies. Her mother told her to shush.
Later, unable to sleep, Janice looked through the stacks of mail in the kitchen for an invitation to her father’s birthday. She didn’t find it—she would’ve torn it up anyway—but she did find a slim Amazon package with Sway: The Art of Gentle Persuasion. She also found February’s mortgage bill. And the Con Ed and Time Warner bills. AmEx, Visa, and neurologist bills. The March of Dimes sent her an actual dime, which they asked her to send back to them along with a donation. It was effectively guilt-making, but not so guilt-making that it made her reach for her checkbook. Instead she took the dime—and the two pennies the universe had gifted her earlier—up to her bedroom to toss the I Ching. Forget about Nostradamus. Forget about Miss Cleo, Mayan calendars, tarot cards, palm-readers, and psychics who advertise their services on pay phone stickers. From the recesses of Janice’s closet she pulled out her only patrimony, her father’s beat-up copy of the I Ching, its pages fattened by long-ago drained bathwater. Duct tape kept the spine i
ntact. With its cover missing, the first page was a blank page, stained the color of tea. Unable to provide a generalized vision of her future, the book instead needed her to ask a particular question, the more specific the better. Will I make three more buys before the end of the month? She tossed the coins onto her bedspread six times in a row. The ratio of heads to tails corresponded to either a broken Yin line (— —) or an unbroken Yang (———). Theoretically she should’ve used only pennies, the humblest of all coins, but whatever, nobody was watching. Her coin tosses made a hexagram that looked like this:
Which the I Ching said meant this:
Here the sun has sunk under the earth and is therefore darkened. The name of the hexagram means literally “wounding of the bright”; hence the individual lines contain frequent references to wounding. The situation is the exact opposite of that in the foregoing hexagram. In the latter a wise man at the head of affairs has able helpers, and in company with them makes progress; here a man of dark nature is in a position of authority and brings harm to the wise and able man.
THE JUDGMENT
DARKENING OF THE LIGHT. In adversity, it furthers one to be persevering.
Which made Janice wish she had asked a Magic 8 Ball. Reply hazy, try again, she at least could’ve understood. In its defense, the I Ching always rolled ambiguous, with a DIY-approach to fortune-telling, but this wounding of the bright business seemed particularly coy. She didn’t know if she was the man of dark nature or the wise and able man or both or neither. And she didn’t know if persevere meant she should sit around doing nothing, waiting for the three buys to come to her. Yeah right. Fat chance. She tossed the book onto the floor, swept the coins off her bedspread.