* * *
—
The student coming to see Brenda doesn’t have any parents. When Casey was a child, they were murdered by accident, emerging from a fancy cocktail bar, mistaken for someone else. She was raised by rich, unfriendly grandparents. There is more death, presumably, on the horizon.
Brenda pours dark red tea and Casey assesses the trailer.
“It’s cozy.”
“You’re polite.”
Casey’s mug features three cartoon dogs with pink tongues. In matching pink bubble letters it says Who Rescued Who? The mug was a present from Brenda’s mother, who is devoted to a small terrier she found on the side of the road. Casey has brought her latest assignment in a pocket folder, printed on sturdy paper. Her essay includes the facts of her life, written in the third person, efficiently and unsentimentally. Casey was born in 1998.
When she first started teaching, Brenda did everything she could to cure her students of their fear of failure. There are no wrong answers, she told them. Things aren’t good or bad. The students teased her, in a nice way. Some of them mimicked her soothing, maternal voice.
“Okay,” Brenda says, pressing the warm mug against her cheek, “what about the first person?”
Casey looks uncertainly at the pages in front of her. Casey was orphaned in 1999.
“Will that make it better?”
“Probably.”
She used to say clichéd things and she used to believe the clichés. She used to tell the students the world was more forgiving than they thought.
With a dark pen, Casey crosses out her name in every sentence. She is diligent, eager to improve—an ideal student, by most measures. When she’s finished, the page covered with I’s—Brenda thinks of I-beams, an invisible metal skeleton—they review the notes that Brenda has written in the margins. She wishes she could tell Casey that these notes are small and unimportant, but this would undermine her authority. If Casey were a little less conscientious, Brenda might respect her a little more.
Later, when Casey is gone, when the sky is still grey and rainless and the tea bags have shriveled up, like dead leaves or the empty brown shells that cicadas leave behind, Brenda drops them back into her mug. They swell into their old shape, fat and heavy and red again, even though the water has long since gone cold.
* * *
—
For the first months that she lived alone, Brenda heard nothing from Sam. She added his last name in her contacts, to remind herself of all the other Sams she knew. One night, she found a website called howmanyofme.com.
“There are 54,591 people with Sam’s exact name in the country,” she told her mother on the phone. “First and last.”
“Hm,” her mother said. Brenda could hear the dog barking, the sound of its nails on the kitchen tile.
“Don’t say what you’re going to say.”
“What am I going to say?”
“Oh, you know.” Brenda held her breath for a second. “Like, we’re all unique.”
“Well,” her mother said, while the barking got closer, “we are.”
Then, half a year after he disappeared, Sam called for the first time, his whole name appearing on Brenda’s phone. It was February, and it wasn’t raining as much as it should have been. She was intentionally burning two slices of toast. On a hot plate, she let an omelet crisp around the edges.
Disappeared wasn’t the right word—out loud, she said simply that he had left, a boring and unevocative word. But how else could she explain why every morning she woke up with a start, in the middle of a plotless, frantic dream in which she looked for him everywhere—in the closet, in the recycling bin, in the trunk with old towels and jumper cables—and never found him?
The phone kept ringing and the burnt toast jumped in the air. She didn’t pick up the call, but she watched the lit-up screen until his name vanished. Brenda had always liked things overcooked: the bitterness of blackened bread, the toughness of meat more grey than pink. Sam always insisted raw foods were sophisticated. Nice restaurants served bloody steak, silky fish, dishes whipped and emulsified so all you had to do was swallow. The most elegant desserts were always soft. Brenda buried her phone underneath a pillow and scraped the omelet onto a plate.
After that, Sam called once a week. On different days, but always in the morning, when she was brushing her teeth or steeping her tea, when she hadn’t yet said a single word out loud. In the end, this was the thing she couldn’t bear, that he would be the first person she spoke to. She started paying attention to how quiet her days were, filled with unostentatious sounds—the faucet running, her feet shuffling. A black walnut fell on the thin aluminum roof and she jumped.
Brenda imagined him calling from noisy places: subways, playgrounds, Starbucks. She imagined him calling from a crowd. The kind of place where you couldn’t hear yourself think, the kind of place where you might get lost. Brenda never picked up and Sam never left voicemails. Instead, he wrote to her after he called, emails that all began the same way. Sorry I missed you.
* * *
—
Brenda’s favorite student is Emily. In October, she submits an essay about fetuses. Recently, she was prescribed a powerful drug for acne. Her doctor, a man with bushy eyebrows and a large Adam’s apple that bobs while he speaks, told her not to get pregnant while taking it. Emily uses condoms and doesn’t have that much sex anyway, but even so, the idea of the fetus obsesses her. The problem with the medication is that it suppresses certain hormones, which would mess up male development in utero. The dermatologist wasn’t clear about what, exactly, would go awry.
“Maybe it would be effeminate,” he said.
“Feminine?”
“Sure.”
“And what about a female fetus?”
“What about it?”
“What would she be like?”
“Normal, I guess.”
“Girly?”
“I’m a dermatologist,” he said impatiently.
Emily wanted the prescription, so she stopped asking questions. On the walls of the doctor’s office, there were huge photos of pimpled chins and baggy eyes, faces splotched like gourds.
When she pictures the fetus, she pictures perfect skin. Thin and milk-colored, like a hard-boiled egg, with black-olive eyes, aquatic feet, and a blank space where the penis would be. The blankness is his best feature. He appears in her dreams sometimes, paddling happily in a bathtub or a pothole or curled up, content, on a moist pillow.
A boy in the class says the essay creeps him out.
“In a good way?” Emily asks.
He leans back, two chair legs off the ground. He shrugs.
The drug takes several weeks, sometimes several months, to kick in, and there is still a cluster of red pimples in the crease below Emily’s mouth. Her cheeks are pocked with scars and her eyelashes are long and beautiful.
The students don’t have much more to say about Emily’s essay. It is the best one of the semester, but Brenda doesn’t say so.
* * *
—
One Monday after class, there’s an email from Sam—longer than usual. Recently, Brenda has been keeping her phone in her desk drawer, because she couldn’t stop imagining all the things accumulating in her pocket. Election results and Amber Alerts, pictures of dogs and portentous messages: Call me and Stop by and Do you have a min. Didn’t everyone always have a min? This is a temporary fix, at best. While she teaches, the news piles up in the drawer, beside dozens of green pens, waiting for her.
The email says that Sam’s sister’s baby did not survive. It takes Brenda a while to understand this. She has not, until this moment, known there was a baby in the first place. Her comprehension occurs slowly, as if something unruly is being opened—a box with too many packing peanuts. Brenda pictures Sam’s sister’s stomach, which was usually firm and ta
n. She adds a baby to the picture. The stomach becomes firm and tan and round. She takes the baby away.
The email explains that the baby was just a month or two from being born. There was no warning. One morning, Sam’s sister woke up with a dull feeling. Like she was a radio that had stopped working, or a phone with a cord—some kind of old machine, plastic that people will soon forget how to use.
In the days afterward, Sam did everything he was told to. By his sister’s husband, by the doctor. He bought maxi pads and drinks with lots of electrolytes. He had moved into his own apartment, but he fed his sister’s cat and watered her spider plants. Those days, he writes, made him realize he liked being counted on. He stuck a finger in the hanging plant and the soil was moist. He borrowed a ladder. He googled how to throw away lightbulbs. Those days made him realize how much he would like being a dad.
Brenda wishes she had her laptop so that she could snap the screen shut. On the other side of the wall, the professor of modern poetry coughs, and Brenda can hear the mucus in his throat. She is glad for something to be disgusted by. She drags the email into a folder at the edge of her screen, which is labeled untitled because she can’t bring herself to label it Sam.
* * *
—
On Halloween, almost half the students arrive in costume: a zombie and an American Girl doll and a lot of cat ears. Emily has fake blood smeared on her cheek and her neck. The red of the blood is the same as the red of her pimples, and it looks as if her face has erupted, as if it has attacked itself.
Brenda has forgotten it’s a holiday. The leaves don’t change color in this part of the country and pumpkins go soft in the sun. Even if she’d remembered, she wouldn’t have known to dress up. Wasn’t that for kids? She had never been trick-or-treating herself, because it was one of many things that her father had not allowed: birthday parties and books about wizards and swear words that her students wouldn’t even know were swear words.
Instead of a costume, Brenda is wearing the same cardigan she wears every day, the one she keeps in her office all year long to protect against the cold of too much air-conditioning. She believes she gets goose bumps more easily than most people. Her skin contracts in gentle breezes, as if it’s afraid of losing its grip on the body underneath.
Casey offers Brenda a plastic crown.
“That’s okay,” Brenda says. “But thanks.”
She looks at her notes. Today’s class is supposed to be about revision. At the top of the page, she has written no one is perfect on the first try. She rehearses saying this in her head, wondering whether it will sound believable. Everyone is in their seats now, a semicircle of expectant faces, waiting for her to speak. At the beginning of each semester, Brenda requests a classroom with one big table and no desks. In the chair beside her, a boy with pretty eyes and a skinny, stubbly neck removes a set of vampire teeth from his mouth, covered in spit. The girl to his left sucks a lollipop. They seem like children. Of course they will believe her; they believe everything she says.
Brenda puts a prompt on the whiteboard, and the students bend over their notebooks. Surveying the tops of their heads—curly wigs and metallic hair dye, cheap masks pushed off their faces—she is surprised to discover that she feels left out. While they’re writing, she slips out of the room and down the hall to the vending machine, where you can buy bags of pretzels crumbled into powder and slices of bright yellow pound cake wrapped in plastic. She has never used the machine, which seems like an artifact of some melancholy past. Half the rows are empty, the labels old and faded.
In the months after her father died, when Brenda was a teenager, she had eaten everything she could get her hands on—the sweeter the better. She ate towering swirls of ice cream, whole sleeves of cookies, sugar dyed purple and pink and blue and poured straight into her mouth. Her friends had long since lost interest in these indulgences—the forbidden thrills they now sought cost more than a few dollars—and so she had been alone with her ravenousness, her tongue raw, her head aching.
Brenda buys all the Skittles left in the machine. Back in the classroom, the students watch while she pours the candy onto a napkin in the middle of the table. It scatters all over, hard rainbow beads in every direction. At least one rolls onto the floor. The students smile politely. Revision, Brenda says, scrawling big, slanted letters on the board. She underlines vision three times, but they don’t write it down. They begin to believe her just a little bit less.
The candy is still there, untouched, when class ends. Brenda sits alone at the table and puts a handful in her mouth. She tries to chew. The sugar coating melts and dribbles down her throat. She watches the students through the thin rectangular window on the door, their voices far away, their faces ghost white, blood red, witch green. They look happy. When Brenda spits the Skittles out, they are wet and misshapen and all the color is gone.
* * *
—
Brenda buys more candy on the way home from school. What’s left on the shelves is brightly colored or hard to eat—taffies and big chunks of brittle. She carves a face in an orange bell pepper, because the pumpkins are sold out. Inside the trailer, she nibbles the arms and legs off gummy bears and wonders if her house is considered the haunted house.
The sun goes down and the sidewalk fills up with voices. Every now and then, they stop—or she thinks they stop—at the end of the driveway. Brenda arranges the armless gummy bears in a line. She hears high-pitched voices and low-pitched voices, children and parents, insisting and resisting. The gummy bears tumble over, facedown, and she doesn’t pick them up. The hours go by slowly. No one knocks on the door. The birthday candle inside the pepper has long since gone out, a hardening puddle of blue wax.
The night turns quiet, as it always does on her street, but she hears the voices anyway, because they’re secret, taunting sounds. The sound of your hand being taken, the sound of being pulled in the right direction. This house, not this house. The sound of being told where to go.
In the morning, she wakes up too early, early enough to hear the smack of the newspaper landing on pavement.
“I love hearing that,” she said to Sam once, while their eyes were still closed. “It’s comforting.”
“It’s suburban,” he said.
But she liked it anyway, because it was proof of the kind of life she might one day have: pets and babies, dog walking and gutter cleaning, tying shoes and cleaning knees.
“A boring kind of life,” Sam said.
“Only because you’ve already lived it.”
They’d explained their pasts, of course. Brenda got the facts out of the way early, and then she avoided them. They sounded cinematic. They made her feel tired and disorganized, as if her organs had been rearranged, as if all the tubes inside her—for blood and food and air—had taken wrong turns. She drifted in and out of sleep, her head under Sam’s chin. She might have said, Is boring really so bad, or she might have only dreamed it.
* * *
—
In the middle of the driveway, Brenda finds the newspaper and a carton of eggs with nine left. She isn’t wearing shoes or a bra and the sun is rising in brilliant reds and pinks. Three of the eggs are already cracked, leaking orange yolk onto cardboard. There’s a roll of soggy toilet paper strung over the branches of the crape myrtle. She pictures teenage boys with puppet arms and untied shoes, with bangs they have to shrug out of their eyes. But it could have been girls, too.
She holds an egg in her palm. The shell is smooth and cold and a little bit wet, covered in the same dew as the newspaper’s blue cellophane sleeve. She wonders how hard she would have to press to crush it, to make the whole thing collapse. Her hands look strange, a little monstrous. When she shakes the egg up and down, she can hear the yolk sliding around inside, and that, too, is a strangeness.
When Brenda throws the first egg, it lands in the overgrown flower bed and doesn’t break,
so she picks it up and throws it harder, against the fence they built to block the view of the neighbors—to block the neighbors’ view of them. The egg splatters, then drips. The pieces of the shell are tiny and sharp. She throws the rest one by one while the sun comes up, the sky more and more brilliant, then suddenly grey. She throws them at piles of brick and piles of mud, at Tyvek walls, at the front steps that lead to nowhere. When there are only two left, she takes aim at the aluminum siding of the trailer. The light through the window would look warm and inviting to a stranger.
Brenda cracks the last one in half neatly and watches the phlegmy white slip down the storm drain. She cups the yolk in her palm, careful not to burst the membrane, and throws it as far as she can, into the hole that was once a house. For a moment, it’s a gold shape in the air.
NOW YOU KNOW
.
While she followed the recipe on the side of the Wheaties box, my grandmother told me about my grandfather’s infidelities. He was in the next room, but he was nearly deaf, and she didn’t bother to lower her voice.
“This is important,” she said, smashing the cereal with a chicken mallet, until the counter was covered in fine, brown powder.
I was twelve years old, but already it had been decided that I was the keeper of secrets. There were not many good listeners in the family—they liked to yell, even when they weren’t angry, as if the volume itself were invigorating—and though in one another they considered silence suspect, in me they considered it a kind of rare treasure. To tell me something, they told themselves, was an investment.
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