by Carol Anshaw
“Human shit?” Nora asks.
“We didn’t get a lab analysis.”
Madame X is fabulously terrible. Stevie and Lauren find it hilarious. Lana and John Forsythe, old as Methuselahs but gamely impersonating young newlyweds, new parents. Ricardo Montalban, heavy accent notwithstanding, wedged into the role of Connecticut hunt club playboy. The special credit for “Gowns by Jean-Louis.” The gowns themselves. The Technicolor dialogue.
Best of all, the tearjerker ending. After years spent in boozy reclusion, Lana has returned to New York, shot the blackmailing Burgess Meredith, and is about to be tried for his murder. To protect her identity, she burns her passport and signs her confession with a spidery X. In the years she has spent going downhill, her husband has become governor of New York. He comes to her trial to see the young public attorney assigned to her case—the music crescendoes—their son!
Stevie and Lauren are in a state of high hilarity, tossing wadded-up paper napkins at the TV screen while Jeanne remains impervious to these peripheral hijinks; she stays firmly enmeshed in the movie’s trumped-up tragedy. She yanks Kleenexes furiously from the box on the coffee table, snorts, and wipes her eyes.
Nora is neither laughing nor crying; rather, she has slipped into a niche between the two. The movie has given her an opportunity to crawl into this place, where she currently spends quite a bit of time. What she does inside is listen to Pam. Replay is all she has available at the moment. They have agreed to a hiatus, to cool things down, like the shower with a chain pull they used to have in the chemistry classroom in high school. If anything blew up, they were supposed to rush over, stand under, and pull the chain.
Of course, nothing at the moment is going to cool down anything. Surprisingly, Pam is new to passion. Up until now, romance has been more cut and dried for her. And so she tells Nora she is floored and baffled by the intensity of what has happened between them. Whereas Nora, from benefit of slightly more experience, recognizes this strain of fever, malarial in nature. Once you’ve been struck, you may recover, but always carry a susceptibility. In a weak moment you can be felled again, a quick swoon to the ground, then the lovely, terrifying incandescence that is the hallmark of the condition. And as you lie there, you have to wonder, is it the other you want, or the other as agent of the incandescence?
This afternoon Nora found a message waiting on her cell phone voicemail. Now she neither makes nor receives calls on this phone. It is now purely a vessel for messages. In not talking with Pam, only replaying the messages in her car, in the basement while she is doing laundry, Nora feels she is at least technically adhering to the hiatus. Pam is having less success. According to her latest message, she’s going crazy, has to talk with Nora, has to see her. She wants to talk about a future for the two of them, a life beyond Melanie. “She’s not going to be easy to get away from, but I’m prepared to run through the wall of fire.”
Hearing this declaration is terrifying. Nora has said nothing to Pam about a life beyond Jeanne. She doesn’t want a life without Jeanne. Still she replays Pam’s message a few times, listens as though something more must be done with these words of desire, as though they must be eaten, swallowed, inhaled. What, she has begun to wonder, is this—obsession or actual love, and what is the difference between the two? Does one merely disguise itself as the other? Here is the very scary part, the idea that you might think this huge, invasive force is love and too late see it’s only obsession in a cheesy costume, with a zipper up its back.
Boogeyman
FERN AWOKE on the outskirts of a nightmare. At eleven, she was still dogged by the same bad dreams that went back to the earliest parts of her childhood, populated with the same creeps and boogeymen. Dark, never quite revealed figures, lurking around corners, behind doorways, or as in this one, waiting behind the trees of a dense forest.
She dragged herself awake. If she fell back to sleep, it could well be back into the same dream, which would only pick up where it left off. This apartment, still unfamiliar, especially in its night shadows and shapes, was only a little less scary than the dream.
She was sweaty under her covers, also thirsty. She had to pee. She was going to have to get out of bed. It was a little after two; she could see the face of her clock in the watery light of the alley streetlamp. The greenish glow, which filled her small bedroom, was one of several crummy features of their new apartment. The apartment was the latest in the small steps down her mother had taken since she and Fern’s father split up, and all of them moved out of their house.
Her mother tried to turn these moves into an adventure, as though they were pioneers in a Conestoga wagon, or circus performers in a colorful caravan. But there was no caravan, just the two of them opening and retaping the packing boxes they’d moved in with the year before, heading for some place her mother was convinced would have more reliable heat, or less noisy neighbors, or better pest control.
Her father now lived in a loft apartment that was really just one huge room and a bedroom and a bath, but no space set aside especially for her. When she was there—most weekends—she slept on the foldout sofa in the big room. During the week, she was here with her mother. A visitor would think Nora and Fern must be very close. They ate little dinners together, sometimes only apples and cheese and crackers, but with everything arranged on plates as though they were having a small party with no one else invited. Then her mother helped Fern with her homework. They watched TV together. Sometimes they went to Kmart late and bought paper towels and underpants, little frames for photos they set out along the windowsill.
But the apartment had another life. Fern could feel this life drifting around when she came home from her father’s on Sunday night. The place smelled different, things had been moved around a little. There were new products. Honey with a honey dipper in a kitchen cabinet. In the refrigerator, a jar of something powerful-smelling called “mango pickle.” And in the bathroom, candles, a whole new category of odd item, had just started showing up recently. Tonight, when she went into the bathroom to pee and drink the glasses of really cold water required as part of getting rid of the nightmares, she could tell that one of the candles had been lit earlier, leaving an apple scent hanging around in the moist air. The moistness meant the shower had been on. Fern had become a detective assigned to the case of her mother. Because although her mother was here, she was also somewhere else, sometimes even while she was here. When Fern wasn’t looking or listening, or was asleep.
She checked to see that both the front and back doors were locked. Lucky was on the overstuffed chair in the corner of the living room, guarding them all. In this way, he was totally a joke. He always settled in as though positioning himself to keep an eye on everything at once, like a sentry on the Great Wall of China. But the one time there really was something to watch—someone breaking into their old garage by prying open the side door—he didn’t make a peep, not a woof. Totally off-duty. Now, as she passed by his chair, he opened an eye, then closed it and flipped over onto his back with a wheeze.
She knew she was too old to go looking for comfort, but went to find her mother anyway. If she woke her up and told her about the dream, it would go away. This trick always worked. When she got to the door of her bedroom, though, and pushed against it lightly, the darkness was clear enough to see that the bed was too filled for it to be just one person. There was talking that wasn’t talking exactly, and a rearrangement of shapes under the blanket. A long, muffled sound that went “nnnnnnnn.” The room smelled, too, like a tent at summer camp—filled with too much breathing in and out.
Fern left unseen, unheard, her presence unfelt as she backed out softly and retreated to her room.
Messenger
FERN FINDS JAMES lying next to his bike, flat on his back on the quarried rocks along the lake, north, up past Foster. His eyes are closed, his hands clasped across his chest. He looks as though he’s waiting to be beamed up.
She has biked around the North Side for a couple of hours trying
to find him. He has an assortment of brooding spots. This is one. There’s also a toboggan hill up in Rogers Park. The roof of one of the office buildings where he delivers packages and to which he has a key. Places that are deserted in their off-hours, or off-seasons.
Today, although sunny, is also one of the first really cold days of the fall, the signal day for winter. The water is the fierce blue of northern seas. And so, even though it’s Saturday, James has this stretch of the lakefront nearly to himself, sharing it only with a trio of gang guys a short ways off, the wide legs of their pants snapping in the wind like black sails. And a little closer, a brawny older woman, one of the population of Russians up here at the north edge of the city, leaning back on her elbows against the first level of rocks, coat and sweater and blouse piled beside her as she offers her enormous, brassiered chest to the sky.
James’s usual gloom sometimes bottoms out in chasms of desolation and despair. When this happens, he goes back on an antidepressant that lifts him out of the abyss, but also flattens him in ways that, after a time, become uncomfortable.
“It’s like the med installs a floor,” he has told her. “It will only let me go so far down. Which is great. Without it, as you know, I can take some pretty headlong plunges. But the other part is that there are no highs. And it’s terrible for sex. You go, like, ‘Sex, what’s the big deal?’ And that wasn’t so important when I was alone, but now that we’re together, well, making love is one of the best things about us.”
He thinks the depression comes, one way or the other, from his mother.
“I mean, I could have a chip of my mother’s DNA, or I could be this way from having been raised by someone who was smoking and on the sofa through most of my childhood.”
James’s depression, Fern has begun to see, is a fundamental part of who he is. In addition to being enormously kind to everyone (but especially to Fern), and in possession of a wonderfully oddball point of view, he is also someone who needs to be on medication a good deal of the time. He has a therapist he sees once a week, a psychopharmacologist he checks in with every month. Even on his sunniest days, deep cold currents run through him.
Today, though, life has dealt up something to which he can apply his vast reserves of sorrow. His friend Kevin, another bike messenger, has died, a road rage hit-and-run, some guy in a van. Somebody got the license number and the cops tracked the guy down.
Fern stands and watches him from a few feet away. Even after all her efforts to find him and make sure he’s okay, she briefly considers getting back on her bike and leaving before he sees her. She has moments when she doesn’t feel quite up to the task of keeping James afloat, when flash cards of Cooper flip into view, and she gets slammed with a nostalgia for those long, languid months of being in love with someone who, by virtue of his absence, required no maintenance at all. Then, the thought flips away as quickly as it flipped in.
“Hey,” she says as she approaches. She is drowned out by Canada geese, making such a racket as they group into formation overhead that she has to repeat herself, this time shouting a little, before he sits up and smiles, happy to see her even though he is sad about everything else. She drops down next to him, and falls into a groove of bumping lightly against him for the next little while, to show him she’s there. Right there.
James has his own tattoo: little wheels on his ankle, little wheels with speed lines and clouds of dust behind them. He and his friends are boys in motion. (Fern suspects that for James, movement provides flight from the sorrow that can accumulate around him if he stands still too long.) Mercuries with wheels instead of wings. Some, like James, are couriers. Others do something more stationary for a living, then spend their time off skateboarding or rollerblading. They are free agents in the treacherous traffic of the city. The risk is part of the thrill. Dodging and weaving among the too many people getting places via too many transportational modes, in too many separate hurries and private fogs, in the midst of too many cell phone calls, juggling too many lattes.
This is different, though.
“It’s not only this guy. It’s like, if this guy in the van is even possible, then there’s some terrible breakdown in the human circuitry. Did you meet Vik—Vikram? He’s from India, and he says in Calcutta when someone gets run over, they just leave the body there. There are too many people to bother about just one person anymore.”
Fern tugs at the sleeve of his jacket and says, “You can’t go global. Global is the wrong direction. You’ll wind up way too far down. You have to go small. Come with me. We need to find something small and really good to do.”
“Okay,” he says, but his voice is numb.
“We’ll go take Lucky down the alley where the big scary black dog is locked behind the gate, and Lucky can bark a bunch and get him all lathered up.”
“Okay.”
“Then we can pick up Vaughn at my mom’s and let him throw his soft blocks around. You know, how he thinks it’s a game with a big point and he’s winning.”
“He does like that an awful lot,” James says, but it still takes a while longer before Fern can unglue him from his rock and get him up and going again.
Tracy has been gone for over three weeks. She hasn’t disappeared exactly; she phones Fern every few days. She is up north, in Wisconsin, way up. Scenic as shit, she says.
Her being up there is because of a guy named Dale. He must have been the guy on the phone, the one Tracy wouldn’t talk to in front of Fern. Tracy met him in the park. He was fishing in one of the ponds. He’s big on fishing. He had a job as a mover, but that got dropped pretty quickly in favor of taking Tracy up to spend some time in a place called Otter Lake, in a double-wide trailer that belongs to his father or stepfather. He comes from a family amorphously extended by divorce and remarriage and sex in the parking lots of bars, really more of an extended town than an extended family. Everyone’s at least an “uncle” or a “cousin.”
The guy who is Dale’s father or stepfather wears a baseball cap that says LIE DOWN HONEY, I THINK I LOVE YOU. Dale’s whole family lives in trailers, or prefab houses that are really just trailers without the wheels. Friday nights they have a fish fry and everyone eats hearty. Good manners is spreading your napkin over your unzipped pants while you digest. The guys work in construction, when they do work, but mostly everyone hangs out in the kitchen of one or another trailer doing a lot of slow, all-day drinking, which picks up speed in the evenings. That’s when the back-seat sex and the jealous rages kick in to liven things up. For added entertainment, there is apparently a lot of falling—off docks, down stairs—that, along with hunting mishaps and ice-fishing frostbite, accounts for a steady parade to hospital emergency rooms, where the drinking and fighting often continue.
Tracy reports every couple of days from a gas station pay phone. “You want to do an anthropology paper, get your butt up here. Bring a notebook. Definitely bring a tape recorder. Except for having a satellite dish to pull in the Packer games, Dale’s family is your basic primitive tribe.” If Fern didn’t love Tracy, these stories would be hilarious. As it is, though, they are pretty harrowing to listen to.
When she handed Vaughn off to Fern, Tracy was going away for a “long weekend.” In every call since, she’s coming back “soon,” but this return remains vague, holding its place firmly in the near future. Every few calls, she talks about coming down to “fetch” Vaughn. Fern understands that Dale’s family isn’t the Mansons, but it doesn’t sound as if it’s a “family values” sort of family either. Fern doesn’t like the way “fetch” has crept into Tracy’s vocabulary. No one’s going to do any fetching of Vaughn if Fern can help it.
This protectiveness toward Vaughn followed improbably out of a moment soon after Tracy left, when Fern panicked in the face of what she was taking on. She and James brought a car full of stuff over to his apartment and then James had to rush downtown to work and there she sat in the middle of an encampment of highchair and bouncer and crib and a short stack of Pampers boxes. Cans of fo
rmula. Bottles with nipples. Plush toys and a mobile of cartoon birds. All of this stuff sat silent while at the same time emitting a low reverberation, like a faulty stereo speaker when there’s no music playing. Here, the reverb said, was her immediate future, a replacement future for the one she had thought she was heading into. Because of someone else’s mistake compounded by someone else’s irresponsibility.
And then the silence was broken by Vaughn, in the bouncer, adding his own bit of commentary.
“Ba!” was what he had to say, a small explosion of joy, about what, Fern couldn’t be sure. But there he was, happy with his immediate situation, not asking Fern for a thing. And it was this realization—that he wouldn’t ask for anything, that he couldn’t be his own advocate for anything—that made it crucial to give him what he needed, whatever that was going to be.
She was not the only one to respond in this way; Vaughn has become a new element in many schedules. Fern has morning classes this semester (a piece of luck), while James keeps the baby at his place. (“Like John Lennon” is how he has characterized this arrangement, and Fern has taken this casually dropped comment as his low-key acknowledgment that he is Vaughn’s father.) Fern takes over in the afternoons, and if she’s working she brings Vaughn along to Harold’s. She leaves him in the living room while she takes her psychic calls. Harold has a calming influence on Vaughn. He finds records at the library, songs about ducks and trucks and such—many look from their covers to be songs Harold might have listened to during his own childhood—that bring Vaughn down from the rowdy, toy-banging boy he typically is to a mellow guy. The only big switch Fern has had to make is giving up her Thursday shift and keeping Vaughn while Harold has the canasta girls over. The canasta girls are feminine, but they are not maternal.