Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  For months we poured out our secret grief every afternoon on the toilet block roof. We read their diaries, scoured their letters, obsessively compared and contrasted characteristics of these young women we’d lost, as if trying to decode some puzzle or classify a genus or species. In this way we kept the other’s sister alive. While they had obvious differences—e.g., one had a voice like a glockenspiel (Veronica), the other a car alarm (Molly); one wept into pillows (Veronica), the other into stuffed bears (Molly); one viewed herself as a princess (Veronica), the other a high priestess (Molly)—there were so many disturbing similarities that the more we talked, the more they seemed like a two-headed creature with one narrow waist, twenty weird toes, and four double-jointed elbows; an übersister, made up of door slamming and mirror staring and the ability to make a bong out of anything (a Pringles can, a carrot, a golf ball) and fake tears and histrionic journal writing and shrooming breasts and crushing putdowns to parents and secret cigarette stashes and early periods and bathroom ruckuses and iron deficiencies and improbable boyfriends and acrobatic mood swings and excessive hair-dryer usage and lame henna tattoos. They stood in doorways unsure whether to enter or exit, and sleeplessly stared out rain-streaked windows. They often pretended to not see us (Veronica) or hear us (Molly). We consoled each other that their meanness was bravado, that the girls would have grown out of torture eventually. I recall how Aldo, as he spoke, would look at his left hand for evidence of his sister’s incisor marks, sadly long faded, and reminisce how she would smoke her cigarettes in his room so he’d get the blame. I told him how I still felt phantom Chinese-burn pains on my arm, and how I hated when Molly held a mirror to me, literally. Aldo admitted he often sat in Veronica’s bedroom running his finger over spilled nail polish that had dried on her bedside table, or trying on her hat collection—fake tiaras, chef hats, crowns, plastic halos, Indian feathers, Stetsons—or looking at her fake ID concealed in her annotated Anaïs Nin journals, or rereading dozens of Veronica’s own poems; that was her main interest: poems about madwomen recently out of attics and those remaining in rooms of their own. It was in those unrhymed stanzas he learned things no brother wanted to: about periods and handsy uncles, how she hated blow jobs but wanted to be nationally ranked, how although she did not yet have a serious boyfriend, she wanted an open marriage. Mostly, as he sat on her bed, Aldo remembered her pitying gaze, as if she knew something bad was going to befall him and didn’t want to be around to see it.

  Together we said their names until their names lost power; we had seances every night and then suddenly we stopped, as though we’d grown out of them at precisely the same time. Our mind’s eyes were sore and tired, we had exhausted them; there was nothing more to say, nothing left to interpret. We were two friends but also two brothers, not to each other, but to our dead sisters. And when those sisters receded into the ether, the brotherhood remained.

  It should be noted, incidentally, that sometimes Aldo spoke like someone with hypothermia trying to keep himself alive. That’s not to say he wasn’t an acute listener—it was actually more common for him to ask a series of intrusive questions about your private thoughts and shameful secrets—but from time to time he’d burst into a furious monologue (a habit that was to become familiar to arresting officers and presiding judges in later years) or regale you with interlocking anecdotes in excremental detail, as if submitting to some maddening impulse he himself seemed almost sorry for, and in the face of which there was zero possibility of interrupting.

  On that dawn tour, Aldo guided me to a street that had rows upon rows of houses with houses stuck on top of them, clumsily added by affluent families who had nowhere to go but up. It was his opinion, he said, that his pathological fear of being alone came from the inability of his father, Henry, to stop renovating their house. “Is that so?” I asked absently, as Aldo went on to psychoanalyze himself in his outside voice. In spite of periodic recessions, he said, these renovations had been ongoing throughout his childhood and adolescence and therefore, he said, sounding unexpectedly shrill, his phobia was not just a result of growing up in what was for all intents and purposes an open construction site, in a home that had containment areas and no-go zones and so many workplace accidents the family always joked that they affected the national average; nor was it simply due to his childhood being choked with dust, or one foot regularly plummeting down holes while the opposing leg bent to near-fracture angles, or because he slipped into cracks, tripped over exposed wires, was soaked by leaky pipes, and threatened by half-demolished walls, and it wasn’t even, if that’s what I was thinking (I wasn’t), because he existed in a world in which nothing was permanent and everything could be improved upon. I tried to say something but Aldo had gained an unstoppable momentum. To rearrange my facial expression or simply walk away were my only options. No, he said, his actual psychological development was warped by the construction workers themselves, the incredible team of unprofessionals he always felt cursed to remember clearly.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  We had stopped outside a beige three-story monstrosity replete with columns, imposing doors, oversized chimneys, and church-like windows.

  “This is it,” he said.

  Aldo knocked vigorously on the front door and encouraged me to press my face against the bay windows. Through the tasseled drapes, we could make out floral-patterned armchairs and a fake chandelier with plastic strawberries. Growing up, any plan to slip downstairs and watch TV was often foiled by the warm body of a stoned cousin sprawled on the couch, he explained, and he couldn’t get so much as a glass of milk without haggling with despotic aunts with pyramids of hair and smudged eyeliner, or climb a staircase without plodding behind slow-moving grandparents, or use the toilet without waiting until he got severe kidney pains, or go to bed without suffering twenty solid minutes of good-night kisses, or turn off his night light without listening to the incoherent bedtime stories of drunk uncles, stories so long and boring his pulse would slow to hear them. It was perhaps because, Aldo went on to speculate, at any hour of the day or night there were clusters of human beings three generations apart gabbing interminably in his living room that he’d felt gripped ever since by a terror of solitude. “And even at the time, I was so aware of this that often I’d wish they would all die at once,” he said. “In their sleep, of course—I’m no monster.”

  We moved around into the backyard where the roots of an enormous tree had broken the terra-cotta tiles. From here the peak of the neighbor’s turret was visible. Aldo stepped up onto the porch and rattled the French-door handles. Locked.

  “We always put the key above the frame.” He reached for the key, but thankfully there wasn’t one.

  “That was my bedroom,” he said, pointing up. “I used to smoke out that window every night and pray to Zeus and Apollo to return Veronica from Hades or else to bring me celestial nymphs—I was really into Greek mythology back then.” Aldo went on about how the sadistic ambushes and the use of enchantment and the monstrous libidos of these immortal gods rang true, at least to him. I lowered myself into a wooden chair covered in dried bird shit and contemplated how, from a certain angle, I could identify every personality defect in my best friend.

  “You see,” he said, “my parents bought this house two years after they were married, but it was Henry’s brother, Brett, who started it all.”

  “Started what?” I asked.

  Aldo’s uncle Brett—who lived the better part of his later years in a swivel chair and then went camping by himself one New Year’s Eve and died of a burst appendix—had always urged Aldo to accompany him down to the basement, which was spookier than most catacombs, where he’d swear himself to secrecy, then ask Aldo about his sexual awakening, and then, over dinner, repeat his answers to the rest of the family, to their sickening laughter. It was Brett and his wife, Cynthia, whose hatred of the saxophone was only equaled by Brett’s proficiency in—what else?—the saxophone, who started the colonization of the neighborhood, or th
e Benjamin Sprawl, as they called it, when they bought the house next door. They were followed by paternal grandparents, a truckload of cousins, and copious uncles and aunts who, one by one, as the neighbors moved out, moved in. And that was why there were unsubstantiated complaints to the police that the family had intimidated the neighbors into selling—though while the Benjamins were one of those families where at least one person per generation gets himself into monumental debt and tries to fake his own death, they were not essentially criminals. Yet because Aldo’s big-bellied, overtattooed cousins spent all day in the street teaching their underage children to drive cars, and because they were now well and truly entrenched in the neighborhood—sharing fences and tossing packets of sugar over them, waving to one another from opposite windows—the nightly family gatherings became mobile. They moved through the streets like a people on strike, hollering to each other, chairs under their arms or in wheelbarrows, eating dinner in one house, dessert in another. They renovated each other’s abodes, and on birthdays and at christenings and recitals, on Friday afternoons and all through the weekends, they were in one backyard or another with naked children everywhere and babies dangling from every breast, and there were out-of-control dogs and too many cats and driveways crammed with cars and someone was invariably blocking someone else in. You could always hear it: “You’ve blocked me in!” “Who’s blocked me in?” “I’m blocked in!” All this could be misinterpreted by a certain sort of mind, Aldo supposed, as intimidation.

  At this point, I had to restrain thoughts of my own childhood. Reminiscing is contagious.

  “Anyway, the funny part of it was that the routine complaints that we’d intimidated the neighbors into selling inevitably gave way to the idea that we should intimidate the neighbors into selling. We did this a few times,” Aldo said, in a slightly thrilled voice. “Let rats out in a backyard, made frightening noises, played heavy metal, but our favorite was to gather at the door of a neighbor’s house and stand there staring silently, even the children, twenty or thirty of us glaring wide-eyed with dreamy ferocity through the front windows, like some deranged inhabitants of a village of the damned.”

  I said, “You did what?”

  “We very rarely descended into actual violence, the idea was simply to make the owners feel uneasy in their own homes.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Normally they’d call the police and we’d just retire into the garden next door and deny everything. Then the next day we’d be back again, a beast with a hundred fairly good-looking heads.”

  “I see.”

  “So in one of these intimidation sessions, we gathered outside number seventy-seven,” he said, in a voice that flared up and died out like a cough in an empty cinema. “We had decided on standing in a semicircle and inching forward every ten minutes or so. We were aiming, if the owners looked out their windows sporadically, for a strange jump-cut effect. You get it?”

  “Amusing.”

  “We thought so too. I remember asking my Dad how long we had to keep standing like that, and he said, ‘Just another twenty minutes or so and we’ll call it a day.’ Then the door opened and out stepped a tall, gangly man with improbably long sideburns and maybe the smallest mouth I’d ever seen on an adult. He said, ‘My name’s Howard.’ Uncle Brett asked if he had reconsidered our offer. He asked what we were offering. ‘Market price,’ we all said together. Howard laughed a laugh that I thought would cost him sexual partners. He said, ‘Can you wait a few more minutes? My niece just put the kettle on,’ and he kept peering inside as if waiting for something to happen. I started having the feeling that we were being set up, but nothing happened other than the near-medical impossibility that in all this time nobody in my whole gabby family said a word. Then a dark-haired woman came out who I thought was his wife, but I later learned she was his sister, and that the middle-aged siblings lived together in this, their childhood home.”

  I shuddered. Adult siblings who live together are a special case in our society. We are right to be afraid of them.

  “The door opened wider and the niece came out and stood there in the evening sun exchanging multilayered glances with her uncle, and some cousin behind me was cracking his knuckles and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, this creature with the dark eyebrows and nose ring and bleached dreads who looked like one of those girls who’d come out of a violent bout of acne scar free but with a permanent expression of hurt surprise and no concept of how beautiful she was. Her uncle was mouthing words under his breath, maybe doing a headcount, and the sun seemed to be setting inside the leaves and everyone was frozen in a stare-off, and finally the niece was staring right at me with an intensity that carried the promise of misconduct, when her uncle said, ‘Stella, these are our neighbors,’ and opened his front door fully, and Stella said, ‘Won’t you please come in.’ Nobody did. They all turned and went home. Except me.

  • • •

  Under the stormwater blue of the night sky, dangling our feet off our favorite toilet block roof at the tennis courts, Aldo was eating a Chiko Roll with weird solemnity and talking about how I should have my sights set on a local beauty with one predominant physical flaw—an aspiring teen model with terrible skin, for instance—before getting totally worked up about his fear that if he ever got a girl pregnant he’d be the type of father who’d accidentally ash on his own baby.

  “You seem stressed,” I said.

  “I’m eighteen this year.”

  “Mine’s in two months. So?”

  “So,” he said, glumly, “soon we can be tried as adults.”

  I laughed. Aldo turned his red eyes mournfully on me, as if I’d failed the bid for mutual understanding. I looked up at the moon that spread a weak light over everything. He held up the fried thing he was eating. “There is no food group to which this belongs.”

  “Toss it.”

  He took another bite instead and went off on some tangent about how lame it was to be a guy sitting around waiting for girls to give us the thumbs-up, about how they got to be indoctrinated into womanhood by their own bodies whereas we had to reach manhood by performing some arcane task like going to war, or else had it forced upon us by violent and energetic sadists. I knew Aldo’s horror of turning eighteen was twofold: the weirdness of approaching adulthood while his once older sister stayed ever young, but more pressingly—his persistent virginity; he had been such a late bloomer that Leila had dragged him to a pediatric endocrinologist who blithely insisted he take his constitutional delay on the chin. By the time he was developmentally ready, he was so besotted with Stella that it had to be her or nobody, and that was the real source of his anxiety, because he still had no firm opinion on whether she liked him in that way, even though she had held his hand at Henry’s funeral, accompanied him and Leila to the airport to await Veronica’s repatriated body from Indonesia, and afterward, with Henry and Veronica gone, when Leila and Aldo packed up everything and moved away from the Benjamin Sprawl into their fishbowl-like first-floor apartment on the other side of the city, on most afternoons either Aldo and Stella would make the hour-long journey to see the other, to smoke pot, sneak into concerts, hang out at Luna Park, break into neighbors’ hot tubs on starry nights. Or Aldo would thread through the dense clot of tourists at Darling Harbour to watch Stella playing a “gig,” which was really just her busking without a license outside the ferry terminal. Personally, I found her voice grating and her lyrics impossible to understand—the only one I’d caught was about her dream of fucking a toll-booth operator in his place of business—but when I articulated my critique Aldo snapped back, “Stella gives voice to the voiceless.”

  I said, “Only, she says things the voiceless would never say.”

  He said, “She said that meeting me was like finding money in an old pair of pants.”

  I said, “See, I don’t know what that means.”

  It seemed to me that Stella was so dedicated to her vocation that if she and Aldo ever got together, her self-reliance would doom t
heir relationship, as Aldo at that time was not dedicated to anything except Stella herself. There was also the unavoidable fact that while we were still wrestling our way out of childhood, Stella seemed fully adult. To accentuate this impression, she’d eccentrically give her friends a key to her house, since she kept losing hers—she said giving away copies was “easier than trying to change your personality”—she drove a dented Ford Falcon GT, wore corduroy and leather and denim, all together; and when she wasn’t writing songs under a tarpaulin strung with fairy lights in the ferny backyard of her rambling house, she gave private guitar lessons to children and businessmen. And she had a high turnover of mentors she slept with: older, bearded guitarists who gave her hickeys that looked like attempts at strangulation. Aldo frantically insisted on “advising” her on these relationships; even while hauling around her amp and microphone stand like a Sherpa, he found ways to subtly run down or undermine her boyfriends. He was weirdly attuned to a person’s insecurity and embarrassing habits and likely sources of shame. This is probably where he developed his rudimentary skill set in psychological manipulation—he found he could turn her opinion on a dude in one conversation.

  So: Aldo and Stella locked arms when they walked; she would wipe her mouth with his sleeve after she ate; they played footsies; she’d often rest her hand on his knee when she talked. Now, he said in a declamatory manner on the toilet block roof, he needed “the matter settled.” He itemized her finer points, including how she “enjoys scaring strangers with hiccups” and “yields to any suggestion whatsoever.” His favorite thing on earth was “when she’s sparking a cigarette at night, her face lit by matches in the dark.” I couldn’t take much more of this. “And the way she walks!” he shouted. OK, I knew what he meant—in those days we often fell in love with girls because of their postures; some girls have such straight backs it drives you crazy—but still.