One morning on my way home from the sandwich shop and bus depot, I passed a yard sale. It was the usual garbage: baseball caps, plastic kitchen utensils, baby clothes folded into tiny cubes spread out on stained floral bedsheets. The only books at Alna yard sales were convenience-store paperbacks or cookbooks for microwave ovens. I didn’t like to read while I was in Alna anyway. I didn’t have the patience. That day a tall, gray, metal sunlamp caught my eye. The scrap of masking tape stuck to its base was marked in red: three dollars. I didn’t care if it worked. If it didn’t, trying to fix it would occupy me for at least an afternoon. It was worth the trouble.
“Whom do I pay?” I said to the gaggle of women sitting on the front steps. They all had the same flat, long, brown hair, the same pinched eyes, bulbous mouths, and throats like frogs. Their bodies were so fat, their breasts hung and rested on their knees. They pointed to the matriarch, a huge woman sitting on a piano bench in the shade of a large oak. Her left eye was swollen shut, bruised yellow, black, and blue. I gave her the money. Her hand was tiny and plump, like a doll’s, fingernails painted bright red. She stuffed the bill I gave her in the pocket of her worn cotton housedress, pulled a sucker from her mouth, and smiled, showing me—not without some hostility—a lone bottom row of teeth rotted down to stubs, like a baby’s teeth. She was probably around my age, but she looked like a woman with a hundred years of suffering behind her—no love, no transformations, no joy, just junk food and bad television, ugly, mean-spirited men creaking in and out of stuffy rooms to take advantage of her womb and impassive heft. One of her obese offspring would soon overtake her throne, I imagined, and preside over the family’s abject state of existence, the beating hearts of these young women pointlessness personified. You’d think that, sitting there, oozing slowly toward death with every breath, they’d all go out of their minds. But no—they were too dumb for insanity. “Rich bitch,” I imagined the mother to be thinking as she plunked her sucker back into her mouth. I lugged the lamp up the street, thinking of her flesh spreading around her as she lay down on her bed. What would it feel like, I wondered, to let myself go? I was eager to get home, uncrinkle the little fortune in my pocket. If the sunlamp did work, I would bring it back down to the city with me. The light could soothe me in the winter and clean my dirty city soul each night.
It’s not that I lacked respect for the people of Alna. I simply didn’t want to deal with them. I was tired. During the school year, all I did was contend with stupidity and ignorance. That’s what teachers are paid to do. How I got stuck teaching Dickens to fourteen-year-olds is a mystery to me. I’d never planned on working all my life. I’d had this fantasy that I’d get married and suddenly find a calling beyond the humiliating need to make a living. Art or charity work, babies—something like that. Each time seniors had me sign their yearbooks, I wrote, “Good luck!” then stared off into space, thinking of all the wisdom I could impart but didn’t. At graduation, I’d take a few Benadryl to soothe my nerves, watch those tasseled caps float around, all the idiotic high fives. I’d shake a few hands, go home to load my car with musty summer clothes and a case of sparkling mineral water, then drive the five hours up to Alna.
When I got back to my house with the lamp that day, a girl was standing in my front yard. She had her back turned, and she seemed to be staring up at the windows, a hand held over her head to block the sun’s glare. Nobody had ever come into my yard before. In all my time in Alna, nobody but Clark had ever even knocked on my door. I put the lamp down by my car and cleared my throat.
When the girl turned around, I saw that she was pregnant. The swell of her baby made a tent of her long black sleeveless shirt. She was thin otherwise, a scrawny young mother, the kind my sister abhorred. Her leggings were pastel purple, and her hair was short like a boy’s, and blond. She approached me, her hands supporting the small of her back, wincing in the sunshine, trying to smile.
“Is this your house?” she asked. As she came closer, I thought I detected rose perfume. A raised mole on her chin glistened with sweat. I folded my arms.
“Yes,” I stammered, “it’s my house. I’m the owner.” I guessed at who she was then—a former tenant. A Teri or Maxine or Jennifer or Jill, whatever their names were. Maybe she’d forgotten something in the house. Those girls always left things behind—a hairbrush, a bobby pin, empty boxes of crackers, tampons in the medicine cabinet, stray socks and underwear between the washer and dryer. I happily used up their leftover bars of vanilla- and floral-scented soaps, each laced with hairs and gouged by their fingernails in sharp half-moons. “Can I help you?”
The pregnant girl stood before me now, face gleaming, and looked down at the sunlamp. She held up one hand to wave hello. In her other hand she carried a sheaf of flyers.
“I’m a housecleaner,” she said. “I wanted to drop this off.”
She handed me one of the flyers. It was a hazy photocopy of a handwritten ad that included her name and phone number and a long list of the services she provided. “I do laundry. I sweep and mop. I straighten up. I dust. I vacuum,” I read aloud. She’d drawn stars around the page, a smiley face at the bottom, at the end of a line that read, “Ask about babysitting.” Her hourly rate was less than what a person would make working at a fast-food restaurant. I considered pointing that out to her but didn’t. I picked the lamp back up.
“Do you need help?” she asked. I ignored her tanned, outstretched arms and let her follow me across the yard. “I cleaned your house last year, actually,” she said. “After you left, before the students moved in, I guess.”
Clark hadn’t told me he’d outsourced the cleaning.
“So you know Clark,” I said, pulling out my keys.
“Yeah,” she said, “I know him.”
I didn’t bother to wonder whether Clark might be responsible for her pregnancy. He didn’t have it in him. Even with me he’d been fiercely dedicated to his fancy brand of condoms. But it burned me to picture him ogling the girl, counting out the cash to pay her for cleaning up my filth. Poor girl. She was pretty for Alna, and tough in a way that came through in her shoulders. They weren’t wide, per se, but angular and taut with budding muscles like a teenage boy’s. She must have thought I was old and ugly. I could have been her mother, I suppose. I struggled with the sunlamp as we climbed the few steps to my front door.
“Clark should hire you to clean before I arrive, too,” I said, opening the door and putting the lamp down inside. “The bathroom especially is always yucky when I get here.”
“I can usually do a house like this in an hour or two,” she said, still standing out on the doorstep. “But I’ve been getting slower and slower, with this baby thing.” She pointed down at her belly, then looked up at me, as if she would find some sympathy there. Her eyes were clear and blue but hooded and tired. She spoke with the grumbling, rhythmless lilt of Alna talk. Maybe she had a dragon or a devil tattooed on the small of her back, or a Playboy bunny on her lower abdomen, now stretched and mutated by her pregnancy, that “baby thing,” as she called it. I studied her face as she peered over my shoulder into the darkened house.
“Want to clean now?” I asked her.
“Okay, sure.”
Then, despite the information I’d just read on the flyer, I asked, “How much do you charge?”
She shrugged, those gleaming shoulders twitching, clavicles glistening in the sunshine. “Ten bucks?”
“For the whole house?”
She shrugged again.
“Come on in,” I said and held open the door.
“Let me just call my mom.”
I pointed to the phone on the wall by the fridge and watched her waddle past me toward it. She put the flyers down on the counter. Her belly was huge, nearly ready to pop. What kind of mother lets her pregnant teen wander around outside in the sweltering heat? I wondered. But I knew the answer. This was the Alna way.
I stared at the girl’s f
ace as she passed, her tiny pores, her small, upturned nose, oily purple makeup darkening into the crease of her heavy eyelids. She dialed the phone and lifted the collar of her shirt to wipe the sweat off her chin. I opened the cabinet under the sink and gestured toward the cleaning supplies down there. She nodded. “Hi, Momma,” she said, turning away from me, coiling the cord around her thin wrist.
I left her there, went into the den, unwrapped my sandwich on the coffee table, and unscrewed my soda. I was a grown-up. I could sit on the sofa and eat a sandwich. I didn’t have to call my mother. I didn’t even have to clean my own house. I listened to the girl talk. “I’m fine, Momma. No, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be home in time for dinner.” After she hung up, I heard her rattling the bucket of sprays and cleaners from under the kitchen sink.
“You must be hungry,” I said to her, eyeing her slim calves as she walked past me through the den. I held out half of my sandwich.
“I’m okay,” she replied, one arm weighed down by the bucket, the other dragging a broom behind her. “I’ll start upstairs,” she said and lugged the stuff up the steps, her face flat and serious, the enormous bulge of her belly straining against her shirt, which was already darkened with sweat down the front. I chewed and watched her disappear up the stairs. Shreds of lettuce spilled out the sides of my sandwich. A slice of pickled jalapeño smacked the hardwood floor. I left it there and ate, happily. It was deadly quiet in that house without the television on. I could hear the toilet flush, the girl grunt and breathe, the scrub brush scrape rhythmically against the bathroom tile. I gulped my soda down, burped with my mouth open wide. I wrapped up the dinner half of my sandwich and set it aside.
Then I took out my zombie dust. I figured I could just test it to see what the zombies had chosen for me that day, a sneak preview of what I had in store. Later, once the girl was gone, it would be nice to take a shower, walk through the clean house, silent and fresh, and sit at the coffee table in my bathrobe with a rolled-up dollar bill. I’d let my soul fly wherever the stuff sent me until it got dark and I remembered the sandwich and the world down below. My mouth watered just imagining it. My hands got hot. That was the best part, that moment, anticipating miracles. But when I uncrinkled the foil and peeled back the plastic wrap, what I found was not magic powder but a cluster of clouded, butter-colored crystals. The hard stuff, I thought, agog. Upstairs there was a loud thud. I put the stuff down on the table and listened.
“You okay?” I hollered, still staring down at the crystals.
“Yeah, I’m all right,” the girl answered. The scrub brush started up again slowly.
What was the meaning of those crystals? They had appeared only once before, with Clark that first summer in Alna. I was still new to the zombies then, still afraid of them. My walks up Riverside with Clark were fraught with nervous thrills. The bus station had been out of operation for a few decades—fake-wood-veneer benches and an old soda-vending machine, empty windows, faded ads with Smokey Bear admonishing smokers and Hillside Church offering day care and asking for charity. Occasionally teenagers would skateboard around, hopping up with a frightening rumble and clack onto the counters at the old ticket windows. The men’s toilets were in back, through a short maze of brick riddled with graffiti. A few zombies were stationed back there, sitting on sinks or squatting on the floor, their wolf dogs tied to a pipe in the wall, panting. The zombie in charge sat in a stall with the door swung halfway open. Silently he took our money and handed over the goods. His fingers were huge and cracked and red, black creases lining his palm, his nails thick and yellow. I hid my face under my hair, lurked and cowered next to Clark, masking myself in false subservience. The zombies saw through all that. They saw everything. But I was clueless still. I was a foreigner. I didn’t know their customs. I got more comfortable as time went on, of course. And then once Clark was out of the picture, I was forced to go alone. The zombies rarely lifted their gaze above my waistline. Theirs was a solid, grounding, animal attitude. Each time I met them in the bathroom I felt I was walking in naked, as if I were some pilgrim approaching a saint. I offered ten dollars and I received my blessing.
When the crystals had appeared for me and Clark all those years before, I had been honored, moved even. It felt like some kind of rite of passage, a sacrament. But when Clark saw the crystals, he crushed the foil back up and jammed the stuff down the front pocket of his jeans.
“What are you going to do with it, Clark?” I asked.
“Flush it, at my house” was his brilliant reply.
Whatever lame affection I had left for Clark was smashed in that instant—it was obvious he was trying to deceive me. I suppose those crystals worked to save me from really getting attached to the man. Such was the magic wisdom of the zombies.
“What’s wrong with my house? Flush it here,” I insisted.
“I could flush it here,” he murmured.
“So flush it.” But Clark just sat there, stroking his beard and staring at the television as if the opening credits of Will & Grace had hypnotized him, as if he’d become one of the zombies.
“Ahem.”
“What?” he asked.
“Give it back,” I said, elbowing him in the knees.
“Trust me,” he whispered. “This stuff rots your brains.” He stood up, scratching his head, his armpit a rat’s nest of hair flecked with white gunk from his antiperspirant. “I’m going home,” he said. “I’m tired.”
I let him go then. I didn’t argue. He tried to kiss me good-bye but I turned my face away. I spent the rest of the day bored in front of the television, pining, furious, confused. I tried to go upstairs and scrape the leftover wallpaper in the bathroom, but it was no use. The next morning I went to the zombies alone and received the usual stuff. When Clark called in the afternoon, I told him I needed some time to myself. I sniffed my magic powders while he blubbered an apology that sounded like all his lame professions—foolishly sincere.
• • •
After cleaning my bedroom, the girl trudged slowly down the stairs. I’d been lying on the sofa reading a teen magazine left behind by one of the tenants. I stared at articles that told me how to “live my dreams,” “score total independence,” and “make more $$$.” I can’t say exactly what I thought I’d do with the crystals. I’d seen movies about people smoking crack out of little glass pipes. I could fashion something, I thought, but I was scared I’d mess it up. I imagined dissolving the crystals like rock sugar in a mug of herbal tea, or grinding them like sea salt over a bowl of canned tomato soup. But I wasn’t sure ingesting the stuff that way would work. And what if it did? I still had a life back down in the city, after all. There were certain realities I had to face. I couldn’t handle real oblivion. I just wanted a vacation. So I had some doubts. I had some misgivings.
I’d been rolling the little nest of foil between my fingers, pondering all this, as I stared at the magazine. When I heard the stairs creak, I sat up and stuck the stuff back in the pocket of my shorts.
“Hot up there,” I heard the girl say.
Her pretty, gleaming calves appeared between the rungs of the banister as she came down the steps. She’d folded the cuffs of her leggings up above her knees, which were red from kneeling on the floor. When her thighs appeared, I saw a black stain of blood at her crotch. She seemed not to know that she was bleeding. There was no way she could have seen the blood past the mountain of her belly, I suppose. She gripped the bucket with one hand and the railing with the other as she descended the stairs.
“Oh, shit,” she said when she reached the landing. “I left the broom.”
“I’ll get it,” I told her, folding the magazine shut.
“Shit,” she said again, putting the bucket down and holding her face with her hands. “Head rush.”
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” I offered. I wasn’t good around blood.
“I’m okay,” the girl said,
bracing herself against the bookshelf. “Just dizzy.” She turned toward the wall, leaned into it, said, “Whew.”
I got up then, patting my pocket to make sure the ball of foil was safe inside. In the kitchen I let the tap run cold, got the ice from the freezer, took a glass from the drying rack.
“I’m really okay,” the girl said.
I plunked the ice in the glass. The cubes cracked as the water ran over them. “See,” the girl went on, “you’re not missing anything.”
“What?” I hollered back. But I’d heard her perfectly.
“You’re not missing anything,” she said again, louder. “My mom says a baby is a blessing, but I don’t know.” I suppose it unnerved me that she could be so naive. She had no idea what her life was going to do to her.
“That baby’s going to change your world,” I said, walking back into the den. She was bent over with her face in front of the fan. I snuck a look at the bloodstain widening down her thighs. “My sister has a daughter,” I said. “Gave up her career and everything.” I handed the girl the glass. She pushed herself upright, took a long sip, set the glass down on the TV, and sighed. “Boy or girl?”
“Boy,” she answered, blushing slightly.
“You sure you feel all right?”
She nodded.
I stood around watching her clean for a while, helping her here and there, moving furniture so she could mop. She seemed perfectly fine to me. “I love The Matrix,” she said, straightening my shelves of VHS tapes. “I love old movies.” She beat the sofa’s cushions with her fist. She stacked the magazines on the end table. She straightened my framed poster of Monet’s Water Lilies. Her eyes were clear and blue as ever under their thick, gleaming lids. I went upstairs to get the broom, then I retreated to the kitchen, put away the clean dishes, and did the dirty ones. I put the dinner half of my sub in the fridge and sponged off the counter. I took out the trash.
Homesick for Another World Page 10