Drastic

by Maud Casey

  “I want to steal your body,” he’d said to Lucy, running his hand territorally over her hip.

  “Why would you want to do that when I’ll give it to you for free,” she said, taking his hand and placing it between her legs. It amazed her how easily she spoke these words. She almost laughed out loud but instead channeled this energy into a seductive smile. She was a much better actor than he was. But what had he taken from her? What had they taken from each other—tasting each other, little bites on the verge of cannibalism. They probably still had traces of each other under their nails, in their throats, in their genitals. They had each stolen something. Lucy hoped that he noticed something gone from him too.

  Back in the office Lucy doodled on her desk calendar—little faces with enormous eyes and wild hair. She’d thrown things at him in hotel rooms when they argued—shoes, TV remotes, maps—so that later he would remember her as the kind of girl who threw things during arguments, the “wild” girl in his past that his future girlfriends, the legitimate ones, would hate to hear about.

  She put an amputated rubber hand that wiggled its fingers in one of the file drawers for Mildred to discover later. She’d found it half price in a magician’s shop in Chinatown. Lucy imagined her screaming, “It’s those pranksters from the morgue!” Mildred would send the crisp papers of the dead flying everywhere with her flailing arms.

  She put her head down on her desk and forced herself to imagine the death of the cross-country lover. It wasn’t hard. She’d had a lot of practice. She’d started rehearsing for his death as they drove across the country, her head propped against the rattle of the van window. She imagined a car accident in which his limbs were flung like tree branches, his head like a bowling ball through the windshield. She conjured farm machinery gone wild, threshing him like a sheaf of wheat. Now she allowed herself to imagine him smothered to death in a collapsed snow cave, his dog sled, pulled by dogs who never liked him, fleeing across the tundra without him. When the phone rang, Lucy lifted her head from the desk and wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth.

  I’m very sorry for your loss,” Lucy said.

  “I’m calling about my wife,” said the man. There was a pause, and then he added, “She’s dead.”

  “What is your wife’s name, sir?” Instead of rolling herself over in the chair as she usually did, she got up and walked to the potential donor files.

  “Her name is Dora. Dora Moore.”

  Lucy felt so tired. Last night she’d dreamed of endless pastures and vast oceans, landscapes in which she looked for the cross-country lover, but even in her dreams she knew it wasn’t him that she was looking for. She searched with the tantalizing taste of salt and earth on her tongue.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Moore,” Lucy said, but she meant “Rescue me.”

  “She’s still wearing the chapstick that I applied before she died, minutes before. She kept saying, ‘Lips,’ and for the longest time I didn’t know what she meant, but then I understood. She even moved her mouth to accommodate the motion while I put it on.”

  Lucy put her hand on her knee to stop the bouncing, but it was not her knee that bounced. The medical center itself rolled with the rhythm of a loping horse.

  “It’s an earthquake,” Mr. Moore said. “Maybe this house will crumble into dust.”

  Lucy felt a watery dizziness, and for a second she thought she might be dying, really dying, too.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Did I mention that Dora is very clean? I bathed her last night after we watched the news. Why we were watching the news as if anything to do with this world would ever have anything to do with us again I don’t know.”

  Lucy wrote down “very clean,” even though there was no cleanliness category on the Vital Statistics sheet.

  “Mr. Moore, do you feel that shaking?” asked Lucy. She thought of all the bodies in the morgue, their blue fingers trembling, slipping out from under their sheets, no one to put them back. Her knee was really shaking now.

  “It’s stopped.”

  “Mr. Moore?” said Lucy.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Moore. “Yes,” he said again.

  “It felt like we were still moving,” said Lucy. And really, she thought that they were. Rushing forward, faster and faster, spinning into infinity. With her eyes shut, the blackness inside was the blackness outside, her body a meager border. Lucy touched the multicolored scarf around her neck. Knotted loosely at her throat, the chiffon brushed her collarbone. This was the scarf that she used to hide from the sun in the Southwest, the fabric breaking up the Texas sun into flecks of color like a sheltering kaleidoscope.

  “There’s a raspberry birthmark on her chest,” Mr. Moore said. “I’d like you to write that down.”

  This is the cowlick, thought Lucy, touching the swerve in her hairline. Licked by cows, the cross-country lover had said.

  “My skin smells like Dora.”

  Lucy was afraid she was somehow responsible for this first earthquake and even more afraid she had nothing to do with it at all. Lucy listened to the gentle sucking sound of Mr. Moore’s lips brushing against the mouthpiece. She could hear his terror, and felt her life continue to rush forward, crashing through the dense brush, cutting a clear path to her blue and dizzy face.

  “It’s stopped,” Mr. Moore said again.

  “I’m sending someone right away,” Lucy said. “You can stay on the line. Stay here on the line.”

  She paged Ryan, cradling the phone between her shoulder and her cheek.

  “We’ll wait together,” she said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Moore said.

  With Mr. Moore’s breath in her ear, Lucy planned her evening—the ride home on the bus, the large chocolate bar she would buy at the corner deli for dinner, the way she would eat it slowly, square by square, letting each square melt on her tongue, not ever biting. She’d apologize to the Frenchies, bum one of their cigarettes, and sit on the stoop listening to the cars go by, the burned-coffee-and-orange-peel smell from the café next door mixing with her cigarette smoke. She would tap the long ash of her cigarette into the air and let it float away as she waited for the relief of boredom.

  RULES TO LIVE

  FROM the shelter lounge, a few days before Christmas, we watch the hard rain flood the playground sandbox. Twice-abandoned toy dump trucks drift over the weather-treated hemlock-board sides. It is a relief to see it flooded—this bizarre thing donated by someone who wanted it out of their yard. A sandbox in a desert town is like a pool in the middle of the ocean. What’s the point? I crowd my mind with these kinds of questions.

  The rain pounding the dry, cracked earth is a reminder of one pure element of my past, something forgotten, then suddenly remembered now that I no longer live in a world of knowing where the silverware is or the feel of the key in the lock of my own front door. Here in the shelter lounge, we are anyone anyplace, three girls at a slumber party—Mary on the couch doing her nails, me on the phone, Lindy pacing the circumference of the room until she can’t stand it any longer because she always feels the need to be doing anything other than what she is doing. She sneaks off to the kitchen for late-night snacks.

  I pick numbers randomly from the phone book to postpone my nightly call to Jonathan. This time the woman who answers says “Hello” three times and then waits, playing phone chicken. “Pervert,” she says. Before she hangs up, I hear the scrape and clatter of forks and knives against plates, a family eating dinner in the background.

  I focus on the rare torrent of rain outside to avoid nostalgia for something that never existed. Dusty red and spare, this unfamiliar landscape is what the moment just before the end of the world will look like. I slept most of the way on the bus ride that lasted days or minutes from my home in the middle of the country, waking up in time to see the pastel stucco houses of the Southwest hunkered down close to the ground, futilely ducking the rays of the big red sun. Saguaros loomed on the side of the road, giant and slightly awkward in their hugeness like freak show tal
l men. Walking from the bus station to the shelter’s confidential location (known only to the people in the apartment complex across the street, the clerks at the Circle K on the corner, and all the bikers who frequent the biker bar down the block and then ride out into the world at large), I passed date palms and aloe vera plants growing impossibly out of dry earth. Outside a faded yellow one-story house lay a rusty car, flipped over and filled with dirt, flowers growing out of its smashed windows.

  Which leads me back to Jonathan, so I consider swamp coolers, the strange contraptions specific to this dry climate, their wet cloth pads hanging down so the thin breeze can blow through. What do swamp coolers have to do with swamps? There’s nothing swampish about this place.

  Like most of the women, I am not from here, though being white I am more from here than the Indian women from reservations, which hover dilapidated and desolate at the edges of the city like guests never invited in, or the Mexican women from the other side of the border. We are all strangers to this place run by helpful white women who provide us with clean sheets and towels and help us to locate ourselves in the slivers of the Power and Control pie chart—economic abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, pushing, hitting, scratching, hair-pulling, knifing and/or other weapon-related violence. The counselors’ conversational Spanish is no match for the clicking rhythms spoken by my neighbor Joan, the Tohono O’odham woman who lives in the room next to mine with her ten-year-old daughter whose head is dented from the time her father threw her down the stairs when she was two. The counselors go home at night, except the one who sleeps over, who is especially proud of her ability to pronounce the ah-ah-DOM in Tohono O’odham.

  I pick a number from the Cs with my eyes closed and dial carefully. It rings only once. “Why don’t you just fuck off?” a crying girl answers midsob. She was expecting someone else, and I apologize. “Who is this?” she asks hopefully. I hang up because I don’t want to disappoint her.

  “He hung up on you,” Mary says, an accusation. She’s sure I’m calling Jonathan. She doesn’t really care whether I call him or not—she just wants to know everything. I don’t even bother denying it because it isn’t worth squashing the pleasure Mary takes in thinking that she’s right. She lies back, taking up the whole couch where she’s been cutting her toenails all evening, the ragged half-moon parings falling onto the thin brown carpet that doesn’t reach the edges of the room.

  “I’m going to have to vacuum that tomorrow, you know,” I remind her. My name is next to Lounge Duty on the chart in the office.

  “Fuck chores,” she says. “I had enough of that at home. It’s like being abused all over again around here.” She likes to talk tough to remind us that she comes from tough-talking, working-class New England stock, raised in a town famous for being the home of a woman who murdered her parents with an ax for no apparent reason. She’s also in a particularly bad mood because she got into a fight with her counselor this afternoon. The counselor said she saw her hanging out at the biker bar up the street where Mary’s new boyfriend spends most nights drinking and playing pool and waiting for Mary. She’s spent all afternoon painting and repainting her nails. Now she twists open a bottle of nail polish called Wicked, procured from the makeup closet. The smell is harsh and medicinal.

  I reach in the pocket of too-big borrowed pants, all they had in the lounge closet, and discover a quarter. I dig it out and hold it in my hand, remembering the way—before he forbade me to leave the house without him two weeks ago—Jonathan slipped quarters still hot from his clenched hand into mine as if I were a slot machine that might someday give. He liked me to call him from wherever I was going once I’d arrived. Once, he had me put the guy at the gas station on the phone. “She’s right here,” he told my husband cheerfully and then nodded, laughing. “Sure will. My wife forgets to change the oil, I can’t tell you how many times.” When he hung up, he smiled at me. “Women,” he said, shaking his head.

  After Jonathan asked me to quit my job, he called from work on the half hour to make sure I didn’t leave the house. The first thing I did when I got to the shelter a week ago was to see how it felt to be on his end of the line. He picked up the phone and said, “Eliza,” in a sad echo of a voice that made me want to get back on the bus and go home to him. He sometimes looked at me so hard it was as if I were the only thing in the world that he wanted. If he’d stared me into dust, I would have been grateful.

  I dial his number, my old number, and the phone just rings and rings. My heart races—whenever he’s not there, I’m sure he’s killed himself, but as the counselors around here like to say, I’m projecting. Whenever he is home, I listen to him breathe for a while and then hang up.

  “So is someone going to do something about this tree?” Mary asks, waving her knife. Impatience is Mary’s natural tone of voice. In the corner of the lounge, the trashbag filled with ornaments wrapped in paper towels sits next to the artificial tree, which still doesn’t have its top put on. The ornaments are mostly glass Christmas balls, green and red, with a few handmade ornaments like the round, smooth, cross-cut piece of wood with MERRY CHRISTMAS MOM, LOVE, PETE ’99 painted in alternating blue and purple letters. None of us know who Pete is, and no one hazards a guess because it is an unspoken rule that the immediacy of life here does not allow for questions that travel backward.

  Lindy walks into the lounge like the ringmaster at a circus, capturing our attention with the possibilities of what she might do next. Last night she showed us how to shake quarters out of the soda machine, rocking it with hands braced on either side of its frame as if she were reprimanding it. She throws a shrink-wrapped cupcake at Mary and a bag of chips at me.

  “Hey, watch the nails,” Mary says, brushing the cupcake off the couch as if it were an insect.

  “What?” I ask. “No dip?”

  “What are you going to do about the tree?” Lindy asks, looking at Mary. Mary’s voice has a tendency to carry throughout the shelter, but even if it didn’t, Lindy hears everything. It’s a sense she fine-tuned over the years with her on-again, off-again cop boyfriend who works for the border patrol in Nogales.

  “Yeah, right,” Mary says. “Merry fucking Christmas.”

  “What happened with the police this afternoon?” I ask Lindy. Lindy was caught shoplifting earlier today—a container of dental floss she could have gotten from the shelter.

  “Wouldn’t you know I’d get caught stealing something useful,” Lindy says. “He said he’d go easy on me because my life was such a mess. I think he was just disappointed to find out I’m legal. I know my boyfriend was.” Lindy’s half Mexican, and her boyfriend liked to threaten her with deporting her mother, originally from Hermosillo and now living in California. Lindy’s father, who abandoned the family when Lindy was born, is white, born and raised in Iowa, like my parents. My own parents are both dead of natural causes, having lived substantial lives. Their deaths were shocking and shockingly unremarkable.

  Our Iowa roots are all Lindy and I have in common, but here, where no one wants to see the thing they have most in common, that is a lot. The distinct groups of women in the shelter only mix in the evening, the time of day when fear hangs most palpably in the air. During dinner we all gather around one table to marvel at each other’s tolerance or lack thereof of various spices, and then everyone drifts apart. Usually the Mexican women make their way to the picnic bench in the center of the courtyard; the Indian women gather around the benches near the sandbox; and the white women hang out in the lounge. Lindy, though, is a wild card. She calls her own shots. In here, she goes wherever she likes and no one says anything.

  She is my only true friend precisely because of the way she asks Mary this question about the tree, bold so that she gets what she wants but with a sense of humor so that she can always say she was just kidding and take it back. She’s learned how to cover herself. I recognized this quality in her immediately and approached her with tentative determination, letting her know my intentions without seeming desperate. Nee
diness here is like a disease; no one wants to catch it.

  At home, my two friends from my old job stopped calling. I was a receptionist at an all-women’s health spa despite my half-finished master’s in English that Jonathan nipped in the bud after a year and a half because it made him feel abandoned when I got lost in a book. “What are you escaping from?” he asked. It was easier to just not do it when he was around, and after a while he was around all the time, even when he wasn’t.

  “Look what we have here, a new box of donations,” Lindy says, opening the donation closet next to the washer and dryer. She holds up a kerosene lantern. “In case we decide to join the snow women.”

  Mary looks up from her toes. “Don’t start with that again, Lindy. I’m serious, it gives me the creeps.”

  At dinner my second night here, Lindy told everyone a story about the women who burrow deep holes in the snow to keep warm when their husbands lock them out. She learned about these women from a resident in a shelter in Colorado where Lindy stayed when she was on the run the first time.

  Lindy said these women dig snow caves with their bare hands. There’s a maze of underground snow tunnels, she said, and a network of women crawling on all fours, digging with chapped hands. They gather occasionally to light candles and warm their hands so that they can continue to burrow.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mary said. “We all got problems.” The other women, used to being invisible, had slipped away as Lindy was still talking.

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” she said to Mary.

  “I like stories,” I said. “Stories are the best part.”