by Maud Casey
“That’s what neighbors are for,” Liza says primly, choosing to interpret Flora’s words as gratitude. “Which window is your favorite view?”
Flora does not answer. Of course it would be this one. Flora feels suddenly possessive of this window, this view that is hers alone. Liza’s face reminds Flora of a slim, long dog bone made of rubber—she saw the man with the lurching Great Dane holding one in his gloved hand recently. Her skin is smooth and glossy like that bone. Flora curbs the impulse to touch it.
“Have you ever been bored?” Flora asks, though what she really wants to ask is does Liza smoke. She knows the answer already. Liza has never been still. Even when she sleeps, she must sleep an active sleep, deep and invigorating but always flailing an arm or a leg or planning the next day, planning whole meals during REM, soup to nuts.
“Like wanting something to happen?” Liza digs her hands up to the wrists into the soil. “I’m always wanting something to happen. So maybe I’m always bored?”
“Do you want a cigarette?” Flora says.
“Oh sure, I love to smoke,” she says, like I love sports or I love this or that movie. “I never do around my husband, but I love to whenever I get the chance.” Liza gestures to the ceiling and rolls her eyes, indicating her husband’s disapproval, and accepts the pack Flora retrieves from the windowsill. “It always looks so good on people. I mean, just look at you. You look like a movie star.”
Flora inhales deeply, feeling suddenly and suspiciously fabulous. “You think?”
The phone rings and Flora just shakes her head, stilling her urge to jump for it, and blows a smoke ring. “I screen,” she says, though she’s never let the phone ring in her life.
She holds herself perfectly still as Rock’s voice thuds into the room. “Flora, Rock. I’m dizzy these days, from my head. I’m seeing a doctor, a specialist, about it and then I’ll talk to you about your floor. Later.”
Flora gestures with her head toward the hole in the kitchen floor the way Liza did to her husband upstairs.
“That’s a doozy, Flora,” Liza says, getting down on all fours to investigate. She sticks a long, skinny arm into the hole and wiggles her fingers as if she is retrieving something that has fallen in. Flora pictures her heart, still beating in Rock’s sink. “What is wrong with that Rock anyway? We can’t stand for that,” Liza declares. Flora suddenly has visions of a tenants’ committee headed by Liza. Bulbs in every apartment! She imagines Liza filling in the hole in her kitchen floor with a homemade concoction she read about in a magazine, made from spackle and gardening dirt.
Flora wants Liza to leave now. She doesn’t want to be on Liza’s committee; she doesn’t like the way Liza assumes something is wrong with Rock or the way she includes Flora in her we. Flora is certain that when Liza is through with her, there won’t be a thing Liza doesn’t know about Flora—her dreams about insomnia, her love for Rock, whether she believes in God. She senses Liza’s investigatory powers, the way she scans a room looking for clues.
Liza wanders into the living room, flicks on the TV to a cop show with heart, gunshots, and tender moments. Flora feels defenseless against this long, rubbery-faced woman bouncing around her apartment. A young cop is about to tell his partner a secret that he hasn’t even told his wife. Rock watches the same show downstairs, and the drama echoes throughout the building.
“I’ll stop by again soon, hon,” Liza says, though she is probably ten years younger than Flora. “Gotta cook the old man dinner.” She giggles as she says “old man.” She is a great appreciator of her own jokes. And suddenly she is gone, leaving Flora with the young cop’s secret. He’s had headaches, terrible headaches, dizziness, what should he do? He’s seeing a doctor, a specialist.
She runs to the hole, cups her hands to her mouth, and screams down at the single tile, “I know your tricks. Don’t you try it!” The silence after Rock turns off the TV has a pulse of its own. Now he’ll have to turn to her for solace. She will comfort him. He will see himself in her. The pulse grows louder like a heartbeat revived.
Flora climbs into her bed with her clothes on and falls asleep listening to the scraping sound of moving furniture above, waiting patiently. She can’t sleep in her dreams again. Instead she wanders down the cold, creaky wooden staircase of her building in bare feet gone numb with chill. It is snowing inside, large flakes falling from the ceiling, and Flora skirts the puddles to knock on Rock’s door. Maybe he has some wool socks he can lend her. She needs socks desperately, more than she’s needed anything in her life. A wind whips her dream nightgown up around her knees and she clutches at it to make it behave. She knocks and knocks, the large snowflakes wetting her hair and her nose, until finally, from behind Rock’s door, she hears the sound of bristles and scrubbing. The banisters are piled with snow, a river of snowy water running down the steps. Suddenly, the door flies open of its own accord to reveal Liza on her hands and knees, scrubbing Rock’s floor with a toothbrush. Flora wakes up, choking on snow—she swears flakes fly out of her mouth as she coughs in her pitch-black bedroom.
She stays awake all night—less exhausting than sleep—watching the silhouettes of bare branches shake in the wind, until it begins to snow for real outside. All night she watches large flakes fall quickly past the streetlamps’ light until everything is hidden under a perfect blanket of snow. The cars, the garbage cans, their lids blown into the street, an abandoned armchair that somebody put out on the curb yesterday, all the stray trash—discarded blue and white “We are happy to serve you” coffee cups, plastic wrapping, chicken bones that threaten to choke the Great Dane puppy. Her love for Rock is like that, hidden, and she realizes she has to find a way to show him.
In the morning Carol calls, though it’s not even a Sunday. “I wanted to make sure that you are warm enough, that your pipes haven’t frozen.” The pipes froze last year and the year before that, and Flora sees clearly the years stretched out before her. “Keep warm, Flora,” Carol says and, having gone above and beyond her duty, hangs up. After years of thinking Carol wretched and meek, a slave to the scripture of the self-help guru, Flora imagines her putting the kettle on the stove for tea and contentedly curling up on a soft couch with a book she has been meaning to read, grateful for the distance between them.
At work Flora can barely sit still, filled with the restless, urgent desire to capture Rock’s attention. Samson stops in to pick up his messages. He doesn’t seem to care about the missing eyesore. He replaces it with a small painting done all in primary colors—blue, yellow, red—with a tiny piece of newspaper collage. “It’s a gouache,” he explains to Flora. “Extremely Mondrianesque,” he adds in a hushed, important tone.
“Oh, shut up,” Flora says, desperate for him to go so she can leave.
“What did you say?” Samson asks. He seems surprised that she talks at all.
“I’ll shut up the store,” she says.
“Of course you will,” Samson says, a look of puzzled bemusement on his face. Flora sees the way he thinks of her, as another museum piece to observe and then sidle away from. He walks out the door backward, like someone robbing the place. “I’m not here,” he whispers. “I am a figment of your imagination.” “And I am one of yours,” she says. He laughs as if this were funny. Flora leaves as soon as Samson rounds the corner, leaving the phone to ring and ring, eager to get home to prove to Rock that she is not a figment of his imagination and to herself that she is not a figment of her own.
On her walk home from the subway, she spots Liza at the counter of the neighborhood video store, her long rubber dog bone face flushed. The clerk behind the counter is ruddy with flirting. He twists a small stud in his ear and looks at Liza sideways. Flora slips inside, slinks down the Foreign Movies section, past the Action/Adventure section to find a suitable place to study Liza.
“This is my favorite customer,” the video boy says to the other clerk on duty, a girl with haphazard pigtails and chunky glasses. “And it’s only her first time here.” The pigtail
ed girl rolls her eyes but Liza doesn’t notice. She smiles, saying, “You are being so silly.” She touches his arm effortlessly as she slides two videos across the counter. There is a sweetness to Liza’s gesture that makes her rubber face beautiful, fixed for a moment in coy, rosy bliss. “Look at that,” Flora says out loud without even realizing she’s speaking. She is that stunned by Liza’s easy transformation. Flora feels the chill creeping over her own bones, encasing them like branches in ice. She is fragile and raw like the naked trees on her block. She is paralyzed in the New Releases section in front of a row of movie boxes—with couples on the verge of passion; boxes that depict redemptive love, mysterious loss, and what the world would be like after World War III. As Liza walks out the door under the warm gaze of the video boy, Flora realizes something must be done or her blood will freeze up inside of her, crack her from the inside out.
“You shouldn’t flirt like that. It’s embarrassing,” the pigtailed girl says, elbowing the ruddy boy clerk as he sweeps the drop box with one arm for returned videos. Flora agrees. She feels betrayed, last night’s dream lingering like the bitter smell of old cigarette smoke in her apartment. Liza invading her life one day, then flinging her attention in an entirely different direction the next. More than this, she fears Liza will turn her attentions on Rock next. Panicked, she follows Liza tripping lightly down the street toward their brownstone. Flora leans into the wind, filled with a decisiveness that warms her like a pneumatic fever as the winter sky sinks lower.
The daggers of hail ringing in her lungs begin to melt as she reaches the brownstone and lets herself inside, the lock still warm from the turn of Liza’s keys before her. Flora takes the stairs two at a time, beelining it for that hole in the kitchen floor. Rock runs water in the sink below to clean his cereal bowl, and Flora feels the hot water rush over her heart lying there in the dirty dishes. As she digs Liza’s slick bulbs out of the new earth in the flower box, Flora’s face is set in grim determination like the snowman the neighborhood children have made in the street, its mouth made of raisins. As she drops the first bulb through the hole, she imagines a SWAT team busting down Rock’s door to retrieve her heart, dry it off, wrap it in a towel, and resuscitate it.
“Hey, what the hell?” Rock shouts as the bulbs bounce against his kitchen floor.
There is a muffled movie scream from upstairs while the voices that are the background of Rock’s answering machine message rise up through the floor in ecstatic agony. Flora pours the rich dark earth slowly, as if she were pouring dirt on a coffin.
“Holy shit,” Rock sputters. Covered in soil, he looks up finally through the hole, but Flora is gone.
She sits on the edge of her bed, suddenly very tired. She is genuinely tired for the first time in months, so tired she could sleep in her sleep. She looks out the window. The sky has lifted. The night is blue-black and clear, filled with stars.
TALK SHOW LADY
TONIGHT I’m a woman who was held captive by a married couple, tied to a chair in their basement for several years. Two or three, I can’t remember as I sit in the studio dressing room in front of a mirror framed with big yellow lights. I paint dark circles under my eyes with black face makeup. With this, I achieve the tired, worn, but recovering victim look that the audience craves. They will ask me if the couple tortured me physically. At which point a more daring but still appropriately embarrassed member of the audience will ask me if I was tortured sexually. Sometimes I rehearse these answers and other times I make them up on the spot. The hesitancy in my voice gives me credence. They will ask me whether I learned to love my captors. I loved them, I will say. As you love me, I will think.
Then they will say I am brave, that I’ve suffered through a lot, that I deserve a good life now. I’ll say that I never in a million years thought it could happen to me. I’ll dab at my eyes with a handkerchief provided by Perry, the show’s handsome host, who occasionally appears in my dreams, all the while thanking the audience for helping me to cry at last. I put on a face of regular tears, which are more palatable than the way the real woman who lost her daughter in a freak blizzard in Florida behaved. After they’d returned from the second commercial break, she began to scream a scream that dogs might hear and then ran offstage to throw up. Some happy medium is what the audience wants. Most don’t know that what comes after the initial anguish is something that looks more like boredom than anything else. I look at my own static face in storefront windows on the way to work, yawning restlessly, as if against my will.
As I slip the black, curly wig over my own hair-netted, mousy brown hair, Don, the production assistant, opens the door a crack to cue me. I’m on in five minutes. This is the second year that I’ve worked as a fill-in for this local TV station on Do Unto Others. When the show can’t get a real woman who was locked in a one-room shack for ten years with a bucktoothed maniac, they call me. When the woman who has sex with her pet python got the flu, it was me that they called.
Misery has turned out to be a fairly profitable business. I’ve played a woman who slept with her son, a woman who was raised by wolves, a woman who was enslaved by a religious cult. You name it, it happened to me. To the audience, I’m the genuine dirt, the stuff of back alleys, the blue-black fade of the pictures of missing children. If the pouches under my eyes, built from layers of foundation, are slightly uneven, or a lock of my real hair jumps out from under that day’s wig, the audience is willing to overlook it. They chalk it up to the disheveled quality they expect in long-term sufferers.
Don comes back to say that I’m on. As I walk out into the studio lights, headed for the familiar chair next to Perry, I feel the eyes of the audience on my sagging shoulders and my slightly mussed wig hair. They scan my body for invisible scars, battle wounds, anything.
They scoop down into my tainted soul. They rush for the soft spots, seeking out the wounds. As I sit down faux-meekly in the round armchair, I smell the eagerness, and the charge of victimhood zip-zaps through my body. Perry turns to me, smiling, and says softly, so as not to startle me, “Welcome, Leslie.”
My name is Rita as I drive home from the studio still in costume. I accidentally sat on the sash of Leslie’s denim wraparound skirt getting into the car, and as I drive it pulls the skirt tight, digging into my belly. I told Perry that I thought she should wear a nice dress, something flowery, but he insisted that Leslie hadn’t seen the light of day for years. “This skirt was probably the last thing she looked good in before the married couple put her in their basement,” Perry said. Perry gets involved in the characters he creates. “Trust me, she never knew how to dress.”
It was a day like any other really. The usual questions. “How long did the married couple keep you in their basement?” “What were their names?” “Did they drive nice cars?” “Did this traumatic experience cause you to gain or lose weight?” There was some confusion when a hefty man with a starched white collar raised his hand and asked whether there had been any sex up the butt. Perry turned to me and said, “Leslie, I know this is painful, but was there any anal sex involved?” I got confused. Between me and the husband or between the husband and the wife? Or did the wife strap on a dildo? I wasn’t prepped for this question. “I don’t remember,” I said, looking straight at this man yearning for something ugly.
I started working for Do Unto Others two years ago when my mother died. I called home one day and my father was so confused that when he answered the phone he was panting like a dog. “Rita,” he said, “I can’t talk right now. Your mother’s having a heart attack.” When he called back, she was dead.
My father called me a lonely spinster once, and that’s how I’d come to think of myself. I used to watch the talk shows just to feel better. When my mother died, I started playing the “Well, at least I’m not…” game. Well, at least I’m not being held captive by a married couple. Well, at least I’m not afflicted with a disease that causes me to pick at my face until I am bloody and unrecognizable. I clipped newspaper articles: “Woman Mar
ries Horse: ‘He’s the Only One Who Really Understands Me,’” “Man Shoots Wife and Family ‘Just Because,’” “Ballerina Chews Off Million Dollar Leg in Bear Trap Catastrophe.” I imagined that I was the horse bride, the murderous husband, and the ballerina. I imagined I was them just long enough to be truly glad I wasn’t when I stopped.
Do Unto Others was looking for a substitute guest at about that time. They’d started to run out of ideas, and they feared that they would soon be taken off the air. Their real guests had become too demanding, complaining incessantly about hotel accommodations, not telling all so as not to give away the end of the TV movie being made about their lives. I brought in my cardboard box full of newspaper clippings, and Perry hired me on the spot. He didn’t know that I was already practiced at the art of relieving my grief by putting someone else’s on. I had no idea then that it would become my life, that I would be doing it still, two years later, at the age of forty-eight.
I’ll admit that at first it was an escape from my mother’s death. I left home long before she died, but still, she was my one true friend. “Rita,” she would say at some point during our weekly phone conversations, “you are a good woman, a very good woman.” When she said this, I imagined that the rest of the world thought this highly of me. Possibilities waited in some other room, in some other house miles away, if only I could get to it. The room was filled with friends and admirers who never watched Do Unto Others but would recognize when I arrived that here was a good woman standing before them, one who deserved to feel the warm, gentle pressure of a human hand touching her face.
I keep the envelopes from my mother’s letters by my bed. She sprayed them with her perfume, and late at night when I can’t sleep I sniff their faded scent. I inhale deeply, recapturing that feeling of hope. When I fall asleep, I sometimes have the dream in which Perry is my plastic surgeon, tenderly handling sections of my face as he sculpts and rearranges.