Drastic

by Maud Casey

  “I’m focusing,” Bernard said. “I’m focusing.”

  “I’m telling you, nerve tissue remembers things.” She pressed a hand over Bernard’s eyes, and though he tried to think of coffee cups, any coffee cup, all the coffee cups he had ever lifted to his lips, there she was—his daughter at his door several years ago, on a day pass, or maybe she’d broken out again, he hadn’t asked. It was the first time he’d seen her in years, though his ex-wife had pleaded in between bouts of ignoring him. His daughter pressed her hands over his eyes. Guess who? The gesture in reverse, all things in reverse, everything flowing backward. Taking her hand away, she moved closer to him as if she were about to ask him to dance, not like someone who wanted to dance but like someone who wanted to get inside of him. When she kissed him, her tongue was like a surgeon’s instrument claiming his body for her own, seeking out the disease.

  “Can you feel it? The weight of the cup in your hand?” Bella asked.

  “Yes,” Bernard said, opening his eyes, filling them with the flesh of Bella’s hand.

  “Where are you really?”

  “Here,” he said, wishing that it were ever true. “Right here.”

  DRASTIC

  MAYBE it’s the other way around? Every unhappy person should have someone happy tapping at their door with a hammer?” Theresa’s book group was reading Chekhov this month. She’d recently joined the group after quitting her acting class—she had enough drama in her life with her ex-husband, Richmond, she told Josephine. Plus, she was a set designer. That’s where her true talents were, she explained at length. “There are some people who are meant to be behind the scenes. That’s me,” she said the way she said most things—as if it were a revelation.

  Josephine wasn’t paying attention today either. She tended to drift off when Theresa got going—the book group fueled Theresa’s tendency to philosophize—but today Josephine was particularly distracted. On the radio this morning she’d heard a story about twenty-five million Hindus in Allahabad, India, bathing in holy waters at the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna. Naked mystics, bodies anointed with ceremonial ash, leading the way to the plunge into the river in the name of everlasting life in order to be free from the endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth. This seemed especially significant because tomorrow was her birthday, which reminded her of her mother. Tomorrow she would turn the age her mother was when she retreated to her bedroom and never came out again.

  Even more immediately alarming had been the little specks like tiny spiders that danced their way across Josephine’s vision as she listened to the story about the plunging mystics. They were there when she first woke up, but she dismissed them as a sign that she desperately needed coffee. Now she closed her eyes and opened them again to see if the spiders would go away, but there they were. As the spiders twirled and dipped, she watched the two girls who lived across the street play with a car battery tossed out on their front lawn. The battery looked as if it had narrowly escaped a fire, its edges singed. Josephine blinked again, but the spiders still hovered.

  A man pushed a pile of mattresses stacked on a rolling cart down the street. On top of the pile of mattresses was another man sleeping under a blanket. At the end of the street were mysterious piles of wood, like something about to be rebuilt. The neighborhood was filled with things that needed to be repaired but never would be.

  “And this is the city named one of the ten best small cities if you don’t want to live in New York?” Theresa asked, gesturing to the sleeping man rolling down the street.

  “I think I’m going blind,” Josephine said, so softly that Theresa didn’t hear her.

  Theresa blew on her coffee to cool it, and even though it was a beautiful day and their chairs were turned to catch the sun the way they’d set them up every morning since the weather turned warm, this struck Josephine as an especially useless gesture. She wanted to shake Theresa and tell her that.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Theresa asked.

  Josephine started to apologize, but there were the spiders. They retreated a little, flickering at the edges of her vision.

  “I’m not feeling very well,” she said, louder this time.

  “It’s practically your birthday,” Theresa said, blowing on her coffee again. “You’ve got birthday nerves.”

  “Just let it sit. The air will cool it.” Josephine took the coffee out of Theresa’s hands and put it on the ground.

  “That’s dangerous, you know,” Theresa called out to the girls playing with the battery. The girls looked up blankly, as if that was the point, then banged on the battery with a rock. Josephine couldn’t agree more.

  “Shouldn’t those kids be in school?” Theresa looked at the wristwatch her ex-husband, Richmond, had given to her, as if knowing the time would provide an answer to her question.

  The man pushing the mattresses lifted the lids of trash containers placed in the street for pickup. Josephine had seen this man before, without the mattresses, looking in the containers just after the garbage man had emptied them. Today the man’s disappointment was a sound, a keening that sliced through Josephine like a sharp wind. Is this how it began with her mother?

  “But really, don’t you think that could be my life soon—joy flickering on the edge of misery? Maybe tonight is about offering me a little joy for once,” Theresa said. She picked up her coffee and started to blow a ripple across the surface again.

  “Maybe. Just be careful.” Josephine said this not so much because she thought Theresa might follow her advice when she saw her ex-husband as because she felt obliged to say it, particularly since she had run into Richmond at the diner around the corner yesterday. It was the first time they’d ever met. She’d been reading alone at a table when he walked in. “Aren’t you Theresa’s neighbor?” he asked. “The therapist, right?” He joined her for coffee, and though Josephine told herself she was doing it for Theresa’s sake (she had even suggested counseling when he said that he and Theresa were having “problems, nothing major”—he was only telling her this because he knew she was a “professional”), she still recalled Richmond’s musky aftershave smell and the way he touched her arm when he got up to leave, causing her stomach to drop with desire. What was happening to her? She was going on ten years in this line of work, that must be it. Eli, her terrifically flawless boyfriend, was right, though she would never admit it to him; she needed a break. Was she telling herself to be careful more than she was telling Theresa? She felt bad for letting her impatience intrude on this friendship, and for having coffee with Richmond and not telling Theresa, so she squeezed Theresa’s shoulder.

  “Don’t be such a worrier,” Theresa said, shrugging her off, alarmed by this uncharacteristic display of affection. “I’m not your client.”

  But that’s how their friendship had started three months ago, the night Theresa first moved in. Theresa banging on her door in the middle of the night; Josephine letting her in—“We could see about getting you a bed at a shelter” and then “Why don’t you sleep here on the couch.” Richmond had threatened her with a knife. “He never uses it; it’s a prop. It’s a bread knife. It’s serrated, for god’s sake,” Theresa said.

  It was never clear to Josephine how much of what Theresa told her was for effect. She was always taking things back, or adjusting them after she succeeded in shocking Josephine initially. Like the time Theresa said she suspected Richmond had secretly killed his own dog so that Theresa would think his dog died naturally and feel sorry for him. The next day she retold the story so that Richmond had put the dog out of his misery because he was old and sick. Whether Theresa was telling the truth or simply trying to restore order didn’t seem to make a difference. Either way it was about taking the world by the throat. Theresa pushed her voice and her body against life in an effort to leave an imprint. Her relationship with Richmond revolved around the drama of their bodies as much as their minds—sex and the potential for violence intertwined. “Sex was best after a fight,” Theresa tol
d Josephine yesterday over coffee. “At least we put our hostility to good use.”

  That first night, Theresa fell asleep sitting up on Josephine’s couch, her tea balanced perfectly in her lap. Josephine watched her and was suddenly willing to throw all her training as a social worker out the window for the possibility of having her own friend—someone apart from colleagues or Eli’s friends. She and Eli had moved to this town a year ago because Eli had gotten a position at the university teaching psychology. Josephine had difficulty making friends, and here was someone who lived right next door, and—she hated to admit this part—someone whose fucked-up life might distract her from the feeling that had started as a seed a year ago and grown and grown, headed for today, the feeling that there was a genetic tidal wave coming her way, that there was no escaping from the undertowlike sorrow that had waited all her life to drag her out to sea. But that was ridiculous, her own hyperbolic nature. It was as ridiculous as reading into the spiders dancing across her eyes, believing they were a wake-up call. And still, they danced. Get ready.

  “What is going on with you today?” Theresa waved a hand in front of Josephine’s face and Josephine batted it out of the way. “You’re starting to freak me out.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m tired—weird dreams. I’m out of it.” She waved a hand dismissively in front of her face. The spiders were doing a polka on her eyeballs. “I should really get going.”

  “I wish I had a broken leg so I could have a cast,” one of the girls across the street said to the other. They were sitting in the dirt now, rebuilding the pile they’d just kicked over. “We could draw on it with Magic Markers and people would sign their names and draw hearts on it.”

  “I wish I was in a wheelchair,” the other girl said. “Like, just for a week or a month.” She cupped a handful of dirt, letting it pass through her fingers like a sieve.

  “What if you were paralyzed from the waist down?” one girl asked, arranging the other girl’s hair in a ponytail. “What if you were paralyzed all over?” the other girl asked back. The high thin pitch of their voices was the music of Josephine’s soul.

  “How’s Eli’s father?” Theresa asked. “Eli is such a wonderful guy. You’re lucky.”

  “His father is much better,” Josephine said. Eli’s father lived alone out west and a week ago had fallen down the stairs. Eli had gone to stay with him, though he felt awful about missing Josephine’s birthday. “Eli’s a wonderful guy,” Josephine said. And he was—a wonderful, attentive, devoted son and a wonderful, attentive, devoted boyfriend after almost eight years. “I am lucky,” she said, reminding herself out loud.

  “I’ll make sure you have a terrific birthday,” Theresa said. “Richmond and I throw great parties.”

  That’s what Josephine was afraid of. She couldn’t think of anything worse than a house filled with relative strangers, one of whom might or might not be wielding a knife, serrated or not. But Theresa was a big believer in quantity over quality. She’d insisted on the party.

  “Don’t go too wild,” Josephine said. “It’s not as though I’m turning a significant age. I’m fortysomething, remember?”

  “All the more reason,” Theresa declared, as if that were that.

  The girls across the street, with their flat chests and legs too long for the rest of their still-growing bodies, kneeled on their knobby knees to build another pile of dirt. They kicked this one over too, as though, even years from now, that would be all that mattered. They reached down and touched the stone in their walkway. “For good luck,” the one girl said to the other, and they seemed charmed, filled with good luck that would let them lead wild, uncharted lives.

  “Where are their parents?” Theresa asked. “They should really be in school.”

  “I think it’s a holiday,” Josephine said, having no idea whether or not that was true.

  “Knock, knock,” Theresa said.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Happiness.”

  Get ready. The spiders jumped for joy.

  “I’ve got to go,” Josephine said.

  If Eli had been there, he would have told her to take the day off, but Josephine couldn’t sit home all day alone with herself. Her mother hadn’t so much died as faded into the sheets. But Josephine had made a career out of the belief that the choices people made changed their lives, prevented them from making the same mistakes their parents made.

  So she would go to Christine’s house, though Christine was no longer her client. Christine was a resident in one of the shelters where Josephine had worked when she first came to town. Josephine had been in private practice for several months, now in an office she shared with an acupuncturist, but she had recently read an article about a doctor in Haiti who tracked down patients with AIDS who couldn’t make it to the clinic for their meds, hiking out into the mountains to make sure they received the doses they needed. Josephine would go to Christine’s house and check her refrigerator to make sure there was enough food for the kids, confirm that her murdering ex-husband was no longer living with the family he longed to murder, prevent whatever little she could prevent. Or was it that Christine comforted her, helped her feel her own life more acutely? Josephine was suspicious of herself; she told no one that she went to see Christine, not even Eli, partly because it was highly unprofessional and partly because she wanted the visits to be hers alone. Christine and her two boys made Josephine think of an abrasion where there was no skin at all. That struck Josephine as better than feeling nothing.

  When she arrived, Josephine pounded on the door because Christine was deaf in one ear, a broken eardrum from her recent boyfriend, James. The TV was turned up as loud as it could go. Joe, Christine’s youngest boy, appeared in the doorway with a fistful of uncapped thick felt-tip markers that smelled like twisted versions of their colors—sweet grape for purple, chemical-apple for green, fading-cinnamon for brown. The dog, Stan, was at Joe’s side, the boil on his stomach skimming the ground.

  “I was so happy then,” Josephine’s mother had said to her once, referring to an unspecified time long ago. She said this as she lay in bed wasting away, refusing to eat even broth. Was now the happy part of Josephine’s life, or was she living the mythic then?

  She walked into the empty living room and turned off the TV just as Christine emerged from the kitchen, waving hello with a splinted finger.

  “James?” Josephine asked loudly.

  Christine didn’t answer and went to the refrigerator. She returned with two glasses of iced tea, holding her splinted finger out daintily from the glass, a tea party for invalids. “You can’t know everything about someone,” Christine said. “Even someone steady.” Christine nudged a red dump truck out of her path with her toe. “Especially someone steady.”

  Josephine wanted to protest, to say that James was anything but steady, but that seemed to be what Christine was really saying anyway.

  “You could move into the shelter for a while,” Josephine said instead. She was sick of herself; she could barely stand the sound of her own voice. Didn’t she have anything more insightful to offer, anything more complex? Christine ignored her again and sat down on the couch, handing Josephine a glass clinking with ice.

  Joe raised the uncapped markers above his head, walking toward his mother. She uncurled his fingers, prying the markers from his hands and shoving them under the couch, rolling her eyes as Joe fell to his knees to pull out large tumbleweeds of dust.

  “Their father is supposed to pick them up in a few days, take them for a while,” Christine said. She brushed the bangs from her face with her splinted finger, revealing the scar from where the boys’ father, who was not James, had cut her with his other girlfriend’s switchblade. She fingered the indentation. “‘My body is marked by the men I’ve known. It’s a calendar of bad love that tells me nothing.’ I heard that song on the radio this morning.” Josephine studied Christine’s cheeks as she spoke, slabs of tender meat.

  Josephine felt a sudden urge to ask if she could mov
e in with Christine, sleep on the dusty couch, eliminate the differences between them altogether.

  “What can I do to help you?” Josephine asked, meaning the exact opposite.

  Christine pulled a clump of dust and hair from Joe’s hand. Stan sniffed the clump where it fell, then fell over on his side, his boil hanging loose with fluid, pregnant with possibility.

  “Look,” Christine said. “I appreciate you coming by. I do.” She held her hands in front of her as if she were holding a steering wheel, her splinted finger sticking up like a stiff ghost. “I’ve got my brother in Florida,” she said. Whenever Christine mentioned her brother in Florida, she pretended she was driving his imaginary car and the conversation was over.

  “Christine,” Josephine said. She spoke before she realized that her words were more than thought. “I think I’m going blind.”

  Christine looked up wearily. She reached the hand with the broken finger over to rub Joe’s back awkwardly.

  “Never mind,” Josephine said.

  “At least it’s only one finger,” Christine said firmly. The adhesive tape of the splint scratched up and down Joe’s sweater, snagged, and moved on.

  Josephine’s shoulders stiffened with embarrassment. She’d wanted Christine to jump up from the couch in horror, fluff the couch pillows for Josephine to lay her head. “Blind?!” The blood rushed to her face, heating it up from the inside out.

  Josephine was nothing like that doctor in Haiti—she wandered out into the squashed-down world looking for comfort from the people she should be comforting. Christine flipped her arm over to scratch her wrist with the splint and Josephine had a sudden murderous impulse to cut the wrist Christine offered up, to see real blood. She shook her head to empty her mind of the image. She would go home and call Eli. He would straighten her out. “Pull the shades, Jo,” he’d say. “Make a cup of tea. Take a nap. Be kind to yourself.”