by Maud Casey
Last night Josephine had found brief comfort on a late-night public TV talk show. A guest scientist had warned against the dangers of bowing down to genetic determinism. And yet all this talk about genomes—how could they not, in addition to everything else, dictate human behavior? That’s what the talk show host had said, striking a thoughtful pose, hand on his chin as if he were in the midst of discovering something himself. The trick, Josephine thought, was to arm yourself with your own life philosophies, to learn to tell your own narrative in a way that allowed you to influence your own evolutionary path. My mother lost her mind so I didn’t have to. The fact that I’m aware of the danger makes it that much more preventable. Yeah, my father left—it made me strong, independent, self-sufficient. No, I didn’t feel abandoned, actually. She had these conversations frequently with imaginary dissenters, who often took the form of the late-night talk show host. He’d ask challenging questions, that hand on his chin. But Josephine, you’ve had moments where you too wanted to retreat to your bed. Long naps in the afternoon, yes? Your work—is it guilt that motivates you? And how about this Eli? He has made it clear that he loves you, and yet you refuse to even discuss the possibility of marriage. What is this about? Perhaps you are afraid you will drive him away the way your mother did your father? Oh, shut up, she told herself.
“Call me if you need anything,” Josephine said to Christine, knowing Christine never would. Then she had an inspiration. She wrote her home phone number on a piece of paper and slipped it into Christine’s good hand.
“What’s this?” Christine asked.
“My home number.”
“Am I supposed to be grateful?”
Get set, the spiders whispered.
Back at her office, Josephine took herself to task for giving a client her home phone number. She shouldn’t foster dependency. She’d gone to social work school after her mother died to be able to give something to people who wanted to receive it. At first that provided a joyous, mind-expanding satisfaction, which then became more of a cleaning-the-house kind of satisfaction. Clean laundry folded neatly in drawers; kitchen counter wiped clean; a bathroom that smelled of fake-smelling flowery disinfectant; groceries unpacked, refrigerator arranged so that the levels of food made sense, cans carefully stacked in the cupboard. A now-that’s-done kind of satisfaction. She knew she’d shut herself down, wrapped herself in the snappy maxims she offered the women she counseled—“Take care of yourself; no one else will,” or “You can’t undo your past.” It kept their sadness from seeping through. Now that felt wrong—she should feel some of that pain. This talk with herself wasn’t having the desired effect.
She thought about calling Eli, then decided against it. His kindness infuriated her. “You need a break,” he’d say as he often did, level-headed and calm. His solutions infuriated her.
“You’ll be like this someday, no matter how hard you try,” her mother had said to her, always quietly (so much better when she screeched), after her father fled. This was before her mother stopped leaving the house altogether, when she still faked fainting spells in movie theaters. Josephine would throw down her popcorn to come to her rescue. That’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? Or was it? Kindness infuriated her too, and solutions enraged her. In a train station once, she thought she was going deaf because the clerk behind the counter began to speak as a train pulled into a station. Josephine, excited by how easy this round of reassurance would be, pointed to the train, something tangible, something right there in front of them. She laughed with relief.
“You think this is funny?” her mother had said. “I’m in pain here.”
“I know that,” she said. “I know.”
“I wish I would go deaf so you could see the thing devouring me from inside.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say,” Josephine said, packing her bags in her mind. “Never think it again or it might come true.”
“I wish it would,” she said, and Josephine unpacked her mental luggage once more, feeling the inevitable tug of guilt in the blood they shared.
Josephine canceled her next appointment and went home, where she lay down on her bed. She fell asleep and had a dream in which she walked around and around her own squat house, crowded together among the other one-story houses in the neighborhood for protection, plucking bits of flaking paint to reveal a different color underneath. As she walked, she realized she couldn’t remember what day it was, whether it was yesterday or today or tomorrow or next year.
“It’s Wednesday,” the two girls who lived across the street told her, running through her dream. She woke up, frightened by the blur of her days. She opened her bedroom closet, where her clothes hung like molted skins. There were no groceries, nothing to eat for dinner. This fact pleased her. Over the hum of the refrigerator she listened with satisfaction to the rumbling of her stomach. She thought of the tin cans—peas, corn, beans—in the cabinet, in front of other, dusty cans of hominy, beets, things that sat untouched for years, good ideas at the time. She went into the kitchen and put them in a paper bag. She would take them to the emergency food pantry. It was time to admit she would never, in the entire rest of her life, eat them. She put the paper bag on the kitchen floor, then lay down beside it on the cold linoleum until she could feel darkness surround the house.
She smelled Richmond before she heard him—that musky smell, a parody of what a man should be. He didn’t knock. He pushed open the door, which she’d forgotten to lock in her haste to get inside, away from the world. Nothing happens by accident, she remembered telling Christine last week. He walked into the kitchen and found her there on the floor.
“Theresa’s not home yet,” he said.
Josephine started to get up, and then the same part of her that had wanted to see Christine’s blood decided against it. “She’s been working late these days.”
“I know,” Richmond said, and lay down beside her. Josephine had crawled into bed with her mother once. She had too much to drink one night and slipped in beside her after she’d finally fallen asleep. Her mother’s body stiffened like a rod as soon as Josephine lay down, but Josephine persevered. She put an arm around that rod and kept it there all night.
Richmond’s body was not stiff. It was supple and warm, and as he undressed her, Josephine thought that maybe it wasn’t happiness that needed to knock on the doors of the unhappy. Maybe it was other people’s unhappiness that needed to knock, or rather, just let itself in. As Richmond’s body covered hers, his unhappiness covered hers until there was nothing but heat and movement. And when he left her there, on the kitchen floor, his unhappiness still hovered over her like a blanket.
When Josephine woke up the next morning, she was still lying on the kitchen floor. Richmond had thrown a blanket over her naked body. She was having the inevitable birthday meltdown, she told herself. People should be required to stay home on their birthdays, and on the days surrounding their birthdays. There should be a special padded cell where people could stay until the week of their birth was over. She checked herself for regret, for guilt, for feelings of pain for Theresa, but there were none, at least none that she could feel, which seemed like a really bad sign. At least she wasn’t in her bed. That was something to be grateful for.
The phone rang and rang. She let it ring. The answering machine picked up and it was Eli. “Happy birthday, Jo,” he said cautiously. “Are you there?”
She could almost say in truth that she wasn’t. He worried for her, and she hated to make him worry, but it was as if she gave off a worry-for-me scent. When they first met, she told him the story of her family and he told her the story of his. That was early on when everything, including the idea of the other person heartbroken in some distant past, fueled their attraction for each other. His story was equally full of drama—divorce, affairs, the death of his mother when he was seven. “You’re not alone,” he’d whispered to her more than once. Somehow, this was never as comforting as it was meant to be.
“I’ll call back later,”
he said. “Hope you’re taking the day off and treating yourself.”
She couldn’t answer the phone, but she would go to the eye doctor. The spiders were back, two-stepping across her vision.
Dr. Piazza, the optometrist, put Josephine’s face in a viselike contraption to keep her head still. He adjusted his own thick-lensed glasses, then pressed a button, setting the machine in motion.
As the light came toward her eye, she willed it to blind her. Maimed, she would be excused from any other affliction. She’d strike a deal with the universe—take her sight, she’d take happiness. Happiness might be asking too much—occasional contentment? That seemed reasonable, though she knew it didn’t work that way. Through her job, she’d met men and women whose houses had burned to the ground while they were in the hospital on the verge of death, their child on life support in the next room. There was no quota on misery.
The black dots seemed larger now, two ill-fitting eye patches. They breathed, breathing themselves larger and smaller. The machine touched her eye with its round, cold surface. It clung like a plunger and Josephine thought for a minute it would pull her eye entirely out of its socket. She leaned into it to help it along, but Dr. Piazza pulled her head gently back.
“Just relax,” he said.
“Floaters,” he announced, after the tests. “They’re a sign of nearsightedness—remnants of an artery that nourished your eye while you were still in your mother’s womb.” Josephine was amazed at the prospect of receiving something nourishing from her mother, all these years after her death.
“Sometimes these things resolve themselves,” Dr. Piazza said, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. “The body just takes care of it. We’ll wait and see, all righty?”
“All righty,” Josephine repeated. She liked the idea of her body as a self-maintaining container for her thoughts, carrying them from place to place like a bucket filled to the brim with sloshing, precious water.
Dr. Piazza recommended she go home—Rest, take the day off, treat yourself, it’s your birthday?! Forget about it! Order in or get your boyfriend—you’ve got a boyfriend, right? A pretty woman like you? Get that boyfriend of yours to cook you a nice home-cooked meal—but she decided to make an effort, to make a show of participation in this whole party concept. Something festive—balloons? What was so festive about blown-up rubber? Maybe a colorful assortment of finger foods—vegetables, fruit? Gourds? What were gourds anyway?
She made her way carefully to the grocery store, got a cart, and found herself in the fruit and vegetable aisle. And then there she was, on the floor again. She got up from where she’d fallen to one knee, her fingers pressing lightly at her eye sockets. The shadows pulsed in an almost celebratory way, revived, and her life lurched forward like her grocery cart rolling away in zigzags on faulty wheels.
There was something joyful, giddy even, about the dancing spiders this time. They didn’t impair her sight so much as focus it. They were nourishment after all. Beyond their wiggling black bodies, Josephine caught a glimpse of melons like giant baby heads, graceful sweeps of green-purple rhubarb stalks, white onions the color of someone’s pale skin.
The floaters pulsed like a beating heart and Josephine stroked a melon for reassurance. She felt a surge of excitement like the one she had felt in her dream last night watching the next-door girls run through her house. “Wednesday!” they’d shouted. Today was Friday. The excitement was more vivid than life, but real and really hers.
A rail-thin grocery clerk in a loose green apron pushed Josephine’s cart over from where it had rolled into a display of generic green plants, their leaves edged with brown.
“Is this yours?” he asked. He reached a bony arm into the cart and pulled out a carton of milk. He held it up to her as if this would help her decide. Josephine returned the melon carefully to its place, rubbed her eyes with fingers ripe with faint sweet-melon scent.
“No,” she said definitively, looking at the grocery cart filled with brightly colored, warty gourds and packages of balloons. Like the Hindu mystics, she must break the cycle. “I don’t know whose that is,” she said. She noticed the clerk’s jagged edges, the sharp outline of his white teeth, and the dent in his apron where his hip bone pressed against it.
“Really,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He lifted the milk carton into the air in front of Josephine’s face. He tapped a long finger against the place where it said homogenized.
“Really,” she said. She smiled at him to seal the deal. She slid away, her fingers gliding along the sticky metal sides of fruit stands and bread tables; she inhaled the chemical sweet smell of the cakes in the bakery; aware of the track light ticking overhead as she moved past other shoppers pushing their carts. She thrilled at the idea of her cart abandoned.
She would call a cab and leave her car in the grocery store parking lot, come back for it later. Maybe she would never come back for it. Maybe she was through with that car.
She leafed through the yellow pages and dialed the number of a cab company called At Your Service. It amazed her that cabs would pick you up and take you anywhere you wanted to go, no questions asked. She was no fool; she was a therapist, for Christ’s sake. She knew she was on the run, but still she could go anywhere, anywhere at all, and her stomach dropped with the sheer possibility of it. She went outside to wait.
The cabdriver who pulled up in front of the grocery store was a woman with no right forearm who wore a wristwatch on that elbow. This struck Josephine as a brave gesture, and she sank comfortably into the the smoky, plastic smell of the backseat. She closed her eyes, and the black dots became shadows again.
“Going home?” the driver said. She made it sound like a forgotten place, somewhere long abandoned. The driver was older than Josephine, with thick black hair whose curls obscured her face. A black spider, or was it a baby octopus—all those legs—did a jig across Josephine’s vision: Look at me! She pictured the cab driver at home, chopping carrots with her one good arm on a chopping block, the knob of her slender elbow bobbing up and down with the quick movement, her short, careful nose, deliberate on her otherwise round and sprawling face. She wanted to ask the woman, “What were you making? What did you do with all those carrots?” But when she looked at the picture of the driver on the copy of her driver’s license taped to the back of the front seat, she saw a face pained with angles.
Still, Josephine felt it strongly, this memory that didn’t belong to her. Was it a memory of her mother? Josephine had moved on with her life in the ten years since her mother’s death—crossed state borders, found a satisfying career that put her experiences with misery to good use. She hadn’t run away—she’d grown up, grown older. And yet she’d gone nowhere. Here she was, a grown woman in the back of a cab, longing for the time her mother took her camping as a child, on a beach thousands of miles away from where she was now. Memory was a cruel thing. Her mother had found driftwood and seaweed to build a fire on the sand, under the white light of a full moon. She remembered the pine needles between her toes once she took off her shoes. Her mother said they should feel the earth directly. They ate rosehips for dinner, picked them off bushes and held as many as they could in their hands. Mouths full of seeds, they nibbled around the taut skin. The waves threatened to steal them away in the night where they slept on the beach huddled together on a single blanket her mother took off the bed on the way out.
“This you?” the driver asked.
“Yes, it’s me,” Josephine said though her neighborhood was for a moment unrecognizable. Josephine thought of her car still sitting in the grocery store parking lot. When she got out of the cab, the little girls across the street were sitting on their crumbling stone wall.
“What if I was born in a different family and you weren’t my sister?” one said to the other, who burst into tears and ran inside.
“What a baby,” the first girl said out loud, for Josephine to hear. She flipped her hair over her shoulder, turned, and followed her sister inside.
&n
bsp; The light dazzled the periphery of the black dots. Go, the black dots hummed. The glare of the moon shone off a bottle broken on the sidewalk, onto Richmond’s car parked at an especially haphazard angle beside the curb in front of Theresa’s house.
“The street is black tar slivers,” Josephine said out loud as she put the key in the front door. She pretended she was speaking into a tape recorder, recording her observations for posterity, though she was too old now for children. “The light coming from the windows of the house across the street is like an exploded star.”
Go, the black dots hummed again, pulsing. Josephine knew what she had to do. She went into the kitchen and cleaned the knife. She traced the outline of her eyes with the sharp edge, imagining the cut at the root that would rid her of the fear. There was a knock on the door.
When Josephine had woken up on the beach that morning, she and her mother were remarkably still under the blanket. She had hoped even then, before things got worse, that they’d be carried out to sea. They went back to the house where her father welcomed them reluctantly back to civilization. He ran his hand across his forehead. This would become his signature gesture, meaning he was tired and couldn’t talk to a woman whose possibilities he’d exhausted and the child whom she’d taken as an accomplice.
“Josephine, it’s party time,” Theresa called through the closed door. Tap, tap. “Ready or not, happiness is coming to get you.”
Josephine felt her blood flow through her veins; her heart like a fist pounding on the walls of her chest; her breath moving in and out of her lungs. Hers was a different life in a different body. She put the knife back in the drawer and pressed on her closed eyelids with her fingers, tentatively at first and then harder, so she saw spots with her eyes closed. She took her fingers from her eyes and opened them. It was so dark it was as if night had entered the house, and then, slowly, reluctantly, the outline of the world emerged from the black.