Drastic

by Maud Casey

  I remember waving out the window as a child from a baby-sitter’s arms as my parents left in a swirl of soap and perfume for a party. I forgot them while they were gone and thrilled at their return. It is that animalistic thrill that is my initial desire. That someone that small would smell the air instinctively for my scent, and thrill at my return. There are pictures of Willie as a child where he is stiff with that kind of excitement and anticipation.

  But there is something before that, before the actual baby. There are Willie’s genes and my genes meeting inside of me, beginning a conversation apart from either of us. Like ambassadors from foreign countries sent to negotiate, through a mixture of cocktail banter and lofty ideas they will come to some kind of agreement. I imagine that years from now the interviewer asks me whether I dreamed about my unborn baby. “The baby was never in my dreams,” I’ll say to her. “The baby was in my body dreaming with me, dreaming the language of my body.” The last time the conversation had only just begun. For that dreamy conversation, there is this part of me that is willing.

  I look up at Willie’s face. His eyes are open—small, shiny plates in the dark. He will not go to sleep on me. We will stay up all night in these separate bodies.

  THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE NIGHT OFFICE IN SUMMER

  Contemplation

  The midnight moon sheds solemn light on the low wooden fences that mark the boundaries of my parents’ neighborhood. I step easily over as I take my usual late-night walk, passing through newly mown lawns littered with the junk of leisurely East Coast summer lives—thick, abandoned paperbacks, their pages warped from reading by the pool; one flip-flop lost from its pair; still-damp towels hung over the handlebars of children’s bikes to dry.

  Every night a different route, and tonight I stumble over a tribe of naked Barbies, their pointed feet jammed into the earth. They stand menacing and alert in a series of semicircles, like the guests (only naked) waiting for my younger sister’s fourth wedding to begin two days ago. Beyond the Barbie tribe, the yard swims with the remains of an afternoon spent lounging in the thick humidity—an empty pitcher; two tumblers, rims laced with salt. I trip over a sprinkler and lie still in the soft, cool grass, straining to listen to the world through the ear of my heart, the way Elliot, the professor I do research for in a university town in the Midwest, has encouraged me to do.

  On the airplane ride here, in the plane with twenty seats, the stewardess smiled and announced, “Your closest exit may be behind you.” One of Saint Benedict’s edicts lodged itself in my mind: Day by day, remind yourself that you are going to die. I took a couple of Ativan instead, and as the plane took off I chanted under my breath. “Flying is boring. Flying is boring,” as the plane shimmied and shook down the runway, finally heaving itself into the air.

  The Ativan had just begun its work on the muscle level—small twitches in my cheeks and hands—when the woman next to me mistook my involuntary movement for an invitation to converse.

  “I’m a writer. What do you do?” she said.

  The plane dipped ominously. Flying is boring. Flying is boring. “Well,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining my status as eternal grad student, suspended in time like a perfect fruit fly in amber, or fluffing up my job as assistant researcher on a book about Benedictine monks. “I’m a librarian.”

  I could have lied in any direction. Her question was a decoy, bobbing politely on the surface of our conversation, useless and hollow. She began her monologue.

  “It was a sudden decision for me, really. A quick realization,” she said. “One day God slapped me on the ass and told me to be a writer.” What I had initially interpreted as hip funkiness—chunky turquoise earrings, wild salt-and-pepper hair, bright red lipstick—began to look more and more like the signs of a woman with questionable boundaries.

  “I had no other choice,” she said. “Absolutely, no other choice. I’ve given up reading altogether. Not even the newspaper. I realized finally that it would corrupt the purity of my writing process.”

  “I’m going to my younger sister’s wedding.” I held it up like a shield.

  “I remember when my sisters got married. I’m one of five, you know,” the woman said. “Nine weddings, all divorced now. We weren’t cut out for commitment.” When she spoke, her earrings rattled.

  When the plane shuddered and the engine’s deafening roar became a suspicious grumble, I headed for the bathroom. Pushing through my Ativan haze up the aisle, I had a vision of my underwear—crumpled and lying in years of unswept office dust, hair, and fingernail clippings—underneath Elliot’s desk where he’d pushed it with the toe of his shoe when a student began knocking on his office door. It made me wonder if there is an age when life is supposed to take off like a plane, when something as big as takeoff is supposed to happen.

  A screen door slams, and a big hairy dog skids across the porch, toenails clattering. He bounds toward the nearest tree, lifts his leg to take a leak. When he’s done, he licks the salt off the tumblers and trots over to where I lie. He sniffs at my shoes, then snuffles his way up the rest of my body. With his margarita tongue, he licks away the tears rolling down the side of my face, then walks in those mysterious doggie circles, lies down with his head on my stomach, and falls asleep.

  You stink like dog,” my sister Lanie says, eyes still closed, when I climb in next to her in her childhood bed. We’ve been sharing it since her fiancé, Jack, disappeared three days ago, the day before they were supposed to be married in my parents’ backyard. We are surrounded by dusty furniture moved “temporarily” from other rooms, stacks of yellowing magazines, and a papier-mâché clown head that Lanie made in high school. It lurks in the corner, a shadowy monster.

  “Ruff, ruff,” I say, licking her cheek.

  “That,” she says, wiping her face with the sheet, “is disgusting.” I watch her settle back into sleep. She heaves a few deep sighs and fades gently into herself. In there, swirling and colliding, are dreams she’ll tell me about tomorrow. She is capable of the perfect dream, or at least of composing the perfect dream, the one that resolves the problems of today, integrating all the necessary players. Today she told me last night’s dream of Jack gambling away her life savings in Atlantic City, where he is in reality holding the hand of an ex-girlfriend as she dies of AIDS, alone in a dirty apartment she can no longer afford. In Lanie’s dream, Jack rolled her wedding ring like dice across the green felt of a craps table.

  Each night I roam the neighborhood and then lie in bed listening to what’s left of the waiting family breathe. My mother and father in their bed; Aunt Bernadette in my old room, smelling of new car upholstery and the cigarillos she smokes since she quit smoking cigarettes; cousin George and his new girlfriend whom no one likes, on the foldout couch in the living room. Carl, Lanie’s second husband, and Kevin, his boyfriend, in the guest room. As a group, we possess the qualities of a freshman college hall mixed with those of the only remaining survivors of a made-for-TV-movie nuclear holocaust—we eat whatever’s in the house and stay indoors, paralyzed by catastrophe but secretly happy for an excuse not to do our homework.

  “We’re staying,” Carl declared when it became clear that Jack wasn’t showing up for the ceremony. Over the years Carl has remained one of Lanie’s closest friends. He called someone at the community college where he works to substitute for the English comp classes he hates teaching anyway. “I’m not going anywhere,” Aunt Bernadette said, taking a long drag of her cigarillo. She would manage her real estate business from here, no problem. “We won’t leave you in your time of need,” George’s girlfriend, Lizzie, said. No one had figured out precisely what it was that Lizzie did for a living, and even now, three days later, all we know is that it has to do with marketing something to someone. Lanie looked at me and mouthed, “Who is she?”

  “Please, everyone stay,” my mother said, pushing my father and his scowl aside. My parents have recently reconciled after a six-month separation during which my father lived next door. She turns a
nd looks at my father. “Lanie needs us.” Kevin was already on the phone to the airline, agreeing to pay a seventy-five-dollar service charge in order to change his and Carl’s return flight. “I’ll call the rental car place,” George assured Lizzie, who whispered her concerns in his ear. George’s business partner would handle the bulk of their web design business from New York. “It’s the internet,” George assured Lanie when she protested. “The internet is everywhere.”

  Lanie shifts, resting her cheek on my shoulder. She flings an arm around my waist, demanding my attention in her sleep. “That’s ridiculous,” she says to someone in the mysterious land of her dream mind.

  Suddenly, I want to wake her up and tell her everything I haven’t told her over the past several years—how my arrangement with Elliot, which at first had seemed like an ideal substitute for a boyfriend or a religion, has become bizarre and slightly frightening; how I suspect I’ve become a full-fledged atheist, unable to believe in the god of marriage or the god of career, never mind the regular god; how there are nights I lie awake in my apartment, staring out the window at the lonely night sky so big and vast and me so small and afraid; how I wonder how to feel less separate from the world around me, then wonder how it’s possible that I’ve wondered the exact same thing year after year lying in different beds looking at different patches of sky. But instead I look at Lanie’s hand draped over my hip, filled with energetic purpose even in sleep.

  I miss her already. We will all have to return to our lives at some point, which leads me, as most things do in the middle of the night, to death. I convince myself that I can stand the thought of my own death more than I can bear Lanie’s death someday, her bones crumbling to dust. I begin to weep—at first from the inside out and then it’s just my body going through the motions, practicing, working out for death as if one could be in shape for it, ready to run its marathon when it finally arrives.

  Community

  “Harriet,” Aunt Bernadette says to me, pausing to light a cigarillo at the breakfast table where we’re all drinking mimosas meant for the wedding brunch. Lanie has cut the heads off of the flowers in her wedding bouquet—roses, delphiniums, hollyhocks, dahlias—and floated them in a bowl of water at the center of the table. They bob brilliant red and yellow and blue. It’s just like Lanie to make something extraordinary out of disaster, orchestrating her own abandonment like a party.

  “It’s ten o’clock in the morning, Bernadette,” my mother says to her sister, waving her hand through the exhaled smoke.

  “Lay off. You have Sam, I have these.” Bernadette pats the pack in the pocket of her bathrobe. “Anyway, look who’s talking, Ms. I’m-working-on-my-third-mimosa. Don’t pretend to be a priss. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Sam is not a pack of cigarettes,” my mother says. Her voice is shrill with the twenty years of tension that run like currents of electricity underneath the surface of this exchange.

  “I’ll get the banana bread.” My father heads for the kitchen.

  “Perfect,” Lanie says, her voice pure and resonant as the oboe she played in the high school band. She speaks without lifting her head from the table as Carl massages her neck and shoulders.

  “That doesn’t bother you?” Lizzie, George’s girlfriend, says to Kevin, Carl’s boyfriend, sitting next to her.

  “No, does it bother you?” Kevin has no patience with Lizzie since the night of the ceremony that didn’t happen. After polishing off a bottle of wine by herself, Lizzie started telling drinking stories from her sorority days. When it became clear that no one wanted to hear about the time she took a shit on a sorority sister’s bed that she mistook for a toilet, she cornered Kevin and began asking him questions about his sex life. Doesn’t it hurt? Is Carl’s penis bigger or smaller than yours? Don’t you ever miss girls? Not even a little? At which point George peeled her off of Kevin and led her upstairs to the bathroom. “Just so long as she doesn’t take a dump on my bed,” Lanie whispered to me.

  “It would bother me,” Lizzie says now.

  “Guess what, Lizzie? Kevin isn’t you,” George says. He’s lost patience with her too.

  “I was just asking.”

  “Harriet,” Bernadette says again. Again, she pauses, lighting a new cigarillo.

  “For Christ’s sake, what?” I was hoping she’d been distracted. I can feel her urge to ally herself with me from across the table—just a couple of single girls holding out for a love that will transform us. The trouble is I’m not holding out, and I don’t want to be on her team. My mother doesn’t want me on Bernadette’s team either.

  For the most part, my mother chooses to see my life as faraway, something she can’t quite make out in the distance, but then she panics and sends me negligees and hair combs, the bait with which to lure a man. She imagines that if I stand at my bedroom window with my hair pulled back and my negligee arranged just so, men will swarm to me like worker bees to a queen. “Don’t end up like Bernadette,” my mother told me over the phone last week. “Finding love and staying in love are acts of will. Look at me and your father. Sheer will and determination.” For her, love is like exercise—something you endure in order to feel virtuous.

  “Nice mouth for a girl who studies monks,” Carl says to me now, working a knot under Lanie’s right shoulder blade.

  “Is that what you’re doing in Illinois?” Bernadette says. “Working with monks?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I fuck them too.”

  “Jesus, Harriet,” Lanie says. She gives me a look that tells me not to contribute to the chaos.

  “You’d think you two actually had a personal relationship with the man given the number of times you’ve called on Jesus in the past minute,” Bernadette says. She blows smoke in my mother’s direction.

  “Don’t give us that holier-than-thou crap, Ms. I-go-once-every-six-months-to-Quaker-meeting. It’s not like we never mentioned him while the girls were growing up. Jesus fucking Christ.” My mother laughs, and Bernadette’s smoking is forgiven, as is her age-old critique of what Bernadette sees as my mother’s inability to live without my father. Bernadette thinks my mother has settled for something less than spectacular, though Bernadette lives miserably alone, unable to settle for anything.

  “So,” Bernadette says, “you’re fucking monks in Illinois?”

  “Is there any hope for a little dignity and decorum at the breakfast table?” my mother asks. “Some of us actually believe in God around here.”

  “You do?” George asks.

  “Don’t you?” Lizzie says, turning to George.

  “How can you even know?” says Carl. “I mean, why beat yourself up trying to know?”

  “What I really think we should all be asking ourselves,” Kevin says in the voice of a recent presidential candidate, “is What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do if Jack hadn’t called him since standing him up at the altar?”

  The room falls silent. Everyone looks to Lanie for guidance. She laughs but it sounds like a cough.

  “I’m laughing,” she says. “I’m laughing.”

  Carl stops kneading Lanie’s shoulder to punch Kevin on the arm.

  “Ow,” says Kevin.

  “I admit it,” my mother says, in an effort to keep things from disintegrating entirely. “I believe in God.”

  “What do you want? A medal?” Bernadette says.

  “I’m just saying.” My mother gets up from the table and heads for the kitchen.

  “Can I have one of those nasty things?” Lanie holds out her hand to Bernadette for a cigarillo.

  “Me too,” says Lizzie, in an effort to befriend Lanie.

  “Clearly, the massage isn’t working.” Carl throws up his hands and returns to his seat beside Kevin. He rests his forehead dramatically on Kevin’s shoulder. “I’m a failure.”

  “No, you’re not,” Lanie says. “I just need some chemical backup.”

  “More mimosas?” my mother calls from the kitchen.

  Everyone groans.

  “You
have no choice when it comes to this banana bread.” My father waltzes in with a steaming plate held high above his head.

  “He cooks, he cleans, he’s superman!” Bernadette puts her most recent cigarillo out with a hiss in the swallow of liquid at the bottom of her champagne glass.

  But we’re all watching Lanie. She holds the cigarillo in one hand and procures the perfect bite of banana bread with the other. We are, all of us, rapt—Carl, Kevin, my mother, my father, George, who used to pine for her until it was explained to him at thirteen that it wasn’t appropriate to French-kiss your first cousin. Even Lizzie puts aside her confusion and jealousy, because Lanie has that kind of power over people. She is a magnetic force, especially in her grief over Jack. The way she inhales smoke with her eyes closed gives us all intense pleasure, and the way she licks the crumbs from her fingers sends us all reaching for a piece of the banana bread, though eating it will never taste as good as watching Lanie. She steals an ice cube from George’s water glass and runs it along her collarbone, heated up from inside her long body. She rubs the dripping water into her skin as if it were lotion.

  Even as a girl, she gave off an electric glow—eating ice cream in the morning, though my parents told her not to, would somehow end up being funny. The same is true of all of her marriages. She says each of them has been like school—her first one like high school—basic and tragic; Carl was like college—almost grown-up and life-altering; her third like graduate school—overly analytic; and now there’s Jack. Jack, she told us, is like being sent back to junior high, being forced to wear braces and have acne all over again.

  Bernadette breaks the spell. “Harriet,” she says. She’s determined to put her pain somewhere else. She’s had a bad year of younger men who broke her heart, first with their yearning for her and then with that sudden, fickle indifference specific to men of a certain age who haven’t yet realized their power and then suddenly, brutally do. “Harriet, have you met any strapping, cornfed, midwestern men?”