by Maria Flook
“You got trouble at home, Doc?” “Does the bitch be bitching?” they try to get alongside. The other day, I examined an inmate whose persistent jock rash presented like a rust-corroded chastity belt. He tugs my hand and says, “What’s the daily mail? What bad deeds she be doing now?”
I talk about Lane. I hope to expunge her with each installment of my narrative. As I pump a rubber syringe of Hi-cal All-in-One Diet or I’m giving some hunger-strike zombie a Com-Electric cocktail, as I reposition a prolapsed colon, feeding it back through the traumatized sphincter, as I exfoliate bedsores, peeling scabbed doilies from the tender living cells—her story goes on. Every word rewords itself. My wind-and-piss monologues have earned their audience. She wouldn’t like to know it, but Lane is famous across these secret tiers. From our hallmark mafioso all the way down to some pimply JD, and in the teeming holding tanks, everyone knows what she’s done to me.
YOU ARE HERE
Ronnie left a small coastal town after ending a two-year romance. She moved back to Providence, safely inland, and started a day job as a receptionist at Swan Point Cemetery. Visitors came into the office to ask for directions to their distant ancestors’ monuments. Even the newly bereaved became confused in the huge network of cinder paths and had to return to the office to get their bearings. Ronnie looked up names of the deceased in a ledger and then she marked individual maps for the visitors. The illustrated sheets had a tiny ruby arrow pointing out the building where she handed out the maps. Beneath the arrow were the words YOU ARE HERE. Ronnie thought that this was a silly error. Shouldn’t such notations be placed only on stationary objects? Once the map was removed from the office and consulted in the complicated twists and turns of the cemetery, the defining words, YOU ARE HERE, would have no meaning at all.
There were small, colored markers at the cemetery intersections and Ronnie told visitors, “Go left at the blue dot, right at the green dot, and then it’s straight ahead. It’s the black granite one between two old Victorians.” Ronnie had memorized the monuments when she took inventory walks with her boss, who was resizing plots on a master blueprint, trying to squeeze new sites next to the antique markers whenever there was a bit of extra space. Every square inch would be sold. There was nothing to read in the office besides the maps of the graves, and Ronnie learned the layout pretty fast. The regulars didn’t need directions to the graves, but they sometimes stopped in to say hello to Ronnie or to ask for keys to the mausoleums. They would tell her one thing or another: the grass was cut too short or burned from too much fertilizer. There was new evidence that local gangs had duped security again and bursts of chartreuse spray paint highlighted the erogenous zones of a white marble angel.
Several times a day, the office telephone jangled, but when Ronnie picked it up and said, “Swan Point,” there wasn’t anyone on the line. People often had difficulty making arrangements for a loved one’s memorial service. A new widow might weep uncontrollably, or a husband, simply planning ahead, might feel uncomfortable asking for the price list. But when the phone rang and it was dead, Ronnie wondered if it was Roger. Once Ronnie thought she saw her old boyfriend driving around in the cemetery. It can’t be him, she thought, but it was just like Roger to take a pleasure drive through a place like that. He had often stopped with her in graveyards to smoke a little crack. He made a production about lining up the little rocks across his knee, like baby teeth, before choosing one for his pipe. Then he would try something with her. She didn’t imagine he would be looking for her now. Yet, at odd times during her shift, a car pulled into the gravel circle outside the office. It looked like Roger’s car, but she couldn’t see the driver’s face. The driver steered away. It was like a ghost car, because she could never identify who was driving, although she thought she recognized Roger’s plaid flannel shirt-jacket. Maybe the whole scene, car and driver, was a materialization. Then again, it was more likely that Roger himself was trying to stalk her.
Roger had suffered an unforeseen reaction to her abortion. He had accompanied her to the clinic, where he sat in the waiting room, reading the whole newspaper. When she came out, he dipped his chin to look at her. He eyed her. On the way home, he bought her an ice cream cone. Yet she saw his disturbance as he watched her lick its drippy chocolate crown. His grief wouldn’t wash away. “How can you eat that?” he told her. She took comfort in the dairy treat, but to please him she tossed the heavy cone out the car window.
Ronnie had endured the suction procedure, and she allowed herself some weeks for the spiritual adjustment. Guilt can be a strengthening fiber woven into the big fabric, or it can weaken its seams until the garment falls apart. Ronnie understood that the abortion resulted from their careless act, but she was getting on with her life. If she sang in the shower again or whistled while at her chores, Roger glowered at her. Roger let his symptoms balloon. Then Roger found God.
God happened to Roger in the same blind way Roger’s seed had stolen into her.
His swerve to organized religion was the last straw.
For months Ronnie had been keeping to herself. It was a relief to go home after work to nothing. She had a small black-and-white TV. She preferred black-and-white; its chalky monotones seemed more generous and forgiving of the little flaws in Raymond Burr’s aging profile. She liked the old monochrome Perry Masons. Black-and-white film seemed like a convincing reenactment of the truth. Her mother sent her several women’s magazines, which brightened the rooms. She slept well. She dreamed. Her thoughts were large, steady examinations of the past. If her mother called and asked her about her arrangements, Ronnie would say, “No current dilemmas, no impending dramas.”
Then Ronnie met a man. She first saw him at Leo’s, the restaurant where she worked a few nights a week. He began to joke with her in a friendly way. She laughed and let her receipt pad drop to her side. She would stop writing the order and laugh, but the woman who came with him didn’t like it very much. Ronnie pulled the pad up to her chin again and concentrated on the point of her pencil; she waited. The man always ordered bourbon, but the woman said nothing. The woman looked at the man. Her big, haunted eyes didn’t seem to disturb him. He sat attentively on the edge of his chair, like a musician in an orchestra pit performing the same notes he had performed many times before. He ordered a glass of white wine for the woman. It was always this way. The woman, looking straight at him, would let him order her drink.
Ronnie could identify the chink of ice cubes in his empty glass when he needed another round. It was more difficult with the woman’s glass of wine; she had to watch the bowl to see its pale level slowly receding, as if time stood still, until at last it was empty. The woman drank in small, even sips. Her conversation didn’t accelerate in the usual way. She waited for Ronnie to set her new glass on the table before she continued talking, and sometimes Ronnie took her time about it. Then the woman drifted forward in her chair; she locked her wounded eyes on the man. She whispered inaudible words, the way that people admit facts in a courtroom.
He was different. His voice was consistent and sincere in its commitment to keep going, to get through the night in a moderate and sociable way. When Ronnie placed a napkin on the table and centered a new tumbler of bourbon on it, he started to gab to her directly. He told Ronnie that he was a professor at the university.
“Is that right? What do you teach?” she asked him.
“Political science.”
“Really?” Ronnie said, but it wasn’t a question. She knew very little about his field and she didn’t have anything more to say about it.
“I’m teaching a seminar in the First Amendment.”
Ronnie nodded. She tried to remember which amendment was first. It might be the one about carrying firearms, but then she was certain it was the law about speaking your own mind in a public place.
“It’s the question of our age,” he said.
Of course, Ronnie knew he meant it was the “topic of our era,” but the woman stared at Ronnie as if trying to figure Ronnie�
��s whereabouts—late twenties? Maybe the third-decade mark had been struck with a gentle thump. Again, the woman lifted her face and stared at Ronnie, trying to oust her from the conversation.
Ronnie moved away and listened to the man’s voice over the loud talk of the sports teams who came into the tavern to celebrate. His voice seemed to steady her even as it excited some part of her, and she believed he was aware of his effect. Of course, the young woman must be his student or perhaps a new colleague unsure of her standing in the department. Something was off. Their tilting situation distracted Ronnie from her other customers; if her regulars got chatty with her, she begged off. She preferred to get a rag and wipe the tables, concentrating her attention on the woman’s glass of wine until it was empty. Then she went to get her a new glass, each time, perhaps at twenty-minute intervals, and this is how the nights went.
Then one evening he came alone. He took the same table in the corner. He ordered a drink from Ronnie and he joked with her in the way he had before. She smiled at him, keeping her pad close to her face. Something made her feel shy and nervous—a suspicion of love or the end of love—and she was guarded. He came back for a few nights and it became easier with him. He learned about her daytime job and he made jokes about her routine at the cemetery office. He said her job was really not much different from his line of business, teaching bored coeds. He told her, “We’re both in day care, however you look at it.” It was a funny idea. He asked her about her coworkers, her “skeleton crew.” His silly puns echoed in her head while she worked at the cemetery until she met him again each night at Leo’s. Sometimes she sat down beside him for a moment, mopping up the beery circles on the next table as he joked with her in his friendly way.
He gave her the key to his apartment so she could use the bathtub. Her place didn’t have a bathtub, only a fiberglass shower stall. Since they were lovers, she figured he was making an affectionate gesture to let her bathe in his home when he was at work. She left the cemetery after her morning shift and went to his building. He was actually quite gallant and had purchased a new yellow towel for her use. He placed an ashtray on the windowsill especially for her. She always remembered to rinse the tub, and she cleaned the ashtray with a tissue. Often the yellow towel would be dry before he came home.
When she let herself into his apartment, she could hear the steady ruffled notes of an aeration filter from an aquarium in the dark living room. A woman he had lived with had given him two tropical fish for Valentine’s Day. The fish were iridescent and billowing. Ronnie purchased a third fish on a whim. It was a long, spotted loach. Its length undulated and flowed as if it were a liquid within a liquid. The strange fish kept low in the tank, against the dunes of gravel, and it hurried away from the other fish who shifted back and forth in perfect tandem.
Ronnie grew fond of the loach. She moved close to the glass to greet it. She believed that its forlorn motions, its nervous prowling through its cloudy environment, hinted at its superiority over the other pair, which flurried about the tank as frivolous as ribbons.
“Poor fish,” she said, addressing the single fish expressly.
The telephone was ringing. Ronnie went over to the desk and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” she said.
Nothing.
“Hello,” Ronnie said again. The person on the other end didn’t respond. She thought she recognized Roger’s fretful exhalation. A ragged, unhappy release of breath before she heard the receiver clunk into its cradle. Then, the dial tone returning. “Roger? Roger, is that you?” Ronnie said after the fact.
She thought about her mystery caller. The tiny hairs on the nape of her neck tightened. She told herself it was vanity itself to imagine she was being stalked by Roger. She went into the bathroom and found the little radio on top of the medicine cabinet. She flicked the dial to find her favorite talk show. She lit a cigarette and exhaled with force. She opened the tap full blast and snapped the window shade until the room was washed with light. She spilled the mineral salts into the tub and the water churned a violent, oily green.
It was a bachelor’s bathroom; there was nothing frilly, no glamour magazines crinkled and swollen from the bath, no scented soaps. Shelves along the wall were half-empty, as if someone had just removed some items. All that remained was a smear of red powder on the glass shelf in the medicine cabinet and a tube of mascara which had rolled under the claws of the tub. Ronnie disliked bathing in a place where another woman had so recently departed. Yet the artifacts of other women intrigued her. As Ronnie undressed, she snooped through the medicine cabinet to find further evidence. She pulled open the vanity drawers and shifted the contents. Containers of disposable razors, old prescription vials, and a few chalky stubs of broken styptic pencils. Something caught her attention and she lifted it out. It looked like a sex toy of some kind. She examined the length of fleshy foam. She saw the word Duromed embossed on the rubber. Ronnie thought she recognized the item. It was an armrest cushion from a pair of crutches.
A foam crutch pad. It kept her interest. Its taut symmetry, its neutral shade had a comforting familiarity. It was the empty middle of the day when she wanted sex most. She didn’t think twice about it and slicked the foam cylinder with a few drops of lotion and pressed it inside her. Its dense, alarming circumference was too harsh and stinging, but she moved it the way she wanted. It took less than one minute. She swayed forward with the sensation. Then she rinsed the foam rubber and put it back in the drawer.
She sat down in her bath. She listened to a talk-radio program called “Ask Joy.” The host managed the phone lines and made on-the-spot analyses of dreams and arguments. She told housewives to be “sexual, not sentimental.”
“For wedding anniversaries,” she told them, “don’t make cakes, make love. Light one candle. Light it at least twice—”
Ronnie tried to memorize the most ludicrous moments of Joy’s shows, thinking her new boyfriend might like hearing these snippets as Roger would have. But she soon found out that her new lover had a different sense of humor. Her remarks were taken for their face value. He didn’t seem to know the difference between her tender thoughts and her jokey details. He sometimes laughed at the wrong moments and didn’t respond to the witty lines or outrageous similes she fashioned in their bedroom conversation. He did want to hear about her bath. She was expected to comment on the water’s temperature—quite hot—and the yellow towel—neatly folded on the toilet seat. It seemed to delight him that part of her day had been designed and awarded to her by him.
As she soaked, Ronnie listened to the despairing phone calls. The telephone lines were burdened. “Keep trying,” Joy said. “You’ll get through.” Women complained about their husbands and accused their lovers. Despite their anger and humiliation, the callers sounded bright, excited by their moment on live radio. They lost all fear of mentioning names, and even threatened their lovers. A caller said, “There—I have witnesses. I swear, if he ever comes back, I’ll kill him.”
When Ronnie had left Roger, there wasn’t all this fanfare. She hinted around for a week that she had had enough of his impromptu sermons, his dinner-table indoctrinations, which had robbed the last bit of cushion from their relationship. She packed her car and said, “It’s been real.” It’s been real was Roger’s typical comment on everything—until recently, when Roger had started to say, with rhythmic authority, “Thank you, Jesus.” Roger said Thank you, Jesus after any little event. He said it at a sudden crack of lightning, at the conclusion of a routine bowel movement, at incalculable moments during sex.
“It’s been real,” she said when she left him. Using his old words against him in her final assessment was the most cutting remark she could have made, but he nodded his head and chimed in with the same.
A few months before she packed up, Roger had taken her to a revival meeting. There was a new church right on the highway. It had a big meeting room, a Kingdom Hall or some such thing with big plate-glass windows that were always blazing. Behind the new glass there was al
ways a good crowd of people mingling, everyone holding white paper coffee cups. It always looked like something was happening, and Roger was interested. For more than a week, Roger cruised past the church, looking through its huge window. Then he made a U-turn, and rolled past again. He said, “That big window there makes me feel on the outside looking in.”
“Well, that’s just what you’re doing. You’re spying on those believers.”
“That’s what they want us to do. They make themselves a spectacle to recruit rubbernecks.”
“Ignore it,” she told him.
“Shit, it’s a crowd, isn’t it?” Roger took his foot off the accelerator as they drove by the new church another time. The people inside the big glass room looked animated in their conversations, standing in pairs and clustered in small groups, committed to their social hour before addressing serious matters.
Ronnie said, “It’s an AA meeting.”
“Nope. These are not mere friends of Bill, these are children of God.”
“Maybe it’s Mothers Against Drunk Drivers or one of those victim organizations. What’s it to you?”
Roger steered off the road and into the asphalt lot. The cars in the diagonal spaces were economy compacts and several clunkers just like Roger’s. Roger said, “We’ve got to check this out.”
“Are you kidding? You want to go in there? We’re not members.”
“No membership required.”
Ronnie said, “How do you know?”
“Sign says.”
Ronnie looked at the signboard: 5 p.m. Revival Ev’ry Nite. All are Welcome. She looked at her watch. It was four-thirty.