Pickle winced. Why would she buy a pair of sneakers if she were planning to kill herself a few days later? It was the obvious question and Pickle sensed Lance’s eyes trained on him. But people did all sorts of things that were perceived as normal, before they offed themselves. Such as, “Oh, I had dinner with Uncle Joe last night. He seemed to be doing better and I noticed he had a healthy appetite.” Only to discover Uncle Joe a few days later, lying in bed with a self-inflicted gunshot wound entering through his mouth and exiting out the back of his head onto the upholstered headboard. And then, finding his wife stuffed in the closet with her throat slashed. Something like that, anyway.
Pickle avoided Lance’s stare and tried to rid himself of his tendency to overthink things. He didn’t want to be a cop right now. Because mostly, people were just too weird. They’d give ice-cold or emotionally overwrought versions of both horrific murders and simple fender benders. And then talk about the shoes they wore. Okay, he reasoned silently, the sneaker purchase was simply not an issue.
Junie paused to pull her hair around to her left shoulder. “When I finally got him to stop, I let go of his hand and turned around because I heard a car coming closer—from New Jersey. We were on the South Sidewalk. I told you that already, right?”
“We know. Go on,” Lance encouraged.
“Well, it’s just that I hadn’t seen a car for a few minutes. Or at least I think it was a few minutes. Maybe it was just a few seconds. But I remember being surprised about the sound of the engine—kind of like an older car, or diesel fuel. Anyway, when I saw the car approaching I was suddenly embarrassed about even being there. Because just at that moment I felt exposed—out on a limb. Maybe even crazy. Here I was on a bridge, ready to kill myself, and the most mundane things kept popping into my head. It’s hard to explain. You know?” She dispensed a defeated sigh.
Pickle was back to tilting on two chair legs with his fingers interlocked behind his head. He was listening with half an ear now, more preoccupied with her face—wondering what gene pool was responsible for birthing that head of hair and those wondrous eyes, and her clotted beige freckles. With a neck so lithe, so swan-like, it was hard to imagine she had the strength to hold up her skull, let alone that thick mane of hair. Her body—as much as he could see—looked very thin. Pickle concluded she didn’t have muscles worth a damn. Her only obvious strength seemed be her ability to sit there and tell two strangers what clearly embarrassed her.
The humid atmosphere had made all three of them clammy. Junie’s wet coat, hanging on the back of her chair, must have increased the dew point in the small room. Lance’s forehead shone with sweat. Pickle’s armpits were drenched and he surely stunk, but was too self-conscious to take a quick whiff. But floating on top of everything rode her peculiar body odor—a feminine stress smell—feral, really. It comforted him that her smell dominated his. “We’re almost finished. You’re doing fine. Just push through and you’ll be out of here,” Pickle assured her.
Junie shot Pickle a weak smile, then her face retracted back to a blank façade. “Okay. When I turned to see how far away the car was, I let go of Jacob’s hand. And that’s when it happened. He ran and climbed over and jumped, all in what seemed like one motion.” Junie put her hand to her mouth and swallowed with difficulty. “I need water, please. I feel sick.”
Lance quickly reached to the floor, scooped up a bottle of water and poured a few inches into a paper cup, then set the bottle beside it. Pickle scooted a metal wastebasket closer to her chair with his foot. She drank, slowly first, then refilled, gulped, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Thanks. I’m okay now. When he jumped, at first I was surprised, because I was alone. See, we were always together—we had that kind of relationship. I guess you’d call it codependent, overly so. Anyway, that was my first reaction—surprise. Like, this couldn’t be happening and we needed to have a huge do-over. Because we’d planned it together and now he hadn’t held up his end of the bargain. I’d been deprived—tricked out of something that was my right, too. And just then, I wanted to be where he was. In the river. Dead. And now I’m alive, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. And that is SO. NOT. FAIR.”
She hurled the last three words at Pickle. He flinched. And for the first time, she bawled, from the very bottom of her lungs. It was a wretched sound, like some kind of cog mechanism with interlocking parts made in different centuries. The crunch and grind of her howl was unlike anything he’d ever heard before. And wrong, like an early death. Pickle clasped his hands together, fingers laced, placing them over his crotch in the prayer position.
It was nearing late morning by now and the next shift would soon gather in the precinct room down the hall for their daily directives. Pickle had no idea what internal clock he was running on, but he’d never felt more awake—alive—in his life. His palms itched badly and it was all he could do to not pull a comb out of his back pocket and scrape them raw. His mind buzzed as he imagined drinking her hot tears, salty as they surely were. He’d rock her quiet, like the baby/girl/woman he knew she was. He wouldn’t press her. No, he’d coax her back to the living. And when she was ready, she’d meet his gaze, with her almond eyes and her blue irises and her orangutan-colored hair and her past life of hurts. Then she’d see him, and know him.
Pickle looked at his watch, then reached over to the recorder. “Terminating at 10:14 a.m.” He pressed the button. Click.
5
KAREN’S HEART ALWAYS CAVED A BIT WHEN STAN was at his most vulnerable. Having returned to the brownstone, she surveyed the state of Stan’s special universe through his eyes. Not only were his shoes strewn from here to there, but clothing lay scattered, willy-nilly, across the floor. The kitchen sink brimmed with crusty dishes and the bedclothes were sullied by an unbearable clump of soiled towels. Karen truly felt for him, but only to a point. Because that was what Stan perceived as the hurricane he imagined swirling around him. In reality, one shoe was proud by two inches in a perfectly lined up row of Tom Ford loafers, a pair of trousers had ever so gently slipped to the floor from the back of a chair, a partially eaten piece of toast sat on a single plate in the otherwise empty sink, and a dry hand towel lay perfectly folded on their pristinely dressed bed. While Karen sympathized, she could not exactly empathize. Stan lived in his head, while Karen was, above all else, a brutal realist.
They’d gone straight to the emergency room from the police precinct, once Pickle had been able to release them as innocent bystanders who’d unwittingly witnessed a bizarre incident, through no fault of their own. And coming off a stinking drunk notwithstanding, that was technically true. The diagnosis? Stan’s forearm had a deep bone bruise, the tooth gash in his forehead would heal, and he was anemic—a chance discovery from routine blood tests taken at the hospital. Karen would need to see a dentist; her front teeth wobbled. Their alcohol levels had passed muster at .05%. All told, Karen was relieved that they’d dodged yet another in an endless fuselage of drunken bullets.
Once back at the brownstone (after Karen had taken The Fucking Doodles out), they’d collapsed on the bed for a five-hour-post-drunk sleep. Hungover and dehydrated, late morning now throttled them.
Karen stabbed a finger toward the sofa. “Sit down.”
“I can’t. I need to do this.” Stan scampered around the living room in his pajamas and robe, wincing mightily with each jostle to his bum arm, as he attempted to restore his imaginary disheveled world to lockstep order. Prodding the odd shoe into place with his toe, he inadvertently jumbled the others.
Karen pressed, “I understand you feel you need to, but this is going to fly differently for a while.”
Stan halted in mid-mania and gave a mighty kick to his shoes in frustration. He chugged deeply from a bottle of Icelandic glacier water. While his right fist clamped the neck of the bottle, his left arm was wrapped in an ace bandage supported by a sling, rendering it useless. Stan was a southpaw. He heaved a tortured sigh and looked at Karen as tears began to
slip down his cheeks.
Not wanting to witness a flood worthy of Noah, she turned her back to him and continued with a barrage of reasoning. “Stan, please. I don’t want to have the same conversation every hour on the hour, so let’s review one last time. You’re taking pain pills, so you’re going to have to cut out the drinking. And you can’t use your left arm, not to mention the computer or even a pencil. Come to think of it—”
“Oh Jesus, Karen. Kindly shut up and stop being my mother or whoever the hell you think you need to impersonate. You know very well what the real problem is. I’m seriously compromised. And I couldn’t give two shits that I can’t write or use the computer, or do much of anything … although I’m sure that reality will descend upon me soon enough when I go back to the office. Because on top of all this …” Stan made a broad gesture with his bum arm and the torque of the sweep caused him to commit an unintended twirl. Karen spit out a laugh.
“Yeah, go ahead and laugh your ass off,” Stan said, attempting to recover some dignity. “Reduce me to a blithering mess, why don’t you? But you’re right about one thing: I can’t drink. Unless I stop the pills, as you’ve advised ad nauseam. So instead of infantilizing me, try to be my wifey-wife for a change—you know, the supportive soul mate I married? The one who’s supposed to know me better than anyone?”
Stan paused, and Karen knew this was her big cue to step in with some words of comfort. Instead, she remained silent with her back to him, arms crossed and foot tapping.
“Okay—be like that,” he soldiered on. “But you’re on notice: I’m officially in withdrawal from alcohol. You know what that feels like. You’re lucky I’m not going into the DTs. Remember Sue Ellen in Dallas? Her ‘tremor scene’ in the drunk tank when she was screaming hysterically? When Miss Ellie and Clayton came to see if it was really her? Because she’d gone missing for a few days? Her makeup was so perfect … mauve … I think it was season eight. No, maybe the ninth … Remember?”
Karen rolled her eyes to herself. “How could I forget? We’ve only seen that episode about four hundred times—”
“You love it too, so don’t go all high and mighty on me. But that’s where I could be right now—in the drunk tank. And you seem to have no conception, no compassion for everything I’m juggling. I mean really. Look at this place!”
Karen turned around and sliced her throat with her forefinger. “Stop all this shit right now. We had the accident less than twelve hours ago and you’re acting like the place has devolved to … to that place that starts with an A.”
“Armageddon. I can see it right in front of me—the official end of my world.” Stan picked up the sash of his silk bathrobe with his good hand, wiped his eyes, blew his nose into the fabric, examined the mess, and then let it drop. A stunned look crossed his face as he realized what he’d just done. “This is what I’m reduced to. Where are the fucking tissues, for Christ’s sake?”
She didn’t feel like even acknowledging his redundant question; a box of Kleenex was sitting right in front of him on the coffee table. Instead, Karen deflected and softened her tone. “Since you brought up the bible, it’s Sunday—let us rest and be grateful in it. Dear God in fucking Heaven. Anyway, The Doodles has been seen to and, at the moment, that’s all we need to worry about.”
The Doodles, who’d been sitting in a corner of the room, heard his name mentioned. He sauntered over and plopped down onto Stan’s trousers—only after first clawing at the fabric to make his nest. His lower jaw protruded—a classic characteristic of the Brussels Griffon breed—and he heaved a wheeze of contentment. Then, as if to press the point of his pleasure, he spent a few moments licking his chops, which caused a few viscous dribbles to land on Stan’s pants.
Stan promptly grabbed his trousers out from under The Doodles and skulked to the back bedroom. “Is nothing sacred in this house?” The Doodles followed the trousers.
Now the living room became a welcomed vacuum of quiet. Shafts of light shimmered through the front windows and trees from the sidewalk blew dappled shadows across Karen’s arms. She stepped into the path of the sun’s rays to warm her face. Normally she loved early light, but this morning it was all she could do to keep her pounding head upright. Her hands clenched as she tried to regulate her breathing. Then she caught a disturbing glimpse of herself in the mirror over the fireplace. What a fright; like a morning facial mask dabbed with hot oil, every line seemed exaggerated.
Karen’s beauty was not orthodox. Her oval face resembled fourth-century BC Etruscan bone structure; indeed, her features seemed carved from different eras of antiquity. Admittedly, her nose was a bit Roman, her lips a tad thin and her eyes a nondescript brown. Still, while one could pick apart the details, the composite was a heart-stopper.
The brownstone, too, was a flawed masterwork, yet it also worked. Whenever Karen felt the burn of imperfection in herself, she simply looked up to the archways, which consistently measured a few inches off symmetrical. The hardwood floor borders didn’t quite match up in the odd corner. Then the ceiling, where century-old tin tiles had been patched in through the years with modern replicas, failed to blend under close inspection. Karen felt reassured that, yes, beauty just might come in complex packages.
The amalgam of beauty and design were common ground for Karen and Stan. Their architectural firm, called simply McArdle, had grown into a sassy and well-respected powerhouse. At the masthead, Stan was considered to be a straight-up genius—his personality quirks mere trifling annoyances to be noticed and then tolerated. The tricky line in the sand was that Stan would not—could not—tolerate any deviation from his design concepts. Just one of Karen’s roles, as head designer, was to assuage the clients and patiently explain that accommodation was not a word Stan ever used or was even willing to admit was listed in Webster’s. And she’d remind them, at regular intervals, why they had walked through their office doors to begin with: to live in a one-of-a-kind McArdle environment.
Within this rarified world of creating space, Karen and Stan connected deeply with one another—ironically, as twins might. They seldom needed to verbalize a design concept; their intuition was perfectly in tune, like a Steinway concert grand sitting on stage at 7:59 p.m. in Carnegie Hall. Often a simple sketch (on a bar napkin, like Stonehenge in the movie Spinal Tap, they joked) was all that was needed to communicate an idea. And Karen understood what a relief it was for Stan to be known immediately, and so thoroughly. He’d spent a lifetime explaining the “way he was” to, it seemed, everyone on Earth. Stan wore the cloak of the brain trust and Karen ironed it all out.
Karen held her breath, waiting for the theme song of Dallas to emerge from behind the bedroom door. Then, as a twang of the country bass guitar thwacked, she released her air. Stan would be occupied for at least the next episode, or, forty-seven minutes.
She stretched out on the sofa and smoothed her white terry-cloth robe, cinching the sash a bit tighter. Her mother had also worn just such a robe. As a young girl, Sunday morning was the best day of the week with her mother. Karen let out a weak giggle, realizing that here it was—Sunday morning—right now. And how odd that a piece of clothing had brought her childhood to mind.
When it was early enough that the weather was still unsure of what it wanted to do, she’d creep downstairs. Then she’d turn the corner to see her mother’s hourglass silhouette in front of the window at the kitchen sink, wearing that white poly-fleece robe, blocking the seven a.m. light. Her mother sought a horizon young Karen could not yet imagine.
One morning in particular, when her parents had been up all night with the card games and her father had just gotten to sleep on the sofa in the living room, Karen walked up behind her mother and wrapped her arms around her impossibly tiny waist. She squeezed her mother’s hands, which were clasped together at the heart level, as if praying. After a few moments, a gesture came back to her—a slight pressing. It was her mother’s way of saying, “Yes. I can have you with me now. I can even tolerate your touch.” They sto
od together like nested spoons while Karen waited for her mother to offer the words in a small voice, meant only for her, the rules Karen needed to remember for when she’d grow older.
“Power over a man is simple: Be pretty. On second thought, be beautiful if you can manage it.”
Karen nodded, and her chin rubbed into the plush robe on her mother’s back. It was not yet certain that she would be a beauty of any sort, and this worry kept Karen awake at night. Her younger sister, Betsy, resembled her mother’s Garbo looks. Karen favored her father, or so she was often told. But it was difficult for a girl to translate the handsome and angular face of her father onto her own, and call it beautiful.
“If you can be lovable, that will help things along, of course.”
Karen wanted to be lovable—tried her best. But she wasn’t quite sure what that looked or felt like. Or, whether she could even learn it, because wasn’t lovability something someone else decided?
“You must be sneaky. This will, without question, be necessary.”
Sneaky confused Karen terribly. What was it? She’d just crept down the stairs and took some comfort in accomplishing that. So, she could only hope that sneaky was already a part of her.
“And always, always go for the money.”
Money was still a mystery, an alien notion. She’d seen a lot of it on the dining table during the card games. The piles created feathery green mountains whose tufts occasionally floated to the floor. This looked beautiful to Karen. But when the men reached across and grabbed the bills and then crumpled them, hard, in their fists, Karen felt disturbed by their apparent urge to destroy something of beauty.
Pickle’s Progress Page 4