by Paige Cooper
In the atlas, Ohio finger-trails a shoal of minnows against the current, leaves Lake Erie, enters Lake Ontario, floats down the adjoining canal. Watersogged, she beaches on the Manhattan shore. With her eyes closed, she can be anyone. A runaway in New York City. A waitress. A drug lord boss baby. Madonna sings Papa Don’t Preach on the kitchen radio and Ohio gets up to prance in the kitchen. She’s all slippery legs and dark eyes; an empty belly, hands open, begging.
At the back of the freezer, hidden behind the fish sticks, is a small bottle of vodka. Ohio takes a swig. It burns her throat. The heat fades to a warm glow. She gulps again. She puts on her mom’s make-up using the kitchen mirror: coral lips, sea-foam lids, tangled green lashes. Ohio’s thick hair is natty, coiled with life, like her mom’s used to be. She has her mother’s eyes—stony black, damning—but her skin is darker, more like the man’s.
Ohio undoes her buttoned shirt and ties it above her waist. She’s as flat as the Erie pier, but it looks good with tight shorts. Especially when she puts on her mom’s cork-heeled sandals. She peels the forbidden leather vest off the final hanger at the back of her mom’s closet. It smells like mildew and stale tobacco, like something wild and not quite dead in a ditch. Its weight is armor across her shoulders. It gapes under the arms, in the chest, where her mom’s notorious rack stretched it out, once upon a time, that summer she ran with the gang.
“You look like a hooker.”
“Thanks.”
Mary Louise turns down the music and sits on a stool at the kitchen counter. “You left the door open. I could hear the radio outside.”
“So?”
“So, you’re lucky it’s only me who came up.”
“Am I ever.”
Ohio pouts and blots her lips with toilet paper. Pieces of it cling to the lipstick. She swaggers to the freezer, pulls again from the bottle.
Mary Louise pushes her glasses up her nose. “Alcoholic,” she says, blinking.
“As if.”
“You’re gonna do this all night? Boring.”
Ohio says, “You’re right. Let’s go downtown.”
It takes longer walking in the shoes. As she goes uphill, Ohio’s feet slide backwards with each step. She tries to buy smokes at the convenience store. Mr. Cooper says, “Nice try, Ohio. Mom working tonight?”
Mary Louise steals Pop Rocks and they sit in the parking lot, letting the tiny pink crumbs explode in their mouths: stinging sugar pings. Bingo is rammed, cars everywhere, motorized wheelchairs parked in a crooked line down the block.
“Look.” Mary Louise points to the gas station. It’s Don filling his Harley. She waves wildly until he nods back.
“Come on,” she says, trotting over.
Ohio follows, nearly wiping out on the curb.
“Ladies,” he says, staring at Ohio.
Ohio cringes, tugs the vest. Should she button it or leave it loose to show her bellyskin? Her mom wore it over a studded bra the summer she was seventeen, waitressing the biker bar in Ohio. That and a pair of cut-offs showing the smiles of her ass. Says they queened her, over in America. Says she made great tips, mostly. Then she met the man.
Don’s eyes peel away the make-up, the shorts, the slutty shoes. They linger on the leather, on a silver pin above her right nipple—entwined adders, tongues flicking one another.
He says, “Where’d you get that?”
“Yard sale,” she lies.
“You’re flagging colours, Sweetheart.”
Don opens her vest, fiddles with the pin and removes the backing, pulls it free from the leather. He reattaches the backing and tucks the pin into the tiny vest pocket with a fat finger. “Gang stuff. Never wear what you don’t know,” he says.
“My dad has a motorcycle but it’s broke,” says Mary Louise. She points to Don’s large belt buckle. “R-ride to live—”
“Live to ride,” he finishes. “Know what that means?”
She shakes her head, no.
“Means there’s nothing better on this earth. Wanna?”
Don sets his helmet on Mary Louise’s head and carefully tightens the strap. Ohio is stabbed by a jealous fork, seeing the way Don tucks strands of flyaway hair into the helmet. He lifts and settles Mary Louise in front. Last time he gave her a ride, Don helped Ohio onto the wide leather seat, but today she scrambles up on her own. She wears the girlfriend helmet. The motorcycle leans to one side when Don kicks the stand away and the muffler burns Ohio above her ankle. She clenches her mom’s shoes at an angle so she won’t get burned again.
Don revs the engine. Mary Louise squeals. Ohio is pancaked on his back just like the biker girls. Don smells like gasoline, sweat, and cigarettes. He says something Ohio can’t hear, not with the helmet on, not with the hot motor running between her legs, vibrating everything.
They hit the street with a lurch. Wind rushes Ohio’s face. Aphids swarm her open mouth like tiny fish. They turn south at the stoplight and she’s sure she’ll fall, but she doesn’t. They cruise past the Coin-o-Matic, they’re coming up to the Legion, the only bar, where a bunch of kids are smoking out front. Don opens her up, gets the lead out, and they speed the rest of the way to the pier.
Take that, Ohio thinks, squeezing tightly.
At the lake, Don turns off the motor and kicks the stand. He lifts Mary Louise and sets her down, takes the helmet off her head. Her lunatic grin is contagious.
“Live to ride, ride to live,” she chants.
Don doesn’t offer to help Ohio, so she slides off the leather seat, puts her weight onto one wobbly shoe, and lifts her other leg over the back of the bike. She sets it, trembling, onto the ground. She removes the helmet and shakes her braids. Don and Ohio walk across the sand and sit on a large, flat rock. Mary Louise twirls around, sugar high, leaps to the water’s edge. She skips flat stones, throws driftwood spears at waves, draws in the sand with a stick.
The red glow of the setting sun lights up one side of the lake like a fairy tale. The rest of the sky begins to darken. Ohio wonders what a real girlfriend would say. Don lights a home-rolled cigarette. He inhales, holds it in, slowly exhales. Stinky blue smoke hangs in the air. He passes it, and she copies him. It pinches her throat worse than the vodka. Makes her choke. Is she smoking pot?
“Why’d you dress like that?”
“Dunno.” Ohio looks down at the skin folds bunching on her stomach. She sits up and they disappear.
“How old are you, sixteen? Seventeen?”
Ohio takes another puff so she doesn’t have to lie, or worse, tell the truth. She’ll be fifteen next spring. Her mouth is dry. She reaches under the vest and unties her shirt, smoothing the fabric. She does up the buttons. After Don flicks the dead butt away, he puts his oil-stained hand on Ohio’s thigh. He has a silver serpent ring and hairy knuckles. Ohio’s heart beats so fast she might barf. Thoughts stutter in her mind: Will I ever get boobs? Did I say that out loud? Did I already think that?
“Get your friend,” he says, pointing to the crest of a large wave.
Ohio hops off the rock. She runs, leaps. Her body feels strong; her arms slice through time and space, windmilling the warm air. She laughs. Slaps bare feet on wet sand, then into the cold lake. Water rushes her toes, freezes her ankles and higher up her calves, splashes her thighs. Shadows twist and reach from inside the curled wave. Somewhere in that murk a clam-crowned princess is living a life meant for Ohio, magic and free. Hair tangled and billowing with tide, skin pale and tantalizing as a trout belly, arms undulating hypnotically. Ohio dreams her almost every night: that tinkling ghost wail and the beckoning fingertips. Mary Louise flops closer and clasps Ohio’s hand. They jump whitecaps, leaning their bodies to take the hit. Ohio knows there are no cowards underwater, only the softened, gnawed-upon bones of sailors, fishermen, and rum runners, cradled in ritual piles in the lake’s darkest, coldest crook.
Under the surfac
e all men want.
Under the surface all men love.
Don slides one hand around Ohio, the other around Mary Louise. An old man with two dripping girls shivering on a rock. “Let’s show her what we did the other night.” Don works the hand that had been on Ohio’s leg inside her wet shorts, into the crotch.
That’s not what we did, thinks Ohio.
Don’s fingers push her goose-fleshed thighs apart. They press and flick a lightning rush of heat.
“Uh,” she says.
Someone is walking a dog down the beach, so far away the dog is a leaping smudge on the horizon, the person a short stick.
“Don’t worry, they can’t see us,” he says.
Ohio feels good, like something might happen next.
Don’s other hand is busy with Mary Louise. Mary Louise leans forward. “Bor-ring.”
Don says, “We do other things, too.” Don pulls his hand from Ohio’s shorts. His left hand resurfaces and rests on Mary Louise’s leg.
“Like what?” says Mary Louise.
Don smiles at Mary Louise until she tilts her head and really sees him, until she starts smiling, too.
Ohio’s tingling crotch spot is forgotten. Tossed over the gunwales with fish guts, net trash. Upstaged by a twelve-year-old with a crappy haircut. Ohio rubs off her lipstick with the collar of her shirt, smearing the cotton pink. “I’ll show her.”
Don turns back to Ohio. Her skinny legs swing from the knee, feet wet with grit. She wriggles her toes.
“Look at you,” he says.
Ohio tugs on the buckle of his thick belt. When she stands she feels woozy, so she leans against the rock. She rubs him the way he showed her. Mary Louise quietly slides down and runs back to the water. Don frowns. They watch Mary Louise jump into foamy waves that purr onto the hard-packed sand.
“She okay out there?” he says.
“Of course. This is our lake.” Ohio squeezes until Don faces her again.
“Careful,” he says.
This time Ohio keeps her eyes open. Three stubbled chins bob in time with her hand. She can see right up Don’s wide nostrils, see the grey hairs inside. His breath comes in hot blasts. White fluid shoots into her fist, drips from her fingers.
“Taste it,” he says.
It is sea salty, the runny part of an undercooked egg, and when she swallows, the acid trails her throat.
“Like it?” he says.
Ohio falters, smiles.
“That’s a good girl.”
Don gives himself an extra shake and zips up. He lights a smoke and leans on the rock. A mosquito bites Ohio’s temple. She swats, scratches, and a drop from her hand gets in her eye, stinging. She rubs it, making it worse. Don says something about a club meeting, says he’ll see her around soon, he hopes. He leaves a crisp twenty-dollar bill on the rock beside her, “For a little treat, for you girls,” and walks toward his bike.
Ohio’s eye burns and waters. She slips the bill into her pocket.
The further Don gets on the darkening beach, the less Ohio sees. His head is a blur. His clothes blend with the night. A few more strides and he disappears.
Mary Louise jogs up from the water’s edge. “Now you see him, now you don’t. Like his thing.” She cracks up.
Ohio says, “That’s not funny.” But it is, and she laughs, too.
Mary Louise yanks Ohio’s arm. “His Thing,” she shouts.
Ohio stumbles, tugs Mary Louise back, spinning her in the sand.
They shriek, “Thing Thing Thing!”
They spin like fireflies, whipping each other in circles until they collapse in a gritty pile, panting, hysterical.
Don’s engine turns over once, twice; it roars. His headlight clefts the beach and lights up a circle of churning water.
“Look!” says Mary Louise, pointing.
“What? Where?”
Ohio hears it first: a tidal suck, the shrieking gale, the whizz and pop of meteorites. The hissing of a thousand jagged voices. Finally, Ohio sees her in the bike’s spotlight—the legendary lake mother, bare-breasted with weedy swirls of hair. Suckling fish cloak her in open-mouthed kisses, flit at the swell of her barnacle-spackled hips. She dives. Dorsal fin splashes. A shimmering ripple—an iridescent web binding her legs, slick captives in silver scales. Here, the levy queen: she who exacts a toll for safe crossing. She who lures the friendless and the forsaken.
“Take him,” says Ohio.
Ohio could feed him limb by limb to the surf; Mary Louise would help. Together, they can do anything. But Don’s headlamp is already cutting an arc, lighting the pier, pointing toward the road. The dark settles. Just the motor whining quieter and the red brake light growing smaller, smaller.
The Drain
Lynn Coady
She wasn’t worth killing, that was the problem. Because Marietta was not liked. Fans joked online about wanting to shoot themselves, or someone else, the moment she entered a scene. It wasn’t the actor’s fault. Well, it was, kind of. But it was Annie’s fault in conjunction with everyone else—the show, the collective Us. In some mysterious whim of TV alchemy, Annie’s energy ended up not gibing with ours. She’d been great on her last series—a supporting role on a show about nurses. She’d been an audience favourite, was cute yet tough yet vulnerable—everything you’d want in a TV nurse. I hadn’t watched it, but the clips had been good. And she auditioned well and did a sizzling chemistry read with both our male and female leads—which was important because Marietta was going to be our show’s first bisexual about which the network was, initially, very excited indeed. But both the chemistry and the excitement sputtered when she came up opposite the show itself. The suffocating Us-ness of it all. Annie had arrived beaming and freckled, with buckets of charisma, and somehow our show had tipped those buckets over, dribbling all that charm away.
We tried changing her hair. Switched her styling from buttoned-up/sexy to masculine/sleek to (and this was pure desperation) flouncy/bohemian. God help us, we gave her a motorcycle. Then we decided we’d been focusing too much on her appearance. We had drunk the network Kool-Aid, we scolded ourselves. We had to get back to what made the show great—the writing! Depth of character, that was the ticket. What Marietta needed was a meaty backstory. And so we spent a full week in fevered discussion of her tragic early life—her abusive mother, her subsequent drug use, her beloved high school bestie, carried away by opioid addiction. We rolled this out in a Very Special B Story. Which the audience hated. The next week, we tried changing her hair again. The failure was relentless. With every episode, every Marietta scene, the audience cringed, and—worse. They laughed. They didn’t even know why they were laughing, they confided to one another in their social feeds and forums, festooning their posts with tearful, hee-hawing emojis. She was just so bad. No one could explain it. They didn’t want to explain it. It was a mysterious, ineffable phenomenon that at this point they almost enjoyed.
It was my job to get all this across to Liz (who barely used the internet, who dismissed any conversation taking place on social media as “not real,” who still referred to Google as “The Google”) in my helpful, non-confrontational, just-asking kind of way. And to do it without using words like “cringe,” or “laugh,” or “hate her.” But how do you kill a character who is a joke, without making her death feel like the biggest joke of all? I also took care not to say “joke.” But lately it was the word that rang in my ears each weekday morning ever since we started breaking Episode Nine.
Because the thing was, Liz was under it. We were all under it. We were a month away from prep and Marietta Dies, Finally (as I called it in my head) was the penultimate episode and we didn’t even have an outline yet—just a few scattered beats on a terrifyingly white whiteboard. Liz wanted to give her a big send off, to devote the entire episode to Marietta. Marietta, she’d announced, would be the A story.
Bad idea, I thought at once. Leaving audience antipathy aside, Marietta was the supporting-est of supporting characters, she’d only just been introduced midway through last season, she wasn’t worthy. “Great idea,” I said. The other people in the room gulped their agreement.
Liz looked around at us—her beloved, supportive team. Besides me there was Ellen, Riva, and two men in their twenties, one black and straight and one white and gay, both named Bruce. Bruces aside, we were a roomful of crones compared to most, because that’s how Liz liked it. Every time I looked at the Bruces I remembered she once told me that a woman-led writers room can only tolerate two men at a time, and those two men must always be young, timid, junior to all the women, and ideally neither straight nor white, otherwise they take over. You couldn’t mess with that balance, she said.
She knew this from dire experience. On her last show, she’d installed her usual two, one of whom she had assumed was gay but who it turned out was not. Then she made the mistake of allowing a third into the room—an intern who was also straight—and one morning she arrived to find all three with their feet up on the table, firing a mini basketball into a toy net they’d secured above the whiteboard. And the Act Three she’d spent the previous day breaking was erased and replaced by, as one of them described it, “something a little more spicy.”
And, the hitherto-timid young man who made this announcement? Liz told me that as he spoke, he’d been sitting there idly combing his beard with a plastic fork.
But our current, timid Bruces mostly stayed in line, as was their job. As was all of our jobs in this business—be there for the showrunner. Support the showrunner. Help make the showrunner’s occasionally dubious, defective vision somehow take flight. I knew this better than anyone, having worked with Liz the longest without getting fired even once. (Liz was notorious for firing you on Friday then calling you up Monday morning to ask where the hell you were.) In short, I was considered the Liz-whisperer, so the room took its cue from me in that moment—nodding and gulping in agreement after I told Liz what a great idea it was to devote an entire episode to one of the most reviled characters on the network.