by Kate Wisel
SERENA
TROUBLE
WE WERE ALL THE same age, our new neighbors and us. Our puppies were the same age, our new puppy and their new puppy. We learned this as the neighbors hauled boxes out of their car and our little prize thrashed his neck against the thick leash we’d bought at Petco. Unleashed, he ran in viciously fast circles or mistook my ankles for chew toys. He found my cigarettes, even when I hid them, and ripped them to bits. We should call him Ashtray, I thought.
“That’s why we buy him toys, dumbass,” Niko said. I didn’t know this. I didn’t know much. Cigarettes were already overpriced, and like a homeless person, I was picking through the promising ones.
Outside the new neighbors’ car, for a split second, we expected that we could become great friends. The neighbors and us, just like normal couples. Just like the puppies, normal puppies, who were pawing at each other like lovers.
“What’s your puppy’s name? Sorry I’m eating strawberries,” the girl said. She dropped the carton on the grass, the strawberries rolling next to her laundry basket. The puppies teamed up to demolish the berries, then chewed her sweatshirt collar, the gray sleeve darkening with slobber.
“His name’s Trouble,” I said. News to Niko, who looked at our puppy reluctantly, but I had him there. It wasn’t something he could argue with. Our puppy had hole-punching teeth and coal-lined eyes like an emo teenager.
“Get back,” I said. Trouble was spread eagle on the concrete as the neighbors’ puppy tongued his privates. I jerked his leash back. Not on my watch. I scooped up Trouble as he writhed in my arms, then started yelping like a Mormon girl during a kidnapping. I edged up the stairs while Niko charmed the neighbors. The girl bought it, and started talking his head off about how we should all go to dinner. Or make it.
“We should have a dinner party,” the girl said. “We’re twenty-six. We’re over partying.”
Briefly I saw myself from the view of the light fixture on the stairs, head-first, knocked out, the door locked, bolted, my credit cards strewn below me like clues.
Later, while Trouble raised his leg to pee freely in the corner of the kitchen, I asked Niko if he noticed that both the girl and the guy neighbors had lazy eyes. Before I asked him this, I prefaced by saying that it wasn’t the reason I disliked them both individually and as a couple. I just thought, what were the chances? Both of their eyes milked at the center, identically, their pupils going googly like Magic 8 Balls.
Trouble panted with his tongue out. I mirrored him, my tongue out in what I imagined was a parched look, while I waited for Niko to say something. I squeezed Trouble like a tube until he slinkyed out of my grip.
“What does it matter about their eyes?” Niko said, pouring bacon grease into a beer can. It matters to me, I thought. Did they look at each other, or half look at each other, and think, You complete me?
I hid under the dining room table with Trouble, taking the padded tips of his paws against my fingers. I loved Trouble so much that I kind of wanted to hurt him. I ran my fingers down the tender muscles of his underside and bit longingly at the aching inside of my cheek. Trouble stared back like he was so miserably disappointed in me, to the core, though he’d only known me a month. He freed himself from the cage of my arms. He gagged, hunched, and heaved onto the hardwood. My cigarettes.
“No! Trouble! No!” I said. I pointed my finger to emphasize my anger, but it reworded itself as excitement. “Go! Trouble! Go!”
I slid down the wall with my head in my hands as Trouble ran track around the table. I thought of my brother when he was little and couldn’t speak. How he twisted his hands in front of his mouth to talk to our mom. Blowing her kisses, pointing to cookies in the aisle, then back to his mouth. Mouth to object, object to mouth. His sincere words dribbling out like applesauce. Since I couldn’t understand him, I would push him as hard as I could when no one was looking. I’d push him again, his helplessness the maker of my fury.
Trouble howled, barks like gunshots, his paws slipping and clicking on the hardwood.
“Why are you such a fucking baby?” Niko said, walking past with a plate of stacked bacon, paleo fanatic that he was. Niko was gorgeous—everyone knew. He had slick black hair and tan skin like a man on the beach whose shoulder beads with water. Our children would be blended. I sometimes imagined their sparkling cheeks and kinky, highlighted hair. They would be him with my affectations. In photos, their eyes tiny riots, wild with inarticulate demands.
I want to tell you why I disliked our neighbors, the girl in particular, so you won’t hate me as much as my puppy hated me. The following week on the back stairs, the girl remarked on the convenience of our shared lawn out back. When she spoke, I couldn’t tell which eye to look into, so I looked at the lazy one. It swung up, receiving radio signals. There was a weird comfort in this. I had the advantage of feigning interest openly, the disfigurement like an invitation where only your true self is welcome to the party.
“There’s going to be a lot of shit in that yard,” the girl said, like a fact. Maybe I didn’t know things, like why Trouble needed monthly shots when I didn’t have health care, or why he required wet food, a spoonful, mixed into a cup of dry food when you could just do either, but I knew damn well that we should clean up after him. We were adults. Every day, we were adults.
Upstairs in our kitchen, Trouble would start barking, and Niko and I would freeze. His barks were an alarm going off that we did not know how to disassemble.
“What do you want?” Niko would say. “Huh?”
Trouble would hop madly at my waist. “You think I’m playing, esé? Say something.”
Niko would step towards me. He’d say, “Why didn’t you set her straight?”
I’d jerk my head back without meaning to. Niko had hit me many times. More than many. More than hit. Smashed my face into the wall where a mirror from a garage sale hung by the door where I never failed to check my gaze.
A month later, I stood on the lawn, shaking my knee. The sky was bleeding down the center like a gunshot wound. I was waiting for Trouble to go already so I could clomp back upstairs to watch Bravo and eat Doritos standing up. He would circle me, the Doritos a bag of crack. His tongue hanging loosely, that deranged shark. It was among these thoughts that I noticed a piece of shit on the lawn.
“Do I have to do everything?” Niko said, all smug, like he was the smarter one. We were on our deck with the higher view of downtown. I’d forgotten to take out the trash.
School is a job, I thought.
“’Cause you can’t do anything,” Niko said. The twelve-pack of craft beers he’d drunk stunk from the sweat that ridged his bald chest, which was now up against my chin.
After I reset my nose with a pencil, I went to be alone in our guest room, where Niko’s electric guitars hung on the wall like a rich kid’s toys. I hid in the closet. I was the guest, to talk to the guy I’d been talking to. When he teased me, I teased back, my old clogs smelling like burnt rubber.
The day after the Fourth, both in our pajamas, the girl and I stood on the lawn as our puppies rocketed towards each other, tumbling together like free-fallers. It was noon and I’d already had two Coronas. My right eye was a puff pastry enclosing a pink slit. Niko had taken my freshly inked arm the night before, squeezing out a code to what awaited me at home. I wanted to be alone. Really alone. Before Niko, before Trouble, the neighbors, before I could even remember. I wanted to be alone with the guy I wasn’t supposed to be talking to. I’d go anywhere with him.
“Trouble got bigger,” the girl said.
My heart sprang like a punch from an arcade game. I couldn’t measure change with what was mine. But he wasn’t mine; I’d never asked for Trouble. Niko and I had woken up from a bad fight. A purple shiner covered my eyelid in a deep swell but matched my makeup, so we decided to go for a walk. We were walking past the thick window of a shelter. Niko thought Trouble could be a gift, a romantic gesture. Wow, I thought, I’ve never received a gift I’d have to walk for fi
fteen years.
When he picked Trouble out of the litter, I thought he’d stay that same size forever, the size of an organ, sticky-soft and warm. We took Trouble home. He trembled, then ripped up the sectional Niko had bought without insurance.
“Cut it out, you fucking monster!” I screamed.
In my spot, in the closet of the guest room, he fell asleep in my arms, where he had puppy dreams. His paws moved like levers in a field where he was free and unleashed.
The neighbor dog nipped at Trouble’s neck. The girl and I watched as they tugged at each other’s skin, then retreated, their eyes fixed intently on the other’s, waiting to pummel. I didn’t care about my eye. I was too tired to dab it with concealer and set it with powder. I wanted her to see.
“They like each other,” the girl said. I knew what she meant. She meant us. She wanted us to like each other. She wanted it since that first day they pulled up with their goddamn sorcerer’s auras and dirty laundry.
“Stop it,” I said to Trouble.
“Do you want to go to that new Mexican place down the street? As couples?” she said.
I opened my mouth, but the heat crawled in and thickened my tongue. I wanted to go, I did. I wanted to sit next to her in the booth with my superior eyes, tracing my fingers down the row of similar but different margaritas. She was waiting, with her permanent grin on, I could tell, though I stayed busy watching Trouble.
He was lunging this way and that way, trapped in the yard, thinking he was free. Was he bigger and why couldn’t I tell? When would I know? And then the dogs started barking, cruel little yips, and I grabbed at the leash, but Trouble had this new kind of force as he lunged at the neighbor dog. I looked at the girl, thinking she would do something. But for the first time she said nothing. Dumb chick just stood there, waiting. I was wordless, wanting. Wanting to look where she looked, but she was looking at me.
SADIE ESCOBAR
MARIAH HAD BEEN STRAIGHTENING her hair the first time I showed up to babysit. She opened the door in maroon scrubs, and when she went to hug me, I felt the heat from the iron transfer to my cheek.
“Hey, babe,” she said. “Come see the babe.”
She took my wrist through the discount-candle-scented living room, past a flat-screen, hundreds of DVDs spread across a bookshelf. TV series in boxes stretching like accordions, romantic comedies, R&B concerts, aerobics videos. At that time, I not so secretly despised assholes who worshipped books like The Fountainhead, any jackoff intellectual’s wet dream. You could say I admired the sincerity of her collection.
I followed Mariah up to Sadie’s room, dimmed by a thick pink blanket tacked over the window to drown out the sounds of the beeping garbage trucks or the downstairs neighbors who leaned off the deck with Solo cups. Deep in her crib, Sadie was obscured, her fists covering her face.
“I love to wake her up,” Mariah whispered, her lash line rimmed with white glue that gave her eyes an unnatural intensity. She scooped her out and instantly set her in my arms. She watched as Sadie twisted, opening her eyes, glossy with the complicated look of being held by a stranger upon waking.
I walked to babysitting from Jimmy’s place in Fenway. Three miles in the heat down Comm Ave, past brownstones that sat like gingerbread houses. The gardens were trimmed with the look of military crew cuts, a cotton-candy smell rising from the hypergreen grass. I’d walk the Common through Downtown Crossing, hopscotching junkies who slept on the cobblestone under the shade of Payless awnings. Towards the harbor, gray skirts and ties flitted into buildings, and it was salty and cool by the waterfront bars where stools were flipped over tables.
Christian and Mariah lived in Southie before Southie realized it was on the water and big signs for luxury condos appeared by the T, driving out the scally-capped Irish townies and their opposites, college kids in Izod seeking cheaper rent. Their apartment was on the top floor of a triple-decker on a lettered block, which meant I learned to clutch Sadie in one arm and haul her stroller in the other, a move that slimmed my hips.
My mentality was that of a soldier. I was never once late, and I didn’t complain when other people were. Straightaway Christian took advantage and came rushing through the door three hours past five, a water-fight of sweat on his collared shirt. He’d insist on paying for my cab home. I knew it was to shut me up, so I wouldn’t say anything to Mariah, which I didn’t.
Christian’s black hair was perfectly faded on each side. He wore aviators no matter what and carried the waft of fresh sneakers through the door. He sold time-shares to lonely victims at the Prudential mall. He was a liar. An attorney’s letter left folded on the Formica revealed that he owed upwards of twenty-five thousand dollars to a debt collector. This coupled with a video I came across on his laptop of him speedily jerking himself off into a T-shirt, his jaw slack to the camera, confirmed he was a cheater. I had no desire to, but I had to watch until he came. I watched and I watched.
“They’re taking advantage of you,” Jimmy said.
“What’d you say?” My mind was always elsewhere, feeling around for words. Brady panted between us, then lowered himself down, resting his chin on crossed paws. Jimmy caught his breath, hocking spit into a grassy patch by the Charles. Fifty-one had snuck up on him. We were running but not fucking. Jimmy wore a faded Rangers hat at all times, and beneath it his chest was steady as an ox. For being so broad, I liked his contained nature, his belly, and tried to pin his weight on top of me.
“Took you long enough to get your degree,” he said. “Use it.”
I listened to his advice but didn’t take it. I guess being taken advantage of was okay with me. It meant I didn’t owe anyone anything. It meant I was earning something other than money, though I couldn’t say what.
A month in and Sadie was rolling over but couldn’t yet talk. I liked the way she needed me, that when she cried, it always meant something. On a park bench off D Street I fed her bottles of milk warmed by sunlight. She’d stare at me as she sucked, senselessly blinking. With no warning, she dropped the bottle and reached for my neck. So much of being a mother was coping with the long spans of boredom that were punctuated by seconds of ache so pure they could shatter your rib cage if you weren’t breathing right. I wasn’t. My ribs felt held by staples.
On the beach, seagulls picked at the tough rings of six-packs. A woman in black spandex passed us with water bottles like suitcases in her grip. She was jogging, but even as she was part blur, I caught the blaze of emotion on her face, her tongue in her teeth, the grit pornographic. She was made of liquid, propelled by the power from inside her.
Sadie had to learn. Her fingers pointed to the tops of trees whose leaves spun light, disco ball refractions across her forehead. Everything was new to her as an acid trip.
“Sadie, look! The sky,” I said. “See the sky.”
She babbled, sounds that verged on words curled and wound like rings of smoke off her tongue. Mariah loved that I took her outside. She told me their previous babysitter, an ex-friend, had taken naps on the couch, leaving Sadie in the crib, and had mistakenly eaten their cat food under the assumption it was cereal. She said I was their angel. A lifesaver. She relayed information in emojis, streams of hearts and trophies and yellow faces switching expressions. She was less of a woman and more of a girl. I saw in a birthday card, filled with pledges from Christian, babys and pleases, that she was twenty-six, a year younger than me, though I had told her I was twenty and she believed it.
One night Mariah got home before Christian. She watched me reach down towards Sadie, who lay flat-backed, surrounded by plastic light-up toys, on an outstretched blanket. I poked her stomach for that tender baby laugh, all gums and lungs. The front door’s bronze handle gleamed from the corner of my eye, but Mariah took me back to Sadie’s room and held up the new clothes she’d bought. Hideous polka-dotted headbands, though Sadie was bald. Strappy pink sandals, a single golden rose on the toe, though she couldn’t walk.
“I love it,” I said, patting a folded two-pi
ece swimsuit. She shuffled through Kodaks she’d printed, Sadie in nothing but a string of pearls and a diaper, propped upright by an oversized stuffed giraffe. In one photo, she sat chunky and cross-legged, smashing a cake. In another, her finger was slicked with frosting, her tongue ultrapink from sugar. In each, Sadie’s eyes followed the lens, open and vulnerable.
“These are beautiful,” I said, eyeing Sadie, her head tentative on Mariah’s shoulder.
Sadie would no longer sit fixed to me. She was flipping over on the carpet, her head craned up, inching forward with her butt in the air. I ran sprints across the apartment to catch her from tumbling down the stairs. With her shoulders strapped in a high chair, her eyes changed expressions like a student in an acting class. If you took away her pacifier, she would scowl, her forehead a dent. If you slipped a mandarin orange onto her tongue, she would roll her whole head back, batting her eyelashes in pleasure. Sadie’s teeth were coming in sharp and round, the size of mints.
“Hey,” I’d say, holding up a spoon. “What is this?” I drew out vowels as if she could catch them on the other side.
Then I’d abandon the spoon. I would say, “Sadie, say something.”
I wanted to know what she would say, uninstructed. Instead, she would deliberately throw things. A piece of pasta slicked with butter, a grape. Then she would scowl at the thing on the floor, maddened by its inability to return.
Sadie had electronic toys and blocks, Mariah’s broken iPhone, which she would hold up to her ear in upside-down imitation. She didn’t have a single book. I went to Trident on my day off and bought her The Giving Tree, Blueberries for Sal, The Secret Garden.
I got a text one day from Christian as I was stepping off the train: I just saw you on the C line. Don’t think I’m a creep. That next morning there were three bottles of Charles Shaw uncorked by the sink, and the laundry was strewn across the kitchen counter. Bleached-out towels and socks, a pink bra hooked to a pair of Sadie’s fuzzy pajamas. I’d drank since I was thirteen, but for Mariah, starting now was like building a house without any floor plans, with no concrete.