Read by Strangers

by Philip Dean Walker

  In the closet next to the head of the mattress, we find plastic sheaths that look to us, at first, like children’s balloons long ago blown into the shapes of a giraffe, a brontosaurus, or some other impossible, long-necked creature. Small white globules of liquid sit in pouches at the end like dollops of spoiled cream. Someone says his brother has one under his bed next to a box of Kleenex and a pink tube of clear gel. It’s for sex, someone says harshly, the word’s finality leaving nothing left to speculation. We’ve never seen one of them like these, though—used. Unlike the needle in the bathroom, we have no problem picking up the slack skins, the condoms, which we pronounce with a quivery reverence, amazed that we now have an occasion to use the word. We also jump to the likely conclusion that someone has had sex in the dead girl’s bed, possibly the same person who pushes off in the bathroom. Except we don’t call her “the dead girl” anymore. We call her “Jeanette” and will continue to do so if we decide to pass the story along ourselves.

  We light the joint. It’s our first one, and we don’t know what we’re doing. We cough, and our faces turn red and puffy. The smoke hangs in the air, dancing in the shafts of sunlight that have managed to break through the defensive line of trees. Rather than taking the edge off things, the pot singles out the cool, harsh reality here. The naked picture from the other room is out. It’s lying in the middle of the mattress on top of the blue blanket that covers the patch of brown. We pick it up, pretend to study it more closely, then place it back on the mattress. No one truly needs to see it again.

  The story of the house needs revision. We’ve gone deeper into it than anyone else we know has, and it scares us. The responsibility is suffocating, but it also gives us a strange sense of power. No one we know has looked at the house, inside and out, and seen what we’ve seen. They treat it as a shell, a crack house, a fuck den. They don’t care what happened here.

  We don’t discuss whom we should tell or whether anyone would care what we have to say. That poor family with the no-good father and the mother who went around town smelling of kitchen grease with her fake smiles and ghostly pale daughter. Weren’t they better off left on the floor with the newspapers anyway? Either that’s where they wanted to be left or where they wanted to be found. No one has the answers. Instead of deciding which, we talk about the barn, the horse, a brisk kick in the head.

  We picture Jeanette creeping past her parents’ bedroom, grabbing the banister in the dissipating glow of the nightlight and feeling the rest of the way by memory. We see her take the long route to the barn to avoid the open window of her parents’ bedroom upstairs. She opens the barn door and sets down the stool. Or maybe the stool is already there, hidden by her the day before. It could’ve been planned. We wonder whether it’s a hot night, whether she can see her way by the light of the half moon through cracks in the barn’s wood. She stands, the stool’s legs wobbling beneath her. As she takes hold of the long, bristly tail, we have to ask: Does she think the horse will really fly?

  Revolution

  ANNA STARES AT Hank as they wait for Gloria and Billie to arrive for dinner. She stands behind him in the kitchen as he excavates the dark space underneath the sink. He’s bent down on his knees, his wide butt peeking out from the boxers she gave him for Valentine’s Day and a pair of khakis she just washed. Say no to crack is all she can think of—the sight gag of a plumber you laugh at who doesn’t know that his ass crack is out there for everyone to see, a blubbery clown with a wrench and a tattered white V-neck with pit stains, just clueless. Anna, however, isn’t laughing like she might have been if she had received a similar photo in an e-mail from one of her sons. They often send her inappropriate jokes and pictures, knowing their mom will chide them later, feigning shock at the obscenity of it, only to then share a giggle with them on the phone. Sometimes it seems like she’s a schoolgirl, in love with her own children.

  The beginning of Hank’s ass crack—announced by a tuft of gingery hair that begins to blossom from his third-to-last vertebra long since buried in flesh—stands out like the opening of an oceanic fissure, something inviting Anna to peer closer. She cringes slightly at the sight of this man she used to lust over. When Hank was on the wrestling team back in college, he meticulously counted calories, maintaining a svelte 157 for all four years. Anna would help weigh him, taking off his clothes one piece at a time until he was naked before her, standing in the small bathroom of the apartment they shared during their junior year at the University of Vermont. She’d knead his muscled hamstring as she pulled the last article of clothing off him. She’d slide down his jockstrap and place each of his feet on the rubberized landing of the scale. And they’d both watch the needle bounce, stuttering indecipherably between 150 and 160 until, finally, it would land on his target number, which, eventually became their target number. They were a team.

  She’d grab his ankles. How knobby they were with the hair from his legs ending just above them like a pair of furry pants he never took off. She’d bring her hands up the meaty thighs she loved so much until she cupped that wrestler’s butt, the one she’d watch from the stands, all snug in his red satin singlet.

  He’s now on his knees in front of her, trying to retrieve her wedding ring that fell down the disposal. She somehow dislodged it from her finger while she was doing the dishes. Hank grunts, his neck twisting so he can inspect further underneath the sink, deep into the maze of piping.

  “I think I’ve juuust got it,” he says, panting. He draws out the word just as if the retrieval of the ring hinges on his holding the vowel as steadily as the hand that holds the wrench that grips the faucet pipe. Sweat drips from his brow onto the brown linoleum floor—a floor that wouldn’t have even registered the small spatters had Anna not washed it to a fine sheen that morning.

  “Hank, don’t kill yourself,” Anna says, fingering the grooves in a salt shaker, the one that looks like a doorknob, the one she always keeps on the wooden island in the center of the kitchen. These are the artifacts of her life, the things she touches. Through touching them, she knows who she is. She is Anna, wife of Hank, daughter of Gloria, and now sister of Billie.

  It isn’t that there’s nothing left to say between the two of them. They actually speak quite a bit. “Oh, c’mon, Hank. Can’t you please at least make an effort to clean out the gutters, or do you not live in this dorm?” and “Anna, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you, but picking up your IBS prescription isn’t currently part of my course load.” Since they met in college back in the ’70s, they often default to this kind of collegiate vocabulary and speak to each other as if they’re both somehow still there—in their twenties, still in love.

  But three boys and years of drifting away from each other, sexually at least, have transformed them back, almost without their knowing, into the platonic roommates they’d started out as back in school when they’d pooled their resources to share an apartment off campus. If not for her boys—Ben married, Ian at Middlebury, and Wade, still at home—Anna wouldn’t know what to do with herself. She has an intense desire to feel needed.

  “When are Gloria and Billie coming over for dinner?” asks Hank. The hollowness of the dark space underneath the sink almost swallows up his voice.

  “What?” Anna asks.

  “Gloria and Billie!” he yells.

  “We’re here!” says Billie’s voice from the foyer.

  “I always loved being announced.” Gloria follows closely behind her into the kitchen.

  Gloria, Anna’s mother, was living alone in Washington, D.C., when she fell and broke an already weak hip. What began as a temporary convalescence in Montpelier to help heal her bones became, at some point, something much more permanent. First, at Hank’s urging, she leased a small apartment across town. Then she began to amass a bevy of friends, whom she regaled with dramatic tales of modeling at Garfinkel’s in downtown Washington and going on dinner dates with the likes of Tab Hunter. “I had him before he became a gay,” she’d state resolutely. These were old, sh
eltered Vermont women, many of whom had never set foot out of the state. They seemed to regard Gloria as if she were a minor celebrity, and Gloria, of course, loved it.

  Admittedly Anna and Gloria had never had the best relationship. For years it was just the two of them. The man Anna had considered and loved as her father, a man whose last name was Ferenbach, had been driven out of the house by Gloria when Anna was only thirteen. Her mother complained that he had bored her, that he had been incapable of taking her seriously as an actress, an occupation she’d adopted based solely on one screen test she’d done in Hollywood at the suggestion of a producer whom Anna could now assume had used the promise of fame to sleep with her. Too much make-believe involved. Too much pretend.

  Billie is a product of pretending. People pretended she didn’t exist. Billie is Anna’s half-sister. Two years ago, Anna had been at her mother’s apartment while Gloria was recovering from hip surgery. She was there to collect some of Gloria’s personal belongings to have with her in the hospital. From as far back as Anna could remember, Gloria had claimed she was terrified of doctors and hospitals. She told Anna she wanted to have her things with her in case she didn’t wake up. “People go to sleep in hospitals, and they don’t wake up,” she said. Anna was putting an old photo album in a bag when Gloria’s phone rang. The woman on the other end, quite bluntly, claimed to be Gloria’s daughter.

  At first Anna didn’t know what to think. In a way, it wasn’t surprising at all: Gloria, like a tornado, funneling through town after town, taking out small houses and farms along her path, leaving behind unwanted children and discarded lovers along the jet stream. There had been so much crisscrossing the country that Anna never had time to make any true friends. Gloria was the only person who could know whether Billie’s claim possibly could be true, whether her existence, always a distant fact to Gloria, one that might never even surface, had in fact done just that. Anna’s first instinct was to find something to give the woman—medical records, old pictures, money—anything so she might go away. It was too late to tell Billie that Gloria was dead; that was an awful thought and an even worse plan.

  She had to tell Gloria about this woman. She was Anna’s sister.

  “Mother, I have to talk to you,” she’d said several days later, dropping off a couple of things she’d picked up for Gloria at the Grand Union as she recovered.

  “Okay, well, talk then,” Gloria said, pushing her glasses down and looking up from her crossword.

  Anna stared briefly at a drawing of an elderly black woman in an intricate maple frame that had always donned the walls of whatever apartment or house or rented room they’d occupied at the time. Gloria had it set up on the table next to her hospital bed. She claimed to have been this old black woman in another life, a former slave who still had a hump on her back from when she was beaten as a young girl. Some of Anna’s earliest memories were of rubbing her mother’s supposed hump for luck.

  “I know about the baby you had before I was born. She’s found you, Mother.”

  The color drained from Gloria’s face, and her milky white eyes went blank. She began to sob. “I didn’t want to do it. Mother and Daddy made me! Oh, God, I want to die!” They cried together for hours, and Gloria went into fits of rage alternating with hysterical crying about how much her life was a lie and everyone was now in on it.

  A half-sister. No one had seen fit to inform Anna that Billie had existed at all. So it turned out that Anna was not the only child she once so completely self-identified as. Gloria had gotten knocked up at sixteen and was immediately sent to a home for wayward girls located in upper Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The identity of the father is another of Gloria’s mysteries. Anna has reason to believe it was a young man named Dash Sinclair whom Gloria used to speak of in almost exclusively transcendental terms, a high school beau Anna could believe had been quickly distanced from Gloria’s “situation” and probably at the behest of well-to-do parents. He saw what the future held and decided Gloria and a baby were not in it. These kinds of things happened back then in a quiet, antiseptic way. You popped out an illegitimate child, and you moved on.

  Anna only gets the story in bits and pieces from Gloria and never in a coherent, plotted fashion. The whole ordeal is so painfully clichéd that she finds it difficult to imagine she can now actually claim it as family history. Suddenly there’s a reason that Gloria has cried every Christmas (Billie was born on December 24). Or made such a fuss about women’s reproductive health in the seventies (she’d been firmly pro-choice before it was ever in fashion to say so). Or went out of her way to avoid shopping in Georgetown when she and Anna had lived in D.C. She’d turned down an invitation to go to a cocktail party at JFK’s townhouse once when he was a U.S. senator and speaks about it now as if she’d turned down an invitation to watch the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

  Everything that Anna has ever wanted to be, Billie seems to have happened upon effortlessly. Billie grew up in California, the place where Anna has always dreamed of living—sunglasses and Hollywood. Billie was a stewardess back when it was still something of a status symbol of beauty. Anna always loved the uniforms they wore with the perfectly matched silk scarves and the cute little tri-peak caps. She secretly wished she was part of their cozy warren, traveling in the handsome wake of a gorgeous pilot. But it’s Billie’s current occupation that really plagues Anna, almost to the point of rage. She writes books for young adults. That is Anna’s secret dream! The one that no one knows about, not even Hank. Billie’s books are stories about young girls abandoned by the world and saved by the love of dolphins and horses. The latest one features a chimp, Anna seems to recall, after looking up customer reviews on Amazon.

  She feels a tinge of jealousy at the lifestyle Billie seems to lead: flitting from here to there, switching careers on a whim, and being successful at absolutely everything she does.

  The first time Anna met Billie, in a café with Gloria, she’d been wary from the start. In had walked this reddish-haired beauty, tall and statuesque, like a Chanel model. She was older than Anna but had the kind of milky skin that appears ageless.

  “My God, you look just like my Great-Aunt Faye,” Gloria said when Billie sat down. Faye, a woman Anna had never even heard of. Of course, Billie’s features had to have been plucked from some distant, goddess-like branch of the family tree Anna had never known about. “I can’t believe I’m actually standing here in front of you both,” Billie had said with a smile that revealed a slight dimple on her left cheek. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

  “Honey, let’s take it all one step at a time,” Gloria said. Anna had smarted from Gloria’s use of the word honey. That was what her mother always had called her. Anna already sensed Gloria falling in love with Billie.

  Anna told the boys at Christmas that year that she now had a sister.

  “What do you mean you have a sister?” her oldest, Ben, had asked.

  “Your grandmother gave birth to a baby when she was a teenager and didn’t tell anyone. Believe me, this is as much of a shock to your dad and me as it is to you,” she’d stated. Diplomatically, she thought.

  “Does she look like you?” Ian had asked.

  “Well, no, she doesn’t really, no.”

  “What does she do?” Wade asked.

  “She writes children’s books. Young adult novels, I suppose. Just make her feel welcome when she’s around, for your grandmother’s sake.”

  “HANK, WHAT ARE you doing down there?” Billie asks, directing her question lower, toward the cabinet, where Hank’s head is.

  “He’s attempting to retrieve my wedding ring. It fell down the drain,” Anna answers.

  “You take it off?” asks Billie. “Why? If I had one, I’d never take it off.” She smiles.

  “It came off while I was cleaning a skillet.”

  “Cleaning a skillet.” Billie turns her head in profile, directing herself to Gloria. “You know, how does one even clean a skillet? I can write about doing it, but
I’ve never actually cooked in a skillet, let alone cleaned one. Isn’t that funny, Mother?”

  “It’s hilarious, dear,” Gloria says, smiling back at Billie.

  “I found it!” Hank leans back on his left heel and rocks back a bit, his pants and boxers bunching back up to cover the crack. He anchors himself to the floor with his left palm face-down on the linoleum, then slowly begins to rise, bringing the slimy wedding band up to Anna’s face like a Chaplin flower.

  “Will you marry me?” he asks. “Again?”

  “Once you wash that thing off,” Anna says.

  “What happened to ‘for better or for worse’?” Billie asks.

  “For better or worse or indisposed,” says Hank.

  “Or in disposal,” Billie says.

  “Ha! You’re right,” says Hank, laughing at her. Not only can Anna see them laughing with each other, but also their eyes are laughing with each other, which is so much worse. “Anna, I’m not going to Montreal with you tomorrow to chaperone Wade’s school trip. It’s decided,” states Gloria.

  “Mother!” Anna exclaims.

  “I’m tired and don’t feel like going on an overnight, especially at my age.”

  “But Mother, you promised you’d do this with me. And now I don’t have a partner.” Anna nearly pouts.

  “That’s why I’m going with you,” says Billie, affecting a curtsy, as if she’s suddenly in a royal court. It is bizarre.

  Anna glances at her mother, who looks at her with pitiful, watery eyes. Her Stanislavski acting eyes.

  “It’ll be a good bonding trip for you girls,” she says. Anna winces at the way Gloria uses the term girls, at the way the word suggests that Anna ever knew Billie as a girl. As if to suggest they have anything in common at all.