In the living area Gene was waiting for me. “They don’t allow dogs or cats, but you could have a fish or turtle or even a guinea pig, I’m sure. Something that doesn’t need to leave its cage much,” he said. He was wearing a creased gray suit and looked almost handsome. One corner of his lapel bent the wrong way. I surveyed the marks I’d made on the floor and walls while removing my possessions. Empty, the place looked bald. “But a fish,” he continued, “is hardly trusty as a dog.”
“I don’t know.”
“I know this is at the top of your budget,” he said. “But you won’t find better value.”
“Oh, I think it’s fine. Just not for me.”
“Do you have an idea of what is for you?” He crossed the room and stood professional. “I do have other properties.”
“More outdoor space,” I said. “Wood floors.”
“People always say they like wood floors and I don’t understand it!”
I said I thought they were nice.
“Well they’re hard to keep clean. Your guests are always tracking in mud and dust, and what are you going to do: sweep all hours of the day?” I coughed; he went on: “No, give me something fine as wall-to-wall! A luxurious pile. A classy color. Heck, what’s more important in an apartment than soundproofing?”
“You may be right, but just the same I’ll keep looking,” I said. We were playing some kind of game, pretending we were not who we were.
He walked to the door and opened it for me. I kept waiting for him to acknowledge who we really were. “You women,” he spat. “You don’t know what’s best!”
I stood in the doorway steaming. “Who does!”
“You ladies need someone to guide you—someone who sees the bigger picture.”
“Someone like you?” I stepped closer to him. “Would you like to teach a lady what she needs?” I brushed the dented shoulder pad of his jacket. I breathed.
“I’ve got a wife, lady. Her name is Marjorie and she likes the finer things—”
“Wouldn’t Marjorie want to know that you’re working so hard to make money so she can have those finer things?” I curled around him: a snake, a rope, a scarf. The door was still open. Who knows what I looked like.
“Miss, I must stop this,” Gene protested. He moved his big body away from me and down the front walk.
“Fine,” I called. “But I don’t want you coming back here, begging.” And then I laughed!
He dematerialized. I shut the door. I was once more myself only, exhausted all over again. I began to understand: My plan was not only an escape but a removal. Better to save my loved ones from this monster I was, a person who’d run off her own imaginary friend, addled by everything in sight.
SOON IT WAS the second week of September. Straightaway, I fixed to leave, but things kept snapping me off my trail.
Once, construction jammed the way. I couldn’t bear a reroute. I wanted to do it right, and feel right doing it.
Another time I saw an ant, a big black one, climbing across my windshield and flattening under speed. It was like watching a surveillance feed of a botched electric chair execution. It was uncensored war footage. Nope. It was nothing like that.
I could’ve used Gene, some backup, some distraction. He wouldn’t come when called—sulking, I figured. I was sulking too, itchy and ready to go.
It was around that time Ken got back from his trip. I consented to seeing him. One night we went to see a movie about a man who couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t tell if it was a horror or a comedy. Afterward we went to the diner like old times, only it had since been relocated. Previously it had been sitting on increasingly valuable land. Something about an historic registry: they’d moved the diner’s original prefab shell a half-mile over, between a bank and a Mexican restaurant. They’d taken the occasion to add on.
Somehow, now, it was worse and smelled worse. Less clubhouse, more eating hall. On the plus, they’d kept those personal jukeboxes at each booth. One play for a quarter, three plays for two. No one ever used them, except kids and Ken.
“What is up with you?” he asked, sniffing and taking a big drink of water. I told him nothing. He asked for a quarter. I gave him one and he put on a pop song about one lover asking another lover not to leave. It should have seemed poignant but abandonment and wanting what you can no longer have, what you had once—that’s rote stuff as far as pop and life are concerned.
“Fifty percent of pop songs are about someone leaving,” I said. “And fifty percent are about how happy someone is to have someone.”
Ken shrugged. I said I was just making an observation.
“What would you do if I left town?”
Ken’s face dropped and cracked. “Like after everything is over?” He meant after Pop had died.
“Yeah, or whatever.”
“I guess I’d want to go with you. We could have some kind of big, life-changing time. Not Arkansas, though. Arkansas is horrible.” Then, dragged into a charisma of complaint, he started in about how his mom had been up his ass to move down the whole time; how, yeah, the air was good there and his sister seemed to be doing a little better, but his cousins were a lot to deal with, and there wasn’t any good coffee, and everyone there assumed he could speak Spanish and even though he could, he didn’t like the presumption. People speak Spanish to you here, I said. All the time. Yeah, he said, but still. Years later I’d recall to Ken this moment. He’d groan at his young self and say grimly: “How eager I was to betray myself.” And I’d think how shamefully unaware I was of any of Ken’s reckonings, of anything beyond the reach of my own arms.
In the diner the song ended and our fries came, soggy in their red plastic baskets. They had been soggy on the old ceramic plates, too. Never fried long enough. Or the oil temp was low. Both or either. I wasn’t hungry. The conversation didn’t double back to leaving. I wasn’t going to bring it up again.
THE NEXT DAY Ken left me a message about a party the next night, even though he knew I wouldn’t go. “That is if you haven’t left town yet,” he joked. I thought maybe he was beginning to worry, that one day if he wasn’t careful he’d look up and I’d be gone.
I used to think I was a person capable of anything. I don’t mean this positively. Once Ken and I had broken into a mansion as teenagers. When I was sixteen, I didn’t yet understand my circumstance. I didn’t understand my family. My fixation was the homes in our neighborhood—the vinyl siding, the dandelions, a lack of sidewalk—and as I grew it became impossible not to snipe at those who had more. I don’t mean this in a political way.
On one day a fair-skinned burnout named Macy had given Ken a joint in exchange for a lunch period with his completed Algebra II homework. To celebrate Ken and I decided to go on an adventure, or what passed for one in the suburbs.
It was not coincidence that we were both wearing black; we both wore a lot of black. We had reasoned it would make us less noticeable. Originally we’d planned to go pool-hopping in the local apartment complexes but the spring night had proven cold.
“What if—” I began, leaning against Ken, who was in turn leaning against the hood of his Buick, parked by my house under the shadows of a big false cherry tree. My parents had been asleep for hours. “What if we go over to Poplar Park and look in the windows?”
About one and a half miles from my family home was a new construction development of minor mansions. It was the next school district over and we knew no one; there no one knew us. Had Pop sold houses there it would’ve been a leg up. The families inside them coordinated with each other according to hobbies, not flaws.
Ken sucked air through his nose. “It’s late.”
“I’m bored,” I said—that tatty siren call of the American teenager.
Without agreeing on anything, we began to walk in the approximate direction of the development. There were a few ghost-lighted windows, the occasional car rolling by and up to something. We made one turn, another, went down behind a row of townhouses, mud and gravel underfoot
. A bird would startle and Ken would hiss “Shush,” and then I’d laugh at him, and grab his shoulder to kiss it. “Nancy,” I’d say, and then he’d shove me off sweetly. Beyond the townhouses was a four-lane road and we crossed it quickly as we would’ve in traffic. Though there was not one motor going this time of deep dead night.
Across an access road and along a marsh, our Chucks betrayed their weak seams. Our socks saturated. There were crickets making their own echoes, no other noise in the air.
As we approached the cul-de-sac we took a moment to look. There were three of the minor mansions in front of us. Each had a stone walk, a bay window, a wide deck on the backside visible from the front. But while two were set into a hill, the third, to our right, was set on a downward slope, which met that same marsh, only on the other side.
Pretending courage I led Ken behind that third mansion, billy-goating down a damp grass escarpment. The blinds were drawn, no sign of light. Soon we came to a small lower patio, beneath the deck, where there sat a small plaster water feature in the shape of an old-fashioned urn.
Where the patio met the house there was a sliding door backed by blinds. I wondered if it was unlocked. “Ken?” I asked. But he was over at the marsh line, pissing on some cattails. Even his urination, in its intimacy, was rousing. I will admit that when we were this age, or these ages—fifteen and sixteen and seventeen—I had a bit of romance in my heart. My parents were distant by sickness or disposition. In my own mind I was a tenderfooted stray. Eventually my crush on Ken transformed into a respectable family love. Which was convenient, as one year later he would deliver the news that he preferred men.
As I waited for Ken to finish I daydreamt a proposition: that we’d find a door unlocked. That it would slide open with a beautiful silence. That we’d find ourselves in a staged rumpus room, with leather couches and a wet bar with an antiqued mirror. That we’d go no further, but rather stretch like kittens across the deep cushions. That I’d withdraw the joint surgically from my fifth pocket, light it, and take a drag with the thumb and forefinger like James Dean, who we loved then.
We would’ve gotten so high that our extremities felt like masses of kind bees, floating us up just a few inches from the earth. I, in my uncanny state, would move from my couch to his, and be the little spoon. He would begin to stroke my hair, and I would have pressed my butt deeper against his pelvis: the smallest aggression. And he would have started to kiss my jaw, and I, so high I could hardly feel it happening, would have raised my chin to kiss him on the mouth. We would have sent out our fingers like sentinels. We would have kept our clothes on; I would have licked his cock through the crotch of his pants, where it would smell silty, like the bottom of a creek. He would have shifted himself upward until he was standing and then laid me out on the mansion’s basement carpet. I would have gone down to greet it slowly, quietly humping the air in a way I would have not yet known I could do. We would have fucked, with our pants down, quiet at first, but then loud, taking turns finishing the joint, feeling raw wetness between us. And in the oncoming light we would have walked back to his car silently. We would have left the glass door open behind us, dreaming blissed out that the local raccoons and chipmunks and squirrels and turtles would, finding the door ajar, broach the alien edifice in waves.
We would not have been weird after; we would have joked about it. We wouldn’t have waited on the future fumbling of relative strangers. We would have owned our sex differently.
I was not wrong that the back door might be unlocked; it was. I hissed Ken’s name once more. He galloped from the marsh’s edge and close together, we ventured in. The basement was standard issue: medium pile carpet, washer, dryer, an old couch, a coffee table with nothing on it. A weak lamp on a side table. The light being on, it keyed us up. We saw a door and I began to walk toward it. “What are you fucking doing?” Ken whispered.
I didn’t answer him, only kept flat-footing it slowly across the carpet, until my hand was near the knob. The door was hung slightly crooked. When I pressed it with my open palm, it gave. Beyond, a bedroom with a desk and a bed, and in the bed, a sleeping person. On the walls, posters for rap-rock acts. A videogame system blinking and hooked to a television, spitting cables. Books and comics avalanched in one corner. Ken stood close behind me, his legs fit into the back of my knees, his chin ducked against my head. “Come on,” he whispered wetly into my ear canal.
As we withdrew, something on the desk caught the wan light of the lamp. I pocketed it and did no examination until later when I was alone in my room. Now when I look at the hummingbird knife, my impulsive petty theft, I understand that the aftermaths of theft and sex can feel the same: a disassembling thrill.
I KEPT TRYING to leave town. Soon it was the end of September. Time was getting slim. To my landlord and to myself I had made what felt like a final pledge, an oath, solemn and straight lipped, that I’d be moving on. At the same time Ma had taken a leave of absence at work and had for now reduced the nurse’s hours. Between escape attempts I went and saw my folks without looking at their faces or listening to what they said. I wanted to delay the reveal of my desertion. “I need you to go over this paperwork with me,” Ma said one day, holding an envelope in midair.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I promise,” I said. And got in my truck and drove back to my apartment to enter it one last time.
Each movement I made in the empty apartment jangled me. There was only one way to stop this. I packed my backpack with all my last minute things: wallet, keys, bottle of water, sunglasses, toothbrush, pain pills, that hummingbird knife, and another, more serious knife. I threw out all the condiments and took the trash to the tract dumpster. I whistled one note, locked the door behind me, and hopped to. I kept my house keys, for no matter the plan I was a true-blue wuss.
For a while, out on the road, everything was looking good. I felt—I don’t know—clean for the first time in months. Directional as an arrow. In the left lane all the cars were moving in a liquid American way. I congratulated myself, aloud. “Denny!” I said. “By George, you’ve got it!” I hummed a bit and knocked out a little tune on the wheel. “Gene!” I hollered. He didn’t show up. I felt sorry for myself, imagined him saying, “Denise, some things you’ve got to do on your ownsome-lonesome!” I wanted prayer beads. Rosary. A fortune cookie. Worry dolls. My friend! I was unfettered. Kept driving.
The clean boost didn’t last long. I surveyed the traffic, feeling bright and calm, only to get cut off by a truck. I veered into the right lane. I measured my breathing. In front of me was a pickup just like mine. It was going slow, its bed jammed with split and stained upholstered castoffs. I eased up on the gas.
I couldn’t see the driver, only the truck’s junk. He was, I felt sure, someone my father’s age. He would have married once or even three times, but, by plumbing or chance or choice, stayed childless. He would have seen a series of light industry jobs through enough years. He would have stopped asking after the names of wives and kids, or what anyone thought about the new highway project, or how the unions were doing. He would have grown quiet. I watched the truck’s load carefully, watched the shadows on the back window of the cab shift when the driver jerked his head one way or another. I fell into a kind of spell.
Then his truck hit a bump and shimmied a couch half a foot to the right, so that I could see now the back of his browned neck. Presented with a body: here is a person I’d never know, I thought. It was an unaccountably sad thought, only because of its surprise and accuracy. I felt like a real schmuck when I felt tears on my cheeks. I had to pull the truck over. To be safe. I thought: I just need a day, half a day, to think out what I’m doing. So I turned back home with a wet face.
BACK IN STUDIO-SWEET-HOME my fingers discovered a missed box of cereal tucked in the cupboard above the stove. I ate up dry handfuls and lapped faucet water. By the evening I started to feel wild and ready. I thought no more of endings or beginnings. I knew I would leave now. It was only a question of when. I slept on the dumb c
arpeted floor. In the morning its rough pile woke me. My skin, pressed in it, had a gruff, postparty texture. I still preferred wood. Being at home was a retreat, but with an air of self-celebration. One more chance to bon voyage. One more chance to remake a choice. “Gene?” I called, groggy. He wasn’t there to say hello or tell a story or lambast me. I wondered had I run him off for good. I went back to sleep with a smirk on my face.
At my second arousal I woke to observe my empty quarters, the judging baldness I myself had fashioned. It was noon. Feeling bodily empty, I called for a pizza. When the man asked for my address I teared up all over. Somehow I made it through the order, and then waited like a patient, twiddling my flip phone. When it rang, it was Ken on the line, asking if I was around. “Still here!” I said, and invited myself over straightaway.
Forty minutes later I arrived at Ken’s house with the pizza. In his living room I patted his roommate’s smelly mutt dog and watched cable as Ken rolled out a sleeping bag. We sat on it and nipped from a bottle of sour leftover party wine.
After half the bottle was gone he asked whether I was okay. I asked him if I had to be. “We’re all our own people, Den.” I could tell he was beginning to get tired of me; he hadn’t asked why I was there. This was one more reason to leave. He was his own person, I know and I knew, but at the time it was difficult not to think of him as a function of my own tragedy. It is cavalier and sinister to let something like this go on for very long.
Indeed an expression of exhaustion passed through Ken’s features. It softened him from jaw to brow. I kicked the pizza box where it sat at the edge of our sleeping area. “Hey,” he said. “There’s no reason to be mean to the pizza.” The smelly mutt dog, corn yellow, with eyes a similar color, farted and left the room. Ken pulled me across his lap like I was Jesus in some depressing contemporary pieta. He stroked my shoulder. I fell asleep and so did he.
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