by Jen Beagin
“Mentally?”
“Mentally, physically, sexually,” Nigel said. “It also means you’re prone to addiction and depression.” He raised an eyebrow.
“One of your shoulders is a little higher than the other,” Shiori said suddenly.
“It is?” Mona put a hand on each of her shoulders. “Which one?”
“The right one,” Shiori said. “You should drink green tea. No coffee.”
“No offense, Shiori, but how am I supposed to clean houses on green tea? Have you seen the houses around here? They’re made of dirt.”
“All you have to do is eat a macrobiotic diet for a few months,” Nigel said. “Whole grains, leafy greens. No meat, no dairy. No fat or sugar.”
“Which reminds me—I made dessert,” Mona said. She got up and opened the fridge, where a plate of lemon bars was waiting. She placed the plate on the table. “I made these last night. They should be perfect. Please, help yourselves.”
They paused, seeming to consider it. Nigel said, “Well, since you were gracious enough to make these from scratch—”
They came from a ready-mix box, Mona almost confessed.
“—Shiori and I will share one. Thank you, Mona.”
Again, she wondered if she should really be associating with these people.
Nigel talked at length about his father. Apparently, he was the son of a semifamous inventor. He described the laundry detergent cap his father was famous for having developed, but all Mona heard was static. She watched Nigel’s face while he talked, and, as she concentrated on his moving lips, she felt Shiori staring at her intently. She tried to ignore it but eventually felt compelled to meet Shiori’s gaze, thinking perhaps she was trying to silently communicate something. Maybe she wanted another lemon bar or her own goddamn beer.
But as soon as Mona looked at Shiori, Shiori quickly looked at Nigel, and Nigel, still talking, glanced at Shiori before his eyes returned to Mona. Then it was back to the start, with Mona and Nigel looking at each other, until Mona was again compelled to meet Shiori’s gaze, and Shiori looked at Nigel again, and he at her.
It felt, bizarrely, like a game of pinball. Nigel controlled the flippers, Mona was the main ball in play, and Shiori was the extra ball that came out of nowhere and threw everything into chaos before disappearing. She wondered who was putting the extra ball in play. Was she inadvertently hitting a button, or was it random?
After Nigel finished his story, they sat in a comfortable silence for several minutes.
“I’ve noticed something about you guys,” Mona said after a while.
“Uh-oh,” Nigel said.
“Now, don’t be alarmed,” Mona said slowly, “but . . . you both have killer cheekbones.”
Nigel and Shiori looked at each other and smiled.
“Seriously,” Mona said. “You could really hurt someone with those things.”
“We enjoy your company,” Nigel said, apropos of nothing. He held his hand out for Shiori, and Mona watched them clasp hands across the table. There was the three-way pinball of looks again.
“I like you guys, too,” Mona said, and felt herself blush.
* * *
IN THE MORNING, SHE SAT inertly in her kitchen chair. Her dining table had been pushed aside. Shiori entered the kitchen and weightlessly placed a heavy vat of chocolate pudding on the tiled floor, motioning for Mona to step in. Mona obliged. The pudding was still warm. She wiggled her toes and was overcome with euphoria. She noticed Shiori had pudding on her crazy spatula thumbs, and she wanted to put those thumbs in her mouth. She tried to move toward Shiori but the pudding had somehow dried like cement around her feet. The pudding thumbs became the dark nipples of Shiori’s breasts. She heard Nigel moaning along to flute music and woke up.
Had they been hitting on her last night? She couldn’t decide. She’d always been terrible at reading sexual cues, or cues of any kind, and had a long and painful relationship with misinterpretation. In fact, now that she thought about it, misinterpretation was a constant theme in her life.
All Nigel’s talk about his dad made her wonder about her own. Although, she’d stopped calling him Dad years ago. Mickey was his name. They’d been playing phone tag for two years and she hadn’t laid eyes on him in twelve. He lived in Eureka—or maybe it was Seattle now. One of the last times she’d seen him had been in sixth grade. Her parents had been separated for a few months and she was splitting her time between the house she grew up in, where Mickey still lived, and her mother’s new apartment. He’d picked her up from school that day. It was a surprise—she usually took the city bus home—and he’d been early; the bell had just rung and the school buses hadn’t yet lined up in the parking lot. She and her classmates were just getting their backpacks on when he entered the classroom, and a few kids had approached him shyly, as if he were a local celebrity.
He’d been wearing his uniform: a yellow, mesh-backed cap with the words “Plumbers Have Bigger Tools” emblazoned across the top, a striped blue-and-white work shirt with his name stitched over the breast, and jeans with large holes in the knees. He smelled like a mixture of alcohol and cigarettes, with a low note of refried beans and the sweat of a hundred hangovers. A brown beard threatened to take over his whole face, and his skin was pebble textured on one cheek, as if he’d been sleeping on the ground. His eyes were what drew people in: clear, green, difficult to look away from. They were so animated they looked cartoonish—when he talked about money, his pupils seemed to turn into tiny dollar signs; when he talked about her mother, they were heart shaped.
His most distinguishing feature, though, was the hook. She always forgot about it until they were in public. The hook was made of steel, which he could open and close with his back muscles, and the prosthetic arm was made of fiberglass, onto which he had someone tattoo an American eagle, along with the words “We the People.”
Her classmates had asked him the question every kid did: “How did you lose your arm?”
“I lost it by lying,” he lied.
Usually he said it was because he didn’t eat his vegetables or didn’t go to church.
Her heart sank as he made his way over to her teacher, Miss O’Farrell. For some reason, Miss O’Farrell thought Mona was smart, even though she was an average student. She gave Mona books to read from her own library, books like 1984 and The Stranger. She carried the books in her briefcase and passed them to Mona when no one was looking, like contraband. Mona read them dutifully but never had the heart to tell her that she preferred her mother’s taste in fiction—Lawrence Sanders, Sidney Sheldon, and . . . Jackie Collins, if nothing else was available.
“I’m Mick,” he said, introducing himself. “Mona’s dad.”
“Hello,” Miss O’Farrell said, and offered her right hand. He never shook hands with his hook, so he’d taken her extended right hand in his left one, which disoriented her. Then he held it for a beat too long so it looked as though they were holding hands. Mona blushed as if he’d just kissed her teacher on the mouth. Miss O’Farrell recovered quickly, giving his hand a squeeze before letting it go.
“Mona a good girl?” He spoke in the flirtatious voice he used on female cashiers.
“She’s very bright,” Miss O’Farrell answered, to which her father merely grunted. “She’s also the fastest runner in the sixth grade,” she added.
“Is that right?” He spun around and looked at Mona. He was beaming.
As they were leaving he shouted, “Race you to the parking lot!” and took off running across the playground. Mona hung back. He ran as though he were being chased by a demon. Then, to her horror, he stumbled at full speed and fell spectacularly onto his face.
The playground was laid out like a prison yard, a big concrete square surrounded by tall chain-link fencing. He was lying in the center of the square. He’d fallen as though he’d been shot in the back. One shoe had slipped off and was lying on its side, near his good arm. His hat rested upside down near his head. She and some of her classmates stood
behind the fence, staring at him, their fingers and noses poking through the holes. A couple of stupid fourth graders climbed the fence to get a better view.
She remembered the noise he’d made. It sounded like bitter laughter, but she realized he might be crying. His expression never told her—he had a habit of smiling when he cried. He rolled over onto his back and called her name. She reluctantly shuffled over to him. When she got there she was careful to stand so that her shadow covered his face, which had been scraped on the pavement. He looked as though whatever he’d drunk that day had just now caught up with him. He was smiling and wiping tears away with his shirt sleeve, but she still couldn’t tell which kind they were.
“I was just thinking about your teacher,” he said. “She has the eyes of a hawkfish. I wouldn’t mind taking her out. Is she married?”
He reached for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket and shook one out. It was flattened and on the verge of breaking. “My smokes are crushed,” he muttered.
“You can’t smoke here, Dad,” she’d said.
When he finally got to his feet, he limped dramatically to the edge of the playground, dragging his leg behind him and moaning in continuation of his performance. He no longer had an audience—her schoolmates had scattered like cockroaches as soon as he’d sat up. She handed him his shoe and hat and he put them back on and then patted her cheek roughly, as if brushing imaginary crumbs off it, a gesture he often made in place of a hug or a pat on the back.
“Sorry I fell, pumpkin,” he said, frowning. “My legs felt . . . wrong. I think my knee might be busted.” He paused, waiting for a response. Getting none, he said, “I guess you think your old man is an ass.”
“Why are you here?” she asked quietly. “I don’t need a ride, I have bus money.”
“I just bid a job down the street and uh, I dunno! I thought it’d be nice to pick you up for once. You shoulda seen this lady’s house, Mona. You woulda been in heaven. She has a swimming pool the size of—”
“Why couldn’t you wait in the parking lot like the other parents?” she’d asked.
“Hey,” he said, looking hurt. “Don’t be so sensitive. I said I was sorry, for chrissakes. I crawl under houses all day,” he said, as if that explained everything.
As they walked to his truck in the parking lot, he put his arm around her and leaned heavily against her. He cleared his throat, and she could sense one of his talking jags coming on. As he fished out his keys, she twisted away from him and took off running down the street, toward the ocean and the apartment her mother shared with her new boyfriend. He didn’t bother chasing her, but she could hear him yelling his head off. She was glad she couldn’t hear the words. His mouth was a coffin she’d spent years wanting to nail shut.
He knew where she was headed and followed her in his truck, a Frito-Lay truck in its previous life, tall, square, and snub-nosed with a large flat windshield. He’d had it repainted white with the words “Boyle’s Plumbing” on each side in bright-blue letters. While she was catching her breath at an intersection, he pulled up alongside her. His face was alert with a mixture of hilarity and rage. The last time she’d seen that look on his face he’d just finished beating a possum to death with a tennis racket in the backyard.
“I’ll drive you to your mother’s,” he said out the window.
“I’d rather walk.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and pulled away.
The next time she saw him he pretended as if nothing had happened. He’d always been good at that.
* * *
BROODING. IT WAS LIKE BED spins; the only way to stop it was to put one or both of her feet on the ground. She slid her foot out from under the comforter and placed it on the floor. Better. She recited her new mantra: Feelings are just stories: they have a beginning, middle—
The phone rang, startling her.
A woman named Susan asked about housekeeping services. The woman apologized for the last-minute call, but she needed her house cleaned for a party that evening. Did Mona have time in her schedule?
She pretended to look at her calendar. “I think I can squeeze you in,” she said. “What’s your address?”
“11 De Vargas Lane.”
Sounded familiar. “You don’t live in the Angel House, by any chance, do you?”
“That’s me,” the woman said.
Now she didn’t know what to say. “Yay,” she said, idiotically.
* * *
THE CORNERS OF SUSAN’S MOUTH were jelly free this time, her blonde hair clean and neatly combed. She wore the Taos uniform for Anglo women in their forties: denim jacket, strappy tee, hand-knit scarf, jeans, practical shoes with treaded soles. She greeted Mona at the door and then gave her the grand tour. She wasn’t kidding about having a thing for angels. Mona had been expecting display cases overcrowded with hideous porcelain cherubs, but Susan had good taste in angels, if there was such a thing, which came as a relief, as there were fucking angels on every available surface, and she always did a better job if the client’s taste matched her own to some degree.
In the living room, on a free-floating shelf that wrapped around the room, stood a series of foot-tall faceless angels made of hand-carved wood; in the dining room, a collection of hand-painted plates displayed in an antique hutch; in the hallway, angels made from coat hangers hung from hooks in the ceiling; on the walls, large and small canvases of angels painted in the style of Picasso, Clemente, Schiele. Mona was impressed in spite of herself.
The house had a turret, the winding staircase of which led to the master bedroom. Susan called it the Angel’s Nest. Everything was white up there—walls, carpet, dressers, nightstands, the linens on the king-size bed. The bed faced a large picture window with a startling view of a mountain covered in aspen trees. Over the bed, the room’s only decoration: an oversized canvas of two emaciated female angels. They were naked and appeared to be either wrestling or having sex. They looked like sisters—they both had messy dark hair, eraser-like bright-red nipples, and lots of pubic hair. Their wings were bloody, broken beyond repair.
“I didn’t know angels . . . got naked together,” Mona said.
Susan laughed. “Me neither, until I saw that painting.”
“It’s unsettling,” Mona said. “Beautiful.”
“Thanks,” Susan said. “I bought it in Paris. It’s one of my favorites. Anyway, you don’t have to do much in here other than vacuum.”
The entire house looked clean already, and she wondered why Susan called in the first place. They left the room and went back to the kitchen, where Mona had set down her cleaning supplies.
“Oh, and don’t bother with the guest room. My dog’s in there, sleeping.”
“You don’t have to keep your dog locked up,” Mona said. “I love dogs.”
“She’s . . . not feeling well. If I let her out, she’ll just get underfoot.”
She picked up Susan’s toaster, turned it upside down over the sink, and shook the crumbs out. There were dozens.
“Holy cow,” Susan said.
She smiled. Clients always ate that up.
“Well, I’ll get out of your hair. I have errands to run in town, but I should be back in a few hours. Think you’ll still be here?”
“Hard to say,” she said. “But if I leave before you get home, I can always bill you later.”
“Perfect,” Susan said. “Listen, I really appreciate your coming on such short notice. I had a good feeling about you.”
“Me, too,” Mona said.
“Help yourself to anything in the fridge.”
She spent an hour in the kitchen, the dirtiest parts of which were the top of the refrigerator and the inside of the microwave, and another hour in both of the bathrooms. The bulk of her time would be spent dusting angels and vacuuming.
Food first. In the fridge, a pitcher of iced tea, feta cheese, plain yogurt, a bowl of tuna salad, and a bag of something in the meat drawer. She removed the bag and looked inside: brownies—bingo. She wolfed down
two. They were partly frozen and therefore somewhat tasteless, but they had a slightly grainy texture she liked, and semisweet chips, and possibly some cayenne. She chased it with iced tea straight from the pitcher, wiped her mouth with her wrist.
As she dusted the angels in the living room, she imagined spending time with Shiori. Sans Nigel. What was her childhood like in Japan? Did she have crappy parents? Did she have to wear a uniform in school? Were the subways as crowded as they say? Was she ever molested by a businessman? Shiori didn’t answer her questions. She just removed her pajama top, exposed her breasts, and offered them to Mona. Her nipples were large, brown, perfect. “Here,” Shiori said. “Suck here.”
“Boobs on the brain, Bob,” Mona said.
He didn’t answer at first. “Must you call them boobs?” he said finally.
“Boobs, Bob,” she said. “Boobs!”
“I’ve never liked that word,” he said. “Unless it’s used to describe a person.”
Her hands were clammy. So was her dusting rag. Dry mouth, racing heart. Must sit. Couch too soft. Must stand. Shaky legs. Must sit.
“Boob, I feel drooged,” she said.
No answer.
She looked at her hands, which had always been her way of taking her drug temperature. They looked like two hard-ons, the erect veins of which resembled blue earthworms, each with its own tiny red heart. Angel dust. Wasn’t that the shit that made you think you could fly? She imagined taking a slow swan dive off the top of the turret, flapping her arms on the way down. Her body impaled on a fence post, being devoured by turkey vultures.
She watched her hands with interest: the left one was picking up angels in slow motion; the right dusted the surface with a damp pink rag. The hands didn’t feel attached to her body but they seemed to know what they were doing. “Dusting angels,” she whimpered. “Angel dust.”
Don’t get all hysterical, she ordered herself. It’s just hash. You love hash.
After vacuuming, which seemed to take hours, she gathered her supplies and put them in her truck. Then she went back into the house for a quick once-over. She walked from room to room. She heard the dog sniffing at the space under a door.