by Jen Beagin
“Most real art is weird. That’s what makes it great.”
“I didn’t mind that much until I saw you showing them to your friends. That sort of ruined it for me.”
“I was going through a divorce. I was ready to wake up in another solar system, and I’m not like that. I don’t believe in suicide. So you know it had to be pretty bad for me to be thinking that.”
“Remember our dogs, Spoon and Fork?”
He didn’t answer.
“You sent them to a farm,” she said. “True or false?”
“I loved you,” he said suddenly.
“So, no farm?”
“I was the good guy,” he said. “I was on your side.”
“You gave me some really creepy dolls once. Remember? Spanish dolls. I was convinced they had cameras in their eyes, that they could see me, and I didn’t even have to be in the same room with them. They held me hostage for an entire year. It was horrible. I couldn’t even shower or take a shit without them watching.”
“Cameras? In the doll’s eyes? Are you hearing yourself?”
“You had a weird habit of watching me all the time. I’d be engrossed in some activity and I’d look up and see you there, fucking staring at me—”
“That was Fat Jim, dummy—not me! I caught him spying on you once and almost strangled him. Swear to God.”
“You never own your part in anything,” she said. “You ever notice that? You make everyone else wear your shit.”
“Fat Fuck was found with no hands.” No man in this one, just two severed red hands resembling maple leaves.
“This is your mother’s fault,” he said. “She ran off with that asshole and threw you in the garbage.”
“You didn’t do anything to stop her. I ended up with your cousin, not hers. Whose fault was that?”
“I thought you loved Sheila,” he said.
“I did,” she said. “I do.”
“It’s me you never loved,” he said. “I used to call Sheila and she’d put you on the phone and I’d ask how things were going at school, and you’d tell me you were a lesbian. Or a communist. Or both.” He snorted. “I never knew what the hell to say. Then I’d try to change the subject by asking if you still loved Bill Murray and you’d say, ‘I only watch prison movies now.’ ”
“I was fifteen,” she said.
“You were better off without me.”
“That’s sort of beside the point,” she said. “Like, entirely.”
What was the point? Why did she keep calling him? It was conditioning, partly. She thought she was supposed to call him. Wasn’t it also biological? She felt a pull sometimes, on what she thought of as a cellular level. You were supposed to call your parents. You were supposed to have a relationship with them, even if it was shitty. But she didn’t want a relationship. She wanted retribution. Verbal, emotional, monetary. And now she knew she would never get it. Perhaps it was best to give up, to get over it.
“Fat Fuck is dead,” she murmured, and hung up.
* * *
JESUS HAD BEEN WANDERING AROUND her apartment for twenty minutes, picking up objects and putting them down again. She loved nosy people. Her only regular guests were Yoko and Yoko, who barely moved, let alone touched anything.
“What’s with all the throw pillows?” he asked. “You’re like the Elephant Man.”
“I’m relieved you know who that is,” she said.
“Where’s Carmen-Maria-Sofia?”
“I put her in the freezer,” she said.
He didn’t seem to think that was strange.
“Take a load off,” she said. “Drink some wine.”
They sat on the love seat in the living room with their feet up on the coffee table. His hands were flecked with white and yellow paint. She asked him what he was working on in his studio and he told her he was doing a reproduction of The Ascension of the Virgin, except Mary was rising up from the town dump and so she was standing on a pile of garbage instead of the usual heavenly clouds. “Hard to describe,” he said. “You’ll have to come by and see it.”
“Why is your skin so perfect? Do you exfoliate?”
He laughed. “I’m not a chick.”
“Well, you smell like one. Is that floral perfume you’re wearing? I smell roses.”
“Shut up and drink your wine.” He examined his fingernails. “Do you have any shea butter?”
She laughed. In between the buttons of his shirt she spotted black ink. “Do you have a chest tattoo?”
He sighed and reluctantly unbuttoned his shirt with one hand. The names “Cathy & Danny” were tattooed in simple typewriter script across his chest.
“Who are they?” she asked, baffled. “Your dogs?”
“My parents.”
“Did they pass away?”
“No,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “I just love them.”
“You know, it’s not easy to surprise me,” she said, “but, wow—surprised.”
He set his wine on the coffee table and slid open the small drawer underneath it. He blinked at its contents for a few seconds before rummaging around. “Anything good in here?”
Before she could answer he pulled out a stack of papers and photographs. “What’s this?”
“A barf bag from Korean Air,” she said. “I don’t know if you know this, but barf bags make pretty good stationery—”
“Jesus,” he said. “Did you take these?”
He was shuffling through her last series of housekeeping pictures, all shot in grainy black and white. In each picture she wore a polyester housekeeping smock she’d ordered by mail and pretended to have been murdered.
“You shouldn’t leave these lying around.”
“Well, I don’t,” she said. “I keep them in a drawer.”
He studied each photograph. “They’re cool—very cool. Were you drunk?”
“No! I’m supposed to be working. And also dead.”
“You don’t look dead,” he said. “You look passed out. You should let me do your makeup next time. I could make you look dead in five minutes.”
“Well, this is just one series. There are other photographs. Many others.”
“How many?”
“Four hundred and twelve,” she said. “In my fantasies, my future biographer stumbles upon them after I’m dead, declares them a work of genius, and then Chronicle Books publishes them as a collection, and the book winds up on coffee tables everywhere, including those of my former clients.”
“Sounds like you’ve given it some thought,” he said.
“Daydreaming is part of my job.”
“Well, I know a lot of people in the art world,” he said. “I could probably get you a show while you’re still alive.”
“Where—at a bus stop?”
“This is good shit, Mona,” he said. “Reminds me a little of Sophie Calle. In fact, it might be interesting if you wrote some text to accompany the photographs.”
“Oh, I already do that,” she said. “I mean, I keep written records. Actually, they’re more like stories, because it’s clearly . . . my own interpretation.”
“What are you interpreting?”
“The lives of my clients,” she said. “Based on the things I find in their houses.”
“Who are these guys?” he asked.
He was looking at a picture of Spoon and Fork.
“My first loves,” she said. “First and only, maybe. Unless I count Mr. Disgusting, who I’ll tell you about another time, when I’ve had more to drink.”
He cleared his throat. “Speaking of love.” He set the photographs on the table and turned toward her.
“You’re in love with me,” she said. “Fuck. I knew this would happen.”
“I have a boyfriend, Mona. His name’s Colin.”
“Okay,” she said slowly.
“He’s a general contractor. He builds solar homes. He’s from Australia.”
“Are you worried I’m going to fly into a jealous rage or something?”
/> He shook his head. “Listen, his dog bit the baby—”
“What baby?”
“The baby he has with his wife.”
“He’s married?”
“Separate issue,” he said quickly. “Actually, a nonissue for me, since I don’t believe in monogamy.”
“I bet the wife believes in monogamy.”
“Oh, she knows about me,” he said breezily.
“Wow,” she said.
“Back to the dog,” he said. “His name is George, and he looks exactly like this guy.” He tapped Forky’s face with his finger. “He’s an intense little dude. He’s got, like, presence, you know? Charisma. He’s like a circus dog. But he’s bitten the baby twice—in the face, no less. Broke the skin both times. Poor baby has two black eyes right now. Anyway, long story short, the wife wants to get rid of George.”
She poured herself more wine. “I’d get rid of the baby,” she said. “If it were me.”
Jesus didn’t say anything, but he was beaming at her.
“Ah,” she said. “I think I see where this is going. Why don’t you take him?”
“I have two cats,” he said. “George kills cats for fun.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Just my type.”
He grinned. “You’d be great together. I already mentioned it to Colin as a possibility. He and the wife have been fighting about it constantly, and I just . . . want it resolved. Put to bed. I mean, not to put you in the middle of anything—”
“My middle name is Middle.”
“So what do you think?”
“You must really trust me,” she said, flattered.
“Of course,” he said. “Don’t you trust me?”
She nodded. She did in fact trust him, even though she suspected they had little in common at the core, as he wasn’t destructive or prone to self-pity. He would never burn himself with a curling iron, for instance, or overdose on a stockpile of pills. He would never stockpile pills in the first place. She wondered why that was, what separated him from her, and realized it was right there, tattooed on his chest: “Cathy & Danny.” He was one of the fortunate ones: he’d emerged from childhood a whole person, and his past wasn’t some vast, immovable mass with its own weather system.
She thought of Mr. Disgusting’s chest tattoo, the giant wooden ship, the sea, the words “Homeward Bound” written in a banner, and she remembered that thing Nigel had said about her, how she was no longer living among the lotus-eaters, how she was back on the boat, bound for home, and it was time she smote the gray sea with her oars and rowed hard—
“What are you thinking about?” Jesus asked.
“Oh, The Odyssey,” she said. “Which I’ve never read. But apparently, according to Yoko and Yoko, I’m on a boat, so to speak, smiting the gray sea with my oars, and so on.”
He laughed. “What the hell does ‘smite’ mean?”
“I think it means to strike something really hard,” she said. “You can be smote by a stick, or a fist, or an umbrella. Or by a disease or illness. Or by your conscience. Or by a sudden, strong feeling. I’m pretty smitten by you, for instance.”
He raised his eyebrows. “How’s that?”
“Because you seem so . . . at home.”
“Well, this couch is pretty comfortable,” he said, and then shifted uncomfortably.
She laughed. “At home in your body, honey,” she said. “At home in the world.”
She watched his cheeks redden.
“Are you blushing?” she asked.
He looked at his watch. “Guess what time it is?”
She yawned. “Bedtime?”
“Hammer time.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s too late.”
“I think you need to do it,” he said seriously. “I think you need to smite that creepy doll. In the face. With a hammer.”
“But we’ll wake the dogs. Have you seen the dogs around here?”
“Get your fucking hammer, dude.” She followed him into the kitchen and he opened the freezer. “You put her in a plastic bag?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t want her to get frostbite.”
He pulled the doll out and started opening kitchen drawers.
“Last drawer on the left,” she said.
“Get your ass outside,” he said. “We’ll do it on the porch.”
“If I had a porch,” she said.
Outside, they stood on the concrete patio. He laid Carmen-Maria-Sofia on the ground and handed Mona the hammer. It was a clear, moonless night and all the stars were out.
“The sky would be perfect if it weren’t for that weird cloud,” she said, pointing with the hammer.
He laughed. “That’s not a cloud, Mona. It’s the Milky Way.”
“Get out of here,” she said.
“Quit stalling and smite this bitch,” he said. “Or smote. Or whatever the hell.”
She crouched over the doll. The hammer felt heavy in her hand, the handle far too long. She raised it in the air.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Your hand’s too close to the head.”
“Which head?”
“The hammerhead,” he said. “Hold it farther down.”
She repositioned her grip, raised the hammer again, and then hesitated.
“Do it!”
She let the hammer fall. The doll’s face cracked but didn’t shatter.
“Harder!”
She started giggling and then got a hold of herself and took a deep breath. “I’m sweating,” she said. “And I have to pee.”
“Mona, if you don’t swing that hammer in two seconds, I’m going to start screaming. You don’t want me to wake Yoko and Yoko, do you?”
She swung the hammer as if driving a nail, four, five, six times. The eyes were hard as marbles, but she kept pounding until Carmen-Maria-Sofia was just a body and a clump of hair. She moved onto the hands and feet and smashed them, too.
Then she dropped the hammer and looked at Jesus. He was smiling.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have my brilliant and generous friend Michelle Latiolais to thank for this book’s new life, along with my agent, Binky Urban, my editor, Daniel Loedel, and the entire staff at Scribner. Many thanks to Courtney Hodell, Daniel Reid, Adina Applebaum, Whitney Peeling, Michael Taeckens, and the rest of the folks at the Whiting Foundation, for allowing me a break from waitressing and self-doubt, and for making my life feel less absurd in general. Thanks, also, to Ron Carlson, Bill Kittredge, and Mike Levine, and to my cohorts at the University of California, Irvine, especially Alan Grostephan, James Zwerneman, Ryan Ridge, Alberto Gullaba, and Ryan Hume. Thanks, also, to Franny Shaw, Kate Barrett, Shane Beagin, Maria Korol, Nicole Mullen, Sissy Onet, Kym Scott, Rebecca Goldman, Kat Dunn, Linnea and Vickie Rickard. To my family at Sophia’s Grotto for cheering me on, to the Drexler family, particularly MaryLynne, and to my parents, Maureen Branch and Jim Beagin.
A Scribner Reading Group Guide
Pretend I’m Dead
Jen Beagin
This reading group guide for Pretend I’m Dead includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Mona—almost twenty-four, emotionally adrift, and cleaning houses to get by—meets Mr. Disgusting, a drug addict who proceeds to break her heart in unimaginable ways. In search of healing, Mona decamps for Taos, New Mexico, where she finds a community of seekers and castoffs, all of whom have one or two things to teach her—the pajama-wearing, blissed-out New Agers; the slightly creepy client with peculiar tastes in controlled substances; the psychic who might really be psychic. But always lurking just beneath the surface are her memories of growing up in a chaotic, destructive family from which she’s trying to disentangle herself, and the larger legacy of the past she
left behind.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Beagin is a former cleaning lady, and draws on some of her own experiences cleaning houses to color the material. Does knowing that affect the way you view Mona?
2. “Names are powerful,” Betty tells Mona on page 218. Is it significant that Mona constantly names and renames people and things in her life? What does it mean for Mona to finally share Mr. Disgusting’s real name? Or for her to finally correct Betty, who had been calling her Maura?
3. Why do you think Mona chose to follow Mr. Disgusting’s suggestion and move to Taos, New Mexico?
4. “Pretend I’m Dead” is the name of a game Mona and her father played in the pool when she was young. She also resumes photographing herself playing dead in Henry’s home, something she starts doing again in order to “move on” from her past. Discuss how this action, playing dead, underpins the novel as a whole, and what its significance is thematically.
5. Before leaving Lowell for Taos, Mona smashed her favorite vintage vacuum cleaner, and in the final scene, she and Jesus destroy one of the dolls with a hammer. Discuss what each of these acts signifies. What do you think is the next step in Mona’s journey?
6. The book is divided into four sections. The final three are named after characters who leave an impression on Mona—Nigel and Shiori (or “Yoko and Yoko”); her neighbors, her client Henry and his daughter Zoe; and her client Betty, the maybe-psychic. Why do you think the first section is titled “Hole”? What does it indicate about her relationship with Mr. Disgusting?
7. Mona is able to turn her “dirt radar” (p. 16) on and off as needed. Do you think she does something similar with people? With herself?
8. What do you make of Mona’s interpretation of Henry and Zoe’s relationship? Do you think she is projecting her past trauma, or witnessing the accessories to sexual abuse?
9. Pretend I’m Dead could be described as a voyeuristic novel, both because of how closely Mona observes the people she interacts with and also because of how intimately we as readers get to know her, and thus the author herself. Discuss voyeurism in fiction, and what it was like to encounter it in this book.