by Tim Hennessy
“A hangover is not sick,” she says. “It’s your own damn fault.”
* * *
Gordon’s neighborhood has bigger homes on bigger lots, but West Allis is mostly a working-class area, a series of narrow rectangles laid side by side, end to end. A place to get a foothold for the climb up. Or dig in your fingernails against the slide down.
Gordon laid out a good sum for his new roof, three years back, which included an unexpected chimney rebuild that took the vacation savings too. So, instead of their week up north, Gordon repainted his windows. Rita complained, of course. “Eternal vigilance,” Gordon reminded her, “is the price of freedom.” But where Gordon used to love these chores, the endless painting and caulking and glazing, in the last few years he’s noticed that he mostly just enjoys having finished them. That, and the gin and tonic afterward.
Rita always thinks they should just hire somebody. Rita’s not much of a saver, and Gordon has a hard time conveying to her the reality of their situation. Which is that machine tool sales is not what it used to be, and never will be again, especially not for a man just turned sixty who never truly had the backslapper’s knack. Who now wants nothing more than to never have to manufacture another smile again.
Still, the house is perfect, no expense spared. The kitchen gleams with steel and polished granite, and in the bathroom, three kinds of Italian tile. The tile-setter’s minivan was newer than Rita’s, with heated leather seats, he said. Gordon saw him flirting with her on two separate occasions. Gordon didn’t say anything at the time. Though he wonders still if he should have.
But now Gordon has a nice clean place to unclench his fisted bowels. His legs still fall asleep when he sits on the throne for too long, that hasn’t changed. And when he stands, feet on fire, he has to clutch the spindly but expensive towel bar and try hard not to fall down. To pull the whole thing down with him.
Milner’s house, on the other hand, hasn’t been painted in over a decade, and the roof looks like one of those West Coast moss gardens. The windowpanes are filthy, some even cracked, and the porch is settling in one corner, a little more each year. Gordon has never been inside, and drawn shades block the sidewalk voyeur’s gaze. He imagines tomato plants sprouting from the dirt on the unswept floors. Feral cats hissing on the mantel.
Gordon and Rita have lived on the block for nearly twenty years. It is a sociable block, with much visiting back and forth, and Gordon especially is often consulted on matters of lawn care. But Milner does not join in the streetside conversations, does not attend the impromptu cocktail hours. He does not discuss his personal life. Nobody knows what, if anything, he does for a living. He’s either unemployed or works at home, for he comes and goes at all hours, day and night. Nobody now living on the block has ever been past the front door. He’s fifteen or twenty years younger than Gordon, never clean-shaven, always wears torn jeans and a shirt with the tails hanging out. And clean white jogging shoes, though Gordon has never seen him move faster than a slow shamble. He owns a rusty out-of-date BMW but is rarely seen driving it. Instead, he rides his bicycle, a shiny intricate mystery, in almost any weather, even January if the streets are free of ice. He has an old wooden crate strapped to the back and fills it with groceries and library books and God knows what else. He wears a tiny blue plastic helmet when he rides.
* * *
When Milner returns from his July trip, he doesn’t seem to notice the apocalyptic wasteland that is his overwatered yard. At least he does not mention it, even in passing, to his neighbors. Several times Gordon has to bite back a comment, restrain himself from pointing it out to the man. Or reminding him that if he’d let Gordon aerate his yard, the drainage would have been much better. But Gordon can’t decide whether it would incriminate him or absolve him from suspicion. In the end, he says nothing.
Oddly, the weeds and scrub grass that constitute Milner’s lawn do not seem to suffer from the flooding or the pesticides, but take it in stride. The weeds especially seem to profit from the fertilizer. By the end of the month, the dandelions are up to Gordon’s knees, and full-grown thistles shake their spiky purple heads at him like the insolent teenagers who gather outside the convenience store where he gets his gas.
Gordon and Rita’s own four children are gone, long out of college now, though the loan payments still linger. They live in the four corners of the country, as if to get as far as possible from their parents and each other. Rita insists on visiting each of them once per year and insists that Gordon accompany her. Gordon rolls his eyes but does not complain. Even such an obtuse specimen of his generation knows that there is more to these trips than a visit to the children, though it must be discussed in this way. Undisturbed, the marriage would settle to the floorboards of the house like dust, and Rita fusses over their travel details for months. It’s unending, really.
As part of this ongoing program, Rita plans a trip to Atlanta over Labor Day weekend to visit their youngest son, Mark. She sends for golf course layouts, restaurant menus, and museum exhibition brochures. She even buys new underwear. Gordon flips through the folders at dinner, picking a golf course at random. Any museum is fine as long as it has a headphone tour and he can leave before happy hour.
Mark meets them at baggage claim. He is twenty-seven, smiling, bouncing on the tips of his sneakers. His dark hair falls past his shoulders, and he has clearly not shaved for several days. He wears a small silver hoop in each ear, ancient paint-spattered blue jeans with holes in the knees, and the most beautiful black sport coat Gordon has ever seen. Rita takes the sleeve between her thumb and fingers, feels the fabric with an appraising rub, and raises her eyebrows at Gordon.
Mark carries their bags out to his car, a new European station wagon with power everything and paint smears on the leather upholstery. The boy has never done a real day’s work in his life, having squandered his out-of-state education on an art degree. Gordon despaired for him, he really did. Then Mark sold a painting of a coffee cup to a national chain of coffee shops, which turned into a commission, which started the avalanche of money that makes Gordon embarrassed, proud, and jealous all at the same time.
Rita loves to talk about her son, the successful artist. But the whole thing makes Gordon feel like he’s been thrown from the Tilt-A-Whirl. If Mark could make that kind of money with a single sale, more than Gordon will ever again make in a year’s time, what has Gordon been doing his entire life? What about the long chain of decisions that has left him adrift in this place he now finds himself? And which was the choice that would have made the difference? In 1967, Gordon wanted to be a bossa nova sax player. He was going to move to Brazil after graduation. Share his bed with a dancer, a long-limbed, brown-skinned cabaret girl he would meet on the beach. He took a part-time job stocking a warehouse to save money for the plane ticket. But he never got on the plane. Here he is, almost forty years later, stuck in an unraveling suburb, sales manager to a dying industry.
Mark was sweet and dreamy as a boy, either staring out the window or finger painting on the kitchen floor. Now he has a website and an assistant and an airy loft apartment larger than Gordon’s house. Gordon watches his son deftly scoop up the dinner check at a restaurant Gordon himself can’t afford; his youngest son has somehow become a wide-shouldered man of the world. And Gordon knows that his son no longer has need of any help he might actually be able to offer.
Then there is the matter of Britta, Mark’s girlfriend. She is Swiss, speaks English, French, German, and Italian, wears a crisp and cool white blouse and a short black skirt, and looks like Ingrid Bergman. Rita adores her, asks for translations from the menu. Gordon can’t look away from her legs. He is so glad to be heading home.
* * *
When they pull into the driveway, Gordon sees the fragments of brick on the cement. He doesn’t even take the suitcases from the minivan, he just runs up the stairs to the bathroom window, which looks out on Milner’s chimney. He can see the gaps where the brick has calved off like an iceberg in warm weather.
Shrapnel in a scatter on the shingles. Rita stands below in the driveway, struggling alone with the luggage, calling out to her husband, but Gordon does not hear.
He has talked to Milner about this before. Told the man that his damn chimney needs tuck-pointing, even rebuilding. And now the proof is here on his driveway, plain as day. What would it take, the minivan crushed under the fallen chimney? Or just Gordon, prone on the driveway, a brick-shaped dent in his head?
He pounds on Milner’s door, but there is no answer. Rita has thrown up her hands and gone inside, leaving the luggage where it lies. Gordon hesitates for only a moment before stomping down Milner’s driveway, in gross violation of accepted protocols, to look through the side-door glass, which gains him nothing. He sees clean carpet, a bathroom door half open, the toilet lid down. No mounds of filth, no feral cats. A surprise, really.
In Milner’s backyard, he stands precariously on a cheap aluminum lawn chair to peer through the windows, shading his face with his hands. The kitchen counter shines, not a dish out of place. The rectangular dining table is taken up with unfathomable computer equipment, wires arranged in tidy bundles. The hardwood floor gleams with polish. A brassiere hangs from the chandelier.
This last detail lies somewhere beyond comprehension. Gordon imagines Milner in women’s clothes, performing a striptease for himself before his computer. He has heard about these things, and what people can do on the Internet, though he is not a computer person himself. Or is the brassiere simply a bachelor’s decoration, a relic from his younger life, when women’s underthings were exotic rather than a nuisance of laundry? Rita hangs hers from the shower door to dry twice a week, and Gordon, who is invariably first in the bathroom each morning, must take them down and tuck their gauzy folds into Rita’s dresser, a task he now realizes that a) he resents, and b) has long ago removed the last pale shreds of mystery from his wife’s underclothes.
Rather than dwell on this, his own shriveled life, he wonders what size the hanging brassiere might be, and if it would fit Milner’s frame. But recognizing this thought in progress and its logical outcome, in which he might find himself actually picturing his neighbor Milner dressed in women’s underwear, he tries desperately to halt this process but, shifting his weight on the lawn chair, feels his foot slip through the elastic bands of the seat.
He falls. Arms spinning like a cheap garden windmill, he falls.
He lands flat on his back on the hardpan that is Milner’s yard, woof, the air somehow vanished from his lungs. Lost behind a wild, unpruned shrub, foot still tangled in the chair, his shoulder on fire, he kicks to free himself, but the chair does not come off. The clouds float overhead. His legs tire so easily. He feels like a turtle that some child has flipped onto its shell. A cartoon turtle wearing glasses and a tweed coat with elbow patches, weakly waving his extremities rather than taking real action to right himself.
His heart thuds in his chest. Rita has been after him to exercise. He should exercise, he should. He’ll join a gym. He’ll take up racquetball or something. He looks up through the leaves of the unpruned shrub he cannot name. It is an autumn bloomer with shocking yellow flowers. Lovely, really.
He lies there for a while, resting. It’s not so bad down there. He’s starting to get used to it. Then he hears an engine in Milner’s driveway. Straining, he peers up from his place on the ground as the car noses past the house toward the moldering garage. It is a convertible, old and layered with dust, and though at first Gordon is not sure because he is upside down, he does know the car. It is a 1967 Mustang. He had a color poster of this car, a beautiful car, hanging in his own garage as a young man, a car he once planned to buy. When Rita got pregnant they got a used station wagon instead.
The convertible top is down. Milner lounges in the passenger seat, arm hanging loose over the top of the door, his head back, laughing. On the seat beside him is a woman, dark hair and a white shirt with creamy skin showing at the vee. Deep lines bracket her mouth as she talks. Her teeth are a little crooked, but that makes him simply want to touch them with his tongue. There is no mistaking the brilliant smile, the brightness of her eyes, the new shine held aloft there between Milner and this luminous dark-haired woman.
And at that moment, still mostly hidden, his foot entangled in the webbing of the overturned chair, Gordon Myles finally feels something. A sympathetic understanding at the rage of a dumb machine, rusted in place. He is rusted in place. A blue flame ignites in his mind. He wants to burn down Milner’s house. Set fire to that beautiful car. Call in an air strike on the whole goddamn block.
No. Burn down his own house, with Rita and her enormous underwear still in it. Move to Brazil, find a big loft apartment. Buy another saxophone.
He will do anything.
He will change! He will change! He will change!
WONDERLAND
by Mary Thorson
Cambridge Woods
Nancy knew that the river had always been dirty. She didn’t know what was underneath. She didn’t know about the junked rides from the old amusement park. How the rails of the Milwaukee Motorway twisted through the mud and would occasionally disappear underneath the layer of shifting sediment. How the Ferris wheel lay out broken on its side, and how the river bottom grew up around it, making six muck caves out of the cars where things could hide. She didn’t know about the electrical tower, fallen over and studded with shattered lightbulbs, cutting through the bend of the river like a broken bone.
As Nancy watched a police officer zip into a black rubber wetsuit, she couldn’t help but feel filthy and polluted. She had never really been friends with the Kings, but she wondered if they thought the same. She had the occasional glass of wine on their back porch, and they invited her for dinner, but she often denied them. Nancy wasn’t the only person down by the river, but she tried to stick close to the trail in case she needed to hop on and start walking. She wasn’t as brazen as the people who were right up on the yellow tape, she thought. But that wasn’t true. She had seen the police moving quickly down the trail behind her house, and she had followed them as if it were any of her business.
It was close, which surprised her, even though she knew she shouldn’t be surprised. If it really was Jessica, she wouldn’t have gone far—that’s what the Kings had said at the press conference where Melissa smiled so much. That had been noticed. Could a four-year-old know about running away? Did they remember how to get places?
A few people there had come from the beer garden holding half-filled liters. They were the generally curious, naturally responding to some activity near them. The way Nancy waited by the trail was pretend. If anyone asked her what was going on, she would lie and say, I don’t know, I was just walking by. She imagined Jessica’s red hair and how it would float underwater, away from her, reaching out like strands of pale fiberglass lights dimmed by the dark. The river was good at hiding things.
* * *
The morning that Jessica had gone missing, Melissa showed up at Nancy’s door.
Nancy had gone out the night before, and a man she couldn’t quite remember meeting was sleeping in her bed. He had black hair all over his back, and she was afraid it might stain her sheets. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She prepared herself to be yelled at. Their houses were unfortunately close, with the Kings’ kitchen window lining up perfectly with her bedroom window. Had they been too loud? What things did she scream when the man fucked her? She thought of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and she squinted her eyes even though the sun didn’t hit her face. But then Melissa smiled.
“I’m sorry,” Melissa said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but we can’t find her.”
“Who?”
“Jessica. She’s not inside. You haven’t seen her? Or maybe she stopped by?”
The suggestion was farfetched; Nancy only ever waved at her when Jessica screamed “Hi!” from the front lawn. Jessica seemed frustrated when she did it. Indignant, attention-
seeking—Nancy could relate. But this had only happened
when Nancy and Jessica were awake and moving in the world at the same time, so once or twice. They had never formally met. Suddenly, Nancy heard a man scream somewhere close, and she thought it might be the strange man in her bedroom, but it was Joe, calling out Jessica’s full name. Her middle name was Joy, and it was strange hearing that word shouted in desperation.
“Oh,” Nancy said. “No, I haven’t seen her. I’ve been asleep.”
“She was in her room, and I took a shower. I thought Joe was up, but he fell asleep on the couch. He’s been sick.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, she was gone when I came back in.”
The zipper on Nancy’s sweatshirt hit her bare skin, and the cold startled her. “Here, let me get a coat on, and I’ll come help you look. I’m sure she just went to a friend’s house.”
“Thank you so much,” Melissa said. “We’ll be in back of the house, or near it. If you want to walk up and down the block and knock on a few doors, that would be great.”
Nancy didn’t want to do that.
She went back into the house and stood at her kitchen window that overlooked the trail. She stared at the dark pavement, then into the trees and bushes, until she forced herself to go into her bedroom. She opened the door slowly, though he was already sitting up and rubbing his neck as he faced her closet. He still had his clothes off, and she couldn’t stop staring at his back.
“Hi,” she said.
“Oh, hey,” he said, turning to look at her. She wished he wouldn’t.
“So, my neighbors can’t find their kid.”
“Huh.”
“I was going to help them look for a bit,” she said.
“Let me just get some clothes on, and I’ll go with you.”
“No, you don’t have to.”
“It’s fine, can’t hurt to have more people out there. What’s her name?”
Nancy thought for a moment, but there was no good way she could tell him to go home, that their transgression had ended. They went outside together, one going north and the other south.