Ricky, p.15
Ricky, page 15
* * *
There was a lone, exhausted therapist at the art school. His name was Edmund, and he had an office that had once been a coat closet. Technically it was still a coat closet. There was a metal rod for clothing that ran above his tiny metal desk. He sat on the metal desk while I sat on a metal chair. The only other thing on Edmund’s desk, besides Edmund, was a red plastic basket. The woven sort that a hamburger and fries might be served in. Or maybe fish and chips. Except this basket was filled with complimentary condoms. Off-brand ones, to make matters worse, and the whole time I talked to Edmund, I just stared at the lousy, unreliable condoms and imagined how many people were getting pregnant at art school.
“My mother told me this thing once that I can’t forget,” I told Edmund. “She said: ‘If I don’t need enough from him, your father threatens to kill me. But if I need too much from him, your father threatens to kill himself.’”
“Shit,” Edmund said. “That is some heavy shit, Claudette.” My name is Claudette, which no one ever expects. Is ‘Claudette’ hot and French? Or is ‘Claudette’ your waitress at the Waffle House? This is the million-dollar question and always will be. “That’s a pretty crazy thing for a mother to tell her kid, right?”
I shrugged. I shrugged at every session. This was the only thing Edmund and I talked about. Literally just this statement of my mother’s. I’d come in, sit down on my metal surface, he would sit down on his metal surface. He’d reach up behind himself and toy with the metal closet rod. I’d stare at the fried-clam basket of budget condoms, and we’d pick up where we left off: still discussing those two sentences of my mother’s.
“I don’t know,” I’d say. “I don’t think it’s heavy shit, really, though it has stuck with me. I think it’s just the truth. My parents were textbook codependents. Their emotional states were completely dependent on each other. So, what my mother said was utterly true. And I always find it insane that people panic at the truth. People have always been, like ‘Your mother shouldn’t have said something like that to her kid,’ and I’ve always been, like ‘What? The truth?’”
Edmund considered this for a long time. I got the feeling most students he saw at art school came to him to talk about depression and desperation. You can only make so many pipes filled with animals before you start questioning the meaning of life. I was only a few weeks into my first semester, and I’d ditched the pipe project to make nine asymmetrical salad bowls. I think I was a relief for Edmund in many ways. Every week when I came in, I could tell that he was really trying to unpack what my mother had said and what sort of effect it had had, and it made me think that Edmund had something similar going on in his background. He was professional enough not to bring up his own life, but he was always dressed in a neat corduroy button-down. He had thinning hair and a discernible part. He always stopped three or four times during our session to clean his glasses with his shirttail. I wore khaki cargo pants and pearl earrings. I did not have a roofing nail through my nose. I think we were similar. Artistic but not artistic. Normal but not normal. I think I was a soft place for Edmund to land once a week. That said, eventually I quit seeing Edmund because I felt like my session became more about him than me, and I eventually quit art school because I was so sad. By November, I was broken and hollow and in need of good therapy, and Edmund was just a regular, bewildered guy in a closet, unknowingly getting people pregnant.
My parents came up to the city that was windy to bring me home. I was too old for them to do that sort of thing: pack me up and chauffeur me around—I was graduate student, for Pete’s sake—but the city had a Ritz and, ever since the scratch-off, my parents were suckers for a Ritz. When my father had won fifty grand a few years back, the one thing he and my mother had agreed on was to spend all of it on Ritzes. So, when I announced I was dropping out, they came to my apartment with a Ritz reservation and a small U-Haul with a couple of movers they had paid.
“Jesus,” my dad said. “This wallpaper. No wonder you have to get the hell out of here.”
My mother just stared out my one apartment window, while the movers and I wrapped my clay bowls in bubble wrap. “Jack!” she gasped. “I see a rat! In the middle of the day!”
That night, the U-Haul went back south, through the cornfields, and my parents got two king rooms on the highest floor of the hotel. The wind was really howling that night. On our way to and from dinner outside of the Ritz, we saw a revolving door that had shattered at an ATM. We also saw a man trying to walk a terrier on a leash and the terrier was airborne, a kite. My mother had had three glasses of wine at dinner, and she wanted to laugh about that with the man—his airborne dog—but the man did not think it was funny at all. And to be honest, the wind was so intense that talking was pointless. My father was holding onto a streetlamp and my mother was holding onto him. I had to pick my way from newspaper box to newspaper box. All I could hear was the wind and the lake, which sounded the same.
I went up to my hotel room alone and filled the bathtub. It was only filled halfway when I saw: the water was sloshing back and forth like I was on a cruise ship and not in a skyscraper. That’s how windy it was. The skyscraper was rocking back and forth, so my bathwater was rocking back and forth. It was so unnerving, I could not bring myself to get in the tub. Instead, I got into bed and turned out all the lights and put on a movie with a lot of special effects to distract me from the fact that I was in a building that was bending, swaying.
The next day, I moved back to my hometown. Within a year, I had met and married a normal man who was not artistic at all. We lived a very uneventful life until I decided to get back into ceramics after our only son turned three. “Ceramics?” my husband said. “What’s the point of ceramics?”
It was a terrible question that raised the very real possibility that he was a terrible person, but it was also a question that couldn’t be satisfactorily answered, which made him think he had a point. I liked the feel of wet clay, the satisfying sheen of glaze. I liked producing an ambiguous, flirtatious shape that made people mildly uncomfortable. But these were things, reasons, that didn’t pay bills or feed mouths or end wars.
Still, I went on and got back into ceramics. For my first project, I made over one hundred little pipes with tiny insects popping out of them. I entered them into a local art competition under the title Pipe Down and won a thousand dollars. Our son, nearing four by then, was so proud of me. I gave him the best pipe in the whole series, a shiny lavender one with a tomato-red cicada emerging from it. On the night of the show, he put it under his pillow at bedtime, and later, after my son had fallen asleep, my husband pulled me into our bedroom and tried to strangle me.
“A thousand dollars,” he seethed, shaking me by the neck. His hands went from tight to loose, tight to loose, like he couldn’t decide if I was worth the trouble, the consequences. “I bet you think you’re something else now.” He sounded like he was going to cry. “A thousand dollars for clay. A real somebody.” Eventually he went limp and stopped and ended up sleeping in the basement, on a camping cot. To be safe, I went and slept in my son’s bed, beside my son.
The next morning at breakfast, my husband walked through the kitchen without making eye contact. “We got wild, huh?” he said.
I didn’t say anything back. I was unable to form words in my head or with my mouth. In that moment, I had never before felt the way I felt. I was outside of myself, spooning eggs onto my son’s plate, trying to figure out if I had died or not. Was I a ghost? I was somewhere between my body and the ceiling. I couldn’t imagine how to get my feet back into my feet.
After my husband went to work, I called a sitter. I didn’t know what I was doing or why, but when she arrived, I got into my car and started driving. The ceramics from the night before were still in the backseat, and I could hear them sliding around in a cardboard box. As I drove, all I could think of was that everything was the opposite of what it seemed to be. I’d thought a renovated apartment would be nice. I’d thought art school would be friendly. I’d thought a normal man would be safe. Behind the poppies, it was all pockmarks.
I drove all the way to that city. The windy one. I spent my thousand dollars of prize money on a room at the Ritz, and I requested it be on the highest floor possible. When I got upstairs, I stripped down and put on the complimentary robe and filled up the bathtub. I sat on the side of the tub for a long time and waited. I was about to give up, but around midnight, it happened. The water started sloshing. To the back of the tub and then toward the drain. To the back and the drain, to the back and the drain.
That was when I got my room key and went out to the elevator. I rode all the way downstairs in my robe and I went into the hotel bar. It is surprisingly easy to convince a man to come back to your hotel room when you’re wearing a robe in a public place at midnight. It was obvious that I could have had any of them sitting there, but I chose the one who was alone at a table with his laptop. He looked something like Edmund. Normal but not normal. I sat down across from him and leaned over the small cocktail table. “I have something I need someone to see,” I said to him. “In my room.” The man looked around at all the men looking at him, then he looked at me. After a pause, he closed his laptop. “Please,” I said. The man blinked and swallowed. “Okay,” he said.
Back in my room, in my bathroom, we both just stood there staring at the tub. We watched the water go left and right, left and right. The man was quiet. I don’t think it was because he was as amazed as I was. I think it was because he was a decent person trying to be polite. He probably thought I had snapped, but I turned to face him anyway. How could I make him understand that everything was the opposite of what it pretended to be? I needed one person to see behind the flowers.
“So, this is what you brought me up here to see?” the man asked. “The water?”
“Yes,” I said. I reached for both of his hands and took them in mine. “But it’s not the water you’re looking at. It’s the wind.”
Brain, Brian
Marvin’s brain tumor is the size of an unshelled walnut. His doctor, who wears Crocs the color of bile, has told Marvin and Marvin’s wife, Cathy, that he plans on removing the tumor with a knife that’s not really a knife but a beam of light. When the surgery was first explained, Marvin saw a hot spatula cutting cold cheesecake, but now that the operation is tomorrow, he keeps seeing a red, plastic flashlight pointed at a dense, winter wood. Who goes there? he hears the surgeon call out, gleefully. Make yourself known!
The neurosurgeon is as young as Marvin’s son, Brian. Brian no longer speaks to Marvin. Brian lives in Arizona with a girl Marvin and Cathy have never met but whose name is Begonia. They’ve seen a picture of their son and this girl. A dog that looked like a coyote was also in the picture. “Who wants a cartoon for a dog?” Marvin asked Cathy. “Who wants a houseplant for a girlfriend?”
Marvin was a terrible father, but the tumor has lessened the reality of this. The larger the tumor grows, the better father Marvin was. And the faster Marvin walks, the faster the tumor grows. Which is why, every morning, he goes to the mall in his big white shoes, the ones that look like loaves of junk bread, and walks eight thousand steps. He walks from one anchor store to the other—fourteen times, back and forth—and as he does, he recalls things he thought about doing with Brian as things he actually did. Camping under a swirl of stars. Shooting clay pigeons. Making cowboy beans in a cast-iron frying pan. “There’s Orion,” he hears himself say. “More pintos?”
In the early morning mall, the managers raise the gated storefronts with much audible ado. The mall fountains sputter to life. Together, the fountains and the gates sound like static, and Marvin’s mind becomes the roaring space between canyon walls. He passes stores. There’s Queen B., Banana Pants, Mr. Stupid. There’s bright and beautiful SprayBaby. He stares at the things for sale and cannot remember what they are for. He imagines a pair of underwear on a potted begonia. Women’s yellow overalls on a coyote. A whoopee cushion as a map of Arizona. Marvin moves his big white shoes faster. He forgets Brian’s thin shoulders and crystalline singing voice. He forgets Brian’s pitiful deer eyes, his milkweed hair. Instead, Marvin remembers throwing a football that was never thrown, laughing at a joke that was never cracked.
At the end of Marvin’s morning walk is Sprinkles, the ice cream kiosk. If Marvin times it right, he takes his last step when Dashel, the ice cream boy, flips over the OPEN sign. “Good morning, Marvin,” Dashel says. “The usual?” Marvin’s excitement is such that he can only nod. His head nods and the tumor nods, and fireworks go off in Marvin’s mind—red and green and violet.
Dashel scoops the vanilla while Marvin watches. It’s a sphere of snow rolled through a pristine field, the belly of a snowman that Marvin and Brian did and didn’t build. Dashel rolls the vanilla through rainbow sprinkles, a brain dragged through artificial memories. I helped Brian make a papier-mâché sarcophagus for Ancient History class. I built Brian a tree house with a trapdoor and pulley system. I told Brian I loved him. I told Brian I was proud of him.
Dashel puts the ice cream into a paper bowl and places a shelled walnut on top. He hands the ice cream to Marvin, and Marvin goes and sits on a bench by the fountains. Every morning, he sits there until the ice cream has melted and the sprinkles have bled and all that remains is the walnut—floating in gray matter—and Marvin, quite pleased with himself. Tomorrow is another story. Tomorrow the doctor will remove the walnut with a knife made of light. Tomorrow he will have his brain back. Today he has Brian.
The Owner
Nina and her husband, Harry, got a good deal on the house. It was a charming bone-colored Cape Cod that seemed to have an agreement with the elements. All over, it was tilted and weathered but also sturdy—petrified, almost. They never met the owner. “He’s in a retirement situation now,” the realtor said, unprompted, twice during the closing. She said it in a plain, firm way that Nina and her husband did not question. Perhaps he was playing golf. Perhaps he was in hell.
* * *
On the first night in the house, Nina dreamed of the owner. He sat in a canvas chair in the desert. To his left was a stunted palm tree. To his right, a beach ball that didn’t roll away. He gazed out over an expanse of red sand. He wore a gas mask, but Nina could still hear what he said. “I left you something. Did you find it?”
Nina woke with a jolt. Beside her, Harry breathed serenely. She rose and went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. She wanted an aspirin, but all she found was a Band-Aid tin—the vintage, metal kind—and inside of that a single white bead. Nina inspected the bead. It was the size of a large pea with a tidy, drilled hole. She put the bead back into the tin and the tin back into the cabinet. She drank from the faucet. When she returned to bed, she could not sleep. She kept seeing the gas mask, the stunted palm. She kept trying to move the beach ball with her thoughts.
* * *
In the morning, while Nina stood in front of the toaster, Harry came up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck. When she turned around, he wasn’t there. “Harry?” she called. “Was that you?” Harry didn’t answer, even when she called out again. Nina stood, frowning, until her toast popped up. In that short time, to her surprise, she was able to recall every argument she and Harry had ever had. There had been problems with money and romance, fertility and drinking. Right after they’d first married, there’d also been a woman. A neighbor named Pearl who visited three or four times a week with something from her garden: profane-looking cucumbers, swollen purple tomatoes, fistfuls of fragrant basil. She was good-natured about everything and everyone. There was always a ladybug in her hair. Nina had never seen Harry so happy. He accepted everything Pearl brought without once looking down at what Pearl brought. “You look at her too much,” Nina had said. “Maybe you could learn a thing or two,” Harry had said back.
Nina hadn’t thought about Pearl in a long time. She was filled with a sudden sadness. She left the toast in the toaster to grow stale. She went back to the bedroom and curled on the bed. This time, when she dreamed of the owner, he had two gas masks—one on his face and one that he held out for Nina. The beach ball was still in the same place. The palm tree was nearly dead. When Nina woke up, she discovered two more white beads on the floor, side by side.
* * *
Every day, in an unexpected place, Nina found another bead. She found one in the lint screen of the dryer. One in the soil of a cactus she repotted. One at the bottom of a bowl of tomato soup. One day, she coughed a single cough and a bead appeared on her tongue. Nina kept all the beads. She stored them in the Band-Aid tin. Sometimes she shook the tin to hear the noise it made. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, it said.
* * *
Nina and Harry weren’t happy in the new house; they bickered all the time. The only thing that brought Nina hope were the beads and the dreams, though neither of those made any real sense to her. She slept excessively. Harry came home later and later in the evenings smelling of beer, cigars, perfume. When he slept, he no longer breathed serenely. Instead, he snored, causing Nina’s dreams to take an urgent turn. There was a loud, new factory in the desert, churning out clouds of navy smoke, and she and the owner would sit in the canvas chairs wearing gas masks looking at it.
“What are they making?” she’d ask him.
“It’s not what you think,” he’d say.
Then Nina would wake up and drink from the faucet and discover another bead. Maybe pressed into the soft, pink meat of her heel. Maybe near the sink drain, in the tiny groove that kept it from drowning.
