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Dangerous Conversationalist
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 Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2009 1:07 pm
 My Hands Hurt
Genie was 34 years old, and arguably didn't have very much more to her than that. She would be 35 in October, which made her a first decanate Scorpio, characterized by a cool, outer exterior at odds with her devastating inner ambition. Her horoscopes were usually favorable in areas of family and finance but cautionary in romance, and the three had never once touched elbows in the narrow hallway of her life.
Genie could honestly say she approved of horoscopes. She liked astrology in general, not that she was a fanatic about it. True, she had a few books on chart-making and relationship guides, and a coin-purse with a little scorpion on it, but Genie didn't set out to make a lifestyle of astrology, and she wasn't interested in buying all the merchandise. You could say she read horoscopes for the same reasons another person might read the weather forecast every day, which she did also.
Because it was in those little rituals that Genie found a superficial sense of control, and the feeling that maybe there was some cosmic justification for the way she was.
Like all the women of her family she was dark-haired and clear-skinned. Her body was bosomy and robust, albeit an unexceptional example at 5'3". Every feature suggesting a life of difficult work and stacking disappointments, down to her fallen arches and red raw fingertips.
She had no husband, no children, no promising romantic prospects. She lived alone in the third story of the Esteemed Gregarious Arms, a tenement building in the lower west side of Durem. It was in a neighborhood called Doherty, historically a point of entry for working-class immigrants in the late forties (and appropriately sounded a little like someone saying the word "dirty" with an accent). Her street was full of people with difficult names, and many, many children. The building was owned by a dowdy married couple in their mid-fifties, boasting air conditioning, semi-pet friendly conditions, and no evictions on record. She lived there because it had a nice view of the street and smelled clean, despite a small mold scare in the bathroom two weeks after she'd moved in.
She worked in a children's playplace and collected a little above Gaian minimum wage at nine-fifty an hour, twelve-fifty on Sundays. She wasn't starving. Parties tipped well, and mercifully she wasn't bogged down with car payments. She used a lot of coupons and could pinch a quarter until the eagle screamed.
Looking back, it hadn't started out so terribly. Playplaces were big in the nineties, like theme parks and "dotcom" businesses. Another breath taken in by the century and exhaled with it a pestilence of parenting trends more paranoid than the ones before, all of them calling for safety features and fingerprinted soccer coaches. As absurd as it sounded, the safeness of playground equipment had at one time been one of Durem's messiest social issues after a little girl skidded down a hot metal slide in shorts and came away with second degree burns. An exciting time if you were involved, and Genie having no children of her own, nor nieces, nor nephews, was not.
The fine people at Standards Durem however, had to sweat it out with every mention of the odious nickname. "Tot-lots" said the placards. Said the overwrought systems analyst. Said the frumpy superintendent of schools. Said the governor's ever so socially-conscious granddaughter. Tot-lots. Oh, the rubber mulch didn't biodegrade. Recent studies showed that teeter-totters were damaging to a child's tender under-region. Stumps and tires were "tripping hazards"—Issues Genie could only imagine to be relevant in middle-class, middle-American type suburbs with neighborhood watches and book-clubs and PTA meetings and "women's societies", full of people with too much time on their hands, who were forever looking for new things to agonize over in the interest of being "topical". Not here in the inner-city where schools were big beige under-funded buildings full of children as neurotic and over-scheduled as their parents.
Feeling annoyed and strangely violated at the sight of all those Easter-colored pamphlets she kept pulling out from under her windshield wipers, it was enough to get Genie wondering, didn't these people have jobs to get to? It was only natural that she be curious. At the time, Genie was desperately in need of one.
There was opposition of course, made up in equal parts by childless twenty-somethings in college with no spending power, and the parenting "activists" struggling to raise their children in the spirit of their parents and grandparents at the risk of being called criminal by contemporary standards. The latter of whom were churning out a new book every month promulgating their radical "lifestyles" and the systemic biases they faced in which arrests and CPS seizures were commonplace, all of which were (naturally) well documented and publicized.
Whichever way you looked at it, the results spoke for themselves. There were still kids in the streets and parks, but fewer than Genie remembered in the days when "parent" was not a verb. Empty swingsets. Untrodden bridges and ladders. Sandlots where nobody ate dirt or tied blades of grass into little knots. Not enough people for freeze-tag and hide-and-seek. Cars were getting better mileage, but suburbs were springing up overnight with their cookie-cutter houses, crammed hip to hip like factory farmed chickens. There were new anti-loitering laws and early curfews to keep the teenagers confined to the narrow spaces constructed around them. Made soft and worm-like, squeezing blind through their little dirt tunnels of moral absoluteness. The right path, the safe path, the only path, when everything else has been denied.
Millions of dollars were invested into technology that would give you a tidy list of everyone in a five mile radius who ever committed the devious act of public urination, tethering more millions of children to their homes by the almighty electric umbilical cord. By their texts and cell-phones and social media, all part of the same machination; A fishing line. Something their parents could use to reel them in at the first sign of tension, the first disturbance in the water, except in this vigilant new world, every kid missed out, and every kid was the one that got away.
Genie's latent hippie was wistful to see what the world was coming to. This new generation of distrustful and overdependent children. An aversion to the outdoors and an increased demand for supervision had created a sucking void, needing to be filled before the wound closed and scarred. In metropolitan areas like these, they were called "indoor fitness centers" for children, and the business caught fire.
Genie's ears pricked at the sound of job security. In 2002 she took her post by the double doors, stamping more numbers on people's arms than the Waffen-SS in invisible ink, but by the end of the decade the bubble had burst. Big names like Dazzlers and Fun Palace had spread themselves too thin. They got greedy. They had opened too many venues in too short a time and declared bankruptcy one after the other. Competitors absorbed their franchises and the strong among them became monopolies. One of the last to get hit, Genie's franchise "Squeaky's" was a sinking ship, and everyone knew it. Last year the place had started to show a very ugly side.
It had started with diseases and infections. Suddenly, she had found herself getting sick more often in a month than she ever had in her life. She and her brothers had always held strong against the annual crop of exotic colds and flus and fevers, even as children. Now, if it could be sneezed or coughed on a prize-counter Genie was sure to be the first to get it. And not just diseases. In just six months she'd endured rashes, ringworm, bedbugs, lice, pinkeye, and impetigo to name just a few.
But Genie was strong. She muscled through believing—very strongly—all that stuff about toting barges and lifting bales. She had been raised to have a strong work ethic. A severe upbringing, to bring out a severe reaction toward the feeling that there was something inherently dirtier about the slow, undignified demise of Squeaky's.
Genie used to turn to her co-workers when times were hard, because who else could relate? It wasn't like a family, exactly. They didn't take each other out for their birthdays or attend their children's graduations or pass around get-well cards to sign. Hardly any of them were even on a first-name basis. If she had to choose a metaphor, she would have said they were more like a corp. Some specialized military unit that bonds with each other through trauma and proximity.
Unsurprisingly as the months passed, more of the employees had started to bail out. People Genie had worked with for years and had developed a small and underwhelming rapport with. She didn't expect to take it so hard, and she was embarrassed to think of how each resignation from them stung like a small betrayal. How she felt like some old, slow-moving animal in a herd that gets left behind for the collective good. Something for the wolves to chew on so the others can get a head-start.
Squeaky's was definitely not a place you wanted to get too comfortable. Genie had made that mistake.
Able-bodied children filled their positions. Some were alright, but most were flunkies and delinquents. A few part-timers were teen moms looking for diaper-money and child-rearing practice. The fact that they were always rotating made it hard to become attached to any one in particular. Not that she ever made a point of rolling out the welcome mat. Especially once she stopped and looked around, and found herself the oldest employee there by an average of ten years.
Most new-hires took one look at her and assumed she was a little slow, or had once spent time in prison. That was fine by her. She knew she had a bitchy face. She stared at it enough in the bathroom at work. With its eye-stinging smell of mop-water, wet brown napkins, and fermenting diapers. She used to come in there to smoke, maybe have a quick cry if she was alone, but now that Squeaky's was mostly staffed by teenagers, both bathrooms had turned into hubs of procrastination and gossip.
There were usually a minimum of three girls in there at any given time, and when Genie came in, they stared at her like they would stare at their mothers. Like she was some kind of intruder.
She couldn't smoke anymore because the rules about that had changed, so instead she spent longer than necessary washing her hands. It was a good way to zone out and get yourself together, and usually nobody bothered you for taking such a long time. It was hard. Facing herself. Splashing water in her puffy eyes, hands weak and trembling from being scrubbed and scalded and held under a hot vent so many times. The skin had gone cracked and flaky, and they hurt pretty bad.
She'd heard a rumor in the kitchen that they would be accepting food stamps the first of next month. That was a week from now. She was nervous. Real nervous. She was not from the everyone-goes-to-college generation. It was getting harder to keep her resume from treading water, and even harder not getting fat from eating day-old breadsticks for dinner. Everything was harder.
At least there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel. She'd racked up a lot of credit card debt in her unemployed years, but she was tantalizingly close to paying off the last of it. She didn't have anything else lined up, but if she was debt-free, maybe, maybe she could survive the hit. If Squeaky's was belly-up by next year, she could eat into her savings until something panned out. Maybe even move away and start over.
She hesitated as she approached the crosswalk, loosening her belt by a notch and a half. She'd made the "half" with a hole-punch she'd lifted from a secretarial job she'd had once, until they found out she'd lied about knowing shorthand, among other things.
Her work-pants were a different story. When she made the decision to quit smoking two weeks ago her stomach had started to wax and wane like the phases of the moon, and now everything felt tight. She undid the topmost button to make a little room, sighing. When relief was abated by her vestigial sense of decency she drew the trench-coat around herself.
She waited at the stop with two men, regretting her earlier decision to undo her pants and knowing she couldn't fix it. The older man to her left was checking messages on his phone, uninterested in her, while the man on the right of her seemed a bit, well, agitated. Her eyes flicked his profile. He smelled like sweat. A salty quality like mayonnaise. Underneath her coat she began to feel naked and over-warm.
Glancing at her shoes, she noticed with dread that the lace of her sneaker had come loose. She didn't want to bend down onto the ground, compromised. Be kicked into the street. Feel her stomach pushing over her belt. Her a** hanging out. She was such a mess. Why couldn't she just get clothes that functioned like clothes?
The light changed. The crosswalk bonged. She waited before stepping down from the curb for what seemed like an acceptably polite grace period. She didn't want to seem too hasty or suspicious. She kept her eyes intent on the path ahead of her.
Suddenly, a large hand grabbed the back of her arm It clenched around a fistful of fabric and she was flung back onto the curb. The arm kept her suspended for a full minute, frighteningly strong. She screamed a high piercing note. She swung her arm against something. She missed. She turned. The man with the cell-phone pointed. She looked. A loud beige-colored car roared past the stop-light, pursued further down the road by a squad car. The sound of the engine and siren faded together into the distance, but resumed her ears, well above the sound of her beating heart.
She looked behind her at the man who still grasped her sleeve. Mayo guy. Ordinarily in the city it was not good form to meet the eyes of strangers, but in bizarre instances like this, in which two human lives are smashed together by unconventional and jarring circumstances, it became appropriate.
His eyes were pale blue, the pupils blown wide. He let go of her arm, then slurringly apologized. He blotted a bit of sweat from his upper lip. How could he be sweating in this chill, she thought. He asked if she was alright, but it was hard to tell. It sounded like she had a heartbeat in her ears. Genie grunted, patting the arm he had snatched, which made his face tighten with possibly guilt. She bent down and snatched up her purse.
It occurred to her that she may have owed her life to this man, but something prevented her from seeming too gracious all at once. Meeting his eyes, just barely, she mumbled a thank you.
Her face white-hot, she straightened her spine and raced past the lineup of burning headlights. Behind her, she heard the asphalt-scuffed footsteps of the men. She heard them mumble to each other. She didn't listen, because she knew it was about her. She broke into a small gasping trot, then bungled over her untied shoelace.
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Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 10:08 pm
F.U.B.A.R
Genie pushed her way through the double doors of the Gregarious Arms. It was a hard push. The door had rusty hinges, coated in some tractable gunk.
"Genevieve? Is that you?"
The reedy voice of the landlord's wife echoed against the tall handsome walls of the lobby. Walls that had at one time been tastefully lit by a series of brass sconces before an unforeseen short in the wiring left them reliant on a single dreary ceiling fixture that suffocated the majority of the room in semi-darkness. She smelled fresh-cut daylilies somewhere.
"No, Mrs. Walloway," She called, "But I'll be sure to catch her up." She discreetly fastened the undone button and straightened her work-shirt.
"Hard day at the salt mines?" The voice resumed after a pause, invisible hands putting away or retrieving something heavy.
"You have no idea." She went faster, crossing hastily over the black tile still shiny with mop-water. Her eyes were fixed on the sickly light at the top of the elevator doors, luring her to them with the frankness of a beckoning finger.
"Hold on dear,"
She stopped, her voice high with anticipation, "What is it, Harry? I kinda need to get upstairs and feed my lizards."
An older woman emerged from the office. In her creamy pink house-dress and suede slippers you'd think her personality as powder-soft as her physique. Genie knew better, of course. On closer inspection, she could see the dress was printed with what looked like little yellow dragonflies, or maybe bananas. She held a large package in her arms, a crisp white envelope secured to it with elastic.
Harriet tilted her head owlishly, "Are you trying to quit again? You're awfully testy."
A burst of indignation went through Genie like a skipped heartbeat. She didn't have the energy to sustain it.
"Is that for me?"
Taking it in her hands, the package had a bit of heft.
"Careful," Harriet cautioned.
"I got it."
Genie gave the envelope a once-over. A smooth clean address label. It was from the Lab.
She noticed Harriet's mouth beginning to widen as though she wanted to say something. As luck would have it, the phone in her office began to ring. Small favors.
Seizing her opportunity, Genie hurried into the lift, maneuvering the package under her arm.
"Thanks!" she called, "Hey, give Phil a big smooch for me would'ja? Tell him I'll see him on the first about my stove!"
___________________________________________________________________
The door to Genie's apartment was jammed. Poor ventilation made the wood get damp and swell up. Most days she had to put her shoulder into it. More than once she'd face-planted on her kitchen floor.
She turned down the well-meaning offer of a blurry stranger down the hall. There was a certain satisfaction that came with pushing through every day. A reassurance of strength. She entered forcefully into a small, dingy kitchen and slid the package on the counter. The keys clattered soon after, landing somewhere near the dish-rack. She paused before stepping away, then pushed the box further from the edge, just to be safe.
She let herself melt into the comfortable mess that surrounded her. Her rigidity broke down and dissolved. She let it settle into her limbs, throbbing in the center of her back and pulse in her flat, narrow feet. Her purse was tossed onto the table. She stretched her arms above her head and glanced at the winking answering machine. It was probably Mickey. Mickey was the only one who called anymore. It could wait.
She went to her pantry and rifled through the shelves. The musical sound of plastic bottles and tinfoil rolls. A thermos and some pens from businesses she'd never heard of. She took down a large, white bottle and shook a multi-vitamin into her hand. Without tasting, she swallowed it with a sip of water from the tap. She cleared her throat and brought the package with her into the living area.
The package went onto the coffee table. Her coat into a chair. Two clicks from the brass banker's lamp and she collapsed into the couch. The room glowed a warm, halogen yellow, with rich shadows and blurry edges. She pulled a green cushion into her lap and gripped it to her chest. She was home.
She rubbed the space between her eyes, then pulled at her face. She had laundry to do. She wanted to relax, maybe shower first. She looked at the package through the spaces in her fingers. It sat there, strangely ominous under its modest brown trappings. She was alone with it now, and it made her nervous. It didn't look like it belonged here.
It was growing dark outside and the traffic outside her building showed no indication of thinning. Her friends and family back home would all have complained of the noise. The sounds were too busy. Too much bumping and clattering and revving and yelling. Too much color and strangeness. This town was too alive for them. Sometimes it got a little too alive for Genie, too.
She reached behind her and took a box-cutter from her back-pocket, less legally compromising than a switch-blade. She would use it first for the envelope, then slice open the top of the box, unfurling the letter in her hand. When she did, a small key surreptitiously slid out from inside, clunking on the glass table-top. She quickly palmed it in her hand, and read,
She scuttled back into the kitchen. She was gonna need something strong.
While she was waiting, Genie hadn't allowed herself to think much of the Lab. She had been surprised to hear back from them so soon, convinced she would be rejected for any number of things. Her salary, her apartment, her parking tickets— anything that would even remotely justify a frank and immediate refusal. Wrapped up nice and tidy with an apology and a form letter. It was a game, and she had played it a hundred times over in admissions offices and job interviews with a left-handed confidence that only fended disappointment by not allowing hope.
But that had all changed. Her insecurity was a sponge and this new affirmation made it swell inside of her, leaving her little room to breathe. It had been easy to play at being indignant, daring this faceless community to turn her away because she didn't have any four-year degrees or own her own house. Now, her faults crowded her at all sides, and she had entered into a very real commitment.
  
The more she pinched and picked, the more rapid her heartbeat became, a tight-chested pain. This was the only page, and everything had been summed up for her. Nice, and tidy.
She drained a fifth of her glass and set it down heavily, the amber liquid sloshing over the edges. Warmth creeped up her neck and face.
A snake, of all things. Jesus alive.
It was time to see inside this box.
She leaned forward and pulled it to her by a shred of packing tape. Lifting a cardboard wing, she saw that it was filled with foam peanuts. She hesitated, as if thrusting her hand into the burrow of some ferocious, snapping animal. She sifted for a handle, and pulled the heavy bulk of the case into her waiting lap.
The case was professional and sturdy-looking, with fine leathery grooves and smart brass corners. She plucked at the clasps, slid in the key, twisted it, and lifted the lid on bated breath. Two legs of steel in the case's interior bent and straightened, keeping the lid held upright. A faintly sterile, antiseptic smell wafted up from inside like band-aids and styrofoam. Inside were the items, as the letter had described them.
Fit snugly in a square of black foam, a slender vial rested next to a delicate orb of glass with some peculiar metal apparatus on top. Held in place by the metal device was a swatch of some burnt-orange fabric, cut into a triangle shape that wrapped in a slant around the glass.
Polished to a shine, they looked almost too delicate to handle, like soap bubbles. As if they would wetly pop if touched. Even fogging the surface with her breath felt strangely criminal as she lifted the large glass orb in her fingertips. She had never owned anything so beautiful before.
Well, borrowed. It was implied she would have to return these at a later time.
She turned the orb in her hands, leaving smudgy fingerprints. She gave the mysterious fabric a pinch. Starchier than cotton but softer than linen. This seemed a bit unrealistic for what was being asked of her. Was this really what she would be expected to take with her through the unspoiled wilderness of Gambino?
She pictured herself in only the most romantic and ridiculous scenarios. Taller, leaner. Chopping away at curtains of vines with a machete, her calves bulging as she hauled a crusty rowboat onto shore. The glass orb, strapped to her hip. Brazen and exposed as if defying the forces of nature to destroy it on Genie's watch. 
What was it about this Dr. Kyou person. Wasn't she only a name in small, round letters? Faceless, anonymous? What did he see for her? What did he expect?
She returned the orb and took the vial next, pinching a braided cord of silken material in her fingers. She held it up to the light. Inside, was a glittering pile of black powder, made invisible by the foam. Well, it was a bit more than powder. It had the fine quality of sand, but she had never seen sand that looked quite as shiny as this. It swayed gently, like water in a bath-tub, but with a certain static quality that felt... wrong. She thumbed a small white label over the stopper.
" #000037 NON-RESONANT GLASS"
Ground glass in a tube. This was getting weird.
 The letter said it reacted to sound. Although she knew very well that she was alone in the apartment, she still looked cautiously from side to side. Softly, secretively, she hummed a high key. The powder hardly reacted at all. She needed a better test.
She set the vial down on a decidedly level couch cushion and pulled her hands apart, her arms outstretched, and brought them together in a loud clap. She gasped when the powder solidified into a solid mass, then broke apart just as quickly. It was like magic, the pieces assembling, merging together like liquid. Forming a small dagger of shiny black glass that made a soft tink from inside the vial before fragmenting.
The sound shook her confidence. She didn't trust herself for one more second with these priceless items. She was lucky that the vial didn't crack.
She hastily packed both items into the briefcase and gently shut the lid.
Desperate for a distraction, she went around the apartment gathering dirty clothes into her arms, huffing as she went. She'd been neglecting the laundry for a while now. Looking at all the heaps and trails of complete outfits, you'd think the rapture had happened in here. She dropped everything into a flimsy white basket, then took the elevator down to the laundry room.
_____________________________
The Gregarious Arms had an enormous stone basement. The walls were dusty fieldstone, the floor unevenly poured cement. It smelled persistently of masonry dust, standing water, and various detergents.
Seven new-ish washer-dryer sets lined the walls. There were metal folding chairs crookedly arranged in a corner, though people usually preferred to stand or lean on the machines. Under the chairs was a threadbare rug that may have at one time been a green-beige color and protected one's bare feet from the biting cold floor.
A piece of masking tape was smoothed over the door of the left-most machine. In black felt marker it read, "FUBAR".
Phil's doing, of course. He told Harriet it was the German word for "caution". To this day, whenever Genevieve came through the lobby on a stormy afternoon and spotted Harriet mopping a puddle, she would smile so smartly, hold out her hand and shout,
"Wait, FUBAR!"
"Back at 'ya," she'd say.
She pulled up one of the metal chairs, watching the laundry tumble in the machine. Her elbows were on her knees, her head in her hands. There was one other person in the room with her tonight. A heavyset woman in sandals and a purple shirt with wolves on it. The extent of their contact had been an awkward exchange of glances as the woman folded an enormous pair of white cotton panties.
Genie's eyes flicked the wall-clock, then down at the floor, the chair wobbling underneath her. She felt a numb, spinning feeling. Alcohol and exhaustion. Planting down her feet she kept it steadied, and blew a lock of hair that dangled near her nose.
Somewhere, hours from where she sat, with dozens of towns and fields and farms in between them, was a sleeping cobra, singled out for her purposes. Waiting.
She cupped her face in her hand, squeezing and drawing it tightly, exposing the red crescents beneath her eyes. Where was she meant to begin? Who would help her? Should she even go through with it? Was it too late to back out?
She thought of how badly her hands were hurting just now. She had no children, no husband, not even a roommate. Only her passel of bachelor brothers. Nobody her death or disappearance would leave a lasting impression on, or even inconvenience if anything were to happen.
Oh sure, she'd be missed. Maybe for a while. Maybe years. But in her actual passing would be taking away nothing from her loved ones but the occasional phone-call. Holidays. Barbecues. Birthdays. Christmases. All cold comfort.
It made her to start wonder if this was it. If maybe this was her only chance to do something meaningful. To have someone, anyone to miss her the way she wanted to be missed.
A single tear found its way to the point of Genie's chin, and plopped wetly on her pant-leg.
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Posted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 1:43 am
Double Trouble
Genie took long pulls from her cigarette, a cloud of blue smoke hanging around her head.
In the cluttered two-car garage Mickey had not once looked up from the engine of Genie's car for the better part of an hour.
"Thought you gave that up," He mumbled.
Genie didn't reply, too engrossed in the contents of a manila folder she held in one hand. She took another drag, holding the breath as she ashed into a trash-can. Mickey thought for a moment she might have said something, but it was only her lungs releasing.
He blotted a mixture of sweat and grease from his face with a stiff red rag. It was a very smooth and mild face, bristly about the chin and mouth, with dark hair cropped closely to his scalp. Unlike Genie, who was a smaller and fuller version of their mother, Mickey was a perfect blend of either parent, more resembling whoever he happened to be standing next to.
"Hey," He said, a bit louder, supporting himself against the car with one hand, "I don't think you should be doin' that in here."
"Why." She didn't look at him.
He raised his eyebrows, saying nothing. When she looked at him, he gestured around the car and the tools. "Gasoline?"
She went back to the folder, "It's not hurting anything,"
Mickey stood up straight and folded his arms. "You can smoke when you're here but you do it outside."
"It's cold," she said tightly. He shrugged. Too bad.
Through the veil of smoke, Genie's eyes were glinty like ball-bearings. She sighed loudly and made a demonstration of grinding the cigarette on the sole of her sneaker. She held the spent stub over the trashcan, arching her fingers and letting go. The can was empty, so the cigarette could be heard hitting the bottom with a soft metallic sound. Mickey made a face and turned away.
It had been like this all day. The distance, the preoccupation, the attitude. He'd sensed it from her the moment he'd pulled up in front of The Arms.
When he saw his sister standing on the steps, bracing against the wind in her big tartan coat that made her look like a bag lady, pity inspired him to reach across and open the door for her. When she crawled into the passenger seat he noticed her hair hanging in chunks around her face as though it hadn't been washed. He'd offered her a scrunchie from the glove-box, which she accepted with biting cold fingers. He kept the scrunchies just for her because she was always losing them.
Looking at the profile of her stiff gray face, he wondered if she was getting enough sleep. He could have asked. He wanted to, but didn't.
Genie called him an emotional agoraphobe. The ways he could dance around the obvious astounded him sometimes. He was perceptive enough to see when people were outright deceiving him, but when it came time to be direct he could only shout, maybe break something. In his mind, it was like the impotent barking of an unhappy dog, unable to articulate its need in anything more sophisticated than a noise.
Partway through the drive he asked how she was doing, and predictably it had sounded stupid. It was with the inflection of small-talk that naturally colored everything he said. Genie said she was fine and left it at that. He waited a moment, then asked if she had eaten already.
"We can stop and get a burger, somewhere, if you want."
She shook her head, turning toward the window. After that he'd opened and closed his mouth a few times but decided that silence would be preferable, and that was how they spent the rest of the drive.
Mickey lived in a one-story rambler thirty minutes out of town and was in the process of moving. Like Genie, Mickey was unmarried and had no children, and for them it was a lot to have in common. Working on commission as a window and drywall contractor meant that Mickey's comfort level ran hot and cold. On a good month Genie was sometimes treated to dinner. Bad months he took his baths at the neighbor's.
It was a decent neighborhood, with barbecues and school buses. Mickey's street was all ranch-houses, but further north were some fake Tudors and Neo-Colonials that Genie liked to drive past. She stiffened as she stepped out of the car and into the driveway. The temperature had dropped a few degrees since they'd left city limits. No smog to trap the warmth in.
She held her hands under her armpits, waiting impatiently on the porch for Mickey to unlock the front door. She didn't help herself to anything in the kitchen but did wet her face in the sink with warm water and soak her hands.
And then, from under the big coat, she'd taken out that folder.
He looked back at the engine, "It should be okay, now, if you want to try it. What sound was it making before?"
"I don't know, a sound." She said, gesturing vaguely with one hand.
"What kind of sound?"
"Just a sound! And it smelled sorta..." She turned to the side and nibbled her fingernail. The little finger. The one she still had left. She heard Mickey's weight-laden footsteps. Felt him advancing behind her. His breath, his stare. When she turned again he was practically on top of her. She jumped, "What!?" The folder slapped shut.
"What are you reading."
"Nothing!" She said automatically, "What'd you say about the car—?"
"Genie." He said.
His sister's face went hard and immobile. Only her eyes were in a state of animation, searching his. He visibly softened, and so the longer he looked at her the more humbled she felt. Like something small and wicked and ungrateful. It had been easier to ignore him when she thought he was just being nosy... She could see he genuinely wanted to know.
Her mouth fixed into a tight line before she gestured her head toward the mudroom. "Fine, come on."
They entered a comfortable space that smelled very much like the garage. There were the sharp co-mingled odors of bleach, paint, and kerosene. Earthy undertones like sweat and grass.
She took a seat in a battered chair by the radiator, toeing off her shoes. Mickey chose to stand, wrapping the oil-rag around his fingers like a rosary. She didn't like being the only one sitting. It felt like she was on trial for something. Sensing this, Mickey hastened to pull up a chair of his own.
He took a moment to distribute his weight, grunting. Once satisfied, he set his elbows on his wide-spread knees, leaning toward her. Genie studied him for a moment. When she opened the folder, Mickey didn't make an effort to hide that he was looking. There were some forms and documents and newspaper clippings. The newspaper clippings puzzled him, and these were what she handed to him first.
"Double Trouble in Matiu".
Assessment. There were three clippings in total, and none of them had pictures. Two of them sported the Gambino Gazette watermark. He blinked, looking up at her, "Why're you gettin' Gambino papers?"
"Just read," She urged, pressing her fingers to her mouth.
He read. His eyes were drawn to italics and bolded names. There were some testimonials from beach-goers and Gambino natives. He saw words like "mutant" and "conjoined", spiking up at him with obscenity. He saw the word snake, raising and prickling over the page like a rash. Some textbook stuff. How long the snakes got. What they ate, where they lived.
This business with the folder had him agitated. Too agitated for whole sentences. He couldn't read from beginning to finish, and he didn't really want to.
He tossed the papers into Genie's lap, "I give up, what am I lookin' at?"
She started to protest, "You only—"
He waved his hand, "No, are you in trouble or somethin'?"
He leaned into the chair. He might have looked formidable with his arms folded that way, demanding answers as if just like that, Genie would tell him absolutely anything. She saw the practiced way he brushed his nose with the heel of his hand. He'd been practicing it in the mirror since he was fourteen years old. Some tough guy.
"No." She said curtly, letting him know she wasn't impressed.
"Then what?"
"If you'd just—" She raised her hand and made a pushing gesture. Calm down.
He worked his tension into the rag until he met her satisfaction.
"Okay. Three or four months ago, I took this survey that I clipped out of the paper," She paused, holding his gaze, "and, I guess you could say I got the results back recently. This folder's part of it."
Mickey squinted, "What kind of survey?"
"Just a survey," She said soothingly, "Or—more like an application, to get into a program."
For three days since it had arrived, the briefcase had been the last thing she saw when she left for work in the morning, and the first thing she saw when she came home at night. It had an overwhelming presence in her small apartment. The calling card of Lab 305. This mysterious, intimidating entity. The thought of having a choice to make put a knot in her stomach. The briefcase itself underscored the fact that having a choice, meant no longer having an excuse not to change things.
She decided to put some distance between the Lab and herself. Pray on it. Have some time to talk herself out of this crazy snake-hunt. Mickey was right to assume Genie had not been sleeping well.
Through her dingy windows, the moon spotlighted the empty space on the bed where a man might have gone. Shifting restlessly from side to stomach to back, her sweat-dampened pillow needed constant flipping. A grope in the dark for a bottle of Ambien. Images of cobras twisting in her sheets.
The first of the month came and went. On a gray Sunday morning, it was frosty and September outside Squeaky's. At 7:30 AM every morning, three people prepared the salad bar.
All of the items were refrigerated overnight and went into little plastic crocks that needed to be flipped and shaken so that yesterdays cucumbers and baco-bits were on the top. Certain items stayed refrigerated as long as three, even four days to cut corners. Funnily enough, no-one had ever seemed to notice. Each crock had a designated place in the salad bar, and an order in which they were set according to a neat little chart that each crew member was required to memorize, as well as any number of "extras" that varied in fussiness and daily commitment. Making sure all the ladles faced the same way and the surface of the dressings were smooth as silk. It was a nitpicky, pain-in-the-a** job, and it took three sets of steady, practiced hands to get it done by 8 o' clock to the floor manager's satisfaction.
That day, it was Genie's job to see that a girl named Marsha Muntz became steady and practiced in all of thirty minutes.
Marsha Muntz was one of the teenage hires that Genie liked. She was a tall, waifish girl with dark, often-startled eyes and a long neck flanked by flaccid blonde hair. She had a habit of walking everywhere on the balls of her feet as if preparing a quick escape, and from a distance Genie thought she looked like a deer.
When she had first started the job, the girl kept mostly to herself, tiptoeing down the midway dispensing tokens behind a formidable wall of noise and stink. It was a thoughtful quiet that made Genie take an interest in her. In the way she moved and looked and listened without talking.
It was pretty refreshing. Genie hated the way these kids turned at you when you pointed out some mistake they'd made. It was always the same look, too. Glassy and panic-stricken as if you'd caught them with a hand down their pants, sometimes slinking away in hostile resignation, and other times arguing their mistake in that blurry, roundabout way they had. Knotting the conversation until it scarcely resembled the thing it started as.
Marsha was not as high-strung as her appearance suggested, and she didn't have that annoying sense of entitlement you found in girls that age. She didn't always take the job seriously, but she never acted as though any task were beneath her, and that made her alright in Genie's book.
Her hands fleeted behind Genie's while they lowered the crocks and raked the ice and moved mechanically toward the end where a straw-haired boy prodded at the lifeless salad bowl with a pair of tongs. Suddenly, they felt a bitter chill rush through the building as the double doors opened to admit a small, red-faced man in a neat brown suit and wooly overcoat. He picked at the fingertips of gloves that were too large for him and stuffed them into his pocket, casually stepping over the velvet ropes around the Kid-Chek area. The crew continued setting up, but had slowed considerably as he approached them.
The boy spoke first, ripping loudly, awkwardly through the silence, "Hey, you can't go past the check area like that! Hold on, okay?"
"I just want a minute," said the stranger, who continued in their direction with purpose. He wasn't here for a birthday party, and he wasn't here to eat. Genie saw out of the corner of her eye as Marsha discreetly smoothed some chocolate pudding over a large green fly, still kicking. She touched Marsha's wrist, who looked at her full-on. Her eyes flashed with fear of reprimand. Genie only patted her arm and turned back to the stranger. Although her face was clear of any worry, on the inside, dread sat upon her chest, heavy and growing heavier.
Because she was the most competent-looking among them, or just the oldest, the man made a point of singling Genie out, "Do you know where Alan is?"
"Alan Gewicky?" The seldom-seen restaurant manager. He nodded in the affirmative.
Genie tugged at her plastic gloves, clinging to her fingers with a thin layer of sweat. She stood a bit taller, her voice free of any "ums" and "uhs", "I think he's in the AV room with Reggie, want me to show you?"
"No, I know where it is, thanks." He smiled at the trio, then turned slightly, making a gesture with his thumb and forefinger, like a gun.
"Ladies?"
"Sir." Marsha said softly. The boy frowned. Genie made a strained, unsmiling expression that meant she was clamping her teeth.
They watched, motionless, as he crossed from the tile area into the carpet. They winced in unison when they heard his leather soles start to stick and scuff. The whole place was like a movie theater. Murder on good shoes. They watched him take a half-step, stop, then support himself on a table to lift his leg and inspect his findings. His back was turned to them, they couldn't see his face. Was he writing anything down? Did anybody see a notepad when he came in?
He turned over his shoulder to see three grief-stricken faces. They recovered with big forced smiles. He smiled too, all natural, and waved. Marsha was the only one to wave back. He climbed the steps onto the stage and disappeared behind a floor-length curtain of purple velour. Behind the curtain was a door they heard opening and shutting.
Marsha and Genie exchanged glances. The boy—whose name-tag read Kelly—broke the silence by slapping his knees, "Holy s**t, you guys!" He he could get away with swearing when Reggie wasn't around.
Marsha shook her head and Genie brought her hand onto the boy's shoulder with enough force to stagger him, "Don't even start, it's probably nothing. Are you done with the greens?"
Kelly fake-cringed from the blow, "Yeeeah, yeah."
He let loose a howl of laughter, then went suddenly, seriously quiet. He turned in place, winked at Genie, cocked out one leg, and turned both his hands into pistols in crude imitation of the stranger.
"Lay-dies?"
He "fired" the guns a few times, his eyes flickering from Genie to Marsha. Not even half a smirk between them. He snorted, annoyed by their lack of humor, and kicked the restaurant trolley in the general direction of the kitchen,"What a dirtbag. He was looking right at Marsha, too. ******** gross."
"Enough." Genie barked. She turned to Marsha, then glanced at the pudding, "Hey, take care of that, alright?"
"What, like, throw it out?" She said.
"No, just dig it out and smooth it back over, it'll be fine."
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Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2009 4:41 am
The Needle
The wait-staff at Squeaky's hadn't received instruction to accept food stamps on the week of the first.
Although the implication had been enough to stir them up, Genie was not surprised to see that her co-workers were only vaguely concerned that it had not come to pass. An office rumor proven false was very much like breaking wind in an elevator. Something that while unpleasant, was also common and quickly forgiven, but not so much that anyone should ever fess up.
Most of her co-workers had fallen back into their usual routine when the excitement had worn off, but there were some that had actually begun to boast about not believing the hype. Of all things. Genie ignored them, and she wasn't subtle about it.
Recently she had caught Marsha, sometimes Kelly, stealing glances at her. Sometimes both at once. Always too long to be coincidence. In her peripheral vision she could see their faces as blurry ovals.
Over time the glances matured into long searching stares, and without knowing why she had become such a spectacle overnight, it only reminded her of the women she used to work with. Women closer to her own age. The ones that confided in her that being around these kids every day had started to make them self-conscious in a way they hadn't felt since they themselves were teenagers.
It started with the jokes. Admissions of matronly haircuts and boring husbands. Jokes that quickly got nasty and constant. So constant, they had a way of reprogramming a person's sense of friendly behavior, so that by the time it was necessary to straighten up and actually be an adult, all that was left were their imperfect confessions. Slung at them like rotten tomatoes.
Over time these women discovered they were trapped. Reduced to sharing space with a small relentless creature that pecked away at them. Pecked and pecked and pecked at the inevitable conclusion. That they were just a big joke. A clownish foretelling of what these kids would someday be, but in the present were not, giving them all the more reason to celebrate. Then they shut down until it was time to go home and quit when they couldn't stand the fighting anymore.
Genie knew the game and this was how it started.
Kelly and Marsha weren't sure what to think when Genie suddenly began slamming things on the counter and staunchly ignoring their requests, except that maybe menopause had visited early. She'd come to regret acting so awful when she noticed how indifferent their co-workers were by comparison.
She realized those two hadn't been trying to single her out at all, but rather were trying to include her in something. To let her know that an unlikely bond had been forced upon them by recent events, and they needed some reassurance that it wouldn't be coming back to haunt them later. It all came down to a need for guidance, and Marsha too insecure and Kelly too lazy to ask for it. Because she was the adult.
Genie could have appreciated that if she wasn't so mad. She didn't understand what they had to be so nervous about in the first place, or what they expected her to do about it.
If the man had been a health inspector, then this was only the calm before the storm. But to them, this job was pocket-money and maybe a new Xbox game. For Genie, it was groceries, heat, and television. She should be the one staring at people.
For a while, she'd convinced herself that the stranger had been sent from the Lab. It was in the way he had approached her so directly, so specifically. Why would anybody want to do that? She was nobody.
It was in the way he had looked into her eyes. Even when she had turned her head just slightly to soften the effect, his head swiveled with it, quickly, almost imperceptibly. What clinched it for her was the way he had asked to see her boss. Something in his tone.
The Lab was checking up on her, she thought. They wanted to know why she hadn't responded to their package. They wanted to know what was taking so long.
She poured a little wine on the theory, and that made things easier for her in general. She argued with herself that the Lab didn't use such invasive methods to investigate their applicants. Wouldn't they have just phoned? Sent a letter? In all honesty, she didn't know. Not for sure. Maybe she was being paranoid. Maybe that's why Kelly and Marsha were so on edge. Genie had her bogeymen, and they had theirs, and until proven otherwise, the stranger could have been there to haunt any one of them.
Kelly probably had a dimebag in his locker, she decided. She also decided to find that funny.
_______________________
Genie and Marsha had been working a birthday party when the stranger appeared again. Genie had been on Kid-Chek when a woman approached the podium with her four-year-old daughter. A cotton string was tied around the little girl's wrist, which was so fat and firm as to disguise the presence of any knuckles except for five tiny dimples.
At the end of the string, a puckered balloon bounced jauntily after its encounter with the doorframe. The string was very long, and the girl amused herself by raising her arm and standing on her tiptoes, pretending as though the balloon were lifting her away. Her mother didn't pay any attention.
Genie did her best to smile under Reggie's hawk-like supervision, but clenched her fingers when out in the parking lot a bustling herd of four and five year olds began to spill out of an old Aerostar. It was a walk-in.
Within hours a dozen pair of tiny shoes were kicked off and the building soured with all the smells you'd find in locker-room, with spicy undertones of garlic and parmesan. A bit after lunch, Genie took over as hostess from another woman who had needed to take a phone-call in the office. Sliding the one-size vest over her regular uniform, Genie requested that Marsha be put on as dining room attendant.
Marsha was always her first choice. She was quick on her feet and didn't buckle under pressure. She also had previous waitressing experience that gave her a talent for doing numbers in her head. It was helpful to have someone like that on-hand if things got tough, but it was just as much for Marsha's benefit as Genie's.
Hostessing was difficult, in that it required a certain marriage of conflict-mediation skills and genuine enthusiasm that most people couldn't even manage with people they liked, much less a room of critical strangers. In most cases you had to please everybody all at once, and because it was in the context of a child's birthday, nobody ever stopped to question whether a parent's methods when dealing with the staff were ever cruel or unreasonable. They were paying after all. Didn't that entitle them to a little abuse on Johnny or Susie's behalf?
Genie had been poked in the chest by apoplectic mothers, and worse. Cornered into a place where it was impossible to do anything but smile at the indignity, even during the times she felt genuinely threatened. It was tough work, and over the years Genie had seen it drive otherwise stable individuals into complete nervous breakdown.
Recently she had started referring to the dining-room as "The Gauntlet", but nobody else seemed to think it was very funny. It was generally accepted that being dining room attendant was the next best thing to being hostess, and Genie felt it was only fair that she start grooming the girl for it now.
While the game technician set the stage for the animatronic show, Genie had been making a noble effort to lead the group in song. Marsha was filling gift-bags nearby, occasionally glancing up and taking a head-count as other families filed into the dining area. The bags were complementary and went out at the end of the party, filled with small cheap toys.
Genie had been trying to teach everyone the words to the Squeaky's Birthday Tune, "If you can't remember the words, it's okay to hum! Ready?"
Even with her headset and microphone, she could see that people were straining to hear her over the sound of not one, but two screaming babies. It didn't really matter. There were always screaming babies. But then, out of the blue, Genie's microphone started cutting out. There was suddenly a lot of humming and the room sounded like a plague of locusts in flight.
She didn't panic, even though the room was stiflingly hot and all eyes were on her. Through the dim pink light she could see Marsha showing her teeth, wincing. Genie made a weak joke to the audience about technical difficulties. There were only two headsets and they took one AAA battery each. She could only guess how old they were. She would just have to get another battery, ideally the other headset, from the AV room.
Raising one hand palm-out, she shrugged her eyebrows at Marsha, asking her to commandeer the party. The girl stared helplessly after Genie as she climbed onto the stage, and for lack of a better solution began passing out the gift-bags.
The heavy purple curtain dropped behind Genie, her eyes stinging at the filth that dusted from it. The fabric was thick enough to mute some of the noise from outside, but only some. She could still hear the shrieking babies as clearly as though she were holding them in her arms, and for a brief instant she felt sorry for their mothers.
Her eyelid twitched and she wiped at it with two fingers. With her free hand she coaxed the headset from around her ear, approaching the metal door at the back of the stage. The door to the AV room was painted to blend with the backdrop, but Genie knew the area by heart and could navigate it in light or dark. She would just keep to the center and feel for a handle.
Her eyes welled up to wash away the dust. She sniffed wetly and looked up.
A horrifying visage peered down at her. Plated and skull-like, with a sinister toothless mouth that hung open on white rubber ligaments. There were two plastic eyes, each the size of a tennis ball. They were glazed and lifeless, staring emptily at nothing, one of them veering just slightly off-center.
The only light in the room came from the concentrated beam of a camping flashlight, and it was focused on that metal death-mask, giving it the appearance of floating eerily, unnaturally in the dark.
She leapt back, her skin prickling all over. She hadn't even seen the blurred outline of a human nearby until a large-knuckled hand moved into the beam, followed by a pitted shadowy face. It was Ben, the game technician.
"Easy there," He said hoarsely.
"JEE-sus, Ben!" Genie spat, holding her hand to her chest. "Why's it so ******** dark in here?"
She started groping for a power-switch. When she found it, it was stuck. She forced it, and when it finally turned with a loud chunk, a yellow dome-light overheard flickered. Somewhere she saw a spray of sparks, then darkness. She looked at Ben and felt a heat rise into her face.
"No harm done." he said neutrally, returning to work on the animatron.
Humiliated, Genie renewed her rush to the back of the stage, trying to smooth the goosebumps on her arms. Once there, she was sure she had heard murmurs. Drawers shutting and loud sputtering coughs. She didn't stop to process these sounds, or take them as any indication that she should wait or even knock.
She reached for the handle, when suddenly the door blew open in her face with a burst of stale air. She stepped backwards, her ankles crossing and uncrossing when a large male presence shoulder-checked her at precisely the moment of imbalance. She toppled into a white sheet draped over two chairs. They toppled underneath of her and the tip of her chin cracked hard against the floor.
Startled by the noise, Ben grabbed the camping light, trying to set it on a target. He aimed it first at the torrent of vulgar swears which erupted from Genie's side of the room. Behind him the curtains fluttered, briefly admitting the glow from the dining area, indicating that the culprit had vanished safely with his identity unseen.
Ben rushed to Genie's side, grasping her by the forearm and helping her to her feet. Genie doubled over, clutching her side and tasting the inside of her lip. There was blood.
"You okay?" He rasped.
Genie swallowed and nodded, "Got the wind knocked outta me..."
"Who was it?"
"Don't know."
"You okay?" He said again.
"Yeah."
There was a change in the lighting, and both turned to see Marsha's blonde head through the curtains. She stared at them with her large, doeish eyes. Genie waved her over, and the girl approached rapidly, delicately on her toes.
"What's going on?"
Ben began to speak, but Genie cut him off, "Did you see anybody run out of here? I could kill a sonuvabitch!"
Marsha was unable to see that Genie was only standing with Ben's assistance, "What happened?"
"Some a*****e flew out of the AV room and knocked me over. I landed on some chairs or something-- how's the party going?"
"It's fine, but Reggie came through right after you left, and he seemed pretty mad that you weren't there. He asked where you were and I said I'd come back here and get you. Are you okay? You need to go to the hospital?"
"I'm fine," Genie said acidly, "But did you see anybody?"
There was a stretch of quiet, broken by the squeal of chair-legs on laminate flooring outside. When Marsha spoke again, her words seemed drawn out of her with the guilt of holy confession, "Yeah, actually. He ran right past me. I think it was that guy from before. He looked a lot different, but I'm pretty sure it was him."
Genie scoffed, "I've been on Kid-Chek all day. I didn't see a guy come in by himself, much less back here."
At this point, Ben removed himself from under Genie's arm. "I think I know what guy you're talking about," He said, "Don't know his name or anything, but he's back there a lot with Alan. He's talked to me a couple of times. Shorter guy, nice coat?"
"Really?" Said Genie, "Since when?"
"Ehhh, August-ish?" A hidden gesture emphasized Ben's uncertainty.
"Oh my God" Said Marsha, "What if he's like... dating Mr. Gewicky?"
Genie laughed, mostly startled Marsha of all people would drop a theory like that. Laughing made the pain in her ribs worse. She took deep breaths to temper it, a smile breaking her clenched expression,
"You think?"
Marsha nodded in the darkness.
With a pugnacious nose and wide simian mouth, the man was not what she would call conventionally attractive, but his formal dress had lessened the effect. When she had first met him, a strong pleasant odor had blown off of him like Balsam, with a hint of ointment or cold-cream. It made him smell sort of like the inside of an old-lady's handbag.
It wasn't a popular opinion these days that a man couldn't be of "traditional" orientation and still dress well, but once the thought had fixed itself in her mind, Genie couldn't help wondering. Any explanation was better than no explanation.
Marsha groped through the dark for Genie's arm, "Do gays do anything to their nails to let other people know they're gay?" she asked, "Like the way they only wear the one earring?"
Genie raised her eyebrows, then drew them into a pinched fold, "What, like get manis?"
"No?" An innocent pause, "The first time he showed up, he had this really ugly pinky-ring on, so when he went past me, I looked for it to see if it was the same guy,"
"Uh-huh?" Genie said cautiously. She hadn't seen any ring but she took Marsha's word for it.
"I didn't see the ring," Marsha said, as if echoing Genie's thoughts, "But I noticed that the nail was really long. Just the one nail. It was actually kind of gross, but I don't know if that's a gay thing or not."
Underneath her touch, Marsha could feel Genie's skin begin to tighten and texturize. She withdrew it immediately. Ben made a soft, "Mm, mm, mm" sound, and Genie made no sound at all.
For years, the deviant nature of Squeaky's was like a thin needle pushing against her arm with a microscopic head. Up until now, her skin had been tough. It caved against the pressure but never broke, the needle plucking and catching on the surface. But now it had slid into her vein for one unguarded second, and all the ugliness seeped in.
Marsha had just described a coke-spoon.
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2010 1:10 am
Junkie
Genie rifled through the shelves of her brother's refrigerator, more investigatively than she would have been willing to admit.
Inside it was yellow and sour-smelling, a bachelor's fridge. There were no fresh vegetables but several varieties of mustard. A covered dish of mashed potatoes and some kind of casserole with peas in Tupperware. Roaming wads of tinfoil. Plasticy-looking lunch meat and rotting carry-out. Jars of pickles and olives and jelly. A twelve-case of Bud and three pints of milk. Genie smiled at this.
("He probably buys one every time he goes out." )
She decided if her brother was guilty of anything, it was shopping too often and on an empty stomach. He didn't always get the things he needed, but she could understand how a grocery store full of strangers was still less lonely than an empty house in the middle of a move. Her own fridge wasn't anything to sniff at.
She let the door swing shut and heard jars rattling inside the door. A magnet clattered onto the floor. She chanced a look at the door to the mudroom before bending over to pick it up.
She lamely told Mickey she needed a drink of water. It was the first excuse she could think of. Any excuse to get out of the mud-room and put an end to her brother's stream of questions and sulky comments. She couldn't say for sure at what point she felt the power begin to shift into his corner, except that it was the result of his insistence and not his powers of persuasion.
At the same time she wanted his reassurance and support, she just couldn't afford to have Mickey hold her plans under a microscope. Get a word in edgewise. Make that single observation that would undo several weeks worth of rationalizing. The decision was still too recent. As soft and vulnerable as a freshly molted crab. She needed time to warm up to it. No matter how crazy, it was usually harder to abandon something if you were standing in it deep enough. For crazy things, the deeper the better.
Putting the folder together was a good start. It never hurt to be organized, and it was nice to have some physical evidence of her progress. The more she looked at them-- the glass and the vial and the folder-- the easier it was to be swept away by the promises they made.
Still, she knew she couldn't make this trip on the back of carefully layered delusions. A few delusions were okay, but they weren't anything to build a house on. She had to make it knowing full well that there were risks, and big ones. Being bitten by a deadly cobra was no joke, and neither was getting canned for being too footloose with her vacation days. It was 2010. Not a great time to get cavalier with your employ.
What she needed was some kind of momentum here. Like everything was moving her in one direction or the other. She was in all the way or she wasn't in at all, and for whatever reason, her brother's opinion now had the extraordinary power to tip the scales. She didn't want to give him that chance.
Unfortunately she only had so many stock-answers to give before Mickey finally wore her down, making her suddenly desperate to get away and regroup. So she said the first thing that came to mind and hopped out of her seat like somebody lit a fire under it. It had bought her a little time but Mickey was impatient. It didn't take long to hear his chair screech back.
"I'll be out here when you're done." He said tonelessly. He went back into the garage, and when he was gone she felt weirdly embarrassed.
"Alright," She said to nobody.
A wave of nausea hit her when she stood. She pinned the magnet carelessly to the fridge door and worked her tongue against the jagged surface of her broken tooth. The pain came and went but was making her reluctant to eat. She was in that stage where hunger pangs turned into barfiness.
She navigated around Rubbermaid totes and cardboard boxes into the half-bath off the den. It was so cramped she had to practically stand in the tub to close the door. She leaned against the sink, gripping the cold enamel rim like a gargoyle clutching a stone cornice. She looked up into the mirror and pulled down her lower lip. She could faintly see it. A clean, even split up the premolar from her fall behind the stage.
When she first caught it at work she was able to sneak into the kitchen for a saltwater rinse, but it was the best she could do for now. Since then she was vigilant for infection, but silently knew she would probably end up losing the tooth. Having already lost a finger made the outcome somehow easier to accept, but no less sobering. Hers was just a life that took bits and pieces of her as it saw fit.
She took a step back and lifted up her shirt, just under the bra. A bruise was yellowing across her ribs. She had hit those chairs pretty hard, and it still hurt when she took a deep breath. Before lowering her shirt, she lingered on what she would do to that a*****e in the coat if she ever saw him again.
She decided to take a peek inside the medicine cabinet. Maybe he had some Advil.
The door opened with a grating shriek. It was one of those clunky vintage cabinets from the sixties.
Mickey rung in every Spring by cutting a potato in half, sprinkling it with baking powder, and scrubbing the rust off the metal. He had a million little tricks like that. He rubbed walnuts on wood-scratches, cleaned copper with hot-sauce, and cut cakes with dental floss. His ingenuity notwithstanding, he had left the inside of the cabinet sorely wanting. It gave off a strong smell of oxidizing steel that didn't help the sick feeling in her stomach.
Her eyes lazily took inventory. A glass jar with some cotton balls, a half-empty box of ear swabs, some razor blades, and two orange-brown prescription bottles. Without a wink, Genie picked one of them up and turned out the label.
---
Three years ago Mickey had put his foot through a pane of glass. He was carrying some lumber to build the frame, caught his workboot on a wrinkle in the rug in the foyer, and stumbled backwards into a 30x30 square of frosted glass leaning against a sideboard. Even with Timberlands and two pairs of wool socks to prevent blisters, the glass had nicked an artery in his ankle just above the pull strap and he needed to be rushed to the emergency room.
When he later told the story to Genie, he oversold the part where the foreman peeled down both pairs of socks to check the damage and fainted dead away when a cherry-red spurt jumped out from his ankle like a flower in a clown's lapel.
"Dropped like a corpse, I swear to God. And you know Jake's built like a linebacker-- The whole house shook."
"How do you know he didn't just get a whiff of your feet there, Mick?"
It was a bit of an exaggeration. Not the arc or power of the spurt, which was every bit as impressive as Mickey described in a series of gestures, but the foreman's cartoonishly delicate reaction to the sight of blood. He hadn't fainted, but he did need to leave the room, heavy-breathing off the client's deck which coincidentally gave him the perfect view of Mickey being carted out of the house by two grown men with a third guiding them. They were all struggling to keep the ankle suspended above Mickey's heart and practically turned him upside down to do it.
Mickey's head, red and shiny like a berry, jostled against the client's inner thigh as the group scrambled down fifteen flagstone steps towards the driveway. On an incline. Mickey counted each one as they passed under his face.
Fifteen must have been Mickey's number that day, because that was exactly how many stitches he had needed. After he was officially discharged, a gray, shabby little man in paint-stiffened overalls seemed to materialize out of thin air, rapping two knuckles on the open door of Mickey's room. Mickey looked up, startled, as the man waved towards the chair furthest from the examination table.
Mickey recognized him as one of the late-hires. A transient. Mickey only ever saw him holding down boards or taking measurements. Stalking off for a lot of unscheduled smoke breaks. Mickey didn't really know his name. He'd been calling him Dennis because nobody corrected him, but the sticker smoothed over his overalls finally confirmed it. More words were mouthed than said outright as Dennis went to his seat in a lead-footed shuffle.
"Can I just?"
"Oh sure! Please."
"Thanks much. "
Mickey continued getting dressed. He slipped both arms into his patchy twill jacket with the burger-stains, and lastly but carefully rolled up his socks over the thick pad of gauze that covered his stitches. He would be leaving the hospital on crutches until the local anesthetic wore off, but they wouldn't be giving him any painkillers for after.
He shot a glance at his guest. The hospital chair was unnaturally right-angled, forcing him to sit straighter than he seemed capable of. Had he a hat, Mickey was sure he would have taken it off with grim formality.
"How's it?" The man ventured croakily.
Mickey shrugged, "Like I got skewered with a piece of glass, I guess."
He laughed good-naturedly, but Dennis didn't. He only bobbed his head in the wooden, agreeable way that older men do.
There was a gap of silence which Mickey neutrally filled by offering him a soda. One of the guys had left an unopened can of Sprite on the counter. Mickey wasn't much of a soda-drinker, and apparently neither was Dennis. He was briskly but politely rebuffed, and right then, something in the man's expression sent a tingle up Mickey's leg. Bad news was coming. He tried to think, to anticipate what it could be.
Was the client suing for damages?
("Sounds like my luck. I guess if you're gonna spring a leak, might as well aim for some priceless antiques." )
It was possible, it was always possible, but in this case, Mickey somehow doubted it. The client —some flashy day-trader from uptown Durem— didn't hesitate to get involved, and he sure wasn't shy about turning him heels-over-teakettle on their way to the truck. That was about the closest Mickey had been to another man's nethers since his football days, and he didn't care for it much then either. It could take less than four minutes for a person to bleed out and die from a severed femoral artery. It was just a fact you carried around with you when you worked around glass and lumber all your life.
"You were lucky," The doctor said offhandedly as he worked the needle like a seamstress, as if Mickey didn't already know. "Everything worked out just right, and not just because you didn't hit a major artery. Everybody acted quickly and you weren't laid up in traffic, and those things are just as important. Honestly, if you'd gotten here ten minutes later, this could really have been a problem. Yep. Luuucky, lucky guy." Chanting the word "lucky" like a mantra to keep Mickey from biting clean through his fist.
So really, did that sound like the kind of guy who would turn around and sue off your overalls? A guy that was so quick to get his hands dirty helping a total stranger that even the doctor agreed it could have helped save his life? It wasn't impossible, but then, what could be hiding behind door number two?
Was he being laid off and this was the poor schmuck they sent to do it? He looked absently at his shoes, crossing up the laces and pondering unemployment when Dennis quite suddenly confessed that he was the one who had left the glass leaning against the table. Mickey almost didn't hear him.
"What's that?"
"Yeah..."
At that point the mood shifted.
At no point between the manic ride to the hospital and the white-hot needle weaving in and out of his flesh, did Mickey ever make the connection between the glass being there, and a living, blamable person putting it there. The realization actually startled him, like when a spider drops down from the ceiling without you noticing. Dangling in front of you and scaring you shitless.
Because knowing he had been injured on the job by the carelessness of another worker somehow made the situation seem less friendly. Less of an honest accident, and something more cause and effect. And here was the cause sitting not ten feet away.
Somewhere, deep in his aching genes, he could hear the old man's voice,
"No such thing as accidents. Only carelessness."
Mickey must have looked less than forgiving because Dennis stood up awkwardly and all at once. He stumbled as he approached the table and alarm bells went off in Mickey's brain when he went to remove something from the pocket of his overalls. He closed it into Mickey's palm before he could help it, disarmed by Dennis' recitation of vaguely religious sentiments about being a good Christian and paying his dues, all while holding and shaking Mickey's hand violently in both of his own.
Mickey made a soft "mhmm", just to say something, accepting the item with a solemn, righteous attitude, as though he knew exactly what he was being given and justifiably annoyed that the man did not atone for his blunder sooner. Mostly it was a front, in case this guy turned out to be a fruit-loop. He held whatever it was tightly in his fist until Dennis was gone, not knowing if it was a bomb or a severed finger or what. And only once he was alone did Mickey look down to see.
And that was the story of how a prescription bottle of Oxycontin came into Mickey's possession, and how two pills from that bottle dropped both lightly and heavily into Genie's hand. They seemed to burn there, and the longer she stared at them, the more her world seemed to funnel into her palm and nothing else existed. On one side were the numbers "446", and on the other was an engraved 'M', as though Mickey had monogrammed each one personally.
She pressed her thumbnail into the flaky whiteness, the edge fitting perfectly into the backbone of the first '4'. She chipped off a little powder, then tested it curiously against her tongue. It left a whisper of bitterness, hinting at its potency. Her face was a stone mask as she quietly reviewed the facts.
Obviously his name wasn't printed on the label, but the prescription was several years old and the bottle was mostly full, so he couldn't have been taking these regularly, if he was taking them at all. Mickey was a great many things, but her mind, or just her mind especially, couldn't stretch far enough to accept him as an addict.
It wasn't that she was naive or anything, but her grasp of Mickey's character was pretty solid. She didn't have to search her mind long to know he was an accomplice at worst, a bystander at the very least. Stubborn in his own convictions, but not aggressively moral. The guy you wanted to guard the bathroom door while you dunked some kid's head in the toilet, and despite feeling guilty, does nothing to stop it. It was far more likely that he was holding the pills for someone else. Lionel most likely of all. (Genie often thought of things in terms of likelihood. Another kind of prediction, like reading horoscopes.)
Unreliable Lionel their father called him. Scratchy, ashy, jittery Lionel who only called on her for money and not favors, which he reserved for his fleet of younger brothers. Maybe Lionel forgot they were here. Or maybe Mickey considered selling them to help with the bills and just didn't have the nerve or the know-how to close the deal with a junkie. A lot of maybes to consider. Maybe it was all none of her business and she should just put the bottle back where she found it.
In her mind she imagined her index finger and thumb tweezing the pills out of her palm, dropping them gently into the bottle, popping the lid on, putting it back into the medicine cabinet, and closing the door like nothing happened.
She pictured it over and over again, looking at herself as though watching a movie. The character performing the same three repetitive movements again and again. An endless cycle of pills and shutting doors. But in the real world-- in Mickey's tiny, echoey, humid bathroom with its cracked tile and exposed pipes, she found herself raising the pills to her lips and pushing them through. One after the other.
She stared numbly at nothing for a second, but could feel them melting and degrading fast on her tongue. The bitterness made reality thump gently against her mind like a moth to a lightbulb. She felt a stroke of quiet panic because there was no going back, unless she wanted to spit them into the toilet and flush, which she almost couldn't, her tongue reflexively trying to pull the substance to the back of her throat and swallow into her cramping belly.
She cupped her hand under the faucet, filling it with water and slurping it into her mouth. She looked down at the sink-drain as she swallowed, seeing that it was speckled with hair and shaving cream and toothpaste crust. After a water-burp and a few seconds of nothingness, her brain finally caught up with her, her heart beating a little faster. Why did I do that. What the ********. Why did I do that!?
She wasn't sure what she expected to happen next, swaying from one foot to the other. Maybe it was the confining space, or the clutching pain in her ribs that kept her from taking deep breaths, but she felt herself growing increasingly, irrationally frightened.
A few minutes passed, and when nothing seemed to be immediately wrong with her, she managed to convince herself that because the pills were so old and expired the danger would have to be pretty slim. It was only two. It wasn't likely she'd get high or sick, or much of anything from just two expired pills out of her brother's smelly medicine cabinet.
She drummed her fingers anxiously on the rim of the sink and looked down at the drain again. A single black, unwinking eye.
She was disturbed to realize how disappointing that was.
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Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 2:06 am
Coming out into the den was a welcome change in space from the claustrophobic bathroom. After steeping in moisture for so long the room felt cool and cleansing. At just that moment the sun appeared from behind gunmetal clouds. The den changed values from warm to cool, flooding with harsh white light and dust-motes that sparkled.
She looked around. All the blondewood furniture had gone into storage. All that remained was the flatweave rug, a tilted shelving unit, and cobwebby ceiling fan with palm-leaf blades. All the plain, sheer curtains had been packed away with the sheets, giving her a clear view into the side-yard, where it was cold and crisp and silent.
When Genie came back into the garage Mickey wasn't working on the car anymore. She followed a crinkling sound around the passenger door where she found him in the corner, sitting up on a cement block and reading some kind of outdoorsy magazine by the light of a privacy window. The shaft of cold sunshine so intentional and coming from so high up on the wall as to look weirdly divine. She couldn't help a tiny smile. He kinda looked like a big garden gnome.
The magazine wasn't Field & Stream like her father read, but Outdoor Life. On the cover was a picture of a steroidal buck springing between two birch saplings in a snowy forest. His fingers were covering up the secondary title, but she was sure it read something like, TWENTY WAYS TO TAG OUT TODAY. Mickey wasn't the only man Genie knew who read those things for real, but he was the first to refer to them as "books" in the supermarket. He probably did it because he knew it made her bugshit.
Mickey looked up at her with a weary, neutral expression.
"Get your water?"
A curtain dropped behind her eyes. "Mhmm."
He nodded and dog-eared his page.
She started looking for her folder, and Mickey made a face. She followed his eyes as they settled on his workbench. She went toward it, picking up the folder. There were big black thumbprints on it. Grease. She waved it at him.
"Nice."
He cut his eyes away.
She opened it up to the newspaper clippings. The DOUBLE TROUBLE page was still on top. The rest of the folder was mostly padding. Forms and copies of forms and affidavits and phone numbers and pages she had printed from the internet. Mostly just things she wanted to have ready in case somebody asked for them.
She closed the folder and held it in front of her chest like a bum holding a sign, "Did you read anything else in here?"
He frowned, "Was I supposed to?"
Genie pursed her lips, her eyes flicking the issue of Outdoor Life. She countered with a gesture that was mostly wrist, setting the folder on the trunk of her car with a smack.
"Okay."
"Don't be pissed."
Genie touched one hand to her forehead. The other gestured at him. "I'm not," she lied, "I just wish you weren't so ******** predictable sometimes."
Mickey rolled the magazine up into a tube and sighed resignedly. "It doesn't matter, Genie. You don't care what I think. You know you're just going to do what you want, and I can't stop you."
"Damn right you can't!"
For whatever reason, she suddenly remembered going away to her first sleepaway camp, girls only. She was eight, which would have made him twelve.
Genie sat patiently in the passenger seat of their Sedan. Bottle-green, corduroy cloth interior, and a trunk big enough to hide a body in. Inside the house she knew a war was being waged because Mickey refused to help carry Genie's bags to the car and their father wasn't in any mood. School had only been out a week. It was a drowsy summer late-morning, too fine and too solemn for fighting. It was uncomfortably warm in the car and getting warmer, but her father left the window cracked for her. Humidity drew the gnats out of the surrounding woods in giant clouds, leaking into the car and singing past Genie's ear.
Overpowering the smell of the freshly mown lawn was the sickly, sugary smell of their dying lavender tree. Genie hated that tree. Gnarled and witchy looking as it hunched over their low porch with the slanty tin roof. The porch where Mrs. Witham was sitting at a plastic white table with some pulpy paperback book. Her mother seemed to get a lot of reading done despite the two-year-old. Her brother Toby.
As the wind peaked, Genie saw her mother through a curtain of browning petals, her eyes distant and sleepy-looking and somewhere else. Every few moments her head would bend down gracefully to her cigarette for a drag and she almost looked pristine.
Genie had her hands folded in her lap. Her tears were guilty ones. Drippy and snotty and somehow boiling hot, gathering at her upper lip like sour water. A ceramic smash sounded from inside the kitchen and her father exploded from the house with barely one arm inside his coat and Genie's last duffel bag under the other. He blew past her mother with not even an explanation and her mother clearly not seeking one, leaving a trail of quiet, crackling rage behind him.
As he took Genie away to camp, the sedan bouncing down the windy gravel driveway, she could glimpse Mickey in the rearview mirror. His little boy's body limping across the porch and into the yard, where he slowly laid down on a bed of white dandelions. Her mother continued her book undisturbed.
After that, Mickey had become less vocal at least about wanting Genie to himself. Torturing her with measured, resentful silences. When she went on her first date. When she spent all weekend at a girlfriend's house when she said she was just going for dinner. When she dumped an armful of college brochures on the kitchen table, hoping to bait a big fat scholarship with her father's military career. Open doors in other cities, maybe other countries, while Mickey would be stuck hammering away at his apprenticeship during the day and coming home at night, eating his saran-wrapped leftovers in a silent kitchen.
Genie couldn't tell you exactly what it was that made him such a mope. Possessive in that conspiratorial way as though Genie were defecting on some pact she'd never agreed to and which they never discussed openly. It wasn't as Freudian as it sounded. They weren't some lurid case-study of misplaced affection and stymied sexual frustrations between siblings, though they were very close, and admittedly not always in the healthiest of ways.
Chalk it up to him being a Taurus, maybe. An accident of birth she hoped never to understand. Tauruses were famously complacent and completely ineffective. An icon known for digging in their heels and resisting change. You can imagine the joy of having such a character for an older brother.
In cases of great offense, he would stalk off to the most dimly-lit room with a thermos of coffee he never rinsed, expressing his grief the only way he knew how. Suffering loudly without saying a word.
Genie would find him wherever he'd gone, and their eyes would meet over the dirty thermos topper, and she would feel an ache. A sad and shiftless kind of ache that she never seemed to leave him on good terms. Acting as though it were just his lot in life to be the family rock. And not just any rock, the Rock of ******** Gibraltar.
He was suited to the task, but it was the way he had accepted it that made Genie so sad for him, and so angry at his choices. How he was plainly stuck in a sinkhole of family obligation, and how he quietly resented it, but somehow always found the strength to bear it. Sometimes she just wanted to scream at him, 'For ******** sake, we aren't kids anymore!'
Who was asking him to be such a martyr all the time? Picking up Lionel from the bars. Buying parts for their cars out of his own pocket. And now here he was, almost forty years old and running home again to play nursemaid. Cooking their dad's meals, learning his schedule, sorting his medications, doing all the home repairs. But why? Why would he put himself through that? And why did he always have to make her feel like she was leaving him in the lurch?
While less the credit to her gender, Genie had never been very demonstrative, but Mickey wasn't either. She came to him, planting both hands on his shoulders and leaving him hesitant to respond. They were not a family that anticipated a friendly touch from one another.
"Sorry." she said softly.
He gripped his magazine-tube and leaned forward to rest his head against her stomach like an elderly dog that leans against your legs. He was not a very small man, and couldn't have spent any less than a minute battling with the cement block for balance. It was big enough length-wise to seat his bottom, but too narrow and too low to the ground for him to be comfortable. He wobbled a little, but Genie gripped his shoulders. She kept him there.
Her cotton blouse glided against his forehead as she knelt down to the ground, giving off a faint odor of french-fry grease. She teetered a little, as though she might lose her balance and fall right on her keister, but she didn't. She smiled funnily at him, and there was something uncharacteristically open in her expression. Less evasive, because she wondered if it was the downers kicking in better than she'd thought, and if he could see it in her eyes. It was kind of emboldening. It made her next words come easier to her.
She kept hold of his shoulders and tilted her forehead softly, confidentially to his. He was close enough to see the little creases under her eyes but nowhere else. Were those always there?
"I know it doesn't make much sense to you." She said in a voice both sweet and husky.
"Mhmm."
"The people at the Lab want me to bring that snake to them."
"What do you know about snakes?" He said glumly.
"If you'd asked me that a week ago, I would have said 'nothing'. But I'm learning, and this is important, so shut up and let me talk."
He nodded, their foreheads grinding awkwardly.
"After I bring them this particular snake, they're gonna do something to it, and give it back to me. That's the idea anyway." She felt his brows knit together as though unsatisfied with that answer. They were doing an awful lot of talking for only fostering a test animal.
By then Genie's back was getting stiff. She stood up and brought Mickey with her. There was a terrifying moment where it seemed like he would fall backwards off the cement block, and he instinctively gave a little yank on her arm as though she was sturdy enough to hold him. He recovered by his own strength, but Genie was still jarred by the feeling of being dragged down. Of being briefly connected to that falling weight. She thought of the Lab again. A huge falling weight she was willingly attaching herself to. She squeezed his hands in both of hers.
"There's more." Her eyes dropped, thinking of the best way to word it. "When I get it back, it's not-- It won't be a snake anymore,"
She wet her lip.
"More like, a person."
Mickey knit his brows. He was making a genuine effort to understand, but he was offput by whatever strange quality he'd seen in her eyes just a moment before. "I don't--"
"It's like an ado-ption." Her voice broke, and took on a horrible plaintive quality that sounded like it belonged to someone else.
His mouth opened, one side hitched in an incredulous sneer. "Of what?"
"Mickey."
"Who'd you sign up with, Doctor Moreau?"
"I have to do this."
"No," Mickey began in that diplomatic tone of his. The one that reiterated his disapproval, but did not insist that she agree with him. "You just think that you do."
"You're wrong."
He raised his eyebrows to show his interest. She said nothing and he squeezed her hands back, "I already told you it doesn't matter what I think. You're a grown woman and you're going to do whatever you're going to do. I guess I just don't get what's so horrible about your life that you think doing wild s**t like this is gonna fix it."
Genie's eyes afflicted him. Two dark ponds where small amphibious things seemed to be roiling beneath the surface. Just then, she felt a powerful urge to ask him to come with her, but her mouth would not form the words. Then, all at once, she looked very tired. "I know you don't."
When she said that, things seemed to come to their natural conclusion and Mickey finally eased off. He took his hands away and thrust them into his pockets. "Well," he began with an awkward, throat-clearing sound, "how're you gonna get there?" He shrugged in the direction of her car.
Genie frowned. It occurred to her that now that Mickey knew what she was planning, she might not get the car back in the time Mickey originally quoted. She knew he wouldn't intentionally try to sabotage her, but he might procrastinate. "Well, what's the matter with it?"
Mickey raised his eyebrows while taking a long inhalation of breath. He puffed out his cheeks, and sighed the air out with a shrug. The news wasn't great. "It's a junker, Genie, I told you that the day you bought it. Let's start with your brake pads. You've got 'em worn down to the metal, leadfoot. Eventually that's gonna grind on the rotors and cost more to fix. I'm surprised you were still able to stop the car."
He looked at her expectantly, but she only stared back at him. He began gesturing around the open hood, "And then you've got your transmission there. I'll bet you anything that's what you were smelling-- burning transmission fluid. And did you know your roof is flaking?"
"Yeah, I knew that." She said distantly, as though still not quite caught up to the present.
"And?"
"Well, you know..."
He waved a hand in front of her face, "...Hello?"
She faced him one of those secretive in-between expressions that he had only a fifty-fifty chance of getting right.
He forced himself to ask, "...What?"
"Sorry, I was just thinking." She said, which made his teeth set together. She bit a flake of skin off her lip and Mickey wasn't sure if she was going to continue. "I was remembering the last fight we had in there," she gestured at the mud-room, "you know, before I left for Durem? You remember that?"
He squinted, looking puzzled. He couldn't tell if she was trying to share a memory for memory's sake, or illustrate a point. To be safe, his mouth made a smiling shape, but was not a smile. "We had some whoppers in there, that's for sure."
"Remember how you always kept your boots lined up on the baseboard?" She finally smiled, and although the memory was uncomfortable to revisit, he was put strangely at ease by that.
He nodded, "I remember you came home that night stinking drunk with one mangy ballet flat and you wouldn't tell me how you lost the other one."
"Oh hell, there isn't much I remember before that. Mostly I remember the way you stood there in the kitchen doorway and blocked out the light like a goddamn eclipse."
She jutted out her chin and squinted her eyes like a bad Clint Eastwood impression. "And you went, 'Genie I should wring you out for making me wait up this late,'" making Mickey's voice extra gravelly for effect.
"And I just spat on the floor and kicked out my foot? And I sent that other shoe sailing over your boots all the way behind the dryer?"
Her voice began climbing octaves into a kind of humorous shriek, "I remember the look on your face!"
Mickey laughed with her at his own expense. "I think you said all of ten words to me that week."
She laughed once and cleared her throat. "Well yeah, I was pretty sore at you."
Mickey made a two-noted sound that was not quite a laugh, feeling as though he had just ruined something but unsure of what it was. A short, helpless sound. There was a long silence.
"I should have paid better attention," He finally said. Their eyes met.
"You were gone by Saturday and I didn't even know it till you called me on Easter Sunday and told me you weren't comin' back. And then it was just me and Sandy."
Sandy was Mickey's old shepherd-mix. Mickey had always had shepherds, and all of them had girl's names. To hear him talk you'd think he'd been married a few times. Nine years ago Mickey had to send Sandy to live with their dad because some scumbag was throwing chicken bones over people's fences.
When they finally found the guy—some demented old ******** in a wifebeater and plaid slippers—Mickey decided to leave Sandy at the farmhouse because she took such a liking to country life and Mickey didn't have the heart to coop her up in the suburbs again. Eight months later their dad called to tell Mickey she went missing and he hadn't seen her in almost two weeks. Mickey was devastated of course, but that was just how it went in the country.
People out in those parts didn't feel the need to characterize their pets, or turn them into miniature people. Dogs and cats were just dogs and cats, beholden to their own natures, and sometimes you just had to face up to the fact that their natures made them wander off. Chasing some rabbit or a female cat in heat. And even if you never saw them again, a part of you always liked to think that they could take care of themselves without you. That their natural instincts would take over and wherever they were, they'd manage just fine.
Still, Mickey didn't get any more shepherds after Sandy, and you could tell he still missed her pretty awful. The way she'd crawl under Mickey's chair head-first while he watched TV, her tail beating his ankles like a cowbell. Genie loved her too. Enough that when she called Mickey from a boardinghouse in Durem, despite his own feelings, Mickey still put Sandy on the phone so Genie could say goodbye.
But she didn't say goodbye to Mickey.
And he'd been on his own ever since.
Genie stepped forward, "Is that why you're moving in with dad? So it wouldn't be just you? You can tell me."
He cut his eyes away and shrugged.
"You know, Toby said he and June could take him. They said that. You don't have to drop everything like this..."
Mickey shook his head gravely. "It'd be wrong. Him and June are just starting out. They've only been married two years. They should be thinking about putting a couple of kids in that spare room they got, not a crippled old man."
Genie threw her arms down in exasperation, "He's not crippled, Mick, he just can't walk. He hasn't walked in near ten years. There's a lot of stuff he can still do for himself, I think Toby could handle the rest."
"Nothing against Toby, but he doesn't know what he can handle yet. He's the only one of us that got off on the right foot, and I don't want to ******** that up for him, and I don't want to hear anymore about it from you or him."
Her eyes flashed. After, there was a pause of deciding silence.
"Fine," she said. She went to the car and took back her folder. "If you think you have to."
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 11:11 pm
Stop
Genie boarded the south-bound bus to Gambino at 9:43 in the morning.
It was crowded as Times Square, cheek to jowl. When you lived in the inner-city, you had to get used to bodies pretty fast. Pressing against you on the subway or touching your fingers when they gave you your change. The city had no patience for the slow or the shy.
All the bodies in this case were padded and fur-trimmed, which made the squeeze even tighter. It got to be so packed she had to crabwalk down the aisle, her left side weighed down by her purse and bulging duffel bag. The briefcase swung freely in her other hand, the corners flashing dangerously in the white wintery light. Before she could stop it, one of those corners caught someone's five-year-old right between the shoulderblades.
Some latent maternal reaction made her breath hitch in her throat as the little boy howled and fell theatrically to his knees, bringing Genie down to the real world so fast it made her head spin. She was not used to a world with physical items that could be moved and manipulated rather than navigated and avoided. She took a surprised half-step and the rest was a blank, making it to her seat in a numb, forgetful panic like she had just floated down the aisle without ever touching the ground.
Two or three people glanced at her curiously, as though wondering if Genie even knew what she had done but not nosy enough to tell her. She sat there, her back ramrod straight, teeth closed, lips parted. She thought for sure the truth would be written on her face, but apparently her expression of alarm was able to pass for the wide-eyed and self-involved look of somebody in a hurry.
Luckily the kid's mother was turned around when it happened. She hovered around a weight-class Lola sensitively called "skinny-fat", with pouchy eyes and thighs that spread when she sat down. She wore bootcut jeans and a pink polo shirt. Somebody trying to look nice for a visit with their parents. She had chestnut brown hair with pungent grape-smelling hairspray, and a mane of crispy curls with flat-ironed bangs. She had little gold studs in her ears but no wedding band, and her name was probably something like Debra or Tammy.
She yanked her son up by the arm to keep him off the dirty floor. There was a back-and-forth screaming match, but eventually she was able to pacify him with a baggie of Cheerios. Then he was babbling about dinosaurs or something, his troubles forgotten.
Genie's eyes rolled towards the ceiling and she mouthed the words Thank God, even though she didn't doubt for a minute he was fine. In her experience, the more fuss a kid made about being hurt, the less worried you could afford to be. When a kid was seriously hurt—for real hurt—you could usually tell by their clenched little faces, gathering every ounce of strength to keep from bawling. To their unending credit, a five-year-old could endure excruciating pain for hours, even days, if only out of a fear of getting in trouble for doing something they probably shouldn't have.
Genie could relate.
_____________________
Before Mickey drove her home, Genie made it very clear that she wanted her car back on Monday no matter what shape it was in, and her brother only had to look in her eyes to know she was serious. Get it fixed, or good luck getting any sleep tonight.
She was still fuming when they got in the car, pretending to look outside and thinking about how once again she'd been a big disappointment to her brother. Probably the only damn person in the world that cared enough to tell her when her ideas stunk. Which made his own commitment to misery all the more egregious.
She had one hand propped under her chin and the other across her tingling empty stomach. Her insides rumbled. She was starving, but the idea of eating made her sick. Every once in a while she would start loudly nose-breathing, like she was trying to keep from retching, then let out a little groan. Each noise drew a microscopic response from Mickey. A sideways glance or squeeze on the wheel. She did the routine two more times before he finally stirred up the courage.
"Seriously, are you okay? Want me to pull over?"
She touched a hand to her forehead, the fingers spreading into her hairline and eyes closed in a nauseous grimace. She shook her head and made her face long and horsey. Her tongue was caressing the bad tooth. Mickey didn't know what to do. Was she shaking her head because she wasn't okay, or because she didn't want him to pull over?
"You look like s**t, Genie." He said helpfully.
"Thanks."
He took a long breath, hovering one hand by her arm. "Here, put the seat down. The lever's on your side."
"Oh, thanks." She said—genuinely this time—feeling for it in the dirty space between her seat and the door. A candy bar wrapper kept touching her hand with its soft-sharp edges. She yanked it out and threw it fitfully to the side, then eased her seat back slowly. She couldn't lay it all the way flat because the truck was a two-seater, but she undid her seatbelt anyway and rolled onto her side.
"Better?" Mickey asked.
"Yeah. Just take me home, okay? I don't feel good."
"Is it your stomach?"
"No."
"You have a headache?"
"No."
A careful pause. "Sure its not your stomach?"
"Can you please stop?"
"Oh! Yeah, sure. Hold on."
He probably thought she needed to puke. Genie knit her brows as she felt the truck ease down in speed, drifting onto the shoulder. Something snapped as she bolted upright, her stomach lurching in protest. Her voice was a shrill zipper in the quiet space, loosing every demon they had worked so carefully so far to disguise as civil adult interaction.
"No! Not the car you ******** moron! I mean stop!"
The tires spun gravel as Mickey jerked them back onto the main road. A last-second move. He was sitting up straighter, eyes forward and unblinking. A blue Dodge Charger laid furiously on the horn. It was stuck behind them for now, but would take the first opportunity to pass them in a mile or so.
Genie was stunned. She knew the right thing to do was apologize. Or rather, she felt like it was just supposed to happen next, the way everyone knows how a fairy-tale ends. The glass slipper fits Cinderella's tootsie, the Big Bad Wolf eats Grandma, and Genie apologizes. The whole thing was so played out.
She should try to justify it with PMS or indigestion. Something she could laugh off, so she could turn on the radio and find something good to sing along to. Find words that didn't belong to them so they could bury the ones that did. But nobody made a move and the radio stayed off. The Dodge bulleted past Mickey's window before sliding in confidently and vindictively in front of them. Gambino plates.
While Mickey sat stiffly behind the wheel, she was exhausted and unfeeling. As empty and scraped out as a pumpkin. She couldn't dredge up an ounce of sympathy for him. Really, what was she supposed to do? Was she supposed to comfort him because he couldn't do anything for her? Her stomach growled, and she laid back down and slept the rest of the drive.
She stirred when the truck began making the familiar turns and stops of her neighborhood, which thankfully spared Mickey the indignity of waking her up. She moaned and touched her cheek. There were little marks in her skin from the seat upholstery. She rubbed away a crust of spit from the corner of her mouth and looked up to see the Sunrise Theater that meant she was two intersections away from The Arms. She thought about the last time she had ever been to the movies.
She leaned forward to put her seat back up. Mickey looked at her from the corner of his eye. When she tugged the lever, the seat rocketed up too fast, hitting her square in the back. Mickey smiled at that and hastily touched his mouth like he was trying to physically wipe it off his face. Genie cut her eyes at him.
"Shut up."
The smile was gone and Mickey set his teeth together. He pulled up slowly in front of The Arms and threw it into park. She should have known things were bad when hedidn't open his door.
Actually, he did the weirdest thing she could think of. He put his hands in his lap. Actually folded them like a church granny. He reminded her of their father when he dropped Genie off at college for the first time, stymied by his own emotions and unable to do anything but shake her by the shoulder and say, "Make me proud!"
Genie looked out the window, suddenly reluctant to leave. She gathered her folder and buttoned up her coat. "So, uh. I guess this is it."
Mickey worked his mouth for a few seconds. He still wouldn't look at her, and for the first time, maybe ever, she had no idea what he was thinking. That she was an ungrateful c**t? That she was making a huge mistake? The car idled gently, almost soothingly. It made the silence even longer. Whatever it was, eventually he decided to let it go. He pressed his lips into a line and moved his hand. He pressed a button and a little black rod shot up with a chunk on Genie's door.
Get out. Make me proud.
Genie stood on the steps of The Arms watching Mickey drive away. Overhead, the sky turned shades of red and purple like a giant bruise. A soft sleepy breeze swept down the road. A wrapper from a cheeseburger skittered down the sidewalk. Looking up, she could just make out the ghost of the stars and the moon hovering on the horizon. Crescent like a fingernail clipping. A blinking red light sang through the heavens. Airplane. Satellite, maybe.
It was almost dinnertime.
Really, what did she expect? Hugs and kisses? A basket of roses? A decorated sendoff? She called him a moron. A <******** moron. It just wasn't going to happen. She went inside, made a bowl of oatmeal, and slept with the television on.
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Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 12:08 am
Genie's father did not like noise.
He had a strict "no-hollering" policy when they were kids, despite doing a lot of hollering and stomping of his own. Lionel pointed it out once when he was thirteen, just to stir the paint, and walked away with a scar above his eyebrow you could still see in his forties. That's how serious her dad was. Nobody knew why. He'd served two years in Vietnam, and was made permanently deaf in one ear during his tour.
The deafness was only in addition to being shot in the knee and thigh which led to his honorable discharge, and as he liked to say to any of his five apparently interchangeable sons, "One more good inch and you might not be around to hear the story".
Or at least, that was the short version. Usually he stretched that single sentiment over the course of a fifteen minute-long story. And with more racial slurs.
Everything Genie's father did was loud and attention-getting. He dropped himself into chairs and heaved himself out of them. He slammed doors and windows hard enough to make the glass rattle. He had thick, sausage-y fingers that couldn't handle delicate items, which was all the same, because he had no time to waste on anything delicate. Her mother was not the kind of woman that collected Hummels or Precious Moments, but if she did, she'd have herself a porcelain graveyard.
Her father was a man that commanded respect. He told stories like he was trying to hear himself over helicopter blades, and people dreaded calling the house because he yelled your ear off over the receiver.
However, growing up, Genie and her brothers were only allowed quiet toys, quiet hobbies, and quiet friends, and naturally they were curious. Their father wasn't eager to explain, taking their questions as a sign of insubordination. An insinuation of fault or wrongdoing they could use as leverage against him.
If asked, their mother would only reply with censored and unsatisfying answers. If she were pressed too long or too adamantly with questions like why deafness would make a person louder, and more baffling, why it would give them such a hatred for loud noises they couldn't even hear, she'd stop whatever she was doing without another word and go out onto the front porch to sit on her metal chair like a marble statue in repose. Just waiting and smoking, sometimes for hours.
Inevitably their father would come out and ask the dreaded question, "Where's your mother?", and if he could smell the trail of her cigarette on the porch, it would spell trouble for the first kid in arm's reach.
Lionel was the oldest, and one day he finally deigned to sit them down and explain it. He smiled as he did, with a sort of smugness over his father's infirmity. Genie was seven at the time.
"It's easy," he said, "He gets confused. You know, turned around."
They all sat there with their glazed expressions, like they couldn't be bothered to connect the dots on their own. Only Dodger showed a flicker of cogitation. Something like intelligence.
Lionel's smile squirmed, "He can still hear out one ear, dumbasses. "
They all cringed, their eyes crowding the doorway to the kitchen where their mother was reading a catalog, a cigarette in one hand and iced tea in the other. All of them strained their ears for the sound of page-turning but heard only listening silence. Lionel glanced at the door and back to them.
"Pft. I don't care." The word "care" was two syllables, in a tone so snotty it oozed.
He continued, "Look, the reason he screams all the time is because he can't hear himself right. He can't tell how loud he really is. With just the one ear, he doesn't know where a sound's coming from. He doesn't know whether it's from left or right or upstairs or downstairs-- and that makes him all confused. And when he's confused, he feels stupid, and when he feels stupid, he gets pissed."
He stood up, narrowing his eyes down at them. A pillar of fourteen-year-old righteousness. "And that's why we have to tiptoe around him all the time. That's why he beats the piss out of us for having the tv too loud. Because he feels like an idiot, and we're stuck paying for it. Get it?"
They got it.
Genie was the second youngest after Toby, and had an excess of nervous energy for a child. She did not make a very lovable baby. Serious and thoughtful, and somehow vindictive in her every decision. When she was four years old, she had a nasty teeth-grinding problem.
At first it went mostly unnoticed, and when it became prominent in their attention, it didn't strike her parents as much of a problem. Genie's grinding kept her quiet and even-tempered. All the more easy to ignore in the face of more pressing adult concerns. The looming and ever-present suspicion of infidelity, for instance. Or the burgeoning financial strain of feeding and clothing six children.
Genie was quiet, that was true. But what they didn't realize was that her silence came at a price. Inside she was bitter and hateful, and desperately wanting the world to know about it. The moment she came off the pacifier she was grinding her teeth constantly, even in her sleep.
It got to be so bad that by the time she was nine it had started giving her headaches worse than her grandma's before they found the tumor. By age ten she needed braces to fix the damage she'd done. The braces were the worst, and Genie was as hateful towards them as a ten-year-old could be toward anything. Grinding made the brackets pinch her lips and give her painful coldsores, so for three years straight every picture of Genie looked like the ones they took of the Dust-Bowl farmers. Overwhelmed and squinty.
When she couldn't grind anymore, she started hitting. A short brutal phase where she took out her aggression on furniture and pillows. Soft things. Quiet things. Her favorite thing to hit was Mickey's upper-arms. He was the only one of her brothers that wouldn't hit her back, and he had thick biceps from playing football. It felt good to hit something real. It felt good to take her pain and give it to someone else. Mickey didn't seem to mind. He just rolled up his sleeves.
When the braces came off, Genie stopped hitting and substituted chewing gum as her habit of choice. All through High School she smuggled gum into her pockets and purse and brother's car, making everything smell sugary and girly. Chiclets were her favorite. The pink ones you could get in big handfuls at the pharmacy. She chewed them between meals and in front of the television, swallowing one after the other when the flavor ran out and throwing caution to the wind about those rumors that it would sit in your stomach for twenty years.
As Lionel always joked, "If that were true, you'd look in your third trimester by now."
It didn't happen often, but when Genie couldn't get gum, she chewed pencils. She liked making lots of soft little dents in the yellow paint until it was all used up, then chewing the squishy pink erasers out of the metal bands, and then chewing the metal bands into tinfoil. Usually it was about temporarily relieving boredom or anxiety, and other times it was just about release. Biting down so hard the pencil splintered in half with a crack. The sound a dead branch makes over your knee.
Other times she chewed her shirt-sleeves. Usually when she was doing homework or something equally tedious. Gathering a lump of fabric into her mouth until it was sopping wet and smelled like rotten food. This habit, more than any of the others, drove her father to a completely unprecedented level of outrage.
He'd reacted similarly to the news that it would cost several grand to put braces on her teeth. But for all his grumbling and swearing and money-doesn't-grow-on-trees speeches, paying for her braces had secretly validated him. It made him feel useful and present. The opposite of the picture Genie's mother would have painted of him. But seeing his daughter's sweaters drenched to the elbows just made him wonder if she was dense, and was not validating in any way. It was babyish and disgusting.
Finally, when he couldn't take it anymore, he sat her on the bed, grabbed all of her clothes out of the dresser and made her cut the sleeves off with a pair of steel scissors.
It was humiliating to sit there, ruining all her nice feminine clothes while her father stood cross-armed in the doorway, but Genie didn't let on. She just did as she was told. She didn't shed a tear when he hauled in the rag-bag from the garage to throw the shreds in. When he soaked them in kerosene and used them to burn a nest of tent-worms out of the lavender tree. As the smoke billowed and curled up to her window, Genie's hatefulness grew stronger, pooling in all her empty spaces.
She didn't want the b*****d to think it was going to be that easy.
If there was only one thing they had going for them, it was that despite being often and thoroughly made examples of, Genie's older brothers all had thick skins and short memories. Lots of kids got hit back then, and worse. They shared scars and stories. It gave them something to bond over and even laugh about, like a secret club of kids that get hit, with marks and bruises in place of handshakes and passwords. But Genie was different. Genie possessed a sort of otherness.
She didn't get hit nearly as often as they did, if ever. Maybe it was being the only girl that saved her from more whippings than she probably had coming, but the unfairness of it didn't escape her brothers. It didn't escape Genie either. Children tend to be very disturbed by unfairness.
That wasn't to say she got away with acting like a brat. It just meant that because her father consciously chose not to hit her, he had to find more creative alternatives to curb her behavior. Punishments that were often more damaging to the spirit and dignity. To Genie, physical pain seemed so much simpler.
Her brothers insisted she was lucky, but Genie was inclined to disagree. She did not feel privileged in the least. She felt in suspense, like an over-tuned violin string, vibrating with tensile apprehension that never found relief in the back of her father's hand. She remembered the awful tingly feeling that started in her pelvis when she heard his footsteps in the hall outside her door, like she desperately had to pee, only to pass over her like the tenth plague passing over the blood-marked houses of the Israelites. Then she'd lay awake all night, the tingly feeling rising up into her chest, like there was a bell inside she couldn't un-ring.
Her only choice was to brace herself, waiting in anticipation of it. The day she would finally trespass far enough to make her father hit her, and she could finally exchange what was her female burden for a burden that was more consistent. A burden with bruises and marks that would heal over time. Not the howling anxiety she was forced to hold inside of her like a typhoon, and endure into her thirties.
After the sleeve-cutting incident, she went on for the next five years in her brother's hand-me-downs just out of spite. Not that it mattered. Genie, from ages 5-19, had gone to nine different schools, and she'd been a complete nonentity in all of them.
At fourteen she was short and plain and sour-faced, and had big stretch-marky thighs from extra helpings of potato pancakes and chicken gravy. Her brigade of older brothers usually kept her from being a target for bullies, but did nothing for her short-tempered teachers, or the grim-faced lunch-ladies that waited in patient, pitying silence as she metered out her lunch-money in dimes and nickels. A nice sweater and matching hairband wasn't going to change that.
Having a boyfriend on the other hand. That was the kind of thing that made a lasting impression on people. The kind of thing that would get her remembered once she and her family inevitably moved away again, which seemed to be a recurring concern for her back then. Not being remembered. It deeply affected her that her parents never got them enrolled in their new school on time, and they almost always missed their chance to get into the yearbook.
grind grind. chew chew.
Sometimes her brothers made it into the final cut for being on a sports team, but Genie didn't do stuff like that in school. Despite it being counter-productive to her desire to be noticed, Genie didn't do sports or clubs. It all just seemed like a fantastic waste of time. They would just move away again the second she got involved enough in something to be worth taking a picture. In twelve years of school she had four yearbook pictures total, ending with the sixth grade. No clubs, no sports, no trophies, no honor roll. Zero. Goose-egg. No solid proof she had really been there at all.
She might as well have been a dead person.
She often wished that she was.
grind grind.
But other times she had sudden and unexpected bouts of optimism. Every once in a while she saw a new move as a chance to reinvent herself. A chance most kids only ever got once, but she had a dozen times over. She could be the interesting girl that "had people" in every state like a mafia-kingpin, with extra points for having been to Germany once, even though she never really left the base and everyone there spoke English.
Despite the crime of being a sporadically hopeful teenager, Genie wasn't a stupid one. She knew you didn't have to be freaking Loni Anderson just to get a guy to kiss you, and if anybody was the authority on that, it was Lionel, who more or less confirmed after a while of hemming and hawing that his little sister was not ugly as sin. When she smiled she could be downright adorable, but her chewing had ruined even that. All because the worst thing she chewed of all were her lips.
Chewing her lips gave her something to do when she was bored in class or smashed between her brothers on long car-trips. Nibbling off big flakes of dead skin, or stinging strips of living skin because the pain felt kind-of good. Her first day of seventh grade she had made them so scaly and scabby to be completely unappealing. Kids spread rumors that it was because she had a dirty disease. That got a few boys interested, but not the right ones, or even the cute ones. Then the whole thing started over and she wished was dead a thousand times more.
Genie learned early. Somehow, your old self always caught up with you. No matter where you were, you were always still you.
_____________________
At some point during the night, Genie must have gotten as mad a hornet, because that's exactly how she woke up. The regret she felt, the excitement-- all of it turned into an exquisite and energetic anger accompanied by aches and pains that were suspiciously hangover-like. She wondered if maybe the Oxycontin had activated in her sleep.
Around noon her body started craving sugar, and she folded strip after strip of Doublemint into her mouth, pretending it was sweeter and crunchier than it was. Of course, she could only chew it on one side.
She unplugged the phone and went into a cleaning frenzy that didn't get anything clean. Mostly moving and straightening things nobody would notice. Doing stupid, useless things like taking clothes out of her dresser and putting them on hangers, or wiping dust off the edge of the bookshelves. It was all just a build-up to vacuuming. In Genie's opinion, nothing was better for a bad mood than vacuuming. Something to get the blood moving and endorphins rushing. Plunging and jabbing the air in a kind of clumsy sword-fight. Letting her mind wander back to those petty imaginary conversations with her brother.
"Yeah, you lay there and think about your baby sister on the expressway with touchy brakes. Smashing into a Mack Truck—or better yet a big ol' propane tank. There won't even be a corpse to bury, just a big stain."
She didn't hear Lola come in, lost somewhere in the angry snarl of the vacuum. She jumped when Lola touched her arm and slammed her foot on the power switch, the brushroll coming to a slow whinnying stop.
She looked at her, and Lola looked back. Genie's color was high, her eyes big and dark like post-orgasm or near-death.
Lola's were dishwater-gray. Her hair was ginger-red and flat-ironed daily, making it look limp and synthetic. Like the nylon mane of a plastic horse, with little singed curlicues everywhere. Her nose had a rodenty cleft on the tip and her mouth somehow seemed a size too small for her teeth.
"Oh, sorry honey! I was in the hall and smelled something coming from your place. I thought it was gas but now," Lola wrinkled her rat-nose, "I guess it's more like... tires?"
It was true. The whole apartment smelled funny, like friction and heat and burning rubber. She and Lola realized at about the same time. It was the belt in the vacuum. She'd been standing there twenty minutes and letting it run.
By the time Monday rolled around, Mickey hadn't made any offer to pick her up, and Genie wasn't sure she would have taken it. She asked Lola to drive her to her brother's house, because it was cheaper than taking a taxi, and she had a feeling she would want somebody there in case the car broke down on the way into the city.
Pulling up, Genie thought she had seen the blinds in Mickey's bedroom window flicker apart, but it was only the petty part of her brain looking for a fight and unsatisfied that it wouldn't get one. She told Lola to park on the curb so she could back the car out, but didn't see Mickey's truck anywhere, which gave her that vaguely guilty feeling again. She didn't make a habit of going to her brother's house when he wasn't there, which struck her as funny, because when she was last living there she made every effort to get home before he did.
It was too cold and too early. Mickey's street was so quiet that even slamming the car-door gave her that feeling of ripping a sneeze in a funeral parlor. She plodded across the lawn, leaving a trail of footprints in the frost. She stole a spare key out from under a stone birdbath and wiped the dirt on her pantleg, a swipe on each side. She unlocked the garage door and heaved it up from the bottom. The sound was so explosive it set every dog in the neighborhood barking. At least now she could verify she was still on earth, and not some frozen alien landscape.
Sunlight flooded into the garage. The tail-lights of her '84 Volvo greeted her like two sleepy, grandfatherly eyes. She was surprised to see the car was on all four wheels and off the blocks, looking too much like a lever that says "pull me" or a pack of gum with a spring-trap inside. Too easy. A set-up. Here she was getting all keyed up on the car-ride over for when she found Mickey still tinkering with the damn thing-- finding new problems, taking out and putting in parts, trying to stall for time, and there all his tools were back on the peg-board. Everything mysteriously in its place, down to the tennis ball spinning on a moldy string above the hood.
It was the story of her life. Even when she got exactly what she wanted, she still felt like the jackass.
She sighed, breath whooshing from her nostrils like a cartoon bull. She ran her hand affectionately across the trunk, her fingers riding the dents and dodging a splotch of old bird poop. So now what?
She didn't know if it was fine to run, but in her head she kept chanting-- It's Monday. It's Monday. It's Monday. Like the mere fact of that was enough to justify taking the car. She wasn't about to leave empty-handed, and she did already made Lola drive her all the way out here... He knew she would be coming over today because she said so, and if he wasn't ready to let her take it, why would he have taken the car off the blocks?
She found her keys on a rack by the mud-room door. She ventured a look inside. She thought she could hear the radiator, promising tight space and cozy warmth, but it was only Lola's car idling on the street. Inside the mud-room it was gray and dusty and motionless.
She climbed into her car, which was somehow colder inside than the air outside. The steering wheel was cement-hard, the seatbelt burning-cold on her skin. She took a shivery breath and crossed her fingers. She turned the ignition, gripping the key's rubber top. A hot-pink hippie flower. pleasepleaseplease
The engine turned over in one try, and Genie shut her eyes in cautious optimism as the car idled. bwubwubwubwubwubwubwub
She took a moment to savor it before she shifted into reverse and pulled out into the driveway. As she aligned herself on the street, she could see Lola looking at her in the side-mirror. She had her hand floating in the air, clutched into a loose, sideways fist. Like she was gripping an invisible motorcycle throttle. Her thumb was out, wobbling like the needle on a temperature gauge.
Genie squinted.
Oh!
Thumbs up or thumbs down.
Genie stuck her arm out the window, palm flat. Paper covers rock. She wiggled it uncertainly.
Her car broke down the next day in traffic.
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 12:31 am
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Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 6:22 pm
Chapter Zero
Badly sunburnt, Genie returns home to convalesce. Mickey comes to visit.
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 6:33 pm
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Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 3:25 pm
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 3:26 pm
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Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2011 1:23 am
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Dangerous Conversationalist
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Posted: Tue May 03, 2011 12:34 am
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