Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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Ana considered this and then said: “You have to die for that?”
They looked at each other, for a held moment.
“I should—James is—”
“Of course,” said Charlie.
She clicked the information into her BlackBerry, then placed the flyer in her purse.
“I keep meaning to get one of those,” said Charlie. He pulled the small spiral pad of paper out of his back pocket and waved it in the air like a flag.
The visit with her mother had drained Ana, which meant she curled up inside herself like one of those red paper Japanese fortune fish that fold into a tube from the heat of a palm. James saw it, her insides recoiling while the skin of her continued on from task to task.
This faded Ana was next to him and Finn as they walked through the grocery store, as she stood inside the gas station at the cashier waiting for him to fill the car, staring straight ahead, a British beefeater in a cashmere coat. There she was again, barely speaking in Ikea, picking a quilt for Finn, standing back behind the other parents. (Other parents? He stopped here: Real parents?)
Finn ran in the children’s area, sat himself inside a shell-shaped chair, and pulled a vinyl top down so that only his feet stuck out. James tickled his ankles, threw him onto a beanbag hedgehog, tied a stuffed snake around his neck. Ana, Ana, Ana, a faint outline wavering on the hot desert horizon—where have you gone? Come back to me.
Ana, staring at the quilt covers blurring together, was thinking: If you act like a mother, you will feel like a mother. She chose one that felt soft in her hand.
Then she finds herself back in the basement apartment, her bedroom just large enough for a twin bed and a dresser, the window an air slot up high. She is eleven or twelve, blowing between groups of girls at school, back and forth, following the dictates of the girl who rules them all, Tracy with the large breasts and pink sweaters and thick lips like a wrung-out tea towel.
Ana has consented to bring home Tracy and another girl, named Siobhan. Siobhan is dark—black Irish, she likes to say, an image that conjures up African American leprechauns to other children—and bewildered, except that there is a clot of meanness at her center. She will forever be known as the girl who didn’t mind putting her hands on the dead pigeon and flinging it furiously into the bushes.
For this, Siobhan has become Tracy’s second. How did they get here? Ana can’t imagine she invited them, but there they are, they who only tolerate Ana because when she arrived at the school in the middle of the year, near Christmas—her fourth transfer in seven years—a boy named Matthew, a boy who mattered, told another boy that “the new girl is cute.” Cute is the most desired currency, and Ana was allowed in. But maybe she is too cute, or not cruel enough or funny enough, because there is no small amount of irritation circling her presence in the group. Still, the girls persist in pursuing her for now, overlooking her oddness in favor of the cute, and she does what is required to keep the scales tipped her way. She fulfills their tasks.
Tracy tells her to walk up to another girl—a girl with a sweaty forehead and sweaters that cradle the fat rolls on her back—and say: “You should tell Jason Cowie you want to kiss him. He really likes you.” Ana does this thing, with a grim stomach, but for a few days, she does not have to worry. She is tolerated again.
And then, on a bright spring day, Tracy and Siobhan are behind Ana, two steps belowground at the front of the house, at the door of the basement apartment. She has never taken anyone here before, has not even unpacked her second suitcase. But she has succeeded in humiliating the fat girl, and this visit is her reward. A wave of worry washes over her as she takes the rainbow-striped shoelace around her neck and puts the key in the lock. The door gives, unlocked after all.
Inside, an empty ashtray on the coffee table sits next to two glasses, wet streaked with melting ice. Everything else is sparse. It’s not that they haven’t unpacked yet, it’s that they don’t have much to unpack. There’s a television on a wheeled stand and a beige corduroy couch, both belonging to the landlord. Empty walls. But her mother’s African violets line the windowsill. Any new apartment must have one sunny window where they can sit, rotated a quarter turn every other day. Her mother plucks the dead outer leaves, and uses a toothbrush to remove grains of soil from the fresh foliage. Once a week, Ana and her mother carry the pots into the bathroom where the hot shower is running and the mirror lined from steam. “How are my babies?” murmurs her mother, and now Ana does this, too, when her mother is off teaching her ESL night classes, and she hears the feet of the landlord’s family overhead. “How are my babies?” Ana murmurs.
“Who lives upstairs?” demands Tracy.
“I don’t know,” says Ana, high-pitched. She is looking at her mother’s closed door, wondering if she’s awake, if she’ll come out and see her. The place is so small that if Ana turns her body here in the living room, she can see all of the little kitchen, and the time on the stove: 3:45.
“I gotta whiz,” says Siobhan.
“I’ll show you my room,” says Ana, but they only have to walk a few steps from the living room to the bedroom, banging into one another.
“Nice poster,” says Tracy, and Ana combs the comment for sarcasm. She looks at the poster with Tracy’s eyes: a pink satin toe shoe balancing on an egg. Ana has never taken ballet in her life. Her mother had a boyfriend last year who gave it to her for Christmas. He was a dancer once.
They are in her room long enough to complete this exchange before Ana notices the bundle under the blankets on her bed. She sees it heaving, face covered. Ana breathes quickly, spins on her axis, tries to lead Tracy out of the room. At that moment, a scream from down the hall, and Siobhan appears, jumping up and down, her arms flapping, a yell that sets off a yell in Tracy, and there they are, the three of them in the tiny hallway, two screaming and one frozen in anticipation.
“Your dad’s in the bathroom! He’s in the tub! He’s totally naked!” Siobhan’s eyes like planets.
Her dad? It can’t be; he’s gone, gone away. But a small part of Ana thinks Siobhan knows something she doesn’t, thinks: Maybe today, maybe—and shoves the girls to get past in the dollhouse dimensions of the basement apartment.
“Watch it!” shouts Siobhan, and Ana, for once, ignores a command, flinging her body through the open door to the bathroom. There is a man in the bathtub, but the bathtub is empty of water, and the man is not her father. He is older, with a thatch of gray pubic hair, a flaccid penis hanging to the side, an afterthought. His hand flops over the edge of the tub. He’s dead, thinks Ana, matter-of-factly, and she wonders if she should draw the shower curtain, like in police procedurals on TV.
“He’s dead,” she says out loud.
Behind her, their bodies against hers in the little room, Tracy has her hand over her mouth, moaning softly. Siobhan is alert, electrified.
“Don’t be stupid. He’s breathing,” says Siobhan, and she is right: The spilling stomach, lined with hair, rises and falls. The natural order of things.
It is this, the breathing, that infuriates Ana, that shifts her mood from terror to rage.
“Go outside. I’ll meet you,” she says—growls, really, and the girls halt their flapping, surprised to hear Ana, pretty Ana, issue a feral order. They obey, stumbling over each other, and Ana hears their footsteps running, the slamming of the door.
The man’s legs are folded, his feet under the taps. Ana gags as she reaches past his toenails and quickly turns on the water, cold, pulls the lever so it comes pouring out of the shower. She pulls the curtain shut, a sound like a train whistling past that covers just a little the scream of the man, the “FUUUUUUUCK” that shakes the thin walls of the bathroom. Ana slams the door behind her.
In her room, she pulls back the quilt on her bed. Her mother has pink underwear on, a thin white T-shirt. Bruises are spaced up and down her legs like piano keys. Her helplessness repulses Ana; the incongruity of her mother’s size in her little bed.
Ana leans over her. Quietly, she says: “Mom, Mommy, Mom,” and her mother murmurs, rolls, and goes still again. Down the hall, she hears the man stumbling, falling against the little corridor, cursing to himself. Ana imagines the girls outside constructing their story, waiting to pass it along the corridors of the school, to use it to maneuver Ana into a corner where she has nothing, where she will grovel not to be lonely.
And in this moment, Ana—who has wept for dead caterpillars in jars, who has nodded and agreed and packed and unpacked and arrived in new classrooms again and again, genial, amicable, okay with it, the most remarkable, adaptable, malleable daughter!—that Ana exits her body, and a new one settles in. This new one arrives in the split second where she lifts up her open palm and brings it down, down, a cartoon anvil from the sky dropped upon her mother’s face, a cheek that jiggles pathetically beneath the weight of Ana’s fury. Good. She wants it red, wants it bleeding, down to the bone.
Her mother’s eyes flash open, confused. “What—?” She stares at Ana with the blankness that will define her later, in her dementia, right up until her death. “Ana—” But Ana can’t look at her, and she is moving down the hall, past the naked hulk of a man in the living room searching on his hands and knees, a glimpsed shadow that Ana refuses to focus on. She grabs her backpack off the kitchen chair and the rainbow shoelace that holds her key. She opens the door to the bright day, the smell of lavender and gasoline.
Tracy and Siobhan are still there, staring at her, wondering how far this transition will go. The new Ana, coarse and livid, stays with them the entire afternoon, as the three girls walk the neighborhood, buying fried chicken and potato salad and Coke at a fast-food place. They carry all of this to the park, eating atop the jungle gym, scaring away the little kids.
When they are finished, Ana says: “I’m staying up here. Show me something funny.” She is trying it on. The girls glance at each other; they are unnerved enough that they are willing to obey, for a while longer anyway.
They climb down, and from the top of the jungle gym, Ana watches as Tracy throws her legs over a bar on the swing set and turns upside down, hanging from her knees, back and forth, her arms folded across her chest. Siobhan finds a patch of grass, juts one leg in front of her, throws her hands to the ground and begins flipping her body up into the sky, then back down again; a perfect handspring. One into the next, as if she could go all the way home like this, as if she could start a new human race where everyone walked on their hands, spun with joy from moment to moment.
When she stops, finally, she makes an exaggerated Y shape with her body, like an Olympian, facing Ana in the role of judge. Ana gives her nothing, nods, knowing that boredom is the only right response with these girls.
But she is reeling. The heat of her sore hand spreads through her whole body, up the top of her head, where it pours down over her forehead, into her eyes. The heat combines with the sensation that she has become totally disconnected, as if she is dangling with one hand from the sun. She wants Siobhan to keep flipping, out into traffic, hands first, into a car. She realizes suddenly that she has been bracing herself, living her whole life in anticipation of the bloodiest, most gruesome disaster. Maybe it has happened today.
The sun sets, and the two girls go off, walking west, backpacks bobbing. Ana walks in the dark, past shops that are closing, through the courtyard of a small church. Cars are parking; fathers emerging; teenagers with hockey bags over their shoulders and ballet slippers in their hands. This is when Ana sees the woman get out of her Audi, high heels over black stockings, a gray pencil skirt. This is a businesswoman.
Ana stops, and sees herself in the woman’s eyes: a girl in a pink ski jacket, blond hair and bangs. She knows already that if she didn’t look like this, it is unlikely that she could stop and stare without being chased away. If she had gray teeth; if she were ugly—then what?
The woman gives her a small, puzzled smile and opens the backseat door. She leans in and backs up with a baby in her hands. Over her other shoulder, the woman has an overstuffed purse, and she balances these two things in the smeared beige early evening, striding toward her home with its porch light on. Its plain redbrick facade is almost identical to the house that Ana and her mother have just moved into. She imagines it might have an identical basement apartment. Who might be down there?
James was searching for a place to park.
“Look at that bastard,” he said. “He’s taking up two spaces! It’s so contemptuous! Where’s his humanity?”
Ana nodded, not certain to what he was referring.
“Car!” cried Finn.
“You guys get out here, and I’ll circle around,” said James.
Ana did what she was told, unclipping Finn and letting him go ahead of her up the walkway. James, glancing from the car, thought: Take his hand, Ana, take his hand.
Inside the house, Finn lobbed himself onto the living room couch and sat, legs straight out in front of him. Ana dropped the shopping bags of Finn things: the plastic-wrapped blue sheets; the owl-printed quilt cover. She sat opposite Finn on a white club chair, divided from him by a glass coffee table. Suddenly, Ana was exhausted. She gave in to that pulling, that dark, stuffed feeling in her gut. Sarah, she thought, Sarah. She felt without gravity.
Finn was picking at the beads on a throw pillow, puzzling over Ana’s expression across from him. This was how James found them when he entered. He stopped at the strange configuration of Finn’s concerned expression and Ana, head in her hands.
He went to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. She grabbed it hard, and looked up, a slash of sadness across her face.
“I’ll make dinner,” said James. Ana nodded.
“I come,” said Finn, sliding off the chair. He held out his hand and James dropped Ana’s to grab it, pulling up Finn to his chest like a monkey plucking a baby from a tree branch.
“That’s quite a move,” said Ana, trying to bring some lightness. But James and Finn were already in the kitchen, too far away to hear her.
After leaving Finn at daycare, James began walking. He realized that he had not returned to the scene of his firing in weeks and felt a little burst of pride.
James walked past a bleak stretch of tile stores and boarded-up facades. Then, the changes. Two coffee shops side by side: One, a chain with COFFEE written in a yellow-and-maroon font on a grimy awning. A few dry doughnuts on a shelf were enough to draw the old men, thought James. They all sat alone. One worked the belly of a doughnut with his fingers, gazing into space.
And then, a new place—James felt instantly slighted that he had not seen it before, considering that since he’d been fired, he was on these streets all day, every day—filled with people who looked like younger versions of himself, men with beards and laptops, women in black sweaters. These patrons sipped from garage sale mismatched coffee cups, caught in the glow of computer screens. Their feet rested on thick pine planks meant to remind urban people of barns, of something purposeful and only accidentally beautiful.
James caught a glimpse of himself in the large mirror over the bar. The angle caught its own reflection in another mirror across the room, so that James could exactly see the back of his head, right there, floating like a balloon above the gleaming Italian espresso machine. This always ruined his day. His hand rose to the spot, and then dropped quickly, embarrassed by the possibility of being caught. It would have been different, he thought, if he hadn’t looked the way he had when he was young. He had always considered himself exempt, and now—this thickening of everything below the neck, this thinning of everything above.
His concern was the most revolting part. He wasn’t that kind of guy, was he? The kind of guy who cared about losing his hair? What was he, a woman? He knew better. He’d interviewed a blind woman who climbed Mount Everest! He’d been to the Gaza Strip (or on a helicopter that flew above it, at least)! He had perspective! And yet, and yet—oh, how it used to be: those girls in university, the plain ones who unbuttoned their pastel polo shirts to reveal the bodies of strippers. All that, just for him, because he was kind, or kind enough, and asked one or two questions, and paid for a beer—and then all that body, all the consent to enter and be risen—oh, it was easy.
Until Ana, who was tightly buttoned at first, the friend of a friend of a friend, connections all lost to him now.
Then James set to work: James in the hallway of the law school. James on the doorstep of her apartment. James finally cast as listener, and meeting her mother—her mother, for Chrissake—he had never met a girl’s mother before. Ana’s was drunk. On the subway ride home, Ana burned with anger and James wanted to put his hand down her pants and push through her, bring her moaning back to him, but he put a protective arm around her shoulder instead.
But what he liked most, maybe, was that once he had Ana, once he could lean close to her and watch other men’s eyes flutter in defeat—what he liked most was that he meant it. That he did actually love her. She was strong, but she could be very still, and he craved that. She was never desperate for anyone’s approval, and casually comfortable in the demimonde she’d grown up in. They attended parties with her mother’s friends, artists and poets, in the kinds of book-lined downtown houses that James had dreamed about from the distance of his suburban childhood. Ana’s mother could make her daughter laugh just like James could, teasing her for being the sell-out daughter, beloved and feared for her efficiency.
And when he wasn’t with her, he still got the glances, still pushed at the edges of his manner to see if he could get the woman to bend her head back, a throaty laugh, the slight spreading of the fingers around a glass, or the knees in a skirt. James knew: If I wanted it … He fed on that If, even now that the women he saw most often were the wives of his friends or the aging producers at his old office. A line from a poet he’d interviewed: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.”
The women he considered his peers were changing; he had noticed a shift in silhouette, a meatiness between the ass and the knee that didn’t exist before, the shape of a traffic cone. Soon they would revert to their ethnic stereotypes, these once exotic Italian and Portuguese women. In a decade or so, they would look like snow women, circles on circles. His mother, once petite, now sported the body of an old Yugoslavian woman in the hills. But not Ana, with her hollows. Not Ana.
It didn’t matter how gorgeous his wife was, because he needed, still, the collective giggle of the young women whose lives were just beginning and who let him in under the mistaken assumption that he had some grown-up wisdom to impart about what came next. He needed it through the wedding, and the rise and fall of Ana’s attachment to him, the wane of their sex life, the renovations of the house. He needed that small, cooing possibility.
So how had he missed the moment when it stopped? He couldn’t pinpoint precisely when his presence in a room began to generate boredom, or when the women got even younger, and the Jessicas became Emmas. At the staff party last Christmas, the handful of pretty young girls were text messaging the whole time, heads bowed. They couldn’t keep eye contact. In the months before he was let go, one of them, Ariel, had begun doing segments for his show. She pitched gauzy academic takes on lowbrow subjects: Is Hip-Hop Dead? Teens and Sexting. Why We Need Cute Animals on the Internet. She had a Tumblr, Sly told him. She “repurposed content.”
During interviews, she seemed to be always laughing or on the cusp of laughing. She was furiously short and wore an array of colored scarves, shooting her own work on a handheld camera, writing and producing herself. James remembered when he was surrounded by a cadre of writers and producers and directors and cameramen, a different person for every job. They were all expected to be one-man bands now. What had happened to those guys? Technology had shrunk the world. He made a mental list of all the things that had vanished because of the Internet: newspaper boys; breathless first meetings; the slips of paper he used as a teenager to withdraw money from the bank. These were all things Finn would never know, and that these girls had already forgotten.
At the party, the young women’s eyes had skimmed his body with tolerance, stopping on Sly—Those ties! Those tasseled loafers!—with flat-out revulsion. They all had long straight hair, as if there had been a conference to decide, a hairstyle colloquium. James, wearing an Arcade Fire T-shirt under his blazer, had caught a glimpse of himself in a window and found he had no idea what he had been trying to achieve. He’d left the party early to watch the Leafs on TV.
In the café, James positioned himself so that none of the mirrors caught his bald spot. He had his laptop open, the cursor on the blank space blinking. If terrorism exists, what does it look like? Delete. The earliest known terrorists were the Zealots of Judea. Faced with the prospect of the erosion of their Jewish belief in the hands of an idolatrous Roman—
Faced and hands? Would anyone care about this? Maybe fiction. Maybe a screenplay, about police corruption. He remembered hearing about a local police captain who used to dangle criminals from windows by their ankles. Serpico-ish. Could that be something?
“Wow, you look really serious,” said a figure from above, and James began at the feet, eyes moving up the black boots, tights, the long leather jacket with the coffee in hand. Short, unpainted fingernails curved around its sides.
“Emma,” he said, and she smiled her red-lipped smile. Her hair was in a ponytail, which had the effect of making her look even younger. She didn’t ask to sit but was suddenly next to him. He shut his laptop.
“I read that book you gave me,” she said, taking off her jacket.
“You did?” He shifted his features into something meaningful, hoping to hide the fact that he couldn’t remember what it was.
“What’s going on with you? Everybody said you vanished.”
James decided to ignore the question. “Did you like the book?”
Emma nodded. “I think so. It seemed a little”—she paused—“outdated. ‘The meaning of television.’ I mean, really—television? Does anyone even watch television?”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said James, sipping his Americano. “Wait, you work in television.”
“I’m in digital, remember?”
James nodded and recalled Emma badgering him to blog about his interviews. She had called his footage “content.”
“So what’s up?” she asked again.
He answered like an echoing cave: “What’s up with you?”
“I’m down to part-time. I got a grant to complete my art.”
“What kind of art do you do?” asked James, instantly imagining sculpture involving silicone vaginas or a performance piece where Emma sat atop a pile of rotting meat for days at a time.
“Photography. Okay, third time: What the hell are you up to?” Emma shifted her body closer to him, leaned forward a little. James recognized this as flirtation and flushed accordingly.
Emma smelled like food, mangos or cinnamon, a perfume from an oily antique bottle found at a flea market.
James smiled. “I’m playing dad to a friend’s kid.”
“Single dad?”
James’s smile retreated.
“What? No, I’m married.” There. He’d said it.
“You said, ‘I’m playing dad,’ like it was just about you,” said Emma, sipping coffee through a take-out lid.
“Well, my wife doesn’t play dad. She’s, you know, she’s the mom.” This sounded even worse in tandem with Emma’s remote, blank expression in front of him. “That’s all I meant. Don’t look for subtext, you denizen of the post-post-modern generation.” She laughed, even threw back her head. Bull’s-eye.
“Where’s your friend at, the kid’s real dad?” Why the slightly ghetto vernacular among this generation? James was fairly certain that Emma had gone to a liberal arts college somewhere in the Northeast. Swarthmore?
He considered the question, answered slowly. “The boy, Finn, his father died. His mom’s in the hospital. There was … this accident,” he said, surprised to find the words catch in his throat, surprised because the catch was totally sincere, but also surprised by how well it worked (the old James recognized the panty-loosening effect of this confession, while the present one was proud of himself for being honest with a pretty woman). Emma blinked, put down her coffee, and shook her head: “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he said. She looked at him closely, as if anticipating something more. “His daycare’s right over there, so I’m going to pick him up later. I came here to write.”
“How old is he?”
“He’s two. Almost two and a half.” And then James couldn’t stop himself: “He’s a really gentle kid, but I don’t know when it’s going to back up on him. He seems okay, and his teacher said he’s doing well. He knows the alphabet and can count to fifteen, which I looked up online and the number thing, that’s advanced, actually. His dad was an engineer, so maybe that’s why. I didn’t really know Marcus that well, that’s the strangest part of this. I knew Finn’s mom, a long time ago. She dated my roommate, but I barely remember her. She remembered me—”
Emma nodded, frowning. What am I saying? wondered James. What is this?
“Anyhoo,” he said.
Emma looked at her watch, started to put on her coat.
“I live just over there,” she said, pointing across the street to a Portuguese bakery.
“Among the flans?” asked James, with immediate regret. Not funny, not sharp. Emma ignored the awkwardness.
“Above, actually, in the apartment with the green door,” she said, rising, tightening her scarf. “Come by sometime and I’ll show you my pictures. You might like them.” James felt certain that was not true, though he thrilled at the invitation. He tried to imagine Emma’s apartment. Would she have milk crates for furniture, like he did at that age? A futon? Somehow he doubted that kids in their twenties lived like that anymore. He couldn’t smell poverty on them. Their teeth were very white. Emma’s jacket looked as expensive as Ana’s.
She leaned in and gave him a double kiss. He sat very still as she did this, aware that if he so much as moved his head, all bets were off, lips would brush lips, and then what else might touch? He was hungry enough, tired enough of Ana’s trail of gentle pushes and rejections, so tired that he might throw a little tongue in there. And then a whorl moving toward the green door above the flans.
He waved at her through the plate glass window of the café, watching as she was absorbed into the accepting crowd.
Ann Silvan moved slowly through the house, as if she might buy it. Ana and James trailed her, up-selling: “I tightened this railing,” said James. “Just to be safe.” Finn waited at the top of the stairs. “Hellooooo!” he called. Ana noticed that he was barefoot. It felt too cold in the house for barefoot. Would this be marked down on the social worker’s notepad?
Ann Silvan walked slowly around the room that Ana had made for Finn. She glanced out the window at the half-finished yard. She asked how he was sleeping, eating, how much he cried.
“You should probably get a safety rail for the bed,” she said.
“What’s that?” asked James.
“A plastic rail, to prevent tumbling. Any toy store will have one. You just tuck it between the mattress and the frame.”
“I put cushions down at night, in case he rolls out,” said Ana.
“A rail is better,” said Ann Silvan.
Finn jumped up and down on the bed. Ana stared at his bare feet; should she immediately go and fetch socks?
Then Ann Silvan asked: “What time do you get home from work, Ana?”
“Oh, it depends,” said Ana. (When had she felt this naked, this tiny? A job interview? An oral exam? Oh, yes—wheeled into the operating room, looking at the panels on the ceiling. The silence of the nurses with their burka eyes peering over their masks, holding the plastic cap of gas over Ana’s mouth. And what they said they did to her: sliced her stomach open like an envelope and put a tiny camera in there, dropped it down like a periscope to peer around at all the bad news. Yes, thought Ana, this felt a little like that.)
Said Ana: “Right before arbitration, or, you know, a closing, then I stay a bit later.” Ann Silvan looked confused. “But usually six. Earlier if I can.” She was shaving hours off her day the way her mother had shaved years off her age. James cleared his throat.
“I’m here, though. I’m with him all the time,” said James.
“When he’s not at daycare,” Ann Silvan corrected him. Then she smiled. “May I spend a little time with Finn alone? Just a few minutes.”
Ana and James nodded.
