Amor and Psycho: Stories (12 page)

“I still think I’m special,” the tiny woman with the lollipop said. “You know, God used to talk to me, sit down inside me and say, ‘Well, Lila, how are we doing?’ That went on until I had my children. I don’t blame Him for giving me a little trouble, He knows I can handle it. Or else there’s some other reason.”

The man in the wheelchair said, “I used to think I was solid all the way through. No organs, no bones. Same on the inside as on the outside. Skin all through. Not so far off—now I got no bones,” he said, and they all laughed.

Fay put away her photographs and picked up a magazine. Sura took a pen and a pad from her purse and made a list of things she needed: a new pink bath mat, a bag of spinach, a salad spinner with a cord you pulled, photograph albums
for the day she finally got around to putting her pictures in books, which would be harder for her children to steal without her noticing. When the good nurse, Julie, came to the door with her clipboard, Sura stood up automatically, as if, somewhere, a button had been pushed. Fay said, “Why don’t you complain, Mom? You let Dr. Frank walk all over you, keeping you here for two hours. You’re the
client
.” But Sura didn’t think of herself as a client; she thought of herself as a
patient
, and anyway, she didn’t mind waiting. She waited for Dr. Frank with a kind of attention she couldn’t gather at any other time, as if waiting well might bring a reward.

She followed Julie down the narrow hall, past the chemo patients sitting under their bags of cisplatin and Adriamycin, and felt a strange longing to be among them, having chemotherapy together while Dr. Frank worked in his office nearby. Sura had hated chemo, the depression, the anxiety and the sickness, finding herself at Longs as if waking up from a dream with a shoe tree in her cart. After the first time, the count of platelets in her blood fell so low that she needed three transfusions, and she worried to Dr. Frank that she might get AIDS. Dr. Frank said, “Don’t worry about AIDS. You’ve just got cancer, Sura.” And now she wanted it; she felt a hunger for the wire in her Broviac, and the antidote and the hydration and the nausea. She wanted to be there, with the other cancer patients doing their protocols together, in the hall.

Dr. Frank told her how well she’d taken the chemo, how determined and strong she’d been. But her white blood
count neared zero. Red, too. Shots would bring the counts up, but he knew she wanted the truth. They’d tried everything. The idea had been to give her some time.

“Right!” she assured him. “Time’s what I want.”

FAY DROVE
her home. Sura tried to remember which of her children had had scarlet fever, which one would eat only tuna fish. It was so long ago she was a young mother with a child hanging from her hip, the legs wrapped around her waist. The years she herself had been a child still felt more real than the years she had been a mother. She thought of her mother brushing out her hair at night by the warm stove, and then, more dimly, of herself, brushing Fay’s hair. She remembered how, last summer at the Elderhostel, the female ape had leaned into the male, plucking at his hairy shoulders, and how Sophie, the night before she died, had painted her toenails in their dormitory room in Seattle after dinner.

“I want to take that clock I told you about back to Longs, if you’ve got time,” she told Fay.

“I’ve got time,” Fay said—but then she took the clock into the store herself and left Sura in the car. “I know you, you’ll lose yourself for an hour,” she said.

“Get me one made in America or China, I don’t care,” Sura told her.

Once Fay had disappeared through the electronic doors, Sura climbed out of the car and walked along the ell of the minimall. The Isle of Wigs was kitty-corner from the
Waxing-Manicure. The Vietnamese women did the best waxing. They had a private room in back where you lay down on a table that was covered with a clean white sheet. One of the women leaned over you and brushed out your eyebrows with a tiny black brush. She put one hand on your ankle, very calm and steady—she had to be. But Sura didn’t need those women anymore.

She tugged at the kerchief on her head and released it, stuffed it into her purse. Her leg buzzed beneath her. She felt the sun beating down on her head. It felt good, the hot sun beaming down from the indifferent blue sky.

She opened the door and went inside. The woman behind the counter had on the same baseball cap she’d worn the last time Sura saw her—and the time before that. Across the bill of the cap Sura read the words:
I
’
M OUT OF ESTROGEN—AND I
’
VE GOT A GUN
.

“I know you. You bought the bob,” the woman said.

“And the pixie!” Sura told her, hearing the shrillness in her voice. She walked quickly to the rows of Styrofoam heads and stood before them, looking at the chiseled faces, the empty eyes, the white lips, the human hair.

“And now you want something a little more—”

Sura fastened her eyes on the heads. “I don’t want anything,” she said. “Just looking.”

This man—Froyd—is constructing a postmodern doghouse designed by an architect in Brazil. Froyd doesn’t yet own a dog. His role: patronal, advisory. The hired carpenter works in the yard below, laying joists for an outbuilding ten feet wide, twelve feet long and ten feet tall (just small enough not to require a building permit). Plans call for a pine frame sheathed in low-grade plywood and metal siding. The structure will sit thirty feet from the house where Froyd lives with his wife and daughter and a neglected betta fish.

The structure’s windows all point west, not to the southeast, where a more energy-aware person would put them. This irritable thought bleeds from the brain of the carpenter, who spent the morning sawing galvanized metal for the doggy door. That job brought small irritations to the surface. The carpenter considers the aesthetic pains the Brazilian
architect has taken with the design of this outbuilding/doghouse a kind of insult against craftsmanship. The doghouse irritates the carpenter on at least two fronts, being both a cheaply built outbuilding and an extravagant doghouse—a willful marriage of bad ideas. The carpenter has long tried to liberate his career from inefficient traditional construction (tarted up in galvanized metal and Plexi) and start his own hay-bale construction business. Working with the noisy, awkward metal sheathing and flashing reminds him that he still lives with his dazzlingly gorgeous blond wife and two blond boys in a thirty-year-old trailer and has been living this way for the past six years.

Froyd, on the other hand, finds the structure beautiful and modest. Two of the front-facing walls, composed almost entirely of wide sheets of Plexi, offer vistas of the redwoods, which contribute to his property’s aesthetic and resale value.

Every half hour or so, Froyd checks the progress of the building by making a pot of coffee for the carpenter and chatting with him for a few minutes—or by looking out the window from his upstairs office. (He has to stand, lean a hand on his desk and crane his neck.) Earlier this morning, Froyd positioned himself for one such look, spilled a jar of pens and cried out in frustration. The carpenter, caught in the act of lighting one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, met Froyd’s eye and smiled aggressively.

This tiny shame has not abated yet. It pricks at Froyd. Why should a man apologize for looking at his own doghouse?
Even the carpenter (who tried to guilt-trip him into a lugubrious hay-bale “alternative”) stands back, looking at the house, judging it. From the tilt of the carpenter’s head and from the cigarette smoke billowing around his face, Froyd discerns that the carpenter might be contemptuous, or envious.

Froyd’s friend Palmer recommended this carpenter, a favor Froyd appreciated early and regretted immediately, as the unnecessary intimacy of the connection feeds Froyd’s paranoid fantasy that the carpenter might mention something to Palmer—something compromising—about Froyd. “He seemed anxious and defensive the whole time,” the carpenter might tell Palmer, or “He kept staring at me”—neither of which is true.

While keeping half an eye—a quarter!—on the progress of the doghouse, Froyd prepares a lecture for a course he teaches in the city, a course on forms. In it, Froyd attempts to prove that traditional forms are still the most radical ones. Although he works up his usual heat in arguing this position, Froyd no longer really believes it; he feels contemptuous of the new forms (the constraints and chance patterns) that have replaced the despised forms he knows. In this, Froyd identifies with the hay-bale-loving carpenter, contemptuous of traditional techniques—concrete foundation, floor joists, wall studs, eight-foot ceilings, and suspicious of new architecture. The hay-bale carpenter rages passively against the dumb tradition that proclaims its supremacy over more
interesting, more original forms simply by replicating itself again and again—house after house built facing any which way instead of south-southeast, so that a woman reading a book at eleven o’clock in the morning has to burn fossil fuels to make out the words. A similar idea—about forms generally and forms of building in particular—flits like a line of text across the screen of Froyd’s mind, and he skims the line as it passes.

Days have passed, and the question remains: Why a doghouse? Froyd needs one, although he doesn’t own a dog. He doesn’t own a dog for the obvious reason that he doesn’t yet have a doghouse. He explained this to the carpenter, who asked. He explained it to his daughter, who asked—repeatedly—for the dog.

When the dog does come, the perfect Plexi sheets will be scratched by the animal’s urgent toenails and muddied by paws, breath and drool. Over time, the Plexi will yellow, too—but for now, at this moment, Froyd looks at what he still thinks of as “the doghouse I built for my dog,” or “the doghouse I built for my kid,” or “the doghouse we put up”—the jocular “we” leaving a generous space around the structure, which is, after all, part of this gift to his wife and his daughter—a doghouse with a dog in it. Every time Froyd looks out the window, though, the harder it is to imagine a dog in the doghouse. Froyd steals another peek at the construction, leaning over his computer, with its cursor blinking over the words “alienated labor, power structures of late
capitalism,” and cranes his neck until he can see the man to whom he is paying carpenters’ wages, whose broad tanned back faces Froyd as he hangs Sheetrock on the walls. What Froyd sees is not a doghouse, but a place of possibilities.

The one possibility Froyd cannot see as he stares through the windows is (frankly) a dog staring back at him, one paw raised dumbly to scratch at the invisible boundary. He considers the porous border between inside and outside, the irrepressible urge to be where one is not. He tries to conjure a dog indistinct enough to be Everydog, and yet particular enough so that Froyd can hear, precisely, the sound of its toe claws on the expensive, fragile plastic.

“
WHEN ARE WE GOING
to get a dog?” Froyd’s daughter asks. She has crept up behind him quietly and caught him peering out at the carpenter. (He should simply have planted himself before the window, his hands behind his back in an attitude of repose, and freely surveyed his creation. “Accept and use your madness,” some mad Beat poet once said.)

The top of his daughter’s head, he realizes with a touch of horror, comes up to his elbow. Could I have shrunk so far already? he wonders.

Froyd smiles. “It’s more complicated than you think.”

Froyd’s daughter’s eyes narrow. “Why is it complicated? I’ve lived without a dog for nine years. You promised.”

Later, she writes Froyd a note and leaves it on the keyboard
of his computer, where his lecture waits, rebuking him. “For my birthday I would like a small, brown, medium-size dog. PLEASE do this one thing for me.”

Froyd hates the dog already.

MRS. FROYD FINALLY GETS DOWN
on all fours, an extension of the yoga she took up in pregnancy, stretching, saluting, elongating, opening. In this position, she feels more in tune with her animal nature. She insists on eating outside. The first time he sees her on the porch, crouching over a bowl, he calls sharply, “Get a spoon!” She has always been critical herself where manners are concerned.

She still dresses every day—good!—and seems cured, too, of the compulsive hand washing. He feels, even, that she could wash
more
—hands and feet. She sleeps with him in the bed.

Froyd does not confide in his friend Palmer. Fear stops him. Instead, he asks, “You know how you fool yourself, thinking a situation will resolve itself? You think you’re trying new strategies and they seem to be working?”

“What new strategies have you got?” asks Palmer, himself a desperate man. His wife has a life all apart from Palmer, a spirit world of witchy dust and trickster animals.

“I’ve got nothing really,” Froyd says.

His wife has changed. She pads around barefoot, covered with dirt and mud, and collapses on the white slipcovers. The behavior continues even after he speaks to her reasonably.
She just lies under the potted cactus, gnawing on a knucklebone big as her head.

“Do you know how much fat is in one of those?” he asks her. But she simply looks at him with her greeny yellow eyes and chews. Later she skulks off with the bone and comes back with dirt on her nose.

In bed, she licks his face with her tongue as he mounts and thrusts into her. It’s the hottest sex they’ve had in a long time. Afterward, she rolls against him and holds up her stomach to be stroked. Froyd looks at his wife, and his face goes cold. He sits up suddenly. “Get off the bed,” he says.

“Off!” he shouts.

She looks at him—stubborn, hurt. He reaches over and pushes her firmly. She tumbles to the floor. She scratches behind one ear, bends impossibly, licks his juices from her hind parts, curls up into a fetal position and sleeps.

The next night, he offers her a cushion beside the bed, but she seems to prefer the doghouse in the backyard. She even uses the doggy door, comes and goes as she likes.

Froyd has spent some time imagining the kind of man he might become if he had a dog—the kind of man who is firm but fair, the kind of man who throws a ball overhand for an hour before dinner. He feels his daughter should take some responsibility; if she can’t even take the food bowl to the doghouse in the morning and the evening, and change the water, then—what then?