The Dream of Doctor Bantam (2 page)

What were you and Mom fighting about? she said.

Tabitha sighed and held her cigarette next to her face. Smoke misted over her eyes.

Dumb stuff, she said. She’s kind of a bitch, our mom. She works too hard. I don’t ever want to work that hard. She doesn’t come down on you so much because you’re the baby. She will.

She dragged on her cigarette and Julie squinted at her.

If I told you I was dropping out of school, Tabitha asked, would you try to talk me out of it?

Julie shrugged. It seemed too remote to take seriously.

I guess, it’s fine, she said. I mean I guess it’s your decision.

But would you want to make it, you know, your decision? Tabitha asked. Be honest with me.

I am honest, said Julie. Fuck you. And it’s your decision.

Tabitha frowned, stubbed out her cigarette, frowned again, re-lit it.

It’s what I need to do, she said. School isn’t going to do anything more for me. I’m not a school kind of person. I don’t know what kind of person I am.

So figure it out, Julie snapped.

Tabitha laughed, but only for a second before the wistful, weak expression Julie hated seeing came back over her. The lingonberry pancakes arrived, butter and pink sauce pooling at their volcanic center. Tabitha looked at them, let her sad smile droop even more.

Sure, said Julie. Quit school.

Do you ever think, asked Tabitha, about what it would be like to get outside of time?

Julie blinked at her.

Like a non-Einsteinian universe? she asked.

I don’t know what that means, said Tabitha. No, I mean more like: you’re a kid now. Anything you do at all, like literally anything, is great. You’re just figuring out how to be alive and be happy. But the older you get the more the bar rises for you. People just expect you to know how to be alive already. Now they start to care more about
how
you’re living, if you’re living in a good way or not.

She yawned, stretched her arms over her head.

And maybe you don’t even know how to be alive and happy in the first place, she said. God, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’d just be nice to be outside of time for a little while. Just to stop and look around and notice things. Just to figure out where to go. Just not to exist for a little while.

She looked down at the lingonberries, smiled again, and started to eat the butter and fruit off of the top.

I mean, do you ever think like that? she asked.

Julie remembered all of a sudden when she had been seven, and Tabitha had been ten, and they’d gotten lost on the way home from the park, and Tabitha had carried her on her shoulders as they walked along the frontage road of the highway home: the cars came roaring at them like trumpets greeting kings, and Julie held on tighter and tighter, her sister’s scent rising from the back of her tiny neck.

No, she said. I think that’s a pretty twisted way to think, actually.

Tabitha closed her eyes, chewed a lingonberry, violently shook her head.

Don’t give me that, she said, and suddenly her eyes opened right on Julie, the eyeliner dark and storming. You’re closer to me than anyone in the world. You have to know what I’m thinking. You have to.

She took a bite of the pancakes, her cigarette burning away to ash in her hand.

Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I’m thinking, she said.

Julie watched Tabitha eat. She waited six bites, then reached out for the pack of Camels on the table. Tabitha stabbed down at her hand with a buttery fork; Julie yelped and pulled her hand away.

Don’t you dare, Tabitha said.

I just wanted to hold one, Julie said. God.

If you don’t start something, said Tabitha, you don’t have to quit something. I really believe that.

Julie sulked in her chair.

Earlier you said there was no point in doing anything that you didn’t have to quit eventually, she said.

I really believe that too, Tabitha said, licking lingonberry sauce off of her lips.

Julie kept quiet as Tabitha ate all of the pancakes and drank three glasses of water, then started to talk about Ira, how they’d met and how he was always talking about publishing this terrible zine and how he was a huge board game geek and everything. She stayed quiet as Tabitha paid and drove her home, quiet as Tabitha dropped her off in front of the house and waved to her over the steering wheel, Pumpkins blaring, then drove off, Julie guessed to Ira’s house, where hopefully the door was unlocked and the bed was half empty, or half full. Julie watched her sister’s taillights fade, then walked back across the lawn, dew from the approaching morning collecting on the fires at her cuffs. Linda was snoring down the hallway. The blue light of the TV mixed with the blue light of the coming dawn.

She wore the pants three times to school after that until she tore a huge hole in the knee and had to retire them. On the day after her seventeenth birthday—her long hair long gone, cropped and tortured into a Wendy O. Williams cut—the police told her that they’d confirmed it, that Tabitha was really dead, and so she wore the pants one last time. Then she cut them into pieces with scissors and shoved the scraps to the bottom of the trash can in the kitchen.

2

There hadn’t been a funeral. There had been a cremation, and Linda’s boyfriend Michael had brought the ashes home. They were sitting on a shelf in the garage. Linda would deal with them later—everyone would deal with them later. No one had notified Tabitha and Julie’s father—nobody really knew how they’d go about notifying him, in the first place. It was fine with Julie; she hadn’t been so much into the idea of going through with a funeral anyway. Funerals were about wallowing, not about moving on.

Tabitha’s bedroom had become Julie’s bedroom. Madeleine L’Engle and star chart books lay stacked in cardboard boxes, filling up Julie’s former closet where her clothes had once been. She moved everything into Tabitha’s room, let it all lay in a leaf pile on the floor. No one else wanted to touch Tabitha’s things, not Linda, not Michael. She sat there, nights, wrapped herself in Tabitha’s paisley quilts, brought in meals on Tabitha’s paper plates, played Tabitha’s CDs as loud as she could.

The walls sagged with push-pinned photographs of Tabitha and other girls, never the same set of friends twice. Between the photographs were Lisa Frank posters in which unicorns chased dolphins in blueberry chrome spirals, and a ladybug-red sheet hung over the window, choking off the cracks of light let in by the Venetian blinds. In the corner sat the bookshelves, two high, mostly unoccupied.

Tabitha’s boyfriends had stayed away from this room. Linda stayed out as well, holed up with her Joni Mitchell records and American Spirits or went to work, paralegal to some disreputable real estate type. She’d explained what she did all day many times and neither Tabitha nor Julie had managed to care about it, and Linda hadn’t seemed to care if they cared. Linda smoked and got ash in the peppered mashed potatoes Tabitha made while Tabitha scrubbed the dinner dishes and Julie counted the sweeps of the clock hand until she could excuse herself to do her homework, which she usually didn’t do. And later she would lie tucked in her bed, under her rainforest sheets, while springs knocked against the wall she shared with Tabitha. Old men—twenty-four, twenty-five!—would grunt through one wall, and Linda’s television and record player would sneak down the hallway:

Help me—I think I’m falling

And when it got quiet, Julie would close her eyes and imagine her sister: sprawled, those last two years, Shirley Manson or Beth Orton or Gitane Demone on the stereo, roach in her hand burning blue smoke in the light of her purple and yellow lava lamp, someone beside her who didn’t matter in the end to anyone.

Julie was going through Tabitha’s things. She paced and she sipped the coffee she’d made, separating everything into piles, one to keep, one to fill the box of black garbage bags she’d brought from under the sink. Get it over with, she decided. She’s dead; doesn’t mean you have to stop moving.

The clothes she had seen before. Tabitha was good at mixing and matching and she owned surprisingly few clothes. Julie inspected every seam and ran the fabric over her arms and her face. They smelled like dryer sheets, scratched her face with clasps and creases and sometimes a safety pin. She sorted them out according to how often she’d seen Tabitha wearing them. There were clothes Tabitha had never worn and there were clothes she’d worn every day, for stretches of multiple days. She kept the latter and folded the former neatly in a pile. When she’d finished, she drew a dollar sign on a sheet of notebook paper and stacked it on top.

Tabitha’s books: cookbooks, restaurant menus, DIY hint guides for Tabitha’s various crafting phases, vague but well-illustrated volumes on the Tarot. There was one thick one, its spine cracked, must have been something like 900 pages; she pulled it out. The cover showed a picture of the world exploding into meaty chunks, and the title was all in gold letters in raised type:

THE DREAM AND THE REALITY OF TIME TRAVEL

On the flyleaf Tabitha had written:

Julie—

Ira and I got drunk and both went in for concentration tests, and they said I was a crazy bitch with self-destructive tendencies ( :( :( :( !!!! ), and they also gave me this free book. They told me that it would help me overcome obstacles in my life. So I’m giving it to you, for your thirteenth birthday! If you actually apply any of the advice in this book I swear to God Julie I will murder you. No joke.

Love / kisses / infinite well-wishes,

Tabs

She’d never seen the book before; Tabitha had forgotten to give it to her. There was an orange price sticker on it: CLRNCE 2/$1.

She let the cover flip shut and sniffed the exposed edges of the pages. It was impossible to smell anything under the reek of the incense. She hated incense. She put the book into the
keep
pile along with everything but the cookbooks, which were probably worth something.

She flipped back the pages of Tabitha’s old wall calendars. She’d tacked every new wall calendar she got over every old one: 100 Adorable Kittens, Great Hunting Disasters, Churches of Charlemagne. Appointments, dinners, Julie’s sixteenth birthday party which Tabitha had missed. Tabitha’s twenty-first birthday was marked somewhere in the clean pages, she knew; Tabitha marked it every year, first thing, and she would burn through the pages until she reached it. Julie didn’t look for it.

There were two old photo albums, covers done in weird burgundy fake leather. Julie herself at four, smiling in a park somewhere, their long-vanished father teaching a miniature Tabitha to play the mandolin with a big smile on his jaw. His jaw was larger than she remembered; his hair was already gray. Tabitha at fifteen, just entering the eighth grade, her arm around some unknown boy and RUDIMENTARY PENI written in Sharpie across a forehead made ugly by acne and a flash. Then Tabitha writhing in the blue bedsheets of a linoleum-grimy dorm somewhere; then Tabitha with three men in a poorly-lit kitchen, their hands on her rear. Tabitha wrapped in a blanket, her eyes raccoon-ringed and her face radiating upward at the lens of some forgotten lover’s camera. Julie closed the photo albums and tossed them into one of the black garbage bags.

Did she keep everything, this bimbo dead sister of hers? Julie tore through old shopping lists, pay stubs, supermarket coupons, receipts, worksheets from middle school with 30s and 40s and frowny faces written in red felt pen, all of it shoved into the drawers of the little white work desk in the corner. She lifted the rugs and searched beneath the mattress.

She found nothing else to distract her from the jewelry box sitting on the corner of the bed.

The box had carved chicken feet and a brass plate on the top,
TT
scratched into it with a nail or something. It wasn’t like the box was unfamiliar territory; Julie had swiped her share of bags, always the cheaper stuff, basically powdered sugar, just to get through a tedious history assignment or whatever. She would hum and work and look at herself in the mirror and think: I do not look fucked up at all, and she would giggle. This time she took out all of the bags and set them on the paisley quilt. There weren’t many left. The felt bottom of the box lay empty, fallen seeds and stems and grains in the cracks between felt and wood. She pressed her finger against the bottom, and it gave.

Tabitha kept a flathead screwdriver in her bedside table. Julie had found it earlier, along with her condoms, her lighters, her fake IDs and her purple speckled vibrator. She pried up the edges of the stash box with the screwdriver. It gave easily, wellused to opening.

She lifted out the bags one by one. White crosses, pink pastilles, long-ago-dried mushrooms, keys with white grains stuck in their ends. She set all of it aside, leaving nothing in the box but an index card and a Lisa Frank pocketbook, huddled together. The index card was noisily headlined FOR A GOOD TIME CALL in blue glitter pen. Below it were a dozen phone numbers, all but the most recentlywritten crossed out. No names were attached to the numbers. Julie recognized none of them.

The Lisa Frank notebook would be the diary.

First she chopped an earthworm of coke on Tabitha’s Carole King CD case. She had no idea if she was even doing it right, but she got it all into her nose anyway. After that she felt calm and she threw the other bags and the index cards in with the garbage, only toying briefly with the idea of throwing it in with the garage sale things. She took the jewelry box to the window and shook out the last crushed grains and strands into the wind. It all blew away into the summer air; she imagined it landing between the blades of grass, where ants would eat it and see God.

She sat back against Tabitha’s bed, her face numbing, and she stared at the wall. The psychedelic-painted CD player was silent and she let it stay that way.

You cunt, she said to the silent walls. You have the messiest room I’ve ever seen.

The Lisa Frank diary had a little padlock on it that she smashed easily with the screwdriver. The back of the cardboard cover was filled with lipstick blots, one per day for a week, MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY written underneath. And each page, save ten or fifteen at the back, had a date written on it. The dates began sometime last November. Beneath every date Tabitha had written:

GET THROUGH TODAY

Every day, fifteen lines of it. Every day was the same.

She made herself pronounce it over and over in her head until it stopped meaning anything to her. She closed the book and set it down on the quilt, then she folded one of the corners over it. She could feel it, lying there, only feet away from her while she lay on the bed.

Eventually the feeling came back to her face; by that point she had taken a lighter to the notebook. She masturbated with Tabitha’s purple speckled vibrator and she fell asleep again on the floor, curled in the blanket.

Once they stayed up late in Tabitha’s room listening to the Buzzcocks and the Smashing Pumpkins while Tabitha smoked two bowls of marijuana, and Julie talked about all the possible situations a veterinarian might have to deal with on a given day; she wanted to care for animals back then, and Tabitha smiled, lazy and slow like a cat, and she dug her hips deeper into the mattress. Julie finally stopped talking and she turned to look at Tabitha; Tabitha’s eyes were closed; her head burrowed into her watermelon pillows. Soft mucus hissed in her nose as she breathed and dreamed. Julie pulled the blanket over both of them and sat up with her knees at her chest and the blanket pressed to her chin. The green smell of pot lingered in the fabric. Julie sat smelling it until she felt tired and she took the short walk down the hall to her own tiny bedroom, her kitten slippers kissing the carpet. And in the morning Tabitha’s hand touching her cheek, just two little hours before school:
wake me up before you go-go.

Julie woke up in her regular place on the floor. It was still dark outside and she was still alone and the smell of smoke under the door was beginning to fade, and in the closet were a stack of things she seriously had thought she could sell.

Help me, I think I’m falling
came from Linda’s bedroom, where the ashes had long since settled into the sheets.