The Lonely (10 page)

Bad Dreams

The whole thing flickers like an old newsreel. Sepia. Scars in the film crackling through the sky, black lightning through a bright white day. Easter is standing in the middle of a wide, grassy field. She is a beautiful girl. A naked girl. A girl who drinks in the sun voraciously. And the sun loves to be drunk by her, begs for it. You can feel it in the air, how much he loves to be consumed by her, his happiness making everything electric. Dripping down her chin, plopping to her chest, funneled by her protruding rib cage downwards, over the mound of her young belly and settling mostly in her navel, warming her whole body from there. And Easter is happy, so happy, and proud of her smoothness and countable bones. She belches sun and pats her stomach, satisfied.

A pair of eyes appear behind her, but she doesn't notice them.

Big, unblinking eyes. Blue and white and red, staring out from the precipice of the woods that surround the field.

Tall trees with tumorous trunks, their roots spread like patient dragon claws. Sounds of cold water coming from somewhere inside. A creek, perhaps: pulsing, eroding, scrambling over rocks.

And the eyes. Which sit side by side, irises facing forward, nestled in a deep scar along a fallen log. With their bottoms squeezed, wedged, into the bark, the tops of the eyes appear bigger and more bulbous than they probably are. But who knows what they'd looked like in a head. You can throw a pair of eyes onto anything and give it a personality. Just ask Officer Big Mac.

Knuckles of rocky earth jut from the ground, tall enough for a person to hide behind. Which, of course, there was. A person hiding. Because this is a dream, and there are always people crouching in the dark corners of dreams. In this dream, the person who'd left the eyes hides behind the largest wedge of rock, perched on his haunches like a frog, biting his fingernails down to the quick, not stopping till he tastes blood, then going further still, gnawing at them from the front with excitement; laying his heavy tongue against the raw, pink nail beds, hot and sore. Had they been his own eyes? One can't quite tell. Because although his face is fully visible, the dream makes it somehow difficult to see whether there are a pair of eyes in his head or just two empty sockets. Woven through with a metal ring, like the skirt of mink in The Cube.

Julia made us dream about that man a lot when we were small and again when I started leaving her to go to the Wonderland. Hiding somewhere in the creek woods, removing his eyes, resting them in bird's nests and in branches, seeing things he wasn't supposed to see. I'd started sleeping on the couch to get away from the dream but it didn't work; she still found me, made me bolt up straight and make my way upstairs.

But one night it was The Parents who woke me up, not the dream. They walked in, heavy footsteps, and I stole upstairs in a blink, unseen. Julia was already sound asleep under the covers, the top of her head peeking out, her hair a splash of moonlit red across my pillow. I crawled in next to her, let our spines grate against one another; our bodies curved and tucked up like a pair of open butterfly wings against the sheet.

A few minutes later the tops of our heads were pushed right up against one another, our ears pressed to the floor. I liked the feeling of the top of Julia's head on my head. Our two hard skulls pressed together, adjusting and re-setting against each other's little dents and deformities. Our hair scraped together like sandpaper and thundered in my ears. Things sound quite different when they come from above your head.

Ours was the hottest room in the summer and the coldest room in the winter due to a pair of badly warped window frames next to the closet. There were many microscopic breaches in our room through which harsh, angry winds turned to whispers, and it was at one of these tiny fissures, a small violation between two floorboards, that Julia and I huddled, warming our ears on the reverberations of The Parents' screaming.

It was a stifling hot night in July. The heartbeat of an old ceiling fan lub-dubbed above our heads, moving the air heavily like a spoon through stew. We were both in long white tank tops, loose with the memory of a few hours sleep. I don't think that Julia thought at all about our heads rubbing together. Touching me wasn't the moment, the thrill, the delight that it was for me to touch her.

The Parents were fighting about the bells. The Mother sobbing hard, incapable of catching her breath, saying that she needed them, that it relaxed her to hear how we moved through the house. The Father, anger growing steadily warmer like a stove-top coil, insisted that she had no right.

“I hate the bells,” Julia whispered.

“Really? I don't even notice them.”

“Honestly, Easter, sometimes I wonder why I've bothered with you.”

“What do you—”

“Shh, I want to hear this.”

My knees were starting to hurt. I wriggled my splayed-out fingers a bit and stretched one leg out, then the other, then I moved back on my haunches and looked at Julia's face. It's harder to hear someone when their head is pressed up against yours; two layers of skull and brain instead of just one rubs words down into mumbles.

“Why do you hate the bells?” I asked her.

I didn't mean to but I'd let a little bit of venom creep into the question, slowly, in reaching tendrils, like the blood that replaces medicine in a syringe. I didn't like that she hated them so much and I didn't.

“Because they're terrible, Easter. It changes a person to hear bells all the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“People use bells to train animals; don't you know that? The Mother is training us.”

“For what?”

“To be just like her.”

“I don't understand.”

“Yeah, that's what I'm worried about.”

“She's not training me.”

“She is, and it's already working.”

“What do you mean?”

“You're leaving me behind.”

“Julia—”

“SHH! I'm trying to hear!”

So I put myself back on my hands and knees and pushed my head once again against Julia's.

But they'd moved into the living room where we couldn't quite make out the words. Where all that passed up through our floorboards were the guttural depths of The Mother's sobs, the sound of her lungs snapping back after almost folding in on themselves she was crying so hard. And The Father might not even be on the main floor anymore. He might have retired to the basement, through with the conversation because he knew he didn't have to fight with her if he didn't want to. He knew that she would never leave him no matter what he did. But she was still crying hard, still talking to someone. It scared me that she might be all alone, talking to herself in the living room.

And for a minute I really hated The Mother. Hated her for how pathetic she was. Hated her for making me pathetic too. I wanted to be rid of her. I felt as though if she were gone I would be a much better person. Not better in a way like I'd start volunteering or giving things to charity or anything like that, but better in the way that I'd be more beautiful and happier and more confident and be able to speak easily to big groups and impress everyone. She was like a shell I'd outgrown, that I needed to crack and peel off of me and emerge as the thing I really was. But the more I thought about how much I hated her, the sicker I felt. The guiltier. The more sure I was that I needed to get rid of her for good.

The basement bell rang loud. The sound made me think of burying my fist into The Mother's stomach, kitchen knife first.

And the guilty nausea wouldn't stop. I just wanted to lie in bed and simmer with the rest of the air in the room. I would be a tuber if our room were a stew. I stood up and made my way to our bed.

“Hey, where are you going?” Julia looked up at me with big confused eyes.

“I'm going to bed.”

“Why? They might start up again. Please stay up, Easter. Come on.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we can't hear anything anyway, Julia.” I lifted the thin sheet and crawled beneath. “And my knees hurt. And I'm tired. And I hate what I'm thinking about so I'm going to go to bed.”

Julia's eyes narrowed to whiskers and she hissed at me through thin lips:

“Goddammit, Easter, you're no fun at all.”

She stood up, stomped over to the bed, flung up the sheet as loudly as you can possibly fling up a sheet, and smashed down onto the mattress beside me. Her anger made her bigger and more cumbersome to sleep with than usual. She pulled the covers over to her side gradually and almost completely, daring me to say something about it. I shivered until I knew she was asleep and gently pulled some back to my side.

Miniature Wonderland,
Day
9
,
330 (One Customer)

A boy with a long neck and hunched shoulders, his head mounted on his body like a stuffed deer head to a wall. Like he's spent most of his life crammed into a box, or a cave, growing into its constricted dimensions. Long brown hair falling over one eye, a kink running through it like a recently unfolded sheet. Large ears with soft-looking lobes, warm hanging honey. Sweet. White T-shirt accentuating a small frame, yellow under the armpits, a hole along the seam, a peek at barely opaque skin. Maybe he's lived his whole life in a cave, tucked away from sunlight. He doesn't move his arms as he walks; they hang still at his sides like a suspended axolotl's.

As he approached my reception desk I wanted to run away, heart fluttering as hard as a trapped bird. I was scared of him.

“Hello,” he said.

I knew he was going to say it but it startled me anyway.

Then he said, “I'm sorry for scaring you. How much to go through?”

I pointed to a sign behind me. He nodded.

“I'm Easter,” I blurted. I'm Easter and I'm an ass who lets nonsense fly from her mouth.

“I'm Lev.”

“I have to find out your name so that I can fill out your particulars in this book here. It's got everyone's particulars.”

“Particulars.”

Particulars? I wanted to fix the barrel of a gun to each of my eyeballs and blow my brains out in either direction. Particulars. Mr. Ungula's idiotic words coming out of my mouth.

“Yeah, your information. Your specifics.”

“Well, my name is Lev. And I've seen you before, walking through the woods in town.”

“Oh?” I'd heard ladies say it in movies like that:
“Oh?”
I didn't really know how someone was supposed to respond to it, but it seemed appropriate here. I waited to see what he'd do with it.

“Yeah. I saw you there. And then I followed you here.”

“You followed me?”

“I did. You seemed wonderful to me.”

I seem wonderful to him. I opened my eyes wide. Wonderful. Wonderful. He seems wonderful to me, for thinking that I'm wonderful. I might not have found him wonderful until he thought I was wonderful. And the sound of the bells filled my ears, loud and warm and vibrating. Julia would kill me if she heard this. Kill me even harder if she could feel how happy I was in this moment that she was gone. And then I felt terribly guilty; it moved through me slow as oil, coated my insides like Pepto-Bismol does in the commercials. Thick pink guilt. Now that I knew he thought I was wonderful, I wasn't nervous anymore. My heart sucked in the wings it had momentarily grown. I'm wonderful, so who cares. The bells quieted a bit but didn't go away.

“Well, are you going to go through or not?”

My sudden impatience caused his neck to droop further.

“What's the rush?” he said.

“If you're not going to buy a pass you've gotta leave. Those are the rules.”

“I don't have any money,” he said.

And I shrugged, not really wanting him to leave and not really knowing why I was being so mean. He left quietly, leaving two little insects behind where he'd stood. Had they fallen from him? Maybe he really did come from underground, crawled from a grave just to tell me I was wonderful.

These are his “particulars” in the book:

Name: Lev

Occupation: Boy

Aura: Cramped and sore, grown too much without enough room. The see-through skin and red-rimmed eyes of a blind cave newt. Axolotl arms. A bit wonderful, too.

Smell: Dry skin and peppermint chewing gum.

Business: To tell me that I'm wonderful.

Lev. Lev. Lev. Long Lev. The Long Necked Lev. Once trapped in a box, a water dragon in an aquarium, but now free to roam the Miniature Wonderland. I thought about chewing on Long Lev's honey-dripped earlobes, spreading them on crackers to eat. The way I'd once thought about Julia's lips, as spreadable and delicious. But the bells didn't ring encouragement when I thought about eating Julia's lips the way they did when I thought about eating Lev's ears. Maybe this meant I was getting normal.

A Bad Day

The Father spent most of his time down in the basement and decorated it in all the stuff that was a little too good to throw out but not nice enough to keep on the middle, our most presentable, floor.

A grimy fish tank, once occupied by an ill-fated party of goldfish, was now turned upside down and used to hold a small television. An ancient set, infected with a virus of off-color distortion that spread slowly and steadily from the bottom left-hand corner. The Father would watch the news down there; I could hear it muffled through the floor. Across from that, a big blue worn-out corduroy chair with crops of patches all over it from Denmark, Amsterdam, wherever. I think it was supposed to look like it had been all over the world, but really it just came from a Sears in Michigan and it was one of the ugliest chairs I'd ever seen. We called it “The Everywhere Chair.” He had a computer down there too, an old one with a big, heavy monitor and a grubby keyboard.

He also had a couple of old clarinets. He used to play in the band when he was in high school and sometimes I would sit at the top of the basement steps and listen to him playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” or some other high school band favorite. I pictured him with his full band-member uniform on: big black boots and a tasseled gold-trimmed hat on top of his head. But I'm pretty sure that he wasn't wearing that. What was more likely was that he was sitting up straight in the well-traveled chair, his bare feet flat on the floor and facing outward. There would be an open window and an ashtray next to it, a cigarette burning down, snuggled into one of the specifically designed grooves along the side. Its smoke blew straight out the window, as though it had been directed beforehand as to where it should make its exit. He might be wearing his robe and he was definitely squishing one eye shut.

I sat at the top of the stairs a lot, trying to hear what he could possibly be doing down there all the time. I wanted to learn something, anything, about him. Maybe even find something I could use to interest him. He might be breeding iguanas down there. If he was, then I could become an expert on crickets and help him find the best possible type of cricket to use to keep his iguanas strong and healthy. Then, when he sold them for lots of money, he would have me to thank.

Now we had Mr. Ungula. A mutual friend, a personality we could both comment on, share and criticize and laugh about. But we didn't.

Sometimes The Mother would kneel down next to me and ruffle my hair with her hand, letting it linger for a few seconds on my warm skull, then use it stand up straight again and walk away. A few times she brought me snacks while I sat there. Quiet things like pudding or buttered white bread with sugar and cinnamon on top. Often I would occupy myself with Tetris, putting it on mute so that I could still hear. Only she could know how terrible it was to want someone like him.

The Father makes a decent amount of money at a regular type of job at which he stays late, sometimes all night, and he has a secretary who's always writing notes for him on slips of blue paper. The last time I was at his office I had to hoist myself up onto my tiptoes and make whites of my knuckles to look over the desk at what she was doing: filling out a list of appointments for June 16th. Her nails were long and scratched softly against the paper as she wrote in black ink. She was the kind of person who had a hard time looking people in the eyes.

I'd once heard him say that he was just about the most bored person who'd ever lived.

It used to be that we ate dinner together. And The Parents would fight and we'd go on drives to get ice cream or feed the ducks in the park and he'd hold my hand crossing streets and she would wear short skirts and pretty blouses and he would pinch the skin above her wrist. But something happened. And they stopped talking to one another and I ended up on The Mother's side, somehow, while she unfolded slowly, her insides on the outside so she was nothing but a big fat sore: tender and infected and wincing and painful to be near. But she loved everyone so much that she couldn't be alone. And he hated us so much that he couldn't be near us at all. And I hated him for it, so I wanted to bother him. But actually I didn't. I didn't hate him at all. I loved him so much that I hated myself for it. And it was all her fault for making me this way.

The upstairs of our house was even more strange; urgent with the smell of overripe pears all soft and grainy and sopping. About to turn, anxious to be eaten. Wetness settled in corners, curdled the floorboards and boiled the walls so bubbles expanded beneath the dark green paper, all transformed by the greasy heat of The Mother's hot Sunday tubs.

But the upstairs didn't belong to The Mother the way that the downstairs belonged to The Father. It wasn't shut off, or made exclusively hers somehow. There was just something very distinctly
Mother
about it. Something private and close to her. The steam of her broth lingering in the air, a visible vapor, like a cartoon smell with a mind of its own, the taste of bath oils and talc all through your mouth and lungs.

We were all welcome up there, stairs wide open and inviting, a small, bare window spilling sunlight over the foyer. Dust emblazoned and twinkling in the rays. Almost too welcoming. Like the witch's cottage in the woods. It might have been this dangerous openness that warped the paper on the walls.

And though it was too welcome to us, it wasn't at all welcome to outsiders. Whenever she found out that someone had been to our house, Phyllis usually, Amelia once, or from time to time a friend of The Father's, she always asked, with air trapped, suspended in her lungs like a note, “They didn't go upstairs, did they?” to which I would respond, “No, of course not.” And then she would exhale, a shallow, nervous cloud of cracked breath. A hand on her chest, relief on her face. No one could be allowed to see. Our house wasn't like the houses in sitcoms.

One afternoon The Mother's voice sliced into the middle floor. Our most presentable pulp.

“Easter!”

“Eaaaaaaster!”

“EAAAAAAAAASTER!

“WHAT?” I screamed in reply.

“Can you come upstairs please?”

I was often angry on Sunday afternoons because it meant that I'd lost bathroom access. Or rather, she'd deprived me of it. Either way, I couldn't satisfy my mirror habit. The Mother would be in there all night long, soaking up the heat from her bathwater until it was ice cold and then starting over again. Hours.

Often she called me up to sit with her, which was a horrible tease. I indulged in the thought of pulling her out of the tub, throwing her slippery into the hallway, and locking the door. Then I'd wrap my head in a towel and scream until I puked. I hated not having that mirror all day. To press my face against and stare at.

In a massive angry motion I grabbed my bandana from the couch cushion next to me, where I had been sitting playing Tetris for the past couple of hours. I wrapped it around my face and tied it tight in the back. This should be fine.

The air became warmer as I grumbled up our wooden stairs, which made sounds to echo my exasperation. I opened the bathroom door, bringing a puff of cooler hallway air in with me.

“Easter?” she said.

The shower curtain was closed around the tub; she rattled it open with the backside of her hand and her eyes flicked to my bandana. A barely audible twitch in her throat shivered its way to her bottom lip, betraying that she wanted to say something about it, some criticism or concern. But she didn't. Instead, she smiled.

I could tell she'd been playing her favorite tub game: sitting as quiet and still as a mouse, trying her best to trick the water into thinking that no one was in it. She would sit with her head against the side of the tub, oddly cocked forward so that she could look down at the rest of her body, which was skewed and made to look strange by the movement of the water. She would look down at herself with her lips pursed, held in deep concentration, staring accusingly at the minute ripples which betrayed that there was a living, moving body in there.

The Mother was a beautiful lady, that's for sure. But she didn't share any of those genes with me. She used up all the good stuff on Julia and left me with the scraps. I was forced to pick through the bargain bin of man genes that The Father had to offer. Not that he was disgusting, really, but in girl form he was kind of disgusting. Which I'm proof of.

The Mother had a precious smile. And a lovely nose, sort of squared-off at the end like a tiny toy dice. Her face was a series of crisp lines, sharp cheeks and a high forehead. She was meticulous about her skin and it showed, glowing in a moonlit sort of way. Her hair was blonde and straight as an arrow. Her body long and graceful even when she was laden with groceries. Most of the time I was excessively, psychotically jealous of her. But The Mother loved me so shamelessly much that I felt guilty about it. It was like being jealous of your dog because he gets to sleep in.

“Yeah, I'm here.”

“What were you doing down there?”

“Just playing Tetris.”

“Well, do you think you could play it up here for a while?”

I transformed the action of putting down the toilet seat lid and sitting on it into a kind of irritated affirmative. What I really wanted to do was implode. Be sucked up in a hiccup of smoke, any trace of me inhaled by the muggy bathroom air. Not that I necessarily wanted to die, just to stop existing in that exact second.

She looked at me and smiled, her face sticky. I pulled the bandana off my face.

“Just so you know, I'm not responding to yelling anymore,” I said.

Her smile disappeared.

“What? Why?”

“Because it's not civilized, Mom. Normal people don't scream at each other like that.”

“But you screamed at me. You screamed, ‘What?'”

“That's because it's how I was raised. I can't help it.”

“Oh Easter, that doesn't seem fair.”

I shrugged.

With my elbows on my knees, I resumed the game of Tetris I'd started on the couch. I wondered if she'd noticed the Game Boy. The Mother has this every-other-year-or-so habit of suddenly being overwhelmed by the clutter in our house. She'd get this horribly suffocated look on her face and begin indiscriminately strong-arming piles of books and papers and toys into hearty black garbage bags.
Julia and I would have to chase after her and pull from her claws those things that absolutely had to stay. The Game Boy just barely made it a couple of years ago.

Those things that linger too long unused, that find themselves settling into the cracks and corners of a house so familiar to its inhabitants as to become invisible, neglected toys and fridge magnets and oversized paper clips and cereal box treasures, all suddenly stood out to The Mother like blood stains. She hated the sight of things not touched, wearing the dusty evidence of their loneliness like a coat. She said she couldn't relax, but I think it was more than that. The clutter made her scared. Uncomfortable. Like it might not realize that she wasn't part of it and make her invisible too.

I must have seemed all settled in because The Mother exhaled in a satisfied way. I guess she'd decided to take a little break from concentrating on her dead body. I suppose everyone needs a break. She had me now, at least for a short while, and you could tell she was happy to have another body in the room.

“Easter's Feature. If you ever open up a restaurant or a movie theater or something, that's what it should be called. Easter's Feature. I could see myself going there, or at least telling people that that's where I was going.”

“I'll keep it in mind, I guess.”

“You'll forget it. But I'll remind you if you ever call me up and tell me that you're opening a family type restaurant, or a drive-in. Now that's a good idea: a drive-in. I think it's just about time for a drive-in theater to do well again. It's in the vault, kiddo! I've got a vault full of good ideas for you.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Not a problem, Easter. You're lucky because you've got two people working on your life. Me and you. A lot of people only have themselves to figure things out.”

I tried to remember the last time she'd actually helped me out, wanted in fact to ask her when she felt as though she'd been helpful to me in any way, but I held back because I knew she was being sincere. I'd let her have this moment to relax. It wouldn't last long. I could already feel a fight foaming in my guts. Hateful things that I wanted to unleash on her at some point today. There was something about her, maybe that wide openness which curdled the walls, that made it so easy to be mean to her. That made me want to hurt her so badly.

“How was school last week?”

Her eyes were closed and she had stretched her neck along the height of the tub. The plastic, nautically themed shower curtain was pulled open and tied to the wall with a hearty white rope.

“It sucked.”

“That's a disgusting word, Easter. Sucked. Sucked what, that's what I want to know. There is something very nasty implied there.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Anyway, I'm sure it wasn't that bad.”

Her breathing was evening out, becoming shallower. She was preparing herself for another bout of stillness.

I returned once again to my Tetris, feeling irritated that all she could come up with to ask me was, “How was school?” I replaced the bandana over my face and jabbed the buttons on the Game Boy a little harder than I should have. It was an antique, after all.

“And how are you feeling lately?” she asked.

She'd closed her eyes and stretched up her neck like an ostrich.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how are you feeling? Is there anything you want to talk to me about? Any questions you might have of someone as old and wise as I am?”

She smiled very gently, careful not to move her neck too much. She always asked me these very annoying and obvious questions. She told me that talk shows told her it was her job to ask me questions like that. I told her I was special and that those questions didn't apply to me and she laughed and said, “I know Easter.” What I didn't add was that it was Julia who made me special. That I had Julia working with me, not The Mother. And in fact I didn't want The Mother's help anyway.