The Safety of Objects: Stories (15 page)

“They go right through my head, you know. I guess it takes getting used to,” Barbie said.

I noticed my mother’s pincushion on the dresser next to the other Barbie/Ken, the Barbie body, Ken head. The pincushion was filled with hundreds of pins, pins with flat silver ends and pins with red, yellow, and blue dot/ball ends.

“You have pins in your head,” I said to the Barbie head on the floor.

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

I was starting to hate her. I was being perfectly clear and she didn’t understand me.

I looked at Ken. He was in my left hand, my fist wrapped around his waist. I looked at him and realized my thumb was on his bump. My thumb was pressed against Ken’s crotch and as soon as I noticed I got an automatic hard-on, the kind you don’t know you’re getting, it’s just there. I started rubbing Ken’s bump and watching my thumb like it was a large-screen projection of a porno movie.

“What are you doing?” Barbie’s head said. “Get me up. Help me.” I was rubbing Ken’s bump/hump with my finger inside his bathing suit. I was standing in the middle of my sister’s room, with my pants pulled down.

“Aren’t you going to help me?” Barbie kept asking. “Aren’t you going to help me?”

In the second before I came, I held Ken’s head hole in front of me. I held Ken upside down above my dick and came inside of Ken like I never could in Barbie.

I came into Ken’s body and as soon as I was done I wanted to do it again. I wanted to fill Ken and put his head back on, like a perfume bottle. I wanted Ken to be the vessel for my secret supply. I came in Ken and then I remembered he wasn’t mine. He didn’t belong to me. I took him into the bathroom and soaked him in warm water and Ivory liquid. I brushed his insides with Jennifer’s toothbrush and left him alone in a cold-water rinse.

“Aren’t you going to help me, aren’t you?” Barbie kept asking.

I started thinking she’d been brain damaged by the accident. I picked her head up from the floor.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I had to take care of Ken.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’ll be fine. He’s soaking in the bathroom.” I held Barbie’s head in my hand.

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

Did my little incident, my moment with Ken, mean that right then and there some decision about my future life as queerbait had to be made?

“This afternoon. Where are we going? What are we doing? I miss you when I don’t see you,” Barbie said.

“You see me every day,” I said.

“I don’t really see you. I sit on top of the dresser and if you pass by, I see you. Take me to your room.”

“I have to bring Ken’s body back.”

I went into the bathroom, rinsed out Ken, blew him dry with my mother’s blow-dryer, then played with him again. It was a boy thing, we were boys together. I thought sometime I might play ball with him, I might take him out instead of Barbie.

“Everything takes you so long,” Barbie said when I got back into the room.

I put Ken back up on the dresser, picked up Barbie’s body, knocked Ken’s head off, and smashed Barbie’s head back down on her own damn neck.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” Barbie said as I carried her into my room. “We don’t have enough time together to fight. Fuck me,” she said.

I didn’t feel like it. I was thinking about fucking Ken and Ken being a boy. I was thinking about Barbie and Barbie being a girl. I was thinking about Jennifer, switching Barbie’s and Ken’s heads, chewing Barbie’s feet off, hanging Barbie from the ceiling fan, and who knows what else.

“Fuck me,” Barbie said again.

I ripped Barbie’s clothing off. Between Barbie’s legs Jennifer had drawn pubic hair in reverse. She’d drawn it upside down so it looked like a fountain spewing up and out in great wide arcs. I spit directly onto Barbie and with my thumb and first finger rubbed the ink lines, erasing them. Barbie moaned.

“Why do you let her do this to you?”

“Jennifer owns me,” Barbie moaned.

Jennifer owns me, she said, so easily and with pleasure. I was totally jealous. Jennifer owned Barbie and it made me crazy. Obviously it was one of those relationships that could exist only between women. Jennifer could own her because it didn’t matter that Jennifer owned her. Jennifer didn’t want Barbie, she had her.

“You’re perfect,” I said.

“I’m getting fat,” Barbie said.

Barbie was crawling all over me, and I wondered if Jennifer knew she was a nymphomaniac. I wondered if Jennifer knew what a nymphomaniac was.

“You don’t belong with little girls,” I said.

Barbie ignored me.

There were scratches on Barbie’s chest and stomach. She didn’t say anything about them and so at first I pretended not to notice. As I was touching her, I could feel they were deep, like slices. The edges were rough; my finger caught on them and I couldn’t help but wonder.

“Jennifer?” I said, massaging the cuts with my tongue, as though my tongue, like sandpaper, would erase them. Barbie nodded.

In fact, I thought of using sandpaper but didn’t know how I would explain it to Barbie:
you have to lie still and let me rub it really hard with this stuff that’s like terry cloth dipped in cement.
I thought she might even like it if I made it into an S&M kind of thing and handcuffed her first.

I ran my tongue back and forth over the slivers, back and forth over the words “copyright 1966 Mattel Inc., Malaysia” tattooed on her back. Tonguing the tattoo drove Barbie crazy. She said it had something to do with scar tissue being extremely sensitive.

Barbie pushed herself hard against me, I could feel her slices rubbing my skin. I was thinking that Jennifer might kill Barbie. Without meaning to she might just go over the line, and I wondered if Barbie would know what was happening or if she’d try to stop her.

We fucked, that’s what I called it, fucking. In the beginning Barbie said she hated the word, which made me like it even more. She hated it because it was so strong and hard, and she said we weren’t fucking, we were making love. I told her she had to be kidding.

“Fuck me,” she said that afternoon, and I knew the end was coming soon. “Fuck me,” she said. I didn’t like the sound of the word.

*  *  *

Friday when I went into Jennifer’s room, there was something in the air. The place smelled like a science lab, a fire, a failed experiment.

Barbie was wearing a strapless yellow evening dress. Her hair was wrapped into a high bun, more like a wedding cake than something Betty Crocker would whip up. There seemed to be layers and layers of angel’s hair spinning in a circle above her head. She had yellow pins through her ears and gold fuck-me shoes that matched the belt around her waist. For a second I thought of the belt and imagined tying her up, but more than restraining her arms or legs, I thought of wrapping the belt around her face, tying it across her mouth.

I looked at Barbie and saw something dark and thick like a scar rising up and over the edge of her dress. I grabbed her and pulled the front of the dress down.

“Hey big boy,” Barbie said. “Don’t I even get a hello?”

Barbie’s breasts had been sawed at with a knife. There were a hundred marks from a blade that might have had five rows of teeth like shark jaws. And as if that wasn’t enough, she’d been dissolved by fire, blue and yellow flames had been pressed against her and held there until she melted and eventually became the fire that burned herself. All of it had been somehow stirred with the lead of a pencil, the point of a pen, and left to cool. Molten Barbie flesh had been left to harden, black and pink plastic swirled together, in the crater Jennifer had dug out of her breasts.

I examined her in detail like a scientist, a pathologist, a fucking medical examiner. I studied the burns, the gouged-out area, as if by looking closely I’d find something, an explanation, a way out.

A disgusting taste came up into my mouth, like I’d been sucking on batteries. It came up, then sank back down into my stomach, leaving my mouth puckered with the bitter metallic flavor of sour saliva. I coughed and spit onto my shirt sleeve, then rolled the sleeve over to cover the wet spot.

With my index finger I touched the edge of the burn as lightly as I could. The round rim of her scar broke off under my finger. I almost dropped her.

“It’s just a reduction,” Barbie said. “Jennifer and I are even now.

Barbie was smiling. She had the same expression on her face as when I first saw her and fell in love. She had the same expression she always had, and I couldn’t stand it. She was smiling, and she was burned. She was smiling, and she was ruined. I pulled her dress back up, above the scar line. I put her down carefully on the doily on top of the dresser and started to walk away.

“Hey,” Barbie said, “aren’t we going to play?”

Read on for an excerpt from A. M. Homes’s novel
May We Be Forgiven
, available from Viking.

ISBN 978-0-670-02548-0

“May we be forgiven,” an incantation, a prayer, the hope that somehow I come out of this alive. Was there ever a time you thought—I am doing this on purpose, I am fucking up and I don’t know why.

Do you want my recipe for disaster?

The warning sign: last year, Thanksgiving at their house. Twenty or thirty people were at tables spreading from the dining room into the living room and stopping abruptly at the piano bench. He was at the head of the big table, picking turkey out of his teeth, talking about himself. I kept watching him as I went back and forth carrying plates into the kitchen—the edges of my fingers dipping into unnameable goo—cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, a cold pearl onion, gristle. With every trip back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen, I hated him more. Every sin of our childhood, beginning with his birth, came back. He entered the world eleven months after me, sickly at first, not enough oxygen along the way, and was given far too much attention. And then, despite what I repeatedly tried to tell him about how horrible he was, he acted as though he believed he was a gift of the gods. They named him George. Geo, he liked to be called, like that was something cool, something scientific, mathematical, analytical. Geode, I called him—like a sedimentary rock. His preternatural confidence, his divinely arrogant head dappled with blond threads of hair lifted high drew the attention of others, gave the impression that he knew something. People solicited his opinions, his participation, while I never saw the charm. By the time we were ten and eleven, he was taller than me, broader, stronger. “You sure he’s not the butcher’s boy?” my father would ask jokingly. And no one laughed.

I was bringing in heavy plates and platters, casseroles caked with the debris of dinner, and no one noticed that help was needed—not George, not his two children, not his ridiculous friends, who were in fact in his employ, among them a weather girl and assorted spare anchormen and -women who sat stiff-backed and hair-sprayed like Ken and Barbie, not my Chinese American wife, Claire, who hated turkey and never failed to remind us that her family used to celebrate with roast duck and sticky rice. George’s wife, Jane, had been at it all day, cooking and cleaning, serving, and now scraping bones and slop into a giant trash bin.

Jane scoured the plates, piling dirty dishes one atop another and dropping the slimy silver into a sink of steamy soapy water. Glancing at me, she brushed her hair away with the back of her hand and smiled. I went back for more.

I looked at their children and imagined them dressed as Pilgrims, in black buckle shoes, doing Pilgrim children chores, carrying buckets of milk like human oxen. Nathaniel, twelve, and Ashley, eleven, sat like lumps at the table, hunched, or more like curled, as if poured into their chairs, truly spineless, eyes focused on their small screens, the only thing in motion their thumbs—one texting friends no one has ever seen and the other killing digitized terrorists. They were absent children, absent of personality, absent of presence, and, except for holidays, largely absent from the house. They had been sent away to boarding schools at an age others might have deemed too young but which Jane had once confessed was out of a certain kind of necessity—there were allusions to nonspecific learning issues, failure to bloom, and the subtle implication that the unpredictable shifts in George’s mood made living at home less than ideal.

In the background, two televisions loudly competed among themselves for no one’s attention—one featuring football and the other the film
Mighty Joe Young
.

“I’m a company man, heart and soul,” George says. “The network’s President of Entertainment. I am ever aware, 24/7.”

There is a television in every room; fact is, George can’t bear to be alone, not even in the bathroom.

He also apparently can’t bear to be without constant confirmation of his success. His dozen-plus Emmys have seeped out of his office and are now scattered around the house, along with various other awards and citations rendered in cut crystal, each one celebrating George’s ability to parse popular culture, to deliver us back to ourselves—ever so slightly mockingly, in the format best known as the half-hour sitcom or the news hour.

The turkey platter was in the center of the table. I reached over my wife’s shoulder and lifted—the tray was heavy and wobbled. I willed myself to stay strong and was able to carry out the mission while balancing a casserole of Brussels sprouts and bacon in the crook of my other arm.

The turkey, an “heirloom bird,” whatever that means, had been rubbed, relaxed, herbed into submission, into thinking it wasn’t so bad to be decapitated, to be stuffed up the ass with breadcrumbs and cranberries in some annual rite. The bird had been raised with a goal in mind, an actual date when his number would come up.

I stood in their kitchen picking at the carcass while Jane did the dishes, bright blue gloves on, up to her elbows in suds. My fingers were deep in the bird, the hollow body still warm, the best bits of stuffing packed in. I dug with my fingers and brought stuffing to my lips. She looked at me—my mouth moist, greasy, my fingers curled into what would have been the turkey’s G-spot if they had such things—lifted her hands out of the water and came toward me, to plant one on me. Not friendly. The kiss was serious, wet, and full of desire. It was terrifying and unexpected. She did it, then snapped off her gloves and walked out of the room. I was holding the counter, gripping it with greasy fingers. Hard.

Dessert was served. Jane asked if anyone wanted coffee and went back into the kitchen. I followed her like a dog, wanting more.

She ignored me.

“Are you ignoring me?” I asked.

She said nothing and then handed me the coffee. “Could you let me have a little pleasure, a little something that’s just for myself? ” She paused. “Cream and sugar?”

*  *  *

From Thanksgiving through Christmas and on into the new year, all I thought of was George fucking Jane. George on top of her, or, for a special occasion, George on the bottom, and once, fantastically, George having her from the back—his eyes fixed on the wall-mounted television—the ticker tape of news headlines trickling across the bottom of the screen. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was convinced that, despite his charms, his excess of professional achievement, George wasn’t very good in bed and that all he knew about sex he learned from the pages of a magazine read furtively while shitting. I thought of my brother fucking his wife—constantly. Whenever I saw Jane I was hard. I wore baggy pleated pants and double pairs of jockey shorts to contain my treasonous enthusiasm. The effort created bulk and, I worried, gave me the appearance of having gained weight.

It is almost eight o’clock on an evening toward the end of February when Jane calls. Claire is still at the office; she is always at the office. Another man would think his wife was having an affair; I just think Claire is smart.

“I need your help,” Jane says.

“Don’t worry,” I say, before I even know what the worry is. I imagine her calling me from the kitchen phone, the long curly cord wrapping around her body.

“He’s at the police station.”

I glance at the New York skyline; our building is ugly, postwar white brick, dull, but we’re up high, the windows are broad, and there’s a small terrace where we used to sit and have our morning toast. “Did he do something wrong?”

“Apparently,” she says. “They want me to come get him. Can you? Can you pick your brother up?”

“Don’t worry,” I say, repeating myself.

Within minutes I’m en route from Manhattan to the Westchester hamlet George and Jane call home. I phone Claire from the car; her voice mail picks up. “There’s some kind of problem with George and I’ve got to pick him up and take him home to Jane. I had my dinner—I left some for you in the fridge. Call later.”

*  *  *

A fight. On the way to the police station, that’s what I’m thinking. George has it in him: a kind of atomic reactivity that stays under the surface until something triggers him and he erupts, throwing over a table, smashing his fist through a wall, or . . . More than once I’ve been the recipient of his frustrations, a baseball hurled at my back, striking me at kidney level and dropping me to my knees, a shove in my grandmother’s kitchen hurling me backward, through a full-length pane of glass as George blocks me from getting the last of the brownies. I imagine that he went out for a drink after work and got on the wrong side of someone.

Thirty-three minutes later, I park outside the small suburban police station, a white cake box circa 1970. There’s a busty girlie calendar that probably shouldn’t be in a police station, a jar of hard candy, two metal desks that sound like a car crash if you accidentally kick them, which I do, tipping over an empty bottle of diet Dr. Pepper. “I’m the brother of the man you called his wife about,” I announce. “I’m here on behalf of George Silver.”

“You’re the brother?”

“Yes.”

“We called his wife; she’s coming to get him.”

“She called me, I’m here to pick him up.”

“We wanted to take him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t go; he kept repeating that he was a dangerous man and we should take him ‘downtown,’ lock him up, and be done with it. Personally, I think the man needs a doctor—you don’t walk away from something like that unscathed.”

“So he got into a fight?”

“Car accident, bad one. Doesn’t appear he was under the influence, passed a breath test and consented to urine, but really he should see a doctor.”

“Was it his fault?”

“He ran a red light, plowed into a minivan, husband was killed on impact, the wife was alive at the scene—in the backseat, next to the surviving boy. Rescue crew used the Jaws of Life to free the wife; upon release she expired.”

“Her legs fell out of the car,” someone calls out from a back office. “The boy is in fair condition. He’ll survive,” the younger cop says. “Your brother’s in the rear. I’ll get him.”

“Is my brother being charged with a crime?”

“Not at the moment. There’ll be a full investigation. Officers noted that he appeared disoriented at the scene. Take him home, get him a doctor and a lawyer—these things can get ugly.”

“He won’t come out,” the younger cop says.

“Tell him we don’t have room for him,” the older one says. “Tell him the real criminals are coming soon and if he doesn’t come out now they’ll plug him up the bung hole in the night.”

George comes out, disheveled. “Why are you here?” he asks me.

“Jane called, and besides, you had the car.”

“She could have taken a taxi.”

“It’s late.”

I lead George through the small parking lot and into the night, feeling compelled to take his arm, to guide him by his elbow—not sure if I’m preventing him from escaping or just steadying him. Either way, George doesn’t pull away, he lets himself be led.

“Where’s Jane?”

“At the house.”

“Does she know?”

I shake my head no.

“It was awful. There was a light.”

“Did you see the light?”

“I think I may have seen it, but it was like it didn’t make sense.”

“Like it didn’t apply to you?”

“Like I didn’t know.” He gets into the car. “Where’s Jane?” he asks again. “At the house,” I repeat. “Buckle your belt.”

*  *  *

Pulling into the driveway, the headlights cut through the house and catch Jane in the kitchen, holding a pot of coffee.

“Are you all right?” she asks when we are inside.

“How could I be?” George says. He empties his pockets onto the kitchen counter. He takes off his shoes, socks, pants, boxers, jacket, shirt, undershirt, and stuffs all of it into the kitchen trash can.

“Would you like some coffee?” Jane asks.

Naked, George stands with his head tilted as if he’s hearing something.

“Coffee?” she asks again, gesturing with the pot.

He doesn’t answer. He walks from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room, and sits in the dark—naked in a chair.

“Did he get into a fight?” Jane asks.

“Car accident. You’d better call your insurance company and your lawyer. Do you have a lawyer?”

“George, do we have a lawyer?”

“Do I need one?” he asks. “If I do, call Rutkowsky.”

“Something is wrong with him,” Jane says.

“He killed people.”

There is a pause.

She pours George a cup of coffee and brings it into the living room along with a dish towel that she drapes over his genitals like putting a napkin in his lap.

The phone rings.

“Don’t answer it,” George says.

“Hello,” she says.

“I’m sorry, he’s not home right now, may I take a message?” Jane listens. “Yes, I hear you, perfectly clear,” she says and then hangs up. “Do you want a drink?” she asks no one in particular, and then pours one for herself.

“Who was it?” I ask.

“Friend of the family,” she says, and clearly she means the family that was killed.

For a long time he sits in the chair, the dish towel shielding his privates, the cup of coffee daintily on his lap. Beneath him a puddle forms.

“George,” Jane implores when she hears what sounds like water dripping, “you’re having an accident.”

Tessie, the old dog, gets up from her bed, comes over, and sniffs it.

Jane hurries into the kitchen and comes back with a wad of paper towels. “It will eat the finish right off the floor,” she says.

Through it all George looks blank, like the empty husk left by a reptile who has shed his skin. Jane takes the coffee cup from George and hands it to me. She takes the wet kitchen towel from his lap, helps him to stand, and then wipes the back of his legs and his ass with paper towels. “Let me help you upstairs.”

*  *  *

I watch as they climb the steps. I see my brother’s body, slack, his stomach sagging slightly, the bones of his hips, his pelvis, his flat ass—all so white they appear to glow in the dark. As they climb I see below his ass and tucked between his legs his low, pinkish purple nut sack swaying like an old lion.

I sit on their couch. Where is my wife? Isn’t Claire curious to know what happened? Doesn’t she wonder why I am not home?