AM/PM (4 page)

Missy had legs, and she knew how to use them. She slid them into jeans or wrapped a skirt around them. She walked with her legs to the grocery store. She used her legs to help haul everything up the stairs and into her kitchen, and she used her legs to walk back into the bedroom and back into bed. It was easy to use her legs, she thought, drifting off.

June continued preparing her apartment for Terrence’s visit, even after it became apparent he would not arrive. She arranged the furniture, thinking
Terrence is not going to like this chair
or
I wonder what Terrence will see first
and then she would stand at the entry, letting her eyes fall on the problematic chair, and the carefully arranged photographs, and the strange carved bowl that June loved but knew for a fact that Terrence would not love, and there it was, anchoring the whole of the room together, sticking out like a bruise. It was wood with tarnished metal accents, nothing fancy, something she had found at a secondhand store when she was looking for curtains to hang so that Terrence would not see the metal blinds and think less of her.

It concerned June that she was taking the sentiment too far, but there was a certain enjoyment to be had from preparing the house for a man, for cleaning and waxing the floors with the thought that he would, at any moment, walk up the stairs (in these fantasies, he had his own key), drop his bag on the couch, and touch her casually on both shoulders before stepping around her to open the fridge. June told herself,
This fantasy could be of any man
. This was, in theory, true. But for that night, it was Terrence, and in the morning it would be Terrence, and June tried not to think beyond that.

The dog’s ears twitched. Simon rubbed scar solution onto the tops of his hands as he had every day for the past six months, trying to erase the marks left by a cooking accident. He had grown accustomed to the scar solution, an elixir of onion peel extract that smelled like the waitress girl at the Italian restaurant when her downy arm brushed his cheek as she leaned over to refill his drink.

Simon stood over the dog on the back porch, surveying the overgrown grass and peach trees and cobwebbed grill that, combined, represented his set of summer projects. He tried to remember the time of day he was born, deciding eventually on five thirty-two in the morning. It was a Presbyterian hospital back then. That was before it was bought and turned into a research center where they studied people with night terrors. Patients woke at all hours, screaming for their mothers. Everybody’s got to start somewhere.

Dear June,

 

I want you to know that when I said I would never wash my hands again, I was serious.

Sincerely,

Terrence

When you’re tangled up with your woman in a bed, it feels right to further tangle yourself.

“I wish I had a hat,” Simon said.

“I wish you
were
a hat,” Betty said. “I wish you were
my
hat. I would carry you with me, wrapped around my skull, when I was having a bad day. You could protect my image, if you were my hat.”

“I would have to be stylish.”

“Far be it from you to not be stylish. You would be the envy of all, and of all hats, in the neighborhood. I would go on walks outside, just to show my hat off to the people, and as I passed, there would be some jealousy there.”

“We would both be able to sense it?”

Betty pressed her face into Simon’s neck. “I would be able to sense it, and you would be able to sense
me
.”

After a few hours or days, Terrence decided to try out his voice. “Charles,” he said.

“Yes, Terrence?”

“I’m afraid we will never escape this box.”

“That is certainly the simplest way to articulate that particular fear.”

“Charles?”

“Yes?”

“We have fallen out of time. If we die in here, will anyone find us?”

“That calls upon some important questions. Will
we
continue to exist as such, for example. And if we will, is it true that everyone else will—or in fact that
anyone
else will—continue to exist as such, and if that’s all true, will the box continue to exist as such. All of these elements have to come together perfectly, and it’s somewhat narrowing to assume they will, with or without our contributions.”

“Charles.”

“What is it?”

“I cannot find the exit.”

“Neither can I, old friend. Neither can I.”

Of course, the conversation was just starting to get somewhere when a frayed electrical connection sparked and set the gas station on fire.

“We should really, really be going,” Emily said. “I’ll tell you all about it if you start driving.”

Martha shook her head. “I have to start driving to hear about your lack of attraction, then. So as long as it’s convenient for you, we’ll talk about how you can’t look at me.”

“I can look at you,” Emily said. Her eyes were fixed on the smoke. Employees were hustling patrons through the front doors. One of the customers gestured frantically at them. Emily rolled down her window. “The gas station is about to blow up,” the man said.

“You’re easily distracted,” Martha said. “You can’t stop to see the good in people.”

“There’s plenty good,” Emily said, watching the man cross the street.

“You say that now, but you can’t even see the good here. Most people die alone yet here we are, together. If you were holding me right while this gas station blew up and took us with it, we couldn’t be closer.” She placed her hand on Emily’s knee.

Emily stared at the hand. “You’re insane.”

“Let’s take it slow,” Martha said, reaching for the elastic band on Emily’s stocking. Black smoke poured thickly from the windows and doors, from the ventilation hoods on the roof. Emily felt something that wasn’t entirely fear.

During his time as a hermit, Simon lived upstairs from two newlyweds. They rarely cooked, and when they did, things burned. They made love at two or three in the morning most nights, and then one of them—the girl, Simon imagined—got up and took a shower. He thought of the girl in the shower, all of twenty-three, freshly displaced from her parents’ home in Colorado, taking a shower in her downstairs apartment in Texas that she shared with her husband. Simon imagined she lathered her hair with unscented shampoo and repeated the phrase:
My husband.

Through the trees under her window, June could just barely make out the swimming pool. She had never seen anyone in it, but every day, two rottweilers took a lap around it. They loped around casually, not looking for anything in particular. The water shimmered. It was hot outside, and the people who owned the pool would probably be down there enjoying it if they weren’t at work, earning money to pay off the pool. June wondered if it was better to be at work, paying off a pool, or at home, watching the dogs run.

Carla woke up, still drunk, and surrounded by Supreme Court justices. Ruth Bader Ginsberg was retching in the toilet. Antonin Scalia was wearing Carla’s underwear. Senior members of appellate courts were passed out in bizarre positions, splayed across her kitchen floor. She was frightened and disoriented.

She got herself up and ate two gas pills, two sneezing pills, a vitamin pill and a tablespoon of oil and you know what Carla did? She got herself a job.

Frances needed a man she could sink her life into. The perfect man, she observed, would like her but not really enjoy her friends, and the feeling would be mutual. She and her perfect man would eventually stop going to their friends for advice. They would eventually see each other only, and one morning, they would wake up to find that they had fused together, just slightly, at the upper-thigh. The fusion would not be uncomfortable, and would allow for some level of privacy for each. The days of uncertainty, and annoyance, and misunderstanding, would not be entirely over, but whenever such feelings arose, Frances or her perfect man would simply reach to their thigh area and gently pluck the shared skin like a harp string.

The insomnia had a calming effect on Reginald, who was accustomed by then to the disappointment of lying awake in bed. At night, small things came to the forefront. The metal cord on the ceiling fan made a rhythmic tapping noise. He made a mental note to pick up a balance kit from the store.

Squirrels ran down their corridors from the attic and into the plumbing behind the bathtub, avoiding the traps Reginald had set for them. The sounds comforted him and kept him awake. If the walls could talk, they would say,
Help! There are squirrels in my brain!

Those infants have a right to privacy. They may be infants now, tumbling about in their onesies while the rest of us have to work to make a living, but pretty soon they’re going to be cogitating, speaking, members of society, and who are you to draw a line in the sandbox between infant rights and human rights?

The causeway had an erosion problem and the monument maker had extra stones. The city manager saw an opportunity. At the water’s edge, the tombstones made a somber beach. The stones were largely production errors—misspelled names and cracked bevels. A few of the stones belonged to the unlucky deceased who couldn’t afford the final payments. Loved ones could visit the watery memorial garden, if they so chose. Most did not.

Are you growing mistrustful of others? Do you suspect your wife does not actually have cancer? Is every trip to the mailbox an exercise in loathing and remorse? Are your coworkers having trouble finding anything interesting to say when they talk about you behind your back? Do you deeply despise people who possess many of the same opinions and motives as your own?

Tess wouldn’t give everything up for Wallace. She found the sentiment behind that statement to be a little tired, a little oversimplified. She had given things up, but if someone had placed the option in front of her and made it perfectly clear,
you’re giving this up for that man
, she would have said, no, I’m not, don’t be foolish, I’d give nothing for him when he’s given nothing in return. What she didn’t know was, love doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t trade one-for-one. Tess didn’t yet know it takes until you have nothing left, until it feels like the blood in your body doesn’t have the energy for a whole circuit.

Lifting a heavy box of files had injured Carla’s back. She sat hunched at her desk, feeling foolish, wondering if old age had finally caught up. Her daughters were grown, and though the men who pursued her did plenty to make her feel like a kid in college, she could see the graying around their temples, the odd areas of slackening skin that matched her own.

They all went out together to the railroad tracks to see the funeral train roll by. Martha and Hazel were pushing each other because they were just kids, and they gained a distinct pleasure from standing next to the tracks without getting yelled at, a pleasure which could be best expressed in meanness. Martha pulled one of the pigtails that Hazel spent so long getting even with the other. So Hazel dug her fingers into Martha’s arm and Martha squealed and Carla hauled back and smacked the two of them so hard they nearly fell off the backside of the embankment. She looked back at them with an incredible anger that Hazel and Martha would not understand until they were much older.

Olivia sees a butter knife on the banister atop the stairs. She fantasizes wildly about the ways in which it might plunge into the ones she loves.

The butter knife makes the entire room feel dangerous. An intruder might not have any desire to stab her until he reached the top of the stairs and felt the butter knife under his hand. Olivia cannot go on until she collects the butter knife and puts it in the sink, where it belongs.

Ask yourself: If you were sitting on a girl’s couch, and you realized the couch smelled like urine, would your first impulse be to wonder if you were the one who created the urine? Would you feel a sudden sense of guilt, like you didn’t belong on the couch at all, and once she came back out of the bathroom, she would take a rolled-up newspaper and swat your ass until you slunk, whimpering, to her open hand? What we’re saying here is men are dogs.

To clean a couch, one must first mix an enzyme cleaner with soap, and then use a clean towel or rag to scrub the soapy water into the couch. After a significant amount of cleaning, one then rinses the towel, refills the bucket with hot, clean water, and scrubs anew, removing soap and residue. Depending on the remaining visibility and odor of the stain, another pass may be necessary with soap and rag, water and rag. It may be necessary to pause between treatments, or to allow the soap mixture to soak into the material. What we’re saying here is our lives are furniture.

“They’re gold flakes,” Wallace said, reaching to touch them on his back. “Genuine.”

Tess held her hand against the textured gold on Wallace’s tattoo. She drew her fingers back. “Are not,” she said.

“Indeed they are. The artist was fantastic. He literally fused the metal to my skin, and I have to get it retouched every five years.”

The gold leaf made a pattern of fish scales across his lower spine.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, turning his head halfway.

“Not as beautiful as a gold flake.”

He considered it. “Maybe not. It was a very special process.”

“Must have been,” Tess said. She felt sure she would die alone.