The Voices in Our Heads (8 page)

Tonight she added a hairnet. She looked ridiculous, but who would be looking? She was just the nutty old broad across the way, and her son Michael hadn’t been a regular visitor since his father died five years back.

Doris tied up the Glad bag, pulled it out with that particularly disgusting little wheeze of suction, rested it against the wall by the door, and then grabbed the mono bin with the plastic and bottles from under the sink. She strode across, flipped down the lock on the back door, and gave it a hip. Thunderheads had broken the four-day heat wave, but the air was an assault of humidity, all ghosted by a dark mist. It tasted like wet hay, and Doris broke a sweat. She shuffled out to the stoop, slipped her feet in her sneakers, and padded down the steps, arms spread like Jesus.

She’d have to wash off the door lock in there now, because she’d touched the Glad bag before flipping the catch. She’d also have to take a shower if the trash bag or recycling container happened to brush her clothing out here because of the same twisted logic that made her wash her hands after throwing out the plastic gloves. Part of her knew this made no sense whatsoever, but she’d long surrendered to the fact that her will and intuition were both better served blindly than with what she offhandedly considered “masculine reasoning.”

Doris made her way down the walk. She angled right to avoid the butterfly bush spilling onto the ancient, turn-buckled pavers, nudged open the wooden gate, slipped through to the back alley, and then she stepped in a puddle.

For a bare moment it did not compute. There was no divot back here deep enough to hold this landmine of rainwater, for God’s sake, she had walked through here thousands of times before and never had an incident. The water was tepid, going about an inch past her ankle, and Doris bit back the scream that had been building inside her. Back here the lighting was especially poor, and she couldn’t really make out the booby-trap her foot had landed in, only that the surface had moving blotches, floaters. She pulled out and could feel something sticking to her bare Achilles heel. She dropped the bag, forced herself to set down the small recycling can as gently as possible, reached down, and picked off the leaf.

Her glove touched her heel and she gave a short shriek.

She approached the shadowed line of trash cans and fumbled through the rest in a blur. She pulled up the trash can lid, groped back for the bag, threw it in, and reset the top. She snapped off the outdoor recycling container’s wide cap, groped desperately for the little bin, now lost down in the shadows, finally found it, and dumped the contents, hating at least somewhere at the rear edge of her present horror and repulsion that loud glassy clunking that made her seem like the neighborhood lush.

She returned the top to the container and stepped back. She was breathing heavily, and her whole body swarmed with what felt like thousands of microscopic vermin dancing in and out of her pores. All around her were vague shapes, rough chalk-like outlines colored black and deep gray, houses rising up in the background, Billy Franklin’s basketball net looming to the side like a dark praying mantis. She lurched for the gate, and her right foot made squelching noises. Oh, these sneakers were as good as thrown away already, and she would put these clothes right in the washing machine. Then she would shower with the water turned as hot as was endurable. Suddenly, it came to the forefront that Doris never directly washed her feet. Nor her calves—she usually went down to the knee. Well, tonight she’d sit her frail, bony ass down flat in the tub and even soap between the toes. She’d use steel wool if she had to.

On the way back through the yard, Doris began thinking of all the things she would have to clean now, all the traces she’d need to eliminate. Even if she left the sneakers outside, there was no way she could get into the kitchen without tracking in a bit of that puddle, so she would have to mop the floor before going to bed. On her way to the downstairs washer, she had to cross the corner of the den, so it would be necessary to get a fresh trash bag and tie it around her foot so she wouldn’t have to wet-vac the carpet. She would bring a second bag in hand, dump the first one in the basement can she emptied the lint trap into, strip down to her bra and underwear, throw the clothes in the wash standing on one foot, tie up the second bag, get upstairs, set the second foot bag in the bathroom trash, and hop into the shower with the pristine left foot. After washing off three times, she would walk the tall, thin bathroom can down to the kitchen can, dump the foot bag, wash her hands, march back upstairs, and clean the tub out with Soft-Scrub. Then, one more shower for good measure and bed. Finally.

By the time Doris finished this dog and pony show, it was 1:17 in the morning.

At 2:19, she stepped in another puddle.

She had woken in the darkness with a start, not quite recalling the dream, but still feeling its potency. Something had been wrong, the world tilted. There was guilt involved, and some impending doom at the edges, wild animals pacing and growling, her father, horn-rimmed glasses buried somewhere in his fat, greasy face, cursing in Yiddish and storming around their small Brooklyn apartment adorned with the bright stained-glass lampshades, lots of marble and ritzy glassware, clowns with frowns juggling dead puppies, something.

She threw off the covers, swung out her feet, and rubbed her cheek. Her toes curled in toward each other, and she sighed. She’d never brought up her iced tea for the nightstand. She ran her palms once over the skirt of the nightgown covering her skinny thighs, stood, put her hand to her back briefly, and walked toward the front corner of the bed. Right by the window by the bureau, she stepped in it. Water. Luke warm. And it reeked like trash.

This time Doris screamed long and loud. She gave a half-turn, stumbled backward in the general direction of the bedroom doorway, and covered her mouth as her wet foot, the left one this time, made splatting sounds against the hardwood floor. By the time she got to the light switch, she was breathing heavily, trying to think rationally.

The room flooded with brightness, and Doris blinked. Everything looked harsh, sharp-edged, menacing. Limping a bit, as if it would make her soiled foot infect the floor less, she made her way back around the bed, hand still frozen up at her mouth. When she came around the corner that led to the scene of the crime, where the bed and the wall made a short alleyway to the nightstand, she saw it picking up a dull gleam. It was an oblong puddle of dark wetness about a foot long, and it had a squiggle of dirty sediment floating across the top like a snake. She gasped. There was also a leaf-stem in there, bobbing slightly, the end of the stalk turned up and off from what looked like a rainbow streak of oil or grease refracting the submerged end in a cloudy slant.

And the smell was absolutely putrid. The closer Doris got, the sharper the odor came off the dank spill. This was trash water, Reading water. Doris darted her glance all around the room, her sharp face jerking into different positions like some terrified little bird. She felt she should call somebody. She looked up at the ceiling for a water stain, but it appeared to be bone dry. Her hands were clasped up by her throat now in the prayer shape, and she crept a bit closer to the puddle. She gave a big sniff just to be sure, and Lord have a mercy, it was bad! In what seemed like centuries ago she’d worked in the Overbrook Delicatessen as a cashier, and had been sent to the walk-in box to get a few onions for Andy, the short-order chef who worked the main meat slicer. She had reached into the pickle barrel on the shelf behind the steel whipped-cream canisters and come up with brown mush between her fingers. At first she thought it was one of those jokes they all liked to play on the new girls, you know, like “Go get me a bucket of steam,” but this was no prank. It was a rotten onion, and that pungent, rank odor was somewhere in this puddle, amidst what registered as rotten eggs and what seemed akin to old, spoiled lo mein in one of those white takeout containers with the dried, petrified sauce stains shadowed up under the top interlocking covers.

Doris immediately began working off the initial fright in robotic, numbing exchanges. The cause, origin, and “possibility in the first damned place” of the puddle surrendered to a series of dumb, long-learned, and deeply ingrained motor functions involving the set of yellow Johnson & Johnson dishwashing gloves she left by the basement utility basin for emergencies, the bathroom can, two rolls of paper towels, some old contour sheets with paint-stains that she hoarded in the basement cabinet with the light bulbs and extension cords, her mop, the bucket that always seemed to collect hair in the bottom of it no matter how many times she scrubbed it and left it to dry upside down at an angle, a double portion of industrial-strength floor cleaner, and some good old-fashioned bleach. When she was finally finished, her room smelled like a hospital. Her fingers were red and her eyes glazed. She showered for twenty minutes, skin tingling as she toweled off afterwards. At 4:46
a.m.
she crawled back under the covers, body aching, head like a stone.

At 7:56, she awoke to the smell of rancid trash mixed with sewage and a somewhat invasive sound, something odd, something that had interrupted the nearly imperceptible hum of the central air she’d spent a good chunk of Frank’s life insurance to have installed. The noise was coming from the bathroom, a slurping, slopping sound edged with that particular, echoed plinking that made one think of pipes and porcelain and dirty toilet bowls. She was lying rigid on her back. She rubbed her face with both open hands, and the noise stopped. She sniffed.

Something still stank.

Doris pushed out of bed and looked down sharply when crossing the area where the puddle had been by the window. The slats of the blinds made bars across the place where the bleach had lightened the wood. She stepped over it and padded across the front of the bed. By the time she got to the doorway, she was holding her nose. When she turned the short corner to the bathroom, she was gasping for breath.

She could taste the smell—it was thick on her tongue, a molestation of her lungs. Suddenly, she realized what an absolute disaster area the bathroom was even
leading up
to the toilet. The floor tile was designed to “cover,” as some salesman might say, or more particularly hide dirt in the same manner that a youngster might move peas into the patterns on a dinner plate. There was a light layer of dust on the board behind the light fixtures on the medicine cabinet, and the soap dish built into the sink by the faucet had traces of filmy residue topped off by a bobby pin with a few strands of hair twisted in it. The toothbrush holders were coated with the remnants of old paste on the inner sides of those little ovals, and the three-way pullout mirror was spotted. And what about the bowl brush and plunger casually left to the rear of the tank on the floor? How many times had they been submerged in water riddled with waste, and then simply stuck back there to fester? This whole room was getting a once-over, and a good one!

She edged up to the toilet, raised her eyebrows, went up on her toes, and looked over the rim.

The water was filthy gray, bubbles coating the surface, slightly darker scum crusted and settled at the edges. There were dark spottings under the bowl rim that had begun to drip back down like dirty tears, and floating in the surface skin was a gob of what looked like a half-pound or so of regurgitated mashed potatoes. In the center of it, just to the left like a cherry on top, was an object of firmer substance. It was a half-buried pine cone.

Doris almost vomited.

She also had to go. Number two. Now.

Doris stretched out her hand for the flusher on the far side of the tank, and then paused. Would the pipes handle the extra baggage in there? She had never tried to send down solids like this. Suddenly an image of an overflow came to mind, and she almost squatted and emptied right there on top of and into the mashed potato goop. There was no way she could handle, in this condition, that gray-brown sludge rising and flooding over the rim to the floor. First, it was the only bathroom in the house, and she would have no choice but to soil herself. Or go in the sink or the tub. And the possibility of the toilet refuse covering the floor, maybe seeping out to the hallway rug, plus feces in her underwear or partly washed down the drain where she washed her body or brushed her teeth was simply not a consideration. It just could not happen. It wouldn’t. God was not that cruel. She reached, held her breath, and flushed. There was that deep sound of water rushing through the jets beneath the rim, and the mass lolled into its first revolution.

“Down,” she thought, remembering not to bring the hand that touched the dull silver spoon-shaped steel to her mouth area. The angled side-streams broke the dirty spots on the inner facing of the bowl and the whirlpool formed just below. The gob in the middle began its spinning act, a carnival Tilt-a-Whirl favoring one side, the pine cone following like some eager dog.

The load went down. There was a horrible moment at that one brief instant where the bowl stood dead-empty, where there was a cough that caused an upsplash about an inch and a half in height, (it made Doris jump), then that bobbing, hesitant sort of refill. It only came up with a half-bowl of semi-clear water by the time the mechanism had gone to its hollow, moaning phase, the side-streams thinning to drips.

A half bowl. The silent sort of protest that let you know you almost had an incident, but the little invisible toilet soldiers went on overtime down there pushing the top-heavy load through the system.

Good enough. The cramps in Doris’s stomach had gone to “code red” heaviness, and it was now or never. She dropped her underwear, flipped up the nightgown, sat hard, and let it come, praying she wouldn’t have backsplash soil her upper thighs or worse.

Her Haines silk underwear with the soft pink flower shapes was touching the floor tiles. She would have to stick that in the wash now. Also the nightgown. Then, she was cleaning this bathroom soup to nuts. Then another change of clothes.

She heard something beneath her. A sputtering or bubbling, then silence.