By Emily Fridlund
“It’s raining in Hollywood.” Her brother’s voice skips notes.
“It is raining,” she tells him over the phone. “That’s some magic you have there, the Internet.” When his silence sails past comfortable, she adds, “Everything okay?”
“Why are you asking?” His voice is pentatonic, black-keyed.
“It’s pretty late–”
“It’s just after eleven!”
“Okay, okay,” she soothes.
For a moment she thinks he’s right, there’s nothing wrong. And she feels bad for her chastising tone, for wanting off the phone, until she remembers he’s obscured an important point that establishes their distance.
“My time it’s almost twelve,” she tells him. “Your time it’s nearly two.”
* * *
Her mother on the phone the next morning is apologetic. “Did I wake you up?”
“Well–” She pours coffee to clear her head and sits down in front of the window, out of which she sees two doves nicking and fluffing each other with beaks. They’re perched on a wet wire, and every time they touch, the whole thing drips across the yard.
“How’re you doing? Did you say you’ve been volunteering?”
“Yeah.” She holds the mug on her knee, feeling the warmth spread through her from that one point. She’s proud of her good intentions and embarrassed at the same time that they’re just that, with no underlying fact of generosity. She tells her mother, “It’s nothing. I haven’t really started yet. I just finished training.”
The birds outside lift feathers on their necks like hackles: now doves, now tiny spiked predators. Her neighbor in his yellow car has flooded his engine trying to get it started. It occurs to her, suddenly, that her mother must have forgotten the time difference, too, or else why would she call so early on a Friday morning? “I’m a little groggy, still. I’m sorry, Mom. You know, it’s pretty early here.”
“Your brother’s in jail.”
“Okay.” She closes her eyes, opens them.
She tries to think about how he sounded last night on the phone, whether she knew and ignored what’s obvious when she looks back on it. But the doves shimmy across the wire, and her mind drifts. While she’s thinking about how she used to call her brother from a friend’s house when they were kids, while she’s thinking about how she used say, “The Wizard’s coming for you,” and how thrilled her brother was, how terrified, while she’s thinking about how it seemed like she was blessing him at the time, but how her pleasure might also have come from succeeding in the lie, her mother tells her about her brother’s second DWI. Then, without any noticeable transition, her mother starts talking about her own father, who died in 1957 on a wheat farm in Texas. She explains the difference between summer wheat and winter wheat, how the latter spouts with the first freeze and then lies dormant till spring.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Mom.”
“Everyone was always saying, it was icy. It was an icy morning in the wheat fields. But now I wonder if it wasn’t an easier thing to say than he was drunk again and that’s why he crashed.”
“What are you going to do, Mom?”
“What am I going to do? Tell me that.” Her mother is in her sixties, widowed, loyal to horoscopes. She is afraid of making decisions that work against her fate.
The doves rear and carve open their wings, settle back.
Her mother sighs. “I guess what you’re saying is that I have to go pick him up?”
* * *
She rinses her mug, overturns it on the rack–wondering as she does whether she’s ever seen ice in Texas. Whenever, as a child, she’d ridden in the car two days south to see her grandmother, her house was always sunk in a marvelous kind of heat. She and her brother sat very still in front of the muted TV, drained even of boredom. It is hard for her to imagine that house covered in snow, a cold morning, a crash of any sort.
In Hollywood, drizzle mottles the windows.
She goes back to the bedroom, where her boyfriend slugs out of the covers. Without his glasses, he has an amphibian look, his eyes all innocence. “Jill?” he asks. She knows she’ll have to get very close before he can read her expression, so she stays for a moment in the doorway and watches him.
“Who was that? Is there something wrong?”
She snorts to snuff out an unexpected sob. “My mom has a theory about my grandfather.”
“She called for that? Come. Come back to bed.”
It pours. Like an optical trick, the windows shimmer with water just as the clouds open up. Sun refracts through the room, and the day feels, abruptly, like another day altogether. Like the afternoon on a weekend after a holiday, all the presents opened, nothing in the world left to want.
“Don’t we have jobs?” she asks him. “Aren’t we going to be late?”
He lifts his glasses, returns his face to its proper shape. “Shit. What time is it?”
The sun makes the room instantly hot. She feels like squinting. “Almost eight. But I need to get to work early so I can leave early tonight. Did you forget?” She feels irritable about the possibility that he has, and that’s a relief. It is good to have a specific, sensible source for anger. She glares at him openly. “Don’t forget, please? Today is the fifteenth. Friday. We’re meeting Manny and her husband what’s-his-name for dinner.”
Part Two
She showers quickly and rushes out, but once on the highway she leans back and lets the car drift through traffic. A carcass on the road turns out to be a palm frond. The exit ramp is strewn with lemon-yellow leaves. She doesn’t, in fact, have to work that day, so she gets off the highway early and takes the side roads towards the hills. They’ve cut back her hours at the lab, where she harvests cells with a razor blade from the scalps of rats. When she tells people about her job, it sounds more ghoulish than it is, less mind-numbing and banal. She doesn’t mind working less. She’s been filling the extra time by volunteering at a public school program for homeless families. She teaches reading and math to Angelo, who’s shy and ten and moves clumsily, like a fat boy, though he’s not fat. Just big for his age. She likes him a lot. She thinks of him fondly and with guilt until she sees him that morning lumbering up to her in the school’s conference room. Then, unaccountably, she feels dismay. His hair curls wetly down his neck. His mouth is budging with something.
She finds herself saying, sternly, “No candy, Angelo, while we’re working.”
Out of his mouth slides something glistening and larval, with points. It lands with a wet plop on his math book.
Angelo grins.
“Is that an airplane?” she asks, incredulous.
* * *
The rats are smart, actually. No one gives enough credit to rats. When she first took the job, her colleagues at the lab made fun of her for naming them. But they were hard to tell apart, the main difference being that some had a crop of pebbly tumors on their skulls, and some didn’t. “Harvest” is what she does to them. After nine years of higher education, she is a farmer like her grandpa was. But even without names–even bristly, corn-like in her hands–the rats are smart. She tries to remember that. She has to remember to bolt down the tops of their cages so they don’t escape and chew open the cages across the lab and feast on the mice. When that happened last summer, two completely separate experiments were ruined, two multimillion-dollar grants from two different federal institutions. That’s when her hours were cut back and her status as a lab technician changed to questionably proficient.
* * *
Angelo’s math book is stained with saliva from the toy airplane. She suggests they read instead. She pulls out a book about witches, about magic and trolls, but he points instead to a book that describes each and every kind of truck with an insidious level of detail. They’ve read this book before. Dump truck. Bulldozer. Tractor.
There is no story. But because she thinks of herself as good with children, she makes a story up. She says, “The suspicious tractor nursed a fear that he could not rid himself of his evil captor.”
Angelo says, “Stop.” He lifts his shoulders defensively. “The book doesn’t talk like that.”
“Sure it does.”
“Does not.”
She is surprised by his intensity. He almost never crosses her, barely even talks. But now this large, black-haired child has pulled his arms inside his T-shirt and seems to be glaring at her. Each of his eyelashes looks separate and knowing, like the antennae of something that should crawl away.
She pours out her voice cheerfully, reads every tedious detail. She reads about earth movers and military scrapers and snowplows, but she can’t help adding just one little elf on principle–on the theory that she can teach Angelo how to be a child, poor kid–and Angelo, fed up, crawls under the table. He takes off his shoes and builds a wall between them. He adds to the wall his backpack, a Transformers lunch box, and a plastic goat.
She feels–all out of proportion–hurt, and yet for reasons she can’t understand, she goes on relentlessly reading. “The elf was friends with a great wizard, who was a kind of God. Some trucks were under His control and were magic, and the other trucks were just trucks.”
* * *
In the car on the way to dinner that night, she gets into a fight with her boyfriend. They don’t fight often, but when they do, the fights descend upon them elaborate and hopelessly unique, like snowflakes. What they’re arguing about, bewilderingly, is National Parks. She’s seen a documentary. “America’s best idea,” she quotes. He says, cheerfully almost, “Catering to middle-class romantic notions of ‘wilderness.’” She can’t understand what his angle is, why he opposes birds and woods. She wants to go camping. She wants to have gone camping when she was a child.
“You’ve been to Yosemite!” she accuses him. “You washed your face in that stream.”
“Is that what this is about?” He sounds surprised. “You want to go? We can go if you want to go.”
She finds herself speaking very fast. “That’s not the point. It’s not personal. It’s about democracy, it’s about fairness and dignity, it’s about everybody getting some little portion of the freedom we’ve been promised. Haven’t we been promised?” she asks.
Rain makes the grey concrete black. She’s pleased, then ashamed, by his hurt silence.
“We’re lost,” she says.
“We’re turned around,” he says.
Part Three
It’s no surprise that the dinner begins poorly. The Thai restaurant is cave-like, windowless, lantern-lit. The tables are too close, so as they wind their way to their seats, they have to touch strangers hunched over plates and beg their pardon. By the time they sit down, Jill feels an overwhelming urge to apologize to her old friend, to everyone. She’s nervous. “Sorry the place is so packed! I heard it was good, but maybe not!” Across the table sit Jill’s boyfriend, her friend’s husband, two of Jill’s colleagues. She has invited people from work to ease the tension of meeting someone she hasn’t seen in years, but now, ridiculously, she can’t remember one of those coworkers’ names. It’s Anna and Somebody.
She does her best to look busy examining her napkin. It has been folded into a crane.
“Cool?” she says to her old friend, who’s sitting so close their elbows touch.
“Absolutely,” her old friend assures her. “There’s nothing better than a really hot curry.”
She smiles back, relieved. She finds Manny’s open-mouthed way of chewing endearingly, elementally familiar. Didn’t she used to eat licorice like that? Didn’t they used to sleep in the same bed? She hasn’t seen Manny since college, but for a few minutes–after Jill finishes her two beers and before the bill comes–the brilliant spices in her curry make her hands seem to pulse and everyone else across the table seem too far away to matter. She lets cold, cold water slide in little strokes down her throat. After a while, her old friend Manny tells her, conspiratorially, between bites, that she’s pregnant. “It’s like I’m somebody’s spaceship, some little fetus driving me around! But he–” She nods at her husband across the table. “–doesn’t understand.”
Jill licks her burning lips. In a moment of exuberant clarity, she thinks she sees how the unknown present of her friend connects to the well-known past they once shared. As if summoning the secret words of a pact they once made (and promised never again to mention), she reminds Manny about the time they lined up their dolls behind her mother’s car so she drove over them when she backed out. Jill’s almost whispering, only half-joking, swigging from her empty bottle.
“I don’t remember that,” her friend says. “That’s creepy.”
Jill looks at her. “We were in our anti-girl stage, remember? We despised all those papers we had to sign to get babies from cabbages. We wanted to be pioneers with rifles.” She casts around for a way to remind her. “We thought it a horrible injustice people hadn’t yet developed signs to communicate more meaningfully with other species.”
Of course it sounds like a joke. Manny decides to laugh. She scoots her chair back, glistens resplendently with sweat from what seems like a perch.
Jill remembers then that Manny hasn’t had any beers–she’s pregnant, obviously. She’s pushed out on that little one-man boat, and Jill is still on shore, aching to return to the woods. She might as well wave. Forlornly, she lifts her rumpled napkin from her lap, tries unsuccessfully to work it back into a crane.
“So,” Manny says, too perkily. “What have you been doing lately?”
“Volunteering,” Jill shrugs. “With a homeless kid.” She has a rehearsed story for times like these, a story about the lab and the bald rats she breeds, but she feels a sudden, pressing need to underscore her impersonal good intentions. Isn’t she trying to save the homeless? Isn’t she better because of that? “This kid’s a little terror, actually.” She finds herself exaggerating Angelo’s behavior, making things up. “Today he threw a tantrum and ran around screaming obscenities. The F-word, worse than that. He put a toy airplane in his mouth and threatened to chew it up and swallow the bits. No kidding. He’s crazy.”
“That sounds a lot like your brother as a kid.” Manny must see something in Jill’s face, because she puts a gentle hand on her sleeve. A mother’s hand, soothing. “But you were always so good at dealing with Ryan. I’m sure you’re doing a great job.”
Her boyfriend inserts himself in the conversation by reaching across the table with chopsticks.
“Ryan? Was he a bad seed even when he was little?”
Manny’s lips are oily. “Oh, no. Is Ryan still getting into trouble?”
Her boyfriend raises his eyebrows, defers to Jill, who’s working out her napkin crane.
“He’s fine,” she says, breezily. “He’s got a job at FedEx, actually. He sends things.”
* * *
Once, when she was twelve and her brother was five, he ran in a fury out of the house. He was angry that their mother had left for work, furious that his Tonka truck had a bad wheel, desperate in a way only he could get, tears and snot making his face look raked with claws. “Damn. Fuck. Roar,” he yelled at her. Then he ran in his socks across the snowy yard. “Oh, no you don’t!” Jill told him, as he fist-climbed an old ladder by the shed and crawled across the icy roof. She stood shivering in the doorway, her breath a dragony puff of smoke. She should go after him, she knew, but it seemed impossible to move from her spot. It was mid-winter, had been winter for many months. Every night, the same.
Before he threw himself from the shed, he threw his Tonka truck. A drift of snow swallowed first one, then the other. They made no sound at all, which was interesting and oddly pleasant, as if she’d been let off the hook, granted reprieve for a crime she hadn’t known she’d committed until it was over. She watched the spot where he’d fallen until, gradually, each of the other parts of the night came back to her. The shed with their garage-sale bikes, the sagging house with its yellow lights, the snow so soundlessly dropping.
Mine, mine, mine, she thought.
Backyard swing, woods and streets, the whole neighborhood.
Then her brother emerged as well, wailing. She went to him. She went to him in her socks. His little body was slippery and hot, despite the dusting of snow that covered him. She put his wet head to her chest. “Shhh,” she said to him. “Look.” He was having trouble breathing. He couldn’t get enough air to sob. “You jumped off the ladder and landed someplace else. I’m not your sister. That’s not your house. It looks similar, but it’s not the same place. The Wizard came and took you away! Relax.
Relax. You’re not even here. It’s okay.”
Part Four
When they get home from the Thai restaurant, Jill says something disparaging about Manny’s husband, but not because she doesn’t like him. In fact, she’d found him funny and smart, effortlessly bearded. She’s just feeling surly, every thought grinding itself down to smaller, grittier thoughts.
“But they seem pretty happy!” Jill’s boyfriend says.
His beard is patchy. He’s been learning German, and has words on index cards taped to all their furniture. He touches the one on the kitchen faucet, like a talisman, before filling his hand with das Wasser and drinking.
“But predictable, you have to admit that.”
“What makes you want to be better than everybody so badly?” he asks.
Good question. Jill squints at him, preparing for another fight. The problem with living with someone is that your every act can be turned into just another example of their larger theory of you. In fact, Jill has her own theories to slot him into–points about his absent missionary father, his need for domestic reassurance–but the feeling of a fight redounds before it starts, turns back on itself, and all Jill feels in the end is left out. Manny, the bearded husband, and her boyfriend all in on something.
She butts his ribcage with her head, ram-like.
He says, “Whoa, there,” and rights her head, setting it against his chest.
Her love for him has always been the underdog. She roots for it as if from a distance. She imagines what they must look like through the uncurtained window, the picture of tranquil domesticity they must now make. He smells like cilantro and beer, like curry and rain. And underneath that, he smells like himself, like nobody else, his body alarming because it is already so, so familiar.
* * *
Just before she’s about to climb into bed, her mother calls again. She sounds like she’s chewing something–a piece of gum? A fingernail? “I’m tired,” she complains.
Jill nods, lifts the long tendril of a spider plant like the tail of a rat. Regretfully.
“My horoscope, listen. Mercantile energy makes love into an exchange. It’s true! He’s twenty-seven, isn’t he? Why can’t he drive himself from here to there? Why can’t he get to a store and buy his own food? Jill–”
She hangs up the phone. Just like that. Then she calls her mother back. She does this very calmly, making sure she hears a dial hum before she presses out the numbers. It’s as if she’d planned to do this, as if it’s a tactic or ploy, though it isn’t. She takes a new tone this time. But of course it’s an old tone, too–wasn’t she always reprimanding her mother?
“It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just be done when you choose.”
“Oh, that’s good, coming from you.” Her mother chews and chews. Jill can hear her molars grinding, the sluice of her saliva around something soft. A caramel, a phone cord. “One day, you say, poof. I got other things to do. In a state three days away.”
She draws a breath across the miles. “I’m not his mom.”
* * *
But she was, in a way. She knew the trick. Whenever he threw a tantrum, whenever he started crying and couldn’t stop, she just said: You’re not even here. The Wizard, remember, has taken you away. You can’t see or hear Him most of the time, but He leaves signs to remind you. Everything is a sign. This Christmas tree, and that clock, see how strange they are, almost glowing? See how the squirrels just stand there and stare at you. See how unsettling that snowman is? See that scary shadow the mailbox casts, that cloud descending, isn’t the weather off? Listen to how funny I sound–doesn’t my voice sound funny to you? You should be careful, you should get away from me. You should go back to your world.
Part Five
She’s in bed, almost asleep, when her boyfriend touches her. She knows, from experience, that it’s not sex he wants, but a little talk, a mutual recognition of their general okayness.
He says, “My toenails feel soft. Are your toenails soft? We’ve been sitting in wet shoes all night.”
She draws up her knees and checks. She finds her toenails are tough as teeth. We’re not the same person, she wants to tell him.
He curls her hand in his, tries another tack. “How was volunteering today? I heard you say at dinner he was quite the terror.”
She takes her hand back. “He’s not so bad.”
“That’s probably your influence.”
She purses her lips though she knows he’s being nice. He wants them to practice lulling each other to sleep with compliments. He wants to wake up in each other’s arms, plan a trip to Germany, send their children to Montessori schools. He wants a future that comes as painlessly as possible.
He says, sleepily, “He just needs role models, no doubt.”
“I may not go back,” Jill tells him. “I probably won’t.”
* * *
Near the end of the session, Angelo had asked her from under the table if maybe they could do math. He’d wanted to do ten times things. Ten times two TVs. Ten times four microwaves. Jill thought she understood why he wanted to play this game, so she’d put her elbows on her skirted knees and pushed her eyebrows up.
“Did you have to live on the street for a while, honey?” She frowned, happy to have stumbled on this chance to flex her pity. “Did you lose all your stuff, your TV and your microwave?”
Angelo didn’t respond. Instead, he’d crawled further under the table, across the room and into a box of donated clothes, where he buried himself in scarves and jackets.
She’d sat silently in the little classroom, feeling ridiculous. It would have been humiliating if one of the other volunteers had come in and found her like that, crouching in a plastic child’s chair, alone, Angelo completely out of sight. But it would have been even more awkward to leave before her session was up. So she just sat there, bleakly, reading on and on about cars and trucks and things that go. As she read, she saw out of the corner of her eye the toy airplane sitting on the math book, now dry. That’s when she’d felt an impulse to put it in her own mouth. She wanted to shut herself up, show Angelo that she understood everything. If she hadn’t been afraid of someone coming in–a teacher, another volunteer–she’d have put that plane in her mouth like a bit, like some horrible, punishing snack, and she’d have crawled across the floor and into that box of clothes after him. She’d traveled a long way, it seemed, to find him.
She’d wanted to do that! But the box of clothes across the room stood unmoving, and she’d had the strong impression she was all by herself. Wind plucked the green out of the trees through the window. The toy airplane windows looked up strangely at her, like black squirrel eyes. She blinked hard, twice. You’re not even here, she thought.
* * *
After her brother is convicted and sentenced, he calls her again. This time they don’t talk much about weather. She can imagine what February in the northern Midwest is like without asking, and the truth is, it doesn’t rain very often in Hollywood. They interrupt each other and pause, awkwardly. They’re always awkward without a season in common. After a while, her brother talks a little about his car, the one that was impounded, and then he starts describing his drive home the night he was picked up by the cops. He does this with such precision and care, she feels as though she’s following a map to a hard-to-find place that shares landmarks with what’s very familiar. He’s the navigator, she’s the driver. She follows every word. “So you get off the 4 at Washington, and you know the gas station? The one near the off-ramp? Well, you go past that, and down the hill and past the post office and the playground. And then you know how Washington curves?”
She knows those curves in her sleep. That’s her world, those are her streets–she can hear how badly he wants to come back.
“Imagine doing those curves and getting to the top of the hill, and now you’re right next to the school, and it’s downhill from here, and now you can see it. The house. You’ll be there in a minute. Less. You’re almost home in bed already. You could almost just go to sleep and wake up in the morning, you’re that close. You’re almost safe. The light is on. It’s right there.”
In a flash she sees it all. The tall maples freighted with snow, Manny’s old house down the road, her own stucco bungalow. She sees icicles hanging from every window, a light coming from her old bedroom, the old Magnavox throwing blue shadows across the yard.
“They caught you at the corner stop sign, then?” She’s trying to capture the whole scene, trying to see everything.
Her brother pauses, confused. “What do you mean? Where?”
“The one at Pine and Washington.”
She hears his frustrated sigh. She hears him get bored, turn on the TV. “Jilly Bean. Jill. What the fuck? That stop sign’s been gone for years.”