Catapult Page 7

  “Hon?” I asked her. I felt wary and, under that, just a prick of irritation.

  She shook her head without looking up.

  “Hey—” I said, reaching out with my hand.

  She took a step back. “Christ, Mason.” She was speaking to the dumplings as she slid them into the trash. “Who does that? Who doesn’t say that?” Her eyes were shiny as scales when she looked up at me. “What kind of person doesn’t ever say dead?”

  I used to think the danger of marriage was getting too close, losing track of the differences between you and the other. The spring after we were married, for instance, A and I took a trip to Itasca, the place where the Mississippi started in a lake still white with ice. A took her shoes off and picked her way across the creek’s mouth: cringing, almost singing with the pain of the barely unfrozen water. It took longer to cross than she expected it would, and when I went over the bridge and met her on the other side, her eyes were watering. I sat her down on a picnic table and put her icy feet in the baggy pockets of my coat, one on each side, her legs open in front of me. I said, softly patting the bulges in my pockets, “Hey, look what I found in the Mississippi!” She giggled noisily, closed her eyes.

  I say this because there were times when I felt useful to her, worthy. I remember thinking we’d avoided the pitfalls other couples had fallen into, the gooey, nonchalant forms of intimacy. Every point of connection for us, even after two years of marriage, seemed precious to me, continually rare. I say this because I was honestly surprised when I looked at the pictures from that trip and there was not a single one of us together. There’s me standing in the shadow of Paul Bunyan’s statue, A frowning forlornly at a diagram of ants. I know the explanation is simple—with two people, there’s just the one taking the picture and the one posing out in front—and yet it never occurred to me until I saw the pictures at home just how painful this made things when you looked back on them.

  After the Fengs left, I expected to lie awake for a long time, but I fell asleep right away, effortlessly, without even crawling under the covers. I tipped in and out of dreams. I couldn’t remember anything particular when I woke. I just had the feeling that I’d been dreaming and I should go back: there was so much work to be done, there was all that complicated maneuvering.

  Once, I woke and went to the window. I realized I was looking out there for the room I’d just come from, the one from my dream.

  Once, I woke with A in my arms, like I’d scavenged her body from a riot. I said, “Where did you come from?”

  She murmured, “I’ve been here all along.”

  I said, “You’re lying.”

  She sounded sad. “You’re the liar, Mason. You must know that.”

  Late in the week, Mrs. Feng left a message on our answering machine about coming downstairs to their office. A didn’t mention the message to me, and neither of us erased it. It stayed a blinking red light on the phone, distracting but innocuous.

  At work, Mabel stopped me outside the men’s room. She took my elbow and asked what I did to the guy with my wife. She had two white bits of saliva in the corners of her mouth, wiggling like maggots when she talked, making me nervous. I was suddenly disgusted by her lopsided face. “Why would you accuse someone you don’t even know?” I demanded. When I walked away, I noticed I was trembling.

  It seems I’m left watching A watching me during dinner. She looks like she’s waiting to say something. “Everything alright?” I ask. Our plates are strewn with the needle bones of fish.

  She takes my hand, walks me to the unmade bed, lies down. Then she fucks me, very swiftly, very proficiently, holding my hips in her hands like handles. I feel shaken up afterward. A works her toes into her socks, clips closed her bra and stands up.

  I feel a panic rising in me. “Don’t go?” Her hair is in her face.

  She makes a ponytail, pulling an elastic band from her wrist in a sleight-of-hand maneuver, a sudden flick of her fingers. “I’m not tired yet.”

  “Then just lie down and wait.”

  “Mason, you can’t make me stay.” Her tone is even, controlled.

  “Just try to sleep.”

  “I can’t. I cannot make myself.” Now her eyes are red. I can see them very well. The tightness of her ponytail seems to have made them wider.

  I tug her back to the bed. “Just stay for ten seconds,” I say, as she moves her lips away from mine. She starts to stand up, so I lean on her, grab her wrists, push her back.

  “Stop it, Mason,” she says.

  I hold her down. She has a new expression in her eyes, one that makes me feel heavier than I did, my limbs oddly sluggish. She tries to push me off, but I still have her fists in my hands, those tiny rocks, those little knuckles and fingers. She makes a sound then, a squeak, which I cover up with one hand. For just a second, I cover her whole face with my palm and fingers. I can feel her legs start to kick behind me. I can feel her sinking—into the mattress, into the pillows and sheets—but her face gets slippery and my hand slides off. I take hold of her hair.

  What she’s doing, I notice, is crying with her eyes closed.

  “A—” I whisper.

  “Fucking bastard!” she says.

  It occurs to me later, after A’s left with a backpack of clothes, that the baby A wants might already be born. I consider that he’s somewhere across the world even as I lie in bed, learning to hold his head up and suck watery formula from a bottle. The thought makes me feel morose, nostalgic. I feel as though I’ve missed something important, something I should have known about and prepared for long ago. I wonder, what if he’s four or five already? What if he can read and write? What if he’s already old enough to resent my absence in his life, the gaping space between him and his future? I think about him—a ten-year-old in China with a shoebox of drawings, sketches of American wildlife he’s seen on postcards—and regret wastes in my limbs. When A comes back, I think, we’ll have to call the Fengs and explain to them that we need to hurry.

  I get up and decide to make the bed, that neat square, but once it’s made, I can’t resist crawling back under the blankets. A’s side of the bed feels like another part of the world. I set her earplugs in my ears and pull on her mask. I lie back in the darkness to wait for her, but there sleep is instead: faceless, pitiless, and perfect.

  GIMME SHELTER

  In her adulthood strangers asked, “Where’d you get your accent?” They guessed England, they guessed Sweden, they guessed the South. She’d shrug, even as an adult. It pleased her to have her words come out of her mouth with no fixed address, as if the English she spoke was soft and malleable.

  *

  In that house where she grew up there were seven rooms, but once she dreamed of an eighth. Behind the washing machine and dusty finches’ cage, she found a secret door that opened to a nineteenth-century library. There were bookcases covering the walls, a red oriental carpet, a long rectangular window at the ceiling. In her dream she felt a sweet despair: what beautiful things her parents kept from her! She understood then that they were just a little cruel, to hide the best room in the house from their children.

  *

  Their bedroom was on the second floor. Dark, walled in pine boards with knots like faces. As a child, Lynn used to nap in their bed and feel watched. She didn’t like going to sleep when it was light and waking up in the dark. She felt that something of hers had been stolen. Beneath the floor she heard their voices—the voices of people who’d had afternoons. She hated them because they left her alone with her sleep, which was like a soft animal that crawled onto her chest and slowly suffocated her.

  *

  Her sister said they should carry their dolls outside and set them on the driveway for someone to find, someone better. The dolls had faces that had been chewed on by dogs. “Look at them,” Henna said, grim and self-righteous. But they weren’t ruined! The dogs had left them slippery with drool, but they still had all their parts. When you pressed the button on her arm, Isabella still opened her mout
h and cried.

  Still, the tiny pockmarks were like a disease of the skin she could neither cure nor imagine away.

  Henna lined them up on the asphalt, tiny arms open and waiting. The sign under the mailbox said SAVE US.

  Lynn stayed in the house and watched through a crack in the curtains. The babies looked like garbage. They looked like war. A boy came by on his bike, eyed them, and asked, “Do you have any baseball cards?”

  Henna said, “No.” She was drawing hearts on her shoe with a pen.

  The boy said, “Do you have anything good?”

  *

  Her parents’ room was at the top of a narrow staircase, the only room on the second floor. It had steeply sloped ceilings, a worn gray carpet, a door that locked. When Henna turned thirteen, her parents moved out, dragged their dismantled bedframe to the unfinished basement. Henna set her collection of glass cats on their windowsill. She covered the pine-knot faces in the wall with her posters of Nadia Comaneci.

  In the other bedroom, the one on the first floor of the house, Lynn’s brother moved out of his crib and into the bunk below her. He did not sleep soundly, as Henna had, but turned and turned under his dreams. It was like bobbing in a rickety boat, the way the wooden bunk bed creaked and shifted beneath her. Lynn said, “Saul, Saul?” hanging her head down to peek at him. The mice turned their wheels in their glass cage.

  *

  This is the story her father told her: the house was given in debt or payment to her grandfather’s father. It belonged first to a farmer, though no one knew what kind, and they set it on wheels and drove it with flashing lights to the new edge of the city. As a child, Lynn thought often of the farmer who gave it up, who stood in a field somewhere and watched it go like a parade.

  They dug a foundation from the hillside and set it down by the pond. The house was clapboard and square, brown-shuttered. In the beginning, it was like a body without limbs, just the most important rooms, the ones you need to stay alive. Then her young grandfather added the upstairs bedroom and garage, covered the back bathroom in pale blue tiles, screened in the open porch. He used the parts of other houses no one wanted anymore. Her grandfather had worked in demolition before auto repair in the years after the war, and he’d pilfered other people’s old doors, their cracked windowpanes and tiles, their long, skittery moldings.

  *

  When the mice got loose, they lived for a while in the heating ducts. You could hear them running past, their claws ticking in the metal pipes, their bodies shushing against the walls. Then they settled under the refrigerator and made babies. Lynn set her ear on the linoleum and shined a flashlight into the narrow crack. They blinked their black, identical eyes. Their babies looked like pale pink stools.

  She didn’t know how the mice got out of their cage, but she didn’t tell her parents. When her mother put Saul to bed—a purse on her shoulder, a sock in her hand—Lynn made a show of filling the blue plastic bowl with seed. She declared, “Midget and Dill look sleepy!” burrowing her finger in some wood shavings.

  After her mother left for her night shift at the hospital, Lynn lifted the bowl of food from the cage and emptied it in the toilet. The black seeds floated on the green surface. She flushed and flushed.

  “Poopy, poopy, poopy!” Saul said when she got back.

  She hissed at him, “Baby!”

  *

  During the summer, her parents carried the TV out to the porch where it was cooler. There were no curtains or shades, just a crimped rusty screen from knee to ceiling. You could hear the TV from down the street, and at night a blue glow lit up the front yard.

  Sometimes Lynn stopped her bike outside at dusk and listened. There was the sound of the cottonwoods against the roof, like a flock of nervous birds, and the dogs at the back door whining. There was a gunshot on television. There was the sound of her mother on the porch, saying, “Just a carpet for the hallway. Just a machine with a button you can push.”

  Her father said, “Just a dishwasher is more complicated than that.”

  The TV said, “The polar bear is nearly extinct.”

  *

  After her parents moved to the basement, her mother started making plans for the house. She wanted to add a new wing to the back, with a sliding glass door that opened onto a deck. She wanted a sink that didn’t leak into a bucket. She got a beautiful, determined look on her face and walked from room to room, squinting at walls. She made the bathroom into a closet; she made the bedroom into a two-car garage. She asked Henna, “Would you like wallpaper for your new room? Do you want carpet or wood?”

  Henna was suspicious. She worried that her room would no longer be the nicest in the house. She said, mimicking their father, “What an asinine suggestion! There’s no money for that.”

  Lynn saw her mother blink and pull a lock of wet hair from Henna’s mouth. She used two pinched fingers, as if extracting something from a puddle. “Yuck, Henna,” she said. “Yuck.”

  At dinner, Henna sat next to their father, who had flecks of grease on his hands from his auto body shop. He hit the ketchup bottle with one swift blow against his palm. “Pass the sauerkraut,” he said.

  Their mother kept it. She described the new kitchen she wanted: the wall she wanted to knock down, the new white linoleum. She made it sound like a country she planned to visit, somewhere far away and scenic, a place they might all go to together. The Kitchen.

  Their father pulled some leaky ketchup from the bottle with a knife. “Don’t be asinine, Linda.”

  She looked at him.

  He said, “Well, really.”

  Their mother was quiet. She had a mechanical anger, Lynn knew, like a wind-up gear. She needed a second to turn the screw and let it release. Then their mother tipped a bowl over and emptied all the sauerkraut onto her plate. It covered everything—her peas, her hotdog, her tiny wad of gum. It slid onto the table.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” their father said.

  Their mother said, “Of course not.”

  *

  Lynn described the library dream once to her lover. She remembered everything: the shiny wooden shelves, the walls of weathered books, the dense smell of old carpet. It was so clear it seemed possible to go back, to fill the car with gas and drive through the night, to find the key under the birdbath by the door, climb down the damp stairs, and open the tiny, hidden door behind the hanging laundry. She knew how the doorknob would feel (a little sticky, cool) and the ten even steps from one side of the room to the other. At the same time, she knew it was impossible to go to the library just like it was impossible to return to that house, which had been so neatly crushed by a single cottonwood. The trunk of the tree came down through the roof one night, splintering rafters and shingles and walls, then lay quietly in the upstairs room like a new piece of furniture.

  *

  When their father bought the new couch at Sears, he wrapped it in tarps and drove it home in the bed of his pick-up. Bound in clear plastic, it looked like the giant larva of a huge insect, something waiting to hatch. Their mother stood in the driveway, saying, “What is that? What is that?” her hands on her hips.

  Their father smiled and blushed. He sliced through the twine with a utility knife and slit open the plastic. The pale upholstery was the color of skin after a burn, perfect and impossibly pink. He helped their mother into the bed of the truck, and she looked like a prom queen up there, waving shyly at them all, perched primly on her new pink couch. Lynn could tell she didn’t want to look too pleased. “It won’t match, Alec,” she complained. “It’s too much.” Then she leaned back and shrieked, “It’s like being swallowed!”

  *

  Their neighbors, the Kenyons, had twin girls who played the violin. On the street, you could hear them practicing—tight little scales, lively arpeggios like stones skipped in water. They also had a Siamese cat they dressed in doll clothes, who wandered in calico on their roof. The Kenyon girls were several years younger than Lynn, but sometimes they saw her in a tree somew
here and climbed up after. They were polite and affectionate. They slapped mosquitoes on Lynn’s bare legs. From time to time, they kissed each other on the lips and wanted to kiss Lynn too, but Lynn climbed out of reach.

  When Mrs. Kenyon came out of the house, Lynn knew there’d be trouble. Mrs. Kenyon yelled, “Alia! Megan!” pulling hoses around on the grass, pointing sprinklers at beds of hostas. Lynn scrambled up as high as she could get, but the Kenyon girls cried, “Mom! Mom!” dangling precariously. They wanted Mrs. Kenyon to be afraid for them, which she was. She ran to the broad trunk of the tree and put her hands in the air, as if planning to catch them. She yelped, “Careful!” grabbing at their ankles, which made it difficult for the girls to climb down.

  On the ground, they giggled and sobbed. “We’re alright! We’re alright!” they said, as if surprised by this outcome.

  Mrs. Kenyon glared up into the branches. “Lynn!”

  Lynn slid slowly down, barely moving her body.

  Mrs. Kenyon put her hands on her hips. “Lynn, you’re the older one, take some responsibility.” She turned to the girls. “For the rest of the day, you can play inside.”

  The Kenyon girls—red-eyed with tears, with excitement—said, “Can we go to Lynn’s house, then?”

  Mrs. Kenyon and Lynn said, “No!”

  But Lynn didn’t like how Mrs. Kenyon walked the girls back across the street, one in each hand, like luggage.

  She revised to maybe, calling after them across the street: “Maybe tomorrow! Maybe the day after that!”

  *

  Each night that summer, Lynn filled the plastic bowl in the empty glass cage. She spun the metal wheel with her hand and ruffled the shavings. In the kitchen, she aimed a flashlight under the refrigerator and watched the mice clean their whiskers with their twiggy hands. The babies fumbled for their parents’ flanks, doddering and unsteady on their feet, holding their tails stiff for balance.

  Once when she clicked the light into the humming darkness, they were gone.

  She put her face against the sticky linoleum, her cheek, her ear. The mice were gone, but not their babies. They were white and dry as bits of powdered donuts, except for the red on the places where they were chewed in half.