| |  | | | | December 20, 2016 | Letter No. 65 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hello Sweet Holiday Lennys,
My favorite place to disappear has always been into fiction. I used to wait for Christmas break with nauseous anticipation, not because it meant Cabbage Patch Dolls or dyed-green sugar cookies, but because I would be left alone for up to thirteen hours a day and, if I was really performing at my highest level, I could finish three Baby-Sitters Club books a day.
Nearly twenty years later, I have similar designs on this holiday season.
Escapism doesn't mean you enter a world with zero problems. (I mean, Stacey had diabetes! Claudia lost her grandmother!) It means that, for a moment, you shoulder someone else's burden and when you emerge, you have a transformed understanding of your own.
Escape also factors prominently into these five pieces of remarkable fiction. In Gabrielle Rucker's "No Type of Good," a sister tries to run from her brother's painful jail sentence until circumstance prevents her from pretending any longer. In an excerpt from Jami Attenberg's latest novel, All Grown Up, a broke woman trying to make a life for herself in the city denies the origin of a fancy chair that means more than she would ever want it to. Nicole Dennis-Benn, also excerpting a longer work, paints a lush and painful picture of genderqueer teenagers in New Kingston, Jamaica, looking to lose themselves to the city's nightlife. While in Jade Chang's story "Britta's Still Here," a teenage punk realizes just how stifled she is by her family of origin. "A Weekend Upstate" by Amelia Kehaney shows the disastrous consequences of trying to feign joy, to pretend socially, to live a lie.
We hope, wherever you are and whatever you're feeling about the events of the past year, these stories can be a respite for you. I feel so lucky that we at Lenny continue to have the chance to harken back to women's magazines of yore and publish provocative, evocative fiction that makes you forget who you are — in the right way.
In conclusion, I saw Santa kissing Mommy underneath the mistletoe. It was revolting, and I think my parents should get a divorce. She wouldn't do that if they were happy, right? She's just trying to GET AWAY FROM IT ALL.
Love you,
Lena | | | | | | | | | | | | Britta's Still Here | | | | By Jade Chang | | |
| (All Illustrations by Melissa Ling) |
Britta is fourteen. Her parents named her after the water filter.
"We did it so that you would be pure," her mother says.
Britta thinks that a girl named after a water filter should have pale, clear eyes that are the lightest possible shade of blue.
Her eyes are black.
Her hair should be black and wavy, but instead it is short and straight and the ends are hot pink.
"You grew up too fast," her mother says.
It's not Britta's fault that she grew up too fast, just like it's not her father's fault, not really, that he sometimes has to walk around the house with an angry crisscross of duct tape over his mouth. Britta's mother always puts it on with a smack, slapping the sides of his face as he stands still, not saying a word. He still lets his facial hair grow, even though the tape rips off pieces of his salt-and-pepper beard, leaving bright-pink patches of exposed skin.
Britta's mother should also have black and wavy hair, but she doesn't, either. Instead it is dyed blonde and curled underneath so that the ends touch her ears.
"Like Marilyn Monroe," her mother says. Britta doesn't think it looks at all like Marilyn Monroe's hair, but she is grown up enough to know when to keep her mouth shut.
Britta has a brother who never kept his mouth shut. When he wasn't talking or singing or shouting at their parents, he was eating honey. Stephen is his name. "Stevie," her mother said. "Steve," said her father, when he said anything.
When Stephen turned fourteen, he started eating honey, on its own, all the time.
He ate it only straight from the plastic honey bears, tilting his head back and squeezing it straight down his throat. Britta kept the bears. Britta kept everything. She kept Stephen's old T-shirts, the ones he bought at shows, and the trophies that he won at school and didn't want. She kept her mother's old high-school yearbook and her father's forgotten souvenirs from his semester in Paris — a sack of business cards and matchbooks with French addresses and notes from old girlfriends.
The first time Stephen gave Britta a honey bear, their father was sitting on the sofa cutting his fingernails with a tiny, silver pair of scissors. He carefully snipped a line in the tape so that he could say, "Make sure you wash that out good, baby." Her father felt very strongly about ants. Back then the tape was just a joke, something her parents would do together. They would use masking tape and giggle as they rubbed their sealed mouths against each other. Britta thought it had something to do with sex, but she wasn't sure what.
By the time Britta was twelve, she had 200 little bears. They stood under her bed in neat little rows, twenty to a row. There were other things under her bed — mostly dirty socks and crumpled drawings — but the bears didn't mind. Soon the bears no longer fit under the bed, so Stephen built her a wall of shelves. She had to take down her poster of Einstein (the one at the blackboard, not the one with his tongue sticking out) so that the shelves would reach up to the ceiling, the way she wanted them to. Then Britta turned thirteen and Stephen stopped eating as much honey as he had the year before.
"He's turning into a fucking druggie," her mother said.
Britta was hoping that Stephen would wait a little longer to turn into a druggie, at least until she had 1,000 bear guardians to count before she fell asleep, but he didn't. Instead, he gave her another bear, bear number 852, and told her that he was leaving.
That night Britta woke up to her mother's screaming. She threw off her covers and ran into the hallway, sliding a little on the wooden floor. Her mother was holding an umbrella, Britta's umbrella, and screaming as her brother, Steve, Stevie Stephen, dropped down to the ground. For a minute Britta thought that he was dead, or dying, but just as she felt tears push out from behind her shock, he bounced up off the floor, grabbed the tip of the umbrella, and stared their mother straight in the eye.
"You can't," Britta's mother said.
Stephen didn't say anything, just reached up and touched the blood trickling from his head. It was thick and dark and Britta could almost taste the iron tang of it in the back of her throat. Still looking at their mother, he held up his reddened fingers and smeared a streak of blood across his cheekbone, right under his eye, like a warrior, or a surfer. Britta half-expected him to flick a bead of it at their mother, to splatter the white silk of her blouse with his blood, but instead they both dropped the ends of the umbrella at the same time and took a step back from one another.
Britta was a kid when she got that umbrella. A green one, shaped like a giant frog head, with black and white flaps that stuck up at the top, like eyes. Britta wanted to run downstairs and pick her umbrella up, she wanted to save it so that it wouldn't have to lie there between her mother and her brother, flappy eyes outspread. She didn't even realize that her father was downstairs too until he moved in to pick it up — but Stephen kicked it out of his grasp, turned, threw open the front door, and ran out of the house.
Now Britta is fourteen, and she still has 852 honey bears. When her friend Stacey sleeps over they draw pictures or write messages and put them inside the bears. Stacey is a boy, but he is allowed to sleep over because his mother and Britta's mother have been friends since they lived with the same man, a man who was not Britta's father. Britta's father doesn't mind if Stacey sleeps over because he thinks Stacey is gay. Britta knows that Stacey isn't because sometimes they kiss and Stacey gets excited, even though he's not her boyfriend.
Britta writes on a square of notebook paper: "All is nothing. Darkness is light." She has just finished reading the Tao Te Ching and the Myth of Sisyphus and thinks she might understand the world, but isn't really sure.
Stacey pushes a scrap of paper over to her. She reads: "I got the world on a string. It ain't nothin' but a thang." Stacey has just discovered irony, but he doesn't do it quite right. They both make fun of bad rap music, but secretly Britta likes most of the jumpy lyrics and hard sounds, even if they don't go well with her pink hair and pierced nose and sparkly blue fingernails.
When Britta brought the release form home from the piercing parlor she didn't expect her mother to sign it.
"Girls are full of holes, anyway," her mother said.
She signed it and gave it back to Britta and now Britta is the only girl in the ninth grade with a pierced nose, though two other girls already have nose jobs.
Britta's mother spends most of her time on the new bears. They are small and perfect, with mink fur and real suede patches on their paws. Britta's mother started making them when Britta turned fourteen, not quite a year ago, even though she had never sewn more than a button before. Now somehow she can make these pensive-looking little bears, who start out as sheets of fur and come to life wearing neatly fitted miniature doctor jackets or ballerina outfits. Now her mother is a company — Grin and Bear It, Ltd. — and people flood her with orders because she personalizes the stuffed bears.
"People are suckers," her mother says.
Britta's mother dresses the bears in outfits, which people pay extra for. She's working on one with a fisherman's hat and waders for some fly fisherman's 50th birthday, ordered by his wife.
"I'll bet he'd rather have a blow job," her mother says, when she thinks that Britta isn't listening.
Britta's mother also embroiders messages on plump red satin hearts and stuffs them deep into the plushy bear innards. "I love you" is the most popular message; there are also a lot of people — women, mostly — who ask for "Forever," or birth dates, or their own names. People pay a lot of money for the bears with the hidden hearts that Britta's mother makes. Even Stacey sees the irony in this, but he is also grown up enough to know when to keep his mouth shut.
Britta and Stacey are trying to come up with something new for the school craft fair. Last year Stacey made T-shirts painted with the names of old punk bands: the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, the Butthole Surfers. This is why Britta's father thinks Stacey is gay. That, and because Stacey was the one who dyed Britta's hair pink.
"She looks like a whore-in-training," her mother says.
Her father doesn't say anything, even though he doesn't have any tape on his mouth, because he isn't allowed to talk anywhere near the bears. The Grin and Bear It bears, that is. It's OK if he talks near Britta's bears, but he never comes into her room, so it doesn't matter that it's OK. He rarely leaves his office at all because he's usually working on a novel.
Nobody buys his books because they aren't very good. Even Stacey knows that because it is something that nobody keeps their mouths shut about. Britta's father once published a book that was very, very good. Better than good. Newspapers reviewed it and called him the Voice of a Generation. There had been interviews and photo shoots and invitations to speak at writing colonies and universities. And then, suddenly, he'd stopped doing all of that and moved them here, to this collection of houses that barely made up a new town.
Now, years later, critics keep reading each new book that he writes, hoping to find The Voice returned. They are always disappointed, and print the usual bad reviews: "clunky, overwrought prose," "leaden characters," "soap-opera plots." This Britta knows even though she doesn't read the newspapers because her mother cuts out every review and tapes it on the refrigerator door. Each time a new one goes up, her father stands in front of the refrigerator, staring at the tape.
Britta doesn't mind that her father is a bad writer, because he gives her a kiss on the forehead whenever he sees her, even if it isn't very often and even if his lips are covered with bumpy gray duct tape. She doesn't mind, for now, that her brother left and never came back. She knows that when she needs to, she can go and find him. And she doesn't mind that Stacey doesn't want to be her boyfriend because she doesn't want to be his girlfriend. Britta doesn't want to be anyone's girlfriend, yet.
Britta wants to be more alone. Or maybe she wants to find different people to be alone with. She isn't sure. She has sent away for brochures from boarding schools and signed herself up for the PSATs. Britta likes the names of the boarding schools. None of them sound like they were named after water filters. Deerfield. Andover. Choate Rosemary Hall. Every time a new brochure comes in a thick cream envelope, the school's seal printed in the corner, her mother brings it upstairs and puts it on the floor outside Britta's room. "Go," her mother says. Britta never hears that, because she's always at school when the mail comes, but it wouldn't have surprised her.
One night, just before she turns fifteen, Britta is finishing her project for the craft fair. Stacey's painting T-shirts again, but Britta has decided to make cell-phone holders out of felt. But these need something else, something extra. She slips down to her mother's sewing room, looking for the box with the red hearts. Sometimes her mother makes dozens of these "I love you" hearts all at once so that she won't have to pause after completing a fireman's suit or a little college professor's jacket.
Inside the cardboard box are the little hearts that her mother started that evening. They are still gaping open a bit at the end, because that's the part that has to be hand sewn after they've been stuffed. Britta picks one up. It makes a crunching noise. Britta always thought that the hearts were filled with the same soft plush that plumps out the furry bears, but this one seems tougher.
She reaches the tips of her fingers in and pulls out a scrap of paper like a fortune-cookie fortune. There is something written on it, but Britta can't read it in the dark. She rips open the little red heart, tears it in half right between the already-sewn "love" and "you." Then she flicks on her mother's lamp and spreads out the minuscule scraps of paper buried inside. Printed there, in neat, cursive script, are the things her mother never says:
"He's gone."
"He took everything."
"I hate him."
"I love him."
"He left nothing."
Britta snatches up the scraps of paper and the shredded satin heart, shoving them into her pocket. She doesn't cry.
The next morning Britta carries a stack of applications downstairs. They are all filled out, fitted carefully into envelopes plastered with extra stamps. She passes her father on the stairs.
"I wrote these," she says.
He nods, mouth taped, and touches his hidden lips to her forehead.
She sees her mother in the sewing room, surrounded by half-finished bears.
"Please mail these for me," she says.
Britta's mother looks up from behind her eyelashes, shakes her not–Marilyn Monroe hair, and reaches for her roll of duct tape.
Britta turns before her mother can say anything and grabs her jacket. She walks to the post office, even though it's three-quarters of a mile away, and marches straight up to the counter. There are other people in line, but it doesn't matter.
"Please send these right now," says Britta.
The woman behind the counter smiles. She thinks Britta is cute, with that pink-streaked hair and baby nose ring. "How old are you?" she asks, taking the stack of applications.
"I'm sixteen," decides Britta, as she smiles back and walks out the door.
Jade Chang is the author of The Wangs vs. the World, a New York Times Editor's Choice and one of Buzzfeed's 24 Best Books of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles. | | | | | | | | | | | | We Deh Yah! | | | | By Nicole Dennis-Benn | | |
We were outlaws. Twice we had been expelled from a womb: first as boys, then as women. Jamaica had been calling itself a country for only 50 years when we converged on the capital in search of our destinies. We were soldiers — warriors prepared to die on the battlefield miles away from the homes where we were christened as boys. We smudged our war paint across broken faces and armed ourselves with our mothers' things — the things we snatched from them to remind the world of the women we came from. The women that we became.
We thirsted for color. A patch of golden sunshine. A splash of blue. Tinges of red and purple and orange. The sky was a brilliant canvas for our dreams in New Kingston. We hoped our present would be nothing like our past — intolerable. Some of us rode the buses from the lush countrysides of Hanover, St. Mary, Bull Bay, St. Elizabeth, St. Thomas, clinging to hope. Many of us came from the sandwiched lanes of the Garrisons — shantytowns in the East where we still remembered the names of our neighbors and the dons who brought our family Christmas gifts and foods they cooked and shared from their pots.
We wanted more. We wanted beauty like we wanted laughter. We wanted to float away, to soar into that colorful sky like the jets heading to America that Floydesha, whose eyes were always trained on the clouds (like those old ladies sit on their verandas awaiting the day of judgment), would point out.
"Look, look! Anotha one! Quick before it fly pass!"
Josie and Farika would come running from their sheds with the speed of goats being chased by schoolchildren, waving sheets and towels and rags over their heads as though the pilots could see them — dark specks in a sea of green below the clouds. Bobbett and Gia banged on Dutch pots in their shed with rocks the size of their fists until their palms blistered and bled. Each one screamed, "We deh yah! We deh yah!"
Even Lena and Krissa, who were perched on their rocks — one on each side of the gully bank to keep watch — joined in on the action.
"We deh yah! We deh yah!"
Pedestrians passing by would have snickered at the sight of eight rowdy sissies — all in women's clothing and barefoot, waving rags we wore or slept on, jumping up and down like the flustered market women from Rae Town in the presence of a political figure. But no pedestrian ever wandered over to where we hid in the gully. Only police officers came, wielding batons or stroking the lengths of rifles.
In this muggy heat, we smelled our rotting flesh in the gully where we hid. We were so skinny that our limbs resembled twigs. Some of us barely had anything to eat for days, sometimes weeks. We scrounged around the city looking for food, picking mangoes and guavas off trees. We savored every seed, every skin, for our hunger ambushed us like the nights that reminded us of our mortality.
There were eight of us. Girls between the ages of thirteen and twenty. Some of us appeared with our fingers still in our mouths. "Me want me mother, but she nuh want me." Others appeared with bad habits of wetting the bed. "Me dream seh dem catch me an' carry me guh bush fi hang me." Most appeared with nightmares that had us clawing at our own flesh in our sleep. Some of us ran away. Most of us were disowned. We were thought of as feeble-minded boys who probably came with cauls.
"Di spirit tek ovah dis one … poor chile. Anoint him wid frankincense."
"Tek ah bokkle ah white rum an' pour it ovah some eucalyptus. Put ah pinch ah salt an' a touch ah garlic an' olive oil. Rub it all ovah him an' seh 'Get thee behind me Satan' three times."
When spells didn't work, we were boys who deserved to be chased with bottles and knives and machetes for forgetting our crowns of privilege in the gutters, lanes, and bushes where it never existed in the first place.
Death shuffled through the streets of Kingston, and we knew that we were doomed. For though the city was leisurely, unhurried, sauntering under the weight of the sun, at every turn our shadows clashed and crossed with the residents like black swords — "Batty bwoy fi dead!"
But no one had said it would be easy out here. We had to know how to survive. We had to know how to carry ourselves — our pupils always darting to the sides to watch our backs. Out here we were the hunted. Our predators were men who cornered us in alleys, vendors and business owners who demanded that we go somewhere else, women who grabbed their children and covered their eyes, their own gazes snatched away from us.
Yet the shadows of possibilities emerged in our minds. Anything could take place in these shadows — dub beats and lovemaking, emerald promises and orange haze from the dwindling sunset. With the hotels, banks, restaurants, and nightclubs that opened and closed then reopened — it seemed like a place for new beginnings. Even the name implied this — New Kingston. But it soon became evident that this place was too small to hold us.
One night, Josie and I snuck out to a dance. We liked the idea of getting away from the gully. Lena and Krissa would've scolded us if they ever found out, their motherly love more smothering than that of our real mothers. As the other girls slept, we hopped the fence. The dance was taking place on Mountain View Road. By day it was a playground that attracted goats in search of the sparse weed that sprouted from the concrete. It also attracted footballers — boys bored with school yet still dressed in their khaki uniforms, balancing balls instead of books on their heads. But at night, under the amber hues of streetlights, the place transformed into something looking like a carnival.
There was lots of flower-scented talcum powder, mostly on the necks and chests of the women who stood, poised, with thick legs wide apart, their knees and feet turned inward inside knee-high boots. They absentmindedly fanned away the heat (though they wore revealing clothes like mesh brassieres, and garter belts worn with pum-pum short) as they moved only their wide hips; the sheesh-sheesh of beads around their waists and gold jewelry dancing along with them. I watched, in awe of their beauty. Their hair gelled into coifs; their makeup flawless — face powder four shades lighter to give the illusion of fairness; plump lips fixed into pouts; eyebrows arched to give that perpetual surprised look that Jamaican women rarely have (even if they were in fact surprised); nose piercings and strategically placed moles. I thought about my mother. Compared to these women, she was far too conservative and bland with her church hats — hats that added cubits to her status as First Lady of the church, though veiling her strength. These women seemed to mock her in their daring outfits. Defiant in their poise, they seemed to use their costumes not to attract but to be seen. When a man looked at them, he did not see easy conquests, but the challenge to prove himself behind their backside as they moved to the BOOM-BOOM of the dancehall rhythm, their respect a proof of his manhood.
Josie and I stood by ourselves by the goalposts, watching. We mimicked the women's moves, dressed in our wigs, makeup, and the skimpy outfits we found at the Salvation Army, our limbs bare and covered with mosquito bites from the gully. The warm blast of the music rolled over us. Josie gently bumped her hips to mine to get me to move closer. But I stood, my feet firmly planted like roots, my knees shaking.
"What if they find us out?" I whispered.
"You're such a Goody Two-Shoes!" Josie responded.
She didn't seem afraid. The glitter in her eyes sparkled brighter than the sequins on the women's outfits; it gleamed with something more than just excitement.
"Dey won't be able to tell," she said, linking her arm with mine. It was as if she were absolutely certain of this. That was how Josie saw the world — as conquerable. Rarely did she ever complain about anything, often ending statements with a resolve: "Everyt'ing g'wan be fine. You'll see."
Josie smoothed her long red wig, which she liked to comb — sometimes for hours in the gully while singing lullabies to it as if the thing were a living pet. The bangs came down in her face, which she liked to blow to feel the lift and fall of the feathery, Farrah Fawcett strands. Before I could stop her, she had moved into the warm glow of the streetlight, where people danced.
"Come!" she said, calling me over with her fingers.
I shook my head and folded my arms across my chest, feeling naked and exposed. I wanted to haul Josie off the dance floor and back to our hiding place in the gully. I wanted to drag her back to the cardboard box we slept on, where we usually spooned each other, our backs to the world. Vybz Kartel's lyrics blasted from the speakers. Instead I watched Josie dance. She became a sensation right away — the way she maneuvered her seemingly pliable body with enough quiver in her rump to make men stand up. She danced on her head-top, legs in the air. She shook, froze, then shook again, before landing in a perfect split. She danced as though she had been born to do just that; as though she were a dancehall queen and not a gully queen. She caught my eyes and smiled, tilting her head back, imbibed by the high she got from the attention. And I felt myself becoming a part of her show, her captive audience.
The deejay hollered into the mic, his eyes on Josie, "Watch har! Dat is a real dancehall queen!"
The crowd pushed toward her and formed a circle to watch Josie flip on her head and land in a romp-shaking split. "Guh deh gyal!" They hooted and applauded.
That was when I saw him. The man on the chair next to the deejay, smoking a cigar. He presided over the dance like my father in the pulpit on any given Sunday, dark as a shadow. A plume of smoke veiled his face, and all I could see was a flash of gold teeth. Two men leaned to whisper something to him. He stood so abruptly that his chair fell over. His shades reflected the blaze of amber lights around Josie.
"Josie!" I shouted from the sidelines, my heartbeat quickening, making its way up to the base of my throat. In that moment, I could not communicate the danger, or convey it with speed. "Josie!" I managed to scream again. But Josie had already disappeared into the music. She had told me once, too, that it's the only way.
Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Here Comes the Sun. | | | | | | | | | | | | Charlotte | | | | By Jami Attenberg | | |
2003, I move into an apartment, one with a tiny view of the Empire State Building, and I can barely get enough money together for the broker's fee and the security deposit and the first and last month's rent, but I do it, and it's a triumph. I can't afford furniture, though. I have a mattress and a small kitchen table that is basically a card table and two chairs and that's it. I end up dumpster-diving in the neighborhood. Two blocks away, outside a senior citizens' home, I find a decent bookshelf, real wood, no nicks.
Briefly, I imagine death on it, a resident passing away in the night, her children picking over the china, the jewelry, the sepia-toned family photo albums. Does anyone want this bookshelf? No. I hoist it on my back and head home with it, stopping every 30 seconds to rest. It's tall, this bookshelf, and it almost hits the ceiling of my apartment. I dust it, and then paint it white while standing on a stepladder. When I'm done, I wipe my hands on my jeans and smile. Overnight the bookshelf dries. I move it against the back wall of the apartment, and I put all my art books in there, organized by color. Then I invite my mother over to see my new place.
The first thing she notices when she walks in is the bookshelf, bright white, and she asks me where I got it. I tell her the truth. "It looks nice," she says. "I just need to do that ten more times and then I'll have a whole apartmentful of furniture," I say, and then I regret it, because I don't want my mother to feel bad that I live that way, even though we've always lived that way, on the edge of broke. She sits down at the kitchen table. I pour some wine into a jelly jar and slide it toward her. For a few minutes she riffs on being alone, missing my father. My mother has been a widow for fifteen years, but she still likes to moan about it whenever her love life gets a little dull. Before she leaves she says, "I can give you furniture," and I say, "Mom, it's fine," and she says, "No, really, I have a few pieces for you," and I don't even know what she's talking about, a few pieces, she's got nothing to spare in her life, and I say no again, and then she gets a little hostile about it and says, "I can give my daughter furniture for her new home if I want to," and finally I agree, and she says she'll send a guy over with it. After she's gone, I drink the rest of the bottle of wine by myself.
A few days later a man shows up with a van. I venture out to the street to see if I can help him carry anything. He's wiry and all jazzed up, with this lean, electric, weird energy. His hair is in tight little curls. He introduces himself as Alonzo. "I'm a friend of your mother's," he says. I ask no questions. My mother has had a lot of friends in her life. She's been a political activist for more than thirty years, involved with every possible shade of leftist organization. We had people coming in and out of our house all the time.
A woman exits the passenger's side. She's a healthy, big blonde, probably twice the size of the man, both taller than him and wider. "This is my girl visiting from Virginia," he says. She waves at me. He does not mention her name. He opens the back of the van. There's a lamp in there, a small end table, another bookshelf, nothing too impressive, but also a lounge chair with an ottoman, actually gorgeous, black leather with a wood base, an Eames, or a good knockoff, anyway. I haven't been home in a while, but I'm pretty sure my mother just gave me half her living room.
Alonzo and the woman move all the furniture except for the lamp, which I carry myself. The woman seems to shoulder most of the weight of the furniture while Alonzo quietly directs her. When they're finished, she says to me, "If y'all ever want to sell this chair, let me know. I love it. This is just my kind of chair." There's a genuine hunger in her voice. This thing would make me happy; this object would please me. How lucky she is to know what satisfies her. I nearly give it to her then, but I'm too strapped; I need it for myself.
Instead I scrounge in my purse for a tip, but Alonzo waves me off. "Your mother took care of everything," he says. He hands me his business card, which has a bunch of job titles on it. He's a carpenter, a deejay, and a motivational speaker. He also does bodywork. "You call me if you ever need anything," he says. "I do it all." I feel like he has everything figured out. I put his business card in my kitchen drawer: my first business card in my new home.
Three years pass. I'm nearly 32 years old. My mother gets a new boyfriend, and eventually they break up because she finds out he has another girlfriend in Miami, and she says, "That's it. I'm done. That was the last one." During that time my brother gets married to a wonderful woman, and she looks like a princess at the wedding, and it makes me believe in the possibility of love. Even if it doesn't exist for me, it could exist for someone else, and I take comfort in that. I sleep with one of my brother's friends at the wedding and he sneaks out early in the morning without saying goodbye and we never see each other again, until I happen upon his picture in the wedding-announcements section of the paper a few years later and I think, Good for you, but also, Fuck you — even though I am not entitled to the feeling at all.
Also during those three years I get two raises at work. Eventually I'm able to pay off the debt from the graduate program I never completed. After that, I buy proper wineglasses and new bookshelves and a kitchen table, but I keep the lounge chair and the ottoman because I like them. New furniture feels grown up. Also I mostly stop doing drugs, which feels extra grown up. Not in any twelve-step kind of way. I simply couldn't take the hangovers anymore.
But one night I do some coke at a stupid birthday party for one of my old drug friends. I walk into the apartment and everyone's high already and I smell it and I see it on their faces and I want it too because this is the land of no repercussions, this community, this group of people, this loft in the nethers of Bushwick. I don't even do that much, and I leave before midnight and things can get too dangerous, but then I'm up, I'm fucked. I take a Valium to bring myself down, but it doesn't work — or it works, but it works against me, and I'm racked with terrible sleep. I have a nightmare right before I wake.
I'll spare you the specific plot, but my dead father was in it. I hadn't thought about him in a while, had actually been actively rejecting thoughts about him for no apparent reason, although if I really pushed myself into a deep kind of consideration about the matter it might have had something to do with a sense of failure and discontentment with my own existence and my fear of mapping that to his personal trajectory, but that's just a guess! An uneducated, bitter, depressed guess. Anyway, there he is, not being particularly threatening or anything, but definitely not friendly either. He's sort of this light-blue color, and he's sitting in the recliner with his legs stretched out on the ottoman, a dream, a nightmare, a ghost, all at once.
It scares the shit out of me. I wake up immediately and focus on the room, looking for reality, a steadiness, a center. I stare at the recliner. It's then that I realize that this is the chair where my father overdosed. It was his favorite place to sit, after all. He nodded off there frequently. He died in our living room while I was at school. He was listening to jazz; my mother had mentioned that much. She had never specifically stated where he died. But of course it was in this chair. And now, in my own home, I had napped on that chair. Flipped through the Sunday paper while lounging on it. A few times I had sex on it, not intercourse sex, but oral sex, both given and received. Sex on my father's death chair. Cool gift, Mom.
I call my mother to confirm the truth. She doesn't answer. I leave her a message. For weeks she doesn't return my call, and when she does, I'm on the train to work, which means I can't actually pick up, which means she gets to leave a message. All she says is "Honey, if you don't want the chair then just throw it out."
I call my brother. "Mom gave me the chair Dad died in," I tell him. "And you took it? She tried to give it to me, too," he says. "Well, I didn't know what it was," I say. "I guess I blocked it out." That is a thing I've been known to do, and my brother doesn't argue the point. "I've had nightmares about it," he says. "Just toss it." "Like in the garbage?" I say. "Andrea, just throw it away," he says.
But I understood why my mother held on to for it so long, and also why she felt like she had to hand it off to someone instead of putting it in the garbage. It was Dad's chair. So I decide to sell it on Craigslist, that way I know where it's going. I look up the value of the two pieces online. The set is worth about a thousand dollars. On a Saturday morning, I list it for two-fifty. Priced to move. Looking for a good home. P.S., my father died in it.
A number of people reply to the ad, and I give them all my address because I feel insane. I buy a bottle of wine, and I buzz in anyone who shows up. About a dozen randoms do. Then there's Aaron, an aspiring folksinger, six months in the city, who smells like weed. Curly-haired and open-shirted. My father would have loved him for different reasons. Aaron would have listened raptly to the three Dylan stories in my father's possession. My father loved to tell those stories. Aaron tells me he's got a van downstairs, he could take the chair right now, no problem. The van is for touring, he says. He plays coffeehouses across America. Folk music, he moved here for the folk scene, he says. Is there a folk scene, I think but do not say out loud, oh wait I did. "There is," he says and he laughs. "I like you," he says. "You're a real ballbuster." This seems to me to be his way of reclaiming control of the conversation, acknowledging my critique but also de-feminizing me. He's dumb, and just another man. I don't care about his unbuttoned shirt anymore. He offers me two hundred dollars for the chair. "Bye-bye," I say.
"Come have coffee with me, then," he says. He glances at the bottle of wine, half empty. "Or a drink. Or whatever you want." He says I look like I need some fresh air. That's true. I walk outside with him. He points out the van. He says I should get in it. I do. We make out in the van for a while. "Let's get high," he says. "I don't want to," I say. "I'm already drunk. I don't need to." "I do," he says. He smokes weed from a one-hitter. "OK, all right," I say. I take a hit.
We go back upstairs to my apartment and fool around some more, and we get really close to having sex, I mean we are basically naked, I've got my underpants on, he's got his boxers on, but his dick is sticking out of them and is pressing up against me hard, and then he backs me onto the chair, and that's when I freak out. "I think you should leave," I tell Aaron. "This was too weird." "Are you sure?" he says. "We could just do it right now, super hard and fast, and then it will be over." He utters a string of filthy words, barely forming a sentence, but I get the idea. "No, go," I say. I don't feel threatened by him, but I get a little physical anyway, and I push him out the door. The action feels right. Then he disappears, presumably into the white-hot folk scene of New York City.
What was all that? My home was just ravaged by strangers. My body, too. I had made out with a man in a van. I had allowed all this to happen to me. I had invited this into my home. I could have just thrown that chair away and nothing bad would have happened. I feel deeply, physically ill. This fucking chair. I want it gone. Suddenly I remember the business card from the man who could do anything. I dig in my desk drawer, I dial the number. Alonzo picks up. I remind him who I am, that I'm my mother's daughter. "Evelyn's daughter, sure. Ev-e-lyn," he sings.
I tell him about the chair. "Do you think your friend would still want it?" I say. "Now, let me think, who was that … Charlotte?" "I don't know if I ever knew her name," I say. "Yeah, it was Charlotte. I haven't seen her in a minute," he says. "I could track her down, but I don't think she'd want to hear from me. They come and they go, you know."
"Yes," I say. This is the part I understand perfectly. (But am I a Charlotte? Or an Alonzo? Probably just an Andrea.) "Anyway, I can take it off your hands," he says. "I can probably sell it if it's in good condition and all." "It's just been sitting here," I say. "Still intact." "I'll give you fifty bucks for it," he says. "Fine," I say. "Just take it." He tells me he's up in the Bronx, but he can get to Brooklyn after eight. I sit and drink the last of the wine until he knocks on my door.
Excerpt from the novel ALL GROWN UP, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in March 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Jami Attenberg. Printed by permission of the author.
Jami Attenberg is the author of six books, including All Grown Up, which will be published in March 2017. | | | | | | | | | | | | A Weekend Upstate | | | | By Amelia Kahaney | | | |
1.
A couple (let's call them Couple A) with a maxed-out credit card packs up their personal effects, three bottles of wine, assorted fancy cheeses, a salami, and their son, Timmy, to visit Couple B (why not?) at Couple B's weekend house in the countryside. On the journey from the city, ice needles stab the windshield. The feeling in the car is that the family is outrunning something.
Couple B's country house, an icicle-festooned alpine chalet the size of an airplane hangar, sits on a low hill on the edge of a frozen lake. Before leaving the car, Couple A performs an imperceptible reprogramming of their personalities. Soon, they will hear themselves tell many breezy lies: We love Scrabble! Whenever you want to eat is fine with us! Staying up until 3 a.m. watching Nigerian soap operas sounds fun!
Couple B has two children: Tammy, age seven, and an eighteen-month-old boy (The Baby) who never stops moving unless it's to violently wail as if someone were pulling the limbs from his tiny body. He never sleeps, Couple B claims. Really, never! He just kind of dozes. Couple B, once bitingly witty in an us-against-the-world way, now despise each other, a fact only evident to Couple A when, upon their arrival, Husband B hisses at his wife, Why can't I trust you to simply watch him for fifteen seconds? Him being The Baby, who has bumped his head on a corner of the dining-room table. A fact further evident when Wife B retorts, You watch him then if you don't like how I do it, after which Husband B storms off, then reappears to say, There's no food, Jesus Christ, if we left it up to you we'd all starve, to which Wife B replies, Fat idiots like you will never starve. Couple A begins to make soothing allusions to the assortment of quality cheeses and salami they have brought until The Baby's wailing reaches a fever pitch and Wife B whisks him away with an apologetic smile and a slammed door.
Tammy pulls Timmy into her room. They're stupid, she whispers. Don't listen to them; let's draw on the wall.
Five hours into the visit, Couple A has, if they're honest, never felt better about their own marriage, their crumbling apartment, the public-school education they are providing for their son. The more vicious is Couple B, the more Couple A responds with private affections, affirmations that they have made the correct choice in each other. Long-dormant love hormones begin to fizz between them again as they snowshoe around the property, alongside an unspoken sense of alarm that this is what it takes to get things going.
2.
All is magical for Couple A in their warm envelope of rekindled affection until day two, when in the morning the children are drawn like magnets toward the frozen lake. This will not end well, thinks Wife A, who has read enough literary fiction to know that a frozen lake always spells peril. Timmy, if you go out on the frozen lake, you will probably die, she says calmly. Timmy is five. He can process this.
Mom, you're such a fraidy-cat! he singsongs.
He is so happy here, inside this monument to the wisdom of Husband B's hedge fund.
Give me a hug, Timmy, she says, and swear to me you will stay away from the lake.
I can't promise that, Timmy says, and then he's off to find Tammy.
Hours then pass with the children glued to the television. Couple A reads their books and pages through the vintage magazines scattered across Couple B's coffee table. They enjoy the winter sun beating in through the massive living-room windows, the snow kicking up at intervals in little bursts across the pines. The dramas of nature here are so sublime and intricate that a person can almost forget about mid-five-figure credit-card statements.
Sometimes they play with The Baby. They largely succeed in ignoring the way Couple B doesn't appear to be speaking to each other.
Wife A needs some Me Time and peers outside at the children, who at last have left the TV room to play again on the cake-white lawn. Keep an eye on them, she instructs her husband. I mean it. The lake is a death trap.
Husband A nods and does not look up from the 1967 Playboy he has discovered on the coffee table. Wife A notes the close-up on a quaint set of teardrop breasts — You never see teardrop anymore in porn, she thinks wistfully — before he turns the page. His nodding might mean: don't give me instructions as if I'm incompetent; or, I have heard you and am taking the matter under advisement. No way of knowing if he's listened to a word of it, Wife A seethes as she strides away.
All is well for the next 23 minutes. The Baby napping, Wife B in the kitchen, Husband B in the garage, Wife A in the bathroom, Husband A focused with complete absorption on a Playboy article about Sweden, when he remembers about the lake. He looks up, and goddamnit if there aren't two small figures in Crayola-colored parkas on the ice.
Goddamn her, Husband A thinks, as if his wife has manifested the unfolding horror to prove herself right. He shoves his arms into a damp parka and begins to sprint toward the lake.
A crack in the ice, known only to the creatures of the lake, begins to form near the children. The microorganisms in the water sense the crack's vibrations without forming opinions. Not like the man from Couple A, who screams GET OFF THE ICE in a tyrannosaurus roar as he closes the gap between house and lake in socked feet.
The children look up, unimpressed. Why does he look like that? they wonder, before going back to their game, a taxonomy of sticks, pebbles, and armpits.
While The Baby dozes, Wife B looks up from the dishes and decides she's done. She will pack a bag and the children and drive to her mother's. She will leave Husband B in this enormous house he insisted on. Couple A can drive him back to the city tomorrow, if they can stomach him. He will find the locks changed on their apartment door, she decides, a shiver running down her arms at the image of his key uselessly stabbing the knob.
Along the front of the house, Husband B piles firewood on top of kindling. He is very high. Stratospherically high. The Baby kicks and screeches in the backpack he's strapped him into. You'll love this, he says, reaching back to loosen his son's mittened grip on his hair. Get ready for it, my man. The lighter fluid he squeezes from the bottle smells like summer. He strikes a match, flings it into the pile, and enjoys the instant, joyous eruption.
And why shouldn't he? He works so hard. He can feel the stress of the hedge fund killing him, but he doesn't talk about it because who could possibly care to listen? His wife has no idea how considerate he is in not yammering on about his miseries, in being the silent pillar on which this all rests, the house and the apartment and two small children and his Wife Who Despises Him. So why shouldn't he see how his firewood catches and erupts? Should he not be warm? Should he not entertain their oldest friends with a spectacular blaze?
Daddy loves you this much, he says to The Baby as he squirts more lighter fluid on the logs.
Timmy! Tammy! Get off the ice! Husband A can barely breathe, he's run so fast. He swoops in and grabs them both by their parka hoods, slides them across the ice to the dock.
On the dock, the children sniffle and bitch. You ripped our pants! Husband A's eyes water with relief. He's wearing only socks. Whoops. Blood pools at the top of a big toe, a dark, spreading stain on the gray wool. The lake has held. See that, Wife? he thinks, jubilant. He may not even tell her about this, come to think of it. Why do that, when they are so breezy here?
A war whoop fills the air. He turns to look at the house and sees smoke behind the stately prow of the snowcapped roof. And then there is his oldest friend in a neon-pink ski hat, doing Tae Kwon Do or something. Moving like a younger man without a paunch. Woo Wee Woo, his friend howls. Yip Yip Yee, Husband A hollers. He will put on his shoes. He will march the children up the hill. They will rejoice.
Everyone is drawn to the fire. Husband A, still shaky with adrenaline and relief. Wife A, who has emerged from her Me Time on the toilet, where she has been purchasing boy's underwear using a coupon code. Wife B sees the smoke out the kitchen window and crunches her way toward the fire to find her husband aglow with madness and purpose. He has dressed The Baby in his snowsuit and boots, a thankless task she admits he appears to have completed correctly, and has captured him in the backpack. My bride has arrived, he says, something tender in the hitch of his voice.
She looks around at their friends and the children, everyone flushed in the firelight, and inwardly shrugs. Another day, another delay in her leaving. The snow on the ground picks up the blue in the darkening sky and there is goodness here, his way of reminding her what they have.
Wife A might call this an epiphanic moment, but Wife B, if asked, would object. Things are never actually over, or decided, or learned.
3.
Couple C has taken a wrong turn on the way to the vet's new office, their ancient cat yowling and smelling of piss in her carrier in the backseat. She will die today. Her kidneys are failing and they cannot afford to pay for dialysis. They've been quietly angry for days at the stark choice before them: debt or death.
It's a left, then a left, then a left, the husband is saying, when they are momentarily astonished by the roaring inferno at the top of a driveway in the gray afternoon. A man in a neon-pink ski hat is doing some kind of dance in the snow while others look on.
Some people have these wild lives, Wife C says.
Weekenders, says Husband C, noting the size of the house. Won't be so wild if the house catches, will it?
4.
Up at the house the fire rages, wet branches dragged in by the children sending up a thick black smoke. An hour later, they will eat fusilli and baked beans found in the cupboards. The children will tell Wife A why Timmy's snow pants are ripped. Tensions will flare: They could have died; why is your first instinct always to make it my fault; is it so much to ask that every few minutes you take an inventory of the children; I wish you could hear how sour you sound; I can't believe you're acting this way in front of our friends; etc.
The sky will dump enough fresh snow tonight to completely cover any trace of the fire. In the hush of the storm, kneecaps will press the backs of knees, hands will curl around loose bellies, and everyone, even The Baby, will give in to sleep.
Meanwhile, the crack in the frozen lake snakes onward. The algae, the protozoa, the frog eggs, the leeches, and the smallmouth bass frowning lazily near the mucky bottom of the lake all tense up. Their senses, such as they are, fill with the urgent, vibrating sound of their world as it shifts.
Amelia Kahaney lives in Brooklyn and tweets at @akahaney. | | | | | | | | | | | | No Type of Good | | | | By Gabrielle Rucker | | |
The last time I see Big Dipper alive, he is mounted behind a wall of glass, peering at me with the frenzied look of something captured. I watch him closely, waiting for the guard to nod me over toward the Plexiglas, where he is already waiting, impatiently palming the bulky, yellow phone that we will soon be speaking through between his hands. From where I am standing, Big Dipper looks like a different man, bent and hefty, cut and divided by muscle I do not recognize. At a distance, the details of his face blur, faded between the harsh fluorescent lighting and his ugly orange jumpsuit so that his head seems like nothing more than a black depth with two floating eyes. I search my mind for an image of Big Dipper that I can recognize, a memory to plaster over whoever he is now. For a moment he is ten years old again, his smile widened by a large gap between his two front teeth. Next, he is a teenager, coy and smart with narrow eyes and smooth dark-brown skin that would peek out from under his wife-beaters and gym shorts. Quietly, I shuffle through all the Big Dippers I have accumulated — the serious ones, the smiling ones, the grumpy ones just waking up with sleep still in their eyes. Big Dippers whirl around my head. I discard them quickly. None of them belong here.
The drive from Detroit to Chauncey Harold Correctional Facility is peaceful once you make it out of the city: blanketed in green and khaki wheat fields, spotted by lonely farmhouses and the metallic glitter of man-made swimming holes. The low roar of the summer's last cicadas weaves in and out, humming between the fuzz of a few croaking radio stations, creating a comforting static. Growing up, Sir would drive Big Dipper and me out this way, just a few miles north of the prison into Tecumseh, to the small Ford plastics plant where he worked molding glove boxes and step rails. During the summers, when Big Dipper and I were out of school, Sir made it a point to take us to the plant every other week. He had struck up a deal with his boss, an arrangement he liked to incorrectly refer to as an "internship." For $20 a day, Big Dipper and I would work at the plant with Sir, piecing together parts for license-plate lights or rearview mirrors. When we got older, Sir let us explore beyond the plant and into the town.
"Be careful, now," he'd say, handing us $20 each, the money we had earned for that day. "Don't do anything stupid. This ain't the place."
Big Dipper and I always thought Tecumseh smelled funny, like plastic and horse and chocolate brownies. "This must be what every small-ass town smells like,"he said to me one afternoon after we had ditched the Plant. We were sitting at a small table inside of the Chocolate Vault drinking milkshakes. I snickered loudly. "Yeah," I agreed, "like shit!" A white couple sitting next to us turned down their mouths disapprovingly. Big Dipper erupted in laughter, smiling hard in my direction. I had just started cursing, and Big Dipper was proud of me. Sometimes, while we sat together at the workstation we shared, he would teach me new curse words or slang under his breath. We whispered back and forth to each other until the words became so common that we no longer considered them words, until we no longer considered them bad.
When he sees me walking toward him, Big Dipper breaks into a smile so wide it makes my heart stop. He has stopped juggling the phone, and now it rests lazily on his right shoulder, bright and graceful like the yellow warblers Ma'am and I used to feed bread-butts to in the backyard. Now, seated before him, unwarped by distance and glare, Big Dipper does not look so unknown. We sit in silence for a few moments, eyeing each other, until Big Dipper playfully nudges his head toward the phone and winks. I pick up the receiver on my end of the Plexiglass and return his smile with my own. When he finally speaks, it is just like I remember it: smooth and twangy with a slight lisp resting at the back of his tongue, a result of Ma'am and Sir's impregnable Southern dialects amalgamated with our Midwestern tongues. My body relaxes, recognizing the home in his sound. I imagine his voice slinking through the wires, coiling toward me; I imagine it vibrating throughout the ugly yellow receiver and into my ear, where it sings, bouncing and glowing along the maze of my eardrums like a pinball machine, its cadence a victorious chime.
"What's good, Ro? It's been a minute." The sound of my name in my brother's mouth catches me off guard. His eyes are small slivers from smiling, but his words prickle me with guilt. It has been three years since I last came to visit him here.
"I'm sorry, Dip. I really am." My voice is small, not sorry enough.
"I know you are. Don't worry about it. I'm just glad you're all right. After you stopped visiting, I just figured you needed some space, you know? Makes sense for a girl your age, but after you stopped calling, too …"
Big Dipper lowers his gaze for a moment. Beyond our silence, I can hear the guard in the distance humming some sad Motown ballad, his only musical accompaniment the droll sound of the large steel fans that spin overhead, attempting to create airflow in this windowless place.
"I just mean I didn't know when I might see you again."
It was easy to ignore Big Dipper at first. Sir and Ma'am had both already stopped talking about him, though I still caught Ma'am whispering his name under her breath during her evening prayers when she thought she was alone and only God was listening. His room had been sealed off, too, piled high with Sir's junk and forgotten. Five years ago, when Big Dipper was first locked up, I used to sneak into his room in the middle of the night to sleep in his bed with his dog, a chocolate pit named Skillet. It had been Skillet's idea to sleep in Big Dipper's room, a fact that Sir scoffed at when he found us in his bed, our brown bodies twisted around each other, and asked what the hell I was doing letting the dog up on the furniture. Skillet had spent a whole week whining in front of Big Dipper's door, moaning and trilling until he exhausted himself and retreated to his worn dog mat by the front door, where he would hopelessly wait. "He's not coming back, stupid," I whispered to Skillet through the crack of my bedroom door after being kept up for the fourth night in a row. "Shut up!" But Skillet only stared at me with big eyes, pawing at the door.
When I finally opened Big Dipper's door for Skillet, he rushed in leaping and bounding, feverishly running his nose across any object it could reach. The room smelled like Big Dipper — his cheap, smoky teenage cologne, Big Red chewing gum, cigarettes, and something soft and clean that reminded me of not just him, but of Sir too. Skillet scurried around frantically, as if he were trying to inhale the answer to what had happened to his master.
"You see any skydivers?" Big Dipper asks, leaning forward on his elbows, hopeful, his nose almost hitting the glass. Years ago, on our drives to the plant, we would sometimes see men falling from the sky. At first, Big Dipper and I mistook them for hawks diving toward prey concealed deep in the cornfields, until Sir corrected us.
"Those are people?!" Big Dipper had commented, eyes widened with disbelief. Curious, we rolled down our windows and stuck out our necks, craning our heads to the sky. Above us the dots seemed to fall slowly, twirling in the wind like the maple seeds Dip and I used as confetti during the bright Michigan autumns. As they got closer to us, to the quilt-like expanse of land beneath them, I began to make out clothing: bright-orange jumpsuits, thick black helmets.
"Nah," I say, eyeing Big Dipper's jumpsuit. It looks so much like the ones we had seen floating above us all those years ago. "No skydivers today."
"Shit," he mumbles into the phone. He moves one hand to his face and rubs his eyes sheepishly. "I thought maybe you might have. I've been dreaming about them a lot lately. I always thought that shit was so wild — jumpin' out of planes."
"You been dreaming about 'em?"
"Yeah," he says, nodding. "I dream about people falling from the sky and making shapes and shit. You know, holdin' hands so that they're all in a circle, or stretching out wide so that they look like a flower or a heart. I'm in there, too, falling — excuse me, diving. It's kinda fun."
"What happens at the end?" I ask, curious.
Big Dipper takes a second to think. I watch as his eyes wander upward, as if the skydivers were above us, falling once again. He hums a bit, sticks his thumb in his mouth and chews a bit at the nail, a habit he picked up from Ma'am.
"Everyone keeps falling, but before we hit the ground, we all let each other go."
"Sounds depressing."
Big Dipper laughs. "We couldn't all land holdin' on to each other like that. I mean, shit, we'd die that way, right? We need our hands to pull the parachute open."
"I guess," I say, imagining a star of people holding hands, falling toward Earth, crashing into a cornfield. "Does everybody make it down all right? I mean, do you see them land?"
"Everyone but me," he says plainly. "I get stuck in the sky somehow."
I imagine my brother's death like this: a slow and steady departure, a fizzing out — the total of his life bubbling upward to a height it could not sustain, until finally each of his memories, each of his cells, everything that made him himself, faded out, leaving nothing behind but a flat existence. Three weeks after my visit with Big Dipper, he hurled himself headfirst over the three-story drop at the center of Chauncey Harold and into the communal area below.
When Sir told me what happened, I screamed and locked myself in Big Dipper's room. I began to rip out everything that didn't belong to him, expelling it into the hallway. I threw out Sir's discarded workout equipment, Ma'am's hoarded cooking appliances, stacks of Oprah magazines and tarnished golf clubs. Feverishly, I emptied the room of the junk and garbage that had come to replace him. I barred Sir and Ma'am from the door, allowing only Skillet to pass. I continued to curse the house, my grandparents, myself. I cursed my abandoned, dead brother. I cursed the fear that drove me from him, the shame that kept his name out of our grandparents' mouths. I cursed my selfishness, my greed and guilt. I cursed the loneliness I cast above him. I cursed my own name for the sake of my brother who now resided elsewhere, somewhere beyond me, where he hovered, finally stuck in the air he dreamed of all those nights.
Instinctively, I curled onto my brother's bed like I had done those first few months of his sentence. Worried, Skillet paced the bottom of the bed, nudging at my feet and whining until he finally jumped in with me. Paralyzed by sadness, I quietly observed the room. It was smaller than I remembered, grayer, too, from years of uninterrupted sunlight and no drapery. Dust had collected thick on every surface; it made everything blur like a memory I couldn't put into focus.
I began to think back on our childhoods and the early devotions we assigned to each other. How from infancy he had been my best friend, and for so long my only friend. I think back to our summers at the plant together, how he used to fight me on the dead grass outside so I could learn how to protect myself and become strong. One day, after we had finished our work and spent our money, we wrestled among the weeds. Big Dipper was being rougher than usual, pushing me down hard, pinning me under his full weight. Fed up, I finally kicked him hard, once in the ankle and again in the groin. Big Dipper doubled over, collapsing onto the dirt. I left him there like that for a moment, squirming. He eyes looked red and wet, like he wanted to cry, while he cradled his lower gut.
"What the fuck was that for?" he spat, a touch of amusement in his voice.
"You hurt me. What did you expect me to do?" As I spoke, Big Dipper stood, rising himself to his full height.
"So because I hurt you, it's OK to kick me in the dick?"
"If you hurt me, anything's fair," I said simply.
"And if you hurt me?" he asked, staring at the loading dock, where a small freight of new bumpers was being unpacked.
"Same thing. Whatever you got to do, do it. It's all fair. I'll know you were just trying to protect yourself. Besides, you can't stay mad at me for long anyway."
Big Dipper erupted with laughter.
"You're right," he said. "I can't."
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer from the Great Lakes. Currently she lives in Brooklyn, where she can often be found on the subway aggressively cursing under her breath. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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