arlene ang
Arrival is another
optical illusion of departure—
... for biographical truth does not exist....
— Sigmund Freud
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Oana Cambrea for the use of her digital art, Autumn (2007).
Nature Hates a Vacuum
It was one of those last day of the world kind of days.
All the way home, Carmen kept thinking about the all natural toasted coconut marshmallows in her cupboard. She thought about them all the way home and not just because they were natural. They were made, Hand-Crafted, in Canada. She thought about their tawny Port color, and their shape, not quite symmetrical. She wanted to place one in her mouth and pretend it was a car heading toward a precise destination, toward an island or some party with an island theme.
She’d been taking the train because her Ford was in the shop. It wasn’t the first time she had driven herself into a ditch. But she knew too much about irresolvable eye problems to consult a specialist. She didn’t even know of a good one nearby, even though she'd been living in Plainfield for almost three years, the last six months with Jim. One thing she could count on with Jim was that he’d be late picking her up. Late he was but only by ten minutes. He gave her a smile but no kiss.
"Who're you calling, honey?
"Wrong number."
"You sure are getting a lot of wrong numbers right."
"It's my excellence."
Jim leaned slightly in, fingering the radio buttons, tapping them rhythmically so that every 1.5 seconds the radio station would change.
It was Friday and a cheerful spirit had prevailed at Carmen's publishers office. Everyone, it seems, had extraordinary plans for the weekend. But that infectious optimism had already vanished and now Carmen's body felt taut and weak at the same time.
Her children's book author, Richard, was a still life on her mind. He'd only been gone a few months before Jim moved in. Sometimes she'd actually forget which one of them was whistling in the shower or thumbing though the bird book she kept in her kitchen junk drawer.
Today she felt like Richard was crouched in the backseat of Jim's car, a discomfort of sort, a typo. When he left her for his ex-wife last fall, he also left a sailor's knot in her throat—not because he knew anything about sailing, except maybe how to be a pirate. He sometimes posed as one in student rallies when he was incited to prove his Marxist theories.
She called him Richard the Rabbit to Bonnie down the street because of his white hair and how he put a lot of rabbit characters in his books. Truth was he hated real rabbits for reasons of overpopulation. He found their cute lasciviousness off-putting. The knot in Carmen's throat multiplied too, replicating itself into smaller, more tedious knots. It was very pronounced today, a day that felt like it had judged the living wrongly.
Jim turned off the radio. "I wish you'd stop fondling your phone."
"Well, we all have our Achilles heel, darling."
"Don't you start mythologizing me."
They passed the Savage Funeral Parlor. Twenty minutes more to home. Mike Senior was walking around to the back in his daylight-saving black suit. The doomsday placard hanging from his neck prescribed marijuana. It was oddly-lettered. The slight tremble in the script made Carmen long for a stiff drink. She didn't even pretend she wasn't paying any attention to Jim.
"You remind me," he sighed, "of my sister when she was eighteen and pretending not to be pregnant. You're not, are you?
Rabbity Richard was the one who had brought an electric knife into her house. He kept it under his pillow as if his signed copy of Alice in Wonderland depended on it. Carmen would take the knife out when she thought he was sleeping because it made her feel untouchable. She thought today about the gadgets those worldly Canadians must have used to slice their marshmallows up into near perfect cubes. Each part of those instruments must've been shiny, sharp, and clean.
Carmen didn't need Richard to tell her that the sky surrounding her house was dirty. But that didn't stop him. The interior was hardly pristine, the smell of mildew unmistakable in the bathroom. Already she came home to it with the conviction that she should be at Starbuck's instead, shouting, off with somebody's head. Or doing card tricks over a flavored cappuccino. Dirt had an insidious manner of making her feel unwanted, perhaps even resentful towards vaguely identified archetypal figures, like a father, a circus clown, the Cat in the Hat. What the sky around her house was like before she moved there she had no idea.
Undependable, lanky Jim wasn't wild but his past was hollow in a way foreign to Carmen. His parents, with whom he had little in common, never outgrew him. Despite his habitual lateness, he managed to drive thousands of miles and leave them behind. Eventually he found the person he became, working his way through business college, getting his start as a delivery boy at American Standard, where they made toilets.
Carmen knew the factory building where he had worked. Long closed down, it was one of those monuments to mankind that used to proliferate the region. People used to speak about it with praise. At least they did before the white-collar jobs started to slide down alongside the bathtub industry. But Jim always landed on his feet, making money first in singing telegrams, then software, and now landscaping. He liked standing next to the "Don't Step on the Grass" sign while giving orders to men who happened to be dressed dirtier than him.
Nearly home, Jim kept it up: "Remind me to take you to Coney Island one day."
"I've seen enough of that in travel books."
"Of course, I keep forgetting your knowledge of everything. What else do you know?"
She angled her head as far as she could, seeming to study billboards. "Be a Knockout" for the discount breast surgeon. "Be the First to Know" for the local ten o'clock news team.
Was it her fault that she kept up with the latest in science? She was twenty years younger than Richard, twelve years younger than Jim. An arithmetic problem of sorts. It shouldn't matter that she never got the answer right. Sometimes she could feel fingers pointing out her shoes, at the heart-shaped nails she wanted everyone to think were her own right to intellectual property. For a time, she kept after Richard to let her read what he wrote about her housekeeping. Why all these expensive cookbooks if you're never going to cook? She discovered that question once, scrawled on a napkin she found wadded up in his pants.
She would have read his manuscript drafts, had he not kept them locked up in a box in her basement. He’d kept them in a small room where most men would keep their tools, where, in fact, hundreds of tools had piled up over the fifty year history of the house.
"Shit. That's what else I know." Carmen snorted.
"Let me tell you something. I used to work at Coney Island as a kid. Weird fucking people populating that place."
Carmen couldn't help but smile, the corners of her mouth turning down slightly. Her eyes grew wide.
"Weird?" she queried, mixing poison with enthusiasm.
Jim shot her a wounded look. It was a look she understood. Jim just kept expecting Carmen to be nicer, more agreeable. He wanted her to automatically agree, for example, with him every time he said, "Hey, let's go have steak at the Ponder Steak Hut."
At least he had never accused Carmen of being adopted by wolves, a favorite tactic of Richard's. It always succeeded in transporting her mentally back to childhood, into a deep-well crisis mode. She guessed that Richard secretly liked poking sticks at zoo animals behind the bars.
Six cats in the yard, four more (Richard's) in the kitchen and fleas everywhere in the summertime can make a person feel needed.
She had mouths to feed. A mouth to feed. She could hear her father say that: I got mouths to feed.
Her father used to steal the Sunday newspaper from the Rosens next door, and never even hid his theft. Then he wouldn't let Carmen read it. Or, as a joke, he'd let her see it but only after cutting out paragraphs or pictures or entire articles. And so she learned to live with uncertainty until it became a skill she could rely on.
She'd never been able to tell Dear Old Dad's lies from his secrets. When he wasn't keeping the news and knowledge of the world from Carmen, he might or might not be drinking. A martini without an olive is like the William Tell Overture without strings. Yar, har, har, he'd laugh. In all those years she'd never laughed back. Worse, when he left her to fend for herself Saturday nights, he locked up the valuables and the garage door, from the outside. Have a good time, he'd say before turning the key. She'd tried barring him out, pushing up heavy furniture against windows and doors, but he knew more than twenty ways back in. He particularly enjoyed sneaking up on her with a gorilla mask while she shaved her legs on the sink. She'd never managed to keep a door shut without feeling skeleton-in-the-closet claustrophobic.
From her father, or more precisely from dealing with him, she had learned how to speak and act in a measured way. For one, she never threw objects anymore, much less threw up on them. She always thought: A marshmallow may be toasted over high fire, but it's still a marshmallow. By the age of twelve she learned how to turn on the charm in places like Finelli's Upstairs Lounge, how to make people think she could handle herself even on an empty stomach.
She left home just before her sixteenth birthday to live at her best friend Amy's, who lived in the same neighborhood. Carmen refused to walk by the house her father was always finishing. He held his last hunger strike there with a bunch of motorcycle hobbyists. It had turned out an impressive edifice. The Ionic columns reminded her of thirst. But she no longer counted hours in bottles or half-bottles, and even relished her forgetfulness. What little she wanted to remember she could always find in the telephone book
"Tell me again what came to your mind the first time we met."
"I wanted to help. You looked like you were having a bad day sticking lost-cat signs on shop windows."
"Oh, get lost."
In a strange interlude, all of the millions of birds in the direct vicinity quit their song-making. Locked up in a small car, a poodle barked for its master.
Well Holy Shit. If her life were a haunted mansion, Carmen would probably be the main ghost act. The "other woman" naturally drawn to the vacuum. The ham in the sandwich. She should've known better. That's what made her predicament downright embarrassing.
She used to be such a calm person. She could wait for a secret admirer under a bridge for hours and still keep her cool. No obvious suited suitor could've fancied her a sadist, just a happy middling sort. No stringy-haired troubadour tried for long to sell her a plot in his cemetery. No sir, not today, thank you. She could be firm when she wanted to, even though sometimes her left hand would slide down and unconsciously stroke a knee, a ketchup lid, a serrated spoon. Her lack of college education was once likened by Richard to a cave sketching—academicians were so often drawn to stick figures. She hated how he made her feel old. She couldn't help being what she was.
She took a box of mints from her handbag and tried to relax into sucking her candy. She was still too rattled to wave politely to 88-year-old Mr. Wilcox, who was just passing by the house when they pulled up. He had slowed down. When he realized that Jim was in the car with Carmen, he leaned against the fence and pretended to retie the invisible strings on his moccasins.
He walked the neighborhood incessantly. He'd built half of it, to hear him tell the story, over forty years ago, and the bowling alley too on the highway across from Wendy's. Carmen would listen to him at length. She knew about his wife and how his sons had taken her away and finagled a divorce. They claimed their father had neglected his wife, keeping her awake in bed while he worked on his Model T or his well-researched miniature Civil War era cannon. At least here was a man who didn’t try to hide anything from her.
Once in the house, Jim wouldn't even look at Carmen: "I'm going down to the corner for a drink."
"Well, hurry back," she quipped while shrugging into a terry robe. There was something about running water that made her feel French, as if she'd managed to run for her life and actually escape the guillotine. The tub filled up and she filled it with bubbles.
Alone at last with Richard in her bath. It lasted about two hours. Fish and wishes are connected, she mused. That was dogma to her. Like in Arabian Nights: talking fish swimming in endless lakes that existed only in the parallel universe of near sleep conversations. Such fancies got her in with the writers at her job in a publishing firm. She had to organize her reading habits around committees and publicity, but occasionally got to take an author or two out to lunch. That was how she met Richard. He was always there with a fork in her spaghetti meatballs, a finger in her chocolate pecan pie.
Carmen feared that Jim was down at the corner making phone calls to that woman who used to be his secretary. Here she was at home pondering matrimony: his and hers, her own two-ounces of daydream. Except it wasn't day any more. It was thirty-six past ten. She herself had never warmed to marriage, and she used to think that Jim never considered it either. He'd hinted, however, just last night, that if "someone" quit her job, he wouldn't mind. She wasn't sure whether he was referring to his ex-secretary or her. That was the first thing she forgot upon waking up this morning.
What year was this anyway? What's that word people sued to use on purpose? Liberation.
Jim had to wait until she was especially vulnerable before bringing up the idea of quitting, on the tail of a harrowing, late-night documentary on candy-making in 19th century Japan.
She used to be such a calm person.
Three hours more spent dialing. Carmen tried to make herself comfortable in the blue-paneled basement, which Bonnie had told her would flood every time it rained for more than two hours. Appliances small and large got into the act, turning off and on, spraying soap and water at each other. At least that's how it looked in the pictures Bonnie had taken. It would rain and rain and the water would reach halfway up the built-in bar. Empty bottles would begin to float around like contented whales. Bonnie's photos had won third place in an international photography contest. There was no cash prize but Bonnie got to see her picture published in an upscale photography magazine. The picture, called "S.O.S," was situated between a highly sexual-looking close-up of an orchid, and a group portrait of street kids armed with what looked like bananas.
The flooding had started when a couple of ghoulish psychoanalysts lived there, the real indoor types. One had gotten the corner property zoned for a business so she could do her counseling at home. To accommodate her clients, she'd transformed the back bedroom into an impractically small bathroom. Three or four floods and the psychoanalysts were gone, bickering as usual over personalized license plates.
When Carmen moved in, she'd replaced the haunted washing machine. She'd had a dream about that, how replacing it in the old bungalow would help control flooding. She was already rather afraid of floods. She knew they were the effect of defenestration—she had already seen how wrong paperback investments could cut a thousand trees in half.
Was it her fault that she could flawlessly remember all of her nightmares?
She went out for a walk, past midnight. She went past Bonnie's but there was no tv light or other illumination from the bedroom window. She wished Bonnie didn't know so much sometimes. She wished she didn't know, for example, how two or three months ago Carmen had seen Richard. Jim had been away at a convention for shrubs and trees, and Carmen decided to crash his book-launching soiree, Bonnie in tow. It was an elegant affair in a fancy Frenchified villa, announcing Richard's Chocolate Mousse Over Mouse's House. Carmen insisted, disingenuously, that Richard should know about Buddie, a favorite cat. Buddie had died in a freak accident. One week before, Jim was playing with him in the kitchen while Carmen was assembling some guacamole on the toaster dish. Dangling a squeaky mouse, Jim kept trying to get Buddie to jump higher and higher, and somehow the poor guy managed to slip in a minute puddle of vegetable oil. He spun around and fell on his back. Dead. The autopsy revealed a broken spine, but Carmen couldn't shake the feeling that it was a heart attack caused by prolonged exposure to Jim's mice, the ones he let loose, as a selling point, in his famous hedge mazes. The newly rich of Plainfield—surgeons, car dealership owners—never tired of taking shocks from the electrically wired dead ends, mostly because it was, in part, illegal.
Ever since that incident the kitchen, the pantry, and various local flora all made Carmen queasy. Out there on the street it felt formal, like it was Sunday, but it wasn't. It was the solstice, but she didn't know it. Out there in the moonlight she missed her basement. She missed the piano that had been played by Andrew Jackson and had survived many floods. It had cost too much to move, so the psychoanalysts had left it behind. A child had scrawled "C" on middle C. Mary had a little lamb and all Carmen had was an old couch with cigarette burns, cat vomit.
How long had Jim been out, anyway? Why worry? She could take care of herself. One man was good as drunk and Richard could play solitaire all night or do his paint-by-number velvet nudes and never notice her silhouette by the window cacti.
And he'd been so earnest when they first started lunching out. He'd written her those steamy love letters, no bunnies, but plenty of riddles. "Go to Sweeties Ice Cream Place, where there's a picture of Einstein biting into a cone. Look underneath table four." A note taped under the table continued the game, "Now you can take off one piece of underwear," or, "Hold your pencil like a pitch-fork." Okay, their relationship hadn't been the soundest, but at least she was up to date on the latest socio-literary non sequitur. There was pretense with Richard that both disturbed and attracted her. He always pretended to forget she didn't wear a watch. When he went back to Wife #2 she felt wrung out and fell into a complicated depression that improved or worsened depending on how she managed to open every tuna can in the course of the day.
She warmed a phone in her palm, then dialed a number from memory.
"Hello?"
"Okay, so maybe I'm pregnant."
"Do you know what time it is? What are you? Crazy?"
Nine months is a long time to outlive a cat.