Read Things Withered Online

Authors: Susie Moloney

Things Withered (9 page)

BOOK: Things Withered
10.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

She reached out to push the select button.

(what the fuck??)

The taste of the beer was in her mouth. Not the taste of beer that was there during—say—the back yard barbecue they’d had with the Meyers this summer where Garry Meyers had cooked hot dogs for their two kids and Karen had helped Jane make her “famous warm potato salad” and Ted had put his arm around her waist and given her a tickle every chance he got just to hear her say (he told her after), “
Ted!
” How had that beer tasted? That whole day had had a taste to it, and now, in retrospect, she thought it tasted like that sour topping they used in place of sour cream in cheap restaurants. It tasted exactly real, just like real sour cream when you first put it in your mouth, wrapped up in your baked potato, or your warm potato salad and then when you weren’t thinking about it, it turned to wax in your mouth and you couldn’t taste anything else.

Wax beer. Bees wax.

(fuck you and the horse you)

Kren pushed Marlborough. Already, she could smell them.

At eleven-thirty Ted wondered about his wife. He supposed that she had run into someone and was just visiting over a cup of tea or something. He smiled when he imagined that. A cup of tea. Tea wasn’t exactly her cup of tea, as it were; but she had developed a taste for simpler things since they’d been together. You never know, he thought, smiling.

He checked the clock on his way into the bedroom: midnight.

She was drunk. She couldn’t have articulated it in her state, but in the deepest, darkest part of her mind, where the snakes and awfuls and bads were, it was as though something had shifted and the world was once more in balance. She was where she belonged and Ted was where he belonged. Suburbia was smoke-free, it knew when to say when; it knew safe from sex.

She was dancing with the man who couldn’t take his eyes off the dancer. He was holding her too close.

(bees wax)

Her mind had slipped to the place where Margaret’s went when Karen saw her zone out. She was at peace. The anger she remembered wanting to feel was dissipated; if the imagined car with a stranger in it ready to abduct her were to appear, the anger would by then have turned to fear.

(don’t kick me)

(fuck you and the horse)

They didn’t really talk, although sometimes the man breathed in her ear, words she couldn’t hear or wasn’t listening to. Words she’d heard before, the intent clearer than language. There was the same rhythm always.

“Let’s get out of here.”

That’s how it was when the man led her away, to his car opened the back seat instead of the front. She got in, a fluid, remembered motion, coming more easily to her than spinning the dryer dial to forty minutes, than snapping clean sheets over the naked bed.

“You’re a sly one, aren’t cha? You don’t say much. You do your talking with your body, don’t cha? Hey?” His hands were the hundreds of hands from forever and always. A part of her slackened, settled in for the duration, her mind shut off. It didn’t last.

Karen. Stevens.
She should have brought a cake to the shower. Food.

There should have been someone to tell her, some way to find out. There never was. Never. There was never any way to know what she was supposed to do.

She realized too late that it wasn’t Ted. They weren’t making a baby. Her hands curled into fists and she hit him, as hard as she could.

(so sorry)

He shouted and it sounded good.

She beat against him, pulling his hair, trying to smash him with her knee, while he squirmed above her, grunting, and screaming, “Hey!” and pausing long enough to look at her.

His eyes.

Karen plunged her thumbs into his eyes so he would never ever see her and she dug in. He screamed. Blood ran over her hands, down her arms, into the sleeves of her blouse. Secrets flew out in all directions.

P
OOR
D
AVID
,
OR,
T
HE
P
OSSIBILITY
OF
C
OINCIDENCE
IN
S
ITUATIONS
OF
M
ULTIPLE
O
CCURRENCES

It was David who found her. Later, at the bar, he was all, “smell my
fingers!
” laughing and shoving his hands under people’s noses, but he wasn’t like that when he found Aunt Bedelia’s dead body. Not when Myra got there. When Myra showed up at, David had been crying like a little kid. Myra, of course, handled it all.

David and Myra had been a twosome as far back as anyone remembered. They grew up practically in the same house and someone said one time that they first did it when they were eleven, which could be true because the family that Myra came from was always a little nasty. Whenever they started, they must have kept doing it, because by the time Myra was in the tenth grade, she had a bun in her oven and no one ever wondered whose bun.

That first bun was a dud. Myra dropped it into the toilet after gym, only about eight weeks into the whole thing. She screamed because it hurt and she wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. The gym teacher came running, ready to read the riot act and found Myra screaming behind a locked bathroom stall, with twenty girls crowded around the outside.

After the gym teacher coaxed Myra out and got an ambulance to take her away, no one flushed the toilet.

Marsha, Myra’s very best friend at the time, said, “What do we do about—” and looked around for support, but no one finished the sentence. You could smell it, a kind of coppery, period smell. They stood around, arms crossed over breasts still covered in identical “Breakout Mustangs!” t-shirts. There was much shifting from leg to leg as they decided.

“Should we, like, say something?” No one knew. What did you say to a blob that would have had high school parents?
Way to luck out.

Eventually Sandy Degas said she needed a ciggy and left, with two of the other girls in tow. The four girls left behind avoided looking into the toilet for a few more minutes and then they left too. Marsha told Myra after she got out of the hospital that they were very respectful. They might have been, for the time. They didn’t say any words over it, but they didn’t flush, either.

When it was all over and done, David acted like she got her period unexpectedly. “Oh,” he said, when Myra told him it was gone. “Oh. Okay.” And then he wondered about whether or not he should tell his buddies, or if he should just forget about it.

“Did you tell them I was pregnant?”

“I dunno,” he said. “I guess so.” When Myra told her mom this, she told her that boys weren’t like girls. Not at all. And if she knew what was good for her, she would never expect them to be.

All of that had been years before David found Myra’s Aunt Beddy after she died, her body on the floor having fallen while carrying lunch to eat in front of the TV. Spread around her body were a half-dozen crackers and a large puddle of tomato soup.

It was almost too much to mention that there was a large, hardcover copy of the King James Sacred Name Bible at an angle just about under the couch on the other side of the room, as if it had been stepped on and slid across the floor. Beddy was a Jehovah’s Witness and the rumour went around about how God was getting her back into the fold, but the truth of it was that her heart had given out somewhere between the kitchen and the chair and that was all.

By the time David had walked in on Beddy’s dead body, he and Myra had been living together in their own little apartment, and were settling into something like the lives they’d lived as children, but by then, of course, they were the adults. By the time David found Beddy’s dead body, he and Myra were exactly as they were always going to be.

David had dropped by Aunt Beddy’s to pick up Myra’s mother’s deep dish pie plate because Myra was making some kind of pie for a thing at some place.

He’d been to Beddy’s a half-dozen times in the years he’d been with Myra, always in some kind of formal setting, usually the Big Four: Easter, Thanksgiving, Birthday and Christmas. He almost didn’t recognize the house, since Myra’s birthday and her mom’s were both in the winter, and so was Christmas, so he’d mostly seen the house with snow in the yard.

The day he found Beddy’s body, he knocked on the door and waited. The only thing really on his mind was what the hell conversation he could possibly make with Myra’s aunt while she was looking for the pie thing. Small talk made him nervous enough to sweat. He told Myra that he could smell his sweat even when he was just knocking. He had decided to talk about their apartment. The super was replacing all the old pipes with new ones and everybody’s bathroom was going to be ripped up for a month or so. It seemed a good topic.

—yeah they’re ripping up the bathroom and such. Copper’s a better bet. Water’s been running out brown for last year. Smells bad when you first get the shower going then it’s not too bad but yeah the PVC’s gonna make a huge difference—

Beddy wasn’t too bad for an old lady. She lived alone; her husband had been dead for as long as David had been with Myra, and she didn’t just go to bingo and bitch about the price of prime rib, she did regular stuff. She went to movies and used to golf and ran with a bowling league. She wasn’t as bad as some.

But he was still sweating about talking to her.

When no one came to the door, David just opened it a crack and called in.

“Hello! Aunt Beddy, it’s David—I’ve come to—” By then he was stepping inside the door, still knocking, and then in the next instant he saw the old woman’s feet sticking out past the TV and of course he thought the tomato soup was blood.

And then he screamed. He slammed the door by instinct and then, stupidly, called her again.

“Beddy?” he called, already a tremor in his voice. “Beddy! Are you all right?” But he knew she wasn’t all right—no one who was all right just lay on the floor with their feet stuck out like the witch in
The Wizard of Oz
. What would be the point? He knew she was all wrong. Just like he knew he had to go in there, to make sure of that. And he had to call someone, the police or the hospital or someone and he wasn’t exactly sure which. All of this was running through his head—even as he knew he would call none of those people at all; he would call Myra at work.

He managed to push the door open a crack and peeked in, the sweat pouring down the soft insides of his chest, soaking into the tops of his Y-fronts. He gaped at her stuck-out feet. They didn’t move. Not a twitch or a roll. Nothing, and that was when he started figuring she was really, truly dead. And that probably that reddish stuff on the floor was blood.

Blood that smelled like Campbell’s Tomato Soup.

It was splashed around by her feet, and it took him a minute to recognize the pieces scattered around it, each piece smeared with the same substance. He noted the regular blue stripe at each of the edges of the bits of white and nodded approval and support to himself with the recognition:
It’s a plate
. He must have seen those plates a million time. He and Myra still had her meat platter, with the same blue stripe around the edge. Broken bowl.

Killed by a goddamn broken bowl.
For some reason, that relaxed him.

“Aunt Beddy?” he called again.

He pushed the door with his foot and it swung open in a wide arc, exposing the rest of the front room and the stairs that led to the second floor. The smells of the house hit him in the face, the usual, vaguely unpleasant smells of a house that spends too much time with closed windows and the same person. And soup.

He leaned in until he could see as much of Beddy as he was going to see. There she was: Beddy from the bosoms down, on her back, one arm straight at her side. The other arm he couldn’t see, so he figured it was up over her head.

Oh god.

David’s family did not hunt. They fished, but fish were fish and hardly worthy of a second glance until they were on the plate. He could remember gutting and cleaning one when he was about ten, but he did it with his older brother, and there were so many jokes and experiments with the insides that he could scarcely remember it as a living thing. Outside of roadkill poked at with sticks in the summer, he’d never seen someone he knew, dead. Never once. He’d not lost anyone and had attended no funerals.

But he was sure she was dead, and that he had to either go in there and check, or call someone who would.

It was the door that stopped him. The door was open, but he had remained on the step, the very idea of sticking his foot over the threshold just seemed too much to bear.

So he sat on the step and called Myra. He waited for her there.

Once she arrived, the machines of the business of death took over. A silent ambulance arrived, the lights turning without siren. A police car. Finally Myra’s crappy little car. Once they arrived and whatever invisible salt had been laid over the threshold had been spoiled, he went inside the house, following behind the uniformed cop, and Myra’s straight back.

He’d looked only once. Beddy’s mouth hung slackly open. A great dark maw.

Myra put her arm around him and asked if he was all right. He lied about having gone inside. With Myra there, he felt brave and was all, “She looks like she went okay, not hard,” and “I knew you’d want to see her,” and “Guess it was just her time, baby.”

When the paramedics took her away and Myra was cleaning up the bits of bowl and soup between making phone calls to family, David burst into tears and sat on the sofa for ages like that, bawling.

Even though once the hours had passed and they were out for a drink at Macon’s, even though he was all
smell my fingers
, it was still a hard thing.

Beddy was the first one, but it was a bad year.

David’s mother and Myra got along pretty well, for the most part. The only time there was tension was during the holidays, like Christmas, when there had to be choices made about who went where for the big dinner. Lorna, his mother, always wanted David to spend Christmas Eve at “their house,” even though he hadn’t lived at home in four years. She wanted him to sleep in his old bed and get up with her Christmas morning to open the presents. The first couple of years, he went on his own and Myra went back and slept over at her parents’ place, for mixed reasons. For one thing, Myra’s two sisters, Grace and Peggy, were still living at home then, and it was kind of nice to spend Christmas in that familiar way. But the third year they lived together, she and David had a big fight about it, ending with both of them going over and sleeping at his Mom’s Christmas Eve. She put up with it then, she told him, but it had to stop. They were adults, they had their own home.

“It’s just an
apartment,
David, not a real home,” his mother had said when he’d tried to explain it.

Lorna was well thought of in the neighbourhood, since she’d raised David all on her own, never once having a boyfriend, let alone a second husband. David’s father had left when David was five and had never come back. There were rumours that he didn’t live very far away and that he had, over the years, made contact with Lorna and she flat-out refused to let him have anything to do with their child. David claimed to never think about his father. Myra, especially around the holidays, got curious about him and wondered what kind of a man had started up with Lorna in the first place. By the time January rolled around, it was business as usual.

Lorna was a nurse, a good occupation for a single mother, since she could work her schedule around taking care of David. Myra’s mother had been a clerk in a grocery store the whole time she’d been growing up, working bizarre hours. It had made her close to her sisters and her dad, who in spite of having to take care of them on his own two or three days a week, never lost the ineptitude that dads sometimes have. So Myra had cooked, since she was eight or nine years old. It meant Myra was a pretty decent cook.

Lorna was a tall woman, thin like they usually are, with a nose that got hawkish around her fiftieth birthday. Myra thought maybe she was a lesbian and that was why she never remarried, and that was fine, but she spent far too much of her time doting on and protecting David. He didn’t resent it, exactly, and it had turned him into a polite man, which is a bonus no matter who you are, but he didn’t put a stop to it, either.

Ah, Ma,
was as far as it got when she launched into her fussiness. Myra suspected, in the beginning, that he liked it, but also respected the fact that he never expected it of her.

Never expected it.

And as Myra would have said, if anyone asked her, she and Lorna got along just fine (when it wasn’t the holidays), but she did find, after the first year together, that she maybe competed a little bit—just a little bit—with Lorna, if not for David’s attention, then certainly for his comfort.

Myra would remind him to wear a scarf in the winter. She always asked him if he wanted seconds. If he had a cold, she went out in the snow and got him vitamins and aspirin. She made the soup he liked. It wasn’t that she mothered him, not that exactly, but she did give him the same comforts he had had at home.

Not that he ever asked for them.

The first year in their apartment had been more or less idyllic. Without discussing it, they settled into traditional roles, where Myra came home and made supper, set the table, and cleared and cleaned. David took out the garbage and fixed things that broke, mostly without success and that wasn’t an issue anyway, since the building had a super. But he would make a vague effort, leaving a plugged toilet with the plunger still sticking out, for Myra to find, tidy up and call the super. He accidentally nailed a drawer shut in an attempt to repair the loose front without removing it from the slot. But he tried.

Money had been a whole other issue.

Both Myra and David worked. Myra was putting in time, punching a clock at the meatpackers, a horrible, smelly, lower-back-destroying job that nonetheless paid a sweet $18 an hour. David worked at a warehouse across the city, shuffling crates for an amount they never discussed. She’d tried to talk him into applying at the meat plant, but he just wouldn’t. He did later, after the thing that happened, but he never did get on.

BOOK: Things Withered
10.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Longest Road by Jeanne Williams
Love You to Death by Melissa March
Hikaru by Julián Ignacio Nantes
The Predator by K. A. Applegate
Wolver's Reward by Jacqueline Rhoades
Thirst by Ken Kalfus
The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell