AM/PM (2 page)

“Superman would go out and save them. Carver, too.”

“Carver wouldn’t get up to sharpen a pencil,” Simon said. “He’d get a good woman to do it. And Superman would recognize that that girl out there is holding her own well enough and doesn’t require saving.”

“He’s screaming at her.”

“She’s translating his language.”

“I’d call the police if you started screaming at me.”

Simon shrugged, writing. “Different language,” he said. “Lost in translation.”

“Bill Murray’d save her, too.”

The neighbors stopped fighting so abruptly that Simon and Betty both leaned toward the window.

From the silence, Simon: “Bill Murray’d save her eight bucks and tell her how
Superman
ends.”

June was the kind of woman who not only talked to her cats, but consulted them seriously about world affairs and life changes.
Mister Pickles,
she would say in that adorable voice women reserve for their cats and when they want a large favor performed,
Mister Pickles, what is your opinion on the recent World Bank shake-up? Do you feel that man should be fired? All he wanted to do was to make his girlfriend happy
. The cat would look up at her, thinking for one wild moment that the tendrils of hair around her face were lizard tails.

The girls, for all their tea-time advice, were each unhappy in their own relationships. Missy and her new husband fought constantly, and Chastity had left the father of her child to go on a spiritual journey. Frances had no prospects and a house full of fleas. She scratched a flea bite on her ankle with the heel of her shoe.

“They’re all intimidated by you,” Missy said. “They’re intimidated by the fact that a girl as young as you, excuse me, could be so sophisticated and beautiful and great.”

“They’re not sophisticated,” Chastity said.

Having a flea bite made Frances feel fleas everywhere. She dug her hands into her hair, scratching her scalp. She had said a few months ago that she’d never had a flea bite, which was how these things happened.

“Not at that age,” Missy said. “They don’t even know how to fake it until at least thirty.”

“Men begin at thirty,” Chastity said, raising her glass.

“Life starts the day after thirty-five,” Frances said. She felt like there was a flea under her arm, where she couldn’t look without being conspicuous. Instead, she scratched under her arm.

Missy was watching her. “Are you okay? You look itchy.”

“I
am
itchy,” Frances said. Her heel had worked its way to her mid-calf. She couldn’t say anything about fleas while they were eating. “I’m itching to find a man!”

A couple at another table turned to look. Frances reached under her shirt, scratching her belly.

“That’s no way to find a man,” the woman said.

Frances glared at the woman. “You stay out of it!”

Hazel and Tess were spending an excellent Sunday afternoon trying to decide the best way to die.

“Old age?” Tess suggested.

“Old age is a cop-out,” Hazel said. “It’s a nice way of saying your organs have sunk so low that you can’t summon the strength to reach them. Dying of old age is like being crucified.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Think on it for a while.”

Tess didn’t like it when Hazel told her to think on things. “Exposure,” she said.

“That’s a good one, in theory, but what is one truly exposed to, in those last moments?”

“A blizzard, usually.”

Hazel gave Tess a look that meant Tess was a few steps behind in the conversation again.

Carla switched off the hair dryer. “It’s easy to forget how much around us is flammable,” she said.

Andrew didn’t look up from his dress shirt. “I believe I have a stain,” he said.

“We could all go up at any moment.”

“The human body is ninety-five percent water.”

“That’s just the blood,” she said, pulling her hair up into a rhinestone-studded clip.

“You’re being morbid.”

“I’m telling the truth. Bone is only twenty-two percent. Give that a couple days to dry out and you’ve got yourself a nice little blaze.”

He looked at her. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The landscape men trimmed the trees outside Olivia’s office window. It was necessary, because the branches were providing easy access for squirrels to the roof.

She watched them remove a series of ash branches, working up to a large one near the top. When the workers cut it, it didn’t fall. The remaining branches were thick enough to hold it up and it hung there, suspended, the cut section swinging slowly with the movements of the tree.

The man sitting alone smiles when his phone rings. The couple smiles at one another and the woman covers her mouth. A father walks hunched through the parking lot, a newspaper under his arm. He reaches for the child’s wrist. The girl touches the car’s headlight to hold herself up. Inside, a college student writes in her day planner with a purple pen. A young man takes pictures of himself next to the door. Tess feels that at any moment her heart could stop.

The truck, advertising FISH and MEAT and GOURMET BRANDS, got stuck on the hump between the parking lot and the road in front of the deli next door to our apartment. We went outside because we wanted to count the wheels still touching the ground but the driver waved us away. So we went back inside, where we could only see the back of the truck from the window, and just barely the cars in the street, swerving to avoid it. Somebody said, What would happen if the back end disconnected from the front end, and rolled in through the window and into our home? Killing us all? And causing thousands of dollars of structural damage for our landlord? And somebody else said, I think you have sufficiently answered your own question.

Imagine if you could call up all your exes, and bring them together on a basketball court to play a pickup game. Maybe you could also call all the girls you’ve ever loved, split them into the Girls You Had a Chance With and the Girls You Never Had a Chance With. Have them play shirts and skins. It won’t be for your honor, though you’ll be the only one watching. You will promise pizza and beer to the winners. The girls you never had a chance with will spit and glare, and the girls you still may have a chance with will snivel and look at you when they make jump shots.

The winners will take your wallet and invite the losers out. Everyone will forget to give you directions, and you’ll be left sitting in the gym parking lot.

You’ll go home and watch basketball movies. You’ll build a makeshift court from scrap lumber in your backyard, and leave messages on all of their answering machines, inviting them back. You’ll go out back every night and play H-O-R-S-E, waiting for them to return. You will wear your shirt when you are shirts and you will remove your shirt when you are skins.

It was still dark, but Terrence’s eyes adjusted enough that he could sense the movement of his hand before his face. “Charles,” he said. “I believe we are in a small box.”

“Indeed,” Charles said, from the darkness. Terrence judged him to be about five feet away, but when he reached his arm out, he touched Charles’s knee, which startled them both. The knee was cold and hairy. Charles’s knee made Terrence more nervous than the existence of the small box.

He leaned back and startled again when he touched the soft walls of the box. The thick velvet felt deep enough to sink his fingers into, but he didn’t want to know what was down there and instead let his hand rest on the surface.

Terrence considered the letter he would write to his girlfriend when he was free. He thought fondly of the time they ate cotton candy until she vomited.

Tess realized one of the great modern dating sadnesses: everyone is so used to the comforting glow of the computer screen that nobody can go so far as to say “good morning” in public without being liquored up. If ever we do accidentally function as human beings, we call it
instinct
, as in, “sorry about the coffee, or your dress, or my last marriage, but I was operating on instinct,” as if it’s a failure to behave the way we’re all designed. Everyone forgets that acting on instinct has gotten many soldiers through many wars and the rest of us through long lives. The realization caused Tess to paint the dead ladybug on her bedside table with gold frost nail polish, which, as she predicted, did make it look prettier.

Social code was created for the thrill of dragging one’s fingertips across the inner thigh of another man’s wife. It has been enforced for centuries so that the room will go quiet when the boss is advised to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. The thrill of acting on instinct should never require an apology. An apology would be an act of belittlement; receiving it, an act of humiliation.

The ladybug is not dead: Good-bye, golden friend.

By then, the cats were used to the sound of construction next door. Carla hoped it would make the move easier for them, though she anticipated the startled cat noises, the wide eyes and that low groan like the sound a machine makes. This didn’t help the prospect of the big move, of course. There were boxes that needed to be opened and checked for contents, and still more boxes that had to be created and filled with the last of it, including perishables, spillables, and the last of the glassware. Packing glassware in secret sounds more stressful than it is. With the newspaper softened by the humid air, it would be easy to wrap and pack her wine glasses without waking Andrew at all.

The man who owned the furniture store was really glaring at Martha and Emily by then. They had been testing the stability of his coffee tables by piling on top of them, first Martha on her back and then Emily on her front. The owner thought it was pretty funny at first, but when they kept going and he determined there was no candid camera to catch his reaction, he started pacing back and forth in his glass-walled office.

Emily took Martha’s hand and led her over to a three-legged table with a glass top.

“Fall back on it,” she said.

“I’m not falling back on it.”

“Come on.”

“There’s no way, under
any
circumstance, that I would fall back on a glass table.”

“Heat of the moment.”

“No way. I’d have to be on drugs.”

“So you’re on drugs,” Emily said. “So we decide to relive our college days, and you’re on drugs, now fall back.”

The owner picked up his phone. In the reflection of the glass, Martha could see the two of them, together. They were reliving their college days, and she was on drugs, and it wasn’t even going to hurt.

Andrew’s problem with women was that he was analytical and they were always, always emotional. Women made fun of him for measuring out salt and spices when he cooked. Even the ones who never cooked would criticize him, leaning against the doorway of the kitchen as if they knew they shouldn’t trespass but teasing him anyway. At the movies they smacked him with popcorn buckets for commenting on an incongruous detail while they were building up the stamina to cry. None of it made sense to Andrew. He was very loving, and concerned, and simply knew where to place sadness and fear and anger, so that it could be accessed with great efficiency when necessary.

“It’s just you and me, house,” Andrew said.

The house was not so sure.

With practice, Hazel learned to paint rooms. The evidence could be found in the botched green walls of the room she left and would always remember, even when the house is sold and the room is repainted.

Understand that if you don’t paint a room properly, you will know those pieces of wall forever. Understand that every piece of paint not properly applied continues to quietly exist. The misapplied strokes hold a dull truth that remains despite new coats.

After a night of terrible sleep, Tess awoke to the realization that cows become meat, though they eat none, and the same goes for vegetarians.

She drank her coffee with extra cream and no sugar. The black linen dress hanging on the wall of the coffee house aspired to belong to a little girl, size six.

A man spoke into a cell phone. He said, Since I met you, baby, I’ve never been the same.

Another man said to a child, Where are you going, you bug? Don’t make me squeeze your little paws, you bug.

Unload your perishables and empty boxes. Give away old clothes and broken cookware. Crush the empty cans and load them with the yellow newspapers. Shred the sensitive documents. Discard fingernail clippings. Get rid of those photographs and letters. Offload the old enemies. A lighter life, at any price.

When Martha was a girl, fire safety was something presented on public service commercials and school visits from volunteer firemen. They even brought a miniature house, perhaps half the size of the house she grew up in, with child-sized stairs and rooms.

The children crawled into the house and the adults would start the sweet-smelling fog machine and pump it in through the windows and vents and say, Get down, get out, remember your training. Martha would obediently get down and get out, though she liked the way the smoke smelled.

The adults said, You must have a plan, and Martha made a secret plan: in case of fire, she would fill up the bathtub, get in so she would save her pajamas from burning, and simply peek her nose above the water to smell that candy smoke.

It was a warm Friday afternoon, and the rain hadn’t yet begun. Sam was throwing a rubber-band ball at Hazel’s forehead with repeated accuracy.