AM/PM (5 page)

Good morning, John Mayer Concert Tee! You seem to have weathered the past few days rather poorly. Your cuffs are split, you’re stained at the neck. The graceful visage of The One Who Will Play the Smooth Guitar is sullied by dirt scrub and bent into a permanent, unnatural shape. You are rigor mortis in clothing form, John Mayer Concert Tee. You accept the elements, the wearer and all his flaws, and your reward is a cramped place in the crack of a window, keeping out the morning sun. You understand what it means to suffer, and what it means to bestow grace. You understand the ditch and the sewage and the long night.

The yoga instructor declared they were pushing toxins out of the body. As the sweat dripped from her face, Chastity licked it to see if it tasted any more toxic than usual. It did not, so she considered the possibility of airborne toxins, or toxins without a discernable taste, toxins that could seep from the body unannounced, and land on the floor, invisible to the naked eye, waiting to be picked up by bare feet, like a splinter, and re-absorbed.

Why does the rain make us feel so romantic and strange? Maybe it’s the fact that we are unnatural spectators of it, from inside our homes, and it is a reminder that we have the power to live our whole lives like this, if we choose. It’s not the smell of fertile ground kicked up by raindrops, or the slick leaves, or the way we must amplify our voices to be heard over this larger presence. It’s the power of the rooftop that makes us want to fuck under it.

Not a hundred feet from camp, Reginald found two stumps next to each other, like twins. He liked the look of them and sat on one, propping his rifle up against the other. It was early yet and the bugles hadn’t sounded, though dew had already wet the tall grass enough to soak the cuffs of his jeans. He didn’t have regulation wool like most of the other reenactors. He spent some time rolling up the jeans until he could see a line of hair from over his crew socks.

He tapped his pack of cigarettes. The others rolled their smokes by hand and lit them with antique lighters. Reginald was there because his friends convinced him to come. They said he could maybe meet some of the women who came to reenact war nurses. Olivia must have told them to say that, which embarrassed him. Most of the war nurses were fat, anyway. The fact annoyed Reginald more, though he was also fat and smoked too much.

He lit his cigarette with a lime-green lighter and thought about how he would save the furniture store.

Pressing on in the winter makes more sense. There’s snow, and when you press on through the snow, you can feel it and sense the difficulty. During the summer, it’s dry land for months. Maybe a little ocean water, but that’s hardly pressing on. Hell, that’s a vacation.

Before the storm, Hazel had washed the sheets and stretched them across the mattress while they were still damp. Sam moved from side to side with some discomfort.

“I feel like we wet the bed,” he said.

“I feel like a brand new bitch,” Hazel said. Her eyes were still closed. He didn’t know what to make of it. At that moment, he didn’t even want to touch her. He felt a distinct fear that she might either disappear or stay the same.

June kept the windows open the first few weeks, but got annoyed at sweeping up all of the dead houseflies, closed the windows, and switched on the air. She still kept the shutters open for a while, but started closing them at night because she couldn’t gauge the tree cover under the dining room window, and she kept feeling like the neighbors were standing in their backyard, watching.

Sometimes she forgot to open the shutters again during the day, and the lack of sunlight made her sleepy. She started opening her eyes only halfway, and then not opening them at all unless she needed them to make chicken salad or sweep the floor.

Eventually, chicken salad grew less important. The chicken straight out of the can gained its own intricacies, and adding mayonnaise and celery and bread and cheese seemed like too much. She could find the chicken in the pantry without opening her eyes, and soon enough, she learned to find the trash can to dispose of the can without peeking even once. She was a high-wire artist. Her invisible audience watched from their backyards.

The trap in the attic was catching some seriously large squirrels. Rats too, but Reginald didn’t want to frighten Olivia by telling her there were rats crawling up through the walls. He installed a humane trap, a kill trap, and a poison trap, and left it up to the vermin to make the choice for themselves.

Carla realized that there are morning people and evening people, and she was both of those, but what she certainly was not was an afternoon person. Words came harder. Things got unpleasantly bright while she dulled, squinting at the computer screen, sipping espresso and making a conscious effort to not eat too much, to not lie down, to take the phone calls and be patient, most of all, be patient.

Reginald sat on the pile of mattresses and wondered how his wife’s friends would die. One particularly dependent woman would be the most likely to be involved in a jealousy-driven murder. Another was a bad driver and too sensitive about it. Still another had undiagnosed health problems. The moon above the loading dock was almost full and Reginald watched it, trying to determine in the stillness if it was waxing or waning.

For a while, Carla dated a man named The Amazing Chet who guessed people’s weight at the science museum. The Amazing Chet was his real name, given to him by his mother. Twenty years before he had traveled with a circus. The science museum liked the novelty and The Amazing Chet was very good, guessing within the half-pound, and exactly more often than not. He used to sit at a folding table and write the weight down on a note card for the person, but the exhibit grew in popularity and the science museum made a special booth for him, with electronic output so that, when a patron stepped on the platform, he could enter their weight and have it be digitally displayed above their head. The Amazing Chet’s exhibit became the most popular in the museum, and scientists of various disciplines came to record and study his accuracy.

The Amazing Chet would come home, tired but happy, and lift Carla in the air to greet her. “You’ve dropped three ounces since yesterday,” he would say. “Are you drinking enough water?”

Eventually his divining career grew too important, and the science museum gathered the funds to turn him into a traveling exhibit. They hosted a gallery party to kick off the tour, and The Amazing Chet invited all his old friends from the circus. Carla was surprised to see so many people. The Amazing Chet was a dull man, in her eyes.

When cold and warm fronts meet, at the right velocity and temperature, a hurricane forms. Tess remembered the morning of the hurricane seventeen years before. That afternoon, she watched the blue sky and white clouds from her seat on the bus and strained to feel something in the air. Seventeen years later, she felt her loneliness rise up to meet an overpowering urge and suppressed the desire to board the windows.

“Being with you is like a plate of hair,” Andrew said. “A dainty bone china plate, covered in hair. And everyone at the table is watching me and waiting to see if I’m going to eat it.”

Carla looked at him and yawned. “Being with you,” she said, “is like taking a sleeping pill.”

Is there too much suffering in the world, and not enough philosophy, or is it the other way around?

Press your right side to massage your ascending colon. Press your left side to massage your descending colon. Express the toxins you are able to express, and ignore the others.

Control the impulse to check the locks on your door.

The more bleach in the bedsheets, the greater Chastity’s impulse to roll around in them. A party would be thrown, she decided, the kind that would tell a small story in the contents of the dustpan the next morning. Detached sequins and mint leaves muddled by high heels, shrimp tails mixed in with a few shards of broken glass, a crust of bread. She rolled in her bleached sheets until they wrapped about her like a storm, and she fell asleep in the eye of it.

A man cultivates a terrible feeling in the woman who loves him. He turns the feeling of love on itself. The woman sees what love looks like in its grotesque selfishness. The price of her knowledge? An enthusiastic event, and another, and the actor will watch herself doing terrible things.

The girls were doing yoga in the living room. Missy played some calming spiritual music and lit a candle.

Chastity winced, feeling the wood floor under her thin mat. “I want the kind of man who goes looking for a war,” she said.

Missy aligned her hips up and back for Downward-Facing Dog. “There’s a few wars out there already,” she said. “Should be easy to find.”

“Not a real war,” Chastity said, after her third attempt at the Plow. “Nothing that would kill him.”

“What, you just want things that will make him stronger?” Missy exhaled through her nose and stood up. “Boring.”

“I want him to find something worth fighting for every day.”

“This, coming from the woman with the most dangerous party theory ever.” Missy raised her arms and took a deep breath. “I guess I could have seen it coming,” she said, exhaling.

Chastity felt it wasn’t a true party until something got broken and someone got hurt. “I want a man who knows what it means to fight,” she said.

“Slap a pair of skates on the girl and you’ve got a roller derby,” said Missy.

Hazel constantly felt the need to express something inside of her. With age, she would learn that everyone has that same feeling, and that the need to express comes from a sensible desire for community, but that reasonable people either forget the feeling or get tired of talking about it, as when all the gossip about an embarrassing acquaintance finally winds its way down and the friends stare at each other across the table, each thinking,
now what
.

Martha was face down on the bed with her feet draped over the closed violin case as if she was having them examined. She didn’t move when Emily walked in and sat next to her.

“I thought I’d join a bluegrass band,” Martha said. Her words were muffled by the pillow.

“You practiced?”

“I can play the songs, but it makes me nervous. Everything makes me nervous.”

“It’s normal to be nervous.” Emily rested her palm on the bottom of Martha’s left foot.

“Great,” Martha said, “I’m nervous and I’m
normal
.” She started to cry.

“Do you even like bluegrass music?” Emily asked.

Martha blew her nose in the center of the pillow. “I’ll wash it,” she said. “There’s just that feeling, you know? When something happens, and you have to let it happen and you get
that feeling
, like your heart is breaking? That’s how I feel about joining a bluegrass band.”

“I didn’t know you liked bluegrass music.”

Martha rolled onto her back. Her mascara had smeared into two dark smudges on her eyelids. It made her look like an animal with its fur or feather patterned like false eyes. “That’s just it,” Martha said, closing her real eyes and inadvertently widening the false ones. Emily could barely watch.

Olivia’s whole body shook, not like a leaf but like the tree itself, a deep kind of shudder that only happened at the hands of loggers. A tree feels its deepest movement in those final seconds. She once watched a program on television where a falling tree snapped at the trunk, creating a ten-foot-long catapult that tossed a logger fifty feet into the air. They called it kickback.

Betty and Simon drove down the dirt road playing Amish or Vietnamish.

“A Bible in every compartment,” he said.

“A compartment in every Bible,” she said. “Tet Offensive.”

“Non-offensive. What’s mine is yours.”

“What mines? Agent Orange.”

“Orange preserves.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “I Am Become Jebediah, Raiser of Barns.”

Betty leaned back and closed her eyes. “Good one.”

Goosebumps came more easily, though it was the middle of the summer. Tess sat in front of the fan and alternated between jerking sobs and laughter at the sound she made. That hiccup of breath was a terrible sound to hear in the dark, and she would laugh, rub her goosebumps down, and sob. She needed to make the decision to cut, because making the decision would bring instant pain and healing simultaneously. She was the kind of girl who climbed the tallest tree and cried to be let down, but she was also the kind of girl who would scramble and jump down on her own as soon as someone went in for the ladder. Here in the dark, she needed to decide.

Missy looked at her watch, and back at Chet. “Half an hour,” she said. She was sitting cross-legged on his chair, naked, watching him on his bed.

Chet yawned. “Until when?”

“It’s been half an hour since I felt good about this situation.”

“The sex?” He wondered when she might finally leave.

“This whole situation. It’s been about thirty-two minutes.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it,” he said, pressing his palms to his eyes for a second before removing them and blinking in the light. He was tired, he wanted sleep. “It was your idea, as I recall.”

“Don’t give me that. It was our idea, together.”

“You essentially teased me until I gave in.”

“You gave in. Fantastic.” She rolled onto the floor and covered her breasts with a phone book. “Now I’m a rapist, and a bad lay.”