AM/PM (6 page)

“Jesus, Missy, you’re not a rapist.”

“I teased you, you gave in. You gave in like it was prom night.” She moved the phone book over her face. Chet reached to the side table for his glasses, which he polished carefully before placing them on his face. He looked at her breasts. Behind the phone book, she was crying.

“Don’t be dramatic,” he said.

“Time keeps going,” she said. “I thought it might not, but it did.”

Missy was making some kind of extended moan from behind the phone book. Chet watched her chest heave. The phone book bobbed up and down with her breath.

“We didn’t go to prom together,” he said.

Frances’s pale skin felt stretched so thin that if she scratched her face or arms, she would mangle herself. She imagined the skin would peel up underneath her fingernails like lacquer from a table. Perhaps she wasn’t drinking enough water, she thought, perhaps she was sleeping too much again. When she slept, she had wonderful dreams.

And the angels looked upon the land, and they said, LORD, look upon this woman who waxes her stairs at seven in the morning. And the LORD looked upon the earth with grave mercy and spoke, saying: That woman must perish, for she is well and truly mad. And the woman upon the earth slipped on her waxen stair and cracked two ribs and suffered a skull fracture on the way down and she looked to the heavens and with her dying breath said, Why, LORD? And the angels did open beers and laugh, and the LORD did take pleasure in the morning.

Terrence realized his eyes were closed. He wasn’t sure how long they had been closed or if he had been sleeping during that time. Perhaps five feet away, he heard Charles moving across the floor of the box. Terrence coughed and Charles stopped moving.

“Terrence?” Charles asked. “Are you awake, old friend?”

“I think so.”

“You may have been meditating. I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”

“What are you doing over there?”

The noise and movement began again. “I’m tamping down this velvet material,” Charles said. “I was feeling a little buoyed.”

“That was your imagination.”

“It was an uncomfortable feeling. There wasn’t much better to do, while you were meditating.”

Terrence felt the kernel of an argument in Charles’s tone and it immediately made him nervous, though they were friends. Perhaps it was the confined space, Terrence decided. He closed his eyes and tried not to stir again, or to be bothered by the velvet noise.

There’s no rule saying you have to be a child to compete in the Westbrook Elementary School Science Fair! I read the Rules and Regulations very closely! I spent approximately twenty-two hours on my volcano, which I have named Carla! I put her chemicals in bottles I labeled with my calligraphy pen! When I arrived, holding Carla aloft, the women at the check-in desk admired my work aloud and asked me who I was bringing this project in for and I said I am entering this category for myself, please! My name is Leonard and this is Carla! And they did laugh and one of the women made a clicking noise with her fingernails on the table because she wouldn’t recognize ambition if it slapped her in the face!

Reginald fought the impulse to help Betty sign the loan. She had the paper wedged awkwardly under her left arm, still holding a wine glass as she attempted with her other hand to manipulate the pen into action.
There’s no reason to rush
, he said to himself,
she’ll get it on her own
. It was essential, as a salesman, to not be too pushy.

She wasn’t putting enough pressure on the pen to start the ink flowing. She shook the pen gently and looked at her husband. Reginald thought about the importance of the ink that was at that moment trapped in the reservoir of Betty’s pen, a very nice Cross fountain, now that he looked at it, with some kind of filigree along the side, possibly an inscription. Perhaps it once belonged to her father, a man who in his day would run circles around Reginald’s rinkydink furniture store. Quite possibly, the pen was the only item of his she carried around, though it seemed equally likely that her purse was full of tie clips and cufflinks and miniature portraits of the man. Just one stone from one cufflink could get Reginald out of the mess he had gotten himself into. He prayed for a few inches of ink.

Starting a family is easy: The sign said “Free Kittens,” and Sam pulled the car over. Two fat people, a man and a woman, sat in lawn chairs behind a cardboard box. They had positioned themselves at the side exit of the Wal-Mart, where Sam and Hazel had just been stealing light bulbs.

The trick to stealing light bulbs is to walk in with an empty light bulb carton. Wave the carton at the greeters so they can see it, and then take what you need. Hazel would sometimes wave to the greeters on the way out, the full carton in her hand. The more blatant, the better, when it comes to stealing.

“Free light bulbs, free kittens,” Sam said. “Today’s our lucky day.”

“Today’s your lucky day!” the fat woman parroted. She flipped open one of the cardboard flaps and hauled out a kitten.

“They’re real pretty,” the fat man said. He was drinking from a juice box.

Hazel reached for the gray and white kitten and touched its paw. “Do those kittens have six toes?”

The woman nodded. “This kitten could shake your hand,” she said.

“That’s a sign of a good kitten,” Hazel said.

The woman looked a little offended. “They’re free,” she said, thrusting the kitten towards Hazel. “There’s four more.”

“We’ll take them all,” Sam said. And they did.

Tess kept a secret: her left hand was turning into a claw. She felt the tendons tightening up in her forearm the week before, and had written it off as the onset of carpal tunnel, but the tendons continued to tighten. The feeling spread into her hand, which began to curve like a scythe, the bones lengthening a little and then bending, almost imperceptibly, until her fingers hardened into one immobile point and her left hand was fully a claw.

Tess kept the secret, but compensated by repeating it to herself. She would lie in bed, curled around her left hand, holding it gently to her knees.
My hand is a claw
.
My hand is a claw.

June woke up covered in seeds. They were small, toasted sesame seeds, thousands of them all over her body. She had never been covered in seeds before and it was a strange feeling, like a snake might feel in sand. There was no explanation, as far as she could see, for the sudden appearance of all the seeds. It was a comforting feeling, and June turned over three times in the slippery weightlessness before falling back asleep.

They were in love! Carla wore her hair up and Andrew saw everything as a sign. They spent an entire afternoon sitting side by side in a coffee shop, taking more meaning than necessary from the world around them. A man wearing boxing gloves walked down the sidewalk in front of them and they took that to mean they would be together forever.

Good morning, John Mayer Concert Tee! It has been a while. I’m feeling a need to overstress my happiness at seeing you, hanging on the laundry line between my house and the neighbor girl’s house. It’s one of those mornings where everything is tinged with miracle. The waxed floor is a miracle! The dirty dishes are a miracle! The day ahead is a gift from heaven. This isn’t to say I’m happy, John Mayer Concert Tee, but you are a miracle. If we mated, John Mayer Concert Tee, our children would have jersey-knit skin. They would never speak unless spoken to, and even then they might not speak. But they would be soft, and they would smell like fabric softener, and they would love us, and we would love them.

“I just had a terrible dream,” Martha said.

Emily turned to look at her. “You were sleeping?”

Martha flicked on the turn signal, changed lanes. “I dreamt we were in a awful car accident,” she said.

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

It wasn’t that much of a coincidence, really, as they were weaving through late-night traffic. It bothered Emily more to think that Martha had been asleep at the wheel, though surely it was just an expression.

“It was a bad dream,” Martha said. “We were in an accident, and I was okay.”

“Did I have a bar through my head?”

Martha shook her head and blinked. Emily realized she was staring.

“You weren’t okay,” Martha said.

“I’m okay now,” Emily said, turning to look out the window again. Without looking back, she reached across the seat divider, found Martha’s hand, and held it.

Betty cracked the crust of her crème brûlée with the edge of her spoon. “This is a symbol of my love for you,” she said.

“You’ve said that about a lot of things,” Simon said. “You said that about the entrée as well. And the bottle of wine.”

“It’s all true,” she said. “Your cup of coffee is a symbol of my love for you. This spoon. Our waiter. The ceiling. Your fingernails. The crack in that windowpane. The cars parked outside. My shoes. Your shoes. The pastry chef. This tablecloth.”

“What about the flowers?” he asked, gesturing to the buds in a vase between them.

She looked at him. “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

Frances ate fish at all meals. In the morning, when the newspaper came, she ate a bagel with lox. Mid-day, she would prefer something light, like tuna in olive oil, but at night she would make cod fried with polenta, rich seafood stews, baked salmon, seared tuna rolled in pepper and sea salt. She declared that she would eat fish until the day she died, and then she would eat fish as an angel.

As the days went on, her fish consumption grew simpler. She ate fish as a singular pursuit. She ate alone, with her back to the door, the fish alone on a plate, without spices or sauces. She stopped cooking rice and vegetables. She drank a glass of water before the fish and a glass of bourbon after. She ate the fish from a white plate, and the fish was white against the plate. When the fish was gone, she licked the white plate.

When Missy or Chastity called, Frances talked about her day in relation to fish.

She would say, “I just ate some fish,” or “I am about to cook some fish, broil it perhaps.”

Her friends silently wondered when they would be invited for dinner, and then they began to wonder it aloud, but she never had a solid answer for them.

She would say, “I’m sorry, I only defrosted enough fish for one.”

When her friends pressed her to make future plans, Frances seemed confused. Her friends decided she was demurring and stopped calling, because they were all sensitive people. She was sensitive, too, and didn’t understand why they stopped calling.

Carla snapped the tines off the plastic fork with her thumb. “No matter how deeply I bury you in the gravel pit of my memory,” she said, “you come crawling back out.”

“There’s no need for poetry,” Andrew said. “I’m just here for my chair.”

“I’m eating,” she said.

“You just broke your fork.”

“See, Andrew, that’s just how you are. It’s no damn business of yours how I eat, and what I eat with. What if I brought this fork to the door just to show you how serious I am?”

“All I’m saying is, you’re not eating right now, and I want my chair back.”

“I want those years back,” Carla said. “I want my youth back.”

“You may have your youth,” Andrew said. He had a bag with him, and he reached into the bag and pulled out a small, carved box. He handed it to her and she held it with both hands.

“Sorry I kept it for so long,” Andrew said.

Carla took a step back to let him in. “Your chair is in the kitchen,” she said.

Terrence and Leonard grew up in Dallas and moved to different cities at the same time. They were bored with Dallas. All the women in Dallas were preternaturally interested in the fact that they were twins, though they were grown by then and had exhausted all avenues for conversation regarding their twinship.

Of course, luck would have it that the woman Terrence was starting to feel comfortable around would squeal and hold her palms together when she learned he was a twin.

“Who’s older?” June asked, resting her chin on her upturned palms. It was the most excited she’d been all evening, even after he told his humorous stories from his job at the collections agency.

“He is, by thirteen minutes.” Terrence couldn’t stop fussing with a dollop of glitter glue on the Formica table between them. He was trying to edge his fingernail under it.

“What did your mother do in that thirteen minutes?” June asked. “Have a cigarette? Wonder, ‘is this second one really worth it’?”

Terrence laughed politely. “Right,” he said, answering none of the questions. June had no way of knowing that his mother was long dead, and she seemed nice enough that she would have been embarrassed if he mentioned it.

“Anyway,” June said. Saying “anyway” was a conversational tic of hers, it seemed, as she had resorted to it three times over the course of an hour.

Missy shrugged. “What I want to know is,” she said, dropping her fork into a puddle of maple syrup, “why does everyone keep talking about how fat Frances is?”

“Who’s Frances?” Chet asked. Missy and Chet had been married for six months.

“Oh my God,” said Chastity, at that moment breastfeeding her three-year-old son. “Frances is so plump.”

“She’s plump!” Missy said. “Exactly! She’s pleasantly plump. I mean, there but for the grace of God go the rest of us.” She pinched the thin layer of fat on her own belly.

Chastity made a face. “I’ll never be that plump,” she said, shifting her weight. The boy toothed her nipple and she winced.