The story splits the room in two. She watches their faces change, some twisted up with disgust and others with laughter. The disgusted people, well, that’s it, they’re done with her for the night. The other half become her satellites, her acolytes.
It’s as if she’s rescued them, from boredom at least, but possibly something more nefarious: the creeping feeling that you might be as anonymous as all these others with their reasonable opinions and eighty-dollar haircuts. She knows what they’re thinking: that a person who would tell such a story must be direct, honest, admirably demented. She lets this opinion enfold her.
To one side a cluster of people are talking about some very nice foreclosure opportunities south of the city. “Don’t be afraid of taking risks,” someone says. She’s left her heels behind in some room or another and one of them is lucky enough to notice her bare feet. “Where are your shoes?” he asks, but he’s smiling. Another sign of her uniqueness. They can count on a person like this to shepherd them through the tedium.
She shows them the size of the owl by spreading her arms wide, as if she herself might fly away. To show the size of the dog she moves her hands close together as if to cradle a loaf of bread, a newborn baby. Some of them are still chuckling.
Sheila B. had returned to Fairbanks for another summer, hitchhiking her way up through Delta Junction with a Superman backpack and a dome tent she had stolen from the open bed of a truck. Her body seemed a weight apart from her, a thing she had to lift and carry and then throw down when the day was finished. She hid inside it, her hair in her eyes, half-listening to the driver talk about the death of Jesus or the many ways oil money had destroyed the state. One of her sneakers was opening up slowly at the big toe, step by step, day by day. She could feel that too: the dirt and pebbles and shame. “How old are you?” he asked, and she pushed her age up a couple of notches. He didn’t believe her—she could tell by the noise he made at the back of his throat—but he didn’t seem to care all that much.
The best spots along the river were already taken by lean boys in groups of three or four. Long hair, patchy beards, dazed expressions, they all seemed like refugees from the same great shipwreck. She took a spot further away and hoped to spy a friendly face from the year before but there were none. An old man asked her, “Do you have any food?”
“No,” she said without looking at him, but he hovered there for a moment, road grit on his vacant face, before moving on to the next campsite.
It would be cold soon. Even in the early summer the night brought in a chill that could sneak up on a person.
In the early evening she found the story in the newspaper she was balling up to set on fire. The owl and the dog were its two principal characters, but the photograph showed the two tourists. The woman held an empty leash dangling like a noose. They did not look pleased.
She did not set fire to that page. She folded it as neatly as if it were a letter addressed especially to her.
Over the next few weeks it began to disintegrate there in her pocket. But by then she cradled the best parts in her brain and shared it with people at the campsite. Some of them had heard the story already, but they still listened when she spoke. She repeated it again to store clerks as she worked up the courage to shoplift. She told the taxi driver she stiffed and the drunks in dirty hoodies trying hard to look sullen and dangerous in front of the Safeway.
Sheila B. remembers Katie’s face, her wide hips and heavy breasts, her hair cut so close that you could see a bump at the back of her head where her skull became her neck. She remembers telling her the story from three stools over and then Katie taking her home to a warm shower and a bathrobe covered with yellow flowers. Or was it that Katie told it and that coincidence, hearing the story while she held fragments of it in her pocket, caused her to move over a couple of stools and listen to the rest?
She does remember this perfectly: Katie was the first one to laugh. Sheila B. hadn’t noticed the humor in it until then, and soon they were both laughing and Katie was buying drinks with a sandwich bag of loose change. “Sometimes you just have to laugh,” Katie said to the bartender, as if this were the wisest of wise things to share with a couple of strangers. She picked out the pennies and nudged them to a remote part of the smooth bar surface, then gathered up the rest. “Laundry money,” she said. “My boyfriend is going to kill me.”
The people at the party ask her what it was really like to grow up in such a place. When did she leave and why did she come to this boring city, a city where nothing ever happens except heart attacks and traffic jams and parties like this one. She smiles politely. She agrees, it can be difficult here, but it’s also comfortable. People underestimate comfort except when it’s gone. She rattles the ice in her glass as a kind of evidence.
Of course, she’s giving them just a crumb of it. That’s part of the fun and part of her frustration. “Where are my shoes?” she asks, as if they might be anywhere at all, upstairs, in the yard, across town, back at the condo. She lifts a leg in mock surprise. Someone will go and hunt them down, return them to her as if performing a great chivalry.
“I wonder if it felt any pain,” one of them says.
“Of course it felt pain,” someone else says. “Jesus didn’t feel any more pain.”
Soon they’ll be sharing their own small grotesques. She’s pushed open the door for them.
Sometimes she forgets the story for months at a time. Not forget really, but it falls into disuse. Then it appears again at the forefront of her mind and she brings it out with a magician’s skill, an actor’s charm. In her imagination the dog is flying up, up, up. One of the tourists—the man probably—is confused at first, because just a moment before it had been toddling along the rocky edge of the road deciding on the best place to pee. Possibly it has run over the slope and is chasing voles in the wide field just now graying in the dusk. Or it’s gone back inside the trailer. And then he looks up and all his questions are answered.
The whole thing has the kaleidoscopic force of a dream. A dream’s logic too.
Sheila B. was standing at the fridge with the orange juice bottle in her hand when she heard the key in the lock. As one door opened she was closing another and she couldn’t help feeling as if she had been caught doing something wrong. “Well,” the man said, as he stepped inside. “Who is this and what have you done with Katie?”
His head was vaguely peanut shaped, although he carried himself with the air of someone who was good-looking, even glamorous. He leaned into the doorframe and tilted his head. And he seemed amused by the possibility of her being an intruder, a murderer even. Katie had just gone to take a shower. The water was still running. It was easy to hear.
“I’m Sheila,” she said.
“I knew a Sheila once,” he said. “She would eat anything for a quarter. Do you do that?”
It occurred to her that she might be the one in danger. But the man was thin, so thin that he positively swam in his button-down shirt, and he wore a knit tie to match his narrow chest—it was the width of a butter knife. Surely nobody had ever been hurt by someone wearing such a tie.
“My second Sheila,” he said. “Katie? Are you here?”
“Hey, Eddie,” she called out above the sound of running water. “Be nice, okay?”
He headed off into the other room and she thought of running to the door and out into the woods. But she was starving and she had glimpsed thick slices of bologna in the meat drawer, a brick of cheese and a bottle of ginger ale. She could hear them talking about his difficult day at work, about charity and surprises. She heard the click, click, click of the shower rings as the curtain was pulled aside. Was he climbing in with her?
“The thing is,” he said later as they ate around the small table. “If you go out there and just look, you can see it. They’re all melting. It looks like a retreat, like they are crawling very slowly back to where they came from. All you have to do is look.”
He studied the glaciers. Or rather he assisted the people who studied the glaciers.
“Don’t get him started,” Katie said, and she rolled her eyes, touched her hand like they were good friends. The sense of danger still hung around the edges of the room but it didn’t emanate from a particular person. It came from everywhere, from the configuration of the three bodies around the small table and the food she was trying hard to eat at an even pace. She reached across Katie for some more bread and butter.
“We’re poor,” Katie said, “but we like to share.” She turned to Eddie. “Skin and bones, isn’t she?”
“Skin and bones,” Eddie said. He seemed distracted, poking at the debris on his plate. Maybe he was thinking about bigger things: the glaciers retreating, his own small place in solving the problem.
“You should see the dirt she left in the tub,” Katie said. “Go in there and look.”
Sheila B. knew what he was going to say before he said it. Dirty girl. She was a very dirty girl.
The party will be over soon and the guests will leave in a swarm, silver Porsches steered by aging drunks, people shouting goodbyes from windows as they gun perfectly calibrated engines. More guests will stumble across the cul-de-sac and squint into the blaze of headlamps and the man next to her, her boyfriend, her whatever, will lean on the horn and steer onto the lawn, just for a moment, the sprinklers raining across the windshield. It’s meant to be spontaneous, but it has all the calculation of a chess move. He’s trying to show her something about himself. He can be reckless too.
Then they are alone, hurtling down the road and finally through the east side, where the stores have bars on the windows. Metal doors tagged with spray paint and boys slow-riding bicycles through the inching traffic. At the intersection ahead a man is making the sign of the cross at passing cars. Her boyfriend touches a button and the doors lock. He asks her, “Did you have a good time?”
She supposes that she did.
How do you tell the rest of it? Mumbled in his ear when they curl in bed, as they often do these days, with him on the inside, the smaller spoon, the sheltered one? Or should she shout it right now? The traffic hiccups forward. He’s frustrated. She can tell. He wants to be home. He wants to be fucking her. “What’s-her-name didn’t seem to like you very much,” he says. That’s grudging a compliment. He likes when people don’t like her. It makes his choice bolder.
When it’s their turn the man blesses them just like the rest.
That summer you could hear the story in all the bars and at the Chena River tent camp. Different people had different ways of telling it and when someone told it wrong, by forgetting an important detail or even sometimes twisting up the whole meaning of the thing, it was like they’d committed a personal crime against her. But like most crimes against her she suffered it in silence.
Katie sometimes asked her to tell it again and she did as she was told, feeling like two people simultaneously: a little girl obediently reciting the alphabet, but also someone telling a secret to her only friend. On the long languid afternoons, they put blankets on the windows and they ate in bed. Crackers and cookies and bowls of ice cream and then they fell asleep. Those hours blurred into a stream of minor pleasurable sensations: her body still wet from the shower, the taste of vanilla. A small TV often played silently in the background and she’d wake and watch the faces of the people on the game shows. They’d spin a wheel and jump up and down. “Eddie can be an ass,” Katie said, “but he’s smart. His family is completely fucked up but he’s making something out of himself. Do you want some more?”
Always say yes because who knows when something might change.
“We should hang out at your place sometime,” Eddie said.
“I live in a cabin,” she said. “I don’t even have running water. It’s one room with a loft.”
“She only loves us for our shower,” he said. “Boohoo.”
But if it wasn’t love then it was something like love. She stood on the edge of the feeling, anyway, and could see it clearly. Just moving forward a few steps might cause her to arrive in that place. That’s how she felt, at least, when she sprawled in bed with Katie and their bodies were warm from the steam, their hair wrapped in towels. “Sheila B. doesn’t love anybody,” Katie said. “She loves potato chips.”
Sheila B. was not new to that strange mix of kindness and hostility. People would give you leftovers at the back of their restaurants but then tell you to get lost. There were men who pulled their trucks over, asked you where you were headed, but looked disgusted when you told them you’d rather walk. It was best to be as invisible as possible. There was an art to holding your body and pitching your voice when you asked for change. It was the same shape and sound she would use in her dad’s house when he was drunk and talking about the second son of God descending on America, so it was not that difficult. In fact, it was comfortable, and to change would have been as bizarre as, well, as bizarre as her current life. How could she have imagined?
She sat in a bustling coffee shop waiting for him and she was not disappointed to find him running late. Many of the traits he saw as unique to himself—his fumbling, arrogant lateness was one of them—she saw as part of a subset of traits shared by many, many men. He would apologize and offer an excellent excuse all at once. He forgets the time because he has so many important things going on. Making the world a better place and making gigantic mountains of money are not mutually exclusive. The entirety of his life is built on this principle.
It will be her job to say no problem. It will be her job to say well, what were you thinking about? Later that day they will have drinks and swim in the pool and maybe if she’s lucky the thought of his lateness will cross his mind again and he’ll grow tender and soft. The colored tiles of the pool bottom form a giant fish. She’ll miss that fish when all this is over.
She thinks of the dumpsters with the black plastic bags, the occasional surprise of finding bread inside untouched by vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. The mind wants to tip everything in the direction of nostalgia. She’s almost disappointed when he shows up.
“Your face,” he says. “It looks different.”
Because she’s upset.
“This one never gets old,” Katie said.
“It’s on the verge,” Eddie said.
“But this is the best part,” Sheila B. said. She said, “The owl takes off from this big broken tree and sees this white fur ball peeing on the side of the road. The tourists, they look up, they’re like, oh, look at the beautiful bird.”
Eddie and Katie stood half-listening: the owl circling in a wide loop above the poodle dog and then descending. “They scramble for their cameras,” she said. “They’re adjusting zoom lenses. In fact, maybe one of them has his camera right up to his eye and he’s ready to snap a picture when the owl plucks up their dog and carries it off. Of course, they start screaming. It’s their beloved dog.”
They sprawled in bed together eating donuts, her at the bottom like a cat. “They taste like Styrofoam,” Eddie said, but that didn’t stop him from twisting off pieces between his fingers and popping them in his mouth. The girls—he referred to them as the girls now—sometimes made a joke of throwing a piece at his mouth as if it were a basketball hoop. They were all naked except for Eddie, who still wore loose boxers and his dirty white socks.
They might let her stay all night, in the bed with them, curled to one body or the other. Or Eddie might sit up, clap his hands together, and say, okay, time to go. If she was smart she’d just shut up and pretend not to be there at all, that’s usually what worked, but she wanted to tell them. She wanted to see Katie laugh again.
“So it lands up in the top of a tree,” Sheila B. said, and she moved her finger through the air, the bird rising up and up until it perched far above the heads of the tourists. “And it just starts dismantling the thing piece by piece.”
Eddie nodded to the music in his head, to the story. He had moved in closer. He opened his mouth and pointed inside but neither of them could be bothered.
What did an owl look like when it ate? She could see it dividing the dog into smaller chunks. As delicate as an old lady at dinner, but with blood on the talons. And just like that old lady it would take a long time to finish its work. First it would crush the skull and then knead the body. She said, “And this family with their big RV parked on the side of the road, they just stand there and watch.”
Eddie said, “I don’t think they would have watched. Why would they watch? They’d be horrified.”
“That’s why they’d watch,” she said. “They’re horrified. They’re not going to just look away.”
“Sometimes I think you’re retarded,” Eddie said. “What’s with you and the dog getting killed?” But when Eddie stood up and headed into the other room Katie touched her hair while they listened to the piss spatter in the bowl. “He’s so loud,” she said. “Obnoxious. Do you ever think about dyeing your hair? You’d look good with short hair. Blonde, maybe.” They smiled and hurried to eat the donut scraps before he returned. They could hear the stream stop and start up again. “Let’s murder him,” Katie said, and she laughed. “How should we do it?”
“Poison,” Sheila B. said.
“Owl,” Katie said.
Sheila B. laughed as quietly as she could. She didn’t want Eddie to think they were having a good time without him.
“You know what I think?” Katie said. “I think you want it to end differently. That’s why you keep telling it. You keep expecting it to end differently, but of course that’s not going to happen.”
Eddie stood watching them now. She thought it was strange that his half-nakedness could be so much sillier than these other bare bodies, but the fact of it was right there, standing in front of them with crossed arms and a confident smirk. “Well, I think the guy in your story didn’t mind the dog dying,” he said. “I bet he secretly hated that little yappy dog and when the owl picked it up he was like, oh dear God, is this it? Am I finally free? But of course, he couldn’t tell that to the newspaper. He couldn’t even tell it to his wife.”
“Right,” Katie said, “because there are things a man can’t tell his wife. Dark things. Important things.”
Sheila B. wondered why Eddie seemed so powerless there when he should have been anything but, standing above them in their nakedness. It was the bed. That was a kind of secret: as long as she and Katie lay in the bed with Eddie outside it then his words, his meanings, that particular spin he put on the world, were as laughable as stuff on a TV. He said, “Why are you two grinning like that?”
“Nothing,” Sheila B. said.
“No reason,” Katie said.
She thought again about murdering him. It was a funny little game you could play in your head. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Time to go. Time to go. I have work in the morning. One of us has to do something with his life.”
“He’s entering data,” Katie said.
“You won’t be smiling when all this is underwater,” he said.
“We’ll just float away on our life raft,” she said, coming up on all fours and perching at the edge of the bed. She looked over and it seemed as if the flooding had already come and that an ocean separated them from the man speaking. He seemed to float further and further away. Except that then he stepped forward and squeezed Katie’s nipple and she kissed him and then he was in the bed, the life raft, as well, and everything was spoiled. Well, not everything, not really, because at least they had forgotten about her. She moved to the far corner and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. What would all of this look like from above?
How to begin? Sheila B. considers this as she gathers her car keys, scans the countertop for her sunglasses. She is thirty years old but feels much younger. A child really, pretending at this life, but doing a very good job of it at least.
She’s returning something to the store. She plans on bullying the clerk into giving her a cash refund. Him and whoever stands behind him in the store’s hierarchy. This despite losing the receipt. Then off for coffee. She’ll read a book at the window, the pages lit by sunlight.
She should begin with the owl and the poodle. That’s the center of it. Or the outer edge. The trail that, when followed, leads her back to the rest. She does not recognize herself in that strange place but there she is, half her current age and expecting nothing from the world. If such a meeting were truly possible the younger would retreat into the forest like a furtive animal. Or perhaps she’d snarl before slinking off.
They know she was born in Alaska. They know her father still lives there. He sends occasional letters written in the tight block print of a former alcoholic. Records of his days, the health of his dogs and the weather. He sometimes encloses a twenty-dollar bill for her birthday or Christmas. Every couple of years he finds her in a new place and the mail starts up again.
She is in the car now. The bag is in the back seat, the strapless dress folded at the bottom. She won’t even have to admit that she made a mistake. All she’ll do is smile and raise her voice and ask for the manager. Would that all things be undone so cleanly.
She imagines the owl circling above her in the Arizona sky and then she is deeper, she is back in Alaska, and when she is back there why does she feel so free of worry? She could start from the beginning, allow the bird into the frame of her imagination again and turn herself and all the others into prey.
“If we stayed at your place we wouldn’t have to worry about when he’s coming home,” Katie said as she was brushing her teeth. She was always brushing her teeth, returning to the bed for a kiss, then hopping up to brush them some more. She had covered the windows with cardboard to block out the light.
“Then he’d really know we were hiding something from him,” Sheila B. said.
“You’re lying again,” Katie said. “You shouldn’t do that, especially not to me. Is it just because you’re used to lying? You can’t quit it even when it’s just the two of us? Your place can’t be that bad.”
“I like it here,” she said.
“He just really gets in the way sometimes. You know what I hate about him? You probably haven’t noticed this but sometimes he’ll turn off the light, turn it on again, and then turn it off. Like he doesn’t trust that the light turned off the first time. I don’t get it.”
“I did notice that,” Sheila B. said. “It’s so weird.” She moved to the edge of the bed to receive her the moment Katie came back. She didn’t want to smile so big, she wasn’t used to her face taking on that particular configuration, but she couldn’t help it. “It was funny how you said you wanted to murder him,” she said. “I could picture us doing that. It wouldn’t be hard, you know. He’s so skinny.”
“Really,” Katie said. “Are you serious?”
She didn’t know if she was serious or joking. Nothing seemed to be purely one or the other here, so unlike her father’s house. So unlike the tent city at the river. They withdrew from each other and Sheila B. patted around in the sheets for her bra but all she found was Katie’s sock, stiff and shiny on one end. She thought of the time she had stood at the edge of her father’s room and watched him in his drunken sleep, one of his hammers in her fist. Where had that hammer gone? She had lost it sometime last year. Someone had stolen it. “I mean,” she said. “Don’t you ever think about it? Does it pass through your mind when he’s being a real asshole?”
Katie came up with the bra, the other sock, the bunched-up jeans. Her lack of laughter seemed a betrayal. She looked annoyed and disgusted instead. But that could have been part of the joke, a joke on her instead of on Eddie, but at least a joke. “You said so yourself,” Sheila B. said. “You said that sometimes—”
“Right,” Katie said. “He’s going to be home soon.”
It was early evening and the walk home was long but pleasant. She picked up change and trash on the side of the road and when she reached the gas station she threw the trash away and used the change to buy a hot dog, which she ate standing by the gas pumps. It tasted like sawdust and catsup but she liked standing there watching the dirty traffic.
“We’ve tried to be nice to you,” Eddie said. “We’ve tried to help you.”
“Because of your situation,” Katie said. “Whatever that is.”
“Right,” Sheila B. said, as if she were yelling at someone else right along with them.
“Sell your plasma,” Katie said. “Do something.”
“No more charity,” Eddie said.
“No more anything,” Katie said. “No more.”
They were turning onto the block by the husks of old cars and piles of hubcaps and the confederate flag in the cracked upstairs window. The ghetto of tin roofs appeared in a tight cluster. There it was among the others, the one she had lied about. A truck sat in the driveway, although Katie and Eddie didn’t seem to notice or care. Sheila B. didn’t have a license but she could imagine driving a truck like that all the way back to Anchorage. She reached out to touch Katie. She said, “Please.” And although Katie allowed the touch, that was all. She continued watching the small her in the rear-view mirror until Sheila B. stepped from the car and slammed the door.
She walked back to the campground to find all the fires dead and black, the tents dark, and she crawled inside her own. All her things were still there: the two flashlights, the matches, and the jackknife she had stolen from her father, the jacket she used as a pillow when it was warm, the fast-food sugar packets and carefully folded map. The inside smelled of the entire summer, her sweat and bad dreams and stale Cheerios eaten by the handful.
She is wondering what Eddie looks like now: a pale scientist in an office with a big window. On good days the Denali range comes into view and he pauses and gives it a surprised glance. Maybe he has a wife and kids. Maybe he doesn’t. She knows that Katie is no longer in the picture. She had a hand in that. So it’s some other supportive woman wrangling them at bedtime, listening to his diatribes about the stupidity of the human race.
But he loves that stupidity too. She knows it because that’s what she used against him, against them. The dumber she acted, the more helpless, the more he liked her. She visited him at his lab, crying, and told him she needed to talk just once more. She wanted to tell him the truth.
He sat at his desk looking befuddled. A coffee cup full of sharpened pencils. She noticed that and the curtain of yellow Post-it notes covering the wall behind him. There were other men there, all older. How could he not show her some tenderness? She pleaded and he touched her and guided her to the door.
But the tenderness was real. The attraction was real. By the time they were at the end of the hall he was holding her tighter and he was asking her what was wrong—the words of a lover, a parent. In a way the tears were real too. She missed Katie terribly. “Please,” she said. “Let’s just talk for an hour. Not even an hour.”
“I’m working,” he said, but he was already halfway there. She just needed to push him a little more. She turned so that she was facing him and his hand on her shoulder became an embrace.
“I know I’m an idiot,” she said. “Sometimes I even annoy myself.”
He stood stiff and grinning. He was trying too hard.
“Is this a date?” he said in the car. “Am I going to meet your parents?”
First, they parked at the far edge of the Fred Meyer parking lot and he reached across her, flipped open the glove compartment, produced half a joint. In the middle distance people were marching to and from the store with carts piled high with supplies and she remembered her hunger. The last couple of days it had been a constant, a throbbing pain that she tried to imagine as pleasure. “Don’t tell me you don’t think about it,” she told him. “You must think about it all the time.”
“Think about what?”
“Leaving her,” she said. “I mean, you’re so much smarter.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he told her. “How old are you? Sixteen?”
“Yes,” she said, a lie just an inch wide of the truth. So close that it didn’t seem like much of a lie at all. She wanted to tell him that same thing again, the breaking apart of the flesh, the funny outrage. Eddie looked amused by his own boredom, but she could tell he was interested.
“You’re high,” he said.
“So are you,” she said. “You’re high all the time.”
He said, “You have your head in the clouds. You seem high all the time. That’s worse.”
“You’re making fun of me,” she said, but she made sure to laugh. She’d be heading back to Anchorage soon, where the shelters were better, or in a pinch back to her father’s house. She liked to imagine the look on his face if she appeared at the door, the story of the prodigal rolling around somewhere at the back of his head. She said, “Let’s go down by the river. I’ll show you.”
A small city of tents and blackened spots in the dirt. Her city. One of the rules: don’t talk to your neighbors. She unzipped the rainfly and showed him inside. It smelled of her body and the peppermint candy she had taken from a bowl at the front of a restaurant. The wrappers littered the ground. They crawled inside on their hands and knees, into the red light diffused through the polycotton. They stretched out as if to look at the sky, holding hands. She told herself not to like him, not even a little bit, no matter what he said or did.
“It’s okay here,” he finally said.
Her laugh came out as a cough. It was a cough. She had taken too big a hit.
She laughed because she was happy and she laughed because she was as angry as she’d ever been. Parts of that happiness emerged into the air in the shape of a few innocuous words and the rest, well, she kept the rest for herself. She had to keep the proportion right. A chip of willpower came loose inside her, something she had been holding in position for months, maybe years, and she became like that couple watching their dog fly up above their heads: a blubbering mess but funny too, ha ha ha, higher and higher. She was laughing at herself as she sobbed—the two became part of the same physical motion: a cry and a laugh, a bend and a lift, a chew and a swallow. “Man, you are fucked up,” she heard him say but he laughed a little too.
Sheila B. allowed herself to think of the dog rising in the air, that first moment when it must have thought it was flying but before its skull was squeezed to pulp. Was that where the comedy resided, in that moment of absurdity? Of fake triumph? Maybe even its owners, that disgusted man and woman, thought it was funny at first. One of them maybe, deep down inside, the one who didn’t like the dog as much as the other. A place the person didn’t even know about. A secret closet at the remotest part of the mind where a person could stack their resentments. But the other thing was this: their idiotic pain was funny, the sobbing and impotent anger, quotes in the newspaper about never, ever returning to this miserable place. They were mad at a bird.
And she was mad at a dog, a helpless ball of fur that couldn’t fight back. For a second it really thought it was flying. That’s why she hated it, that’s why it was funny, that’s why she is telling it again years later at a party in a beautiful house thousands of miles away.
She won the bed back. The food too, the cabinet full of teas and spices, the candy bars he liked to keep in the freezer, the potato chips she ate from the bag as she walked around the place. Everything but Katie, although there were still telltale signs of her former presence: the toothbrush, for instance, chewed up and dry on the edge of the yellowed sink.
Almost two months of living with him and then to Vancouver. Alone, of course, although she has always wondered if Katie would have gone with her. She can imagine them on the road together, although not in Vancouver during that very difficult winter. After Vancouver Montana and after Montana then North Dakota. Back then it didn’t feel like running away from anything at all. Not even living with Eddie seemed like running away.
He’d say, “If people knew about this,” and then he’d roll his eyes. He’d say, “I’m going to go to hell.” That was part of the delirious fun but also, yes, he was scared. He was not nearly as unconventional as he liked to believe. After all, she had observed him with Katie for months. She knew what he liked and what he claimed to like. Two months and she hitchhiked her way west. A light snow was already beginning to fall. She took his gloves with her, his coat too. Too large, of course, but she rolled up the sleeves.
She did not loathe him. He was capable of occasional tender surprises: a gift of flowers or a sudden apology. So she returned the kindness by sheltering him. When Katie called she would tell him it was a wrong number, an old friend, anybody but her. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” she’d whisper in the dark of the kitchen. “Don’t you understand that?”
“I don’t understand anything about this,” Katie said.
It was strange to hear someone else’s blubbering and wonder what percentage of it was genuine. Possibly all of it.
“Please,” Katie said. “Just explain it to me.”
She sounded like someone who didn’t get the joke. Lay it out for her and she’d laugh dutifully but she still wouldn’t get it. It might take years before she would.
Sheila B. is screaming at the clerk and even as she screams she knows that this is too much. Everybody is pretending she isn’t there—they’re looking at their feet, their phones, their pocketbooks, anything but her—and this makes her yell a little louder. The girl, she can’t be more than twenty, shrinks into her body, pulls downward ever so slightly behind the desk.
There is a complication. They need the other credit card to run through, his credit card, and without it all they can give her is an exchange. It’s the clerk’s stupidity, her repetition of the words I’m sorry, ma’am, that makes the first swear word come and then from there it’s easy enough to raise her voice, to become the well-dressed lunatic calling for the manager, calling for justice.
But really, it’s over in, what, twenty seconds? And then she’s pushing the bags into the back seat again, glancing into the rearview, spinning out backward and then forward in a satisfying arc of escape. When she gets home he comes up behind her, places his heavy palms on her shoulders and begins to rub. “What’s the matter?” he asks, but she says, nothing, nothing, and arches her neck to kiss him from her sitting position.
They’ll talk about her later. The other customers, the girl behind the counter, they’ll head to their homes and share the story of the crazy woman vain enough to have her nervous breakdown right in front of them. Sheila, she was almost to the door before she realized she had forgotten her bags in the cart. She had to spin around and head back, lift the bags up and repeat the whole stupid thing.
They’d make a point of sharing that part. That was the comeuppance. That was the punch line. It would make everybody feel better.