14

Murielle is going on a date with A Jesse. She has told the others it is a date, even if it is only a cup of coffee. She has spent several hours getting ready. Several hours? At least. Here it is, already fall and none of the new fashions to wear! Every item she pulls out of her closet is wrong according to the standards of Julie, Tahnee, Cliffort and Dyllis. But since each of them has a different idea as to what is appropriate, or looks good on her, it appears there will be no consensus.

There isn’t one item that goes with any other. And during the time the things have been in the closet, they have acquired spots, stains, tears, ripped hems. Had the girls been borrowing her stuff? She simply doesn’t understand why everything is so full of holes until a moth-like thing flutters by. Oh, no, it is a SloMoFly! Those stupid flies that follow Slawa around, that according to Julie are supposed to save the world by devouring polyester, rayon, everything synthetic that would never disintegrate.

She can’t bear it. She turns in front of the mirror: Look at this ruination of a body! What the heck has happened to it? Someone has taken her head and placed it atop this… this… she doesn’t even know what to call it. A body, yes, but so misshapen, lumpy, flabby. Breasts that once stood taut and firm now end at the navel. Broken capillaries cover the corpus like a child’s dot-to-dot game. It has to be some kind of joke. Mentally, she doesn’t feel any older. She’s got the same expression as some of her seniors at the home, with that desperate look as if they had been trapped against their will inside a human body.

Oh Intelligent Designer, Murielle thinks in silent prayer, please let A. Jesse be the type of man who loves fat, hairy middle-aged women! Let him be the sort of man who is only turned on by the flabby type!

It seems impossible; a lifetime spent waiting. There is no use in seeming too dressed-up; on the other hand she wants to make sure this guy knows she cares about her appearance!

At last the group selects a polka-dot halter-top dress in shades of pink; it has a matching bonnet, so very a la mode, pettipants beneath, also au courant. The holes are quickly glued together so it will look presentable, temporarily at least; but to Murielle it simply isn’t flattering. Her ample breasts sway in the sacks of the dress’s top; she has on pink pumps and because her legs are so white, he has rubbed them with that very fashionable self-greening lotion which has turned them green but, alas, also streaky and odorous.

The five of them sit in front of the house on lawn chairs, waiting for A. Jesse’s arrival, munching on a bowl of some snack that Cliffort has prepared. “Benito Intelligent Designer,” Dyllis says between crunchy mouthfuls, “Aiiee, I can’t believe he is coming here to have coffee with you, Murielle. Ju know, I remember when we was growing up, and eet was like, we never going to get of here! Thas why I always thinking – say, Cliffort, what is this snack anyway? Eet’s so good!”

“It was something I thought up, using cockroaches,” Cliffort says, grabbing a handful.

“Oh my gosh,” says Julie. “Cliffort, you know about the cockroach Greg, don’t you? With the red spot? You didn’t cook him, did you?”

“Don’t worry, I clean out their systems first, a couple of days till they voided themselves. You see we are so used to eating only processed cellulose texture products, when you finally get to have something that was alive –” His tongue is so long he can almost snatch one from his hand from far away. “Heat the oil very hot, garlic, fresh squeezed lemon and chili pepper – doesn’t completely cover the slight hint of pesticide and doom, but I kind of like that.”

Julie is about to run into the house in search of Greg, when a Gigantor Monster Smash Truck pulls up over the dirt lawn.

“Bowel movement, look at that truck,” says Tahnee. “I hope the neighbors see!” The truck is so huge that the wheels are the height of the house, you can’t even see who is inside.

“Hello, A.,” Murielle says, getting up and going over to the car as A. Jesse throws out a rope ladder from the driver’s seat and waves. “Did you have any trouble finding us? How was the traffic?”

“You know what I’m doing these days?” he says. “I just drive right over the other cars. I mean, not the ones with people in them, of course, but the ones that have just been left there, stuck so long the people walked home. Yup, this is the way to go these days!” He appears older than the way the girls have described him.

She can’t remember meeting a man – he’s at least her age – with such an animal magnetism. On the other hand, he is wearing a very strong after-shave, so perhaps that’s it. His eyes are kind and admiring: she knows at once he has suffered a great deal, he hasn’t had an easy life. Seeing him makes her nervous. When she gets nervous, though, she involuntarily recites from 101 Greatest Scenes For Actors. “Ida Scott?” she tilts her head winsomely. “This is Amanda Wingfield!”

Tahnee is glaring at her. Murielle can’t stop: it’s so stupid, but what can she do? She isn’t alone in this only recently recognized medical condition, which is due to a tiny glitch in the brain, kind of like an electric hiccup. “Look at my hands! These hands are worse than a foghorn for reminding me.” Now she’s getting the skeeves, hands shaking, head filling with ice and tar. Mumblechuks, she thinks, mumblechuks.

“How do you do, I’m A. Jesse March Bishrop. Tahnee and, um… her sister didn’t tell me they had such a young and gorgeous mother…” His feet are killing him, these darn platforms! But they looked so pretty in the store. He should have stuck with the court heels. He takes Murielle’s hand and presses it to his lips. The kids are smirking. Somehow the whole event, a simple cup of java, has already escalated into more than she is prepared for.

“Would you like to come in?” Murielle says. “Have something to drink? We’re not air-conditioned, I’m afraid, but it’s a little cooler inside.”

“No, no, thanks, if you don’t mind, I think there’s a place near here we can have a drink, I think I mentioned, earlier, I’m on quite a tight schedule –”

“Oh! Never give a sucker an even break!” It’s almost a tic.

A. Jesse March Bishrop raises his eyebrows, puzzled. “Excuse me –”

“Oh, I’m sorry you had to come all this way then, I didn’t realize.” She is blabbing the way she always does when she thinks a man is highly eligible. For once, though, Dyllis is silent, no doubt at the presence of her boss.

“So how come you’re allowed to drive a Gigantor Monster Truck?” Tahnee says, almost belligerently.

“Guess I just know the right people!” he says with a wink. “And, you know, I hold the patent on the anti-gravity Sonambula, it’s just that, well, keep this a secret, okay?” Everyone nods eagerly. “We just can’t get them to stay up very high!” There is silence, this has to be mulled over. A. Jesse doesn’t trouble to explain how the hole through the earth screwed up a lot of things, what’s the use? This weird crew would never understand. Still, he supposed, he could have gone on to explain, patiently, simply, how like an apple without a core (even though the extraction of the earth’s core wasn’t proportionate) Isaac Newton was dealing with a different object. “And is this little, um, little sister?” A. Jesse March Bishrop says, going over to Julie. Julie sits with hunched shoulders.

“Julie, get up! Say hi!” Murielle commands.

“That’s okay, she doesn’t have to! Next time, honey, you’ll come with your sister – and your gorgeous mother, too.”

“What does ‘honey’ mean, anyway? I always wondered.”

“Good question.” He is always happy to explain. “It was something people used to eat, back in the old days – made from insects. Bees or some such.”

“Yuck!” The girls shriek in unison. A. Jesse is delighted.

“Oh, before I forget.” He returns to his car, reaches into the back seat, pulls out a bunch of lilies. “These are for you.”

“Just beautiful.” Murielle holds them wistfully in her arms, inhaling deeply.

“They don’t have a smell, Ma!” Tahnee says contemptuously. “They’re flowers, not perfume!”

“Yes, they do,” Murielle said. “Of course… there’s rosemary, for remembrance – but these have a beautiful scent. Kind of like something very old-fashioned, nostalgic. Something people used to have at the turn of the century. I don’t know if they still make Paris by Paris Hilton?”

When Murielle and A. Jesse have departed, Tahnee heads off to meet Locu at the shack and Julie goes up to see how Sue Ellen is getting along. “Sue Ellen? Is that you?” In the corner of her bedroom Julie can hear some… something soft and slimy, mucking around. More at night, it’s true, but even during the day, lately. It’s Sue Ellen. And those little suctioning sounds – at first Julie had been afraid; now she kind of understands.

Sue Ellen is a ghost – or maybe just a wet spot – who lives in a corner of Julie’s room.

Sue Ellen makes one corner of Julie’s room very unpleasant, but then, so many corners of the house are unpleasant and there seems to be nothing anybody can do; sometimes Julie suggests to Sue Ellen that she go to The Other Side.

Wet spot

Sue Ellen has tried to, but when she got there she was sort of lost: first there had been a lot of people waiting on line, to use the bathroom? – but she didn’t have to go – then there’s a test – in a… room, endless row of – what the heck were they, desks? And something like a pen and paper – and a kind of a bad smell and finally nothing seemed to be happening… And then there were questions that didn’t make any sense… alive – either that or a damp area, Julie still isn’t certain – when Sue Ellen does seem to talk, she explains, kind of, that over the course of history so many people had died… people, and then in other categories, animals and trees and grass, they had sort of… run out of room. It is too crowded and kind of… spongy.

Sue Ellen has told Julie that at the time when she did try to Cross Over, she thought, I’m not going to stay around this dump here! And even though they were all screaming, wait, come back! Don’t be scared – there was no way Sue Ellen was going to take a test she was clearly going to flunk (which Julie could sympathize with) and so she kept going and that was how Sue Ellen ended up here in the corner of Julie’s bedroom, making it damp.

Every few days her father – before her mother kicked him out – would come into her room, inspect the corner. “I do not understand! What you do here, Julie! You spill something? Why always, in this corner, wet? No leak from outside wall, no pipe here… no plant in pot. You do this? But why? Here is the mildew, this blackness – no good, I say!”

Once in a while he gets out the sander, sands down the Renewable2% floor – it is getting kind of worn out there – spritzes the wall with bleach… A day or two later, it is back to being slimy. She feels kind of bad, maybe she could have explained to her mother and sister, “It’s a ghost –” but not to her father.

Even though her mother and sister believe in the existence of ghosts, and coffee enemas and the kabbalah and channeling past lives and paranormal phenomena and holistic medicine; astrology; psychic abilities; mushroom-quinoa intestinal implants; telekinesis and that the government is covering up the existence of aliens, somehow Julie doesn’t want to tell them about the wet spot. She doesn’t have the strength to go into all the details; they would have kept questioning her, plying her with questions – and probably gotten the HGMTV crews to visit.

One thing about Sue Ellen – Julie knows she isn’t happy. Sue Ellen keeps saying there doesn’t seem to be anything to eat around here – not that she is exactly hungry, but at night she often accompanies the person she called “that wady” meaning Murielle, to the fridge and makes sure the “wady” keeps stuffing her mouth full.

Maybe its Murielle, maybe Sue Ellen, but one or the other has terrible cravings! Salt and fats, salt and fats! Salami and swiss cold slabs of eggplant parmigiana; potato chips, jelly donuts, cheese enchiladas, hot buttered toast, peanut butter and bacon and mayonnise and whipped cream. But it is never enough. If only there were fried pork dumplings, even cold! But there never are.

And so when Murielle says, “I can’t understand, I wake up in the morning, I am so thirsty, and who keeps eating everything in the fridge?” Julie knows there is no use in saying, you ate it, because there’s another… person… in the house, or more like a sort of… wet spot… that is trying to eat vicariously through you…

It wouldn’t have made any sense, would it?

When she has finished trying to soothe poor Sue Ellen, Julie goes to the basement and one by one lugs the cages upstairs and out, so the animals can have some light and a little hop around the yard. No one else cares, is how it seems to Julie, and it is up to her to rescue dying plants and sick animals and volunteer in the old age home where her mother works; if she is taken out to eat and there are two restaurants side by side, one well recommended and full of customers, the other empty and smelling of grease, Julie asks to eat at the latter. Because she feels sorry for the poor people who run such an unsuccessful place.

She is a good student by virtue of the fact that she studies hard but even so she never gets the right answers. Nor do the teachers really like her – too plain, too plump – her sister, it seems, has gotten all the looks. The height. The blonde hair. Julie doesn’t resent Tahnee for this, the opposite, she admires her and thus when Tahnee says, “Let’s go steet,” or needs a companion in drinking or a lookout if she is going to have sex in the shack with Locu, Julie is always grateful to be included.

But Julie is happy enough, not like Tahnee; she has everything she needs: tonight her father will take her to the mall; since Murielle is out, he is going to come over and visit, cook dinner, do some repairs… He still has the keys; fortunately Murielle hasn’t had the locks changed, and when he comes in, looking around nervously, Julie runs to greet him, grabs him in a big hug and throws her legs around his waist. “Oh, Daddy! I missed you…” Then wrinkling her nose and taking an involuntarily step back she sees her dad is looking at Cliffort who has draped himself in a number of damp cloths and is slumped on the sofa in front of the TV with his feet up on the table…

“Oh, Dad,” says Julie, “This is Cliffort, he’s been staying here. Cliffort, this is my dad –”

Cliffort rises, the damp cloths dripping. “My apologies for my soggy state, Comrade,” Cliffort says. “I find I thrive under moist conditions.”

“No need to get up,” says Slawa quickly, but Cliffort has already crossed the room and is grasping his hand; Cliffort’s skin is pale and soft… How many of these poreless, uncallused fiends now occupy the planet, Slawa wonders, what has happened to all the testosterone?

“Right, Julie, I have to go out, I’ll leave you and your dad to it,”

Cliffort says, grabbing his things on the way out. “Very nice to have met you, Comrade, Julie talks so much about you.”

“Daddy, Daddy!” Julie hops and dances as she wheedles.

“Daddy, can we go to the mall so I can go to Shrimp Chips?”

“Julie, what did I tell you? No!”

She has been bugging him for months. “But Dad, it’s not fair! All the girls in my class are doing it.”

“I’m not giving you the money, Julie.” Slawa had planned to sand the floor in Julie’s room where it was always damp, and maybe cook some borscht: Julie loves his cooking. Certainly he hadn’t planned to go to the mall. He needs to do chores around the place, he doesn’t want his daughter growing up in squalor. Should paint the driveway, although it looks, at any moment, as if it were about to snow… which it does, sometimes, in August.

“I have my own money. The place at the mall, Shrimp Chips, you don’t even need to make an appointment.”

“I am not taking you! Julika, it’s awful! It’s going to look terrible. Why you want to do this thing?”

“I just do! It’s the style, Daddy.”

“Right, and then in a few years they’re going to start sagging and… what did they say, they’re going to be pendulous, and –”

“You can’t talk! Look what you did when you were my age – you had your nose pierced, and your eyebrow, and your tongue slit, and your belly button. And you thought it was terrible to have a microchip implant, but look, now everybody has one and it’s no big deal.”

“This was stupid of me, Julya, because then when I arrive in this country the piercings were already out of style, and it just made me look dated. Like an old guy wearing white shoes.”

“So what, it’s my choice!”

“So it is your choice, but why you can’t learn from me? Look what I had to go through, the stupid hole in my nose that people always point at and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, you have something on your nose’.”

“I know, I know, you’ve told me that a million times. But Mom is glad all the old people at the nursing home have nose rings – that way the aides can chain them to the wall. Dad, this is different. Guys now are only interested in girls who’ve had it done. It’s totally safe, they inject them with FBI-DA-Homeland approved lichoneÑÒ –”

“That’s the style this year that you think guys want. Then when the style changes, you’re going to have to have them shortened.” Slawa adores his daughter. He never wanted her to suffer, nothing bad must happen to her, yet there is nothing he can do, life is going to happen to her anyway. “Listen, you know the saying: the lord is with you, getting and spending. But now is not the spending time, not on a foolish fad!”

“I don’t care!” She is petulant. “There are lots of places that do it; you just go there and they inject them with the stuff and that’s it – I mean, you can go back for more, if you want them bigger – all I’m asking, Daddy, is for you to take me there. There’s no way I can wear a bathing suit otherwise –”

Slawa gives up. He has never thought he could love someone so much. How he worships her, she provokes an emotion he has never imagined possible; he had been such a tough unthinking kid, desperate for basic survival and here she is – when he still lived at home, when the washing machine still worked, he would go through Julie’s pockets before doing the laundry and find them stuffed with seeds, nuts, bits of bread. She always carried something to feed the rats in the park. And now with her poor puffy hands, that somehow got all burnt; let her do what all the others her age want. “Okay,” he sighs, giving up, “not this time, but next. Right now, I got no money.”

“Ooo, yay, yay Daddy!” She jumps up and down exaggeratedly.

She isn’t pretty but to him she is beautiful, a fat, plain serious little child with dark, close-set eyes – he never saw what she actually looked like. He would croon to her in Russian while she slept, his little dumpling, his stuffed cabbage, and songs he did not even know he knew came back to him, Russian songs from his childhood.

He thinks about her during the day, the way she twinkles through a room, no more solid than the shifting light or dust motes, an electron floating capriciously and speeding up to the ceiling and then the floor. When she was little he found her crying in bed one night after she read how pearls are created. How old then, six? Eight?

“And they take the oyster and put a grain of sand in it, so it has to live with constant irritation, that’s what people go around wearing, a poor oyster’s drop of torture.”

“Okay, but now, you know, don’t worry, there are no more oysters.”

That only made things worse; she sobbed and sobbed. He had to sing to her for hours to get her to calm down, fragments of songs that popped into his head: “And there we had a collective farm, all run by husky Jewish arms, who says that Jews cannot be farmers, lies?” and “My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light and he slept with a mermaid one fine night. From this union there came three – a porpoise and a porgy and the other was me!” Finally she slept, her face flushed and puffy from salty tears, he had never loved her so much.

And now his baby wants to have something done to her… bits. Of course it is the fashion. Or is it? He worries about Tahnee’s influence. He had known her since she was tiny but he had never exactly liked her. Tahnee was always beautiful to look at but after a short time he no longer thought so… There was something in her eyes, an inward glance, as if she didn’t see the world or other people, she has no need for them, a little spoiled face begging to be smacked. He never did smack her, but she never warmed to him, either, no matter what excursions he took her on. And he had tried!

Once he had taken them on an outing to the beach, which for him was something very special; growing up in Moscow he had always wanted to visit the ocean… They set off early in the morning but… the public parking lot was full, there was a three-week waiting list. Otherwise it cost almost a thousand dollars to park unless you had a summer home here. Finally he let them out and drove around for seven hours before at the end of the day, when the sun was setting, he managed to find a public spot.

His family: Murielle, the girls, perched on a plaid blanket on the middle of the… beach.

Only it wasn’t so much sand as rubbish, mile upon mile of plastic bottles, condoms, rubber balls, crushed cups, garbage cans full to overflowing. The sea was miles away, apparently it had shrunk. Certainly it was not the way he had envisioned it from childhood storybooks and old movies.

And when he finally did get to the water’s edge, he could barely push his way through the water which was more garbage than liquid, viscous, slimy, as much sugar as salt. It was a sea of hair.

A Sea Dirge

By Lewis Carroll

There are certain things – as, a spider, a ghost,
The Income tax, an umbrella for three –
That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most
Is a thing they call the Sea.

Pour some salt water over the floor –
Ugly I’m sure you’ll allow it to be:
Suppose it extended a mile or more,
That’s very like the Sea.

Beat a dog till he howls outright –
Cruel, but all very well for a spree:
Suppose that he did so day and night,
That would be like the Sea.

I had a vision of nursery-maids;
Tens of thousands passed by me –
All leading children with wooden spades,
And this was by the Sea.

Who invented those spades of wood?
Who was it cut them out of the tree?
None, I think, but an idiot could –
Or one that loved the Sea.

It is pleasant and dreamy, no doubt, to float
With ‘thoughts as boundless, and souls as free’:
But suppose you are very unwell in the boat,
How do you like the Sea?

There is an insect that people avoid
(Whence is derived the verb, “to flee”)
Where have you been by it most annoyed?
In lodgings by the Sea.

If you like your coffee with sand for dregs,
A decided hint of salt in your tea,
And a fish taste in the very eggs
By all means choose the Sea.

And if, with these dainties to drink and eat,
You prefer not a vestige of grass or tree,
And a chronic state of wet in your feet,
Then – I recommend the Sea.

For I have friends who dwell by the coast –
Pleasant friends they are to me!
It is when I am with them I wonder most
That anyone likes the Sea.

They take me a walk: though tired and stiff,
To climb the heights I madly agree;
And, after a tumble or so from the cliff,
They kindly suggest the Sea.

I try the rocks, and I think it cool
That they laugh with such an excess of glee,
As I heavily slip into every pool
That skirts the cold cold Sea.

The entire ocean had filled with human hair flushed down the lavatories as people cleaned their brushes.

A man was giving a nature lesson to a group of others who watched him as he emerged covered with hair and used condoms. “It is so much better now that we are able to raise our food products in factories, no creatures are killing any other creatures… And can you imagine having to swim with all those things in the water around you? Fish, sea urchins, electric eels –”

The group gathered at the shoreline shook their heads in disgust and disbelief.

They drove home in sticky silence and no one ever made a request to go back. But he never forgot the seaside, how he had taken the girls, one at a time, into the soft gray waves filled with garbage and oily soap, and when he picked up Tahnee to carry her out he saw her lip had curled and she said with disgust, “You are so hairy!” If it was possible for a child to be born bad; anyway, he hadn’t liked her even when she was so little.

It was absurd, she was only a child but he couldn’t help but feel there was something evil about her. Still, he would never forget the taste of the air and the flat slap of the waves lapping on the sour brown sand.

God knows he had tried, but what had it led to? His wife hated him, she was trying all the time to throw him out. And Tahnee, older now, had appreciated nothing he had done, either. He suspected her of being a bad influence on Julie. It was thanks to Tahnee, no doubt, that Julie – who was smart – wasn’t interested in beauty school to become a hairdresser or a product marketing stylist, something like that. What will become of her?

The years went by so quickly. No more little girls; sometimes he came back and the house had a funny smell and Tahnee and Julie sitting there with a shiny polyurethane expression in their eyes: “What have you two been doing?” he said. “What is that smell?”

“We were painting, Daddy, painting and playing with Sue Ellen… dat’s de paint smell.”

Now that he is no longer living at home it occurs to him the children had not been painting, they had been taking drugs of some sort. How stupid could he have been? Abruptly he can feel his own liver, a large spongiform entity, occupying more than its fair share of space on the lower right side. He has accomplished nothing he had planned and now the bubbling… whatever it is, a bubble of rage, coming up from his stomach, blocking his throat. He has to get away from this place, especially before Murielle gets back, even though he hasn’t helped Julie with homework nor any of the other things for which he had come, he has to get out of there.

Especially before Murielle gets back. Though his past remains fuzzy he can see his future, his hands as alien and thick as that of a gorilla’s, joining the plump flies in a stubby circle around Murielle’s neck.