Standing in her mother’s driveway, duffel bags in hand, Elsa takes a good look around, at the cottonwoods with their golden leaves, at the highbush cranberry’s bright red bundles, the long-legged shadow cast by the water tower, and the jagged snowcaps on the neighboring wall of mountains. This landscape is as familiar to her as the arrangement of her mother’s living room furniture, unchanged since the oak coffee table was as high as her chest, and her father’s pillowy recliner doubled as a jungle gym.
Elsa will spend the winter in this house. With August nearly gone, her mother has already flown south, headed for arthritis-friendly desert country, leaving Elsa behind to wrap the old pipes in blankets, eat dinners off her childhood plates, and look after Little Big Bird, the chatty cockatiel.
The phone buzzes inside Elsa’s front pocket. Dammit, she whispers, hoisting her heavy duffels to one hand, biting her glove off with her teeth so she can swipe at the screen. She checks the glowing picture. A sour face stares back at her. It’s Mel. Jesus. Already?
Mel is Elsa’s tenant and seasonal roommate, a chronically down-on-her luck, post-menopausal curmudgeon with no apparent friends or family in the state. Elsa rents Mel the spare bedroom in her own house, a few miles away. Over the past few winters, Elsa had grown tired of shoveling the snow on two driveways, tired of trekking up the hill each night to see if her faucets were still dripping, or if her roof had caved in under the snowpack.
If Elsa was being brutally honest, ever since her divorce, she had begun to loathe that tumbledown house. She’d only bought the house for its land: eight wooded acres just outside of Palmer, a few driveways down from the guy with his very own castle, complete with turret and vertical aluminum siding. Elsa had hoped to build her own cabin on the property someday, nestled between the birch trees. She planned to level the old house and haul it away for scrap, provided it hadn’t already fallen flat on its own.
But this was all before Elsa got married, and before her new wife needed a dishwasher, and a linen closet, a greenhouse, and an affair. Between home improvement projects, Elsa used to flip through the pages of her log cabin magazines, the ones she kept stacked in her closet like vintage porn. Eventually, even the reminders turned sour.
The winters Elsa spent alone in her mother’s house had helped to take the edge off. She’d started dreaming again, even renewing a few of her canceled subscriptions. Last summer, Elsa cleared a foundation, to the right of the greenhouse, in a spot where the morning sun could shine into her imaginary bedroom windows.
When winter hit, and Elsa burned out the motor on yet another snowblower, she decided she needed a tenant. She took an ad out on Craigslist seeking “a handy recluse with a steady job.” What she got instead, was Mel.
“Found a yellow jacket nest,” Mel coughs into the phone. “In the crawl space. You’d better come look at it. Don’t want to get stung in my sleep.”
“Shit, Mel. Do you go hunting for problems as soon as I leave? How big is the nest?”
“Big.”
“Is it live?”
“Dunno. Didn’t stick around to find out.”
Elsa sighs. “I’ll be over tomorrow. I’ve got to unload my bags and check on Little Big Bird.” Elsa lumbers up the sidewalk. She jiggles her mother’s floral-printed key in the latch. Opening the door, she is surrounded with the fading scent of her mother’s lilac perfume. It mingles with the kitchen smells of leftover biscuits and warm flour.
Elsa drops her duffel bags at the foot of her mother’s bed. She’ll unpack later, she decides, eyeing the stack of empty milk crates left for her beside a teeming armoire. Forty-five years old, and still dressing out of milk crates like a college kid. Some things never change. It’s the ones that do that break your heart.
The cockatiel chirps from his cage in the living room. “Jungle bird,” Elsa calls out. “Who’s a jungle bird?” Little Big Bird recognizes Elsa’s voice and launches into a piercing series of open-beaked trills that bounce off the walls like a fire alarm.
The next afternoon, Elsa drives up the hill to check out the yellow jackets and the growing list of issues Mel has managed to compile over the past twenty-four hours.
In the kitchen, Elsa squats, and shines her flashlight under the metal sink. Mel stands beside her, takes off her shoes, and stretches her toes wide inside her socks. “Finally,” Mel mutters. “Damn wrinkle’s been rubbin’ my foot raw all day.”
“What’s that?” Elsa asks, but Mel doesn’t answer. She’s already turned around, and is heading for the living room. Elsa gets down on her knees and reaches for the Allen wrench she left dangling underneath the pipe. She tethered the wrench there months ago, using a strand of green dental floss, in the hopes that she could encourage Mel to become more self-sufficient in the fix-it department. The garbage disposal clogs about every other week, but so far it hasn’t broken so Elsa doesn’t see the need to replace it. Instead, Elsa inserts the tiny wrench into the bottom of the machine, and gives it a few cranks. “Why didn’t you fix this earlier?” she calls to the adjoining room.
“Couldn’t,” Mel grumbles, pushing against the arms of the Naugahyde lounger. “Ain’t no way I’m takin’ off my shoes at work.” Mel tilts the seat back, and the footrest creaks in protest.
Elsa turns on the water. The pipes rattle. The faucet burps and spits before settling into a thin stream. Elsa flips the switch up, and a horrible clatter erupts from the sink. She quickly flips the switch down again, and the clatter tapers. Elsa waits, then reaches her hand inside the clammy disposal to feel around. The shape of the gears, the way they’re set up to spin against one another, they remind Elsa of that carnival ride, the Scrambler. When she was a kid and her dad was alive, Elsa’s family went every year to the state fair. “No screaming now,” her dad would say. He took her on all the rides. Elsa always screamed anyway. That was half the fun. “You nearly squealed my ears off, kid,” he joked, making a big show of it, gingerly patting the sides of his head, shouting “What?” and “Huh?” to Elsa’s mother for minutes afterwards.
Elsa runs her fingertips along the edges of the metal gears until she gets to something sharp and out of place. Using her nails to loosen whatever it is, she fishes it from the sink. Pinched between her fingers is a rough hunk of gravel. How’d that get there?
Elsa runs the water and tries the disposal again. The empty gears rattle and whir. “I’m driving in to Costco tomorrow,” Elsa says. “You need anything?”
“You’re out of body wash,” Mel tells her, punching the button on the TV remote, turning up the volume of a British announcer narrating a true crime drama. “And don’t get that fruity kind. It stinks. Makes my nose itch, and I smell like salad.”
For a while after Mel moved in, out of habit, Elsa kept replacing the empty household bottles: shampoo, laundry detergent, dish soap, salad dressing. It hadn’t seemed strange until Mel started making requests. When Elsa was young, and she would whine about having to fold someone else’s laundry, or pick up a mess she didn’t make, her mother always reminded her: “We take care of the people we live with. It’s not up to us whether or not they deserve it.”
Elsa kept on buying the body wash. Something about the act made her feel useful. Mel’s needs were simple. There were a lot of them, but every single one was manageable. Not like her ex.
Elsa types the words, body wash, not fruity, into a running list on her phone. “Butch up the body wash,” she says. “Got it. Anything else?”
“Why’s it always gotta be a gay thing with you?”
Elsa’s pretty sure that if Mel liked people, Mel would be a lesbian. In fact, when she first moved in, Elsa had her figured for a closet case. She assumed Mel would come out once she realized Elsa was also gay, not that it wasn’t obvious. With close-cropped silver hair, a penchant for Carhartts, cowboy boots, power tools, and a sharp eye for damsels in distress, Elsa would be an easy tell most places. But Alaska has a tendency to blow the fuses on general gaydar, especially out in the valley, where Instagrams of teenage girls sporting semi-autos, riding four-wheelers, or holding hundred-pound fish are about as common as bathroom selfies. In Palmer, women like Elsa are everywhere, and most of them are straight. In San Francisco, at least according to her friend, Tracy, a woman like Elsa would be in high demand.
“You should move here,” Tracy told her. “You’d be a real heartthrob. A lesbian Clint Eastwood.”
“And about as miserable as a wet cat,” Elsa replied. “Why does anyone even live in California?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s the winters full of sunshine? Or a never-ending supply of citrus?”
“Well, at least we have water. When’s the last time you flushed a toilet?”
“Touché. I’ll come visit next summer.”
“Bring produce,” said Elsa.
During Mel’s first few months in the house, Elsa tried coaxing her out of the closet. She invited Mel to go dipnetting and hosted barbecues, all with her solid group of female friends, each of them sporting similar haircuts, sensible shoes, pockets full of Leathermans, and a collective appreciation for Susan Sarandon’s glorious, age-defying rack.
It wasn’t until Mel came home from work one day, complaining loudly about “some fucking dyke” who kept getting orders wrong at the warehouse that Elsa finally spelled it out for her.
“You do know that I’m gay, don’t you?” Elsa said.
“That’s disgusting.”
“Homophobe.”
“Dyke. Hey, did you get any toilet paper?”
“Shit,” said Elsa. “Nope. Sorry. I’ll get it tomorrow.”
In time, Elsa quit trying to drag Mel out of the closet, and Mel stopped spending most of her time hiding in the bedroom.
Mel punches again at the remote, this time drowning out the sound of a Pizza Hut commercial. “Hate these stupid commercials,” Mel grumbles. “Shitty deals are never true.” Sure enough, at the bottom of the screen, in the all-too-familiar fine print, appear the words: *Alaska and Hawaii not included.
Elsa pulls a warm bath towel from the laundry basket. Elsa’s mother has a washer and dryer, but they’re brand new, high efficiency, hold about three socks each, and take forever. Elsa prefers to wash a lot of clothes quickly, so she does her laundry here. That usually means dealing with Mel’s clothes first, always conveniently left just inside the washing machine. Elsa gives the towel a sharp snap for a clean fold. A pair of hot pink bikini briefs go sailing into the air and flutter to the floor, landing in a heap at Mel’s feet.
Mel stiffens.
A tiny satin bow, held on by a single stitch, shines from the top of the brightly colored bundle. Elsa stares at the panties, tightening her lips, and tries not to crack a smile. Hot pink, Mel? Seriously?
“That yellow jacket nest,” Elsa fumbles. “Where’d you say it was again?” She turns, grabs the flashlight from the kitchen counter, and, stifling a laugh, takes several steps out of the room before Mel has time to answer.
“Crawl space.” Even from the hallway, Elsa can hear the frown in Mel’s voice. Elsa doubles over in silent laughter, clamping a hand over her mouth.
When she recovers, she grabs the rope hanging down from the ceiling. Tugging, Elsa feels a thin layer of crumbs and dust sprinkle onto her face. She is several steps up the aluminum ladder before she hears the buzz of a few stray fliers, stirred into action by the opening door. Elsa sweeps the eaves with her flashlight beam. It doesn’t take long to locate the nest. It’s a big one all right, larger than a football, tucked at the crook of a soffit. Elsa climbs slowly down the ladder and heads back into the living room. The panties are gone. Mel’s eyes are fixed firmly on the television screen.
“I found the nest. It’s a live one.”
Mel nods, says nothing.
“I don’t want to spray it,” Elsa says. “Not in the house. I’m going to town for some dinner. I’ll come back and take it out tonight. I’ll probably need your help.”
Elsa can see the whites of Mel’s fingertips gripping the remote. “Sure,” she manages, pushing the word through clenched teeth.
After dinner, Elsa hunts around the laundry room for appropriate wasp-killing attire. If it were up to her, she’d leave the nest alone, but if Mel ever got stung, she’d never hear the end of it. Elsa slides open a drawer and pulls out a roll of duct tape. She lays a few more articles of clothing on top of the washer, then digs through a Rubbermaid bin for the rest.
Later that evening, Elsa and Mel stand across from one another in the narrow hallway. Mel is holding both of her arms stiffly away from her sides while Elsa winds the shrinking roll of duct tape around one of Mel’s wrists like a boxer. Elsa makes sure to close any gaps between Mel’s leather gloves and her insulated Carhartt sleeves. It’s getting harder for her to see the tape through the dark amber lenses of her snowboarding goggles. The steam from Elsa’s breath keeps fogging up the plastic, now duct taped firmly to her newly crinkly, silver balaclava.
“Hurry up,” Mel grumbles. “I’m sweating to death in here.” Her voice, muffled under all of the layers of heavy clothing and duct tape, reminds Elsa of an astronaut.
“Oh, keep your panties on,” says Elsa.
Mel jerks her hand away. “Gimme that,” she says, tearing at the roll of tape still dangling from her sleeve.
Elsa picks up a broom and hands Mel a roll of heavy-duty lawn and leaf bags. “Tear off a few of these and triple bag them,” Elsa says.
Mel gropes clumsily for the bags with her stiffly gloved hand. “I can’t see jack shit. This is ridiculous. Why don’t you just call someone?”
Elsa doesn’t answer, but climbs up the rickety ladder, realizing that she can no longer hear the buzzing of the yellow jackets over the huff of her own breath in her ears, the steam of it rising and falling in front of her eyes.
In the attic, the two women creep closer to the nest. It’s quiet, most of the fliers that were out earlier are tucked inside for the night. Elsa wonders how quickly they’ll wake up. She hands the broom off to Mel, then carefully opens the mouth of the bags and reaches toward the nest.