Hard Mouth Page 2

  Later that day at lunch I’d asked Ken if he thought the whole walk-a-mile-in-someone-else’s-shoes seemed important or dumb. He said he didn’t think it was anything original, and maybe not useful either. I said “I agree,” mooned up at him, plucked a fry. He was already tall, had a dirtstache, had a Buick and a permit, was new at school. We didn’t go much of anywhere those first and second years of high school, when we were still learning each other. The dining car diner or the mall or the movies or a ride on the Red Line to go downtown and knock around the Mall, see what the art was up to at the Smithsonians.

  We mimicked what we thought serious looked like, wore dark colors without committing to any particular subculture, frowned. We planned on flowering sometime later. We liked the Warhols in the basement of the Hirshhorn, the rocket pops from the snack bar beside the carousel, the Natural History’s Hope Diamond, and the Beats show at the National Portrait Gallery. We liked to think about what it seemed like life could be, living as famous artists, glamorous and drunk or glamorous and hungover.

  Then, one January day in my senior year, Ken dropped me off. My mother stood at the door with a plate of apple slices. The gesture was for her aberrant; I asked her what had happened, if Pop was OK. Conveying plate and daughter toward kitchen she reported that she’d heard something from a neighbor: Ms. Landon had died. It had been during an operation for a medical condition she hadn’t known she’d had until things were too bleak. “It goes to show you,” Ma said, “to take care of your teeth and walk between the raindrops.” I got a glass of water, and chewed the apples, beginning to understand that no one had much control over what happened to them. I did not evaluate this as good or bad.

  While I didn’t learn empathy from the bracelet business, I did learn that I was curious about what life might do to me. Throughout my days I have learned to turn this curiosity on and off, switch-like. It’s all part of my parable. Also I learned to invent what I could not feel. And finally: people and things die.

  On days of particular vulnerability or boredom I wondered if in that empty house, I had become permanently split, striated—like a cooled, fat-topped broth. Or perhaps I had just learned to use it as an excuse. There would be many more separations. Bifurcations, vivisections, vacays. Many more failures in being and telling. Many more empty houses. As much emptiness as anyone could bear, and I, rushing toward it, unstopping, hardly knowing my own face.

  Shifts at my first real job, I swiped in, slipped in. I tended flies in a research lab. Or, I tended the lab and sometimes the flies. I was low in the hierarchy. I tried to talk to people. I mean, I didn’t try. But sometimes I opened my mouth, silently, just after they passed. I was working on the idea of being alive. It had been nearly a decade since I’d tried demonstrating catharsis in a high school classroom. Now I was an adult and didn’t try things like that anymore.

  Daytime was for other people. I preferred nights, their lack of friction: only then did the flies seem to take on perceptible life. As if they grew in the quiet. As if they starfished outward to make themselves known. I came to them, under lights that did not buzz. Sometimes, as if I were another person, I’d laugh. Each study had its own closet, and each hall had several closets, and I worked from one end to the other in a simple, steady pulse. This labor bloomed across my life. It could have been anything, but it was this.

  The flies climbed the walls of narrow-mouthed beakers. These were closed with dense cotton plugs. The media made an immovable swamp at their bases, in which eggs hatched into larvae, pupated, then flew. A small piece of netting was held by tension, midway up, where the adult flies could rest and where the pupa could hang.

  One of my tasks was to check the flies’ status (alive y/n), and to prepare new beakers with new media. I made this sloggy media in batches, from an instant mix with yeast and scoops of other things, filled trayed vials, distributed, freshened. With water the media turned a coolant blue. New, it smelled lightly sweet, and old, like fruit rot. Regularly I was to tap and shimmy the adult flies from the old universe into clean new receptacles—tipping mouth of beaker to funnel and vial, up-end, let fly, tap again, stop-up—for study. If I held my ear open enough—up and back with my forefinger and thumb—I could pretend to hear them as they alighted, landed, halted, waddled. Bent over, I would watch them mount their new landscape. I’d feel a close pride. Though the glass kept me distant. I’d straighten and sigh, shake my lab coat sleeves. I could close the closet door behind me and move onto the next. When I had visited each closet, I was done.

  Yet often before leaving a closet I’d feel a slow slice of grief. This feeling was inexplicable. Though I liked the idea of staying put—of setting my heart on a given genetic line, of making a home there—in the end I could not adhere. There was nothing to do in the closets besides work and look. The flies lived about six weeks, or until their use had been spent.

  In light, in day, at prescribed intervals, scientists came and put the flies to sleep. They hushed them with carbon dioxide gas and shook them out onto miniature glass platforms for microscopic study. I did not like to think of this. Nor did I invest myself with the content of their studies or genius, which, I assume, often made disciplinary and sometimes national headlines and on occasion changed one person’s life, or another’s, or the lives of many.

  After this labor I would update the supply inventory and send orders as needed. I’d set some tools into the autoclave, bend over the big sink to wash others. I’d initial the clipboard logs. I’d get myself a paper cup of watery joe from the break room. There were posters bearing reminders for several kinds of safety. There were security and emergency protocols. Infographics instructing the importance of recycling. A bulletin board declaring the latest funding awards. The fridge smelled of liquefying leftovers. The seats farted faintly for you when you sat. I’d look out across the research campus, on, to the silent whiz of the highway. There’d be one car a minute. There was comfort in this.

  Night or day I was alone and alone and only sometimes lonely. I worked and went home; saw Ken and went home, saw my folks and went home; slept, showered, ate, drank, pissed, shit, went to work, and went home. Pop had once said to me: “Being a person is contributing your fair share. Being nice is doing more than that.” Though I was not nice, I was a person, and so contributed my fair share. I did my best to do so inconspicuously. I negotiated myself. I was a dutiful daughter. I fetched my own dimes. I tolerated nearly everything. Days melted, one onto the next, into basins of unremarkable time.

  BY THE BEGINNING of my second August at the lab I felt that at last I might be leaving my long-standing self-quarantine. I could not then say why. Now I can say that it had been at least a year since Pop had last been sick. Perhaps I was unhunching. It was summer and summer and summer, barely any air to breathe with all the water hanging there. Inside, at work, it was dim and cold. I’d started to want to greet the younger staff—ideating invitations for drinks at the bar across the street, the dew of a cold glass, unembarrassed eye contact.

  I knew well enough not to try with the May-to-August college kids, who surely had their own friends and fucks, a taste of land further out than our own suburban reef. Too, the grad students were distant in their calm rigor. Though I ventured that the high school interns, so part-time they felt like hints, might be more comfortable with a crone such as myself. They would see that I was not a threat, might find me useful, the way I might bring contextual realness to their fresh fake IDs.

  At last, one day—emboldened for no reason but boredom—I did approach a quiet blonde, a rising high school senior with a cartilage piercing, as she refilled her bottle from the lounge drinking fountain. I watched it fill. She screwed its top, then offered me a service industry smile. “Did you want to get in here?”

  I said I did and grabbed a paper cone, filled it brim-ward. She dried the sides of the bottle with her shirt hem. “How’s the summer been?” I asked, inexactly.

  “Oh fine. Really busy actually.” Her face flushed. “My mom’s be
en on me to retake the SATs.”

  I had a gluey recollection of myself, then, at a desk in another county, filling out a scantron, nearly a decade previous. “It’ll be fine,” I said. I was attempting to offer comfort as a kind of social currency.

  “I know it’ll be fine,” she said. “Just tell my mom that.”

  I understood this was rhetorical. I drank my water all at once, then asked: “Do you wanna get a drink after work?” The water backed up in my throat. I sent it back down with a swallow. I reminded myself that this was not a come-on, was merely the predicate of a social life. Still I felt I might vomit on her loafers, which she wore sockless.

  She made her mouth go flat. “Can’t,” she said.

  “Wanna do it another night?”

  “I don’t mean to be weird, but—” She turned her whole face from me.

  I nodded and went to stand in the restroom, alone, swallowing my own spit. I let the empty cone fall in the can. I wanted to give myself a boost or reminder. I could call Ken. I could quit. On the other side of the wall, in the men’s, a toilet flushed. I felt pinned by my own shame till I remembered that my shift was over and I could leave. So I left.

  Later, as I was unlocking my apartment door, unbuttoning my pants, ignoring the dishes in the sink, the phone rang. In my empty apartment, I waited, then answered. It was Ma calling to say: “It’s back.” I didn’t ask questions. She requested I come over for dinner day after next. I told her I’d have to get back to her.

  AT FOURTEEN I was told for the first time that my father might die. It was on a Friday. After school Ken and I had consumed a round of limp diner fries and gritty shakes, looking at one another’s zits, complaining, and only half-observant that anyone else was breathing too. “So long,” I’d said, when Ken stopped the car at the end of my drive. It’d been a boring day and I was glad to end it. I was looking forward to a further hermit, to snapping my bedroom door shut: a shell. To napping until it turned dark, then light again.

  When I looked back from the stoop Ken gave an all-chin nod. In response I stood there then turned. His Buick puttered back down the street. The neighbors had on some loopy singsong tune, with accordions and a guitar. It ornamented the air, but when I shut the front door behind me, I could no longer hear it.

  “We’re in here!” Ma called, in a hoary stage-whisper.

  I walked down the hall into the kitchen as I had done so often, and so unremarkably, prior. The two of them were in a dinnertime pose this midafternoon, sitting across from one another.

  “Get yourself comfy,” Pop said. His cheeks were luminous as brill cream. Or it must have been something in my eye. In fact I noted he was wan. There was a big bowl of oranges on the table, and next to it, the old steel juice presser and three glasses. I wondered how long they’d been waiting. “Look,” he said. “Steve brought us oranges back from Fort Myers.” Pop snatched one up and showed it around. “He picked them at one of those you-pick places.”

  “You-pick?” I said.

  “Well, he-picked,” Pop laughed. Then he told me to get a knife and cutting board so I did.

  Ma told me to sit down. “Your father’s got cancer,” she said. Her face was oil and water. “It’s not the bad kind.”

  “It’s going to be some work, but we’ll get there,” Pop said. Ma opened her mouth and angled without a word. He patted her.

  “Oh,” I sighed out, feeling an imagined lung crunch. “Not the bad kind.” As if Pop had said nothing. My stomach felt like what—like letting go of an inflated, untied balloon. A confused emotional flatulence. In response I began to halve the oranges, and Pop took each half and hammer-squeezed it in the device. No one was looking at anyone else. The juice dripped down, into the steel compartment at the bottom. When the compartment was full he distributed it into the glasses. The pulp congregated brightly at the surface.

  We all drank the juice. The juice was bad and bitter but maybe the juice was fine and there was something wrong with my mouth; or maybe it was the dairy film of the diner milkshake curdling now. Ma and Pop slurped, uncommenting.

  “I’ve got some errands to do,” Ma said when she’d finished her juice, and stood, grabbing her purse and keys from the counter. She, deserter, hugged my shoulders and I mmhmm’d an okay.

  Then it was Pop and I at the table, beside one another. I, already a monster, let him rise and wash the juice implements himself. I sat at the table unmoving until he asked did I want to watch a movie.

  We settled in for three viewings back-to-back: Grant, Hepburn/Tracy, Powell. He collected old black-and-whites, mailed away for or ferreted out. He’d plucked them from the back shelves of junk shops. Pressed record on blank tapes during WETA’s Sunday afternoons. The cassettes lived in three old fruit crates, behind the sofa in the front room where we now sat. Often, we’d watch them together.

  On-screen, here’s two lover ghosts perched on a fallen log, bantering beside their own sports car wreckage. Here’s a roomful of fedora-wearing men bickering gruff over a missing show dog. Here’s a case of mistaken identity, always a case of mistaken identity, played for laughs, or for tragedy, driving into an orchestral swell of recognition and hope. Here’s people falling down dead, except it’s never permanent, or else it isn’t sad, or else it is, but only for one moment before strength and joy and sun prevail. Here are no flash-forwards, no bearing out the weight of bad decisions, crummily, for the rest of your life. No punished heroes, no selfish acts without instructional consequences. Rather: here is getting off scot-free, happily and neatly, over and over, with a song in your heart. The end.

  These movies were glossy, speedy, poignant: nothing like me, nothing like Pop. What did we need to add to our life’s inventory. With what did we vary our hearts’ fare. “What’s so great about these?” I’d once asked Pop. He’d smiled blankly and said, he just liked them was all. Isn’t that just like a dad. This time I didn’t ask him anything; we merely bolted down thirty frames a second.

  At some point Ma returned but I paid no attention, riveted on the screen to the strategic exclusion of all else. The cancer would be gone by the following year, only to return as I finished up a degree at the local college, burned through two telemarketing gigs, lucked out with employment at the lab. It was not a haunting, these unruly cells dividing. Nor was it a war. Together we watched movies. Sometimes we hugged. Life continued but I didn’t think of it that way.

  THE DAY FOLLOWING Ma’s call I had to cover some work at the lab. I was to go in, feed the flies, and then depart. I’d return that evening for a fuller sentinel. I did not want to see the blonde rising senior. I did not want to be reminded of the minor rejection. So I delayed my departure: “Gene?” I called into my stale apartment. He did not respond. Gene was like that, so often checking out when I wished he’d check in. For an imaginary friend, he was petulant, and what I deserved. “Gene?” I called again. I was dallying. “I need a pep talk.”

  At last he materialized, striding from the direction of the bathroom into my little entry vestibule, already midspeech. “Why do you even try to talk to those people? They don’t want ya.”

  I said that seemed clear.

  “You gotta punch your own weight. Look for folks with open sores. The ones who can’t stop crying long enough to finish up at the deli counter. Vowers of silence, of abstinence, of desperation . . .”

  In the wake of Pop’s first diagnosis, I’d acquired stress-related heartburn and this imaginary friend. Only the latter lingered. Gene was styled lightly, it seemed, on a failed character actor from the early twentieth century, a fat man who played sheriff and dad, judge and dupe—someone who might be on Pop’s tapes. That day Gene’s soft chin met a high-collared waxed canvas safari vest: Doc Livingstone by way of the studio system. “Go be a productive member of society,” he barked.

  “Go take a long walk offa short pier,” I said back. He blew a raspberry. I laughed.

  As a young child I’d had nothing like this. I’d always been with my parents or else alone, or, l
ater, with Ken. This was the dramatic solitude of the only child, underscoring itself. In it I had been fine. But Pop’s first diagnosis had pushed the envelope of fine. Gene was a way through to something else. Without him I was inert, forced to be everything I was.

  “They have a saying in show business—” he began, and then did not finish his sentence. Rather he stood in his pith helmet, brim shadowing his dark brow, looking into the middle distance. I looked that way too, saw only the gummy, dusty fridge top.

  Finally I asked: “What’s the saying?”

  “What saying?” He looked at me as if I were the imaginary one.

  I let it drop.

  Upon first encounter Gene had been clear and sharp, a reflective blade. He had known where to land his punches. He had known, too, how to pet me, gently enough for me to miss him when he left the room. I’m not deluded. Gene was me and not me: the right tool for the job.

  But lately, it seemed Gene had been fraying, warping into nonsense more commonly. This could have been worrying, but I ignored it. “Are you coming?” I stepped outside, shut the door, locked it.

  He rematerialized on the front walk and whined, “Don’t rush me!” then trotted to the car.

  THAT MORNING I took the back roads to work, the access roads and cut-through residentials. There was a long strip of road where I liked the tree-cover, which enlaced itself along a narrow park in which I had never walked. Ordinarily the shape of shadows on this route calmed me. Though on this day I had a sort of road blindness. “Will you look at that!” Gene hollered, then, too closely in my ear. He said again: “Will you look at that!”

  I focused my eyes. The road was covered in dark stains. With further attention I found the stains were blood.