The Entire Predicament Read online

  It hurts. In the break in time when we’re one-upping each other, hurt for hurt, I picture the prostitute like this: I picture her in a small room with a low mattress. She’s rigged a set of sheets like curtains around the bed and she’s lying on her side, half under the cheap covers. She’s looking at me and her face is maskless. I think I like her face. I lie near her on the bed. I can feel bits of sand. Then she puts her gloves on. She snaps them on her wrists, and I expect to see a puff of powder, poof, like magic, but there’s just the sound. She winks, which terrifies me, which she sees because she’s a professional. Like magic she has a scarf and she ties it behind her head so all I can see are her eyes. I know I should think harem, but I don’t; I think bandit, which is fine because it calms me. I am so relieved. She puts her fingers in my mouth. I concentrate. The glove is instantly slick, and I’m astounded that such a transformation can take place. I relax. I can hear a variety of noises. I begin to participate.

  It could end here, with Andrea caught in the moment before china crumbles, covered in hairline cracks. She isn’t moving, but she’s collapsing, soundless. It could end here.We could both throw up our hands: I surrender, we say. You could throw up your hands, too, in the light, your face cupped in cotton, your hands encased in heat-conducting super-easy-to-feel-through rubber, wielding your shiny pointed scraping tool.You are my favorite dentist because you’re satisfied with my teeth.You are what I think I want to be. I could go home, my head bent low as I cross the driveway and duck into my house. Andrea and I could make up for making out. Cooperatively, we could shake on it and swap chrysanthemums.

  Instead, I leave the room. I leave her on the floral carpet, go into her bathroom with its enormous orange butterflies, stand in front of her pedestal sink, and look in her mirror. I bare my teeth at myself for a second and then I open the medicine-cabinet door, as if I’m looking for something. A plastic container of allergy pills bounces into the sink. Inside the cabinet is an eight-pack of toothbrushes, seven heads visible through a cellophane window in the box. I close the cabinet door. There’s my head, in the mirror. Butterflies are spilling out of the frame all over the place. I go back to baring my teeth. Am I frightened? I almost growl. Why am I not frightened?

  I’m thinking of you. I’m baring my skull. I’m trying to look inside. Way far up there is my brain.

  You say, “Look at this. Anything new?”

  I’m noticing all the chrome in the room. Her soap dish and her lotion dispenser are silver. The towel racks, the paper holder, the faucets in the sink and bathtub, too. I’m seeing your scrapers, your pokers, and your wheeled stool. I’m enumerating reasons to be hospitalized. I’m surrounding myself with orange butterflies, feeling wings surrounding my eyes and my ears. A shining bullet is easing through the air with speed, and clearly it’s moving from cleaning to cleaning. My teeth are so much yellower than they felt like they were, all day.They are so much more irregular, these misshapen nubs. My tongue is soft, and like my brain it wants to believe what it wants to believe. In dreams of death teeth crumble, or fall like soldiers, or they tumble into my mouth and down my tongue backward like a herd of miniature animals off a cliff. I can smell myself, and there’s an ancient tribal stink to my smell.

  I picture the prostitute again. Her scarf hangs around her neck. I’m nowhere around. Who knows, maybe I went into her bathroom. I’ll tell you this, though: I can see her face, and the look on it makes me think of the glossy magazine that comes with my retirement plan. The magazine is called Participant. There’s always a glossy face on it. Every time it arrives in my mailbox I throw it into the garbage with a fury that astounds me. The fury comes, I realize—looking at this prostitute surrounded by curtains, looking at her face, which is far, far from glossy—from feeling dehumanized.This woman’s face is exhausted, fully human, and full of fear.

  There is always terror. I know there is terror every day, and I know because sometimes I can actually feel it. In the small moments when I am actually able to look, I can see it in any face, a low rumble under every voice and any skin. In my office at work I sometimes feel so afraid that I spend hours cruising online. I look at people’s high school photos and I can see it. I look at mug shots of people and see it.Their faces, their heads. I can see it when I take the long walk to the water fountain and pass all these people at their desks.They’re generic, they’re encased, but I can see fear glowing through like a bulb from behind a wide white plate. I imagine I forget these times, that they contain themselves within the building where I work, within the hours I spend there, that they wad themselves into a pellet I could pocket, but it’s not true. Sometimes they reopen, they unfold, they bloom, and fill any space I’m in. Andrea is kneeling in the living room, and so far inside my mouth she’s in my mind. It’s where she’s moved since I left her in our standoff. Her face trembles.The distance between one moment and the next is shaking. I am forgetting nothing. You are my favorite dentist because I want to feel shiny and automatic. I’m not moving. I’m not moving. It won’t end.

  Midgets Often Marry Each Other

  Midgets often marry each other, like celebrities. Simpletons often marry each other. There were these simpletons who married each other, and they had a baby girl named Peanut who wasn’t simple at all. As a bright girl, by the time Peanut was four she was tricking her parents into leaving the house and then locking them out. They’d wander around the yard holding hands and Peanut would tear up the house like a lonely dog.

  No-neck people tend to marry each other. There’s a birth defect, a missing gene or something, sometimes associated with mountain people, and it causes them to live without necks. Usually it’s the nonskinny mountain people; not the kind with rat eyes, pinched faces, and enormous Adam’s apples, but the bug-eyed ones who’ve moved to town and eat lots of potatoes, potato chips, and deep-fried potatoes from the grocer’s freezer. These are people whose bodies are sort of spheres and sort of cubes.You could fit a finger, maybe, between the shoulder and the jawbone, but that’s it, and good luck if it’s one of the especially fatter people with no neck. These people marry each other, and their kids have no necks either. They are called no-neck people, and sometimes you see a family of them walking around and it can make you feel like there’s something wrong with you for having so much neck.

  Tennis people marry tennis people, but what else would they do? When you marry people, you have to meet them at school, at work.You have to meet them at church.You have to meet them at the bar, or you have to meet them at the park or the Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Sometimes a celebrity marries an ugly celebrity, and there are other exceptions as well. Still, mostly people don’t want to have to carry a mirror around to look at themselves.

  A child psychologist from the local university enrolled Peanut in a study. Peanut was really good at the test where you predict where pool balls will go. The one where you say whether the item is dead or alive, she had trouble with clay. She wasn’t sure. It sort of moved, and it sort of changed, but it sort of didn’t. She had trouble determining agency.

  People who both like to cook shouldn’t marry each other. For example, the two of them like cooking, so they start cooking constantly. One gets into one country’s kind of cooking and takes pleasure placing special orders and pronouncing them correctly. The other calls pies: I do pies, she says. She builds a marble counter, and learns all about carpentry.They’re trying to be variations on a theme. Pie girl can’t win. Pies are in the other’s country along with lots of other dishes, and she feels like a minor cooker, doing pies. She quits cooking, nauseated, and takes up collecting exotic plants. Cooking is like the baby in the chalk circle, and they pull and pull, but when, finally, one gives up, it’s not for love, it’s for exotic plants. Then budgets are stretched, because they both need so many accessories, cooking, plants, cooking, plants, and it starts to feel like there’s an elastic cord between them. They’re forty-five degrees to the ground like plow horses, pulling in opposite directions. Sometimes they get exhauste
d and smack into each other, sometimes face-to-face but mostly rump first. Birds flying backward into windows.

  When she grew into an old person, Peanut turned this over on her deathbed, in her mind, after having lived the life of a bright girl, but also particularly a bright girl with simpleton parents, if you can imagine that. She pictured her thinking, her turning, like the golf ball-size globule of mucus she’d recently produced, which was incandescent, white, and motable. It seemed alive, it was not alive, particles of it could be alive, and it meant death. One time she’d been sitting at a sidewalk café and saw a mother and child, holding hands, walking by. The mother had protruding from her forehead an egg-shaped lump. The child, too, had one bulging from his forehead, a slight variation on egg, his mottled like cauliflower. There are many possible explanations. Some things are given, and you don’t know how.

  Wizened

  I: OTHER PEOPLE

  I begin with what I see plainly, before and around me. There is much to curtail. To one side, my neighbors are a family, extremely nuclear in a contemporary way. There’s a mother, a father, a girl, and a boy, both children from previous marriages, the girl blonde, the boy brunet, both juniors at the local private high school, both athletes (soccer). The kids, Jeff and Amie, own (that is, were given for Christmas) a basset hound named (by Jeff) Spliff, a word his parents pretend they don’t understand.

  A good family: Mrs. Craven runs an antique store, and Mr. Craven is a corporate-theft deterrent specialist. Amie plays clarinet, and Jeff’s hair is longer than Amie’s. Spliff runs in small circles and bays like a donkey, true to his breed. When Mr. Craven goes to another town to deter theft, Mrs. Craven goes along. She says they are taking the opportunity for a romantic getaway. She says instead of missing each other, they are making applesauce and lemonade, so to speak.The kids say, “Yeah, mom, you just don’t want him screwing around.” Mom says, “That’s me, I smother,” and points at her cheek for a kiss.

  I see it all through my sharp eyes, hear it all with my keen ears, and I’m mired by experience, dense with inaccessible wisdom. Mr. and Mrs. Craven pull out of the driveway, and soon a dozen private high school kids, along with a dozen of their friends who were kicked out in seventh grade, and a dozen of their friends from public school, and a dozen of their friends who dropped out last year . . . dozens and dozens of kids arrive. I am the one who waits until the two-foot water pipe is pulled from under the bed and passed around, and then I am the one who calls the police. I am the bitch from hell and what I need is a good fuck. I have nothing better to do, no business of my own to mind, and I don’t shave.You can smell my bitterness, it’s so old. When Mr. Craven does not have a business trip, I crouch in my car and wait for Amie and Jeff to sneak out their windows and hop into a van that waits up the block with its lights off.Then I follow the van to a neighboring development, and when the block is lined with cars and the house is filled with kids, I call the police on my cell phone, which I bought for this purpose and this purpose exclusively, since, regardless of the fact that I am a young maid, and not an old maid, this is the business I mind.

  I wait until the police have come, dispersed the children, and vacated the premises.Then I wait for the kids to gather at the golf course because it is not raining, and once they have set up their keg in a thicket, I call the police again.They must think I’m having a good giggle, but I’m serious, in a dead sort of way, because I have come to this, and of all things, in this I believe. I know what happened to me. I became crotchety. En route to wisdom, I wizened. I terrorize with my morality. But I do take pleasure as well.

  My neighbors to the other side are a homosexual couple about my age. They are graphic designers and work in a furnished garden shed in their backyard. In the morning, at eight o’clock, they walk out their front door with their briefcases, kiss like Europeans, and then one turns left and one turns right. Around the house they go, meet up at their shed, and shake hands. It’s such a good, old joke to them that they don’t have to laugh aloud for me to know how happy they are, how deep and ironic their ritual.When I go through my junk mail, I separate the good stuff, like “Herbal medicines enclosed” and “Check here for your free magazine.” I peel away my address and leave the fat envelopes in their mailbox. When their Dalmatian bitch Goody digs a hole in the Cravens’ yard, I fill it when no one is looking. I don’t want a spat raging across my yard. I don’t want the Cravens to have anything on the homosexuals.

  Also, I experience compassion in my distanced way. Across the street lives a woman who is older than me, although no one knows it because I have adopted the role I have adopted. I wear appropriate thick stockings and waistless housecoats. Vivian’s husband left her a year ago, and so eager was he to travel around the world without her that he allowed her the house and makes the payments, and took with him only his credit cards, their daughter, their pet cockatoo, and, it is evident from my observations, his wife’s will to survive. The bird died in the baggage compartment on a plane to Israel, but the girl, who is eight and has yet to speak a word, flies in from places like Crete and Bangladesh for monthly visits, collecting exotic airline stickers on her suitcase. Various breeds of men hang around the house with Vivian, sometimes more than one at a time. They sit on her front porch in their boxer shorts. They play catch with the little girl in the dusk.

  One at a time, each man’s immoral afflictions are revealed to me. One spent an afternoon in the yard aiming a gun (not registered) at Goody, Spliff, and the front door of the homosexuals’ house. One broke a bedroom window when he was trying to open it, then told Vivian it had always been that way. One slapped the little girl when she threw a ball and it hit his crotch. One refused to use a condom. One pocketed the change from Vivian’s bedside table. It’s the sneaks I can’t stand. There are too many people in the world for me to allow for sneaks. If there weren’t so many people, the sneaks wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t get tangled up. The sneaks could sneak all by themselves. One of Vivian’s men, though, a man with a willowy body and big, marble eyes, shot up heroin on my side of Vivian’s hedges, under a street lamp, at seven thirty in the evening. I left him alone. I admired his gumption. The rest: I find out where they work and let their bosses know. I find out where they live and tell their wives. This, if not all things, is possible if you do your research and commit the time.

  This is my sphere of influence. I have drawn a circle around the homes, making a fine subset for my purposes. In its center, I have drawn a circle around myself. I cover myself with clothes. Somewhere, I am inside the circles, inside my clothes, seeing with none but the relevant eye, the eye that sees within my worldview. Irrelevant eyes are elsewhere, living in forms of sight I’ve rejected. Outside are the larger circles of the housing development, the earth, the orbits of other planets, and who-knows-what. If God appeared, He would be a circle.

  When Spliff sneaks across my yard to have sex with Goody, I throw stones at him until he goes home, baying in circles. When Vivian’s mute daughter falls from her bicycle, I set her on the porch, ring the bell, and run away, the bike’s wheels still spinning. When Jeff and Amie ding the car, I spray paint a circle around it, so it can’t be missed. When the homosexuals begin to romance with the lights on, I close my shades so that they may have privacy, although, when I’ve had my nightcap already, I do allow myself to peek. Sometimes I spend the day making things for my house. I cut the bodice off an old sun-dress and sew curtains for the kitchen. I scrub the living room floor with sandpaper and paint it blue.

  I am twenty-seven and I have been crotchety for a good three years. I moved here when I felt it coming on, a fear that began with other people’s genitals, which are taking over the world. The fear filled me; a city of fear grew inside me, unarticulated, a mess of fear with outdated maps. I was, in fact, living in a city when I articulated the fear for the first time. It was all the people, trying to organize themselves into buildings but spilling into the streets, stepping all over one another, erecting and imploding, and worst of all,
when they felt their humanity at its height, humanity in the form of lust or sentiment, extracting their sex organs and producing more of themselves.

  When it comes to genitals and humanity, I give the homosexuals a break, because I think they have promise. But I do not give my parents a break, and I do not give myself a break, either. My parents have moved from this, my childhood home, to an identical house in another development, another cul-de-sac, another state. I think they had nothing to do without a mortgage. Three years I’ve come to this and remained. My parents send me money because I hate them so much. I tried—I have—to believe that it’s time for something new to happen to me, some new idea. But I have already heard all the ideas. They’re towered in the city of my fear. And I swear, I never get over it, the prospect of cleaner space, wider spheres, consequent mass widenings of individual existences. It gets me gaga, floats my boats, recharges my engines when I imagine it, so I work on my scheme for reduction, which comes down, plainly, to people. It’s not the genitals as such that I mind, so much as the minds behind them, and what is done. A gun is not really a gun unless it’s shot, you know.

  Jonathan Swift thought of this, more or less, when he proposed feeding the destitute with sick and starving children. People thought he was serious, but then smarter people caught up with his irony. Smarter people still, like me, know exactly what was going on. Swift knew he was right, and he knew the futility created by the condition of the biologic human heart: the heart says, “You can’t kill people,” and the mind says, “It sure would be good for those alive.” I mean, it was a good idea.