The Entire Predicament Read online

  So I work on my scheme, which involves the identification of pressure points on fault lines, the poisoning of potato chips, the introduction of ravenous, rabid animals to a metropolis or two, a grand network of anonymous assassins. I’m working it all out, rubbing my hands together with private glee, putting my self-doubt and grandiosity alternately into perspective, trying to construct a way to allow the remaining population a pure mourning, one that cannot blame, one that results, finally, in cleansing.This one, this idea, after many small ones, fills my mind. I cannot conceive of a better one, and I’m currently convinced it simply can’t be done. The weaseling I commit each day with the Cravens, with Vivian’s men, the way I resort to the law of all things to clean my neighborhood—none would be necessary if I could finish the scheme. Not an easy job, but it keeps me going, and for now it keeps my great shakes in place.

  But truly, I confess I am not stupid enough to believe I can do a thing to help people on such a scale, especially as I am no good at networking and hold no fascist claim to fame. So I keep the scheme to the sphere of my mind, because I haven’t got it done, and because despite my best intentions, I am a good person, and can therefore be no more than an itch on a person’s butt, a salve on a pimple, a bane to my own existence. I’m done examining why. It’s so old hat, and it smells up a room.

  II: ONE PERSON

  Which is not to say that I am always by myself, and which is not to say I never question the time I spend. For instance, merely months ago, someone knocked on my door. It’s true, I ran upstairs, afraid that something had fallen from something, but I did, eventually, discover the cause of the banging and interaction ensued.

  It was a fellow, an up-front one as it turned out (I admire up-front), seventeen as it turned out. I invited him in, and he said, “Look, I’m not gonna dick around. Jeff next door, you know that kid, basically dared me to ask you out because he thinks I’ll fuck anything.” I considered. I straightened my stockings, which I wear even in the summer as part of my role, and asked him if he wanted tea. He said,“I drink coffee.” I said, “Okay. I have some here somewhere.”

  The fellow’s name was Shannon, which as I remember can be difficult for a boy in school unless he is blessed with social acuity and popular acceptance, which this Shannon was. Good-looking in a contemporary way. Would make a pretty girl, but also played basketball.

  It’s true, I am wizened, sullen, frustrated, crotchety, but although the world generally annoys me, I have not lost interest in it. “What does Jeff want you to do?” I asked, hoping my smile was as wry as intended. Shannon scratched an ear and leaned against my kitchen table.

  “He wasn’t too clear, really,” Shannon said.“Everyone knows what you’re like. I guess old Jeff just said what he said. It’s the kind of thing, if I was seven, I’d of knocked and run away, that kind of thing. He’s laughing his ass off right now.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  I was still looking for coffee. Shannon walked around the room and then said he had to piss. I couldn’t find any coffee, so I put water on to boil. Shannon came back.

  “I’m gonna take off, I guess,” he said.

  “You’re not going to ask me out?” I scratched an ear and leaned against my kitchen counter.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Thirty-five,” I told him, settling for a balance between truths.

  “Damn, girl. I’m in high school.” He considered. Then he said, “Okay, let’s go out. I’ll come over tonight.”

  “It’s not like I’m eighty,” I said, feeling excited by the prospect of, well, a prospect I suppose. An inkling of kindness aimed at myself, I suppose, a lightness in my old bones.

  So he came over that night. I opened the door to him and he said, “Let me in quick. I don’t want everyone to see.”

  His hair was combed and wet. I’d taken my stockings off and dressed up the way I had in college when I went to the parties fraternities held at hotels. I’d looked at myself in the mirror for a while that afternoon and in a girlish way decided I would make a pretty boy. But by the time Shannon arrived, I’d almost forgotten my outfit, so busy had I been all evening, organizing my license plate file, which I use to keep track of people who speed on this road, and working on my scheme.

  “You clean up good,” Shannon said, and I thought he meant he liked my house, so I showed him around, and then something happened to me for a moment, something really kicked in, calm, even poignant as I remember, a softness he culled and lent me. Then we had sex on the blue floor in the living room.

  And that’s not all since I wizened: a couple years ago a friend of mine from college showed up on her way to visit someone else and borrowed my guest room for the night. She said it seemed I’d grown up a lot, which is what you say to someone who remains virtually silent for an entire visit, smiling in a wry way as you talk about a variety of things that are half-heard, old hat, and immediately forgotten.

  Also, I wrote a letter to Ann Landers once, before I knew my scheme. Only half joking, I wrote, “Dear Ann Landers, I need some advice. So what should I do?” And I started a chain letter once, in an effort to solicit ideas. “Send me a good idea, a good idea to four more people, and so on. If the ideas are good we will all have good ideas!” Someone sent me a dollar, which is illegal, so I reported it, and that was that.

  And my folks invited me for Thanksgiving, but I knew if I went I would seem to be giving solicitous thanks in exchange for food, which I believe is underhanded. So I let them know, by ignoring them, that I was still uncomfortable with their presence on the planet, and they sent me a check for fifty dollars.

  So it’s not like nothing ever happens to me. In fact, things continue to happen, which, it turns out, is a potential problem when it comes to settling on a way of life or a sense of truth regarding one’s ideology. For instance, I was supposed to have my period about two weeks after I met Shannon, but I didn’t. I started jogging. I wanted my body to be strong in case I had to give birth. I went jogging with a pen and paper, so I could note the actions of sneaky people in the housing development sphere. I saw a man piss on his neighbor’s lawn. I saw a pizza guy exit a house zipping his pants. I saw a girl drop an enormous vase from a second-story window. I wrote little notes, planning to place them in appropriate mailboxes, so that people would know what was going on. But then I suddenly felt like cutting up my flannel sheets and sewing them into layered squares to make diapers. And then I knew it was about time to check on the homosexuals; they had never disappointed me, never required correction, but I knew that if I wasn’t vigilant, I could not be sure. And then I felt like cleaning out the guest room and painting it yellow.

  In short, I felt different. I thought about how I should adjust my scheme so that only the right people would die. I had never wanted the homosexuals to die because they are so nice, and I hadn’t wanted Vivian to die, or her little girl, because they are so wounded, and, of course, I admire wounds. I knew all this was my human weakness, and I tried, in my own way, to get over it. Trying to calm my human weakness was part of what I did when I worked on the scheme. With this new development, this lack of my period, a mere month ago, I began to find it so frustrating to work on my scheme that I cried a lot. I couldn’t figure out how to sort through all those people.

  It’s hypocrisy I can’t stand. It’s how I’m always two steps from paradox, if not residing in it, if not allowing it to reside in me.

  I cried so much that soon I didn’t think I was upset about the loss of an ideological structure. I admitted that the scheme could, after all, be one in a series of ideas. I thought, Something else could still occur to me and ring true, something different. After all, I am only twenty-seven. Some people don’t get wizened until they’re old. Some people don’t at all. I wondered what I really meant by wizened. Did I mean bitter? Static? It is not necessary to think one thing and not another. It made sense, and felt good, to blame the tears on my newly churning hormones. It felt like something new, this unexpected l
ack of bleeding, a new something I had never before encountered, something of my own invention, that could not be thought up or done by anyone else, a thing that had nothing to do with anyone else. This went on for a week or two. I felt light. I felt like a child. I felt full of potential, and it was great.

  III: ANOTHER PERSON (MYSELF)

  A long time ago, I guess it was before high school because I was still trying to find God, I was looking through my parents’ desk.They shared one. Her stuff was in the drawers on the left, and his in the drawers on the right. The surface was for bills only. I found my father’s old cigarette roller, the kind with the handle you pull, and tried to make it roll various office supplies into post-its, which didn’t work out so well. Then I found a couple chess pieces and some nail polish, so I painted faces on the chess pieces, which made them look downright demonic. Then I found my mother’s collection of fortunes from Chinese restaurants, which was old, I knew, because my father hated and hates all that is Chinese. The fortunes said that her life was going to turn out in ways it had not, not then, not now, and they told her she possessed virtues I’ve never witnessed.

  I found six photographs of our house, each taken from the same spot in our yard, right in front of the maple tree where I spent hours scribbling on a yellow legal pad. At the time, I was working on a novel. I’d been reading about Nazis, and asked my mother, “Who is our enemy now?” and Mother had said, “We don’t have enemies anymore. The Russians, I guess.” In my novel, a family would hear someone breaking into their house and whisper, “The Russians are coming!” and for pages and pages they would hide and plot and then emerge, trying to beat the Russians back with pitchforks and garden hoes, but the Russians would keep coming, so then the family got to live in the woods with kind animals.

  In any case, the photos taken from in front of the maple tree preserved each color scheme in which the house had been painted—six colors—the primaries, a couple secondaries, even Williamsburg blue when that was the rage.All these colors and I was still just a kid, though I felt older. It was as if someone wanted to keep track of what they’d done, so they could check back, and see if they’d ever had it right. I remember thinking that they hadn’t, and that I didn’t even have a favorite. They hadn’t ever had it right.

  I found a sketch my father had made of my mother holding me as an infant, but he’d never gotten around to my head. I found a box of cherry stems, in brittle knots. Buttons never returned to shirts. Rusty paper clips. Single, double, and quadruple gummed staples that would never do a thing because anyone who can afford a stapler can afford new staples. Idiocy, everywhere. Idiocy just crammed into a decent-seeming piece of furniture, and I remember every item of it, every bit of hidden, accumulated, puerile waste. An inventory of other people’s ideas.

  That afternoon when I forgot I was looking for God and examined the items at hand, that afternoon stretches when I think of it and holds years of weight. A small period of time can mean years in a person’s life. A person knows only what a person knows, and time feels as big or small as it does according to how much space it takes up now, in a person’s heart and mind. The time I have been living through in this house is permanent in this way, and this is why I can call myself, why I can be, why I am old. History is all bunched up behind me: what I know other people do and have done, all categorized, lumped, the facts of lives and occurrences undermined by failure, by the constant increase of trouble taking and having taken place, of lives documented, or forgotten, or both, or worse, remembered and useless. Useless? Failed? What on earth can I mean by that? I mean Vivian’s men keep traipsing, the Craven kids are wallowing in banality, the homosexuals are shaking hands in their backyard. I mean, after a while, the pregnancy wore off. My period came back, innocent, saying, “Oops, I forgot, sorry,” and instantly, that new feeling, the new idea, crushed itself into a minor moment, and I woke as from a nightmare.

  I think there are too many people, and that’s all I think. Still, looking from my little sphere with my relevant eye does not mean I’m without memory, or without imagination. For instance, I never likedVivian’s husband. I knew he would leave, or should, but I can see him, suited up for safari, plainly and purely glowing, standing where giraffes knuckle over to drink, where tigers and zebras materialize from the grass as his past recedes. His little daughter holds his hand and her first word is “Oh.” At seven thirty, the heroin addict steps off Vivian’s porch and stands under the street lamp until, at the end of the dusk, the light bursts on and he takes in his drug, linked, in his mind, with the stars. Vivian can see him from her window, and she allows him his pleasure, tacit, pretending for its sake that it doesn’t exist. Her hair is long, full, and dark, her skin shining through the nightgown she has worn all day.

  No one is left out when I watch my people. I can see Amie’s subtle, appropriate sneer when she finds herself sleepless, watching the television sputter and chat. She makes tea, wanders the house and the yard. The night, the insomnia, is like years for her. She converses with it: she says,“I banish you, insomnia!” and walks it up and down the street. By morning she’s collapsed on the couch, and when Jeff finds her he pulls an afghan over her body. He’s a little confused, momentarily filled with a recognition of the vast spaces of which he’s never conceived and never experienced. The day passes like wind. At dinner, their father breaks down at the table, half weeping, half laughing at the stock of his life. “I can’t deter theft,” he says. “It’s too much. It’s just everywhere.” Mrs. Craven takes his plate of beans and potatoes and replaces it with berries in cream.

  In the morning, the homosexuals lay a gingham tablecloth on the lawn and picnic for breakfast.They are dressed in their suits, but one stretches out and rests his head on his lover’s lap. For hours, it seems, his lover strokes his face from above. After a while Goody comes over, puts her head on the man’s chest as he sleeps, and I think it’s a family, whole.

  A sphere, even if it is only one body wide, can be comfortable. Shannon gave me a good fuck, and I’m sure he will give many others, and better. He’ll draw tenderness from the cluttered world and let it spill, making other people feel as I felt. The weight of the world can rise, history all fog and ghosts. I lift my eyes from the cul-de-sac and take a jaunt around my own place.Years ago, I threw a yard sale and relieved myself of the furniture my parents left behind, pieces too big and cumbersome in design or content to move. I look at what I brought to this house on my own, what space is taken or empty. I look at what I see and what I know. I think about war, how it can make a person feel half a unity, and I grow frigid with my fear. I repaint the guest room a careful shade of neutral. I build a shelf in my kitchen and line it with empty jars.

  In due course Mother and Dad Craven go out of town. Amie and Jeff throw a rockin’ shindig. Kids come from all over the county, and the cops hang up when I call. They recognize my voice.

  Vivian slaps the shit out of her little daughter for walking in on her and the heroin addict. The girl, dumb in this country, finds the addict’s stash and mixes it with roach poison.

  Spliff sneaks up on Goody and one night Goody births a litter of spotty, baying puppies. The homosexuals creep into their backyard in the dark, dig a hole, take one puppy at a time by the hind legs and slam it against the wall of their garden office, drop each into the hole and cover it up.

  I am old, after all, and plenty dead. I’ve barely begun to work out the angles in my scheme, ridden as it is, still, with sloppy thinking, hypocrisy, and logistic impracticalities. As it is, with nothing new, there is too much work to be done.

  A Woman with a Gardener

  I’m with the caterers, a one-time job, a borrowed bow tie, old sneakers I’ve spray lacquered black. It was that or heels. Fifty bucks, four hours.

  White turned rails swoop up the lawn and curve around the verandah. What’s a verandah? It’s what I think I’m seeing. There’s a funny white statue of a lithe angel holding a lamp at the walkway entrance, and then later, up nearer the house where
the stairs start toward the entrance, nothing you could call a stoop, a baby one, what do you call it, a cherub? Like going in reverse, back in time. Next, great lion-headed knockers looking nothing like boobs, I think, annoying myself, scanning for a back entrance, somewhere I must be supposed to be going.There is one. Around back.You go in a door built into a hill and it’s a tunnel left over from slave days. I heard of these somewhere, in a class, maybe, this way to pretend you don’t have slaves, like it’s magic everything is so nice, but this place might be old or it might be replica. It doesn’t look old. What looks old and not dirty? This looks clean, a clean hill of grass, nice trees, a clean door in the hill, and inside, chunky rock walls. It could be a rich crazy lady’s delusional obsession. She could have built it for her demons. I don’t know enough to tell.

  Either way I feel dumpy and defensive. Inside it’s an underground kitchen and the company is using it to do final prep. Long metal tables fold out from the walls on insectlike legs and people, mostly dropout-looking kids, are lined along it in narrow cook’s hats making piles of dices and squeezing butter into ramekins with pastry bags. Piles of baskets for rolls, buckets of utensils, trays of four kinds of glasses, mounds of grapes, and eight hams pegged with fruit, and platters of strung-up little birds, and supersized crosshatched pies . . . I don’t know anything about food, but I’m for it.