Babylon and Other Stories (25 page)

I look at the
Reader's Digest
books. “Where do you get this stuff?”

“I read things,” he says.

“Is that a water bed you've got there?”

He shoots me a look.

“I've never actually been on one,” I say.

He holds out his arm in a gesture of welcome, the bottle of Scotch still in his hand. I lie down on my back, expecting it to swish and sway. Instead it feels basically solid, like any other mattress. Unfortunately I'm encountering other problems: the spins, for example. The water bed and I seem to lift up off the ground together, hurtling through space on a mission to some faraway planet. My palms feel very cold. I keep losing my grip on my glass. Luther Hodges is lying next to me, talking about back muscles and the even distribution of weight. The bed spins
and flies, part water, part solid. I'm leaving earth and I'm all alone—no Jeff, no Mario, no camera—and it almost makes me cry, the agony and confusion of it, and I grab Luther by his grimy collar and pull him down closer to me, so that on this mission at least I'll have a warm body along for the ride.

I wake up regretful.

A few hours later I wake again and find I'm still in the apartment. In my dream I'd showered, dressed, and left Luther behind—but apparently never got around to doing it for real. A middle-aged man is lying next to me, smelling of middle-aged sweat. I think I've just violated a bunch of journalistic ethics. I remember what one of my journalism professors used to say: “When you find you're starting to break all the rules I've taught you, you'll know you're finally working in news.”

I get dressed slowly, my stomach several steps behind me. Luther's snoring is soft and buzzing and regular, like a small appliance. He doesn't budge as I leave the place, stepping out into the cold morning. The temperature's the same as it has been, but today the cold doesn't feel bitter. It just feels numb, inevitable. I'm not even surprised when Jeff and Aurora pull up to the curb. Why wouldn't they be here? It's their case.

I walk toward them, all of our three breaths pluming in the air. I can see that Aurora knows right away what has happened, and that Jeff doesn't, because his brain won't admit to it, won't let him see it, even though there are simple explanations for most things. I know that this, as much as my future in news, explains why I couldn't ever marry him. He isn't unobservant; he just can't imagine that someone he loves could be so different from himself.

“He must be asleep,” I tell them. “I couldn't get him to come to the door.”

“Probably passed out,” Jeff says.

“Probably,” I agree.

He looks at me closely, and for a second I think he registers my hangover, my bleary eyes, my skin that Luther Hodges has touched with his doughy little hands. “You're up early,” he says.

“News never sleeps,” I say.

I head home and shower and check messages. There's only one and it's from Jeff, from last night. He's calling to tell me that the homeless man in Cranston has been identified by workers at a downtown shelter. So far as they know, the guy didn't have any family. He gets to the end of the message and then stops talking for a couple of seconds, as if he expects me, impossibly, to say something back. It's the moment of hope that gets me, that pause on the line before he hangs up.

The kid was screaming, and Gayle's sister seemed helpless to stop him. He stood on the steps of the swimming pool in the backyard, its serene turquoise water shimmering in the afternoon sun, oblivious to his complaints. Gayle, watching, was tempted to cover her ears. It had been two years since she'd seen the kid, and in that time something had gone seriously wrong. To begin with, his head had grown way out of proportion to his body, although she couldn't quite tell if this was part of the problem or only some sorry accompaniment to it. More disturbingly, from the second she'd arrived at the house he'd been screaming his head off, almost literally: his wide, chubby face swollen and red, his enormous head flung back, wobbling above the tiny stem of his neck as if threatening to detach. All this because he wanted to eat macaroni and cheese and Gayle's sister, Erica, didn't have any in the house.

“Be soft, Max,” Erica kept saying. “Be soft.”

The kid did not want to be soft. Softness was last on his list of priorities.

“It's not fair!” he screamed, his face getting, impossibly, even redder. Twin streams of mucus ran out of his nose and down his chin. His little hands kept twisting the hem of his striped T-shirt in an anguished, strangely adult, Lady Macbeth–like gesture.

Erica knelt beside him, her face level with his, wheedling. “Why don't we go inside and have some bagel pizzas?”

“I hate bagel pizzas,” was the kid's response. “You said I could have mac and cheese, and I want mac and cheese! It's. Not. Fair!”

“I could run out to the store and get some, if you want,” Gayle said. At this her sister turned and stared as if she'd suggested capital punishment, or jail time, or selling the kid into slavery. It was not, apparently, the appropriate solution.

“What are you thinking?” Erica said. She always asked rhetorical questions when she was mad. “He needs to learn you can't always get what you want. Isn't that right, Max? Isn't that what you need to learn?”

“No, it's not. It's
not
what I need to learn
at all
!” He curled his hands into fists and beat them against Erica's chest. Gayle flinched. He was hitting hard.

“Okay, that's enough,” Erica said. “You're taking a time-out.” She scooped him up by the waist and carried him inside, his legs thrashing behind her like he was swimming. Gayle wondered what she'd do when he got too big for her to pick him up. The head alone would soon be too big, at the rate it was growing.

While her sister and the kid were waging the mac-and-cheese war inside—she could hear, through the sliding glass doors, the muted arias of his continuing screams—Gayle sat down in a lounger by the pool. A mountain laurel hung over a corner of the shallow end, its blue flowers bent down, as if drawn to the blue water. It was a brilliantly sunny day in early April, eighty-five degrees, the perfect season to be back in Texas. She always tried to line up sales conferences in sunny places this time of year: Florida, Arizona, southern California. There were conferences going on in every state, every weekend, at every hotel, and Gayle
sometimes thought it wasn't sales that kept the economy going, wasn't in fact any particular industry or service, but the conferences themselves. She'd chosen this one so she could see her sister and family, a decision she knew she'd regret almost immediately but had made anyway, because her parents would have wanted her to.

The glass doors slid open, then closed, smooth on their runners. Erica's husband came outside, carrying two glasses, and handed her one.

“Henry Higginbottom,” Gayle said, and took it. “Hank.” In the eight years he and Erica had been married, Gayle had never gotten tired of saying his name. They hugged. Henry was wearing khaki shorts and a button-down shirt and he sat down in the lounger next to her. His legs were pasty white. He had a job teaching biology at the university. All the Higginbottoms were nerds: teachers, lab technicians, civil servants. They all wore glasses, too, and in the wedding photos—taken on a day as bright as today—their eyes were often hidden behind the lenses, which caught and reflected the Texas sun.

“So, how's the conference?” he said.

“Oh, you know.” Gayle sipped her drink, which was gin, and enjoyably strong. “Power Point slides, vendors, cocktails. The usual. It's nice to take the afternoon off.”

“Always be closing,” Hank said. “That's the extent of what I know.”

“That's pretty much the gist of it.”

“So have you been? Closing?”

“Sure.”

“I'd suck at it. Schmoozing and handshaking.”

Gayle shrugged. “It's easy if you don't take it personally. It's just your job, you know? It's just the things you sell. It's not
you.
”

“So basically you're saying you have no soul.”

“I leased it to the company,” she said, “in exchange for a thing called money.”

Hank laughed, and she smiled at him. The two of them had always gotten along.

In the distance, the kid kept on screaming. Then, in an instant, he stopped, and behind his glasses Hank raised his blond eyebrows.

“She used the secret weapon,” he said.

Moments later, Erica and Max came outside holding hands. Max had a pacifier in his mouth, and the redness of his face was paling to a moderate rose.

“I thought we were trying not to do the pacifier thing anymore,” Hank said.

“Were you in there just now?” Erica said.

“Okay,” he said.

“I'm going swimming,” the kid removed his pacifier to say. He ran to the other end of the pool, where the steps were, and sat down on the top one. He was still wearing his regular clothes, a T-shirt and shorts. He had Higginbottom coloring, light blond hair and alabaster skin. Without looking at them he started splashing quietly around the top step, humming to himself, seeming perfectly happy. It was as if Erica had given him a quickie lobotomy inside the house.

“Drink, honey?”

“No, thank you,” Erica said tightly. She pulled up a lawn chair and sat down next to her husband. She'd gained a solid fifteen pounds since the last time Gayle had seen her, and her dye job had grown out so her hair was now half blond, half dark brown: half Higginbottom, Gayle thought, and half Swanger. She wasn't
working these days, and Gayle had hoped maybe she'd be more relaxed than usual, but this was not the case. She was staring gloomily at Max, who was making a boat capsize in the water, over and over again, and imitating, in his high, delicate voice, the siren wails of imaginary people being thrown overboard. He'd taken out the pacifier and set it on the cement amid a scattered rainbow of toys. Gayle waited for Erica to say something about this, but she didn't. The three of them just sat there watching the kid play, as Gayle had noticed parents often did: too exhausted to maintain their own conversations, they gazed at their children as if they were television.

“He's sure gotten a lot bigger,” she eventually said.

“Shockingly,” Erica said.

Gayle and Hank exchanged looks.

“Max has been having some trouble at school,” he said. “It's been a little rough around here lately. We keep getting these calls.”

“I keep getting these calls,” Erica said. “Hank doesn't get the calls.”

“Young rebel,” Gayle said. “What's going on, exactly?”

Hank glanced at Erica before answering, but she was still staring at Max in the pool. “There's been some aggressive behavior, I guess? I'm sure it's not a big deal. Happens to lots of kids, I think.”

“Aggressive behavior,” Gayle said. “What kind?”

“Well, one thing, most recently, is that he pulled a teacher's pants down. She was telling him that he had to pull his pants down to go to the bathroom, and he insisted that she do the same thing.”

“Only fair,” Gayle said.

“That's what he said. But she refused, and I guess he just
grabbed her waist pretty hard and pulled her pants down, and her underwear came down too, so she was exposed in front of like twenty kids. She wasn't very happy about it.”

Gayle snorted. “I bet not.” She looked up at the blue Texas sky. She was wearing a skirt—she'd come straight from a lunch meeting—and the sunlight hit her shins with a pleasant weight. “The little monster. Must be the Swanger in him.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on, Erica.”

“Come on where?” Erica said, opening her eyes wide. The skin beneath them was puffy and dark.

“Well, we had our own issues, I guess, is all I'm saying.”

“We did not.”

“We did too.”

“What kind of issues?” Hank said.

“I guess in today's parlance you'd call it aggressive behavior,” Gayle said. “Kicking, hitting, biting.”

“Biting?”

“That was you,” Erica said, “not me.”

“Well, the biting was.”

“You bit people?” Hank said.

“Just Erica,” Gayle said. “Sank my teeth right into her flesh.” She hesitated for a second, knowing that telling this story would make Erica mad. Although virtually everything Gayle did made Erica mad. All their lives it had been this way, and even more so since their parents had died, leaving the two of them abandoned, undiluted. They'd died within months of each other—both of cancer, as united in illness as they'd been in marriage—shortly after Max was born, and Gayle and Erica had just barely made it through the funerals without arguing. Yet Gayle still called her sister, still wrote and visited, the same as when they were kids
and she wouldn't stop going into Erica's room, even when her parents told her to leave well enough alone.

“Why'd you bite her?”

“She had my doll. My Cabbage Patch doll.”

“I remember Cabbage Patch dolls,” Hank said. “Vaguely.”

“She took the doll, and the birth certificate, and everything.”

“You weren't taking care of her,” Erica said. “There was
mold
growing on her back.”

“That was because of the air-conditioning unit,” Gayle said. “Not my fault.”

“A responsible parent would've noticed.”

“I was like eight,” Gayle said. “So anyway, I went into Erica's room and took the doll back. And okay, I took some of her stuff, too. Her My Little Ponies and Strawberry Shortcakes.”

“She took all my toys,” Erica said.

“It's okay, honey,” Hank said, and put his pale hand on her arm. Gayle wondered what was with all these
honeys.
Judging by Erica's reaction, or lack of one, it was a completely useless endearment.

“And I arranged them in a, uh, tableau, would you call it, Rica?” she said.

“I wouldn't call it anything.” She turned her entire body toward her husband. “It was the most sadistic thing you ever saw in your life. Those poor dolls. Some of them were hanging in little nooses from the bookshelf. And the other ones, Strawberry Shortcake and Raspberry Tart—they were being, you know, molested by the ponies and stuff.”

“Raspberry
was
a tart,” Gayle said, “and Strawberry wasn't as innocent as she looked, either.”