Babylon and Other Stories (26 page)

“You are sick,” Hank said.

“She always has been,” Erica said. “I bet Dino finally
figured that out. What happened to Dino, anyway, Gayle? I thought you two were engaged.”

Gayle gazed at her levelly, choosing not to blink, just as she would at accounts who tried to string her along, get free drinks and lunches without ever committing to the deal. “He ordered a child bride from the Philippines instead,” she said, and Hank laughed. “Anyway, so Erica took back all the toys, plus the Cabbage Patch doll
and
Aerobics Barbie, and set them on fire in the backyard.”

“You did not,” Hank said.

“I was very upset,” Erica said. “You should've seen that tableau.”

“The smell of burning plastic was all down the street. It was intense,” Gayle said. “We had this babysitter who always took naps, and when she woke up the stuff was already melting. She never worked in that neighborhood again, I'll guarantee you. We both got into a lot of trouble, and our parents locked us in our rooms while they tried to figure out what to do with us. I was so mad at Erica for burning my toys. I've never been so mad in my whole life. To this day I don't think I've ever been that mad. Our parents unlocked the doors when we went to sleep that night, and I crept out of bed in my nightie and went into Erica's room and put my teeth on her arm, and I didn't stop until I tasted the blood in my mouth. She screamed like you wouldn't believe.”

“Jesus,” Hank said.

Erica sat rigid in her chair.

The wind blew coolly against Gayle's cheeks, and she realized she was flushed. In her memory she could taste the blood, its unmistakable metallic warmth, this liquid iron at the back of her throat. Over the years she'd tasted her own blood plenty of
times—chapped lips, hangnails, paper cuts—but never anyone else's, except Erica's.

“Aerobics Barbie?” Hank said after a while.

“She came with a little radio,” Gayle said.

“You never told me any of this,” he said to Erica.

She reached out her forearm and showed him the scar: a jagged half moon sunk forever into the skin.

“I always thought that was from a shot or something,” he said.

“Nope,” Gayle said. “From me. So anyway, maybe that's where Max gets it from, his Swanger blood.”

The kid had gotten out of the pool and had his pacifier back in his mouth. He had a different toy in his hand now, something in flesh-colored plastic, and he was spinning by the edge of the water to make it fly around his body in circles.

“Will you stop saying that?” Erica said.

“She's only kidding, honey,” Hank said. “Don't take it so seriously, okay?”

“Don't tell me what not to take seriously,
honey,
” Erica said, standing up. “I've had about enough of you telling me not to take things so seriously.”

Hank put his drink down on the concrete patio. “I only meant—”

“It's not like the Higginbottoms are God's gift to the world, you know,” Erica snapped. “Every single one of them would rather have a drink than an actual conversation with an actual human being. It's not like they're so perfect.”

“I didn't say they were,” he said. He stood up with his glass in his hand. “I'm going to get another drink. Gayle, do you want another drink?”

“No thanks,” Gayle said, although no one was listening to her.

“Don't walk away from me,” Erica ordered. He did. “Max, stay out here with your Aunt Gayle.”

If the kid heard this, he didn't show it. The glass doors slid open and closed, twice.

Gayle kicked off her sandals and sat down by the side of the pool, sticking her legs in the water. Max was on the other side, sitting on the steps of the pool again, making noises that sounded like gunfire and bombs. He'd taken his shirt off, and his skinny little chest was as white as office paper.

“Hey, Max,” she called, “what are you playing?”

He ignored her, focusing instead on his symphony of explosions. It was a war zone over in the shallow end. His fair hair was plastered to his big head. Gayle's thoughts moved, listless with gin and sunshine, to Dino. The child-bride thing wasn't actually that far from the truth. Although the girl was not technically a child; she was twenty. Old enough to be legal, young enough that she wouldn't give Dino a hard time about marriage and children.

“The perfect woman,” Gayle had said, and Dino had only nodded; he was always honest, which was supposed to be one of his good qualities. “I don't know why you were with me in the first place,” she'd told him, “if
that's
what you want.”

“No, you're great, Gayle. But—you push too hard. You can't let things, I don't know, unfold.”

“I put my cards on the table. What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing, I guess,” he'd said thoughtfully. “You just sometimes have the wrong cards.”

“Oh, I could kill him,” she said now, to herself but out loud.

This made the kid look up. “Kill the beast!” he said. He was holding up the flesh-colored toy: a figurine of a man with muscular arms, wearing a red shirt. One of the arms was partially extended, the other bent, but whatever he was about to shoot
someone with had gone missing. “I'll lock you and your father in the cellar, unless you marry me!” the kid said.

“No offense, Max,” Gayle said, “but I don't really know you that well. Plus we're related and everything.”

The kid's eyes were glazed and unfocused and he kept shaking the figurine at her, its one arm extended; she understood it was the figurine who was supposed to be speaking. “Kill the beast, chase you with wolves, lock you up!”

“The beast?” she said. “Like Beauty and the Beast?” The figurine nodded its whole body wildly in agreement. Leave it to this kid, she thought, to concentrate on all the most violent parts of the fairy tale. In his hands, it wasn't a story about love; it was an action movie, a mob scene, a hostage-taking. “Do you really want to kill the Beast? Isn't he a good character in the end?”

“Not to me!” the figurine said loudly.

“Well,” she said, thinking of Dino, “I guess I know how you feel.”

The kid made a strangled, wordless noise and threw the figurine in the water, where it floated on its back, its muscular arms extended toward the bottom of the pool. Then he threw a plastic ship at it, and the two toys rippled slowly forward, spinning as they floated toward Gayle. For a moment he stared at her, a look of shock and desperation on his face; he hadn't intended this to happen. Then he stepped farther into the pool and started splashing the water in an ineffectual attempt to turn the toys back in his direction. Actually he wasn't splashing the water so much as slapping it, hard, all the while making animal sounds of frustration. Just as he had slipped into a happy mood earlier, he seemed now to have lost, in an instant, all ability to form words.

“Max,” Gayle said, but he ignored her. The toys he'd flung away were suddenly the only ones he wanted, and all the others
lay abandoned behind him. His face was getting redder and redder, and a pink flush was spreading down his white chest, too. The sun was hot and strong and he was going to get a burn, she thought; so was she. She dipped her hands in the pool and splashed her face. When she opened her eyes, the kid was all the way in the water, paddling frantically toward his toys, having difficulty holding his huge head above the water, and terrible gasping noises were coming out of his nose and mouth. He'd moved about three feet into the center of the pool, out of the shallow end, but the wake of his awkward swimming had only pushed the toys further away from him.

“Max,” Gayle said, “can you swim?”

The kid's eyes—pale blue, unfocused, Higginbottom eyes— moved toward her, his lips moving soundlessly, and his arms flailing around in a circular movement that didn't look even close to the crawl. Gayle saw the enormous blond head sink lower and lower until it was beneath the surface of the water, and his pale, small feet were kicking in a sideways frenzy that wasn't going to do him any good at all.

She jumped into the pool and swam over to him. The kid was spazzing out in the water, his limbs going in all directions, and when she reached him he kicked her in the stomach, hard. She kept trying to grab his body, but his skin was slippery and each time he wriggled out of her grasp. Her skirt twisted itself around her waist. Something scraped her leg—a toenail? a toy?—and she couldn't see clearly, the water so frothy from all the commotion. Finally she got hold of his midsection and heaved herself up. The kid was scraping his hands up and down her arms, and she broke the surface saying, “Ow, damn it, Max,” and he was screaming with what she thought was panic but then realized, as his arms kept extending behind her, was rage: he was still reaching
for his toys and couldn't get them. In his anger he kneed her in the chest and she choked and sank down, the two of them wrestling. She couldn't believe how strong he was, how capable he was of pulling her down.
He'll kill me,
she thought for one crazy second. Then, with a last push, she got him into the shallow end and carried him out. There was a piercing sound in her ears, which, she now became aware, had been going on for some time. It was her sister, who tore Max out of her grasp and wrapped him in a towel and her own arms, shrieking all the while.

Gayle stood up, dizzy, heart going madly, dripping in her clothes. She pulled her skirt down over her thighs. Behind Erica and Max, Hank stood by the glass doors with another drink in his hand, watching.

“Are you okay? Are you okay?” Erica was saying to her son, and Gayle couldn't hear what, if anything, he was answering. Erica looked at her over his head. “What the hell were you thinking? I can't leave you alone with him for five minutes? Were you trying to kill him? What the hell is your problem?” She burst into tears and hugged Max again, her two-colored hair mingling and dampening with his wet blond strands.

Gayle rubbed her arms. Her legs were shaking. There were streaks on her biceps where the kid's fingernails had broken her skin. “I was trying to help,” she said, and looked at Hank, but he said nothing.

“I don't know why you even had to come,” Erica said, sobs thickening her voice. “What do you even want?”

If this were a sales deal, Gayle thought, she would have the perfect answer to that question; she would be able to calm Erica down; she would know exactly what to say to close. But it wasn't, and she didn't. She stood there wet and shivering and silent. The
kid was turned away from her, his body hidden by the towel that fell to his feet. She only knew that, though she had been misunderstood, she was bound to come back. It was just the way things were, and it was never going to leave her, this craving she had for blood.

I'm more of a cat person, really—I prefer a warm purr on the lap to the bouncing, slap-happy kisses of dogs. But when my husband, Phil, brought Blister home from the park, I have to admit that I fell in love with him just as deeply, as swooningly and childishly, as he did. Phil'd been out jogging, which he did every weekend (although I knew, from having accidentally driven past him once, that he jogged five blocks to the park, walked to a bench, and sat down for a while before jogging back), when Blister came up, prancing, and licked his ankle. Blister was a small dog, knee-high, with short black hair that shone like an oil slick in the Saturday afternoon sun. He was wearing a red collar with a round tag that bore his name. After petting him a little, Phil looked around for the owner, who was nowhere to be found, and after a further while he brought him home to me, when the previously mentioned falling in love happened and there was a lot of petting and fetching and wagging and speculating about his name, which seemed to suit him perfectly in some strange way, and there was also, I'll be honest, some baby-talking to the dog, and after looking for posters and ads in the paper we took him to the pound, and since no one claimed him in fourteen days, Blister was ours.

We don't have kids. Phil doesn't want them, and I kind of do but not badly enough to push; but with Blister we made a family. Phil works days, as an actuary, and I work the night shift in the clean room of a computer-chip manufacturer, so we cross paths at home like the proverbial ships in the proverbial night. Before Blister, we were often so tired that we'd just sit on the couch, not talking, watching an hour of shared television before heading off in our separate directions. After Blister, we'd venture out into the neighborhood, to the park or along the weedy industrial lots behind the shopping center, where Blister could run off leash, investigating trash, spills, and the accidental wildlife that thrives along the unkempt edges of suburbia. We'd talk, Phil and I, not about anything major—just our days, people who were annoying us at work, that kind of thing—and although I hadn't realized that our marriage was in any danger, I could feel cracks being mended, a kind of basement-level fortification, and I knew that the dog was saving us.

Even in the freezing winters we walked Blister, or he walked us, even in ice storms when his paws slipped comically over the glittering carapaces of lawns, even in black afternoons after the end of daylight savings. The dog walk was our together time. And then, in March, Phil got his promotion and started working longer hours. The money was welcome but the hours were difficult; for one thing, I had to walk Blister alone, by myself, in the afternoon. When Phil finally got home, Blister would greet him in a frenzy, curling up beside him on the couch, his black chin on Phil's thigh; but I only heard about these things, because by then I was already gone.

At work I wear a bunny suit, helmet to booties, the entire thing, and have to move slowly, so as not to disturb the complex air-filtration system, and I don't talk much, either. I use a scanner
to examine chips for defects. People say it must be hard working nights, the same tasks each shift, in silence. This, however, is not the case. It is an atmosphere of almost one-hundred-percent calm. I move through the shift in a trance, my mind in total focus, my body swathed and clean. The chips are made out of a square wafer and then cut out into circles, and the chemicals on them produce gorgeous and geometric patterns of pink and blue. When a chip comes under the scanner and I look at it—carefully, carefully—it reminds me of a jewel sparkling in a store window. It shows me that human beings can make something perfect and beautiful. I love what I do, and don't want to give it up, not even to be at home in the evenings on the couch with Blister and Phil.