Doing Dangerously Well (4 page)

Within the house, an overburdened taxpayer flipped through his newspaper and glanced at an item hidden on the seventh page. His outline was that of a bulrush: thin, with a pale stem and greying brown hair frizzing at the top. Hair also protruded
from his ears and nose, but most startlingly from his eyebrows, almost as a visor.

He scanned the item and smiled to himself, nodding in approval. He had a special interest in dams, having had the privilege of serving as an engineer on some of the giant projects of the 1960s, most notably the Inga Dams in the Congo-his most cherished project.

“Aha!” He flicked his finger onto the newsprint in triumph. “Another of my predictions comes true.”

“Ernest!” A deep boom from the kitchen, clipped tones with strong dental fricatives. “Put that down now and help me with the clearing up.”

“Chalk another one up for Ernest, my dear.” He licked his finger and marked an imaginary blackboard in the air, waggling his crossed leg in self-approval.

Catherine entered the drawing room, detective eyes darting back and forth, following a trail. She stopped. Then exploded: “Have you brought mud into the house?” She fell back two or three steps in shock.

“If you’d given me the weather patterns for the last five years …” he continued in a conversational pattern woven from forty years of married bliss.

“What the hell have you done to my carpets?” she snapped.

(A conversational pattern woven like chain mail, that is.)

“… I could have told you the dam would break,” he pointed at her, “and the exact month and year of rupture,” waving his victorious finger in a final flourish.

“Ernest! Get your feet off that table now!”

Ernest held his feet up in the air, letting them hover above the table. “… With a month or two of leeway, of course.”

Catherine’s box-shaped hands roughly unburdened her
husband of his shoes, staring at him with a depth of loathing that only intimacy allows.

“Wonder if you can bet on these things. I’d make a fortune, you know.”

She rushed to the hall closet, chucked in his shoes, liberated the vacuum and handed it to Ernest. “Mary and Barbie are due today,” she snapped, “and you’ve decided to open a greenhouse in our front room—don’t respond!”

Ernest stood up and looked out the window towards the sprinklers. “Always die in droves, don’t they?” he mused in his wife’s general direction. “They’ll no doubt harass us for foreign aid. Arrange a few pop concerts and so on. As if we don’t pay high enough taxes already!” He sighed. “Still, far, far less than if we’d stayed in England.” He turned to his wife for a congratulatory nod.

Catherine stood in front of him, blood collecting around her throat and chins, anger mounting.

Ernest turned on the vacuum. “Looks good for Mary’s company, I must say,” he reflected, as he pushed mud to the farthest corners of the carpet.

As this deeply connected pair continued their interchange, another pair of eyes alighted on this innocuous snippet of information. Unlike most reading the piece, these did not scan quickly and move on. Mary’s eyes rested carefully on the words and then slowly crinkled up at the corners.

Spider fingers darted to the first memory button on her cellphone. “Hello, Janet. Sorry to disturb you. I want information on all the major players in Nigeria on my desk by Tuesday.”

“But it’s Thanksgiving!”

“Don’t worry. They don’t celebrate it. See you Tuesday. I’m available on my cell all day.” She was about to hang up when
she remembered a small point of etiquette. “Best wishes to your family, by the way.”

Mary rang off and sat back in the limousine sailing past lunar landscapes and ragged bush on her way from Santa Fe to the airport in Albuquerque. A hairless replica of her father, Mary was all angles, points and corners, with a plumb line for a body, a mercilessly rectangular chin and a gash on her lower face that served as a mouth.

She caught a first-class flight to Washington DC. There she hopped into another limo, which coasted into Alexandria and cruised up the crescent driveway, coming to a smooth but forceful stop. She set her cellphone’s ring to loud, hoping that an emergency would arise, and chucked it into her bag, almost as a basketball trick. As she walked to the front door, she inadvertently trampled the meticulous row of small, tight, fairly ugly flowers that led up to it. She checked her watch. It was 1200h. She rang the bell.

“Hello, darling!” It was her father, already slightly sloshed. “You look like an enchantress, darling, doesn’t she, Mum? Do come in!”

“Thank you, Daddy. You look spectacular yourself. How’s the golf? Mom, what a wonderful dress you have on. Where did you manage to buy such a thing? It matches your skin colour so wonderfully!” Mary didn’t bother to listen for responses. No interest. “I’ve brought you presents. Hope you like them.”

Her assistant had purchased and exquisitely wrapped the presents in TransAqua International’s gift paper, and written and signed the cards as well.

“G and T, darling?” Father said, taking her burnished brown cashmere to hang but turning away before the coat gained any purchase on the hanger.

“Thank you, Daddy.” Mary headed to rescue her coat. “So, Mom, how’s the garden?”

Mary’s sister, Barbara, charged into the Center for Beatific Light, which remained open on Thanksgiving Day to promote the serenity its clients required to endure family occasions. She ripped off her coat to reveal a purple leotard a couple of sizes too small and bounded into the yoga room, reared slightly and coughed. Some over-eager yogi had lit a bit too much Nag Champa—it must be Dayisha—despite her submission of a written complaint on the matter only one week ago. As she ran to the props, she threw the teacher a glance of black contempt.

Ignoring the odium emanating back at her from Dayisha’s half-closed eyes, Barbara busily rifled through the yoga mats until she found her favourite purple—the colour of the spirit—and tiptoed hurriedly and loudly to the front of the class. She unfurled her mat with a flourish and lay down in corpse pose, panting like a dog.

To slow her breathing, she started taking in prana breaths, whistling through a pinched “o” for the uptake and exhaling loudly in a slow groan for the exhale. After a few seconds, she tapped the shoulder of a strange creature to her left. She could not tell whether it was male or female, nor did it seem to be of any fixed race. However, she had noticed it in class over the last few months. It always arrived early and sat in its front/centre spot.

“Could you move your mat over?” she wheezed. “I can hardly fit here.”

It turned its head and opened its eyes. Barbara smiled and blinked a greeting.

“No.” It closed its eyes again, rolled its head back to centre and silently linked its thumb and forefinger for added concentration.

“Well, I can’t fit in,” Barbara continued, displeased that the creature had ignored such a blatant overture.

“There’s no room.” Its eyes remained closed. “Go to the back.”

“I can’t see what—”

“Sshh!” the teacher interrupted. “No conversation, please. Keep focusing on your breathing.”

“I can’t see what she’s doing unless I’m at the front,” Barbara whispered.

“Go to another class, then. I’m sure they’ll let you back in Beginners.”

“I don’t think this is terrific for your karma, you know,” Barbara barked. She stared at the ridiculous object-neither male nor female-lying on its blue mat, hair twisted in the manner of a Dutch milkmaid.

“Who put you in charge of my karma?” it asked, opening yellow-green eyes and talking to the ceiling in irritation.

“You’ll pay for this in your next life,” she said. “You’ll come back as a virus. Or maybe worse. You’ll come—”

“Ssssh!” Dayisha again. “Please. Keep quiet!”

“You’ll come back as yourself.” She could see that life had already played the creature a cruel joke, with its female face on its stringy male body. Barbara stared at the hermaphrodite, battling with her deeply held Taoist beliefs. On the one hand, he/she/it represented a pulling together of all of nature’s threads; on the other hand, the object represented the frayed edges where reason disintegrates into chaos.

Moving her mat, she opted to stay in the here and now, as one of her Buddhist gurus had so wisely instructed. Filled with vexation, Barbara pledged to enlighten the creature as to the spiritual dangers of its unreasonable behaviour.

As the other students attempted to push their thousand thoughts away from their busy minds, Barbara lay-as if
entombed—with that single thought heralding her in-breath and trailing her out-breath.

Fifty minutes after her sister, Barbara arrived in a rattling and rusting hybrid, late as usual. Spotting the limo, she hid her car behind the house, where it stalled to a halt, sputtering for many moments afterwards. She stormed up the front path with a tut and veered off towards the side of the house to turn off the tap that supplied the sprinkler system, disgusted at her parents’ open violation of municipal guidelines on water use. Then, shaking her head in reproach, she clinked up to the door, her Papuan trinkets clattering against her chest, and rang the bell.

She checked her reflection in the brass-plated keyhole, jabbing the antique barrettes lurking in the ink splash atop her head into new positions. She knew her appearance would cause comment of a disparaging nature. However she tried, and despite her parents’ constant advocacy on behalf of the family aesthetic, she could not create “willowy.” Slender, slim, even thin was good. Anorexia would have made them proud, but Rubenesque was simply unacceptable.

She looked down at her Tibetan skirt. “Of course,” she muttered to herself, “patriarchal hegemony will always repress those elements that threaten the status qu…” She adjusted the skirt to look more slimming. “I, for one, refuse to subordinate myself to such an obvious form of tyra …” She reached into her bra and flattened her breasts into her armpits. “… nny which performs the same role in 2020 as foot binding did in whenever.”

And so this robust item of seventeenth-century splendour stood staring at the door, trying to persuade herself that five hours behind it could do her little harm, as long as she said as little as possible of any depth or consequence. Her beliefs differed from her family’s to such an extent that they considered her
slow-witted: slightly more intelligent than a rock, but certainly less gifted than any creature that might live underneath one.

As there was still no answer, she rapped on the door.

“Ernie, tell her not to bother. We’ve almost finished,” her mother instructed on the other side of the door.

Barbara could feel the anxiety rising in her and the blood rushing through her veins, but was able to release the tension by acknowledging it (her Gestalt therapy had been well worth the money). As a safety measure, she also popped 2 milligrams of clonazepam.

This time, she vowed to unleash all her expertise on her family-her listening skills (“What I’m hearing from you is …”), her conflict resolution training (“I feel x when you do y”), therapy techniques (“And what makes you think that?”; “How does that make you feel?”; etc.)-and, if all failed, she would simply remain in a deep meditative state.

“Hello, darling!” Her father finally opened the door, a beaming smile on his face. “You look like an enchantress, darling, doesn’t she, Mother? Gained some weight? Do come in! What’s happened to your face? Let me take your coat, sweetheart.”

“Ernie!” A screaming voice. Mother was not far behind it. “In! Don’t keep that door open. Barbie, darling, it’s so wonderful to see … You seem to have put on a lot of … Jesus Christ! What the hell have you done to my …”

“Like a drink, luv? Vodka tonic, isn’t it?”

“No. I’m Scotch.”

“Who cares what she drinks, Ernie? Look what she’s done to my flowers!”

“No, you’re not!” Father added.

Barbara was already confused. “I’m not what?”

“You’re not Scotch.”

“Yes, I am!”

“It’s never passed your lips. You’re vodka.”

“I hate vodka. I’m Scotch. Always have been. Since I was thirteen, for god’s sake.”

Temporarily distracted by the sight of her sister slithering into the hallway, Barbara turned to catch her mother crouching deeply behind her, legs wide apart, hands on knees, surveying her daughter’s shoes.

“Mom, I am at one with the flowers. I respect nature’s bounty! Besides, my car is parked over there! That was Mary.”

Mother stood up, crossing her arms, her lips pressed and indignant chins thrust so deeply into her neck that blood collected within the creases. Her eyes stared dead ahead, fixated on their target—the small frame of Mary.

Barbara unknowingly mirrored her mother’s body language, staring down at Mary in profound disbelief, arms crossed, slicing her body in half. Mother pivoted slowly from one hip to the other while the room echoed her silence. Barbara also switched her weight to her left hip. Mary shot a look of loathing at her sister.

“Such a pity,” Barbara said. “They were such beautiful flowers too.”

She spotted panic in Mary’s bat-like eyes—as the elder sister, perfection was Mary’s watchword, and anything less could destroy her. A wash of empathy swept through Barbara: her sister was only adopting the role the family demanded of her. Even she expected this unwittingly fragile creature, placed at a precarious height, to represent the bastion of the family’s ideals. If Mary fell, Barbara would feel the bruise just as keenly.

“I’ll get some more flowers,” Barbara said.

Mary strained a smile. “Don’t bother. I’ll get them. Cost really isn’t an issue.” Then the stab. “For me, anyway. Another G and T, please, Dad.”

Stung into silence, Barbara vowed to rein in her compassion.

“G and T? Of course, darling.” He turned to Barbara. “I’ll just be a sec with your vodka, pumpkin.”

“Scotch!”

“Scotch? Coming up. Always good to try out new things.”

With that intervention over, it was now time for the family to focus fully on Barbara.

“What in heaven’s name has happened to your face?” Mother was a foot away from Barbara’s nose. She could feel the hot air from her mother’s nostrils on her cheeks and see the beams of disgust radiating from her eyes. “Don’t you care about your appearance? Did anyone see you come up the road like that?”