It Chooses You (9 page)

Miranda: I understand.

I felt a little ashamed to have asked. And yet it would have been more romantic if she had pulled a picture of the blue-eyed husband, the one I had just suggested was the love of her life, out of her blouse. Two lives, one after the other, but the second life can never compare…

Beverly: I planned a surprise for you. His name is Sebastian, and he won’t be here till four thirty.

Miranda: Oh, well, you know what — we have another interview at four thirty.

Beverly: Oh no.

Miranda: Sorry, I didn’t realize that.

Beverly: I’m really sorry you can’t see Sebastian. He’s thirty-five pounds. He’s double what we’ve got here. And she walks him on a leash like a dog, and it’s just the darnedest thing you ever saw in your whole life. And the thing of it is she does drum rolls on him — hard. She gets in there and just pounds and he just takes it all — I don’t know how, but he does. Look what I made you guys.

Beverly pulled a giant bowl of fruit salad out of the fridge. It was the kind with marshmallows; they’d melted into the juice, turning it milky. I started to make a polite noise of regret, but seeing her face fall, I realized refusing was the opposite of polite. I squeezed my iPhone in my pocket. Would it be weird to check my email right now? Or maybe read the news? I had an overwhelming desire to take a little time-out. One option was a bathroom break.

Miranda: Wow, that’s a lot of chopping. Could you point me toward the —

Beverly: Yeah — took me all morning.
I can send a cup with you home on the road.

She had bought an enormous amount of fruit and spent all morning chopping it. She’d asked her husband to herd the biblical sheep toward us at the exact moment we exited the aviary; she’d invited Sebastian, the thirty-five-pound leopard. The least I could do was eat the salad.

Miranda: Okay, give us a cup, that would be great.

Beverly: I can also do a bowl. Or cups — which would you prefer?

Miranda: A bowl’s good. Just one bowl and we’ll —

Beverly: Oh no! You each get one! Would you like some crackers to go with it? We like soda crackers with ours, crumbled on top, but it’s up to you.

We held the dripping bowls in the car and drove to the gas station. I made us each eat one piece of pineapple before we threw them in the trash. It tasted fine. I moved some newspaper over the bowls, because what if Beverly went to get some gas and threw something away and saw? Nothing could be worse than that. We had gone to the place where all living things come from; it was fetid and smelly and cloyingly sweet, filled with raw meat and curling horns, her face was smashed, everything was breeding and cross-breeding, newborn or biblical. And I couldn’t take it. The fullness of her life was menacing to me — there was no room for invention, no place for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes me feel useful, or feel anything at all. She wanted me to just actually be there and eat fruit with her.

I went home and immediately fell asleep, as if fleeing from consciousness. I woke up three hours later and, instead of going online, I tried to pretend I was Beverly, that I was so caught up in living things I that didn’t have “the time or the energy” for a computer. The
PennySaver
didn’t have quite the allure it once did, but I sat down with the latest issue and a pen to circle new listings. Andrew’s ad was still in there; the tadpoles had probably transitioned this week. It seemed Michael had sold the leather jacket; he was ten dollars closer to womanhood. Everything was changing, except me. I was sitting in my little cave, trying to squeeze something out of nothing. I couldn’t just conjure a fiction — the answers to my questions about Jason had to be true, wrought from life, like all the other parts of the story.

Each character in the movie had been wrestled into existence, quickly or slowly, usually slowly and then all at once. A year earlier I had been suffering through a fruitless week when I told myself, Okay, loser, if you really are incapable of writing, then let’s hear it. Let’s hear what incapable sounds like. I made broken, inhuman sounds and then tried to type them, with sodden, clumsy hands. I wrote the pathetic tale of Incapable. It was long and irrelevant to my story about Sophie and Jason. Who would talk like this? Not a man or woman, no one fit for a movie.

I shut my computer gratefully at the sound of my husband’s car outside. I waved from the porch as he parked, and then, with growing horror, I watched our dog jump out of the car, chasing a cat into the street as a speeding car approached. The car swerved to avoid hitting the dog, and hit the cat instead. It had happened so quickly — one moment I was writing about Incapable, and in the next moment I was putting a dead cat in a bag. He was an old, bedraggled stray, one I had seen around. I felt as though we were all complicit — me, my husband, and the driver. All of us had been careless, if not today then on another day, and all this carelessness had culminated in the death of a stranger.

When the cat was buried I finally sat back down to work and re-read the broken monologue. I felt more tenderly toward the inhuman voice now; it wasn’t really incapable, just very alone, and tired, and unwanted — a stray. I named him Paw Paw and swore I would avenge his death. He was part of the script now.

It took me a long time to figure out this cat’s place in the story. Again and again it was respectfully suggested to me that I cut Paw Paw’s monologue. But I couldn’t kill him twice, and I thought his voice might be the distressing, ridiculous, problematic soul of what I was trying to make. Not that my conviction protected me; it’s always embarrassing to pin a tail onto thin air, nowhere near the donkey. It might be wrong, it sure looks like it is — but then again, maybe the donkey’s in the wrong place, or there are two donkeys, and the tail just got there first.

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Pam could not believe we were seeing her house when it was such a mess. We assured her that it looked very clean, which it did — clean and chaotically filled with art. Gainsborough’s
The Blue Boy,
The Hunt of the Unicorn
, and various other familiaresque images had been meticulously re-created in needlepoint, by Pam, over the years. We settled ourselves around a large stack of albums and I lifted one onto my lap.

Miranda: Where did these come from?

Pam: One of my friends, he has a friend, and that friend have a big sale. I keep looking at the first album and the second one, and I said, “Oh my god, that’s interesting. I wish I could go on vacation like this lady here.”

As she talked I flipped though the album, and then another one. They were all filled with pictures of the same wealthy white couple — beginning with their wedding in the ’50s and ending with the last of their cruises.

Pam: These people, they are going all over the world. To Greece and Italy and Japan, and it is gorgeous wherever. It really is nice, and someday maybe I wish I can go, but no money this time. My life, I get married so young and I have no time for vacation. And I say, Well, I can look at this pictures — is better than no vacation.

Miranda: So you don’t know these people?

Pam: No, I don’t know the people, but I don’t want the albums to be thrown away. I keep almost like ten years actually, in my house.

I glanced at her, wondering if she was a bit of a hoarder. She wore a pink sleeveless top, not unlike Michael’s, and her baroque decorating style made her seem older than she was. I guessed she was forty-eight. An exhausted forty-eight.

Miranda: What do you imagine their life was like?