Stranger Things Happen (22 page)

Jak calls me at three in the morning. He says that he has a
terrific idea for a sci-fi story. I say that I don't want to hear a
sci-fi idea at three in the morning. Then he says that it isn't
really a story idea, that it's true. It happened to him and he has
to tell someone about it, so I say okay, tell me about it.

I lie in bed listening to Jak. There is a man lying beside me in
bed that I met in a bar a few hours ago. He has a stud in his
penis. This is kind of a disappointment, not that he has a stud in
his penis, but the stud itself. It's very small. It's not like an
earring. I had pictured something more baroque—a great big gaudy
clip-on like the ones that grandmothers wear—when he told me about
it in the bar. I made the man in my bed take the stud out when we
had sex, but he put it in again afterwards because otherwise the
hole will close up. It was just three weeks ago when he got his
penis pierced and having sex at all was probably not a good idea
for either of us, although I don't even have pierced ears. I
noticed him in the bar immediately. He was sitting gingerly, his
legs far apart. When he got up to buy me a beer, he walked as if
walking was something that he had just learned.

I can't remember his name. He is sleeping with his mouth open,
his hands curled around his penis, protecting it. The sheets are
twisted down around his ankles. I can't remember his name but I
think it started with a C.

Hold on a minute, I say to Jak. I untangle the phone cord as far
as I can, until I am on the driveway outside my father's garage,
closing the door gently behind me. My father never wakes up when
the phone rings in the middle of the night.
He 
says 
he never wakes up. The man in my bed,
whose name probably begins with a C, is either still asleep or
pretending to be. Outside the asphalt is rough and damp under me.
I'm naked, I tell Jak, it's too hot to wear anything to sleep in.
No you're not, Jak says. I'm wearing blue and white striped pajamas
bottoms but I lie again and tell him that I am truly, actually not
wearing clothes. Prove it, he says. I ask how I'm supposed to prove
over the phone that I'm naked. Take my word for it, I just am. Then
so am I, he says.

So what's your great idea for a sci-fi story, I ask. Blond women
are actually aliens, he says. All of them, I ask. Most of them, Jak
says. He says that all the ones that look like Sandy Duncan are
definitely aliens. I tell him that I'm not sure that this is such a
great story idea. He says that it's not a story idea, that it's
true. He has proof. He tells me about the woman who lives in the
apartment across from him, the woman who looks like Nikki, who
looks like Sandy Duncan. The woman that he accidentally followed
home from the subway.

According to Jak, this woman invited him to come over for a
drink because a while ago he had lent her a cup of sugar. I say
that I remember the cup of sugar. According to Jak they sat on her
couch, which was deep and plush and smelled like Lemon Fresh Joy,
and they drank most of a bottle of Scotch. They talked about
graduate school—he says she said she was a second-year student at
the business school, she had a little bit of an accent, he says.
She said she was from Luxembourg—and then she kissed him. So he
kissed her back for a while and then he stuck his hand down under
the elastic of her skirt. He says the first thing he noticed was
that she wasn't wearing any underwear. He says the second thing he
noticed was that she was smooth down there like a Barbie doll. She
didn't have a vagina.

I interrupt at this point and ask him what exactly he means when
he says this. Jak says he means exactly what he said, which is that
she didn't have a vagina. He says that her skin was unusually warm,
hot actually. She reached down and gently pushed his hand away. He
says that at this point he was a little bit drunk and a little bit
confused, but still not quite ready to give up hope. He says that
it had been so long since the last time he slept with a woman, he
thought maybe he'd forgotten exactly what was where.

He says that the blond woman, whose name is either Cordelia or
Annamarie (he's forgotten which), then unzipped his pants, pushed
down his boxers, and took his penis in her mouth. I tell him that
I'm happy for him, but I'm more interested in the thing he said
about how she didn't have a vagina.

He says that he's pretty sure that they reproduce by
parthenogenesis. Who reproduce by parthenogenesis, I ask. Aliens,
he says, blond women. That's why there are so many of them. That's
why they all look alike. Don't they go to the bathroom, I ask. He
says he hasn't figured out that part yet. He says that he's pretty
sure that Nikki is now an alien, although she used to be a human,
back when they were going out. Are you sure, I say. She had a
vagina, he says.

I ask him why Nikki got married then, if she's an alien.
Camouflage, he says. I say that I hope her fianc?, her husband, I
mean, doesn't mind. Jak says that New York is full of blond women
who resemble Sandy Duncan and most of them are undoubtedly aliens,
that this is some sort of invasion. After he came in Chloe or
Annamarie's mouth—probably neither name is her real name, he
says—he says that she said she hoped they could see each other
again and let him out of her apartment. So what do the aliens want
with you, I ask. I don't know, Jak says and hangs up.

I try to call him back but he's left the phone off the hook. So
I go back inside and wake up the man in my bed and ask him if he's
ever made love to a blonde and if so did he notice anything unusual
about her vagina. He asks me if this is one of those jokes and I
say that I don't know. We try to have sex, but it isn't working, so
instead I open up a box of my father's Christmas tree decorations.
I take out tinsel and strings of light and ornamental glass fruit.
I hang the fruit off his fingers and toes and tell him not to move.
I drape the tinsel and lights around his arms and legs and plug him
in. He complains some but I tell him to be quiet or my father will
wake up. I tell him how beautiful he looks, all lit up like a
Christmas tree or a flying saucer. I put his penis in my mouth and
pretend that I am Courtney (or Annamarie, or whatever her name is),
that I am blond, that I am an alien. The man whose name begins with
a C doesn't seem to notice.

I am falling asleep when the man says to me, I think I love you.
What time is it, I say. I think you better leave, before my father
wakes up. He says, but it's not even five o'clock yet. My father
wakes up early, I tell him.

He takes off the tinsel and the Christmas lights and the
ornamental fruit. He gets dressed and we shake hands and I let him
out through the side door of the garage.

#

Some jokes about blondes. Why did the M&M factory fire the
blonde? Because she kept throwing away the Ws. Why did the blonde
stare at the bottle of orange juice? Because it said concentrate. A
blonde and a brunette work in the same office, and one day the
brunette gets a bouquet of roses. Oh great, she says, I guess this
means I'm going to spend the weekend flat on my back, with my legs
up in the air. Why, says the blonde, don't you have a vase?

#

I never find out the name of the man in my bed, the one with the
stud in his penis. Probably this is for the best. My reading is
coming up and I have to concentrate on that. All week I leave
messages on Jak's machine but he doesn't call me back. On the day
that I am supposed to go to the airport to pick him up, the day
before I am supposed to give a reading, although I haven't written
anything new for over a year, Jak finally calls me.

He says he's sorry but he's not going to be able to come to
Virginia after all. I ask him why not. He said that he got the
Carey bus at Grand Central, and that a blond woman sat next to him.
Let me guess, I say, she didn't have a vagina. He says he has no
idea if she had a vagina or not, that she just sat next to him,
reading a trashy romance by Catherine Cookson. I say that I've
never read Catherine Cookson, but I'm lying. I read a novel by her
once. It occurs to me that the act of reading Catherine Cookson
might conclusively prove that the woman either had a vagina or that
she didn't, that the blond woman who sat beside Jak might have been
an alien, or else incontrovertibly human, but I'm not sure which.
Really, I could make a case either way.

Jak says that the real problem was when the bus pulled into the
terminal at LaGuardia and he went to the check-in gate. The woman
behind the counter was blond, and so was every single woman behind
him in line, he tells me, when he turned around. He says that he
realized that what he had was a one-way ticket to Sandy Duncan
Land, that if he didn't turn around and go straight back to
Manhattan, that he was going to end up on some planet populated by
blond women with Barbie-smooth crotches. He says that Manhattan may
be suffering from some sort of alien infestation, but he's coming
to terms with that. He says he can live with an apartment full of
rats, in a building full of women with no vaginas. He says that for
the time being, it's safest.

He says that when he got home, the woman in the apartment on the
fifth floor was looking through the keyhole. How do you know, I
say. He says that he could smell her standing next to the door. The
whole hallway was warm with the way she was staring, that the whole
hallway smelled like Lemon Fresh Joy. He says that he's sorry that
he can't come to Virginia for my reading, but that's the way it is.
He says that when he goes to Ankara this summer, he might not be
coming back. There aren't so many blond women out there, he
says.

#

When I give the reading, my father is there, and the owner of
the coffeehouse, and so are about three other people. I read a
story I wrote a few years ago about a boy who learns how to fly. It
doesn't make him happy. Afterwards my father tells me that I sure
have a strange imagination. This is what he always says. His friend
tells me that I have a nice clear reading voice, that I enunciate
very well. I tell her that I've been working on my enunciation. She
says that she likes my hair this color.

#

I think about calling Jak and telling him that I am thinking of
dyeing my hair. I think about telling him that this might not even
be necessary, that when I wake up in the mornings, I am finding
blond hairs on my pillow. If I called him and told him this, I
might be making it up; I might be telling the truth. Before I call
him, I am waiting to see what happens next. I am sitting here on my
father's living-room couch, which smells like Lemon Fresh Joy,
watching a commercial in which someone's hands are dialing the
number for a video calendar of exotic beauties. I am eating
butterscotch out of the jar. I am waiting for the phone to
ring.

Two women and a small child meet in a restaurant. The restaurant
is nice—there are windows everywhere. The women have been here
before. It's all that light that makes the food taste so good. The
small child—a girl dressed all in green, hairy green sweater, green
T-shirt, green corduroys and dirty sneakers with green-black
laces—sniffs. She's a small child but she has a big nose. She might
be smelling the food that people are eating. She might be smelling
the warm light that lies on top of everything.

None of her greens match except of course they are all
green.

"Louise," one woman says to the other.

"Louise," the other woman says.

They kiss.

The maitre d' comes up to them. He says to the first woman,
"Louise, how nice to see you. And look at Anna! You're so big. Last
time I saw you, you were so small. This small." He holds his index
finger and his thumb together as if pinching salt. He looks at the
other woman.

Louise says, "This is my friend, Louise. My best friend. Since
Girl Scout camp. Louise."

The maitre d' smiles. "Yes, Louise. Of course. How could I
forget?"

#

Louise sits across from Louise. Anna sits between them. She has
a notebook full of green paper, and a green crayon. She's drawing
something, only it's difficult to see what, exactly. Maybe it's a
house.

Louise says, "Sorry about you know who. Teacher's day. The
sitter canceled at the last minute. And I had such a lot to tell
you, too! About you know, number eight. Oh boy, I think I'm in
love. Well, not in love."

She is sitting opposite a window, and all that rich soft light
falls on her. She looks creamy with happiness, as if she's carved
out of butter. The light loves Louise, the other Louise thinks. Of
course it loves Louise. Who doesn't?

#

This is one thing about Louise. She doesn't like to sleep alone.
She says that her bed is too big. There's too much space. She needs
someone to roll up against, or she just rolls around all night.
Some mornings she wakes up on the floor. Mostly she wakes up with
other people.

When Anna was younger, she slept in the same bed as Louise. But
now she has her own room, her own bed. Her walls are painted green.
Her sheets are green. Green sheets of paper with green drawings are
hung up on the wall. There's a green teddy bear on the green bed
and a green duck. She has a green light in a green shade. Louise
has been in that room. She helped Louise paint it. She wore
sunglasses while she painted. This passion for greenness, Louise
thinks, this longing for everything to be a variation on a theme,
it might be hereditary. This is the second thing about Louise.
Louise likes cellists. For about four years, she has been sleeping
with a cellist. Not the same cellist. Different cellists. Not all
at once, of course. Consecutive cellists. Number eight is Louise's
newest cellist. Numbers one through seven were cellists as well,
although Anna's father was not. That was before the cellists. BC.
In any case, according to Louise, cellists generally have low sperm
counts.

Louise meets Louise for lunch every week. They go to nice
restaurants. Louise knows all the maitre d's. Louise tells Louise
about the cellists. Cellists are mysterious. Louise hasn't figured
them out yet. It's something about the way they sit, with their
legs open and their arms curled around, all hunched over their
cellos. She says they look solid but inviting. Like a door. It
opens and you walk in.

Doors are sexy. Wood is sexy, and bows strung with real hair.
Also cellos don't have spit valves. Louise says that spit valves
aren't sexy.

Louise is in public relations. She's a fundraiser for the
symphony—she's good at what she does. It's hard to say no to
Louise. She takes rich people out to dinner. She knows what kinds
of wine they like to drink. She plans charity auctions and
masquerades. She brings sponsors to the symphony to sit on stage
and watch rehearsals. She takes the cellists home afterwards.

Louise looks a little bit like a cello herself. She's brown and
curvy and tall. She has a long neck and her shiny hair stays pinned
up during the day. Louise thinks that the cellists must take it
down at night—Louise's hair—slowly, happily, gently.

At camp Louise used to brush Louise's hair.

Louise isn't perfect. Louise would never claim that her friend
was perfect. Louise is a bit bow-legged and she has tiny little
feet. She wears long, tight silky skirts. Never pants, never
anything floral. She has a way of turning her head to look at you,
very slowly. It doesn't matter that she's bowlegged.

The cellists want to sleep with Louise because she wants them
to. The cellists don't fall in love with her, because Louise
doesn't want them to fall in love with her. Louise always gets what
she wants.

Louise doesn't know what she wants. Louise doesn't want to want
things.

Louise and Louise have been friends since Girl Scout camp. How
old were they? Too young to be away from home for so long. They
were so small that some of their teeth weren't there yet. They were
so young they wet the bed out of homesickness. Loneliness. Louise
slept in the bunk bed above Louise. Girl Scout camp smelled like
pee. Summer camp is how Louise knows Louise is bowlegged. At summer
camp they wore each other's clothes.

Here is something else about Louise, a secret. Louise is the
only one who knows. Not even the cellists know. Not even Anna.

Louise is tone deaf. Louise likes to watch Louise at concerts.
She has this way of looking at the musicians. Her eyes get wide and
she doesn't blink. There's this smile on her face as if she's being
introduced to someone whose name she didn't quite catch. Louise
thinks that's really why Louise ends up sleeping with them, with
the cellists. It's because she doesn't know what else they're good
for. Louise hates for things to go to waste.

#

A woman comes to their table to take their order. Louise orders
the grilled chicken and a house salad and Louise orders salmon with
lemon butter. The woman asks Anna what she would like. Anna looks
at her mother.

Louise says, "She'll eat anything as long as it's green.
Broccoli is good. Peas, lima beans, iceberg lettuce. Lime sherbet.
Bread rolls. Mashed potatoes."

The woman looks down at Anna. "I'll see what we can do," she
says.

Anna says, "Potatoes aren't green."

Louise says, "Wait and see."

Louise says, "If I had a kid—"

Louise says, "But you don't have a kid." She doesn't say this
meanly. Louise is never mean, although sometimes she is not
kind.

Louise and Anna glare at each other. They've never liked each
other. They are polite in front of Louise. It is humiliating,
Louise thinks, to hate someone so much younger. The child of a
friend. I should feel sorry for her instead. She doesn't have a
father. And soon enough, she'll grow up. Breasts. Zits. Boys.
She'll see old pictures of herself and be embarrassed. She's short
and she dresses like a Keebler Elf. She can't even read yet!

Louise says, "In any case, it's easier than the last thing. When
she only ate dog food."

Anna says, "When I was a dog —"

Louise says, hating herself. "You were never a dog."

Anna says, "How do you know?"

Louise says, "I was there when you were born. When your mother
was pregnant. I've known you since you were this big." She pinches
her fingers together, the way the maitre d' pinched his, only
harder.

Anna says, "It was before that. When I was a dog."

Louise says, "Stop fighting, you two. Louise, when Anna was a
dog, that was when you were away. In Paris. Remember?"

"Right," Louise says. "When Anna was a dog, I was in Paris."

Louise is a travel agent. She organizes package tours for senior
citizens. Trips for old women. To Las Vegas, Rome, Belize, cruises
to the Caribbean. She travels frequently herself and stays in
three-star hotels. She tries to imagine herself as an old woman.
What she would want.

Most of these women's husbands are in care or dead or living
with younger women. The old women sleep two to a room. They like
hotels with buffet lunches and saunas, clean pillows that smell
good, chocolates on the pillows, firm mattresses. Louise can see
herself wanting these things. Sometimes Louise imagines being old,
waking up in the mornings, in unfamiliar countries, strange
weather, foreign beds. Louise asleep in the bed beside her.

Last night Louise woke up. It was three in the morning. There
was a man lying on the floor beside the bed. He was naked. He lay
on his back, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes open, his mouth
open, nothing coming out. He was bald. He had no eyelashes, no hair
on his arms or legs. He was large, not fat but solid. Yes, he was
solid. It was hard to tell how old he was. It was dark, but Louise
doesn't think he was circumcised. "What are you doing here?" she
said loudly.

The man wasn't there anymore. She turned on the lights. She
looked under the bed. She found him in her bathroom, above the
bathtub, flattened up against the ceiling, staring down, his hands
and feet pressed along the ceiling, his penis drooping down,
apparently the only part of him that obeyed the laws of gravity. He
seemed smaller now. Deflated. She wasn't frightened. She was
angry.

"What are you doing?" she said. He didn't answer. Fine, she
thought. She went to the kitchen to get a broom. When she came
back, he was gone. She looked under the bed again, but he was
really gone this time. She looked in every room, checked to make
sure that the front door was locked. It was.

Her arms creeped. She was freezing. She filled up her hot water
bottle and got in bed. She left the light on and fell asleep
sitting up. When she woke up in the morning, it might have been a
dream, except she was holding the broom.

#

The woman brings their food. Anna gets a little dish of peas,
brussel sprouts, and collard greens. Mashed potatoes and bread. The
plate is green. Louise takes a vial of green food coloring out of
her purse. She adds three drops to the mashed potatoes. "Stir it,"
she tells Anna.

Anna stirs the mashed potatoes until they are a waxy green.
Louise mixes more green food coloring into a pat of butter and
spreads it on the dinner roll.

"When I was a dog," Anna says, "I lived in a house with a
swimming pool. And there was a tree in the living room. It grew
right through the ceiling. I slept in the tree. But I wasn't
allowed to swim in the pool. I was too hairy."

"I have a ghost," Louise says. She wasn't sure that she was
going to say this. But if Anna can reminisce about her former life
as a dog, then surely she, Louise, is allowed to mention her ghost.
"I think it's a ghost. It was in my bedroom."

Anna says, "When I was a dog I bit ghosts."

Louise says, "Anna, be quiet for a minute. Eat your green food
before it gets cold. Louise, what do you mean? I thought you had
ladybugs."

"That was a while ago," Louise says. Last month she woke up
because people were whispering in the corners of her room. Dead
leaves were crawling on her face. The walls of her bedroom were
alive. They heaved and dripped red. "What?" she said, and a ladybug
walked into her mouth, bitter like soap. The floor crackled when
she walked on it, like red cellophane. She opened up her windows.
She swept ladybugs out with her broom. She vacuumed them up. More
flew in the windows, down the chimney. She moved out for three
days. When she came back, the ladybugs were gone—mostly gone—she
still finds them tucked into her shoes, in the folds of her
underwear, in her cereal bowls and her wine glasses and between the
pages of her books.

Before that it was moths. Before the moths, an opossum. It shat
on her bed and hissed at her when she cornered it in the pantry.
She called an animal shelter and a man wearing a denim jacket and
heavy gloves came and shot it with a tranquilizer dart. The opossum
sneezed and shut its eyes. The man picked it up by the tail. He
posed like that for a moment. Maybe she was supposed to take a
picture. Man with possum. She sniffed. He wasn't married. All she
smelled was possum.

"How did it get in here?" Louise said.

"How long have you been living here?" the man asked. Boxes of
Louise's dishes and books were still stacked up against the walls
of the rooms downstairs. She still hadn't put the legs on her
mother's dining room table. It lay flat on its back on the floor,
amputated.

"Two months," Louise said.

"Well, he's probably been living here longer than that," the man
from the shelter said. He cradled the possum like a baby. "In the
walls or the attic. Maybe in the chimney. Santa claws. Huh." He
laughed at his own joke. "Get it?"

"Get that thing out of my house," Louise said.

"Your house!" the man said. He held out the opossum to her, as
if she might want to reconsider. "You know what he thought? He
thought this was his house."

"It's my house now," Louise said.

#

Louise says, "A ghost? Louise, it is someone you know? Is your
mother okay?"

"My mother?" Louise says. "It wasn't my mother. It was a naked
man. I'd never seen him before in my life."

"How naked?" Anna says. "A little naked or a lot?"

"None of your beeswax," Louise says.

"Was it green?" Anna says.

"Maybe it was someone that you went out with in high school,"
Louise says. "An old lover. Maybe they just killed themselves, or
were in a horrible car accident. Was he covered in blood? Did he
say anything? Maybe he wants to warn you about something."

"He didn't say anything," Louise says, "And then he vanished.
First he got smaller and then he vanished."

Louise shivers and then so does Louise. For the first time she
feels frightened. The ghost of a naked man was levitating in her
bathtub. He could be anywhere. Maybe while she was sleeping, he was
floating above her bed. Right above her nose, watching her sleep.
She'll have to sleep with the broom from now on.