The Listeners (15 page)

Here was the doughnut shop.
A maple, ma'am? Why thank you, I think I just might!
Teeth sank happily into sugar-bright flesh.
A second maple, methinks.
The shop was blessedly noisy, hot with machines and voices and traffic to conceal the beeps. Legally deaf by forty was my prediction. If correct, I'd buy a state-of-the-art gaming system (including projector and wireless controls) with my disability check. And I wouldn't be able to hear Mert tell me, ever again, that it wasn't much of a life.

At 10:04 I sallied down the block to the chain store. I would enter with confidence, chin high. With any luck, the manager would be a local and old enough to know me. Pastel carpet, blond shelves, disinfected air. I mourned the smoke-friendly dinge of our dead store. Gave my cockiest grin to the infant behind the counter, who forgot to smile back.

“Help you?”

“Yeah, I'm wondering if you guys are hiring?”

I waited for a bloom of recognition
Oh my God is that—?
on the hairless cheeks.

“Sorry, man. We've been slow. The Web is fucking us all in the A.”

“Who's the manager here?”

But the infant said a name I didn't know.

HOW LONG DID
you have to not eat before it quit coming for good? I wanted so badly to eat bread again, chocolate and butter and sugar again, but the books did not tell me when I might. I hadn't bled in four months, which was not long enough, probably, to ensure everlasting drought.

I asked the school librarian if there were any more detailed medical encyclopedias.

A girl stopped me at the lockers: “Can I ask you something?” She was a popular girl and I had never spoken to her. “Um, a few of us have been wondering—is there something—are you, like,
taking
anything?”

I frowned.

“Because you look fabulous. Are you taking something?”

“No,” I said.

The girl said, “Then how are you getting the weight off?”

I said, “I'm not doing anything.”

“Yes you are,” hissed the girl.

I shook my head.

“Whatever,” the girl snorted.

And Riley said at home: “When did you get so hairy?”

“I'm not.”

“Yes you
are
!” He ran two fingers along my arm. “Look at that fuzz. You're
fuzzy
.”

“I am not,” I said at the back of my mouth.

“Fod she looks like a cat!”

“There's nothing wrong with her,” Fod said. “She's going through puberty, there's naturally some extra hair growth…”

“But Fod she's like a skeleton with fur.”

I could barely breathe my heart was going so hard. They would take me to a doctor, who'd give me pills to force the blood to grow. And back the worm would come.

ON THE PORCH
I propped myself like a Southern gentleman of yore, boots on railing, hand closed around beading glass of liquor—no mint, but it could have loosely been classified as a julep. “Are you crazy?” I inquired of the cardinal on a low branch brushing near. Bird stared back. “Are you?” louder, and bird jumped away. Watching its flittery progress down Observatory Place, I noticed a guy standing—just standing, not doing a single thing—across the street. He wore a sort of cape. He was perhaps one of those creatures who dressed as their favorite fantasy character when the movie came out but forgot to take off the costume. What the dickens was he doing? His face, if he had one, was hidden by hood and noonday glare.

I sat up with difficulty and called: “Hey!”

Capey moved not.

“Be warned, I'm in the neighborhood watch…”

Now he moved. Down the street. At a brisk clip.

If Mert had been around, I would have informed her that the area, once a bourgeois stronghold, was getting
sketchy. But she and Fod were on campus, slaving away while their middle-aged daughter lolled on their front porch to escape the apartment of their not-quite-middle-aged son. This street was plagued by sketchy capes, but pretty too—trees all bursting green, and little red flowers at the fences. The paper lay open at the want ads. Just look on the computer, Riley had said. But I preferred the feel of a newspaper. I liked how the print stained my fingers, proof of effort, and how a newspaper made me appear, to passersby, just another citizen—an American taxpayer who knew how to fill a day properly, with a job and lunch at restaurants and kisses for her husband upon returning to her toy-strewn castle moated by lemon trees.
And where's my dear offspring I am never not nice to?
—the offspring running qualmless into her arms.

The morning lumbered on without any reappearance from the cape wearer. I made my way through an entire can of chips to defray the effects of the almost-julep. At 1:00 PM I would get up from the porch and become relevant. I would enjob myself, somehow. Riley needed not fear: I would be gone from his couch before he could realize how very much he would miss me.

NO MATTER HOW
hard I clenched my eyes, I still saw the sound her voice made, a forest branch, a green so black it could barely be heard.

Why are you here?

But I don't want to.

No I don't.

No.

But I can't.

But I've tried really hard and I can't figure out how!

I don't know how to!

She could smell in a forest if a wolfberry grew.

 

Something was on my arm. Patting.

A voice: “You were shouting.”

I sat up.

“You were shouting in your sleep,” Riley said.

I watched him go—now back—a glass of water.

“Thanks, Coyote.” I sipped.

“Better?”

“Yes.”

I held my lips tight so the worm could not glide out. For a long time the worm had been gone and I ate whatever I wanted. Cam had brought it back.

“BODY LANGUAGE,” SAID
the group leader, “is very important in communication!”

The room stank of old hamburger, which was brutal in a room of people afraid of food. Even the overeaters were afraid. “Body language!” the leader repeated. “Think about it—it says everything! I'm closed; I'm open; I'm wary; I'm interested; I'm not paying attention!” She paused in her pacing around the chair circle to clear her mucousy throat. It made me nervous to have her walk behind us. Why was she outside the circle? Weren't we
in this together
as she often proclaimed?

I could feel my mother thinking it was all quite ridiculous. She sat still, one leg neatly over the other, hands clasped on her thigh, and her face was polite but behind it, I knew—

“Crossing one's legs, for instance!” the leader cried. “What does that say about one's attitude? It says: I'm guarding myself! I am not open to new ideas! But if both feet are on the floor—now that's a different message!
Uncrossed legs say: I am willing to consider new ideas! I am not shutting myself off—no, in fact, I'm
listening
!”

My fingers tore a strip of notebook paper smaller and smaller.

Back in the cold air, Mert tightened her scarf. She said, “
That
was interesting. What did you think?”

“I don't know,” I said miserably, “what did you?”

Mert said, “Well,
first
of all, I'm not sure I buy the body-language theory. I think it's misleading. Because, for instance, some of those women couldn't cross their legs if they tried. They're too—large. Does that make them more receptive to other people's feelings and ideas? Or does it simply mean they're too fat to cross their legs?” She loosened and reknotted the scarf, and sighed. “But if that group is useful for you—if it's helping—”

“Not really,” I said.

Mert nodded. “You're much smarter than that counselor, anyway. What's she going to tell you that you don't already know?”

THERE MUST ALWAYS
be someone to watch the body, ensure it won't do the wrong thing: bulge too far, shrink too near. If I could have picked a body to be in, it would have been a man's. That straight-down-ness, that bony plunge. In a chap-husk my thighs wouldn't chafe; they would be lean and long and ready to run me away from machete or mastodon.

AT THE HISTORY
museum we leaned on the cold wall, and the lemon smell of the floor became a taste. Cam kissed fast, fingers tight on my neck. He pressed me to the marble. Instead of kissing back, I had to talk: “How come all these tourists who never go to museums in their regular lives go to a million when they're on vacation?”

“Who the fuck cares,” he whispered.

“I don't know,
me
?”—tugging his hand out from under my jacket.

 

“You are bound,” Mr. Nzambi told him, “for great things.” He asked where he planned to apply next year. “Good,” he nodded when Cam said the big names. Our high school, a crappy public factory, was a disadvantage. “But your recommendations will be outstanding,” Mr. Nzambi consoled. “And if your SAT scores are anything like your PSATs…”

Our teacher smiled, and I watched the hot reed grow taller in Cam's throat. I could tell he was seeing himself
pink-nosed in snowy northern twilight, books on his back, crossing what was known as a green.

 

My parents liked Cam, despite his alarming (in their opinion) outfits, because he was polite and good at school. In the six months we went so-called
out
, I tried to limit their contact with him, but contact happened. He got invited to dinner, where he asked Fod—grown-up style—about his research. He mentioned a novel he was reading, and Mert dove gratefully in; the two chattered like teeth in love, while I, who had never read the book in question, toe-pinched my brother under the table.

Their approval made me like Cam less.

Which made me a cliché, I guess.

I ANSWERED THE
phone in the juvenile manner I only dared use when Riley was at work: “Den of Coyote, how may we help you?”

A man's voice said, “Quinn?”

“Yeah?”

“It's Cameron.”

“Shit,” I said. “I mean, hi!”

“Hello,” he said. He sounded neither pleased nor displeased, friendly nor unfriendly.

“You got my letter.”

“I did.”

“Great,” I said, snapping the rubber band hard.

“Do you want to meet for a coffee?” said this man whose name was Cameron.

“Sure,” I shouted, so nervous I had no volume control.

“Okay,” he said.

“When? My schedule's very open.”

“This week's not good, but how about next Wednesday?”

The voice betrayed nothing: he could have been a salesman, a business acquaintance, a doctor's office.

 

Then I smoked three cigarettes in a row, and still felt like I was shouting, but no sound was coming out.

“IF STRANDED IN
the Himalayas and your foot got frostbite, which you'd know by”—the middle squinted at the notebook—“
skin that is pale and waxy and the bitten part feels like a piece of wood
, what would you do?”

“Chop it off and save the rest of me,” said the oldest.

“Make a fire and hold the foot over the fire until it melted enough to walk on,” said the youngest.

“The pain of melting would be exquisite,” said the middle.

“I wouldn't mind a fake foot,” said the oldest. “I'd look like a sea captain.”

The middle said, “But your teeth are too clean to look like one.”

IT WAS FOD,
not Mert, waiting outside the good doctor's building.

“Don't you have class?”

He smiled. “I cancelled it.”

“What for?” I latched my seat belt.

“Because I wanted to pick you up.”

“Why?”

“Just to hang out.”

I laughed. “Hang
out
?”

“Sure, why not? We don't get to see each other all that much.”

I said nothing, not sure this was true. He was usually at dinner, wasn't he?

“So,” he said, “how was your session?”