Read What Strange Creatures Online
Authors: Emily Arsenault
What Strange Creatures (12 page)
By the time I’d finished reading it, Rolf had positioned himself on my chest, purring like a Harley. I let him stay. Jeff’s piece saddened me even more deeply than I’d already been this evening. Typical Jeff—hopes dashed by little realities. What scared me now was that this thing with Kim was no
little
reality he was dealing with. And, more so, that this time there was going to be no laughing his way through it.
I clicked on Kim’s response for the same assignment.
Fourteen.
When I was a kid, it was all about fourteen.
When I was seven, I couldn’t wait to be fourteen. Mostly I just liked the number. It had an appealing evenness to it: twice my age. And someone had told me that was the age you could become a cheerleader, so I was sold on it.
I remember asking my mother often, “When I’m fourteen, can we go visit Grandma?”
My grandma lived five miles away from us. My mother misunderstood the question. She’d get all teary-eyed and say, “Of course, honey. If we can.”
What I meant was that I wanted to make sure I’d have the opportunity to show off my fourteenness. And who better to show it off to than my grandmother—my favorite person in the world. I was aware that people’s grandparents sometimes died, but at the time I didn’t think that sort of thing could touch me.
For several years I was counting down to fourteen. Seven years to go. Six years to go. Five.
When I was ten, I wanted it desperately. It was going to be so awesome, so teenagery, so sophisticated. Surely I’d date boys and kiss them. I’d wear cool jewelry and cut-off jean shorts with red tights, and matching lipstick, and black boots.
I believe I forgot about fourteen sometime around the age of twelve.
When I got there, I didn’t really bask in it. I got a few zits. I got an F in geometry and an A in music. I went to homecoming with a sophomore who had beautiful eyes and a bad haircut. I visited Grandma often enough, but I don’t remember her being particularly impressed.
This response surprised me. It was short, yes, but I liked it. It had a jadedness to it that resembled Jeff’s, actually—and that I hadn’t seen in Kim in person. Suddenly her chemistry with my brother made more sense to me. Suddenly—but too late.
I didn’t feel up to reading Kim’s piece about Jenny Spicer. Too many depressing stories running into one another. I’d read it tomorrow, maybe. Instead I peeked at Zach Wagner’s sample response for the same week. He’d responded to the transitional-moment prompt:
To me, “Money for Nothing” will always taste like a mouthful of smoldering ash.
It was playing in my father’s truck when I had my first cigarette. We were stalled by the roadside after a fishing trip. I was nine years old, and it must’ve been boredom that motivated him to offer me a puff.
By that time my parents had been divorced for a few years and I saw him only about twice a year when he came out from California. I had few opportunities to show him how tough I was, and earlier that morning I’d failed to do so: I’d refused to cut my own hook out of a live fish. So this I had to do, no matter what.
I put that cigarette to my mouth and inhaled. It burned so badly that my mind went blank for a moment. I’d swallowed a mouthful of hell. My throat was on fire. My father watched me as I coughed and sputtered. He didn’t smile or frown—just turned up the radio and waited for my next move. Dire Straits was singing about money for nothing, about chicks for free. I held on to that cigarette, though. I squeezed back a couple tears of pain. I put that thing back up to my lips again. If I could swallow lima beans for my mother, I could do this for him. I took another puff.
My father smiled. “Great song, huh?”
There was more, but I stopped reading. Deeper and deeper depression. I’d clicked on Zach’s piece to cheer myself up, but unlike the personal parts of his book, it felt more sad than funny. Even though he’d invited me to read the blog generally, reading this piece felt like an intrusion.
I looked at all the other students’ responses to the time prompt—even flipped over to the responses of students from other semesters. I really liked the question, and it was comforting to read of others’ quirky childhood perspectives. There were a fair number that talked about time being experienced as a “countdown”—days till Christmas, days till summer, days till a father returned home from serving abroad. One kid wrote of his certainty that all dogs died exactly at age twelve and his grim countdown as his family’s bulldog mix inched toward the inevitable. There were an almost equal number of essays about “marking time” with something besides a calendar or a clock—hair growth, report cards, a father’s Friday lottery tickets, a yearly box of crayons worn to nubs. My favorite was one that explained how the writer thought as a preschooler that daylight was generated by collective sleep—and each night he felt compelled to force his eyes closed and do his part.
In that spirit I shut my laptop and did my best.
I was in my kitchen buttering my toast when I saw a woman in white moving across the lawn, holding a basket. Despite her Coke-bottle glasses and zip-front velour robe, I knew it was Marge. She was collecting golf balls. My first impulse was to duck and hide. What if she saw me? What would I say? And what if she told me I was going to purgatory? Or even hell? She liked to tell people where they were going in the afterlife, and she was pretty certain of herself when she did.
Before I could move, she turned and looked at me.
“Hello?” I whispered, heart pounding. She said something back, but I couldn’t hear it at first. I opened the window.
“I wore a hair shirt for a while,” Margery was saying, “but he told me to stop wearing it.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Jesus,” she answered. “Remember? He said, ‘I shall give you a hair shirt in your heart, which shall please me much more than all the hair shirts in the world.’”
I recognized this as a direct translation of a line from
The Book of Margery Kempe.
“I’ve always had trouble believing he said that to you, Marge.”
Ding-dong.
Just as I was saying this to her, I heard a doorbell ring. But I didn’t have a doorbell.
Marge seemed to sense my confusion. She put down her basket and pointed toward my front door.
Ding-dong.
“Answer it,” Marge said.
I went to my door, but no one was there. I checked to see if there was a new doorbell installed but found nothing new.
Ding-dong.
My eyes flew open. It was my new ringtone. I’d chosen it a few days ago, to replace the barking-dog one I’d had before that. When Jeff had made me feel like a freak for biting Boober’s ear, I’d decided to ease off the pet trappings a bit.
I grabbed my phone off my nightstand. Jeff was calling. It was 2:00
A.M.
I’d slept for about an hour.
“Hey,” I said.
“Were you sleeping?” Jeff wanted to know.
“Um . . . I’m gonna have to go with yes.”
“I think I ought to tell you sooner rather than later,” he said. “I lied to the police.”
It was like this, Jeff explained. Kim had one of
those
relationships with her ex-boyfriend: one of those relationships that never truly ends. You could tell by the way she talked about him, for one. She’d known him since she was a kid. They’d broken up just two years ago. But he was the whole reason she’d even been here in Thompsonville. She’d moved to this part of the state with him when he’d gotten the managerial job in Ricksville. He was a serious part of her life and her history. And she made no secret of the fact that he called every so often, to “check in.”
None of this bothered Jeff—until recently. A few weeks back, she said she was going to visit her sister in New Jersey. A couple of days later, when she got home, she showed Jeff a picture on her phone—of Wayne nosing a jar around her kitchen, trying to lick the last bit of peanut butter out of it. When Jeff closed the picture window, he saw a text from Kyle.
The text said something like,
IT WAS NICE SEEING YOU THIS WEEKEND. I MISS YOU.
Nothing terribly romantic or racy. But definitely suspect.
“Wouldn’t that make you wonder?” Jeff asked.
“Sure. Of course,” I admitted. It seemed to me Jeff was a little more adept with his girlfriend’s phone than he needed to be, but I decided not to point that out, under the circumstances.
“So the next time she said she was going to see her sister, of course I was skeptical.”
“Okay.”
“
And
she wanted me to take care of Wayne. I wondered, am I the big stooge here? Believing her
and
taking care of her dog while she goes off and cozies up with some other guy?”
Cozy up.
Nice euphemism, I thought. I was pretty sure I’d used the phrase on more than a few candle descriptions.
“So I told her I was busy. It was a lie at first, but then that job with Mike came up.”
“Okay. So you were gone all weekend anyhow. No big deal.”
“I was gone, yeah. But I wasn’t at that job the whole time.”
“Where were you?”
Jeff said nothing.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Where
were
you?”
More silence. He was scaring me.
“Just spit it out,” I said. “Jesus, Jeff. Is this how you acted with the police?”
“I followed her.”
“Jeff!”
“Yup, yup, yup,” he sputtered, “I know.”
“You don’t drive fast enough for that.”
Jeff’s style of driving is a bit geriatric—from his days driving the kids to school.
“It was tough. I had to speed a little. Out of my comfort zone. But I kept up with her. All the way to Rowington. Once I saw we were going that far north, I should’ve turned around and gone home. ’Cuz then I at least knew she wasn’t going to Kyle’s. But we weren’t going to New Jersey, obviously. So I was still curious.”
“Just curious?”
“Okay. I was angry she lied to me. I still wondered if this trip had something to do with Kyle.”
I switched on my bedside lamp, thinking I might have an easier time processing this information with a bit of light.
“You followed her all the way to that hotel?” I asked.
“Yeah. And I spent the night in the parking lot.”
“Do you think she met Kyle there?”
“I didn’t see him there. Her door was to the outside. So I saw her go in when she checked in. No one came to her door after that. Not that night anyway.”
I rubbed my eyes and got out of bed. “What if she saw your car?”
“I don’t think she did. I parked pretty strategically. I did doze off at around five in the morning, for like an hour. But I doubt anyone came in or out at that hour.”
“Okay, so . . . why do you think she was there? Did you see anything that would help you answer that?”
“No. Not at all. But around seven I left. I had to get back on the highway to meet Mike in time for the job. What I did do, though, was call Carpet World after nine. To see if Kyle was there. He wasn’t, but the girl who answered the phone said he’d be in by eleven. By then I was too busy on the job to check and see if he really was.”
“So you’re going to go tell the police all this, I take it?” I was pacing my bedroom floor by now.
“I guess. But I’m not sure how. Should I wait and see if they come and ask me about it again?”
Something about this question made me a little queasy. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jeff.”
“But if I just show up and tell them I lied to them, that looks pretty bad.”
“Looks worse if they figure it out themselves.”
He paused for a moment. “But maybe they won’t.”
“Maybe,” I said. “This isn’t good, Jeff.”
“No shit, sis.”
Usually it made me giggly to hear Jeff use curse words. They generally came out of his mouth all wrong—like a kid pronouncing a foreign word in a language class. This time, however, he sounded expert.
“I’m glad you told me.” I wasn’t entirely sure of this, but it felt like the right and sisterly thing to say.
And then I told him to try to get some sleep—knowing, of course, that neither of us would.
O
n my desk the next morning was my next assignment: Travel Candles. They were small candles in cute tins, with just a couple of hours of burn time.
“Available only in our most classic scents,”
said the memo from the marketing director.
With this sort of thing, I always started with the same question:
Who buys this shit?
The head of marketing had told me that they were popular for weddings—as favors or in “care packages” or gift bags that couples put in the hotel rooms of out-of-town guests. This intense bridal consumerism was so far from my world that I had no idea how to get on its level. Who else, I wondered, might be convinced they needed a travel candle? I checked the price. They were very cheap compared with our other candles.
Hmm. Something about small indulgences going a long way?
The second thing I usually do, if I’m having difficulty relating to the product, is purge myself of any annoyance I might have toward its potential consumer. Just a line or two, scribbled out on a scrap of paper before I got to work on my computer:
It’s kind of like an Olive Garden for your nose. Wherever you go, you never have to smell anything new. You can have Pumpkin Spice and Holiday Cheer running hard through your limbic system, always.
I ripped the paper to bits, threw it into my wastebasket, and got to work.
A little indulgence goes a long way,
I typed.
Sure, “goes a long way” was a cliché. But since this was a travel candle, it could work. And your typical Whitlock’s Candles fiend probably didn’t mind a little bit of cliché. In fact, she probably found it comforting. Yes. Comforting. That was what this was really about:
A little bit of comfort that can go a long way. Toss one or two of these in your travel bag and enjoy our classic scents on the go.
“On the go” was all wrong, of course. We didn’t want to be sued for injuries if some bonehead decided to burn our candles on his morning commute. You really do need to think of these things in my line of work.
