Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House Read online

  They’re trying to kill us! she sobbed, wiping her nose on her T-shirt.

  Who? How? How are they trying to kill us?

  The people bringing this stuff in.

  But who’s bringing it in? I asked. We’ve been home the whole time.

  Ghosts, she said, eyes huge. She stared at the mug. It’s not even your birthday, she said, not for months and months.

  I stuck the mug in the outside trash can along with the extra newspaper. I kept my eyes carefully on all the doors. The twig stayed put.

  We had a respite for a week, and everyone calmed down a bit and my mother went to the market and counted how many cans so she’d know. We ate the food we bought. We stared at the knickknacks that represented our personalities. All was getting back to normal until the next Sunday, when Hannah opened the towel closet and screamed at the top of her lungs.

  What? We all ran to her.

  The towel closet had towels in it. Usually it had small, thin piles—we each had a towel and were expected to use it over four days for all towel purposes, and there’d be a big towel wash twice a week, one on Thursday, one on Sunday. We never stuck to the system and so usually I just used my towel as long as I possibly could until the murky smell of mildew and toothpaste started to pass from it onto me, undoing all the cleaning work of the previous shower.

  Now the towel closet was full, not of anything fluffy, but of more thin and ugly towels. Tons of them. At least ten more towels, making the piles high. Countless piles of worn towels.

  Well, I said. I guess we can cut the Thursday/Sunday wash cycle.

  My mother went off to breathe into a paper bag. Hannah straightened taller, and then put one towel around her hair and another around her body, a very foreign experience in our family.

  I’m going to just appreciate the gifts, she said, even though her face looked scared. I’ve always wanted to use two at once, she said, even though her hair was dry and she was fully dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and the towel looked like she was getting a haircut.

  At school the next week, it was past Halloween and we had to bring in our extra candies for the poor children of Glendora. Bags and bags came pouring in and, aside from candy, I brought in an extra bag of stuff for the poor children, full of soup cans and knickknacks I’d salvaged from the trash. Everyone in the family felt funny about it; maybe it was like passing on poison. But at the same time, throwing out whole unopened cans of lobster soup struck my mother as obscene. How often does a homeless woman who lives nowhere near salt water get lobster? she asked, hands on hips, as I packed up the bag. We all shrugged. We liked how her guilt looked in this form of benevolence. I repeated it to my teacher. It’s not a Snickers bar, I said, but it’s got a lot more protein.

  I think I saw my teacher take that soup can for herself. I watched her closely that week, but she seemed healthy enough, and my dad had never had a single negative symptom from his lemongrass corn chowder. I didn’t eat any Halloween candy. I didn’t want anything from anyone else.

  I got a note from the shelter saying my bag was the best.

  Hannah got a boyfriend. She didn’t tell anyone but I could tell because she was using so many towels, making the bathroom a pile of towels, and for some reason I knew the towels were happening because of a boy. Why did she need to be so dry all the time? I asked her about it, when she came home for dinner and looked all pretty with her eyes bright like that. I had to set the table because she was late, and she apologized and said she’d take dish duty for two days.

  It’s okay, I said. Who is he?

  She blushed, crazily. Who is who?

  The reason you are late, I said.

  I had to study.

  Mom stood in the doorframe, but she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t out to bust Hannah.

  How was your math test? Mom said, brushing the side of her hair with a soupspoon.

  Okay, said Hannah, glaring at me. I got an A.

  What did you hear? she asked, dragging me aside and cutting into my arm with her budding nails.

  Nothing, I said. Ow. I just guessed.

  How? she said.

  No reason, I said. Towels. Who is it?

  She said no one, but then she barely ate at dinner, which is rare for her, and usually I have to fight my way to the main dish to even get any because she is so hungry and that let me know she really liked him.

  Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.

  We didn’t get any more items for a few weeks. I started to miss them. I mean, I felt like I would die of claustrophobia and I had become paranoid about all things coming into the house including bathwater and I had made a checklist for market items, shopping items, and all school items, but when I opened the refrigerator and saw all the same old stuff, I wanted to cry sometimes.

  I left a few baits: I cleared my nightstand of all things so that it was ready for a deposit. Nothing. I bought a lobster soup with my own allowance, which made my mother shriek, but I assured her I’d bought it and I’d even saved the receipt to prove it. I brought it out of my bedroom, and she stared at the curling white paper and then looked at me, in the way she rarely did, eye to eye.

  Are you okay, Lisa? she said. Ten-year-olds don’t usually save receipts.

  I’m trying to trap a ghost, I said.

  Would you like to go to the mall? she asked. Her eyes were tired. She looked pretty with tired eyes, so I didn’t mind so much.

  We went to the nearest mall, over in Cerritos, which had been built twenty years ago and was ugly. I liked that about it. It was like a relative nobody liked but still had to be related to anyway. We went to the kids’ store and she bought me two shirts, one orange, one red, and then I got very attached to a particular cap with an octopus on the cap part and I felt if I left it in the store I might dissolve. I didn’t have much allowance left due to the spenditure of the lobster soup, and so I asked my mom as nicely as I could if I could have an advance and get the octopus cap because I loved it very much.

  That? She was holding the store bag and trying to stop the salesperson from talking to her by staring out the door. Thanks, she was saying, thanks, thanks.

  I love it, I said, putting it on my head. It was too big. I couldn’t see well underneath it.

  Please? I said.

  We just got you two new shirts, she said. Do you really need a cap?

  It’s good for skin cancer, I said. Of the face.

  She laughed. She was tired these days because she was having job trouble too; her job trouble meant she did not know how she could be useful in her life. Dad’s job trouble was he had too much to do with his life. Sometimes I just wanted them to even it out but I couldn’t think of how. That afternoon, I didn’t want to bother her more, but I wasn’t certain I could leave the store with that cap still in it. If someone else bought it, I might tear in two.

  I will pay you back, I said. I swear. Or we can exchange it for one of the shirts?

  She got me the cap because I hardly ever asked for much, and at home, I slept with it on, and I wore my new orange shirt to school and back and I was ready to charge ahead when I noticed the octopus cap on my dresser.

  I thought it was the one on my head except then I realized that one was already on my head. So this had to be a new one? I took the one on my head off and held them both side by side. Two octopus caps. I had two now. One, two. They were both exactly the same but I kept saying right hand, right hand, in my head, so I’d remember which one I’d bought because that was the one I wanted. I didn’t want another octopus cap. It was about this particular right-hand octopus cap; that was the one I had fallen in love with. Somehow, it made me feel so sad, to have two. So sad I thought I couldn’t stand it.

  I took the new one, left hand, to the trash, but then I thought my mom might see it and get mad that I’d thrown out the new cap she had bought especially for me, so I put the one I loved on my head and put the one I hated in the closet, behind
several old sweatshirts. I went out to play wearing the first one. I played kickball with Dot Meyers next door but she kicks cockeyed and it was hard to see out of the cap and when I went inside, I scrounged in the closet for the second cap and it fit. That’s what was so sad. It was the right size, and I put it on, and it was better. The ghosts had brought me the better cap. I put them both on, one after another, because at least by size now I could tell which was which, but it was just plain true that the one I loved did not fit and kept falling off and the one they brought did fit and looked better. Dot Meyers thought I looked dumb in a bad-fitting cap but she’s dumb anyway and can’t spell America right.

  I saw Hannah kissing a boy I’d never seen before outside our house in the bushes.

  That night, I put a bunch of stuff in Hannah’s bedroom to freak her out but she recognized it all as mine so it wasn’t the same as the ghosts who came in with their own stuff, and I had no allowance to buy anything new.

  I wore the good new cap to school.

  I ate the lobster soup. I liked it. It had a neat texture. I liked it better than the usual plebeian chicken noodle my mom got. I liked the remaining wild rice one that hadn’t made it into the Halloween bag; it was so hearty and different. I used the cow cup I’d salvaged from the trash, and the truth was, I liked the cow holding a balloon; it was cute. When I looked in the mirror, I sneered my upper lip and said, Benedict Arnold, Benedict Arnold, your head is on the block.

  Mom came home from taking a class called Learning How to Focus your Mind, and she seemed kind of focused, more than usual at least, and she sat with Grandma on the sofa and talked about childhood.

  After awhile I sat with them. There’s nothing to do after homework and TV and creaming Dot Meyers.

  You were a quiet child, said Grandma.

  What did I like to do? asked Mom.

  You liked to go with me to the store, said Grandma.

  What else? asked Mom.

  You liked to stir the batter, said Grandma.

  What else?

  I don’t know, said Grandma. You liked to read.

  Even as they were talking, I saw it happen on the dining room table. Saw it as they were talking, but it wasn’t like an invisible hand. Just one second there was a blank table, and I blinked, and then there was a gift on the table, a red-wrapped gift with a yellow bow. It was in a box, and I went to it and sat at the table. I knew it was for me. I didn’t need to tell them, plus they were talking a lot, plus Dad was at work, plus Hannah was out kissing.

  It had no card, but it was really good wrapping, with those cleancut triangular corners, and I opened it up and inside was a toy I had broken long ago. Actually, I hadn’t broken it; Hannah had. It was a mouse, made of glass, and Hannah had borrowed it without asking and dropped it in the toilet by accident—so she said—and broken off the red ball nose. I had been so mad at her I hadn’t spoken to her for a week and I’d made a rule that she couldn’t come in my room ever again and I asked Mom for a door lock but she didn’t think I really meant it so I got one myself, at the hardware store, with a key, with money from my birthday, but I couldn’t figure out how to put it on. Here was the mouse, with its nose.

  What was next? Grandma?

  Thanks? I said, to the air.

  I took the mouse and put it on the shelf it used to be on, next to the mouse that had no nose, retrieved from the toilet. The mouse without the nose looked pathetic but a little charming, and the mouse with the nose, well. It had never been in the toilet.

  When Hannah came home, I showed her. Mom’s taking a new class, I said. That’s good, she said. Her face was flushed. She seemed relieved, once she paid attention, that the new mouse had arrived. Sorry about the toilet thing, she said, for the fiftieth time. It’s cute, she said, patting the new one.

  Let’s flush it down the toilet, I said.

  What?

  My eyes were pleading. I could feel them, pleading.

  Please, Hannah.

  Hang on, she said. She went to the bathroom and splashed her face and spent a minute in there with her crushiness, and then opened up. I brought both mice in.

  Both, I said, the old and the new.

  Fine, she said. Whatever.

  How’d you do it?

  I just dropped it in, she said.

  On purpose?

  Yeah.

  I didn’t blame her. Right now, it seemed like these mice were just made for the toilet. I sat next to her on the edge of the bathtub and dropped in the new guy. He floated around in the clean white toilet water.

  Flush away, said Hannah, her eyes all shiny from kissing.

  I flushed. He bobbed around and almost went down but didn’t. He was slightly too big. The toilet almost overflowed. But still, the nose.

  That’s just what I did, she said. She was putting on lip gloss and smacking at herself in the mirror.

  I picked up the wet new mouse and broke his nose right off. It took some pressure, me holding him good in one hand and then snapping it off. You can ruin anything, if you focus at it. There, I said.

  I put both mice in the trash and washed my hands. Hannah broke up with her boyfriend a few weeks later because he’d started calling her honey, and I got picked for the kickball team, and we didn’t get any more gifts. Not for years.

  Mom found some work downtown as a filing clerk, and Dad almost got that promotion. Hannah went to college nearby but she lived at home because of the price of rent. Grandma got older and eventually died.

  When I was about to graduate high school, I did notice a packet of yellow curry in the pantry while I was rummaging around, looking for a snack. It was in a plastic yellow envelope that just said Curry on it in red letters. I asked my mom if she’d bought it, and she said no. Hannah? No. Dad? No. I don’t like curry, I said out loud, although I’d never tried it. As an afterthought, I brought it with me to college, where I had a scholarship, so I was the first one to leave home, it turned out, and it sat in the cupboard in the dorm for four years, alongside the oregano and the salt and my roommate’s birth control pills. I took it with me to my first apartment that I shared with the utilities-shirker, and my second apartment with the toxic carpet, and in my third apartment, when I was twenty-seven, living alone across the country, I opened it up one night when I was hungry and made a delicious paste with butter and milk, and then I ate it over chicken and rice and cried the whole way through it.

  KATE BERNHEIMER

  Whitework

  The cottage into which my companion had broken, rather than allow me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the thick-wooded forest, was one of those miniaturized and hand-carved curiosities from the old folktales that make people roll their eyes in scorn. This, despite the great popularity of a collection of German stories published the very same year as my birth! As to the justifiability of this scornful reaction: I cannot abide it, nor can I avoid it by altering the facts. This is where I found myself: in a fairy-tale cottage deep in the woods. And I had no use of my legs.

  When we came upon the cottage we were certain, by its forlorn appearance, that it had long ago been abandoned to the wind and the night, and that we would be perfectly safe. Or rather, my dear companion was certain of this. As for me, I was certain of nothing—not even of my own name, which still eludes me.

  There were but few details for my enfeebled mind to record, as if the cottage had been merely scribbled into existence by a dreamer’s hand. Tiny pot holders hung from the wall in the kitchen, beside tiny dish towels embroidered with the days of the week. In each corner of each room was tucked an empty mousetrap—open and ready but lacking bait. At the entryway, on a rusted nail, hung a minuscule locket, along with a golden key. As to whether the locket ever was opened, and what it contained, I have conveniently misplaced any knowledge. About the key I will not presently speak.

  My companion placed me onto a bed, though I would not know it was a trundle bed until morning. I had only vague notions as to how we had arrived at the cunningly thatch
ed cottage, but I believe we had walked through the forest in search of safety. Perhaps we sought some gentle corner where we would not perish at the hands of those who pursued us. Or had we been banished from a kingdom I no longer recall?

  The room in which my companion put me to bed was the smallest and least furnished of all. It lay, strangely enough, down a long hallway and up a stairway—I say “strangely” because the house was so diminutive from outside. I realized, upon waking in the morning, that I lay in a turret. Yet from outside, no curved wall was visible. With its thatched roof the house had resembled a square Christmas package, a gift for a favorite stuffed rabbit—a perfect dollhouse of a cottage, the sort I had painstakingly, as a child, decorated with wallpaper, curtains, and beds.

  Though there was scarcely any furniture in this turret room, the sparse pieces were exactly correct—nothing more, nothing less: the trundle bed, empty and open; and the walls bedecked with no other ornamentation or decoration save whitework, the same sampler embroidered with the same message over and over. It was embroidered in French, which I do not speak: Hommage à Ma Marraine. In the center of each piece of linen was sewn an image of a priest holding two blackbirds, one on each hand. The edges of all the whitework were tattered, and some even had holes. To these white-on-white sewings, my foggy mind immediately fastened, with an idiot’s interest—so intently that when my dear companion came up to the turret with a hard roll and coffee for breakfast, I became very angry with him for interrupting my studies.

  What I was able to discern, looking about me while nibbling the roll after my companion had left, was that some of the whitework contained a single gold thread as the accent over the a. Why the gold thread was used, I had no idea; and in considering this detail, along with the remarkable fact that blackbirds had been so expertly depicted in white, I finally asked my companion to return to the room. I called him and called him before he returned—disconcertingly, for it seemed he had returned only by accident, to fetch my empty teacup—and when he took the cup from my hand he gazed into it for a very long time without speaking a word.