Short People (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  Not today, Kat, Dad thought. He didn’t say it, though. Instead, he bit his lip and hit redial.

  When caught in an untenable situation—and sometimes all this took was rain on a day that was forecast for sun—Mom retreated inside herself toward the moony landscape, equal parts memory, self-mythology and a recklessly free-associative imagination, that she cultivated there. It helped her cope or, at any rate, helped her escape, and since childhood she’d spent a lot of time in this place, hiding from the dense, uncontrollable downturns in her life. Big Symbol Land. She could gaze back across the border and discern shades of meaning that compounded into poignant, epiphanic truths, though these truths were foggy and damp and generally inexplicable to those of us on the other side. Long before she’d met Dad, she had been hospitalized and forcibly taught that the proxy world in which she hid was more dangerous than any catastrophe the real world might throw her way, and since then she’d tried— one day at a time—to stay sane. She still had trouble defining the boundary between healthy contemplation and Big Symbol Land, though; there was no dotted line on the ground, no posted sign saying YOU ARE NOW LEAVING REALITY. The topography changed in mind-bogglingly subtle ways that were hard to notice until it was too late; she suspected, sometimes bitterly, that the boundary existed only in textbooks and on doctors’ clipboards. Her way of looking at life wasn’t worse—measurably, objectively worse—than anyone else’s. How could it be? To make judgments about someone’s sanity was a subjective act in and of itself. These doctors whose opinions her husband respected with such grave seriousness couldn’t prove anything. In her opinion, she could do brilliant things with a mind that worked the way hers did. All she lacked was a context in which it might be allowed to run free.

  But, no, she had to stay on this side of the boundary, if only to please her husband, for the good of the children. She did her best to show him how “better” she was; otherwise, she knew, he was liable to be up at four a.m. drinking and pacing and drinking. She dedicated herself to the simple, tactile, care-for things moms have historically striven to master. She wasn’t good at them, but with determination she’d improve, if only she could keep her mind on the task. And though she knew she’d never be appreciated by her husband, her children, by anyone, for who she actually was, she imagined that years from now, Denali and Zack would smile at least at the things she’d done for them—for the grilled cheese and the tomato soup, for the TheraFlu, for the sitting on park benches, bored, watching them climb the monkey bars. Her children would tear up when they tried to fathom her pouring her love into the voids that had grown up to become them.

  Her husband, he had the easy job, basking in unearned adoration. He was a mythic figure to the children, a great benevolent giant whose heavy footsteps thundered across the front stoop every evening at six, stirring a frenzy of squeals and a whole lot of yelling—“Daddy’s home”—loose in the air. Every day the children darted for the door and stood poised to jump on him as soon as it was thrown open. Each of them would grab a leg, and he’d hobble stiff-jointed around the house, mussing their hair and beaming his star power down on them until he inevitably tripped over one of their bodies and the three of them fell in a pile of giggles. Lying on the floor with them wrapped around him, he’d listen as they babbled on and on about everything—every single tiny detail, sometimes repeated four or five times in their excitement to impart the mass of fun that had happened that day. They’d talk about how they played Bloody Murder, leaving out the part where Mom ran out of the house in a panic, convinced that one of them had been hit by a car. They’d tell him how they dragged the dog by its front paws from room to room teaching it “This is where we go the bafroom and brush our teeth and things like that and this is where we go sleepy time and that’s where Mommy and Daddy go sleepy time” and on and on “until Mommy took Dulcy away,” of course, leaving out Dulcy’s low growls and the way the dog had snapped her jaw as Kat rescued the children. They’d tell him everything, even the ways they had misbehaved, because he never judged, he never reprimanded. He acted as if they could do no wrong, although his eyes darted to her, expressing his disapproval over their heads. Later, when the children were asleep, he’d get the rest of the story and prescribe corrective measures for her to try and fail to accomplish the next day without his help.

  And now her failure was total. She didn’t blame him. There was something in her that refused to be contained by the days of waking and cleaning and cooking and mothering—this something, this pull toward Big Symbol Land, was at fault. She herself was at fault. It had seemed, when she first met him, that her husband might save her or comfort her or at the very least provide a compelling alternative to the boredom and panic that filled up her days. She’d hoped he might carry her out of Big Symbol Land for good, that his uncompromising morality and noble responsibility would seal up the border. She had been elated and surprised by his unflinching response when she described the horrors of her months in the hospital. Maybe hugs and kisses and his warm sympathy could make the external world more endurable. So she fumbled and stumbled beside him for years until, now, she knew he was as cold as everything else, and that even if he were Prince Charming, he couldn’t save her from herself. She just wasn’t programmed to operate by the world’s circumscribed standards. She was a terrible parent; today’s events proved it. Why not disappear into the safety, the comfort, of her own pathology? The doctors were wrong: anything’s better than this.

  And easier. Freer. More natural. There was no reason to rein in her thoughts, to track them and judge them and strangle them into a logical sense, taxing her brain and spinning in circles until her head was so jumbled, aching and tortured that she couldn’t think at all anymore. Better to go with the flow, wherever it took her, even into the world of terror and wonder.

  Mom shut her eyes and played with the weave of the carpet under the bed. She stepped into the pitch-black darkness inside herself and floated there untethered. A white light, a dwarf star, flickered in the distance. Voices hung heavy around her, almost as if she could touch their vibrations, but they came in slow and shaggy and she couldn’t make out the words; she knew their tricks, though—eventually they’d tighten and start to taunt her. She briefly lit on her familiar hope that this was the tunnel leading toward death, and she half expected to see her life flicker past in rewind as she began walking toward that dwarf star. But no, that was just wishful thinking. Big Symbol Land was in fact not the sanctuary she told herself it was. Danger crouched everywhere waiting to pounce. She lived in fear for a reason. The world was crazy and from here she could follow its deepest logic.

  She fled further in, slipping her focus toward muscle and bone, her hair, her blood, her womb, this physical thing that was and wasn’t her. She tried to concentrate on the tiniest, cellular parts of herself. Remembering how she had learned about these things in Science class, back when she was going to grow into someone important, she saw her cells—little sacks of jelly, somehow adhering to each other—adding up to her. This had awed her then and it awed her now; something like God—whatever that is—was mirrored in her body. It was the unknown, and the unknown was holy. Her body. They could regulate her mind, but her body, that was something else entirely. It had incubated her two children, it had taken single cells and, through a process so much like creation, transformed them into complex, breathing, living things. Her husband and the doctors couldn’t take that away no matter what kind of mojo they played.

  The voices in her head rose out of the murk. But we’ll get at your body, we’ll get that too, we’ll do things that you can’t imagine, you’ll see what it’s like to have nothing, to be nothing, you’ll see, you’ll see.

  She tried to sink still further, her muscles relaxing, allowing the bones to burrow. She felt sore. It wasn’t her imagination and it wasn’t the voices or the void. Something had happened earlier this morning, somewhere between sleep and waking. She had been dreaming when something—it was her husband—had poked into the place that was now
sore. She’d bucked and flailed and then something had popped and she’d woken up to discover her arms and legs spread for this man’s body, probing and dripping all over her depths. This really happened. She had relaxed, played dead, stared at the door, which, thank God, was shut. He hadn’t taken long, he never did. Just a little suffocation until his heavy gut relaxed and he made that ugly groan and the globby spume of mucus squirted into her. Then he turned and his hipbone stabbed into her thigh. He’d gazed at her and smiled, so proud of himself— as if he were a five-year-old innocently waiting for Mommy’s pat on the head.

  The voices again. Yes, and the children. What about the children? Don’t lie, we know when you’re lying. This morning the door had cracked open and two eyes showed vertically, one above the other. She’d seen them, she was sure. All of this since then had merely been proof.

  The voices would not quit. And you did nothing. You did nothing. You failed. These voices, they were even worse than her husband.

  Dad was now getting busy signals. He’d reached the point of repetitive action and put his fingers on autopilot: hang up, hit redial, hear the tone, hang up again. When he tried to remember why he was calling, he couldn’t. Without Mom’s support, he was losing his nerve. His thoughts kept wandering over to her. It was just like her to turn a situation that should bind them together in perseverance into an excuse to throw a fit; everything was always all about her. He wished she’d come out from under the bed. He had to keep reminding himself, think about the kids, that’s what’s most important. But his focus was split, now, and he couldn’t concentrate. He put down the phone and collapsed on the bed. He picked up the phone again. Redial. Disconnect. Redial. Disconnect. Redial.

  Mom heard a cracking in the wooden brace that held the mattress up. She gasped and watched the bed sag above her. This bed was too old for them to be sleeping on. It was too old for her to be lying under. Look, there were bloodstains and semen stains and breakfast-in-bed stains and this was the flipped side, the other side had been on top since Zack was born, before they gave up housekeeping. The springs had dyed the threadbare fabric with rusty circles. Her voices were telling her, Finally, you’ll be set free. It could happen any minute now, the wood splintering into barbed phalanxes piercing her skin and lodging in her vital organs, the mattress entombing her there on the bedroom floor—a fitting end.

  And of course her husband had chosen the weakest spot to sit on. He was trying to kill her—just like he’d nonchalantly been doing for years now with all of his shrugging disregard for quality time and his yammering on about moral integrity and society’s wrongs, and then there was the real him who had clawed into view today with a sloppy good-morning rape, that’s what it was, rape, as if the rhetoric he’d built their lives on had really been nothing but words. But what he didn’t know was that she was untouchable, impervious, because she didn’t care; he could kill her, fine, she looked forward to it.

  But it would hurt, warned the voices.

  Ha. Not as much as it would hurt him—because this is a suburb, and when they hear the sirens, people come to gawk from blocks away. It would make the local news, the state news, it might even slip into D.C., and before he knew it his crimes would go national. Pundits would turn them political. The story would come out in tabloid detail—MAN KILLS WIFE WITH BED; KIDS TORTURED MOM WHILE DAD WAS AT WORK; LIVING IN FILTH (WIFE WAS A DOMESTIC SLAVE)—and he would be condemned by the very world he judged so harshly. Considered the emblem of an evil, selfish man, he would have no champions. And she would be martyred and sainted, and in her grave she would no longer have to pretend to agree with his every half-baked, elitist opinion. The best part was that he would become everything he stood against: a media spectacle, the gossip of his life pawned off on the masses as if it were news, as if it were profoundly disturbing and more than just another drop of entertaining trivia to be added to the public’s supersaturated consciousness.

  Let him kill you. Show him how cold his heart really is.

  Mom sobbed. “I loved you,” she bellowed.

  Dad bounced the phone in his hand. “Kat . . . Kat, can we, just . . . one thing at a time.”

  “And you had to ruin it.”

  “Kat, honey, really, I’m . . . How am I supposed to . . .” Dad’s voice went almost to a whisper. “I don’t know what to do.” His head hung low and defeated from his shoulders. He rubbed his scalp. Redial. Disconnect.

  The sound Mom made seemed to come from somewhere deep in her bowels, a rumbling, groaning howl, and Dad rubbed his palm down over his face. He pulled at his mustache and beard, wiping the weakness and self-pity away like crumbs. He flushed red. “You know? I mean, can’t you act like an adult just this once, just today?”

  When Mom finally spoke, the words were drawn-out throbs of sound. “You. Raped. Me.”

  Redial. Disconnect. Redial. Disconnect. Redial.

  Dad was back on Mount McKinley, higher up now than he’d ever climbed. He fumbled for handholds, hoping the shadows in the rock face didn’t lie. He was exhausted and still he could not see the summit. He’d never reach it; his only two choices now were to admit defeat or climb until he fell. The air was thinning. He climbed, though he no longer wanted to, and his body grew heavier with every vertical foot. Below him he could see a jumble of fir trees, each one a spear aimed at him. The terrain began to spin. He wanted hot cocoa, a fireplace, the fraternity of strangers united along an uncomfortable wooden bench, comparing versions of their shared adventure. He wanted to be at the point in the future where you get to brag about what you’ve accomplished. His fingers were numb. There were blisters on his feet. He wanted, most of all, to let go.

  And at that very moment he finally got through. He heard the ring, but not until after his fingers had pressed the wrong button and hung up. He shouted, “Fuck!”—swearing for the first time in years— and hurled the phone at the wall. The plastic mouthpiece cracked. The wiring snaked out. The microphone drooped toward the floor like a dying sunflower. Except for the sex, the memory of which his wife had just ruined, this was the first thing he’d enjoyed all day.

  He listened to Mom sobbing under the bed. The sound was deep and meditative, like a prayer. When she spoke again, her voice was low and distant, an echo in search of freedom. “Where are my children? I want to hold my children.”

  Where were the kids? He didn’t want to know, but he stood up anyway. He wasn’t sure what he’d do when he found us. He was still falling.

  II. Where Were the Kids

  Where were we? Loitering, terrified, eavesdropping outside their door. We didn’t know what we’d done wrong. We knew it was something, though, a monumental something. But what?

  As we did nearly every Saturday, Denali and I had tiptoed across the street to Suzy’s house that morning to watch cartoons. The bottom section of her split-level had been converted into an adult-proof playroom with smurf-blue shag carpeting and smurf-blue walls on which her mother had painted hot-air balloons and clouds and helicopters and miscellaneous other flying things. We didn’t have anything like it at our house: the beanbags and blow-up chairs, the sleep-away couch, all the old furniture left after her mother’s divorce; the long fluorescent lights; and the toys strewn everywhere—Atari cartridges, stray Colorforms, marbles from the Chinese checkers game no one knew how to play, more than one Etch-A-Sketch, even those huge Nerf bopper things, expressly made for kids to pummel each other with. She had an Easy-Bake Oven and a Snoopy Snow Cone. She had Starbrite. Her Lite-Brite’s color pegs were strewn around the room like tacks. She had both the male and female Monchichi monkeys, and they could suck each other’s thumbs. Toys upon toys upon toys. You could find a toy or a toy component tangled in every strand of carpeting. Just close your eyes and plop your hand down: there was a plastic high heel or a tiara belonging to one of the numerous Barbies, or maybe, Custard, Strawberry Shortcake’s cat. The playroom at Suzy’s house was a shrine to everything my sister and I weren’t allowed to have, complete with cable TV and a VCR.
/>   Cartoons came on at six-thirty, but we usually arrived around seven. We’d kneel at the tiny ground-level window and peer down into the room, squishing our noses on the glass to search through the grime for Suzy. If she was up, she’d be sprawled on the floor, sucking her thumb and kicking her bare feet against the frayed couch cushions. Hearing your rap, she’d shift on her elbows and take a long last look at Super Friends. Then she’d suck the juice off her thumb, drawing it out slowly with a smack of her lips, and wipe it dry on the carpet. Scratching her bottom, she’d roll over and wave us to the front door. We’d sprint around and wait for her—she always took her time—and listen until she jumped for the top lock. When the door opened we’d clamor excitedly into the house, the screen door, its spring broken, banging behind us. The same every time. Suzy would put her finger to her lips and pucker, hissing a stream of spit through her front teeth as she shushed us. “My mommy’s asleeping,” she’d say. But we’d already be gamboling down the stairs to gape at the magical screen—entertainment for hours, until just before nine when we had to run home and pretend we’d just woken up.

  Oh, the luxury of these two hours. To loll every which way on those beanbags or couch cushions or, best, in Suzy’s big round papasan chair—a satellite dish you could sit in—imagining ourselves out trolling for trouble with the Garbage Pail Kids or reshaping ourselves as more daunting, less frightened creatures—shiny as chrome—while we saved the universe with the Transformers. Even the Care Bears my sister and Suzy adored so much were captivating; I wouldn’t admit it to them, but the gauzy safety of the land of Care-a-Lot and the Forest of Feeling got to me, made me all mushy inside—something about those rainbows. It didn’t matter what we were watching, the momentous thing was that we were watching, breaking the taboo—and without any negative psychological effects. No, TV was helping us. Though we wouldn’t have been able to put it this way, we knew, we just knew that if we logged enough surreptitious hours, the massive assimilating force behind them would shove all our weirdnesses and eccentricities into a cellar where no one could see them. We’d put an end to the whispers, the jeers, the abrupt pointed silences. The condescending questions —from adults and children alike—that ran along the lines of “What, are you some kind of Jesus freaks?”