Processing

They delivered the news of his death with a sharply creased flag. She was nursing their two-week-old girl-child on the worn couch, lulled by the glow of the television then the hard rap on the door snapped her awake. She yanked her breast back into the nursing bra and bounced the squalling baby in the crook of her arm. The NCO stood at the door haloed by the morning sun. He was wearing dress blues. The golden buttons and white gloves beamed against the terrible sameness of this cul-de-sac. Her mouth was dry.

We regret to inform you. Killed in action. Your husband. In service to this nation and the beloved Corps. His beloved Corps. Regret. Taking fire.

She felt the officer’s fingertips as he pressed the triangle of the flag into her left hand.

Identification

She named the girl child Jonathan Rene after her dead father, whose remains were so damaged the Interment Officer touched her wrist and shook his head when she asked him to open the black bag.

“We have DNA testing now.”

She smiled, all teeth, and stroked Baby Jonathan’s arched lips. “Open it.”

The officer pulled the zipper and she peered into the dark slit. A pile of teeth heaped in the middle of a stubbled jaw. An arm with a tattoo of a skull in a top hat nestled against part of a rib cage. She couldn’t stop grinning. Her breath puffed in front of her and the skull peered at her through a monocle.

“Where is his heart?”

“Ma’am?”

“His heart? His blood? His tongue? Where did it all go? Where is his cock?”

“We were unable to recover all of the remains, ma’am.”

She pressed closer to the officer and pulled the baby blanket away from Jonathan’s face.

“This is our child. Do you think she looks like him?”

He flicked his green eyes to the door and put his arm around her. She could smell formaldehyde and deodorant and sweat and Big Red gum.

“His personal items will be sent within 5-7 days after they are processed, inventoried, and cleaned. His weapon will be issued to another soldier. You will receive his uniform. You will also receive a lump sum of one hundred thousand dollars.”

His voice hung around her as she stepped into the light of the waiting room. Jonathan yawned pink and settled into the creases of her own neck. She never cried. She just opened and closed those fat fists and pulled on her momma’s scabbed tit like a calf with that cruel little mouth.

Interment

Lance Corporal Jonathan Selzer’s funeral was brief.

She sat between framed photos of their dead parents and watched some NCO lift the flag from the fiberglass box and snap it in half with another glassy-eyed officer.

She always killed the catfish they caught. He was too softhearted and couldn’t stand the way they gaped at him from the cooler. He said it sounded like they were talking to him.

She remembered him whole. She remembered him when she was young and he was young, deep in the woods that ran along the river where they fished for yellow mudcats. Before he became a pile of teeth, before he pulled his laces tight, before her pussy stretched and a creature turned inside her, they pinched worms in half and threaded them onto golden hooks. Coors Light nestled in the dirty ice of her daddy’s Styrofoam cooler on the bank of some forgotten inlet of the Mississippi. It was always too warm and the perch nibbled the worms off the hooks, flashing their yellow bellies as they flipped away from her bobber. A couple of times she fucked him out there when the fish weren’t biting, but the deer flies were. They specked his pale thighs with tiny dots of blood. She liked his resolve. He was a born leader.

She always killed the catfish they caught. He was too softhearted and couldn’t stand the way they gaped at him from the cooler. He said it sounded like they were talking to him.

She hauled them out onto a cinder block that they dragged up from the bank, and rubbed her thumb over the soft spot on their heads. She stabbed a straightened wire hanger through the weak skin and wiggled it until they quit flopping. She hacked off their tails and bled them in the cooler until the ice was pink and gray. She couldn’t let things smaller than her suffer in a crowded bucket, better to kill than to let die slowly.

Now her husband wasn’t. Mist beaded on the Class A casket paid for by the United States Marine Corps. Seven more Marines stood to the left, gripping their rifles in the fog. Twenty-one reports and the brass drone of “Taps.” People coughing. The rustle of fabric and a General Brigadier kneeling in front of her pressing another flag against her chest. His MO: sympathy, empathy, candor, and grief. He let a single tear trail down his nose, mapped with broken capillaries from nights in foreign bars where he smashed glasses and had his money stolen by laughing whores. She twisted a damp napkin from the Waffle House around her pointer finger and looked at a single stray hair in his right nostril. She leaned into him and wondered if he thought about her breasts touching his shoulder. They put some of Lance Corporal Jonathan Selzer in the ground.

Housing

Weeks passed. Their lease was up. She sat in her gray manufactured house and listened to an odd bubbling rendition of “Für Elise” coming from the sticker-dotted ice cream truck. Baby Jonathan jerked her pink hands around, batting at her mother’s chest.

The music from the ice cream truck had always made a hard lump stick in her throat. From the time she was six or seven, the tinkling from a music box or the odd mechanical notes drifting through the air made her pull at her eyebrows and bite her thumbnail. She knew it happened on her uncle’s dairy farm. Whatever it was. There was a burn barrel and the neighbor boys throwing chicken bones in the air. They chased her to the shed. It was something, something to do with thrown out dish soap in her eyes and hard hands gripping her shoulders. Something to do with a pink porcelain ballerina balanced on one toe, crushed under mildewed magazines ready for the fire, and the mechanical plinks of a sad song. Something.

Once, when Jonathan was deployed, she sat rubbing her pregnant belly in the same little off-base house and waited for the ice cream truck to come. She stumbled outside when she heard the music, waving bills at the ice cream man, and begged him, “please please please, turn off your music, I’ll buy everyone here ice cream, but please, no more.” The children from the neighborhood pressed their hot little bodies all around her and put their sticky hands on her arms. She looked down at the crusted nostrils and red Kool-Aid stained skin around flaked lips and handed them Tweety Birds with blue bubblegum eyes and Chocolate Rockets and orange Creamsicles. The smells of fake fruit and vanilla and sun-warmed chlorine drifted around her. She gave the ice cream man her phone number and hoped he’d call her even when he wasn’t coming into the neighborhood. He was so young and pretty, with a thick-lipped gap-toothed grin, his fingers brushing hers as she reached for confection after confection.

Now, she pressed her scabbed nipple against the side of Jonathan’s face, praying for a latch this time. Toys and blankets, all in primary colors, were sprinkled over the worn carpet. Unfolded moving boxes leaned against the refrigerator. A straightened coat hanger with threads of hair still clinging to it, from when she tried to unclog the bathroom sink, teetered on the back of the reclining couch. The mail was heaped on the counters and his smell had disappeared before he had even died. She picked up her breast again and squeezed from the base, just like the nurse told her. A pearl of milk grew and dropped on Jonathan’s wrinkled forehead.

“I hate you,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Just fucking eat, God damn you.” She wrenched Jonathan up and gripped the limp child under the arms, looking straight into her hazy gray eyes. “Do you want to die?” Her sore tit hung from the unclasped nursing bra. “Your daddy wanted to die. He wanted to die the moment he was born. Maybe you got that sickness, too.”

She twisted down beside her now sleeping baby on the faux velvet couch, only to be awakened by her now intact husband crouching in his desert fatigues beside her, holding a catfish by the gills.

Custom and Tradition

She had been sitting on the broken recliner couch for two hours. The baby still wouldn’t eat. Jonathan cried and crinkled her forehead specked with scaly cradle cap. The truck was circling the block again. “All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel, the monkey thought it was all in good fun, pop goes the weasel!” The low rattle of the cicadas reminded her of her grandmother’s story about seeing the devil in the Mississippi woods. The same woods where she and her husband had fucked and caught catfish and hooked their fingers trying to impale grasshoppers. She put the baby down on a pillow with a snoozing puppy printed on it, and pressed her forefinger to Jonathan’s rose petal lips.

“Shhhh, Jonathan, I’ma tell you a story about the time that The Son of The Morning came and told Meemaw just what she needed to do. She was only a little girl, just a few years older than you. She was playing in the woods by the river because the grownups in the house told her that her momma needed privacy. They didn’t know Meemaw had scarlet fever, so they sent her into the bright sun with her rag doll and told her to be back for dinner. Meemaw felt so warm and tired that she sat down by the creek and started to cry. She was so very hot and her knees and elbows were just hurting from the fever. Then, from the other side of the creek, she heard someone crying. She saw a tall man with hair so red and skin so pure, sitting, sitting just like she was, crying. She asked him why was he crying and he said his momma was with the angels just like hers was. She told him that he must think she was someone else because her momma just needed privacy, because Santa Claus was bringing her a little sister for an early Christmas present. The red-headed man said he’d show her where her momma was, and that all she needed to do was come with him to the deeper water. When she asked who he was, he laughed and his laugh sounded just like a tinkling music box, it was so clear and pretty. The man came across the creek to her and offered his hand like a fancy gentleman, and his hand was as soft and creamy as a lady’s. He even had perfect, filed fingernails. Meemaw said she don’t remember where they went, but that his hand was as cool and smooth as magnolia petals. They found her half-asleep on the bank of the Mississippi, nestled in the cold mud. Only thing that had kept her from burning alive from the fever, they said. And guess what? Her momma, my great-grandma, was with the angels. She had died from giving birth to my Great Uncle Eustace. He died in World War II. Isn’t that something?”

Absent Without Leave

She twisted down beside her now sleeping baby on the faux velvet couch, only to be awakened by her now intact husband crouching in his desert fatigues beside her, holding a catfish by the gills. He smelled like gunpowder and dirt, like little boys do when they’ve come out of the sun. His black hair was dusted with pale, powdery sand. He put his finger to her lips and raised the catfish up with his other hand. It spoke in the static silence of the room.

“I am,” it said.

Blood soaked her husband’s sleeve. The catfish’s tail had been hacked off and a crimson bead formed on the soft spot on the top of its gray head. Jonathan grinned. His nicotine-stained teeth gleamed.

“See? They sound like they’re talking.”

The catfish sounded just like Jesus in those church films they watched in Sunday school sometimes, when Ms. May was sick and couldn’t teach. “Let the little children come unto me.” The catfish flopped out of Daddy Jonathan’s hand and shivered on the floor, its gills working open and closed until her husband pushed her eyelids closed with his warm palm and pried her mouth open with his tongue. She wasn’t asleep. This was not a dream. He was here again.

Until he wasn’t, and she was holding Baby Jonathan to her stretch-marked breast trying to force her to eat again in the dirty living room. Jonathan’s silky baby skin was very cold and almost slick. A diamond pool of blood on her baby’s head streamed in long ribbons and pooled in the crevices of her elbows. A straightened coat hanger was caught in the fabric of the couch and dangled over the stained carpet. It was coated in blood. The setting sun filled the room with strange light and long slotted shadows from the blinds.

Separation

She felt a warm calm and knew where to take her child. There would be no caskets or paperwork. No flags or death-quelling Lilies of the Valley. She would not sit in a plastic chair in a glinting forest of framed dead faces. No. She would take Baby Jonathan to the mighty river and let her tiny body feed the turtles and the fish, and maybe get swallowed whole by a great mudcat. And when that fish was wrenched from the water and eaten by some family by the delta, they would drink beer and play cards in the front yard, until the night closed over and the warm fat raindrops drove everyone inside hollering. Mommas hushing the drunk men and the teenagers with their fat titties, eyeing their daddy’s friends with that wetness. “Don’t y’all wake them babies. You hear me?” The frogs burping love songs and the patter of rain on the tin roof of some trailer. Maybe her blood, mixed with that catfish blood and sweetish, malty Coors would make some girl dream about the devil and forget that boy with resolve.

R. Peralez is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the University of New Orleans, where she teaches Freshmen Composition. She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in English. She is from DeRidder, Louisiana. She is also the fiction editor for Quaint Magazine. She writes short stories about the South and the characters who inhabit it.

In 1962 my parents packed four suitcases, one gray trunk with a brass lock, my stereo, my tennis racket (remnant of happier days and therefore a sign of their hope for my future), and me into our white Lincoln Continental. We headed up Route 301 to the University of Florida campus in Gainesville three hundred miles away.

I was going to have fun. Before I left, Uncle Harry said I envy you, Monica. Four years of leisure to study mankind and the universe. Uncle Harry never recovered from not going to college due to the depression. He supplemented his life with a complete set of Harvard classics. The red books lined his office shelves for years unopened. I know because eventually I inherited them, and except for the pages being brown with age, they were in perfect condition. Yet I knew he was sincere. My psychiatrist was less scholarly minded. He said, “What a great time you’re going to have at college, Monica, sitting around drinking cokes, going to frat parties, bull sessions until four in the morning. It’s going to be a great four years.”

I believed both of them. Both scenarios appealed to me. I suppose that’s why when Dr. Davey said the day before I left, Monica, I can’t do anymore for you right now. (He’d already told me that all you could do for teen age girls was patch them up and hold them together until their hormones changed, so I knew what he meant.) So, you’ll be back here next week, or you’ll enjoy four years of college—it’s up to you. His words sank into my brain. When you consider what other words were clamoring in my head it is truly amazing. Words like glass, fire, poison, death, my fault—always my fault. I had to make it at college. It was that or back to Dr. Davey’s couch.

He really did use a couch. That startled me when I first saw it. I thought shrinks having couches was a stand-up comic joke. This one was a green velour job with no arms that always seemed to capture a few strands of my long blonde hair. Did they sell these things in catalogues I wondered? I’d never seen one in a furniture store. Dr. Davey sat at one end on a hard back chair and leaned his head over mine. We’re going to relax now, Monica, stare at the eraser on the tip of the pencil and relax. The dark room would become very quiet, and I would become very relaxed, but eventually I would have to open my eyes and look into his hazel ones and say, what’s up doc, (feeble attempt at humor). Dr. Davey would sit back and sigh. Monica, you’re not trying he would say.

Yet, I did try, wanting to please. I just didn’t trust anybody that much. Later I read that people who were intelligent had no problems getting hypnotized. I decided the reason I had so much trouble was because I had a mind of my own. So we were stuck with regular therapy. Talk, talk, talk. But the talking got out of hand the month before I left for school. It was then that I felt compelled to tell everyone what was going on inside my head.

Mom, there’s glass in the soup, I can see it. Stop it, Monica. Mom, if you eat that soup it’ll hurt you. Mom, I smell smoke. I’m calling the fire department. Mom, the devil is trying to get in me. Mom, don’t cry. I’ll stop. Mom, you’re purple pillows are evil—I can feel it.

When she cried I felt bad, but I still talked. Dr. Davey said, Monica save it all for here—O.K.? Dear Dr. Davey, there aren’t enough hours in the day to tell it all to you. Strange, but this is the one place I don’t have to tell it. I’m safe in your green and brown office, dear Dr. Davey. Is there something calming about green and brown?

The trip to Gainesville was a nightmare. Eight hours of non-stop talking. Dad, if a man’s penis gets glass chips in it, would it be awful? Dad, there was glass in the bathroom this morning, millions of pieces. Mom, don’t scream at me, please don’t scream at me. I would put my hands over my ears. No, Mom, I don’t want to work in a factory. I do want to go to college. Mom, there was glass in the bathroom this morning.

My parents continued up the highway hanging on to Dr. Davey’s vision for me with a tenacity that was incredible. I sat in the back seat and dealt with the hundred thoughts a minute that were clamoring to be told. I only said one in four, but I tried very hard to say them all.

As we drove into Gainesville, Dad finally gave out. This is insane, Lenore, we can’t leave her here. But he couldn’t make a turn on the skinny two-lane highway—it was too crowded. Suddenly I heard voices—real ones—coming from the white columned ATO house. The clear sound of young men’s singing floated across the air to our car like a gift from God. I looked at the bright green Florida campus, the romantic whitewashed fraternity houses, the solid brick Administration building and I shut up. My college career was saved by heavy traffic and singing frat boys—at least for the moment.

When I answered I could hear my own voice pleading and breathless. “Please go. I don’t know how much longer I can keep quiet if you stay.”

My parents were thrilled. Dad kept squeezing my shoulders and saying, Good girl! Dr. Davey was right. You’re going to be O.K. His face beamed as he carried my bags up to my second floor dorm room. Mother smoothed her blonde wavy hair into place. Let’s get your suitcases unpacked, Monica. I wonder who your roommate is.

Only I seemed to understand. Of course, only I was privileged to the craziness still going through my brain. I knew what Dr. Davey had said. If I could just keep quiet, the thoughts would stop. I needed my parents to leave so I could be alone. Please, Mom, you have to go. All right, Dad, but first thing tomorrow you have to leave. I can’t hold out. If you stay, I’ll start talking. Don’t you see—I have a chance here. I don’t know anybody and that helps me keep quiet. Please, you’ve got to go.

The next morning we said good-bye in front of Broward Hall. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Mother asked. I could feel her hand trembling on my arm. Her green eyes, so like mine, filled with tears that didn’t quite spill over. I noticed the lines around her mouth. She had never looked old to me before.

When I answered I could hear my own voice pleading and breathless. “Please go. I don’t know how much longer I can keep quiet if you stay.”

Dad stared at me. “What are you going to do after we leave?” All the joviality from the previous evening was gone.

He was standing two steps below me so I could look right into his face. I had never realized his moustache was turning white. I looked past him to the two rows of royal palms that flanked the entrance way to the dorm. “I’m going to walk by myself. If I’m by myself I can’t talk and school doesn’t start for a week.” It sounded so reasonable that I stopped right there before I started to talk about glass or smoke or the devil. If they didn’t go in the next five minutes I was going to lose it. I clenched my hands into hard fists and bit the inside of my cheek hard. I tried to concentrate on the pain in my mouth. I could see my dad’s dark eyes were becoming shiny so I looked down at my brown penny loafers.

“Come on, Lenore. We’ve come this far. Let’s go home.”

I felt them kiss me on the cheek and when I lifted my head they were halfway to the parking lot walking between those tall palm trees, my father’s arm protectively around my mother’s shoulders.

I headed to the northern part of campus. The Resident Hall Reception was in the afternoon. I knew that from reading the Orientation Week events. I planned to skip most of the events. I hadn’t met my roommate yet and hoped to exhaust myself with a ten mile walk before I did.

I noticed the trees first—palm and pine everywhere. I remembered the words to the Alma Mater—where palm and pine are blowing and southern seas are flowing—I wondered what the melody was; I wondered if I’d be here long enough to learn it.

Three hours later sweaty and tired, but calm, I walked into my room and saw two girls sitting on my bed, and another combing her hair in front of the mirror. The one at the mirror turned to greet me.

“Hi, I’m Susan Watson. I hope you’re my roommate.”

“I’m Monica Farelli, and if this is your room, I am.” The room had undergone a transformation since I’d left. Pink flowered bedspreads covered both beds and matching curtains hung at the wide casement window.

“I hope you like the bedspreads. Mom and I decided it was the only thing that would tone down this ghastly floor.” I noticed the green linoleum floor for the first time. “I wanted to paint the walls pink too, but that’s not allowed.” She wrinkled her nose. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’ll be a Zeta by the end of the week and probably move into the sorority house next semester. How about you? Are you going out for rush? Peggy and Jane aren’t.” She pointed to the two girls on the bed and started to apply bright red lipstick as she leaned closer to the mirror.

All this before I could open my mouth. It occurred to me that I wasn’t going to get a word in edgewise. Great. It also occurred to me that if she was going out for rush, I wouldn’t be seeing much of her. I could see she was the perfect co-ed. Curly brown hair framed an oval face and big brown eyes were set in creamy skin like two smoky topazes.

“Hello, I’m Peggy. I’m three rooms down the hall in 34B.” One of the girls on the bed got up and came toward me with an outstretched hand. “This is Jane.” She turned her head toward the girl still sitting on the bed with the dreamy look on her face. She had straight black hair cut blunt at her chin and bangs that almost came down to her eyebrows. She looked interesting like a character in a mystery novel. I was impressed with her long polished fingernails and the graceful way her hand moved as she waved to me.

“I was just asking Susan if she’d like to walk uptown for some dinner tonight. Would you like to come with us?”

I liked the looks of this girl. She also had brown eyes and hair, but she couldn’t have been more different than Susan. For one thing, she had a million freckles on her face. Something told me I’d better say no. “Sure, what time,” I said.

Six hours later the four of us sat in Woo Ling’s, a Chinese restaurant Susan had picked. Susan and Peggy were talking about school, but Jane and I just listened. I knew Susan had already written me off. Who could blame her? She had been the perfect roommate all afternoon and been met with a monosyllabic response every time. Feel free to borrow my clothes, Monica. Did you break up with your high school boyfriend, too? I do hope Mother doesn’t get upset when I pledge Zeta. She’s a Theta you know. Aren’t mothers pushy sometimes? Of course, mine’s really wonderful, but she’s really being ridiculous about this Theta thing. Don’t you think a person should have the right to pick their own sorority? When she mentioned being the President of the National Honor Society at Carelton High I announced I wanted to take a nap. Uncle Harry and Dr. Davey’s co-ed wrapped into one neat package and she was my roommate. Wonderful. All I wanted was not to say anything stupid at dinner.

Now as I sat in the restaurant I knew my hope for a normal evening wasn’t going to come true. The walls at Woo Ling’s were red and the chairs were lacquered black—bad colors for me. A huge Buddha sat in the center of the room, and a picture of a dragon with Chinese script was hanging right above our table. Evil lurked out of every corner of the room. Peggy and Susan chattered about orientation week, and Jane looked over the menu intently. I dared not lift my eyes from the white table cloth. I heard Jane and the waiter discuss the various satisfactions of General Tso’s Chicken and regular Chicken Szechuan, and I was impressed, but still too terrified to lift my head. When the waiter took my order I pointed to something on the menu while wondering if food prepared in an evil kitchen could make a person bad.

Then I heard Susan, her voice sounding impatient, address me. “Well, who do you like more, Elvis or Pat Boone?”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening,” I answered.

“Peggy was saying she thinks Elvis is gorgeous, but I like Pat Boone more.”

I remembered Susan showing me her new white shoes that afternoon and commenting on how all the Zetas were going to be wearing white bucks this semester—one of Pat Boones big trademarks. I shrugged my shoulders. “He’s O.K. I guess.”

Susan sat back, obviously stunned by such indifference. Then she turned to Jane. “What do you think?”

Jane turned her face toward the Buddha, pursed her lips, and then turned back to Susan. “I think they are both entirely inadequate,” she said. Susan rolled her eyes and looked at Peggy.

Meanwhile I looked at Jane as she stared at the Buddha again. Suddenly I noticed Jane’s black hair and heavily made up eyes. The red walls seemed to surround me and I could feel the urge to vocalize my anxiety spill over like a gushing waterfall.

“Do you think we should eat here? This place is evil and besides I think there are little glass chips on the tablecloth that could get into our food.”

Susan put the water glass that was halfway to her mouth back on the table.

“What did you say?” she asked. Peggy looked puzzled, and Jane turned her head toward me and stared with a long unblinking look. I knew I had to get out of the restaurant.

“Are you O.K.?” Peggy said.

Suddenly Jane leaned toward me and smiled. Then very slowly she began to brush the tablecloth in front of me with her hand. I tried to smile my thanks to her, but I couldn’t quite get my face to work. Instead I pushed back my chair, and mumbling something about having to get back to the dorm, I ran out of the restaurant. The last thing I heard was Susan asking Jane if there was really glass on the table.

I walked until I was exhausted, and Susan was asleep when I got back to the dorm. The next morning I was up and out by seven, deciding after looking at the orientation schedule that I could miss the tour of the library and the lecture on the Dewey Decimal System.

I headed north to the Century Tower and University Auditorium. I stopped for a few seconds to get a look at Albert the Alligator locked safely behind a chain link fence in the middle of the lawn. His pen was all muddy and he just sat in the middle of it. I had heard some fraternity boys had tried to whack his tail off, but it seemed to be firmly attached. I kept walking until I reached the Plaza of the Americas. A hundred pine trees stood straight as soldiers among the walkways that crisscrossed the open space. It had rained at dawn and everything smelled fresh and washed. I turned west and passed the gym and finally headed south toward Lake Alice. There were supposed to be gators in the Lake. I stopped in front of a huge pine with a trunk at least two feet across that lifted into the blue like a straight arrow. “Grandfather,” I said, (it seemed like a grandfather because the trunk was so gnarled) “I blew it last night.” I waited and blessedly there was no answer, just a soft swaying of the top branches from the breeze. I smiled to myself. I had one of Dr. Davey’s yellow pills tucked in my pocket. Don’t take one, Monica, unless you have to. You’re really not as sick as you think. O.K., Dr. Davey, if you say so. Time to check out the gators in the lake.

The lake took up the whole of the horizon, but no gators visible. Everything A.O.K., Dr. Davey, as the astronauts would say. I turned north again, walked slowly back to the student union and sat down on a bench beside the steps. Time to take a break.

The school newspaper was stacked in a pile in a green stand. Next to it was a box stating the cost, a nickel, and the admonition that the University of Florida operated under the honor system. I dug out a nickel and picked up the paper. The headline in black bold type read “Half of All Co-eds Not Virgins.” Just then a guy came up, picked up a newspaper, did not deposit a nickel, and sat down next to me on the bench. He had long brown hair tied with a piece of leather in the back and old dirty blue jeans on. Having troubles of my own I ignored him and plunged into the article about fallen women. Who knows, maybe Sr. Agatha had been right about this so called godless secular university. I could see her face swathed in white wimple. They will try to confuse you about your faith, boys and girls! They will use clever arguments to put seeds of doubt into your mind. Now, I hadn’t met any professors yet, but I had my arguments ready.

I looked up and two men in gray suits who were carrying briefcases (obviously professors) were depositing nickels into the box. The hippie was leaning back on the bench, his arms stretching along the back. I was going back to my newspaper when I heard the one with white hair hold the newspaper out toward the hippy and practically accuse him. “I suppose you think this is great, don’t you.”

The hippie shrugged and started to smile. “Hey, man, it’s O.K. Why shouldn’t the girls enjoy life too?”

Then before I could catch my breath at this nonchalant answer the one with the wire rim glasses turned to me. “And you, do you agree with him?”

I gathered myself together. O.K., Sr. Agatha, here we are center stage. God, classes haven’t even begun and here I am defending virtue. “Well, no, I mean, no, I don’t.”

“Why not?” The white-haired one threw the question at me like a bullet.

O.K., let’s see. The community—virginity and faithfulness are necessary to maintain stability in the community—then, of course, the obvious—babies out of wedlock, disease control. I decided to start with the community. That was less obvious and after all this was college. No obvious answers please. “Well, when a young woman decides to maintain her virginity she is in a sense upholding community values and contributing to the stability…”

“Because it’s wrong. Period. Is that right?” The one with the glasses peered into my very soul.

I nodded my head, but I couldn’t believe my ears. Godless professors! Why they sounded like Sr. Agatha, Sr. Margaret Mary, and every other nun who had ever taught me!

Years of learning the way to act, the way to do, the way to think were crumbling before this innocent fact—there were two ways to iron a shirt.

Three days later I walked out of my room and there was Peggy ironing a white blouse in the hall. I had calmed down quite a bit—even trusted myself to spend a few hours a night with my roommate. (She just wanted me to listen while she exploded after the nightly call from her mother who was determined she join Kappa Alpha Theta.) I hadn’t seen Jane or Peggy since the dinner at Woo Ling’s. I decided to try some normal conversation.

“Hi, what are you doing?” Stupid question since I could see what she was doing, but she took it in the social way it was offered.

“Just catching up on some ironing.” She shook out the blouse and put it on the ironing board, folding it in the back along the yoke.

“Got all your classes yet?” I watched as she ironed the yoke, turned the blouse and ran the iron across the front tab without touching the inset at the sleeve.

She nodded. “How about you?”

“I’m seeing a counselor this afternoon.” I couldn’t believe the way she was ironing this blouse. When she started on the collar before she had even begun the back, I stepped up to the ironing board and gently removed the blouse from her hands. “Look, you’re doing this all wrong. This is how my mother taught me to iron blouses.” I shook the shirt out and carefully set the sleeve into the end of the ironing board. “See,” I said, “if you do the sleeves this way and then the back, you don’t get that line at the yoke. The very last thing you do is the collar.” I ran the iron firmly over the top of the collar, careful not to cause any creases at the stitching and handed her the blouse.

“Is that how your mother irons blouses? Well, guess what, my mother does it this way.” She grabbed the blouse out of my hand and slammed the yoke on the board. Her face flushed a bright pink behind her freckles and I stared speechless as she re-ironed the entire shirt. When she was finished, she looked up at me.

Startled I said, “God, I’m sorry.”

Suddenly her shoulders dropped. “So am I. I’ve got a fierce temper. Forget it. Hey, some of us are going downtown later to check out the shops. You want to come?”

“Sure.” I turned to go back into my room. I was relieved she wasn’t going to stay angry, but what she had said and done stunned me. I sat down on my newly acquired pink floral bedspread. Peggy’s mother didn’t iron shirts like my mother! It seemed there were two legitimate, bona fide ways of ironing a shirt! The implications of this fact had to be taken slowly. My life at school and home had been learning the one proper way of doing things. Years of learning the way to act, the way to do, the way to think were crumbling before this innocent fact—there were two ways to iron a shirt.

The next morning I was walking through the lounge when I heard the resident advisor, Miss Simpson, call to me across the room. She hurried up to me carrying important looking papers in a folder. I could see she was a little flustered. Little strands of dark hair had escaped the tight coil at the top of her head and hung down the side of her face. Very unlike Miss Simpson.

“Monica, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Can you walk Jane over to the infirmary? They’re waiting for her, and I can’t get away. I’ve got three sets of parents to see”—she held up the folders—“late coming students, and I can’t find Peggy anywhere.”

“Gosh, yes. Is she sick?”

She hesitated a moment and then tapped her finger against her forehead. “Freaked out this morning. Her parents will be here to get her tomorrow, but she’s got to go to the infirmary now. Oh, don’t look so horrified. She’s not dangerous. Come on, I’ve packed her bag and she’s sitting on the bed staring at the wall. And I’ve got three new students that just arrived. What a day!”

I followed her to Jane and Peggy’s room. Jane didn’t look like herself. Her eyes weren’t dreamy anymore; they were vacant and she was staring straight ahead at the wall. She was using her beautiful fingernails to pick at a scab on the back of her hand.

“Oh my God,” said Miss Simpson. “Stop that, Jane, You’re going to make your hand bleed. There’s her overnight bag, Monica. Do you think you’ll be all right?” I wondered if Miss Simpson knew I had a few emotional problems myself. Her next remark convinced me she didn’t. “Honestly, you’d think somebody would warn me.”

I picked up Jane’s overnight bag and helped her off the bed. “I’ll be fine, Miss Simpson.”

“Okay.” She sighed. “Let me know when you get back.”

It only took us ten minutes to get to the infirmary. I held on to Jane with one hand, and her bag with the other. I knew if I tried to talk to her I’d start crying. The nurse put us in a room with white walls, a black vinyl chair, and an examining table covered with a sheet. I settled Jane in the chair and started walking back and forth in the small room while we waited for the doctor.

I wanted to tell Jane so many things. About how walking had helped me, that she had helped me that night at Woo Ling’s, that I hardly knew her, but I thought her hair was beautiful and her fingernails elegant, and that I’d never heard anyone order from a menu with such sophistication. I wanted to tell her there were two ways of doing things, who knows, maybe a hundred ways to do everything, that professors (some of them anyway) were as pure as Sr. Agatha, that she’d be okay, I knew she would. But I didn’t say anything. I heard the door open and a man with a white coat and stethoscope stepped into the room.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Evans,” He glanced at me and went across the room and knelt in front of Jane. Gently he took her hands in his to keep them from picking at her scab.

I brushed my eyes with the back of my hand and I could taste the tears as they rolled into my mouth.

Dr. Evans looked up at me. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Was I all right? I looked around the room. No glass, no burning smells, and the black chair held no demons, just poor vacant Jane.

“I’m fine,” I said and turned to leave.

As I stepped out of the infirmary I stopped. My eyes were so blurry I couldn’t see. I held on to the railing at the top of the steps. Suddenly I shuddered and it was as if I was shedding some invisible skin. I decided I’d call my mom and dad later on. I wanted them to tell Dr. Davey I’d been up until four in the morning talking to Susan, trying to figure out a way to convince her mother she should be a Zeta, and to tell Uncle Harry I’d gotten my books and they were beautiful, and I wanted to tell my parents that I loved them. Right now, though, I wanted to see some pine trees. I wanted to sit on the cool green grass and feel scratchy bark against my back. I walked down the steps and headed east to the Plaza of the Americas.

Natalie Cornell has a MA in political science and has taught as an adjunct at Santa Fe Community College and the University of Florida. She was a Contributing Writer to the St. Augustine Catholic and her articles have appeared in several other magazines. She lives with her husband, John, in Gainesville, Florida.

1. Don’t obsess about the reasons you ended it with him. Of course you could think of reasons but none of them would be true and also all of them would be true. Things like: the way he cut the mushrooms for dinner, one at a time instead of bunching them, irritated you. Things like: when you stood in line at the grocery store on a Saturday morning and he thought you didn’t know the difference between granulated and powdered sugar. He explained it to you, carefully, precisely, like when you were in college and showed your grandpa how to use the GPS in his car. You said to him, “Oh really, that’s the difference? I never knew!”

“Yeah, that’s the difference.” He smiled dopily, like a golden retriever, the kind of smile that’s fixed into a face.

You stared at this person you’d been dating for almost eleven months, since you moved to the city and learned that’s what you called it.

“Wait, are you joking?”

“Of course I’m fucking joking, Alex. You think I don’t know the difference between powdered sugar and regular sugar?”

“I can’t tell when you’re joking or not.” His forehead wrinkle appeared. This meant: worried.

You didn’t tell him that wasn’t the point.

2. Focus on the real moment: a Monday morning, a few weeks later. Downtown, a new route, one block from his work, two from yours.

“Look,” you said, pointing at the lot across the street.

When he turned his body towards the construction, you could see in his hair the places he’d be bald one day. The building was totally open, and workers stood in the middle of the u-shape they’d made from the inside of it. The concrete revealed, the wires of its insides showing, like crumbling halva.

“That’s so cool,” he said.

“Cool?”

“Yeah, it’s so cool the way the wires are exposed.”

You were maybe already sad before he said this, but you were definitely sadder after.

“I wonder if they tear down buildings the same way every time, or if they do it differently depending on the structure.”

This is the moment you knew you’d eventually have to end it.

Here’s what you were thinking about: your grandpa’s jaw hanging open, drawing in raggedy breaths every five seconds. You sat next to his hospital bed in his room, pleading with him silently to let go, but you wouldn’t say it out loud. Too cheesy. Begging God to take him, but God knew you mostly didn’t believe in Him and so He probably wasn’t listening.

Alex saw exposed wires and you saw your grandpa’s empty mouth, without his teeth in, the darkness of it hanging slack. And this picture you found near his desk, digging through his things while waiting for him to die, which was of yourself as a little girl, wearing a turquoise swimsuit the color of the swimming pool water, and jump-hugging up on his large body, your arms wrapped around his shoulders.

“What?” Alex asked. You knew he was worried he’d be late if you stood there longer.

You shrugged. The construction worker put down his sign and motioned you forward. “Have a great day, okay?” he said, kissing you on the cheek and pushing his sunglasses back on his ears.

3. You were stagnant for a week, until it was Monday again, and you still hadn’t done it. You left work early with your tired in the edges of your eye sockets.

You stood on the train—you still called them that even though you knew it wasn’t strictly correct, what a native might say—and tried to feel your skeletal system, align your posture. You weren’t sure where you were going: his house, yours, somewhere new, a neighborhood you’d never been. For seven days, you’d been trying to talk yourself back into it, the relationship.

You got off at 24^th only because Jen, one of your best friends from college, was calling. This seemed like enough of a sign to head aboveground. You pushed through the turnstile, phone held in between your ear and cramping shoulder. You tried to get to full service before losing the call—“Hold on, hold on, I’m walking upstairs.” It was windy outside, coming through the stairwell of the BART.

For seven days, you’d been trying to talk yourself back into it, the relationship.

Jen wanted to know what was going on. Jen had a sprained ankle and was waiting for her boyfriend David to come pick her up outside the gym. Jen was still in Boston, where you lived together at the beginning of your Real Lives. Before you felt itchy on your arms and the soles of your feet every time you came home to the house in JP, and started applying for jobs on The West Coast. (You still thought of it in capitals then.)

You walked down 24^th, towards no one you knew’s house.

“I’m just sitting in the last moments of sunshine.”

“I’m sorry you sprained your ankle.”

“It’s okay. Have you done it yet?”

“No. Not yet. I think I’m going to though. Really soon.”

“I guess I still don’t really get the issue. Did something happen?”

“No. Yeah. He just…we just don’t see things the same way. He doesn’t get how I feel about anything, he just wants to…I don’t even want to tell you about this. I’m ruining it, I’m making things up and telling you some story about why it doesn’t work but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter why it doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work.”

“There must be a reason.”

“That’s exactly the point. There’s a reason but there’s also no reason.”

You didn’t want to invent something for all your friends who wanted to know why, so you stopped returning their calls and texts. You were like a teenager again, making excuses for getting a bad grade on a test, who wouldn’t just admit she’d stayed up late, listening to the new Something Corporate/Dashboard Confessional/Taking Back Sunday CD on repeat instead of studying. Letting the music feel your feelings for you.

“Well. You’re entitled to your feelings,” Jen said.

“Maybe.”

“The longer you stay, the harder it’ll be to leave, so, if you’re having all these doubts…yeah.”

“Or maybe I’m overreacting. Did you ever feel like this with David?”

“With David…I mean, I think when we first started dating, it wasn’t like I was like oh my god I’m going to marry this guy. But I remember one night we’d been dating for like six months, and he got out of the bathroom and there were his little shaving hairs all over the edge of the sink, and I was brushing my teeth and noticing them and I didn’t even care, and that’s when I was like shit I am totally in love with this person, because you remember when I lived with Peter and he did that I would flip my shit about it, like, this is so gendered that I’m having to clean up the sink from your chin stubble! But that night I didn’t even care. Also, though, he’s not emotionally manipulative like Peter.”

“Also.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s…hold on. This entire city is fucking under construction. That’s a jackhammer.”

“You’re in a boom, Carrie! I keep reading you’re in a bubble. More jobs. It’s good.”

You walked quickly away from the noise. You saw a dress in a window and you saw, in its printed green and white flowered pattern, an excuse to get off the phone, away from whatever story you were making up for a person who had known you for seven years, who held your hair back while you vomited from tequila plus vodka, whose hand you squeezed at the hospital once when Jen had to get an emergency spinal tap, who lay giggling with you on the floor of your shared bedroom in the dorms until you yelled, “Stop! I’m going to seriously pee on this floor if we don’t stop.”

“Okay,” Jen said from Boston. “I feel like we didn’t really talk about it.”

“That’s okay. I’m sorry you twisted your ankle.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“Okay. I’ll call you soon.”

“Yeah, okay, just call whenever. Let me know what happens. I’m sorry you’re having a hard time.”

“I’m fine. I’m just, it’s just today.”

4. When you visited your grandpa last summer at his house by the ocean, the wind came off the Atlantic and you were wearing just a t-shirt, pale peach and loose. He said to you, “Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m a little cold. I didn’t want to wear any of my sweaters though. I didn’t want to carry it.”

“You can’t keep arguing with the world like this, Carrie.”

“Grandpa.” You sang it to him.

“Okay, you can keep arguing, but you’re going to lose. The wind, you’re not going to beat the wind with just being stubborn. You’re not going to beat nature.”

“I’m not trying to beat nature.”

“Are you trying to be uncomfortable? Why don’t you just let yourself be comfortable?”

These were the kinds of questions he asked.

5. You didn’t look for a dress that night. And you didn’t go to Alex’s for dinner. Or turn around and walk the thirty minutes straight home, to your unmade bed with its twisted grey down comforter.

You walked down the street, towards the fancy ice cream place with the strange flavors, and ordered biscuits and gravy, which came with actual dough pieces. You sat inside, in the heat. Now it was getting dark, sun behind a hill, and all you could see was your own reflection in the window, the place in your left eyebrow that you’d over-plucked by accident earlier in the week, that still needed to grow in.

You left your coat on, scarf wrapped around your neck, tight. Licking slowly, slowly, letting it coat the top of your tongue and the back of your throat with creamy fat, like covering your dry legs with lotion in the winter.

You spun on the stool, pretending the world had ended around you, there’d been the apocalypse but you hadn’t known because you were inside the ice cream place, which somehow had been the only safe place. The luck of it.

When you went outside later, if you went outside later, you’d see only dust, everything transformed to rubble, and there’d be no empty, sad, torn down places, once everything had been reduced to brown, fine silt. The kind you could pick up in your hand and scatter, like cremains.

6. In the beginning of the new year, four months after you ended it, and three months after you decided to stop speaking, or rather, after Alex told you he didn’t want to hate you and that he needed you to stop speaking, you are learning a different story. It’s a story about a man with an almost hairless arm. Him, holding his dark arm next to yours to compare shades. A man with a gold band around his finger that looks like a cousin of the one you’ve been wearing on your hand since your grandpa died.

You quit your job in the office and are teaching swimming to middle school girls. Your hair is always crunchy with chlorine.

“Why not? Why not make a mess of it?” your mother said on the phone, when you told her you were quitting your job, just a month after ending things with Alex.

“Of what?”

“Your life. You’ve never done that before. So try it.”

Your arm has more hair on it and is almost the same shade as this man’s. You are probably the only person in the entire city who’s getting tan in the winter, but it’s been a dry one, everyone says, so you can be outside, in Marin or Berkeley, when you’re not at work.

“You like that band?” the man asks, looking at your ring. He’s the kind of man who knows everyone’s name at the front desk of the pool, and they know his.

“Sure,” you say. You don’t tell him it’s your grandpa’s that you got resized. You don’t tell him you’re beholden to no one.

You’re learning city kids are strange creatures outside of the pool. One second they’re children, the next they’re grown-up skinny models, all hips and sassy eyebrows. They know how to protect their bags; they know how to catch a cab and a bus. Sometimes, except in the water, you feel like they know more than you, child of the suburbs of the northeast.

Don’t ask him about his ring.

After, you lie in the bedroom of the studio apartment south of Market where he takes you. He says it’s his friend’s place, only occupied when his friend is in town for work, which is rarely. Something about data and hospitals. His friend is always on the road. The apartment has no photos.

You miss the seasons. You miss the way the leaves falling forces people to think about change, and the cold keeps them inside to consider what they have or haven’t done, and talk to each other. You miss weather that doles out consequences.

The next day, at the pool, one of the lane swimmers pulls you aside as you walk toward the locker room to get ready for work. You want to run from her the way you want to run from everyone, lately. Stay.

“Hun,” she says, in a voice like no one you are related to, a voice of the south. You wonder what turn she’s taken to end up in a community pool in northern California.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve seen you. You’re a good swimmer. You’re a good teacher.”

“Thank you.” The woman wears a purple one-piece and sparkly, blue toenail polish.

“You’ve got an open heart.”

You smile at her like someone with an open heart might.

“Has anyone told you, how good it gets?”

You hold still. The woman has short silver and white hair and is pretty, with sharp features and ballerina cheekbones. She wears no make up.

“Child, you’re young, and you’re beautiful, but let me tell you from sixty, it gets even better.” The woman smiles; the corners of her eyes get crinkly. “I’m in love again! And it can get so good.” Her teeth look strong. They look real. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

She squeezes your shoulders and trots off toward the pool.

You walk to the locker room to put your bag away, to sit on a rubber bench with your head in your open hands, briefly, to try to feel ready to teach those adultbabies how not to drown.

Janet Frishberg lives and writes in a light blue room in San Francisco, where she’s currently editing her first book. You can find her work in places like Smokelong Quarterly; Pithead Chapel; Literary Orphans; Cease, Cows; the SF Chronicle; and r.kv.r.y quarterly. She’d love to tell you more at janetfrishberg.com.

“That nurse-girl stole my check blanks.”

It’s a conversation starter. I just got here, just sat down in the chair that used to be Grandma’s and we needed a place to start.

The nurse comes in on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to check on him and get him to bathe. On Fridays, I show up a half hour after the nurse leaves, and he bitches. As he bitches about that “nurse girl” he points to the front door and I can see his arm because he forgot to button his shirt sleeve and his muscles aren’t big enough to keep the material up. His withered arm, like chicken skin that’s been pulled off raw, slaps at the air. He shakes his fist and that skin jiggles and I can’t eat chicken anymore.

I look away, over to the television that’s not on, to the bookcase filled with Reader’s Digest books in rainbow colors, to the robin’s egg blue paint on the walls and the thick brown shag carpet. But his arm stays up, the skin jiggling back and forth at the edges of my sight line.

“She didn’t steal your check blanks, Grandpa,” I say.

“Listen here, missy, they’re gone.”

“I put them in the desk drawer where you always keep them.”

“That’s not where I like them.”

“Yeah, it is.”

He looks over the 1940’s red metal TV tray he likes to eat at, his brittle blue eyes pale imitations of themselves with white cataract lace crocheted across. The old face, deep wrinkled cheeks, and I make myself remember being told that I’m supposed to love and respect this man. And I want to, I really do. It’s just easier to remember when his skin’s not jiggling at me.

His wrinkled mouth, concaved from losing all his teeth, has that white foamy stuff caught on one corner. He reaches a hand up and wipes at his lips, like he knows the foamy spit is there, but he doesn’t. It’s just one of those things he does.

“Drawer’s where we keep ‘em?” he says.

“Yep.”

“Oh.”

He looks at the air between his face and my face, sort of in my direction but not looking at me. Like every Friday, I wish I could think of ways to get out of the house for the night. That’s not going to happen. It’s my turn. And just like every Friday, I feel a sigh slide up me before it comes out, try to make it stay inside, but it won’t.

“Show’s comin’ on soon,” he says.

That’s Grandpa’s code for me to stand up and turn on the television he’s had forever. The set takes a minute to warm up enough to show a picture, and while it warms I turn it to channel four— Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. These shows seem to be on some Old Person Mandatory Viewing list. He watches them six days a week, talks about them with other old people when I take him places. An octogenarian version of water cooler TV.

“You make a good door but not a good window,” he says.

I know my being alive is because of this bent and broken person covered in chicken skin and baggy clothes, this head scattered with liver spots and white hair.

It’s a family saying. One my father repeated too many times when I was growing up. I step to the side of the television set, no longer a door. My jaw is teeth against teeth while I pull the TV tray in front of his chair and take a white napkin from the holder on his wood-like-finished end table, lay the napkin on the tray.

“You cold?” I say.

“What!”

I take a breath in so I can talk in a calm voice.

“You’re in my way,” he says before I can repeat the question. He leans to his right, to look around me although the set hasn’t warmed and neither show is on.

“Didja break my television?”

I step left. Make a Vanna White gesture to the set. “It’s warming up.”

“Oh.”

I know my being alive is because of this bent and broken person covered in chicken skin and baggy clothes, this head scattered with liver spots and white hair. But I’m nineteen and he’s been, like, eighty years old for my entire life, kind of like my parents always being forty. They will always be those ages, even though I’ve grown from kindergarten to college. They are my adults, and now I’m supposed to be old enough to take care of them like they’re children.

“What do you want for dinner?” I say.

“It’s Friday.”

“What kind of fish do you want?”

His wrinkled arm and hand come out at me and wave me away. Jeopardy! is starting. “Whatever you find,” he says. His words, his blue and white eyes aimed more at the TV and Alex Trebek than at me. I pass by him toward the kitchen, and, “You make a good door.”

At the same time I say, “Sorry.”

Inside my head is the little girl in me that wants to smartass back at him with, “I never wanted to be a window,” but I can’t because he’s still my adult.

*     *     *

The kitchen is pink 1950s tile counters, cool rounded edges, a white cast iron sink with chips that show the metal underneath. The place where Grandma used to make fried chicken and ginger cookies while I watched. I lean on the counter, weight into my hands and arms, all of me bent and braced and tired. So damned tired my body could melt into a puddle, lie there until I evaporate into the stale air of this house, because my night, my one night of the week on duty, has only just started.

And he coughs. The cough that comes from smoking filterless Salems until he couldn’t get them anymore. Long enough that the smell of cigarette is ground into the pores of the house.

Then the after-cough sound, a guttural slog of goop out of his lungs and spit into one of his red handkerchiefs. The red handkerchiefs lie all over the house in crusted sculptures of red patterned cloth and dry mucus, waiting for the day my mother or my aunt is here because none of the rest of us will touch them. Waiting for my cousin to come on Wednesday and iron them, because she likes to iron. A pile of dozens of those washed and ironed red handkerchief next to his chair, because when we buy him Kleenex, Grandpa says that a handkerchief was good enough for his father and his grandfather and then he says nothing else because that’s supposed to be an answer.

I think about those handkerchief sculptures and vomit a little in the back of my throat. My own goop that goes back down to my stomach.

On the pea green fridge, the white board has the weekly schedule, the same schedule for every week since Grandma passed and the family had to take over the responsibility of Grandpa. Fish on Friday, chicken on Sunday, laundry on Wednesday. It’s all on the white board, even the “nurse girl” and the in-home-hospice guys who come overnight to doze on a chair in case something happens during the wee-smalls.

My sister has Tuesdays. My brother lives out-of-state and therefore out-of-reach. My cousin, parents, aunt, and uncle each took a shift until all that was left for me was Friday.

Friday because I don’t have a boyfriend.

Friday because I don’t work nights.

Friday because it’s supposed to give me time for homework.

Every fucking Friday.

Friday and therefore fish.

I want to lean on the pink tiles I love—the tiles that are pale, delicate, old. A single thing inside this house that I can always count on. Even the cracked tiles remain steady in their spot, saying to hell with you, we are not leaving this place without a fight.

Of course, the tiles are just the kitchen version of my grandfather and with that thought my peace is broken. I pull myself up and over to the fridge with the white board, with the schedule, with the fish on Friday.

I get to choose between frozen fish sticks or frozen breaded clams that are like eating deep fried pencil erasers. A handful of clams on a cookie sheet, into the oven, 350 degrees for eleven minutes. I reheat the leftover creamed corn from last night. And ta-da, microwave-and-eleven-minute Haute Cuisine.

Grandpa hollers from the living room. “You ‘bout done in there?”

I’m leaning again, staring out the window over the sink and I holler back, “A couple minutes.”

“Wheel of Fortune’s coming on soon.”

“I know.”

“I like to eat when Wheel‘s—” his sentence ends in another cough, another hack, another spit, another potential goop and red handkerchief statue.

The vomit taste burns my throat, goes back down into my stomach, that horrible aftertaste of acid sick in my mouth. I come out to the living room, Double Jeopardy, and ‘What’s the Mona Lisa,’ and his cough goes on.

“You okay?” I say.

“Course I’m okay,” he says, and coughs goop into the red cloth. “Just get me my dinner.”

I bite my bottom lip on the little girl that wants to smartass again and go back to the kitchen.

The creamed corn bubbles in the microwave. I rummage to find his tartar sauce behind the milk that will expire tomorrow, plop some onto the plate in a lumpy circle, and wait for the oven timer.

*     *     *

Wheel of Fortune is starting in the living room and Grandpa’s eating batter crusted chewy clam parts from the flowered plates Grandma always used. My chance for a moment of peace and I take it on the toilet.

But peace comes at a cost. His stomach and bowels don’t hold much of anything anymore. The splattered edge of the toilet seat, however, holds whatever is splattered there.

I find the cleanser, the blue plastic cleaning brush, and scrub. A few minutes of bleach activated lemon scented suds, a solid minute of soap and a fingernail scrubber on my hands, and I can finally sit.

While the pee falls into the water under me, I close my eyes and think of all the memories of this place from my childhood. The laughter and conversation that would come through the rooms, us kids running to Grandma where she sat in her chair, lemon drops in the sky blue candy dish—hard sugary outside that always cut the tongue and the sharp-sweet lemon beneath. Then I grew up and this became the house where my grandmother died slowly from cancer without telling any of us she was sick. Where my grandfather now sits and rots, Friday by Friday.

A bang against the flimsy bathroom door and my thighs go goose-bump prickly with the interrupt. Is it another time bomb? Another drizzle down the pant leg? The exciting opportunity to put my bare hands into the toilet bowl with real live old man shit?

His voice echoes into the hollow bathroom door. “My corn’s cold.” He slaps a fist on the door again. “D’you hear me in there?”

I take a breath in. “Can I please have a moment?”

No answer.

I count to ten in my head and still nothing. My body relaxes; small drops of pee come out of me. My head falls to the spring green bathroom wall beside me and I think again about how much I miss chicken.

Then his voice again, relentless. “My corn’s cold and they have some spick on Wheel of Fortune.”

With my head against the wall, I can see the ancient yellow shower tiles in the mirror over the sink. The dripping shower head with rust on the pipe. One of Grandpa’s dark blue coffee cups on the counter.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I say, more to the coffee cup than to him.

“What!” he asks, but it’s not really a question.

The little girl piece of me makes a fist and the fist wants to slam at the door and through the door and I collect my calm and I say, “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Oh.”

The sound of his answer bounces around inside the door and repeats itself. Oh, oh, oh. Sad, sorry, pathetic.

At the sink, my Grandma’s green eyes look back at me in the mirror. Her cheekbones and not-quite-pug nose. The memory of her is all over my face and I think of those times when Grandpa is really out of it and he calls me Grandma’s name.

Whatever she saw in him, I don’t see.

I come out and he’s walked back to his chair, the hump of his shoulders pulling the back of his white shirt from his gray pants. He turns around and half-sits-half-falls into the chair where he half-lives his life.

On the ancient red TV tray are the remains of his dinner. Cold creamy stuff with floating corn, tartar sauce with floating clumps of clam batter, half the clam pieces uneaten.

“You want me to warm that up again?” I say.

He looks at the plate and I look at the plate and we pause. My grandfather and I have never spent so much time together, have never been alone-just-the-two-of-us before I took Fridays a couple of months ago. We don’t know how to be silent with each other, how to be just family.

“Do you want it warmed up?” I say again.

His hand raises and shoos me away. “Not hungry anymore,” he says. And he reaches a hand up and wipes at his lips because it’s just one of those things he does.

The memory of her is all over my face and I think of those times when Grandpa is really out of it and he calls me Grandma’s name.

My teeth against teeth make a false smile he isn’t looking at and the girl in me wants to scream, shrill enough and big enough to break something. Break him so I can have my Fridays back. So I can have some memories that haven’t been broken by adulthood.

“Look!” he says, the flap of chicken skin arm falls out of his sleeve while his finger points at the television and his skin points at the kitchen then the bathroom then the kitchen again. “Look, right there on Wheel.”

Some guy named Eduardo asks for an F, gets three. While Vanna White does her bit, Grandpa’s finger stops pointing, his skin stops pointing, and I remember liking chicken.

“Damned people are everywhere,” he says. “Ruined the damned country.”

I pick up the plate and Eduardo solves the puzzle to win two thousand five hundred and fifty dollars. ‘The Eiffel Tower of London.’

“There’s no Eiffel Tower in England,” Grandpa says.

“It’s a before and after puzzle,” I say.

“A what?”

“A before and after.”

He stares hard at me, cataracts over blue.

I point to the television, my second Vanna White moment of the night, and say it louder, “The puzzle is Before and After.”

“Oh,” he says. “Still a damned spick.”

Another end to another conversation.

I cross in front of him to get to the kitchen. I’m not a door this time because he doesn’t mind missing commercials.

“Dessert?” I say.

“Maybe coffee later,” he says.

As I walk toward the kitchen, he says, “You know.”

I stop. Look at the back of his half-balded head.

“I used to care about things,” he says.

He keeps his eyes on the TV set. A new puzzle. The category is Same Name.

*     *     *

In the pink tiled kitchen, I leave behind idiots buying vowels.

I reach for a glass and find the bottle of vodka behind Grandpa’s dark blue coffee cups. I shouldn’t be surprised and I’m not. I know I’m supposed to be angry and reprimand him like he’s some kid sneaking a cookie and I won’t.

Something I never noticed before my Fridays was Grandpa and his coffee cups full of vodka. Grandpa walking back to his chair or into the bedroom or into the bathroom, the cup beside his leg because he thinks if it’s beside his leg no one else can see it. Grandpa moving along every day with badly hidden blue cups of what’s killing him.

I grab a glass and the bottle of vodka. At the sink, I fill my glass from the tap and it clinks on the tile when I set it down. Then I hold the bottle up in the window sunlight. Through vodka bottle glass I see the neighborhood my grandparents have always lived in. None of their friends are in these houses now; they’ve gone to live with relatives, moved to retirement homes, died.

The vodka bottle is more than half gone, hidden away in the cupboard for less than a week since it wasn’t here last Friday. It smells like nothing. Tastes like nothing but a warm burn through my throat and into my chest as I tip it up and empty the bottle. It clears away the vomit taste, gives the evening a lightness.

Then I drink my water and set my glass beside the sink. Under the sink, the garbage smells of mold and bad meat, and I shove the empty vodka bottle under some old tin foil and close the cupboard door.

Sally K Lehman is the author of the novella Small Minutes. She has had more than twenty poems and stories published in online literary magazines including Bewildering Stories, The Scruffy Dog Review, Ascent Aspirations, Voice Catcher, and the upcoming Perceptions Magazine of the Arts. Find more about her at SallyKLehman.com and TheIncidentalPoet.com. Sally studied Mathematics at UC Berkeley and worked in the computer industry for many years prior to becoming a full time writer. She currently lives near Portland, Oregon.