Accept the Fluster

(first short story since junior year of high school, finished 3/11/10, written in two sittings)


She can’t remember now who gave her the key. That seems to be the way of things—sources fade. If on any given day she can piece together beyond a blur the faces or make more than a haphazard stab at the hair color of her earliest teachers, the ones who gave her numbers, gave her words, gave her voice, it is a rare miracle. Her grandmother, idolized for decades, is now little more than sketchy patches of memory flesh, strung together with sutures whose mental molecules dissolve handfuls at a time. She’s given up on journals, chronicles of places and events that need never have occurred.
The key, then, held its own special comfort lying small, notched, and heavy in the creased basket of her palm. It had remained. Unless lost it could not be forgotten. It found a home in the pocket of her coat, at first, until she began to worry about holes fraying in the lining or sudden jolts on the subway. For some months she wore it on a once-gold chain, savored its dangling presence against her sternum and fingered the tip of it whenever the ground seemed to move too quickly beneath her feet. And ground hardly ever moves quite as quickly as it does in March in Boston, when the rain still falls white but infuriatingly non-adhesive and the temperature hovers at an ambivalent in-between, numerically irrelevant until the wind hits skin.
One week into March, Gypsy had worn the bronzy polish of the key down to a dull sheen, and the semi-conscious but fully compulsive rubbing did not stop. Her brother had died. Barring complete strangers, she felt farther from no one than she did from Carson; she’d collected more accidental details about the girl who slouched at the opposite end of row five in the auditorium of her psychology classes. One or both of them had chalked a line separating their respective existences with so much dexterity and precision that Gypsy would not have been able to guess at his favorite color, should the possibility that he might have one ever occur to her.
His absence lingered anyway. Carson had been like a last name, peripheral but present. He left an uncomfortable gap; she slept less. She lost the capacity to sleep entirely, in fact, favoring nervous movement and full hours over the limbo of uncontrollable thought pooling in the folds of the sheet left untouched in knots at the foot of her mattress. Five classes were no longer enough. When the campus gym opened at seven, Gypsy was jogging in place inches from the glass doors, sending puffs of evenly spaced visible breath to bloom condensation just between the printed logo and list of hours. Notebooks became extraneous as she committed her notes to memory verbatim, down to the comma, down the irregular scribble of a hurried bullet point. She took up knitting, though she could only stand it as something to do with her hands while going nowhere on a treadmill, on an elliptical machine, on a stationary bike.
Drugs, alcohol, guys whose names she wouldn’t remember, the predictability of these avenues dampened their appeal from the outset, narrowing her options. Reading was impossible. Television had to strike a delicate equilibrium between mindless and absorbing, and stick to innocuous themes. Gypsy ate even less than she had before Carson disappeared, and only with friends who knew better than to ask questions after a week of her comatose response. Her calorie count dipped closer to triple digits, and this was especially satisfactory. The combination of exercise and starvation allowed a certain degree of unconsciousness at night, shortly before dawn, when she would lie on top of the blanket gazing blankly at the deflected rays of headlights moving across her pockmarked wall. |

“Get off your ass.”
April scrambled for the counter edge in stability-seeking reflex when Trisket kicked her stool on his way to the register, awoken completely from her hypnotized reverie. Her eyes felt like peeled grapes and only the kick had stopped her heart from continuing to beat in tandem with the blinking cursor on her laptop’s glowing screen. That damned cursor. So rhythmic, so taunting.
“My characters won’t breathe,” she whined, straightening the straightened display of bookmarks on the counter for the fifth time that morning and falling back in a folded-arms slump against the wall of rare books behind the counter. Trisket’s growl came as if on cue.
“You’ve disturbed the dust!” He elbowed her away from the books. “I’d be more surprised if they did; words don’t have lungs. Stop touching these books, for Christ’s sake. I’ve told you. Old books have to look old. No one will buy them with disturbed dust.” His rant continued, one hand pinching the bad hip he denied having as he tried to blow dust from the adjacent books onto the newly clean spines, and April pecked away rapidly at the linoleum countertop with her pointer finger. “People who care about the fact that some guy wrote his name on the title page a century ago kick more and more buckets these days. Those people aren’t going to bother with clean books. Characters have to have flaws. Perfect people are made out of cardboard; I don’t trust them. You have flaws. They have flaws.”
“I don’t have flaws, you have flaws.” The response came out low and instinctive, like a toddler tiring of its tantrum. “And I’ve heard all this. Flaws. Dialogue. Back story.”
“Feh, no flaws. You hear everything, you learn nothing. And how many brownies are left in the back?” He was Windexing the front window, shouting over his lumpy shoulder. "Maybe try writing someone like yourself."
April stood up straighter. “Two. Shut up. I have great metabolism and you have blood pressure problems. I get the brownies.” Trisket was her favorite part of working at Etheridge Books. Before she walked into her first college lecture hall she’d been bored of the other students, their narrow focus, the empty pretention that seemed to curdle just beneath their noses. She liked her clothes mindless and interchangeable and spared more thought for the grass struggling at the corners of intersections than she did for the contents of red plastic cups. Reality television never entered her sphere of consciousness. “And I never know what to name them. It’s character development that I really enjoy—plot’s so cumbersome—but they need names. I wonder if people name babies that arbitrarily.” As she finished the sentence, though, she turned back to her laptop and opened a new Word document.
_____________

The salty paper crunch of the Pringles against the roof of her half-open mouth flooded Magali's system like morphine as she crammed as many of the sour cream and onion shards into her eager esophagus as possible. She stood caved over the bright green canister wedged between her breasts and held there by one solidly determined forearm, staring straight ahead. She knew the shelf of canned tomatoes provided only a temporary shelter.
"What the hell are you doing? Give me those." Too temporary. When Neva snatched the Pringles and dropped them without ceremony into the murky abyss of her handbag, Magali felt as though she'd been robbed of a child. "You're not allowed to just be in the kitchen." People dressed in the customary white were beginning to pause and stare here and there in the stainless steel jungle of the restaurant's kitchen. One, the one with the biggest hat, was shoving a handful of coppery curls behind her left ear and charging toward them. Neva had a firm grasp on Magali's limp wrist and tugged her closer to the swinging door.
"I changed my mind, Neva!" Magali flailed behind her with the other hand and found godsent purchase in the grille of the romato shelf. "I'm not going. Give me back my chips, I'm hungry."
"You're not hungry; you left most of your dinner on the table to squirrel away in here." Every other word or so was punctuated with a grunt of effort as violent as a badly timed expletive. Neither woman was terribly strong, but Magali had the tomato ballast on her side. "You're. Going." Recently retouched black hair ballooned away from her face with each huff, and she tucked Magali's forearm against her ribs in order to drag her oxlike closer to the exit. The redheaded chef seemed to have gone for backup.
"But I like Timothy!" The shelf was beginning to really dig into the soft flesh where fingers meet palm, and she was losing protest momentum.
"You'll like the next--one--too!" That 'too' was the deciding factor. Magali reeled loose from the shelf and thrust half of the unsuccessful hand into her mouth in an attempt to alleviate some of the pain. Neva stumbled forward a few steps but braced herself against a column of cardboard boxes labeled ONIONS: HANDLE WITH CARE and slumped there, gasping. "This is what you want. What you've always wanted. Timothy's not worth it. And God help me, if all that junk you gobble doesn't go to your hips someday soon this friendship is so over."
"I resent that crack about the next one, you know." Her words were lisping and barely intelligible around the fingers she was nursing. "Timothy's a nice guy."
"He's as emotionally unavailable as any other male you've ever been interested in. This breakup dinner is the first time you've really seen him in over two weeks; it's hardly worth the tip."
"I don't eat that much junk food."
"You run on it. Focus, Magali."
"I had to quit my job."
"Yes."
"I may not be able to get another apartment here."
"I'll keep your key."
Neva looked at Magali. Magali looked at the bulge in Neva's handbag that she'd begun to suspect might be the pilfered Pringles.
"This is why I'm here, remember," Neva said, taking a quiet step closer. "We decided that I'd eat in a far corner in case you backed down or, in what I must say is a new high for you, decided to break into a public kitchen and eat a stack of Pringles long as your arm. You wanted to make sure you'd do this."
"Maybe that was crazy me and this is me me." She began to chew on a brown strip of her bangs. "I don't know anything about Nepal." She'd been researching it online and robbing libraries dry of any books related to or known to mention the country for as long as she could remember, but anyone can write anything on the internet, and who knew whether the authors were thorough fact-checkers? Magali tried not to think about the orphans, about the fact that she could read, write, and--save for a crippling anxiety about correct pronunciation--speak Nepali, about what Monday morning at nine would be like when she smiled at the first person on line from behind the glass and accepted their deposit or cashed their paycheck.
"You're scared. Anyone would be. But your other option is to die bored, alone, and covered in chip dust that's been gathering for decades on the gradually inflating rolls of your belly fat. Man up, Mags."
"Do I really have to dump Timothy?"
"Honestly I doubt he'd notice either way, but it's only polite."
_____________

Trisket was puttering about somewhere in the shadows of the European history section and grunted something muffled and unintelligible. April scowled at what remained of Gypsy and her dead brother. She’d been so excited by the idea of writing a story based on Elizabeth Bishop’s loss poem, but forming the paragraphs had been less pleasant than flossing, which she never bothered with anyway. A special folder on her desktop was devoted to these false starts, enthusiastically entitled POSSIBILITIES. She had a sudden urge to replace that with FAILURES, or something more graphic. Every time. Every single time. They died after a page and a half with disturbing consistency, and almost always featured a girl who may as well have been born without dopamine. These were the girls, the people, April couldn’t stand in real life, the ones who flopped spinelessly when shoved and then moped. She’d skimmed the first three lines or so of college rejection letters and tossed them, her mind already on other things. For her worst breakups thus far, April had allowed herself twenty-four hours of cliché: edible garbage, cinematic garbage, stretches of sleep that left Van Winkle looking like a peach-cheeked newborn, and then a vigorous shower and gulps of fresh air. No eating disorders or excessive exercise—brownies and will power were for her plentiful and lacking, in the wrong order. She couldn’t quite imagine reading being impossible for more than the duration of a mood.
_____________

She'd majored in English and resented the stigma. Of all things, she thought literature ought to be valued. Magali was put off by computers, with their buttons real and pixel, screens, humming, and errors. She often lost track of time in the back corners of bookstores, fingering the paper in the journals propped up for sale, running their ribbon markers through her fingers like rivulets and trying to imagine all the things someone might write on their pages. Her idols had always been readers, writers: for a week in high school she stayed up late at night with biographies about Catherine the Great, who'd woken each day at five to write comedies, histories, tragedies, who knew not only Russian but German, French and Latin, who'd corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot. She wished ink tasted better; she would have liked to imbibe it.
And now her life was going no where. Funny how that happens. The minor in accounting, mandated by the grandparents who were shouldering tuition, was the only thing that kept Magali fed. Twenty-four years old. She knew French, Italian, German basics and now Nepali. Timothy was her sixth boyfriend in half as many years; mainly she liked the warm body, the banter at meals, the easy plans. 'Bank teller' was such an outlier in her sense of identity that she often had to pause to remember when people asked her what it was she did. The bank was local and its manager burned out, or she would have been out of a job much sooner--account-holders often had to tap on the glass in order to break the spell held over her by whatever book she was hiding in her lap that day. For months it had been Emerson. She'd begun with the poetry and then dove into the essays. Compensation. Circles. The American Scholar. Intellect. Self-Reliance. Her sense of restlessness, of overwhelming insufficiency, became visceral, became too strong to bear. Stagnant, static, the synonyms crashed against the backs of her eyelids every night before she fell asleep.
So she bought a ticket. Living with Neva in the one bedroom apartment above the flower shop where Neva had been working since freshman year, and subsisting on a diet of saturated fat balanced conscientiously with simple carbohydrates, had left the bulk of her salary, meager though it was, untapped. The bargain airline websites were her new Jesus; she watched ticket prices rise and fall for three days before losing her nerve and dropping a little over a thousand dollars on a one-way from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Kathmandu, Nepal. There'd been an article in one of the Reader's Digests that the bank kept fanned out on the glossy end tables in its glossier lobby about a man who'd sold everything he owned to live and work in Nepalese orphanages, and that was the plan.

_____________

“Muttering like a crazy person again,” Trisket said, kicking her stool again for the hell of it as he approached the ‘This Month’s Reads’ table with a stack of slick-covered books teetering against his chest and stabilized only with the aid of his tucked-down chin. “Do something useful, it’s already eleven.”
“I know you’re ancient, but most people my age aren’t even awake yet. It’s Saturday. I could be just starting to feel my hangover right about now. I could be wondering where my pants are, I could—”
“I don’t pay those people. I might, though, if you don’t get off your bum like I told you twenty minutes ago and stop muttering. Do something. Look alive. We might even have customers.” Trisket had opened Etheridge as an escape and April knew it. It didn’t have a self-help section, there was no colorful display of books about babies and breastfeeding and progressive childrearing techniques, and she’d probably take him in to be examined if he ever purchased a CD. The ‘Help Wanted’ sign, written in scraggly pencil on an index card, had been taped crookedly to a shelf bowed with the weight of Chaucer, Milton, and Spencer, a shelf you could only reach by passing modern languages, Greek mythology, a solid wall of Crèvecoeur, Hemingway, Stein, Twain, Dickens, Pope, Whitman, Beauvoir, the ethics/metaphysics/stoicism/republicanism/sophistry corner golden with a tiny window embedded in the brick across from it, and a pocket of Plath and Sexton and Hughes jumbled messily together. Eight months after being hired, when he finally gave her the key to the backroom—tossing it onto the counter to land beside her wrist like it didn’t mean anything—she’d come across a stack of paper tucked into a manila folder, the pages’ edges ruffled from their notebook origins, the surfaces covered with tiny hieroglyphics which slowly began to cohere into legible words that never, never, passed a margin boundary. He was a closet playwright. Some of them were fifty years old; all were meticulously dated. Comedies, tragedies, one-act symbolic explorations, two exhaustive epics that he’d written as a college sophomore, a one-woman show that made her giggle into her sleeve and ended after four pages with a scribbled Screw it. His characters were never flat.
_____________

"There are more Fruit Roll-Ups in here than there are pairs of socks," Neva snorted, pushing Magali's suitcase over on the bed to make room to sit. "I don't know who taught you how to pack."
"They only really eat lentils and rice." She was teetering on one toe, blindly brushing the darker recesses of her top closet shelf to see if she'd left anything begind. "It sounds disgustingly healthy."
"I don't think I'm even going to comment on the fact that your tioletry bag features one toothbrush, too bags of Goldfish, and no soap. When is your taxi?"
"Tomorrow, six." She ducked under the bed up to her shoulders, backside wiggling in the air. "So dusty..."
"Wake me and I kill you, you know."
"Not even to say goodbye?"
"We'll say goodbye tonight. You're coming back eventually. And I don't speak English at six on Sundays." Neva wouldn't look at Magali. She was peeling bits of stem from beneath the crescents of her fingernails, scrubbing with a spit-dampened thumb the ever-present splotches of chlorophyll on her fingers.
Shoes polka-dotted the floor. Neva's were lined up against her wall and represented virtually ever color it is possible to artificially manufacture. Magali's, interchangeable in hue and description, seemed each to have made brief and ineffectual runs for their lives; she'd yet to pack any. "I can't believe I'm doing this." Magali added another blob of denim to the skyscraper slowly developing at Neva's hip.
"You're doing it. And thank God, seriously. So many people trash their lives dreaming and never bothering to do."
"Emerson said--"
"I know. Whatever it is, my biology degree and total lack of literary background aside, I live with you. If Emerson said it, you said it." She fell back onto the bedspread, unwrapped a Fruit Roll-Up, and started popping out one of the cartoon characters. "Nothing this blue can be edible."
"Where else are you supposed to get Vitamin B?" Magali began to jump up and down like a woman possessed from her seat on the overstuffed suitcase in an attempt to flatten it.
"I want your degree--hell, your high school diploma, your kindergarten graduation cupcake--rescinded for that question," Neva said, picking bits of plasticy blue sugar from between her teeth.
_____________

“Maybe I could kill them.”
“That’s what an employer wants to hear.”
“Come on, Trisket. Maybe I could kill off my stupid girls. Give the reader some relief.”
“Worry about the reader when you have the reader. Worry about the job or you won’t have one. Maybe we should finally straighten out that damned Plath orgy.” He’d been saying this since her second day at Etheridge. Three years later, she was taking him as seriously as she did then.
“It’s not her fault she committed suicide,” April knee-jerked into the inventory binder she was squinting at, trying to add in her head. “Hughes was a bastard.”
“And Sexton was a vicarious hanger-on, we’ve been over this. I still say Plath used the color red too much.” He was leafing through the copy of Love in the Time of Cholera that he’d leafed through often enough that it fell open naturally at his favorite sections.
“Devaluing her entirely, of course.” She didn’t look up. “Not her fault you’re old enough to hate the Russians. 192 and 564 and 387 is…”
“I should have hired a math major. You know there’s a calculator in the drawer. Literary value and personal integrity aside, that shelf is still a shambles.”
“Math majors wouldn’t bicker with you about Sexton being a morbid copycat. Did you give away another book?”
“Don’t give me that look. I own this place. Yes. Esther said her daughter told her that she just has to read Guns, Germs, and Steel to be considered human, but you know she’s been behind on her rent since the day she had a rent to be behind on. She’ll bring it back.” These women never brought them back; Trisket never cared. She couldn’t remember a time when the inventory binder balanced perfectly.
“I’m going to kill them all off in a freak depressed girls massacre that CNN will be blaming on Republicans and Fox will be blaming on Al Qaida until global warming ends the world.” April pushed the open inventory binder aside, shoving it against the edge of the bookmark display to knock it slightly askew, and opened her email. Trisket straightened the bookmark display, and April added a sixth tally to the count she was keeping in her head.

_____________

Magali touched for the twentieth time the tiny purse she was wearing under her jacket. It held her passport, a roll of cash to be converted to rupees, a printout of her itinerary, her driver's license, and at least thirty Starbursts. She remembered her dad telling her, when they'd traveled, to always keep her passport as close as possible, because everyone--American citizens included--was on the look-out to steal American passports. People accrue so many paranoid tendencies over the courses of their lives; thinking of her father's warning led her directly to remember that she should never touch anything of value that she was keeping concealed, because pickpockets know to watch for that anxious tell. Source unknown. The woman on the loudspeaker reminded her not to leave her bags unprotected and not to accept strange packages from stranger individuals. Magali suppressed the immediate desire to do both, and continued to watch the tired people drag their carry-ons past her gate. The ticket was warm in her hand. She shifted a little in the plastic seat when the spinach quesadilla she'd grabbed from a stand in the food court roiled a little more raucously in her stomach.
Too nervous to sleep the night before, she'd finished the last few pages of the last book of Emerson that the Charlotte libraries carried. Neva had been snoring with unflattering complacency in the other bed when she'd closed the book, the pages coming together with a crisp, satisfying smack. "It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'Always do what you are afraid to do'" sent her into a fitful three hours of sleep before the alarm brieflt stopped her heart at five-thirty.
Magali scooted aside a little to make room for the large woman who had just settled into the plastic seat beside hers and watched a few travelers with unwrinkled suits and strings of pearls line up at the call for the first bracket of boarders. She didn't quite understand spending hundreds of dollars for three more inches of legroom and a slightly nicer microwaved dinner, but smiled all the same. The next bracket was called, and the large woman at her side rose slowly, leaning forward at the waist first in order to gather sufficient momentum. The third bracket was called, and Magali thought about the orphans in Nepal. She looked down at the neatly printed one-way ticket in her hand. Emerson and Catherine the Great did a little waltz in her head. She was still looking at the ticket when the plane left the runway and the door to the gate was closed. Funny how that happens.

_____________

“Trisket?” April closed her laptop with a small smile and started on another brownie.
“Mm?” The response was almost inaudible; Florentino Ariza was approaching Fermina Daza in the marketplace.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
“Okay, April. Now earn your keep.”