Tiny Ladies Read online

  We took him home, and my father went into the shed and brought out an old grill, splashed some water in it from the hose. I went around the backyard pulling out grass, clumps of dirt, rocks. We put him on the patio. My mother had just gotten out of bed, though it was well past noon. She gathered her night robe around her and looked in. ‘That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,’ she said, and though my father insisted it was a great life there in that rusty black drum, the alligator did look sad. Sad and confused, sitting on a little rock with mud and grass and sooty bars overhead.

  We rarely had pets growing up, but I remember the Wallaces’ horse. Sometimes they kept him overnight in their backyard, and I’d sit and watch him from the window, gracefully bending forward and eating out patches of the grass. He belonged to Karen Wallace, who was a few years older than me and who used to charge me money to pet him, so I just watched him over the fence when Karen was asleep. I remember the commotion, too, when that horse got loose at 3 A.M. one morning – my father out in his shorts with a flashlight, my mother standing beneath our yellow porch light. It was my father who brought him back; he rounded the corner cocky as a hero and put the horse behind the Wallaces’ gate. My father always said that the best way to calm an animal is to look in its eyes.

  I often look in my clients’ eyes, angle my chair to sit a little closer to them. Frances says I get too involved. She prefers an impartial interrogation. I don’t think looking into a client’s eyes is necessarily coddling; many of them are unnerved by it. So I don’t look into Hannah’s. I just tell her, ‘That’s from Florida – where I grew up.’ I take the alligator from her hands and run my finger over the little, bared teeth, the hard ridges down its back.

  I put it back down near my pen holder and bottles of White-out.

  Hannah looks amused, thinking about something.

  ‘Ellen was … mischievous,’ she says. ‘She was always surprised by the trouble she’d find herself in. I think that’s what I liked about her, at first. She seemed so lawless. Naive, but brash at the same time.’

  ‘How’d you meet her?’ I ask, sensing immediately that this is about her friend who’s passed.

  ‘She was in painting class with me, and I liked her work. She painted these almost primitive self-portraits engaged in petty crime – shoplifting, pouring coffee on an unsuspecting lady, perched in a tree with a slingshot. Really funny paintings, some of which I still have.

  ‘I talked to her once about them. I think I just said something mildly encouraging, like how funny they were – nothing really critical. Then, a couple of days later, I found this box of homemade cookies she’d baked and placed on my front doorstep. She’d made a box for them with miniature paintings on each side, and all the cookies were glazed and decorated with different color icings and silver candies. It was an amazing effort. And I remember thinking she must have followed me home, which I found kind of childish and flattering. I knew we’d be friends.’

  ‘The last time someone followed me home, it was an ex-felon on my caseload.’ I don’t tell her that I invited him, that I was an ex-offender specialist in California. No. Why should I tell her about Victor? You don’t need to tell your story …

  ‘That sounds a little scary.’ She loosens her scarf and draws it from her coat. She carefully drapes it over the back of her chair, but she keeps her coat on.

  ‘Well, fear was something I had to learn. I’m better at it now.’ I recognize stability, what some might call common sense, as something Iowa affords. I remember San Francisco – my whole life, really – as demanding something else from me: blind courage, perhaps. I have some simple things now that I can depend on: a quiet cottage; a loving dog; this job that many of my co-workers plan on retiring in; a checking account and a little savings. And my car. God bless my rusty old Valiant.

  This is what I’d suggest to Hannah: a safe place, a few simple amenities. Though I’m sometimes afraid of the quietness of my life – how the walls sometimes whisper, conspire – I prefer it to what came before. What came before is always on the tip of my tongue, but I’m no longer in its mouth.

  She leans forward over my desk, cupping her face in her hands.

  ‘Did you get some kind of training to do this work?’

  ‘I’m not a therapist,’ I tell her. ‘I had some training when I worked for the state in San Francisco. I’m a case manager. I’m primarily here to make referrals, coordinate some kind of plan for you.’

  ‘I’m good at planning myself,’ she says. She leans back and inspects me coolly. ‘I’m very quick,’ she says, clutching my stapler and pointing it at me. ‘I’d probably be pretty good at your job if I wasn’t so fucked up.’

  I put her file aside and move my calendar to the front of the desk.

  ‘I don’t doubt that you might be good at this,’ I say. ‘But for now we might just want to concentrate on one thing at a time.’

  We schedule an appointment for the following week, but I notice her drumming her fingers on the chair, shifting in it as though she has something else she wants to tell me. I look up at her once I’ve written the appointment date on my business card.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ I ask.

  ‘I was just wondering if you might really be able to help me,’ she says. She looks off for a moment, then stares into my eyes. ‘I’m not comfortable asking too much of anyone. I have a way of screwing things up, you know?’

  She stands up abruptly. ‘I enjoyed meeting you, though. I’ll see you next week.’ She walks out the door before I notice her scarf piled by the leg of the chair. And then the phone rings with the day’s first cancellation.

  The road home is desolate and lunar, a little wooden fence and railroad crossing. Nothing else for a few miles. I put a cassette into the tape recorder I keep on the front seat, and the Byrds’ 5-D scratches its way out of the box. Oh, how is it that I could come out to here and be still floating and never hit bottom and keep falling through …

  I light a cigarette and look over at Hannah’s scarf on the seat beside me. I pull up to the little cottage I’m renting, with its shrunken path, the insulating, waist-high wall of snow up to the doorway. It seems like an entrance to an igloo. How I arrived here is a question that persists for me, but the place is so remote I no longer seek out an answer.

  I have to keep the porch light on all day so when I get home from work I can make my way up the path. I haven’t shoveled it in the past few days, and the mottled ice is slippery as the back of a prehistoric fish. I spot King in the window, my beautiful white Samoyed, fogging the glass with his panting. I picked him up on my way to Iowa, riding on the highway at 2 A.M. in a terrible storm. I saw him running along the side of the road, just a strange white flash at first, a dwarfed ghost. Then I saw him turn in someone’s headlights, stilled there with his mouth and eyes wide open, a terror and incomprehension that made me brake dangerously fast. I had only to open the back door of the car and he jumped in, wringing wet, overly excited for the next three days.

  For a while we lived in the car together. Once I got this place, we slept on the floor – just the dog and me – with a few layers of blankets. I had some cocaine left, and I was shooting it, cramped by paranoia, visions. I thought of them as visions. I imagined Victor outside, as patient as any judge. I spent the first nights convincing myself of the impossibility of his having followed me. But when you pull yourself out of a place as low and desperate as the one I’d escaped, it’s easy to imagine things and hard to stop.

  King would cower in the corner, and I’d spend hours peering from the windows, hiding from shapes the shadows took on, or trying to coax him to me, staring into his eyes as though I could communicate with him – some crazed Dr Doolittle. At one point he lunged through the screen door and ran out to the pond. I ran after him, calling to him in my underwear, eyes dilated like black lakes themselves. I saw him out in the water; I was paralyzed with the certainty he’d drown.

  He didn’t drown. He eventually came out, shaking with cold, a
nd afraid of me. I began to get a hold on myself, approached him carefully and dried him. That was the last time I did drugs. I gathered up all the syringes and paraphernalia and dumped them into a milk carton, threw it away. Two weeks later, I interviewed for my job with the Department of Social Services. I was wearing a belt with my teeth marks in it. Once I got the job, I threw the belt out too.

  I got the job three winters ago. I’m still trying to convince myself that it’s possible for life to move at this pace. Maybe it has something to do with my not using drugs, the tentative return of sanity, but the days have a dream length, entire lives played out in the inching forward of a clock hand. And only recently have I come to appreciate each day’s slowness, a languor that makes me wonder if I didn’t drive into some lost or swallowed-up town, where sands move backward through the hourglass, the past reassembling itself, ready to fall again in different configurations.

  This two-bedroom cottage has a peculiar warmth. I appreciate its accumulation, a kind of organic decorating that seems to have happened without my intervention. Some of it was here when I arrived – the lamps and a couple of the rugs. I purchased the furniture almost entirely at the Mennonite store: a used ‘50s sectional and a recliner with a worn plaid cover, forest and pale green. Now there’s a nest of King’s white hair in the lap of the chair. His toys are here and there, and records everywhere.

  I take King out behind the house. He loves the snow and runs over the slick surface of the frozen pond. I worried at first, fearful of a break in the ice. Now I just assume that dogs have some kind of sense about these dangers. Animals know trouble; you can see it in the eyes of the alligator on my desk.

  I don’t follow King out over the pond, but pack my heels down along the natural embankment, admiring his bursts of energy. He’s a beautiful dog, healthy and with a full winter pelt, but there’s something sad about him too. The image of him running along the highway remains there for me, and I hug him sometimes too tight, and give him too much love and talk embarrassingly like a child with him.

  I look away from King and scan the flat landscape, the one large hill like an Indian grave that casts a shadow up to the door, the few dead trees and the abundant snow pillowing the roof of my house and virtually camouflaging it. I rarely recognize my loneliness anymore, except in this silence. And it isn’t silence, really. I hear an owl, the wind, and my breathing. I bring my mittens to my mouth. The heat of my own breath is a comfort. There was a time when this weather would have killed me, when I couldn’t find any warmth in my body, bone-thin from drugs. But I like it now; it points to the change in me.

  When I turn away from the cottage and the pond, the white seems to go on forever. I often think of Jack London stories when I come out behind the house. My father loved his stories; he read them while incarcerated, dreaming, I guess, of some other wilderness with its other justice.

  It is after 7:30 P.M. I cross the floor, back and forth, looking at the phone, sick of smoking. I pull my large bag from the couch and draw out Hannah Fisher’s file. The notes I meant to transcribe are there on post-its. I think of rewriting them – fleshing them out – but with what? Her features are strong. She’s Jewish, I think. She’s guarded. There’s something almost willfully vacant and affectless in her speech, and at other moments she exhibits an unrestrained enthusiasm. I wonder how much of it is the drugs, and how powerfully her past is pitched against her. And what are her odds? No odds for someone up against the dead. I think of Janine, and how my leaving San Francisco only made her more present. I can’t be impartial about guilt or ghosts. I live with them, their limits. It is Janine who keeps me from knowing anyone here, not my other fears. It’s atonement she exacts. Stay alone, Janine says. Be cautious with care. Don’t think of calling Hannah; she’s more trouble than you know.

  I get in the car and drive through Iowa City, past its fraternity and faculty houses, the gold dome of Old Capital glowing like a captured sun. These sights carry all the hushed solemnity of my first encounter with them. When I first arrived, I’d driven so long, pushing myself past exhaustion, past the life that chased me here.

  I lived with Victor in a small hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin for two years. Life began and ended there; there was no larger picture. At the very end, I lost my job and Vic went back to his old ways, nothing like he’d been at our initial interview when he was just out of prison and certain about too many things. He’d become unpredictable and dangerous, the behaviors he’d warned me about but that I thought were just boasting. And though I fled because of him – the desperation and plotting he carried into our relationship, and how he involved Janine – I know I scared myself too. I was too hungry for everything, and too accustomed to crumbs.

  I drive west up streets with small houses and large porticoes, and away from the area where students are walking, encumbered with too many books. Their down coats make them look comical, balloon-like, as though they could rise a few feet off the sidewalk. But on the side streets, apart from the vigil of porch lights, there is no movement or sound. I pull into a driveway that hasn’t been shoveled. There’s a birdbath submerged by snow in the front yard. I gather loose cassettes and put them into their covers, suddenly in no hurry to talk to Gina. Then I look up again at the house. The lights are on in all the windows, but still it emanates a kind of darkness. Some places reveal their troubles as plain as the people who tenant them. This is Gina’s house; it sinks a little on one side, and the screen door is patched with a green mesh.

  I met Gina at The Deadwood bar shortly after I arrived in town. She was saving her money, she said, to get out once and for all. She provides massages to older men in the city. She shared this with me within the first few minutes of our introduction.

  ‘I don’t mind giving a hand job when I have to. It’s easy. Only complication is that I’m a dyke.’

  Rachel, who has been working with Gina recently, is sitting on the couch when Gina opens the door.

  ‘Good to see you,’ she says in her gruff, warming voice. Rachel waves from the couch. She is wearing a pair of red vinyl pants and a black rubber bra. Gina’s wearing jeans and a tank top. I like both of them, but I’m not sure what they think of me. I know they distrust me. That’s the thing about girls like Gina: they’ll tell you everything they think you want to know. I do this and this for money, and it doesn’t trouble me. Compromise for the long-term goal. My head’s here. My body’s here. My sex is hidden. They tell you everything right up front, and you think it’s a test. Can you love me? That’s what you think they’re asking, so you just smile. You’re very broad. You’re very accepting. But they don’t really want you to love them, all bashed up. They want you to look deeper, to find the qualities they’ve put in reserve. And they’re really like hoarding old ladies that way, underneath the wild looks; they put the finery away and just bring out the chipped stuff, until they forget they’ve got it.

  Though there are only a few bottles of beer and a wooden bowl with pretzels on the coffee table, there is the feeling of an impending party – the two of them waiting for their first guest to arrive. I immediately want to put my coat back on and leave. Rachel rubs the couch where she’d like me to sit. ‘Come here,’ she says. ‘I was just asking Gina, if you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?’

  I remember the party we threw for my father when he returned from prison. We celebrated his return, but it also marked the end of a struggle my mother and I endured for the two years he was gone.

  Six months after my father’s incarceration, my mother had me begin a series of what she called ‘crash diets.’ Oddly enough, she believed that naming them this way would make me feel encouraged about joining her in them. She’d say, ‘Next week we’ll go on a crash.’ That meant we could drink as much tap water as we wanted and split a can of Campbell’s soup once a day. We picked oranges from the tree in our backyard – small, sour, and still green at the tops – and ravaged them, skin and pulp spit out in our hands. My mother would create elaborate storie
s about the healthfulness of a fast, and when I was sick, diminished from lack of food, she would insist that was a sign that the toxins were working their way through me and that I’d soon be as good as new. Once she insisted we eat only white foods: bread, milk, rice, angel food cake. I waited anxiously for my shit to turn white, to be restored to the pre-toxic state she seemed so certain of.

  We didn’t talk about money. She contacted her mother, just once, and I spoke to her for the first time in my life. My grandmother asked the kind of questions you expect of a substitute teacher: How old was I? Did I like school? What did I eat today? We received small checks from her each month thereafter. On the memo, she wrote ‘For Carrie’ in careful script.

  Sometimes my mother spoke to my father on the phone, either shouting or crying. But during the time he was gone she never spoke harshly about him – nothing as tangible as anger, or the inevitable guilt she must have felt in her dull complicity. He was apprehended for grand larceny, and of course she knew about it; it was a restaurant she’d worked in years before. He went right to the safe. The mouse, the cheese. We went to eat there a couple of times before he did it. I was ten years old, and they talked over my head.

  What kind of person eats dinner in a restaurant they’ve been fired from? Who eats dinner in a place they plan to rob?

  They always talked over my head, but it wasn’t their words that were hard for me to understand. It was their reasoning.

  My mother said of my father: ‘He’s just who he is,’ or ‘Who can say what’s wrong or right for anyone else?

  ‘We’ve just got to tough it out,’ she’d muster, weakly smiling. ‘That’s what family is all about.’