The monster moved into the house after Florrie’s mother died and her brother left. When the silence had begun to ricochet off the walls and sock slide on the hardwood floors, the monster appeared, its encroaching darkness overlapping her own.
“I won’t cook for you,” Florrie said after it had announced its intentions to move into the basement. “I won’t clean up after you. And I won’t tolerate excessive noise.” She bit her lips as she announced this, but the words marched prissily out of her mouth nonetheless. The last person she’d spoken to in this way was her brother and he’d left her alone in her dead mother’s house.
But the monster did not seem to take offence. It made a gesture of assent and went back downstairs.
Florrie blew an untethered strand off her forehead and went into the kitchen.
Although the monster was downstairs, she imagined herself to be observed and therefore needed to do “normal” things, like keep a clean house. Part of this involved washing the dishes that had accumulated over the past week. She turned on nearly scalding water and watched her hands redden from the stream of it has she began to scour pots and plates. She’d put two away when she began to feel the pounding of her heart in her chest at the mess of congealed food lying in her sink. She hoped that the monster hadn’t seen this.
She took a large plastic bag from a drawer and placed the remaining dishes in it. They were cheap things she’d bought at Walmart and none of them matched. “A new start,” she announced to herself. Turning around, she spied her reflection in the door of the microwave hanging above the stove. She felt a dull despair at her blunt features, her thick lips, and small, close-set eyes. She bared her teeth to grimace at her distorted image and turned away from it.
She walked into her bedroom, feeling the bulk of her body, her gut straining against the waistband of her jeans, her breasts jiggling. She felt her face. “This is not who I am,” she whispered to herself and blinked away the sting of tears. She was alone. She did not count the monster that now lived in her basement.
But she had to go to work and so she had no time to think about this more. She dressed briskly, putting on a pair of clean slacks and a crewneck sweater. It was the weekend, but she had reports to finish if she didn’t want the week to be utter misery. She lived farther from work than she’d preferred, because she’d needed to care for her mother before she’d died. And she’d needed to provide for her basement-dwelling brother who was only starting to make his way in the world.
She missed her family now in the way one misses a addiction that erodes bodily functions but nevertheless creates a sense of identity. She had been a caregiver before. Now she was not. She had been a sister. Now she was not. She had a monster now. Before she did not.
Florrie moved past the mirror in her bedroom, barely looking at it. As she left the house, the cold morning air was like a slap against her face. The sky was a dull blue after last night’s thunderstorm and few cars glided along the streets sending up plumes of water when they hit the crevices of the street. When she arrived at her office building, a square cinder block in an industrial park of square cinder block buildings, the parking lot was deserted. As she waved her security pass at the front door sensor, she briefly that she was entering into an empty prison, with musty smelling carpets and row after row of deserted cubicles. She settled into her own and turned on her two computer monitors. She displayed a report template on one and an excel sheet on the other.
Tomorrow was Monday and when she went back work she would be surrounded by her co-workers, people generally less intelligent than she was and happier. People who looked down on her bulk and unattractive appearance and who didn’t seem to hear her when she spoke. Florrie’s lips trembled as she logged off her computer. “This is not who I am,” she said again. “This is not my life.”
She stopped at a bookstore on her way home, hoping to press down her anxiety by disappearing into a book. She admitted too, that she hoped to see the man who worked in the CD section again, the one with the Andy Warhol hair, who’d spoken to her briefly last week when she’d purchased a Laurie Anderson CD. He’d complimented her on her choice and they’d chatted for several minutes about the music.
Florrie wandered into the section of the bookstore next to the music department and looked up to find him at the security barrier. She smiled at him and he looked at her stonily, not recognizing her. She blushed and looked down immediately. He must think she was crazy to smile at him without even knowing him. She darted from the literature section to the front of the store and hastily selected a book she didn’t really want. The woman at the counter pursed her lips at Florrie for not having her membership card handy and Florrie stammered an apology along with her phone number. The woman’s cold grey eyes dismissed Florrie, flicking instead to the customer behind her who she greeted with a smile.
Florrie drove home, too distracted to purchase her dinner at a takeout place the way she’d planned, to reward herself for working. When she pulled into the driveway she took in the general rundown appearance of the house, the wildness of the lawn. She had the money from her mother’s insurance to fix some things, to repaint the exterior, to repair the roof, and maybe even to hire someone to fix the yard. She had the energy to do none of these things. She darted into the house, afraid to see the baleful eyes of her neighbors on her. The screen door slapped behind her. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the living room, to the musty smell of her own carpet that she would stop noticing soon. She walked to the kitchen to get a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. Just one. She saw the basement door ajar.
The monster looked at her. It shrugged. “I was thirsty.”
Florrie stepped forward, her lips pursed. The monster’s darkness rippled. It took on the shape of her mother, and then her brother and then, after, a belch, herself as a young girl.
“You’re cruel,” she observed.
The monster blinked itself back into its customary formlessness. “I don’t care enough to be cruel,” it said. It looked at the television. Florrie walked forward to turn it on. They sat together in companionable silence until the light fled the room. Then Florrie began to feel uncomfortable. There was something about the monster’s darkness blending in with the darkness of her living room, the way Florrie could barely discern its presence out of the corner of her eye. It set her on edge.
After a few hours, Florrie got up to go to bed. She was embarrassed by the creak of her bones and wondered if she should say good night. As she stood by the sofa indecisively, she realized that the monster was gone. She felt stung, disrespected somehow.
“I’m going to bed,” Florrie muttered. She marched into her bedroom. “I never told you that you could make yourself at home in my living room,” she tossed off in the general direction of the basement.
****
In the morning Florrie felt like the aftermath of a storm, quiet and spent. With grim resolve, she went through the routine of taking a shower, putting on her work clothes, and collecting papers she’d brought home to take work on. The basement door was closed and there was no evidence of the monster’s presence last night in the living room.
Work was a burden. Florrie’s skin prickled from contact with her coworkers, who seemed stolid and stupid and aggressive. She bolted out as soon as her watch said 5:00, feeling guilty since it was her habit to work to six or seven. She found herself speeding on the highway, zooming through yellow lights, her heart a clenched fist pushed against her chest.
When she pulled into her driveway her jaw dropped when she saw the monster was sitting on her front porch, or rather, a younger Florrie, college-aged this time. Florrie stomped up the driveway, feeling the small gravel stones roll beneath her feet. “What....” she huffed, “what do you think you are doing?” Her eyes widened when she saw a small shopping bag by the monster’s feet from the bookstore. “Where have you been?” she asked, her voice becoming shrill.
“Not looking like that you haven’t! That’s my body.”
“Is it?” the monster murmured, twisting a strand of hair, the color of autumn leaves.
Florrie bit her lips. Her hand fluttered at her face. “It was,” she said. “Before, I spent so many years of my life….” She wanted to say working, being responsible…but she suddenly could not find the words to describe how all the years of her life had disappeared, had brought her to this awful place.
She took a deep breath and sat down on the porch steps, the creaking of her bones and the creaking of the old wood synchronized somehow. She looked out across the street at the nearly identical houses and lawns. Sprinklers had begun their synchronized sweep across neatly mowed squares of grass. Florrie felt thirsty. She wanted the water to reach her, to sting her skin. More importantly, she wanted to understand how the monster moved about in the world outside her house. She clenched and unclenched her fists on her thighs. “Tell me about the friends you made,” she said, refusing to look at it.
The monster began to speak to her about its day, about the way it saw the world. About the people it had met. Like the white-haired boy in the bookstore who looked like Andy Warhol. Florrie closed her eyes and imagined that the monster’s present was her history.
“You’re cruel,” she whispered again. “Why can’t I do any of these things? I never could. Not even when I looked like that.” She jerked her head in the direction of the monster. She could hardly bear to look at it. She had not remembered that the younger Florrie had been beautiful.
“Just see what happens to you when you realize that no one really sees you,” she said bitterly.
“I don’t exist just because you see me,” the monster replied, a bit testily. It removed a lit cigarette from the air and blew a thin plume of smoke into the space between them. It got up then, seeming to be bored with her and went inside the house.
Florrie got up as well and brushed off her slacks. When she went inside, the living room was empty. She called for the monster but there was no answer. She walked to the basement. The door was closed. She knocked. There was no answer. She placed the palm of her hand against the peeling paint and reached for the doorknob to test it. It opened and she peered down the dim stairwell, vaguely discerning the shapes of the furniture in her brother’s old room, the posters of heavy metal bands still on the wall. “Hello?” she called. But there was no answer. The bed sheets on her brother’s sofa bed were rumpled. Hesitantly, Florrie placed her hand on them, in case the monster lay coiled beneath it, but the sheets flattened at her touch and the room seemed even emptier than before. She backed out of the room and went through the routine she usually engaged in after work and before bed. It was the most alone she’d felt since her mother died and her brother left.
After work the next day (she left at 5:00 again!), the monster was not on the porch waiting for her, or in the living room, or in the basement, which she entered with brazen disregard for the monsters’ privacy. She roamed the house and its perimeter at various times during the night, pacing the front lawn in her night gown, the monster’s absence a furious itch she could not scratch.
The next day Florrie called in sick. She barely felt guilty about the work she was leaving to another day, registering instead the lack of guilt she felt with a mixture of fear and exhilaration—what if none of it had ever really mattered to her? She got in the car and began to drive around town looking for the monster, or rather, for the younger Florrie. She looked first in the places she might have gone to—the bookstore, the town gardens. Then she began to consider places she might not have gone. She stood outside of Jack’s bar, tubes of neon in its signage waiting to be lit. Bits of newspaper blew desultorily on the sidewalk in front of it. Florrie took a breath and walked in.
The darkness was comforting to her but she immediately felt uncertain about how she should behave here. There were nearly empty booths and a nearly empty bar—it was 1:00 in the afternoon. She had to assume that the people in here were hard drinkers who started early and finished late. She huffed up to the bar, the broiling summer air had left her winded. She fished an old photograph of herself out of her pocket and showed it to the bartender, a small, chunky woman with black spiky hair and scarlet fingernail polish.
“Excuse me,” Florrie said, “have you seen this girl?”
“Well, it can’t be hard,” Florrie said nastily, “you don’t seem to have many of them.”
The bartender grunted. “I didn’t say it was hard.” She turned her back on Florrie who felt ashamed of her pettiness.
“I’m sorry,” Florrie said. “It’s just it’s my sister.” The lie floated easily to her tongue. “I’m worried about her.”
The bartender began wiping down the counter, her expression softened. “She has to find her own way.”
“I know,” Florrie said. “I miss her though. I didn’t expect it. How I’d miss her. And she owes me rent,” Florrie said jokingly.
“You make your sister pay rent?”
Florrie blushed. “She’s an adult.”
The bartender nodded. “Well, tough love. It either drives them out or does ‘em a world of good.”
“Yeah,” Florrie nodded, lifting the glass of beer the bartender had poured her without asking.
“It drove me out,” the bartender commented.
Florrie’s smile faded.
“Then it did me a world of good,” the bartender laughed.
After a moment Florrie joined in. Customers began trickling into the bar and when a man sat down beside her at the counter, Florrie surprised herself by making conversation with him.
After a few hours, she decided to go home. Though the night was cool, the alcohol and the closeness of the bar made her skin feel damp and her clothes feel sticky. But she felt light, like an expanding balloon. She drove home slowly with the radio turned on loud. When she pulled into the driveway and saw the lights were on in the living room, she was almost disappointed.
She tossed her keys on the coffee table. “I don’t need you,” she said to the monster.
“Never said you did,” the monster replied. It was a rippling darkness in the old recliner by the television, a spreading stain on the mustard yellow corduroy.
“In fact,” Florrie said, nodding in its direction, “I think you should leave.”
“You’ll miss me,” the monster said.
“But not that much.”
“You’ll miss the rent.”
“About that…”
“Check’s in the mail.”
They were silent for a time, the monster and the old woman who was not really old.
“You’re not ready. It’s a different world when you face it without drinking,” the monster noted.
Florrie was about to bite off a retort when she remembered. “I said that to my brother. Before he left.”
“I pluck my words from the air in this house,” the monster replied. All our conversations are bits and pieces of other conversations.
“And when you go outside…”
“The air is bigger there.”
“Still, I have to try…” Florrie said, remembering that these too, were words her brother had said.
“Maybe you should leave the nest and I should stay,” the monster reflected.
“Find the bigger air. Maybe I should.”
“Try to be happier then.”
“You think I don’t try?”
“I think old habits are hard to break.”
Florrie tried to remember where these words had come from—her mother’s lips, her father’s? He’d left long ago but maybe his words still lingered. She suddenly found it hard to look at the monster’s shifting darkness without seeing all the old residents of the house. Her mother’s drawn face. Her brother’s, pinched and manic, flushed with alcohol or drugs. Her own face, the hope winnowing away from it as she grew older.
“Stop,” she said to the monster.
“I’m taking back my life,” Florrie said, withdrawing her hand reluctantly.
“About time, dear,” her mother’s voice whispered. The words light as a kiss. Then the monster was gone and Florrie was alone in the house again. Waiting for the darkness to withdraw.
####
Photo credits
Recliner by Sean Graham
Liquor bottles by Karel Kulhavy
No comments:
Post a Comment