I wandered over to her laptop set up on an old door balanced on two sawhorses. Bruno filled the screen. He was no one I would picture my sister with. He had on a Sox T-shirt and baseball cap. “This is the guy who won you the fish?”
“Yup, I named the fish Bear in his honor.”
“That’s really special, Cecile.” I rolled my eyes, and she shoved me.
“Quit it, Becky. He’s really sweet and he’s actually super smart. He knows so much about movies and reads the Trib everyday. He’s way up on current events. He made me feel dumb with how little I knew about Chicago politics.”
“Awesome. I only hope I can find someone to make me feel stupid some day.”
“Oh, Lord. Fine. I don’t know when you got so cynical, kid. I’m going to invite him to dinner at home here next week. You’re gonna have to be nice.”
“Good luck with that,” I said, taking my shirt off and easing onto the stool set up for me.
Cecile cranked some sad song and I heard her scrape another cough out of her throat. She’d been smoking. Suddenly I knew.
When I walked into the dining room the next day, there was a pigeon chained to the table. Every few seconds it’d remember it was trapped and flap its wings frantically. I had no desire to watch that bird pull its own foot off. “Cecile!” I hollered. This was too much. She wandered downstairs, stretching, rubbing her eyes. “Cecile,” I said, “we live in Chicago, not the fucking country.”
“Whoa, Becs. Language!”
“Seriously though, this bird’s life is not some trial you get to put it through. It’s a living thing and deserves to be free like you and me.”
“Life is a miracle. Blah, blah, blah.”
“This bird is shitting all over the dining room table, Cecile.”
“Eh, she’s fun to be arouuund,” Cecile drawled.
“What is wrong with you? Are your drunk or high or something? What is the deal?”
“Aw, God! I am going back to sleep, Rebecca. This is too much. You are not my mother. Jesus.”
I wasn’t, but I was the closest thing she had right now and vice versa. Our mother had taken up a second job catering in the evenings and on weekends, and we were lucky if we caught her for the minute it took her to brush her teeth twice a day to babble news at her or ask for lunch money.
“You used to be fun!” Cecile called from halfway up the stairs. When she reached the top. I heard her kick something. A second later the punch bowl shattered down the stairs. She’d brought it up there to soak her feet a few nights ago and now the crystal stretched itself down to the hallway.
I sat at the table and said everything I had to say by tapping my fingernails on the surface.
My mother stopped home between catering shifts to grab a clean white shirt and I asked her how she liked the bird chained to the dining room table.
“There are moments when all I can think about are dead birds in the dark, Becky. I’m mostly unconcerned.”
“That’s where we get it from, I guess,” I said and wandered away, her voice sticking in my ears.
I went to the kitchen and started pitching expired jars of condiments into a trash bag. I tried to haul it out to the alley, but the bag broke, leaving me more lopsided than usual and nauseated. I wasn’t supposed to carry such heavy loads without the brace on, so I went back inside for a couple more bags. I cleaned up the mess and divided the trash between the new sacks. When I opened the back gate, Bruno had a knife to my throat and I dropped the bags again.
“Give me the money!”
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the wad of singles I’d been saving for the puppy. I handed it over without a thought. All of this felt right. I shook my head, angry at myself for having the cash on me, but relieved to give it up. “That’s all you want, right, Bruno? Don’t mess this up.”
The blade dug into my skin. Not enough to make me bleed, but I could tell he didn’t like that I knew his name.
“I won’t tell her. Do you want me to call Cecile down here? I can tell you she’s not in a real good mood. She wouldn’t unchain the bird in the dining room and she kicked a punch bowl down the stairs.”
“What are you talking about, kid?” he asked. He took the knife away from my skin and shoved the cash into his own pocket. He had a wide ugly forehead his baseball cap had covered in the photograph; his eyes were useless nickels in his head. I didn’t say anything and let the silence crumble his resolve. I wished something would happen.
“Cecile!” I shouted over my shoulder and her face appeared in the window. “Bruno’s here!” I screamed through the glass. She smiled and disappeared to run down the stairs.
I told Bruno to put the knife away. “I hope you at least buy Cecile something with that. Nothing living. She can’t sustain growth.”
Bruno grimaced. Cecile flung her arms around him and they mashed their tongues together. I figured manners had no place here, so I stuck around, waiting for an introduction, until I couldn’t stand it.
“Cecile, will you take this trash out? I’ve gotta go.” Without taking her mouth off his, she pointed a thumbs up my way.
Cecile’s solo show finally opened: sixteen portraits of my spine pointing in all different directions. She treated me like some side-show act when I appeared at the gallery, parading me around to all of her friends with their unkempt hair and lack of antiperspirant. I excused myself, not following the conversation, unable to participate in the unbridled praise comparing Cecile to name after name I’d never heard before.
Bruno stood at the snack table across the room, looking out of place in a basketball jersey and jean shorts drooping below his butt. I walked toward him and he tried to slip away, but a gaggle of professors were clumped between him and the rest of the room.
“Hey, Bruno. Still living the dream, huh? Did you buy something nice?”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about, Rebecca,” he said, and I had to blink back instant tears. I’d never wished someone would call me Becky so badly in my life.
“Let me know if you need any more cash,” I choked out and turned away.
Cecile had begged our parents not to come, but there they were, ogling the paintings, toggling their eyes between them and the real-life me, sizing up what they’d been ignoring. My mother and father stared at me, my mother inspecting my torso to try and tell if I had the brace on under my sweater without actually having to ask me. They expected me to start making excuses any second. The feeling was mutual.
Ratman
I arrive back from visiting my mother for a week on September 12th. Magpie gives me a live rat as a welcome-home gift. He never gets it right. No matter how hard I try, I will never be able to position my target closer to where he is pointing his arrow. I know he thinks he’s aiming straight for me, and sometimes I find myself capable of thinking this is endearing. He holds the rat in his dirty, browned hands and looks at me like I should know how to look back at him. Eight years ago, Magpie wanted to have sex on September 11th. Like the September 11th. I wasn’t into it, but I kept trying to convince myself that it could help, that it could make us feel like we weren’t alone or in danger. Magpie fucked me on a pile of old newspapers, my bare ass rubbing the newsprint, Magpie squeezing tight at my hips. I tried to forget the dirt under his fingernails, how it seemed like they never got clean. The whole time, the pile of dry paper wobbling, I kept thinking about the tremor of a building before it falls. I kept thinking of steady streams of cigarette smoke. I kept thinking of kindling.