You emerge, and the bartender gives you a look like he has a secret he knows he should tell you, but you look away quickly so he doesn’t feel implicated. The whiskey barks down your throat all familiar-like, but husband is all fanned eyebrows and tilted breath.
You gulp the drink down and smile at husband and bring his hand to your mouth for a kiss. It is sweaty, but you make nothing of it.
The rest is blurry: you get loopy and other patrons notice. Husband takes you home. He butchers your somnolent self like a fine-boned rabbit. He flushes fourteen pounds of you down the toilet. He files a missing person’s report and your sister grows confused. They never find the rest of you.
Stories start coming out around the neighborhood: large purchases of rubber gloves, trash bags, knives and saws. A regular at Ray’s says he saw the two of you there and tells how you’d gotten wiped out with one glass of whiskey. Husband’s office reports missing quantities of sedation samples.
The police find the wad of your muscle and fat in the septic tank, but your husband’s lawyer argues a person could survive the loss of this much flesh. He charms the grand jury into thinking the evidence is inconclusive. Turns out it doesn’t matter if people recognize you buying the damning supplies. Husband remains a practicing physician in the free world. Your sister can see what happened, and as soon as the trial is over, she runs as far away as possible to start a new life.
About a day after you’re chopped to bits, you wake up in some mental state at Ray’s, bodiless. “This must be the ghost life,” you think. But you never cared about anything. What could you have to settle? And here? Say this boredom is eternal. “Well, then,” you think half-heartedly, “all these men are stuck smoking with the wrong sister.”
Somebody Else’s
Looking back, it’s hard not to feel crusted. When I press on those memories they exhale a dusty hiss. I showed up on the set and had my lightly padded skeleton sewn into some lint ball of a sweater. The episode was set in a ski resort, the town heavy with snow and trapping everyone in the lodge. Of course, all of it was filmed on a studio lot in California and cut with some stock footage of a ski lift climbing a mountain. My character was just supposed to be sitting by the fireplace when Larry walked in to show his cousin Balki how to pick up a lady. His line was, “Would you like some coocoo?” The character wanted to say “cocoa,” but was so nervous to talk to me that it came out “coocoo.” I was supposed to say, “I think I’ve had enough, thanks!” and stalk off, a suspicious shell of a woman.
All went according to plan, and I waited anxiously for the episode to air, for my agent’s calls to increase in frequency. But the episode came and went, and the phone never rang. I guess I could have kept trying, but if I wanted to, I would have, or at least that’s what a book told me.
I started to stay home, watching the old movies I’d grown up with — suspense thrillers and musicals and dramas about aging film stars being replaced by younger ones. I reached into the gap between the cushions of my couch to find change to tip delivery men. My shoulders grew weak until it was a bother to lift my arms, and before I knew it, I wasn’t raising my hands even to the height of the doorknob. Staying in was easy enough. I had residuals coming in from a corporate training video I’d done in college. I was living in a house my grandfather had left me when he passed away. My sister showed up every other week to convince her limbs around me and eye my scalp oil, unable to tell me to shower. I’d smile and tell her I was fine. “I’m happy!” I’d say and she’d gather the dirty dishes piled on every surface and heave them into the sink before donning her rubber gloves to scrub off the scum. I could feel cavities nesting in my teeth; I knew the root of one tooth was dead. The pain rang and pounded like someone wanting to be let in. I spoke pulverized truths to my sister trying to get her to relax. “I can leave whenever I feel like it” and “I just need a few minutes to be myself.” She’d give up and leave and I’d trace paused cartoons off the screen of my television for fun. The arrangement felt logical at the time.
I refused to admit my behavior was not normal. The outside world and I were like cracked magnets. We had been one and the same, but we’d broken apart and could now do nothing but resist. Every time I considered leaving my home, I wondered what could be waiting for me out there and never came up with an attractive enough answer. It wasn’t even fear. That’s what I kept telling myself.
I’d sit on my couch and try to catch the sunlight on my watch face. I’d direct the light onto my cat until she chased the slow burn of the reflection. Bugs showed up, cinching themselves through the pipes and the baseboards. My sister would appear to ask me lists of questions out of pamphlets she got at the doctor’s office. I’d test myself by trying to guess how she was diagnosing me by the questions she asked. My record was guessing bipolar from the first question. “‘I feel so restless or find it so hard to keep still that other people have pointed this out to me.’ Do you feel this way ‘Rarely,’ ‘Occasionally,’ or ‘Most of the Time’?” I said, “Penny, do I look restless? I’m not bipolar,” and she stared at me like I had pressed her into some impossible place.
When our mother died back in Tulsa later that year, I wanted to pay my respects. I booked a flight and called a cab. When I walked out my front door, there was the proof that that agoraphobia pamphlet didn’t apply. I got on a plane and tried to take the stains out of the memories of my mother. The asshole next to me kept forcing his elbows down on the armrest that my hip meat kept forcing up. Eventually he spilled a mess of words into the air at me and moved to sit across the aisle next to a child flying alone. I adjusted that armrest up and relaxed comfortably for the rest of the flight.
I examined the photos my mother had framed all along the staircase: so many of me making smiles like I was dying with forced charm before a dance recital, photos that were sixty percent ceiling, where I clutched bouquets of flowers after the high school musical. I recognized a lingering pride in my belly, and in the reflected glass of the frames, I saw an abstract smile pulling itself from my lips. I had had such hopes, but now when I thought about my ambition, I felt pity. My dream had been to excel at convincing people I was someone else. The intention felt so specific now. It felt sad and misguided. It felt better not to know what the hell I was doing than to think about where that impulse had come from at such a young age.
I thought of the bugs roaming the house back in California and how it felt good to recognize a problem.
I held it together most of that day, meeting with the undertaker and going to the florist with my sister and her family. Not until I went out to the garden and saw one of my mother’s footprints still stamped into the waterlogged mud of a flower bed did I cry. My mother had just had the yard resodded. She didn’t think she was about to die. You could see the seams stashed all over the lawn where sheet of grass met sheet of grass. I found a single weed that had wormed through the newly laid mess. “It’s okay,” I thought. “She would have found you.” And my mother would have. She was ruthless, determined to a fault. She kept after something until she forgot why she was after it. My mother thrilled every time I got another role, every time I became another option. She seemed sure I’d find someone better to be.