Haven said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
And I said, “Leala can comb my hair.”
The white doll with the china face sat on Leala’s bed through her teenage years, long after the tan sedan had disappeared down our driveway, long after our mother had ventured to say, daring on the front step slowly to raise her head: “Already? But you’ve only been here an hour. I thought you were going to spend the day”; and Haven had sighed, fingering her pearls, her eyes large, not insincere, and said, “It’s been good to see you, let’s not let it be so long the next time,” and stepped in brown heels down the flagstone path to her sedan.
Our mother stared at the car as it left. My sister, who stood in the door of our house as directed, intuited, by a shoulder spasm, that my mother was crying and flew down the path, and even though our mother said, “Go inside, I don’t want you”—words I heard while biting a chunk of ice cream I’d excavated from Haven’s cake with a salad fork — my sister wrapped her arms around our mother from behind and stuck her face in our mother’s rear — a sight I glimpsed from the doorway while chewing — and said, “I love you,” and when our mother muttered, “Go away,” my sister said the finest thing she could think to say: “I love Haven.”
This was decades before our mother stopped answering the phone when we called and stopped returning our messages, even if such message should say, “I totaled my car, I’m at the hospital,” and started returning the packages we sent with the word REFUSED written on them, which she meant to seem an official postal negation but which was scrawled in her handwriting in blue pen; and, as you know, it was only Leala who sent those packages, birthday presents for our mother, one a keepsake box, hand-painted with roses, encrusted with white shells from Hawaii, which came back to Leala broken because someone stomped on the box; it was only Leala who made the phone calls, Leala who flipped over the guardrail on a high pass in a storm in the Front Range and almost died and called to leave a message. I’d say those precipices are unimaginable but you’ve seen them.
GOING FOR A BEER by Robert Coover
He finds himself sitting in the neighborhood bar drinking a beer at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one. In fact, he has finished it. Perhaps he’ll have a second one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third. There is a young woman sitting not far from him who is not exactly good-looking, but good-looking enough, and probably good in bed, as indeed she is. Did he finish his beer? Can’t remember. What really matters is: Did he enjoy his orgasm? Or even have one? This he is wondering on his way home through the foggy night streets from the young woman’s apartment. Which was full of Kewpie dolls, the sort won at carnivals, and they made a date, as he recalls, to go to one. Where she wins another — she has a knack for it. Whereupon, they’re in her apartment again, taking their clothes off, she excitedly cuddling her new doll in a bed heaped with them. He can’t remember when he last slept, and he’s no longer sure, as he staggers through the night streets, still foggy, where his own apartment is, his orgasm, if he had one, already fading from memory. Maybe he should take her back to the carnival, he thinks, where she wins another Kewpie doll (this is at least their second date, maybe their fourth) and this time they go for a romantic nightcap at the bar where they first met. Where a brawny dude starts hassling her. He intervenes and she turns up at his hospital bed, bringing him one of her Kewpie dolls to keep him company. Which is her way of expressing the bond between them, or so he supposes, as he leaves the hospital on crutches, uncertain what part of town he is in. Or what part of the year. He decides that it’s time to call the affair off — she’s driving him crazy — but then the brawny dude turns up at their wedding and apologizes for the pounding he gave him. He didn’t realize, he says, how serious they were. The guy’s wedding present is a gift certificate for two free drinks at the bar where they met and a pair of white satin ribbons for his crutches. During the ceremony, they both carry Kewpie dolls that probably have some barely hidden significance, and indeed do. The child she bears him, his or another’s, reminds him, as if he needed reminding, that time is fast moving on. He has responsibilities now and he decides to check whether he still has the job that he had when he first met her. He does. His absence, if he has been absent, is not remarked on, but he is not congratulated on his marriage, either, no doubt because — it comes back to him now — before he met his wife he was engaged to one of his colleagues and their coworkers had already thrown them an engagement party, so they must resent the money they spent on gifts. It’s embarrassing and the atmosphere is somewhat hostile, but he has a child in kindergarten and another on the way, so what can he do? Well, he still hasn’t cashed in the gift certificate, so, for one thing, what the hell, he can go for a beer, two, in fact, and he can afford a third. There’s a young woman sitting near him who looks like she’s probably good in bed, but she’s not his wife and he has no desire to commit adultery, or so he tells himself, as he sits on the edge of her bed with his pants around his ankles. Is he taking them off or putting them on? He’s not sure, but now he pulls them on and limps home, having left his beribboned crutches somewhere. On arrival, he finds all the Kewpie dolls, which were put on a shelf when the babies started coming, now scattered about the apartment, beheaded and with their limbs amputated. One of the babies is crying, so, while he warms up a bottle of milk on the stove, he goes into its room to give it a pacifier and discovers a note from his wife pinned to its pajamas, which says that she has gone off to the hospital to have another baby and she’d better not find him here when she gets back, because if she does she’ll kill him. He believes her, so he’s soon out on the streets again, wondering if he ever gave that bottle to the baby, or if it’s still boiling away on the stove. He passes the old neighborhood bar and is tempted but decides that he has had enough trouble for one lifetime and is about to walk on when he is stopped by that hulk who beat him up and who now gives him a cigar because he’s just become a father and drags him into the bar for a celebratory drink, or, rather, several, he has lost count. The celebrations are already over, however, and the new father, who has married the same woman who threw him out, is crying in his beer about the miseries of married life and congratulating him on being well out of it, a lucky man. But he doesn’t feel lucky, especially when he sees a young woman sitting near them who looks like she’s probably good in bed and decides to suggest that they go to her place, but too late — she’s already out the door with the guy who beat him up and stole his wife. So he has another beer, wondering where he’s supposed to live now, and realizing — it’s the bartender who so remarks while offering him another on the house — that life is short and brutal and before he knows it he’ll be dead. He’s right. After a few more beers and orgasms, some vaguely remembered, most not, one of his sons, now a racecar driver and the president of the company he used to work for, comes to visit him on his deathbed and, apologizing for arriving so late (I went for a beer, Dad, things happened), says he’s going to miss him but it’s probably for the best. For the best what? he asks, but his son is gone, if he was ever there in the first place. Well…you know…life, he says to the nurse who has come to pull the sheet over his face and wheel him away.
STANDARD LONELINESS PACKAGE by Charles Yu