They Is Us

“What?” says Dyllis.

“What’s he saying? I never learned Spanish.”

“Ah, I’m not sure. He is angry, though, I theenk!”

“I know, but…” It occurs to Julie: Dyllis doesn’t actually speak or understand Spanish. All she has is a Spanish accent.

After this incident she is told not to go into the room with the pigs anymore. Instead she is given a lot of agar plates into which she has to pipette exact quantities of substances she has been told must never get into her mouth. Sometimes she stains slides, or counts various living organisms under a microscope. Even though the organisms are infinitely small, they do not, mostly, appear very nice – most of them spend their whole lives destroying, or trying to destroy, others.

And yet there are creatures, such as the spiderfish, she loves. When she comes into the room they all swoop down to her eagerly and twirl around her head as if they are carousel animals.

What if her whole life continues this way – the animals, always hungry, for food, for light, for air – nothing could help any of them, herself included, to escape. Here are these animals, these animals that are wrong – herself as well. Just wrong, and they know it and suffer, with their extra body parts or human limbs that were never meant to blend. And she is guilty of not being able to feel compassion for them, but only disgust, despite how sorrowfully they regard her and plead with their terrible saucer eyes.

Toward the end of summer, one afternoon her dad comes to pick her up. She is surprised to see him. Somehow their paths haven’t crossed in months, he is up and out before she is awake and gets back when she is already asleep. Usually she meets her mom outside in front; she can’t figure out how her dad has gotten past security. “Dad! What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“What you mean? I walked in, it took long time to find you.”

Then she realizes he got in because he looks like one of the workers – a janitor or electrician, whatever – and she hopes she hasn’t hurt his feelings. Even though he has lived in this country for a long long time, he still doesn’t really get it. Why couldn’t she have had the sort of father who wore a suit and did something respectable, instead of a shoe repair shop? He is so proud it’s his own, doesn’t he see how sad that is? Just thinking about it, her eyes fill with tears.

“So, Yulenka, show me around, I want to see what you have been doing all summer.”

As if things aren’t bad enough, her father is even more tenderhearted than she. The flies, the ones that Dyllis calls SloMoFlies, Julie has moved into an unused glass tank the size of a closet; it is her job to clean the tank each day without letting any of them escape. Every few days she puts rank slabs of old meat and dirty clothes into the tank. This is so disgusting, each time she thinks she is going to barf. The flies fly slowly – and they are so big! The air in the tank is stale and hot – and she hates the strange sound they make, a kind of gleeful buzzing hiss! They land all over her, it feels as if they are stinging, even though she knows they can’t, and afterwards she can’t help but scratch and scratch.

But her dad takes to them right away, and it really is peculiar how the whole swarm flies over to the side of the glass in unison and stare at him. Some have green eyes and some have blue, eyes the size of thumbnails. Her father has a puzzled expression. “What you do with these?” he asks.

“Um, not much. I’m in charge of cleaning up their tank and feeding them; it really creeps me out, Dad, the smell is so bad and they look at me kind of mean –”

“Cage is dirty. I clean for you.”

“Thanks, Daddy, but I don’t actually have to do it until tomorrow.” Her father is usually so gruff, this is all surprising.

“Is nothing. I will do it.” He opens the door and goes in. The flies land on his head and shoulders, she can’t help but think they are licking him. On second look she sees they are wiping themselves on him, cat-like, at least so it appears, and her dad has a kind of blissful look on his face, what Miss Fletsum in school calls “the find-your-bliss look”.

There are still a few on him when he comes out of the tank. He opens his jacket pocket and gestures. “Moushkas, come, my little moushkas.” More promptly than trained dogs, the flies, five or six of them, go in. “Yu-Yu, they are telling me, they want fruits and a little fish. They are not meat-eating flies but mostly fruit flies. And some of them they say are becoming wery sick.”

“Whatever, Dad. They’re just flies. And I have to do what I’m told, it’s, like, a special diet or something.”

“All living creatures –”

“I know, I know. I love animals, too, Dad, it’s just that, I dunno.”

“What?”

“Something about them – they like you, they don’t like me. Besides, I think Dyllis said they were engineered with some kind of cold virus or something, some marker so they could spread disease? I can’t remember what she says. Anyway it looks like you’re covered with snot. I mean, look!”

Her father glances down at the slimy trails that have been left by the flies, and shrugs.

“Anyway, if you say so, Daddy, I’ll try to sneak some fruit in there once in a while. But the ones in your jacket – you’re going to put them back in the tank, right?”

“No, no, don’t vorry. These flies, they say, they come with me, and tomorrow, more are born, ends up same number.” He is the only person who could treasure flies. Her poor father, who is there who treasures him?

“Oh, Daddy, I do love you so much,” says Julie, and clasps her father around his stomach, while overhead the flies circle in their stately, slow procession.

2 (#ulink_77d68194-095d-56e1-959c-3a0bb2816af2)

Murielle stands at the window staring at Slawa with hatred. How long has she been standing there? She has no idea. Sometimes, glancing at her watch, she finds ten hours have elapsed, when it seems twenty minutes; conversely, it feels like ninety minutes have passed but the reality is only a quarter of an hour has gone by. She sees now she should have been taking out her anger on Slawa, not on poor Julie, even though the kid does drive her nuts.

Tahnee switches stations from the kitchen keyboard. She has been using the computer. There is no way to switch off the big screen entirely, or they would have to call the company to be reconnected. It’s easier just to leave it on all the time. “Ma, can I go look for my dad this weekend?” she says. “I think I might have a clue.”

“You can just forget that,” Murielle says bitterly and then adds, in a gentler tone, “I don’t know why you would ever want to find your father, he’s never sent a dime for you. Anyway, I already told you, we have to go to Grandpa’s, I need your help.”

Tahnee shrugs. “But Mommy dear, you have Julie to help. Besides, this time it’s a genuine lead.”

Another time she might have been more lenient, but right now everything is irritating Murielle. “So what do you think will happen if you do find Terry? He’ll probably try and convince you to sell his Diamond-C dust to your schoolmates. I know him. He’s no good, Tahnee. I told you, forget it, you can go look maybe when you’re older.”

“I don’t want to go to Grandpa’s, Mom. It is so boring. Can I at least stay here?”

“Alone? Yeah, right. Forget it.” Now Tahnee is looking sullen, Murielle feels a bit frightened. “If you come with me to help at Grandpa’s, I’ll take you shopping after. If you stay for the day.”

A car pulls up at the end of the driveway – the mother of Julie’s rinky-dink girlfriend, who is going to take the two girls and her own kids to the public pool for the day.

“Moommm! Mom!” A shriek the pitch of which must date to early hominid: “Maaaa!” Tahnee yells, a sour Acadian howl. “Mom! I can’t find my merkin – and I need it for the pool!”

Julie comes up from the basement. She hopes her mother won’t go down while she is gone. Her mother doesn’t know just how many pets she has there. She has been fussing with her pets, trying to move them to different cages, but she is running out of space. All summer all her animals have been reproducing.

Even during her days off, all she does is clean cages and it is her own fault, kind of. The pink rabbit she brought home from work mated with the blue rabbit she already owned and now there are six feathered babies, cute, though one has three ears, only two of which are normal size.

Finally the lost merkin is found, or another substituted, and the kids depart. “Bye-bye, Mom!” says Tahnee, grabbing her towel.

“Byeeee!” says Julie, swathed head to toe in her thick ultra-protective V-ray-stopper swimming costume. “See ya later!”

“Bye!” Murielle yells back. She is just about to step on a cockroach when she realizes it has a red dot. “Oh, hi, Greg,” she says. “Sorry about that.” She doesn’t know if the roach waves one leg at her, or just in general. Either way, it’s hard to care! Murielle can’t imagine why Tahnee is still anxious to find her father. She has told her older daughter for years how miserable Terry was to her. Terry is not Julie’s father. Just after Tahnee was born, Terry left and it wasn’t long before she met Slawa.

When Slawa and Murielle first met, Slawa was a limo driver – car service, actually – exotic, kind, of a spiritual nature – who gave her a ride from Newark. It turned out that Slawa’s wife Alga, who was much older than he and suffered from reeTVO.9, was a resident of the nursing home that Murielle managed.

The coincidence seemed remarkable: fate. After Alga died, they married. But somewhere along the line Slawa had changed from a man who rescued her, a single woman with a kid, into a fat Russian slob who worked in a shoe repair shop.

Murielle slams the screen door. When she was married to Terry, Tahnee’s father, and Terry wanted to make Diamond-C dust in the bathroom to sell, she wouldn’t let him, which was one reason why they split up; now in retrospect she thinks, but at least he didn’t drink.

Of course, if Terry had been caught by the law for selling Diamond-C dust, all of their property would have been confiscated, even the things that were in her name. Tahnee would have been sent into foster care. Murielle’s struggles to survive, her desertion by Terry just after Tahnee was born; it means nothing to Tahnee. Tahnee would end up doing what she wanted. There has to be a way, some way, to keep Tahnee with her for a while longer. She loves that kid so much. Who would have thought her own daughter would have ended up being the love of her life?

Even so, Murielle knows there is something wrong with Tahnee. Her dead, pale eyes, white hair, white skin; but that isn’t it. Other people are mesmerized by her, but not really in a positive way. They become nervous, upset. Frightened? Murielle has never figured out what it is, exactly. Tahnee has a certain cat-like indifference to people and things.

Despite this, she loves Tahnee much more than Julie, whom she almost always wants to slap. It takes major control not to. Julie’s eager, earnest face, plain and scared – how is she going to get through the rest of her life unless she toughens up?

“Make sure you put on plenty of sunscreen!” she calls, hoping the girls can still hear. “Otherwise you’re going to fry!” It isn’t that the sun is particularly bright – there is a reddish haze in the sky – but Tahnee is so fair, virtually albino and at fourteen years old almost five eleven, all endless insect leg-and-arm stalks which only burn. Julie has brown hair, more normal color, but prone to prickly heat, rashes, asthma. The kids have never been all that healthy but it is probably from growing up around this polluted marshland.

From the window where she stands, Murielle can see the bald spot on Slawa’s head. He is still painting the drive. How long could it take? And, how stupid to wear a swirly yellow MUU-MUU. Yellow has never been his colour, he looks sallow.