They Is Us

In the meantime he is supposed to sleep on the sofa, baffled, bewildered and then, slowly, irritated, at having to beg her forgiveness for… for what? Even she would not be able to remember. This time, Slawa thinks, it is going to be different. He actually will leave, he can live in the shoe repair shop. The only person left who is important to him here is Julie, and he can arrange to visit her. His cats are scattered all over the house and even though they are responsive, they can do tricks, he works with them daily, it still takes an age to round them up and coax them into their cages. Breakfast, the dog, stands watching by the door. “You go?” he says in a plaintive voice. Slawa nods. “When back?”

Breakfast

“I don’t know,” Slawa says. He is full of sorrow. “You want to come with me?”

The dog shakes his head. “No,” he says. Slawa knows the dog is scared of anything new. Breakfast likes his routine. “When you come back, Poppy?”

“I don’t know.” There are six cages of cats; he carries them out two at a time. They are heavier than he remembers. How much could a cat weigh, twenty pounds? They resemble small mountain lions, or bobcats. He doesn’t remember ever having cats like these before. Each trip he makes, Breakfast follows him to the car and back in again.

“Why you leave, Poppy?” Breakfast asks. “Where you going?”

“I don’t know, Breakfast. I don’t know.” But still the dog asks, “Why?” again and again.

Murielle hears Slawa’s car. Is he really gone? For the moment the house is peaceful, apart from the scream of the dysfunctional air-conditioning unit and the thump of the Patel boys next door playing Flosh Express in their driveway. She has begged them not to because the ball keeps hitting her wall; they continue.

At a distance the ceaseless surf pounds, not waves but cars on the thirty-lane highway that has recently opened alongside the abandoned twenty-lane highway.

She will go crazy if she doesn’t get out of here, she thinks. But where can she go? Anyway, the girls will be back soon, she will have to give them something for dinner and it is too hot to move. Maybe a cold shower will make her less irritable. There is always a chance the faucets will gush real water instead of Sanitizing Gelatin.

Sure enough Slawa has left three towels, wet, on the floor – who needed to use up three towels, just for one wash? – and hasn’t opened the window afterward so the whole place is still steamy, which he has been told not to do one million times. Half the tiles are coming off the walls and the plaster moldering, the floor is crooked, too. Slawa was right about the place; soon the whole foundation is going to collapse.

Last night had been the last straw, to hear him crashing around and wake up to find he had pissed again in the hall, so drunk he thought he was in the toilet. What if one of the girls saw him? And in the morning the urine stank so bad, even a dog knew better than to piss in the house!

Once she had been fond of him, he had seemed to come out of nowhere like a gentle… not a giant, he wasn’t that tall… but a gentle something, maybe one of the seven dwarves, which had always seemed a bit kinky to her, what was that virgin princess Snow White doing with the seven filthy little men – not that dwarves in general were filthy, but at least in the movie Snow White had to go in there and clean the whole place – the dwarves weren’t infants, they had beards, though that one – Sleepy? Dopey? – seemed microcephalic, with a tiny pointed head and huge ears –

Slawa had rescued her from that horrible apartment, one room with the two of them, she and Tahnee who was only one at the time – it was part of her salary as night-manager, but to live in the old-age home was relentlessly depressing, the smell of the old people and overheated, steamy smell of bland food; it had never seemed like a place to bring up a kid, and besides, how would she ever meet anybody there, everyone was sick and dying and/or a hundred and ten years old.

Somehow, she wasn’t certain, she kept buying stuff, probably out of depression, from catalogs, or would go to the mall which you could practically walk to, when she had free time – and the debts mounting up month after month so the leased furniture was taken away; night after night of boxed macaroni and cheese dinner and canned peas and soda that wasn’t even Coca-Cola but the store brand; she would never get out from the mess, and every damn box or bottle had its own singing or talking microchip and some were light-sensitive and others were activated on vibration so that each time opening the cabinet a whole Disneyworld chorus, though atonal, would burst out in conflagration: “Yankee-Doodle went to town, riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it Kraft-Ebbing Macaroni!” at the same time as “All around thekitchenette, come and get your Peases, we are good – and good for you! – Pop! Goes a Zippety pea!” And then the deeper bass voice, “A product of Zippety Doo-Dah Corporation, a registered trademark. Zippety – Mom’s best friend for over a generation!”

Terry’s mother lived nearby then and helped out, babysitting, though she couldn’t stand it; Lorraine smoked, even though it was illegal, and had once burned Tahnee when she was holding her, as an infant, and couldn’t even put down the cigarette for long enough to hold the baby.

So when she met Slawa – and he was so kind, seemingly, he wasn’t drinking so much then, or hardly at all, and he visited his wife, Alga, almost every day and then would come by to say hi to her, and play with Tahnee, and take her out to dinner – she was grateful, more than grateful and his house was nearby, less than a half-hour away, with a yard for Tahnee, etc. etc.

Car doors slam. Surely he isn’t coming back? But no, it’s just the kids, returning from the pool. “Didn’t LaBenyce’s mom want to come in? How was the swimming?”

“No water.”

“I thought they were going to start using that gloppy stuff, the water-substitute?”

“They did, but we were only allowed to get in for, like, twenty minutes, then all of a sudden some girl started screaming and she was having an allergic reaction and so they decided to drain the pool in case it was poisonous or something.”

They are damp and cheery, reeking of chemicals, white mulberry skin puckered from their day in the… whatever it was. Tahnee really is a beauty, with that ash-blonde hair and tippy nose, thin, wispy; Julie is chubby and will never be so pretty; her smile is pretty, though, but she has the pleading look of a beaten dog while Tahnee – there is that imperious, snotty expression, and she is always batting her eyelashes at men. You can see she is going to be a real heartbreaker. She never smiles but there is already something frightening about her. Though she is not even fifteen, totally pre-pubescent and flat-chested, there is something about her… an insect queen.

“We’re starving, Mom,” says Tahnee.

“Yeah, Mom, what’s for dinner?”

“I’m not going to tell you to go and hang up your towels.”

“Why not?”

“Because I expect you to do so without being told.” It’s six o’clock, dinner time for normal people. There is nothing in the cabinets or in the freezer that the girls will eat. Why not? Everything is the same, pads or stacks or cubes of texturized cultured processed food-product, grown hydroponically in sterilized growth medium in factories; flavored with emollients, sauces, herbs, spices as well as artificial flavorings and preservatives. The food contains no by-products, all of it is pure and organic. Next week she’ll go see a lawyer.

“Where’s Dad?” says Julie.

It was probably better to get the whole thing over with sooner rather than later.

“Listen, kids,” she says, “things didn’t work out between me and Slawa.”

Julie’s face opens in a howl.

“Why?” says Tahnee. “Slawa’s not coming back?”

“He wasn’t your daddy anyway, Tahnee, so I don’t want to hear anything from you. I don’t want anybody making a fuss, either of you!”

Julie is weeping. “I always knew that was going to happen!” Julie will never get anywhere in this world; she has low self-esteem, Murielle thinks, and is, according to Doctor Ray-Oh-Tee, whose show is on at four, overly case-sensitive.

“You’ll get used to it, now we can have lots of fun without any big beer belly grunting and bitching and slapping his way around the place.”

“Daddy was nice when he wasn’t drunk,” Julie says.

“Right, but he was almost always drunk. One husband a Diamond-C dust dope head and one alcoholic, that’s enough for anybody.”

“Nooooo –”

“You don’t know anything, he didn’t let you see but there was never a single second when he didn’t have a beer in his hand and he went through a six-pack a night easily. That is why he was always in front of the TV in a catatonic stupor and plus he kept a bottle of bourbon going on the side – look, he wasn’t the worst guy in the world and I know you’re going to miss him –”

“I’m not,” says Tahnee, “I don’t even remember him already. It was like having a stuffed pig –”

“Okay, that’s enough. Anyway, we’re all going to have to be tough and strong. I’m thinking, we’re going to get out of this dump and travel and have an interesting life.”

“But I like it here,” says Julie. “My friends are here.”

“Not me,” says Tahnee, “let’s get out of this dump. Anyway, you don’t have any friends, remember, Julie?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what you said, you don’t have any friends, remember? When was that, Saturday?”

“Yeah, but –”

“All right, stop it you two. Tahnee. I tell you what. As a celebration, I’m going to order us a pizza, how do you like that?”

“Yeah, yeah! Pizza. I want mrango,” says Julie.

“I’m gonna have to borrow some credit from you kids. Who has money left on their micro-chips? I’ll pay you back, I’ll have cred tomorrow. My chip is over the limit.”

“I hate mrango,” says Tahnee. The two girls begin to squabble. Apparently they have already forgotten about Slawa’s absence. But whether that is due to indifference, or some type of brain damage, Murielle can’t determine.