Brian Evenson - Fugue State - stories

So while it was true that the oldest girl knew something was wrong with the father well before the youngest girl, by the time the youngest girl began to notice and feel it the oldest girl had stopped worrying and already saw this wrongness now instead as a condition of life to be adapted to. The youngest girl worried about what was happening with the father, but the oldest girl, while calming the youngest girl and distracting her and making up games in the tent for her, was not so much worried as only curious about where it would all lead.

The father kept coming to get them, mostly late but occasionally on time. Sometimes he seemed so distracted that he could not even be talked to. They would ride back with him to his apartment in silence. Once there, he would sometimes notice them and smile, and sometimes they would even walk a few blocks together for ice cream and then figure out something else to do, but mostly they would just sit around the apartment in their inadequate blanket tunnel while the father lay on the blanketless bed reading a book or just staring up at the ceiling. Sometimes he would come out of the bedroom and sit at one end of the blanket tunnel and give them choices about what they could do. They could order a pizza or they could have pasta. They could go to a movie or they could go to the zoo. Which did they want to do? The oldest girl had developed a system of not putting any demands on the father, figuring that putting demands on him would make him even less dependable than he already was, so mostly she shrugged and said she didn’t care. The youngest girl usually followed her lead. But somehow not caring put another sort of demand on the father, so that he just shook his head and often went back into the bedroom without deciding on any particular thing, and nothing was done. Something was happening to the father so that he was slowly disengaging himself from them, even when they were actually present and there. The oldest girl could guess where it was going, that they would see the father less and less and one day see him not at all. But all she could do while she comforted the youngest girl and kept her from the truth was steel herself for what would happen next.

On the day the father failed to arrive, the mother had made other arrangements. She would not be home after work, had an engagement, would not be back until the next day. She had in fact called the father the night before to let him know this, to stress that he must come on time. This, the youngest girl thought later, once night had fallen and she and her sister were alone in the tents, had been a mistake on the mother’s part. The mother did not understand how the father worked, since she herself, the mother, worked so differently. She did not see that saying such things to the father made him not more dependable but less so.

So, when they left in the morning, the mother gave them their lunches and reminded them that she would not be home, that when they got back from school the father would be there waiting for them. She kissed them and drove them to school and left them there like she always did, and they went to their classes and ate lunch and went to their classes again. When school was over, the oldest girl went to the youngest girl’s classroom and got her and together they walked home.

At the house, the father wasn’t there yet. They took the key from under the doormat and cleaned it off and let themselves in. Hello, the youngest girl called out hopefully as they entered the house, but there was no answer.

They put their schoolbooks down on the couch and then went to get their already packed overnight bags out of their rooms and put them next to the front door, up against the wall right beside the door, so that when the father arrived they would be all ready to go. They sat on the couch, waiting. Usually, the oldest girl thought, the mother was there and would have them do something while she herself called the father, but they were alone, the oldest girl thought, that was fine, the oldest girl thought, they would manage. Or at least she would. The youngest girl, she could see, was beginning to fidget and get anxious. She was sitting on the couch and trying to figure out what was happening, or rather not happening, and soon she was going to start to panic.

“Let’s go get a snack,” said the oldest girl to her, poker-faced, as if getting a snack and their father’s absence weren’t actually connected. They went into the kitchen and the oldest girl boosted the youngest girl up onto the counter so that she could stand there and open the cabinet and get the snacks out. Getting up on the counter was a special treat for the youngest girl, the oldest girl knew. The youngest girl got down the sandwich cookies and sat on the edge of the counter while the oldest girl opened the packages and divided the cookies out. The way the girls liked to eat sandwich cookies was to break them open and scrape the cream out with their teeth and then eat the cookie part later, dipped in milk. But even when they were done, cream and cookie halves and milk gone, the father still hadn’t arrived.

The sun was getting low in the sky outside, the oldest girl noticed. She wondered how long it would be before the youngest girl noticed. The oldest girl helped her sister off the counter and they went back into the living room and the oldest girl, trying to be casual about it, turned on the light.

“When is he coming?” asked the youngest girl.

“He’s on his way,” said the oldest girl. And then she said, “Time for tents.”

They did it the way they always did. The oldest girl went into her room and pulled her blankets into a pile and carried them out all at once, then dumped them on the living room floor. The youngest girl carried out just one of her blankets and then waited for the oldest girl to come get the other one. Together, they pushed the armchair closer to the couch and brought in the kitchen chairs as well. They got the encyclopedias down from the shelf and then set about spreading the blankets out, tucking them into the couch cushions and anchoring them down with books.

When they were done, the tents overlapped and stretched from couch to fireplace, in some places as high as the girls sitting and in others almost touching the floor. The girls crawled under an edge and got in and moved into the middle, where, near the armchair, they could sit upright without the tents touching them, the overhead light coming differently through the different blankets around them, shining oddly on their flesh.

“I’m hungry,” said the youngest girl.

“We had a snack,” said her sister.

“When is he coming?”

“Soon.”

“Did you call him?”

The oldest girl did not answer. She did not want to call the father, though she knew that was what the mother would do. She wanted him to come on his own. Instead, she crawled out of the tents and got some bread and a knife and a mostly empty jar of peanut butter and crawled with it back into the tents.

“We’re not supposed to eat in the living room,” said the youngest girl.

“We’re not in the living room,” said the oldest girl, “we’re in the tents. Besides, mother isn’t here.”

When the bread was gone and they had scraped the rest of the peanut butter out of the jar, they sat and waited. The oldest girl watched the youngest girl’s pale and anxious face, and wondered how her own face looked. And while she was sitting there, looking at her sister’s face and wondering about her own, she saw the face begin to change and her sister begin to cry. The oldest girl reached out across the tent and put her hand on her sister’s back and began to move her hand. It was like she was petting an animal — or rather, since she herself, concentrating on staying as calm as glass for the sake of her sister, felt distant not only from her sister’s back but from her own hand, as if she were watching someone else pet an animal.