Karen Bender: Refund: Stories

Now it was 11:45 PM, and she watched them; she wanted to rush in and gather them in her arms and feel the sweet thrum of their bodies — but she could not. She was afraid something inside her might crack apart, and her weeping would frighten them. She stood, instead, silent, dim, in the hallway, trying to remember that she was real.

Then she stepped into the room.

“They’re still up?” she asked.

The girl looked at her and shrieked with joy. The boy jumped up. “Did you get me a toy?” he whispered, seductively, into her ear.

“Oh,” said her husband. “I thought you were staying for the whole thing—”

“Something happened,” she said.

“She took my Harpie Lady card!” yelled the boy.

“She didn’t take it,” said her husband tiredly. “She found it.”

“She stole it!” yelled the boy.

“Welcome home,” said her husband. He looked like he had endured a brawl. “Good night.” He stood up, zoomed into the bedroom, and collapsed onto their bed.

“Daddy, no!” screamed the girl.

“Please, God,” he muttered, hoarsely, into the bedsheets.

Anna lifted the kicking girl into her crib. “Time for bed.”

“Daddy, help me!” screamed the girl. “Help!”

Her rage was awesome, tremendous. Anna closed the windows so the neighbors would not hear her screams. Anna touched her hair, softly. She did not know what to say to the child. “Please,” she pleaded with her child. “For God’s sake, please.” The girl glared at her mother until her father crawled in and stretched out on the carpet. In all of the lit homes, were parents making similar pleas of their children?

“You also need to sleep,” she said to her husband.

“No,” he said. “Sophie, I’m here.” The girl stood in her ball gown, clutching the bars of her crib, beaming.

The boy was hurling the girl’s stuffed animals at the wall. “Look what she did!” he yelled. He opened his fist. There was a tiny shred of crumpled card in it. “Look!”

She smoothed his hair and guided him to his bed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Get me more for my birthday,” he begged. “I want to get fifty. Sixty. Please!” He rolled over and fell asleep.

SHE LAY AWAKE IN THE DARK WHILE THE OTHERS FELL INTO THEIR dreams. Was it strange that Johnny the Weatherman had begun to shoot? Or was it stranger that Tyra Johnson, a beauty, had gained one hundred pounds and moved to Modesto, or that Brian Horwitz, the class clown, was president of his synagogue, or that Laurie Stone, who had held her hand tenderly as they walked into kindergarten, had been indicted for embezzlement at a local bank? She looked out the window, and all she saw was determined innocence — the bullish SUVs parked in the driveways, testament to dreams of safety, of endless oil; she looked at the houses of her neighbors, flocking here, to the edge of the desert, the only place they could afford in Southern California; she saw the development vanishing violently in a wild-fire, in a terrorist attack. Her own childhood home in Granada Hills was bulldozed for a luxury condo complex, her parents retired, taking medicine for their hearts, her father a math teacher now bagging groceries at Ralph’s for extra money, both of them praying that Social Security would hold up. The sight of her father, a man of six feet, gentle but bad with money, carefully guiding groceries across the parking lot made her ache with useless love. She could not save him. The houses were slapped together with drywall and paste.

When she finally fell unconscious, she dreamed of Warren Vance. She dreamed that Warren bragged that he spent $800,000 on a day trip to the moon. She saw him standing on the moon’s white surface in his cheap suit, smoke trailing off the end of his cigarette. “Vance wants you,” he said, and he pulled her toward him.

HER HUSBAND WOKE FIRST AND WENT DOWN TO MAKE BREAKFAST; Anna hurried to the front lawn and grabbed that day’s paper. The shooting had made the front page; eight classmates had been injured in the shooting, two were dead. Her throat felt cold as she read about the dead: Tiffany Mann, Harry Waters. She had just glimpsed them in the ballroom. Their high school faces smiled from the front page.

Her husband was standing in front of the stove making breakfast. The hearty smell of bacon filled the air.

“Read this,” she said, handing it to him.

He glanced at the newspaper. The pale desert light poured through the windows, as though shoveled from a mine of diamonds. Her husband looked up at her quickly.

“Two dead,” she said. “People were injured—”

He looked at the paper and then at her and then lifted strips of bacon from the grease to a paper towel. His hand trembled.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“What did you do?”

“I hid under a chair.”

He blinked.

“Did you think of throwing something at him?”

“He had a gun,” she said.

He looked dissatisfied. “Did anyone try?”

“We were afraid,” she said.

“My God,” he said. He clutched the handle of the pan, trying to will all of them into an ordinary domestic scenario. Then he stepped forward and hugged her. They clung to each other, their hands grasping but awkward, as if touching these bodies for the first time. The girl hurled her bacon to the floor.

“Hot!” she announced.

“Don’t throw your bacon!” shouted the boy, joyfully. He slapped her arm. The girl shrieked and whacked him with her spoon.

“Stop, everyone!” Anna said, pulling them away from each other. The girl threw the spoon across the room, where it hit the monthly calendar; it slid down. “Stop now!”

“Have more,” said her husband, piling more bacon onto their plates.

The sun made the children’s hair gleam. She felt the boy’s arm twitch, slow. The children resumed their breakfast. Her husband looked at her; he wanted to ask more.

“Was there blood?” he asked.

It was not what she had expected him to ask.

“There was,” she said, and they waited for this to answer something. They were all balanced, barely, on the fragile sheath of linoleum.

“More bacon!” yelled the boy. “Now.”

SHE HAD FOUR APPOINTMENTS THAT DAY, AND SHE STRAPPED HERSELF in the car and set off. Her car joined the flood of others on their daily missions. Anna knocked on doors, looked at circuit boards, listened for unusual noises; tightened, aligned, cleaned, lubricated parts; brought out her RF leakage detector, her thermistor vacuum gauge, her hex wrenches; she turned machines on. She lingered in homeowners’ kitchens, chatting with them about warranties, prices, but really, she was looking around. There was the precise cleanliness of the floors, the proliferation or absence of family photos. She pretended to be checking a dryer to make sure it was running, but she was listening to the way the customers talked to people on the phone while she worked; she needed to compare the tenor of their fear to her own. They all were afraid of something, big or small — the shoddy work of a contractor or being too shy to wear a certain dress, or the results of a biopsy or a child’s bad grade on a test or the thought that the cat had spoken or the weird sound the refrigerator was making. And on and on.

In the car, returning from the day’s work, she remembered Warren Vance as a young man. She remembered the first time they had sex, the frantic way he pulled her toward him, the way they both cried. He had lived in a tiny, dark apartment with his aunt, for his father was dead; his mother was in institutions sometimes, sometimes not, and his aunt worked as a telemarketer fifty hours a week, and the house was covered with a thin sheen of dust. Warren’s room was always very clean. It was plastered with cutout pictures of famous leaders who had risen from difficult circumstances. The apartment was a shoddy, barely furnished place, but it seemed holy with them in it. He did not have a particular career goal but wanted to assume the top post of various organizations: the head of Coca-Cola, the governorship of California, the presidency of the United States.