Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

On her walk home from the subway, she spots Liza at the counter of the neighborhood video store, her long rubber dog bone face flushed. The clerk behind the counter is ruddy with flirting. He twists a small stud in his ear and looks at Liza sideways. Flora slips inside, slinks down the Foreign Movies section, past the Action/Adventure section to find a suitable place to study Liza.

“This is my favorite customer,” the video boy says to the other clerk on duty, a girl with haphazard pigtails and chunky glasses. “And it’s only her first time here.” The pigtailed girl rolls her eyes but Liza doesn’t notice. She smiles, saying, “You are being so silly.” She touches his arm effortlessly as she slides two videos across the counter. There is a sweetness to Liza’s gesture that makes her rubber face beautiful, fixed for a moment in coy, rosy bliss. “Look at that,” Flora says out loud without even realizing she’s speaking. She is that stunned by Liza’s easy transformation. Flora feels the chill creeping over her own bones, encasing them like branches in ice. She is fragile and raw like the naked trees on her block. She is paralyzed in the New Releases section in front of a row of movie boxes — with couples on the verge of passion; boxes that depict redemptive love, mysterious loss, and what the world would be like after World War III. As Liza walks out the door under the warm gaze of the video boy, Flora realizes something must be done or her blood will freeze up inside of her, crack her from the inside out.

“You shouldn’t flirt like that. It’s embarrassing,” the pigtailed girl says, elbowing the ruddy boy clerk as he sweeps the drop box with one arm for returned videos. Flora agrees. She feels betrayed, last night’s dream lingering like the bitter smell of old cigarette smoke in her apartment. Liza invading her life one day, then flinging her attention in an entirely different direction the next. More than this, she fears Liza will turn her attentions on Rock next. Panicked, she follows Liza tripping lightly down the street toward their brownstone. Flora leans into the wind, filled with a decisiveness that warms her like a pneumatic fever as the winter sky sinks lower.

The daggers of hail ringing in her lungs begin to melt as she reaches the brownstone and lets herself inside, the lock still warm from the turn of Liza’s keys before her. Flora takes the stairs two at a time, beelining it for that hole in the kitchen floor. Rock runs water in the sink below to clean his cereal bowl, and Flora feels the hot water rush over her heart lying there in the dirty dishes. As she digs Liza’s slick bulbs out of the new earth in the flower box, Flora’s face is set in grim determination like the snowman the neighborhood children have made in the street, its mouth made of raisins. As she drops the first bulb through the hole, she imagines a SWAT team busting down Rock’s door to retrieve her heart, dry it off, wrap it in a towel, and resuscitate it.

“Hey, what the hell?” Rock shouts as the bulbs bounce against his kitchen floor.

There is a muffled movie scream from upstairs while the voices that are the background of Rock’s answering machine message rise up through the floor in ecstatic agony. Flora pours the rich dark earth slowly, as if she were pouring dirt on a coffin.

“Holy shit,” Rock sputters. Covered in soil, he looks up finally through the hole, but Flora is gone.

She sits on the edge of her bed, suddenly very tired. She is genuinely tired for the first time in months, so tired she could sleep in her sleep. She looks out the window. The sky has lifted. The night is blue-black and clear, filled with stars.

TONIGHT I’m a woman who was held captive by a married couple, tied to a chair in their basement for several years. Two or three, I can’t remember as I sit in the studio dressing room in front of a mirror framed with big yellow lights. I paint dark circles under my eyes with black face makeup. With this, I achieve the tired, worn, but recovering victim look that the audience craves. They will ask me if the couple tortured me physically. At which point a more daring but still appropriately embarrassed member of the audience will ask me if I was tortured sexually. Sometimes I rehearse these answers and other times I make them up on the spot. The hesitancy in my voice gives me credence. They will ask me whether I learned to love my captors. I loved them, I will say. As you love me, I will think.

Then they will say I am brave, that I’ve suffered through a lot, that I deserve a good life now. I’ll say that I never in a million years thought it could happen to me. I’ll dab at my eyes with a handkerchief provided by Perry, the show’s handsome host, who occasionally appears in my dreams, all the while thanking the audience for helping me to cry at last. I put on a face of regular tears, which are more palatable than the way the real woman who lost her daughter in a freak blizzard in Florida behaved. After they’d returned from the second commercial break, she began to scream a scream that dogs might hear and then ran offstage to throw up. Some happy medium is what the audience wants. Most don’t know that what comes after the initial anguish is something that looks more like boredom than anything else. I look at my own static face in storefront windows on the way to work, yawning restlessly, as if against my will.

As I slip the black, curly wig over my own hair-netted, mousy brown hair, Don, the production assistant, opens the door a crack to cue me. I’m on in five minutes. This is the second year that I’ve worked as a fill-in for this local TV station on Do Unto Others. When the show can’t get a real woman who was locked in a one-room shack for ten years with a bucktoothed maniac, they call me. When the woman who has sex with her pet python got the flu, it was me that they called.

Misery has turned out to be a fairly profitable business. I’ve played a woman who slept with her son, a woman who was raised by wolves, a woman who was enslaved by a religious cult. You name it, it happened to me. To the audience, I’m the genuine dirt, the stuff of back alleys, the blue-black fade of the pictures of missing children. If the pouches under my eyes, built from layers of foundation, are slightly uneven, or a lock of my real hair jumps out from under that day’s wig, the audience is willing to overlook it. They chalk it up to the disheveled quality they expect in long-term sufferers.

Don comes back to say that I’m on. As I walk out into the studio lights, headed for the familiar chair next to Perry, I feel the eyes of the audience on my sagging shoulders and my slightly mussed wig hair. They scan my body for invisible scars, battle wounds, anything.

They scoop down into my tainted soul. They rush for the soft spots, seeking out the wounds. As I sit down faux-meekly in the round armchair, I smell the eagerness, and the charge of victimhood zip-zaps through my body. Perry turns to me, smiling, and says softly, so as not to startle me, “Welcome, Leslie.”

My name is Rita as I drive home from the studio still in costume. I accidentally sat on the sash of Leslie’s denim wraparound skirt getting into the car, and as I drive it pulls the skirt tight, digging into my belly. I told Perry that I thought she should wear a nice dress, something flowery, but he insisted that Leslie hadn’t seen the light of day for years. “This skirt was probably the last thing she looked good in before the married couple put her in their basement,” Perry said. Perry gets involved in the characters he creates. “Trust me, she never knew how to dress.”

It was a day like any other really. The usual questions. “How long did the married couple keep you in their basement?” “What were their names?” “Did they drive nice cars?” “Did this traumatic experience cause you to gain or lose weight?” There was some confusion when a hefty man with a starched white collar raised his hand and asked whether there had been any sex up the butt. Perry turned to me and said, “Leslie, I know this is painful, but was there any anal sex involved?” I got confused. Between me and the husband or between the husband and the wife? Or did the wife strap on a dildo? I wasn’t prepped for this question. “I don’t remember,” I said, looking straight at this man yearning for something ugly.