Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

Years ago, when I still lived with my parents, my mother and I witnessed a car accident. A boy walked away from one of the crumpled cars without a scratch, then the blood came up in staggered waves from his mouth. A police officer who arrived at the scene told us the boy had swallowed part of a windshield. My mother said he would have been better off had he swallowed the whole smooth rectangle of the windshield rather than the tiny splintered shards. That’s how I feel about dressing up as these big griefs, pain so unimaginable that it swallows in one gulp the death of my mother, my runaway cat, the touch of Perry’s fingers on my neck and nothing more.

I pull into a gas station on the way home, and the attendant studies my face as I tell him to fill it up. On rare occasions, people recognize me from Do Unto Others. “Sally, as a fellow woman, I know just what it’s like to lose all your teeth at such a young age,” a woman once said loudly through loose dentures, down the length of a crowded aisle in a grocery store.

There was one show where I played a woman who was addicted to sadness. A woman in the audience began to talk about her estranged sister, and suddenly an adolescent boy next to her screamed out the name of his best friend who’d moved all the way across the country. When the older man in the back row brought up the fact that his real parents gave him up for adoption, Perry said, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get back to the subject at hand. The topic of today’s show is ‘addiction to sadness.’” He paused and looked out into the audience. For the first time in the show’s history, he didn’t say anything. The sadness was everywhere, floating in midair above us all, cloudy beyond recognition.

So when the gas station attendant bends down next to my window and says, as if there is a secret between us, “Look, I know it sounds like a cheap line, but I’m serious — haven’t I seen you before? Your face is so familiar — do you work at the Stop and Shop?” I shake my head no. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I know I’ve seen you,” he says, handing me my change. “I’m sure you did,” I say reassuringly, and all of us feel the stroke of a smooth, warm hand of comfort.

WHEN the phone rang in the middle of the night, Bernard answered it even though he wasn’t in his own apartment or even in his own city. It made him feel needed for once.

“What?” he said into the receiver, eyes still closed. He was emerging from the deep fog of postcoital sleep. The woman lying next to him, moist and naked, said something about getting the fucking dog off the bed though there was no dog, then rolled over, pulling the tangle of covers with her.

The person on the other end of the line said nothing. “What?” Bernard asked again, starting to feel a familiar panic — the sensation was one of small birds flying in his chest. For him, middle-of-the-night phone calls meant death (his ex-wife’s) or anguish (his daughter’s). “Is everything okay?” he said. The tiny frantic wings beat against the cage of his heart.

“Who are you?” a nervous male voice asked.

“Come on,” Bernard said. What a question. “Can’t you do better than that? Isn’t there anything else you’d like to know?” For the past several weeks since taking a leave of absence from the university, Bernard had lived his life like this: he drove rental cars up and down the East Coast, spending nights with women who found his kind of drifting irresistible or else they found him just pathetic enough (finally, a man who needed directions). In the tourist area of rest stops, women asked him if he was lost ( And how! he always thought). Once, as he wandered through a roadside plastic dinosaur park on Route 1 in Massachusetts, a woman — a paleontologist who took study breaks there — appeared seemingly out of nowhere and asked him if he wanted a tour.

The woman lying next to him had said she smelled his sadness. “What does sadness smell like?” he’d asked. “Maple syrup,” she said. He reminded her that he’d been eating pancakes when they first met. “No, you smelled like syrup,” she insisted. It was his scent that drew her to him as he sat alone in the twenty-four-hour Greek coffee shop underneath her apartment on a grim strip of discount tire stores, electonic stores advertising beepers for sale, nail salons, and across the street, the psychiatric hospital the color of dried blood.

“That fucking dog,” the woman said and flipped over, pulling a pillow over her face.

“Look,” the nervous voice suddenly burst forth. “I call this number occasionally to get off. Are you happy now? I pick up the phone and dial randomly, and every once in a while I get lucky. This is one of my lucky numbers, pal.”

“Maybe you dialed the wrong number?” Bernard asked.

“It’s no wrong number,” the nervous voice said defiantly. “I’ve got it on speed dial.”

In the hotels where Bernard stayed, when he wasn’t staying with one of these women (they were never looking to take him on permanently — the fact that he was a wanderer was part of his lonely charm), he was treated with the respect due a man in his late fifties with all the nutty professor trappings — shabby tweed coat, unkempt hair and graying beard, the way he smelled of musty, cramped offices piled high with old, decaying books (except when he was having pancakes with maple syrup).

Bella looked out from under her pillow — she was a beauty not everyone could appreciate, with eyes so close together it made people a little cross-eyed to look at her and a crooked Roman nose. “Is that Ralph? Ralph, fuck off, you fuck.” She took the phone from Bernard and threw it down, then put her hand over Bernard’s, let it linger in a way that made him think of earlier, her soft pubic hair a darker red than her hair, against his face. He reached over to touch her, and she reached just beyond him to pull a condom from the box on the bedside table, handing it to him as she closed her eyes and turned her back to him.

“I like to pretend I’m asleep,” she said. She was an actress, so Bernard didn’t ask.

When the phone began its off-the-hook beeping, Bernard thought: Exactly. Sex is an emergency. For Ralph, for Bella, for me. He sometimes thought of his penis as a surgeon’s instrument. Entering somebody else’s body in such a profound way must leave a person changed or more knowledgeable. Here’s the part where you’re full of shit, he heard his ex-wife say. But touching someone else was the only way he kept from floating away these days. Here’s the part where you have an epiphany about your life, his ex-wife would have said. Here’s the part where you look at the wreckage of your life and make something good out of it. She had always hated to watch him wander aimlessly, something she never did. She had been a big narrator of life as it happened. Her life was a movie, and she was the annoying person in the audience who had seen it before.

The phone rang again, and Bernard pulled out of Bella, still pretending to sleep.

Bella turned and looked at him incredulously. “That’s my phone, you know.”

“Yes?” Bernard had heard his ex-wife’s voice so clearly that he expected it to be her on the phone, telling him to leave his daughter’s city if he couldn’t bring himself to visit her. Even though Bernard and his ex-wife could barely be in the same room together when she was alive, he’d always taken comfort in the idea of her out there in the world.

“Ah, man,” the man said. “Fuck.”

“Why’d you call back, Ralph?” Usually people wanted to tell him their sad stories. They hurled them at him like stones from the sinking ships of their lives. After less than twenty-four hours with Bella, she had told him about her wicked parents, her almost-marriage, and the miscarriage that kept her in bed with the shades drawn most days, leaving her apartment only to go to the acting class that she hoped would someday change her life.