Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

She skins out of her tweeds and into the big blue tank suit. Her thick arms and shoulders roll with padded power. Her hands are short and thick, the nails clipped straight across at the tips of the fingers.

“New member,” she says.

“Yes, I joined for the sake of the pool,” I say, looking at the hooks in the locker as I sling my clothes onto them. “My doctor wants me to learn to swim.” I can feel her eyes on my hump — on the rolls of my neck climbing up to my bald pate.

“Arthritis?” comes her voice.

“It goes with the turf,” I say lightly.

“So I hear,” she says, and I keep my back turned long enough for her to get a good look at me.

Fourth day at the pool.

“Clever contraption,” says Miss Lick, as she snaps the elastic band of my swimsuit that crosses above my hump. Her voice is soft and low, at odds with her bigness and her brusque movement. The showerhead suddenly decides on cold and the water hits my hump and my neck and my whole naked head with a bright chill.

“Special tailoring?” asks Miss Lick. “Expensive?” I smile up at her. She is vigorously massaging her own arms in the spray from the next nozzle.

“Well, it’s orthopedic,” I say, bobbing out of the cold water to stand dripping on the tiles.

“Ah!” says Miss Lick. “Right.” She pounds her big solid belly with both fists. She flicks her short hair briskly, and her massive jaw wobbles a run of water down onto her chest. I am pulling the rubber cap down over my scalp, feeling it crumple my forehead into rolls over my nose. It pinches.

Miss Lick slides an identical swim cap onto her head, puffing, going red at the edges where her face bulges out of the cap like a ruptured condom.

“Check your feet!” whispers Miss Lick cheerily, and I crouch against the tile bench and dutifully spread my toes and run my fingers between them. Miss Lick is slamming the fire door open and propping it with a rubber wedge. Out she bounces into the shallow footbath that fills the passage between the shower-room door and the pool door. Miss Lick spends several minutes in this high-chlorine footbath before and after her swim. She is concerned about athlete’s foot and other fungoid growths.

Miss Lick has kindly offered to give me swimming lessons to counteract the arthritis that is sinking into all my joints. Miss Lick says that all hunchbacks and dwarfs should swim.

I stand knee-deep in the footbath with my nose on a level with Miss Lick’s bouncing buttocks, as she jogs vigorously in place in the warm nose-searing chlorine solution. She is looking through the small screened window in the door to the pool.

“Christ! She’s there already!” I splash back a step, startled because Miss Lick’s side of our conversation has been pretty spartan up to now. This burst of emotion throws me. Then I recognize it. Success. Miss Lick’s jaw shoves forward belligerently and her big hands reach back and grasp her buttocks and begin to knead them nervously through the blue tank suit.

“That old nanny goat haunts me.” She looks back with a wry grin at my inquiring face. “She swims so bloody-arsed slow! And she never stops. She’s always in my lane and I’m forever running over her! I tried coming in on my lunch hour. There she was. I tried running in before I got to work in the morning and she was here. She’s here every goddamned hour of the day. And look at her! She swims like the dead!” Miss Lick stares out the diamond-shaped window and grabs hard at her butt. I pull my tinted goggles down over my pink eyes and close out some of the sting of the chlorine. Her profile blurs in the green lenses and her muttering goes on.

“This may seem horrible but I’ve actually considered trapping her in the deep end and holding her under. There have been days when I wouldn’t have hesitated if I thought I could get away with it.”

She looks anxiously back at me, her eyes bulging through the fat pads of her cheeks. I nod my head at her pale green face. The light moves on the surface of the footbath and streaks jump in shades of green across her face. “Oh, I can understand that,” I say, and I grin, nodding.

Miss Lick is doing her third lap of what she refers to as “butterfly” stroke. She will do seven more “butterfly” laps before she reverts to “breast” stroke. She does each lap in one minute, which means that the pool will be swamped with three-foot waves and a pounding roar for seven more minutes. Breast stroke is quiet even for Miss Lick. The very old woman who does her mile-and-a-half each day in this pool is clinging to the tile gutter at the side. She will hang there, waiting, until the butterfly is finished. The other swimmers, the young ones, who can evidently breathe under water, continue with their laps. Miss Lick’s enormous shoulders have her whole torso free of the water before she splashes back. Her buttocks show briefly like a barrel going over Niagara. I can loll here on the steps at the shallow end, only my legs in the bath-warm water, and watch.

I’ve taken her on her own hook and I have to be careful. She thinks she’s adopted me, that she’s doing me a kindness, that she’s displaying the magisterial stature of her goodness by spending time with me. I have to watch my ass. She is hideously lonely.

The whiskey looks like transparent wood in my glass. I hold it carefully between my eyes and the firelight so the movement of the red flame casts a grain into the brown liquid. The whiskey that I have already drunk sits warmly in my gut and mouth and penetrates the fog in my skull. The corner of my eye registers Miss Lick’s heavy wool socks pointing at the fire over her footstool. I am waiting for my palms to dry, breathing slowly until the clammy seep of my nerves sinks back from the surface of my skin. The whiskey is amazing to me. I wonder why I never realized that I would like it. I wonder why I never tried it before. Liking it so much is dangerous now, and so I hold it and look through it, drinking very slowly.

Miss Lick has the bottle on a tray beside her chair and is being generous with herself here in the fire dark. She cuts the wood herself, takes an ax up to the family parkland in spring and drags a chainsaw into the woods on weekends to clean up the deadfalls from the winter. One whole storage cubicle in the basement of the tasteful brick apartment building is devoted to split cords seasoning in the dry dark with a deep resin odor. She goes down in the elevator with a canvas sling over her shoulder and brings up one night’s worth at a time. She kneels on the flat granite paving stone in the hearth and nicks off tidy triangular kindling with a hatchet that looks at home in her hand, ticking the slim sticks off a sixteen-inch chunk that rotates quietly under her other hand.

The chairs are dark, supple leather, as big as rhinos. The drapes are a dark plaid in heavy wool. A plaster bust of Minerva, painted glossy black, sits on the mantel beneath a rack of shotguns.

“I used to go for birds with my old man,” she says.

She talks slowly. Dry barks of laughter punctuate the sad parts to show that she is not sentimental and is not looking for sympathy. She has just described her father, her house in the woods outside of town, her employees, the old but reliable machinery that poops out 3 ounces of gravy, 1.8 ounces of niblet corn, 3 ounces of turkey breast, 3.2 ounces of apple cobbler, each in its proper compartment of the plastic trays. She is considering a massive retooling.

“I’ll get more ice,” I say, with the bucket in my hand, shuffling to the kitchen as she pads heavily toward the brown-tiled bathroom. The kitchen is blank. Clean and empty. A torn bag containing two dark chocolate cookies lies abandoned on one white counter. The refrigerator door yaws outward from its emptiness. Nothing but a half bottle of ketchup in the door shelves. The mouth of the bottle is caked with scab, and in the freezer section are solid stacks of frozen dinners in plastic trays — unlabeled.