Tao Lin: Bed

The mom is in the side yard, watering a palmetto with the hose. Her dress is a bit wet, and her hair too. She waves at Mattie. Their toy poodle is sitting very still on top of the mailbox. He is overheated, but has retained good posture. He looks content in a once-wild way.

Mattie waves at her mom and carries the poodle into the living room.

On the sofa, Mattie pets the poodle until it is dark outside. She lies down. She stares sideways through the sliding glass door, at the sky. In third grade she told some classmates that their teacher, Mrs. Beonard, looked like a dolphin, even though Mrs. Beonard looked very much like an owl. She surprised herself then, and liked it.

Mattie sits up, carries the poodle into her room. She arranges it so they lie facing each other on the bed. The poodle is submissive and inaudible. Mattie closes her eyes, and sees her own face. A nerd, she thinks. Someone at school had called her a nerd. She tries not to think about dirt. Her dream about dirt wasn’t a good dream. She sneezes. Her head rings — resonates, like a padded bell. The poodle stands. Mattie pets him until he is flat again. She keeps her hand on his body. She sneezes again, hard, the hardest sneeze she has ever sneezed, and this time there’s an exquisite, high-pitched squeak from the pappy center of her head, and then she feels perceptually enhanced — honed and lucid as a tiny, soap-washed moon. She closes her eyes. She hears new things. She hears her own shouldery hipbone, low and curving, sounding purly, cello tones. She hears an ant, in the yard, walking up a blade of grass. She falls asleep and wakes up early in the morning, wide-eyed and alert, four hours before school.

The dad goes around one Saturday with a notepad, taking orders for lunch. He goes out, comes back. “Who ordered the toy poodle?” he says. He’s holding, in a manhandled way, an apricot-hued poodle, who is a girl. He points at his notepad. “Says here …”

“I ordered that!” says Paul. He is eight. He is taking all the credit for this, in case of future situations. “I knew to order something good like that.” He looks around. The world, he feels, is becoming less, is closing in, trying to detain him, clamp him like a bug. He takes the apricot poodle and runs away.

The mom is going around the house, watering her many potted plants.

Mattie comes out from her room, gets the other poodle, goes back to her room.

In bed, the dad says, “It’s fair.” He’s thinking about the poodles. It’s a few years later. “One poodle per child. One male, one female.”

“Yes,” says the mom. “Fair.” She has discovered, going through the trash, envelopes postmarked Nevada, from someone named Scarlet Leysen. The dad had taken a business trip there. Two females per male, the mom thinks. “Life isn’t fair,” she says. “So we should comport extra fair, to compensate.” She used to say, “Life isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to make it fair,” but changed it one day while eating a peach, when she was twenty.

“I know,” says the dad. “I agree.” He goes to pat the mom’s shoulder, but pats the bed instead. He moves his hand through the dark and pats it down again, on the mom’s face. Her lips and teeth are wet; she has just licked them. “Sorry,” says the dad. He gets up, washes his hands, goes out into the rest of the house.

The mom dreams of the dad, dreams that he descends through a trapdoor, into a room that spins. He crouches, leaps, pushes a button on a wall. A rope ladder appears. He catches it, helicopter-style, climbs it, and is back in the bedroom. He lies down. He rolls over, toward her. His head is snoring and fat and looming, and she is afraid. She wakes up and there he is. His head is snoring, but not fat or looming; he is smiling a little.

In the morning, the mom goes looking for the envelopes. She doesn’t find any. She sits down with a microwaved waffle, a bowl of dried cranberries, a canister of whipped cream. She plays back the dream in her head. She likes the rope ladder part. She holds the whipped cream vertically down, as it says to on the canister.

Over time, the mom makes herself forget the envelopes, which works, until one day, going through mail, she finds that she has been looking for a very long time at this letter from Nevada with Smurf stickers all over it — Smurfs dressed in pink, Smurfs smooching. She throws a pencil and a wristwatch into the swimming pool. She frowns and paces. She throws a muffin on the floor and doesn’t clean it up. This is her little rampage. She locks herself in her bedroom and sits very still on her bed. The world sits beside her, the size and intelligence and badness of a cupcake. In her head, there is a steady, clear-voiced scream, pitched in middle C. It is not unpleasing. She listens to it for some time and then lies down.

The dad is made to sleep on the couch. He buys his own blanket from Kmart, a green one, and a pillow that is supposed to be for dogs. He sleeps with a box of sugar cookies on his chest — something, he knows, that he has always wanted. Instead of toothbrushing, he has mints.

The mom misses the dad. She does not speculate on Scarlet Leysen. She destroys Nevada out of her head, the entire state. She makes it have a lava-y Earthquake. She mostly forgives the dad. Still, though, she knows, the dad should be punished. She begins to make dinner only for herself, Paul, and Mattie. She tries not to look at the dad when they are in the kitchen together. Once, though, she glances and sees that the dad’s mouth is moving and that he is lining up three uncut pickles on a piece of bread. They make eye contact and his mouth keeps moving, noiselessly, and then he loudly says, “—and I’m competent.” The mom looks away. She grins. She leaves the kitchen. She is a little giddy. Control yourself, she thinks. Each day of punishment is a delay of gratification, an investment towards better, future love.

“Tell your mom to stop being angry at me,” says the dad one night to Paul. He is at the fax machine, on a stool, has his head turned around to Paul, who is on the sofa watching TV.

“You,” says Paul. He is eleven. He has changed. He is somewhat fat, and his head has grown, he thinks, too big. Some nights, in bed, he spreads his fingers evenly over his skull and pushes inward and counts to one hundred. He has to do something, he knows, contain it — not unlike braces for teeth, which he has. Sometimes he looks in the mirror and imagines a team of dwarves, swarming, smacking at his body. Once, he dreams this. “Hey now,” he says in his dream. There is a doorway and the dwarves keep rushing in. “Hey,” he says. “Why?”

“She listens to you; not me,” says the dad. He moves his face close to Paul’s. It is a bewildered, distracted face — the face of someone clearly without secrets, but still somehow untrustable. “She doesn’t listen to me,” he says. He has just invented a new laser, that afternoon. “You need to tell her. Say to her—”

The fax machine begins to make noises and the dad attends to it.

“You,” says Paul. He bites in half his cream-filled Popsicle. He makes a face. His favorite thing to do, now, is to eat something concocted and sludgy — cherry pie-chocolate syrup pudding, marshmallow-maraschino cherry soup — and then, sweet and sticky mouthed, lie down for a nap. He likes to be sleepy, likes the keen apathy and warm coolness of it.

After a few weeks the dad is allowed back in the bedroom.

He is smiling and clear-eyed. “That was terrible,” he says. “You were so angry. I tried to impress you by eating healthy.” He chuckles. “You were so angry!” He smiles and moves to her and hugs her.

Weekends, the dad puts on swimming trunks, swims two or three laps, then gets distracted and goes, dripping, into the house, to find the poodles. He enforces direction and speed as the poodles are made to swim repeatedly from the deep end to the shallow end. He mock screams at them. The mom has the camcorder. She encourages Paul and Mattie to swim. After the poodles, the dad spends time — too much time, everyone agrees — with the long-handled scrubber, scrubbing at all the fey and faint patches of pool algae.