Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

Two weeks passed. At intervals irregular enough that Penny could never plan to evade them, Irene continued to stop by, always bearing a gift: banana bread or blueberry muffins or a potted plant or brochures from the local chamber of commerce with pictures and maps of area attractions. Sometimes she brought Henry, at whom she would occasionally shout—“Henry thinks so, too, don't you, Henry?”—to include him in the conversation. He nodded and smiled and then fell asleep with a nonchalance Penny could only envy. Irene's sense of the boundaries between landlady and tenant was eccentric. She was always telling Penny what a joy it was to have her and Tom renting the house, making it impossible for Penny to ask her to leave. She was too sweet, too lonely, too short and smiling, too stubbornly pleasant. In the evenings, hearing herself complain to Tom, Penny felt like a small, bad person. Once she'd aired them, her complaints dissolved so entirely that she couldn't even understand why she'd even been annoyed, until the next time.

One hazy September day, Irene chatted through an entire afternoon. Penny had never met anyone whose conversation so clearly defined chatting. She tilted her gray head to one side, clucked her tongue, and chatted about how the doctor wanted to change Henry's blood pressure medication even though she couldn't see what the problem was with the current drugs. After she mused on this for a solid half hour she tilted her head to the other side and took up the subject of her own social security benefits—“It's all a mystery,” she said, “to your average taxpayer like myself”—and various problems she'd encountered in her dealings with the government, the intransigence of bureaucrats, the crucial need for young people like Penny to begin planning immediately for the long-term future. There were always special circumstances, she said, that you hadn't planned for but happened anyway, whether you wanted them to or not, so it was important to be prepared.

Listening, Penny felt dread drizzling over her like rain. Was this what it meant to get old: your worldview blinkered, sexless, narrowed to administrative concerns? Taxes, medications, schedules and routines, a set of forms and formulae for the numbing worries that eased your transition to the final numbness of death? She thought about Tom, about the few gray hairs she'd noticed behind his ears, and she thought about the two of them in bed, her fingers moving through his hair in rhythm with their other movements. On the one hand was her vision of the two of them having children and growing old together; on the other hand, the idea that they might grow old like Irene and Henry made her want to scream. She found herself trapped between these competing feelings, each equally powerful and unexpected, with no sense of which one would win out in the end. It made her feel desperate and reckless. In her mind, overcome by the contest, she stood up and screamed the word “Motherfucker!” in Irene's face. She literally had to prevent herself physically — with more pinching — from screaming this in Irene's sweet, beaming, elderly face. Not because Irene was a motherfucker but because she so patently was not, because she was so permanently and rigorously removed from the world of motherfuckers. Penny trembled with the desire to do it. Then she really stood up.

“Thank you for the delicious bread, Irene,” she said.

Irene — interrupted mid-tip: “You can use a vinegar solution for that”—rearranged her spotted face from shocked to compliant. “Of course, dear,” she said. “Don't let me get in your way.”

The books lined the upstairs shelves, and the wedding crystal glinted in the mahogany cabinet that was itself a wedding gift from Tom's aunt in California. She'd unpacked enough of the living room that she could take a break there and read a book without feeling distracted by the disarray. She was working on the bedrooms when she happened to glance outside and saw Guy standing in the yard, fiddling with his watch and checking the time as if he had somewhere more important to go. Which, it soon became clear, he didn't. He wasn't even tangentially involved in anything important. It was ten-thirty in the morning, and he was drunk, or had been drinking, anyway.

“There's some guy standing on my lawn,” she said to him.

He smiled in broad appreciation of this remark. His face had been lightly touched by the sun. His T-shirt today was a sallow, mustardy yellow, and his gut made the fabric blouse above the hips. “I was going to break into the shed,” he said, “but it's daytime.”

“Why do you need to get in there so badly, anyway?”

“There are some items in there I need to collect,” he said.

“I think maybe you should talk to Irene about that.”

“That old bag?” He was weaving ever so slightly, like a tall building in a strong wind, and it fascinated her to hear him talk about Irene that way. “She hates me,” he went on, “with a passion.”

“Why?” she said, although it was not hard to imagine why someone like Irene would not be overly fond of someone like Guy. He was definitely a person who had at least a passing acquaintance with the world of motherfuckers. The treacly smell of hard liquor wafted from him like perfume.

“Christine,” he said, “my love and life.”

“You weren't the yard man for her, either, then.”

“I don't know shit about yards.”

Penny gestured to the plastic chairs on the front porch. “Would you like to sit down?” she said.

Guy and Christine first met in high school. She was sweet and shy, wholesome and blond. She wore glasses and wanted to be a veterinarian. Guy was a loser — a kid who hung around the parking lot and smoked a lot of cigarettes all day long. “She was a square peg, and I couldn't even find a peg.” They both came home again after college. Christine didn't have the drive for veterinary school and settled for work as a kennel-tech instead. Guy got a job at a construction company and started saving money; he didn't know just what it was for, but liked the thought of it growing safely in his account. One winter afternoon, driving, he saw a tabby cat lying by the side of the road. Hit by a car, it was still alive, dragging itself, inch by painful inch, to the curb. He stopped the pickup and walked over. Its hind legs were red mush, but when he picked the cat up it clawed and bit him, then lay still. He put it in his lap and drove to the animal hospital, the cat's blood soaking his pants. Christine was on duty at the reception desk when he came in, and if the fluorescent hospital lights bleached her pale skin to white, then sight of the cat paled it even further.

She was almost intolerably shy — he remembered this from high school — as she took his name, mumbling, and led him into an examination room. He laid the cat down on the counter. It was panting shallowly in pain, blood oozing from its open mouth. Christine came back with a veterinarian, a bossy, red-haired woman who said the cat would have to be put down. She asked if it was his, he shook his head, and she told him to leave the room, then she and Christine together administered the shot that ended the cat's life.

He sat in the truck in the parking lot, waiting for her to get off work. When she saw him there, she turned around and went back inside. After a couple of minutes she came out again, her breath streaming in the cold, and got in on the passenger side. She had antibiotic lotion and bandages and cleaned his arm where he'd been scratched, and when she was done he drove her to the pub and they drank for an hour or so without hardly even speaking. Then he took her home.

After this evening he would stop several times a week to wait in the parking lot for her shift to end. They would go to the pub, or down to the river to watch the water, and in this quiet, unhurried way, over one long winter, they fell in love.