Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“It’s too bright,” she said. “Pull down the shades.”

Martin pulled down the shades, and now the room smelled of the shades as well as the dozens of bottles of perfume atop Terra’s dresser.

“It could be a sin. I thought you wanted to be an altar boy someday and wear a lace surplice. Are you sure you want to see?” Terra asked in a whisper.

“I do,” Martin whispered back.

Terra threw herself down on her bed and lay seized by a fit of laughter. When she recovered, she brought the French doll down from its place on a bookshelf.

It wasn’t her favorite doll, Terra said. It was too old-fashioned and there was no wardrobe for it, so it wore the same dingy clothes day after day. The doll’s name was Terri. Terri from Paris. It rhymed if you pronounced Paris like the French. Terri from Paris was special because she’d been the favorite doll of Terra’s mother when she was a girl. And before that Terri had been the favorite of Terra’s grandmother. Terra had never met her grandmother.

Terri from Paris ran in the family, Terra said. Terra’s father had told her that someday Terra would pass the doll down to her own daughter.

“That’s why you took her from Mom, isn’t it?” her father had asked. “Because you wanted to pass her on to your own little girl.”

“Mom forgot she gave her to me,” Terra had answered.

Actually, her mother had never given her Terri. While her mother was alive the doll had lived in a hatbox on top of a shelf in her mother’s closet. Terra told Martin that she’d lied to her father, because she wasn’t about to agree to passing a doll on to a little girl of her own since she had no intention of having a little girl of her own.

Terra had never met her grandmother because, like Terra’s mother, her grandmother had died young, of breast cancer. When Terra’s mother was dying, she’d asked that the doll be buried with her. Terra sneaked Terri from Paris out of the coffin.

“So you want to see something I discovered?” Terra asked Martin.

This time Martin said nothing. He didn’t want to be laughed at again.

Terra showed him anyway. She lifted the doll’s frock and pulled down the yellowed muslin underpants.

“I don’t know if my mother ever took these underpants down, but maybe it’s why she kept Terri in a hatbox,” Terra said. The space between the doll’s legs had been cracked as if someone had tapped it with a hammer. In the middle of the crack a jagged hole opened on the hollow interior of the doll. The hole was surrounded with the same cotton candy frizz of gold hair as once seemed to grow from the doll’s head before it became unglued and now looked like a wig.

“I think my uncle Bella did that,” Terra said. “I think he did that when he was a boy. He always tickles me. I hate him.”

* * *

Martin kept the potato even more secret than he did the doll. Wearing the doll’s golden wig, the potato was hidden away behind the tubes in his makeshift dollhouse, an ancient TV set half gutted in the basement. The potato troubled Martin, but Martin couldn’t forget it or leave it alone. At night, while the family slept, he crept down into the basement, turned on the bare bulb above the workbench, and clamped the potato in the vise. Sometimes he put his own finger in the vise and tightened it to see how long he could take the pain. He selected screws and nails of various sizes from the mayonnaise jars in which his father had them organized. Then he screwed and hammered them into the potato. He daubed the wounds they made with Mercurochrome from the tiny clotted bottle that had been stored away on the top shelf of the medicine chest for as long as he could remember. Some of the Mercurochrome ran in streaks down the wrinkled potato skin and dripped like orange drops of blood to the dusty floor.

Finally, he stripped off its wig and buried the potato in a narrow corridor of sunless dirt between the house and the garage. He could bury it, but he couldn’t stop worrying about it. So he found himself digging it up just at dusk one Sunday after dinner. The screws were already rusting, the nails turning black, festering. Sickly white fingers sprouted from the eyes. He squirted it with lighter fluid and watched it char in a ball of blue flames, then he peed out the fire.

After that it was no good simply burying it again. He put it in a brown bag that he taped shut with tape from the roll of white adhesive tape that had been stored on the top shelf of the medicine chest for as long as he could remember. Whenever he swung the mirrored door of the medicine chest shut he would watch for his face to appear, trying to catch its expression before his reflection met his eyes. When the mirror swung he could feel his eyes roll like a doll’s, minus the clatter, but he couldn’t catch that eye roll happening to his reflection.

It was Sunday night. Martin stood before the mirror on the medicine chest. He’d taken his clothes off and was daubing himself with Mercurochrome around his wounds — his nipples, his navel, the tip of his wiener. With the tiny scissors his father used to clip hairs from his nostrils, Martin snipped strips off the roll of adhesive tape and taped them over his Mercurochromed scars. Orange streaks ran from the tape. It reminded him of Christ on the cross and he stretched his arms out pretending the nails were in his palms. Then he taped his mouth. He wanted to imagine what the doll would feel in the time to come when, staked to the workbench, she would give birth to the potato.

Father Boguslaw was the priest I always waited for, the one whose breath through the thin partition of the confessional reminded me of the ventilator behind Vic’s Tap. He huffed and smacked as if in response to my dull litany of sins, and I pictured him slouched in his cubicle, draped in vestments, the way he sat slumped in the back entrance to the sacristy on cold mornings before saying morning mass — hungover, sucking an unlit Pall Mall, exhaling smoke.

Once, his head thudded against the wooden box.

“Father,” I whispered, “Father,” but he was out, snoring. I knelt wondering what to do, until he finally groaned and hacked himself awake.

As usual, I’d saved the deadly sins for last: the lies and copied homework, snitching drinks, ditching school, hitchhiking, which I’d been convinced was an offense against the Fifth Commandment, which prohibited suicide. Before I reached the dirty snapshots of Korean girls, stolen from the dresser of my war-hero uncle, Uncle Al, and still unrepentantly cached behind the oil shed, Father B knocked and said I was forgiven.

As for Penance: “Go in peace, my son, I’m suffering enough today for both of us.”

She lies bluish in a puddle that looks like it has seeped through her skin. The Lifeguard with bleached hair and white zinc cream nearly washed off his nose, wearing a soaked red tank top with a white cross on the front and his name — well, his nickname— Mars , on the back, is giving her the kiss of life. He holds her nose pinched, comes up for air himself, and then fits his mouth over hers. It sounds as if he’s blowing up a rubber raft.

She just kept swimming when he blew his whistle. He rose in his tower chair and blew repeated blasts as he watched her stroking out past the buoys. By the time he’d raced across the sand to his boat, scattering shorebirds as he went, and was rowing out after her with the gulls screaming and swirling overhead as if he was chumming, she was going under.

A sunburned guy in cutoffs, a backward baseball cap, and mirror-lensed sunglasses pushes through the crowd repeating, “I’m a doctor, excuse me, I’m a doctor.” The doctor kneels beside her, feeling for a pulse, and the Lifeguard, between breaths, asks him, “Who the fuck are you really?”