GHOST RANCH

The moment we drove over the cattle guard, a beat-up truck materialized out of road dust and pulled in front of us. The wizened rancher-type driving it didn’t need to say anything. In fact, he didn’t get out of the truck. 

We practically glowed in that New Mexican dusk—two gringas in a snow-white Toyota. Interlopers. There was nothing to say.

We had been to the Ghost Ranch that was open to the public, but that wasn’t where she lived. We spent days trying to figure out where the real house was, the one with the door she painted. 

It was a Thelma-and-Louise kind of trip. Spur of the moment. Utterly impractical. I was trying to punish B. He was never going to leave his wife. My therapist said that’s my MO—I only choose unavailable men.

When O’Keeffe met Stieglitz, he was married. He left his wife and children to be with her.

I needed different—different colors, different smells, a different angle to the light. I needed to be somewhere vastly different, and New Mexico delivered on that with its flat open spaces, ochre dirt, and sage brush. 

What Nikki was running from wasn’t clear. But with the way she popped Xanax, clearly there was at least one demon chasing her.

We searched for the Lawrence tree. We haunted Abiquiu. We even questioned the young girl working the desk at the inn. She acted like she had no idea what we were asking. 

We had spent days trying side roads off Highway 84, and when we found the compound, we didn’t even have the chance to look around. Of course the place was guarded.

The spark didn’t last for O’Keeffe and Stieglitz. They flamed out. He took another lover. She seemed more prolific without him, maybe even happier, painting in New Mexico and Lake George. But it is hard to tell anything from the outside of a marriage.

GRUDGE PERSON

We always say we’re whatever people, like we’re Bob Seger people because we listened to “Night Moves” four times in a row then twice in the morning, or we’re e-bike people after that weekend with the e-bikes, Garth Brooks people, cleaver people, mini golf people, but when he said we’re co-op people! I said, no, don’t even joke about that, and then I told him about back when I worked there, and how one time when, after catching a white shoplifter, my supervisor came running up to my lane, leant his lanyard over my belt, and said, see? we don’t only get black people for shoplifting here.

My boyfriend’s eyes lifted up in a way that made me think the story was worse than I thought, like maybe we should put down our ginger shots and get out of there. But it’s almost ten years later now, so I shop at the co-op again. I refuse to smile back when that supervisor smiles at me, still full-time, welcoming me to the store, shifting his hips back and forth in the rolling chair behind the customer service desk. It’s fine, not forgiving. You don’t have to forgive anybody for anything. So much racist stuff has happened to me here, the town I choose to live in. The street I choose to work on. The café where I pick up shifts. Last shift alone a man asked me if he could take a photo of me to show to his granddaughter. She looked like me; he wanted her to see. See what?

And then the tall guy who owned the vintage shop across the street came into the café with his mother. He introduced me to her as someone who is obsessed with the presidents, which I am. Her name was Val, so I picked her out the SCRABBLE mug with a V on it for her coffee. When I went back to the kitchen to tell the cook the story of the last time I talked to the vintage shop owner, the cook told me Val was in town because their mutual friend had died. That’s the kind of town this is: everyone knows why you’re in town. Everyone knows the truth about what kind of person you are.

They let it slide because they love the things you sell. About six years ago, outside a cocktail bar, the vintage shop owner and I were flirting. He asked me what was up. I said, nothing really, just I think we have fleas in my apartment, and he said, well I hope you don’t have any fleas in here, then raised both his hands and stuck them into my hair. He held my head, shaking imaginary fleas out of my afro. I know your eyebrows are raised right now. You wouldn’t blame me if I couldn’t forgive him.

But if you were one of my female friends back then, you probably would have said, well I would still fuck him. Or if you lived in town in 2016, and I was sitting on the floor of your living room, each of us smoking our own joint, sending a walking wind-up toy shaped like a human ear back and forth to each other across your low coffee table—if I said, where did you get this walking ear, and you said, at the vintage shop owner’s shop, I would have told you the flea story, but it would only ruin the walking ear for you very temporarily. It would regain its cuteness and its kitsch shortly after I left your apartment. But like I said, no one here knows how to hold a grudge—

Maybe you do. It’s a shame about the flea conversation, especially because the week before, I was actually considering fucking the vintage shop owner—he had found me at a different bar to give me a gift. He lit my cigarette and handed me a plastic bag. Inside were four soft doll heads and a headless doll. The doll was dressed like a boxer, in wristbands and American flag shorts, abs printed across its hairy chest. Each head belonged to a different candidate from the 1992 presidential election. Ross Perot’s little glasses were so cute. Clinton’s face was off-center. The doll’s neck was velcroed so you could rip off and reattach different heads, depending on who you wished would win.

He had stopped me, outside the cocktail bar that night, before putting his hands in my hair, to tell me he found a missing piece of the doll.

He tipped a hundred and twenty percent on his breakfast today. I said have a great day the same way I would have to anyone, without meaning it. He walked his mom to her car; I watched him kiss her hand, her forehead. She drove off and he went into his shop. The front window of the shop was set with an arrangement of unique lamps; my favorite had bulbs shaped like seashells. I had never been inside. The cook called order up, and I went back to serving. The bell rang on the door. The vintage shop owner had come back: with the doll’s missing velcro heart.

He said, I’ve been keeping the president’s heart for you, in a bag, in a drawer, since the last time I saw you. He didn’t say anything like forgive me? before he handed it over, but I heard how the heart sang with it.

SOMETHING LIKE COMFORT

Michael and I lay on our stomachs at the end of the dock, arms in the water up to our elbows. It was a game we played, to see who could stay still the longest while the minnows tickled us. Michael usually won.

In early April, Principal Mathieu instituted a half-day schedule for as long as the heat lasted. He’d already canceled Easter recess and, ominously, we thought, hinted at adding Saturday classes as a way to recoup lost hours of instruction. Our school building, he wrote in the letter sent home to parents and published several days later in the village newspaper, was not constructed with such weather in mind. A few paragraphs later, he signed his name in smudged ink, and we knew then, as we’d speculated before around kitchen tables, at the village store, in homerooms and classrooms, that our lives had slid into something new.

The perceptive among us, adult and child, understood that more than stifling classrooms, the principal and his faculty and staff sought to relieve themselves of a hundred or so cranky and inattentive pupils. One could hardly blame them. In that endless heat wave, we’d spoiled into a rowdy bunch. So the duty was split: the school would have us for those torpid mornings, the hours before we roused to our fullest, and our families would deal with us at our peak agitation. The arrangement clearly benefited some parties more than others, but in the end, even the aggrieved got on with it.

“Well,” our mother had said, opening and closing the matter in a single syllable.

Michael and I spent many of those newly free afternoons on the dock with the minnows. We went back to them, too, in the evenings while we waited for our father to return from his work or his travels, those hunger-pained hours before dinner. We’d wait for him, even if that meant cold meals well after dark.

“Here, fishy fishies,” Michael whispered.

“That’s cheating,” I said.

“Is not.”

“Is so.”

“It’s not like they can hear me.”

The point was that I could, and he knew that. Our game rewarded patience and silence, not coaxing and cajoling. I pulled my arms from the water.

“There,” I said. “Congratulations.”

I sat up and dried my arms on my shirt. Michael pouted.

“No need for that,” he said.

I blew a raspberry at him.

“No need for that, either,” he said.

Michael leaned back on the dock beside me, resting on his elbows, water pooling on the planks. I dropped a leg over the dock edge and, with my toes, traced circles in the water. The lake felt colder than it had been a minute before, higher too, like it had risen again in the time we’d spent arguing. A shiver rippled up from my toes, but I kept my leg where it was. I waited for the shiver to pass, and when it did, I waited for what came after it, which was something like, but also not like, comfort.

“What do you—” Michael started to say.

I didn’t hear anything else. Later I’d imagine I missed something vital, but in that moment, in that heat still new to us, I succumbed to late-afternoon drowsiness. I let myself float off on it. It was the first of many such moments that summer when I may have fallen asleep without realizing it, even after waking or, if not waking, then coming back to myself. The heat induced in us fugues from which we soon recovered, or believed we did. As we’d discover, some of these dozes were pleasant and others less so. That day on the dock was neither. It was a pause only, neither good nor bad but interstitial. I experienced it, as I’d later experience others, as not quite the record skipping so much as the skip itself, which does not know what came before it or will come after it, does not understand that it is the abrupt replacement of sound with silence and, in a moment more, the rough resumption of the music.

“This weather, Michael,” I said after however long, my tongue lolling against the backs of my teeth.

But Michael was gone, the pools where he’d been reclining evaporated.

“This weather,” I said, now directing the words at myself.

An annoyance by my left ear demanded an immediate scratching, conveying me fully back into the world.

When I finished, I rolled onto my side and came up again to sitting. The sun, lately a violent smear, had dripped lower toward the trees that ringed the western side of the lake. How much lower I couldn’t say, having not marked its position earlier, but of course time had passed, as it does. It was later, consequentially later, I was certain of that.

Two mink caught my eye. They dashed here and there on the rocks in a game of chase. The pursuer and the pursued changed roles as the chase changed direction, turned around on itself, back on itself. They ignored me. The braver of the two, the one that shot faster over the rocks and took corners sharper and surer, feinted to its left and then dove into a crevice and disappeared from sight. Its friend followed. Neither reemerged, and after a time I stopped watching for them.

I jutted my bottom lip and, with a halfhearted puff, blew my hair from my eyes. I felt no inclination to move, not yet, though I knew I would have to sooner than later. The world was closing in, was reassembling itself just over my shoulder. Like Michael earlier, I leaned back on my elbows—we did so much lounging that year—determined to ignore what in a few seconds or a few minutes would be impossible to overlook, to look past. A fish pipped the flat surface of the lake. Then another, farther away, did the same. Trees in the stands on either side of our house, between us and our neighbors, exhaled languid moans, leaned forward and backward, pushed by the wind now kicking up. They moaned, I thought, in their confusion, just as fish rose to bite at bugs that had yet to arrive, those bites pricking the surface in small circles that lazed outward in ring after ring. The mink and the trees and the fish: the world had sped up for them, too. And like us, there was nothing they could do to make sense of it.

I heard Michael and our father on the porch then, heard a neighbor’s car start, heard the scrape of still-bare branches against each other, heard myself rise to my feet, heard those feet scratch along the rocky path to our house.

SWIMMING IN QUARANTINE

I tune her out as I lean forward and delicately place a seashell on each of my toenails. She’s incessantly talking, saying my name or some version of it again and again and again. Her hand reaches for my mouth and I almost swat it away but think twice because I know he’s watching. I hold out a finger, a warning. Give me a minute. I find a tiny white shell, we used to call them shark teeth, and place it gingerly on my pinky toe. Before too long it falls into the sand and I shake off both feet, my masterpiece crumbling. 

“Momma,” she shrieks again. “I want to swim.”

“In we go,” I say, springing up, suddenly cheery. I throw a wicked glance over my shoulder at him, then stick out my tongue, knowing that before too long any faked enthusiasm will be gone and we’ll swap places once again. 

 She and I hold hands as we race to the shore. Be fun, I tell myself. This could be your last day. We wade into the water and of course it’s freezing cold. I get to my waist and stand, hugging myself, and tell her we’ve got five minutes tops. She ignores me, radiating pure joy, oblivious to the temperature. 

“Chase me,” she says. 

I watch the families around us, playful and happy, and in this small town, at least four people deep. 

“I’m cold,” I hiss, still smiling, wondering if they’re also watching me. One mother seems to eye us. Longingly, I think. She’s got two boys, she’s slightly heftier than I am. I imagine she’s jealous of us. Me, almost slender, with my gorgeous daughter, her stomach exposed by her strangely adult bathing suit, both of us smiling. And then she waves. A woman swims past us and right up to her. They embrace. The friend is followed by her husband, two daughters and a son. Everyone plays. 

My daughter takes them in. 

“Do you feel sad,” I ask her, “when you see everyone else playing?” 

“No,” she says. She looks up at me quite seriously. “I feel happy for them.”

She leans back onto her floatie. Five years old and still can’t swim. Sometimes I feel ashamed of myself that I haven’t taught her but then mostly I feel ashamed for her. Yesterday, a baby went into the water wearing the same contraption. I made a big show about how lifesavers are made for children of all ages. Mine couldn’t have cared less. She wants to float. I want to float unencumbered. It’s a calm day, and I roll onto my back and float and float. Sometimes I wiggle my toes so that people on shore won’t worry. I realize, too late, that no one is watching.

KILLERS

We all play a game sometimes, when we get too fucked up.

It’s a game of predator and prey—of boy and girl.

 

Huge cabins hang on the mountain—empty all year.

We come on the first of December, let out early on our names. Our bags are packed for us; flight reservations are booked. When we all arrive, someone’s already been there. Everything is dusted and fresh.

 

We all talk about the girl who died. A couple seasons ago she tiptoed from the house—out the back door, down the deck steps and into the frozen air. Her tiny bare feet made footprints in the snow—winding around trees, up and over snow drifts. She wanted the boys to come looking for her, all full of concern and heroism—kiss her icy lips to life. But they got distracted, as heroes do, and didn’t notice. So she slumped down at the base of a tree with long green needles to wait.

 

There is a bar in each of the houses. Off the kitchen or off the dining room sits a pool table and dark wood bar stocked with bourbons and vodkas and scotches and decanters refilled each night with red wine. Leather barstools sit, permanently pushed in just below the bar so everyone can mingle. The party never starts until five or six; we get our drinks early so our parents won’t see.

We say, “Alfred, make us drinks.”

He says, “That’s not my name.”

We snap our fingers at him. “Alfred! Drinks!”

He makes them, and we slide off—socks like skates on the new wood floors.

 

Me and the girl who died used to tease my brother’s friend. We’d pretend we didn’t know he was over, walking down the carpeted steps in our underwear to make a drink, or feed the dog, or check the news, or get an apple, or look out the window that leads to the back deck and then out to clear, cold air. He’d watch us the whole time, but we’d never turn toward him and we’d never turn away. We’d just walk straight by, then turn around and walk straight back—models on a dim runway.

 

I come downstairs late every morning to my mother slicing fruit she won’t eat and my father commenting quietly on the newspaper spread in his lap, uneaten eggs before him on the table. My head always hurts, and my mouth’s always dry. I drink orange juice and eat grapefruit with a serrated spoon.

She says, “Clean up your dishes.” But she is just saying this because she thinks it is what mothers say to daughters in the mornings. She’s like an actress. Putting on plays for dinner party guests, extended family members, empty rooms. I leave my dishes on the counter, or the table, or dump them in the sink. We have maids fluttering around the house fixing things and cleaning things like birds in a fairytale.

She says, “Dress nice for dinner tonight. The Stewarts are joining us.”

 

Just before she died, the girl stole pills from her mother’s bedside drawer. We’d take them together and stand out on the deck in the freezing wind to stay awake until we weren’t so tired, and then we’d go back in and get under the covers together, giggling from the drugs and the adrenaline of the cold, our skin touching under the sheets.

The boys would come over and we’d tell them, “Oh, not much, we were just in bed together,” our hair wild and our minds full—stomachs empty.

They’d say, “Really? Show us.”

And we’d say, “Make us,” and run down to the basement together.

 

Everyone is starting to arrive; I’ve put on something nice like my mother instructed. And I’ve taken something nice from the pills the girl left behind. I take one more and get a drink from the bar before the adults work their way in. The Stewart kids have the same idea. They are already standing with my brother by the basement stairs, glasses in hand.

In the basement, we put on music and sway around on the carpeted floor. We let some neighborhood kids in the basement door and turn the music up. Someone brought a bottle and we pass it around, drips falling from our lips as we twirl, dresses flying up around us like popped umbrellas.

We cling to the boys, draping ourselves over them, hanging from them, letting them lift us and push us between them—trading us. We stand on their feet, and they walk us around. They walk us to the couch or the corner or the guest bedroom. But when they plop us down wherever they’ve dragged us, we run screaming back together like shrill magnets.

 

The girl who died, on the night she died, kissed me in front of the boys.

They said, “Kiss.”

And we said, “Okay.”

She sat down across from me on the soft floor in the dim basement with the music low and everyone watching. We sat with our legs crossed, knees nearly touching, and she put her hands on my thighs when she leaned in.

 

The heat is always up so high in the house to keep out the cold; it makes us crazed—tugging off clothes, sucking down drinks on ice, sprinting into the night and back again.

 

Upstairs, the adults are winding down—putting on wraps, collecting parkas, and saying goodbye. But downstairs, things are only just beginning. The boys are sweating. The girls are nearly naked. We keep drinking and dancing, thinking we might really dance until we drop. They put their hands out for us from where they sit watching, and we glide our hips or legs over them.

They say, “You tease.”

They say, “You better not be wasting our time down here.”

They say, “Come closer. Come here.”

Finally they grab us. They say, “You’re acting crazy.”

“So kill us,” we say.

 

TIGER DRILL IN BUTTERFLY CLASS

Preston Rigalloe is going blind. I have a slip from his mother that says so. We trust you will deal with this gently.

I’m watching Preston try to write a sentence involving an adjective, his eyes an inch from the page and squinting. Someone could teach him braille, but in two months he won’t be a Butterfly anymore; he’ll be the middle school’s problem and I’ll retire to the coast. I debate ordering the books anyway, just to slide my fingertips over the bumps. Like, bump-bump. Daiquiri. Bump-bump. Please.

That’s when the Big Cat Alarm starts to peal.

I have a look through the split blinds. Nothing but gray sky and wind over the Play Yard. No twitching tails in the high grass by the cafeteria dumpsters. We figure it for a drill.

This is Jeffers’ first year as a teacher’s aide. She has Preston’s twin brother at the Designated Freak-Out Spot. It’s just a laminated red circle taped to the floor, but there’s nothing like the affirmation of protocol to get the scaries out, and boy is he: clasping his arms across his chest and bending at the knees while Jeffers talks him through some respiration cycles.

I’m right there with you, buddy, I’d like to say, but I’m directing traffic to the marker box, leading Preston by the shoulder.

The idea is: tigers attack where you’re not looking. From behind. But they don’t know the difference between Helen of Troy and a pair of plum-sized googly eyes glued under yellow yarn hair. So let’s doll up those paper plates, says the Board of Education Crises. Let’s get some color in those eyes. Really wow this beast.

I patrol the room. Pen stray freckles and moles on the mask faces. Jeffers gives a gap-toothed girl a nasty scar.

With a tiger loose, we wouldn’t normally risk an ice cream, but what ill could come with each child touching shoulders, buddy-to-buddy, as they walk to the creamery van?

“Are you sure?” Jeffers asks. She’s checking her email. Looking for the All Clear.

“Let them live,” I say.

We march to the Play Yard with thirty masks affixed.

Jeffers climbs to the roof with her rifle, and I slump against the brick face of the Learning Hall with a Disaster Whistle in my teeth. Watch the children pass.

The Butterflies are trudging arm-in-arm across the yard, and it is eerie—the way their faces change from human to facsimile. On one side, they’re grim, focused on reaching the ice cream unmauled, keeping their zig-zagging Flee Routes clear like we’ve practiced. And on the other side, they’re smiling, wide-eyed and vibrant in the open sun. Preston is in the middle of the chain, being led on his left and right, and thinking, what? What is happening to me?

And I can see why these masks were chosen as a countermeasure. How they might give a tiger pause.