The Lonely (13 page)

The hanging

When I woke up the next morning, Julia was home again. She asked me to follow her into the laundry room where she was preparing to hang herself and wanted me to watch. This was a new twist on an old favorite. Julia had hanged before, plenty of times, but it was never a suicide.

She appeared as a witch once, in a book I was reading, and together we wrote a whole hundred pages of us talking while she rode in a wooden jail that had been strapped to a wagon. I pictured her with her feet hanging out through the slats in the back, her ankles brushed with the weeds sticking up from the dirt road, her long dress pulled up and strategically situated to accommodate the unladylike surroundings, her manacled hands kissing wrists and resting on one thigh. Face sooty, but she was happy. That was the first hanging.

Another time she hanged herself accidentally, fetching a long orange extension cord from the garage. It looped down over the rafters, concentrated in brambles on top of them, where it was dark and damp and nasty. She was standing on a stepladder, a wadded section of the cord already in her arms, then reached too far, slipped, and before she knew it an orange loop had grabbed her by the neck and refused to let go. When I found her she was already dead, and I felt bad that she'd been all alone.

I sat with my legs crossed on our laundry room rug while she fixed a hard, unnaturally yellow rope around the metal bar in the closet. A chorus line of men's collared shirts on either side.

“Julia, you don't have to do this.”

“I do, Easter.”

“You don't!”

“I do. You've made your choice. You want to be like everyone else. You want Lev. And friends. And to be regular. You know that if you stay crazy you probably don't even have to get a job when you grow up? You can just live in a special home with me forever and The Parents will pay for it.”

“Yeah.”

“But you don't really want that. I can tell.”

“I do want it, Julia, but I don't know. I want other things too. Can't I have both of you?”

“No. You'd rather kill me for real.”

“No I wouldn't.”

“Do you know about hell, Easter?”

And I thought that I did. Hell was living in The Tooth House without Julia. But instead I said, “No.”

“Hell is a library,” she said, tightening her fresh knot.

“That really doesn't sound bad, Julia.”

“That's because I'm not finished. Hell is a library of books containing every word you've ever said, and videotapes of everything you've ever done.”

“So what. Do you have to watch them?”

“No, you don't have to. But would you be able to help yourself? It would be unbearable. I couldn't resist, but I would hate myself after.” She gave the noose two good, hard tugs. “Plus, even if you could resist the temptation, you'd eventually get so bored that you'd do anything. And the only thing to read is stuff that you've said and the only thing to do is watch yourself.”

“Is there food?”

“I guess, yeah; if you still need food to exist, there can be food.”

Julia became exasperated with me easily. She disappeared into the kitchen and I ran my hand backward against the rug, agitating the fibres, attempting to make a pattern. Julia returned to the laundry room with a footstool.

“Stop that,” she said, placing the stool in the closet beneath the noose.

Then she got up onto it.

“Stop what?” I asked.

“Rubbing the carpet like that. It's gross.”

“Who took the videotapes? Who wrote everything down?”

The more I thought about it, the more horrible it seemed.

“I don't know, Easter. It's hell, okay? It was all recorded in some demonic and mysterious way. Cripes.”

She put the noose around her neck, tightened it.

“All right, well, I guess that does sound pretty terr-ible.”

“I know, right? I really think that would be the worst possible thing in the world. That's why that's what hell is like.”

“Doesn't killing yourself make you go to hell?”

“Oh, Easter, there's no hell. And even if there were, I wouldn't be going there.”

“Because you're not real.”

“No. Because I'm such a good girl.”

Then she kicked the stool out from underneath her feet and let herself hang by her neck from the metal bar. She flailed her arms and got them all wrapped up in the white collared T-shirts, pulling them off their hangers and letting them get tangled up around her wrists. She looked like a bird now, trying to fly with long, white wings, useless, especially in a space as small as a closet.

She kicked her feet around. They searched for the footstool even if they didn't realize that's what they were doing. I wasn't going to put it back. Julia had made me promise to let her go through with it. And, as usual, she made me promise her that nothing weird was going to happen to her body after she died. As though once she was out of it she still had some right to it. As if there was really a body there at all. Which there wasn't. But Julia was still my sister and I was bound to honor her wishes for that reason. I sat and watched her body until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore, and when I woke up on the rug the next morning her body was gone and she had put the white shirts back neatly on their hangers.

Two days later I dreamed her funeral. Which I'd never done before. And lying on the ground like this in The Woods made me think of how it must have been for Julia: looking up at the sky, cliffs of dirt on either side, craning over the edge the gloomy, pulled-down faces of all the people who had helped The Mother to change our diapers when we were kids or let us raid their purses for gum or mints so long neglected that the crackle had worn out of the cellophane. Every time someone peeks into a coffin, they always raise that little tissue to their snouts, like they're scared that something is going to fall out. Which is actually quite gross. But really, who best to witness snot falling out of your nose than a dead girl. She's not going to tell anyone. She's not even going to notice. And if she did, she's not really in any place to judge, considering an undertaker has just seen her six ways from Sunday. Cold, naked, unable to resist any position that he decides to put her in.

Or maybe when they raise the tissues to their noses, they're trying to protect themselves from something. Some infection of the dead writhing in the soil, waiting to leap up into an open mouth or flared nostril. If there were any type of ground you were going to catch something from, I guess it would be the cemetery ground, percolating with the volatile exhalations of the recently diseased. Or, in Julia's case, hanged.

It looked like the casket was going to swallow Julia up. Like the maroon satin fabric had once, deceptively, been pulled tight over the open bed of the coffin and when Julia decided to lie down on it she started getting sucked, tightly, into some anonymous hole. Holes are always something to be wary of. In movies, in books, you never hear of someone getting trapped in or falling down a safe, fun, comfortable hole. In fact, holes really get a bad rap when you think about it. I actually quite like holes.

Anyway, there she was: paused, suspended, saved, before she could sink all the way to the bottom. So slow you could barely tell that she was sinking further, frame by frame, fractions of inches, no one could tell but me. I sat between a pair of relatives I'd never met before. Two elderly aunts. Both with long noses that stuck out like tent poles beneath short black veils that obscured their faces but showed their chins and necks. They both sat with their arms knotted around their chests, floral sleeves dampened where a few big fat tear drops had escaped without being noticed, chins doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and dimpled with frowns as they watched Julia's coffin lower into the rectangular hole.

But of course no one is looking at me here under the rock. Except for that thing, maybe, that Something Coming. I closed my eyes and tried to listen for a shuffle or a snapped twig but heard nothing but the leaves.

“Shh!” I said to the leaves, and for a second it seemed as though they might have heard me, might have stopped their twittering for just a scallop of a second. But I still couldn't hear anything. Two squirrels sat on a branch nearby staring at me. One squirrel gave the other a “she's talking to the leaves” look, and even though I'd enjoyed being the only person on earth for a while, turning to wood in The Woods all alone, I suddenly felt very ready for my hero to come and save me soon.

Easter Story

Easter sat at a barstool in the kitchen, her dangling legs making little perpetual motion circles, stirring the air. The Father was crouched in front of her; the breath billowing from his nose warmed her knees. His tongue was out, clipped to his upper lip which was pursed with concentration. He was making X's with his thumbnail into the many oblong mosquito bites she had acquired on her legs that night at the party. He claimed that it was the best way to stop a bite from itching. Easter was dubious. It hurt at first; she begged for calamine, but slowly, the pain began to satisfy the itch; wonderfully, it spread like butter forgotten on the table for a few hours, coating all of the little spots that were driving her insane. The Mother paced the kitchen on the telephone, speaking to the woman whose house they had just left an hour ago, and her voice was beginning to absorb the squealing, anxious quality of their recent host.

“Yes, the bugs were bad tonight, but I think most people made it out of there unscathed.”

Pause.

“Well, Easter got a few bites, we're taking care of them.”

Pause.

“Thank you for inviting us! We had a lovely evening. We really did. Easter loves to swim, as I'm sure you noticed HA HA HA!”

The Mother had let Easter pick out a red dress for the party and bought her a new bathing suit, pink with pineapples all over it. She fed her cake until she could barely focus and then let her swim five minutes later. She was the only kid there and quickly forgotten as the clouds of bugs thickened and the sky faded to black. She had the whole pool to herself, dark and warmed by an expensive heater. Their host, a woman that The Mother knew somehow, had apologized that the light stopped working in the pool a few days ago.

“I'm sorry, Easter, I hope you're not scared of dark water. Are you brave enough to swim without it?”

“Of course I am,” Easter replied from the shallow end.

“And you'll stay in the shallow end, won't you?”

“Yep.”

Then the woman turned around and resumed her hosting duties and Easter was left alone for the rest of the evening, which was exactly how she liked it.

Easter performed complicated gymnastics routines, somersaults in the water, spins and dives until she was dizzy and made deaf by the thunderous frenzy of bubbles surrounding her. She tore through the water and the air indiscriminately, splashing and ripping and kicking and flapping. She floated on her belly with goggles on, imagined herself to be drifting through space, slowly, not bound by the perimeters of the pool but one little white and brown and pink-with-pineapples speck in the universe with no destination, no purpose but to float.

And she slipped into the deep end a few times. They didn't notice. She could do anything in here. She considered taking off her bathing suit but was too embarrassed. Someone would definitely notice that: a little naked girl among all of these grown-ups who wore so much stuff.

Easter's legs became riddled with mosquito bites without her really noticing. She'd spent a lot of time sifting through foam noodles and paddleboards in the pool shed, which was rife with pockets of hidden, stagnant water. Dangerous. Now that she was sitting on the barstool in the light of the kitchen, she couldn't believe how many had got her. She thought about how she should really hate bugs more.

The bites went all the way up her legs and she was pretty sure that a small cotton triangle was peeking out from between her thighs beneath the gathered front of her new red dress. She thought that maybe she should adjust it. Or The Father should. Move her dress over her legs to cover it up. But neither of them did. He probably hadn't noticed, but it was all that she could think of. The warm little triangle devoured her thoughts greedily, guzzling them by the clawful, swallowing them whole, smacking its lips for more. The little white triangle. Hide it, Easter. Blood ripened her cheeks. They grew scarlet, like blood moving slowly through a sheet. It's showing, she thought, it's showing, it's showing, it's SHOWING. Her ears rang, full of blood and bell. The Father rose from his knees but kept his head low as though he were bowing to her, his face in Easter's.

“Is that better?” he asked.

“Yes.” Her heart was beating fast.

“Are they still itching you?”

“No.”

“And it didn't hurt that bad, did it?”

“No.”

Easter closed her eyes and felt a hot rush of tears banging against her lids. Why did she have such disgusting things in her head? Why did the little white triangle have to be so greedy for attention?

“Good,” The Father said.

He pulled another barstool over, lifted both of Easter's small ankles up in one hand and placed them softly onto the cool cushion. Then he went downstairs to play the clarinet. “When the Saints Go Marching In” wafted up from the basement and The Mother kept time with her pacing.

hell

With Julia gone, seemingly for good this time, I felt lonelier than ever. I could have been special with her, but I chose to be nothing instead because I'm a fucking idiot.

And without Julia to hate him, Lev seemed somehow less wonderful too. I didn't care if I ever saw him again. He showed up to work smiling. He said “Hello” and moved close to me because after what happened in his underground lair, he must have thought we were boyfriend/girlfriend. I kept my head down the way The Mother does. I didn't look into his frosted eyes.

“What's the matter?” he asked, touching my arm with a cold, slimy hand.

The sound of bells again. Only this time I wanted to shake them out of my ears like warm water after the beach. They felt like intruders, distracting and relentless and loud.

“Nothing.”

He smelled so much like skin. Like body hair and saliva all dusted in cheap laundry soap. He was nothing compared to Julia. He was boring and ugly and completely unwonderful.

“I don't think you should keep coming around here,” I finally said, after he'd been standing there pretending to peruse the phone books but really upset and dying for me to say something.

“What? Why?”

“Because I don't like you anymore.”

Really I couldn't look at him without seeing Julia and feeling so guilty it hurt.

And his eyes welled up with tears and he didn't say anything else, just left and slammed the door, causing a loud groan to lurch through the barrack and Mr. Ungula to emerge from the back: “What on earth was that sound?”

Back at home, I hadn't spoken in days. My stomach hurt. I couldn't eat. The Mother could tell. I could read her concern left to right along the lines of her furrowed brow: she's not eating properly; she looks peaked; she seems tired and withdrawn; why is she slouching like that? We need to fix that hunch, it's so unattractive.

I sunk down further at the dinner table, filled up my spoon with vanilla pudding and hung it vertically from my thumb and my index finger, letting it swing back and forth slowly like a pendulum, globs of it forming a fence around the perimeter of my bowl. I think they thought that vanilla pudding was my favorite. They might even have been trying to cheer me up, but it's hard to tell, as vanilla pudding also happened to be the item in the fridge that required the least amount of effort.

“Honey, what's wrong?” The Mother demanded.

“Nothing.”

“It's not nothing. I know it's not nothing. There's something the matter with you and I want you to tell me what it is.”

“I'm not going to tell you, all right? So just leave me alone and let me enjoy my pudding for once. You never let me enjoy dessert. Always asking me what's wrong as soon as the good part of the meal comes up.”

“What, suddenly you don't like turkey? Why wasn't turkey the good part?”

“I hate turkeys. They're disgusting. All the leftover parts that god didn't know what to do with, that's what turkeys are. Leftovers, leftovers, leftovers.”

“Okay, fine. You hate turkeys now.”

“And the leftovers.”

Then, in an act most unlike her, The Mother cleared her throat loudly and declared:

“You need to get out of this house, Easter. We're going to the lake.”

The Father and I both looked at her in shock. Neither of us had ever heard her declare something so absolutely, make plans without running them by the both of us over and over again, so many times that the entire event was soiled by her incessant nattering about it. We were both too stunned to speak. Which is why we found ourselves that weekend, still dazed by the aftershock of her declaration, squeezing and cramming and folding and bending all of our necessary living utensils into the back of the car like Tetris blocks. Everything smelled like sunscreen. I sat in the back seat waiting for The Parents to finish making sure that anything which could cause a fire or a flood was turned off. The Mother entered stage right, The Father stage left, and Backs of Necks Theatre was about to begin. The scratch and fumble of a microphone switching on and Julia's best impression of a snooty British man filled the back of the car:

“The very handsome Father enters stage left. His wife, The Mother, stage right. Neither will speak for the first little while. One will fumble with the radio while the other makes a mental checklist in his head. If you look closely at the mirror, you can see a pair of eyes checking things off: doors locked, coffee machine unplugged, burners off. Cue the radio. It's something with a reasonably fast beat and while one of them brings the car to growling life, the other begins to move her head to the music. A neck twists like a wet towel, wringing sweat, and she smiles. Off we go.”

“Julia! What are you doing here?”

I wanted to grab her, leap into her arms, but strangle her too, kill her for good because she'd made me think it was over. She let me cry and feel terrible and hurt the long-necked Lev.

“What do you mean? This is a family vacation, isn't it?”

“Yeah, but you're dead. You hanged yourself. You made me think you were never coming back.”

“Of course I was coming back. When have I ever not come back?”

“You know it was different. You hanged yourself, Julia. And there was a funeral.”

“But you're still the same. You got rid of that Lev. I knew you loved me best. Now we'll really shake things up. They'll send us to live somewhere together. We don't ever have to go to The Tooth House again.”

“Where will they send us?”

“Maybe to a hospital or a home for extraordinary people. We won't have to go back to school, no jobs, no worries, nothing will matter. Not your ugly face or your imaginary friend.”

“Lev didn't think I was ugly.”

“I don't think you're ugly either, but you do, so what's the difference?”

“Put on your seat belt.”

“Why should I?”

“I don't know. Why do you keep coming back? Why don't you just stay for good, or die for good? Just do one or the other, instead of coming back here all the time and messing me up. That funeral was too much, Julia. You didn't have to do that.”

“Well, I had to do something, Easter. I'd never killed myself before. We had to commemorate it somehow.”

I covered my ears and squished my eyes shut and whispered something out loud. The Mother twisted her neck back at me, then looked ahead once again.

“You're lucky to have me,” said Julia.

“Well I don't feel lucky, Julia. I don't feel lucky at all.”

“Think about it, Easter. Anything you don't want to think about, I think about instead. Anything you don't want to do, I do for you. You only deal with the parts of life that you want to. How many people can say that?”

“That's not what it feels like.”

“Well, that's what's happening, all right? Now will you get The Parents to change the radio station?”

“You do it. And maybe, whether you're dead or not, I don't want to see you splattered all over the front seat, so put on your goddamn seat belt.”

“Fine. And I can't, by the way, ask them to change the channel. And you know that. They never listen to me. Do you want an apple?”

Her hair, as red and alive as ever, slashed her shoulders as she leaned into the cooler to grab the fruit. She handed me an apple.

“Easter, I'm bored. Make up a poem about me.”

“Okay. Julia, Julia, Julia. You hanged yourself recently, that must have hurt, the top of your coffin all splattered in dirt. Choosing your funeral dress was a bore, to shop with The Mother is always a chore. There was great debate over in what you would fester, but in the end we went with blue polyester.”

“Did you really bury me in polyester?”

“Yep. Now you're going to be hot and itchy for all of eternity.”

“You're an asshole.”

“I don't care what you think. You're dead.”

“Well, you're an awful poet.”

It's true. I'm terrible at rhyming. There are a few skills in which kindergarten failed me. I'm also terrible at cutting things out nicely, handling white glue, and napping in the afternoon.

But either way, that was that. Julia and I were in a closed-quarters fight. I had my arms crossed: a warning, a skull-and-crossbones flag on a pirate ship. Leave me alone. Julia didn't look particularly happy either: her eyes were down, chin to her chest. I looked up and let my eyes wind along the nautilus of a sleeping bag. Looked down from there and let my eyes leap from lap to lap. The Mother's fists on her thighs. The Father's hard to see. And a bottle of nail polish remover between Julia's bare knees. And I watched her, comparing the cuticles of her thumbs. Wearing a bathrobe.

A bathrobe; that was odd. Usually when she came back she was wearing what she died in. Which really was polyester this time. That's what you get for hanging yourself and making me watch. A blue polyester one-piece with big purple lapels and a zipper from the knee to the neck.

In an act most unlike her, Julia broke the silence first. Sort of. She resumed Backs of Necks Theatre. Her snooty British voice had seemed to improve over the past hour or two.

“As you can see, a single word has yet to be uttered. But where usually The Mother's neck would be twisting near constantly, an attempt to crack The Father's stony expression with overly make-upped eyes, her neck now remains staunchly forward. And in fact it's his neck that twists every so often, fast so she doesn't notice, but of course she notices. And it's all she can do to stop her heart from beating right out of her chest and flying free and terrified and exhilarated like a bat once trapped in a room. You'll notice how deliberately she's dressed this morning. Her chest pushed up to her throat, a necklace buried between the hills. Still they don't speak. But for the first time in family vacation history, The Father's expression seems to have splintered ever so slightly. Has The Mother worn him down with her patheticness? Or is something more sinister afoot?”

I interrupted her: “Julia? How did it get this way?”

She furrowed her brow at me and bundled her robe up closer to her chin.

“It got this way because he hates her, Easter. And he hates you, too.”

“Then why does he stay?”

“Because he's lazy. And mean.”