A Better World, page 10
“Just because she’s an outsider doesn’t mean she can’t write,” Rachel said.
“I’m not elitist and I resent the implication,” Anouk said. “I’m one-sixty-fourth Lakota and one-sixteenth Brazilian. I’m a firm believer in healthy genetic variation.”
“Just throwing it out there,” Rachel said. “In case you’re taking notes on which people’s abilities you question and which you trust. For, say, a statistical analysis at a later time.”
“Should we write this not-elitist letter?” Daniella asked.
As was their clear intention, Gal had stopped listening. Though it was a brisk night, she wore no coat, just Omnium track pants and a short, tight T-shirt, and had bobbed black hair. She’d given up getting ActHollow’s attention and was now focusing solely on Linda, whose nose and cheeks—her whole profile—felt hot under the scrutiny.
Unable to endure it, Linda asked, “Are my teeth red?”
Gal’s brown eyes stared through Linda.
“Gal,” Linda said, to snap her out of it. “I’m Linda. I’m wondering if my teeth are red.”
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Gal asked in that breathy, baby voice. “I can’t hear. I can’t even hear what you’re saying.”
Linda scooted her seat closer. “Better?”
She nodded, her big eyes widening.
Linda gritted her teeth and pointed. “Are they red? I’ve just met these people. I don’t want to make a bad impression.”
Gal shook her head very slightly. As she spoke, she became less spacey and more present. “No. A little. But you’re fine. That’s what everybody here does,” she said, regaining that cutesy, high-pitched voice.
“What?”
“They drink themselves shit-faced. Then they hug and fake-bond and pretend they’re one big family. But none of it’s real. Trish puked all night the first time she met these guys.”
By now, Linda was three-plus glasses deep, which meant she was 80 percent shit-faced. There was no way to time-travel fix it now. “Their tolerance is that high?”
Gal nodded.
“They like wine because it’s low calorie. Except for Anouk, who doesn’t have to run, they don’t want anything weighing them down at the big Thanksgiving race. They act like it’s just for fun but it’s not. Everything here’s serious, except ActHollow. Even Trish knew, the clinic’s a joke.” Her face tightened, eyes squinting as if trying to hold back tears. “Charity. Starts. At. Home.”
Linda felt the attention from ActHollow turning toward them. She tried to steer the conversation away. “Are you from here originally?”
“They’re gonna eat you alive.”
“What?” Linda asked.
Gal smiled, still sweet but also vacant, like Linda could have been anyone, including a cardboard cutout of a person. “I was lying. I’m not getting takeout. I knew they’d be here.” Gal blew her nose with her cloth napkin, a meaty sound.
Linda looked over at the rest of them, who were pretending that Gal didn’t exist but also listening, and she understood that the beef between them was big and ugly and the only reason they hadn’t kicked her out was because they didn’t want to deal with the wreckage of a screaming argument in the middle of the nicest restaurant in town. There was something unstable about Gal. Something dangerous that couldn’t be contained. “I’m not sure your sneak-attack approach is working,” Linda said.
Gal kept going, hearing nothing but her own pain. “My wife left. Our kids are sick, so she gave up on them. She doesn’t consider them hers because it was just my eggs.” She volunteered this as if Linda had asked.
“That’s awful if it’s true,” Linda said.
Gal let out a breath. “I’m a second marriage. I met Trish when I was sixteen, the cradle robber. I used to be friends with these guys. I lived in a big house. Now I have to leave Plymouth Valley. Because I wasn’t the one with the job. When a breakup happens, the one without the job gets expelled. They’re not even giving me the full year to figure it out. They’re making me leave early because I’m trouble. I’m not trouble—they’re trouble!” she said, her voice raised a few decibels.
Linda scanned the table. The rest were all watching.
Gal puckered her lips. Probably, babyish girl-woman had once been an effective life tactic for Gal Parker. But age and drink had tipped the parody scale from cute to obscene. “I’m okay about losing Trish. She stopped going down on me, so whatever. But I’m not okay about everything else.”
“That’s enough, Gal,” Daniella said. “Get your food and go.”
Though she heard, Gal spoke only to Linda, like the rest of them didn’t exist. “They have so much. They’re not the ones who have to sacrifice.”
Linda had no words. It was all so bewildering.
“It’s time for you to go,” Daniella added, standing at last, preparing to usher Gal out.
Gal looked to Linda, her eyes wide. “Do I have to?”
What could Linda say? This wasn’t her dinner party. It wasn’t her town, either.
“They’re making me do something I can’t do,” she pleaded. “And they say it’s for the good of everyone, but it’s not good for me or my kids. It hurts us. And how can I even trust they’re right? They’re crazy.”
“Stop it, Gal,” Daniella said, heading in Gal’s direction. Then Rachel was standing, too. “Don’t poison the well.”
“Please,” Gal urgently begged Linda, her words rushing together. “You’re nice. You’re so smart and nice. You’re not like them. I can tell. Don’t you know someone who can help me? A lawyer from the outside?”
“I don’t know anyone,” Linda said.
“Gal,” Daniella said. “You have to go. Now.”
Gal stood very slowly, as if still hoping someone would jump in and tell her they were just kidding. This shunning was all an elaborate test, and that test was over. They were sorry they’d put her through so much. She’d passed. She and her kids could stay. Congratulations!
“Gal,” Rachel said, her voice hard. “Get out.”
Unable to navigate the small space, Gal pushed the chair back as she stood. It toppled, legs up. There wasn’t room for her to exit, or for her to bend down and right it. So she tried to climb over it. Her ankle got caught inside the metalwork aperture between spindle and apron. She kept going and the chair came with her, slamming the table from beneath. Linda stood, but everything was swimming. Crouching, she held the chair down by its stile and rear leg. Her efforts backfired. Like a bird, Gal thrashed harder. She lost her balance and fell.
She spun as she came down, landing in a straddle, right leg bent under her on the hard ground, the other still trapped. She might have twisted her knee, too. She didn’t move at first. It was the kind of injury that hurts so much your body goes still in response, from the shock.
“Oh-my-God-are-you-okay?” Linda cried in a rush. The chair was still between them.
With a terrible grunt, Gal freed herself and started crawling, hurt left leg dragging and leaden.
“I’m so sorry,” Linda said. Tears burned her eyes.
Oblivious to Linda’s words, Gal kept going on hands and knees. She reached the door and went for the wood grilles to hoist herself up. But there wasn’t enough purchase. She fell back down and crawled out.
* * *
The door stayed open to the hall, the sounds of chatter and music and metal on pottery pushing into their small room and echoing around. Rachel reached back and closed it. Everything got quiet again.
“Holy shit,” Linda said. “I tripped her.”
“She tripped herself, the goddamned oaf,” Rachel said.
“Will she be okay?” Linda asked. “Should I go after her?”
“She agreed to the rules just like the rest of us,” Anouk said. “But now that they stopped suiting her, she wants to tear it all down. I refuse to feel bad.”
Daniella didn’t flash one of her tight smiles and act like everything was perfectly under control. She looked just as sad as Rachel. “I’m sorry you had to see that, Linda. I let her stay because I didn’t want her to cause a scene. You’re new and you don’t deserve that. But she always causes a scene. It’s the one thing about her that’s predictable.”
Linda wiped her eyes. “She can’t be twenty-five. She’s a kid.”
“We were all twenty-five. None of us acted like that or we wouldn’t be here,” Daniella said.
“Gal’s got epigenetic trauma. The stress carried through to her children and made them sick. Anyone can see it, and it’s not her fault. She can’t help her lineage. Not everyone has a pure line. But what’s happening to Gal and her family isn’t our fault, either. We didn’t hurt them,” Anouk said, having raised her chin and lips from the protection of her shawl.
“Fuck. That was bad,” Rachel said, her cheeks flushed and sweaty. She lifted her drink, knocked the whole thing back.
It was as if they were all coming down from a state of shock. The lights felt too bright, the sounds too loud. Everything was sharp and hard.
Daniella’s voice trembled. “We can’t help everyone. We have the clinic, and we have board seats to secure. We have a mission, and that’s what matters.” She ran her index fingers under her eyelids to dry them and keep the mascara from running. “Where are the entrees? I said they should take a leisurely pace, but this is negligent.”
“What did she do to get kicked out early?” Linda asked.
“Gal?” Daniella asked. “She did everything. Every single thing.”
“We tried to delay her eviction,” Rachel said. She rested her head in her hands, pulling the skin back so she appeared wide eyed. “But she pissed everybody off.”
“There’s nothing that can be done for her kids, even though they’re sick?” Linda asked.
Still looking down, Rachel flinched. A tear splashed. It was always the toughest talkers who were the most sensitive.
“You see how she is,” Daniella said. “She fibs. She makes threats. We did try. We petitioned all the right people. She got in her own way. You throw her a life preserver, she uses it as a cinch to pull you overboard.”
“Winch,” Anouk corrected.
“I understand,” Linda said, still shaky. “I’m not blaming you. It’s just sad.”
“Are you okay, Linda?” Daniella asked.
Linda looked up at the stained glass, which she only now realized was a caladrius, surrounded by green grass, a blue sky, and a godlike halo of cadmium-yellow glass slats. “I’m not the one who fell,” she said. “But I have to be honest. This is the bat-shittiest job interview I’ve ever been on. You’d better give me the job!”
For a second, total silence. And then Rachel barked with laughter.
* * *
Their ordeal acted as a relationship accelerator.
The food finally arrived—family-style pasta and caladrius eggs served with a treat: four ounces of cow meat each from a fresh kill at Parson’s Farm. Oh, she hadn’t eaten beef in years. It was so good. They ate and drank even more wine—four bottles, all told. Linda did her best to pace herself, but the drinking was a tension release. She’d been carrying a lot lately, and it felt good to drop it on the floor.
Dinner plates were removed. After-dinner whiskey appeared, along with a chocolate brownie sundae, which they shared. Daniella and Rachel jousted spoons, and it reminded Linda of the easy friendships she’d had back home. More whiskey arrived. Anouk, drunk and loose, recited a poem she’d written called “The Inheritors.” Linda especially liked the ending—
It is impossible to worship
A thing with feathers
that does not fly.
—A barricade
with capricious walls
—A gilded cage
without a key
For the princess
there’s nothing left
but to dig
A city within a city
wrought of skin and bones.
“Huh. It’s almost critical,” Linda said.
Anouk’s voice went low, and for the first time, Linda could see she’d been raised by a leader because she knew how to talk like one. “It’s not worth our time to criticize the things we hate. Only the things we love.”
There was clapping, and more laughing, and even shouting, and then, suddenly, the lights in their private room went bright so that the stained-glass bird shone like a visiting ghost. Drunkenly, they filed out, the last customers in the whole restaurant.
A moonless, cloudy night, made bright by streetlights. There were just a handful of cars in the lot. The flat emptiness of the midwestern terrain carried the sounds of their cackles and footfalls. Linda was giddy, the evening odder and more poignant than she’d expected. She’d forgotten how good it felt to laugh. “This was amazing,” she said, working hard not to slur. She’d have added that she’d had fun, but given what happened with Gal, the sentiment seemed inapt. “I hope you have me back.”
“Oh, we will,” Daniella promised.
Linda clasped her hands and lifted her arms—giving herself the same champion shake that Keith Parson had done at the Beltane Crowning. “I rock! You rock! We all rock!” she said, feeling welcomed and understood, and also quite drunk, because I rock isn’t something you say when sober.
As they were getting into their cars, she realized she’d forgotten her purse. She jogged back inside. The restaurant was fully lit. One of the dayworkers had tuned a longwave radio to news from outside Plymouth Valley. The announcements were familiar: there’d been an uprising against the West Virginia government, and a tornado had shredded much of Iowa. In brighter news, scientists had made further breakthroughs in nuclear remediation. Because of national security laws they weren’t yet able to share their discoveries.
A handful of dayworkers mopped and wiped down surfaces inside the large church. It felt like being backstage at a play after the performance has finished. Someone had placed a cut pomegranate in a basket on the bandstand’s Hollow altar just ahead of its Geiger counter. Photos of two children she didn’t recognize were inserted into the meat of the fruit. Their shapes had been cut out from larger photos, the scissors overzealous, so that the kids were missing parts of arms and legs. The fruit juice had run upward via capillary pressure, staining the bottoms of the photos red.
In Linda’s condition, it made little impression. Seeing double, she wandered into the small room where they’d met, which she realized was an old confessional with the screens dividing priest from sinner removed, to give it length.
She bent low. Spotted her purse under the chair where Anouk had sat.
When she came back out to the parking lot, the players had changed. Anouk was gone. Rachel and Daniella were standing on either side of Gal, who was swaying on her feet. Linda guessed she’d never gone home at all but had spent this whole time drinking by herself at the bar.
“The decision was made. It’s done. It’s over!” Rachel yelled. But that whiskey was starting to hit, so Linda wasn’t sure. Maybe it was Daniella who was yelling.
Then, somehow, Gal was crying, and Daniella and Rachel were driving away.
Weaving drunkenly, Gal headed for Linda’s car like she thought it belonged to her. She grabbed the handle and tried to open it: nothing. “I think that one’s yours,” Linda called, pointing at the only other car in the lot: a clown-orange C class.
Gal tugged the handle. “I want this one!”
On jelly legs, Linda came to the fender. “Moot point. The engine won’t turn with either of our blood alcohol levels behind the wheel.”
Gal rattled the handle. Things were swerving, streetlights making trails. “Probably stop that,” Linda said.
“I want to go home! To my real house!” Gal said, letting go. She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. But it was two sets of eyes. Linda squinted, doing her best to stay focused.
Behind them, the dayworkers headed for their bus. She considered asking them to make two stops before exiting town, but she wasn’t sure whether this violated one of PV’s many mystery rules. She pulled out her device. “Do they have ride services here? Do you know a number?”
“They don’t care. No one cares,” Gal said, her voice returning to that baby talk.
“But is there a number?”
“You just hit the red emergency button. They give rides,” Gal said. Her arm looked freshly bruised from her fall. A splotchy purple welt had spread along her right shoulder and trapezius. Linda winced. Though they were covered, her knees had to be even worse.
Linda hovered her thumb over the red button. Calling Russell was the better move, but she hated to wake him. More to the point, she didn’t want him to see her this irresponsibly drunk. It seemed like a violation of their partnership: they’d agreed to try hard to assimilate; she’d drunk her weight in booze.
“Red button,” Gal said. “Press it, dummy.”
“Are you messing with me?”
Gal shook her head. “That’s all the cops do is give rides at night. It’s all drunks and no crime.”
Linda pressed the red button. Right away, a polite voice answered. “Would you like a car, Dr. Farmer?”
She didn’t give her location. They’d found her through her device and were on their way. She hung up just as the dayworker bus pulled out. As soon as it was gone, the town went still. Sleeping. Like a clock whose gears have ground down.
“They said five minutes. Sit tight.”
“But I’m not sitting,” Gal said.
* * *
“People here are nice but they’re not good,” Gal mumbled.
They were in the back of a spacious police sedan equipped with device chargers and a screen. In the side pockets were Omnium shrink-wrapped toiletries like toothpaste and combs, plus a gallon-sized barf bag. Linda pulled this out, shuddered at the amount of alcohol necessary to fill it.
“No good. Meanwhile their dumb birds’re barkin’ all night and all day!” Linda answered. The whiskey had hit, and even if she’d tried, she couldn’t have explained what she’d meant, because the birds didn’t bark.
As the car traveled, the houses got smaller. Gal pulled out the toiletries on her side, tearing and tossing the Omnium wrap to her feet. She chewed on the toothbrush, broke the comb in half, then took the barf bag and slowly tore it down the middle. Don’t be a jerk, Linda wanted to say, but decided not to engage. She rolled down her window. Crisp, cold air slapped her cheeks.
