SANDRA
It took me nearly two weeks to track Maggie down. Back then, there was no e-this and online search—just columns of identical names, and lots of dialing and dead ends and finger cramps.
At last, I got her. She was a low-voiced woman who paused before every sentence as if she was debating whether to speak at all. Even when she picked up the phone, she paused, and I counted several seconds of heavy breathing. By the time she said hello, I was about to hang up.
Why did I call her? Why did I think it was important?
Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you’ve run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it’s oops, sorry, turn’s over.
“Are you Maggie Lundell?” I said. “From Coral River?”
“Not anymore” is what she said. Then: “How did you find me?”
“I found a turtle with your name on it,” I answered.
There was another pause. And then a sound like she was overcome with the hiccups. It took me a moment to realize she was laughing.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “I knew he would come back.”
Maggie arrived two weeks later. How could I have known it wasn’t a good idea? That even then, Alice was waiting, watching, twitching in the walls like an overgrown cockroach?
It was a day that made me glad I’d left New York and the Lower East Side and its crusty people, with faces like moth-eaten cloth. Here it was all bluebells and honeysuckle, climbing roses and birds chasing each other across the sky—a place where nothing bad could happen.
A bit of golden dust unwinding like smoke in the sky announced her; then a wide, boxy maroon Mazda came bumping up the drive. The owner matched the car: wide and squat, with a square jaw and a thatch of bright red hair, cut short. I pinned her for queer right away.
She moved slowly, deliberately, the same way she spoke. It was only eleven a.m., but when I asked her if she wanted a soda or something to drink, she said, “Got any gin?” I liked her right away.
We sat on the deck and bullshitted for a few hours—she told me about the way the house had changed, and about the turtle she’d named Norman, and how she suspected her mother had deliberately turned him out of the house, and I told her about how I’d ended up in the middle of Buttshit, Nowhere, USA, and how glad I was. She was interested in the New York scene. She’d been living in San Francisco for three decades but had grown tired, she said, of all the “faghags.” She’d followed a job to Philadelphia after she found her last girlfriend cheating with her ex-husband—“an engineer,” she said, as if disgusted.
I didn’t blame her. I’d been with an engineer once in my life, and every time we were screwing around I felt like I was some kind of mechanical model he was trying to deconstruct or decode. Pull a wire here, twist a nob, oops, that’s not working, how about pressing this button? It’s like he expected me to start beeping and flashing a green light.
She did installation art and worked in TV production to make ends meet.
As we got deeper into the bottle, she started pausing less, talking a little freer, telling me about some of the stuff she did—trash cans inverted and made into toilets, that kind of stuff, but I’ve never been much of an art lover, and I certainly don’t know why someone would pay fifty grand for a piece of rusted metal, but whatever floats your boat. She told me, too, about the commercial work: regional stuff, mostly, although I had seen one of her TV advertisements for toilet bowl cleaner and thought it was very well done.
The afternoon lengthened and sharpened, too, like a microscope had been adjusted; the sun, the drinks, the coolness of the house every time I went inside to pee. I told Maggie about where I worked, the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, and about the kooks and the weirdos my boss researched: phobics, neurotics, psychotics, freaks of all shapes and sizes.
“It’s the liars I’d be most interested in,” she said. “What do they call it? Compulsive liars.”
“What about them?”
She stared out over the back lawn; sloping down toward the woods, it dropped suddenly into shadow where the sycamores and the oaks began. “Aren’t we all, in a way? Liars, I mean. Unable to help it.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’ve always been a straight shooter. What you see is what you get.”
“But that’s the whole point.” Her voice had softened as she got drunker. She wasn’t slurring, exactly, but where before she spoke in short staccato, now her voice was all melody. For a quick second, I thought of Georgia, and even missed it—the tip of a hat, the drawl of the postman saying hey there, little lady. “We don’t know we’re lying,” she went on. “Not about ourselves, anyway. Everything we see, everything we remember—it’s all just made up, isn’t it?”
A fly was drowning spectacularly in her half-empty glass. She went to take a sip, grimaced, and then fished the insect out with an unsteady finger.
“Looks pretty damn real to me,” I said and laughed.
We’d finished most of the bottle of gin before I got around to showing her the suitcase. I was sorry almost as soon as I did, because just like that the good times were over, and I realized—with the kind of bottlenecked clarity only a solid afternoon of drinking brings—that she was very, very drunk. Later that night, I would come upstairs and see her passed out in my bedroom, clothes on, spread-eagle, mouth open in a puddle of drool.
She was quiet as she examined the objects one by one, like she was puzzling over a crossword. I started getting impatient and made a joke about it, but she didn’t seem to hear me.
I started thinking about food, and whether I should eat something and risk killing my buzz, or whether I should just open the whiskey, which I didn’t particularly want to share. Would she notice if I refilled my glass in the kitchen? Was she too drunk to notice?
“This isn’t my father’s jacket,” she said abruptly. Her eyes were red and her mouth wet, like a wound in the center of her face. “It’s too small. Not his style, either.”
I was bored already—wishing now that I had asked her to leave, so I could open the whiskey and drink it in peace, while the shadows swallowed up the hill.
“I never really knew her,” Maggie said. A little bubble of spit had formed at the corner of her mouth.
“Who?” I asked automatically.