Upon the unwrapping of each package, she vows to write a thank-you letter to Aunt Tammy—a letter of the handwritten, thick-papered, thesaurus-consulted variety—but every day following, Joan “forgets.” She “forgets” for so many consecutive days that the idea of a thank-you letter begins to gain weight in her mind, becoming too heavy to lift. By the end of the first week, a mass of gratitude and shame has accumulated inside her body and grown so dense that adequately transcribing it, surely, would take a lifetime. It would bruise both writer and reader. To send a thank-you letter now, she believes by week two, would be like mailing a handwritten account of my indolence, my boorishness. I can’t. I can’t.
And once Joan has decided that the opportunity to demonstrate her appreciation has expired, the gifts begin to sicken her. Even when they’re hidden, their presence fills her apartment like an odor that is also an itch. Like some toxin. Joan hides the gifts in drawers, tucks them beneath sweaters too expensive to donate but not comfortable enough to wear, twists them in plastic bags, which she then shoves in paper sacks, which she then stows in the coat closet, behind the vacuum. But it doesn’t help. She can’t eat or sleep or read or pray or watch her shows or even recite the nation’s capitals. She tears her cuticles. Her asthma worsens. At any given moment, she feels like she might cry—not because she wants to, to bespeak her sensitivity, but because she needs to, in order to proceed with her day.
By the end of the month, her guilt crescendos, the odor of the unthanked gifts too foul and itchy to endure any longer, and Joan surrenders. She gathers the gifts in one quick raid, stuffs them in a trash bag, leaves the Rabbit Hutch, and marches one block south to Penny.
Penny is a woman of indeterminate age who spends most of her days whistling outside the convenience store on St. Francis and Oscar Streets with a shopping cart of Beanie Babies. Joan secretly—shamefully—uses her interactions with Penny to temper anxieties about the Rabbit Hutch’s proximity to the women’s shelter, where she assumes Penny is a guest. Penny accepts any donation besides food because, she once explained to Joan, “I don’t wish ill upon anyone or anything,” and she believes all materials suffer when they are prepared for consumption.
In her youth, Penny had wanted to be a dancer. When she was in her twenties, she met a handsome banker online. After half a year of correspondence, she and the banker finally scheduled a meeting in person, upon which Penny discovered that he was in fact a bedridden and senile former bank teller. Penny visited him every weekend, nonetheless, feeding him applesauce and reading him detective novels. “I had nothing better to do,” she told Joan. “And his profile pic was really him. In his thirties. I thought that was kind of ballsy. Using a picture of who you used to be.”
Penny offered this information to Joan in pieces, without encouragement. Exchanges between Joan and Penny have become so frequent over the past few years that Penny has taken to calling Joan “Mama Bangs,” which disturbs Joan, but also feels like friendship.
“How’s it hanging, Mama Bangs?” asks Penny on Wednesday evening as Joan approaches. The sky is powering down, and heat pulses from the asphalt. The block smells like hot tar. In the sky, a storm brews. Joan swallows. “I used to date a guy who said that every time he passed a crucifix,” says Penny. “How’s it hanging? You don’t notice how many crucifixes there are in this world until you spend time with a guy like that.” Penny yawns. “That cross you gave me last time made me think of him.” Some of her teeth are missing. She sits against the store wall, squinting at Joan, her rusty shopping cart waiting next to her like a sidekick. Along with Beanie Babies, Penny also possesses CDs, DVDs, a landline phone set, a pager, a video game system that Joan doesn’t recognize, paper maps, a few chunky computer keyboards, and other artifacts of the recent past. Penny once told Joan that these things will be worth a lot of money, in the future. “Nobody but me will’ve thought to collect and protect ’em. They’ll pay a lot of money for the past, in the future. History proves me right. Just look at record players. Typewriters. Nintendos.” Joan had nodded politely, but their whole town was haunted by the recent past, and she couldn’t imagine anyone who would exchange money for obsolete junk.
Before she met Penny, Joan had never seen hair that so thoroughly resembled straw in texture and color. Penny’s face is overcast and somewhat flat, like Vacca Vale itself. She wears a tracksuit that’s not exactly the color of grapes but exactly the color of artificially grape-flavored foods. Penny whistles a popular song. She is a very talented whistler.
“Just some spring cleaning,” says Joan, handing the bag of Fourth of July gifts—a patriotic pencil sharpener, a trio of bald eagle erasers, and two war-related novels—to Penny.
“It’s summer,” says Penny, accepting the bag with mild interest. “You know, I’ve been wondering something. You—with that skirt and the sweaters and those shirts with the buttons you button. Plus the hair.”
Joan waits.
“Well, I was wondering if you were Mormon, is all.”
“No.”
“Amish?”
“No.”
“Jewish?”
Joan touches her crucifix, absurdly flattered. “No.”
“A virgin, at least?”
She blushes. There was Toby Hornby, with the bad teeth she loved, at the community college, but that only happened almost, and Joan prayed three rosaries for penance. And then, when she was thirty-five, there was the impossibly soft JP Hidalgo after the Rest in Peace Christmas party. Vividly, she remembers his ranch house. Total silence beyond the shut window. Central air-conditioning. The smell of dogs. Joan had decided that this was it; enough was enough; her religious devotion to virginity before marriage would disqualify her from an actual proposal, in this town, in this age, and her loneliness had reached its freezing point. Before the Christmas party, she read the tamest how-to articles she could find on the internet. She took a laborious, prolonged shower and even packed a small overnight bag, feeling positively urban. She and JP Hidalgo of human resources had flirted exactly four times. He was going through a divorce and developing a passion for sourdough. At the Christmas party, as soon as he brought her a plastic cup of white wine, Joan knew she would go through with it.
She would remember the entire night fondly, had JP Hidalgo not been seized by a sudden and mighty shyness as he neared completion. He pulled out, apologized, spilled a glass of water on his carpet, apologized again, and asked her to leave. Avoided her at Rest in Peace after that.
“Basically.”
“Gay?”
Joan shrugs. “Probably a little. Isn’t everybody, at least a little?”
“Married?”
“No.”
“Christian?”
“Yes.”
“Employed?”
“Yes.”
“Happy?”
Joan’s heart drops. “Of course.”
“Okay,” says Penny, leaning back against the wall and closing her eyes. “Was just curious. Wanted to break the ice.”
First the girl at the laundromat, now Penny. Joan managed a sort of genetic predisposition toward invisibility for forty years, and then, within the span of a few days, two strangers solicited her autobiography without apparent reason. It’s moments like these when Joan fears she is a subject in some elaborate, federally funded psychology experiment. Abruptly, Joan understands why so many celebrities develop addictions. She feels like a demanding and ill-fated houseplant, one that needs light in every season but will die in direct sun, one whose soil requires daily water but will drown if it receives too much, one that takes a fertilizer only sold at a store that’s open three hours a day, one that thrives in neither dry nor humid climates, one that is prone to every pest and disease. What kind of attention would make Joan feel at home? Who would ever work that hard to administer it? She will never own live houseplants.
“I have freckles on my eyelids and nowhere else,” says Joan.
“Yeah? Let’s see it.”
Joan leans in and closes her eyes.
“Nice,” says Penny neutrally. “But are you happy?”
“You just asked me that.”
“But you seemed like maybe you needed someone to ask you again.”
“Are you happy?”
“Hell no! Who is? You can feel happy, but you can’t be that way forever. Let me tell you something: if somebody says yes to that question, they either don’t understand it, or they’re on drugs. I’m only asking you because it’s a good conversation starter. I haven’t been happy since spring of ’ninety-eight.”
“What happened in the spring of ’ninety-eight?”
Penny’s eyes widen. “I’ll tell you about it when we’ve got a whole afternoon ahead of us. I need a Long Island ice tea for that story.”
It has been a long week for Joan. Yesterday’s exchange with Anne Shropshire still echoes in her mind. The potato salad she had brought for lunch was beyond its expiration date, which Joan hadn’t realized until she’d already consumed half of it. Three coworkers on her floor went out for drinks after work and did not invite her. And now this interrogation from Penny. Joan turns to go, awash in relief and still more guilt, eager to purchase a jar of maraschino cherries and eat them in bed. She will not brush her teeth. She might even pray. Then she will apply frankincense-geranium-petitgrain-serenity lotion to her arms—which she must admit are quite nice arms, for a woman of her age and lassitude—listen to soporific nature sounds, and fall asleep early to stave off her Thursday drowsiness.
At least the tram was quieter today.
“Wait!” Penny calls.