The Lease

note: Here's another story i'm thinking about submitting. feedback?

There was never anywhere to go. Most of them lived in small houses – Mike lived in a trailer with his mom and stepdad . No one’s parents wanted the five of them hanging around every night.
So they were always ending up somewhere. The friends would drive dark roads down into Illinois or walk the lakeshore as far as they could before private property cut off the waterfront. They talked about getting out of Kenosha. They did not name specific destinations.
One night, when it was almost summer, they walked the corridor of sand between the water plant and the boulders as if it were a prison exercise yard. The sand was dry and had tufts of grass sticking out here and there. Sharon suggested they put enough distance between them and the water processing plant’s lights to see the stars over Lake Michigan. They walked a little faster, but the soft sand made it feel like walking in place. After awhile the boulders gave way to a beach.
Brett picked up a stick and flicked away a few dead alewives so they could sit in a sheltered area under the eave of a boulder. The three girls and two boys cuddled together like ferrets. Lisa and Christine lay their heads on Mike’s lap, touching at the ashy crowns of their heads where the black dye stopped. Mike leaned against Sharon’s shoulder, and Sharon, trying to act as if this were just any night, wrapped her arms around Brett’s waist. He leaned back against her and sifted Christine’s hair through his hands.
They often piled their bodies together like this, listening to one another’s breath and heartbeats. The girls believed the cuddling showed that the group’s friendship was asexual, a spiritual communion cemented by hugs and handholding. The boys were careful not to let their erections poke anyone.
They looked at the stars over the lake. The reflection of the water plant’s lights still watered down the sky’s indigo, making it shine like a wet plastic slicker.
Mike said, suddenly, “We should all go to the same college.” Sharon looked at him to see if he was joking, but he was earnest, his sparse blond eyebrows raising up and down as he went on:
“We could rent a big house and paint the walls with laundry detergent. And have blacklights in every room so the laundry detergent glows.” Sharon reached out and stroked Mike’s downy hair, and felt his scalp on her fingertips. Mike was probably going to graduate next month, but Sharon knew he wasn’t going to college because his mother wasn’t interested in paying for it.
Brett snorted. “Mike, if you were going to college, you’d know where you were going by now. I’m still a junior and I’m already pretty sure I’m going to Notre Dame.” Brett was taller than any of them, and more aggressive. Both boys considered themselves more friends of the girls than friends with each other. But no one was boyfriend and girlfriend.
Sharon hadn’t told anyone, but that afternoon after school, Brett had kissed her in the playground, where they had been sitting on swings and talking. She had been surprised and flattered; it was understood that Christine and Lisa, with their willowy figures and porcelain complexions, were the ones all their friends had crushes on. Even Sharon loved them in a puppyish, crush way, even though she wasn’t gay.
After letting Brett kiss her once or twice, Sharon picked up her bag and they walked to the auditorium to see if Christine was finished auditioning for the summer play. Brett had walked beside the way a dog walks with his master, burning up extra energy by zigzagging onto the school lawn and out into the street. All he could think about was how close he had been to touching his friend’s breasts. He had felt them touch his arm or his back when they were hanging out, and he knew they were denser than he'd imagined, more like foam rubber than spongecake. But he’d never touched them with his hands.
Sharon wondered if he’d try to kiss her again when he drove her home that night. She didn’t know what it meant. Did he want to be her boyfriend? She was 15 and had never had a boyfriend. Lisa and Christine had consorted with this boy or that, but Sharon couldn’t imagine that they had seriously cared for anyone more than they cared for each other or for her. She didn’t want to be the first to break the tripod that had delivered her safely through the horrors of gradeschool and junior high.
In gradeschool Sharon had been pudgy and might have become the kid everyone picks on. But Lisa and Christine for some reason befriended her. They were a year older than Sharon and a grade ahead, and even at nine, they were elegant and different – in a good way – from the other fourth graders. In high school, Lisa and Christine dressed in black, and kept their skin very pale, like Goths, even though they didn’t hang out with the Goth kids who smoked clove cigarettes by the old archery targets at school. They hung out with Sharon, who had grown from pudgy to solid and athletic, and they hung out with Brett and Mike. No one else.
Mike they loved because for his dark sense of humor – twice he had managed to get art projects displayed in the hallways that included tiny, unnoticed cartoons of people being hung or beheaded. He spoke softly and seemed afraid that the friends might dump him at any time. Before high school, he had never had any friends at all.
While Mike walked around milky eyed and languid, Brett loped from one place to another, and even standing still he seemed like he had a coal engine laboring within him. He had straight A’s and engaged the teachers in long arguments in class. He was adopted. His thick black hair, which he wore hanging over one eye, came from his real parents, who were in Pakistan somewhere. Brett rarely suggested anything to do, but he was good at pointing out why the others’ ideas wouldn’t work. They didn’t blame him; they had seen enough cafes and CD shops open and close downtown to see that people’s plans usually didn’t work out.
That night, Brett put his hand on the top of Sharon’s head to prevent her from bumping it as she ducked into his car. She quivered inside at the protective gesture, and forgot that she had decided not to let him kiss her again. Before she got out at her house he touched her breasts under her paisley peasant blouse, and she felt so nervous that cool sweat trickled down the sides of her ribcage. She didn’t let him take off her bra.
After that Brett tried to drive Sharon home as often as he could. But they weren’t alone in the car more than a once a week, because they had to time the curfew rush right to drop everyone off in the right order. Sharon and Christine had to be home at 12:30, Lisa and Brett at 1. Mike didn’t have a curfew.
When school ended, Brett tried to get Sharon to spend the day with him, so they could drive to Silver Lake alone or go to Chicago together.
She wouldn’t do it. She liked to kiss him in the car at night, liked to feel his hands coursing up and down her back when she sat on his lap, the driver's seat pushed way back. But the talking scared her.
“You sing beautifully,” he told her one night, after they’d all spent the evening playing Lisa’s parents’ old Beatles 8-tracks and singing along. He always noticed things about her when they were all together, and he’d tell her these things later when they were alone.
She told Christine about Brett, alone in the older girl’s room. No one but Lisa and Sharon were ever allowed in here. Christine, with her black eye make-up and pale skin, would die if anyone else saw that she still had a pink canopy bed -- and liked it.
“So what’s the big deal?” Christine asked her. “We could tell he liked you. He’s cute.”
“I feel like he doesn’t want us to hang out with everyone else all the time. It seems like he always wants us to be alone,” Sharon said.
Christine laughed. “We don’t all have to spend every free second together,” she told Sharon in a voice she had used since fourth grade to remind Sharon that she was an entire year younger. Christine didn't tell her that Brett had already tried to get with Lisa and herself.
Lisa was out somewhere, they didn't know where. Not at rehearsal. Sharon felt a nameless uneasiness in her when Lisa disappeared like this, but she liked having Christine to herself. Christine, like Sharon, was still a virgin. Lisa had slept with someone, but she would never tell them who. Christine got out a bottle of black nail polish and started painting her short nails. Sharon tried it on too, but it smeared and she ended up taking it off.
On the Saturday night after the Fourth of July, four of them got into Mike’s car and went downtown where an antique shop/coffeehouse sometimes stayed open evenings. Christine was at rehearsal again. The school was doing a “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and she was playing a fairy.
A band was supposed to play at the coffeehouse. But when they parked Mike’s car they could see that the windows were dark. They stood around the locked door, smoking cigarettes, wondering where to go from there. It seemed too early to hit the all-night diner where they liked to drink coffee and eat from the complimentary breadbasket.
“We could go to your house,” Mike said to Lisa. Lisa’s parents were often out late on weekends, and they had a big TV and a VCR. They could rent a video. But when Lisa’s parents did come home, her dad would be drunk and try to act cool and hang out with them. That was a drawback.
“Let’s go to the park,” Sharon said. They were near the old park in the middle of town, a place now deserted by all but pot-smoking kids and homeless people. She pulled a glossy paper pouch out of her pocket. It was a packet that a kind of gum called Big League Chew came in. They always carried their marijuana, when they had any, in empty packages of Big League Chew. The packs were resealable and the powdery gum residue left on the inner foil seemed to soften the smoke.
A car turned down the deserted downtown street, and Sharon quickly put away the packet. But it wasn’t a police car, it was a blue Camaro. It stopped.
“Hey, do you guys know where Wet Pet is playing?” It was Rick Bell, who dropped out of their school last year at age 20. He’d hung around a few years because he was on the golf team and really liked that.
“It was supposed to be here,” Lisa told him. She leaned against his car, and the way she looked at Rick, Sharon wondered if he was the one she’d slept with. But then again, Lisa flirted with guys a lot. She liked getting them to buy her things, because she rarely had any money of her own.
“Well, hell, let’s bust in,” Rick said. Lisa laughed.
“There’s no point,” she told him. “There’s nothing going on in there.”
Rick looked at the coffeehouse again. His blue Camaro was reflected in the window.
“Oh yeah,” he said. The five of them stood in the street, Rick sat behind the wheel. Then Rick started laughing. He must have been pretty stoned.
“You guys wanna come to my house?” he asked. “I got like a pound of weed.” Lisa rode in Rick's car and the rest of them followed his Camaro to a bad neighborhood, over by the dormant auto factory. His house was two stories, with siding the color of urine. Rick parked his Camaro on the lawn. Outside an upstairs window, a swayback couch sat on the tar shingles of the porch’s roof.
“Cool,” Brett said, and Mike and the girls sighed in agreement.
“You have your own house,” Mike said.
When Lisa rejoined them they could tell that she and Rick had been drinking in his car. Her eyes shone and she talked more than usual. She smelled like canned cherries.
Rick did, indeed, have almost a pound of marijuana. He told them how much money he’d been making selling homemade glass pipes at Grateful Dead concerts. He had a glass blowing furnace in the garage.
Rick’s living room was like a furlough, sunken two steps below the rest of the house. He didn’t have any living room furniture, just a very expensive stereo. They sat on the wall-to-wall carpeting and passed a large bong that hadn’t turned out well enough for him to sell. If someone happened to be pulling on the pipe between songs, the loud gurgle made them all giggle. It was a horrible, drowning sound.
Later they left Rick in his house and drove for two hours along the northern edge of town, where lawns and fences gave way to fields and barbed wire. Mike was too nervous to drive after smoking all that pot, so Lisa was behind the wheel.
Sharon had an idea.
“Maybe Rick would rent us his attic,” she said, turning to address her three friends in the back seat.
“Why would we want his attic?” Brett asked. “You think there’s gold up there?” They laughed so hard that the windows began to steam up and Lisa turned on the heat by mistake. She meant to turn on the defrost.
“We could have our own apartment,” Sharon said. “We could pool our money and rent someplace cheap. After school we could hang out there. Put a stereo there. Decorate it and stuff.” She knew it was a good idea, but she felt she couldn’t explain it properly. She leaned her head against the window glass, which was damp but warm. They rolled down all the windows and hung their heads out in the wind, and Lisa drove faster so they could be cooled.
They started going to Rick’s house once or twice a week. After smoking up, Rick would disappear into his garage to work, and they would lie on the carpet watching the stereo lights as if they were a meteor shower. Sometimes they'd rummage around in the two ground-floor bedrooms Rick didn’t use. They were full of boxes left over from the people who used to live here. Mike found and old plastic typewriter in a blue case once, and he wrote a long, hilariously rambling poem about the group trying to walk around a very, very large lake. When they asked him if the big lake was Lake Michigan, he said “No, way bigger than that. Way bigger.”
Lisa and Sharon came screaming out of the smaller bedroom one night after finding a stack of pornographic party games on a closet shelf ("Sin Rummy," "Orgy, the Board Game.")
It was Mike who got up the nerve to ask Rick to rent them his attic, and when Rick declined, Mike looked embarrassed to death, even though Rick was nice about it. The attic was Rick’s bedroom, it turned out.
“I like to climb out that window mornings and survey the lay of the land,” he told them. “I’m king of the neighborhood.”
The more time they spent at Rick’s house, the more they talked about getting a place of their own. It stopped being Sharon’s idea and became group property. In their real homes, they felt like lingering houseguests. Sharon avoided going home between 6 p.m. and curfew, because her mother would inevitably suggest she stay in the rest of the evening, maybe play some Scrabble.
After spending a few hours on Rick’s living room floor, Sharon’s head pillowed on his stomach, Brett would desperately maneuver to drive Sharon home. Now that it was summer, her parents were less strict on the curfew thing. He would drive her to a housing development being built in the former cornfield near her neighborhood, and they’d park on the newly laid asphalt street next to a gaping square foundation hole.
There were no streetlights there. Brett would feel for Sharon’s hand in the dark, then pull it into his lap. She would feel the bulge there and laugh.
“Were you like that all night?” she always asked. He’d tell her the exact moment when his hard-on struck – while watching her raise an arm to lift a stack of old magazines off the bedroom closet shelf. Or the moment he lay down on Rick’s carpet and she kneeled next to him, looking down at his face, her shoulder length hair tickling his cheek.
“Wanna play Sin Rummy?” He asked the night the found the games, and “rummy” became their secret code for making out. Brett was 17 and a virgin, and he told Sharon that not sleeping with her physically hurt him, pulled at his muscles from the inside as if a fishing reel were tightening every sinew one turn at a time.
“I don’t want to lose my virginity in a car,” she told him.
“I could borrow my dad’s Blazer,” he said.
She laughed, and even though he hadn’t meant to be funny, he saw that it was and he laughed to.
The group took to buying newspapers and exploring the For Rent listings. When they divided the prices by five, it didn’t seem that expensive. Only $50 a month each for some.
They discussed it one day, sitting on the lawn outside the school auditorium where Lisa was rehearsing her play. She was supposed to come out in half an hour. It was so hot that they saw shimmering air above the sidewalk. But the grass felt cool.
Mike wanted everyone to pony up a little more -- say $75 a month -- to get someplace nice and big, since they'd probably end up crashing there on weekend nights.
For once Brett didn’t argue with an idea someone else put forth.
“Yeah, totally,” was all he said. “They want me to work more hours at Calvo’s anyway.”
Christine didn’t like the idea.
"Mike, your parents don't care if you don't come home at night," she said, but she directed her arch look at Brett. "The rest of us would never crash there unless our parents were out of town, and if they were out of town we wouldn't need to get out of the house anyway. We could fire up a big old crack pipe right in the living room."
They didn’t smoke crack. But it was nice to think that once they had the apartment, they could do that if they really wanted. They could do anything.
Lisa opened the theater door and a rush of air conditioning flowed over them all like water. Two men were with her. They were actually men, like in their 30s. She introduced them as guys from the play, and the friends smiled at them but said nothing. Sharon folded the newspaper and put it in her purse. They all walked down to Lake Michigan and stripped down to their shorts – the girls in their bras – and jumped off the dock into the freezing water. They pretended it was normal to have two men hanging out with them, and the two men pretended that they often took off their shirts and shoes and socks and jumped into Lake Michigan off the dock.
Lisa took off her bra and her shorts and underwear too, and dove in to the lake naked. Sharon grinned at her, proud of her friend’s courage and of the silvery-white slash of a body that Lisa displayed before disappearing into the water. Both of Christine’s friends from the play stood around chest deep in the icy water, talking to Lisa and Christine, pretending not to notice that Lisa’s pink, erect nipples were visible above the water’s surface.
They couldn’t stay in the water for long. They lay on the dock until their clothes dried. They wanted to talk about the apartment, but not in front of the two guys from the play. But then the Lisa and Christine stood up, with their damp clothes on, and went off with the two guys to work on their lines for the play. No one pointed out that Christine wasn't in the play, and Lisa only had one line.
Without them, Sharon and the two boys spent the twilight trespassing on the grounds of old lakefront mansions, most of which had metamorphed into institutions: a museum, a funeral home, a wedding hall. Then they went to the Sunshine Restaurant to talk about the apartment some more. Sharon felt odd being the only girl.
They bought a new paper from the box in front. The restaurant was run by a Greek family, with a revolving glass case near the register, displaying cream pies and cakes. There were probably 20 such restaurants in Kenosha, but they only patronized this one. Because they always tipped as much as they could scrape together, the staff rarely enforced the $2 per person minimum order.
While Sharon and Mike read the menu, struck dumb like children left alone with a stranger, Brett bent over the classified ads. By the time the waitress came he had found an apartment he liked enough to argue for. But without the other girls, Sharon and Mike couldn't put up much of an argument. Everything was out of balance.
They ordered three coffees and Soula, a waitress who tolerated them, immediately brought two ceramic dishes of half-and-half packets. Mike ordered a BLT and shared it with Sharon, who only had enough money for coffee.
Brett told them about the apartment he liked as if he had seen it, maybe lived there a few years, raised a family in its
two bedrooms, eat-in kitchen.
"The best thing will be that balcony," Brett said, spooning ice cubes out of his water glass and eating them. "You'll sit out there on hot nights, look down on the street. Like Rick’s roof. And you could see if the cops were coming, or if someone you don't like is coming over, you could go inside and turn off the lights."
They laughed at that. Brett was trying to get them warmed up, they could tell, and they made an effort to pretend that it was normal for the three of them to hang out without Lisa and Christine.
There were indeed a lot of kids at school they didn’t like, most of all the jocks and preppies who painted their faces at pep rallies and practically wet their pants trying to cheer loud enough to get the spirit bell. But it had been summer so long that they had nearly forgotten about all those kids who were not part of them.
“What’s the address?” Mike asked.
“2285-14th street,” Brett said.
"That’s by Beaver Pond," Mike said, watching Brett nervously as he spoke to make sure he wasn't’making the other boy angry. “Too many mosquitoes down there.”
Brett grinned. He wanted a debate. "You'll sit out there smoking. Smoke keeps them away," Brett said. He had ordered carrot cake and when Soula put it in front of him, he handed Sharon a fork.
"And we'll have one of those bug zappers," Brett added. The three of them giggled. “I'm serious. Those electric purple bug zappers are a trip when you're baked.”
Mike grinned into his plate and shook noiselessly when he laughed. It occurred to Sharon for the first time that it might be Brett that Mike loved the most, not Lisa or Christine, as she had always assumed. Mike, shy, powerless, unloved by his parents, might see a hero in Brett's edgy self-confidence. Sharon squinted at Brett and tried to see him that way.
That night Sharon’s parents were still out when Brett pulled his car in front of her house, so he came inside with her. It was risky; she wasn’t supposed to have boys over when she was in the house alone. But she was feeling warm and confident, and for once Brett wanted to talk.
He told her about how much he hated their school, and how anxious he was to leave this town. They lay on her parents’ couch, and he clutched at her clothes as if he was drowning, as if the blue velour of her mother’s old living room set was a stormy lake.
He mentioned his mom, and Sharon’s heart thumped. Brett’s mother had died three years before. Everyone knew about it. She was in a car accident. No one knew the man whose car she had been in, not even Brett’s father.
“I don’t really have any special memories,” he told Sharon. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be paying attention. I remember begging her to get sugar cereal at the store, and her coming back with Apple Jacks. And I was like, that’s not sugar cereal. It doesn’t even come in a foil bag.” They laughed and Sharon felt herself attaching to him more closely, as if they were two sides of a boot that someone was lacing up.
He put his hand inside the front of her jeans. Soon he was pushing his penis against the front of her underwear. He begged her to have sex with him.
"They could come in at any time," she told him. She imagined her father seeing her with her jeans slid halfway down her hips, her bra hanging around her waist. She sat up and put her bra back on. Brett sulked.
"It's just, I don't want to get caught," she told him.
“What about when we get the apartment,” he said. “Then, we could do it, right? We wouldn’t get caught there.”
“But everybody else would be there,” she said quietly.
“Not every minute,” he said, smiling, feeling himself close to winning an argument.
She said OK, and he went home. She watched him drive away from the front window. Just after he turned the corner, her parents’ car turned onto the street from the other side. She ran to her bedroom and turned off the lights.
She brooded over the promise. Was she obligated to keep it? She didn’t want to be a tease. She avoided him for awhile. Maybe he would forget about it.
She told Christine she’d sort of told Brett she’d do it.
“I said I would when we get the apartment,” Sharon said.
Christine laughed. “Well that’s fine. How serious do you think they are about getting an apartment? Hardly anybody has any money. You and me don't have any, and Lisa owes me like, fifty bucks.”
“But I really want to get one. It would be so cool,” Sharon said. “We could have one wall where people could write with crayons and draw pictures. And instead of furniture, we could just have big pillows all over the floor.”
They started trading ideas about what else they could do with the apartment. Christine thought they could start their own experimental theater troupe, hold performances there, and collect donations to help pay the rent. Sharon looked at her. She hadn't shown an interest in theater before. She longed to ask her about the two men from Lisa's play, what Lisa and Christine had done with them. But at the same time she didn't want to hear anything about it. While they were talking, the phone rang. It was Mike.
“Guess where I am?” he asked Christine, breathless. Sharon crowded her face near Christine’s so they could both hear. “OK, well, I’m at my house, but guess where I just was? I was viewing an apartment!”
Sharon felt that ominous feeling in her gut that she used to feel when she’d been bad as a kid, when she knew her parents would find out. She took the phone from Christine.
“Mike, who said you could just go looking at apartments? We didn’t talk about this.”
There was a pause. Mike’s enthusiasm was instantly deflated.
“It was cool,” he said. “Brett saw it in the paper.” Now Brett and Mike were going places without the girls? This was a first. Sharon felt like everything was coming unfixed, crashing around.
The next afternoon the three girls went to see the apartment, pretending to be totally unconnected to Brett and Mike.
It was right next to the Fire Department. It was a long attic room over a ramshackle old Victorian that was being rented out, floor by floor. Carpenters were putting kitchens into the first three floors, but the attic only had a microwave and sink. Exposed pink insulation lined the ceiling.
Christine grimaced. “This looks pretty shitty,” she said.
But Sharon couldn’t speak. It was worse than she feared. She loved it, she saw the possibilities. All the open space. They would have parties. With a band playing. No one would care about the noise, not right next to the fire department.
She sat in the stairwell, knowing her voice would quiver if she tried to speak. Where the roof peaked in the center of the room, the ceiling was 15 feet high. She imagined friends coming and going, each with their own key. They would be like teen-agers on TV. But better.
The landlord, a mailman, was telling them how this used to be his bedroom when he was a kid. His mother was going into a nursing home, so he was renting out her house. He showed them his window seat, where he would look down on the street.
"King of the neighborhood," Sharon whispered, and Lisa squeezed her hand.
They spent the afternoon at the playground, planning who would approach the landlord agreeing to rent it. Probably Mike, who was 18, although Brett looked older. They talked about what they could do with the place. Christine wanted to start an experimental theater troupe and hold performances there; they could raise money for the rent that way.
Ever since the day when Lisa and Christine had gone off with those two guys, Christine was suddenly into theater like Lisa.
“Come on,” Brett said. “You don’t want to call attention to the place.”
Sharon said they could get a puppy that they would all take care of.
“The landlord said no dogs,” Mike told her.
That night Brett drove her home. For once even he was flushed with ideas.
“We should get a calendar for the wall, where you could mark a day if you wanted to have the apartment to yourself that night,” he said, squeezing her knee.
She sighed. That’s not what she thought having an apartment would be like. She imagined Lisa, Christine and Mike laughing at the Sunshine while she and Brett went to bed together in the long attic apartment. Things would be different after they did it.
Then she thought of the experimental theater troupe Christine wanted to start. She’d tried out for a play with Lisa once already, and she’d hated it. If the girls were going in that direction together, Sharon would get left behind.
Brett pulled over. There was now a naked house, the writing on its drywall visible in the starlight, where a hole had once gaped.
She stared out the window, resisting when Brett tried to pull her into his lap. He sat there feeling uncomfortable. He didn't know how to ask what was wrong.
“It's like getting a divorce,” she said after awhile. “We're losing everyone.”
She couldn't explain further. She knew that it was too late to get the apartment, because they had lost Lisa and Christine. She sniffled.
“Hey,” he whispered, petting her hair. “Don’t cry. We don’t have to rent that place. We could find somewhere that allows dogs.”
She laughed and climbed on top of him. It wasn't just that Christine wanted to be in plays, and that Lisa wanted to hang around with boys who would buy her drinks, she realized. It was that the group had lost her too.
Brett had expected it to feel like winning when he finally got inside Sharon. Instead she was on top of him, guiding him in her soft hands, and he had never known losing could feel so good.

Photocopy

Here is another story i'm thinking about submitting. Tell me what you think, especially if you've read both my novel segments and this.


I know practically everything about Helena Mrotkus, including a lot of things she still has no idea that I know. But the way I look at it, it wasn't what I knew about Helena that landed me in the Northern Disctrict of California Federal Court, facing jail time. It was the things she found out about me. If only I could have been content to trace her through life, one transaction leading to another in an administrative pas de deux.
But I would make a lousy news camera operator, because I couldn't sit on my hands while Helena ruined herself any more than I could film a self immolation. I have always been the kind of person who has to help people.
And the more I learned about Helena, the closer I wanted to get to her. You can't get much closer than carrying someone's fetus in your own womb. Trust me.
Here are some things I know about Helena: She owes $45,000 on a variety of credit and store cards, and on a series of cooking videos she subscribed to at $19.95 a month. I long suspected she didn't watch all the videos that came by UPS with each waning moon. But the first time I got inside her house, I realized I had been unfairly jumping to conclusions: There was that month's video -- Fondues with Cheese, Chocolate or Meat -- sticking out of the VCR. Like Macky always says, that's what happens when we assume. It makes an ass of u and me.
Helena has been divorced once, and she is still married to a man who lives 2,600 miles away in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I assumed correctly that they are estranged, since her frequent flyer miles do not reflect trips to Pittsburgh International Airport. In fact Helena has not flown anywhere since 1996. Not much of a frequent flier after all.
Helena likes to go to the San Mateo Public library after it opens at noon on Sunday, and read magazines -- Elle, Women's World, even Teen People. She can't get enough of them and she checks out back issues to get her through the week.
Personally, I can’t read that kind of dreck. I had a subscription to Barbecue Cooking magazine, but that’s mainly for professional reasons. For the past four years, I have sold barbecue grills over the phone every afternoon and evening from 3 pm until 9. My boyfriend Macky took the University of Toronto’s alumni magazine, but that was just to flaunt the fact that he had attended college, while I never did. Of course, he never flaunted the fact that he left UT after four semesters to work on an Alaskan fishing boat. Macky shouldn’t be so haughty; I’m sure I learned more from reading books from the Redwood City library – and from that correspondence course I took in fluid dynamics – than he learned in those four semesters.
The first few calls for Helena were dismissed as random wrong numbers. We weren’t even sure they were all asking for the same person, because some of the callers had thick accents. But then we registered for a club card at Safeway, so we could take advantage of 2-for-1 specials. I know you're supposed to be suspicious of those club card schemes, because the stores record personal data about your brand of underarm deodorant. But I like to belong to a club. I would often try to guess what conclusions Safeway's marketing experts were drawing about me.
"Well," they would say, pointing a pool cue at a pie chart. "She's certainly a hobbyist. She's purchased Superglue twice in the past six months. And she must have quite a large home because her light bulb consumption is in the 99th percentile."
They would be wrong, on both counts. If I had any hobbies, I never would have gotten into all this trouble. We buy a lot of Superglue because Macky uses it for everything, from reattaching buttons to his jacket (I'm not much of a homemaker) to posting interesting newspaper pictures to the walls of our apartment. And we've both been known to indulge in a little glue sniffing in the wee post-work hours if there's nothing on TV. But that doesn't really use it up, that I know of.
And the light bulbs? Our studio apartment only has three lamps, but we used to stay up till dawn many nights after our calling shifts, playing Monopoly and talking about our childhoods. We weren't about to hang out in the dark.
But I digress. At Safeway, if you forget your card, they let you punch your phone number into a little machine instead. Whenever we punched in our phone number, the receipt read, "Thank you, HELENA MROTKUS!" Instead of “Thank you, INEZ CRADDEN AND MACKY GETZ!” Helena, we realized, was the name the wrong numbers always asked for.
"Thank you, Mrs. Mmm... " the clerk would start out, then falter. He had no idea how to say “Mroktkus,” and I couldn’t correct him, because I didn’t know how either. That was the first thing I wanted to find out, lest the Safeway clerks call my bluff and arrest me for falsely appropriating someone else's Club Card number. I might have gone to jail for that, instead of for the other business, if I hadn't done any research. Seriously, we were stealing: We got Helena's free ham at Easter as well as our own.
This is how I found out how to say “Mrotkus”: The next time someone called for her, I simply asked, "Helena who?" as if we had a half dozen or so Helenas of various ages lounging on the 5 by 5 patch of patio outside our apartment’s sliding glass door.
You know what? The M is silent. Now that is fascinating information. It got me thinking.
Then one night as I was almost finished working -- I could usually sell two or three grills every night; I was good at it because I'm difficult to embarrass -- I hit the button on the phone that usually starts a new call. But there was no dial tone. Instead a man started speaking before I could say anything.
"It's me. Listen, I'm only in town for the one night and I gotta pick up my canoe from you. Lori and me wanna take her kids on a camping trip and I can't let them down."
The voice paused and I wondered what to do.
"Hello! Are you there!" he shouted in my ear.
"Who is this?" I asked. I suspected this was a Helena call but I maintain that I was perfectly in the right to ask this. Having made my living on the telephone for several years, I knew that etiquette demands identifying oneself when placing a call.
"It's Joe!" he shouted, as if the connection was bad. It wasn't. "Goddamn, can you hold a grudge or what? What do you want with a canoe in that little house of yours anyway? Where you got it, in the fish pond?"
"Joe who?" I asked, still well within my rights. Later, I would think of many, many other questions I wished I'd asked him, such as what in the heck was he doing back in California?
Joe breathed in and out a couple of times after I said that. His voice became much quieter.
"You really have to ask, Helena? What are you running, some kind of massage parlor in my grandma's old house? You got that many guys comin' in and out?"
I didn't answer. What could I say? I had no information -- yet -- about Helena Mrotkus’ current line of work.
"Joe Mrotkus, Helena, Joe Goddamned Mrotkus." He sounded like he might cry. Something moved inside my chest and I wanted to comfort him. Through my work, I'm quite accustomed to emotionally bonding with people whose faces I have never seen.
"Come by at 10," I said, not disguising my voice. How would I know what Helena sounded like?
"Helena? Is that you?"
"Yes," I said. Come on, what would you say?
"You sound different, girl." He was all sweetness now. I looked at Macky, his small head weighed down with large wireless headphones as he listened to Li'l Kim and superglued felt daisies over some holes he'd accidentally burned in the couch. This guy sounded like a real man, one who didn't do gay phone sex for a living and still wear Underoos.
I walked to the mirror above the sink and smoothed some of the frizz out of my hair, working around the phone headset. I wondered if I should pack an overnight bag, in case I wanted this Joe to sweep me off my feet and take me off into the wilderness with him. Of course, we'd stop by Helena's and pick up the canoe first.
"'K, I'll see you in an hour, then," Joe said, and, after pausing to see if I would say goodbye, hung up.
I realized, as he hung up, that I would never see Joe. Helena lived in a house somewhere, she had never lived here. We just got assigned her phone number.
I guess that's when the curiosity really started. I wanted to know if she still lived there -- if so, why did she change her number? Maybe she didn't want Joe calling her anymore? But that was the first time he'd called in the 6 months we'd had the number. What was going to happen when he went to that house? I hoped he wouldn’t get violent when she didn’t have the canoe ready. As far as I knew, he could drown her in that fish pond he mentioned.
If he did, it would be my fault. I realized – and I plan to bring this up in court – that I had a responsibility to find out if my conversation with Joe had any negative repercussions for this Helena Mrotkus. And even after everything that happened, I’m still glad I did, because I was soon to find out that Helena needed someone like me – a lot.
I went to bed long before dawn that night so I could take the bus to San Mateo County Courthouse in Redwood City before it closed the next day. It was guessing that since Helena had lived – or did live – in the 650 area code, Joe and Helena might have gotten married in San Mateo County. It took me about two hours to figure out where the bus stop was and which way the right bus was going, but all the effort paid off. I found a copy of Joe and Helena’s marriage certificate there and photocopied it.
Then I knew a lot: Helena’s maiden name was Martin, she was born in 1961. That made her 39, 10 years older than me. I wondered if the M was also silent in Martin, but I figured, probably not.
That photocopy was the first step toward the stone bench next to Helena’s fish pond, where I sat eight months later, watching a fat carp poke a hole in the blanket of algae with its marbled orange and white face. It reminded me of this recurring dream I had as a child, of Oscar the Grouch's pet worm Slimy crawling out of a hole in the sun-worn green carpeting on our back porch in Sacramento.
Helena and I were sitting on that bench the day she asked me to have her baby for her. She was smoking, and when I agreed, she threw the butt into the pond and stretched her arms out to hug me.
But I’m skipping ahead. In the weeks after finding Helena’s marriage certificate, I learned more that allowed me to assess whether or not she needed my help. From family court records, I learned that Helena's first husband, Reinhart Becker, had custody of her only child. A girl, Becky Becker, now in third grade. The records didn’t include a transcript of the proceedings, so I couldn’t find out why she didn’t have custody herself.
I suspected that it might be because she was in fragile health or psychiatricly deranged, but I couldn’t verify that. Damn it, but medical records are a tough nut to crack. I've tried impersonating her at several hospitals and on the phone with insurance carriers, but until I actually became a part of Helena’s medical records, I never saw so much as a vaccination card. If only Macky would have let me use the old Apple computer he rescued from the curb, because I've read in the paper that you can find out about peoples' medical records on the Internet. But maybe you have to be a hacker or something, I didn't read the whole article. And anyway Macky always said my negative energy would make his computer freeze up.
Not that Macky didn’t want me to learn more about Helena. In fact, he egged me on. He claims to be an aspiring screenwriter, although he's got such terrible penmanship that, what with several keys being missing from his computer keyboard, I don't see how he could write much of anything. But because Macky rarely ventured outside our studio apartment, except to ride his motorcycle up and down Highway 1 on sunny afternoons, I think he seized on the details I was learning about Helena’s life as possible source material. Yes, he can be that exploitative.
The day I came home from Redwood City with copies of the family court files, Macky was taking a bath in Calamine lotion. I mean he really filled the whole tub with that pink stuff. He was prone to allergic rashes. He took the papers from me and slapped a little calamine on the wall to hold them there for appraisal.
"So she had a kid with this Reinhart person. And she’s still legally married to that guy Joe who called you." He studied them, his uneven eyebrows moving slightly as he surveyed them top to bottom. "I sense a lot of passion in this woman. A tumultuous past. Do you think she still shops with her Safeway club card?"
I could see where he was going with this. "I think she does, because I got that 5% savings certificate last time I punched in our number, and they don't giver you those until you spend $350 in a month. We only spent, like, $75. You think Safeway would give us lists of what she bought?"
Macky tapped his temple, leaving a smudge of pink calamine on the short blond hairs there. "That's why I love you, Inez. You're right there with me. Can you imagine what we'd learn about this woman if we knew what she bought? This is my screenplay. She's living it. If we can just follow in her tracks, learn about the drama of her life, tweak it a little, add a car chase in the end..." he narrowed his eyes lazily and sank back until only his head was unsubmerged. A puff pastry on a pink plate.
"Inez, you're like a cat that just brought me a dead squirrel that turned out to be made of solid gold."
I peeled the photocopies off the wall and walked out. I felt Macky was being rather pushy. Tracing the sordid details of Helena's life had been my private pastime, like the advice column for troubled teens Macky published on the Internet.
But once I got over my huff, I reconsidered. Having Macky involved could be a good thing. I can be lazy sometimes. I might have let Helena's trail grow cold while I wasted my late evenings and dawns making latchhook rugs. But when Macky gets into something, he's driven. To keep the project mine, I would have to be a little bit more driven than him each day. I felt up to the challenge.
The entire month of May was a flurry of discovery for both of us, although I did most of the legwork and Macky mostly analyzed the results. In Macky’s movie, he told me later, that month would be the part where an upbeat rock song plays over a montage of us opening envelops, making phone calls, riding double on Macky’s motorcycle to the Registrar of Deeds or the local IRS bureau. We felt like we could accomplish anything.
We Superglued each new document to our kitchenette’s wall. We called the public library claiming to be Helena Mrotkus’ mother and demanded a list of what she had checked out in the past 6 months. Apparently they don't keep card holders' ages on file.
Safeway was very compliant. Apparently frugal old women ask for printed inventories of their monthly purchases all the time; so we began to receive periodic printouts by mail. Her purchases were easy to separate from ours:
Helena - Slimfast, Kool Menthols, fake crab meat.
Us - calamine, pot roast, Like-em-Sticks candy.
The mail-order company I worked for, headquartered in Plano, Texas, has vast databases of telephone numbers and addresses stretching from the nation's dusty innards to its windswept shores. I called my supervisor and told her I had an offline lead but needed the person's phone number and home address. She came up with Helena's home address and new (unlisted) phone number with a few taps on her keyboard. I’ve often dreamed of visiting the call center, I imagine there are banks of glowing control panels and rows of stylishly dressed managers wearing headsets; I’ve even heard tell of a cafeteria with a potato bar.
My manager even threw me this bone: Helena had purchased three items from other divisions of the company; one of them, a knockoff of the TopsyTail hair tool, she had never paid for. But she’d paid for the home food drying system and the clock.
Macky and I used our professional phone skills on the operators at the phone company and the Department of Motor Vehicles, and they rained bounty upon our mailbox. Actual copies of phone bills from Pacific Bell. We ran out of wall space and had to start gluing papers to the cupboard doors. Especially revealing papers – such as Becky Becker’s first year of grade school report cards, which were less than sparkling – we glued to the insides of the cupboard doors. Should anyone break into our home, we wanted Helena’s privacy to remain intact.
Now whenever someone called for Helena, we took their name and number, and sweetly said she'd call them back. This encouraged them to call again and leave more and more detailed messages. We changed our answering machine message from "Inez and Macky would have picked up the phone if they really wanted to talk to you" to a more cryptic "We're not home, please leave a detailed message and your phone number."
We learned that friends thought Helena should get out more after work (she was a nurse at a retirement home). One friend, Marianne, even suggested that the man Helena was dating, Frank, was not a real catch, and that Helena could do better. I longed to meet Frank and judge for myself. After all, unlike me, this Marianne might not have Helena’s best interests in mind.
Although Macky egged me on, I can't blame it all on him. I was not invulnerable to the thrill of the chase. It took bigger and bigger envelopes with more and more detailed information to satisfy me. And I liked taking a number in government waiting rooms such as the Social Security office; it made me feel like I was part of a public ceremony. I had never voted, except to bring back New Coke, and we lost that one.
In fact, I persevered after Macky dropped out. It got to be too much for him the day it occurred to me to fill out a change of address form for Helena, rerouting her mail to our apartment.
"Don't you realize you're giving the Feds your address?" he asked me. "You're going to the Big House." After that day, he never examined another document I brought home, and he refused to take Helena's mail out of our skinny metal letter box. He’d reach around her bills to pluck out his paycheck and the Fingerhut catalogs addressed to him. I didn't feel it was such a big deal because all we ever got was junk mail and bills. She must have picked up her paycheck each week at the Shadetree Care Facility where she worked.
"If they come for me, they'll come for you too," I told him one night as he took a break from his phone calls. "We're a household." I had received a rare piece of personal mail for Helena, a postcard from her mother in Florida, and he refused to look at it with me.
"We're not married," he'd say, looking over his wire-rimmed glasses as if he could truly dissociate himself from me with a mere whim of logic.
"But we have sex," I said, and he sighed as if he were a professor and I a particularly moronic student.
"Oh Inez, don’t be naive," he'd tell me, and touch the pound button on the phone, which would automatically put another horny mail on the other end of the phone line.
I decided it was time to visit Helena’s home. I wanted to see if she had noticed that her mail had stopped. For once, I was motivated by self interest: If she was about to alert the US Postal Inspection Service, I wanted to be prepared.
By this time I had already walked by Helena's house three times. It was a 30-minute ride away on the SamTrans bus system, which I was learning to use very well because of this whole caper. Her house was squat and white with a porch in front and white lace curtains in each window. A five-year-old black Acura Integra was parked in the driveway; I wrote down its license plate number. I had even rung her bell once, but she didn’t answer, even though her car was there.
One afternoon, while I was working, I thought of a way to ensure she was home the next time I dropped by. On company time, I dialed her number, getting up and pacing the kitchenette in my excitement.
She answered, her voice low from all those Menthol Kools but sweet and welcoming, as if she were expecting a call from a loved one. Probably Frank, I thought, feeling an unexpected stab of jealousy.
“Hello, I’m calling for Helena Mrotkus,” I said calmly, with a smile in my voice.
She ratcheted the sweetness in her voice up a notch. Apparently it wasn’t Frank she was expecting, because she didn’t sound disappointed at all when she cood, “This is Helena.”
I told her my real name, and that I was prepared to offer her a very unusual bargain price on a professional quality barbecue grill, including a free bonus set of tongs and hamburger flipper. When she didn’t interrupt me, I pressed on, telling her that this particular model was perfect for fun-loving singles who wanted to rekindle their social lives.
“Oh,” she said, with obvious disappointment in her voice. “I’m sorry, Miss Cradden, but I need to keep the line clear. I’m expecting a very important call.”
“I’ll keep this brief then,” I assured her, and ad-libbed: “I’m just calling to set up a demonstration appointment, in which I will actually grill you up a couple of hamburgers so you can taste the quality of home-grilled goodness yourself. What day is good for you?”
It was a deft maneuver, some of my best work, but at the same time I was kicking myself, because I had missed the chance to ask, casually, what kind of important call she was waiting for. The life I had sketched out for her didn’t include many important calls, unless her water heater sprung a leak or something.
But then she laid the proverbial golden squirrel in my lap.
“Well, this afternoon isn’t good, because I’m waiting for a social worker to come by. But they might come any afternoon this week. Could you come on a Saturday by any chance?”
An embarrassment of riches.
“A social work-er?” I asked, my usually silver tongue stumbling.
“Oh, I hope you don’t think I’m a child abuser or anything like that,” she laughed. As if we agreed to sell barbecue grills to only America’s finest families. “We’re planning on adopting a baby from Guatemala, and they have to make a home visit to make sure we’d be good parents.”
“Of course, a barbecue is one of those touches that makes any home seem welcoming,” I said, hopping up and down on the linoleum. I hadn’t felt so blessed since Warren Cordbank asked me to prom at Sacramento High, even though my mom didn’t let me go because all the dresses they were wearing that year were too skimpy.
“Gosh, I didn’t think of that,” Helena said. This woman so needed an influence like me in her life. “You think you could come by today?”
Thank god DataService Inc. had sent me my own deluxe model grill including the bonus utensils as an award for making the top 20% of the sales force last year. We’d never used it, since we usually stick to microwaved TV dinners or our Sunday pot roast. I dug into my jewelry box for $20 to take a taxi to San Mateo and back, and within two hours, I was ringing Helena’s bell. It was one of those chimes that goes “bum, bum, bum, bum, bung, bung, bung, bung.” It suited her, I thought: It showed how her yearning for the sublime battled her tragically common taste.
She smiled at me through the window on her white front door and opened it.
Of course I had seen pictures of her by then, but she had gone slightly downhill. She had wrinkles in her forehead, and her chin – which had always been weak – seemed half caved in. Her neck was fat. But her shoulder length, dyed-blonde hair was as bouncy as the Breck girl’s.
"Are you the social worker?" she asked.
I raised an eyebrow and looked at the grill standing next to me. Stay with me, Helena, I said in my mind.
She opened the door smoothly toward me, and I brushed Helena's cotton covered arm as I entered her home, the living room I had stood so near on several afternoons and late nights but never penetrated. I shivered slightly, and Helena looked at me, perhaps sensing that I was more excited than the occasion strictly called for.
I saw the fondue video protruding wantonly an inch from the VCR, and I realized that the collections of facts Superglued to my kitchen wall left a lot of details unpainted. I was enthralled.
Helena walked me through the kitchen – I would have guessed linoleum flooring, but it was real ceramic tile with glass-fronted cupboards – and into the back yard, where I stood face to face with the fish pond Joe had mentioned to me months before. Two dragonflies flirted above the pond’s fuzzy green surface. I had tried to see it when I stopped by her house before, but the white, peeling wooden fence around the yard was too high.
I set the grill up on the grass, where it stood somewhat unevenly, and filled it with charcoal.
Fortunately, Helena wasn’t very interested in the grill’s automatic air uptake system. While I fried up the two hamburger patties I’d brought, still in their styrofoam and plastic wrapping from Safeway, it was easy to get Helena talking about more important things.
“So this Frank, what’s he like,” I asked, and then bit my tongue. Of course, she had never mentioned her boyfriend to me.
“Frank Jr.? He’s so cute,” she said, grinning, and pulled up a lawn chair to watch me work. “Of course we’ve only seen his picture so far but he’s got these huge brown eyes that just seem to say, ‘Are you my mommy?’”
Then a look of suspicion crossed her face, and I though of dropping the lighter fluid and running. She was onto me.
“You are the social worker, aren’t you? Gosh, how sneaky, you wanted to catch me off guard, huh? Well, I’m not worried, I’m gonna pass this home inspection thing. I been cleaning all morning.”
I laughed.
“Honestly, Miss Mrotkus,” I said, trying to act natural. “Since when do social workers know how to grill such lean, juicy burgers?” Actually, I was just getting ready to place the raw meat on the coals, so it wasn’t as cool a deflection as I’d hoped, but it seemed to work on her.
She laughed.
“Gosh, I’m so nervous. I’m sorry.” Then she started pouring it all out.
"Me and my boyfriend Frank just want to start fresh, raise a family, you know what I mean, Miss Cradden?" she opened the Diet Pepsi she’d carried out from the kitchen and lit a Kool Menthol.
“Sure, I understand. And please, call me Inez,” I said, fanning the coals and closing the lid to the grill. She jumped up and got me a Diet Pepsi too (Although I usually drink the sugared kind, I knew she didn’t have any so I didn’t complain.).
“You can’t have children of your own?” I asked.
“Yeah, I had to get a hysterectomy after I got cervical cancer six years ago. Did you know you can catch cancer from having sex?" She laughed as though she had just told a charming little vignette. “Cigarette?” she asked, and I politely declined. I could see what years of smoking had done to her skin. I wondered if I could get her to quit.
“And your boyfriend, he’s pretty anxious to be a father?” I asked, and flipped the burgers.
“I don’t think he really minds,” she said. “You wanna see Frank Jr.’s picture?”
She led me inside, and as I looked at the photo of a wide-awake infant, propped up in some kind of straw basket, I told her that “He doesn’t mind” was perhaps not the best answer should the social worker ask the same question I had just asked.
We ate the burgers I made with forks off plates (I had forgotten buns). They were ok, a little charred, but not bad considering that for all my intimacy with the benefits of this particular grill, I had never used one before.
I gave her some more common sense tips on what to tell the social worker. This is territory I know pretty well, since social workers visited my own home several times when I was growing up. It’s pretty easy to get them to go away without making any changes in your life if you give them the right answers, my mother quickly learned, and she trained me to give them.
“Don’t tell them you’ve been cleaning all morning,” I told her. “In fact, apologize for the mess, so they’ll think your home is usually even cleaner. And of course, you’ll need Frank to actually be here when they come."
“Oh yeah?” she asked. I was so glad I had come. Helena needed me more than I had ever realized.
When the shadow of her house made it too chilly to sit in the yard, we moved to her living room and sat in the deep, flower print couch with wooden arms. I thought of Joe’s grandmother, and asked casually if she rented this house.
“No,” she said. “My husband inherited it from his grandma. I know, this furniture’s kinda, like, old lady, huh?”
A cuckoo clock over the television chimed 7, and I realized that hours of barbecue selling time had slipped away from me. I was going to have to hustle home if I expected to sell one tonight at all.
I excused myself, took the check she had written for the barbecue grill (I gave it to her at a 10% discount, since it was technically second-hand), and gave her the number of the pager I had rented to take callbacks from state agencies. I urged her to page me if she thought of any other questions.
The bus passed by just as I walked toward the stop, and I had to wait another half hour for the next one. By the time I got home, I only had an hour to make calls. I didn't sell a grill that night, and Macky looked at me smugly as he took over the headset.
"What?" I asked, trying to cloak myself in the passion of discovery I'd felt earlier that evening.
"The first sign that you have a problem is when your habit starts to interfere with your work," he said. Then his face changed to a mask of coquettish flirtation. "Hi, Mister, my name's Danny, what's yours?" he asked into the headset.
The next day Helena paged me and I called back, my heart thundering in my ears. She wanted to know if I thought Frank should actually move in with her before the social worker’s visit. Without meeting him, I had already taken a dislike for Frank, and I didn’t want him to move in. But I had to be honest, so I told her, yes, that would definitely help.
Two days later, she paged again to tell me that the social worker still hadn’t showed up for the visit. She wondered if she should call Social Services to remind them that she was waiting.
The next time she paged, on Monday, I felt a little crowded, nagged.
"She's stalking me," I told Macky as I dialed her number. He snorted.
But this time, she had news, and that rekindled my interest. The social worker had visited that morning.
"Oh, Inez, it was terrible. It was like I was under investigation. They looked in my closets, and half the stuff in there belongs to Joe’s dead grandma, and they were like, what are all these syringes for, and I was like, my estranged husband’s dead grandma had diabetes, and they wrote that down. They said it was bad that I'm separated but not divorced," she sighed, and I almost sighed with her. All the information I had so painstakingly sleuthed out, I realized, she would have told me if I had just rang her doorbell sooner and caught her home.
Next time I want to find out everything there is to know about a stranger, I thought, I’ll pose as a social worker.
I began to think of Helena in the evening after I had finished work, while Macky made his calls. In our comparitively pastoral pre-Helena life, I had usually cleaned our studio during those hours, thinking of strategies for outwitting Macky in Scrabble. But with Helena in my life, Macky seemed too, well, small, weighing 120 pounds as he did. The cuffs at the bottoms of his jeans had seemed adorably 6th-grade for years but now they made him seem freakish to me, a shrunken man sitting in normal peoples' furniture and trying to pass as one of us. Helena, on the other hand, was a head taller than me, and plump.
The next afternoon I called Helena without being paged.
"I was meaning to page you," she said, sounding sad.
"Could I come over again?" I asked, and an hour later we were sitting in swivel stools at her breakfast bar, drinking Diet Pepsi. It was a thrill to see those cans I'd seen tallied up on our Safeway Club Card. She never waited until cases were on sale. She bought a 12 pack each week.
Helena had failed her home inspection. Frank Jr. would not be leaving Guatemala for San Mateo, at least not to live with her.
She folded her hands over the top of her can and rested her chin on it. I put my hand on her head, like I was petting a dog, and she seemed comforted by that, although I have never been good at conveying sisterly affection. I am an only child.
I told Macky about it the next morning as we lay in bed, our shins touching under the sheet. Even though he was purportedly out of the Helena thing, he had some advice. I should offer to have a baby for her. I had often told him I wanted a baby, and he had always shied away from the responsibility of becoming a father with lame excuses like, where would we fit a crib in this 14-by-14 foot apartment?
At first I thought his suggestion was going too far. It was just like him to want to meddle with what was already perfect. He couldn't just buy a picnic table and set it out on the patio, like a normal person would. He had to improve upon it, Superglue a lazy Susan to its center, weight its hollow legs with gravel.
But later I started thinking that improving upon Helena would benefit me. It would let me into her life in a way I'd been unable to attain so far.
Before I offered to have a baby for her, I wanted to meet Frank, to make sure he’d be a fit father. I told Helena to arrange it – these days she responded to my suggestions pretty well. I told her we should all go to the San Francisco Zoo, where I knew there would be tons of children. Then I could observe Frank’s rapport with them.
He met us at the zoo entrance. He had already bought tickets, a good sign, I thought. He had watery blue eyes and he had done an uneven job shaving himself. A thin yellow mustache sat above his lip.
He didn’t seem to notice much unless things were pointed out to him.
“Oh, look at that cute little Chinese boy tapping on the glass,” I said in the reptile house, and he obediently gave the child a once-over.
He seemed nice enough, smiled when I smiled, but there wasn’t much personality to him, and even less brains. Still, I felt OK with him parenting a child with Helena. To be honest, I didn’t mind him being in Helena’s life because he was obviously lousy competition for her time and attention. Helena enjoyed talking with me much more; we spoke on the phone every day at this point. She even taught me to play bridge, a skill I expect to help me pass the days should I in fact go to prison.
Helena asked about my home once or twice, and I told her I lived alone in a residence hotel in South San Francisco. It was one of my poorer lies, since I'm not sure South San Francisco, or “The Industrial City,” as it is nicknamed, has such establishments. But neither Helena nor Frank are as smart as me, so it seemed to work.
The idea of surrogate motherhood came up as if accidentally one night at a bridge game between Frank, myself, Helena and Leonard, a friend from Frank’s Bridge for Recovering Alcoholics Club. I mentioned that I had seen a 20/20 special about women who carried babies for other women.
“You know that broad in the club, Mary? She had her friend do that,” Leonard volunteered. “She could have kids and everything, but she didn’t want to pass on the alcoholic gene. Then her friend got knocked up by accident, so Mary offered to take the kid of her hands.”
Frank listened dutifully as if Leonard were delivering the latest news from the Gaza Strip, something that had nothing to do with him. But I saw Helena thinking hard.
“That’s not usually the way it works,” she said. “I was reading up on it. You can get your own fertilized egg implanted in someone else’s womb.”
I stared at her, smiling. I had had no idea that my subtle mentions of surrogate motherhood had already started working on her. But now it was clear we were on the same wavelength.
I made sure the subject of children kept coming up, just to keep it fresh in her mind. Perhaps I was cruel. Instead of letting her desire for a kid dry up and blow away -- she sometimes went a week or two without mentioning it -- I'd invite her places I knew we'd see children, like afternoon showings of Disney movies. I got Frank to treat the three of us to a Giants game at Candlestick Park on family day, when kids under 12 got in free. I clipped an article from Ladies' Home Journal about miraculous late life pregnancies and post-vasectomy babies.
“I’m getting anxious to get started, but she hasn’t asked me,” I told Macky in bed the afternoon after the baseball game. At the time, I thought Macky was being unusually gracious not to complain about me going to all this fun stuff without him. Usually he wants a piece of everything I do. I should have known better.
"Just come right out and volunteer," Macky told me, and I sighed.
"I'm too retiring," I told him, and he laughed.
Two days later, she popped the question.
We sat there on the bench, looking at the pond. It was August, and the water was starting to stink. She proposed the plan: She would pay me $10,000 (a paltry sum compared to most, according to my research, but I kept quiet). I would have sex with Frank and conceive a child, which I would hand over to her.
I told her I’d be happy to take on this self-sacrificing deed; anything to help her and Frank fulfill their dream. But I was annoyed; apparently Frank’s friend Leonard’s story had confused her.
“But what about having your egg implanted in my womb?” I asked.
“It seems so expensive,” she said. “I never told you this, but I have kind of a lot of debts.”
As if I didn’t know.
“Couldn’t Frank help pay for it?” I asked. Didn’t he get a settlement for that accident he had in the Marines?
Frank had gone to the Persian Gulf with the Marines, where another soldier had, as a joke, blown up a camel that was standing two yards away from Frank. The blast had made Frank mostly deaf in one ear, and he had gotten an honorable discharge and a financial settlement for it.
“Huh,” Helena said. Poor dear, she didn’t have the head for planning that I do.
"Do I still have eggs?" She asked. “I had a hysterectomy." I savored the irony that she turned to me for this intimate information. She asked the right person: I was the world’s foremost expert on Helena Mrotkus.
"Yes,” I told her, drawing on the medical research I’d done at the college library. “You have immature eggs sitting in your ovaries, waiting for release, but they have nowhere to go. A doctor can stimulate one of those eggs to maturity, remove it, artificially inseminate it, then implant it in my womb.”
We saw a doctor. I sat in the examining room with her. I read her file when the doctor was out of the room. The hysterectomy. And oh, an allergy to penicillin, good heavens, I'd never have guessed. The eczema I knew about.
The doctor saw no problem with the plan I’d mapped out. I had a physical exam, which checked out fine, and made appointments for the removal of several eggs from Helena. That went fine, and soon the clinic had several little proto-Frank Juniors swimming around in vitro, which, I explained magnamiously to the parents-to-be, means in glass. It was my turn to go under the knife.
The night before the implantation day, Macky wanted to do it with me so they would accidentally get our baby instead of theirs.
"It would be like our mole on the inside, forever," he said, grinning. He was joking, although it wasn’t a half-bad suggestion. Still, I wanted her baby in me.
I almost peed my pants when Macky surprised me by showing up at the doctor’s office in San Jose the day of the procedure. I had not told him the doctor's name or the name of the medical park. I literally wouldn't have been surprised if I had peed my pants, because I'd been instructed to show up with a full bladder to aid the ultrasound imaging involved in the procedure, and then we had to sit in the waiting room for about 15 minutes before we went in.
Macky just walked in with his five-foot swagger, grinned at me and then hugged Helena. I looked at him thunderstruck. Words wouldn't come. What the hell was he doing? Why did Helena seem to know him?
The doctor called my name and I stood up.
"Oh, so this is Inez," he said warmly, as if just noticing me.
"Yes, she's our knight in shining armor," Helena said, all smiles, and followed me toward the receptionist, who was holding the door open.
Macky, I realized, had been playing double agent. For who knows how long, he’d been hanging out with Helena too, pretending he didn’t know me. I wanted to kill him. I had looked forward to this day for weeks, and now it was ruined.
"I'm sorry," the receptionist said to Macky, "but only the parents and the surrogate will be able to come in."
"Yeah, see you at home, Macky," I said, glaring at him, and escaped into the office. I glanced back through the receptionist's window and saw that his face had colored, his chicken pox scars standing out in white against pink skin. His little hands were balled into fists.
Helena looked at me, perplexed, as we stood behind a fuzzy beige screen and I removed my clothes.
"You know Macky?" she asked.
I guess Macky expected me to go along with him, pretend I didn’t know him. Fuck that, I thought.
"He's my boyfriend," I said casually. "He never mentioned me?" I put on the white, backless paper gown they'd given me.
Helena looked confused but we didn't have time to talk anymore. The doctor came in, a plump woman with short blond hair, and took my temperature, my pulse, and made me put my feet in the stirrups. As it turned out, there was no “going under the knife” involved. The procedure was, as advertised, only mildly uncomfortable, as if I was receiving a pap smear or pulling out a few eyelashes.
During the procedure the doctor and I focused all of our attention on the ultrasound machine that displayed my vagina, cervix and uterus in sepia tones. It was pleasantly intimate. Since I don't have health insurance, I considered asking her to give me a once over while I was here and naked inside and out. But before I knew it, she was patting my knee in a motherly way and telling me I could hop down and empty my bladder.
On the way out to the hallway bathroom I saw Frank leaning against the wall. I realized I had been alone with the doctor in the examination room.
I left the bathroom door cracked and asked, as I peed copiously, "Where's Helena?" My bare feet were cold on the tile.
"She left," Frank said. "I don't really get it. Maybe she's having second thoughts about this whole thing." Suddenly I remembered Macky's jack-in-the-box appearance at the office, his goading grin. He couldn't bear to think that I, too, had intellectual capabilities, had built this empire of knowledge about a person and could reign over it like a duchess. He had to step in and show that he was the smart one, not me.
I stepped back into the hall and looked at Frank, his wispy yellow mustache, his spacey blue eyes. He must not have picked up on the little scene between Macky and me. He really didn't seem to understand why Helena left. I put my hand on my stomach, and imagined all three spawn of Mister Nothing nestled into the thick red carpeting of my womb. I wondered how many of them would stay put.
Strangely, I didn’t wonder too much about where Helena had gone now. All the curiosity felt washed out of me, as if I’d had a strong mental enema. It must be the embryos, I thought. It felt like someone had added the last piece to me at last.
I didn't even wonder, too much, whether Macky and Helena had been sleeping together. I doubted it. Macky’s not the most passionate of men, although he had been a real pal to me in the five years we’d lived together.
But now, if Helena's baby was really inside me, I told myself, I could give a fuck about Macky. Stupid little Canadian.
"It worked, didn't it?" I asked Frank. He looked at me blankly. "I'm pregnant now?" I asked. I looked around the recovery room, noticing that everything looked different through the eyes of a pregnant woman.
"Uh, I dunno, I guess we're supposed to ask the doctor," he said It was painfully obvious that Helena had talked him into this thing. And I guessed I talked Helena into it.
The doctor had already zipped off, probably to wend a flexible tube of animalcules into someone elses' womb. A nurse gave me a ton of shots and told me to rest for two days, to call if I had any bleeding, and to come back in two weeks for a pregnancy test and an ultrasound.
By the time the pregnancy was medically confirmed, I was in jail and in the newspapers. The fact that I was pregnant was part of the articles. That embarrassed me, because I had always been such a private person. I refused to speak with reporters. I refused to speak with my mother, who called, confused, as soon as she heard about it on the television news.
Macky was in our apartment when Frank dropped me off there, but he left the next day, while I lay in bed resting, and returned an hour later, with Helena. Helena in our studio apartment! I watched from bed, feeling simultaneously powerless and regal, like the queen of an ant colony, as he showed her the kitchenette wall plastered with the evidence of her life, the cupboards covered with credit card bills and letters from creditors, the pile of unopened mail I'd let slide lately. She looked at me with shock and confusion as I lay, propped up on pillows, and tried to think of something to say. Seeing her reaction was certainly interesting; I'd wondered over the last few months what she would say if she knew. The answer, it turns out, was that she would say nothing.
Helena called the police from our phone, but she's not very articulate, so it took her awhile to get the point across that a crime had been committed, albeit a drawn-out and ambiguous one. When police arrived the next evening, they brought postal inspectors, who asked me about a thousand questions. Then the police clicked handcuffs onto my wrists, because I was under arrest for mail fraud. Helena wanted to press charges on me for becoming impregnated with her child under false pretenses, but the cops said they didn’t think there was a statute for that one. And anyway, no one knew yet if I was actually pregnant.
On our last night together, before the police took me away the next day, Macky made his sex calls and bustled about the apartment as if it were a normal night. He occasionally tossed a clever comment my way, or told me about something he'd heard on the radio recently. At 4:15 am, when the patio curtains took on the gray glow that announced the end of the night, I asked him what the hell he'd been doing with Helena.
"Lots of things," he said, smiling. "Giving her advice. Taking her places on my motorcycle when I knew you were going over there. I met her about a month before you ever laid eyes on her," he said, and his smile broadened. “I drove by while she washing her car one Sunday, and I offered her a ride. She took it.”
"But why?" I asked. He snorted.
"Why did you make friends with her? Why do you want to have her kid? Actually, I have a legitimate reason for my interest, unlike you. I'm researching a screenplay."
“I was helping her!” I said. “I think we should all do some volunteer work, it would make this world a better place.”
He guffawed.
"You should thank me. Who do you think told her she should get a surrogate? You think she thought of that herself? Helena's not exactly the sharpest crayon in the box, Inez, in case you haven't noticed. She needs a little prompting here, a gentle suggestion there. For example, I may suggest she sue you and try to stop you from carrying through with this supposed pregnancy," he stopped and rolled back on his heels, enjoying the effect on me.
Acting on Macky’s advice, she tried that. Fortunately, her lawyer told her there’s no legal precedent for forcing someone else to get an abortion. But throughout my criminal trial, Macky has been sitting at the table with Helena and her lawyer. She’s in Macky's little pocket, and it’s pathetic. The poor woman.
I, on the other hand, sit at my table with my court appointed lawyer, wearing street clothes in demure colors and an unassailable look on my face. Of course, I was released on a bail bond. I’m staying, ironically, in a residence hotel in South San Francisco, from which I still make my sales calls after court adjourns each day.
Yesterday, Macky testified about what a good friend he had been to Helena throughout this thing, and how he had had no idea that I had been illegally receiving her mail and prying into her personal records. His short legs dangled like a Muppet’s from the high wooden witness’s chair. From time to time, my hand strayed to my abdomen to feel how it had hardened into a protective wall. Macky still thought he could come out a winner in this thing. As if he could get pregnant, and have a core of Helena's essence radiating from inside him like a cesium chip. As if he would ever have the liberty to consider, like I am right now, whether to change his mind when the time comes and keep that squalling package of genetic information for himself.