“The Cat Sitter” by Genevieve Plunkett
The couple showed up behind my apartment building on the hottest day of summer. I hadn’t heard their truck drive onto the lawn, hadn’t seen the blue and red of their tent going up outside my first-floor window. I never felt a sense of intrusion combing the back of my neck.
They were just there, and they seemed perfectly unembarrassed and casual, like people sitting around a yard sale with Diet Cokes. Squatters was the first word that came to mind but, as unsettling as they would become, the word squatter never held any bitterness for me. In fact, I appreciated the drama that it implied.
My brunch friends, I knew, would be appalled. They never truly believed me when I said I was broke, even though they’d all, at some point, hired me to pet-sit, and saw firsthand how much I made per gig. They thought that I declined dinners out and wore their hand-me-downs because I was cheap, or worse: self-pitying. But if I told them that there were squatters in my yard, that the wife’s stretched-out bras were hanging on a line from the truck’s side-view mirror, that the husband had laid out a set of hand tools and three repotted begonia cuttings on the sidewalk with a SALE sign, then my brunch girlies might finally understand that my situation was different than theirs. Not that I was looking for sympathy from a bunch of Disney-obsessed adults on their third MLM. But a little validation can go a long way.
There was one problem: this month’s gossip at the brunch table was absurd to such an unusual degree that it would have absolutely overshadowed my squatter situation. I decided that I would have to wait to share the news, so that we could all properly revel in the shock value of each separate incident. It was a gift, really—this abundance of drama—because my brunch ladies didn’t have a lot of excitement in their lives, besides weaponized-incompetent husbands and labradoodles that sometimes faced bowel obstructions.
Chelsea had brought the gossip to the table. She was the wrong person for it but she gave it her best shot, including halting innuendos and an endearing hand gesture that would have been effective if she had fully committed to it. Thankfully, Robyn jumped in with her own, more forceful hand gesture, and made sure that none of the information was lost on us.
“What Chelsea is trying to say is that Mr. Lloyd was arrested last week for vigorously masturbating in public.”
There were grimaces.
“How public?” Cilla wanted to know. She was our helicopter mom, her mind a ready lather for this kind of stuff. She could probably spot a pedophile from a mile away and had one of those spring-loaded jaws that I could see biting off a pervy wiener. She’d once hired me to feed her kids’ guinea pigs while she and the family were out of town, and she had texted me the minute I walked through the door. Hi Becky! Thanks again for feeding us! Love, Squeakers and Cookie Dough. I couldn’t decide whether I was more creeped out by the rodent impersonation, or the fact that she’d been watching me.
Chelsea reclaimed her story: “Well, no one actually saw it, except for the one person who happened to be driving by when it happened.”
Elmer Lloyd was a man that we all knew for different reasons, although to me and Cilla, he’d always be our dorky JV field hockey coach from ninth grade. Plastic whistle around his neck. Socks pulled up high. Sunblock never quite rubbed in. Chelsea knew him from the library, where he had volunteered for a spat, and where she used to work part-time before the birth of her second child. Robyn sat on the school board with Mrs. Lloyd, and knew the couple through church.
Recently, I had done some cat sitting for the Lloyds. I was just at his house! I almost said to the group, wanting to ride the wave of notoriety. But there was really nothing more to it, nothing about the house that had indicated or forewarned of Mr. Lloyd’s level of perversion. Inside, it was heavily curtained with low ceilings and high pile carpeting. I felt sedated whenever I was there, like a child under a mother’s skirt.
It had been Mr. Lloyd who showed me the correct way of mixing Fancy Feast into dry kibble, and how to mold a scrap of foil over the open can to refrigerate the leftovers. The water bowl was not a bowl at all, but a pint glass filled to the brim. It was how the cat “liked things done.” These small acts of his felt confessional to me. Mr. Lloyd, once an impenetrable stereotype of a hockey coach, was now, in his home, a softened old man, yielding to the demands of a cat named Prune. It embarrassed me, and not for what it was (devoted pet ownership), but for what it wasn’t: a choice to share. Mr. Lloyd had no choice but to include me in these things, because otherwise he could not go on vacation with his wife.
I followed him to the bathroom, where they kept the litter box, and he showed me, with some meekness, how he scooped the cat poop directly into the toilet. He looked up at me, dirty scooper in one hand, the other grasping the toilet lid.
“I close it before flushing,” he whispered conspiratorially, and I felt an understanding pass between us, as if we both knew that there was no way of dealing with cat feces that wasn’t somehow problematic or embarrassing. I wanted to say to him: Don’t worry, I’m a full-time cat sitter. I see this all the time. I wanted to comfort him in this matter, but didn’t dare, because whatever vulnerability I was picking up on didn’t have a name. It was probably all in my head.
“Maybe there was some misunderstanding,” Cilla said, cooling her jets now that no children had been present. “Maybe he was sleepwalking and thought he was in the bathroom.”
“He was completely naked,” Robyn said. “And it was three o’clock in the afternoon.”
I imagined Mr. Lloyd standing on the side of the road, his sixty-five-year-old body caught between decline and stubborn virility, his face turned upward into the sun. I had so many questions. Like: had Mr. Lloyd kept his eyes open, or were they closed? And, when Robyn had said “vigorously masturbating,” did she know that for a fact? Was vigorous in the police report? And if so, who was to judge when uninspired masturbation turned vigorous? But I didn’t ask, because I did not know how to mask my sudden curiosity, to temper my voice so that it matched the others’. They sounded horrified, as if discussing a spontaneous combustion, and not just a guy with his hand around his dick.
There was talk around my building about who the squatters might be. Who they “belonged to,” was how most of us were framing it, as in, which resident’s weird extended family had overflowed so unbecomingly onto the lawn?
Marion and I talked about it by the mailboxes, choosing our words carefully, calling the squatters “guests” or “the situation,” all the while raising our eyebrows to convey our intolerance, because the fact that we had a shared skepticism and impatience for the subdivided Victorian’s many quirks meant that we were on the same team. Marion didn’t need to know that I was also on the same team as Patty and Fronia, and that I sometimes joined Vincent behind the maintenance shed for a cigarette, even though he had pink mouth spittle and kept his TV on too loud. Keeping up with the neighbors, and making sure that everyone knew that I was not in any way responsible for our new visitors, seemed to take precedence over actually figuring out who these people were.
It was only after I walked in on the husband squatter in the laundry room that I realized how young he was. Younger than me. He had been waist-deep in the dryer and shot upright when he heard the door open, his body language not so much guilty as nervous, like a servant. Coy hands sliding into his jean pockets. A polite nod. Still, my first thought was that he had snuck into the laundry room to root through the clothes and steal my dirty underwear. This was a ridiculous and purely intrusive notion because my dirty underwear wasn’t in the dryer, it was in the basket in my hands.
“Hi,” he said to me. “That fro-yo lady wanted me to check out the sounds in the dryer.”
“You mean Fronia?” I said, bewildered. I was still thinking about the underwear scenario, wondering why I felt a little disappointed that it wasn’t real.
“That swamp woman, yeah,” he said, seriously.
I laughed in sheer surprise; at his ease and audacity, and at the accuracy of his depiction of Fronia. She wore long black skirts with about twenty hand-sewn pockets on the outside, and I’d once seen her smoking a Gandalf pipe. She was incredibly bog witch.
I said, “It’s always sounded like that—’like there are bones inside.’” A direct Fronia quote. At this, the husband squatter’s eyes widened in a show of pretend fear that seemed for my sake entirely. We stood for a moment in silence. I was overcome with the uneasiness of having no idea what was happening, as well as the realization that I would probably ask everyone except the guy in front of me, who had the answers.
“That’s kind of a joke,” I said, and then turned to dump my clothes into the washing machine, to escape the awkwardness that I wasn’t even responsible for. As I was doing this, I had an impulse, one that I’ve never had before. I reached into the now-full washer and plucked out the black cotton thong that I’d worn yesterday in the eighty-five degree heat—and balled it into my pocket.
“Nice to meet you,” I said to the husband squatter, like he hadn’t just watched me do the thing with the underwear. Like he wasn’t a stranger living outside my window, which could have been kindness or avoidance on my part. Honestly, I’ve never known the difference.
Saturday was beer night, so I drove to the bar to meet my boyfriend Daryl. I enjoyed beer night, because it was predictable; the bar we frequented attracted people that we knew, but didn’t particularly like, and somehow this dynamic was extremely relaxing.
Not tonight. I could already feel that tonight would be different. I had the sweaty underwear in my hand, clutched against the steering wheel, my foot heavy on the pedal. I was in a rage, an anticipatory rage, even though Daryl and I weren’t currently fighting.
We’d been together for two years. I was the only brunch girlie who wasn’t married or mid-divorce. The only one who had always lived alone. My excuse was that neither Daryl nor I were in a position to break our leases, but the truth was that my lease was up in September and I had already made up my mind to cruise aimlessly through, committing to another year of single-income solitude. The arrival of the squatters had done nothing to alter this plan, which probably meant that I really didn’t want to move in with Daryl.
Daryl was at our usual table, looking at his phone, which was good because I was so wound up, I was almost smiling—the twitchy, involuntary smile of a woman who was about to cause a scene and could not help it. I put the underwear on the table next to his beer and watched his eyes slide away from the screen. They narrowed in mild confusion then flicked back so he could swipe up from whatever he was doing. It was most likely that exasperating, yet stubbornly wholesome, text thread with his buddies in which they expressed all their feelings through memes about Taco Bell diarrhea, or small dignified outbursts of Love you, man.
“Hey, babe,” he said, and brushed his hand against my hip, looking at me expectantly. What I wanted to do was sit across from him and have a normal conversation that did not reveal what I was feeling. I wanted to listen to him talk about the weekend’s wiffle ball tournament, or that one client who never tipped. Daryl’s side hustles were arguably more respectable than mine. He was a fly fishing guide who made up the difference repairing houses and doing minor construction projects. Last year, Chelsea and her husband had hired him to fix a rotting porch step. Everyone loved Daryl. But I couldn’t stomach the small talk tonight. It seemed that our validity as a couple was suddenly and inexplicably on trial. I sat.
“I brought you a pair of my sweaty underwear,” I said. I could tell that he could tell that I was acting differently, and I was not going to allow him any time to raise his guard. “Do you want to sniff them?”
“What, here?” He did that head in a spiderweb shake, hoping to make light of whatever this was going to be. He didn’t touch the underwear.
“I asked if you wanted to sniff them,” I said. “Like, if I left them with you, would you go home and—I dunno—rub your nose in them?” I made a gesture with my hand against my face, like a rooting pig. I was being unhinged without warning. Had this question been inside me all along, like a spitball on the ceiling waiting to fall?
Daryl made an “eh” face. “It’s not my particular fetish,” he said, and slid the underwear back toward me. I was momentarily horrified to see that they left a slug trail of moisture, but it turned out to be the condensation from Daryl’s pint glass. I grabbed them.
“Your fetish?” My voice was too loud. “That’s not what I was asking.”
“What then? Wait—are you actually mad about this?” He picked up his phone, thumbed it three times and then put it face down, like he couldn’t even focus on the fight that I was trying to have. People liked Daryl because he was level-headed, reliable—the kind of guy you’d pay to go fishing with—but sometimes it drove me insane. I left the bar burning.
It was dusk when I got home. I could see a figure in the tent, shifting around its light source. I stood on the lawn watching, wondering if the couple’s houselessness meant that they were any less deserving of privacy. Of course it didn’t, but that didn’t make it easier to look away. The shadow inside the tent dilated and shrunk, like a moth in a paper lamp. There were footsteps behind me—not really footsteps, but rather the sense of weight compressing the ground—and I turned and saw the squatter husband coming toward me from the direction of the building. He pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and put it between his lips. Your wife is living in a tent, I thought, and you are spending money on cigarettes? But he might have bummed it off Vincent, and if so, he was no worse than I was. I wondered if he cared that I had been so obviously spying on his wife’s tent shadow.
“You were gone a while, so I put your clothes in the dryer for you,” he said. I did not like his air of ingratiating deference. It seemed exhausting, like trying to keep up a fake accent would be exhausting. He cupped his lighter and I watched his eyes linger on my left hand, tight around the dirty thong.
“What you got there?” he asked, which no one would ever ask, except for maybe someone like him. In my mind, I handed him the warm bunch of fabric, pressed it into his palm and asked, “Would you know what to do with these?”
Instead I said: “Just trash from my car.”
I woke up the next morning sweltering under my top sheet, dreams dissolving. No memory of them, except for a kind of mental brine. I—and the brine—needed coffee. Daryl had beaten me to an apology but, even over text message, I could sense his bewilderment.
I’m sorry if I didn’t handle that right. Let me know yr ok
Daryl wasn’t terrible, he was just stunted, lacking a certain dank bottom floor to his imagination. He wouldn’t do the weird things, would never surprise me with whims, animalistic or otherwise.
No I’m sorry, I texted back with a single tear emoji. Let me make it up to you. I didn’t hint at how I would make it up, which might have been a little underhanded of me; let his interpretation speak for itself.
I put the water on for coffee and went to the window to look for signs of life. My impulse to check on the squatters’ camp was like the desire to inspect an ant farm: I didn’t know what I wanted to see, except for the satisfaction of seeing that something—anything—had continued through the night. I got more than that: the husband was asleep just beyond my first-story window, starfished on the lawn, like a child who had fallen out of bed without waking. Could he have spent the whole night like that? Practically next to me? My kettle began to whistle and I hurried to remove it from the burner, afraid of disturbing the sleeping husband, as if I were the intruder in his life and not the other way around. It was a trait of mine, to give my space away at the slightest discomfort, ready to deny my own basic needs before they were even under review.
When I went back to the window later, the squatter husband was gone. There was no indent from his sleeping body. The tent was also empty (I could just tell) and the truck was missing. Maybe they had gone to the rec center for a shower, or maybe the library was open and they were using the computers, enjoying the AC.
I wondered if I was supposed to complain to the landlady and have them kicked off the property. Marion told me that no one else dared to say anything because they were all guilty of something they didn’t want to draw attention to. Fronia had her weed plants. Jesse, in apartment five, was a hoarder, and lately he had taken to collecting rainwater in big, mosquito-breeding barrels around the building. Marion herself had already asked for two rent extensions, and she had an illicit cat. Patty was just plain volatile. That left me, and what was I hiding, besides my body apparently not making my boyfriend hungry enough? I found my phone where I’d left it on the windowsill, and unlocked it. If I was going to call the landlady, it was going to take me at least a full day to build up the nerve, a ritual of picking up my phone and putting it down again, until I annoyed myself into taking action.
I fought the urge to call Daryl, ask him something like, “If you could shrink and ride around in any part of my body, which part would you choose?” Or: “How come you wash your face immediately after it has been between my legs?” If I could grow a beard and eat pussy, I’d rub the evidence in like conditioner.
I undressed, right there in the kitchen. As an experiment, I held my hot coffee cup to my bare stomach to see if I could make myself flinch, then pushed it further in, pretending that I was branding myself. I’ve always been privately overdramatic.
In the shower, I wondered if I would break up with Daryl if he jerked off on the side of a public highway. I found that the act itself—that is, a man masturbating while standing—was appealing. It would require a certain tightening of the buttocks, a squaring of the legs. Tendons in the neck would show up unannounced. There would be an overall stance that I found wildly intriguing. However, the question was not whether I had discovered a new sick fantasy. The question was, would I be pissed?
Yes.
“But why would I be pissed?” I asked the shower curtain earwig. It didn’t know, so I explained to it that I would be pissed because Daryl had never stood in front of me, naked and uninhibited, with various tendons flexing.
I was about to exit the shower. The curtain was open, the water still running. I caught my reflection in the patch of the mirror where the fog never sticks, the swift cutout of my torso dancing in and out of frame as I tried to examine it.
“What’s the highway got that I don’t got?” I asked the mirror. As if in answer, the mirror began to shake. My bathroom shared a wall with the laundry room, which had once been an elegant foyer with a black and white tile floor, and was now grimy with lint. Whenever someone used the coin-operated dryer, the force of it rattled the light fixtures above my bathroom sink so badly their swan necks swung upside down. I had to tighten the screws every few weeks. The laundry room’s great cherrywood door opened to an ornate front porch, which would have been a lovely addition to our lives if it hadn’t been crowded railing-to-railing with yard equipment and the overflow of Jesse’s hoard. If I didn’t keep my bathroom window covered, I’d be staring at a nest of rusted mattress springs and splintered scrap wood every time I sat on the toilet. In theory, if I didn’t keep the window covered, anyone on the porch who wanted to brave the fortress of junk could peer directly into my life.
I turned off the shower and stepped out, then went naked to the window. I brushed aside the curtain. With my finger, I made a vertical line down the fogged pane, then another and another, imagining that I was exposing myself to the outside world tally by tally.
It was Sunday and I had my shopping to do. I was on a store-brand fig newton kick and I needed half-and-half because I had stopped trusting the carton I already had. This was another reason why I couldn’t move in with Daryl: I lived like a child. I opened cereal boxes from the bottom. I owned one pan. My response to finding mouse turds in a bottom cabinet was to duct tape it shut.
I was in the breakfast aisle looking at the wall of cereals and feeling depressed (because honestly, who asked for any of this?), when I was struck by an unexpected wave of guilt. I thought, there are real people living outside my apartment, and here I am bitterly disappointed by Fruity Pebbles. I wondered if I should buy the squatters food or toiletries and, if so, would it be kinder to offer them something practical or something fun? Practical implied that I knew what was best for them. Fun implied that I had no clue whatsoever what it meant to be in need. I was so engrossed in this dilemma that I did not see the woman wheeling her cart toward me. It would have been fine if I’d had a half-second to compose myself, but there she was—Mrs. Lloyd herself—and I gasped.
“Oh, hi, Becky,” she said and I could see that, were it not for my look of horror, we might have politely avoided the silent exchange that was now occurring between us: she was realizing that I knew about her husband. That I had heard everything. What’s more, I felt that my position as cat sitter put me in a strangely intimate, yet detached, category, one that was possibly more humiliating for her than if I had been a close friend or a distant relative. I was a mistress of sorts. To the cat.
“How’s Prune?” I asked.
“Prune is Prune,” she said and I thought that would be it, but Mrs. Lloyd was self-possessed to a fault. “How has your summer been?” she asked me. I watched the corners of her mouth set, as if by invisible push pins. It struck me that some faces were more defined than others, by markers far more interesting than nose shape or eyebrow thickness. The thing about the squatter husband’s face was that it always looked as wiped clean as a plate. Eyes straight, jaw relaxed and earnest. He was friendly, like any new neighbor would be.
“I have people living in my yard,” I said. “Strangers.”
It was Mrs. Lloyd’s turn to look horror-struck. It made me wonder: if this was her response to my squatters, then where was she stowing her feelings about her husband’s actions? Had she, before she left that morning, asked Mr. Lloyd what brand of toothpaste he wanted from the store? Did she still fold his socks? Did the image of his flexing tendons play out in her mind?
“Oh, how sad,” she said. “Tell them to come by the church this afternoon for a hot meal.”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t as sad as it sounded. The husband squatter was young and handy. The wife took naps in the truck bed and wore her hair in pigtails. They were just a nuisance that no one knew how to deal with.
“I caught the man spying on me,” I said in a low voice. “He was peeking through my bathroom window when I was getting out of the shower.” It wasn’t true, of course, although technically it was possible, junk heap notwithstanding. For all I knew, the squatter husband had been walking across the lawn and caught me drawing my stupid fog lines, which would have been a hundred times more humiliating than if he’d just spotted me naked. Still, I don’t know why I said it, only that I wanted information from Mrs. Lloyd that I knew I would never get otherwise. And for an instant, I saw it flash across her face: disgust and a sense of inevitability, as if we should have known that this would happen, eventually. That it was the way of men. I felt sure now that she would stay with her husband forever, slowly folding his wrongdoings into herself until they became her own.
Later, I texted Robyn.
Any more info about Mr. Roadside Attraction?
I was afraid to type his name into Google, as if that would somehow expose my interest in him (maybe no one would know, but the ether would know). Asking Robyn directly seemed safer, more casual, like I was just making conversation. Plus, I knew that Google wouldn’t answer my most burning questions.
It was evening and I hadn’t told the squatters about Mrs. Lloyd’s hot meal. The husband had been picking around under the truck’s hood all afternoon, his movements like someone shifting food around with chopsticks. Was he just trying to look busy? And for whose sake? Bringing up a church dinner felt obscene to me. As if, as long as we never addressed the obvious, we could exist in a limbo of polite denial. My phone buzzed on the counter. Robyn had texted back.
What’s this about a man peeking through your window??
This was not good. I hadn’t considered the possibility that Mrs. Lloyd would talk to Robyn about me. But they were at the church dinner together and maybe the church dinner had gotten boring. Maybe Mrs. Lloyd was trying to throw the scent off her husband by spreading rumors about me. Could it be that I had underestimated her cunningness? How many people had she told?
I backed away from the phone and looked out the window, as if to make sure that the husband was still under the hood, suddenly terrified that he would find out what I had fabricated about him. I imagined Daryl catching wind of it, driving his car onto the lawn, stumbling out swinging his fists. Not that Daryl was that kind of guy, only that it felt good to catastrophize, like pouring ice water over my head. No, Daryl was more likely to interrogate me: why hadn’t I told him about it? Was my silence cowardice or proof of something more deviant. You liked it, didn’t you? the imagined Daryl sneered at me. Although this was also unlikely. So why did I feel as though I’d already been called out, persecuted, publicly shamed?
It was getting dark and the husband squatter wasn’t under the hood anymore. From my window, I could see the glow of the tent, the small licks of light reflected off the parked cars. And then I was seeing something that at first did not strike me as odd. Maybe it was the hazy weather, the feeling that everything was separated by heat and curtains of gnats and pollen, that reality was swollen into a fever dream. Whatever the reason, I felt as though I was hidden behind a fourth wall, watching a scene from a movie. I felt lucky, in fact, to have spotted them, that same sense of ant farm interest taking over.
Through the open window of the truck, I could see the wife squatter at the wheel, gripping it and leaning forward, while her husband sat in the driver’s seat behind her. He was doing all the work of thrusting, holding onto her and working so hard, it looked like she was some obstruction that had fallen onto him, and he was trying with all his might to push her off. Like her flesh was this beautiful and frightening problem presented to him and he was going to meet it with every drop of vigor he had. There were many things going through my mind in that moment: the shame of having lied to Mrs. Lloyd; the fascination with what I was witnessing; and between those two emotions, a dark impulse emerging, like a strong weed growing through two stones.
When I was a little girl, my mother and father brought me to a county fair in upstate New York. We spent hours walking through the agricultural exhibits, the 4H craft tables, the stiff cakes and pies pinned with blue and red ribbons. This was a world that I could not comprehend: where children cared enough to bake competitively or to raise a prize-winning calf then slaughter it. Caring maybe wasn’t the right word. Seeing themselves as functioning members of society is probably closer to what I mean. These kids knew how to follow a recipe. They had a completely businesslike approach to matters of reproduction—semen was something that could be purchased from a catalogue. It was delivered in vials. These peers of mine seemed to come out of the womb understanding that A led to B.
When the sun set, the fairgrounds became more crowded. People were walking noisily, as if they had somewhere to be. The carnival part of the fair had come to life, flashing and barking with a kind of devilish promise. My father suggested that we all go on a ride that looked like a carousel adorned with a hundred swings. You were strapped into the swing and then spun around so fast, your body was thrown parallel to the ground. I rode the thing with a delayed sense of horror, and when my swing was vertical again, I staggered away to reconnect with my parents. We did not talk about the experience of being on the swings, and I wondered if that was because I had felt the surge of gravity inside my vagina, and so had everyone else, in their respective areas, and perhaps it was an unspoken rule of the fair to not acknowledge this.
My father did however have much to say about the ride operators. He said that many of them did not have trailers to sleep in but camped beneath the rides at night—rides like the carousel, the fun house, and even the great vagina stirring mechanism that we had just been on. This concept fascinated me. It gave me the same feeling of invention as when I used to turn my Little Tykes pedal car on its side, nestle into the hole that the window made, and stare out across the backyard, the sensation that the world, too, had been flipped. It irritated my mother that I never used my toys in the way that they were intended. My art easel was flattened into a sled in the winter or became the central tower of a fort. Barbie heads were popped off and used to hold beads, coins, and Nerd candies.
This, I believe, is why part of me envied the squatters: they were out on the lawn, living reality askew, like me in my upended pedal car, while the rest of us drove around upright, if not quite convinced of anything.
In bed, I touched myself under the blankets and thought about the husband squatter. I imagined that he had looked up from his thrusting, caught me watching from my window, and then finished explosively without breaking eye contact. It was a promising start, but something was missing, a main ingredient to the whole thing. I kicked the covers away and tore off my pajamas, so I was lying naked on my back. I tried again, and again I got nowhere. The water stain above me was not impressed. I’ve seen it all, it said to me. Its face was bulbous and layered, like the cross-section of a cabbage. A bored cabbage.
Often, if I wanted to finish when Daryl was going down on me, I’d have to think about Val. Val was a guy who I’d made up, a carnival ride operator who slept every night beneath the merry-go-round alongside his crew. It had been a long summer for Val. He was tired, and sunburnt, and horny. In my fantasy, Val tries to rub himself sneakily through his pants but knows already that it’s not going to work. So, he lets out his cock and, turning on his side, beats it into the dirt, not caring in the end who hears him.
I guess you can say Val was my tried and true, my sexual equivalent of pulling the fire alarm when the meeting had gone on for too long. But Val had been around for years and he was losing his edge. Lately, he’d emerged from beneath the carousel like a fish that had grown legs, to perform godforsaken acts in the freak show tent. It was time for him to retire. It was probably time for me to reel it in with the weird fantasies, get a vibrator like everyone else I knew.
The water stain leered at me, like it knew that this plan would never work. I squirmed. I pulled the sheet over myself and then kicked it away. I shut my eyes so tightly, I saw Pop Rocks in my brain. And when I opened them again, I felt very much alone. Terribly alone. Even with the muffled racket of Vincent’s television above me. It was as if what I’d thought was loneliness my whole life was in fact just a rolling die, and that die had finally landed. “Fine,” I said to the stain. I got up and wrapped the sheet around me like a towel. “I’ll go somewhere where I’m appreciated.”
The night still had that fourth wall feel to it, and the inside of my car was snug and warm, like clothes just out of the dryer. When I turned the key, my headlights eyeballed the squatters’ tent. The husband and wife had since left the truck and gone to bed, and I imagined them flinching in their sleep at the lights and the engine sound. I still felt awkward for living my life noisily in front of them. It didn’t matter that I paid rent, or that I had been there first.
The sheet—I was still wrapped in it—fell away from my shoulders, and I wondered if it was going to be painful to drive a car without clothes on. Would my boobs bounce? Would the air blowing in through the windows sting my nipples? There was only one way to find out.
Did he finish? I had texted Robyn, ignoring her earlier question. Robyn’s husband was a cop. Cops knew about the details that didn’t make it into the paper. They saw the bruises and the messy bedrooms. They heard the slurred voices and the insults, smelled odors that most people don’t have to think about. But they didn’t seem to have the heart for them—details in general, I mean. While a poet might obsess over one drop of blood, a stray inflection, the dark shifting of guilty eyes, I had only ever heard cops speak of these things with weariness. Robyn tagged my text with a question mark.
Mr. Lloyd, I wrote.
Another question mark.
So I texted, in all caps: DID MR LLOYD CUM YES OR NO?
As I drove away, my phone on the passenger seat flashed a text banner: Ew Becky, followed by two barfing emojis. Robyn probably wasn’t the type of woman who asked her cop husband about the details of his job. I wondered if she even said the word cum around him, if it was a thing that she thought about when she wasn’t trying to get pregnant. Daryl only said the word as a polite warning, but I preferred to interpret it as more of a sports commentary. Oh, what I would do for a good play-by-play these days! For a man to tell me he’s about to cum, like it’s the most important thing he’s ever accomplished.
The night feels different when you’re in it sideways, the car like an animal ready to buck you through the windshield. My nipples were two raspberries on a bush, assaulted by the wind. My labia stuck to the seat like wet leaves on a dock. I drove through familiar intersections, traffic lights seeping into the haze, like markers pressed onto paper too hard. I drove past the bar where, just nights ago, I’d picked a fight with Daryl over a problem that I’d created. That problem now felt like a pebble tossed high into the air: maybe it would hit me when it fell back to earth, but who cared? I had a bigger, better problem to chase.
What none of my brunchies want to say out loud is that I had been an afterthought. A sub-in. I wasn’t supposed to be part of the original group. Originally, they wanted it to be a weekly mommy club, but it turned out that no one could commit to meeting that frequently, plus Robyn was having fertility issues. The consensus was that they needed one more childless member, so that it didn’t seem like they were waiting for her to catch up. Someone who was never going to have a baby. Someone fucked up enough that she would never catch up to them in any category. I had been suspicious from the start, wondering when they were going to start pummeling me with sales pitches for Tupperware or sex toys, but they gained my trust, tamed me like a lanky backyard deer.
“Becky, how do you stay so thin?” Cilla asked me one day, as I was destroying a brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tart.
“Visualization,” I said, and they all leaned in, ready to learn about some new-agey diet hack. “I imagine that I’m a toddler and, whenever I get the urge to snack, I lick a doorknob instead.” They laughed. And just like that, I became the comic relief. Suddenly, they all had memories of me saying hilarious things in high school, as if we could so easily trade my own version of the past for theirs. And there was gratification in maintaining this act, although I don’t know why. It felt safe, I suppose, to be the rumpled outcast, wide-eyed in the face of their husbands’ 401(k)s, the fancy preschool waitlists. I was never going to impress them anyway.
I turned into a development of little sloped lawns and freshly tarred driveways. I knew the road well but I was still worried that I would miss the house and have to turn around, and by then my courage would have fizzled out. If you can call any of this courage.
The house was marked by a lamppost and a kidney-shaped flowerbed. I knew that if I were to keep driving past it, the road would end in a cul-de-sac. But I also knew that there was a footpath just beyond the cul-de-sac that led into the woods, that followed a deep creek bed, then turned sharply, narrowing to nothing more than a bicycle skid in the dirt. From there it shot steeply upwards, where it ended at a weedy guardrail at the edge of a state highway. If one wanted to be naked by the time they reached the highway, they would have plenty of time to shed their clothes along the way.
I wondered if he had been erect the whole time he was walking, or if he’d had to pump it up when he arrived at his destination. If I were a cop, I would make sure to know all the details. If I were a man, I would make sure that I was always erect. Not just for the obvious reasons, but for the whole world. I would be hard for the sunlight and the winding creek bed, and for the dense sticky weeds. I would be hard for the look of determination on the squatter husband’s smooth face, for his frantic thrusting, like someone pinned under a felled tree. I’d be so hard, my tendons would explode out of my neck, and the whites of my eyes would cloud with red. I would be hard for Jesus. I would stroke it for God. I would flay the air with seven to eight inches of throbbing devoutness.
I pulled the car over, parallel to the kidney-shaped flower bed, and got out. Around me, houses flickered with late-night TV. Cars were sealed in their ports. Garden hoses were reeled in. Everything was tight and gleaming darkly. I pulled the sheet around myself and stepped barefoot onto the lawn, then walked up to the door.
The bricks of the front stoop were still warm from the hot day. There was a rectangular button with a half-glowing light shining inside it. I held the sheet together at my collarbone with one hand and pressed the button with the other and heard, as if inside the skull of the house itself, a faint chiming. I waited, the night breeze blowing up through my sheet. A tremor growing in my legs.
I had left my phone on the passenger seat, Robyn’s text banners washing the screen with worry: Becky, are you okay?? The brunchies seemed to think concern was the best response to anything that they didn’t understand. Anything that anger couldn’t cover. I once told them about the time I accidentally drank bleach solution that I’d left overnight in a water bottle, and how the doctors at the emergency room wouldn’t let me leave, because they thought I was suicidal. Because who would be stupid enough to drink bleach? I’d told the story as a funny anecdote. But Cilla had looked distraught, putting her hand on my knee.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” she said. She looked as though she’d rather not have heard the story. I couldn’t relate. I always wanted to know everything.
A light switched on inside, illuminating the perfectly flat top to a hedge below the window. I could see the funny outline of a man, distorted through the decorative glass of the door. Shuffling. Tightening his robe.
There was the sound of a June bug in a dark lamp. Then the clunking of a latch. His familiar gravelly voice.
“Who’s there?”
He stood in the doorway, unable, it seemed, to make sense of what he was seeing. I watched the alarm on his face turn to confusion, confusion to recognition. He tilted his head, as if that would shift it all into place.
Here was his cat sitter, in the middle of the night, clutching a sheet around her like a toga. His cat sitter throwing open the sheet and standing naked on his doorstep, her body pinched tight from the shock of the night air. When I spoke the first time, he couldn’t hear me. His eyes widening, he stepped across the threshold. He looked like a man about to be crushed by a train.
“Please,” I said. “Teach me how.”
