A Lighter Dark
by Katja Andreiev
The phone rings as they are taking tea. There is no tea of course, but Lola is going through an Anglophile phase and lately has insisted on calling the snack they have every afternoon at 4:30 when they both feel a simultaneous mild pre-dinner hunger "tea". Today it is Krispy Krème doughnuts from the drive-through window and flat mineral water that Lola leaves in the refrigerator uncapped on purpose. She likes the flavor but not the bubbles.
Lola does not answer the phone. She does not even acknowledge that it is ringing.
"Yes."
It sounds more like an answer than a question and throws the man on the other end of the line into the realm of thorny hesitation. He will no doubt return to that bramble of confusion as soon as he tries to pronounce their name. They always do.
" Is Mr. ...Bysy...Bem-ser-tid-ini-hu-i? Uh.. is he home please?"
"Mr. Byezsmertdnhi."
The man breathes carefully, his mouth probably moved away from the receiver, rescued from the jutting limbs of the name, but she hears him, and takes her next shot just as he has exhaled, his lungs empty and unprepared.
"Who is this?"
" Um this is..uh, are you his wife? That is the lady of the house?"
The words climb into a nervous treble, breathlessly released, but the phrasing is a quaint retreat into politesse that immediately pisses her off.
"His daughter."
"Oh, well hey, um hello. I'm with Grey Lady Aviation and.. what's your name?"
"Malenja."
"Mah-len-ya. Gee that's pretty, how do you spell that?"
"With a J."
Knowing that with that salvo she has forced him back into no man's land, she strikes quickly,
"Are you selling something? If you are, we don't want it."
"Oh no. No ma'am."
His answer is surprising, though the Texas playing hide and seek in his words is not. It explains the ease with which he used the honorific. He sounds affronted at being associated with telemarketers. What does he expect? In Malenja's experience, ninety nine out of a hundred times if the phone interrupts a meal, important conversation, or episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it is a telemarketer. The rest of the time, it is something worse. Someone you know and love, with News.
"Well then, Mr. Byezsmertdnhi is not home, but if you leave aŠ" she stops and remembers, but the man has already recovered and is firing off a rote closing, precise as a Vegas dealer.
"Well ma'am I can't actually do that, our hours here are pretty irregular, but what if I call back at a more convenient time?"
"You could try that."
"All right then." His drawl can't help chasing the vowels like a badly trained puppy, stretching after them in tandem with the curled phone cord Malenja loops through her fingers.
He waits for a few seconds. Malenja counts the Wednesdays on the calendar beside the phone, but does not offer up a more convenient time. Or any time at all.
He exhales again, not bothering to move the phone away from his exhalation again.
"Thanks for your time."
Malenja listens to the dial tone for several seconds after he hangs up. It's a B-flat, as she and Lola determined one thick summer day in grade school by process of elimination in a series of trips back and forth from phone to ancient baby grand piano. Their enthusiasm for determining the note of the dial tone was greater than any either of
them were ever able to muster for the weekly piano lessons paid for by aggressively reclusive Great Aunt Elena, who, thankfully, had the grace to pass away before Malenja's last year of junior high, thereby preventing the stigma of piano lessons from following her to high school and branding her a band geek. Stigma. Stigmata. Piano stigmata. It becomes a little chant in her head to the one note drone of the dial tone until a chocolate custard tossed with the accuracy of a sticky dart hits her hand where it holds the receiver.
The day of the dial tone tuning, for reasons obfuscated by time but probably somehow related to the phone, the piano, or the fact that she and Lola were less than two years apart, Malenja threw a wooden salad bowl, a telephone book, and a wineglass at her sister. She missed all three times, the bowl smashing a vase of wilting florid gladioli, the telephone book flopping flaccidly open to the J business section, and the wineglass bursting like confetti over the corpses of the flowers in the broken vase. Lola had dodged the projectiles as nonchalantly as if they had been bubbles, rose liquidly from a relaxed and implacable crouch when the glass had ceased falling, and laughed, her mouth a blowgun of scorn. The doughnut, now globular graffiti on Malenja's jeans, is Lola's reminder that she has not forgotten. Lola has always had better aim.
"What the hell is your problem?" Lola demands, a moue of doughnut icing-she only likes the original glazed kind- perching on the corner of her mouth.
As a child, Lola always got milk mustaches; as a twenty year old she still gets them, but now they are contrived to emphasize her grenadine mouth. If there were a way to get something as seemingly accidental as a milk mustache around her eyes, the color and shape of young citrus, she'd do that too. As it is she has to content herself with a make-up palette the variation of which rivals Benjamin Moore's. Their father used to call Lola in to mixed company and point out the perfect symmetry of her eyes; like a cat: four equal lemon shaped curves, two smiling, two frowning. Her mouth currently matches the frowning curves, except for the frosting. And the make-up.
"I don't like salesmen." Malenja replies. She tries to make it sound like an observation and not an explanation.
Lola doesn't even bother to nod. She didn't really care about an answer. Lola does not really care about anything that does not directly involve, affect, or interest her. In Malenja's mind, this perfect self focus, as disciplined in its own way as religious zealotry, is why Lola is so easy to love. Her selfishness is flawless and rare; spending time with Lola is like admiring a borrowed diamond.
Lola finishes off her doughnut and leaves her glass half full of water. Pushing all six feet of herself from the floor where they have been eating rough since Mama tore out the breakfast room and threw the table out the window last week, she brushes her hands off on her black jeans, one of eighteen pairs, and heads for the door.
"Hang on La, I'm not finished." Malenja protests, folding the last bit of chocolate crème-filled into her mouth.
Lola turns
"I am, and besides I'm meeting Bryan and Brian at the shop in ten minutes."
The single letter distinction comes out in her tone. Bryan is a school friend who remembers when Lola went by her real name, more provincial and meek, so she wastes no time coloring in his name for Malenja, who used to drive him and Lola home from school. Bryan is innocuous, and, Malenja suspects, probably gay. Brian is someone new, the single vowel difference in his name plucked with a delicacy by the pick of Lola's tongue. Probably another guitar player who could fit two of himself in Lola's size three pants and tries his self-conscious best whenever a dark corner big enough to through an elegant shadow over their chic emaciated frames. Such corners are not hard to come by. Malenja refuses to wear black jeans for this very reason. She wears a size eight, and that is only if she goes to the really expensive stores where they knock a size or two off to make up for the three hundred bucks they dare to charge for pants probably made by starving Ecuadorian children chained to radiators in a Manhattan basement. Which she doesn't do because she needs the money for exorbitantly priced textbooks she will not read because the lectures usually cover them word for word anyway, not to mention Friday night wine binges to console herself for missing the previous week's morning lectures and not wearing size three jeans.
"Oh. Which car are you taking?"
"Mine." Lola shrugs and adds "You could come by later. We're thinking of going out."
"Where? You haven't got ID."
Lola inhales with chirruping scorn through her nostrils. Her nose is the only feature that bars her from magazine covers. It is an inheritance from some unknown Native American ancestor Malenja would like to think was Cherokee. A little long and too thin for a cover girl, and it looks as though it has been broken and carefully reset, though it never has been. People look at Lola and say she looks like a distinguished Drew Barrymore. They say Malenja looks just like her mother. Malenja doesn't mind as long as they don't say she acts like her mother. The table is not the first piece of furniture to be ritually defenestrated; there is a rapidly growing graveyard beneath the first floor windows that face the backyard. Malenja makes sure to lug anything thrown out the front windows to the corner for the trash people to take away before the neighbours notice.
"Why would I need ID? Have you seen the new shirt I bought? It gives me cleavage down to my ankles" Lola hops to emphasize her point; her breasts bounce obligingly and her ankles flash their two hundred dollar black boots, then she opens the door. On the outside landing she stops and turns,
"I've got one. Whales, and don't say pod."
"A gam." Malenja says without hesitation. "How about turtles?"
"A bale. You always do turtles. Geese?"
"Easy, gaggle or skein, both are acceptable though gaggle is more commonly used in America."
"You sound like a dictionary. Elks."
"Actually, it's my turn, and it's elk, but the answer is gang."
"Oh that's good, can't you just see a bunch of elks, sorry elk, in an Impala low-rider wearing dark glasses and sagging their pants looking for unsuspecting little Bambis to sell their elk smack to?"
"Bambi was a deer, a smack is a group of jellyfish, and don't end sentences with to."
"Why not? You just did."
Lola leaves, neglecting to shut the door behind her. Malenja pushes it closed with her foot from the floor. When she stands up a sudden cramp skates across her shoulders and she rolls them like a boxer before heading up the stairs to her room. She has been home for a month but still has unpacking to do. Or not do. Maybe she will tackle the four boxes of papers and unread textbooks tucked away at the end of each school year and stored until graduation, and organize them in the bookcase Dad finally got around to building last Christmas. He did it over a single weekend, covering two walls of her room from floor to ceiling with a labyrinth of shelves, probably out of sheer excitement over the last of the tuition bills. Maybe she will take a nap.
"Uh."
This is the best Malenja can manage. She barely caught the phone before the fourth ring, when the service automatically picks up. It is not that she particularly wants to hear from anyone, nor is she conditioned to always answer the phone- she prefers to keep herself a step ahead of Pavlov's dogs- but that she just doesn't want anyone to hear the old message, with her and Lola screaming a brief rap they wrote themselves about how to "leave your name and your number and who you want to talk to/ here comes the beep, you know what to do". It was set on the service before she left for her freshman year, and Mama still hasn't figured out how to change it. Lola doesn't get calls on the ground line anymore. She has cultivated a bouquet of cell phones, shiny as shades of lipstick and lately, small enough to serve as body jewelry, since she graduated middle school. She keeps getting upgrades. Malenja wonders if Lola waxes her cell phones, or at least runs them down every week with a chamois.
"Malina? Is this Malina?"
"No, malina is the Russian word for raspberry. This is Malenja. But you're doing better than most. What do you want Texas?"
"Um.. I think you've mistaken me.. this is.."
"Aviation guy. I know. From Texas."
"Well, yes, at least when I was a kid, but I've haven't lived there in..."
"Doesn't matter, you still have Texas in your voice."
"Damn..Oh lord, I apologize for the profanity ma'am, it's just I had to take speech classes when I moved out here so y'all could understand me. Took me forever to make "aviation instruction" sound like what it is. And now you got me sounding even worse."
She does not correct his grammar. This tolerance will surprise her later.
"It's not a bad thing to sound like the area where you learned to talk. Besides, I'm sure people don't usually notice. I'm a specialist."
"In West Texas?"
"Linguistics and Speech Therapy. Just a summer class from a degree."
'Oh, I see then. How long have you been studying MsŠuhmm"
"Bezsmertdnhi. Also Russian. It means immortal, or deathless actually. There's a fairytale about a flying dwarf with a twelve foot beard called Koschei Bezsmertdhni, but he gets killed by the hero in the end."
"How's he manage that? The hero I mean."
Malenja looks at her feet. She has good feet, and always keeps her toenails polished. They are green today, but they have been green for a week and she reaches over to the bedside table and chooses a new bottle of polish at random. There is a scar on the top of her left foot, the shape and size of an obese ladybug. She was at a party with her bare feet on the table and a drunken friend missed the ashtray. It looks as though someone started to crucify her and then got bored.
"A giant head gives him advice and a good sword."
"That's really weird."
"So's West Texas. But the fairytale's been around long enough that it's eccentric, not just weird."
"How long?"
"About a thousand years."
"So is that an official linguistics differentiation?"
"Don't patronize me you asshole. You sell flying lessons over the phone."
Malenja hangs up.
When she wakes up again, the backyard is dark, and a figure backlit by the motion activated deer light is climbing through her window.
"Hi La."
"Mom tore up the carpet." Lola greets her, and as if to prove a point drops her heels hard down on the wooden floor boards.
"While I was sleeping?" Malenja looks around and, indeed, the green carpet that has covered the floor since she and Lola shared the room is gone, except for four green circles, perfectly spherical shag coasters, under the four posts of her twin bed.
"How do you think she got the circles so good?" Lola asks, "It has to have been a weird angle to work at."
Malenja says nothing, just slips her feet in to her tennis shoes and heads towards the living room and the windows that face the front yard.
"I am not happy. These are brand new"
Lola drops one side of the roll of mutilated carpet to chime her silk wrapped silver fingernails together at Malenja.
"Don't drop it. I already think I did something to my shoulders carrying the table away by myself."
"Jeez Mal, why do you even bother?" Lola asks, kicking at her end of the carpet, then striking what Malenja assumes is an interrogatory pose.
Lola is the only person who ever calls her Mal.
Lola's real name is Nadia Helene. Nadia: the Russian word for charity or possibly faith. Helene is from Mama's past. She graduated with high honours in Classics, and now spends her days as a receptionist for Davis Previously Owned Recreational Vehicles. Malenja is not Russian for hope, it is a made up derivative of Mary Magdalene that the priest at the baptism said was acceptable as long as it was followed by a more traditional Orthodox name. Mama, true to form, chose an ancient but serviceable Efraxinia, which she thought sounded both Greek, and like snow falling. Of course schoolteachers and other Americans mangled it so badly that by the time Malenja was in fourth grade, even her closest friends thought her name was Malinha Ever Seen Ya. She also has never thought it fair that "Nadia" contains the same final sound as her name, but it is created with an "i" no American has ever mispronounced, and in spite of it Nadia goes by an even easier epithet, because when she was a baby, Mama used to sing her to sleep with the show tune "Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets". Still, it could be worse. Papa used to sing Malenja to sleep. Usually with "Yankee Doodle Dandy".
"I'm bored with this Mal. And I don't want to ruin my nails." Lola has obviously just practiced these lines in her head. She changes her pose to an arms crossed sulk exactly halfway through.
Mal hopes her eye roll does not show up in the dim light from the street lamps.
"Pick it up. Come on."
It is the wrong thing to say. Lola's eyes shrink, lemons to kalamata olives, and her weight shifts like lava down a mountain, settling and hardening in way that makes it hard to remember she is made of flesh. It is, Malenja knows from experience, Lola's angle of repose. Defiance is her natural habitat
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"I'll buy you a drink."
"No."
"Come on La, just help me."
"No."
" I swear to"
"No"
"I'll beat the crap"
"No"
"Don't make me"
"No"
"You're a"
"No"
"Why are you such a giant poophead?" she finally cries, neighbours forgotten "If you don't help me I swear toŠI'll tell Mama!"
Lola laughs at that
"What are you, five?"
Malenja smiles too. She'll help now. Lola picks up the other end of the carpet and walks backward towards the curb.
"What about bugs?" Lola muses "Like...What about caterpillars?"
"An army."
"Flies"
"You'll like this. A business of flies."
"I hate flies."
"How about bees? I hate bees."
"A swarm or hive."
"Or grist."
"Grist? You're making that up."
They drop the carpet simultaneously this time. Lola is already moving purposefully towards her purse on the kitchen table, as if there were no closed front door, no outer walls of the house at all between her and her overstuffed pink objective. Malenja grabs at ideas like scattered tinkertoys as she hops ahead to open the door before Lola walks through the oak and red paint like it isn't there. Or something equally discomfiting.
Lola is looking in the mirror to the left of the telephone table, reapplying lipstick, or possibly checking her voicemail, when Malenja comes up behind her after relocking the door. She is shorter than Lola, but in the mirror she looks even smaller, as if she would barely come up to Lola's leather armoured shoulder if they were side by side.
"Oh, um, I got one. You'll never guess. Bagpipes."
Lola tugs on one ponytail, artfully arranged to look artless, and then, capping her lipstick, or possibly closing her cell phone, answers solemnly
"More than one bagpipe is a colossal mistake."
"That's pretty good. Ladies and Gentlemen, and now for the three hundred pipers of the Scottish royal guard. A colossal mistake of bagpipes."
"Ching kaching. See ya."
"Where you going now? You just got in."
"Abel said he'd fix my truck."
"At three in the morning?"
"It's not like the truck will mind its beauty sleep being interrupted."
"True, nothing could make that truck better looking."
" You're just jealous because you haven't got one and have to sit around here all day."
"I don't just sit around all day. I do things." "What, paint your toenails?"
Malenja throws a half-full tin of Altoids out the open door after Lola, but misses. The tin falls to the ground. Malenja drops her head to the newly exposed hardwood floor and tries to pound out the beat to Flashdance's "What a Feeling". It is only when she is doing well and thinking of moving on to "Footloose" that she stops, abruptly. She is turning in to her mother.
She reaches up to pull the cordless phone off the edge of the kitchen table where Lola probably left it, and hits speed dial
"Whaa--at?" Lola's standard greeting turns the single word into a sentence. But the question mark is because she knows it is Malenja. Normally, she does not bother with questions. Questions are for the uncertain.
"La, when's the last time you actually saw Mama?"
"She was asleep on the couch this morning"
"What time is morning?"
"When I get up. Like, around noon."
"That was me. My shoulders hurt and I didn't feel like moving up to my room."
"OK. I'm turning on to the freeway."
It is a reminder of the ferocity of Lola's driving. She has made it on local streets to the freeway entrance in less than five minutes. It is on the other side of the railroad tracks and past the shopping district, and takes any normal person three times that. Lola takes no pride in what Malenja occasionally suspects is casual defiance of the laws of physics.
" I was asleep on the couch at noon." Malenja enunciates. She has raised the pitch of her voice, but not the volume.
"So?"
"So when did you see Mama before that?"
"I didn't."
"What, ever?"
"No, this morning. I gotta go, my exit's coming up."
The dial tone on the portable phone is not as pure as on the kitchen telephone. It fluctuates between F and F sharp, depending on how far it is from the dial pad. Malenja walks back and forth from the living room and then in to the hallway by her mother's room, the phone cradled against her ear, both hands free to awkwardly explore the contours of her shoulder blades behind her. They seem blunted; their edges rounded like the rims of thick diner coffee mugs.
"Great. I'm a mutant." She says into the F sharp, then slides out the back door in to the yard to see if she can get a half tone higher.
Malenja stops at the edge of the cement patio, pretending to ignore the idle grill and wicker chaise her mother used to suntan in rather than going to such a pedestrian worship as church on Sundays.
The yard is not as flat at night. Where there should be a deep and even field of grass all the way to the back fence, there are swirling shadows cast by bushes that aren't there, and mysterious hummocks of darker dark push up from the sleepy eyelashes of still grass. When Papa laid the water pipe for the hot tub, he dug a long trench from the back fence and the water main all the way to the lip of the patio, with even piles of dirt at regular intervals, like cairns, along its length. The little variegations of darkness seemed to follow along that line of filled in trench, the ghosts of larger, blacker dirt.
Malenja lays flat on her back on the patio, turning her head away from the lawn to rest her cheek against the cement. Her shoulder blades twitch against the ground, scraping through her t-shirt. The cement is still warm from the sun, or maybe it has just reached equilibrium with the temperate night air.
Malenja considers.
Maybe she will go to the doctor about her shoulders.
Maybe she will call Mama's cell phone.
Maybe she will just lie on the patio until the darkness claims her too and she is just the ghost of a hummock in the smooth skin of the cement.
"So listen Malenja, I figure we're on first name terms now." Texas says to her Friday afternoon after asking if her father is in. She is beginning to notice a sense of obligation when he asks. As if he might not if he weren't on the clock. "I'm Ed."
Malenja slides off the piano stool where she has been sitting and not playing the piano, and braces her back against the foot pedals.
"Not for Edgar? Because I don't think I could handle that. I'm very fragile right now."
He laughs, but stops quickly.
"No, you're right. It was a joke." She says.
"It's um, Edwin."
"How very Regency of your parents."
"Yeah, I guess. My mom read a lot of romance novels if that's what you mean."
"Oh yes, that's exactly what I mean."
"Well?"
"Well what? You already know my name. First and last actually."
"Oh right. Well, what's your middle name then?"
"Are you sitting down?"
"You mean it gets worse? I mean, uh"
"Yes, Edwin, it gets worse. My full name is Malenja Efraxinia Dmitrievna Byezsmertdnhi."
He doesn't miss a beat this time. She can practically hear one of her names falling in to place for him with the leathery sound of a ball in a catcher's mitt.
"Efraxinia? Like Fraxinus? Hey, I know that one. I went to Sunday School."
"So what? I did too. What do you mean?"
"Oh, well, I went to a boy's Catholic high school too. Obligatory Latin. I remember that phrase. You know 'Fraxinus me fecit'?"
"No. I don't. I was never Catholic. I can speak conversational Slavonic though, if that does it for you."
But he is not willing to let it go. He continues as if she had just enthusiastically affirmed a Catholic upbringing tantamount to his.
"Fraxinus me fecit! You know. It was a joke they, I mean people who wrote the originals. Latin people you know. Well, they would write in manuscripts. Fraxinus is an ash tree. So fraxinus me fecit is "ash made me". Like the tree was used to make the book, but also, all things come to..you know, umŠ ash."
"Yes. No. I didn't know."
"So how come no one calls you Ash?"
Malenja smiles.
"Maybe they do."
She hangs up quietly, and cries.
"Why are you under the piano." Two bare feet, three gold toe rings, an anklet salvaged from the wreckage of broken charm bracelets, and hairless legs like punctuation on the question that isn't one. That particular skill is hereditary.
"Hi Mama." Malenja says without sitting up. If she sits up, she will hit her head on the support struts, holding the body of the baby grand in place and sporting a fur coat of black dust.
The feet turn towards the piano stool and then disappear, one at a time, followed almost immediately by two discordant smashes on the piano keys, then, the gentle creaking of the struts, shedding dust directly in to her squinted eyes.
"Jesus Mama, what the hell are you doing?" Malenja demands, sliding out from under the piano on her back.
"I'm standing on top of the piano."
"Why?"
"So I can reach the top of the china cabinet."
Mama's name is Lucille. Her maiden name was Martin. Everyone calls her Marty, even the people she has met through her husband who do not know it is a derivative of an old name she theoretically replaced when she got married. She looks like a Marty.
"What's on top of the china cabinet?"
"This!" she holds up a medium sized battered tin, one of the old Christmas gifts from some acquaintance or co-worker, fading pictures of shortbread and men in kilts covering its painted plaid surface. She leaps down directly from the piano top, and mugs accusingly at the piano stool after landing, tin still in one hand.
"Mama, do not throw the piano stool out the window. Throw the tin if you must throw. But I actually like the piano stool. I will not take it to the curb. I will bring it back inside. I will." Malenja speaks clearly as she moves protectively towards the little oak stool with teeth marks around the legs from a childhood dog, now out back under his own hummock.
"I'm not going to throw the piano stool out the window." Mama says, but she flickers her eyes, like half raised hammers, at it again before shrugging, and gesturing with the hand still holding the tin "Come on then."
"Where?"
"To the back yard. Lola is home. We might as well do this now." She turned towards the stairs and called up. "Lola, we're going in to the back yard! You aren't invited because you smell!"
Five seconds and thirty eight grace notes of boot heel on hard wood floor and Lola lounged against the banister.
"Do we have to do this now" she doesn't ask "Because I'm hungry."
"We can have tea after." Mama said.
Malenja resents her matter of fact mention of tea. She had thought tea was just something Lola and she did, secret in the way their late night trips to 7-eleven after curfew were in high school. Mama had co-opted those as well, casually handing Lola a five dollar bill at dinner and asking her to pick up some diet Pepsi when they made their late night trip.
"Mama, it's only four, why aren't you at work?" Malenja prods as they step out on to the patio.
"I'm a bereaved widow. Sometimes I get to come home early." Marty proclaims with a backslash movement of her arm. The one not holding the tin.
" I'm a bereaved child. Does that mean I don't have to go to work either?" Lola wants to know.
"You don't work. You play manager at a movie theatre with a bunch of friends. You wouldn't want time off even if you could get it." Malenja mutters. "What about time off for me?"
"From what." Both Lola and Mama don't ask at the same time.
"Nevermind."
"Enough. Seriously. Let's just do this together and then have tea. Or a drink. Maybe several drinks. Maybe several flammable drinks. With umbrellas. " The admonishment begins as Mama, but ends as Marty. Marty has been around more frequently lately, when anyone is around at all.
"Do what?" Malenja demands. "What are we doing out here? It's windy."
Marty grins
"I know. It's perfect."
She opens the tin to reveal something grey and small wrapped in a clear plastic bag, something which has taken on the shaped of the tin.
"It's time we said goodbye like normal people." Mama says. As if it will explain everything.
Malenja wraps her arms around herself to hold in her shoulder blades. She closes her eyes and turns around, her back to the tin and Mama and Lola.
"You buried him. You said he was buried upstate with Great Aunt Elena. You had a wake and made the announcement that he didn't want a grave side service."
"Oh?" Lola said. It wasn't meant to be a question, but it rose into a squeak at the end, like she was holding back a giggle.
"Oh wait." Lola cartoonishly shakes her head, maybe trying to knock out a sentence " Um, that was the public story."
"Perhaps you could rehash the private one then." Malenja forces out between her teeth, the words grabbing the backs of her incisors with sticky paws. "You're so morbid kiddo. Why do we have to..ohŠWell, um, Daddy died muttering about his ashes. That's why we had him cremated even though it's against some religious thing. Eugh. Why does it matter now? Here he is in this nice box. Let's go to. " Mama suppressed Marty with the strength of slow realization, but impishness resurfaced again halfway through the explanation, impatient. Marty would probably be shaking the tin like panning for gold if Malenja turned around.
"Um. I lied to some priests about this whole thing." Lola added, taking a quarter side-step over to Malenja, sidling in to her blurry and stinging peripheral vision on the left side. "Also, a bishop. Also the newspaper and everyone at the wake."
"Also. Me." Malenja added, turning to the right.
" I thought you guessed because of his last words and stuff."
"I. Wasn't. There."
"Oh. Right. Wow."
"Jesus Malenja, stop making this all about you, we all lost Daddy, so justŠgrab a handful so we can say goodbye like a family who fucking loves each other." Mama, no Marty this time, made her turn around, her words hooks and grappling lines.
"So what? You've just had his ashes sitting in a cookie tin for the past three months?" she manages.
Mama grins, parts the plastic with one hand and delicately takes a pinch of ashes, like seasoning, between her fingers and sprinkles them on the lawn.
"Pretty funny huh? What if somebody at the wake with a sweet tooth had seen the box?"
"Some of them were probably drunk enough they would have grabbed a spoon and tried some." Lola says, circumspect as she grabs her own handful and tosses it overhand against the wind, stepping aside as it blows back towards her and dissipates above her head like an old halo.
"Oh Jesus" Malenja manages, afraid to let go of her shoulder blades.
Lola wanders over to the outside wall of the house, poses against it, one foot raised, and brushes her hands together to get rid of the dregs of her father. Malenja staggers over and leans next to her, presses her back hard against the wall.
"Here, you wanna?" Lola says, simultaneously reaching in to her jacket pocket and pulling out another dusty handful.
"What is wrong with you" Malenja says, but takes the ashes in her fist as she does.
"I didn't want to keep going back and forth." Lola explains, throwing her chin briefly in Mama's direction.
In the plain afternoon light, Mama is raising her hand and holding it above her head, letting the light wind just blow grayish powder away. Some of it falls back in her hair, grey over grey and brown. Lola and Malenja watch her until the phone rings.
"Hello Texas." She says when she picks up the phone
"How did"
"You're the only one who ever calls at tea time."
Another deep breathe. This is it.
"Look, I've really enjoyed talking to you but the reason I keep calling is I have these unclaimed flying lessons under the name Dmitri Byezsmertdnhi and they expire at the end of the month and they're five hundred dollars worth of lessons which was a special deal we were having last year and it would be a real shame to pass up on the opportunity especially as they were a gift and I know you haven't been telling him I'm calling but maybe you could just give in because it's a really nice present someone is trying to give him and could I please just talk to your father?"
"He's dead."
"You'reŠ.You're joking."
"Not funny."
"What? I mean, oh god, I'm sorry. Since yesterday?"
"No."
"Wait a minute. You mean he's been dead this whole time? Jesus Christ"
"Yeah."
"Where you everŠgoing to."
"Tell you. Not really. I figured you would pick up on it eventually."
"Jesus ladyŠI meanŠJesus. I meanŠ what the hell is your problem jerking me around like that?'
Malenja can smell the anger pushing its way into his words, like hot water in a pipe, coming towards her faster and faster. She does not care.
"My problem is my father died." She says it soft, even, and sincere. She has become a greeting card, a cloistered nun, a prison psychiatrist.
"What!" the pipes burst. "What are you? Crazy? Fucking Crazy?"
Her shoulder blades feel like they are being filleted. Malenja grabs one with one hand, and with the other, slams the receiver several times against the other. The softness and even tempered avatars break into shards and torn muscles.
"Yes. Yes I am crazy." She screams in time to the slams on her shoulder blades "I've been crazy for going on three months now since my father died suddenly and no one told me because they didn't want my grades to suffer, and then I graduated with a straight C average and couldn't get a job to save my life. My mother is possessed by the demon version of herself at my age, and my sister is a thousand times prettier than me and knows it. I spend my days thinking about doing things and then sleeping and my nights hauling furniture off the lawn. I'm tired and fat and bored shitless and to top it all off, I think, and this is really the straw on the monkey's ass or whatever that phrase is, the front page of my current stack of issues is that I think I might have wings trying to grow through my skin. I hate everything in the world except taking your calls and pretending for a few minutes every day my father is still alive, but even now explaining myself that sounds reallyŠfucked up." she stops, and brings the phone back to her ear, it moves as she breathes, and waits for A sharp.
"What, like airplane wings?"
"Oh Jesus, I keep forgetting, no, not airplane wings. Wings, like a bird. Feathers, articulated joints, the whole bit. I can feel them fluttering against my shoulder blades right under the skin, and sometimes it really hurts." She is crying now, tears streaming down her face, but all that will come out of her throat are the hiccupping gasps a small child makes after exhausting themselves crying. She is sure it sounds as though she has been weeping for hours, when really, she has only just started.
"He died during finals. I had a thesis. Nobody told me until I got home. They didn't want me to toss four years of work out the window. I came home and he was already in the ground. Or so I thought until my mom pulled his ashes out of a cookie tin on the china cabinet. We just threw them in the backyard. Just now."
She keeps gasping, air whistling into her lungs like a panicky horse, snot dripping all over the receiver. But the crying quickly blows itself out, as though she really were at the end of a fit she never had. As she is looking around for something with which to wipe off the phone, she hears a tentative cough on the other end of the line.
"I'm sorry. But uh, well, that's nice. I mean, that you got to do that. Together."
"It was bizarre. And probably illegal." She smiles and snot drips on to her lower lip " It was insane. Just like everything around here. I guess it was nice. But I still think I might be getting wings."
" I'm real sorry ma'am. I guess we all have our troubles."
Maybe she went too far with that one. She's a ma'am again.
"I hate you."
"I'm sorry. I am sorry Malenja. Say, should I try to cheer you up? I do a real good howler monkey impersonation."
"Texas, that is the most inappropriate thing I have ever heard a telemarketer say, under any circumstances. Did you know a group of monkeys is called a troop? "
"No, I didn't."
"Yeah, kangaroos are called a troop too. "
"Huh. I can't do a kangaroo. But I can yodel a little."
" No really, that's ok." She is now on familiar ground. Reassurance is easy.
"Well shit lady, I told you I wasn't very good at this. I don't suppose you want some flying lessons?"
"In a plane, no thanks. However, if you know any seraphim or mutants who might need some extra cash"
He laughs.
"What about owls. They're supposed to be smart, you find a real intelligent owl willing to work days. Say, you'll like this. The plural for owls? It's parliament. A parliament of owls."
"I didn't know that. That's really good." A pause, worthy of Pinter and not nearly as obnoxious.
"Goodbye Malenja. Good luck with..things."
"Bye Texas. Thanks."
Malenja hangs up the phone.
Maybe she will go for a walk.
"Hi La." Malenja steps out on to the patio where Lola is seated on the chaise, drinking something with an umbrella in it.
"Mmmph." Lola says around her straw. "Marty got bored and dumped the rest out over by the fence. There's still some left if you want."
"Uh, no. That's ok." Malenja sits on the edge of the chaise and rests her arm on the steel toe of Lola's boot.
"You're not growing wings."
"Yeah. I know."