entryway?
It’s ridiculous, the development is nearly sixty years old but no one important has ever come to pay a visit, there are no front parlors, there is no life inside or out.
Two or three blocks down is the marsh, what is left of it. The chemical seepage can be smelled – more or less – round the clock. It stings the eyes. Slawa has an empty beer bottle next to the metal pail of driveway blacking, or whatever the stuff is. In a minute he will be in to get a fresh bottle. He is stout, with a big gut. He looks older than his years, although she’s not quite sure how old he is; he has never bothered with the skin treatments and injections even little kids know about from school. How could he let himself go like this? He used to be cute! He comes up the stairs holding his empty beer bottle. “Any more?” he says.
“How should I know? Look in the fridge.”
“All the time like this, Murielle. Why you so angry all the time?”
“Go,” she says. “I think you should go before the girls get back.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I’ve had it. I want you to move out.”
“But… I don’t understand.”
“What is there not to understand? I can’t stay married to you any more! We’re over! Finished! D-I-V-O-R –”
“What will you tell the girls?” he says. “Anyway, at least I want to finish the driveway first.”
“Just forget the driveway. The way this dump looks, that’s the least of it. I’ll tell them… you had to go away for a while, on business. Shoe business. You can call them tonight if you want.”
“Hey,” he says. He is breathing heavily now and for a second she thinks he is going to hit her with the bottle. The big gut swings heavily. He’s practically pregnant. His legs and arms are scrawny, though. He has an alcoholic’s jug belly, under that flowing MUU-MUU. He must think the MUU-MUU hides his tummy. “Do you mind if I shower and change first?”
She guesses he is trying to sound sarcastic. “Can’t you do that when you check into a motel?”
“I’m paying the fucking mortgage on this place, I can sleep here if I want. Why don’t you get out and take Tahnee with you and I’ll stay here with Julie?”
“We’ve been through this a million times, Slawa. Let’s not have another scene. Take a shower if you must. Just don’t leave your towels on the floor.”
He goes muttering up the stairs. “I’m supposed to paint the driveway and then move out covered with tar to check into a Motel 99.” He curses in Russian. Once she might have found this sexy. Now she knows he is saying that he wants to kill her. When his murderous rages strike, Slawa is like an elephant in musth, blood-eyed, uncontrollable. Then, in English, he adds, “Stupid cow, what makes you think I have to go to a motel? There are other places I can go. You think you are the only woman out there? Many womens say to me, Slawa, you are handsome, you are so kind.”
She doesn’t bother to answer. It is true that to some he might still be attractive, if you are into tiger-eyed, slap-you-around, rough-trade, peasant-type Slavs.
There is only one bathroom in the house. Good luck to him, thinks Murielle. There hasn’t been any real water, any decent water, in months. It is all that instant sanitizer glop coming out of the showerhead these days, stuff that leaves you stickier than when you went in. Even so, it will be nice to have one less person using the bathroom. The girls’ rooms are across the hall from the bigger bedroom, one on the side of the house looking out to the neighbors and the other facing the street, neither of them large enough to hold much more than a bed: pink for Julie, pale lilac for Tahnee.
When she first moved in – Tahnee was little more than a year, Julie just about to be born – Slawa had been living alone for some time. The place was a mess. In his enthusiasm at her arrival, Slawa attempted to do some re-decorating. He bought floor-to-ceiling hologramovisions at a nearby discount supply house so each room could have hologramovisions on each wall.
But the sets were of such inferior quality that half the time the color was lousy, and then some of them stopped working; when the men came to bring in new ones, Slawa didn’t want to pay the exorbitant fees for removal of the old, so he simply had the new ones installed on top. And then when those broke, he did the same thing. Now each room, in terms of square footage, is diminished by half.
With much delight he installed new light fixtures, ceiling fans, a garbage dehydrator, MereTwelve-operated self-generating devices, top of the line Siebmosh communicators – but half the time touching the light switch gave you a shock, or caused a fuse to blow. Clapping on or off worked sometimes, but often things would go on or off in the middle of the night. And no amount of scrubbing could clean the vintage vinyl flooring, which, a realtor had once told them, could make the house more valuable to the right buyer, if they were to someday sell.
When Terry had left, right after Tahnee was born, saying he was sick of being around someone who was so cheerful all the time, she hadn’t thought of herself as cheerful, though it was true she was taking Chamionalus, but it did stop her hirsutism; that made her cheerful. Terry had grown up in the same neighborhood as she, though she hadn’t known him; he was a fireman and just about the only guy she had ever met who wasn’t working in a factory of one kind or another.
After they were married they moved in with her father. She worked at La Galleria Senior Mall and Residence Home for the Young at Heart, in Administration. It was a job with a future, especially compared to what others their age had found for jobs, working in the meat products factories; it was amazing, that two kids from their area hadn’t ended up like everyone else.
Until she got pregnant when they realized both their salaries combined weren’t going to be enough to enable them to buy their own place, or even rent; Terry was obsessed with making the Diamond-C dust in the bathroom, and she began to realize… that pervasive smell of an addict: violet soap, Brussels sprouts and bleach. He already had a dust problem, a problem big enough that they made him take an unpaid leave-of-absence at work. Then he decided he wanted to go to the West Coast and write screenplays, although as far as she could see he had shown no ability to stick to anything at all.
What skills did Terry have? He couldn’t even write, he could only use a dictation program on the computer so what came out was pages of, “Um, so Joe goes, like fuck, um what um kind of um shit is um this.” She had to admit that making Diamond-C dust was not easy, the few times he had made it before she put a stop to him the quality had been amazing, and what he didn’t do himself he was able to sell for thousands of dollars a gram; of course the ingredients were expensive, the special lights needed, the hydroponics equipment, growing the crystals, inseminating the blossoms, harvesting and so on.
She had been too stupid to know, at first, that was how innocently she had been brought up! She thought he was just growing some kind of mineralized food-product for them, gorgeously fragrant; as if Terry would ever have been the kind of guy who had a nice little hobby.
Thinking of living at home reminds her she has to call her father to let him know they are coming the next day. She dials and the phone rings and rings but there is no answer… He is such a strange old man, he refuses to move into the house with them, he insists he wants to go to a nursing home. Now that she is Managing Administrative Director, he says, she could get him a discount, and she would be able to see him every day, if she wanted! It doesn’t seem to matter that she has told him, over and over, the Senior Mall is the last place she would put
