The Safety of Objects: Stories (8 page)

“Did you have a doctor’s appointment this morning?” Jill asks.

“No,” Susan says. “A bomb threat.”

Jill’s eyes light up. The waitress asks if anyone would like a drink, and Jim thinks of having a martini but doesn’t because there’s something about the way Jill’s looking at him that makes him sure she’d tell everyone he was an alcoholic.

“B.L.T. and a Coke,” Jim says.

Susan and Jill talk about houses: what’s good, bad, broken, and who fixes it. Clearly this is where Bill’s Repair Man came from.

Jill’s been inside every house in the area and keeps a running score of who has what in terms of cars, large-screen televisions, walk-in freezers, etc. Jim thinks if she could keep her mouth shut, she’d make a killing as a burglar.

When he can’t stand it any longer, he excuses himself from the table by saying he has to make a phone call—“Checking in with the office,” he says. Jim goes to the bar and orders a double martini, careful to keep his head low. Through the potted plants he watches Susan and Jill, wondering what Susan sees in Jill—it’s not like her to be friends with a woman who frosts her hair. Perhaps she’s changing, he thinks—as though this sort of a change is a precursor to something more serious, like Alzheimer’s.

He tosses back the martini and returns to the table, face flushed, just as the waitress is putting the lunch plates down. Jim picks at his sandwich carefully, knowing if a leaf of lettuce or a piece of bacon were to lodge in his throat he would be unable or unwilling to free it, and in all likelihood neither would Susan.

He pictures himself choking, looking at Susan and Jill as the world around him gets smaller.

“Should we do something?” Jill will ask—she can never do anything without asking someone’s opinion first.

“No,” Susan will say, “let him go. It’s all right.”

He imagines himself falling to the floor, Susan and Jill looking at him sweetly for a moment, like he’s a child imitating a dog. As his eyes roll back in his head, the women return to their conversation, and the last thing Jim hears has something to do with winterizing.

This is not a solution, he tells himself, ending the choking scenario. This is not the way to go. At the office, at the office, he thinks, sucking on his thoughts like they’re lozenges, I’d be talking to my secretary who likes me very much, having a drink in the restaurant next door, buying snacks from the blind man in the lobby, looking out the window, watering Patterson’s plant. His eyes water. He almost cries. Everything is okeydokey, he tells himself. It’s going to be all right.

“Aren’t you well?” Jill asks Jim.

She is used to men who shovel food into their mouths without looking up until finally, when there is no more, they lift their eyes and burp simultaneously.

“Fine, thank you,” Jim says.

“Finished?” the waitress asks as she clears the plates.

“Thank you,” Jim says, plucking the colored plastic swords from his sandwich before she takes the plate.

“How cute,” Jill says.

“Do you want to come with us to the mall?” Susan asks Jim, waving her eyebrows up and down, as though she’s making a special offer.

“I think I’ll just walk home,” he says, standing up. “It’s a nice day for a walk. Good meeting you.” He pumps Jill’s hand as though the up-and-down action turns the key to a spring that winds him up so he can toddle home.

It is a beautiful day, the most beautiful day Jim can ever remember seeing. The sky is brilliant blue, the trees are full of leaves, there’s a light breeze. It’s perfect except the streets are deserted, there are no people, no babysitters, no strollers, nothing. The stillness makes Jim uncomfortable. He feels as though something horrible has happened and everyone except him knew enough to run away. When he turns the next corner, a giant mutant killer will be waiting for him. It will reach down from above the trees and he will never know what hit him. He walks quickly, sure that he will die before he reaches home. He can feel it in his chest. If nothing reaches down to snatch him, it will happen anyway. He will collapse. He will lie crumpled on the sidewalk. The cars driving past him will not see Jim in the suit, they will see only the suit, and think it is a heap of clothing left out for charity to collect. He begins to run. He runs faster and faster until he sees the spastic boy standing in his regular place. The sight of the boy calms him, and Jim stops running and begins waving from very far away. The boy waves back.

“I’m home early,” he says as soon as he’s close enough to talk.

“Did you lose your job?” the boy groans in a voice that is as twisted as his body.

Jim shakes his head. “No.”

“That’s good, I’m happy,” the boy says and waves good-bye.

As Jim goes up the steps to the house he thinks about work. If they cancel it again tomorrow he will go in anyway. He will simply arrive at the office. If the guards won’t let him upstairs, he will refuse to go home; he will throw himself on their mercy.

The Bullet Catcher

Frank hovered near the frost-free refrigerators listening to a conversation two aisles over.

“Gross, Julie, what are we getting here—pull-on pants? A washer/dryer? It’s not going to fit into the bag.”

“Open the other one, it’s emptier.”

“You know I’m not supposed to shoplift anymore.”

“Don’t take that, idiot! It has a sensor.”

He worked his way into power tools hoping that between chain saws he’d see them. At the end of the row he poked his head around the corner. There were three girls with what he and his wife called big hair. One of them slowly turned around and dropped a blender into her shopping bag. It was Julie, his neighbors’ daughter, his Saturday-evening babysitter.

“Gross, a blender. What do you need that for?”

“I can make diet drinks in my room. Besides, eventually Christmas will come and I’ll need presents,” Julie said.

“A blender is good. No one would ever steal a blender,” the other girl said. Except for fingernails a mile long, red like they’d been dipped in fresh blood, she had no distinguishing features.

Julie put a mini-chopper in on top of the blender.

“Hurry up, I’m hungry,” the third girl said. She had big breasts and wore a very short T-shirt that barely covered them, and no bra. Frank wondered if anyone had suggested that perhaps it was time she restrain herself.

“How could you be hungry? You just ate a cheeseburger and fries.”

Her breasts were growing, Frank thought, they needed food.

“I threw it up.”

“Are you serious?” the girl with the nails asked.

The overdeveloped girl nodded. He decided to call her Tina.

“Is this, like, a problem?” Julie asked.

“I just need a frozen yogurt or something. I have a really bad taste in my mouth,” Tina said.

“I’m sure,” Nails said.

Nails put a blow-dryer in on top of everything and they walked out of the store.

Frank hung back as the girls got closer to the entrance. He didn’t want to be right there when the security guards grabbed them. He waited by a rack of large-size flower print dresses and watched the girls walk untouched into the body of the mall. Then he hurried to catch up, wondering if it was his obligation to stop them, to drag them kicking, screaming, swearing, maybe even yelling rape, to the manager’s office.

He checked his watch. He was supposed to be buying tires. He was supposed to meet his wife at the Twistie Freeze at the other end of the mall in twenty minutes.

“Oh my God, turn around, walk the other way,” Nails said.

“Why?” Tina asked.

“Get with the program. It’s Adam.”

“So?”

“Is your bulb, like, only sixty watts?

“Oh, Adam,” Nails screamed down the mall. A boy standing in front of the record store—which, Frank noticed, didn’t sell records anymore, only tapes and CDs—tensed. “Adam, look who’s here.” Nails pointed her finger like a gun at Julie’s ear. “It’s Julie.”

Julie slapped Nails’s hand down. Nails dropped her shopping bag and slapped Julie back.

“Bitch, I was trying to help you!” she said.

In the middle of the mall Nails and Julie clawed at each other with fingernails like switchblades.

“Come here,” Nails said to Adam.

As he moved to come toward them, he stepped on his shoelaces—intentionally untied, as was the style—and fell forward, catching himself in a position similar to the peak of a push-up.

Frank felt the fall in his stomach, the horrible sensation of failure, the tripping of mankind.

Adam lay facedown on the floor as though his embarrassment was enough to kill him.

The girls laughed and walked away, their claws magically retracted by the punch line of Adam’s fall.

In McDonald’s, Frank stood in line next to the girls, and when he and Julie accidently made eye contact, he blushed the same shade of red she did.

“Hi,” he said.

“Yeah.” She immediately looked down at the floor.

Frank looked at her and wondered about what she did alone in his house, with his children, on Saturday nights. He came up with nothing specific but in general the thought frightened him.

Sitting in a molded plastic booth that reminded him of his daughter’s play furniture, he tried to spy on the girls. A tropical plant blocked his view. He ate a few fries and sipped the Coke. The girls were silent. Frank started to think he smelled something burning. He lifted one of the french fries to his nose and sniffed it. He extended his neck and inhaled, testing the air around him . . . plastic burning.

The three girls were kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, probably nymphomaniacs as well. He closed his eyes, conjuring an image of himself with a fifteen-year-old girl in a scenario that involved giggling, posing, uncoordinated and inappropriate body movements, and frustration that ultimately resulted in a spanking that was definitely pleasurable, at least for him.

A second wave of the odor overcame him. They were probably flicking their Bics against the Styrofoam containers their burgers and nuggets came in, melting them into cute little animal shapes or costume jewelry, like an arts-and-crafts project. They were burning everything. Next they’d try out the tropical plant.
Is it real, Julie? I don’t know, light it. Real things don’t burn.
He imagined McDonald’s on fire, melting. He saw himself trying to escape, stuck in a hot pool of liquid plastic like a mouse in a glue trap. He smelled matches but no cigarettes. He smelled plastic burning and thought of toxic fumes filling the mall, working like nerve gas, killing thousands of people who would never know what hit them, the credit cards in their wallets forever fusing with their flesh.

Frank jumped up, jutting his tray out in front of him, brandishing it like a weapon. The girls were way ahead, on their way out. He glanced at their table; they’d left their trash. He went toward it; the Styrofoam containers were singed, but only slightly. There were at least twenty-five burnt matches dunked in a pool of ketchup. He sifted through the garbage—picked up a half-eaten burger and took two bites before he realized what he was doing and put it down. Under everything he found “Adam and Julie 2 Gather 4 Ever” burned into the Formica tabletop. It was still warm.

“You spelled it wrong,” Frank started to shout. The word
You
came out in a loud passionate voice before he realized it was pointless. Spelling meant nothing to the girls. Frank went toward the exit, tray still very much in hand. A McDonald’s security guard stopped him.

“Sorry, sir, you’ll have to consume that in here.”

Frank tried to peak around the guard. He shifted to one side and poked his head out. The guard shifted with him and blocked his view.

“Your fries are getting cold,” the guard said.

Frank dumped his tray into a trash can and raced into the center of the mall. Walking briskly, almost running, he went down the center of what felt like a nightmare; a brightly lit fluorescent tube filled with seating groups and planters set up like obstacles. He went after the girls asking himself, What am I chasing? What am I doing?

He went through the mall, weaving in and out of people, strollers, breathing hard, looking for Julie, Nails, and Tina, their big hair, their miniskirts, their overloaded shopping bags. Instead of seeing them or seeing nothing at all, he saw hundreds of girls just like them, identical twins. Like in a mirror ball, a million reflections spun across the mall. High hair, skinny legs, faces caked with makeup like in a science-fiction movie. They were everywhere, as though it were a dream. A strange and disturbing element came upon him like a hidden danger, causing him to panic. Boys. Suddenly, he was aware of an almost equal number of boys in dark T-shirts with bloody daggers decaled onto the front, roaming freely. They were thick in the neck, arm, and thigh and walked slightly off balance, an overbred species. Male and female, hanging out as if this were some private party in someone’s living room. The mating game. They pressed into corners, leaned back against pay phones, and exchanged phone numbers and deep kisses. They lay on the floor in front of their favorite stores, stretched out, heads propped on elbows, watching the people go by like they were watching something on MTV.

A security guard, who could have passed for a twelve-year-old dressed up for Halloween, walked by Frank. He smiled at the girls and rested his hands on the heavy leather equipment belt around his waist. The girls blushed. Frank imagined the boys took turns playing cop. When they got to the mall they flipped for it and then the winner (or was it the loser?) changed into the uniform. Frank noticed the guard had a gun, a real gun, and wondered why a twelve-year-old in a Halloween costume was carrying a real gun.

His watch beeped. He had set the alarm for the time he was supposed to meet his wife in front of the Twistie Freeze. Visually, he made another quick sweep of the area and then walked toward a clump of what looked like airport lounge chairs near the Twistie Freeze.

He sat there for a minute before he was overcome by self-consciousness and had to get up again. He went into the Twistie Freeze, bought a vanilla-and-chocolate-twist cone, and stood licking it near the door.

Across the mall, a baseball team was having a party in the Cheezy Dog. When Frank was a kid they always had barbecues after their games. They’d stay in the park playing catch and stuffing their faces until one kid threw up, and then they’d all climb into someone’s father’s station wagon and be dropped off one by one in the sadness of dark.

Frank looked in the Cheezy Dog and saw some kid take his hot dog out of the roll, hold it in front of his crotch, and wag it at the waitress. He quickly looked away.

At the far end of the mall, a shiny jeep was parked in the middle of things. At first Frank thought it made no sense, but as he thought about it more he became convinced it was the perfect idea; he couldn’t believe someone hadn’t thought of it before. A car dealership in a mall. Perfecto! It was the one way to get men to come back again and again, to spend hours, lingering.

Frank stood in front of the jeep, dreaming of a different kind of life, the kind he’d read about in stories of men outdoors, fishing trips and cabins in the woods. He dripped a bit of frozen custard onto the jeep and blotted it off with his napkin, leaving a smeary place on the hood. He fantasized buying a second home somewhere by a lake.

The jeep was wrapped in plastic tape that looked like the stuff police use to rope off crime scenes. It had Z-100 printed all over it.

“What’s Z-100?” he asked a kid standing next to him.

“Great metal station,” the kid said.

It was as if the child had spoken in code. What the hell was a metal station, Frank wanted to know.

“What’s Z-100?” he asked again.

“A radio station. They’re giving it away, in about fifteen minutes,” an older woman said.

He walked in circles around the jeep. He checked the sticker: fourteen thousand six hundred bucks; AM/FM radio, cassette deck, rustproof, good tires, mud flaps. He finished his cone and planned a new life. As he ran over the figures in his head and realized that any life other than the one he already lived was a complete impossibility, he became furious. Who were all the people in the mall, carrying around big shopping bags full of who knows what? They couldn’t all be shoplifters. They were buying things, big, important things. Where did they get the money? They couldn’t all be millionaires.

A crowd formed around Frank and the car. People started setting up folding beach chairs and plastic coolers, like what you’d put in the backyard or by the pool, in a ring around the car. The contest hadn’t even started yet and already a bottle of two hundred and fifty aspirins had been opened and was lying next to a can of Diet Coke.

The contest, I want to be in the contest, Frank thought. He imagined how proud Mary and the kids would be if he actually won something, especially something large like a car.

“Sign me up,” he said to someone wearing a judge’s hat.

“What’s your name?”

“Frank Mann.”

She looked down at her list. “Your name’s not here.”

“But I want to be in the contest,” he whined like a child.

“Did you call in and win?”

Frank gave her a confused look.

“The first twenty people who were the one-hundredth callers when we played the Poizon Boiz ‘Roll My Wheels’ are in the contest. Obviously you’re not one.”

“There has to be some way.”

“Sorry,” the judge said, walking away.

Frank continued to accost anyone in a Z-100 T-shirt until another judge pulled him aside and explained in extreme detail how the entrants had qualified. There was no way to sign up late.

Frank was so upset it was all he could do to contain a tantrum. He pictured himself screaming and pointing and calling everyone names until the security force, the boy with the gun, came for him, and like a civil disobedient he went limp and had to be dragged from the mall.

“Sore loser,” some girl with very big hair would say as they swept him past her.

Frank saw Julie on the other side of the car, sitting in one of the lounge chairs. He worked his way over to her.

“Are you a winner?”

“Yeah, but I had to pretend I was my mother. You have to be twenty-one to get the car. She’s doing the contest.”

Julie pointed at her mother, who was in a huddle with the other contestants and the judges from the radio station.

“How’s it work?” Frank asked.

“You have to keep your hands on the car all the time, except five minutes an hour. No other part of your body can ever touch the car, and like, if you want, someone can stay here with you overnight.”

Without thinking, Frank offered to stay overnight. He imagined himself prowling the corridors at three
A.M.

“That’s okay,” Julie said. “I’m staying.”

A short ugly man with permanent acne began speaking into a megaphone. His voice was like chocolate mousse, deep and smooth; he was obviously a disc jockey. The contestants arranged themselves around the car, scurrying for what they thought was the best place, the hood versus the side, and so on.

“Are your hands ready?” the D.J. asked.