AM/PM Read online

  The trick to stealing light bulbs is to walk in with an empty light bulb carton. Wave the carton at the greeters so they can see it, and then take what you need. Hazel would sometimes wave to the greeters on the way out, the full carton in her hand. The more blatant, the better, when it comes to stealing.

  “Free light bulbs, free kittens,” Sam said. “Today’s our lucky day.”

  “Today’s your lucky day!” the fat woman parroted. She flipped open one of the cardboard flaps and hauled out a kitten.

  “They’re real pretty,” the fat man said. He was drinking from a juice box.

  Hazel reached for the gray and white kitten and touched its paw. “Do those kittens have six toes?”

  The woman nodded. “This kitten could shake your hand,” she said.

  “That’s a sign of a good kitten,” Hazel said.

  The woman looked a little offended. “They’re free,” she said, thrusting the kitten towards Hazel. “There’s four more.”

  “We’ll take them all,” Sam said. And they did.

  96:PM

  Tess kept a secret: her left hand was turning into a claw. She felt the tendons tightening up in her forearm the week before, and had written it off as the onset of carpal tunnel, but the tendons continued to tighten. The feeling spread into her hand, which began to curve like a scythe, the bones lengthening a little and then bending, almost imperceptibly, until her fingers hardened into one immobile point and her left hand was fully a claw.

  Tess kept the secret, but compensated by repeating it to herself. She would lie in bed, curled around her left hand, holding it gently to her knees. My hand is a claw. My hand is a claw.

  AM:97

  June woke up covered in seeds. They were small, toasted sesame seeds, thousands of them all over her body. She had never been covered in seeds before and it was a strange feeling, like a snake might feel in sand. There was no explanation, as far as she could see, for the sudden appearance of all the seeds. It was a comforting feeling, and June turned over three times in the slippery weightlessness before falling back asleep.

  98:PM

  They were in love! Carla wore her hair up and Andrew saw everything as a sign. They spent an entire afternoon sitting side by side in a coffee shop, taking more meaning than necessary from the world around them. A man wearing boxing gloves walked down the sidewalk in front of them and they took that to mean they would be together forever.

  AM:99

  Good morning, John Mayer Concert Tee! It has been a while. I’m feeling a need to overstress my happiness at seeing you, hanging on the laundry line between my house and the neighbor girl’s house. It’s one of those mornings where everything is tinged with miracle. The waxed floor is a miracle! The dirty dishes are a miracle! The day ahead is a gift from heaven. This isn’t to say I’m happy, John Mayer Concert Tee, but you are a miracle. If we mated, John Mayer Concert Tee, our children would have jersey-knit skin. They would never speak unless spoken to, and even then they might not speak. But they would be soft, and they would smell like fabric softener, and they would love us, and we would love them.

  100:PM

  “I just had a terrible dream,” Martha said.

  Emily turned to look at her. “You were sleeping?”

  Martha flicked on the turn signal, changed lanes. “I dreamt we were in a awful car accident,” she said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  It wasn’t that much of a coincidence, really, as they were weaving through late-night traffic. It bothered Emily more to think that Martha had been asleep at the wheel, though surely it was just an expression.

  “It was a bad dream,” Martha said. “We were in an accident, and I was okay.”

  “Did I have a bar through my head?”

  Martha shook her head and blinked. Emily realized she was staring.

  “You weren’t okay,” Martha said.

  “I’m okay now,” Emily said, turning to look out the window again. Without looking back, she reached across the seat divider, found Martha’s hand, and held it.

  AM:101

  Betty cracked the crust of her crème brûlée with the edge of her spoon. “This is a symbol of my love for you,” she said.

  “You’ve said that about a lot of things,” Simon said. “You said that about the entrée as well. And the bottle of wine.”

  “It’s all true,” she said. “Your cup of coffee is a symbol of my love for you. This spoon. Our waiter. The ceiling. Your fingernails. The crack in that windowpane. The cars parked outside. My shoes. Your shoes. The pastry chef. This tablecloth.”

  “What about the flowers?” he asked, gesturing to the buds in a vase between them.

  She looked at him. “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

  102:PM

  Frances ate fish at all meals. In the morning, when the newspaper came, she ate a bagel with lox. Mid-day, she would prefer something light, like tuna in olive oil, but at night she would make cod fried with polenta, rich seafood stews, baked salmon, seared tuna rolled in pepper and sea salt. She declared that she would eat fish until the day she died, and then she would eat fish as an angel.

  As the days went on, her fish consumption grew simpler. She ate fish as a singular pursuit. She ate alone, with her back to the door, the fish alone on a plate, without spices or sauces. She stopped cooking rice and vegetables. She drank a glass of water before the fish and a glass of bourbon after. She ate the fish from a white plate, and the fish was white against the plate. When the fish was gone, she licked the white plate.

  When Missy or Chastity called, Frances talked about her day in relation to fish.

  She would say, “I just ate some fish,” or “I am about to cook some fish, broil it perhaps.”

  Her friends silently wondered when they would be invited for dinner, and then they began to wonder it aloud, but she never had a solid answer for them.

  She would say, “I’m sorry, I only defrosted enough fish for one.”

  When her friends pressed her to make future plans, Frances seemed confused. Her friends decided she was demurring and stopped calling, because they were all sensitive people. She was sensitive, too, and didn’t understand why they stopped calling.

  AM:103

  Carla snapped the tines off the plastic fork with her thumb. “No matter how deeply I bury you in the gravel pit of my memory,” she said, “you come crawling back out.”

  “There’s no need for poetry,” Andrew said. “I’m just here for my chair.”

  “I’m eating,” she said.

  “You just broke your fork.”

  “See, Andrew, that’s just how you are. It’s no damn business of yours how I eat, and what I eat with. What if I brought this fork to the door just to show you how serious I am?”

  “All I’m saying is, you’re not eating right now, and I want my chair back.”

  “I want those years back,” Carla said. “I want my youth back.”

  “You may have your youth,” Andrew said. He had a bag with him, and he reached into the bag and pulled out a small, carved box. He handed it to her and she held it with both hands.

  “Sorry I kept it for so long,” Andrew said.

  Carla took a step back to let him in. “Your chair is in the kitchen,” she said.

  104:PM

  Terrence and Leonard grew up in Dallas and moved to different cities at the same time. They were bored with Dallas. All the women in Dallas were preternaturally interested in the fact that they were twins, though they were grown by then and had exhausted all avenues for conversation regarding their twinship.

  Of course, luck would have it that the woman Terrence was starting to feel comfortable around would squeal and hold her palms together when she learned he was a twin.

  “Who’s older?” June asked, resting her chin on her upturned palms. It was the most excited she’d been all evening, even after he told his humorous stories from his job at the collections agency.

  “He is, by thirteen minutes.” Terr
ence couldn’t stop fussing with a dollop of glitter glue on the Formica table between them. He was trying to edge his fingernail under it.

  “What did your mother do in that thirteen minutes?” June asked. “Have a cigarette? Wonder, ‘is this second one really worth it’?”

  Terrence laughed politely. “Right,” he said, answering none of the questions. June had no way of knowing that his mother was long dead, and she seemed nice enough that she would have been embarrassed if he mentioned it.

  “Anyway,” June said. Saying “anyway” was a conversational tic of hers, it seemed, as she had resorted to it three times over the course of an hour.

  AM:105

  Missy shrugged. “What I want to know is,” she said, dropping her fork into a puddle of maple syrup, “why does everyone keep talking about how fat Frances is?”

  “Who’s Frances?” Chet asked. Missy and Chet had been married for six months.

  “Oh my God,” said Chastity, at that moment breastfeeding her three-year-old son. “Frances is so plump.”

  “She’s plump!” Missy said. “Exactly! She’s pleasantly plump. I mean, there but for the grace of God go the rest of us.” She pinched the thin layer of fat on her own belly.

  Chastity made a face. “I’ll never be that plump,” she said, shifting her weight. The boy toothed her nipple and she winced.

  “Not as long as you keep up that tit lipo,” Missy said, mostly for the benefit of Chet, who hadn’t stopped staring since Chastity unbuttoned her blouse and hauled it out.

  Missy plunged her fork into the last square of her french toast, swirling it around and thinking of all the opportunities for pain she had missed in her life. “Frances is so fat,” she said, satisfied.

  106:PM

  They found Tess in the center of her living room with her legs folded neatly under her. The pose suggested that she had received sudden and shocking news, and had to sit down immediately to allow her body to catch up with the emotional significance.

  The rope hung loose from the rafters, still on her neck, its frayed ends spun out behind her like a child’s toy. The shoe on the table, five feet from the girl, suggested that she swung about eight horizontal feet before the rope broke. You could imagine the look on her face.

  AM:107

  One day, everyone stopped over-thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. There were no more misunderstandings whatsoever. Minor disagreements were forgotten, not turned into proof of larger things. Trivial errors of speech or judgment were just as important as items on the breakfast menu: you chose waffles and I chose eggs and it was a god damn miracle.

  108:PM

  Carla stepped out of the dressing room and took a modest turn. “How do I look?” she asked.

  Hazel looked at her mother with a critical eye. The knot halter cut of the gown revealed her slender shoulders. The vibrant pink, which had looked a little young on the rack, added color to the woman’s face. Carla looked in the mirror, put one bare foot forward, wiggled her hips a little.

  “Mom,” Hazel said, “you look like a brand new bitch.”

  “Well that’s fine,” her mother said. “I somewhat feel like a brand new bitch.”

  AM:109

  Charles was painting the ceiling red after the landlord specifically told him not to paint anything at all.

  From the door, Doreen looked up at him. “It must take a special kind of stubborn,” she said, “to live your life.”

  “It will look incredible,” he said, stretching his arms overhead. He winced in the stretch.

  “You should get off that ladder.”

  “It all has to be done at once, or it won’t appear even.”

  “You’ll pull a muscle in your back and we’ll starve.”

  “You want to do it?” he asked, waving the roller at her. Red paint dripped to the drop cloth below. At least he had the foresight to put down the drop cloth, she thought.

  “I don’t want you to do it,” she said. “The landlord doesn’t want you to do it. Nobody wants you to do what you’re doing right now.”

  “It will look incredible. The baby will love it.”

  “What baby?”

  He looked at her, exasperated. “For God’s sake, woman. I’m simply thinking ahead.”

  110:PM

  Olivia couldn’t bear to watch them take the rest of the tree. The men propped ladders up against the trunks and climbed up to stand at eye-level with her office. She shut the blinds and shuddered as branches fell against the walls and windows. When she opened the blinds again, she saw that the tree central to her viewing area had been compromised, swarms of gnats attending to sap glistening on the cut trunk. The tree bent back unnaturally from the window, as if shamed. She realized the hatred she felt for the people and things over which she had no control.

  AM:111

  They sniped at each other quietly outside the changing room at the department store. “Everything makes sense if you think about it long enough,” Missy said. “That’s your problem.”

  “Now, that makes sense,” said Chet. “I bet you thought about that for a long time.”

  “Does this make me look fat?”

  Chet looked appraisingly at his wife. “You gained half a pound this week.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “Maybe a quarter pound,” he lied.

  “You make all that stuff up anyway. I can’t understand why those scientists call you amazing.”

  She flounced back into the changing room. Chet took a seat by the doorway.

  112:PM

  “Terrence,” Charles said. “Friend.”

  “Charles?”

  Charles mumbled something, but Terrence could barely hear Charles’s voice from the other side of the box.

  Terrence leaned forward. “What’s that?”

  “Infants are smarter than we think,” Charles said, faintly.

  “Infants?”

  “Infants,” Charles said, “are smarter than we think.”

  “You’re all right, Charles?”

  “They’re smarter,” Charles said.

  AM:113

  Wallace’s concept of honor ensured he would never go to sleep satisfied. His concept of God was that a being that creates bread from bread is to be feared. Love is intensity with less spectrum, sadness is spectrum with less intensity. Wallace believed in the horizontal nature of pain and the verticality of love.

  114:PM

  The children found the cube, and shrieked over it as children do. The adults couldn’t be pulled away from the picnic at first, and assumed that the children had found a shed snakeskin or a gopher hole during their exploration of the causeway. Only when the kid touched the monolith and burned his hand did the parents come running, attracted by the screams.

  It was an iron cube, ten feet high and wavering like a mirage. The Thurber kid wept bitterly, his hand already swelling with the blister.

  Nobody knew what to make of the thing. It was too big to have been carted in on a pickup truck. It might have fit on the open bed of an eighteen-wheeler, but there were no tire marks in the area, no damaged vegetation and not even a road nearby wide enough for a load that size. It was as if the block had been cast in its spot and destined to remain. And then there was the issue of the inscription.

  They didn’t notice it at first, between the screaming kid and Betty Thurber’s wailing panic, hustling him back to the car for ice, and the pandemonium of parents finding their own children and clasping them to their chests and lifting them up at once. The object in question itself received little scrutiny. Only when the women took the children back for calamine lotion and jelly beans did the men notice the printed text, sized no larger than a half inch, on the shady side of the block:

  EVERYTHING MUST EVENTUALLY SINK.

  AM:115

  The tour bus slowed to a halt and the occupants took up their cameras, craning their necks.

  The young, pretty tour guide switched on her microphone. �
��On your left,” she said, gesturing to a modest brownstone,

  “you will find where the philosopher lives.”

  An audible gasp rose among the crowd. Shutters clicked and mothers hauled their children up to see.

  “He lives there,” an older woman said in a daze. “He solves our problems there.”

  The pretty tour guide recited her memorized notes with reverence. “The philosopher is the wellspring from which our lives flow. Without him, there would be no heaven and hell, no love or feeling or meaning. The philosopher toils in silence, alone, a thankless life. Perhaps we will catch a glimpse of him today.”

  The crowd leaned forward, eagerly scanning the windows for movement. Perhaps the philosopher would peer out the window as he drank his morning coffee, or sit on the stoop and have a cigarette.

  They watched. Nothing happened. The driver released the air brakes with a hiss and continued down the street.

  116: PM

  Try not to fill yourself with anxiety. Take your pills on time. Consider the proper way of doing things. Parcel your week into a series of days, your day into a series of hours, your hour into a series of thoughts. Know when to push yourself and others. Congratulate yourself for small successes to mask the other growing pile. There has been a ladder in your office for weeks now, and you’re trying to be polite about it.

  AM:117

  June believed in spells that could be broken, and in making the final push. She wrote letters to congressmen and companies and strangers. Her life’s goal was that people understand her, and each other, and themselves. It was the only kind thing she did.