Somebody In This House

(for Rae)

I meet Little Brother at our favorite coffee shop, Rainy Day Café, where they serve Thunder and Lightning Bolt espresso and CBD in any form one desires: elixir, tea, chai, hemp-infused sparkling water and hemp biscotti bites that look like dog treats. Their clientele is a mix of messy multimedia artists, working on their tablets, and remote business workers on laptops, donning headphones and dressed for success from the waist up. Little Brother is into the espresso, which enhances the effects of his Adderall. I’m the CBD fan. We look out of place, but continue to meet here, once a week, preferring the patio, weather permitting, over the slaves to their screens, sitting side-by-side at the long butcherblock tables indoors. Outside, we seat ourselves on cast iron chairs with heart shaped backs and tiny tabletops with space enough for two elbows and a bowl of sugar, like a café designed for anemic, chain-smoking Parisians. But we like what we like, so here we sit.

My friend, Rae, is anxious that the refugees have enough to eat. Her answer: Thai Boil-a-Meal, only a dollar fifty a pack at the co-op. She’s written to the United Nations and to the Red Cross. All anybody needs is a cup of water, a fork, and a pot, she says, What’s so hard about that?

I accept an invitation to “nap” on my new guy friend’s futon. Slinking in beside me, he says, Somebody in this house, I won’t say who, is about to wake up with her pants on backwards.

My birth control, the cervical cap (a device better known by female European sophisticates than their paunchy, American counterparts) is in a hotel room in Philadelphia. I’m in Detroit with my legs crossed. True Love (aka: husband) can’t remember what it’s called, so he calls it the hat. Thanks to my husband’s euphemism, we’re able to speak publicly without arousing curiosity. Hey, Babe, my husband begins in the restaurant, Did you remember your hat? If only he was there to ask me that before I left the hotel in Philly.

No false moves. Friend slips off the futon and out the door. I squish my eyes shut. Wait. A car starts up and zooms down the road. I don’t even know where the bathroom is located. It’s my first time in his shit house.

Sweet little nephew shows me his pre-school graduation picture: a red-faced four-year-old with a mortar board on his head. That’s my heart, he says, beating.

True Love doesn’t question why I had my hat in Philadelphia where he wasn’t. Surely somebody should find that suspect. I remembered on the plane, heading to Philly, it was still in me, forty-eight hours post coitus.

I can’t drink caffeine or my heart darts around my chest like a bumper car, which is how I end up in an emergency room, insisting I may be having a heart attack.

Silly niece, a kindergartner in footed pajamas, patters over for hugs good night. Stopping in her tracks, she turns her behind toward us, do these jammies make my butt look big?

Reverend Dad calls to tell me he was hit by a tiny Toyota truck while pushing his cart across the Costco parking lot. It was Rae, muttering to herself about the Thai Boil-a-Meals, which they don’t even sell at Costco. Dad said he heard a thud and, falling, realized, Well, shit, I’ve been hit. His shopping cart zips off and a musk melon rolls underneath a minivan as he meets the asphalt at an unnatural angle. Rae, who knows my father as the Methodist minister who presided over her failed marriage a few years before we met, reacts in record speed. She pulls back into her parking space and ducks down in the cab, thinking it a safe spot to escape the commotion. She’s yanked out by the parking lot attendant, otherwise known as the surly cart collector. Reverend Dad broke an elbow and suffered a severely bruised hip. Forever benevolent, he forgave Rae the instant she confessed. Sweet kid, he said, I could have told her that marriage would never work.

I squat in the hotel bathtub, stick in a finger, and pull out a plum. Violà. I’m latex free. Which is where it sat on the edge of the tub, a flimsy frisbee to be discovered by the cleaning staff.

Before I met my friend with the futon, who later became my True Love, I had the misfortune to be engaged to a heroine-chipping, cocaine-snorting drug addict. If you want to see what was to be our future home, you’d have to look up his nose. He used to wait until I fell asleep, then he’d sneak out of our ramshackle apartment to score. Leave in a bad mood, return with a dying urge to be productive and an inability to sleep. I was in love with breakfast, which would magically appear on the Formica kitchen countertop at all hours of the night.

Today at Rainy Day Café, Little Brother has got something to show me: a picture on the internet. He hands me his cellphone. It’s a houseboat. He’s excited, more so than usual, squirming around in his too-small chair, unable to get comfortable.

I just bought it. Cool, isn’t it?

The houseboat looks like a studio apartment on a raft, empty barrels strapped together with a dinky house plopped on top.

Does it have plumbing?

He wrinkles his forehead. It doesn’t need plumbing. You can pee off the side.

What about number two?

You can shit in a saucepan and toss it over. What is this, what’s your point?

You’ll live there? All year long?

No, it’s a timeshare. I bought it for the winter.

The winter? Won’t the lake freeze? Is it even insulated?

Do you have to do this? Jesus. You sound like somebody’s mother. Not ours, but somebody’s, he says, grabbing the houseboat back.

During Rae’s divorce from her cheating husband, a kindly security guard found her in the CitiBank parking lot, the one next to Costco. She’d been reported missing by her mother when she didn’t answer her calls and hadn’t arrived home the day before. There had been hints of potential self-harm, not threats, but oddly specific inquiries about the effects of barbiturates, a hose in the garage, too much duct tape lying about. She was asleep in her tiny truck amidst a spilled bag of Chex party mix and a half-eaten cheesecake. The instant the security guard woke her, she started bawling. I just want to go back in time to when I was a baby, before things got all fucked up. I just want to be that innocent baby again.

No, my memory is wrong. That was Meryl Streep in Adaptation.

Try to buy a replacement cervical cap anywhere outside of Europe or Northern California. Go ahead, try. New Gyno swears she never had another patient request one. My former gynecologist’s office in California had disbanded. New Gyno said, You find out what size you are and where I can get one, and I’ll order it. I had to talk to some nun in medical records who said she couldn’t give me that info. After continued harassment, she finally said, Miss, I can’t tell you that it says twenty-three centimeters here on this chart. That would be breaking the rules. Blessed be!

All in the family: Zoloft, Adderall, CBD tea, a pack-a-day and gimme-a-God- Damn-cup-of-coffee. That’s Reverend Dad, Little Brother, Me, and Mom.

Watch mom’s eyes. They roll around like marbles in a teacup.

This is what’s wrong with the word “wife.” It sounds like “wipe” and “wet ones” and “rag” and “mop” and “toilet bowl” and “tea stains” and “throw up.” It sounds like a hairless dog licking its crack clean. Look at Wife, on her knees, cleaning crap off the kitchen floor. She’s a God forsaken minivan, an American anachronism, cream of mushroom soup. Let’s just admit it, “Wife” is antiquated and ugly and smells like sour milk and Soft Scrub. We need a new word for this woman. You hear me Merriam-Webster, OED, Strunk & White, Chicago Manual of Fucking Style?

I wake on the futon to the sound of milk steaming. The cappuccino maker is going full tilt and Friend (True Love to be) is running around the kitchen, cleaning out coffee cups and putting things in cupboards. What’s this? Sexy smile, Well, you said you didn’t do caffeine, so I ran out for decaf. Hallelujah, this one is drug free.

She didn’t make the house unless she built it. In which case, she’s a carpenter, or construction worker, a master builder whiz with power tools. Homemaker is not an adequate euphemism, I tell Rae, who appreciates any rant addressing failed attempts to dress up acts of domesticity.

Little Brother, three years my junior, is not-so-little. He is about six-foot-six with a receding hairline. He has been swallowing speed since his third-grade ADHD diagnosis. He whimpered and flailed about coming off it each evening throughout elementary school, my inconsolable kid brother. Marbles in a Teacup, at her wit’s end and wanting quiet, tossed him in the clothes dryer on one of those nights when her eyes went swimming and her whole head followed. He was more jittery after that. Startled easily, bumped into things.

In the hospital, where I’m having a heart attack, the nurse sticks suction cups to my chest and tells me she thinks it could be indigestion, like I don’t know the difference between stomach bile and a collapsed ventricle. It takes about two minutes for me to flatline. The EKG machine starts squealing and here comes the crash cart. Meanwhile, one of the suction cups has popped off my breast and is tickling Hilda belly.

Flashback: Drug Addict Fiancé pulls me to the window facing the back parking lot. We live between a dive bar and a porn shop. In the dark, I see two ghost faces in the back seat of a rusted-out Ford Fiesta. They are illuminated by a mysterious yellow light, a pocket of flame under their faces. Beautiful angels.

See that, he said. They’re smoking crack.

Because I met Rae mid-divorce, which means I don’t fully know the arc of her coupledom, I get an episode every time we meet for a glass of wine on my back deck. Rae mines her married past life while I drink cabernet and flick pistachio shells into the bushes. Today, it’s about his propensity to take Rae to dating hotspots as a means—she later learned—to scope it out for himself and his side dish. We’d go to the fancy restaurant and sit at the bar while he eyed the dinner menu and checked out the ambiance. Leave with the wife and return next weekend with Holly Hotpants. Monsieur Oui-Oui Merci, dining on escargot and duck confit like he’s Lance Romance with a chalet in the south of France.

One winter, when Drug Addict Fiancé and I were having a trial separation, no contact whatsoever, I became psychic. Late at night, after the bars closed, I’d wake from a dead sleep, look out the window and see him sitting in his truck, parked across the street, watching and waiting, like he expected me to throw the door open and invite him in.

Marbles in a Teacup sends me a package. A present? From Mom? It’s padded bras in three pastel colors: pink, baby blue, pale green. No note.

Sweet little nephew cracks his arm falling off the trampoline while I’m visiting. We all load into the car to take a trip to the hospital. He’s not howling, but his eyes are wide while he cradles one arm with the other. Slow down, Daddy, he demands of my brother, you are going to get a nitwit.

Silly niece sings in the back seat, entertaining the troops. What do you get when you kiss a tycoon? You get enough cold sores to sink a cruise ship. She stops to clarify, He means TICKET, Dad, he doesn’t want you to get a ticket.

This is what I’ve learned about love and drug addicts: A drug addict will grow bored of you just about the time that you are sure you need him to need you. Once he has sex with you from every angle and he knows every slit of you and there are no new stories to tell, that’s it. He owns you. Once he realizes you are completely attainable and easy to access, he’s asleep at the wheel, bored beyond belief. Drugs, he will never own. Drugs always lead to a new story to tell. He can repeat the act of consumption and each time the results will be a bit different. And drugs aren’t cheap. Not like you. Drugs will cost him. And he’ll never be bored. Blotto, incoherent, happy as a clam, sick as a dog, brain damaged, palsied, yellow-eyed, left for dead? Yes. Bored? No.

Upon hearing the wording cellulite, think, instead, “hail damage.”

Rae and I are on my back deck again drinking wine and flinging nutshells when she diverges from her episodic anti-romantic tales to tell me she drove across town to pick up a pizza at Viking Lanes where she caught sight of her ex and Holly Hotpants (apparently having downgraded their outings to better match their plebian palates) at the bowling alley bar. Wearing those clown shoes, she said, drinking longneck Buds and feeding each other onion rings. Mr. & Mistress Grossly Greasy. Not to give him the satisfaction of her disdain, Rae got the bartender to send over a second round, quickly fleeing the scene. Upgraded to Heinekens, a class act!

I call home to talk to Reverend Dad and get Marbles in a Teacup. Luck of the draw. You know what they do to people at airports? she begins as if in the middle of a story, as if in the middle of making a valuable point, They make them take their clothes off. Did I tell you that Mrs. Dragachano’s dog died? Renal kidney failure. She took him for walks while he was on dialysis. Just like the elderly and their oxygen tanks. They make you get naked with strangers in airports. That’s how TSA gets their kicks. Your father knows where it is you’re living now. Oh, no, don’t tell me. I don’t have a pen. No, here’s your father, Reverend Limp Along. He takes SO LONG to get to the phone.

Time for pictures. Nobody blink.

Knock, knock. It’s my neighbor, Joe, with a package in a plastic shopping bag. He signed for it. Sorry, no time to chat. It’s a California company, FemCap™. Phew!

By the summer after my breakup with Drug Addict Fiancé, we were sleeping together again. I did not love him, but I discovered I had been addicted to the appearance of my naked body having sex, which I could see reflected in the mirror next to his bed. It was my favorite mirror, and I had missed it. We began having sex with such frequency he had to buy a ValuPak of condoms. He hung his used condoms, one after the other, on finishing nails he had pounded into the wall next to his bed for just such occasions. That’s what I remember most about that summer. Those condoms. They looked like a row of tiny, transparent Christmas stockings, puddles in their toes.

It wasn’t a heart attack. I was having an arrhythmic reaction to a 7-11 Super Big Gulp I had sucked down on an empty stomach on a too-hot day during the Latvian Festival at Hart Plaza, downtown Detroit. That, and I had been taking my birth control pills sporadically, not at all as prescribed, which is why I had to find a replacement birth control that nobody on this continent has heard of.

Ding Dong. Doorbell dilemma. I’m not inclined to open the door to strangers. Through the kitchen window I spy a man in a three-piece suit. Salesman?

Hello, who’s there? I ask the pressed wood door with a dysfunctional dead bolt. Your neighbor. Not neighbor Joe. He’s new to the neighborhood, he says. I play with a twist tie, think. It’s about three hours before True Love is due home, leaving a potential killer plenty of time to do with me what he will.

I hate to bother you, he shouts, but my granddaughter. I can’t find her.

At this, I grab a spatula, just in case, and open the door. He looks very much like Al Pacino in The Godfather, except for the fact that, in addition to his suit, he is wearing a fishing cap and an oversized yellow rain slicker.

I was a little late getting to the bus stop, and now she’s not there. I was wondering if she’s here.

No, no kids, maybe at another neighbor’s, sorry.

He looks like he’s not sure if I’m to be believed, but thanks me just the same and trundles off.

For a time, I lived in a town where there were no birds, just an energizer battery plant, a mace factory, and couches on the porches. In the winter, it was just the couches, but in the summer, there were TVs on the porches, too. Then came the parades—the parade of ambulances, the parade of fire trucks. Little League parade and Christmas floats. Rows of lawn chairs lined the sidewalk, monthly, or so it seemed. People set up early, seeking prime spots for the inevitable scattering of candy, which is where I found myself, hand outstretched, competing with the kiddies.

Here’s the story with Marbles in a Teacup. Her father did tricks with his hands and taught her to do tricks with her hands and her other parts. They had a whole God Damn routine worked out by the time she was ten. He also smacked around her and her siblings. But when they did tricks together, he was soft and sometimes cried and talked to God. So, as you can see, things got a bit confused in her head, which is how her eyes got loose.

The day I had the good sense to marry True Love was the best day of my life. We eloped, and I was handed a plastic bag with several samples of household products, but it was still a good day. I want to be perfectly clear about that.

Marbles in a Teacup on the phone again, babbling about what: so-and-so’s failing liver and the so-and-so’s daughter passing a kidney stone and the price of potatoes in Thailand and me as a little girl curled up in a ball under my bed, so cute, hiding and holding my breath till I passed out, trying to disappear. That was you, Mother, when you were a girl, hiding from Grandpa, remember Mother? Remember?

Here’s how Rae and I became friends after her dipshit husband took up with his bowling league partner: We both signed up for a pottery class. Mine was a gift from my husband who had probably grown tired of me talking about it, and, for her, it was a divorce gift to herself. But it was clear she was off-the-charts angry, and while she thought the pottery wheel was the place to work it out, that didn’t go well. In fact, we were both pretty terrible potters. But one day, at Valu Village, I came upon a restaurant’s supply worth of old, cheap china—the mass-produced stuff—and on impulse, I bought a shitload and hauled it over to Rae’s house. I said, Grab some beers and open your garage door. Which she did. We drank a few while she talked about her lame divorce lawyer and who was going to get what—none of it going her way, of course—which was when I picked up a soup bowl and said, Throw it. She froze for a second, mouth half-open. Then her eyes lit up, and she shattered it against the garage wall where the tools he took with him had hung in neat rows. I handed her a plate and said, Again. And she did. Over and over. At first, she was laughing. We both were. I even shattered a few. Then she was crying. Not doubled over, not heaving, but quietly, defiantly, emptying herself out.

Al Pacino, still in his fishing cap and big yellow rain slicker, walks by my house with a little girl holding a white balloon with an image of a pink ribbon on it. The balloon is a cure breast cancer event left over. He has a hand on her head, keeping a tight grip, resolved not to lose her, again.

I liberated you from that dryer, I remind Little Brother who is still sore about the houseboat conversation. Remember, I’m the one who let you out. Sibling coffee shop chit-chat, to which he responds, That wasn’t heroism; that was your civic duty. What else would you have done, left me there with the underwear? Left me to suffocate in Dad’s Fruit-of-the-Looms?

This is what Silly Niece, age six, wants for Christmas—a facial. And do I remember the ruby pinky ring I bought her? She lost it in the refrigerator, in the vegetable crisper.

When I finally broke up with Drug Addict Fiancé forever and for good, I went back to college where I found work as a nude model for the art department. I had felt like I was disappearing, yet I had a deep-seated desire to be seen. And so, during otherwise dreary midwinter Michigan afternoons, a room full of students committed my naked body to canvas. Some drew my feet surprisingly large.

Rae calls and she’s talking fast again, this time about a PBS special on refugee camps. She wants me to watch to see what kind of cooking implements they have. She’s driving and apparently can’t wait to stop and call up the video herself. So, she’s elected me to be her eyes. She hopes I can help prove her theory about Boil-a-Meals, that they’re a reasonable solution. But my internet is on the fritz and now we’re both swearing into the phone at the same time, not at each other but at my Internet provider.

MARIA MCLEOD’s poetry and prose have been published by literary journals in the U.S., England, Scotland, and Germany. She has won the Quarter after Eight Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize, the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. She has authored two poetry chapbooks, Skin. Hair. Bones. and Mother Want. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Washington where she works as a journalism professor for Western Washington University. Visit her on Instagram @mariapoempics