Glow in the Dark
GLOW IN THE DARK
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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Heat Signature
GLOW IN THE DARK
STORIES
LISA TEASLEY
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2002.
by Lisa Teasley
“What the Fertility Goddess Brought” appeared in Rampike, “Holiday Confessional” appeared in Washington Square, “Why I Could Never Be Boogie” appeared in Great River Review, “The Breaking of Miss and Mrs. Gaines” appeared in Event, “White Picket Fence” appeared in Amelia, “Nepenthe” appeared in Herstory, and “Baker” appears in the anthology Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Teasley, Lisa, 1962—
Glow in the dark : stories / Lisa Teasley.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59691-921-1
I. Title.
PS3620.E43G57 2006
813’.6—dc22
2005057033
First published in the United States by Cune Press in 2002
This paperback edition published by Bloomsbury USA in 2006
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Flewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
For John
CONTENTS
New York
Baker
Holiday Confessional
Wanting Girlfriend with the Pink Hair
Northern California
Nepenthe
The Profit in Fort Bragg
Mexico
Magda in Rosarito, Beached
Los Angeles
What the Fertility Goddess Brought
White Picket Fence
Why I Could Never Be Boogie
The Breaking of Miss and Mrs. Gaines
Meeting for Breakfast
Paris
Sunnie’s Forehead
New York
Baker
The last person ever to see Marty naked was his little sister, Baker, back in Amarillo, Texas when they were twelve and five, respectively. Not long after, Baker was diagnosed as autistic. Marty always thought his nakedness had caused his sister’s disability.
Marty moved to New York when he was seventeen. For nine years he had numerous jobs involving grease and oil, until he met Carol who hired him at the paper in Jersey City, where he lived. Carol was soon fired but it didn’t matter since she failed upwards. She had already been fired from seven jobs, each one paying more than the last, so she sported no pallor of defeat. Carol was beautiful—not heartbreakingly beautiful, but beautiful and heartbreaking. Only thirty-three, she’d been divorced three times. The ex-husbands hung on, left messages on the machine. Marty knew little about them because he didn’t want to. She told Marty her lovers had always worn jockeys, but her mates wore boxers. Marty looked particularly tall, skinny, pale, and gangly in the boxers she chose for him. Although it had been a year and a half with Carol, he was always half-dressed with the lights off when they had sex, and he always took showers with the door locked. So she’d never seen him naked. This she said she’d conquer after he agreed to go to AA.
As well as drinking there was coffee to kick, then sugar, then Jesus. Soon Marty found the god of health. Couple mornings a week when he had spent the night at Carol’s in Williamsburg, he’d leave the car in front of her building, and take the L train one stop into the city for yoga on 1st and 15th. There was a woman, Leila, whom he somehow didn’t consider a revisiting of his past big black girl fetish. This was different, and serious. He could never predict which class she would attend, but when he was lucky, he’d walk in, see her name on the sign-in sheet, and anticipate the thrill of watching her limbs move, her muscles skate, her dark skin shine. Her body had one flaw, which didn’t challenge aesthetic but rather function. When she scooped her stomach on the floor, pressing the palms of her long hands, attempting to bring herself up into the position called Cobra, she winced, hardly making it halfway. He heard her apologize many times to the teacher for the structure of her spine. He wanted badly to hear her whisper the same into his ear while fucking her from behind. But he knew this would take time.
Marty’s sponsor gave him a tape denouncing self-will, self-love, and sex. Mornings after Carol rode him, he would pop the cassette in her deck while she got ready for work. But this time Carol came out of the bathroom and screamed. When he showed no reaction, she started yelling about how nice it was when they first met, listening to tapes of the ocean, or some of the “fast shit” that he was into when she still worked at the paper. Watching her, Marty felt nothing. He wondered how he’d ever fell for her, since he had never really liked the taste of her. She ran for the iron, which wasn’t plugged in, scrambled for him where he sat on the bed, then punched him with it in the ear. The pain rang as he closed his palm over his ear. He looked up at her in disbelief, and then she hit him again, this time in the jaw, which was where she said she’d meant to put the first one.
He could knock her back with it, or he could lie there enjoying the pain and the look of girlish regret on her face. He’d seen it before when she’d hit him, but these scattered incidents of her explosive anger were few and far between. The pain felt right, he thought, burying the back of his head into the pillow as Carol said she was sorry, and put her hands gently on Marty’s hips. Forgive me, she said. And he knew he was forgiven for one more night of sex that meant nothing to him, for one more night of sex without love or marriage. How was it, he wondered, had these ex-husbands fallen for her anyway?
The drive through the Holland Tunnel, the stop and start and the echoing howls of horns made him aware for the first time that they were all under water. It felt soothing to him. He could live out the fantasy of drowning, if he really concentrated, and it would squeeze it out, those thoughts of little girls, and the whackings, as he called them, from his old mother.
What happened to your face? everybody in the building kept asking as he made his rounds with the mail. And everybody, except Benjamin, got the sly smile from Marty, which hurt and reminded him. With Benjamin he went out to the truck for a dog and a Snapple. Both tasted nasty and cancelled out all of last week’s offerings to the god of health.
Marty my man, have you fallen off? Benjamin finally asked from the curve where they sat looking across the street to the soot-colored building. Ah nah, man, 246 days, I’ll make it to my first birthday, Marty said, smiling to face Benjamin, so it hurt again. It was Carol, and I didn’t lay a hand on her. Benjamin shook his head, laughed, then said, Don’t take this the wrong way, but everybody knows, me especially, that Carol is fucked up. Marty rolled that over for a while, then said, No, it’s me. Really. Well, Benjamin said, This is the best time of year to count your friends and leave the rest of them where they belong, in the dirt. Know what I mean, man? When the leaves are changing color, and falling down on the ground. The beauty of it man, always tells the truth. Yeah, Marty answered. I used to travel ‘round this time most every year. Drive from Texas to wherever when the colors were doi
ng their thing. And I used to leave half my heart home, but then came a time when I took the whole thing with me. So I know what you mean. Maybe you do, man, Benjamin said. And then again, maybe you don’t, because you have this problem, see, with listening. Benjamin got up and hit him firmly on the back of the head, and called back, See you in there.
Later when Marty drove by the preschool, and his head started pounding, pushing, trying to squeeze out any too-old memories of his little sister Baker, he ran a red light then screeched all the way to the first payphone to call his sponsor. Thomas, a market analyst, had given him his cell number, and whenever Thomas gave him a short quick response of when he could call him back, Marty knew that when Thomas did call, Marty would have to wait out five minutes of a testy edge until Thomas settled in with some humanity. Fuck it, Marty said aloud when he hung up, and he made it to the next meeting.
While he was there not listening to the woman going on about her sickness, he was thinking he would go to a yoga class for every meeting. That would up his chances for seeing Leila.
It was the fourth time when Leila gave him five minutes after class, and he gave her the depth of his white boy humility, which had always worked. He asked if he could drive her home since she lived in Brooklyn. Even though he didn’t have his car there, he knew she would turn him down but maybe take him up on it the next time. So he figured out her schedule. He found out she was a pastry-maker for a French restaurant in the city, and he feigned surprise, lied and said his mother did the same thing in San Francisco. It occurred to him he should explain his slight Texas twang, so he told her about Amarillo but made up the rest about moving to California with his mother, and he left out his sister all together. There was some truth to it, he thought. The instructor said goodbye, and a couple of people pushed in to get their things, as Leila pulled her skirt up over her purple bike shorts, now covering the shape of her gorgeous thighs. She slipped her backpack on quickly. This lie wasn’t such a stretch, Marty thought. After all, his mother worked in a diner and pies were among the things she served, and his mother had a sister who left for California soon after their parents were murdered when his mother and aunt were still in their teens.
From the door of the building, Marty decided to go the opposite way of Leila, so he could wait until she made it three quarters of a block, then follow her. When she disappeared down the steps into the subway, he walked around in search of a lingerie shop to buy her a bra and panties, some deep strain of red, like burgundy or maroon, that would set off the tone of her skin. Then he could give it to her at the proper moment.
Carol had been leaving desperate messages on his machine for the past week, since he’d only been by her place once or twice in the last month. The time before last was violent again. He swore to her later he didn’t mind, because he knew it saved him from having to have sex with her again, and again.
Sponsor Thomas invited Marty to meet him at one of his Wall Street bars thick with slick hair and cigar smoke. How can you drink Coke in one of these places? Marty asked him as he always did. Because I have to, Thomas said, it’s my job. And that’s what you have to learn, Marty, how to handle yourself in all the tough situations, like bars, and women, and lonely winter nights. This winter hasn’t been shit yet, has it? Marty asked, trying to be light. No it hasn’t, Thomas said, dragging on his cigarette. So tell me, you moving up yet in that shit-hole of a paper? Marty laughed. And then he looked past him, and made a tunnel through all of the dark suits, and loud voices that sounded like one long grumble until Marty squeezed it into a rumble, fast, like getting into a car and racing it down the road, dragging it past the drunk fucks who’d just challenged him to a crash.
What do you see in me? Marty asked Thomas. Thomas laughed, and then squinted his eyes, and brought his face closer to Marty’s, and with a slim curl in his lip, whispered, Is there something you’re trying to tell me, son? Then he winked, hit the table, beating it with both hands as if it were a drum, and said, Fuck man, you’re going to make it.
The eighth time Marty had a treasured encounter with Leila was when she finally said she would take that ride home. They had to walk five blocks to his car, and he noticed she often left off the last words of her sentences, as if he was supposed to know what would come next. He noticed too that there was something similar to Carol about her, not their skin or texture of their hair, of course, but something in the space between all of the features of their face. He was sorry about this and tried to see something else. He concentrated then on the expression she had with the instructor when he would adjust her, this kind of merciful expression he wanted to lick off.
As they drove, he was relieved to see that she lived in Park Slope, very mixed, and not some black ghetto he couldn’t be caught dead in in Texas. And he pushed that out of his mind as well. He was determined not to fuck with his own mind and his own past with her, because he deserved a little better this time.
It wouldn’t be right to come in, he thought, as he pulled up in front of her building, and she gave him the sweetest smile of gratitude. Then something else washed across her face just before she opened the door, and he wanted to slap it off her. That thought scared him, as she said, Thank you, and got out, and she shoved the door closed quite hard, and since his car had human qualities to him, he took offense for a moment, then thought to himself, Well she could never know what a car could mean, she’s probably never owned one in her life.
He saw Carol that night and she’d pulled out all the stops; candlelight, very sheer nylons, and she even put on his favorite gloves, and sat dangling her shoe from the tip of her toes, the way he used to love. Instead of grabbing her as he thought he would a moment ago, he got up, proud of himself, feeling like Thomas, whom he realized he hated and had always hated, but felt proud to be like as he walked out the door. Yes, he did know how to handle difficult situations.
At the truck with Benjamin the next day in front of work, Marty said it was finally over with Carol. Thank God, man, Benjamin said gulping down his Sprite, pulling his pea coat tight around his neck. I was beginning to think you were truly thick, but you did it man. Marty smiled, leaned back, and stretched his arms behind him. Benjamin started talking about Hawaii again, where his stepfather had an old coffee ranch, and what it was like the last time he was there and how he wished he was there right then. And then he started talking about his best friend from college, with whom he’d had some rivalry that started with some chick but was really about something deeper like the dynamics of his family. Marty tuned out, and headed to the preschool in his mind. When he realized Benjamin had gotten up, he looked up at him and saw that Benjamin was looking at him with disgust. See you in there, man, Benjamin said, as if to hide the look. But Marty saw it. He never missed those looks. He’d seen them way too often in most everybody he knew.
Leila had been to lunch with him once, then for a late coffee one Thursday night. It wasn’t until after a movie, the week of his first birthday, that he decided to give her the underwear. It was daring, seeing as how he had never even kissed her, and he felt a punch in the gut as he handed her the package, all wrapped in butcher paper with a curly yellow ribbon.
I’ll open this when I get home, if you don’t mind, she said to him. She was searching his eyes, the way he hates in a woman. Why do they always do that, exactly when you don’t want them to? Marty looked at the ground, and then they got in his car and he drove her home playing the “fast shit” Carol would have preferred to his self-help tapes.
He didn’t see Leila until two weeks later when he picked her up one morning to go to yoga. She came down the steps with a little girl, and the sight of her knocked him flat. As Leila opened the door, Marty thought he was having a breathing attack. Leila ignored it, or else didn’t see it, and she introduced the little girl. He didn’t get her name, but he did hear that she was her daughter. When he was catching his breath, looking out of his window, pretending to watch for oncoming traffic before he pulled out, Leila said they needed to drop her d
aughter off at dance class, and her cousin would be picking her up.
Marty heard nothing else Leila said that whole excruciating drive to the dance class, which couldn’t have been more than five minutes but took him through his entire lifetime in his head. He kept trying not to look at her, there in the backseat, her hands in her lap. Looking out of the window, then at him in the rearview mirror, she was already like an adult with that subtle look of disgust on her lips.
He watched Leila take her to the door, and then come out again. She looked as if she were trying to catch her breath too, and before she got in, it seemed for a moment as if she were changing her mind.
I should have told you about her, I suppose. No, no, Marty said, and then he wondered where that came from, out of him. I mean, I had plenty of opportunities, and I mussed them all. He looked at her before they got on the bridge, and then he thought he should try and be nice. As they began to climb it, he put his hand over hers, but more to steady his own mind. You don’t have a problem with children, do you? she asked hesitantly, and her eyes were big, and he hated that, and then hated her for making him think he could push her out of the car and head for the first bar. Just a few weeks after his birthday, like that. No, no, Marty said. How old is she, anyway? Four and a half, she said. A big four and a half. I wouldn’t know, Marty said, too quickly. The traffic started to bunch up and he felt smothered being up so high. She doesn’t look much like you. Thanks, she said. Then she laughed. Her father is Pakistani. Really? Marty asked, moving the gear into park, as traffic had come to full stop for minutes on end. They don’t like black people much, Indians, do they? She seemed taken aback at this, and then she laughed again. Well, who does like black people much? Sorry, Marty said, looking at her. Forget it. You don’t want to hear the history with her father, which is very much over for me. Not for her. He’s actually a good man, and we were in love for some time. It just didn’t work is all. Sorry, Marty repeated, and then moved back into gear to crawl another few feet. Shyly she looked at him, You think we’ll make it to class? Probably not, he said, relaxing finally. Well, she said. She laid her head back on the seat. She sighed. She looked out of the window. Well, she said again. I must tell you, I fell asleep in the underwear you gave me. She turned to look at him, and so he returned it. You can’t guess what I dreamed, she said. Maybe I can, Marty said, getting mesmerized by her eyes, then turning to drive a few more feet. I’ll tell you anyway, her smile getting bigger, her eyes more coy. I dreamed you fucked me all night. Well, Marty said. Well, well. Leila gasped a little before she giggled, and it touched him. That being the case, Marty said, if I’ve already had you, I may as well have you. And they drove through the traffic on the bridge and through the streets, and through the Holland Tunnel to his place in Jersey City.