The Animators(41)

WASPERS AND SNAKES


“Welcome home,” Mel says.

It is the crappiest one-story house I’ve seen in a long time. Two bedrooms, a grimy kitchen, a bathroom with a filthy water heater in the corner. The deck is the house’s saving grace, looking out onto a backyard lining a swamp. The grass here is sparse but dark, pocked with sandy soil running down to a grove filled with spiny overgrowth, wild and tangled all the way to the water’s edge. The leaves closest to the bank are as long as my leg.

In the living room, Mel has assembled a makeshift studio. Two drawing boards assembled from plywood stacked on two old desks with coffee tables turned on their sides to make the angled sketch surface. It’s been cut, hammered, and polished to a glimmer. There are pencils, inks, oils, rolls of easel paper. Onionskin she got from God knows where.

We’re renting the place from a guy named Jesco, who thinks it’s hilarious that we’re from New York and doubly hilarious that we’d want to live in this house. He laughs and shakes his head every time he encounters us. “So this is the other’n,” he says when he meets me. “The other cartoony gal.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“From New York City,” he wheezes.

“We’re transplants,” Mel explains. She’s told him this before. “I’m from here. She’s from Kentucky.”

“Uh huh. So you’re a wildcat,” he says.

I shrug. “Sure.”

“I tell you what. Y’all are crazy to want to live in this piece of shit.”

“It’s short-term,” Mel says. “Sharon here needs to rest and recuperate.”

“Well. I wish you’d take the place with ye when ye go.”

The rent is two fifty a month. When the toilet breaks our second week here, Jesco installs a porta-potty at the side of the house and outfits it with lime for sprinkling and a flute of plastic flowers. “Watch out for the waspers,” he tells us. “And the snakes. We gotta horrendous snake problem. They like high grass, and they like womern. Always slitherin round the womern. So y’all watch y’allselves.”

Mel’s attentive. She stays in the hospital lobby when I go to physical therapy, and we do the grocery shopping after: fruit, sandwich makings, cases of vanilla Ensure. In the evening, we take to the deck with ginger ale in tall glass bottles, watching their necks cloud as the stink and steam rise from the swamp. She rations cigarettes out to me, never more than three per day. “No weed yet,” Mel says. “I read up on it. You smoke up right now, it could make you slow.”

“Who says.”

“Encyclopedia Brown, babe.” She looks off, squinting at something down in the bushes. “I’ve cut back myself. Only after hours, now.”

“Seriously?”

She looks offended. “Well, it won’t kill me.”

Now that we’ve settled into our temporary life in Florida, I need to give Mel an explanation about what she found in my journal. She’s been patient: looking carefully at me when she thinks I don’t see, opening her mouth, drawing breath, then abruptly going shut, holding herself back from the question she was going to ask.

Being sick has given me an excuse to keep it to myself. But I owe her this. Without knowing how, quite, or why, I owe it to her to tell her. I owe it to myself, I think. Had I slipped under completely—those few terrible moments under the bright lights, the self deeper than my body wavering on the dividing line between something known and something deeply, nauseatingly unknown—it would have been an unforgivable omission. Never telling anyone else about Teddy. Our summer.

I start approaching my lingual therapy sessions with this goal in mind. Get enough words back to finish this unfinished business so we can get on the other side of normal. So we can get to work again.

One night, out on the deck, I start slow. “I need to talk to you about the thing you found.”

Her eyes go wide. She nods, still peering out into the yard. “Yes,” she says.

“I should explain,” I say to her. “I need to—I mean, it’s kind of hard to, you know. Tell the whole story. But I want to.”

“I was curious,” she admits. Cracks through the weird silence, here, to give a partial grin. Trying to lighten it all up. “Yeah, man. What the hell kind of project was that?”

“It’s not exactly a project.” I take a deep breath. I feel a cold prickle on my skin, a dampness under my arms and behind my knees. The prospect of saying it all out loud is sending my body into revolt.

Mel leans in. “You okay?” She studies my face. I’m still shaky, still weak enough to warrant caution. “We started out pretty early today. You had therapy. If you want to go to bed early, I totally understand. There’s nothing we have to do tonight.”

“No,” I tell her, gripping the armrests. “I need to do this.”

Her fingers go for her breast pocket. She fumbles out a smoke. It occurs to me that she might be a little shaky, too. About what I might tell her. What she might have found. That she senses what’s coming. When I reach over to grab a smoke for myself, she doesn’t protest.

I take a deep breath.





TEDDY’S HOUSE


I need to tell you about the day I saw my house on the CBS Evening News.