Big Swiss(19)

Greta smiled. “Your accent.”

“You hate it,” he said.

“It’s comforting.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m gonna leave my numba, and maybe you’ll call and allow me to comfit you.”

Dear Mom, she wrote later that night. Finally, a non-flake. A man with a code. Sober but not humorless, outspoken but not obnoxious, well-mannered, unmaterialistic, able to produce tears, won’t abandon me if I get cancer, might in fact drive me around the country. A dream.



* * *



A FEW WEEKS LATER, after he’d returned from his road trip, Stacy suggested they take a walk around the tah pits, maybe dip into the aht museum, and then grab a bite at a place called Whisper, during which Greta insisted they whisper as much as possible. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of this sooner, as nearly everything about her sounded like a secret.

“My mother killed herself when I was thirteen,” Greta whispered when Stacy asked if her parents still lived in the area. “So, I was fostered by a few of her siblings. She had six sisters and one brother, and they were scattered across the country and very different from one another, but they all had the same exact voice, so they’d always seemed less like eight people and more like one person with multiple personality disorder.”

“Where was your fahtha?”

“Jail. He told people it was for embezzlement, but the truth was he’d been busted for impersonating a police officer.”

“Was he a bank robbah?”

“Sadly, he was only trying to pick up women. But even if he hadn’t been in jail, living with him was never an option. When I was in high school, he married his accountant. She was sweet, Dominican, half his age. No one knew what she saw in him. A week after their honeymoon, she shaved her head and began dressing in long white robes, because, well, it turned out she was a Santeria priestess. She transformed their living room into a massive shrine to her murdered twin boys, and long story short, she ran away with all his money. In his despair, he stabbed himself in the stomach, samurai-style, except he was too weak to pull the knife toward his heart, and so he just lay there on the linoleum, bleeding out. He waited six hours before calling an ambulance.”

“What an awful way to die,” Stacy said. “My god.”

“He lived. He got married again, twice. Now he’s drinking himself to death in the Florida Panhandle. I don’t even know his address.”

Stacy chewed his straw solemnly. He was drinking seltzer with lime; Greta, the same, plus tequila.

“But enough about me,” Greta whispered. “Did you have an okay childhood?”

“It’s too boring to whispah about,” Stacy said. “My parents are saints. Do-goodahs. If anything, I suffid from too much happiness, which might be why I’ve always been drawn to dahk-sidahs.”

“Docksiders,” Greta whispered. “The loafers?”

“Dark-siders,” Stacy said slowly. “People who live on the dark side. Like my next-door naybuhs. They had eight kids, right, so they raised rabbits. Not to cuddle—they ate them for suppa. Rabbits don’t have vocal cords, but they scream when they’re dyin, and it was all I could hear from my bedroom window. Still, you couldn’t keep me away from that house. I lost my viginity to one of the oldah girls. Her name was Stacy, too. She worked at Cumbahland Fahms. So, you know what that means.”

Free candy, Greta thought.

“It was the beginning of a long, very loving relationship,” Stacy said.

“With convenience stores?”

“The bottle,” Stacy whispered. “Stacy introduced me to alcohol.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen,” Stacy said.

Greta admitted that her mother had been an addict, too. Her drug of choice: terrible news. Nothing gave her mother more pleasure than hearing about the worst thing that ever happened to you, preferably in exhaustive detail, the more visually disturbing the better. The only metric she used to judge someone’s worth: had they suffered enough?

Greta’s childhood had been dominated by run-of-the-mill rescue fantasies, most of which ended with Greta’s being saved by Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Her fantasies finally came true after her mother’s death, when Greta was rescued by Dusty, her mother’s twin. Like Chief Bromden, Dusty was taller than average (six-one), was nearly deaf (but not faking it), and had spent many months in a nuthouse.

“Were they identical?” Stacy asked.

“No,” Greta said. “In fact, they didn’t even seem related. Imagine Ali MacGraw and Sissy Spacek sharing a womb.”

Greta had moved in with Dusty, who lived in a tract housing development in southern Arizona. Dusty’s romantic relationships were with incarcerated men and therefore epistolary, so she spent most of her time at the kitchen table, writing long letters in silence. Dusty seemed utterly fulfilled by these correspondences and didn’t want or need anything from Greta. Much of what came out of Greta’s mouth seemed suddenly unnecessary, or perhaps better written down. Since she’d always been a letter-writer, she continued writing to her mother, whom she pretended was alive and in prison for murder.

“How’d she end her life?” Stacy asked.

“She blew her brains out while I was at horse camp.”