Big Swiss(49)

“My last name?” Greta said. “Graves.”

Big Swiss watched Greta light a cigarette and take a few puffs.

“What are you, nervous?” she said.

“I’m a smoker,” Greta said.

“I know, but your hands are shaking,” Big Swiss said.

The shakes were from the night before, which she’d spent in the kitchen with Sabine, drinking Redbreast whiskey in front of the fire. At some point, Greta noticed that Sabine seemed wasted but not drunk, that she was in fact pretending to drink, and telling stories that sounded like historical fan fiction. Although Sabine was terrified of bats, Greta wondered briefly if she’d been bitten. She continued to lose weight, even in her forehead. Greta could literally see her skull. Sabine was keeping something from her, something she seemed on the verge of confessing, but then she’d disappear to the city, sometimes in the dead of night, and was gone for days. Yesterday she’d texted to inform Greta that she was making edibles for a well-known dealer in Jersey, and might be gone for a whole month, and was Greta okay with that? It was a lot of house for one person, Sabine admitted, but she was making good money now and promised to cover the cost of wood.

Back to Big Swiss. Shockingly, despite ample opportunity, Big Swiss had yet to mention being beaten half to death. Not a whisper. Nor had she mentioned, or even hinted at, her attacker’s recent release from prison. The restraining order alone would be the first thing out of most people’s mouths, and you’d never hear the end of it. Instead, Big Swiss wore a lot of tweed and fixated on her (Rebekah) and was extremely intense (Swiss?) about it. In other words, she reminded Greta of a certain famous psychoanalyst, except she didn’t smoke a pipe or cigars. She sucked on something brown and dick-shaped, however: root beer Popsicles, which she brought with her to the dog park, even though it was the dead of winter. Root beer, she said, was her winter flavor. In spring, she would switch to watermelon. Summer was strictly citrus. Additionally, she ate a lot of salty licorice. And apples. Greta herself had never felt compelled to eat an apple. It was certainly never something she’d craved. She disliked fruit in general, but Big Swiss made apples look irresistible. Since Big Swiss’s mouth was always full, Greta had gone ahead and told her a few things. A few hundred things. Between bites, Big Swiss had peppered Greta with personal questions about her past, which had made Greta uneasy at first, but then Greta remembered that her most basic facts—name, age, birthplace—were outright lies, and the lies made her feel cloaked and anonymous, like a whistleblower in a documentary. After the initial discomfort wore off, Greta talked as blithely as if her face were blurred, her voice digitally scrambled, her exact location obscured.

“Didn’t you tell me you were engaged?” Big Swiss had asked, somewhere in the woods.

Greta nodded. “Stacy and I were engaged for a whole decade, but it only felt like a few months.”

“Does she live around here?”

“California,” Greta said. “And Stacy is a man.”

“When did you break up?”

“A year ago,” Greta said. “We still talk on the phone, though that’s tapering off. His new girlfriend says she doesn’t like the look on his face when he talks to me, so I don’t call him anymore. But we share custody of Pi?on, so they FaceTime.”

“He FaceTimes with the dog?” Big Swiss asked.

“Of course,” Greta said. “How else are they going to see each other?”

“Why’d you break up?”

“I was ready to live alone,” Greta said.

“But you don’t,” Big Swiss said, and bit into her second apple. “You have a roommate.”

“I was ready to sleep alone,” Greta said. “Stacy was a teddy bear. With a penis. It startled me to cuddle him and then feel an erection. And yet I was extremely attached to him. I relied on him for everything. That’s why I’m living the way I am now.”

“And here I was convinced you were gay,” Big Swiss said. “Are you?”

“Not all the way,” Greta said. “I mean, I’ve had sex with women.”

“How many?”

“Oh, I dunno,” Greta said. “Five or six?”

“Do you have a type?”

It was hard to say. Apart from her one girlfriend in high school, she’d only ever slept with stone butches, and they were mostly one-night stands, a few long weekends.

“So, like, emotionally distant women?”

“Stone butches prefer to touch rather than be touched. They’re not stony, per se. In fact, they’re often very doting. The last one told me that I wasn’t a bottom, that underneath my girl clothes and makeup, a butch was waiting to emerge. This was news to me. Of course, I never did anything about it except shave my head, which I regretted instantly.”

“Why?”

“Turns out I have a criminal head shape.”

Speaking of, Greta looked around for Keith. Unless he was wearing camo or hiding behind a tree, she and Big Swiss were alone.

“When did you become aware you liked girls?”

“Puberty.”

“Were your parents still married?”

“They split up before I was born.”

Greta paused to yell at Pi?on, who’d performed an elaborate water dance in the freezing creek and then covered himself with mud, and was now barking in Silas’s face. Pi?on was a mess, but everything about Silas was immaculate: his feet, his jet-black fur, his calm.