Click
here for info on the Print Journal
(and to purchase your copy)!
By Darren Kaminsky
-------------------------------------
Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Click here for a Chapter Index.
Chapter Seven
June 12
We were slouched on the sofas watching a sitcom I didn't know the name of. It was one of the ones where the flawed single father with the temper and the heart of gold tries to raise the children who redeem his bad habits by teaching him the life lessons he never would have learned had he not been a single father. Or, maybe it was one of the ones where the well-meaning New York magazine editor/cartoonist/journalist/fashion-something-or-other with the loyal, but hapless and/or wacky gay and/or asexual best friend negotiates the pitfalls of love and life.
The phone rang, but none of us ever wanted to answer it, except maybe Nell, but Nell wasn't home. It was like a perpetual game of Chicken to see who would give in and grab it first.
Do I even need to say that I lost?
"Is Brenna home," a flat voice asked.
"Rick? Hi, it's Nathan. Let me get her."
I looked up and Brenna was shaking her head back and forth, mouthing, "I'm not home" and making the "kill"--pulling one finger across her throat--gesture.
"Rick, you know what? I thought she was, um, here, but, it turns out that she just went up...uh, to the corner...to get beer."
I looked at her and she was shaking her head while scribbling on a pad of paper that had been sitting on the trunk we used as a coffee table.
When she saw me looking, she held the coffee-stained paper up.
"Oh, sorry. Um..." I fumbled, trying to read from her scribble, "...she's gone with Jean to get that food...sorry, I mean Thai food and..." She had put the pad down again and was writing something else.
I made a rolling motion with my hand in the universal gesture for, "Get the hell on with it."
She turned the pad around again.
"...and to see a movie," I read, knowing full well that, unless he was a complete fool, he'd already guessed that this was a haplessly choreographed…and, at this point, completely unbelievable, lie.
He didn't answer or say anything for a few seconds…long seconds…then, slowly, in his usual flat monotone, now just a little broken with disappointment, said, "OK, tell her that...tell her to call me when she gets in."
While I was telling Brenna's lies on the phone, Jean had stretched her legs where I'd been sitting and I had to sit on them to get her to move.
There was no discussion of the phone call at all or of Rick. No more stilted conversations with him, at least not soon.
Later, I was upstairs sitting at my desk, which I’d set up in the small kitchen behind my bedroom. The desk is set against a wall that has windows facing the tiered back yard. It's level with the topmost tier.
I looked up from my computer and saw the recognizable low-slung-shouldered loll of a familiar shadow, Brenna, as she walked slowly up the stairs and slipped out the back gate. Her car didn't start. She didn't fully close the white gate door, so I could see a sliver of dark alley through the crack.
I
went downstairs, trying not to let the stairs creak too much, but they
did anyway, a different creaking note with every step. I was hoping to
find that Jean or Nell had left some stray food around, but instead I
found a stray Nell
asleep on the sofa.
With her eyes -- which are owlish and intelligent -- closed and her lips pursed, she looked like a little child. She was making a slight snoring sound.
I walked into the kitchen to find the door to the backyard wide open. I closed and locked it, then went back to the living room and touched Nell on her shoulder. Nothing happened. I put my hand on her shoulder and shook her just a little. Her eyes opened, then closed again and she wrapped her arms more tightly against herself.
She smacked her lips and pleaded, "Can I sleep for five more minutes?" and I had to back-up as she exhaled stale sleep breath.
"You can sleep for five more hours and, if you go up to your room, you can do it in your own bed." I told her. And, just like one of those hypnotized people in movies, she sat up, said, "Oh," pulled her rumpled self up and shuffled towards the stairway.
* * *
June
13
7 p.m.
It was pouring out, the rain so thick that I couldn't even see the lowest tier of the backyard from the couch where I was curled up watching the local news.
The front door burst open and Brenna and Nell ran through, both soaked and laughing hysterically.
Brenna body-checked Nell into the wall of the entrance hall. Nell fell down, right on her ass, and lifted her arms like a child for Brenna to help her up. Brenna bent down like she was going to do just that, then sank almost all the way to her knees, grabbed the tail of Nell's t-shirt at both sides and pulled her shirt straight up over her head, then sloshed up the stairs.
Nell, soaking wet, sitting in her now transparent bra, on her ass, in a puddle, looked shocked and started shouting, "Brenna, you bitch, get back here. Brenna, damn-it. I want my shirt." She ran up the stairs after Brenna. I could hear things being knocked over, a shattering noise, a squeal that I thought must be Brenna's, and a shout of “No,” then silence.
I waited a couple of minutes then walked slowly up the stairs, finding, anticlimactically, Brenna's door shut and, Nell, her door wide open, asleep and tucked deep into her bedcovers.
Later, Brenna told me that the two of them had met at Trolley's for Margaritas, that Nell had had a pitcher to herself and had started talking and had talked and talked and Brenna couldn't remember what she'd said, but that Nell had realized that she couldn't stop talking and literally covered her own mouth with her own hand to try and stop and still couldn't.
"I think it was her entire life story," Brenna said, then started laughing. "And I wasn't even listening."
Kerran hasn't been sleeping here. He has a girlfriend named Samantha who's five inches taller than he is and very willowy, except at her hips (and you can tell she's self-conscious about them because she never wears anything that binds or clings though it's a shame because her hips aren't really that big and she has long thin legs).
Up until we got this house, Kerran had been staying with her and wasn't even paying a damn dime's worth of rent. She was paying for everything.
But there's something about Kerran -- his nonchalance, his Dennis the Menace Grin, his maniacal laugh, his surfer crouch -- that are irresistibly charming. He can get away with anything, with anyone, just because nothing much matters to him. He's berserk for tacos and will walk a mile out of his way to get good ones, which he never even sits down to eat. Several times I’ve run into him on streets around D.C. with a half-eaten taco in his hand.
Of course, Mt. P with its El Salvadoran community is almost as perfect as D.C. will get for him since the El Salvadorans make good tacos and they're cheap and there are plenty of places to get them.
Tonight, he came back here. He and Sam broke up or they've had a fight or something and he was wet from the rain and pissed, which in him doesn't change his natural cheerful nihilism, but does make him self-destructive almost in the way that Brenna can be when she's really bad, though she hasn't been really bad for a while.
"So, what have you been up to?" I asked while we carried three guitar cases up the two-point-five staircases to the top floor.
"Bleed Monkey's been rehearsing, we're getting pretty good."
"Cool. We'll have to go see you."
"Yeah, on a night when I've got some chick to impress with how many fans I have."
We got up to his room, which is on the same floor as mine, and I'd completely forgotten Nell has 3 people sleeping in there. Two of them are activists from Germany, the third is from Chicago. They’re helping organize a big protest next week against the World Bank's resistance to debt relief; and to the interest rate they're charging African countries; and, of course, to the perks that World Bank execs get: cars and drivers, country club memberships, helicopters to and from the airport, private planes. Everything you'd need to combat poverty in the Developing World.
The protest will have something in common with the poverty-fighting skills of the ever-lunching World Bank execs: the same huge impact that mosquitoes have on elephants.
I told Kerran why there were 3 people crashed-out in sleeping bags in his room and he was even more pissed and ran downstairs, stomping so loudly that his clomps reverberated, even shook, the whole house. When he got to the bottom, he shouted for Nell, but Nell was still passed out from the hard-drinking at Trolley's and Kerran went back up the stairs to her floor and opened her door and shouted her name loudly, but she obviously was not waking because he clomped back up the stairs in defeat.
He sat Indian-style on my floor for a while, air drumming to whatever he was listening to on his Walkman, but obviously got bored and walked over to his room and must have woken the squatters because, before you know it there they were, all four of them, drunk and stoned and singing Beach Boys songs off-key and in German which took all the giddiness out of them and made them sound dirge-like and funereal.
---------------------------------------
Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
©
2004 Me Three