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.
Chapter Twenty
Wednesday June 28
In the living room hangs a painting by Brenna that she says is of her sister. A woman stands in its foreground, slightly off-center. Behind her is an abandoned and rotting farmhouse, its windows are gaping black holes; its skewed shutters are missing slats; the paint on the front of the house is peeling; planters at the front entrance are full of dead flowers. Around the woman and the house is dead land, brown dust shimmers as the soil just blows away. The woman herself is as desiccated as the land. Her cheekbones protrude from the top of her face, the hollows below seem to sink all the way to her teeth before climbing the gully of her jawbones. The eyes are vacant, any presence of personality missing with the woman’s fat. If she’s alive, the only sign of it is that she’s still standing.
If you had walked into the living room from the vestibule, the painting would be on the wall facing you. Below it is a grand looking sofa that has large wooden arms at each side and an ornate square pattern that runs above the upper cushion. The cushions themselves are a silky red. It was given to us by Livia, who got it from a girl she dated last year. That woman had gotten it from a guy she’d lived with, who had gotten it from a friend of his, who’d gotten it from his college roommate, who just happened to be Nell’s ex-boyfriend, Matt. Nell had always loved that sofa and, when she’d been dating Matt, had schemed to get it and by happenstance she did.
Jean brought a bunch of plants when she moved in and many of them are around the living room. There are little piles of dirt where the various plants were knocked over or sloshed this way or that.
Handbills from various shows form a ratty collaborative collage on the wall around the doorway back to the vestibule. On many of them the 2nd or 3rd act is Bleed Monkey (though the announcement of this fact is usually in very small letters). I’d love to say it was a “Best of,” like these were our favorite shows, but, instead, these are the handbills we didn’t get around to throwing out, the ones that were sitting in small piles around the living room.
In a legit household, the room next to the living room would be a dining room. With us, it’s a TV room with another set of sofas. Considering that we do eat in there while watching TV, from now on, I’m going to refer to it as the TV Dinner Room.
The kitchen is like a long hallway next to the TV Dinner Room. It’s actually underneath the stairway that runs up to the 2nd floor and so part of the ceiling on one side of the room is a little lower. If you were to draw a diagram of the downstairs, the kitchen would be a long narrow rectangle behind the short rectangle that represents the vestibule. Next to them would be two more equally lengthed rectangles to represent the Living and TV Dinner Rooms.
Nell hasn’t been home much lately. We’re not always sure where she goes and she doesn’t talk about it. She comes home angry a lot and occasionally she comes home stoned. Sometimes she’s drunk, but she usually saves the drinking for us. It’s something we all do together.
Yesterday she surprised us when she came home and told us that the week after next she’ll be going to Peru for a month to do voter registration among native Peruvians, Inca descendants.
At the moment she said this, Jean gave me a look that I knew the meaning of. It was a special variation on the “he/she will be found dead in a ditch” look that my grandmother used to give and my mother still gives. The variation should be known as the “she’ll be killed by government-backed death squads dressed to look like peasants and found dead in a ditch” look. Of course in Peru she’s in as much danger from Maoist insurgents (they’re called Shining Path) as she is from the government. The government there regards democracy activists as Maoist sympathizers. The Maoists regards democracy activists as government stooges.
Having managed to slip away so easily in the aftermath of the World Bank protest, I think that she thinks she’s invincible and I think that she’s also become enamored of that type of harrowing danger and escape, that if she can’t find it naturally, she’s going to invent it, create it: Walk home drunk through the park late at night; Brave repressive governments facing equally repressive anti-government forces.
She’s going to be renting out her room to a guy named Scotty who we’ve met a couple of times. Scotty does some sort of community service organizing, but I think that it was only A) for grant money and B) to impress his girlfriend, Sherry. Brenna has nicknamed him, “Spider,” for reasons unknown, but we now we all refer to him that way.
We’re being watched. A car sits down at the cul-de-sac; a conspicuously government-looking car with two white guys in suits. There’s no visible surveillance equipment, though I have to wonder what they might have hidden here. Not that it matters. I don’t know what Nell talks about, but none of the rest of us talk about much that could be of interest to them. In fact, they’re probably figuring that we’re a big waste of their time. We are.
We’re having the party on Saturday night and we’ve got preparations to make. This evening we gave the house its first major cleaning. Nell swept. I mopped. Brenna and Jean dusted and rearranged. Kerran cheered us on while sprawled on the sofa in the TV Dinner Room getting drunk on cheap beer. “Go guys,” he said with mock enthusiasm and raised the can in mock salute. Kerran can get away with this because he can, because we have no expectations from him other than that he’d be sitting on his can.
After we finished, we all sat on the stoop, those that had cleaned and were now tired and dirty and in need of beer in the way that the now sleeping Kerran no longer needed beer. And I wanted to not need beer for the same reason that Kerran no longer needed beer -- to be fast fast asleep.
“We should invite the FBI guys to the party,” Jean said. Nell laughed and sucked in her breath like she couldn’t even believe that Jean would suggest such a thing.
“C’mon, they’re down there,” she said. “We assume they’re supposed to be spying on us, right? So, why don’t we give them a better vantage point?”
So Jean and Brenna, both looking pretty grubby from cleaning and smelling of cleaning products, head down to the car. I can see them leaning in at the window and they were down there for an awfully long time before they make their way back, two little dots moving through the trees at the bottom of the steep hill.
“Well?” I asked.
“At first,” Jean says looking at Brenna, “...they were all like, ‘I’m sorry ma'am, but we’re not even supposed to be talking to you’, but then we told that that they might as well...”
“...Yeah, because they have to watch us anyway and why not watch us from close up?” Brenna said. “It helped that I stuck out my chest while I was saying it. It doesn’t matter how big they are, guys just can’t say no to them. They’re like soft round mob enforcers,” Brenna said and giggled like a 12-year old.
---------------------------------------
Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
