Homebodies Read online

  Todd had the worst taste and a collection to rival all humanity. He preferred comedies, not ones that were remotely intelligent or satirical, but the kind that relied heavily on fart jokes and sexual innuendo. She could never understand why he found gas so hysterical, and while she appreciated the effort at humor, she just wasn’t made to measure the subtle shades of comedic difference between letting one rip and cutting the cheese. After about thirty minutes of marital silence punctuated by only theatrical flatulence, she was ready to shut down for the day.

  “I’m going to bed, Todd.”

  He glanced at her but turned his head back to the television. She only caught half his frown. “It’s so early.”

  She bit down on her bottom lip to prevent it from saying anything before she had time to think about it. “I don’t know if you noticed, since you didn’t bother to ask, but I’m not exactly having the best day.”

  Todd gave her another glance that flashed about as quickly as a guy naked beneath an overcoat. “What happened?”

  Emily thought if someone had looked in from the outside, they would have assumed Todd was talking to the characters in his movie. If she really wanted to get his attention she was either going to have to strip or learn some jokes about farting. Neither of those things would happen before bedtime. “Nothing. Nothing at all Todd. I worked in the garden by myself. I made dinner by myself. I shot Mr. Turlington, dragged him down the street, and buried him by myself, and now I’m going to bed by myself. It was a perfectly normal, absolutely ordinary day.”

  Todd looked at her long enough to roll his eyes. “Why are you complaining about things going the way they are supposed to go? Normal is a good thing.”

  “Normal is just normal, I mean, neutral, but. . .” He was only listening with half his brain. He may have only possessed half a brain some days, but she couldn’t prove it without an MRI. “I’m not complaining. I’m going to bed.”

  “You want me to go with you?” He looked straight at the television, which meant he was offering to do something he didn’t want or plan to do.

  “No.”

  He jumped on his good fortune quicker than he’d jumped on anything else that day. “Okay. Goodnight.”

  She let out a measured sigh, steam to depressurize. “Goodnight.”

  Expectation was her enemy. She thought it might have always been, but she couldn’t really remember. What did it say about them that her brain didn’t find memories of them worth saving? She shuffled to the stairs and stood there, staring at the carpet, trying to think of one single thing about them that didn’t seem so mundane it might bring her a pang of happiness. When that failed, she looked up the stairs and tried to find something to make her angry instead, but even that was useless. There wasn’t happiness, there wasn’t sadness, there was just ordinary. Maybe he was right. Maybe she was just complaining about things going well. They didn’t really know any other married couples. She had very little basis for comparison.

  Their house was perfect. She remembered buying it, being happy, and she remembered picking out the curtains and carpets, and hanging that floral wreath. She remembered Todd boarding up the windows and adding that additional lock on the front door. She remembered Pottery Barn, but she couldn’t remember what all of it was for.

  Every house on their street looked the same on the outside, but they all couldn’t be so alienated behind closed doors. She and Todd had gotten their own piece of the cookie cutter, and she’d decorated the cookie how she’d always wanted. It was perfect, flawless, and meaningless. They only really used the living room and the kitchen, and one of the four bedrooms to sleep in. Their lives were useless space filled with useless things that didn’t make them happy any more than it made them whole.

  She stared up the stairs, at the white door at the top; she couldn’t remember the last time she opened it. She couldn’t even remember the useless things she’d put inside. Why keep things that weren’t worth remembering? She thought of climbing up the stairs, opening that door, and tossing everything in the room right out the window, but she didn’t want the neighbors to see even the things she didn’t care about enough keep. Strangers were the only thing keeping her from an act of complete insanity.

  She felt Todd’s arm slip around her waist. He stroked her ribs with one large hand, and he set his chin down on her shoulder and spoke gently into her ear. “I’m sorry.”

  She breathed, grateful for the contact even if she did think about pushing him down the stairs. “Sorry about what?”

  “Em, I know you’re lonely. I don’t help things.”

  She patted his hand. “Sometimes you’re the only thing that helps that particular thing. Don’t worry about it, Todd. Normal is good.” She didn’t sound very reassuring, she was certain, because she was still distracted by the door at the top of the stairs. “What’s in that room, Todd. Do you remember?”

  “I don’t know. Storage stuff I think. It doesn’t matter.” He took her hand in his, kissed it once, and led her up the stairs. With his hand on the small of her back, they walked past the door of nothing, up the hall of nothing, to the room they shared, which sometimes was also a room of nothing. “I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep. I’m not tired, but I can sit here at least.”

  She gave him part of a smile and regretted at least half the time she’d spent wanting to hit him with a blunt object. By the time she pulled on her too large pajamas, pulled the band out of her tangled blond bun, and curled into the crook of his arm to fall asleep, she was convinced, at least for those few moments together, that normal was all they’d need.

  3

  She was most content in the back yard, and they’d paid an extra fifteen thousand dollars on the price of the house for the largest yard in the neighborhood. She needed room enough to grow things. The back yard was surrounded by an eight-foot-high cinderblock wall, and Todd had even gone so far as to fill in the gate area with cinderblocks too, completely contained. The wall was the only thing she didn’t like, but she’d mostly covered it in climbers. It looked more natural than it had, but it was still a wall.

  One of the primary reasons they’d chosen the house, aside from the roomy yard, was that they were one of the few communities in the city that had well water. The city water was notoriously bad and tasted like it had been sucked directly from a swimming pool, and she’d been worried that it would make her fruit taste awful.

  The mornings were the best part of the day because it was her time to go into the yard and tend all those lovely, growing things. As soon as she woke up, she put on some clothes and snuck outside to her green sanctuary. Pruning and weeding wasn’t exactly noisy work, but she felt the need to sneak around all the same. She wasn’t nearly as tall as the wall, and there was no chance of anyone seeing her root through the dirt, but even in privacy, she never really forgot that there was a neighborhood just past the wall.

  Many of the neighbors were strangers. She couldn’t identify what wandering child belonged to which yard. When they’d moved in, no one had even stopped to say hello, and aside from Mr. Turlington, who came more to threaten than to welcome, she could only name a few families that lived on the street, and those only because they stood out in unpleasant ways. The Andersons were only memorable because of some domestic violence that accounted for the presence of a police car or two on the street every other week. Things had been quiet lately, and she wondered if Mr. Anderson had left his abusive wife.

  Mr. Johnson was another neighborhood troublemaker. She knew him only because he was their neighbor and an odious human being. He’d had three wives at different times, but now lived alone. No one wondered how he’d ended up that way. Aside from a few drinking related noise complaints that required police intervention, Mr. Johnson was the neighborhood’s resident nudist, and there was probably not a single man, woman, or child living on the block who hadn’t unexpectedly gotten an eye full of Mr. Johnson’s dangly bits because he never closed his curtains or wore pants. The fact that his first name was R
ichard, but he chose to have people call him Dick, was baffling. He wasn’t exactly unfriendly, which was either a good or bad thing depending on how much old man penis she could stand to see that day.

  Lately, he’d confined his bare-assery to the back yard, and he was always up early. Even as she loaded up a basket with red bell peppers, she could hear him moaning over the fence, and couldn’t possibly imagine what he could be moaning about unless he was over there doing the types of inappropriate things a man who was naked all the time probably did to excess.

  Today there wasn’t going to be much chance of avoiding him, no matter how long she put it off. As long as she was quiet, she could usually get on with her gardening without having to play neighborly and get an eyeful, but the climbers were getting out of control and starting to spill over the tops of the wall. She was going to have to trim them, and that meant she’d be saying hello whether she wanted to or not.

  It didn’t yet sound like he was aware of her presence in the garden and was much too focused on moaning to himself to notice she was puttering around out there. She finished her work, opened the garden shed, and hauled the ladder to the wall which separated their yards. The moment he saw her head crest the top of the wall, Mr. Johnson groaned excitedly.

  She began pruning immediately. There was no need to drag out the unpleasant pleasantries. “Good morning, Mr. Johnson, how are you?”

  Mr. Johnson moaned and muttered.

  “I know. It’s been one of those weeks for us too.” She tried not to look down, but apparently exposed parts had more gravitational pull than the sun. She glanced, and immediately regretted the lack of willpower in her eyeballs.

  She managed not to grimace at his filthy blue bathrobe, untied and flapping gently in the breeze behind him. The back of it especially was badly stained, though Mr. Johnson would never admit he’d been incontinent. He was naked everywhere else.

  Emily always imagined that Mr. Johnson had probably been quite good looking twenty or so years before she was born, though she never bothered to ask his age. His body seemed like it had once been muscular but had long since melted with age and miserable diet habits. His skin was a milky grey covered with a smattering of white body hair, and there was a large concentration of black veins protruding all over his body and some near his abdomen that created a sort of artistic pull to his penis, which was also covered in swollen black veins. Emily realized with a heave of revulsion that there was no earthy reason why she should be looking at Mr. Johnson’s dick, again, and managed to drag her eyes up to his face and not to vomit over the fence directly onto his balding head. “I see you’re getting some sun today. I think it’s going to shape up to be quite nice outside.”

  Mr. Johnson took a shaky step toward the fence and lifted one hand toward her. She followed the direction of his fingers and saw a few black clouds on the edge of the sky. “Hopefully they will miss us, but a little rain never hurt. I know my plants will like it, and it looks like your grass wouldn’t complain.” Mr. Johnson’s back yard was dry and unruly. She’d told him half dozen times he should install some sort of auto water irrigation system that would keep the grass green without really having to think about it, but he never did anything. Plus, that would probably require pants.

  Another groan. Another shaky step. Mr. Johnson lifted his left hand where he was missing a chunk of skin on the wrist. She wasn’t sure how he’d managed to take such a chunk out of himself, but she felt it would be rude to pry. The wound never seemed to heal, but it occasionally oozed a thick black blob that snaked down his hand and dripped off his fingers.

  She gave him her best frown of neighborly concern. “You really should have someone look at that. It’s been months. What is it about men that makes you never want to see a doctor?”

  Mr. Johnson screeched, grumpy and guttural.

  Emily sighed. “Well, you know best. I can’t tell you what to do.”

  Mr. Johnson had reached the fence and craned his neck upward to stare at her. His eyes were dark green and bloodshot. She always imagined that he probably had difficulty sleeping. She wasn’t certain why, except that she thought there was something wrong with him, in an emotional sense, and it seemed like people with those types of problems could never sleep. Mr. Johnson clapped his teeth at her, the skin around his lips was pulled back and very dry.

  “Todd is fine, thanks for asking.” She looked away, back at the garden, the green plants sprawling along the grey block wall, the dots of color nestled between the leaves, reds and oranges, and a few purple flowers she planted for no practical reason except she liked the smell of them. She was having trouble finding comfort even in the green space. “I’m sorry if we disturbed you. It seems were not very good at being married yet.”

  Mr. Johnson grunted and rolled his eyes back into his head a little.

  She smiled. “You’re right. Neither of us have tried as many times as you. Thanks. I needed a laugh today.”

  Mr. Johnson pressed his body against the fence and stared up at her with his eyes wide and mouth open. His tongue was dark, almost purple.

  She leaned closer to him. “You want to hear a secret.”

  Mr. Johnson whimpered, and his purple tongue flopped excitedly between his teeth.

  “Yesterday, I saw Mr. Ward sneak into Mrs. Aim’s back yard, while Mrs. Ward was up the street. I think there’s something going on there.”

  Mr. Johnson’s black and white eyebrows drew together in frustration and he breathed a heavy sigh that sent a cloud of rancid breath into her face. Mr. Johnson was no better at taking care of his oral hygiene than he was at washing his bathrobe.

  “I know. I shouldn’t be such a busy body.” Not that she felt bad about it at all. The other people on the street probably did the same thing, and she’d stop when everyone else did. She wondered what they said about her and Todd; it was probably something very cruel and not entirely inaccurate, like most gossip.

  Mr. Johnson made a barking sound and pounded his oozing hand against the block wall leaving little fist curls of black ooze there.

  “I don’t have anything better to do.” She looked away from him again, but this time, she traced the trail of a vine up the back of the house and followed the curl it made around a window. The curtains were a pale cream color, and thick enough not to see through. She tried to think of what the room looked like on the other side, but her knees began to tremble, and the ladder wobbled. She had barely begun clipping the climbers, but the wave of dizziness was strong enough that she didn’t care if they waited until tomorrow. “I should get going, Mr. Johnson. It’s always nice to see you.”

  That was at least partially true, the part that didn’t contain his body from the neck down. Mr. Johnson groaned a long, loud goodbye.

  “Have a nice day.”

  He kept low groaning even as she put away the ladder and went inside. She had been friendly enough for one day, and the shaking of her knees had barely begun to subside.

  4

  Tuesday was garbage day, which made it inherently the worst day of the week. They didn’t create that much garbage; she’d always preferred to compost anything that was compostable, but nonetheless, garbage happened.

  There was a time before, she wasn’t sure when exactly, but definitely before, when it had been Todd’s job to take the garbage out, but that was when he only had to take it as far as the curb, never directly to the dump.

  The dump was five miles away, which might not have felt very far if it weren’t for the fact that the road had been under construction as long as she could remember, and while she did spot the occasional worker hanging around the site, she was pretty sure that no actual work had been accomplished in several months at least.

  She had a theory that there was not actually a storage house for construction equipment and road cones. Instead of storing them, the city and construction companies conspired to set them up in random locations when they weren’t in use, and they relied on people’s unquestioning subservience to orange to keep u
p the ruse.

  To her surprise, there were no less than three construction workers at the site, though one of them must have been a manager because he was wearing dress slacks and a tie rather than the bright orange construction vests and yellow hard hats on the other two. They weren’t doing anything of course, just standing together, quavering in the sun, and staring at the ground like they might be watching slugs race, but they looked up slightly as she navigated through the loathsome orange road cones in her SUV. She waved, slathered on a smile for them, and resisted the urge to wave only with one finger instead of five since they were standing around and still not fixing the stupid road.

  None of them waved back, completely rude. They were just beginning to disperse when she cleared the road cones, and she could see them take a few shoddy steps in the rear-view mirror. It looked like all of them had been drinking, which given the completely crappy state of the road after months under their care, really shouldn’t have been shocking.

  Mostly, the road was clear, but there were a few abandoned cars that had been rusting on the shoulder for quite some time. One little yellow VW Bug had front end damage, probably totaled, but, there were others just sitting there with the doors open, tires flat or out of gas, sometimes even with keys left in the ignition. It was unbelievable someone hadn’t stolen them yet, and it was absurd that no one from the city had bothered to tow them.

  Their local government was completely incompetent and had been neglecting their jobs for months. The city’s failure to fulfill their basic elected duties and public services was the entire reason she had to make this irritating trip to the dump anyway. Most of the garbage trucks were sitting abandoned, some sort of worker strike, and she’d heard absolutely nothing about any effort to get them moving again.

  Once she’d driven by city hall. It wasn’t a place Todd told her she was allowed to go, but she’s wanted to see for herself why things had gotten so bad. The place was packed with people protesting, stumbling about in the courtyard, and looking quite pathetic. It was the kind of thing she expected to see in stories of repressed foreign countries thousands of miles away, nowhere in the vicinity of her front lawn.