Death Rattle - Part II
In Part I, the narrator and her girlfriend travel to Cormac McCarthy’s house to spread her girlfriend’s father’s ashes. Their relationship is feeling unsteady, and at a highly rated oddities shop, they meet Marta, and the two discuss her in the car after.
Unless you’ve dated a person who is notably more attractive than you, you won’t understand why I feared, even after three years, that I was stuck at the center of some miserable prank.
Girlfriend aside, I saw myself as undesirable company. My mother used to joke with my friends when they left playdates or sleepovers that she’d send their check along later, thanks for doing her the favor of spending time with me. Whenever I asked her to stop, she claimed I lacked a sense of humor—I was too serious. Perhaps both were true. But most jokes had a serious core.
My mother and I possessed contradictory personalities that hindered meaningful conversation, but we were experts at sending each other gifts. To El Paso, she’d shipped sixty spice jars and a glossy bamboo spice rack. I was organizing these jars alphabetically when my girlfriend entered the kitchen in a lemon-colored silk spaghetti strap sundress I knew had cost her $278. She tugged on the strap and told me she was going to drive to Horizon City.
I asked, What’s in Horizon City?
She smiled and shrugged and said Marta had the day off.
On a Tuesday?
She nodded. My girlfriend had every day off because she no longer worked a job. She was supposed to be looking for a job but had instead developed a hobby crocheting lingerie—boxers, too, with striped tubes for penises. I had a few of the bras, itchy and too small.
My girlfriend had paused the job search once she’d realized how low the cost of living was in El Paso. My salary could sustain us both—and we were content with our days as they were, weren’t we? I didn’t know.
For seven months, I’d held a remote position at a struggling ad agency that wasted resources helping the wife of the CEO build a website no one needed. The website spun a wheel. The wheel told you what book to read. The point of the wheel was to assign books randomly to help female readers venture out of their comfort zones. To enter the site, you had to click a box saying you considered yourself a woman. The chosen books almost exclusively detailed the trials of underappreciated wives, all with a mystical bent. My girlfriend would’ve enjoyed the website had she ever asked about my career.
In recent months, I was attending an increasing number of meetings about this website, which the CEO’s wife called Wheel of Bestsellers, or WOB. I had to pause my spice organization to join one such meeting—a fine distraction, at least, from my girlfriend as she buzzed away to Marta.
I was the last to join the call. My team members were pretending to take WOB very seriously while the wife listened from her car. Instead of answering our questions about WOB’s business plan, she began to educate us on how the literary scene was no longer based in Manhattan but in Boston, where she lived. I nodded along, thinking about Marta. Were her tits symmetrical? In the shop, they’d looked satisfactory, but bras could lie.
I love Boston, said Marty, the SEO analyst, always the suck-up.
Marty was from Milwaukee and spoke as gently as Jeffrey Dahmer. Once, he’d forgotten to turn off his microphone during a company-wide meeting while he’d murmured Christian lullabies to his calico.
I’m happy to be out of that city, I said.
The wife glared. She asked, What did Boston ever do to you?
I said, Everything.
Boston had scorched me internally. I still felt its aftermath in my chest like a dissolving ball of wasabi. A whole year, we’d paid for decaying appliances. We’d paid for radiators to dribble fetid water into our hair as we fought through the wind to fetch overpriced Cuban coffees. We’d paid to wake up to roaches scuttling into our sheets, one of which my girlfriend had squashed to a crackling pulp with her slipper, flat into my skin. Like a fool, we’d paid for all that.
We meant me.
The wife asked, Did you spin the wheel today?
I nodded.
I got a book about covens, I said.
Which one?
With the orgy.
Me too, Marty said.
You’re not supposed to spin it, she said.
******
When my girlfriend arrived home a few hours later, she washed her hands for a very long time over the stack of my dishes, all streaked orange with dried yolk.
I waited for her to greet me. After a minute or two of silence, I asked, How did it go?
She glanced over at me and blinked rapidly, a tic that was occasionally cute, occasionally startling, like I’d trapped a bird prisoner in my house.
Let me think about it for a bit, she said. I love you.
******
Our bedroom in El Paso was ideal for impassioned, sophisticated lovemaking. I knew this tormented my girlfriend. The emerald sofa faced the California king for prime viewing. The connected bathroom was equipped with a porcelain whirlpool jacuzzi and a walk-in granite shower with a rectangular rainforest nozzle. Luxury for under $1800 a month.
I was reading a book about the untold lives of honeybees. My girlfriend nuzzled me and smiled and cocked her head like a coy child testing the limits of a babysitter. Her fingers slipped between my legs, and I felt the ache in my chest that arose before tears. I nudged her arm with my shoulder.
She sighed and turned off the light. I apologized and regretted apologizing. The room smelled disgusting. She’d left the bedroom window open, craving the desert’s evening chill, but broken pipelines on the west side of the city had made for a week of putrid air. I glared at the window. We’d left sewage in Boston.
Another time, I said. I’m sorry.
I’d made this promise on so many occasions that we both knew it wasn’t worth believing. A clot of guilt filled my chest. I was better off reassuring a terminally ill child that he would have children of his own someday.
My girlfriend muttered, No need to apologize.
She swiped her phone from the bedside table. I studied the ceiling that ballooned invisible in the darkness. I’d hoped to finish chapter three of the honeybee book. The creatures possessed an enviable toolkit of survival skills that I was eager to learn from. Instead, I inhaled distant sewage and endured the melancholic rattle of the neighborhood dogs as they crooned their evening songs. The howling in El Paso was unlike anything I’d heard before, gut-wrenchingly primal. I wondered if we weren’t listening to dogs at all but a pack of ashamed cannibalistic creatures roaming the desert basin, moaning as they lugged their deadening limbs into the mountains.
My girlfriend hummed at her glowing phone, unphased by the smell or pretending it didn’t exist. She rarely admitted to her wrongs—thus, we wouldn’t be closing the window. I wondered if she was texting Marta. I grabbed my phone from under my pillow and googled WOB. I liked to repeatedly visit the site to boost its page views and improve my reporting before our meetings. I spun the wheel. Again, it told me to buy the novel about a 16th-century coven of single mothers who partake in a time-bending orgy. I refreshed four times, received the same suggestion, and smirked.
My girlfriend lowered her phone and shifted a peeved set of eyes in my direction.
Sorry, I said.
What are you watching?
Work stuff. What about you?
It’s tacky to pry.
You asked the same question.
She shifted herself incrementally until her back was to me.
Cooking videos, she said.
Are you ready to tell me how it went?
No.
I groaned and wished I hadn’t. My girlfriend would latch onto that sound, remind me of my callousness the next time she wanted to withhold information. How can I confide in someone who groans at me?
I didn’t bother pushing the issue—argument or apology would stave off sleep, and exhaustion would make us crazier. I had to remind myself, in these moments, what I was asking of her, what she’d given to me—how she’d tearfully declared, all those months ago, that she could live a life of abstinence if it meant staying together. A small part of me had known she was lying by the size of the gesture. A year of abstinence, fine. A decade if she was a verified saint. But a life was obscene even for the most delusional romantics. Not even I planned to live a life of abstinence, of isolation. Many times, I’d tried to communicate this to her, how I wanted caresses to soothe and not startle me. But repulsion was a long-term byproduct of fear, like the dregs of a stubborn illness. Sex was anger, sex was favors, sex was a reluctant apology.
My girlfriend had promised she understood. She knew people who’d experienced what I’d experienced, because everyone knew people who’d experienced what I’d experienced, and honestly, she’d said, the whole thing wasn’t really a big a deal, since the people she knew who’d left troubled relationships were having loads of sex now in the new untroubled ones. We had this conversation once every few months when her libido got antsy. She’d complain, and she’d cry, and I’d fuck her to make it all stop, thinking of my ex-boyfriend and the ease with which we’d learned to harm each other.
Before we’d flown to El Paso, I’d suggested, half-asleep, that my girlfriend screw someone else. I’d stolen the idea from a radio special about a husband who let his wife sleep with the members of his softball team since he lacked a satisfactory libido. The arrangement apparently satisfied all parties. I wondered if I too could rapidly evolve to a level of consciousness that would allow me to obliterate my dignity.
I don’t know if you’re testing me, she said.
I’m not. It’s only fair.
Okay.
I suppose I was ignorant to have expected her to have protested just a little.
*****
El Paso grew on me quickly, a fungus that felt like company. Juárez was only a few miles south, and from our kitchen, I could see the golden lights that dotted the crossing like the spread pearls of a necklace. Most of the flat roads were under construction, so when the sun set, and the desert softened beneath the mournful orange glow, I felt like I was looking at the end of the Earth and not the country.
I kept this fondness for the city from my girlfriend. Though I’d openly loathed Boston, I still wanted her to believe she’d wronged me by flinging us so far away, into a state we should have politically shuddered at.
The only downside was my linguistic incompetence. I knew a total of six words in Spanish, and though I’d purchased a language app, I was too nervous to give my grammar a try when it came time for human interactions. At the markets, I was as useful as a raccoon with paws of cash.
Huevo burrito, I told the baker. Gracias, thanks.
I was spending too much of my free time food shopping. Each evening, I strolled the frigid aisles with a rattling empty cart, buying ingredients without meals in mind. What I stopped buying was toilet paper. We still required toilet paper, of course—our bodies functioned properly—and I could probably have afforded toilet paper, considering what I spent on coffee, but I was choosing not to buy it, for some reason. I stocked up on tortillas and eggs while we played chicken with UTIs.
My girlfriend wasn’t complaining. Some days, she ran the shower six times. When I failed to hear the violence of it spurting, I wondered if she was stealing my makeup remover wipes or if her crotch was enduring used wads of Kleenex from the trash bin. Days passed, and we never spoke about it.
If we had any real interest in seducing each other, we probably would’ve picked up a roll.
To be continued…
Savannah Horton was the 2021-2022 St. Albans School Writer-in-Residence. Heidi Pitlor selected her story from The Cincinnati Review as a Distinguished Story for the Best American Short Stories 2020 collection. She has published in The Raleigh Review, Subtropics, and The Drift. Her novel opening has been longlisted for the First Pages Prize and the CRAFT First Chapters Contest. She is a graduate of the University of Florida’s fiction MFA program, where she received the Porter Fellowship.
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