Fence Sickness

Fence Sickness

a novel

by Susan Scutti

Thanks to India Almgren and Gerard Flynn

All characters are fictional.  The historical events are real.

Lily

Your dad was a misunderstood hero with a beautiful soul.

Mom says this like it’s something she’s been thinking about for a long time. Her hands plunge into the foamy water where they move, mysteriously, beneath the surface and then she brings up another newly clean dish, rinses it, and places it in the rack.

He was a true… radical, she mutters so low I barely hear her though I stand beside her drying the dishes and putting them into the cabinets. She speaks like she is explaining it all to herself and so I figure this is the truest thing she’ll ever tell me.

Mostly she lies to me. She begins by saying things like, I never knew these things at your age, and then she talks in a way that sounds like the way you’d see friends talking in a movie or on TV but not the way any real friends actually talk and she thinks by telling me things in this way she will protect me from what she fears. But her fears are old fears and not the stuff that makes me scared. And so I listen with my good girl face on and I nod my head and she walks away with a look on her face like she’s all pleased with herself, thinking that she reached me, as she puts it when talking to Aunt Nancy.

But she hasn’t and never will reach me.

Jennifer’s mom says whatever she wants and nothing is held back, unlike my Mom, who carefully strains her words like soup and then steadily watches me gulp them down.

My hair and eyes are the same as Dad’s but the rest of my face is hers. Everyone says so plus all the pics and videos prove I’ve always had his eyes.

Some knowledge is instinct, you know it immediately and deeply, Dad told me once while we were idling in the car waiting for a light to change. Then the driver behind us honked his horn. Dad looked up like he was back in the world again and pressed the gas. But he must have glanced over at me in the passenger seat, still wondering about his words.

Lil, it isn’t a bunch of thoughts unspooling inside your head, he said as he turned the corner of our block. It isn’t mental — it’s in your heart. It’s your soul, he said.

Then he smiled at me. For a moment we faced one another and it was like we were staring into mirror sunglasses — my eyes looking exactly like his.

I know now that this is the truest thing Dad ever told me.

This happened two years ago just around the time when spring begins to flirt with summer.

That same morning a robin redbreast had hopped off the fence right in front of me, pecked the mud, and flew away with a twisting worm dangling from its beak.

Watching, I’d stepped backward and accidentally crushed a crocus. That afternoon, seeing the flower flattened against the grass, Mom said, Life’s fragile.

A week later, Dad was gone.

Emily

Waiting for the light to change, I glanced at an empty storefront and saw an unexpected reflection of my own face superimposed on a headless mannequin. Seeing its naked body weirdly twisted with my very own head on top, I decided right there I needed to do something.

I have tomorrow, Friday, and Monday off, why not take a break from the city? At the very least, I could go to the burbs and visit Mom and be back in the urban grind by Sunday morning.

With this little escape in mind, I joined the tableau of ATM users queue-ing up at the bank. Through the window, I watched the faces of the passing creatives : the animators, digital artists, retouchers, and copywriters who worked in the design shops dotting the Chelsea neighborhood. Observing the too-many-people looking too-stressed, I thought, What’s the point?

Work had never been fun but that was probably my own fault… or maybe not. In chat, my co-workers IM’ed about running into their crush at the bagel shop and what happened last night on their favorite TV shows and whether they were going to eat Korean or Mexican for lunch. Twice, once around noon and then again around three, they all heeded some mass instinct and informally mingled, clustering around the break room. Wanting to fit in (and stay employed), I forced myself to join them, listening to their plans for finding the perfect, the best, the absolute most adorable (bar, restaurant, shop, fill in the blank ), and then I returned to my desk and ducked my head into my monitor, doing my best to appear unnoticeable.

Friday nights they always went out to get drunk in a tight, noisy circle that gave off a hostile, celibate vibe from across the bar. I’d joined them once, drinking three, maybe four glasses of wine with them, but somehow I never became intoxicated. Frozen in a snow globe world of my own, I mutely watched them, trying to understand the patterns of whispered conversations and laughter, the undercurrents of unrequited emotion, the meaning of each anxious glance and sudden exit. On both their, and my own, behalf, I felt a Thoreau-like desperation — the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Now, closing the door of my apartment, I clicked on the TV for company and then began stuffing things into a backpack: toothbrush, hairbrush, some clothes, and my laptop. Pausing to watch a car commercial, gleaming fenders speeding down a country road, I wondered if I should go to the gym and get in a little exercise before leaving the city. Mom would be up no matter when I arrived, she always read until midnight.

My phone rang: Geoff.

Surprised, a little nervous, I muted the TV.  Hey.

How are you? Geoff’s baritone voice leapt out at me. He sounded unusually upbeat.

Good and you?

I’m in New Mexico.

Wow, excellent. Sitting, I pictured him as I first saw him: Naturally thick, dark hair and playful caramel colored eyes. A tall, slightly stooping guy, he radiated kindness because of (or despite?) his artistic affectations. 

Left in a rush, sorry I didn’t say goodbye.

No worries. (A lie. I’d been disappointed not to get any calls even while telling myself he wasn’t right for me.) So you made it, I said, remembering now he had in fact mentioned some plan to drive across country.

Yeah, we went straight through, switching off driving, taking turns sleeping in the back. We were beat when we got here.

I said, I’ve never been out there.

We stopped in Santa Fe. That’s a funky town. Then we came up here to Taos, He shifted the phone and when he spoke again, his voice sounded nearer, more quietly intimate. The light is intense. Anyway, Justin has an extra room so I figure I’ll just hang out and paint.

Listening, my gaze landed on the packets of seeds stacked by the phone: marigolds, zinnias, daisies, forget-me-nots. You escaped New York, good for you.

The sky is so… in the museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe paintings I always figured her colors were meant to be surreal, but the sky really is that extreme shade of blue. And the stars!

You know you’re outside the city when you see stars. I added, It’s great you’re there.

It’s beautiful, Em. I really love it here. The people… they’ve got this real earthiness to them.

Interpretation: he met someone else already.

Anyway. Just thought I’d call….

Hanging up, I felt restless, filled with fierce energy. I clicked off the TV, stripped, stepped into the bathroom. I penciled my eyes and pulled my hair into a ponytail and then dressed in gym clothes. The elevator was empty and when it reached the windowless lobby, the doors opened on the new doorman saying, Is anybody there? into the walkie talkie. I slipped past him with a wave.

At the gym I started with sit-ups and stretches and as sometimes happens when I’m doing crunches, I had passing thoughts of war. Pausing, I sat and stared out the window at the building across the street. Observing its uniform metal embellishments, identical ornaments of the upper half of a woman’s body with wings, I thought about what would happen if we suddenly had to fight some enemy right here in the city and so I calculated, Well, that metal could be stripped off to make bullets. Then, I looked around at all the other people, headphones on, silently going about their gym routines, and I thought, It would be okay; we’d all pull together. Weirded out by my own assessments of armaments and self-defense, I vowed to do more stretches as a way to wipe out these thoughts once and for all: one, two, three, four, five…

Next, I jogged on a treadmill, my same old gym tunes submerging my same old thoughts, and above this mental noise I thought how a boyfriend could cure me of all that ailed me. Naturally, then, I thought about Geoff, and the fact that deep down he was a good person and how we had plenty in common. But somehow romance never bloomed between us. And in my gut I knew it wasn’t because of Tommy as Claire or my sisters would claim. It was me . I just didn’t feel like handing Geoff my heart. 

Returning from the gym, I showered, picked up my backpack and locked the door behind me. Leaving the building, I looked up this time and saw the Empire State Building lit up in red and white lights, rising into the misty sky like a finger. It’s probably more magnificent for me than for most people—after all, my grandfather, a plasterer who came to America from Italy, helped build it.

Most of my family, no matter their actual careers, were builders. They’re people who talked about sheetrock while poking candles into birthday cakes for 5-year-olds and, between guitar sets on the back lawn, talked about additions and new decks and plumbing. Generally, they had little taste for TV, they preferred the satisfaction of walking into houses and tapping on walls and knowing exactly where the electric cables ran, how much time they’d needed for the carpentry, how pristine the blueprints looked before they’d been examined one time too many. I’d seen my brother buy a crumbling house, tear it down to its foundation, and reconstruct from there. Possibly more than his actual job, Jim seemed to enjoy every aspect of this work, everything from chasing down suppliers and joking with matronly secretaries who handled permits at city hall, women who jokingly referred to him as a self-improver .

It’s this family pride in building that caused me to feel like a cast-off from life in New Jersey.

In their eyes, I lived in the city. Like whenever they said, We’re going into the city to see a play, and that of course means Broadway and only Broadway. Or, we went to dinner in the city, and in this case they would be talking about a favorite hole-in-the-wall in the West Village. All their lives, my family streamed in and out of the city and they knew it very well in their way. They had their familiar experiences here and there and they understood exactly when they’d had enough and it was always just enough so that upon arriving home they’d feel the comfort of their suburbs… as well as a need to someday return.

This was what it meant to live in New Jersey.

And though I loved my family and knew I was no worse and no better than they were, I also understood how living in the city changed me in ways I could never have predicted before making the choice to live here. Because I’ve seen so much raw ugliness here – the casual disdain for homeless people, say, and the corroding infrastructure -- the city has forced me to look for beauty in unexpected places.

In Penn Station, I purchased a round trip ticket from a machine, and then boarded the next train on the North Jersey Shore Line. I sank into an available seat and moments later, when the train lurched into motion, I realized I was facing in the wrong direction.

Tickets. The trainman punched holes in my ticket as the middle-aged man beside me flashed his monthly pass. When the train plunged into the tunnel, the man beside me began to nod off and in his half-sleep, he shifted and I detected a distinct odor, not unpleasant, more like a staleness.

Actually, his scent was that of someone who was rarely touched, I decided as the train emerged from the tunnel. But then as I watched New Jersey rush by in backwards motion — corroding infrastructure, a congregation of high voltage transmission lines, and an endless number of rusting shipping containers — I suddenly wondered, Is that scent coming from him or from me?

Lily

Walking home our usual way, Jennifer and I talk about homework or biology class but mostly we don’t say much. Neither of us are into school this year. Actually, neither of us are doing well in school this year.

I had trouble right from the start when my guidance counselor called in Mom for a special meeting after school with the psychologist.  Waiting, I could hear every word.

We believe she may have an attention disorder, the woman’s voice said. ADHD.

I understand, I understand, Mom kept saying as they talked, the woman explaining in a voice as steady as a drill how the tests hadn’t been conclusive but all the signs were there. I knew Mom didn’t understand, probably hadn’t heard a word of what the woman or my counselor were saying.

Many students benefit from medication, I heard my guidance counselor say.

That’s when Mom came to life.

Is that necessary, she said, I mean really. Especially considering what she’s just been through.

When the psychologist tried to smooth the waters, her voice somehow warmer sounding, Mom talked over her in a loud embarrassing voice.

She’s just been through, Mom said pausing dramatically, a death in the family .

Last year, the same school psychologist said Jennifer was borderline ADHD and she took pills for a week but then her mom said she was acting funny so she insisted Jennifer be tested again and this time the psychologist decided she was a typically developing child .

Since then, anytime someone doesn’t like the same band we do or posts something stupid online, we say, I wonder if she’s a typically developing child? Is he typically developing or not?

These days Jennifer and I are happy just getting through a day at school with no pop quizzes and no psychological profiling.

The sun has not yet set so none of the holiday ornaments decorating the lawns of the diehards who push Christmas into the New Year are lit up. The houses blur together until we get to the one with a huge blow-up doll Santa in front of it.

The owner, a short, gray haired man with a trim mustache and a bulging gut, is there now, working up a sweat, taking down lights and letting the air out of Santa. House of Thor, whispered Jennifer the first time we saw the arrangement of oversized Christmas decorations. Now the half-inflated Claus is bent over like a girl puking into the gutter after drinking too many beers. 

At the corner near the deli, a car stops and the guy inside asks directions and though Jennifer only glances at me for the briefest second, though the expression on her face never changes, I know she is thinking he’s really creepy, too. Still, both of us act nice and I explain he needs to head south while Jennifer tells him to make sure to take a left when he hits Route 35.

He drives off and only then does Jennifer turn to me, her face creasing with laughter.

Greasy skin and wire-rimmed glasses and a pregnant belly pressed against the steering wheel, says Jennifer.

Pearly white hands with dirty fingernails pushing wire-rimmed glasses up a fat nose, I say.

After that we run laughing all the way to the corner where she goes her way and I go mine.

Half a block later, I am still smiling though back to my usual self, walking down the center of the street instead of on the sidewalk.  Some old guy gives me a grumpy face as I pass. Probably someone mom knew when she was my age.

She’d gotten out of Woodbridge years ago. I still couldn’t understand why she ever moved back to the old home town.

Everything is so similar and familiar I barely see it anymore. Instead, all the small yards presided over by drab colored houses blend into a single emotion. An ambient emotion: It’s the feeling you get when you look at a chain link fence. 

Emily

Blue TV light flickered behind the pale curtains of the picture window of my parents’ house. I climbed the stoop and tried the door but it was locked. I rang the bell. Inside a brief musical note chimed as I glanced behind me at the row of houses sagging above skimpy lawns. The blinds in Mrs. Bukowski’s window opened and the squinting face of her son — referred to as Ted the Head during a span of about five pimpled and marijuana-laden years and now one of the neighborhood’s underemployed — was momentarily exposed. I straightened my shoulders and turned around when Mom’s heavy tread rattled the glass window of the door. In that high window, a geometric section of her face appeared as she cautiously peered out. For a moment she stood there blinking and then her face disappeared and the metal click of the lock sounded. She swung open the inner door, her instinctive caution relaxing into a grim smile as she released a second lock on the outer screen door.

Em! What a surprise. She stepped aside to let me pass into the vestibule. Despite a sturdy appearance, Mom’s coloring created an other-worldly impression: her hair had gone completely gray, her skin was nearly fish-belly white, and her eyes were the kind of blue little kids choose when coloring crayon skies.

I figured I’d stay through the weekend, help out with…. My explanation, like so much smoke, drifted into uncertainty.

It’ll be nice to have some company.

Gratefully, I kissed her cheek and hugged her, inhaling her vague talcum scent. As she closed the door, I lowered my backpack to the floor at the foot of the staircase and glanced around the living room. An ancient stereo sat atop a CD player positioned on a cabinet filled with albums and CDs, including Ella Fitzgerald sings Cole Porter , the Deutsche Grammophon collection of Beethoven symphonies, Frank Sinatra records, and an Original Cast Recording of Oklahoma! A couch, two chairs, end tables and lamps, all in a clunky style my mother referred to as colonial crowded the small, square room. Only after I left home for college had I begun to understand my older sisters’ corrosive disdain for our mother’s taste, which I’d always defended. Meanwhile a baseball game (the Yankees) flickered across the face of the TV.

Is Dad… the same?

I maintained a deadpan expression as she self-consciously pulled her bathrobe tight. I knew her worries woke her in the middle of the night and led her straight to the fridge.

He’s in the back bedroom. You know, he doesn’t leave his bed anymore.

He doesn’t get up? Since when? Some accusatory note had crept into my voice.

Since last week. Her blue eyes turned hot as they did whenever she was challenged. The doctor said… well, he’s awake now, Em. See for yourself.

I stepped down the hall, and looked through the open door into the back bedroom. Dad lay, slightly askew, in a hospital bed. I felt my heart constrict with sudden pain to see him so frail, unrecognizable. Propped up on a pillow, his head was cocked to one side and his nose, a classic Roman beak, appeared prominently in his face. What remained of his hair was mostly gray, the stubble of his beard mostly white. His eyes, the color and complexity of brown marble, slowly found then locked onto my own. My hopes, like a steady drumbeat, amplified as I stepped closer to the bed, wishing for another breakthrough like the short spell about a year ago, when out of the blue he’d been clear and conscious for minutes at a time.

Hey, Dad.

Wha…? he asked, his once strong voice a hoarse whisper now.

It’s Emily. Your daughter, I said, trying to lure him back to lucidity.

Don’t bother. Mom folded her arms across her chest. He doesn’t even know who I am.

Deep down I understood all that I loved was no longer really there. What lay on this bed was not my father but a simple husk of the man. Never, though, would I tell Mom how much this wounded me. She had had me when she was in her forties (a change-of-life baby or as Nancy liked to say just more of an accident than the rest of us) and she never let me forget that I was the youngest even now that I was in my 30s. Feeling her gaze, I leaned forward so that my hair fell like a curtain and hid my face. I looked at Dad, yet I was unable to conquer the now familiar rush of fear.

Mom said, He’s not terminal yet but…

Terminal? But of course he’s going to die.

That’s what they call it when he has only six months left to live. Dr. Dowling thinks the disease has progressed to a…

She continued to describe the details of Dad’s illness and I felt myself wilt. Where is he? I couldn’t remember the fierce man he once was. When Mom’s weary explanation finally ended, I gingerly raised my head as if recovering from a blow. On the bedside table stood a cup filled with water. I lifted it, held the straw to Dad’s mouth, and watched him eagerly sip like a child.

Good. The doctor said he needs more liquids, Mom said, leaving me there.

I took the straw from his mouth and sopped up the water that had dribbled onto his chin. After his initial paranoia passed, he began to silently roam the house. Next, he stopped walking one day and remained seated in a chair. Now, it must be time to accept that he would never leave the bed. I placed the straw to Dad’s lips. No liquid rose, the cup had been drained.

I stepped into the kitchen. Before turning on the light, I walked to the screen door and looked into the yard. I smelled freshly cut grass, honeysuckle, trees —scents rarely encountered in the city. Streetlights were lit as well as a couple of porch lights. Across the street, the houses stood silent and closed like the faces of the mostly new, unknown neighbors living within them. Suddenly the door of the Howells’ house opened and Vincent stepped onto his front stoop.

He stood there, staring up at the sky. Even from across the street I could see the new streaks of gray in his straight, thick hair, which had grown a little long, and, when he turned his head, this little bit of gray caught the streetlight and flickered like chrome. In the dim half-light I could make out the remembered features of his face, his high cheekbones, strong nose and chin, which hinted of both Slavic and Anglo-Saxon ancestors.

He lifted his face toward the unseen stars. What is he thinking? The one thing I couldn’t see and read was the ocean-color of his eyes. Because he was good-looking, most people immediately liked him, but once they figured out how uncompromising he could be, well, that generally colored their opinion of him in a negative way. He’s stubborn, some said: Difficult. He did only as he pleased, my mother once said, a comment that stung. A major jerk was how other people put it.

Vincent simply had never been one for the crowd-sourced opinion. He always needed to understand reasons, the why? of a thing, and he always made his own judgments. And that separateness, that way he had of always standing apart without even seeming to know it, that was what pissed people off the most.

You either see the truth or you don’t, he once told me. Vincent helped me see things for what they are.

Including myself.

Lily

He went out to buy the proverbial pack of cigarettes and never came back, Jennifer’s mother says, So I’ve been two times abandoned.

While she tells me this her pretty face wears a small, neat smile, like what’s painted on a Barbie doll’s plastic face, and all of this taken together, her words, her smile, her everyday prettiness, is not something I even remotely understand when it all comes together in one package.

I sit waiting on the couch with Jennifer’s mother sitting across from me at the kitchen table while Jennifer is in her room changing her clothes. In the silences, I am trying to hear the words of an argument going on in the apartment next door.  The windows are closed and steamy with all the heat.

Jennifer’s mother is younger than my mom. She’s got wide brown eyes and shoulder length brown hair and she wears clothes that accentuate her thin shape. None of that sounds exceptional yet she is because after meeting her people always smile and say, Isn’t she the nicest woman. She and Jennifer’s real father divorced years ago and then she remarried some guy named Bill and now she’s been on her own for about a year and a half.

Though her mother says she’s given up on men, Jennifer says that’s never going to happen since different guys have already begun calling her and every now and then her mother sends Jennifer a text telling her she will not be coming home and to call her grandmother if she’s worried or doesn’t want to spend the night alone in their apartment. Jennifer’s mother works as a waitress at the Reo Diner. We go in sometimes and she brings us cheeseburger deluxes and asks us how school is going and do we like our teachers and classes, when we know what she really means is: How are the boys treating you?

Jennifer’s mother never liked school and wasn’t good at it herself so she just assumes Jennifer is the same. But Jennifer is not the same. She must take after her father because she always been really smart without even trying.

It’s a shame, says my mom whenever Jennifer stops by our house, You really should be going to college, you know? Jennifer always straightens her spine and laughs nervously when mom goes on like this. Why don’t you think about it, mom says.

At the mall where Jennifer and I go only if we’re desperate with boredom we see girls who are our age or at least I think so because it’s hard to tell with certain girls, the kind that don’t look suburban, the kind that become mothers really young and wear dull expressions like my mom and Jennifer’s mom even though our moms are twice their age.

My mom looks more grieving than sullen, these days, but she was a single mother, too, so she’s no different than these girls with pregnant bellies and no sign of boyfriends or husbands.

Once, I tried to ‘out’ her as a single mom, but she denied it.

It isn’t the same, she said laughing. Your father and I lived together. We just never got married. He loved me.

How do you know that? I said, focusing only on the love part.

You just do, she said.

But how?

Mom shrugged. You just know. 

She always says this about love and I want to believe her but I don’t.

Jennifer says the same. She always knows whether or not a boy likes her but then most of the boys really do like her. She’s very pretty, her brown eyes are wide but a lighter color than her mother’s, and her straight brown hair hangs all the way down to her waist and she’s got freckles across her nose that everyone says looks really cute.

Jennifer can whistle through her teeth like my Dad used to, and she is a wizard in Algebra and Biology, but can’t remember a single grammar lesson from 7 th grade.  She sings off key. Jennifer can look at a person and sum them up in ten words and it always makes me laugh. She’s the pitcher whenever we play softball in gym and she likes granny candy — Peppermint Patties.

When the boys talk to her or watch her, their faces look open and honest and sly all at the same time. Each time she looks away from them, their eyes drift from her eyes to her mouth to her breasts. And then there’s something about the way her tongue peeks between her teeth when she says certain words that makes them look dumb and hungry and eager like dogs. 

Lily, she says whenever we’re alone again and she’s finished telling me how much fun she had talking with some new boys, Why didn’t you say something?

I shrug. I say, I didn’t know what to say.

She laughs. You don’t have to say much.

Mom calls Jennifer ‘mature for her age.’

When I’m around certain boys I don’t even bother trying to speak. They seem so immediately different from anyone I might naturally like. Someone like Jason, Jennifer’s cousin. Jason used to