THREE-SEASON ROOM by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple
Outside, the November air pinches, but it’s warm on the screened-in porch where Shelly and Charlotte are getting high. They pass the joint back and forth between them as they would have back in high school, had they been friends. But Shelly and Charlotte are not friends. They’re sisters.– not the same thing. This, despite a needlepoint their mother hung in the house where they grew up that claimed, “A sister is a friend for life.” Their mother had three sisters herself and died while not on speaking terms with any of them. For a long time now, Charlotte suspects that sister- love is really just a proximity thing.
Because she is high, she is moved to share this thought.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shelly rasps, craning her neck to face Charlotte. The two of them are lying flat on their backs, head to head, like murder- suicide victims or conjoined twins. They have discovered that the artificial turf on the porch feels pleasantly springy if you lie on it long enough. When Shelly looks at Charlotte from such a close range, Charlotte sees tiny broken capillaries on Shelly’s nose and the places where her sad- mom mascara has migrated into her wrinkles. Charlotte blinks her own naked lashes, thinks suddenly, and with some alarm, that Shelly looks not just like an older sister, but an old one. Does this mean Charlotte is old too?
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Shelly repeats.
“Of course, we’re friends. Of course, we like each other. We love each other. I mean, think of how we were joined at the hip when we were young.”
“Were we?” Charlotte asks, genuinely surprised, and also a little touched by this information.
Shelly grabs the joint from Charlotte. “You smoke too much of this stuff,” she says. Charlotte watches thin fingers of smoke wind themselves from Shelly’s frown lines when she exhales. The windows are closed on the porch where they lie, the room Shelly calls her “three- season” one, so the smoke is trapped inside along with them.
Sometimes when Shelly exhales, Charlotte imagines her own lungs squeezing and contracting, as if they really did share some of the same body parts. And when Shelly’s son, Henry, comes calling after a nightmare, “Mommy! Mommy, where are you?” Shelly sighs, stubs out the joint, but Charlotte is the one who has to stop herself from answering.
Smoking weed used to put Charlotte to sleep, but these days, it, like everything else, leaves her wired, restless. Late into the night, she stays awake in her nephew’s tiny bedroom, all the things she owns in this world, her laundry, her insurance paperwork, her knives, taking up one small space between the toy box and the closet door. The bed on which she sleeps butts up against a wall shared by the master bedroom, where nothing of interest ever goes on between her sister and her husband, except for hushed talk about Charlotte herself.
“It’s not me I’m thinking about, but the kids,” her brother- in-law Darren says, when he thinks that he can speak freely, when he thinks Charlotte cannot hear. “They need to get back to normal. To their routine. I have no problem with your sister or her lifestyle. To each his own, I say. But, how long do her problems have to be our problems? Yesterday, Henry asked me if gangrene was hereditary.”
There is a pause. Charlotte strains to hear Shelly’s reply. The words come out mumbled, as if spoken from a head over which a pillow is being held. “She’s not even looking for an apartment anymore,” continues Darren. “I checked the browser on the laptop. You know what she’s been doing all day? Watching cooking videos on YouTube. I bet she hasn’t even called a realtor.”
Charlotte makes a mental note to call a realtor tomorrow, first thing! She pauses the video she has been watching on her nephew Henry’s bed. The screen freezes on a close-up of a knife, the skillful hand that operates it just out of frame, blocked from Charlotte’s view. Charlotte imagines holding the knife herself. She squeezes her palm around the handle, but her palm isn’t there.
Charlotte prefers the word maimed to injured, or incapacitated. She has had nearly a year to settle on this word choice. As in, the car accident maimed Charlotte. It maimed Charlotte, but killed Raul, Raul being Charlotte’s fiancé, his car being the one she wrapped around the tree.
Since the accident, Charlotte no longer has use of her right arm. She cannot feel a thing below the shoulder. She has been told that beneath her skin, the “muscle is dying.” She likes to imagine this phrase giving her goosebumps, but only on one side. Two corrective surgeries, so far, have not proven so corrective. Nerves are fickle things, her surgeon says. They are delicate circuits, difficult to rewire. We will try again, he says. We will try again.
Each time the doctor broke the news that the surgery didn’t take, he looked so sorry, but so clean, and Charlotte thought to herself, Where is the blood? Where is the gore?
She knows she should be feeling something else after the surgeries, but all she can muster is curiosity.
Charlotte suspects that if she had not been the one driving that night, Darren probably wouldn’t be trying to kick her out. Likewise, if she had been the one who died, there would be no reason to get rid of her because she would already be gone.
The accident report called Charlotte’s driving “reckless,” but Charlotte feels as if it has not been reckless enough. Instead of grief, there is only obligation. She now feels as if she owes Raul a debt that she cannot pay. She has outlived him by 212 days, 31 Saturdays, and 84 dinner services at the restaurant where they met and where each of them no longer works, for obvious reasons. Her debts keep racking up. She counts them, measures them out while in her nephew’s bed, her dying arm propped up next to her on its own pillow, like an uninterested bedfellow.
When Charlotte moved in with Shelly and her family, her nephew Henry was made to move across the hall to accommodate her. He now sleeps in his big sister Dalia’s room. Henry doesn’t mind Charlotte living in his space, but even so, Charlotte has given the children a hermit crab for their troubles. Dalia is afraid of the thing, but Henry is quite fond of it. When she handed over the tank the day she moved in, he exclaimed, “Now you can stay in my room forever!” and Charlotte thought it strange that the price of her forever was a small terrarium with a plastic tiki hut in it.
Henry’s room is tiny, his walls covered with posters of NASCAR drivers, all of whose statistics and biographical information Henry can recite at will. The sheets on which Charlotte sleeps are decorated with tracks on which racecars zoom all night long in a never- ending circuit. When she falls asleep Charlotte dreams of engines, figure eights.
In the marital chamber next door, a monotonous sound of waves eventually drowns out the conversation, and Charlotte can no longer eavesdrop. She shuts the laptop and places it on the floor. She arranges her arm on its pillow, allowing herself to fondle the wrist of it for a dull moment. She closes her eyes, concentrates on a pulse. In the darkness, a voice cuts the silence. Darren exclaims, “You’ve got to try harder, dammit!”
Charlotte knows he is talking to Shelly, his wife, but she squeezes her own wrist tighter. Feeling nothing. More nothing. Then less than nothing at all.
* * *
The surgeon who her sister sees has prescribed her medical marijuana because Charlotte has had trouble sleeping ever since the accident. And because the weed is prescribed by a doctor, Shelly can’t see any reason to take issue with it. She has no problem with Charlotte smoking on her property after the kids go to sleep. She has no problem even sitting beside her sister in the quiet of the three-season room, keeping her company, like a candy- striper. And when Charlotte offers to share a little with Shelly one night, Shelly is surprised that she also has no problem saying at once, “Well, maybe a little.”
Unlike Charlotte, Shelly has not smoked a lot in her life, but lately she is beginning to think it’s not too late to fix that! She discovers she likes it. Likes even the fact that she likes it. Charlotte’s prescription has given her something unexpected to look forward to. At odd moments during the day, braiding Dalia’s hair, zipping Henry into his winter coat, Shelly finds herself anticipating these forays onto the porch with her sister, the earthy smell of the joints, the burn in her throat. These are not, she thinks, the joints she remembers passing up at college parties, lip- wet, limp, reeking of b.o.
No, these joints are something else entirely. They call to mind for Shelly a tea she once drank at a temple in Japan. That summer during college. A million years ago. The tea, as she remembers it, was served in earthenware mugs without any handles. To drink it, you had to wrap both hands around the vessel, hugging the warmth all the way to your mouth.
“You know what this room needs?” Shelly asks Charlotte one night as they lie head to head on the turf, the smell of the tea wafting around her. “A fountain.”
Shelly pulls her phone from her pocket and with a few focused swipes of her finger, she locates and orders a “moderately priced Zen- water garden” to keep in the three- season room along with them. This, Shelly thinks, is just the thing.
The very next day, a package arrives. It is smallish, but surprisingly heavy.
“What’s that?” Henry asks, as Shelly makes straight, shallow incisions into packing tape.
“A fountain.”
“For wishes?”
“No,” Shelly says, thinking, maybe, sort of. She opens the box and pulls the Zen- water garden out amid an explosion of packing peanuts. Shelly stands the thing on the counter to study it. Henry comes up beside her, placing the hermit crab whose shell he had been painting next to it. The word “NASCAR” drips off the crab and leaves a smudge on the basin it rubs against. “Yep,” Henry says, appraisingly. “It’s a fountain, alright.”
That night, Shelly carries the moderately- priced Zen- water garden past the living room, where Dalia and a homely friend of hers watch television. The two girls stare solemnly at the screen on which Humphrey Bogart appears to be mumbling. Shelly doesn’t know what film it is they are watching. It may be, she considers, The Maltese Falcon, one of many movies Shelly regrets never having seen. There is too much! she thinks, hurrying past them. Too much never something or other.
Around midnight, after the kids are asleep, Shelly sets up the fountain on the porch. She pours a pitcher of cold water into its basin and turns it on with the flip of a switch. Charlotte chortles, blowing smoke through her nose, when the fountain begins to bubble. It sounds like an old man pissing, she says. But Shelly likes the noise of it, the tiny tinkle, the sound of an itch being scratched.
“Why don’t you say something in Japanese,” Charlotte says drowsily after some time spent alternately listening to, and laughing at, the fountain.
Shelly combs the folds of her mind, trying to locate a word, any word, that she had learned on her trip. But her mind is slow, and that summer, so long ago. Any Japanese she had once known has been lost, scattered to time. Loose change pulled from pockets before going into the wash. The only word she can come up with is one that she learned from watching a cooking show on YouTube with Charlotte.
“Umami,” says Shelly.
Charlotte laughs as if Shelly has told a joke. But Shelly finds herself repeating the word, as she once used to do when reciting meditation mantras. Though she has given up meditating years ago, she misses the feeling it gave her, like closing your eyes while you’re still awake. “Umami,” she says to the porch roof. Long ago, when Charlotte was still a chef, and Raul still alive, she had told Shelly that chopping up vegetables into very small, even pieces felt like meditation to her. Shelly thinks suddenly, maybe I should get a knife! Maybe.I should try to make things smaller.
That Shelly smokes pot with Charlotte isn’t the point, says Darren, though it’s true he doesn’t approve of it. The point is that Charlotte is still here at all.
“What did you and your sister do together all day?” he asks tersely from the walk-in closet as he undresses at night. When he asks this, he snaps off his tie like a whip. Shelly likes this small, defiant gesture. It makes Darren seem meaner, and thus, somehow more appealing.
“Are you stoned?” Darren always seems to want to know. It is a word that Shelly has never considered. Especially as Darren likes to say it. In his mouth the word sounds strange, biblical.
“Real nice, Shel. Real mature. And with your kids in the house. Classy.”
Darren turns on the white noise machine app when he is done with her. Fed-up, disgusted. Shelly lies awake and listens to the waves from the app crash, dredging up each ghost of other arguments, earlier arguments. The room grows thick with ghosts. Shelly once had a friend who described her marriage as “rocky.” At the time, Shelly didn’t understand the term. But now she thinks she does.
“I just want life to go back to the way it used to be,” Darren says occasionally into the darkness.
“Me too,” says Shelly. And she means it when she says it. Just not the same life, maybe. Not the same way, perhaps.
When Darren gropes for her body beneath the sheets, Shelly makes herself count to ten before shooing his hands away.
“I’m trying,” Shelly lies earnestly, pulling down her nightshirt.
“I need you to try harder!” says Darren.
Shelly thinks her problem is that she has become too impressionable. Soft like sand. Her body, once so taut and responsive, is now shifting, untrustworthy. Shelly frets a lot about something Charlotte has told her. How splinters of glass can emerge from the skin of an accident victim, months, years later. How they can just pop up through the surface out of the clear blue, painfully, and just when you thought there were no more. Shelly lies awake and worries that something might be waiting to break through her own skin, though she herself has never been injured. Other times she worries that there is nothing down there. Nothing at all to relieve the pressure.
When Shelly sleeps, the waves do not come from Darren’s white noise, but rather from the Sea of Japan. In her dreams, she stands on the edge of a great pattern of raked lines in the sands of a meditative garden, her body entwined around a beautiful young man’s. The man is the tour guide on the trip with whom Shelly fell intensely, aerobically, in love that summer during college. He was 27 at the time. A baby! Shelly thinks now. And yet, it hadn’t seemed so then. Now, she feels old enough to be his mother.
Before Shelly started smoking with Charlotte, Shelly hadn’t thought about the tour guide, the boy, for a long, long time. So long that now when she thinks of him again, dreams of him, she isn’t sure if she is remembering things she has done with him or things that she wished she had done with him. They both seem equally impossible, the things her body did and the things she wished it did. The lack of distinction between the two make Shelly’s memories, even the most carnal among them, feel as if they belong to someone else and she is just borrowing them temporarily.
Shelly supposes that the return of these dreams of the tour guide should bring her happiness, but they do not. Instead, the dreams leave her dazed, frustrated. For a long time after she wakes, she looks at the tissues in Darren’s wastebasket, at the children’s fraying toothbrushes in puddles by the sink, as if she has never seen any of these things before in her life. She looks at her own skin in the mirror but cannot bring herself to touch it.
Some people only discover religion after their children are born. But Shelly has done the opposite. Her children are secularists. They have called her attention away from what she used to worship. She used to fall asleep meditating on memories of lines made with rakes, of the boy with his fingers, of traced patterns on soft surfaces. The life she has now does not accommodate such a practice. It is full of stuff and loudness, crab claws clacking over gravel, fabric ripped from the teeth of a zipper. All day long, her family obligations buzz around her brain, occupying every lane of her thoughts, the children, Henry and Dalia, jockeying for space like racecars on the circuits Henry watches, each trip around her mind re- writing any memories of Shelly’s that preceded them until, eventually, Shelly feels as if her life must have only begun the moment they were born. That any part of the life that came before them wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been. Well, could it?
Only now, Shelly has become the owner of a moderately priced Zen- water garden that dribbles softly in her three- season room. Now, Shelly has proof that she was once concerned with more than this thundering life.
Shelly closes her eyes, plunges her hand into the cold water of the fountain and lets it sit there grazing the stones and rocks near the filter at the bottom until a biting sensation causes her to recoil, to pull her hand back, and cradle it against her body. Maybe the bracing. cold. Maybe something sharp down there.
* * *
Dalia’s summer had royally sucked. She had wanted a dog, but she got a hermit crab. She was supposed to go to a wedding, but instead she went to a funeral. Since Aunt Char moved in with her family, and Henry moved into her bedroom, nothing has been right.
“That does suck,” Dalia’s friend, Cass, whispers cross- legged on the floor of Dalia’s closet where they sit. They have to shut themselves up to talk in there so as not to wake Henry as he sleeps in the bed. “It sucks capital- D dick.”
Dalia nods, appreciating Cass’s willingness to “go there” with her curse words. Cass is widely considered to be crass by the other members of the 6th grade. Cass is crass, actually, always talking to Dalia about things Dalia secretly finds distasteful, her collection of photographs from nature magazines of animals “doing it,” for example. But for all her faults, Cass appreciates what Dalia considers her Dalia- ness, her big teeth, her bad attitude, her frizzy hair that she still needs her mother’s help to tame, and for this Dalia is grateful.
“What does Char stand for anyway?” Cass asks, picking at an ingrown toe nail.
“Charlotte.”
“Well, it sounds like a cut of meat to me,” whispers Cass, flicking the freed nail into a pile of clothes that have slipped from their hangers. “Some rotten old burnt piece of meat.”
“Aunt meat,” says Dalia, agreeably. “Aunt Dead Meat.”
The worst of it, as far as Dalia is concerned, is that Aunt Charlotte just can’t seem to understand that she is not wanted here. That Dalia, especially, doesn’t want her. She doesn’t want to hear her voice, or see her face, or have to get a glimpse of that dead thing that hangs off her body.
“Hey, Dally!” Aunt Charlotte says brightly whenever Dalia enters a room, but Dalia always pretends she cannot hear. She has started to wear headphones everywhere now, even inside the house. She likes the force- field of silence they project around her, even when they are not turned on. They protect her from her pathetic aunt. Dalia moves about the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, packing up her book bag in the morning, while her aunt’s mouth forms words that Dalia ignores. Her aunt is just a mouth to her with no sound coming out. A dummy.
If Dalia is being totally honest about it, she may have had the tiniest crush on her almost- Uncle Raul. Not, like, in a creepy way, but there are some things you know in your life, even when you’re twelve, and the thing Dalia knows is that she was a little bit in love with Raul. Before her aunt went and killed him, that is.
She hasn’t told a soul about this. Except for Cass. Cass is good at keeping secrets, she says, because she has so many of her own.
“Like what?” asks Dalia. “Tell me one.”
“Like your hermit crab is dead,” says Cass. “Like I drowned him in the fountain downstairs.”
Dalia laughs, good one. But Cass is sincere. “Look if you don’t believe me.”
Dalia doesn’t want to, but she forces herself out of the closet. She lifts the mesh top of the tank on the dresser. It’s busted on one side, as if someone was in a hurry to yank it open. She holds her breath against the stink coming out of it as she checks under the tiki hut. Sure enough, no crab.
“I didn’t mean to,” says Cass brightly when Dalia returns to the closet floor. “I meant to give it a bath, but the fucker bit me, so I let him drown in there.”
Dalia nods. The fucker.
She doesn’t feel guilty about the crab dying because she hated it. She supposes you can only feel guilty about the things you truly love.
In the darkness, Dalia tells Cass the story about the time that Raul read her palm and she realized at once that she was in love with him. He had just gone and grabbed her hand out of the clear blue, in front of everyone. Grabbed it and laid it flat on top of his very own. It was Christmas Eve, two years ago. Dinner was over and the house was stinking pleasantly of fish.
Here is my present for you, Raul had said to her as he suddenly grabbed her palm like that. In Raul’s wide brown hand, Dalia’s own looked so tiny and pale. The pearl in the center of an oyster.
Raul made a series of theatrical faces for Dalia’s benefit, but they made her Aunt Charlotte laugh instead. “Isn’t he ridiculous?” Charlotte asked no one in particular. She was still wearing the apron she had worn to cook for them that night, with its stains of various bloods and sauces. When Aunt Charlotte used to prepare a meal at their house, her mother complained that it would take her weeks to get her kitchen back in order. Charlotte was a hurricane, her mother said. A stormfront. A force of nature.
While Raul stared into her hand on Christmas Eve, Dalia had a thrilling opportunity to study his face close up. His fuzzy eyebrows especially, which intrigued her for the way they moved like exotic caterpillars bucking around his face. “Dalia,” he said, urgently, seriously, pronouncing her name in that special way of his that no one, no one else ever did, “you will have some big surprises in your future. I am sure of it.” When he spoke, Dalia saw how the caterpillars wriggled and danced close up.
Dalia tells Cass that sometimes she believes that Raul was trying to tell her something that day. To let her know that he would be dead soon. That she would never be a flower girl. Never get to Colombia to visit his family, to meet his little cousins who were the same age as her, somewhere on the bottom half of the world. Other times, she feels so silly, so stupid for remembering a small moment like this, that lame tears sprout up in her eyes. The nerve of her body sometimes!
When Cass tires of Dalia talking about herself, she insists they leave the closet and go downstairs to watch a movie. Cass claims to have seen every movie in the world, practically. She considers herself an expert in something called “film noir,” which Dalia is unfamiliar with, but too shy to admit. When Cass sleeps over, she always picks to watch some black- and- white film that Dalia finds almost painfully uninteresting.
They wouldn’t be so uninteresting if she were able to follow what’s going on. But the plots of the movies all seem so overly complicated, so hard to follow, that Dalia finds herself instead concentrating on the unimportant details, the way the people dress on screen, or the way they talk sometimes. Why did everyone from the past seem to have some sort of accent that Dalia just couldn’t place? The serious, quick words never seemed to be in regular, plain English.
“Do you know what’s happening?” Dalia gets up the nerve to ask Cass one night, while her father bangs dishes murderously in the sink, while her mother and aunt shriek, or laugh, from the back porch, where they hang out burning incense or something else equally smelly.
Cass shushes her without answering, and Dalia feels instantly mortified by her own stupidity.
Dalia waits out the film by concentrating on the astonishing fact that because it is so old, all the actors in it must be dead by now. It’s a thought that starts as a terror, then a curiosity. And later, something of a comfort.
Dalia and Cass must have fallen asleep in front of the TV. The movie they were watching has been replaced by a new one, a different one. Onscreen, a man who looks remarkably like a former president of the United States carries a chimpanzee in his arms. The chimp wears striped pajamas, or perhaps a prison uniform.
Someone has turned the sound off. It takes Dalia a minute to register a voice calling her name.
“Dally, Dally! Hey, look,” Aunt Dead Meat says, the whites of her eyes a curious red. It is a detail that Dalia doubts she would manage to dream up, so she guesses she’s awake now.
“Guess who I found in my bed?”
Dalia blinks, waits for her aunt to tell her something terrible.
But to her surprise, her aunt has nothing terrible to say. Instead, she silently holds out the fingers of her good hand, from which a wriggling, indignant, very much alive hermit crab dangles. The paint on the creature’s shell has faded to pastel, the word “NASCAR” almost completely worn away. Dalia feels the muscles in her lungs suddenly release in a sigh. What her science textbooks describe in their biology unit as “an involuntary response.” The crab was still alive. She thought it wasn’t, but then it was.
There was a teacher at Dalia’s school who lost a daughter to a terrible disease. He didn’t work there much longer after she died. He tried to, but it didn’t work out. One day during class just before he was dismissed, a kind, shy girl, the sort of girl Dalia hoped to one day be like, approached the teacher and told him in a whispery voice that she was sorry that his daughter had passed.
The teacher didn’t even look up from his desk. He picked up a pencil and thrust it into the electronic sharpener. The class watched as the two of them, the girl and the teacher, just stood there, rather stupidly, watching the machine suck the pencil in with a terrible racket. The teacher held the pencil, and didn’t let it slip out, even when it was obviously sharp. Even when it began to grow smaller and smaller and the noise became almost unbearable. When the pencil was almost all eaten up, the teacher let go of the stub and the machine finally shut off. Only then did the teacher look up to the girl. “When you talk about it,” he commanded, “say ‘died,’ not ‘passed.’ ”
From that moment on, Dalia decided always to say “dead” or “died,” as in “The hermit crab was not dead.” As in, it, too, had not died. As in, Dalia was surprised by her relief to have learned this.
Gingerly, so as not to wake Cass, who is sprawled insouciantly at Dalia’s feet, Aunt Charlotte nudges Dalia over and sits herself on the blanket Dalia has spread in front of the TV. It’s the closest Dalia has let herself get to her aunt since her aunt has moved in with them. Dalia’s heart thumps. Fear, or excitement. The involuntary response of a body makes no distinction, her teacher says. With the TV light shining on it, and from such close proximity, the scars on her dead arm look almost as if they were glowing, as if Charlotte brushed them against her, Dalia would burn.
“Watch this,” Aunt Charlotte says and to Dalia’s horror, Charlotte drops the little crab right onto her bare arm, allowing it to scuttle up and over, with its little knife claws, the tender, gouged skin there.
“It’s okay,” says Charlotte. “I can’t feel it. I can’t feel any of it!”
She laughs as she says this, as though the hermit crab is somehow tickling her with its terrible claws. As if there was something still down there that wasn’t yet dead.
Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Passages North, DIAGRAM, The Journal, and Wigleaf.