fly-over state
by
Emma Straub
Flatmancrooked Publishing
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. In fact, somewhere deep down in our hearts all any of us really want is a crazy neighbor and a cold winter.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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fly-over state
Copyright Emma Straub
2009 (c)
ISBN
978-0982034828
A Flatmancrooked book from the New Novella Imprint / published 2009.
Cover art by Raul Gallardo. Cover design by Bessie Nadine Sweet and Michael Fusco. Typography by Bessie Nadine Sweet.
All rights reserved.
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Printed in the GOOD Ol’ U.S. of A. by Bookmobile
E-Book: Smashwords Edition
For my husband, Mr. Wisconsin, 2006-2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS
fly-over state
Hot Springs Eternal
fly-over state
I watched the neighbor’s kid from our screened-in porch. He had a BB gun—the kind of gun parents reluctantly give eleven-year-old boys on their birthdays. Of course, the kid was not eleven. The kid wasn’t even a kid. He was of an indeterminate age, hovering; he could have been eighteen or thirty, with skin the pale color of sliced bread. If he hadn’t been so big, we might not have noticed him at all. It appeared that none of the other neighbors did.
The boy wedged his gun against his thick shoulder, and with the orange felt of his hunting cap hanging low over his ears, he was only slightly more threatening than Elmer Fudd. He aimed at the squirrels attacking the dying hostas between our houses.
That summer was unusually harsh for Wisconsin. It was ninety degrees, and our boxes were still on the porch. The BB boy’s mother came over with a pitcher of iced tea. “Well, hello there,” she said, pulling open the screen door. “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you!”
The pitcher sweated as much as I did, and dropped little streams of water onto the warped wooden planks of the porch. I took it out of her hands and set it down on our coffee table, which was on the porch next to our dining room chairs. I motioned for her to sit.
“I’m Margaret, from next door.” She pointed, as if I hadn’t seen her walk out of her house and up my steps. She kept a beautiful garden, which was seemingly unharmed by the heat. I suspected she had a secret watering technique, a magic potion made of horse manure and sunshine. In New York, I had worked hard to cultivate a small cactus plant on our fire escape overlooking Prospect Park West, a gift from a friend who belonged to the Food Co-Op who’d said that it could withstand anything, even me. The plant was dead in three months. I considered it a success.
From what I could tell, the neighbor’s house was the mirror image of ours—our dining room faced their dining room, our bedroom their bedroom. They had curtains, however. Watching us must have been like watching reality television, unedited and endless. Live! Moving! People! It had taken us weeks to buy any sort of window covering, and even then, they were shower curtains. They kept out the light, and if it was raining, it didn’t matter if we closed the windows. Of course, it didn’t rain. Still, I thought, terribly clever.
“Sophie,” I said, shaking her hand. “From the porch.”
“Where are you all from?” Margaret sounded like she was from the south, or at least she had been some years ago.
“We moved from New York, but originally I’m from Connecticut, and my husband is from Philadelphia. So, East Coast, I guess. We’re from the East Coast.”
“Mmm,” Margaret said, as though eating something delicious. The full pitcher of iced tea sat untouched between us.
“I think I know where the glasses are,” I said, getting up. “Can I get you a glass?”
Margaret looked longingly at her house like a blind mole searching for its dinner, and was on the verge of protesting as I pried open the first box.
Only a few days before the move to Wisconsin, James caught me in bed with the laptop, emailing building managers in Los Angeles about cozy cottages up by Griffith Park. Ample room for four-legged friends! We could find a dog en route—surely there were a thousand ASPCAs between New York and California. Not one of those Hollywood dogs that can fit in your purse; we’d get something big, something like Marmaduke, a dog with jowls and gallons of drool. Shopping for new apartments was like shopping for new lives, an easier fix than dieting or yoga. I could garden, and he could hammer together bookshelves in the garage. He would become an apprentice at a motorcycle shop and we would get tattoos that said Forever. Forever Sophie. Or maybe something dramatic: Sophie’s Choice. People who didn’t know him would ask him about it in restaurants—James would wear tank-tops to show it off, along with all the others: the red-scaled koi fish, the winking mermaid. You must really like Meryl Streep, they’d say. James would take a sip of coffee—or no, bourbon, even in the morning—and laugh. No, he’d say, I really like her, and nod his chin towards me. The other patrons would look at me, and through all the gleaming silver rods and balls sticking out of my nose and ears and eyebrows, they would think that I was beautiful.
Of course, James had no tattoos, no metal objects poking out of his face. He was an academic, the kind of man who had always enjoyed spending his Saturday afternoons in dreary library carrels. We’d come to Wisconsin because he’d gotten a job at a local college, although not the University, which was what people always asked.
He taught two courses in the English department, both of which were supposed to introduce the students to some names they’d heard only as movie tie-ins: Austen and Dickens and Eliot. James had written his dissertation about the role of gossip in Emma and Middlemarch. A few years in, when he’d started bringing home the glossy tabloids, I’d thought it was some brilliant research, just the ticket. Then he started saying things to me like, “Can you believe they’re getting a divorce? I really thought if anyone had a chance, it would be them.” He would shake his head and have to go to bed early, his thin chest sunken with disappointment. The novels seemed beside the point, unable to rescue him from the harsh facts of the day.
It seemed inevitable that we would spend our lives going from college town to college town, always having the same conversations about departmental politics and the weather. One merely had to adjust to the scale of possible adventures. Red Lobster had an All-You-Can-Eat Lobster Tail dinner once a week; the aisles of Home Depot were satisfyingly endless. There were still small excitements in the world, things our friends in New York couldn’t even imagine.
A few weeks in, we got invited over to another professor’s house for dinner. They lived on the other side of town, the side with all the trees and expensive shops. ‘The Professor and his wife,’ as a phrase, always bothered me. I refused to let James introduce me as his wife—he had to say my name first, then wife. The order was important; it was easy for people to get the wrong impression.
The conversation at dinner was standard, almost as standard as the food. “I just love salmon,” I told the Professor’s wife, whose name I couldn’t remember because she’d been introduced as Wife First, Name Second. “Really love it.” The men talked about department politics. James was nodding at everything the professor said, making mental notes about who was overly flirtatious with his students, who hid what in his desk drawers.