The Smash-Up Read online

  Ethan turns around. In front of the store, Elastic Waist is stepping out of her old hatchback. Ethan watches her lumber toward the door, heavy and slow, like a bear just waking from hibernation. “Yikes,” says Ethan. Elastic Waist is probably the very last person he wants to see right now.

  “You know her?”

  “Sort of. She’s…” Ethan decides not to explain about the witches, or about the scene he and Zo just made in front of the group. “She’s not a fan of mine. Listen, I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  He’ll call Zo right now. Tell her to stop driving. He’ll pick up the medicine from the pharmacy, meet her at a rest stop. But Zo’s voicemail picks up after just one ring. Ethan hangs up without leaving a message.

  Still, as Elastic Waist enters the store, Ethan presses his phone to his ear and says, loudly, “UH-HUH.” The truth is, he’d rather have a fake conversation with dead air than to make small talk with one of them witches right now.

  When Elastic Waist sees him, he flashes a perfunctory smile, points apologetically to his phone. It’s like he’s saying, Gee, I sure wish I could talk, but I happen to be on the most important phone call of my life, what a shame we can’t talk. “YES, THAT’S WHAT I FIGURED,” he says to no one.

  Elastic Waist greets Jarrett, too loudly. “ARE THEY READY?”

  “Yeah,” Jarrett says.

  “WHAT’S THAT?” Elastic Waist asks.

  “YES,” Jarrett says. “THEY ARE.”

  “NO,” says Ethan to nobody at all. With no connection, the phone against his ear sounds dampened, inert, like he’s talking inside a coffin. “NO, TUESDAY WON’T WORK FOR ME.”

  He imagines describing the scene. There I was, he’ll laugh. A grown man pretending to be on a call, just to avoid talking to someone who calls herself a witch. This town is just too damn small sometimes.

  But to whom might he describe this, exactly? Not Zo. Maybe Maddy.

  “BIG RALLY SATURDAY,” Elastic Waist tells Jarrett. “YOU SHOULD JOIN US.”

  Jarrett, under his breath, mutters, “In your dreams.”

  “WHAT’S THAT?”

  “I SAID MAYBE,” Jarrett says. He sets a stack of posters on the counter:

  Believe women.

  Believe Zo.

  Rally: Starkfield Green

  Saturday 10 am.

  Believe Zo. Sure, okay, whatever. Never mind that Zo has twisted beyond recognition the relevant facts about what happened yesterday. Never mind that under an hour ago, she seemed ready to accuse Ethan of having been a literal sexual predator. Never mind that she once promised to love and to cherish him forever, and for the record, he doesn’t exactly feel cherished right now.

  Yet somehow, bewilderingly, Zo’s furious at him.

  She’s furious enough, apparently, that she won’t even answer his call. She’s driving straight on to Boston without an inkling that Alex won’t have the medicine she needs in the morning, and Ethan is powerless to help.

  But why must Alex’s medicine always be his responsibility, and his alone?

  Ethan keeps his phone pressed to his ear as Elastic Waist pays for the posters, waves goodbye. He returns the device to his pocket only after she exits the store.

  Jarrett shakes his head. “Moron,” he says, watching her climb into her car. “They’re all a bunch of fucking morons. You know what those protests do? They hurt small businesses. Like this one. It’s hard enough to draw people downtown these days. Now when people do show up, they get screamed at? No wonder this branch is closing. Another empty storefront, and I’m out of a job again.”

  Ethan attempts to steer the conversation in a more elevated direction. Or at least one where Jarrett isn’t unknowingly calling Ethan’s wife a fucking moron. “The thing that I don’t understand,” Ethan muses, “is what those protests are supposed to accomplish.” He means here, in Starkfield, a world away from anywhere that matters.

  “Right?” Jarrett asks. “Like this Supreme Court thing. Most experienced justice in history. So they’re protesting what exactly? The system working the way it’s supposed to? Send these women just about anywhere else in the world, and they’ll be kissing American soil faster than you can say, Make me a sandwich.”

  Ethan laughs, not because it’s funny, but because—well, it is sort of funny, imagining this kid saying “Make me a sandwich” to Zo and the other witches.

  “I’m kidding,” Jarrett says. He looks down at his feet, shakes his head. “Kind of. But I saw online that they’re trying to turn this rally into a whole big thing. Bringing in protesters who aren’t even from around here. People coming in just to make trouble. I don’t like it. Don’t like it one bit.”

  Ethan sees something flash in Jarrett’s eyes. So Jarrett goes dark, too, apparently—the way Alex does.

  Jarrett seals up Ethan’s boxes. “Hey, you ever know anybody who topped himself?”

  “Anybody who…what?”

  “Danced with the train. Rode the comet. Caught the bus. Tried a little shotgun mouthwash. You know, who…” Jarrett forms a finger gun, points it at his own head, pulls the trigger.

  Oh. Suicide. He’s talking about suicide.

  “Well…sure. Of course.” There was a high school buddy. Shot himself while drunk. A neighbor of Zo’s in Brooklyn who swallowed pills, maybe by accident, maybe not. Probably more than that these days, especially back in his Pennsylvania hometown. Places like that—all those communities, all across America, abandoned by factories then stripped for parts—are ground zero for despair these days.

  “Any of them women?” Jarrett asks.

  Ethan thinks about that. “I knew one girl who tried. No, two.”

  “But those girls are still around, right?”

  Ethan nods. He’s pretty sure.

  “I lost four friends in the last seven months alone,” Jarrett says.

  Whoa. “Friends from around here?”

  “Yeah right. I don’t have friends around here. Nah, these were online buddies. But I tell you what, they were more real to me than the people I interact with in the so-called real world.”

  “I’m really sorry, man,” Ethan says. He means it too.

  “Eighty percent of suicides are men. Think about that. Eighty percent.”

  Ethan nods. Maybe that’s right, men tend to choose more violent methods than women. But he can’t see how this fact, if it is a fact, will help Jarrett right now.

  “It’s always guys like me and my buddies too,” Jarrett says. “Guys who won what I call the fuck-you lottery.”

  “No. You didn’t.” Ethan’s starting to get kind of worried about this kid. Is this a cry for help?

  “Sure we did. We’re the punching bags of the world, the last ones left it’s okay to make fun of. We’re just supposed to take it too. We have to grin and bear it while everyone else shouts about how they’re the ones who have it rough.”

  “Well…” Ethan knows there must be a good response to what Jarrett’s just said, he’s almost sure of it. Zo would know how to respond. WWZD? What would Zo do?

  But even as he asks himself this, he already knows: Zo wouldn’t be talking to this kid at all, wouldn’t feel sorry for him. She would have dismissed Jarrett entirely after his first sexist wisecrack. Might even have called UPS headquarters, actually, filed a complaint—You have a misogynist in your store and if you don’t dismiss him, I’ll tweet about it and stir up a world of trouble for you.

  So what would Zo do? Who cares what Zo would do? She’s not exactly a paragon of virtue herself these days.

  “Hey.” Jarrett’s peering at him. “Are you okay, man? You’re looking a little peaked.”

  “I’m just—life’s complicated, that’s all.”

  “My advice? Stop drifting. Be your own savior while you can.”

  Ethan looks at him, confused.

&
nbsp; “Actually, that’s not my advice,” Jarrett admits. “It’s Marcus Aurelius: ‘Stop drifting…sprint for the finish….Be your own savior while you can.’ ”

  The Matrix and Marcus Aurelius: Jarrett K contains multitudes, apparently.

  “I think what he’s saying,” Jarrett says, “is that guys like us need to take back some control, you know? Refuse to accept the decline of our own lives.”

  “Refuse to accept the decline of our own lives…” Ethan repeats.

  Yeah. He likes that.

  * * *

  —

  There was a time, he can’t remember how long ago, when Zo’s notes to Ethan—even about mundane tasks—took the form of haiku:

  Toilet paper low

  Quickly running out of squares

  Ethan, can you help?

  Milk and yogurt gone!

  So, too, Hypatia’s dog food!

  Stop & Shop awaits.

  Today, when he gets home, he finds a series of notes, all in Sharpie, all in uppercase, each on the back of a different piece of scrap paper:

  STAYING AT THE KIMPTON

  HYPATIA PEED DID NOT POOP

  HOME AROUND 6 TOMORROW

  If Ethan squints at them, the notes resemble miniature protest signs. Ethan scoops up all of Zo’s messages and drops them in the recycling bin.

  He walks to the bottom of the stairs.

  * * *

  —

  People cheat all the time, that’s the thing. And to be honest, Ethan’s not even sure Zo would mind anymore if he did.

  When the witches were just forming Zo confided to Ethan that one of the witches (she refused to tell him which one) and her husband were in a relationship with another couple. “You mean they’re swingers?” he’d asked, incredulous.

  “Polyamorous,” Zo had corrected him. When she saw the look on his face, she’d shrugged, as if asking who was he, or anyone, to judge? So who knows. Maybe Zo—this new Zo, anyway, the one he barely recognizes—wants him to cheat. Maybe she’d be nonchalant, or relieved, or heck, even excited about the possibility.

  For all he knows, Zo’s breathing the occasional whiff of fresh oxygen herself, and if that’s true, can he blame her? What if caring about somebody means occasionally turning your head away from what your spouse is doing, saying, I see you need something other than me, and that’s okay? Couldn’t a person make an argument that this attitude is just an extension of the thing Ethan himself has been doing for months now: taking on more and more of the childcare duties, just so his wife can feel whatever she feels when she puts on those boxing gloves?

  Okay, maybe it’s different. It’s probably different. Sure, it’s almost certainly very different. But who knows anymore. Once, there were rules, taboos, and they were clear. Nowadays, it feels like someone tore the rules into pieces, then tossed the fragments in the air, confetti-style, as if morality were a game of fifty-two-card-pickup.

  Maybe it’s time for him to pick up a card or two.

  * * *

  —

  Outside Maddy’s door, he takes a deep breath. Knocks.

  It’s almost like she’s been expecting him, has been expecting whatever this next part is, because when she opens the door, she wears a knowing grin.

  “Hey, so I was just…” He swallows, then looks straight at her. “Maddy, I don’t know if you were planning to go out tonight, but I don’t think you should.”

  Do her brows lift, ever so slightly? Does the tilt of her head shift a tiny bit? “Why, you got something in mind?”

  “Maybe,” Ethan says. He pauses. “Zo left for Boston.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “So we could get some take-out. Or watch a movie. Or something.”

  “Or something,” Maddy says. A statement. But not without its own sort of question.

  “Yeah. Or something.”

  She mulls this over. “How about I cook dinner?”

  And now he’s the one lifting his brow. “You cook?”

  “Yeah, and by cook, I mean, I’ll order pizza, and you’ll pay.”

  “Perfect.” If Zo were here, she’d ask, which brand of pizza? One of the pizza chains is on her boycott list, he forgets which, or why. But let’s get real: all the pizza companies probably use tomatoes grown with pesticides and picked with migrant labor, cheese from cows in factory-farm conditions, herbs shipped with fossil fuels, drivers who don’t earn a living wage. Scratch below the surface of anything today, you’ll find venality. Probably that’s why everyone’s always shouting at one another on social media, putting their righteousness on public display: deep down, they’re terrified that there’s no escaping the cesspool that is the twenty-first-century global economy.

  The world is rotten to its core. We’re all fucking compromised. Might as well be honest about that.

  “Cool,” says Maddy. “Then we’re on.”

  “We’re on,” he echoes. He hovers in the doorway, unsure if he should turn around and go downstairs, or what.

  Maddy glances at her phone. “Oh, shit. Ethan, I need you to clear out for a bit.”

  “What, you have another…job?”

  “I do.”

  Just like that, he’s less interested in leaving than he was even a few seconds ago.

  “Ethan, you have to go. I have an appointment.”

  “Yeah? And what exactly is this…appointment?”

  “One of the better-paying ones, is what it is.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What, are you going to go full Dad on me now? Warn me about stranger danger or whatever?”

  “This dad’s off duty tonight. I’m just curious. Will it be underwear on the head? Or your charming dead-girl sketch?”

  Maddy eyes him, like she’s considering whether or not to answer his question. Then she reaches into her pocket, taps out something on her phone. Hands it to him. He reads: I have never seen a woman pleasare herself to compleetion if you know what I mean, I want vry much to see that will you be the 1?

  He looks up from the screen. “You’re not serious.” She can’t be. She can’t possibly be about to pleasure herself on-screen. For pay.

  “It’s good money. Great money, actually. I bargained him up by a lot. Plus, he threw in an extra fifty if I’d do it while playing some band called Axis of Perdition. Some sort of heavy metal, not my thing, but whatever…”

  “Maddy. You can’t.”

  She raises one eyebrow, like it’s a dare.

  “But how is that not…” he starts. “I mean, doesn’t this make you—”

  “A whore, Ethan? Are you suggesting that this makes me a whore?”

  “No! No, Mad, of course not! I just…” And, he doesn’t mean that, not really. Maddy and this guy won’t even be in the same room, so obviously it’s not prostitution. Not literally. Also, is he even supposed to say “prostitution” anymore? He read somewhere that you’re supposed to use the term “sex worker” now, and that there’s no longer any shame about the work, and aren’t they trying to unionize like twenty-first-century Norma Raes? “But will you actually…you know…do it to…”

  “Completion?” She says the next part really slowly: “Am I going to have an orgasm, Ethan? Is that what you’re asking?”

  Well, yes. That is sort of what he’s asking. “No.”

  “Hmm…Well, the answer to the question you’re definitely not asking is this: I’ll see how I feel in the moment. Maybe I’ll fake it, maybe I won’t; either way, I’ll give him a good show. But to answer your other question, this is about me doing what I want, with my body. This is, like, the stuff that Zo talks about, you know? Empowerment or whatever.”

  Empowerment or whatever. Ethan’s pretty sure this isn’t exactly what Zo is talking about. In fact, he’s pretty sure Zo would freak the fuck out if she knew that Madd
y was jacking off for money mere feet from Alex’s bedroom, and frankly, he’s mighty uncomfortable with the idea himself.

  Maddy glances at her phone again. “Look, you gotta go,” she says. “Client’s waiting.”

  He wills himself to leave, if only because he doesn’t want to look like such a hopelessly stodgy old man, Dad the dumbfuck.

  Maddy closes the door most of the way, then, almost immediately, opens it again, pokes her head out. “Actually…I don’t mind if you watch.”

  It takes him a few moments to register what she’s just said.

  “As I see it,” Maddy says, “the whole thing is already bought and paid for, so as long as you stay out of view of the camera, what’s one more set of eyes? And honestly, Ethan? You seem like you could use a little more fun in your life.”

  And then, after a beat—after an eternal beat where he says nothing at all, just stands there turning her words over in his head, wondering if he heard her right, if there might be another possible interpretation—she shrugs. “Up to you.”

  Maddy disappears into the room, leaving the door half-open. He hears the tapping of her fingers on her laptop. A ding, then her voice, not to him: “Hey. I’m ready if you are.”

  Ethan doesn’t move. Doesn’t leave, doesn’t watch. Just stands there frozen.

  The music kicks in. Baum chack baum baum chack. The guitars are hardcore. Angry. He imagines the wails filling not just Maddy’s bedroom, but also all the other spaces of his torn-apart home: the stairway and the cramped living room, the kitchen, the bedroom he shares with Zo, everything he has.

  He keeps his eye on the space between the open door and the jamb.

  Maddy steps back from the computer, only partially into his view. From where he stands, he can make out just a few inches of her left side: her shoulder, the edge of her T-shirt, her elbow, the sweeping curve of her hip beneath her jeans. Then she shimmies, bends, stretches, and now, where jersey cotton and denim had been, there’s only a single elastic band over bare skin.