Fragments of One or the Other
It’s Tuesday, which means it’s the day that I spend the afternoon with my niece. I watch her, that’s what her mother would say, although that sounds a little too punitive to me, makes her sound a little too puny, one or the other. Suggests a power imbalance which isn’t possible because I have very little power, which is maybe why I’m on the phone with some man I don’t know, filing a complaint.
“Your guys,” I hear myself saying. “They’re so much worse than the city guys. It’s like they’re being loud on purpose. You know it’s like, four in the morning, right? When they come?”
I’m talking about dumpsters. About trash collection. Because at some point, the three dumpsters lined up like ducklings in the alley across the street quietly became the property of someone named Big Bob. No more municipal blue, but gaudy black and yellow, and with the new colors came new noise. Earth-shattering noise, impossible to sleep through. About a week after Big Bob’s dumpsters moved in, one of them caught fire. It was probably not an act of rebellion against Big Bob’s big noise, but it should have been.
“What do you want me to say?” says the man on the other end of the line. I mouth thank you to my server, Shandy, as she sets down my red plastic cup of cherry cola, no straw, lots of ice. She winks at me. “They’re just using the equipment. The equipment is loud.”
I don’t know how I landed here, or who it makes me. Once, I was a girl who drank gin and tonics on an empty stomach and got driven home in cop cars. And before that, a girl who stole black nail polish from drugstores and wrote curse words on the kitchen walls with it. And before that, a girl who bit the boys who teased her sisters and shouted when she got in trouble for it. I think the only thing I still have in common with any of those girls is that most of the time, I don’t understand what I did wrong.
“But the city people,” I say to the man on the phone. “They have the same equipment, right? They weren’t this loud. I mean it sounds like buildings are being leveled. It sounds like the end of the world.”
I take a sip of the cola, the ice electrifying every nerve in my front teeth. They’re sensitive, bad enamel, but we—the conscious folks—aren’t using straws anymore.
“Ma’am,” says the man. He’s trying not to sound exasperated, but I hear it. I never know what’s appropriate. Not when it comes to defending myself. A therapist told me once that it was because of my sisters. Because it was important to our pecking order that I accept suffering gladly, that was the word she had used.
“Never mind,” I say. “Just. Tell them to try. To be more quiet. Thanks.”
The niece that’s coming to meet me is the middle one, old enough to ride city buses by herself but not yet old enough to let herself into an empty apartment, at least not by today’s standards. Her name is Maribel. All the girls in my family have Ma- names. Marceline. Marybeth. Mandy. I am plain old Madison and the little ones (who really aren’t that little anymore) call me Auntie Mads. Maybe that’s why not one of them seemed afraid after I had my stay at in-patient last year. Auntie Mads is, as far as fairytales and jump rope rhymes go, sort of meant for the madhouse.
“Hey, Shandy,” I croon. A certain type of older woman always makes me flirtatious. “What pies do we have on deck today?”
I keep one eye on the door while Shandy talks Boston cream and apple cinnamon and peach, every last one sugary enough to coat your teeth in fuzz. Maribel rounds the corner on the last syllable of key lime and blows through the door like an off-leash puppy. At twelve, she is like that. Limbs and breathlessness and ideas. I wave her down.
“Pie?” I ask her.
“What kind?” she says, stripping her coat from her arms so the sleeves turn inside out. Shandy goes through the entire list again, patience inexhaustible from years of past-the-counter service. Maribel orders a slice of Boston cream, so I get the apple with ice cream on the side.
I’ve thought of a roster of questions to ask Maribel. Questions that aren’t about school. Auntie Mads isn’t boring like that, doesn’t put kids in boxes and hold down the lid until they suffocate. I pop two ceremonial quarters into the tabletop jukebox, select “Dreamboat Annie” by Heart.
“What art projects are you working on right now?” I ask, because Maribel has been lucky enough to draw the creative stick in her litter of sisters, and because she never requires any conversational priming.
In lieu of an answer, Maribel takes out her phone, a six-generations-behind iPhone with small fissures lining one edge. It probably used to belong to Maychen, who is my oldest sister and Maribel’s mother. She talks frequently about how she wants her daughters to understand the value of a dollar, because no one ever taught us and she had to learn the hard way, paying off a wedding loan long after the divorce papers were filed. Eventually, the phone screen will shed tiny glass splinters that stick to Maribel’s fingertips, and what will that teach her? That sacrifice has no limits? The photo she shows me is of a collage that looks big as a house and is all shreds of blue. Cornflowers sprouting from ocean waves, cerulean bowling balls tipping out of the clear sky. A woman in a blue rubber raincoat standing in the center, her arms outstretched to show just how safe and dry she is.
“Excellent work,” I say, because I take Maribel seriously. She doesn’t resist when I take the phone from her hands, so I zoom in on one particularly busy corner, avoiding the broken bits. A tiny train springs from a blue stone hillside, a plume of blue balloons emerging from its smokestack. “X-Acto knife? Mod podge?”
“Scissors,” Maribel says forlornly. “And glue stick. Even though I’ve used an X-Acto knife before. They let us use them at art camp. And one girl did get hurt, like she almost cut her whole frigging finger off, but I’m not the one who did that!”
It is one of life’s most persistent pains and Maribel knows it already. That we live with consequences wrought by someone else.
I pick the diner for these afternoons with Maribel because it is familiar to me, and contained. I don’t feel alone with the responsibility when Shandy is scooting around the sticky linoleum and when Vincent and Marcus are back in the kitchen. Mine aren’t the only eyes making sure the kid doesn’t slip through the cracks of the city, end up in the back of some van or down in the sewers—although if she did the latter, I would be the best person to find her. In my month of in-patient, I’d asked for a map of the local sewer system. Because it wasn’t just an insurance-based operation, we were really paying a lot of money for my care, they obliged. I had a theory then that mold growth was creating vibrations underground. That the vibrations were the reason why you might feel good one moment and then turn the corner and feel bad. I thought I could prove it if I just memorized the layout of the sewers and the basic layout is still imprinted on my brain.
Maribel picks the next song, “Hungry Heart” by Bruce Springsteen, and I nod approvingly.
“Did you know that everything is about algorithms now?” Maribel asks, because I don’t need conversational priming, either. “Everything you see is related to everything you’ve seen.”
“Hmm,” I say. Our pie arrives, and my ice cream is already sliding around on the plate, souping up the crust.
“My teacher says that it’s basically impossible to form your own opinions now. The internet decides what you’re going to think based on what you’ve already thought. She says nothing is more important than digital literacy.”
I don’t remember what I thought about when I was twelve. Who was sleeping over on the weekends, probably. How to wear my sisters’ clothing without getting caught, definitely. As I got older, my thoughts would turn almost exclusively to love: who would give it up, how to make them. How to keep it. What to do when it was gone. Maribel is something else entirely. Smarter. Self-assured.
“My algorithm is mostly animals,” Maribel says. Then, “And not just the cute stuff.” She takes a big bite, speaks around pudding. “Like, did you hear about the elephant who went after that lady?”
It rings a distant bell. I’m not on the social apps like my nieces are or even like most of the people my own age, but I spend a lot of time on Reddit.
Maribel continues, “There was this lady doing some kind of, I don’t know, safari or something, and she lured this baby elephant away from its mother and then the baby died.” The last part she whispers, as if the words might summon a ghost. “And like days later, the mom elephant found the woman and ran at her, like tried to stomp on her and everything. And people thought it was maybe just a mix-up but the next day, the elephant did it again. The woman had to go home early.”
“Elephants think humans are cute,” I offer. “They react to us the way we react to dogs, or something.”
Maribel waves a hand that says I already know that. “Well not this one. Not this lady. That elephant would have tormented her forever if she could.”
It’s odd to hear a word like tormented come out of the mouth of a twelve-year-old girl. But then, who knows more about it?
“My mom says only a mother can understand what that elephant was feeling,” Maribel says.
That’s just like Maychen. To grant herself the right to feel big and act out, but deny someone else that right.
“If someone took you away, I would torment them forever,” I say, nudging the last bit of vanilla bean onto my spoon.
“That’s what I said,” Maribel says.
I tense a little, waiting for the rest, wanting to push, and then what, what did she say, how did she respond? Because Maychen was my tormentor, all my sisters were, back when we all hovered around the age of twelve. Because I am still the odd one out, even now, even when we are in our thirties and forties, and I still want their approval, and I still can’t get it. That isn’t something I want Maribel to know. She might take her mother’s side. Or worse for us both, she might take mine.
My phone rings and it’s the same number I dialed earlier, Big Bob’s number. I turn my phone over and let voicemail collect whatever it is they want to say.
“I would look for you all day every day until I found you,” I press.
“I know.”
“Even if I had to go down into the sewers.”
“I know.
By now, Bruce is most of the way done. I dump more quarters out of the little change purse I carry around, the black leather one that used to be my grandfather’s. Everyone else, all my sisters and cousins, had fought over things like the mid-century side tables and, of course, the money. They’d acted like it was some kind of sickness that all I wanted was something they’d have happily thrown away, because we all knew that’s why I wanted it. My whole life, I offered up the scruff of my neck to their teeth. I slide two quarters over to Maribel and she picks one up, turning it over to examine the tail side.
“Vermont,” she says.
“What year?” I ask.
She squints. “1992. You were … three.”
And somehow now I am thirty-five. Old enough to have a before-personality and a slow, stiff, groaning new one. A me-then, me-now contrast. I look at Maribel, her thick curls frizzy from hapless brushing, a little striation of pimples along her cheek, her teeth gapped charmingly in the middle. I wonder which one she thinks I am, me-then or me-now, and which one I’d prefer she thought I was. Me-then was cooler, freer, until she was placed in the care of the state, and then she was just about as unfree as a person could be. Money didn’t buy private showers and let you keep your shoelaces, anyway. Me-now is driven to the edge by the grating sounds of trash collection. Me-now feels like this is a perfectly justifiable thing to complain about and fears that this is a type of madness worse than anything Auntie Mads has come up with so far. The getting-older madness of demanding a certain level of peace, of refusing to sit with discomfort. And is that so unreasonable? Maybe it’s just unrealistic.
Maribel points at the twenty-five cent machines located in the vestibule by the door and I nod. I watch, twisting my whole spine, as she crosses the diner and tucks a quarter into the slot, cranking the dial until it stops, unyielding, just short of the mechanism that deposits the plastic ball into the collection drawer. She tries twisting the crank backward and then forward again, but it won’t budge.
“Hey Shandy?” I say, but Maribel widens her eyes at me and scurries back to the table, cupping her hands to the sides of her face like blinders. You never know what might embarrass a tween.
“Sorry I lost your quarter,” she whispers.
“That’s okay,” I whisper back. “Who even cares about Vermont?”
She laughs, and all is good with the world again. I shake another quarter out of the coin purse and flip through a few of the little jukebox’s pages until I find the list of Patsy Cline songs.
“You know her?” I ask. “You need to know her.”
I pick “She’s Got You” because lessons in heartbreak are everywhere, and it’s important which ones stick out first. We listen in silence for a moment and Maribel sways a little, shutting her eyes. This is the reason she’s my favorite. This earnestness. I think again of the blue locomotive with its plume of blue balloons. The magic of it. That’s a train that could take you anywhere, away from any problem.
“How are things with your friends?” I ask, because that is the place to probe when weighing a girl’s problems, second only to the place of her sisters.
“Carol is moving next summer because her parents got divorced. Judith got detention this week because she threw a carton of milk at the gym teacher. Judith was my best friend for a while, but I think now it’s probably Alice.”
I marvel at all these old-fashioned names. Carol. Judith. Alice. Even Maribel. As if the local middle school swapped places with a Boca Raton retirement village. Really, I know it’s just people my age trying so hard to be different from their parents, they’ve reincarnated their parents’ parents, and now we all have to contend with girls named Ruth wearing low rise jeans.
“What’s Alice’s deal?” I ask.
“Mm,” Maribel says, touching a finger to her chin and tilting her head, a little miming of thought. “She’s an artist, too. And she knows a lot about cryptids.”
“Cryptids?”
“Yeah, you know. Bigfoot. Mothman.”
Maribel retracts her hands into claws, bares her teeth, making herself into an odd little monster. I feel proud, which is another thing about getting older: you start marveling at the personalities developing in the kids around you. Convince yourself that all the best parts are some gift you’ve given them.
The door opens and a man in a dirty-looking suit walks in. He takes a seat at the counter, hunching into himself like a gargoyle, then casts his eyes back to stare at the two of us. I sit up straight and set my jaw, assuming the position of the grown-up woman I’m technically supposed to be. He smirks and turns back around.
“Do you have a favorite cryptid?” I ask, distracted. My eyes flick from Maribel to the man and back again. She follows my gaze and I can see in the way her body shifts that she understands this man is a threat, even if she doesn’t understand why. My phone buzzes and I turn it over, scanning the preview of a text message.
“Hello, this is Stacy from Big Bob’s Garbage Disposal. It has been brought to my attention that you have been dissatisfied with our servi …”
“I like the aquatic ones,” Maribel is saying. “Nessie is an obvious classic, but she’s more majestic. The scariest one, I think, is Megalodon.”
“Mega-what?” I ask, deleting the text without reading the rest. The man at the counter is placing his order with Vincent, who has a look on his face like he’s smelling something bad.
“Megalodon,” Maribel repeats. She’s fidgeting now, leaning one way and then the other, sitting on her hands and then pulling them back out. It’s my fault, this restlessness. Because I’m listening but not really listening. It’s a betrayal, asking Maribel to share with me and then treating her words like they’re inconsequential. It’s a bad-adult thing to do. But I have to keep my eye on this man because letting him get to her would be even worse.
Maribel says something about a giant shark while Vincent continues talking to the man. I try to read the words reflected in Vincent’s face, to see if the man is talking about us. Saying he might approach us. Reach out one of his sort-of-dirty hands and pick up the change purse on the table. Address Maribel directly. Call her something like sweetheart to test her tolerance, It’s a problem I have, knowing when to panic. I seem to do it at all the wrong times, and never the right ones. Vincent’s eyes flit past the man and up towards mine.
“I’m sorry, Mare,” I say, holding up a finger. “Shandy, can I get the check?”
“Are we leaving?” Maribel asks, her eyes widening again and tick-tocking between her Auntie Mads and the man at the counter. “Isn’t this where Mom is picking me up?”
“I can call her,” I say. “I’ll tell her to meet us at the park instead.” But that isn’t where we’ll be, either. I just say it to throw the man off, so he won’t know how to find us after we leave.
“I don’t know,” Maribel says, gathering her things anyway. “I mean, Mom told me not to go anywhere else.”
“But you’re not going alone,” I say, realizing that that is the whole point. She isn’t going alone, she’s going with me. Because Maribel and her sisters don’t mind that Auntie Mads is mad, but they know it means something about what she is and isn’t allowed to do. “We’ll be careful,” I add, and something pings inside me. A specific type of sadness I never noticed when I was the person who still made mistakes, not the person who lived with them.
“Yeah, we’ll be careful,” Maribel says. She sounds like a kid auditioning to be a grownup. She probably knows more than I realize about her mom and me, and her three other aunts as well. She probably tries to keep the peace between her own sisters, one older and one younger, using a voice just like this one. Hoping they won’t turn out like us. Hoping that none of them turn out like me. She probably knows that I am the real reason she isn’t allowed to use X-Acto knives, too.
If she is a reflection of me, it’s of me-as-a-lesson. Me-as-what-not-to-be.
I take our check up to the register and pay in cash, urging Shandy to keep the rest even though it’s nearly as much as the bill. Maybe it’s too late for me to take control of my own life, but Shandy deserves a shot, or at least a manicure or a trip to the movies that she doesn’t have to feel guilty about. The man watches the entire transaction and behind Maribel’s back, I flip him the bird.
“Real nice,” he snarls, and I raise it higher, thrust it in his direction.
Maribel tries to turn and see what he’s talking about. I put my hand to the back of her head, steering her gently out the door.
Out on the street, it’s overbright and a little warm. I hold Maribel’s backpack so she can take off the coat she’d put back on while we were still sitting in the booth, and then I take the coat, too. She links an arm through mine, using her free hand to grip my bicep. I want to assure her that she doesn’t have to hold on that way because I’m not a flight risk. I want to get down on her level and promise her that she doesn’t have to be an adult yet, not for me. That it’s my job to do the watching. But then, maybe that would rob her of something else. Maybe this is her chance to try something on, some role. The responsible one, the brave one. I will be safe for her. A wounded thing that needs care but doesn’t teach her that caring means enduring pain.
We walk and I let her call her mother, watching her fingers glide over the unbroken part of her phone screen. We talk to Maychen on speaker phone, both of us reassuring her that we’ll be fine, that we can handle the city streets for the next half hour, that we won’t get lost or kidnapped. I feel like a twelve-year-old asking a friend’s mother about playing after school. I feel like a grown-up silently promising my sister that I won’t screw up her kid. For one moment, I am not fragments of one or the other. I am entirely both, and it is right.
Mini-interview with Molly Andrea-Ryan
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
MAR: Oh gosh. I think a lot of those moments sort of reveal themselves in my writing, and this story is no exception. The birth of my first niece is a big one. She turns five in November. Her arrival in the world gave me a whole new perspective on what it means to impact someone else. I want her emotional landscape to be big and safe for her to explore, and that’s a concept that I think drives a lot of my writing. Making it safe to feel, putting words to feelings I know (hope?) I’m not the only one to have experienced. I love nothing more as a reader than that moment of, “Wow, I’ve felt exactly this thing that this writer has put down on the page, but I could never have described it like this.” If I can do that even one time as a writer, I’ll have succeeded.
HFR: What are you reading?
MAR: Right now, I’m on my second-ever reading of It by Stephen King, because that is my idea of a cozy summer read. I’m also reading John Chrostek’s debut short collection, Boxcutters, which is excellent and weird and funny and thoughtful. I’m in my Malarkey era, because next on the list is Kill Radio by Lauren Bolger.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Fragments of One or the Other”?
MAR: I don’t really go into short fiction with a plan. I almost always go in with a single image or movement and hope it takes me somewhere. In this case, I was really pissed off one morning because there really is a new trash collection company emptying the dumpsters outside of my apartment and they are SO LOUD that I kept thinking, “You know what? I’m going to call and complain.” I never did and never will, largely because it would leave me wondering, “Who even am I?” I decided to give that identity crisis to my character, instead.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
MAR: I’ve been working on a novel for a couple years now. It stemmed from a short story I published in Overheard Lit called “A Problem of Other Minds.” In the novel, that same character (a grocery store employee named Nora) has her sort of humdrum life disrupted by the arrival of a new coworker who she really wants to befriend. There’s some interdimensional stuff, too. It’s a little wacky. I also always have at least a few short stories in the pipeline.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
MAR: Palestine should be free. ICE should not exist. Gender-affirming care is life-saving healthcare, and we have the research to prove it. I’m so tired of all the prestigious, monied news outlets and publications making so much space for ideas that fundamentally oppose humanity and calling it balance. I may just be a lowly fiction writer here, but I have to say, using one’s platform to legitimize obviously dangerous ideas and misinformation is one of the most shameful things a writer could do.
Molly Andrea-Ryan is a fiction writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in Overheard Lit, Roi Faineant, Idle Ink, trampset, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She is also a fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine and an enjoyer of many hobbies. Find more of her work at mollyandrearyan.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 