Made for Love Read online

  —JOY WILLIAMS,

  “THE LOVER”

  9

  HAZEL BEGGED AND SCREAMED FOR DIANE TO LET GO OF HER ARM, as though the doll were a hairless, giant-breasted attack dog; Hazel pulled her off the bed and began kicking her, then started knocking Diane’s head against the wall before trying a few other actions that illogically supposed Diane capable of feeling pain or losing consciousness. Hazel then attempted to break the doll’s head open on the nightstand like a piggy bank, but Diane’s exterior proved to be almost indestructible. This made Hazel realize Diane’s makers had designed her to be able to withstand incredible beatings, which made Hazel sad for humanity. And what does that say about you, humanity, Hazel thought, that a grown woman whose arm is stuck down the throat of her elderly father’s love doll feels sorry for you? It was not a spirited advertisement for mankind.

  Next, in a sort of conjoined-twin crawl, Hazel dragged Diane out of the bedroom and headed in the direction of the bath, stopping in the hallway for a moment to sit and have a break and look at the family portraits lining the walls. “That was my aunt Lena,” Hazel said to Diane, pointing with her free hand, even though Diane’s head was not facing in the picture’s direction. Aunt Lena was dead, and Diane wasn’t alive or sentient so it wasn’t the most utilitarian introduction, but Hazel was sick of everything needing to have a function. Function was the only thing Byron cared about. His first question to everyone, always: “What do you do?” by which he meant, What can you do for me? Hazel wanted to make a real effort from now on for her words, actions, and existence to be as pointless as possible. From this day forward, she vowed to be a living middle finger of inanity raised in the direction of either Byron or his grave.

  But of course she was going to die before Byron did, whether he took her out or not. Technology was on his side, as were any/all powerful forces of evil in the universe, whether real or metaphorical.

  “Aunt Lena had the longest braid I’d ever seen,” Hazel told Diane, grunting and dragging her a few more inches down the hallway. The doll’s fingers made a musical xylophonic sound when they moved over the top of the heating grate on the floor. “Uncoiled, her braid probably would’ve hung down past her feet like a tail. As a kid I wished my hair was as long as hers so I could do that—tuck it into the back of my pants, then cut a hole in between the rear pockets of all my jeans, and pull the braid out of it so it hung there like I was part horse. Only a small part, since it would just be the tail and nothing else on me horse.” Hazel gave a final lengthy tug and at last she and Diane reached the bathroom entrance where the hallway’s carpet transformed to tile. Hazel felt breathless; she lay down next to Diane with her cheek on the floor so the heat could transfer out of her face against the cool linoleum.

  It wasn’t a position void of intimacy there on the ground with Diane. Hazel’s face was so close to the doll’s that even in the relative dark she could see the tiny raised buttons beneath Diane’s hair where a wig snapped onto the scalp. Being on the floor of her septuagenarian bachelor father’s personal washroom, Hazel also noticed upsetting body hairs strewn about her field of vision. Nothing was worse for one’s emotional comfort than scrupulous observance, Hazel reminded herself. So instead of indulging in the sensory information around her, Hazel gazed deeply into Diane’s nearest eye. She tried to think of Diane as less sex and more doll, to make the percentage more 20/80 than 50/50. Though there were things Hazel would’ve liked to change about Diane’s functionality in that moment, such as equipping Diane with an “autoregurgitate” button so her arm could be readily extracted from the doll’s throat, Hazel certainly could not critique Diane’s listening abilities.

  “Aunt Lena never took advantage of my horse-jeans idea,” Hazel continued. “What she did instead was wear the braid pinned up into a domed mound on the top of her head. This was her hairstyle from when she was sixteen or so until emphysema killed her in her sixties. She smelled like smoke all the time. I tried one of her scarves on once and it smelled so smoky that I had this image of her braid-dome being filled with emergency rations of cigarettes, like her own sort of camel-hump storage unit to fall back on if resources ever grew scarce.”

  Hazel sat upright and looked over at the tub, which was outfitted with large silver handles and a bench seat for her father’s safety. Her idea was to try submerging Diane’s head in hot water to see if it made the doll’s rubber throat any stretchier. Hazel still had to foist Diane up, over and into the tub, so instead of wasting her strength standing them both up again to turn on the light, she grabbed Diane’s long right leg with her free hand and operated it like an extension wand, finally thonging the light switch between the doll’s big and second toes.

  Getting Diane inside the tub was a less dainty production. For whatever reason Hazel had an absurd paranoia that water was going to make the doll freak out, so she tried to talk in the soothing, even tone a professional animal groomer might use with a stray cat. “This will feel great,” Hazel encouraged, “to take a nice, relaxing bath.” She heaved the doll inside then climbed in after her and powered on the faucet. But watching the water rise over the doll’s nose and mouth gave Hazel an unsettling homicidey feeing, so she grabbed some shower gel. Maybe bubbles would make the scene more festive. “Smell that, Diane?” Hazel asked. “Freesia!” The bath products had probably been her mother’s, kept but unused in the years since her death.

  It seemed like the closer Hazel’s father came to his own expiration date, the more he granted everything around him an endless life span. Yesterday she’d found a box of cereal in his pantry from Smather’s grocery. “So?” he’d questioned. “That store closed over a decade ago, Dad,” she’d said. “The chain went bankrupt.” “Well, has the box been opened?” he asked. It hadn’t, so Hazel knew that was the end of the conversation. “I actually don’t even think I like that kind of cereal,” he’d added. “When I die, that’s all yours.”

  AS HAZEL WAITED FOR THE TUB TO FILL, SHE THOUGHT ABOUT A story Aunt Lena had told her, an ancient punishment for murder. If you killed someone, the decomposing corpse would be strapped to your body so infection from its rotting matter would eventually spread to you and take your life as well. The foreboding tale had always stuck with Hazel. But she’d never felt that the way Aunt Lena tried to make the metaphor relevant to Hazel’s own childhood made any sense. “Killing them would kill you, in other words,” Aunt Lena liked to stress as a follow-up, “so be sure to keep your room clean! So just say no to drugs!”

  Hazel then tried pulling at her still-stuck arm and was reminded of an unusual fishing practice she’d heard about called “noodling.” The fisherman would stick his bare arm into underwater holes to lure catfish, and the fish would bite down on his arm and could then be wrenched from the water. But if the catfish was large enough, it sometimes could drag the person under for long enough to drown them, or it could retreat into an alcove where the person’s limb would get stuck and they couldn’t surface for air.

  And that reminded Hazel of being a kid and getting caught with her hand and arm literally inside the cookie jar, because if her mother saw her she’d yell, “FREEZE!” and Hazel would have to turn into a guilt-statue of her crime and stand there feeling the cookies on the tips of her fingers, even perhaps picking one up then dropping it then picking another up and dropping it as her mother lectured on. “Hazel!” she’d scream. “Why are you hell-bent on hitchhiking the malnutrition highway? Do you know what broccoli is like to your body? It is like a hundred-dollar bill. When you eat it, you are paying yourself with health. Do you know what a cookie is like? It is Monopoly money! You’re giving your body fraudulent currency. Your teeth are going to try to go down to the vitamin and mineral store to buy some calcium, and you know what the checkout clerk is going to have to say? ‘I’m sorry, Hazel’s body, but you don’t have sufficient funds to pay for this because Hazel is a blockhead sugar addict who disobeys her brilliant parents.’ And your body is going to start crying and maybe even begging. ‘Please
take pity on us,’ it will say. ‘If we don’t get calcium right now, our teeth will fall out and then everyone at school will make fun of us and we will never have a boyfriend or get a job or be loved.’ And the clerk will just have to shrug and say, ‘I have no idea why a young lady would behave so stupidly as to eat cookies before a nourishing dinner, thereby ruining her appetite and forfeiting all the nutrients she so desperately needs to grow into a respectable adult instead of a toothless mutant, but if that was her decision then she deserves whatever comes to her.’” And the whole time her mother spoke, Hazel would be scraping as many chocolate and cookie particles under her fingernails as possible so that when the sermon finally ended and she was sent to her room until dinner, she could eat the sugary crumbs and feel like the mission hadn’t been a complete wash.

  The water had almost reached a good soaking height. She decided to pretend that Diane’s head wasn’t actually underwater; instead Diane was a civilian who’d gotten trapped inside a storm drain and everything except her head was under, and she was very scared and it was Hazel’s job to reassure her and help her be patient while they tried to get her out. Hazel reached down and patted Diane’s head, then grimaced: the doll’s hair was liquifying into a slimy paste. Should she have taken Diane’s wig off before bringing her into the water? Hazel gave Diane’s limbs a quick feel then cleared her throat. “You know, Diane? Things change but things also stay the same.” By which she meant that even if Diane’s hair didn’t make it, the rest of her body seemed to be holding up just fine.

  Applied to herself, the saying had a different sort of meaning. Here she was, back in her parents’ house, her hand sort of caught in a cookie jar. “But luckily,” Hazel said, “your throat is large enough that it’s not like a little kid could get his hand stuck inside. Not unless he was a really big little kid. I only had a problem because I’m an adult. I don’t see you as being a hazard to children, Diane. That’s another thing you’ve got going for you.”

  It was just then, just as Hazel was reaching out her free arm to turn off the water, that the super-white-flash fireworks started up in her brain. Hazel couldn’t see a thing except a series of glowing sparks shooting off behind her eyes.

  She leaned forward in the bathtub and vomited, then vomited again. But that didn’t stop the sparks from coming.

  MINUTES LATER WHEN HAZEL REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, THE BATHTUB was overflowing and the water had started to turn cold. She realized later that she should’ve shut the faucet off at this point—that would’ve stopped the noise and the gushing and probably given her more time to think, but her first thought was SAVE DIANE.

  Hazel had a burst of adrenaline. She’d heard about this—how in times of crisis, petite mothers in sweater sets get the ability to lift a station wagon off a child’s pinned leg. But she’d never experienced it personally until now. Hazel cried out Diane’s name and pulled upward so forcefully that Diane was launched from the bathtub. But when the doll hit the ground, it pulled Hazel’s arm with her in an unplanned way. Then all Hazel felt was pain.

  Emotional pain Hazel was a true soldier at. She was the equivalent of a wounded Civil War cadet who whistled folk tunes during a battlefield amputation while the bone saw did its thing. Physical pain Hazel had far less experience with. The shoulder dislocation really hurt.

  At this point, the running bathtub water in the background no longer even registered. Hazel lay down on the floor next to Di and they sat there together, shipwrecked. Diane’s face was completely occluded by her gummy wig, which had a matted golden retriever texture now, and Hazel felt the shame of this too because if Diane’s face looked like the backside of a giant dog, it meant Hazel’s arm appeared to be coming out of said dog’s backside.

  What had just happened to her, before the tub filled up and her shoulder got ripped out? It made little sense. In recall, the incident felt a little bit like being in a movie theater, watching a screen.

  The movie theater Hazel frequented in college played a concession-stand commercial that made her panicked instead of hungry. Its premise was a roller-coaster ride in outer space on a track made out of filmstrips. Giant snacks hovered in the air as the virtual ride zipped forward: it passed an enormous box of popcorn, massive hot dogs, a soda whose straw rotated in a whirlpool motion.

  Hazel remembered the dream from her blackout as being a little like that commercial, except instead of passing by junk food, she’d found herself passing by supersize images of Byron’s face. Then the ride had turned into a terrible funhouse, and Byron’s head had swelled even larger and his mouth opened wide as she’d tumbled down his throat.

  Then she’d smelled spaghetti. Byron had a tincture of this artificial odor on his desk, for sniffing when he ate his meals, which were flavorless nutritional shakes (the shakes were weird enough, but Hazel also couldn’t understand how the only food smell he used was spaghetti. “Don’t you want to smell something else, for variety?” she used to ask him. “A cinnamon roll? A bucket of chicken?” He’d blink once, twice, then shake his head no.). Aside from these shakes he really didn’t eat, preferring to get weekly transdermal supplements via pneumatic injection guns. Eating grossed him out; he felt it was antiquated and menial. He’d wanted to get a port implanted in his abdomen where he could deliver daily sustenance to his stomach via a gel or blended material, some texture just bulky enough that his digestive organs wouldn’t atrophy, but he’d decided against it since eating is such a metaphorical act across all cultures. Byron worried that it might affect his business dealings if others, particularly foreign partners from European countries that didn’t romanticize efficiency, found out he did not participate in calorie swallowing and traditional digestion.

  Maybe she’d had an allergic reaction to some chemical compound in the rubber of Diane’s throat?

  Her arm hurt badly and her brain was acting strange. Hazel pried open the cupboard beneath the bathroom sink with her foot, hoping to have the good fortune of finding a decades-old bottle of aspirin. Her father had never been big on pills. Whenever she felt ill growing up, no matter what the symptoms, his solution was always to go lie down in bed with a wet washcloth over one’s eyes. It won’t make you any worse, he’d say.

  Instead she found the full inventory of a small pharmacy. The stockpile seemed to have been assembled based on an opiate addict’s Make-A-Wish fever dream. Hazel curled her foot into a shovel shape and started moving the prescription containers out of the cupboard and onto the watery floor, where they spun and bobbed and eventually floated over to her. “Look!” she said aloud to Diane. “A message in a bottle!”

  The first one that landed in Hazel’s hand was Percocet. She took a mouthful, scooped up some water from the floor to wash them down with, then sat back against the outside of the bathtub and panted. “I’d share,” she eye-roll-joked to Diane, “but your mouth is already full.”

  When Hazel woke up again, it was to her father’s terry-cloth slipper standing next to her face. His slipper was absorbing a lot of water. Hazel was grateful for the rubberized four-prong antiskid bottom of her father’s cane.

  “Let me guess,” he said, his voice thundering down and echoing within the bathroom. From her angle on the ground, with his gray beard and wrathful eyes and bathrobe and cane, her father looked like an angry Moses holding an orthopedic staff. The sea had parted and she’d somehow survived the flood, but now he was going to scold her to death.

  “You found my stash of drugs, got loopy and wanted someone to talk to, went to find a sympathetic ear in Diane then got the spins and puked on her. So you tried to bring her in here and wash her off but you were so high things got out of hand. Am I in the ballpark? Why your arm is stuck between her lips I do not know. That’s where you’ve stumped the detective. My working theory is that whatever you took began to kick in after the water started running, and maybe you thought Diane’s open mouth was a flotation ring you needed to shove your wrist inside. But I’m open to correction. Enlighten me, please, Hazel. Give me somethin
g to focus on besides my obvious failures as a parent.”

  “My arm’s dislocated,” Hazel yelled. She wasn’t saying this to her father, specifically; she didn’t expect him to care or help, but felt it possible to get the attention of a neighbor who’d hear her cries and phone for a medic. Given the frequency of ambulances visiting the Shady Place retirement mobile home community, it didn’t seem too far-fetched that one might coincidentally be on its way. Or if a Byron-cam was in the house, she was covered. For once she missed the meddling assistance of her engagement ring. “My arm!” Hazel repeated.

  “How strange that my upstanding daughter should have an issue with her angel wing. Yes, I noticed that, believe it or not. Age has dulled my perception, but an arm extended out an extra foot or so will still raise my eyebrows. Tony’s on his way. Leon’s kid, a chiropractor. Leon owes me a solid. I filled a badger that moved in beneath his ornamental lawn windmill full of buckshot. However, also at my request, Tony won’t be here for a few hours, for two reasons. The first is that I want you to feel more pain. The second is that I’d like you to clean the throw-up off yourself and remove your hand from my pretend old lady’s throat before we have guests. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “It’s stuck.”

  “Not for long.” He reached into his bathrobe pocket and took out a spray can of WD-40, then used the bottom of his cane to move the globby wig up and back from Diane’s face. “Good night for now, sweet girl,” he said to Diane. Then he popped her faceplate off, slid it forward on Hazel’s arm like an oversize bangle, and went to work trying to free Hazel’s arm. Diane’s internal back-of-mouth sleeve had the product name, size, and copyright info tattooed on its bottom in stretched lettering: THROATGINA™ extra small. Had her father opted for the Throatgina medium or even a regular small, Hazel thought, perhaps they wouldn’t be in this predicament, but she kept her viewpoint of shared blame quiet.