From Hell to Breakfast Read online

  Dracula isn’t really aching to ask.

  Lucinda’s eyes come to rest on him with a beautiful, battlefield stillness. “I’ll show you.”

  She takes his wrist and stretches across the room with him, pulling him like reluctant rubber, until he’s with her at the chair that came with their dining nook. “Sit there,” she says, and then she gets some twine out of the bottom drawer in the kitchen. Standing over him, she unwinds it.

  “She tied you up?” Dracula is incredulous. His girlfriend is arranging his hand against the arm of the chair and wrapping the twine around it. “Is this another of your theater homework assignments?” he asks, preferring that. “Are you just practicing or did your mother really come over?” He hates the theater but her mother is way worse.

  Dracula’s girlfriend is too busy grinding the twine into the flesh of his wrist. “Ow,” Dracula says. “That hurts.” She is leaning over him now to tie the other hand, white cords of tension pushing up through the skin at her throat, her hair singed like kindling. He feels almost a tantalizing amorousness in the throes of her despotic calm. What really happened?

  Dracula’s girlfriend stands back and screws her face. “You filthy bitch,” she says, raising her hand.

  “Wait a second,” Dracula says.

  She flicks her hand down and slaps him, stingingly.

  “You sick, sick, creature.”

  “Is that what your mother said to you? It seems like you’re more talking to me.”

  She slaps him again, this time more bluntly. Her clammy hand leaves a trace of dew on his cheek.

  “I’m confused,” Dracula says, but she is concentrating on the performance now.

  “Don’t you know what you are?” she hisses at him. “Don’t you know? It’s about time.” She holds up a finger—as if to politely signal he wait—and retreats to pull an eyebrow pencil from her purse at the particleboard table. “Sit still now.” She grows a monstrous grin. He can’t tell if this is reenactment—what her mother said to her—or instruction—what she’s saying and doing to him for the demonstration to be accurate. Lucinda’s not using her voice or her mother’s. Then she begins to dig greasy lines into his face with a frenzied look of animal greed.

  “Ow. This is scratching. Did she really use a makeup pencil? Or are you doing this to—” He can’t think of why she would be doing it. “I can’t see anything on your face,” he says into her milky complexion.

  Her gum blots pink in her mouth, and then all at once, as if the words just hit her, she stops, the stalled operation of her mouth seeming to throw a hitch in her whole industry. She pours a sorry look over him, either false or forthcoming he can’t tell, and hovers with the point of the pencil still denting his cheek. She turns and sits down sideways in his lap.

  “I’m sorry.” She breaks out into breath. Without looking at him she reaches out and holds his head against the flutter of her heart.

  “I don’t like being toyed with.” Did he really just say that? “I mean tricked or lied—” he still can’t figure out what exactly she did.

  Lucinda sighs, like she agrees. “I just kept thinking about how you were going to go out and suck on all those girls tonight.” Now her voice seems to be blowing cool air at his sparks of indictment. “I get so tired of it.”

  He’s silent, letting her pat his ire away for several moments, breathing deeply against her fragile chest, sniffing at the blue white skin. “So, my pigeons are really gone?”

  “Those are the ones I couldn’t get to fly away.”

  She points outside the window, where two pigeons flap on the railing, looking like frazzled witnesses, flustered and disheveled and too enfeebled to flee. “I feel sorry for those pigeons,” she says. “More so than the girls.”

  Dracula tries to sift through her bare-branch words, to make sense of the admission that seems to be budding there. “Was it really your mother that let them out?”

  His girlfriend’s eyes have glazed over. Her breathing is quiet. “I can’t stand hearing them in there,” she says. “All those wing sounds.”

  “I understand.” Dracula sighs. He leans back and his hairline goes up with his brows. It’s one of those fifties hairlines, so he’s been told, severe and handsome.

  “I just wish you weren’t Dracula.”

  It occurs to him, wiping her hair off his face, that she could any night have killed him with a wooden stake, that she is not the hanged one here so much as he is, that even that eyebrow pencil could do the deed. He isn’t even sure if she loves him. What a silly predicament for someone of his infernal status to walk himself into. How did he take such tasteless and lackadaisical terms here, heading right into apartment living with the first girl he spares, and leaving the night a mere curio outside his window—a place he visits only when he wants to shop for the strange and arcane. He even dreams now of daytime, things he sees on TV. Lucinda isn’t having it either. She isn’t having him. Not really. He can tell.

  “Are you mad at me?” she says.

  He is hanging here on her mercy. “I love you,” he says, unconsoled and unrelenting like always.

  “I sort of wish you were,” she says, daubing his wound with her hand. They watch the pigeons. “I love you too,” she remembers to say. “I have to tell you—” she breaks off to toss her hair out of her face. The pigeons continue to snoop, like secret agents in everyday plumage. Lucinda still can’t seem to say something. “I can’t believe her.”

  “Your mother?”

  Time wafts. Lucinda is looking down at a strand of ragged hair. What had her mother done? “My mother is a monster.”

  He pats her thigh, waiting.

  In a quiet voice, through crisp tendrils, she says, “She is the mother of all monsters.”

  Dracula hesitates, turning this over in the slow, immortal folds of his mind. Is this what she was going to say? Just before? “You mean…” Dracula trails off. He thinks she’s being metaphorical. He thinks.

  His girlfriend looks at him, eyes dark as a sitting cauldron, and also far away, lost in the prim postulations of stars. Or is he just once again grafting his own eternal fixations on her?

  “She says she wants to have you for dinner.”

  The Coffee Table

  Lucinda’s mother has a new coffee table. It’s a wire cage with a dog in it. She puts her magazines on top of it—stolen copies of Bait and Lure and Game and Trophy—and a scalloped wooden tray from the pawn shop she sometimes manages, a spot for her husband to put his can of beer on when he watches TV. The TV is also from the pawn shop, and it tends to display a jolting picture embellished with digital hieroglyphs that pop up sporadically in the upper right corner of the screen in laser-green bars—B, ^, PL, :P, B||. Lucinda’s father likes to write these symbols down on a notepad for later examination.

  His job is to interpret the seemingly inexplicable and random phenomena in the universe—all the cryptic and incidental outpourings of material happenstance that suggest a hideous tendency toward entropy—and find a logic that knits them together, a pattern that uncovers the grand plan, a fabric profound enough to underpin the extrapolations of all apparent chaos. Lucinda’s father used to be a mathematical genius, but then he hit his head in a fishing accident some years ago and has been on disability ever since. His current studies include electronics, the ancient wisdom of various Masonic groups—a few to which he still maintains an emeritus membership—obsolete computer information systems—preferably the archaic ones that display DOS commands and a blinking cursor, and which are in abundance at the pawn shop—and the entrails of dead animals washed up on the beach. Dead animals are a rare gift and necessitate a beach scouring at least twice a week.

  The dog is of little interest to him because it’s alive. It came with the cage and though the door is always open this is where it settles to while away its days. The dog is old. Lucinda named it Vlad and she takes it on walks every afternoon. During his fifteen minutes of release Vlad is in spasms of uneasy animation, though one deciphera
ble only to the empathetic eye. He waddles around on sleep-stiffened legs taking huge gulping yawns. His bobbed tail vibrates. When he arrives again at the recognizable charred stone columns of their porch he poops out with a wheeze and sits looking into the tarry dusk with Lucinda.

  When she catches a glimpse of his eyes, the darkening luster there, it tells her he’s astonished to be free. And it’s that look that reminds her of his namesake, which is not exactly the right term, she knows, because she named the dog before she even met him, but somehow it feels like it was through some prophetic foresight that she named the dog ahead of time after the guy who she would end up dating with all the timorous uncertainty of a lamb to the slaughter.

  It has come to her attention that the man she is dating really is Dracula—and if he isn’t, well then he’s even worse than Dracula—a deranged moron who sleeps in a coffin by day and hunts pigeons all night in a show of unsolicited loyalty to her. He doesn’t want to make her jealous. Biting all those dewy-eyed young professionals drifting home from a long day of work. There are a lot of young professionals in this city. It’s up and coming again.

  Lucinda sighs, and Vlad looks up, his mouth stretched wide in a whining yawn. He seems to understand her melancholy. When she’s ready to go inside he escorts her back down the hallway and trundles back into his cage, lifting his nose to the delicate complexity of Lucinda’s father’s feet, which are bare and propped overhead. One of the big, cheesy loaves twitches, and Lucinda’s father laughs.

  “That tickles,” he says.

  This, thinks the dog, is where it all ends, and it closes its eyes, living mostly in dreams—places of dappled shadow and light, vast continuous breezes swept down from the gory firmaments, the howling urgency of deepening night and the musky bouquet of morning shadow. The company of other dogs, the surrender and ecstasy—tumbling, romping, breathing in the deep assembly of scents—all those richly hued and moist exchanges of energy and spirit that cling to a different life.

  The dog’s paws and eyelids twitch.

  “Dad,” says Lucinda. “I’m dating a monster.”

  Her father scuds his glasses up on his forehead, where they ogle her. He is busy with his notepad. He is not even Lucinda’s dad. “Huh,” he says. He scratches his armpit with the capped end of his pen and puts it in his mouth, thinking hard. “PBJ, volume bar, absolute value, cardinality set x. That coincides with yesterday’s luncheon at the lodge. Arlo made sandwiches without the crust.”

  “Dad—” Lucinda likes the word Dad.

  But it’s her mother that answers, loudly, from the kitchen. “What? Come in here.”

  Her mother hocks noisily over the sudden rush of sink-water.

  “Hey,” says Lucinda, getting up to talk to her. “Is Warren my real brother?”

  Lucinda is still gazing back through the doorway at her mother’s husband who is quietly puffing out a series of belches.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know? It’s not normal not to know.”

  Her mother can look at her with an ember in her eye that actually glows. It makes Lucinda twitch like a bug with plucked wings. It makes her suspect that some kind of huge force is at work around her, and she can’t always say how she feels it, or why it slides off like a warm bathwater every time she leaves the house.

  “I’m dating a guy who says he’s Dracula.”

  “Oh, I know.” Her mother scratches in her hair.

  “You don’t care?”

  “The guy in the hall?” She tilts her head and pricks up a smile, still scratching. “No, he’s cute. Why should I care?”

  Lucinda remembers the day in the hall. How he followed her all the way up the walk to the porch as if he had no idea how unnerving, how utterly horrendous, this was. She opened the outer door and stood in front of it, afraid and furious that going inside might offend him. Why did she always attract crazy people? She hated it. She hated crazy people. They were hazardous and unpredictable. And who was this guy? What would he try to do to her? Maybe if she invited him further in he would get jumpy and go away.

  “So you want to meet my mom? She’s psycho,” she said, stepping into the entryway. To her surprise he came spryly up the steps.

  “Oh—this isn’t a house,” he said in a slightly flat, smoked voice, like a corpse.

  “It’s an apartment conversion.” Her tongue fumbled nervously in her mouth. He was actually following her into the hall. She found herself two steps ahead of him, scuttling down the gummy blue carpet to her apartment.

  “You haven’t told me your name,” he said.

  “Oh, I haven’t?” She stopped with the keys in the lock, her heart traipsing up into her throat. “I’m Lucinda,” she swallowed. “So are you sure you want to come in? Because you don’t know me or anything. You could find something atrocious behind this door.”

  He seemed shyly amused. She was trying not to mention her qualms about what he had said. He was not the type. His teeth were big and squarish. They looked like bones, not teeth—not even regular teeth, let alone the chiseled little points required to pierce flesh. And he wasn’t very tall. Wasn’t Dracula supposed to be tall and sallow, floating lugubriously over the land like a gloomy vulture? And shouldn’t he have been varnished in everything black, a veritable pothole of oily, sinister stealth? This guy was in a plaid flannel coat. His skin wasn’t a traditional chalky white. It had a stale brown tint like the pages in an old book. Maybe that was how eastern Europeans looked.

  “If you want me to,” he said, spreading his palms out. “I could just take your phone number.”

  “You know, maybe you should just do that.” She glanced uneasily at her apartment door. Her key was having problems in the slot.

  “Are you afraid to take me into your house? Your mother—is something bad going to happen?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I was just joking about all that. My mom’s cool.” She let him look at her. Now the slow petroleum of his eyes did seem to spill from him and into the hallway, gathering some shadows. Was she imagining that?

  “You’re afraid of something,” he said.

  “Well, actually—” she looked down at her key. “I just—”

  As she spoke the door opened a crack and her mother peeped out. “Be quiet you. Your father is sleeping and if you wake him up so help me.”

  The blunt heavy slab of her mother’s voice was like a hand steadying her.

  “Oh, Mom. Hi.” She whooshed out a breath. “I was just coming inside.” But her mother wouldn’t let her through the door. The raised cloth bolt of her arm held it resolutely cracked, letting the pungent odor of catfish boil past her into the hallway. “I have an idea to leave you here,” she said, looking past her at Dracula. “Who’s this?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucinda said.

  Her mother snorted. “What the hell’s he doing in the hallway then?”

  “I just met him here,” she said, trying not to meet his eyes, trying to flatten herself and her voice into something discreet and inoffensive so she could get past the doorway.

  “Is he a delivery man? We didn’t order any food. You’re delivering something?”

  “No,” he said, and pointed a girlish finger at Lucinda. “I was invited to meet you by your daughter.”

  Lucinda felt her knees quake with dismay. Why was he such an idiot? He acted like a foreigner.

  “Oh isn’t that nice,” said her mother, and she reached out and flicked her daughter hard on the forehead. “Well I can’t meet you tonight because I’m busy cooking fish for my dimwit husband. He went on a trip with his friends and came home with a shitload of the little stinkers. I’ve been gutting all day,” she said to Lucinda. “Little missy ran away right when he came home because she likes to hide from us. Don’t you?” her mother asked her.

  “No,” she said in a threadbare voice.

  Behind her, Dracula stood in his swirl of darkness. She could feel its cold oil spreading across her back, slicking her down. Oh please, s
he thought.

  “Well if she doesn’t like to be my daughter she doesn’t have to be.”

  “No Mom,” she said.

  “No Mom,” her mother repeated. “She’s a pain isn’t she? A pretty little pain.”

  Lucinda patted her sides with dread. When was her mother going to let her in?

  “Give it,” she said, crabbing her hand at the air.

  Lucinda sucked in her breath. She fumbled the knife out of her pocket. Now could she go inside?

  Her mother snatched it away. “It’s not yours. That reminds me,” she said, “I’ve got a surprise for you.” Her face left the crack and reappeared smiling as her free hand stuck something out into the hallway. It was the barrel of a shotgun. It was pointed at Lucinda’s acquaintance. “Your father came home with this. I don’t know where he got it but it’s mine now.”

  This was like a bad movie, Lucinda thought—she out here, her mother in there with a castaway armory, aiming the shotgun while the monster pressed all the shadows together behind her. Just like when she was a little kid and she woke up from a nightmare and stood at the sloppy darkness of her mother’s bed, afraid her mother would claw her back if she tried to climb in and afraid to stay away in the crushing darkness of her room, strung on an invisible cord of terror in the middle of the night, alone and incubating in her own unending dread.

  “Mom, please,” she heard herself say, but she knew desperation would only egg her mother on. “Can you please let me in?”

  Now this man was seeing everything. She hated him for making her need her mother.

  “You can just stay out here tonight,” her mother said, “and sleep on the doorstep for all I care.” And she closed the door. Lucinda knew it wouldn’t be opened again for hours.

  “I hate you,” she said, to her or to him, and pushed him backwards into the hallway. Now a baby was crying somewhere. “You did this.” She was stumbling away from him. She and the baby were both crying.

  “You’re going to kill me.”