From Hell to Breakfast Page 9

  Dracula sighs at the ambiguous stare-down. To be young, he thinks. To be out this late. To look that way at a world you hardly know. He’s probably no older than twenty. He’s probably just looking past him, he tells himself. Dracula stares until he turns away. He can’t help noticing that the girl across from him is wearing nothing but a pink kerchief around her chest in twenty-degree weather. Her coat is shrugged off on the booth behind her. At least she has one. Dracula watches her stick her finger out at her companion’s face—oh, now she’s picking his nose and squealing. How old are these kids? He has no concept of that anymore. Lucinda is twenty or something like it but she seems ageless, utterly outside of her generation. Dracula’s too tired to contemplate the implications. All these kids out at night, drunk and dumbstruck by the brief and misleading promise of adulthood. He sees them over and over, everywhere he goes. They’re like an epidemic.

  The steak and eggs come out on a heavy white platter in a great big hemorrhaging heap and the waitress walks behind it like she can hardly keep up. For a moment Dracula feels a throb of alarm at her momentum, as if she’s preparing to throw the dish at him. Her face is hardened into a little, calcified smile as she dumps it down on the table and follows with the bottle of Tabasco.

  “Okay?” she says.

  “Ah—” says Dracula, and she smiles and walks off again, interpreting his utterance to be an affirmation—or else making clear she doesn’t care. Either way she did it on purpose. He is now struck by the saucy dismissal of her hips as she saunters away, as if she expects him to watch and wants him to feel rebuffed. He doesn’t have a napkin. He’s watching because she left him in the middle of a sentence—more like a word. Not because he wants to watch but because he wants a napkin. He looks around his table. All of this would amuse him if he wasn’t actually trying to do what she presumed he was, at least by half.

  He turns the bottle of Tabasco upside down and shakes it vigorously. Are those kids sniggering? He thinks he hears them. He knows so well what she’s doing. She made him look after her by walking away before he was prepared and then tried to make him think he was a pervert for watching. This was supposed to mortify him out of talking to her. What a scam, Dracula thinks. What a self-fulfilling punishment it all is.

  Dracula is taking large heavy forkfuls of the bleeding heap before him and thrusting them into his mouth. Now what? He continues to violate the meat on the front half of his plate while behind it the egg yolks jiggle. He’s aware of the dull, heavy clamor his cutlery is making on the stoneware, and after a while he rotates the plate and continues eating. What would his girlfriend say if she were here? She would probably say the woman was beautiful. She was always appreciating the weird looks of strangers. She could do that because she herself was beautiful. Dracula pauses a moment to think of the soft hiss of her hair, floating behind her like spun sugar as she left the bedroom, and he has this sudden feeling she was leaving him forever in that moment, that she may or may not be home when he gets back but either way she will be gone, unreachable, and he can’t swallow the bite of food in his mouth. He gapes quietly into his plate and sits very still, feeling the late hour, feeling as if any movement might cause him sudden inexplicable agony.

  When he looks up from his plate he sees the waitress at the other booth delivering a hamburger to the girl and an enormous bowl of cereal to the fat kid across from her. He had seen that stupid item on the menu, and it seems appropriate that some podgy bear kid would indulge in something so showy and gargantuan. The dour waitress can barely support the bowl with her feeble wrist. She’s surely one of those hollow, anemic girls who never eats. Her blood would be tangy and acerbic. He swallows a bite of food. Her teeth have that leached granular look that Lucinda’s have, like eggs dipped in vinegar. That acid streaking—as if their throat is a leaky valve for constant reflux. Lucinda has to take pills. Sometimes he can hear her gagging in the bathroom. Dracula puts down his fork.

  The grease he has just consumed is sliding warmly down his stomach, and he feels it ripple up in a wave of anxious anticipation when the waitress turns and comes toward him, tearing the ticket from her pad and pretending not to see him looking at her. Lucinda would say she was beautiful. She was so ugly she was beautiful, he thinks, feeling the same confusion and resentment he had felt when she made him watch her walk away from his table. He loves her. Lucinda. This is what love is, he thinks. It’s a sickness that is starving him and stuffing him full.

  The ticket comes fluttering down on his table and the words come blurting out. “I have a girlfriend,” he says. “You’re like her.” He watches several taut cords spring up in her wrist as she lifts his plate off the table.

  “Okay.” Her voice corrodes into scrap.

  Dracula is sparking like a ripped wire. “She’s bulimic. Anorexic,” he says.

  She looks up at him in surprise, her dry lip snagged by the two points of her teeth. “What?” she says.

  He clears his throat. He watches the bleak vacancy of her expression sour into confusion and disbelief. Then her look goes to brine. “What are you talking about?” she says sharply.

  For an instant she gazes at him, and her acid expression holds such a power that he goes blank. “It’s a disease you know.” He fumbles to regain himself. “My girlfriend,” he says. “You can get help.”

  “Oh my God.” She shakes her head. A smile spreads up her face and hangs there, and he knows she is privately damning him to hell.

  “You might think you look okay but to the rest of us you don’t look healthy,” he says, hardly knowing where he’s going. He realizes this is something he has heard her father say. Lucinda’s.

  The waitress blanches. She is still shaking her head, even as the smile goes to slush and slips from her face. “I can’t believe this.” Her face sags and for a moment she stands very still, as if any movement will destroy her. With a sudden guilty panic Dracula realizes she is about to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean—”

  She mutters something under her breath.

  “Wait,” he says, and she brushes her hand across her face and turns and walks away. When she’s gone Dracula sits a moment in the pummeling silence. The murmuring patrons all seem to be mouthing soundless scoldings at each other. He fishes his wallet from the chest pocket of his new shirt and pinches out a twenty with fumbling fingers and leaves it on the table. He stops in the bathroom, listening to the echo of pipes in walls, rubbing his numb hands under the sink water for a long time. Outside, in the alleviating cold, a bald wind blows back on him. The kids are out in the parking lot, romping and frolicking in the freeze. He feels a vanishing stealth as he comes up on them, bouncing pertly on the back bumper of his truck. They’ve just finished tugging at the handle of the cargo hold.

  “You want to go in there?” he says, crossing his arms.

  They look at him and then at each other. “Oh, this is your truck?” The girl is instantly submissive and stepping away.

  The guy has to peacock a little. “You want me to go in there? Why would you want me to do that?”

  “Because the night is young,” says Dracula, feeling so much better out here. “And you’ve had your milk and oats and now you need your honey.”

  “Uh, what’s that supposed to mean?” He glances, almost, at the girl.

  “Ew,” says the girl. “Let’s go.”

  “You tell me,” says Dracula.

  “I think maybe it means you’re a whackjob.” Dracula smirks. The guy seems to be waiting for some insult to give him the volition to get up and walk away. Dracula can feel it. “Nice shirt,” he says.

  Dracula can’t tell if he is insulting his actual shirt or the fact that he’s wearing only a shirt in the cold. He shrugs.

  “My dad took that shirt to the thrift store last week.”

  He might have, Dracula thinks. Maybe that was why the kid was staring so incessantly before.

  “That’s what I said,” the girl outs him brashly. They both ignore her.<
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  “And do you like your dad?” Dracula asks. It puts just the stitch he hoped for in the kid’s expression.

  “What? Whatever.”

  “Can we go?” says the girl. “I’m cold.”

  Dracula’s coat is in the truck and he notices that he’s not yet chilled at all. These are both bracing sensations—being out here and badgering these kids. He’ll give the waitress thirty minutes to come out for a cigarette and then he’ll leave. He could make it happen out here without any effort. He can tell already. He is Dracula. “You could go in there and do whatever you want for thirty minutes.”

  “Okay. Gross me out. Come on Tim. Let’s leave. Let’s not give this guy a reason to talk.”

  “But what are we supposed to do in there?” Tim is really pushing it. Poor Tim. Clearly he can’t figure out how else to get on top of this.

  “I don’t know,” Dracula says, spreading his hands. “It’s probably your only chance to ever do anything in the back of a UPS truck. You can do whatever you want.”

  “You mean, like—” Tim is making himself uncomfortable now, with this dimwit craving for explanation.

  “Oh please.” The girl is going to do it for him. “He wants us to fuck, Tim, you fucking idiot. We’re just friends,” she says to Dracula. He didn’t mean to imply that. It’s just what happened.

  Now Tim really can’t get up from the truck or get this back in his field of action. The girl just eclipsed him. All he can do now is go all in. Dracula sees it on his face. The flaccid fool’s look is there and Tim is out of options. “I don’t get it. You want money or something? Why would you want us to do that?”

  “I’m leaving. Assholes. I’m going back inside.”

  “You better go with her.”

  Tim looks after her. “I didn’t say I wanted to,” he calls out.

  They watch her pull out her phone.

  “Shit.”

  “Go tell her I said I wanted to watch,” says Dracula, lifting lechy brows. “You can both be disgraced by the pervert.”

  Tim looks at him, seemingly deepening his own disgust.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Dracula says, shrugging.

  “You’re fucking sick, man.” Tim raises his voice. Now Dracula can tell he is going to go a different route.

  The kid finds his feet and pounces, torpidly, right as the girl flicks that fated glance over her shoulder. It’s a good move, Dracula thinks, but a losing one.

  Back at home, he tells Lucinda, “Maybe you should go. Maybe it will help.” He doesn’t know how he got here.

  She’s eating sunflower seeds, possibly the only thing he’s ever seen her eat. “They’re nutritious,” she used to say.

  “By myself?” she says now. “What would you do? If I went in.” She seems oddly complicit, calm with the idea of it. She is not teary and wrung out as he thought she would be.

  “I’ll find another place,” he says, watching her closely. “Nearby.” He doesn’t like it, her composure. “I’ll visit—or not, if you don’t want me to at first.” After all this, what he needed was the waitress to show him. She’s not really eating those seeds.

  Lucinda seems to be watching him with some matching but unforthcoming unease. “Don’t worry—it’s not you, or whatever your… effect is on me,” she says, as if reading his mind.

  Dracula nods. They both wonder if it is her, and what about her it is, but neither says it. “We can pick back up when you get out.” He doesn’t want her to think he is trying to dodge her, now that he knows, to slough her off somewhere and leave her there with false promises. “I’ll come every day,” he says, swinging hard the other way. “I mean—” He is confused by what he’s saying. “I want you to get well,” he says, pinning it down. “I want you to go so you can come back and be with me.” Then the idea of her going so she can be with him disconcerts him. Is that possible? He can’t imagine her coming back the same person as the one who is with him now. Is he killing their chances? Suddenly he is terrified. “Never mind,” he says. “I don’t want to tell you what to do.”

  Lucinda sighs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve always been this way. I’m not dead yet.” She shrugs.

  Dracula nods. He’s relieved, but still distracted by her mild contemplations. What’s keeping her so even? He now wants to ask her, what has she been up to tonight?

  “Why are you wearing that shirt?” Lucinda asks.

  “Oh.” He looks down. “I left it on under my uniform,” he says, thinking fast. “I wanted to break it in.” That was stupid. He should have had a plan for this. Now he’s having to scramble back in his mind to the bedroom, when she had him try it on. Had he changed back out of it before or after she left?

  “You spilled on it,” she says.

  He pulls it out into a flat plane, to see. So he did. Right on the pocket.

  “Through your uniform,” she says.

  “Huh,” says Dracula, looking up from the stain at her.

  “Huh,” says Lucinda, looking down from him at the stain.

  The Prop (Part I)

  Does Lucinda ever get inside his coffin when Dracula’s away? Of course she does. Does anything ever happen? Of course it doesn’t. It’s just a box of wood.

  She’s schlepping it, all in a rush, out of the apartment and to her theater class as a last-minute substitute, until they find the prop that went missing. Dress rehearsals are the day after tomorrow. They are only a few days from opening night.

  Sometimes she thinks Dracula has forgotten all about it.

  Her classmate Rory is helping her shoulder the coffin down the stairs. He has a truck and he doesn’t mind.

  “Why do we have to take it back and forth? Can’t we just leave it there through the show?” he asks.

  “I told you,” Lucinda says breathily. She can barely intonate with the effort. It’s not that his casket is heavy, but she’s weak. It’s a simple cedar box. She’s afraid she’s having a heart attack right now. Wouldn’t that be something? “Where’s Seth?” she huffs. Last night Rory had Seth with him.

  “Are you saying he actually sleeps in this? For real?” Rory says right over her question, not hearing it. He seems incapable, over and over, of accepting this simple truth.

  Lucinda blinks at the horde of insects speckling her vision.

  “What does he look like in there? Do you ever look?”

  Lucinda finds this question crass. She has never tried to open the lid while he was sleeping. “No,” she breathes.

  “I wouldn’t want to see that. Where is this dude, anyway? I’m never going to meet him.” Lucinda has some idea why Rory doesn’t mind helping her with this.

  “At work.”

  “Where does he work?”

  She doesn’t answer. Dracula is, as always, at work. And if he knew what she was doing he would kill her.

  “It’s so light,” Rory says, pumping his end effortlessly. “He actually sleeps in it?”

  “Stop,” she says. How many times is he going to ask?

  Something in her tone must have alerted him to her physical predicament because he cranes his head and says, “You want to put it down for a minute?”

  In answer she sloughs the coffin and watches it clatter down the steps.

  “Whoa. Is somebody mad at her boyfriend?”

  Lucinda is too faint to answer. Rory suggests that she sit down after she is already on her way. “Do you need something? I have Gatorade in the car,” he says. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Lucinda shakes her head.

  “I’m getting the Gatorade.” He leaves. The apartment manager looks out through the blinds of his window. It’s the first time she’s seen him since he refused them a rent extension. She can see the stiff crimp in the vinyl and she wonders if he’s deciding about coming out to say something. She thinks about their plan for their new rent predicament. She wonders what will come of it. Rory returns, holding a bottle out with his hand. Inside is a slosh of foaming blue that is likely slimed with his spit.
Lucinda takes it and pretends to swallow.

  “I can’t do it.” She gestures limply.

  Rory looks down at the coffin. “Yeah, that’s not a problem—I can do it myself. It’s really easier that way.” She watches him bend down and lift with the knees. He is like some meat-head bodybuilder. How did he find his way into her acting class? She lets him lug it away and succumbs to the feeling of impending disaster. She knows that what she’s doing is some kind of double sacrilege, a sacrilege upon the sacrilege that Dracula is committing to begin with.

  Why does she want to do this? Ever since she went to Vanessa’s funeral, ever since her East Coast sweetheart gave her eulogy, Lucinda has realized something. People tell the truth. One way or another, they tell the truth.

  Lucinda wants to know Dracula’s truth. She would rather know hers without having to look.

  Rory is back, swiping his hands together, having apparently done that all the way back from his truck until she could see it. The deed is done, he seems to be saying, thanks to his physical aptitude. He really is a man. He really is a ham. That’s what he is.

  “Ready to go?”

  Lucinda stands, refusing the elbow of assistance. She feels fine now.

  She can say, with the exception of a few people, that she really likes her theater class. She might be scared stiff of the play, but she has discovered that she appreciates the challenge of acting itself, and she likes that about herself. The class has tested her in ways that nothing else has. Her teacher is a weird guy. He keeps a puppet in a closet and he sometimes does little enigmatic routines with it that are meant to inspire and/or confound them. It is all part of acting, he says, part of disappearing into that onstage space, that black hallowed lack of self, bringing that out under the lights with you. Stay dark, he says. Darkness is your light. Hell is full of light, he says. A fallen angel goes black in perfect opposition to his own lightness. It’s a faultless equilibrium. An absolute reversal, an image transfer, direct from life to stage. All this is just part of the play, of course. He’s not a raving lunatic. He’s getting them into it.