Works in Progress

Carley Doktorski

My neighbor Josephine keeps a pair of little boy’s shoes by the door. She has a sign, too, that reads “cats welcome, people tolerated,” and a big old-fashioned umbrella, faded and fraying at the edges. She teaches at the local college down the street, either a Proust intensive or a fiction workshop, every semester. She says she’s a writer, but she hasn’t published anything in a long time—I’ve checked. On our elevator encounters, we don’t speak much. Jo, she said to call her, when I kept referring to her as Miss Josephine. She carries her books in a little wheelie cart out to her Prius. I hold the door to the apartment building for her most mornings. We make small talk. She goes to her car. This is all I knew about Jo before the invite.   

The invite came one night in December, after a quiet shift at Scoop To My Loo. When there weren’t school fundraisers, ice cream business got slow in the winter. It was late on Friday, and Jo was moseying into our apartment building, clad in dark sunglasses and a cheetah print blazer, her wheelie cart in tow. There was a baseball in it. I was wearing a visor, an unzipped puffer jacket, and a shirt that said “Jumping through Hoops for Scoops!” on the back. It was for the local college basketball team’s charity fundraiser a while back. It didn’t fit. I held the elevator door open for her, and helped her get her wheelie cart over the ledge. I didn’t ask what she was doing out so late on a Friday. I pressed the fifth-floor button for us, smiled at her, and asked how her night was going.   

“Well enough, hon,” she said. “Well enough.”   

I asked her about her baseball, and she told me she was watching the local rec league’s playoffs. I nodded, as if this all made perfect sense. When the elevator door opened, Jo shuffled out and fumbled around for her keys in her worn, red leather purse. I adjusted my visor, wiped the cold snot on my upper lip, and stuck my hands in my pockets, heading down the opposite end of the hall. I had the strange urge to check on Jo then. This seemed stupid, since Jo was a reasonably self-sufficient, working woman with a wheelie cart. I watched her look at the little boy's shoes by the door, cluck, then scooch them over so they were perfectly straight. She started to turn the lock, then stopped to look back at me. 

“Do you like writing?” she said. I was taken aback. I couldn’t fathom where Jo had gotten the notion tonight that I, clad in my Scoop to My Loo visor, might enjoy writing. I didn’t. I hadn’t read a book in three years. 

“Not really,” I said, and she frowned. 

“Oh well,” she said. She shoved her wheelie cart into her entryway, then paused again. “You should still come to my fiction reading this Sunday,” she said. “My students are reading their pieces. Do you like quiche? There will be quiche.” 

I nodded and told her I did in fact like quiche. She smiled, more satisfied with this answer than my distaste for writing.

“Good,” she said. “I’ll see you then.”  

 I, too, used to attend the same state college where Josephine taught, but she did not know that. I was tall for my age, and most people thought I was older. I was going for music production, because it had become my hobby in high school. I was dating a girl who was in a band. She introduced me to indie films, and record players, and alt-rock. She’s chopped off all her hair since then, and dates the butch bass player. Left with her mini keyboard, a love for Sean Baker, and little to no idea what to do with my life, I downloaded Garageband, then upgraded to Ableton. I quit the music production program this summer, after an internship spent working night shifts at the studio and baking cookies for famous artists who carried glocks in their waistbands and created little to no music within the twelve-hour blocks they’d booked. They did, however, eat the three batches of Pillsbury chocolate chips the interns had to bake for them, and leave syringes on the expensive oriental rug in the lounge. I broke up with the College Girlfriend not long after quitting the internship, because she told me, while lying naked in my bed and painting her toenails, that she had HPV, which at the time, I thought was HIV, which made the whole situation even worse. Then my mother got the diagnosis.   

It’s funny, you don’t realize you’re just barely keeping yourself afloat until there’s a hole in the boat that really sinks you. The diagnosis was the Hole. I took a leave of absence at the beginning of my junior fall semester. I haven’t been back in four months.   

I was supposed to be working on a transfer application, or job application, or beginning a community college redemption arc that December. Instead, I only left the apartment to go to Scoop To My Loo. Scoop was nice, because Boss Andrew paid in cash under the table, and every time a sorority had a fundraiser there, I got lots of money in tips, and usually brought some variation of the same bleach blonde, vaguely slutty Kappa Delta member home.   

I didn’t have a future at Scoop, but I liked it. It consisted of a small red shack, a garbage can next to the window, and tiki lights strung across the parking lot. There was no seating. It was a drive by ice cream place for a drive by town, a place you go to under the guise of a date to make out with someone in the backseat. Or like, to bond with your children or something. My favorite days were when someone else was taking the register and I could just work on orders. Then I could truly get lost in the monotony of wrenching hard ice cream out of a gallon tub. When I got home, I’d spend the majority of my time obsessively swiffering, or vacuuming, or dusting my apartment. It was a new development, the cleaning. I was germaphobic, and tired, and somehow still horny, relying on the assistance of Kappas who’d come to get soft serve, hookup in the car, then fuck on my couch. I always went over it with a dustbuster in the morning. When Josh, the only friend I retained from the local college, visited, he said my place had turned into a psych ward. I liked it that way. It was sterile, and void of the past, or the future. I stuffed utility and credit card bills into the drawer and never looked back. For four months, I’d paid neither of them.   

That Monday, I went to my mother’s house to take her to her appointment, and check on her and her diagnosis. The diagnosis was unchanging. I don’t know why I kept thinking it might. I found my mother sipping peppermint tea and doing a word search at the kitchen table. She looked peaceful there, framed by the window light. I asked how she was doing, and she told me that if she thought of the disease as a little cancerous lump in her breast, rather than breast cancer, it was easier.   

“It’s a matter of semantics,” she said. I nodded. Then she made me go out and string the Christmas lights around the bushes in the front yard. No one else was around to do these things. My sister had gone to Delaware for her freshman year. I kept getting unwanted pictures of her half-naked in frat basements on my Instagram feed. My father was never in the picture. The job of the empath thus went to the lost and underemployed.   

At the oncology outpatient facility, a nurse escorted my mother into a room with a scale and blood pressure machine, then to a bathroom to pee in a cup. The nurse had cows on her scrubs. She kind of looked like one, too. She had the kind of ass that swung back and forth as she walked. The Cow sat us down in an examination room, where we would face the final boss, the nice doctor lady. My mother thanked her, turned to look at me, and whispered, “That was quite the big behind.”  We were sitting side-by-side on two little chairs against the wall when the nice doctor lady came in. When she saw us, she did a double take. 

“Wow, he’s a carbon copy,” she said. 

We weren’t, really. We both had curly dark hair, but the similarities ended there. 

Like Josephine, my mother was no more than five-two. 

My mother looked at me, then back at the doctor. 

“Hope he doesn’t have breast cancer too,” she said.

The nice doctor lady smiled, and told us that if my mother had to get cancer, this was the best type to get. My mother laughed in her face. 

“Bet you tell all the pretty patients that,” she said. 

We were silent for most of the ride home. The hospital was part of the medical school at the college, and students were trickling out of class buildings. It was the first day below freezing, which meant you could tell which kids were from the South, because they never had on good coats. I was peering out the rearview window for people I knew, people whose lives still had potential. My mother turned on the holiday radio station, and started humming along to “Santa Baby.” I would have laughed, under different circumstances.   

“Everybody’s gotta succumb to something, I guess,” she said, fiddling with her necklace. It had me and my sister’s birthstones on it.   

“Huh?” I said. I made an illegal left turn, and got honked at. She glared at me, then turned the volume up on the radio. It had changed to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”  

“I hate this song,” she said.   

“You always say that,” I said. “I meant the thing about succumbing.”   

“Oh,” she said. “Well if it’s not this lump, it’ll be another one.” She shrugged. “Pull into Stop & Shop honey, I need to pick up ground chicken.”   

The nice doctor lady had printed out two copies of my mother’s recent bloodwork and a patient report for each of us. When I got home to the apartment, I stuffed both into the junk drawer filled with bills, the things I’d deemed unimportant to the overall course of the human experience. I had started researching exotic retreats and study-at-sea semesters as part of my ongoing efforts to find purpose. Since then, the internet had begun to assume that I needed spiritual healing. The internet can coddle you, if you let it. Under bleached sheets and a freshly washed duvet cover, I scoured the corners of the web for anything other than answers. I kept getting curated videos on Instagram of the Amazonian rainforest, or the Sahara Desert, with an Australian lady doing a voiceover that always said something along the lines of “all this natural beauty and we still have to do taxes.” The Australian lady made a compelling plea for society to see beyond the dollar signs, to stop getting stuck at the Scoop to My Loos of the world instead of living. I wanted to tell the lady that I would go to the Amazonian rainforest if I could. I would drop everything and lay in the wet dirt and wonder how I never knew what it was like to truly be alive. Instead I put the phone on the coffee table and vacuumed for the sixth time that week.

That night I put on my visor and a hoodie for my shift at Scoop. It had been raining all day, which meant the chances of meeting a Kappa who wanted sex and fat free frozen yogurt would be slim to none. When I got off the elevator, I passed Jo with a wheelie cart full of groceries. Her big umbrella was hooked around her arm, and she had a clear plastic bonnet over her curls. She said hello, and gestured to the bags in the wheelie. 

“For the quiche,” she said. 

“Ah,” I said. 

“You’re still coming tomorrow, right?” Jo said. 

I’d forgotten all about it. I reminded her I didn’t write.

“That’s fine, you’re not getting graded.” 

“I don’t want to show up with nothing, though,” I said. 

“Then write something,” said Jo. She said it so plainly, so-matter-of fact, I believed I could. 

“What time tomorrow?”   

“2-5,” Jo said.   

I brought a half gallon from Scoop home for the occasion.   

When I knocked on Jo’s door, a kid who looked no more than fifteen answered. He'd attempted to dress up for the reading, it seemed. He had on a polo shirt and basketball shorts. There were goose bumps on his legs.

“Hi,” I said, and he looked at me with fear in his eyes. “I’m Josephine’s neighbor. I was invited to the reading.”

“Professor Dimont’s in her bedroom,” the fifteen-year-old said. “She said everyone can put their things in the guest room.”   

I had no things, except for the pint of Scoop to My Loo vanilla custard, which needed to go in the freezer, but I followed the kid into the guest bedroom anyway, swinging the plastic bag with the Scoop custard in it. Jo’s hallway was lined with books stacked up to the ceiling, and cat-themed decor stuffed into every space in between. She was a hoarder. This was a new piece of information, and an unexpected one. The books, unsurprisingly, were largely vintage editions of Proust. A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, one of them said. I had no idea what that meant. I hated French people, as a rule. The College Girlfriend had been obsessed with a French guy in her philosophy class while she and I were dating, a friendship that, according to Josh, had recently culminated in their hooking up at a rooftop Halloween party, with her dressed up as sexy Marie Antoinette. Josephine was French. Josephine was the only exception to my rule.   

The guest room was for a child. I looked around, at the twin bed with the students’ North Face jackets piled on top, and the shelves with Legos by the desk. The room was a faded light blue, the furniture covered in dust, toy cars, and something that felt like longing. There were tiny baseball participation trophies on the shelf above the bed, and children's sneakers lined in a row in front of the closet. The place was surprisingly book-free.   

“Does she have a grandchild?” I asked, and the fifteen-year-old shrugged, leaving me in the haunted little boy's bedroom. I peered at one of the trophies. It was from 1985. When I picked it up, a ring of dust was left in its wake. I resisted the urge to wipe the shelf clean with a tissue. When I put the trophy back and turned around, Nelson was sitting in the doorway, absentmindedly kneading the carpet, just staring. 

In the main living space, an open-concept living room-kitchen, the hoarding was even worse. Leftovers in tupperware and cardboard boxes were piled up on her countertop, along with an extra large bottle of Vitamin D pills, a large stereo speaker with an antenna, and a rotting squash. There was a portrait of Proust resting haphazardly on a storage container next to the kitchen island, and a personalized painting of Nelson as a European monarch. The garbage was long past overflowing. Jo had set up a few extra folding chairs around her living room so that everyone was facing each other in a circle. The students were sitting in silence while Nelson sat upright in the middle, boring into all of their souls with his unsettling hazel eyes. I inched around a girl to get to the kitchen, opening the freezer only to find a solid brick fortress of leftovers. I shoved the custard into the side door, then slammed it shut. When I turned around, they were all staring at me.   

The girl wearing a matching pink sweatsuit and Uggs looked the most normal out of the group. I sat down next to her. She had dyed black hair in two braided pigtails and was picking at her nails, unbothered by the state of the apartment. It was clear she was used to similar conditions. “Has she come out yet?” I whispered to Sweatpants. She shook her head.   

“Not since I’ve been here,” she said. Sweatpants was sitting next to the fifteen-year-old, who sat next to a couple that looked straight out of a theater class. The girl was wearing a vintage fifties skirt and had a pixie cut. The boy looked like he hadn’t showered in days.   

The air was heavy in the house, the kind of hot that only old people with thin blood can stand. All of them were nervous and sweating. The refreshments set out by Jo were limited to a variety of half-opened liters of various seltzers and iced teas on the kitchen table. I stood up and poured myself a glass of water, surveying the scene. I had become an unwanted intrusion, it seemed. Their eyes followed me everywhere. Only Sweatpants and one other girl seemed unbothered. She had purple hair, was morbidly obese, and was scooching herself down from her seat to the floor to dangle Nelson’s feather on a stick in front of him. There was, remarkably, another purple-haired fat girl right next to her, who was also staring at me. When the first one sat back down, the pair of them looked like plump little grapes on a vine. Jo finally came out, clad in her usual pantsuit, and one of the Grapes perked up. The other one continued to be completely enthralled by Nelson. Jo shuffled over to the oven, yanked it open, and took two different varieties of quiches out, along with some other cinnamon bun-like dessert. Then she noticed me. “Oh good, you’re here,” she said.   

“I’m here,” I said.   

“Everyone, this is my neighbor,” she said. Then she paused, as if unsure of how to introduce me. It occurred to both of us that she didn’t know my name.   

“What’s your name, hon?” she said.

“Anthony.” 

“Right, yes. He’ll be listening in today,” Jo said. She asked for help with the quiches, and the first Grape perked up, along with the fifteen-year-old in the polo. They shuffled around the kitchen. Grape One did so with great difficulty.   

“I actually also have a story,” I said. I stood up to help. “And I brought ice cream, if anyone wants it. From Scoop to My Loo.” This caught Grape Two and the theater kids’ attention. I took it out of the freezer and put it with the rest of Jo’s spread, and everyone stood.   

“Great, well, everyone eat first, then we’ll start the reading,” Jo said. The crew shuffled over to the kitchen, climbing around book stacks and making awkward conversation. Josephine had stacked a mish-mosh of plates and utensils on the table, which I detested. Mine had little trains choo chooing around the perimeter. I slid a piece of quiche onto it, and wondered for a second if Jo was a witch. She’d make a good one, I thought, inviting all of these high-achieving academics and putting their grades on the line, only to poison them with a quiche. Nelson was probably her familiar. I took small bites of my spinach and feta slice, then spread the rest around on my plate.   

We sat on our plastic folding chairs in relative silence. Nelson paraded around the room before climbing into the big La Z boy chair that Jo had plopped herself down in, lording over her class like the Sith. Jo asked us to clean up before we started the reading. I collected the plates and walked them over to the sink, only to knock over Nelson’s water bowl, which was precariously positioned right under it. When I bent down to clean it with a paper towel, there were tiny ants clustered around the wet cat food in the bowl next to it. I looked at Jo, unsure of how to address the ant situation without embarrassing her, but Nelson came over, seeing me meddle with his water, and started eating up the mush. I gagged once, twice, then stood up, opting to let the rot fester.   

One of the Grapes read first. Jo, in her lazy boy chair, demanded that the Grape move to the seat next to her, so she could film it, and because she couldn’t hear. The Grape waddled over, took her paper from a manila folder, cleared her throat, and told a story about a Build-a-Bear for sex toys called The Spot. I couldn’t tell if it was avante-garde, or satire, or stupid. Jo and the classmates were applauding her commentaries on postmodern hedonism and consumerism. More likely, I thought, the Grape was just sexually deprived, because she looked like a grape. Sweatsuit wrote a story about a girl obsessed with eating other peoples’ hair. Pixie Cut wrote about an emotionless demon-hybrid woman. When it was my turn, I unfolded a bank statement from my back pocket and flipped it around to the back, where I’d written my one sentence. It had taken four hours. I’d skipped vacuuming last night just to finish it.   

“It’s really short,” I said, and Jo just waved me on. I stood up, sitting down in the chair next to Jo. She held her phone up in my face. Nelson leaned in. They were both breathing down my neck. I looked down at my sentence.

“My mother’s blood work scared me,” I said, “so I put the results in the junk drawer.” The Grapes, Sweatpants, and Pixie Cut all looked around, avoiding the situation at hand. I couldn’t get up from the seat-of-honor. My arms were shaking, and the paper was heavy, and now they all knew the truth of it. The truth. What was the truth? I crumbled up the paper and stuck it in my pocket. I couldn’t stand it all of a sudden, the filth of that room, and those people, with their purple hair and greasy ponytails. Jo reached out, touching my knee. Her red fingernails were chipped at the edges. I flinched. She had tears in her eyes. “Hon,” she whispered.   

Sitting side-by-side in our chairs like that, she was eye-level with me. I got the strange urge to lay my head on her lap, for some reason. To cry into her pantsuit, and tell her about the Amazon rainforest. How, when I couldn’t sleep, I liked to think about ripping off my shirt and laying down in the dirt, letting the vines and the moss overtake me. How I missed the ex College Girlfriend, and my Mother, and the stability that was not knowing. Instead, I stood up so fast that the foldout chair fell backward. No one moved except for Nelson, who, still on Josephine’s shoulders, meowed at me.   

“Right, well, round of applause for Antoine,” said Jo. She started clapping aggressively, and Grape One joined in.   

“Anthony,” I said. She didn’t hear me.   

After listening to the story of the greasy theater boy, the fifteen-year-old, and six other unremarkable-looking people, Jo clapped her hands together.   

“Well friends, it’s been a pleasure getting to know you all, and do keep in touch,” she said. She stood up, and Nelson hopped off the chair. “When my son is home, the place is a little more lively. You’re all welcome to visit any time.”   

Grape One was the only person who looked pleased with the notion of an invite.  “Happy holidays, Professor!” she said. The class murmured in unenthusiastic agreement. They exchanged knowing looks, as if this ordeal would most definitely be discussed in the class group chat later. I almost wished I was a part of it.   

In the year and a half I’d lived in the apartment, I had never seen Jo’s son. She never mentioned a husband, or a family, for that matter, except for the one article I found of hers that she wrote for Cosmo in 1982 about the death of her father. Other than that, there was a novel she’d written in 2000, and a picture of her from at least twenty years ago on the internet. Josephine Dimont, as far as I could tell, was a disembodied entity from a far off planet, the sole survivor of a long dynasty of a population of small ladies with fur print jackets. It was clear nobody else was going to try and squeeze more information out of her, so I went for it.   

“How old is your son?” I said. Sweatsuit gaped at me, and the fifteen-year-old fidgeted in his seat. 

“He’s twelve,” Josephine said. 

“Twelve?” I said.   

“Yes, he’s out right now,” Jo said. “They have a mind of their own at that age.” I don’t know why, but I kept going.   

“He plays baseball, yeah?” I said. Jo smiled.   

“Yes, rec baseball, he’s a pitcher,” Jo said.   

Her hands were shaking now. I stared at them. The class had seemed to unanimously decide that their obligations for the semester had been fulfilled, and they started to stand. I stayed in my folding chair as Jo said her goodbyes. When she finally sat down again, her hands were steady. “My mother has cancer,” I said.   

“I figured it was something like that,” said Jo.  

“Yes,” I said. “Feels unremarkable, doesn’t it?”

“Reminders always do,” Jo said.   

“Of what?” I said.   

She didn’t respond. It was dark already at quarter to four, and her face was shrouded in shadows. The automatic light popped on in the hallway.   

“I just reset the timer yesterday,” Jo said. “Gets so dreary this time of year, doesn’t it?” She stood up, Nelson following her into the guest room. Peering around, she seemed to check as if everything was in its rightful place, then turned the light off. It occurred to me for the first time that she didn’t have Christmas decorations. She sat back down in the folding chair next to me. 

“The um, the cat food,” I said.   

Jo raised her eyebrows at me.  

“It’s just, the stuff in the bowl right now—it’s gone bad.”   

Jo peered over at the bowl. I watched her eyes pan over the various monstrosities in the kitchen, as if just noticing it for the first time.   

“I know,” she said. “I know.”   

“Miss Josephine,” I said. “Do you…need help?”

“What?” she said.   “With this,” I said.   “Just Jo, hon. Just Jo.”   

“Jo,” I said, more imploringly this time. “What’s going on? What can I do?” Jo looked down at my hands. They were red and raw from scrubbing with bleach that morning.   

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she said.    

“What?”

“The question. What can you do?” she said. “What can you do.”   

She stood up, looking out the window onto our dimly lit parking lot, where students were climbing into starter cars and pulling out into the night. She didn’t turn around. “I need this,” she said. She closed the curtains, and sat back down next to me. 

“This?” I said. 

“The readings,” she said. “I like having them.”   

“Oh,” I said. “I get it.”   

“Do you?” she said.   

I looked at the little red bleach spots on the inside of my palms. I tried to count them, but they blended together, forming one big rash.   

“It’s not a bad cancer,” I said. She made the same incredulous chortling sound as my mother. 

“That’s not the point, though, is it?” she said.   

“No,” I agreed. “No, that’s not the point.”   

She scooted back in her seat, as if pleased with her leading me to this grand revelation. 

“So what is?” I said.   

“Huh?”   

“The point.”   

“Oh,” Josephine murmured. A car tooted its horn as it left the parking lot. Nelson climbed from her shoulders down onto her lap. They both peered at me. For the first time, Jo did not have an answer. She swallowed, fingering her chunky beaded necklace. No one spoke for a while. A coo-coo clock stashed between stacks of Proust books struck five. Under normal circumstances, this would be vacuuming time. I remained sat in my folding chair.  

“Your son,” I said. She looked up at me, unblinking.   

“My son.”   

“What was his name?”  

 “Antoine,” she said. The tense change was a bold move, I knew. I looked up, thinking she was calling me the wrong thing again. I wanted to tell her that I hated most French people, and most certainly wasn’t an Antoine, and that she was the only French woman I tolerated. It would be a good joke, an old lady joke. It would make her laugh. Instead, she looked me dead in the eyes. Like Nelson’s, they were hazel.   

“His name was Antoine.”