Megan P. Shub
Megan P. Shub
Megan Peck Shub is a writer and producer who has won Emmy and Peabody awards for her work at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, Salamander, New York Magazine, Haaretz, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other publications. She is a fiction editor at Story magazine and a reviewer for the Jewish Book Council. She is currently based in Seoul, Korea.
The Ether
The first morning at Gordon’s house in the woods, Valerie goes for a jog. Before the fog burns off, she runs down the long slope of Gordon’s gravel driveway, down the country road, and past a natural gas plant set far back from the road, behind a concrete wall topped with spiraling concertina wire. The air smells like gas, the kind of gas that creeps inside and kills the fast asleep, snuffs its victims out through-and-through just hours after they’d gone to bed with a whole life ahead.
Valerie keeps going. If something hurts, her grandmother had always said, make yourself hurt somewhere else. That’ll cure the pain.
It’s about a half mile to the next residence, a farmhouse with a patchy lawn carved into the surrounding cornfield. Valerie runs parallel to the farmer’s barking dog, who chases her from inside the chain link fence. Drool flies off his pointed teeth and gums, snot runs from the horrible faucet of his snout.
Enough, she thinks, unnerved, circling back around in the middle of the road. On the return she runs faster, picturing a hole in the fence, gross negligence, a loose dog, a farmer discovering her body in one of the passing ditches. She imagines the news cameramen kicking out their tripods, the hot lights, an anchor powdering his nose and asking how he looks.
#
“What’s the plan today?” she says, entering the house through the screened kitchen door. It claps shut behind her like a trap.
Her grandmother sits at the table reading The Buffalo News. A plate of burnt white toast and a jar of raspberry jam sits open on the table. The wooden handle of a paring knife sticks out of the jar, the brass pins reflecting the light of the stained-glass pendant lamp above. Gordon lays in his recliner watching Fox News at the volume of an ambulance siren, same as he was when Valerie arrived last night. She does not like her grandmother’s latest boyfriend, only the latest in a long line, like balloons in an arcade game exploded by darts.
“The plan? Oh, I don’t know,” her grandmother says, eyes on the newspaper, her reading glasses sliding downward, taking a sip of whatever clear liquid is in her cup. Vodka, probably. “We could go into town, maybe go to the marina and get ice cream cones. Gordon, what do you think? Gordon?”
He grunts and snaps the first in the row of the mother-of-pearl buttons down his Western shirt.
“Damn things keep coming undone,” he says.
“Gordon? The marina?” her grandmother says.
“I don’t know.” He moves his lips and his cheeks like he’s chewing, but he hasn’t taken a bite of anything.
This is the first time Valerie has met Gordon. Her grandmother met him at the Elks Lodge in January and swiftly moved into his house. Everybody in the family had rolled their eyes: Let’s see how long this one lasts.
Her grandmother sighs, redirecting to Valerie. “He doesn’t like to leave the house. That’s why I’m so glad you came to visit me. I wish you’d brought along that handsome boyfriend, though.”
She doesn’t tell her grandmother that they have broken up, that she had sat on the Amtrak to Buffalo for eight hours without reading a single word of her book because of her useless mental devotion to researching his new girlfriend. Above all merits, she had looked much younger than Valerie, like a girl in possession of ovaries laden with sparkling young eggs.
“Would you like a doughnut, dear? They’re on the counter.”
“No thanks,” Valerie says. She hasn’t been hungry since she arrived. The smell of the gas hangs over the household, a rotten, malodorous curse stifling her appetite.
“Gordon gets the donuts for free, up at the casino. That’s pretty much the only thing he leaves the house to do.”
“Well, now,” Gordon pipes up. His voice, like his skin, is leathery. “Valerie, I could show you around the property?’
“That’d be great,” Valerie says. “Show me the property, Gordon.” She feels her thoughts curdling in proximity to the conservative television pundit currently yapping away. The voice is like the long arm of a lobotomy pick hammering back toward her brain.
“Come on,” Gordon says, hoisting himself out of the chair. “Let’s start out back in the woods.”
#
She follows Gordon across the back yard, where a clearing, like a doorway in the trees, opens to a path. From inside the woods, the trees appear further apart than they do from the outside. The canopy extends dozens of feet above them. Splotches of sky float colorless between the leaves and branches. She inhales. Dirt, pine, gas.
“It smells like gas all over the place,” she says. “How come this whole area doesn’t just, I don’t know, explode?”
Tall and thin, Gordon walks a few feet ahead of her like an old-time TV sheriff.
“That’s the odorant you’re smelling—from the gas plant. They have to add it to the gas because the gas itself doesn’t have a natural odor. You know how it is, you smell gas, you know something’s up.”
“Mmhmm,” she says. Still, she pictures lighting a match and watching their surroundings combust into an inferno.
Gordon leads her to a small pond, the water a calm, matte surface in the ambient morning sunlight.
“I used to come out here with my kids when they were growing up. And my wife, sometimes.” He puts his hands in the pockets of his jeans and kicks a clump of fallen bark. “She died last year.”
“Oh,” Valerie says, surprised her grandmother didn’t share that detail. Her grandmother’s calculus suddenly revealed, Valerie likes this place even less. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s my shed,” he says, pointing to a wooden structure a few yards from the shore of the pond. She follows as he walks over to the door and turns the knob. “I spent a lot of time out here hunting deer. There’s a fireplace inside.”
He opens the door for her to take a peek. “See?”
In the corner stands a cot, and against the opposite wall, as promised, a fireplace, its stone floor blackened with soot. Faded plaid curtains hang on both sides of the window, whose panes are coated in a thick film of sap and pollen. She pictures his dead wife sewing them, her dull white hands patiently working the fabric beneath the machine needle, its perpetual stabbing a rattling thrum.
“You want me to show you where I slaughter the deer?” he asks.
“Sure,” she says. Why the hell not.
#
Back in the house, she follows Gordon down the steep staircase into the basement. The wooden steps creak under her weight. On the floor, toys lay strewn in the form of a comet. The room smells like fungus.
“My grandchildren’s,” he says, pointing at a red plastic tricycle, as if she’d otherwise mistake it for his. He opens the door at the far end of the room, reaches in and pulls the ball chain connected to a bare lightbulb in the ceiling.
Inside stands a stainless-steel table, the same kind an embalmer might use. Saws and knives and contraptions hang from hooks drilled into the knotty pine walls. A hose lays neatly wound up on its wheel, the nozzle hanging off. She looks into the drain in the middle of the floor and imagines blood gurling through its grate.
“I spent too much time down here,” Gordon says, his voice flat. “I should’ve been upstairs with my wife.”
#
At the marina, she and her grandmother climb the lookout tower, a squat, Brutalist square looming a few stories over the anchored boats. Her grandmother huffs and puffs along the railing, stopping a few times for coughing spells.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Valerie says.
“Doctor says I’m fit as a fiddle,” she says, hacking again. “I’m just old.”
Valerie doesn’t believe her.
At the top of the lookout, the modest cityscape of downtown Buffalo lays to one side and Lake Erie to the other. The weather has turned lovely: blue sky filled with thick white cumulus clouds that look like she could knock on them with a fist. Valerie recalls standing there years earlier with her grandmother and her second husband, a mild-mannered orthodontist she’d later divorce. As a child, Valerie found the lake fascinating. A lake so big you couldn’t see the other side. A lake like a sea. It felt impossible.
“You didn’t tell me Gordon’s wife died so recently,” she says to her grandmother. “You just slid right in there, didn’t you?”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” She clucks her tongue. “If I’d talked to my grandmother like that, she would’ve clocked me.”
“Well?” Valerie says.
“It’s not like that with Gordon. He’s the type of man who needs a woman, and I came along at the right time. We met up at the Elks Lodge, didn’t I tell you?”
“Yes, you did. I’m surprised you enjoy living in such a rural area. It feels very isolated out there. And Gordon doesn’t seem to want to do very much.”
“Well, my dear, men my age aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. And I love his grandchildren. I loved having grandchildren so much. I loved playing with you when you were little.”
“But you liked where you were living before. The retirement home—you had friends there.”
Valerie knew she’d been on a waiting list for a year before getting into the home. “There’s tons of organized activities there,” Valerie’s mother had said. “Even someone as miserable as your grandmother could be happy there.”
Her grandmother shifts her gaze to the water and then quickly back to Valerie, who watches the wrinkles in her forehead deepen in anticipation of her next statement. Valerie braces herself for a backpedaling announcement about her health.
“Gordon’s a good man, so I try to keep him happy,” her grandmother says. Still recovering from the climb, she braces herself against the concrete wall.
“Don’t you want more than just ‘good?’”
Her grandmother looks at Valerie like it’s the dumbest thing she’s ever heard.
“As I said, eligible bachelors are not popping out of the woodwork. Anyway, he’s a good man. But it’s awful what I have to do to please him.”
She’s not sure what her grandmother is getting at, but contours are forming.
“I’m just not interested in sexual things anymore, I’m an old woman now,” she says, running a hand through her short hair. She sighs. “Gordon makes me give him blow jobs.”
“What do you mean makes? Like rape?” Valerie says.
Her grandmother frowns. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Because that’s what it sounds like?”
“It’s not that. Let’s just drop it. I shouldn’t have said anything. That’s me, always with my foot in my mouth.”
They walk back down the steps and get their ice cream. Strawberry for her grandmother, like always, and mint chocolate chip for Valerie.
“You girls today sure think about things differently,” her grandmother says, dabbing at the pink ice cream on her chin.
“I guess we do,” Valerie says.
She can’t finish her cone. She can’t shake the ghastly vision of Gordon shoving himself into her grandmother’s mouth. She wants to vomit as she tosses the half-eaten cone into the trash. Immediately, a bird swoops in and yanks the cone back onto the boardwalk with its beak. Several others join, a congregation. Valerie watches the flurry of beating wings as the birds tear the cone savagely apart.
#
At night they order a pizza for dinner. Pizza is rarely bad, but this version is terrible. The dough in the center of the pie is raw, and the cheese slides around like a wet towel falling off a doorknob. She eats sitting across the table from her grandmother while Gordon sleeps in his recliner, his empty plate on his lap. Her grandmother splashes some orange juice into the clear liquid in her cup.
“If that’s vodka, I’ll take some,” Valerie says.
Her grandmother gets up and yanks a Dixie cup from the dispenser silo beside the sink. She opens the freezer and grabs a frosty bottle of Smirnoff.
“Now, how about that man of yours? Isn’t it time you think about marriage and children?” she says, pouring vodka into the paper cup, splashing some down the side. She was a little drunk. “In my time, you’d be called a spinster.”
“Great,” Valerie says, the vodka going down like something detonating in her chest.
“I know you think you do—but you don’t have forever.”
“No, I don’t think that,” Valerie says. She assembles the muscles of her mouth and jaw into a false smile. Warmth from the vodka radiates all the way to her fingertips.
“What? Why that sarcastic look?” her grandmother says.
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
Her grandmother laughs and sips her drink. “Oh boy, you don’t even know what you don’t know.”
Over in his chair, Gordon begins to snore. His cracked mouth produces a peculiar scraping sound, the sound of a stick dragging across concrete.
“Gordon’s grandchildren are wonderful, I think I already told you. They remind me of your mother when she was little. Did I ever tell you about her birth?”
“No, I don’t think you did.”
“Back then they gave us ether during labor, did you know that? It’s a gas. The husbands sat out in the waiting room, and the doctors put the women out like dogs.”
“Sounds archaic,” Valerie says.
“Well.” She pauses to cough again. “I am archaic, remember. He was a bastard, you know. Your grandfather?” She looks through the window to the woods, still barely visible in the violet light of a summer evening. She shudders dramatically.
“What happened with the birth?”
“Well, I was out. All the way out, like in outer space,” her grandmother says, gesturing up to the sky with her arm. Her eyes widen, bloodshot. “I had a vision. I had an awful vision. I can’t even describe it out loud, but I’ll never forget it. It haunts me.”
“What was the vision?”
“I told you,” she says. She coughs, removes her glasses and wipes the lenses on the scalloped edge of her nightgown. Lifting the gown exposes networks of varicose veins on her legs. “I can’t tell you. I alone am taking that vision to my grave.”
Valerie’s mother had always said that her grandmother’s mother had not loved her. She tried to have a son but kept spawning girl after girl. A year after her grandmother was born, she got her boy, the princeling, and the family’s attention turned overwhelmingly to him. The daughters raised themselves. Education was sparse. Her grandmother received zero notice about anything related to the body. The first time she got her period, she thought she was dying. She was in the bathtub, so the story went, and all of a sudden, wisps of blood floated in the water. Nobody had warned her, so she thought she was dying.
“I think it’s time for bed, Grandma,” Valerie says. Her eyelids are falling.
She heads into the guest bedroom, where a rifle hangs above the bed.
She dreams of the shed in the middle of the woods.
#
In the morning she rises to the smell of gas. An emergency, she thinks. Panic. A flash flood of norepinephrine. Then she remembers the factory. In these conditions, she wonders, how would you know if there was really a leak?
She goes into the kitchen, pours a cup of coffee, and exchanges a sullen nod with Gordon, who mutters complaints about making his own toast because her grandmother is sleeping in. His eyes stay trained on the television screen even during commercials. Erectile disfunction. Tom Selleck selling reverse mortgages. Golden Eagle Coins. Valerie doesn’t want to talk to Gordon. She wants to get on a train and watch the world roll for eight hours.
She steps outside for some fresh air and freezes at the sight of a family of deer standing in the middle of Gordon’s front lawn. A father, a mother, and a baby stand stock-still in triangular formation, each one forty feet from the other. She hears their breath, watches their legs quiver like the struck strings of an instrument. She takes a step closer. At once they bolt together into the woods, flying across the grass in a split second, quickly enough to have seemed to her like the ghosts that all of them soon will be.