Relationship Re-enactment
By Robert J. Patteson
On a hot day one summer I pulled my truck to a curb next to a post, to a piece of paper flapping. Tassels cut at the bottom of the page. Each tassel was a phone number and each tassel intact. Not a number torn from the paper meant that I wasn’t competing with nobody and I tore the paper from the post, the whole thing, and I called the number and spoke with a woman named Brit and she asked for my address and if I’d ever taken acting lessons and I said no. She didn’t have much to say besides that. So I told her I’d never been to jail and could prove it and she said it was too bad that I’d never been, but it also wasn’t all that important.
A day later the guy who runs my building hands me a package and it’s from Brit and I went inside and poured milk into my cat’s dish and watched her lap the milk while having a cigarette and I opened the package. It was a script that I was instructed to memorize before my first day of work and I would be playing the part of Brad. The script was typed and printed. My thumbs turned black memorizing that script.
--
Brit stood in the doorway of her house waiting for me. She was a young-looking forty, bottle blonde, smiling at me some big dental plan that covers everything. I parked my truck across the street so I wouldn’t drip oil on her cobblestone. She smiled to me the whole time I was walking up the walk.
When I held out my hand, she said Brad would never do that. “Am I going to be on camera,” I asked.
“Brad doesn’t like being filmed and it’s hard enough to get him to sit for a picture.”
She ushered me inside and the house smelled like home cooking and Pine-Sol. The house was clean. There were photos of Brit, ten years younger, with a man with red hair and I asked her if her husband knew anything about this and she told me to get into character. She dressed me in a cardigan and we took pictures in front of a cloud backdrop. She set the timer on the camera and ran to me and said through her teeth, “On the count of ten, I want you to look annoyed.”
Sitting in a stool in a clear raincoat, Brit soaked my light-brown hair red and twisted it in tinfoil and an hour later she washed my hair in her sink and we practiced our lines. “This chicken is cold and it tastes like rubber.”
“I’m not your fucking mother, Bradley.”
“I was at work, you know, working. You could stick this in the microwave two minutes and it wouldn’t kill you.”
Brit blow-dried my newly red hair and teased it with a comb and hairspray and she brought me to the kitchen and the table was set and there was grilled chicken and rice on my plate and she sat opposite to me and took a small bite of her chicken and dabbed the corner of her mouth and cleared her throat, “What’s wrong?”
“Are you married or something,” I said.
“No, you’re not getting it,” she said. She stood up and sat back down and took a small bite of her chicken and dabbed the corner of her mouth and cleared her throat. “What’s wrong?”
“This chicken is cold and tastes like rubber,” I realized.
--
Some nights were stay over nights and I was paid time and a half. Money for sleeping. A heaping bowl of cat food for Whiskers to get her through the night until I could feed her the next morning. At first, I thought of it as prostitution but there was never any sex involved. Making love was never in the script. Even on the night that Brit drank a bottle of wine and put on the fire and let down her hair and wore lace. That night she became drunk enough to improv and she pulled me to bed and pulled off my shirt.
“I could be your Brad,” I told her.
She handed me pyjamas and told me to stay on my side of the bed. “Periodically, I will roll to your side and maybe breath in your ear and maybe scratch your calf with my toes. That’s your cue to turn your shoulder and tell me to go to bed.”
“We can rewrite the pages,” I said.
Brit didn’t hear me because she was pretending to be asleep.
--
One night we were doing the chicken and rice bit and afterwards I was to take out the trash. This was the night that I’d messed up my lines. Exterior, front yard, evening: Brad storms out of the house and stops halfway up the drive and throws the trash to the curb. Brit’s line is, “The fuck, Brad.”
I held the bursting thing, flies buzzing, and my hands were slipping from chicken grease and Brit’s yelling from the door to hurry up and I turned around and told her I couldn’t do it.
She pulled her script and licked her thumb flipping the pages. “Exterior, front yard, evening,” she said.
Defiantly, I went to the garage and placed the garbage bag in the pail and rolled the pail to the curb.
--
My mother called one day before work. I was checking my roots in the mirror when my phone vibrated on the toilet seat.
“Anton, how are you? You haven’t called.”
“Work has been busy.”
“You met someone,” she said after a long pause.
“Sort of.”
“You either have or you haven’t,” she said. “Be assertive or you’ll be alone when you’re old. Ever since Christine left, you talk about everything in maybes. You’re not the same after her. You need to find someone to love and to know it enough to shout it from a mountain top.”
“Mom.”
“What’s wrong? You’re happy, aren’t you?”
“This woman, she wants me to be someone I’m not. She wants me to mistreat her, to throw her trash to the curb and spill it everywhere.”
“Your father is a dark-haired mechanic,” she answered. “My first boyfriend had dark hair. He was Italian and was going to school to become a mechanic. I had three other boyfriends before your father and they were all mechanics. I’ve got a thing for men who work with their hands.”
After the call, I applied the cream to the applicator and brushed it on my roots and fed the cat and had a shower and then drove my truck to Brit’s.
--
It was late and Brit and I were in bed. There was the sound of crickets. There was the sound of raccoons getting into the trash that was splayed by the curb.
“This is the season finale,” she said. “Action.”
“Would you shut off the light,” I said.
“I’m wearing this for you. Would you look at me?”
“I’ve had a long day.”
“Are you sleeping with someone else?”
“I’m tired,” I said.
“Jesus, Bradley, look at me. You fuck. Bradley, did you do it? Tell me the truth, goddamn it. You owe it. I’m human, would you look me in the fucking face?”
I turned to her and her lips were gummed with spit and snot and her eyes were soaked and her lashes were stuck together like the points on a cartoon sun.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said.
Brit furled her brow. She wiped her face and the tears stopped as if by magic and she asked me if I’d been practicing my lines.
“My name is Anton,” I said.
--
I got a job working in a warehouse. I tore a number from a post and was hired the same day. This was a week after I’d stopped answering Brit’s calls. The man at the warehouse had me come down and he sat me in his office and asked me about my last job and I told him I was the ghost of someone and that I had haunted a woman’s house. He said he didn’t understand and I told him it was a metaphor and that I was tired. He hired me anyways.
Now I’m the guy that punches tags into baseball caps. Sometimes I break boxes and feed them into the bailer. I don’t have a script but I still can’t say whatever it is I want to say. I tell the boss what he wants to hear. I show up for work at nine and leave at five. I’m told to keep my hair short so it doesn’t get caught anywhere.
My red hair is only on the tips now and there’s a guy at my work named Brad and whenever someone calls his name, I crane my head to look around.
--
Being an actor means putting yourself in other people’s shoes. You get in their clothes. You swap brains with them even, trying to feel what they feel.
The cat was taking a shit in her litter box while I laid myself on the bed staring at the closet mirror. I held up my cracked hands and wondered which one of my mother’s mechanics had inspired them and then I forced myself to cry in the way that Brit had done. My face was red and wet and I blubbered, “Jesus, Christine, would you look at me. I’m human. You owe it.”
--
I got an unexpected envelope from Brit, eight and a half by eleven, and I stuffed it in my trash and poured my ashes on it. Three days later, I was in the dumpster of my building looking for it. I guess I couldn’t sleep thinking the script could’ve had a happy ending. I would have rather been Brad than alone. I found nothing.
I showered and put on my cardigan and drove my truck to Brit’s and parked a ways down the street and the sun had dipped on her suburb casting long shadows of triangle rooftops and square chimneys on the road. I stayed on the opposite side of the road. I watched as Brit’s door swung open and a man stormed out and he looked flustered and it was hot and his light-brown hair was dripping at his sideburns. His teeth were showing and he was about to shot-put the bag to the curb and then stopped mid-rotation and turned to Brit who was slamming her finger on the pages of her script. She pointed to her garage. Then the man took a deep breath and lugged the bag to the garage and lifted the door and placed the bag neatly into the pail and rolled the pail to the curb.
Brit squinted her eyes trying to look my way and made binoculars with her hands to fight the sun. I ducked back the way I came and darted to my truck and drove home knowing I was nothing to her. The new guy was the new me, even though it was my picture in all the frames, on the mantle, on the bedside, looking annoyed in front of some cloud backdrop you get in school photos.
THE END