Lurkers by Sandi Tan

Author:Sandi Tan [Tan, Sandi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2020-12-20T19:30:13+00:00

– 10 –

THE SICK ROSE

Mary-Sue had come a long way since the days she dreamt of outrunning the world on a pogo stick and flipping off her legions of doubters. She knew people still flung adjectives like “kooky,” “screwy” and “desperate” behind her back—but she learned to put her fists away. Over the years, this tolerance evolved into indifference, and as she stopped fighting back, she stopped hurting.

She grew to like her own company. It wasn’t the kind of loneliness she had experienced among the ascetics in Humboldt long ago, but the solitude of voluntary singlehood. Any non-asshole who entered into her orbit was gravy. After all, you could buy single-serving frozen pizzas these days, with all kinds of toppings. If she wanted to dine out, there was no dread in it; no longer did waiters throw pitiful looks at lone women. She always tipped well. There were also things called DVDs if she didn’t feel like going to an R-rated movie by herself.

Florida suited her. She was glad she had the opportunity to discover this for herself. It wasn’t only the immigrants and migrants, she realized, who roamed around America looking for a place to call home, it was everybody. And it was this restless wandering, this endless self-creation, that made this country dynamite. The alternative, she supposed, was to calcify into some kind of stupefied Amish tree stump, doomed to have happiness motor right by.

At sixty-six, after the end of what had admittedly been an abnormally long adolescence, Mary-Sue emerged a confident, independent woman. She might have been alone but she was no longer lonely. Her dear Kate still meant the world to her, of course, but as hard as it was at first to accept, it was healthier for them to be apart—Kate was probably happier, too, without her hanging around. Whoever said no man was an island obviously wasn’t speaking about women. Women were superb at being by themselves . . .

Forgetting to return a phone call wouldn’t have been strange for most people, but this was Mary-Sue, who, whenever Kate called, always sounded like she’d leapt for the phone from a hundred yards away.

Scenarios ran through Kate’s head, all unpleasant: Mary-Sue, her hip broken on those slippery back porch steps, writhing in pain as raccoons came by and mauled her; rifle-toting Cuban bandits making her compound the base camp for their drug-smuggling empire; migrant-worker thieves who, when caught climbing in the window by Mary-Sue, hacked her head off in cold blood. The world being what it was, even the prosaic worries were wearisome—coyotes, whiplash, twisters, aneurysms. Could she have been planning an expedition, an elopement or a suicide?

It wouldn’t have been out of character for Mary-Sue to slip, unannounced, out of this world. Kate was well acquainted with the cussed, childish way her mother insisted on crafting her own fate and woe betide anyone who got in the way of her narrative. She’d never consulted Kate on the move to Florida—she said she was going

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