Home on the Range
By Tabitha Woolcott
Gin Club starts in twenty-seven minutes. Lisa is looking down at her eyebrows, which are no longer in their place along her angular brow-bone and instead lie scattershot beneath the bathroom mirror, like nicks of black biro in the granite.
The bottom half of her face is scrunched up sour-tight against the bulge of hysteria pushing at her lips; the top half of her face is red-raw where the tweezers have picked it into a near open wound, the kind of throbbing needlepoint pain which only an over-enthusiastic eyebrow plucking can procure. Lisa places her hands flat against the mirror, presses her fingers down until they fog up the glass – like she’s engaging in one of her old Satanic rituals – and allows herself to shed one tear.
It’s a hot, thick tear, and in the time it takes to track from the purpling top of her face to her sallow chin, she has to be over it. She flicks it from her puckered skin and reaches for the bathroom scissors. Gin Club starts in twenty-six minutes.
When she gets outside she already knows it’ll be ten minutes to Kendall’s, and she’ll need to stop for five at the CVS near the bus stop she avoids on the next block, because once she sat in gum there while wearing a Kate Spade skirt and if there’s one thing about Lisa, as a few of the rancid bitches at Gin Club might tell you, it’s that she clings tooth and nail to a goddamn grudge. And it’s ten minutes there and back to the CVS – that’s a fifteen-minute round trip for an eyebrow pencil, which she doesn’t have at home because her brows were once so naturally perfect – so she can redraw her face on the way to Kendall’s, clocking in at twenty-five minutes in total.
Lisa stands there on the porch for a moment, with the evening breeze lifting her long black coat around her ankles. Ruffling her new chunky bangs as if to say ha ha, look at you. Her sixteen-year-old Satanist self would have really dug Boston. The old red brick buildings she passes at a brisk trot lean haunted in the twilight, crammed close together like snaggled witch teeth. Her teenage self would not have dug Gin Club, which she attends for the same reason she stopped burning her hair with black dye, meekly requited with her natural dishwater blonde. The snake bites had to go so that dishwater Lisa, Negroni-sipping, working-world Lisa, could get a handle on things. Or the appearance of a handle on things. The additional bonus of Gin Club is the appearance of friends, which she can stick in Erin’s face now it’s been long enough and they’re both supposedly moving onward and outward following the Divorce.
“You don’t have a life outside of me. Are you paranoid?” Erin had said into her side of the mattress one night, back when they were still shopping for vacuum cleaners and thinking about installing a conservatory. Lisa hadn’t thought it then. But Erin had cheated, so maybe there’d been layers to that accusation all along.
Lisa still remembers standing over the two of them in the bathtub, under the fluorescent greenish light. The reflection from the tiles casting them all sickly and inhuman. Who’s paranoid now?
The trees at each streetcorner are tawny and sparse. It had been accent walls, first – she’s renting her post-divorce pad but it had seemed so sleek, so composed, to have one of the kitchen walls in charcoal grey. But she’d painted on until the whole room was dark, claustrophobic with her fervour. Once she’d tried doing oil pastels of the Charles River, but soon found she couldn’t figure out where to stop shading until the colours drained into one murky basin. Now the eyebrows. She starts things, sees them through. Can’t bring herself to stop.
She rounds the corner and the bus stop comes into sight, but she’s not thinking about gum on her Kate Spade or oil pastels or Erin because the CVS is gone and it’s actually startled her racing brain into something close to silence. It had been there, she’s sure, because the hexagonal storefront with its corporate automatic doors remains in place. Only now the racks of waxy toiletries are gone, and the windows glow hot-bright with an assortment of ornate lamps. Lamps. One of those sly and gorgeously inconvenient closings, the silent migration of an essential service you’d been idiotically taking for granted all the damn time, usually substituted by something twee and useless. Who the hell needs a local pharmacy, anyway? We’ll all have lamps! Lisa comes closer, brings her stinging forehead to the plexiglass, and lets out a short strangled sound.
Idling lopsidedly behind the new counter is Cowboy. And he’s wearing her favourite shirt.
The shirt, in Lisa’s mind, deserves a polite introduction – lilac, a pointed yoke edged with subtle, simple lace, pearl-bead buttons down the centre. Cowboy does not. He’s just the family fuck-up, her little brother, the one she hasn’t seen in two years since he indirectly but certainly ended her marriage. He floats behind the counter like he’s tethered to nothing, because he isn’t.
Cowboy is nothing, has nothing. Except Lisa’s favourite shirt. God. God. Gin Club starts in twenty-one minutes, but her browbone is smarting, and she wants her fucking shirt back.
So she marches into the ex-CVS, brings the sides of her palms down on the counter and says as much.
“Hey! I want my fucking shirt back!”
Cowboy’s long white face is briefly startled, only his expressions have never settled like they do on other people – he’s semi-circle browed with downturned flapper-girl eyes, looks perpetually sleepy. He has one of those faces which must age yet doesn’t seem to, appears to her at 30 the same way it did at 7.
He spits out words like they’re pips, drawn-out and drawling. “This isn’t even your shirt, dipshit.”
“Yes it is!” Lisa clenches, then straightens up to glare at him better. “What are you doing here?”
“I work here, or something. Selling the lamps.”
There are no other customers. The store’s space is tight and long, like a genie’s cavern filled with the golden light of aged bulbs. It’s bright and intense and it makes Lisa even wilder.
“Here, genius. In Boston. Wearing my shirt.”
Cowboy shrugs, flat. “Can we talk about you instead?”
He’s disinterested. That sums it up, really – he’s always been disinterested, in life, in work, in doing any of the things you’re supposed to do to keep afloat. Lisa thinks a fuck-up should at least have the courtesy to be funny. Not that he’s much your regular fuck-up – no drugs, prison, kids scattered across the Midwest. Just a guy who used to be smart and likeable, went to art school and talked big avant-garde game, now hangs dully in the air like he’s living on pause. Like an old Tiffany lamp with no lightbulb in it.
Lisa thinks of herself as the put-together sibling, though she doesn’t fit that particular bill comfortably herself. Divorced, back to renting, working a good job with healthcare yet still gradually turning her house into one big accent wall. But Lisa, the way she sees it, has always strived – to be settled, happy, to have something to be proud of. Even when she was Goth. And she’d had it, for a little while. Cowboy drifts.
Gin Club starts in seventeen minutes. “I’ve decided I don’t want to catch up, actually. Give me my shirt.”
“It isn’t yours,” says Cowboy, his eyes narrowing into two twin folds. “It isn’t. I got it last month at Goodwill, or something. It’s pink, see?” He stretches out his forearm a little. “Yours was kinda purple.”
Lisa leans closer, and it’s hard to see in the yellowy vintage light so Cowboy moves his sleeve under a fluorescent-bulbed gooseneck lamp. It’s a gentle pink.
“Must be the same brand, or something.” He shrugs again. “You still wanna kill me?”
She forces herself steady over the shirt. His sallow-skinned wrist under the greenish fluorescence recalls her, achingly, to the real reason she’s mad at him. Lisa’s forehead throbs.
“I have to go,” she grits. “Fucking lights are gonna give me a migraine.”
The lights go out.
Lisa drops her mouth, but spins on her heel and turns to the automatic CVS doors anyway. They don’t open. She reels back to the counter, to Cowboy, his shape just visible in the sudden dark.
“Power went out, or something,” he says, nonchalant. Then: “Kinda spooky.”
Lisa takes her lip between her incisors, brings the words out slowly. “If I’m late to Gin Club because of this, I really will never speak to you again.”
And Cowboy, to his credit, does start to look a little reproachful. Or his faint outline does. “It’s… there’s a back door, for the garbage. And keys.” He sucks his teeth, twirls out his fingers at the dim-lit darkness of the store before him. “But I don’t know where I put them.”
“Why are you like this?” Lisa sears, before she can help herself. “I’m gonna look for it. I have to go.”
She drops to her knees and scrabbles around on the remaining drugstore tiles, making a real show of it so he feels he’s got her in a panic. Cowboy lingers behind the counter.
“I’m gonna wait for my eyes to adjust. And then I’ll find it easier. Or something.”
“Or something,” Lisa grits, and keeps crawling. If he were really a cowboy, she thinks, they’d call him a yellow-belly. The image of him looking pathetic in a Stetson, being barred entrance to a dusty macho saloon, is extremely gratifying.
His real name is Marlon, but he’s only ever been Cowboy, the same way she’s always been just Lisa. If anything they’d both been golden children, polite and academic and promising, only Lisa had tamely rebelled with eccentric eyeliner while Cowboy rejected Brown for a small art college in Wichita. He’d gotten through his late teens by being better read than everyone around him, then slept through his twenties and awoke aged 30 to find his peers had read him out of the water. In the meantime, Lisa had lived, got married – hell, they’d been thumbing through IVF pamphlets, for a good while – and yet people seemed perpetually fascinated with Cowboy. They followed his antics with their fingers like the pages of a comic book. She’d resented him long before she had an outward reason to.
But as kids they’d been close, real close. Their Kansas hometown had been a line of dried-out farms and people, their parents often somewhere at the end of a long leash, but they’d held out as the odd sensitive ones together. Even though he’d been safe by proxy of gender and heterosexuality, suckled and supported up to and through his decade of nothingness while Lisa languished in her lived-life, alone – when they were young he’d been good old Cowboy.
“I think it’s really shitty that you came in here just to yell at me,” says Cowboy from somewhere in the darkness. It’s weird for him to start with this, but maybe the power outage means there’s a free-for-all. Martial Law, and everything. “I know the shirt was an excuse to do that, so don’t start. It’s been three and a half years. I got a job.”
He says it in a tone that all but spells it out: I’ve moved on. Have you? As if it’s his to move on from.
“She got the house,” says Lisa, hot enough to singe the floor. “Did you know that? She cheated, and she got the house. Don’t marry a goddamn divorce lawyer.” Oh, the irony. Losing the house to your divorce lawyer ex-wife. Trapped amongst vintage lamps during a power outage with your stupid brother. “And I get to yell at you because you brought Sylvie over, and you thought it would be funny, and I don’t care how anyone else sees it. It’s your fault. But whatever. Congrats on your closing shift at the lighting store.”
Sylvie was Erin’s silvery ex from college. She’d befriended Cowboy at some exhibition gig during his nothing years and he’d brought her over for Erin’s birthday. There was never any goddamn conservatory, not after that. And through the bad meat of the afterwards, when her homeless heart hung in space between ribs like rotten picket fences, Cowboy had offered nothing. He’d clicked his heels, gone back to Kansas.
“It’s your fault,” says Lisa again, and it’s meant to achieve something this time. But it doesn’t. Cowboy doesn’t get loud or argue back. He just stands there in the dark.
“I planned out this whole apology,” he starts instead. Purses his lips. “Lisa.”
Her fingers pass over the key, but she doesn’t say anything.
“Mom’s worried. Said you still won’t talk about anything else.”
“She can talk to you, then. You’re the fucking favourite.” Lisa is nobody’s favourite. Above her, Cowboy’s mouth is a straight-across line.
“I didn’t know, Lisa. Really. I didn’t know Sylvie was her ex. But I’m saying sorry anyway, okay?”
His voice. Like he’s apprehending a wild animal. Like she’s the one at rock bottom, scrabbling around on the tiles for a key.
“Mom was right,” says Cowboy, sadly. “You’re so angry.”
“Mom doesn’t know shit.”
“She’s trying. And I called and called.”
The darkness shifts and suddenly Lisa is seeing oil pastels, over-smudged and shaded into a murky blur.
“I’m trying to get a hold on it.”
She gets to her feet, timid. Tender. Holds the key out in her palm, through a dim her vision hasn’t quite adjusted to.
They go out.
In the alley, Lisa gasps. Spinning across the concrete is an intense psychedelic pattern of stubbed cigarettes, lined up like dominos, meticulous and intentional.
“This was you?”
Cowboy slides down the brick wall, pats the place next to him on the backstep. “I’m getting a hold on it.”
Lisa descends. Boston won’t sit silent, and a distant ambulance trills.
“Kathy, who runs this place, she’s old. Sorta crazy. But I’ve got a room upstairs I’m paying for. What happens at Gin Club?”
Lisa blinks. “We try all these nice gins. It’s nice.”
She thinks about Cowboy living just a block away. About Cowboy, channelling art school into cigarette sculptures, worrying about her. About Erin and Sylvie, somewhere else in the city, shopping for vacuums. All while she’s been rolling herself up in her anger, painting desperate walls to draw it out. Fetishising it, like Cowboy with his empty sadness.
She thinks about Kansas, about nodding golden fields and sky. And sitting small on the porch at twilight with her little brother, listening to the put-put-put of tractors turning themselves in. About white Baptist churches and pitchers of lemonade, about some big something that might’ve made two golden promises go wrong.
“What happened to your eyebrows?”
Cowboy is frowning, the extra inch of forehead they share providing room for an additional wrinkle.
Lisa leans her shoulder into his. ‘Pretend we’re on Daddy’s porch right now, looking out over the West Field.’ Pretend we’re a lonesome cowboy and trigger-happy sheriff. We’re not so different, you and I.
“I can’t pretend,” says Cowboy. “I make people call me Marlon now. Cause I feel like I’m a fuck-up, or something.”
“Or something,” says Lisa.
In his moonlight, her pastures seem so blue.
Tabitha Woolcott is a British student studying abroad at UNC for the year. She loves moto boots, Donald Fagen and Sex and the City.