THE ANTS

 

Olga seems less interested in greeting Pina than in scoping out Vince’s condo. She takes herself on a little walking tour of the front room. Pina wants to tell her not to touch anything, that they need to keep their social distance, but instead she’s quiet, just like one of her clients, wondering why she invited her old friend up here in the first place.

Olga saunters onto the deck. The galvanized tub filled of basils and peppers takes her by surprise.

“Wow, Pina, is it your gardening?”
“I’d hardly call it gardening. I do best with minimalist efforts.”
“At least you know yourself, Pina.”
“That’s highly questionable.”

Olga bends over the rail to have a look. “Who has the lovely roses down here?”

“That’s Sylvie. We’re becoming friends, of sorts. She’s very smart, and can be comfortable like a good aunt. She actually reminds me of my mother sometimes. Pina brings her voice down to a measured breath. “She has surprisingly good ears for somebody her age. She gets a little testy sometimes but she gives very good advice.”

Olga laughs and Pina drops a finger over her lips to remind her friend to keep on the quiet side. “As I remember, “ Olga says in an exaggerated whisper that’s more like a hiss, “you don’t take people’s advice well. How could an old woman advise you? What kind of advice has she given you?”

“Nothing comes to mind off the top of my head.” In fact, after Sylvie proclaimed Charlie kind and relayed her mother’s advice about kind men, she asked Pina for a piece of advice. She thought it sweet, the way Sylvie asked: “Please, honey, tell me how to get rid of the ants in my living room. I’ve got a trail of them coming in from the yard. I keep shooting Parsley Plus at them, but it’s like the story of civilization, Pina, the dead are simply followed by the living.”

Pina suggests to Olga that they sit out on the deck where she’s positioned two chairs at appropriate distance. She whipped up a pitcher of margaritas in advance. Now she salts the rims of a couple tall glasses, fills them and floats lime slices.

“Do you want us to get sloshed, Pina?”
“Drink at your own risk, darling.”
“Do we have to whisper the whole time out here?”
“Don’t worry about it.”

They clink glasses. “Are we supposed to do that, Pina? Is that Covid safe?” Olga spills a little of her drink on her white peddle pushers as she brings the glass to her lips.

“God dog, Olga, if you’re spilling before you’ve even drunk any you’re in a bad way.”

Olga wrinkles her nose in response, and then takes a long careful sip.

“Olga, I’ve forgotten, have you been up here to the condo beside that time with Janice and Molly when everybody got super loaded on wine and Janice made us watch Porn Hub?”
“Don’t you remember, you and Vince had me up for a weekend a couple of years ago? I slept on the futon in the second bedroom.”

Pina forces a smile. Of course she remembers. Vince blasted jazz and quoted poetry all night; they all drank way too much. Vince became sloppy and lascivious. He wanted to go to bed with both of them. He practically shoved his tongue down Olga’s throat. It was hard to say how much Olga encouraged him, but she and Olga managed to hold Vince off, until he mixed himself a chemical cocktail that knocked him out. For all she knows, Vince snuck into the second bedroom in the middle of the night and fucked her.

Olga has cut her hair short since she last saw her. With her deep dimples and bright green eyes, she appears girlish, which is curious for a woman in her early fifties. But somehow it all goes along with Olga’s childish lisp. Pina used to tell her that she could help with the lisp, help her find another placement for her tongue and show her exercises that would reinforce it, but Olga always demurred. The lisp had become part of her personality. Some people thought it was cute.

“Wow, I like your hair, Olga,” she says, even though she’s not sure that she does.
“It’s one less thing that I have to care for. I’m really in this mode now of shedding everything I can. It’s like this weird trip I’m going through due to the Covid, because who knows when I might end up dead? I don’t want to leave a bunch of crap behind.”
“You really think about that, Olga?”
“Damn straight. I’m reminded of my mother warning me to change my underwear every day because a respectable girl doesn’t want to be found in dirty underwear if she dies in a crash. I used to think, who the fuck is going to check my underwear if I’m killed in a crash?”
“So, did you change it every day?” Pina asks.
“Yep, always did, always do. The great mother still has a lot of influence. You never met her did you, Pina? She also had a lisp. I think I come from a long line of lispers.” She laughs and flaunts her flawed sibilance with a sputter of s’s and z’s.
“Anyway, I’m like liquidating my shit right and left. Books, pots and pans I never use, chipped dishes, paintings I made when I was in grad school, even my giant coleus plant, which I’ve had since before my divorce with Robert. I got sick of looking at the motherfucker.”

Who, Pina wants to ask, the coleus or Robert? She remembers Robert, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple. He was a financial analyst or an investment banker, some damn job that made a shitload of money. She never understood what Olga saw in him, except the money. Robert was a Libertarian, who’d get heated easily on a couple of drinks and rail on humorlessly about abolishing the IRS and eliminating the “welfare state.” Pina remembers sitting with Marco in Olga and Robert’s Russian Hill apartment during one of Robert’s performances. Olga was fairly deft at getting him to quiet down, but she remembers Marco, at the end of the evening as they walked up the street to their car, asking how Olga could stand her husband. She was married to Robert for nearly twenty years, and she’s lived years now on alimony and whatever she makes teaching yoga.

“Tell me something, Pina, if it’s not too personal. Do you ever wish you had children?”
“To bring into this world?”
“Never?”
“Only after Marco died. I wished I’d had a little Marco. How about you?”
“Yes, I think about it a lot. There’s no way I was going to get pregnant with Robert—end up with a little Libertarian running around. And after Robert my biological clock . . .”

Both Olga and Pina stand and stamp their feet in tempo with each other. “My biological clock is ticking like this,” they call in unison, doing their best to approximate Marisa Tomei’s Brooklyn brogue in “My Cousin Vinnie,” a film they watched together more than once, back in the day. Pina wonders how closely Sylvie is listening to their song and dance.

Seated again, Olga takes a long sip of her margarita and then lowers her head. “Here we are, two barren women in our fifties.”
“That’s how you feel, Olga, like a barren woman?”
“I wake up some mornings and feel very empty. It’s not the same for you, Pina. You have a man, two men.”

Pina has no response. She’s never thought of herself as being barren. It strikes her as a pejorative term along the lines of old maid. She made the choice not to have children. It wasn’t something that did or didn’t happen to her, but she doesn’t want to share her feelings about this with Olga. “That must be very difficult,” is all she manages to say.

Olga’s holds out her glass: “How about a refill, Pina?”

Pina fills her friend’s glass to the very top.

“What about you, aren’t you going to have another, Pina?”
“I’m trying to cut back.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. The world’s coming to an end and you’re on the wagon. So you made the pitcher of margaritas just to get me soused?”

 

After being introduced to Olga, it’s Roscoe that flirts with her rather than Charlie.

“Nice to meet you, Olga,” he yelps, his nasal voice, rising and falling dramatically. “Olga is a Russian name, isn’t it?”
“Oh my God,” Olga says. She’s more than a little tipsy and drops both her hands over her eyes. Olga peeks at Pina and whispers, “He doesn’t even have a lisp.”

Pina has gotten used to Roscoe’s new bursts of language. Charlie has developed ways of cuing the parrot and teaching him scripts and, now that she hears Roscoe every day, these phrases strike her as wooden and disembodied.

“Ask her again, Roscoe,” Charlie prompts.
“Again,” Roscoe repeats, his trained brain kicking into action. “Olga is a Russian name, isn’t it?”

Olga bursts into a loud spasm of bright laughter, which takes her a moment to corral. “It actually derives from the Old Norse,” she says, showing off her lisp.

Roscoe looks stumped. Norse is not a word he’s been programmed to respond to.

“Shall we take our leave of Roscoe and have some lunch now?” asks Charlie.
“Good idea,” Pina says. Her tolerance for the Roscoe project has waned over the last weeks.
After a hiccup and a spurt of laughter, Olga says, “Nice to meet you, Roscoe.”
“El gusto es mio,” Roscoe replies in a sing-songy tremolo.
Charlie smiles at his parrot before turning to Olga. “We’re just starting out on Spanish.”

 

Pina’s phone rings during lunch. It’s an unfamiliar San Francisco number so she doesn’t answer it. When a call comes from the same number five minutes later she excuses herself from the table. It could be Vince on somebody else’s phone, for all she knows. She walks out to Charlie’s deck and answers.

“Hello, is this Pina?”
“Yes, this is she.”
“This is Andre, Sylvie’s son. She gave me your number. She tells me you’ve been very kind to her.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“I don’t know. Have you seen her today?”
“No, we had a nice conversation yesterday.”
“I haven’t been able to get in touch with her, either last night or this morning.”

Pina feels tightness gripping her chest; her breathing quickly become shallower. No, she thinks, not an asthma attack. She tells herself to stay calm.

“I wonder if you would mind checking on her? I’d drive up myself, but my wife is away and I’m alone with three kids. There’s a key to the front door under the welcome mat.”
“Alright,” she says, breathless. “I’ll call you back. I’m not home; it might take me a little while to get over there.”

Pina manages to calm herself, but wants her rescue inhaler. She pictures where she left it, in the cabinet under the sink in the main bathroom. She hadn’t used one for years, and recently got a new one. She even forced herself to inhale some of a metered dose before driving up from the city. The inhaler worked and there were quite a number of remaining doses.

“I need to get something back at my place,” she says as she walks purposely past Charlie and Olga.
“Is everything okay?” Charlie asks.

She keeps walking toward the door. “Back in a flash,” she says over her shoulder, knowing full well that she won’t be. Down the steps, she holds tightly on to the railing, stepping as slowly as an octogenarian. Thankfully, Charlie hasn’t opened the door to look after her.

On the way across the grounds to Vince’s condo, she counts very slowly. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. This used to be her routine when the asthma plagued her regularly. She never counted past eight and doesn’t try it now.

Pina stands a distance from Sylvie’s door and gazes at the welcome mat under which the key should be. First she needs her inhaler. She considers the steps up to the condo and begins the count again.

The inhaler is exactly where she pictured it. Within five minutes she feels the medicine work, the muscles in her airways begin to relax, and yet the prospect of going back down the stairs and looking in on Sylvie, dead or alive, is daunting. Her resistance to asking Charlie to join her is just her same old bullshit need to assert her independence at all costs. Who cares about that now? She taps Charlie’s number. She should tell him that he’s now the first name on her favorite’s list.

“Charlie, can you come by my place quickly?
“Sure, sure. Are you okay?”
“Just come, and bring your mask and some gloves for both of us.”
“Roger. And Olga?”
“Leave her with Roscoe. Tell her to take a tour of Arrow Wilk’s paintings and your wrestling masks.”

Pina goes slowly back down the stairs. She’s breathing easier now. She has Sylvie’s key in her hand by the time Charlie arrives, masked and gloved. He hands her a matching pair of purple gloves. As she slips on her gloves, she has a rogue thought—she’d like to play patty-cake with Charlie in purple gloves—but finally forces herself back to the present.

“I’m afraid Sylvie may have done the deed. That was her son on the phone; he hasn’t been able to get in touch with her. I think it’s safe to go in here. Sylvie hasn’t been out of this place in months. She has all her food and meals delivered.”

She and Charlie look warily at each other and then he grabs her hand and holds it a minute. He is a kind man. She knocks on the door, waits, and knocks again. Now she hands the key to Charlie. It is a way of asking for help. She stands behind him as he opens the door.

“Stay back,” he barks, and that is exactly what she does. He repeats his order and adds, “I’ll tell you when the coast is clear.”

She stands in the small hallway just inside the door. Charlie steps deliberately toward the main room. In a cracked voice, he calls, “She’s here . . . dead. You don’t have to see this. You better not see this.”

“Better not,” she mutters. Pina’s lightheaded, but her shortness of breath hasn’t returned. Still she pulls out her inhaler and honks on it. And then there was Sylvie. She sees her standing in her creamy purple blouse with the black scarab, her wedge of white hair, once symbolic of her alacrity, a bit disheveled with the times.

Pina creeps, one sideways-step after another, to the main room.

Charlie hears her. “Better not, Pina.”

She hasn’t a choice. “Oh my God!” Sylvie is on the floor. The way she’s laying on her side, Pina can only see one of her eyes. A shallow pool of blood has formed beside her head and a thick trail of ants is visiting.

“I didn’t want you to see, Pina.”
“Had to.”
“I’ve tried to keep the ants away from her. I think we should lay something over her.”

Pina grabs a towel from the linen closet and comes close to Sylvie for a moment, just getting a quick glimpse—a cubist profile of Sylvie—before Charlie stretches the towel over her head.

“I don’t think she killed herself,” he says. “Can’t see how she could have.”

There’s a tall overturned stool not far from her body and a spray bottle of kitchen and bathroom cleaner close by.

“You think it’s an accident with the stool?”
“Or a heart attack.”

Pina notices the civilization of ants coming down the wall in two rows. “She was up on the stool firing Parsley Plus at the ants when she tipped over.”

“I guess it was her time,” Charlie says.

Pina bows her head. She hardly knew the woman. They may have become good friends in a post-plague world.

Charlie comes over and holds her. Finally, she lets herself cry. In a couple of minutes Pina steps clear of Charlie’s embrace. “I need to call Sylvie’s son. Why don’t you go tell Olga what’s happened. I’m going to stay with Sylvie until her son arrives.”