SIM by Alicia Oltuski
The people who lived in the apartment below ours, she was an academic and he was migraine- prone, and those were two of the reasons they didn’t like my mother, who favored classic rock music in the evenings. The other was that she’d called the police on them once when he threw his wife at her nightstand, or the nightstand at his wife. Their daughter was my friend. I was only allowed at their apartment when my mother was desperate for what she called alone time, but wasn’t; otherwise, the girl came to me. They’d named her Alexandra but seemed to have forgotten, and called her Sim instead. When we were at Sim’s, we had a series of games we played, all of which utilized the half dozen decorative rugs in their home that were the harvest of Sim’s father’s carpet store on Spring Street. (This was another reason they didn’t like my mother; it was Sim’s father’s carpeting, in particular, that she’d rejected. He’d tried to sell her a pair of matching rugs when we moved in, first by insisting we were too loud, then by insisting they were too beautiful.) In one of our games, you could win by rolling yourself up in the distressed arabesque rug that covered Sim’s bedroom floor. In another, you won if you were the first to pull a green thread from the cluster of multicolor tassels that hung off the living room carpet – the largest in their home, and the one which Sim’s mother always seemed to sidestep if she could. Because of our pulling at it, the color balance of the rug’s tassels had shifted and sometimes, we hypothesized that Sim’s father noticed and was planning his revenge, but we kept plucking the green threads, because that was the way the game went. Most of our games could only be played at Sim’s home, due to the rugs. The only game we/ Sim could think of that did not involve her father’s inventory was getting naked and riding our building’s elevator three flights down and back up before anyone saw you. Sim kept a tally of who was winning the games in a notebook. Whoever won at the end would get a prize, but only she knew the prize, and only she knew what constituted the end.
The end was not when our building’s superintendent caught Sim naked in the elevator one day. As she relayed it, he just said to her, “It’s not a whorehouse, this,” but also brushed past her breast on his way out. Meanwhile, I rode the second elevator, alone and cold, but more alone than cold. It remained a fantasy of mine years later for Mr. Abbott to see me naked, but when I came back to Maryland to move my mother out of that same building after I finished a later- life PhD, he came to say goodbye, and it occurred to me that, actually, I hated him, I rather wanted to kill him; imagine if it had been me.
In September Sim’s father’s store came home with him altogether, when his business went under. He laid them out, the majority of the carpets in his study. They covered the entirety of the floor, and were piled so high, you had to climb into the room. Often, after a phone call, he would kneel outside the threshold of the door, sorting through his stock by rolling down a corner of each rug, as though sifting through the pages of a book. Then he would call to Sim and her mother (and consequently to me) to drag out the chosen inventory, while he kept the rugs above it anchored inside the room by squatting down on them, his fists and feet pinned to the mound. The latter expended visible effort, Sim’s father driving his own weight through the carpets and into the floor. When we got out the rug, we would roll it and he would tie it up, like hunted meat, and add it onto his dolly to take out to his car. Sometimes, after a day or two – one time, a week – the carpet might come back, and he would return it to the top of the pile on his own and then, when he had gone to bed or left the apartment, Sim’s mother would perform a lesser version of his original toil to cover the returned item with whatever rug lay beneath it, presumably so her husband could more easily forget it. I understood the equation: if the carpet selling went well, he was less dangerous.
My mother had started requiring more alone time that summer, she had started seeing a man named Keith, so I was there with greater and greater frequency over the next few months, learning the details of their routine. It had been a long while since she’d called the police on them.
By November, we’d depleted the living room rug’s green tassels, and it changed the entire impression Sim’s apartment left on me when I visited. The place looked oranger, and I felt compelled to stay long every time I went, even when my mother’s apartment was empty, or she was alone. She had also stopped asking me, every time I returned, whether anything had happened, partially because nothing had happened in so long and partially, I think, because she didn’t want an answer that would necessitate change. (And nothing had ever happened to me, even when something happened at Sim’s house.) But if I said that he’d taken a knife and carved BITCH into the parquet inside the master bedroom (which he had, Sim showed me, and which I didn’t say), or that sometimes, upon my entering, I’d find a shattered object somewhere in the room that had so recently been shattered, it hadn’t yet been taken to the trash, then she would have had to forbid me from going there. It wasn’t Keith, really. I don’t think it was sex – there was sex, but it wasn’t sex that made her not want me there. It wasn’t me either. By far, the simplest way to put it would be that our quarters were very close – mine and my mother’s, Sim and her family’s – and that some of us needed to roam, or else we would rage.
We had somehow outgrown the need to tempt fate with the elevator, but not the need to play with the carpets when her father was gone. Maybe they were all one game, and the game was to see what men would do to us. We wrote curse words onto the bottom side of the entry runner, shaved splinters off the side of the steps to the trash room and dispersed them in the psychedelic- patterned rug that bore the weight of her parents’ bed, on her father’s side.
He was working at a restaurant down Cedar, running orders to law offices that had recently discovered our nominal section of the commuter rail line and had sprouted outposts. He was still trying to sell the rugs, at night, in a wholesale dump. We heard him on the phone, describing their qualities, then their quantities, and, finally, their price. Sometimes, people would come over to their apartment to look, and Sim’s father would stand outside the study while they sifted. I liked to be there when they came to look at the rugs. It felt like showing off – even though what I was showing off was not mine – in the way I had felt every time I saw Mr. Abbott after his elevator ride with Sim. I didn’t realize that when the rugs were gone, she would be, too.
It took almost a month for someone to make an offer. Sim’s father was out at work when she came. Sim’s mother was in the bedroom, in the far corner of the bed where I sometimes spied her if Sim ever opened the door to say we were leaving, and where she looked like a pile of laundry with hair and teeth. We left now, we went out. We had bored of our building; we realized it stank. Sometimes, when I got home from school, she was already waiting outside for me in front of our building (hers was closer), and we’d walk to the park and sit on a bench and Sim would tell me who was smoking what. That day, though, we were home, because Sim’s mother had complained that we always left.– and she wasn’t wrong, and she also wasn’t wrong to want us there when he came home from work, and Sim knew this – it was she who told me – but the building stank and now that we were older, we hated to tolerate anything we didn’t have to.
The buyer, when we opened the door for her, asked for Sim’s father, but Sim just said, “I’ll show you where the rugs are.” By this time, they’d all been rolled up and leaned against the wall of the study, which, I would learn later in life – the first time I’d enter a real rug store – was how everyone else did it. The rugs were propped two scrolls deep, and looked like they were closing in on her in the small room. She bent each one back and took a picture with a camera she’d brought out of her bag.
“Are there any others?” she asked, wandering into the living room.
Sim pointed at the ground beneath us. We were standing on the erstwhile green- tasseled rug. The woman aimed her camera down.
“And then there’s this,” said Sim, pointing to the one beneath her father’s armchair, but there was a shattered lamp in the corner behind the chair and some of the glass had gotten stuck in the carpet, and the buyer did not photograph that rug.
I could see Sim thinking of other rugs to show the buyer, and I could see the buyer looking around the apartment, not at the rugs: at the shattered lamp, at the toaster oven plugged into the outlet beside the TV; at the pile of their winter coats on the floor, next to the couch. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Mm- hm,” said Sim.
The buyer was straining to see into the bedroom through the gap we left when we forgot to close the door all the way. “Is that your mother?” she asked Sim.
“She’s resting.”
“Are you sure?” said the buyer.
I watched to see what Sim would say. I wondered if the buyer thought Sim was my older sister, or if she knew I didn’t live there.
“How long until your father gets back?” said the buyer.
“I don’t know.”
The woman handed Sim the camera. “Go take a picture of her face. I can send the film to you,” she said, looking at me. Then I knew she knew we weren’t sisters.
“What about the carpets?” asked Sim.
But the woman ignored the question. She had me write down my address on her inventory list. I remember wondering, despite my nerves, what she thought of my handwriting. Sim took the camera and came back with it a moment later. When the buyer left, Sim said I should go, too.
My mother was breaking up with Keith over the phone because he hadn’t known the Berlin Wall had come down. I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t known, either. On Saturday morning, she offered to make me breakfast, but I didn’t want her breakfast. I tried to see if Sim wanted to go out. She was babysitting her mother until her father left to go to a game. My mother was trying to figure out more about the Berlin Wall. She’d called a friend who was married to a Russian in the hopes of disambiguating and was on the phone taking notes when Sim came upstairs to get me. I held the door for Sim, but she said she’d wait in the hallway. Pulling aside her jacket, she flashed a knife.
I followed her downstairs and into the public garage two blocks north of our building, where I had never been; my mother hadn’t owned a car since before I was born. I thought that maybe we would rob someone – that she would rob someone and that I would stand there and watch.
“My dad loaded the truck this morning,” Sim said, as we approached a truck. I had never seen the truck, but neither had it occurred to me, as it should have, that there must have been one.
“She didn’t ever send the pictures?” Sim asked me. I think often about whether it was a postal error or my handwriting that prevented the photos from arriving (they never did), or if the woman just forgot about Sim.
“She could, still,” I said. I think I said that because of the presence of the knife.
It had been two weeks, and another buyer came by, a warehouse rep from Anne Arundel. Sim’s dad was home and Sim’s mom stayed in her room and the package that was negotiated – gutlessly, according to Sim – included the transport of the rugs by their owner on Sunday morning.
Sim lifted herself onto the back of the truck and then took out her knife. I suddenly wished I’d brought a knife, even though I didn’t know what she was going to do with it, and even though I knew that whatever she did, I couldn’t do.
He was driving them the next day. We were going to ruin everything for him, she said. By everything, she meant the rugs. We couldn’t cut the outer bands, Sim said, otherwise, he’d notice in the garage, before he left. It had to be the mass of the inner rugs pushing on the out- facing layer as he sped up on Cedar Street.
I watched her stick her arm deep into the network of rugs – they looked like pipes – with the knife in her hand, and cut. I saw it every time she broke one of the plasticuffs, because her arm popped.
“Tell me when they feel like they’re getting pushed,” she said. I climbed into the cargo bed. “Stand on my other side, I only smell from my right pit.”
I only partially understood the plan until I felt what she was talking about: the push of the inner stacks on the carpets that surrounded them. It scared me to feel how much mass there was amongst them collectively. When she was finished, we sat down inside the cab. She went into the glove compartment and looked around for, clearly, the first time; this car was more for the carpets than it was for them. Inside, he kept a Coke bottle filled with water, a single breath mint, ten dollars, and a roll of toilet paper. Sim added the knife, and then we left.
By the time I got back home, my mother had stopped her inquiries into Communism. “Clem,” she said. Some pastry was uncoiling in the microwave. She was drinking juice out of a plastic cup because she hated washing glasses. She said it felt like hospital work. I got the pastry and we split it and she said that Keith had brought her down in the exact way she thought he was going to lift her up. She also said, six months after she’d first called the police, “You know, I think Sim’s father is abusive.”
I waited a block away from the garage. They were late, and I was already cold. I thought of Sim in the car with her parents, sitting between them. I had never been in close proximity to either one of them, had no idea what they smelled like, the force their bodies exerted upon the space around them when they tensed. When I saw the garage door lift for a bundle of rugs, like a cartoon, I wished I’d told my mother that I wasn’t going to school on the chance that he came after me.
They didn’t make it to Cedar. The carpets slumped left when they hit the driveway’s apron, as though systemically ill, and then came apart by the time they finished their right turn, tumbling at the intersection by our building. He slammed the brakes. The car behind them rode over the pile of rugs – how easily, as though they were a speed bump – and into their car. Someone honked after it happened, but I wasn’t sure which vehicle.
I was more scared than cold, but I was very cold. I tried and failed to see inside Sim’s father’s car from where I stood. There was an immense yellow rug hanging over the side of the cab. After a moment, Sim’s father opened the door and batted the yellow rug out of his face, as though cutting brush. He directed Sim’s mother to stop traffic – which hadn’t, for the most part – while he spoke to the other driver, who had also emerged from his car with his insurance card. Most of the other cars were skirting around the rugs in the intersection, though some drove over the mass. Sim’s mother took Sim’s hand, as though she were a child – she was and she wasn’t – and led her back in the car, and closed her in. Then she stepped over the pile of butchered rugs, and into the street. Her hand wasn’t held up as his had been. She continued across Cedar, past Cedar, onto the ramp, and at the other end, where they could no longer see the stoppage we’d created, she turned and went at the cars, and they at her.
Sim opened the door of the truck and screamed. The guy with the insurance card put his insurance card in his mouth and ran toward the ramp. Sim’s father then followed. All the cars had stopped now.
I ran to the truck. “Is she underneath the car or in front of it?” Sim asked. I got into the truck next to her. “What are you doing? Go look!” she screamed. I couldn’t look any more than she could, but I did get out of the car, so that I wasn’t flaunting doing nothing. The police had come, I realized, when the sirens I hadn’t heard stopped. I turned around. No one on the ramp or on Cedar was moving. Only one full block down, where the incline leveled and Sim’s mother’s body was no longer in view, had they begun to get restless and make themselves known.
One day – this was a few months after Sim and her father had moved to southern Maryland, near a flailing historic district.– Mr. Abbott was in our apartment, and he told us about everything that Sim and her family had broken during their occupancy in the building. My mother listened from our couch, enraptured.
“Isn’t that wild?” she asked when Mr. Abbott left.
“What?”
“The curtain shredded in the disposal?”
I shrugged.
“Did you see that when you were over there playing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?” She was getting frustrated.
“Because I don’t know,” I said.
But it wasn’t a curtain. It was Sim’s mother’s nightgown, and I didn’t want my mother to tell Mr. Abbott; I didn’t even want my mother to tell herself, all over again, lying in her bed, thinking, boy, had we had ourselves a year.
Alicia Oltuski is the author of a collection of stories, Precious Objects (Simon & Schuster, 2011). Her stories have appeared in Tin House, TheNewYorker .com, W Magazine, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, NPR Berlin Stories, Narrative Magazine, and Catapult.