Toad, page 30
Carlotta was hunched on the bench. Behind her on the wall there was a faded old mural. A big cartoon sombrero with the regulation legs and feet coming out from underneath. An imaginary cactus on a wavy blue horizon line. Maybe the owner’s wife painted it. Or his oldest daughter who would have liked to go to art school, but then she got married. One day twenty years ago, slapping paint on the new green plaster wall and laughing at the trademark of what was supposed to be the first in a long chain of Siesta Times.
“The sheriff’s wife. I should have killed her, too. She kept saying, ‘Let me put him out in the hall. Was it a boy?’ ‘Put him on the sofa. There’s no reason to hold him now.’ And then she kept pouring tea and eating this meat. She was fat. Flaps hanging. All these doilies on the arms of the chairs. She kept saying, ‘Drink your tea, dear. You must keep up your strength.’ And she said, ‘I know it’s always terrible when it’s your firstborn. We lost three of our seven, but the first boy was strong, thank God.’”
Carlotta snickered. It sounded dangerous somehow. The scratches on her cheeks twitched, then her face was expressionless again. Her eyes held mine, watching me. Triumphant Madonna sorrow. My hands were clammy and shook at my sides.
“What did you do with the shitty diapers? Did you have a diaper pail or something?”
She frowned. “I rinsed them in the stream. Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure out what it was all like. Did he dirty a lot of them?”
“Yellow. He shat yellow. Three or four times a day, but never much at a time.”
Her brows lifted, and for a moment she looked bewildered. She started to cry again. Some lost question in the angle of her eyebrows. When she spoke, her voice was low and broken, clogged with mucus.
“I loved his shit.”
* * *
We walked back in the rain with the hot clothes under our shirts to keep dry. I lifted my face up for the rain to wash off my sticky tears. They say the rain isn’t clean anymore, either.
We stopped on the deep old porch to catch our breath for the stairs. Carlotta slumped against the wall.
“What are you going to do now?”
It was dark in the way of lighted towns. She looked to me like a figure in an old black-and-white photograph. I must have looked that way to her, too. Souvenirs of ourselves.
“I want to get to California. See my psychiatrist.” The scratches on her face were nearly invisible in the light from the streetlamps. “Do you know anything about psychic readers?”
“There seems to be one on every block. I always figured half of them must be whores. Why?”
“I want to try to contact my baby. There was something in his eyes that makes me think it might be possible.”
“What would he have to say? ‘Goo’?”
She turned away from me sharply.
“Carlotta, I’m sorry.”
“Are you going to open the door?”
“It’s not locked.”
She stepped inside. The vague yellow light in the hall colored her suddenly. She ran up the stairs. I followed her wet footprints. Arrived at the open door of my room with my laundry still bouncing under my shirt. Rennel’s face was inquisitive. His coffee cup was empty and stained.
Sam watched Carlotta, anxiously. She stood over him, gripping the clothes and glaring.
“Do you really want to go right now?”
She didn’t answer him, but turned and walked out the door without looking at my face. The stairs creaked beneath her.
Sam gave me a pained smile. “I thought you would be gentle with her.”
“I’m too vain.”
I threw my bundle of laundry into the cardboard box. Plopped myself onto the floor and dealt angrily with a cigarette. Rennel cleared his throat.
“I’ve been telling Han Shan about the valve job I did on the Rambler. That’s what his car needs. I’m going to get him started and then he is going to do it himself.”
“Lovely.”
Sam leaned forward with the light of another story on his face. “It might be interesting. I watched a man once who was a good mechanic. He was a simple guy. Wanted to make a good living for his kids. He kept stopping work to call his wife about her menstrual pains. The thing that struck me most was how much of the whole mechanic business was sheer superstition. He’d listen to the engine and run his hands over things. Then every once in a while he’d give some part of the contraption a slam with his wrench or jam a screwdriver into some hole and wriggle it around. All the time he’d talk to himself. He’d lean over the engine, staring at it with this bewildered look, saying, ‘What the fuck is that?,’ ‘Ho, here’s something,’ going on like that constantly. He was like a high priest trying on different little rituals to bring on rain. Very interesting. He didn’t really know why the things he did worked, but they did. Of course he didn’t call it religion. He called it experience.”
Rennel shook his head and waved away Sam’s words.
“Believe it or not, some people really do know what they’re doing.”
I’d have been more interested if Rennel weren’t thinking of himself when he said that. Instead I felt hollow, bleak. Darkness poured in through the skylight. My rain-soaked clothes chilled my skin.
“So what are you going to do, Sam?”
“Well! I’m going to get some new valves at an auto parts store, which has got to be one of the most mysterious premises open to lay visitors, it’s like a reliquary or something. And I’m going to get grease all over my clothes and hands and lean over the engine with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and burning my eyes. Whenever anybody on the street stops to ask me what I’m doing I’ll wipe my hands on a red rag and talk about combustion and gaskets and pistons. I’ll drink beer at lunch. Maybe I’ll change my name to Gary and get a job in a service station.” He smiled. “I think that’s probably what I’ll do.”
He rose slowly out of the chair. Grains of tobacco fell to the floor from his lap. “I’d better go.”
Rennel asked, “Do you want me to drive you?”
“No. I’d like to walk in the rain. I might catch Lotta.”
Sam stopped in the doorway, looking for something more to say.
“Whatever happened to your six-guns, Sam?” I asked.
He smiled and straightened a little. “You know, I’d forgotten all about them. I think they’re in a trunk somewhere.”
He waved and left.
Rennel’s eyes were half closed. He looked almost sick. Drifts of his smoke were visible in the dim light. Finally he turned to me and the hurt in his eyes hurt me.
“There was a baby, wasn’t there?”
“I think so.”
We sat looking at each other. Not a very comforting sight for either of us. Loneliness is hard and cold. A sick thing.
“Rennel, do you suppose we ought to live together for a while? You and me?”
His face hardened. His hips undulated briefly in his leather pants. “No. Actually, not.” He sighed. “No,” he repeated. “I don’t think that would be very nice at all.”
He got up then and went away. I climbed up onto the chaise. Carlotta’s cup, full of dark coffee, was beside me. The smoke lay still on the air. The rain pecked at the skylight all that night.
The cat, the fish, and the toad
I might as well get a cat. Why not have the picture complete? Not having a cat may be an originality I can’t afford anymore.
This is going to be one of my sluttish days. I will not get dressed. I will keep the lamps on all day. It’s raining anyway. If it rains for a week, I’ll have a sluttish week.
I think the most depressing thing about this past weekend was that Rennel slept. It would have been all right if he had dozed off with my pages fallen in his lap and happened to sleep till morning. But he stacked the papers in a neat pile on the desk. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas and then deposited himself tidily in the bed I had made for him on the sofa. His glasses folded neatly on the coffee table. His blue velvet robe on a chair above his slippers. I found him that way the next morning. He had even brushed and hung his suit. He lay flat on his back pouting softly at the ceiling. His eyelids swollen over their contents. It made me angry. I went straight through to the kitchen and made a lot of noise to wake him up.
His stomach seems to have settled with age. He’s become a big breakfast feeder. I was thrown off by his ankles and feet. I had quite forgotten other people’s unclad ankles and indiscreetly presented feet beneath breakfast tables. His manner was clinically cheerful. Nobody could ever complain that Rennel was unwilling to discuss.
“Tell me now,” with his cheek full of half-mauled toast, “have you always felt such resentment for me? Do you still?”
“I’m too gray and fat now to resent anything.”
“You’re the same size now that you’ve always been.”
“I’ve been pretty fond of you for years now, off and on.”
“Yet you have insulted me, and Sam, and yourself. You’ve insulted us all.”
“Do you think so? I thought it was the truth.”
“Babies die.”
“Yes.”
“We all die.”
“It’s not the death, it’s the pain.”
“Pork fat.”
“Have some toast.”
“I’m going to send you down Greek honey.”
“If you’re finished with the bacon pass it over here.”
“Why don’t you do something about these poor damned fish?”
I’ve just been out to the kitchen for my day’s supplies. I fed the fish. I have the cookie jar and a quart of milk. Two detective novels. The bed is still warm from my night’s sleep. I shall have a rich sluttish day and tomorrow I’ll clean house and ask at the pound about cats. Or there’s that white brute at the butcher’s. They always drown her litters anyway. If I took one of her next batch it wouldn’t do any harm. We could play out a cartoon tableau, the cat and the fish and I. Still, I don’t know if I’m ready for a warm-blooded creature yet. Would a cat eat a toad?
EDITOR’S NOTE
Naomi Huffman
For years I’ve kept multiple copies of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love around; right now three editions sit on my bookshelf, and one in the seat pocket of my car. Each time I read it, I am stunned by Dunn’s singularly depraved imagination and her don’t-give-a-fuck swagger, how her sentences strut across the page.
After her death from lung cancer in 2016, my interest in Dunn became insatiable. I read everything I could about her. I’d initially assumed Geek Love was her only book, the single pearl of a dark and brilliant imagination, but then I learned about Attic and Truck, the novels she published twenty years before Geek Love. I devoured them and still wanted more. In the online catalog of Dunn’s archive, at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where Dunn once taught creative writing, I found a list of several short stories I’d never read. Most of them were published in the 1990s in small, now-defunct journals, which explains why they’d eluded my initial search. Editions of these journals were nearly impossible to find online, so I wrote to the staff at Lewis & Clark College and crossed my fingers. Within a few days, I received an email from Zach Selley, the associate head of special collections at the Watzek Library. He sent me images of the original handwritten and typewritten pages. Reading them, I was reminded what it is like to sit in the magnetic field of Dunn’s imagination, to be jolted by her voice.
Zach introduced me to Eli Dapolonia, Dunn’s surviving son, who, at the time, still lived in Portland. We struck up a correspondence; he was generous with stories of his mother and patiently answered my questions. In September 2019, I flew to Portland to visit the archive in person. Eli and I met for breakfast at the Stepping Stone Café, where Dunn once waitressed. Over coffee and eggs, he told me about sitting at the chrome bar top after school while she finished her shifts. When I described the difficulty of locating her stories, he said it had been very important to his mother to see her work in small journals, even after the success of Geek Love. He also told me about Toad, his mother’s completed but unpublished novel (Harper and Row, the publisher of Attic and Truck, declined the novel, even after a round of revisions). He thought I might like to read it, too.
* * *
Sally Gunnar, the maligned and self-deprecatory central character of Toad, reminds me of myself in my twenties. She scuffs around in a pair of beat-up leather boots, smokes too much, spends a lot of time thinking about writing but never getting around to it. She toils at menial jobs and earns enough cash to make possible this lifestyle but not much else, which is fine by her—her desires are unconventional, if a little vague. When it all seems pointless, she sinks into her decaying pink velvet chaise (mine was green), the secondhand centerpiece of her shitty attic apartment, to drink purple soda, nurse her disappointments, and wait for something else to happen: “I lay there with the weight of unspecified darkness, contemplating suicide, and hoping for an interruption.” I knew Toad would be as meaningful to other readers, that it was a significant contribution to the history of women’s writing and feminist fiction.
Despite how deeply I connected with Toad, I was unprepared for the isolation of editing the work of a deceased writer. Up to that point, for me, editing had always been a conversation, a pleasing tension between two people. When I prepared to make even the smallest edits to Toad, I found I could not; the writer wasn’t there. I held both ends of the rope, and the responsibility was stymying.
A deft procrastinator, I decided to read Geek Love yet again, in hopes that it might divine the way forward. In fact, the table of contents offered some advice. Geek Love’s chapters have brassy titles like “Popcorn Pimp” and “Blood, Stumps, and Other Changes.” Toad initially lacked uniform section breaks as well as demarcated chapters and parts, so I imposed chapter titles composed from the text. It felt like a small thing, but afterward the novel possessed a discernible architecture upon which I made subsequent changes.
In Toad, there are two Sallys: one is a young woman who is plagued by self-hatred, maintains a string of relationships with unfaithful men, and is disappointed in her own unrealized dreams. The other Sally, having survived all this, relishes the life she’s made: lonely and modest, but sweeter because all of it is her design. In the original draft, the alternating perspectives were sequenced haphazardly; I rearranged some for the sake of pacing, and others so that the Sallys more clearly mirror each other across time.
* * *
The months I spent reading Dunn’s unpublished fiction are marked by a frustrated incredulity. Surely someone has been here before, I thought, again and again. Wouldn’t someone else already have come looking for this? One afternoon, I printed it all out, everything that I had read in full: the manuscript for Toad, the transcribed stories, extant poems, and correspondence from the archive. I wanted to see it all together, feel the weight of it. All this work, all these words, all the hours, all this time, I thought, turning the pages, turning the pages. This writing, these words, this woman.
After Toad was announced, one journalist described it as a “lost” book, a term often applied to texts unearthed from archives or reissued after many years of being out of print. But it never seemed accurate. It overlooks the detailed work the archivists at the Watzek Library devoted to Dunn’s papers to guarantee they weren’t lost. And it suggests that one only had to read this book to see its value. I’ve come to consider “lost” a sinister fiction that elides the cascading failures of an industry that for centuries has heralded the work of white cis men and erected a canon that celebrates only a sliver of the spectrum of human experience. The consequences of this narrowmindedness, this pitiful vision, are vast. It normalizes and maintains the belief that great literature is the province of certain men and infers that the women and other outsiders who rival them are unusual and rare. Their books aren’t lost; they’re forgotten, neglected, subjugated by a system that disincentivizes their existence. I’m glad Toad is no longer relegated to that fate. I hope it helps usher in a greater understanding of what we can learn from overlooked literary histories.
* * *
I don’t know that it would have occurred to me to search for more of Dunn’s work if it weren’t for small presses, journals, and magazines like And Other Stories, Another Gaze, Cita Press, Dalkey Archive Press, Deep Vellum, Dorothy, the Feminist Press, New Directions, New York Review Books, Persephone Books, the Second Shelf, Silver Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, Verso Books, Wendy’s Subway, and many others. I am grateful for their inspired efforts, their differing visions of a more radical and inclusive publishing industry. I am thankful for the folks who read Toad alongside me: Mitzi Angel, Emily Bell, Jonathan Galassi, Sean McDonald, Jackson Howard, Julia Ringo, Patrick Ford-Matz, and especially Lydia Zoells and Daphne Durham.
And to Eli, for breakfast, and for your trust.
March 2022
Also by Katherine Dunn
FICTION
Geek Love
Truck
Attic
NONFICTION
On Cussing
One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing
The Slice: Information with an Attitude
A Note About the Author
Katherine Dunn is the author of Geek Love, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Award, as well as the novels Attic and Truck. She was an award-winning boxing journalist whose work appeared in Esquire, KO Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, The Ring, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue. Her writing on boxing is collected in One Ring Circus. In 2004, Dunn and the photographer Jim Lommasson won the Lange-Taylor Prize for their work on the book Shadow Boxers. Dunn died in 2016. You can sign up for email updates here.
