Terrible Lizards

Jenna put the record player on the wrong speed and lay with her head hanging off the side of the couch. Judy Garland sang “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis, high-pitched and chittering, words running together at chipmunk speed. It was the only way Jenna could listen to the record player. She liked the voices spun out so they could barely catch their breath, no pause between verses and chorus. She liked them out of control and shrieking.

Blood pounded in her ears, hair dragging the unswept floor. Jenna was the only one home. She was drunk off a couple screwdrivers made with orange juice that had soured from sitting out on the counter. She lived with her sister, but most nights Amber chose to stay at her boyfriend’s house. Amber’s boyfriend worked in real estate. Jenna had only met him once. His name was Paul and he had dark hair that swooped down over his forehead and a nose that looked too small for his face. He’d stood in the hallway of their rental with his shoulders tucked in, like he didn’t want to rub against the wall and get his coat dirty.

You two don’t look much alike, he’d said, rocking back on the heels of his loafers. Are you sure you’re sisters? Amber laughed, one she did behind her hand so people couldn’t see her teeth, which were very dark and horsey. Paul wore trousers. The word blinked in Jenna’s brain: TROUSERS, a term suitable for pants with a crease down the front. Pants were something anyone could wear, but TROUSERS were something different. TROUSERS were pronounced with ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. They were pants that had gone to college.

Judy sang loud and fast and screamed about the bell clanging, clanging. Jenna braided her hair while she hung upside down. Her fingers were clumsy from the alcohol and the blood rushing through her temples. When she sat back up, her vision cleared abruptly and her skull felt cold and prickling. She picked up her phone and called her sister, the record player still shrieking along behind her.

“Hello,” Amber said. “I’m busy.”

“Could you bring home dinner.”

“I can’t hear anything you’re saying.”

“I’m hungry and there’s no food in the house,” Jenna said, looping the braid around her forehead. “Why didn’t you buy bread.”

“Turn off the record player if you’re gonna call someone.”

“I drank that old orange juice. It was sour. I’ll probably get sick.”

Amber huffed into the receiver. It gave Jenna chills and made the hair stick up on her neck. “When you listen to the record player that loud, it blows out the speakers.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Paul’s taking me to a RESTAURANT.” Amber said the word RESTAURANT like Jenna heard TROUSERS, bold text printed on a flashcard. It was a word that stood up on its own because it was stuffed full of money.

“What am I supposed to do?” Jenna asked. She was pulling her finger along the inside of her empty glass. Pulp smeared onto her fingernail. When she licked it off, it tasted more sour than before. The AC wasn’t working very well, and it sputtered lukewarm air that left the whole house covered in condensation.

“If there’s leftovers, I’ll bring them tomorrow.”

“Can’t you come home now? You live here, remember?”

“I don’t want to live there. It’s shitty.”

“Come home or you’ll be sorry.”

Jenna hung up and went into the kitchen. Amber used to do the grocery shopping, but recently she only stopped at the convenience store when she needed to put gas in their car. They had things like small, stale bags of corn chips and off-brand cookies and two-liters of flat soda that sat for weeks in their bottles like forgotten science experiments. Jenna couldn’t drive. Amber had offered to teach her once, when they were both in high school, but Jenna hadn’t liked the overwhelming largeness of the car. It was one thing to ride in it; it was another thing to try and control it. Cars had a habit of plunging off bridges and slamming into light poles. Even if she wanted to learn now, Amber wouldn’t let her. There were too many variables with a car, Amber said, and Jenna’s life had too many variables already.

A roach crawled over the top of a cabinet door. Jenna smacked her palm beside it, and it fell on the floor, scrambling to right itself like an overturned turtle. Jenna wasn’t wearing shoes, but she still crushed it with her heel. Then she pulled out the container of honey shaped like a bear and the peanut butter and ate it mixed together from the jar, the honey churning down into the oily remnants. There weren’t any clean spoons, but there was one left on the counter next to the coffee maker that held a little swirl of coffee in its bowl. It tasted good that way, almost like a fancy coffee she might buy at a shop. It would probably be the kind of coffee Paul would buy, Jenna thought. The word LATTE strobed in her head, the font bold and assertive.

Back in the living room, the record ended. The arm rotated around the center and made hissing, fuzzy noises in the speaker. Jenna put it back to the beginning and wiped her dirty fingers on the afghan that lay piled up on the back of the couch. Their mother had knit it before Jenna was born. That’s what Amber always said, anyway, but Jenna didn’t know anything about their mother. She’d only seen her in pictures: a woman with fuzzy, cotton-candy hair and a mouth that looked like Amber’s when she closed her lips around her too-large teeth. Amber was her mother and her sister. Amber was the person who made the world go faster-than-fast. When Amber wasn’t around, everything slowed to an unbearable crawl.

Their house was a rental, and they’d lived in it all Jenna’s life. It was small enough that they shared a bedroom, the two sisters curled up on a bed that sagged in the middle and always wanted to dump the two of them together. It had a living room and a dining room and both rooms were the exact same size. There was a shag carpet the color of Dijon mustard in the dining room, but the living room had peachy linoleum that stuck to bare feet when it was dirty.

Her stomach growled, and she dropped the peanut butter jar. She wondered what her sister might be eating, at the RESTAURANT, a place that probably had more than one option for appetizers that came on heavy, cream-colored plates. Before Paul, there had only been her and her sister. They’d gone to school together, and they’d lived together in the little house. Amber went to the dental academy and learned to clean teeth, and sometimes Jenna went with her to those classes, sneaking in the back while her sister worked on plastic dentures, teeth so white and fake they looked like Chiclets.

Amber brought the toolkits home and practiced scraping her own incisors. She scraped at Jenna’s, too. Neither girl had ever had braces. Amber’s two front teeth were crossed like fingers, so she never smiled in pictures. Her gums sometimes bled until it looked like she’d taken a bite out of somebody. Once she got a job at a dental office, Amber said, she would get her teeth fixed for free.

They’ve got those trays you can put in that are clear, almost invisible. She tapped a tooth hard enough Jenna heard the click of nail against enamel. Nobody knows you’ve got anything on.

Jenna didn’t care about her teeth. She hoped the job meant they’d finally make it back to the dinosaur park. Every time Amber drove them down the highway, Jenna saw the jut of the Brontosaurus’ heads poking up from the tree line, greeting her with happy, dumb grins. It wasn’t the kind of park that cost too much money, not a bold-text place like Disney World. It ran on donations. The dinosaurs were plastic and concrete and ceramic statues, with faded-out legs you could run between. It was a park that sold corndogs and slushies and candy that was already expired.

Amber met Paul her first week at the dental job. She’d helped correct one of his fillings that had gotten infected beneath the cap. Now Jenna never went anywhere. Paul and Amber went out to RESTAURANTS and stayed at his CONDO, which was another bold-text word that made it better than an apartment, and drank after-dinner liqueurs that were so sweet they gave Amber headaches.

Judy Garland yelled some more about the trolley and its dinging bell. When the needle moved to the next song, Jenna pushed it back and listened to the clang-clang-clanging some more. The peanut butter jar had fallen over onto its side, and some of the honey had leaked onto the couch. Jenna flipped the cushion over so that the cleaner side was showing and sat back down to call her sister. It was the only entry in her phone, other than her grandparents’ house and the emergency number.

“If you don’t stop. I’m gonna turn off my cell,” Amber said. There was white noise in the background. The steady rush of traffic.

“I’m hungry.”

“Just walk to 7-Eleven. Buy a hot dog. I left you some money in the key bowl.”

Jenna had eaten four hot dogs that week, and it was only Thursday. “I’m tired of being by myself. Come home and do something with me.”

“Can you turn off the record player? I can’t hear anything you’re saying.”

Judy did another loop around the block on the trolley. Ding-ding-ding went its bell, faster-than-fast, the kind of trolley that would run somebody down in the street.

“If you don’t come home, I’m gonna do something.”

Amber laughed, and the sound was full. She must be outside alone, thought Jenna. She would never laugh like that in front of Paul. Not with her mouth open like that. “What are you gonna do? You won’t even leave the house.”

Judy’s heart strings zinged, and she rode around the block on the trolley one more time. “I’ll break the record player,” Jenna said. She ran a finger down the spindly arm and felt the needle jab a little into the grooves.

“Stop. Don’t joke around.”

“I’m not joking. I’ll break it. Snap the arm right off.”

Amber sighed even louder than before. “Give me half an hour.”

Pressing down on the plastic arm, the needle dug deeper and Judy’s voice braked into growly syrup. The trolley made its sluggish roll into the station, bell dinging and clanging as it chugged along. “Fifteen. And bring me something to eat.”

Her sister hung up, and Jenna switched off the record player. The disc spun lazily on its loop, canting a little as it slowed to a stop. She put the peanut butter jar on the coffee table between some old magazines and the wicker key bowl with dollar bills inside it. She decided she should brush her teeth, because it had been a few days.

In the bathroom, she squeezed the last dregs of the toothpaste onto a toothbrush with bristles so splayed they looked like parted hair. Her sister’s toothbrush was pristine. She purchased a new one every month and made sure she got the good kinds, the ones with the massaging rubber spokes that helped prevent gingivitis. Jenna smiled at her own reflection in the mirror over the sink, baring her teeth. Toothpaste ran from the corners of her lips and trickled down her chin. Her hair was long and dark and very tangled. She knotted it up on the top of her head and rinsed her face off with a cracked sliver of soap she found in the medicine cabinet.

Amber was the pretty one, aside from her teeth, but Jenna liked her own face. It was very round, and her nose took up a lot of space. When she smiled, her eyes crinkled until they almost disappeared. It was the kind of face that reminded her of cartoon gnomes from a show she’d liked as a kid. She could look mean or nice, depending how the light struck her. Amber’s face was very freckled with high cheekbones. Her hair was long, too, but it was slick, and it slithered around her skinny shoulders like water snakes. Paul likes my hair. He says it’s always cold. Amber sometimes plaited it around her head until her scalp showed through. Once, Jenna had tried to give her a fishtail braid, but then she’d coiled the round brush in the back of Amber’s hair, and they’d had to cut out the mess with kitchen scissors. It had left a bald patch across the back of her scalp in the shape of a starfish.

There weren’t any clean clothes on her side of the bedroom so she put on one of Amber’s dental hygienist smocks. It was pale blue, and there were pictures of rubber ducks printed on it. Headlights splashed yellow up onto the walls through the slats of the vertical blinds, and Jenna went out into the living room to wait for her sister. It was Paul’s car. Instead of backing down the driveway and leaving them in peace, the engine turned off. Both Paul and Amber walked inside the house.

“I thought you were bringing me food,” Jenna said. “I’m hungry.”

“We’ll go out to eat.” Amber wore a coat with a red velvet collar, even though it was very warm outside. Paul stood just behind her in the hall that led to the front door. He wore a coat, too, but it was the kind of suit jacket that would definitely require bold-text DRY CLEANING. His eyes were very pale, almost milky blue, and when Jenna stared at him, he looked away, up at the ceiling, like he could maybe spot a leak.

“I’m not wearing any shoes,” Jenna announced. “I can’t find them.”

“It’s fine. We’ll just get some drive thru.”

Amber stood beside the record player and tenderly pet the small, swinging arm. Jenna didn’t like the way her sister was eyeballing it, like she might take it and move the whole thing somewhere Jenna couldn’t get to it. Paul stood in the doorway and looked at Amber, then back at the ceiling, and cut his eyes around Jenna like she was something slick they slid off of.

“Are we ready to go?” he asked, clearing his throat before and after he spoke.

“Go out to the car, and we’ll come out.” Amber picked up the trolley record from the player and made a face like someone had stomped on her foot. “Look at this, you scratched it. Now it’ll never play right.”

 Paul backed through the doorway, and the engine started up again. Jenna thought he’d probably never walk all the way into their rental; it was too much like walking into a public restroom.

“Can we get chicken tenders?”

 “We’ll get whatever you’d like. Just get in the car.”

 “Will we go to the dinosaur park?”

Amber picked up a pair of her own shoes from under the coffee table and slid them on Jenna’s feet. They were ugly brown sandals that had straps over the top that made her flesh bulge out like the casing on roast beef. “I don’t think they’re open this late.”

“Can we at least drive past?”

“We’ll see,” Amber said, standing back up and dusting crumbs from her knees. She was wearing a red skirt that matched the collar of her jacket, but the color was a little off because it had been washed a bunch of times. All their clothes had pills on them from rubbing up against chairs and other fabric and their skin for so many years. Jenna liked that. It made her feel like the clothes belonged to them and no one else.

Outside felt too sticky, and Jenna hummed the clang-clang-clang part of “The Trolley Song” under her breath. Amber climbed into the front seat of the car, which was big and black and sat in the driveway like it wanted to run over the house. The backseat was wide and made out of LEATHER, which was another bold-text word. Instead of smelling like mildew, like the inside of their car, Paul’s car smelled like something brand new that had just been released from a plastic container. Jenna covered her nose and mouth with the neck of Amber’s scrubs and wished they were sitting in the living room again, eating pizza, which was the kind of food anybody could eat.

Paul turned down the street and drove to the hamburger place. Jenna watched the back of his neck where the hairline met his crisp collar. It was a very stiff fringe of hair that looked like it had been gelled into submission. Amber leaned over him in the seat to order Jenna’s food, and the voice she used was high and quick, sounding a lot like Judy Garland on the too-fast trolley. Amber handed back the bag after Paul paid with a credit card and told her not to spill the drink, which was a Coke with no ice.

“So where to next?” Paul asked, turning on the radio. The music all played too slow. It sounded like the batteries running out of a tape deck, like everything was sluggish enough she could race after it and stomp it to death.

“Wherever you like,” Amber said, and she slid her hand onto his sharply-creased TROUSER leg. “Thank you.”

“Dinosaur park. We are going to the dinosaur park, remember?”

“What’s the dinosaur park,” Paul asked, but he was looking at Amber when he said it, and he slid one of his hands around the back of her neck to cup below her fall of dark hair. Jenna wondered if he could feel the scar where the hair had been removed. Jenna had kept the hair and bunched it up inside one of her socks.

“If you don’t take me to the dinosaur park, I am going to throw soda all over this car,” Jenna said, and she went to uncap the lid. Some of the drink slopped over the lip and dotted her shirt. The car might be better with the Coke dousing its interior. Give it a smell other than new.

“Sure we can go,” Paul said, tapping lightly on the brakes, glancing up worriedly into the rearview mirror. “Just tell me how to get there.”

“Eat your chicken, Jenna. Not just the fries.”

Paul turned them around in the parking lot, backing up five different times to make what should have been a three-point turn. When he moved his arm up around Amber’s neck again, Jenna could smell the strong scent of his COLOGNE, a capitalized-text word that shouted its smell with every intake of breath. She shoved her face into her paper bag, inhaling the thick, greasy odor of oil and potato and salt. Amber directed him toward the dinosaur park, pointing him onto the interstate as Jenna pressed her face to the window and rubbed her forehead, hard, trying to leave a mark. Something that said she was part of the car, that it was something other than a bold-text word, but when she pulled her face back, the glass stayed as shiny and pristine as before.

“There,” Amber said, pointing again. “See them?”

Ahead on the right, heads jutted above the lofty oaks and pines that dotted the highway. Jenna counted the dinosaurs like Judy’s clanging bells, ding-ding-ding, three necks poking up from thick, prehistoric bodies submerged in the undergrowth. Paul took the exit, slowly, eyes darting to the backseat every few seconds in the rearview mirror. Just to worry him, Jenna held up the cup and pretended to tip it. Amber whispered no, so she stopped, but she thought she might try it again on the way back from the park, just to see what Paul might do.

The moon was high and bright, but the parking lot was empty.

“They’re closed. I told you,” Amber said.

Jenna didn’t care. Once Paul pulled into a parking spot, she climbed out of the car and dropped her trash on the seat behind her. The half-empty cup fell over and Paul scrambled between the seats to pick it up before anything leaked onto the leather. The air outside felt sticky, but there was a rush of breeze carding through the trees. Jenna could see the legs of a Triceratops and its baby, frolicking on the patch of weedy grass beside the gate that led into the main entrance of the park.

Amber called her name, but Jenna was almost to the entrance. There wasn’t a security guard or motion-sensor lights or any kind of thing to keep anyone out other than the chain-link fence that locked in the middle, like a regular park that closes at sundown. Jenna tried to slip through the open triangle of space at the bottom where the two sides of the gate met, and when her hips got stuck, she changed her mind and climbed the fence. Amber’s sandals slipped awkwardly against the links, but she made it all the way to the top before her sister and Paul got below her.

“Get down from there!” Amber hissed, shaking the fence. Jenna laughed and threw her leg over the other side. Once mounted, she looked across the park and saw the torsos of the dinosaurs, shaded green and brown, speckled from the few lights that dotted the pathways. There were herbivores and carnivores in the park, lizards with giant teeth that could chomp a body in half. Jenna wondered what kind of toothbrush would be best for a dinosaur. When she got halfway down the other side, she dropped into the dirt and gravel and proceeded into the heart of the park.

Behind her, the fence rattled and clanged as her sister and Paul climbed up after her. Jenna darted beneath the trees and passed the Stegosaurus with its wide back of bony plates. It had a dumb-cow look to it, the kind of animal that would walk into the side of a building if someone drew on a tunnel on its side. The record player at home used to have a couple other albums that Jenna liked to play: one about animals from foreign countries and the other about dinosaurs. The one song Jenna could remember was about the Stegosaurus, and it was a very slow track.

Amber called her name again. It clanged like the bell on the trolley, thought Jenna, who jogged ahead through the trees and away from the gravel path. The thing Jenna liked most about the dinosaur park was that the animals were set randomly, and there was no way to tell where to find one. There was garbage in the overgrowth and a lot of clumped Spanish moss. Jenna ran through it, and it wrapped itself around her ankles.

She passed oviraptors crouched around a plaster nest, ready to steal eggs from the unsuspecting Maiasaura that congregated along the swampy, overgrown retention pond. Behind a tall stand of trees next to a shed was a chipped Iguanodon whose paint dripped off like dandruff. Stands of bushes and palm scrub marked the far corners of the path nearest the highway. The cars zipped by, going so fast Jenna could barely make out their shapes. She climbed up the rocky hill next to the fence and crouched down there, squatting behind an azalea bush that served as a barrier to block the road from the park. It preserved the illusion of the prehistoric world, Amber had told her last time. Nobody wants to see a Ford when they’re looking for a Brontosaurus.

Across the park came her sister’s voice, resonant on the breeze that rattled through the trees and left the oaks spitting acorns along the dinosaurs’ faded backs. Jenna leaned back against the fence and sang Judy Garland as loud as her voice would carry. The dinging of the bell would let Amber know where to find her. Jenna wished that she could remember the rest of the words to the Stegosaurus song, that she hadn’t broken the record by slapping it against the back of the couch when Amber had stayed out too late with a couple of her friends from the dental academy.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Paul complained. “Let’s just leave her, if that’s what she really wants.” They’d walked out from beneath the canopy of trees and stood beside the clump of Coelophysis, munching on a fallen Brachiosaurus beneath a large stand of sago palms.

“She can’t be far.”

Amber called her name again and didn’t bother covering her mouth when she did it. Jenna liked that. She liked seeing all the teeth in her sister’s head. The dark graveyard of her mouth was something that shouldn’t be kept hidden. It was where Jenna’s name lived, a word that had shape and context when she said it. The name Paul would come from behind a smothering hand, a bold-font name, one stiff enough to choke someone to death.

“She’s way too old to do stuff like this. It’s weird.”

Paul stood beside the gutted Brachiosaurus and ran his hand across its thick trunk of a leg. He knocked a fist into it, and the sound was ringing and hollow, too slow to clang like a trolley bell and much too deep. He’d taken off his jacket. The shirt beneath was very clean and creamy white. He looked like a fake tooth, Jenna thought.

“She’s my sister,” Amber said. “It’s just what she does.”

“That’s not a real answer. This is really fucked-up behavior. She’s an adult.”

Spinning in the fallen pine needles, Amber danced around the pack of carnivores. “Sometimes she does stuff she doesn’t mean. She’s always sorry later.”

Jenna remembered the only other time they’d come to the dinosaur park. Amber had held her hand, and they had walked to all the different herbivores first, then all the carnivores. They’d skipped through the trees together and sang "The Trolley Song,” slow, then faster, so fast that it felt like everything was moving faster than Judy Garland could ever sing it. When they’d gotten home from that trip to the park, Amber had gone out with friends to a bar and stayed out until after two in the morning. Jenna had broken all the tools in the Amber’s dental kit and lit the practice teeth with a Bic lighter. When she was done, everything had melted to a waxy puddle that wouldn’t come up from the linoleum.

“I have to take care of her,” Amber said. “It’s my job.”

“Who takes care of you?” Paul draped his jacket carefully over the Brachiosaur’s leg and kissed Amber’s cheek, then her neck. His mouth made slurping sounds that carried across the open field they stood in. It sounded like someone biting into something juicy. Jenna hummed “The Trolley Song” to try and drown it out and looked away, up into the high stands of the oaks and pine trees. Between the branches, Jenna spotted the hard, stark jaw of the park’s biggest predator. The Tyrannosaur’s plastic eyes gleamed wetly down at the prey below. Her sister and her boyfriend stood there oblivious.

Its teeth were large and yellow, shoved into the open maw of its mouth like daggers. The night was very quiet and still. Jenna’s breath rasped as she watched the Tyrannosaurus, which watched her sister and Paul, who had his hand under her sister’s skirt. The one line about the Stegosaurus song she could remember said something about how if another dinosaur came by and wanted to fight, the Stegosaurus would lose its friendly demeanor and come out swinging. Paul’s hand went up Amber’s skirt, and her sister’s lips pressed against his. When her mouth did open again, it was to say Paul’s name. It came out slowly, trickling, the sound like a bell muffled in cloth.

Zing went Amber’s heartstrings, thought Jenna, who blindly searched around with her hands in the dirt and fallen pine needles until she found a large, smooth rock. Canting back her neck, she called out the chorus to “The Trolley Song,” clanging, clanging until her sister broke apart from Paul with a shriek, pointing up at the Tyrannosaurus behind them. Jenna picked up the rock and threw it down the side of the hill she squatted on. It hit Paul in the side of the head, knocking him sideways until he fell over beside the dead Brachiosaurus.

He grunted and clutched his head. His hands were dirty from bracing himself against the silty dirt beside the downed dinosaur. Amber screamed and kneeled beside him, putting a hand against his cheek. Dark blood poured from the wound. Jenna stood up from her hiding spot beside the fence and felt the warm, buffeting air of the cars racing past her on the interstate. It felt like the breath of an animal, Jenna thought, leaning into the warm spray of it, like a mouth that had opened, fast, teeth ready to clang down hard against bone and break everything open.