I stayed with my aunt and uncle once for two months in Utah, where the air felt so dry and dusty that it hurt to breathe, and all the people looked the same. Women wore fluffy, blond perms and men wore jeans and cowboy hats. In exchange for my room and board in their home, I helped my aunt and uncle repaint their triplex apartments to prepare for a new batch of tenants. One of the units needed a lot of repainting. The past tenants had been Satanists and had painted black, purple and red pentagrams on the walls and ceilings in thick paint. I spent hours sanding them level, and then I layered on six coats of eggshell white paint. Even after all that, if the lighting was right, I could still see those pentagrams.

* * *

Even a year later, after I moved back to California, I still thought about those pentagrams. They'd come up at the oddest times.

"Mary, do you ever think that maybe you're crazy?" Zack asked me.

We were driving on the freeway at night. Actually, I was driving and Zack was sitting in the passenger seat, coming up with these questions. It sounded like another one of the little mental tests he tried to give me every now and then like, "What do you think of when I say the word 'popsicle'?" or the time he gave me a list of nouns and adjectives to memorize. Two weeks later, he asked me to repeat them back so he could evaluate my personality from which words I still remembered.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"I was just watching you at dinner tonight and I wondered if you ever thought you might be crazy."

* * *

I have pictures of my mother before she married my dad. She was beautiful, like Audrey Hepburn, with blue eyes, and always smiling. She smiled in her wedding photos as well; her white dress had a skirt like a bell, and her parents and siblings stood around her. There aren't any pictures of her smiling after the wedding. I remember once when I was young I heard her laugh and it surprised me so much I turned to look at her. I wish I could have known her when she smiled like the pictures. I wish I could have known her.

* * *

I met Zack three years ago, on the edge of my life. I found him because he was in the same place. Where nothing meant anything. A month after I met him, he told me he had killed his wife. He hadn't told anyone about it for months, but he was getting to the point where he felt like he could talk about it. He got married his freshman year of college and two weeks after the wedding, she was dead. They used to fight a lot, he told me, and he was a control freak. He kept notebooks that listed all the things he knew drove her crazy, all the things he knew she hated. He liked to be in control of her emotions, to be able to change her mood like he changed channels with the remote control.

They had a fight one day and she locked herself in the bathroom. He was angry, so he let her stay there. While she was in there, he got more and more angry, until he went and pounded on the door. She wouldn't answer him, so he broke it down. she had slit her wrists with one of his razors. There was blood everywhere, but she was still alive. He carried her to the car and drove to the hospital, but it was too late.

"That's how I killed my wife," he told me. He hadn't held the razor in his own hand, but I could tell it made no difference to him. Clearly, he felt that he controlled her every move, and her hand would not have moved without his influence. It was a fine line to draw, and I couldn't argue with him, once I'd heard the story.

* * *

It's hard for me to decide if my mother was killed or if she just died. It would be nice to think she just died. It would be nice to think that my father hadn't told her he'd take her to the emergency room after his business meeting was over. It would be nice if that sentence didn't have the words "after" and "business meeting" in it. It would be nice if he had driven her to the hospital as soon as he realized her headache was a stroke, rather than asking her to wait until the afternoon, which was when I came home from school and found her in a coma on the bed, choking on her own vomit. So, when Zack told me he had killed his wife, I found it hard to argue, but I wondered how many times that day went through his head since then. I wondered how many times he wished he had asked her, "How are you feeling today?"

* * *

My aunt, Rachel, used to help at the apartments as well. She was in her forties, but in great shape. She carried sheet rock for the bathrooms and helped me take the doors off the hinges and carry them outside to paint them. Sometimes she said her back hurt, mostly when my uncle, Robert, was around. He didn't seem to hear her. He was in a rush to finish the apartments before the new tenants were due to move in. Rachel and Robert had three kids, all with the first initial "R." They liked to keep things consistent, I guess.

Once, my aunt and I were taking a break out on the front steps where we could watch the cars go by. It was the middle of October and chilly outside, even in the afternoon. While we sat there, she swirled the paint brushes around in a glass jar of turpentine to clean them. I picked at the brown leaves of the bush next to the step, and she started to tell me about her financial problems. Robert made good money as an independent contractor, but he never billed the customers .

"I've been after him to bill them for months now," Rachel told me, "but he won't. We've even lost one of the contracts because they wanted their bill and he wouldn't send it. We have twenty thousand owed to us by different companies that we could collect if Robert would just send them their bills." She looked down at her hands in the paint splattered work gloves and shifted a little on the cold cement of the stoop. "I've tried to figure them out myself, but his records are so disorganized I couldn't get anything straight."

"Why won't he send them?" I asked. I pictured the house where they lived. It was a beautiful house that had gotten more and more run down over the years, the furniture faded and three beatup cars in the driveway. Robert bought jet skis and dirt bikes for the kids, but didn't seem to care much how the house looked. Rachel hadn't answered me, so I looked up. She picked flakes of paint off her left glove.

"I finally asked him that the other day," she told me. "He said that as long as I wanted him to send them, he wasn't going to do it." The look of acceptance on her face startled me more than her revelation about my uncle.

* * *

I looked at Zack in the car next to me. "Yeah, of course I think I might be crazy sometimes. Doesn't everyone?"

"No, I'm serious, Mary. Have you ever thought about getting psychiatric help?"

"What, you're saying you think I'm crazy?" I looked at him under the passing flash of the streetlights, but he stared straight ahead.

"Coming from you, that doesn't mean much," I said.

"What does that mean?" he asked. I could see out of the corner of my eye that he had turned to face me now.

"It means I don't know anyone who would refer to you as normal, so I don't think your judgment is valid." There was a long pause after this comment of mine.

"That may be true, but it doesn't matter which end of the spectrum I'm coming from," he said. "I can still recognize it when I see it. But I guess a psychiatrist couldn't do much for you anyway." He tapped his fingers on his knee in time to the music on the radio.

"You're functioning, but I can tell you're a little funny around the edges."

"If I'm crazy, you're crazier."
* * *

After I moved out of my aunt and uncle's house and into my own rental house with roommates, my uncle invited me back for Thanksgiving dinner. I'd heard that the apartment project had lagged far behind schedule and was still unfinished, even though the new tenants had already moved in. School had started for me, so I hadn't had much time to help out lately. A little painting around the outside windowsills, but that's about it. Rachel and the kids did most of the work, and she had finally forced my uncle to hire two students to do the roofing, although he waited so long that the second day they were up there, it snowed and big yellow water spots spread on all the ceilings I had painted.

Thanksgiving day, I stood in the kitchen with Rachel while she peeled carrots and watched the turkey in the oven. Robert's parents were coming for dinner, as well as his brother's family. Rachel cooked all the main dishes, while the guests brought things like salads and desserts. She looked pale and tired and I asked her if she had been sick, or was she just worn out from all the holiday preparation? I thought she would brush the question off, but she looked up at me. "No, I had a miscarriage two days ago, and I'm still hemorrhaging. We were waiting 'til Christmas to tell everyone I was pregnant. We wanted it to be a surprise," she said, and the motion of her hands with the peeler stopped. "Do you think you could finish peeling these carrots while I go lay down for a minute? And please don't say anything to the rest of them, I don't want to ruin the dinner."

I stood there at the window and looked out at the snow covered lawn. I looked at the window sill, and remembered all those hours painting and Rachel's sore back from carrying sheet rock and doors in and out of the apartments, and my uncle's impassive face as he watched her do it. Their wedding photo hung on the wall behind me, I'd looked at it many times. Rachel wore my mother's dress, and my mother stood in the line in blue, not smiling. I wondered if there would ever be enough layers of eggshell white paint to cover the pentagrams on the apartment walls.

* * *

"You know, I could kick your windshield in right now," Zack said in a deliberate voice and raised his foot up like he was going to do it as I crossed three empty lanes to our exit.

"That would not be the action of a normal man," I said. He froze, then dropped his foot back to the floor and leaned over to wrench the wheel from my hands. The car swerved to the left as the exit ramp curved to the right, and I started to laugh.

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Occam's Razor, Issue 14 Contents