Two sisters pass the time at home wondering why their eccentric mother Joan, and their reclusive father Herb, are behaving strangely.
Image generated with OpenAIIs what I always thought when someone came to the door. Watch as they took it in, the whole spectacle. The carefully constructed smile. Eyes flicking back and forth, back and forth. Some garbled pleasantry. Bodily contortions of normality. It was typical. Predictable, at least. Had anyone acted nonchalant, I would have been concerned for their wellbeing.
I may as well tell you now. You may as well know. It was the frogs. Not real ones, no, never alive. Thankfully. Heaven help anything in our house that couldn’t fend for itself. My mother. Her name was Joan. She brought the frogs. Hundreds of them. Plastic, ceramic, metal, blow-up, plushy, painted, crocheted, stickers, photographed, embroidered, mechanical. Alyssa and I started counting them once and got bored at 459. They were everywhere. Outside and in. On the tables and the floors and on sticks in the yard and in the windowsills and on the back of the toilet and on the glass door and on the shelves our father put up and on the rocks by the driveway and on the plates in the kitchen and on the car dash and stacked at the foot our parents’ bed.
That was Joan. There wasn’t much more to say about her. The woman loved frogs. It wasn’t an inherited trait, the way some generations have blue eyes. But it was notorious – people called us the frog family. And to many, that’s all we were. Joan didn’t mind. When she died, just a few years ago, we put a frog on her tombstone and hoped it brought her joy.
That’s a lie. There is a lot more to say about Joan, my mother. But you have to be prepared to hear it, to hear everything. Because when it happened, decades ago now, she changed. You’ve probably heard some version of the story from people who think they know it. But they don’t. And neither do you. Only those of us in the Uncanny Valley know.
Another thing about my mother was her love of lottery tickets. Cheap ones, scratch offs, whatever was selling for a few dollars at a gas station. Any area she frequented contained them if you looked hard enough. Little scraps of paper. These weren’t like the frogs – she tried to keep these hidden. Little ghosts. I think she was ashamed, as if the money should have been going to penance or our college funds instead of the West Virginia lottery. But we only ever attended church on holidays with our father’s mother, and no one had ever talked seriously to Alyssa and me about college. Most people around us went into the mines or worked at the grocery store or failed at farming. Some did series of odd jobs and others were “between steady work.”
Our father, Herb, was one of the latter. He was laid off from his trucking job seven or eight months before the incident and hadn’t found another, largely because our mother put her foot down about him driving long distance again. He’d done it long enough, she said, and it was high time he stuck around the family more. I never knew where that line came from. Alyssa and I practically raised ourselves. I wondered if he wasn’t loath to give up his diesel-fueled sanctuary, but Herb didn’t fight it. He rarely fought anything. Instead he collected unemployment and waited for a local trucking job that would never materialize.
The morning everything began – “that Wednesday” we would later call it – started out typically enough. Both our parents were up at the crack of dawn. I got to the kitchen about seven thirty and sat bleary-eyed with my coffee and toast. Alyssa rolled in a while later and we sat discussing what nothingness we would get into that day. Summer break stretched before us like some vast emptiness. Joan sat at the table with us, chain-smoking. The radio was on low, Loretta Lynn crooning about an unfaithful lover. Our father went in and out between the kitchen and the garage, taking things and bringing them back and taking other things.
I refilled my frog mug, my favorite with the pink tongue handle, and followed Alyssa to her bedroom.
‘You know what I’m going to do today,” she announced. ‘I’m going to bleach my hair.’
I sat down on her bed and looked around. Alyssa’s room was remarkably frog-free, something I’d never accomplished. How, I asked. We didn’t have any hair dye.
She clucked her tongue at me and said she didn’t need hair dye. ‘Sally told me all about it on the phone yesterday.’
She hadn’t gotten a phone call yesterday, but I didn’t say anything, just followed her to the bathroom. I watched as she diluted hydrogen peroxide with water, mixing in Sun-In and a raw egg.
‘Are you sure,’ I murmured on the closed toilet seat and flipped through a tabloid magazine from the rack next to the vanity. It was from the year before and well-thumbed.
She heard me and said to shut up. Sally’s aunt used this method on her clients all the time. I handed her a towel. Sally’s family had money and her aunt was a professional hair stylist, but I still didn’t say anything.
After Alyssa had coated her head and killed several of our brain cells with the fumes, she said, ‘I’m supposed to cover it with a hair cap. Do we have a hair cap?’
I was taping a plastic bag to her head when Joan suddenly appeared in the doorway. ‘I’m going out, girls.’
We stared at her. She was clutching her purse and had on lipstick. I started to ask where she was going when Alyssa interrupted to ask why she was all done up.
Our mother ignored us both. ‘If anyone comes to the door, don’t answer it. Tell your father the same.’ Herb hadn’t answered the door or the phone in fifteen years. We stared at her again.
‘And Alyssa,’ Joan said as she walked away, ‘if I find any of that on the bathmat, so help me God.’ Alyssa waited until her back was turned to give her the finger.
As the door to the garage slammed, I asked Alyssa where she thought Joan was headed. Alyssa just rolled her eyes. I finished taping the bag to her scalp and went to pour another cup of coffee.
Passing through the living room, I noticed the curtains. They were a bright spring green, embroidered on the bottom with pink frogs sitting on orange lily pads. And they were closed. The curtains were never closed – you could tell by the patterns of faded spots. I almost didn’t recognize the living room wall. Herb stepped into the kitchen just then, but went back to the garage after a few seconds. I didn’t follow. His radio was on and loud. A stranger’s car sat in the driveway, waiting for him to diagnose its latest illness.
Back in the bathroom I said to Alyssa, ‘The curtains are closed.’
What curtains, she replied.
‘In the living room.’
‘The living room doesn’t have curtains.’
‘Yes it does.’
‘Since when.’
‘Since forever have there been curtains on those windows.’
She gave me a crazed look and asked if I was feeling okay. I was fine, I said, but maybe those chemicals she mixed up were infiltrating her brain.
She was poised to launch the hairbrush at me when suddenly she stopped. Her scalp was burning. Was it supposed to burn?
I was rinsing Alyssa’s hair in the under the bathtub faucet and she was yelling not to get her face wet when the doorbell rang. We both froze. I knew neither of us could remember the last time it rang. Formal visits seldom graced our house. Alyssa said to just keep rinsing, but it rang again and again.
Finally, she pushed me off her. A chunk of her hair broke off in my hand, orangish white.
In the living room, Alyssa threw open the door. We stared at the man on the other side. He looked like a child playing dress-up, or maybe a clown without makeup. Every article of clothing he wore was exceedingly large. His tie was so wide it almost covered his shirt, baggy under the giant shoulders of his suit jacket. His pants bunched around his long shoe tops, held up for dear life by a belt cinched as tight as it would go. The only piece that fit was his fedora, which looked strangely small and out of place.
‘Good morning to you! Is Mrs. Joan Greene in?’ The man chirped like an overexcited chicken.
We stared at the caricature. Alyssa said ‘No, sorry,’ and moved to shut the door. A breeze drifted into the house just then. It smelled pleasant.
But the man started babbling as he stuck his clown foot in the doorway, and we caught the word ‘comment’ as Alyssa pushed the door harder. I gasped. The man cried out, like a parakeet this time. Then he was gone.
I looked at her. She shook her head. ‘Probably a scammer. He’d have wanted your social security number next. Weirdo.’
Something was off. ‘Don’t you think-‘
She glared. I wasn’t to push it. Fine, I said. Fine.
She made a move to kick me, but it was half-hearted. We looked around the living room at nothing. I said to her, ‘See? Curtains.’
‘Oh,’ she replied. ‘I thought you meant the plastic kind that pull up and down.’
‘Blinds?’
‘I’m not blind.’ She paused. ‘What’s that in your hand?’
No sooner were we back in the bathroom and Alyssa’s head under the faucet than the doorbell rang again. There wasn’t time to be surprised. Alyssa growled with irritation and marched toward the living room, hair dripping a sporadic pattern behind her. I threw a towel on the floor and got there as she was opening the door to a woman in a pastel skirt suit who introduced herself as Mrs. Carter, ‘from just up the street at First Baptist. Maybe you’ve seen me around?’
The breeze that blew in wasn’t as pleasant that time.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said at the same time that Alyssa deadpanned, ‘We’ve never seen you before.’
The woman blinked and turned a little pink. ‘Well, I’m sure I’ve passed by here a time or two.’
‘Doubt it,’ Alyssa muttered.
I elbowed her ribs and in the most polite tone I could muster, asked the woman what brought her by.
Mrs. Carter blinked some more. For a moment we just looked at one another. A mask of placidity and patronizing adulthood came over her face as she inquired after Joan. She really needed to speak with her.
Alyssa told her Joan hadn’t been home since morning. Neither of us offered to take a message. Well, the woman said. Well.
Her smile was strange, like her facial muscles weren’t used to the exertion. ‘When she gets in, girls, tell her that her friend Carol Carter stopped by. And we’d love to see you all at church this Sunday, if you aren’t too busy with everything. The Lord guides us even in the most extraordinary circumstances. You would love our Teen Warriors class. And there’s a Gentle and Mild girls’ group.’
I had never met a gentle and mild woman in my life and didn’t plan to. Thank god I didn’t need to say as much, because Alyssa snapped –
‘Okay, church lady. I don’t know what air you’re breathing, but I’ve never seen you before in my life. My mother doesn’t know you either. And we’re Catholic.’ She slammed shut the door.
As we watched Mrs. Carter’s butter yellow bottom disappear down the driveway, I said to Alyssa, ‘But that guy earlier was weird, too. And he asked for Joan. Where is she right now, anyway?’
Alyssa blew a big bubblegum bubble and popped it with her finger. ‘Who cares? Probably at Doreen’s.’
I was unconvinced.
‘It’s bull,’ she said, her eyes on the ceiling. ‘I told you that first guy was a scammer. And that lady was just off her rocker.’
I must have continued to look uncertain, because she went on about the air and the water around here. This was here, she said. I knew this, she said. And she paused, remembering herself, her hand to her head.
I was yanking the detangling comb through her hair, which now had the texture and consistency of straw, when the doorbell rang a third time.
‘Ignore it.’ Alyssa’s voice came through clenched teeth.
Mmm, I murmured, mildly horrified by a gnarl of hair half the size of my fist. I dug the comb into it. ‘Tip your head back, and don’t move. This will hurt.’
Alyssa was lying face down on the bathmat with me straddling her back when the doorbell rang again. She raised her head. I pushed it back down.
‘Don’t. I swear if you move you’ll ruin all my progress. And I’m not doing this again.’ The knot was now about a third the size of my fist.
The doorbell rang four more times over the next hour. Each time, our bodies clenched, tensing, waiting for whatever was coming to strike. We didn’t say much to one another. Our deepest communication did not require speaking.
As I was combing another glop of detangler through her hair, the phone rang. Alyssa’s head sprang up like a frog. I pushed it down again, hard. She argued that it could be Sally. Ring ring. Ring. Ring ring. Ring. Sally Hancock, who never called our house unless she wanted something, but my sister was up, throwing me off her and in the living room, receiver in hand. Hello, she said. Hello. Over and over.
No one appeared to be on the other side.
I stood and waved the comb with big swirls of my wrist. Alyssa sighed and put down the receiver. We resumed our positions on the bathmat, Alyssa pinching me when I pulled the knot too hard. A tiny purple bruise bloomed on my thigh.
Then the bell rang again. Neither of us moved. The noise stopped for a moment, then returned in triple time. Bing bing bing. Bong bong bong. Alyssa growled into the bathmat. Bong bong bong. Bing bing bing. She huffed like a disgruntled bear and raised her head.
It kept coming. Whoever was there was intent on getting in. A boulder hurtling down a mountain.
Something throbbed in my chest. I dipped the comb in the detangling cream.
Bing bing bing bong bing bong bing. BING –
Alyssa screeched like a banshee in the echo chamber of the bathroom. Wriggling out from under me until I was halfway in the tub, she stomped to the living room.
I screamed, scrambling. ‘No! No.’
She ignored me. I grabbed her arm. ‘Alyssa.’
She threw open the door. I was not wrong. There on the threshold stood our aunt Doreen.
She carried a package of store-bought cupcakes. A glance at the icing told me they were stale. Somewhere on the plastic a half-off sticker lingered.
For a moment no one moved or spoke. Then, behind us, someone coughed.
I jumped. Herb leaned in the doorway to the kitchen. Doreen stepped inside. Alyssa closed the door. A few stray leaves blew gently against the coat closet door. I didn’t notice what the air smelled like.
‘Why the front door?’ Alyssa demanded. Doreen handed me her purse and the cupcakes and half-collapsed into the armchair.
‘Your father shut the garage door.’ She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I turned to Herb. Our garage door was perpetually open. Alyssa and I would camp in the driveway when we were younger. We knew everyone on our street – apart from Carol at the Baptist church, apparently. The last time Herb shut the door was during a freak ice storm the winter before, and only then when Joan badgered him, saying it would be all his fault if our toes fell off in our sleep.
He looked back at me blankly. ‘What?’
Alyssa was losing patience. With what, I wasn’t certain. ‘Will someone explain what the hell is going on,’ she growled. She hadn’t moved from her spot by the door.
I thought I heard someone approach the front step just then. My jaw tensed and the throb in my chest lurched again. But nothing happened. I looked around. No one appeared to have noticed.
‘Don’t swear, the lord hears you,’ Doreen said absently. She yawned, and looked closer at Alyssa. ‘What in heaven’s name have you done to your head?’
Alyssa glared. ‘They’re highlights.’
‘Come over here,’ Doreen barked, motioning with her hand. With theatrical reluctance, Alyssa let go of the doorknob and shuffled over to the armchair.
‘Bend down.’ She thrust her hand into Alyssa’s knots. ‘Highlights. Did you dip your skull in bleach?’
Alyssa jerked away and a not insignificant chunk of hair stayed in Doreen’s hand. ‘Stop. I still need to condition.’
‘Better bathe in it,’ Doreen muttered. ‘I’ve got a woman who can maybe fix this. We’ll go down tomorrow and see what she can salvage.’ She held up the snarl of hair in her hand. A small, nameless animal.
Alyssa was working herself up to tears. Her regular fine performance, Joan called it. ‘Stop. This will work. I just need to condition. Sally told me what to do. It’s just not done yet because of all the interruptions.’
Doreen cackled. ‘Sally Hancock? Her aunt Arlene is a hack. I wouldn’t trust her with my leg hair. No, you’d better come see my woman.’
‘She isn’t a hack,’ Alyssa protested, half desperate and half angry. ‘We followed her method exactly. We just aren’t done yet.’
‘We,’ Doreen turned to me. ‘Huh.’
The phone rang. Herb reached over and picked up the receiver. Alyssa and I looked at each other and blinked. Our father listened a moment, then said quickly, ‘No comment,’ and hung up.
‘Who was that,’ I asked. My voice was quiet.
He looked at me, weighing something. ‘No one important.’
‘Aunt Doreen,’ Alyssa said through gritted teeth, ‘Do you know where our mother is?’
Doreen studied the shelf of ceramic frogs nearest her. ‘She should be home soon.’
The phone rang again. Alyssa and I both moved toward it, puppets on a string, but Herb answered. ‘Greene,’ then again, just as quickly, ‘No,’ and put down the receiver.
‘What -‘ I began, but Doreen interposed, ‘I think we could all use a cup of coffee.’
Caffeine did not seem the precise thing any of us needed at that moment, but Herb nodded, ‘Fantastic.’
In the kitchen, we listened to the coffee pot gurgle and sigh. No one spoke for a few minutes. I tried to catch Alyssa’s eye, but she was studying the cabinets, a row of blue frogs painted across the brown laminate, every third frog leaping over its neighbor. Her hand strayed absentmindedly to her hair.
Herb poured four mugs. Like a robot, I got the sugar bowl and placed it in front of Doreen. ‘Oh, no thank you, dear,’ she said as she dumped a large spoonful into her coffee. ‘I’m cutting back.’
A knock came on the front door. Alyssa moved toward the living room, but Herb held out his arm. ‘No. No. Leave it.’
She was too surprised to be combative. ‘It might be Sally,’ she said tentatively.
‘She can come back another time,’ Herb replied. He and Doreen exchanged glances. Before either of them could speak, the phone rang. Herb picked it up, listened, and said ‘She’s not home.’
I practically fell over the table. ‘Who isn’t home?’
He took a long, meditative sip of coffee. ‘Your mother.’
I could have screamed. Maybe I should have screamed.
‘She’s with the priest,’ Doreen said suddenly. I looked at her. She tucked a lipstick-stained napkin into her sleeve.
Alyssa scoffed. ‘Right.’ She turned to Herb. ‘Who was that on the phone?’
He half-grinned. ‘The County Courier. Wanted to know if Mrs. DeWinter was at home.’
Rebecca was one of Joan’s favorite movies. Alyssa stared at him like he had grown a second head. If he had, I wondered abstractly, would any of us have thought to notice?
Doreen said quietly, ‘Herb.’
Our father looked at us and gestured to the table. ‘Sit down.’ When neither of us moved, he sighed. ‘Okay. Okay.’
For a moment it was quiet. The clock ticked on the wall above the sink. The coffee pot had gone to sleep.
Herb took another breath. ‘Your mother won some money. She found out yesterday. She’s with Father Francois now, talking.’ He studied us closely, searching for a reaction.
He didn’t get much of one.
Doreen took the napkin from her sleeve and blew her nose. Herb walked into the living room and unplugged the phone line. I suddenly understood the meaning of deafening silence.
Alyssa was pacing around the kitchen. She stopped and fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers. ‘I know.’
Everyone was silent for a moment. ‘You know?’ Herb repeated.
‘I heard you talking last night. You know the vents in your room connect to mine.’
‘My god,’ Doreen murmured. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
Alyssa moved the salt shaker back and forth. She didn’t speak for a few moments. ‘I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think it was real.’
I found myself retracing her steps around the kitchen. I came up behind her and took the pepper shaker in my hands. In a haze, I saw myself unscrew the cap and dump the contents onto the counter. ‘How much money?’
Herb looked at the pepper. ‘Enough.’
‘A lot?’
He nodded.
‘A lot for here, or a lot anywhere.’
Herb didn’t answer.
The air was suddenly stifling. I pinched pepper between my fingers and held it to my nose.
Alyssa still didn’t look at me.
Everything was happening very slowly around me. I felt myself raise the pepper shaker in the air, hold it like some deformed baseball. I threw it to the floor; a shard flew to Alyssa’s forehead. A tiny cut bloomed red.
I walked out of the kitchen to the bathroom, where I stayed long enough to make them think I had to go.
Doreen held an ice pack to Alyssa’s head. I opened my mouth to speak – a long croak came out.
‘She’s fine.’ Doreen hardly glanced at me. ‘Her scalp was burning. And we can’t go to the salon right now.’ She looked at the ceiling for a moment. ‘Your mother will be home soon.’
At that moment the front door opened. Joan came bustling in. ‘Oh good, you’re all here.’
I stared at her. She didn’t look like a woman with an enormous pot of money. She didn’t look different at all. More disheveled, if anything. ‘Well?’ Herb asked.
‘It went well.’ Joan sat on the loveseat arm and slipped off her shoes.
‘You talked to him?’
‘I did.’
‘Mother,’ Alyssa growled.
‘What?’
Doreen shoved the ice pack back onto Alyssa’s head.
‘She means,’ I tried to clear my throat. ‘We’re rich.’
Joan smiled a little. ‘No. No, we’re not.’
Everyone was silent again for a minute. Our family is good at silence.
Herb coughed. He was always coughing. ‘So it’s decided, then.’
She nodded. ‘We are not keeping it.’ She looked around the room, studying us.
Alyssa’s mouth hung open. I choked on my own spit. ‘Don’t you have to keep it? Isn’t that, like, the law?’
Joan snorted. ‘No.’
Alyssa located her voice. ‘Why? So we can keep eating shit?’
Joan’s eyes were wide. ‘Excuse me?’
‘You heard me. Why can’t we keep it?’
‘Because we don’t need it.’
My sister quacked like a duck, her voice rising. ‘We don’t need it? Look at this place. We’re the frog freak family in the frog house in a stupid, backward town in a stupid, backward place. Do you know what we could do with that money?’
Joan looked down her glasses at her. ‘What could we do.’
‘Get a better house! Go to a real place! We could go to college. You could retire! Get your precious frogs a home of their own!’ Alyssa was standing over Joan now, her arms waving wildly. She was breathing hard.
Joan got to her feet. Her expression was one I had never seen before. ‘What makes you think you deserve anything like that. Anything special. How many times have I warned you against your delusions. You are not -‘
Herb stepped forward. Joan held out her arm to keep him away and turned back to Alyssa. ‘You want to go to college? Fine. No one’s stopping you. Fill out the goddamn forms. But don’t pretend for a second like you’ve got a clue what you’re doing.’
‘Joan,’ Doreen said.
Joan ignored her. She fixed her gaze on Alyssa. ‘You want to know why we aren’t keeping the money? Because you are not. Too. Good. For this place.’
For about ten seconds no one moved or spoke. The air was pregnant enough for a hundred babies.
And then Alyssa lost her mind.
She laughed, a deep laugh from the depths of her belly. ‘You’re so stupid. You’re so, so stupid, Joan. Don’t you realize? You’re digging your own grave.’
And then she left the room. A few moments later we heard a crash, and then another.
Before anyone could react she was back, eyes wild and smiling. ‘If we are staying here, we might as well spruce up the old prison.’ She took a glass frog from a shelf and hurled it at the wall. ‘Might as well decorate the palace!’ And her arm swept all the little statues to the floor.
I couldn’t move. I looked at Herb and Doreen, but they were frozen too. Joan remained in her seat, only standing when her daughter neared her. Her eyes were almost meditative.
Alyssa came forward and pushed her. I jumped up. ‘Alyssa -‘
Joan fell into the coffee table. It broke, and in a breath there was blood.
Doreen yelled at me to call an ambulance. But I was rooted to the floor, useless as a fake frog.
Alyssa threw open the front door and started chucking out anything she could hold. Figurines, throw pillows, pictures, little metalworks. She tore the curtains from their rods.
And Joan sprang to her feet like a frog herself. She hurled the TV remote at the doorway. Alyssa was running back and forth, back and forth, like some horrible wild thing.
Suddenly Joan took hold of the TV itself, ripping its cords from the wall. Grunting with Herculean effort, she lugged it outside and deposited it on the lawn.
And then, all at once, between the two of them everything inside was outside. The kitchen radio and coffee pot. Frogs. Remnants of the broken coffee table. Joan’s purse. Frogs. The clock. The magazine rack. The detangler. Frogs. Bath towels. Silverware. Shoes. Frogs. A math textbook. Beer cans. Winter coats. Candlesticks. Frogs. Doreen’s box of stale cupcakes sailed through the air.
Like marionettes we followed our two madwomen out the front door. People were gathering in the yard. More were coming up the street. A flashbulb went off in my eyes and I saw the most beautiful stars.
Someone was screaming. Maybe we were all screaming. A chorus of banshees for my sister.
Joan dragged the wicker loveseat off the porch. She took a deep breath and pulled a lighter from her pocket. Slowly, tediously, she crouched and touched the flame to the wood. Little sparks danced, and Herb tackled her to the ground.
