Josie Tolin’s story, “Fucking Illinois People,” is the Honorable Mention winner for the Rumpus Prize in Fiction. This short story chosen from many submissions by our judge Rachel Khong, who wrote about the piece: “In ‘Fucking Illinois People,’ the task of caregiving is brought to life in perfectly perceptive lines like this one: ‘Trent’s head does not touch Jackie’s but they are so close together he can hear the pluck of floss between her teeth.’ I admire this story for its deftness and compassion. It covers so much of the stuff of life: marriage, aging, love, desire—but never reductively, and always with deep understanding.”
Fucking Illinois People
Trent’s wife, Jackie, has another dying wish: to make love to a woman. She tells him so after dinner one night, both of them reclining in the Adirondack chairs Trent crafted years ago, collecting splinters in his forearms where the gloves left skin exposed. I want to make love to a woman. Jackie’s words are sure and lilting, but the sentence thickens the air, hangs like fog over the dunes and the lake beyond, the lake toward which Trent peers, hand cupped against his forehead even though the light out there is stars only, the tourists having steered their headlights away from the park for the night. It is the type of sentence Trent knows he will remember once Jackie has passed, knows he’ll repeat when he tells the story of her, to one of the guys, maybe, in the litter pick-up group he joins every morning. Trent pictures himself among the other retirees, trash bags in hand as they scour the shoreline. He imagines them stabbing their pickers through wrappers and cans—condoms used and unused, sand-caked playing cards and extraneous Ziplocs—when a round-cheeked man in a bucket hat turns to him all somber-faced, asking what his wife was like. Well, says future Trent, the hairs on the back of his neck standing taut from the wind, she wanted to make love to a woman.
“Trent?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you think?”
“I think if that’s what you want, we’ll make sure you get it.”
“Really?”
Trent nods, places his large hand over her bony one. The doctors mentioned this might happen. Well, not exactly this, but things adjacent to it, exhaustion and wooziness in the later phases, trouble focusing or making sense. So far, Jackie has been relatively mobile for stage four, though sometimes she needs a hand to stand up or sit down, stops to clutch the door frame on her way out of one room and into another. But Trent knows her mobility will be short-lived—that, within weeks, Jackie will need him to push her around in the wheelchair he’s borrowed from the wife of a dead friend, which sits, for now, at the base of the staircase.
“Who’s the lucky gal?” Trent asks.
“Greta,” Jackie says.
There is a fierce gust of wind, a distant crash of waves. “Greta Miller?”
“Do we know another Greta?”
“What’s so special about Greta Miller?”
“She’s a lesbian, Trent. Is that what you want me to say? I gave her her first tattoo, looked after Henry while she was out of commission for her back spasms.”
“And now you want to make love to her?”
“I like her and I always have.”
“I like her too.”
“I like her different from how you like her.”
Trent pauses, tries to wrap his head around this. He’s known for decades that Jackie is attracted to both women and men, but usually the reminders arrive as fleeting comments, never involving people they actually know.
“I see,” Trent replies finally.
By now the night has cooled, and the dune grass rustles beneath the mills. The light clicks off on the back porch between Trent’s house and Greta’s. There is the faint echo of footsteps, the slam of a screen door. Then there is nothing, just Jackie breathing beside him.
Before Trent retired, he and Greta worked together at the veterinary clinic. “You’re going to hate it,” Greta said to him once, her fingers dancing over the telephone keypad, the speaker cradled between her cheek and shoulder as she painted her nails a glossy clementine. “You’re going to sit at home, twiddling your thumbs, wishing you had your hand up a miniature poodle’s asshole.” She had moved to Beverly Shores from Chicago a few years back, in the aftermath of her wife’s death, had stay-at-home grandmothered her daughter’s child, Henry, before forgoing her own retirement to sit in a desk chair and make unhinged small talk with pet owners all day. I’d sooner strangle myself than raise another kid, Trent heard Greta say once, to a short woman with a German shepherd named Lieutenant. She sounded like she meant it.
Now, Trent wraps his arm around Jackie’s waist, helps her up and inside. He has tidied the first-floor guest bedroom, has situated a couple of precious objects on the dresser—a geode they bought in Savannah, a wax-coated menorah passed down to Jackie from her grandmother—in anticipation of the day Jackie can no longer take the stairs. Neither of them glance at the wheelchair as they ascend. They pause at the landing, Jackie’s breath snagging audibly in her throat.
“Everything OK?” Trent asks.
Jackie grunts, maneuvers away from him. She grips the banister, then pulls herself up the rest of the way, like a child playing tug-of-war, one hand in front of the other, bare feet following suit, Trent following her. They brush their teeth and wash their faces. Trent’s head does not touch Jackie’s but they are so close together he can hear the pluck of floss between her teeth. As she waddles to bed, Trent keeps his gaze fixed on the space between the spaghetti straps of her loose, satin tank top, wills her rounded shoulders not to further offset her center of gravity. She folds herself beneath the covers, then turns away from Trent, who stands, still, in the doorway. He has a thought he feels bad about, but he thinks it nonetheless: at least she doesn’t want to make love to a man.
*
An incomplete list of the dying wishes Trent has already fulfilled: a homemade pedicure where Jackie sat on the ledge of the tub, her feet soaking in bathwater, Trent shaving her callouses with a pumice stone; from-scratch tiramisu to round out a five-course meal a couple of days after she received her diagnosis; a hot stone massage where the masseuse came out to the house and everything, built a trail of black rocks down Jackie’s spine until a long, deep moan escaped from her, the type of moan Trent had not heard out of her for years. It startled him a bit to hear her make that sound, to know she was capable of experiencing that kind of release. The fact she was going to die and there would still be unknown pieces of her felt like something he could live with, however, and the more he thought about this, the more the sentiment began to sound beautiful instead of sad. As much as he and Jackie had shared in this life, each had managed to keep some things all for themselves.
Before he sets off for the beach the next morning, Trent sees to it that Jackie has both the TV remote and a healthy stack of gossip magazines within arm’s reach. He snags three trash bags from the cabinet beneath the sink, takes his picker from the broom closet, and swings it as he marches out the door and into the road. He passes the squat and sturdy house next-door, then Greta Miller in her VW-something, idling outside her daughter’s place, enormous sunglasses obscuring her expression. Trent intends to just keep walking, but Greta calls after him, so he paints a smile on and asks how things are at the clinic.
“Oh, same as usual.” She cocks her head, lips pursed. “Why do you ask? Bored of all that free time yet?”
“It hasn’t been a lot of free time.”
Trent watches as Greta remembers the news she’s had the privilege of forgetting. “Just giving you a hard time, Trent. Didn’t mean to be insensitive.”
“Yeah, well. Times are hard enough.”
Greta removes her sunglasses. Trent can see the remorse written all over her angular face, but the authenticity of her sorrow only makes him feel worse.
“Listen,” Greta says, muffler putt-putting, “if you need anything, and I mean absolutely anything, you come knocking, okay? Jackie and I have a special bond.”
“Special?”
Greta holds up her hand so Trent can see the band tattooed around her ring finger. He has never looked closely but is aware that this is Greta’s first and only tattoo; that she got it in memory of her wife; that Jackie inked it onto her; that it was one of the first interactions Greta had with a person outside her family when she moved to town.
“Are you free tonight for a chat?” Trent asks. “It’s about something weird.”
“What kind of something weird?”
“Something to do with Jackie.”
“Well, all right then.”
“All right then?”
“Yes. I’m running late, and I know you’ve got your trash group to get on with.”
“We can do a different night too, I didn’t mean to insist or—”
“Tonight is good. I’ll tell everyone at the office you say hello.”
As she speeds away Trent thinks how he doesn’t want her to tell them anything at all. He imagines the pity coursing through the vet techs’ voices as they bemoan the tragedy of their former boss’s soon-to-be former wife. Widower. Something dark and unholy in that word—sinister even, complicit.
Trent continues toward the beach, pick stuttering against the asphalt all the way to the boardwalk, trash bags thrashing in the breeze. It is May now, and the shore is packed with visitors. When Trent was growing up in the same house he now lives in, he and his friends spent every day out on the beach in the summers, snatching beers from the coolers of Chicagoans and playing chicken in the wake of boats that drifted too close to shore. Fucking Illinois people—this phrase they tossed around like a sun-worn football, lamenting the line of cars outside the state park entrance, not knowing how good they had it. And every year, when the Fourth of July rolled around and residents of surrounding states crammed through the park gates, boxes of fireworks rattling in their trunks, Trent and his friends remained inside their houses, watched the displays from their windows as their dogs lowered their tails between their legs. Maybe this is what made Trent want to become a vet, his beloved yellow lab peeing all over the hardwood in fear of the sounds she did not understand.
Before the Indiana Dunes assumed national park status, nearly doubling her rental costs, Jackie, too, had a job she enjoyed. She was the proud owner of Skin & Bones in Michigan City, intimately staffed with a couple of piercers and three artists besides herself. The shop’s interior boasted pale pink walls, a long, glass case of jewelry for every imaginable body part, and colorful booklets of flash tattoos in a stack near the register. Every time Trent paid Jackie a visit, usually on his lunch break, there were only one or two customers seated in the waiting area, but whenever he suggested people might not want to get tattoos from someone who had none she either ignored him or stormed off. He learned to keep his mouth shut about matters having to do with her business, and after decades of lunch break visits Trent began to recognize the regulars himself, figured that if people kept coming back to Jackie—if she could satisfy others and herself in her line of work—it didn’t really matter whether she was raking in the cash. Until it did.
It is easy to locate the men who will walk the beach with Trent this morning, their khaki and gray standing out among the vibrant swimsuits. He approaches, and the men encircle him, waiting for instructions about what to do next. Trent isn’t sure when he became the de facto leader of the group, though it must have been sometime in the past year. Since his retirement, he has joined the pick-up every single morning, with the exception of last Tuesday, a bad day, Jackie vomiting her guts out.
“Toward the visitor center,” Trent commands. He points with his picker, and the men follow, grateful for a mission.
*
“Come in,” Trent tells Greta that evening. Jackie is on the couch watching a recorded episode of The Bachelor, and she smiles knowingly as Trent ushers Greta through the living room, out to the porch. He slams the screen door harder than he means to, then blushes, embarrassed by his own embarrassment. Greta takes a seat in Jackie’s chair. She sits stump-straight, none of her touching the seatback. She looks so wrong there, too compact, not all unwieldy in the limbs like Jackie.
“What’s the matter, Trent?”
He takes a breath and holds it. “Jackie wants to make love to a woman. It’s her seventh dying wish.”
“A woman?”
“You.”
For a moment, they share a silence punctuated only by the distant shriek of gulls, back now for the onset of summer. Trent believes he has made a mistake, but then Greta begins to laugh. Her laugh is rich and thick and unlike any sound he’s heard out of the woman before, the type of laugh that makes you want to cry because you know the person has been storing it up.
“Well,” she says, “that might be the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It is?”
Greta wipes her eye corners. “I’ll take her on a date. How’s that? You know, I had a crush on Jackie when I first met her.”
Trent feels almost flattered, as though she’s talking about him and not his wife. “When she did your tattoo?”
“And a while thereafter. After her shop closed and before I went back to work, she’d come around to take Henry off my hands when my back pain flared, did you know that?”
“Yes I did. Thing is, she can’t go on dates. You’ve seen the type of shape she’s in. What if something terrible happens while you’re out with her? What if you have to rush her to the hospital and I don’t get there in time?”
“I didn’t mean, like, a restaurant. I’d just have her over and cook for her. Henry and my daughter are in Traverse City this weekend, visiting Henry’s dad.”
“You’d do that for her?”
“Why not? It’s the least I can offer, at the end of someone’s life.”
Trent has to stop himself from asking whether Greta’s wife had any odd requests at the end of her life, whether Greta tried to see to it that they were fulfilled. He realizes he doesn’t actually know how she died. It might not have been gradual, like Jackie’s death. It could have been a car crash or a drowning or a suicide; Greta might not have gotten to say goodbye.
As he and Greta sort through schedules, trying to pick a date night, it dawns on Trent that this is maybe the most selfless thing he’s ever done, though this thought does not spark pride so much as the wish to never to be this selfless again. He and Greta set the date for two evenings from tonight. Greta stands to leave, and Trent yells for her to watch her step as she hops down from the porch. She turns and waves, then moves quickly through the dark, rounding the front of the house between them.
Once she is out of sight, Trent returns to the couch with Jackie. The women on The Bachelor are preparing for the rose ceremony.
“I just don’t know who he’s going to let go. Everyone on this show is a whole lot more charming than he is, that’s for sure.”
“I got you a date,” Trent says. Her hand is colder than he expects.
“What do you mean?”
“With Greta.”
“Is that right?” Jackie sounds genuinely surprised. Trent nods and though Jackie’s eyes have gone yellowish around the irises, they seem to sparkle right then. Suddenly she and Trent are twenty again, and the waves are lapping the shore like tongues. A breeze comes by and slaps sand across their wet cheeks, and the beach is neither empty nor crowded, the day neither cloudless nor clear-skied. It is merely a day, one day in the rest of their lives.
*
The night of the date, Trent helps Jackie into a plaid smock dress, which comes down to her knees. As he buttons the top for her, she looks at her cleavage as though seeing it for the first time.
“What do you think?” She’s chosen lipstick in a purplish shade, looks like she’s been sipping merlot.
‘Healthy’ is the word Trent thinks to compliment her with, but he catches himself. “You look incredible.” He takes her hand and lifts it while she does a tentative spin, and without separating their fingers they walk carefully out the door, into the road, and down to Greta’s house.
When they arrive, Greta hurries them inside. The house looks smaller now than it does from the street, a good deal smaller than Trent and Jackie’s house, the AC a touch too cool for the season, the hardwood a touch too shiny. Trent removes his shoes but Jackie keeps hers on. In the living room, Greta has CNN going on mute, a tray of shortbread cookies situated on top of the ottoman.
“Lasagna’s in the oven still. Can I get you anything? Tea, maybe?” Greta is facing Trent but talking to Jackie. Greta has the ends of her sleeves all scrunched and balled in her hands. Trent has never seen her like this. Not while comforting the owner of two Siamese cats after both her babies had to be put down at the same time—not then, not ever.
“Tea sounds nice,” Jackie says. Greta heads for the kitchen and a few seconds later there is the rush of faucet water, the crackle of stove fire. Trent helps Jackie onto the sofa, keeping it gentle as he nudges the ottoman out of the way so the cookies don’t go tumbling to the ground. On the side table, obscured by photos of Henry at various stages of his babyhood, is a picture of Jackie and her now-dead wife. The wife is gap-toothed and skinny with a tan and a baseball cap; the sand sprawls behind them, white and peopled, the dark, stairs-shaped smudge of the US Steel plant barely visible in the corner.
“Hey Greta,” Trent says, “how often did you visit the dunes before you moved out of Chicago?”
“Plenty of times. Jackie, how do you take your tea?”
“Sweet.”
A few cabinets thump closed and a spoon clinks as it stirs. Then Greta emerges with two mugs. She moves as though she’s overfilled them, hands one of them to Jackie, then sits beside her. Trent stares at Greta’s finger tattoo, its thin, even lines. Those lines were etched, Trent knows, by the steadiest of hands, not like the hands he watches now, which tremble as they lift mug to lips.
Greta leans to grab a few cookies. She offers one to Trent, who declines, then Jackie, who accepts. As she chews, Trent helps Jackie out of her coat. Greta considers his wife’s arms for a moment before asking, “How come you’re a tattoo artist, but you don’t have any tattoos?”
“It’s because I’m Jewish. They don’t let you get buried in the Jewish cemetery if you have tattoos.”
“Where does that rule come from?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I didn’t know that was the reason,” Trent says.
Jackie turns to him, lips sealed and smiling. “What’d you think it was?”
“I just figured you liked to keep work and pleasure separate. Something along those lines.”
“I guess there’s a lot you still don’t know about me.”
As Trent sits in the aftershock of her words, he remembers the sigma on his ankle. He’d gotten it with some fraternity brothers one snowy winter night, alcohol and youth coursing through them. He realizes that Jackie has never asked the story behind it, not once.
Nor did she ask about the post of his she’d seen on Craigslist Missed Connections. She’d pulled it up on their desktop computer one day while Trent was out, completing one of his final shifts at the clinic. He knew it was she who pulled it up, not him forgetting to close the browser. He’d made the post on his phone for this very reason—to lessen the likelihood of getting found out—though seeing his words blown up on the screen right then was the first time he’d acknowledged his methods, even to himself. “Cashier at the Marathon off Dunes Hwy” read the post’s title. “You told me I was the first customer to purchase Sno-Caps in a year. You had dark eyebrows, light eyes, and a mole on your chin. If you see this, remember me, and want to talk, message me with your favorite candy (which you shared as I waited for my card to process).”
Why Jackie had even pulled up the page in the first place was a mystery he knew might be painful to solve, and Trent decided not to bring it up, not then or anytime. It would have been too hard to explain himself, and even if he could somehow get the words to match his reasoning, he wasn’t sure she’d believe him that the post had nothing to do with her or the gas station attendant. The post had to do with Trent, with the type of lonesome feeling that didn’t come from anywhere, not a tragic childhood or anything else. He couldn’t make a story from it because there’d be no cause and effect, couldn’t tack it to a wall and call his closest friends to crowd around and look. And even if the feeling did go away on its own one day, who would he be then?
But the post had not mattered in the scheme of things, because Jackie’s diagnosis came shortly thereafter. Stage four. No chemo, she insisted, since it was simply going to prolong what was already inevitable. “I may as well die with a full head of hair,” she joked, and they’d made arrangements for hospice care at the very end of her life. But what about me? Trent wanted, but felt too guilty, to ask. Where do I factor into any of this?
“Trent?” Jackie says. “Are you going to be heading out soon?”
Trent notices that the two women have moved closer together on the sofa as his mind has been drifting, knees almost touching, their chatter loosening at some point while Trent was off in his brain.
“I was just leaving, actually.” Trent stands, wipes his damp palms on the thighs of his jeans.
On his way to the door, Greta grabs him by the wrist. “I’ll call you if she needs you,” she whispers in a register Jackie can surely hear. Trent nods, thanks her, and keeps moving.
Alone for the first night in recent memory, Trent busies himself with household tasks, trying to keep his mind off Greta and Jackie. He folds the laundry, leaves Jackie’s pants and blouses on top of the dresser, where she can reach them without strain. When he opens the closet, a shoebox between two crates catches his eye. He knows what he would find if he opened it—old photos from his and Jackie’s courtship, faded and crinkled at the corners, both of them younger and thinner and fuller of life. This is the problem with photographs, he decides right then. They take the mystery out of memory.
Trent lays his best slacks over hangers, drapes his sport coats around them. He knows he will not open the shoebox until many years after Jackie has died, until the painful forcefield around the object, and others like it, has weakened.
The first floor of the house is mostly tidy, not offering much in the way of chores, and Trent finds himself out on the porch in his chair once more, attempting to read through a small stack of Jackie’s romance novels. Try as he might, he can’t get into any of them, abandons each after the first chapter, sometimes sooner. It’s not that he doesn’t think he could love these books. He does, and plans to, especially once Jackie is no longer sharing this earth with him. The words just aren’t sticking, he can read them all separately, can hear their sounds and know their textures, but the actual meanings are slippery, his peripheral vision too aware of the empty seat beside him, of the rounded tops of sandhills, shadowy with distance. Waves slosh. Gulls caw. A truck grates down the road with its muffler dragging. Trent brings his hands to his ears.
And when the sky, too, goes black, he leaves the books in a stack at the foot of Jackie’s chair, knowing it will be a clear night, that he doesn’t have to worry about a storm sweeping by and ruining them—that, even if such a thing were to happen, it would perhaps be for the best, a few less pinpricks to the heart as he moves through the house in her absence. He slides the screen door open, then closed. He surveys his surroundings, noticing the TV, which he considers turning on just break the silence, and the rocking chair, a heart-shaped pillow Jackie embroidered for one of their first Valentine’s Days resting on its seat. Trent picks it up. The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have, reads the cursive quote across the front of it. When she gave it to him, he’d been confused, as the quote didn’t seem to have anything to do with love whatsoever.
“Michelangelo?” he asked her then.
“Vince Lombardi.” She said it as though her reply illuminated everything, and for that reason, Trent didn’t press, didn’t tell her the gift was a bad one, actually, bad and unthoughtful and cliché.
Upstairs, Trent removes his shirt and pulls on pajama pants. He crawls beneath the comforter, and his back cracks as he turns toward the large window on the far wall. In the months that follow, he knows he can count on the fireflies to light it up in specks, the crickets to call to him from the outside, their voices high and bleating. In the months that follow, more tourists will press into this town. They will be from places besides Illinois, places like Montana or Arkansas or Maine or Texas or (God forbid) Ohio. They will be passing through on their way from somewhere to somewhere else, will stop only because they’ve heard of America’s newest national park. “Look at the power plant!” they will say, pointing fingers. And when Trent sees all that, he knows he will feel as implicated as he did the day they closed Mount Baldy to foot traffic, so many times had he hiked that dune, from childhood into adulthood: he had been part of the erosion.
It is all Trent can do to keep himself from losing it right there in the bed, the past and future colliding in his head, those worlds where he exists and those where he does not. He buries his face in a pillow, breathes in Jackie’s scent, though he can’t stop imagining the years that will follow this moment, the dunes worn to sea level, the lake lapping its way up the beach, some fresh US Steel oil spill outlining the shore in murk.
Jackie should have been home hours ago. Trent considers her comment, about being buried in a Jewish cemetery. He is sixty-nine years old, has not thought about his own death so much, but now he wonders whether he would like to be buried next to her. In theory, it sounds like an excellent idea: he wouldn’t even mind getting his tattoo removed, as it never meant much to him anyway. But when he thinks about converting to Judaism just to lie there next to her, the work behind it seems unnecessary, since her bones and his bones are just going to become dirt.
Would Greta convert to Judaism if it meant she could be buried next to her beloved? Trent is sure she would. He checks his phone to see whether Greta has texted, but he has no unread messages, no missed calls. Of course they are having a good time, he thinks. A good time is exactly what should be had, by all parties involved. And of course Jackie will not actually make love to a woman, to Greta, because she simply does not have that kind of vitality left in her. Greta knows that too, of course. But a part of Trent wonders whether he’s wrong, underestimating Jackie in some way. He coils himself in bedsheets and pictures it, Jackie and Greta with their hands on each other, lips locked, clothes coming off. Greta with her fingers inside Jackie—maybe Jackie would like that, from a woman. Maybe she will tell him about it if he asks. Greta kicks the cookies and the tray goes clattering to the floor. The women laugh, then carry on all breathy and slick, everything tautening and tautening until their bodies allow them to let go.
