Whack-a-Duck

The Whack-a-Duck machine was broken again. This may have been an inconvenience to the pimpled teenaged boys trying to beat each other’s scores at bashing plastic waterfowl on the head (one of them still clutched the mallet in both of his hands like a conscripted medieval peasant), but it made Aggie’s day. Whenever the Whack-a-Duck machine broke, the futchy maintenance girl with her royal purple eyebrow piercing passed right by the caricature booth with her toolkit and worked on the machine directly in Aggie’s line of vision for twenty to thirty minutes. The machine broke nearly every week. The previous Tuesday, Aggie drummed up the courage to lean over from the caricature booth as the girl passed by, both of them visibly sweating through the armpits of their uniforms.

“That thing sure breaks a lot, huh?”

“Yup,” the girl said, grinning. “Keeps me employed,” and wandered off.

This time Aggie intended to ask for her name. The girl was wearing her usual getup, ashy gray coveralls with the words MOOSE LAKE AMUSEMENTS PARK MAINTENANCE scrawled across the back in white script, with the top two buttons undone and a red bandana tied around her neck and stuffed into the gap. Aggie had five minutes left on a caricature when the girl appeared in her periphery. Five minutes should have been plenty of time, but the family she was drawing was absolutely miserable. They were a white family, as far as Aggie could tell, which was perfectly normal. Aggie was white. Many of her clients were white, although Somali families also contributed to a significant portion of the caricature booth’s business. It was an ongoing challenge for Aggie to balance the nature of caricature, which by design required exaggerating and riffing off of somebody’s physical appearance, with her own biases, implicit and otherwise. It did not help that the caricature world had not caught up to the most contemporary discussions of gender, class, and race. 

Aggie’s problem with this family was that they seemed to wield their whiteness like a weapon. The subjects were twin boys in matching camouflage, about ten years old, neither of whom was able to sit still. The father wore cargo shorts and a mustard colored t-shirt printed with the words “Forty Percent Man…Sixty Percent Beer!” and a picture of a beer can with legs, and he commented on Aggie’s tattoos three separate times as if he’d never seen a person with tattoos before. The mother kept shooting dirty looks at a group of black kids laughing in the long line for the rollercoaster fifty feet off from Aggie’s kiosk and muttering into her husband’s ear. The parents made no attempt to get their own children to sit still, so Aggie had to continuously stop drawing to corral them amidst her distraction over the maintenance girl and her hot pangs of white guilt that she wasn’t speaking up about the casual racism she was almost sure she was witnessing but told herself she could not prove.

Aggie really needed to keep her job, and she was pretty sure that her boss wouldn’t take her side if she pissed these people off. She couldn’t focus on anything besides drawing or painting or molding clay for long enough to keep a job waiting tables or cleaning houses, and her only other gig was teaching a figure drawing 101 class at a community center twice weekly in St. Paul for $12/hr.

“What do you keep looking at?” Aggie asked the mother.

The mother paused. Her bare shoulders were dotted with big, gingery freckles. The freckles shrugged up and down. “Those kids in line are just being so damn loud.”

“They’re being awfully dark-skinned too, aren’t they?” Aggie said.

The Whack-a-Duck machine loosed the chorus of piercing quacks it made whenever it was restarted. Aggie halfassedly finished the drawing in the tense silence that followed, charged the family $10 for a $20 caricature mumbling something about twins, slid the cash into the pouch in her apron, and walked over to the awning shaped like an open yellow beak. The maintenance girl was crouched behind the long aquamarine table with its two dozen or so “lakes” which the ducks were meant to leap out of when the machine was operational. Aggie could never quite follow the logic of the game; was the player intended to be a giant who smashed ducks with a lake-sized mallet? From here, she could see the girl’s earrings, shaped like a pair of dangling leather boots. The air smelled like funnel cake and sunscreen. Aggie waited, and a flurry of quacking mallards came popping out from their holes. The maintenance girl sprang up from behind the table. Up close, she had clear, wide brown eyes that glistened with the rotating fire engine light of the carnival game.

 Aggie extended a hand. “Aggie.”

(Aggie did lose her job. It wasn’t over anything she said to a customer or due to any poor performance on her part; she lost her job to the virus.)

The maintenance girl’s name was Jaqueline, no nicknames, please, and she and Aggie started hanging out a week before the virus hit. In fact the virus had “hit” a month prior, but it wasn’t until the hospitals began to overfill that the theme parks and the restaurants and the gyms and the tattoo parlors and the museums and the coffee shops began to close their doors. It wasn’t until people started losing their jobs that they realized the public health officials weren’t kidding about isolating themselves from friends and family.

Jaqueline was married. Aggie had never thought to look for a ring on a crush’s finger before, considering she was queer and twenty five and nobody she knew who was queer and twenty five was married before she met Jacqueline, who was in conversation with her spouse about how to approach opening their marriage and wanted to take things slow.

So they took things slow. They first met outside work at a coffee shop which two weeks later would attempt to transition to selling their sandwiches and drinks online and leaving them on a pickup table under the patio awning for their customers to come and retrieve, which would end up closing permanently several days later because nobody was ordering anything. They walked around the neighborhood drinking tea, stopping to inspect free yard libraries and once at an oak tree so that Jacqueline could chirp back and forth with a chickadee. They did not kiss. Aggie would have (Aggie would have done more than kiss- Aggie would have pushed Jacqueline up against a wall and pressed her finger pads into Jacqueline’s hips and leaned in until she could feel Jacqueline’s soft, half-filled cock against her stomach), but Aggie didn’t even ask to kiss because she was committed to the pace, the taking slowly of things, the simmer, the slow burn, the respect she’d been asked for and was willing in spite or because of her desire to give.

A week later the burn got slower when Jacqueline decided to stop leaving her house for anything but essential trips, since her spouse was immunocompromised.

The day after Moose Lake Amusements shut down, Aggie applied for unemployment. She lit a stick of incense, sat cross-legged on the floor beside Waffles with her back against the sofa, and opened her laptop. The unemployment website looked like it hadn’t been updated since the early 2000s, with its blocky tables and text box entry fields, except that there was already a button to click if you’d lost your job to the virus. A strong handful of her peers had lost their jobs to the virus. She’d written out an itinerary for that first day (and many subsequent days), because she’d learned during a particularly bad suicidal episode several months prior that if she was going to be cooped up alone in her apartment for days or weeks or months on end she’d better build a structure for herself. Applying for unemployment was the third item on the itinerary after waking up and walking Waffles. She knew that “waking up” was a silly item for the list, but she wanted to set herself up for success with an easy one. Following the application, the agenda listed: “paint (one hour)”, “lunch and call Mudge”, “jigsaw puzzle”, “paint or draw (ninety minutes)”, and “free time”. 

The more optimistic of Aggie’s friends expressed their hopes that the changes which the virus had demanded would wake the country up to that which must be changed- the vast income inequality which separated the people who actually kept the world turning from the wealthy, the inhumanities of the prison industry and the war industry, the ceaseless abuse of the planet. The less optimistic saw the gaps getting wider, the black and brown and Asian people who had already been denied care and blamed for the spread, the nonbinary friends who were already being forced to delay surgeries they’d fought for months to get their insurance providers to cover, the virus which would spread like wildfire in the overcrowded prisons and the communities where the poor still had to work. 

“Take this seriously,” the health experts insisted, and still barely anybody could get tested, and the billionaires weren’t lifting a finger to help, and still there was so much else to take seriously. Aggie deleted her Instagram app and started writing “phone in drawer” beside entries on her itineraries. 

Jacqueline texted her: “hey cutie.” Aggie’s favorite kind of text- the kind where someone clearly wanted her attention and didn’t bother to hide it. She wondered how Jacqueline was holding up in relative isolation. Aggie had established what Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton might have called a sort of loose fluid bonding arrangement, where she was only seeing three people in person until social distance was no longer necessary or until measures became even more extreme: her two best friends in the Twin Cities and a very sweet fuckbuddy. Each of those people was only socializing with one or two additional people, and so a sort of containment was built: not airtight by any means, but not nothing, either. Aggie wondered if she should be even more careful, but her mental health and the mental health of her community felt like a real enough consideration. When it came to Jacqueline she texted and facetimed and flirted and daydreamed about the half minute they had spent holding hands in the car when she dropped Jacquline off in front of her squat brick apartment building after the chickadee, frozen solid in each other’s eyes.

How many of the shuttered restaurants would reopen when the world washed its hands of the virus? In how many theme parks would the rats take up residence and refuse to leave? How many cruise ships would be converted into hospitals?

Aggie put a cigarette out on her thigh at three in the morning in the harsh cloud of her bathroom’s grow light, her shadow hovering over the sprawling vines behind her. It felt like really good sex and it sent tingling shockwaves rolling across her flesh, converting her body into a savannah of goosebumps. She hooted and bounced around on the balls of her feet and dropped the cigarette in the toilet before she could do it again. She didn’t have any other cigarettes- she’d nabbed this one from an abandoned turquoise box of American Spirits she’d found on a bench a block from her apartment by the lake. She’d considered taking the whole box, but she hated the logo. Her bathroom smelled like ash and sour yogurt.

She’d never purchase her own carton of cigarettes, so she hoped she’d be safe from doing it again. To be extra careful, she told everybody she knew what she had done. Mudge cried on video chat and swore to Aggie that when all of this was over they would be together, that one or the other of them would move across the country and they would find a cottage and fuck whoever they wanted and, more to the point, love whoever they wanted and sleep sometimes in the same bed and sometimes in separate beds and be a family.

That sounded good to Aggie: when all of this was over. She could hear the Whack-a-Ducks screeching in her ears. She wondered if the camouflage family had lost anyone to the virus. She wondered if the black kids laughing in the queue had lost anyone to the virus. Waffles put his fuzzy head in her lap, and Mudge said “awww” and “thank god you have Waffles” and “please promise that you won’t do it again no matter how bad it gets, that you’ll call me or Ash or Emmett or even your mother” and Aggie promised and they both cried over how much they loved each other and missed each other and Aggie ran her fingers through Waffles’ espresso fur and a question for Mudge dribbled out of her mouth: “hey, how are you drinking your coffee now if all of the shops are closed?”

Would Aggie learn to focus on what really mattered now that there was nothing else to focus on? Would she drink too much in isolation? 

The next time Aggie wanted to hurt herself, only a couple of days later, she instead painted a self portrait where in place of her breasts were two gaping bloody holes. How would Aggie and Mudge afford a cottage if neither of them could work, if nobody who worked with their hands or on their feet or in front of a crowd could work again for months or longer, if the job market was broken for years? How must the preachers and the rabbis and the imams be feeling? She often thought of Mudge’s brother, who’d just had a baby. Would that baby live on, never knowing what world they’d been born into? Or would they learn what world they’d been born into when some harsher catastrophe collided with their young adulthood and scattered their plans to the winds? Or would they catch the virus tomorrow and be dead in a week?

The ducks raised their new hatchlings around the lake by Aggie’s apartment, swimming in formation across the surface and splashing about in congregation at the shallow edges. Waffles wanted to play with them, sitting still at Aggie’s command but twitching forwards towards the flock and softly whining. She took a picture of the birds, which she sent to Jacqueline along with the text: “Please Come Help Me Fix These Ducks” along with an emoji of a duck. Jacqueline did not respond. 

Did Aggie have the virus already? Was she carrying it around in her body and showing no symptoms? Was she unwittingly passing it on to every person she came near?

Aggie logged onto Instagram via web browser, a decision that made her feel like dog crap because everyone else seemed to be thriving in isolation, learning new hobbies and baking successfully (Aggie tried to bake biscuits and they came out like stones) and writing music and building systems of mutual aid outside capitalism and crying gracefully on video and finding new uses for pasta water and all Aggie was doing was self-mutilating and being resentful of ducks. Somebody spray-painted in hot pink on the side of the expensive coffee shop in Aggie’s neighborhood: FUND VIRUS TESTING NOW! Even the vandals would be builders of the new world, and Aggie would be left behind.

Would the disasters keep happening over and over, faster and faster?

They walked around Moose Lake Amusements for half an hour together before either of them went back to work. Since Aggie was paid on commission, she didn’t make any money for any time that she spent at Moose Lake not drawing caricatures (which meant that on slow days she made well under minimum wage, which was $10.25 an hour in Minneapolis where you could no longer rent a room in a shared apartment for less than $550 a month), but she didn’t care. She felt light in Jacqueline’s presence. Everything made Jacqueline laugh, which made Aggie laugh even amidst the roaring of the old rollercoasters which usually triggered her body’s panic response. She asked Jacqueline if she ever worked on the rollercoasters.

“No,” Jacqueline said. “Just the games and the kiosks and the vending machines.”

Two days after the duck picture, she texted Jacqueline again: “When all of this is over, I’m going to kiss you until you’re dizzy.” Jacqueline responded with an emoji of a blushing face and three words: “I’d like that.”

I’d like that.

When all of this is over. 

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020