Susie’s Safe Word — Part 1
Kaylee was my first girlfriend back in 2005, during the reign of MySpace, reality television, and low-rise jeans. We were both on the pin-straight, layered hair bandwagon and heavily invested in anything and everything “pop-punk”. I suppose our rebellious nature was, in part, what led to the events of January 15th. I recall that day with perfect clarity. Well — bystanders may disagree, but even now, as I recount this in the dead of night, with my wife of four years sleeping next to me, I refuse to believe it could have happened any other way.
January had been cold that year. While not uncommon for our area, that winter, in particular, yielded winds that threatened to mow down the sanctity of our first apartment. Albeit my handyman skills being limited to angling bobby pins into Kaylee’s hair extensions, I’d managed to seal any gaps I could find in the window frames using felt from one of my old sweaters, eventually winning us a degree or two.
At the time of these events, Kaylee and I had been together about five months. Long enough to receive joint invitations from mutual friends, but not nearly long enough to merit the approval of our parents. Still, it wasn’t like their blessing — or lack thereof — mattered much anyway. I was twenty and Kaylee was nineteen. Both clearly wise beyond our years, fiercely independent, and completely self-sufficient individuals. Well… at least sufficient enough to afford the rent of a semi-livable space in a semi-reputable neighborhood.
That being said, our living arrangement was certainly not without its hurdles. What with Kaylee being fresh out of high school and… okay, I know she’d pinch me for saying it, but in retrospect the term “unemployed” befitted her perfectly.
“But I am making money, Griffin,” she’d snap, snatching another box of pink hair dye off the store shelf, “My last picture got a lot of traction, remember? This is an investment.”
She only called me Griffin when she was truly upset, so I did what I thought was best at the time and focused on being the sole breadwinner, putting in extra shifts at the laundromat to feed her hair dye habit, and…well… her.
I won’t lie though — it was great in the beginning. For the first two weeks following our move, Kaylee and I relished in our newfound privacy by incessantly blessing each corner of the apartment. No, seriously. At the rate we were going, the television stand must have been holier than the local church. Taking little notice of the near-empty fridge or the moldy bathroom wall, we hyper focused on each other, figuring that was the way of things for two people in love.
However, our naive worldview was abruptly challenged when a married couple in their late thirties leased the apartment parallel to ours. I recall watching from our third-story window as they hauled their belongings down the sidewalk and up the front steps.
“They look… normal enough,” Kaylee grimaced as the man spat over his shoulder, the gunk landing smack-dab on the woman’s pointy boot, “Better not expect homemade cookies any time soon though.”
She was right not to. Our new neighbors promptly accentuated how thin the walls really were, which made me reconsider that new tongue thing I’d tried on Kaylee. Without so much as an introductory nod, we soon became privy to the scope of our neighbor’s lives all from the comfort of our own bedroom.
The woman appeared to be foreign. Slavic, most likely, given her thick accent. Syuzanna, I believe her name was, although her husband, Brad — who was clearly American — only ever called her Susie. We’d received a letter addressed to her in our mail once, and while we simply dropped it back into their own mailbox, the sender’s address on the envelope insinuated that the couple’s marriage was probably built on a favor-to-favor basis.
Look, I say this, even though at first it certainly seemed like a win-win. Not unlike ourselves, Susie and Brad would go at it like a couple of caged rabbits in heat, which wasn’t at all surprising. Conversation between the two seemed relatively bland, given her limited English. Which is why, following a particularly raucous 8 AM session, we were stunned to hear her exclaim “Cass…e…role!” with a calamitous thud on our wall.
Kaylee and I stared at each other, stupefied before bursting into a quiet fit of laughter.
“Casserole?” she repeated, a hand over her mouth, “Did she just say casserole?”
We analyzed it for a while, wondering if perhaps we’d misheard it due to her accent, but the sexual encounters that ensued left little doubt — Susie was, in fact, saying casserole.
“What an odd choice for a safe word,” I remarked to Kaylee one night, after a series of bizarre muffled c-c-ca-cas on the opposing side of the wall, “He must have chosen it deliberately, so it’d be hard to pronounce.”
But Kaylee only shook her head, a strange look on her face, “I don’t know, Finn, she seems to be doing a pretty good job of pronouncing it as of late.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” she began, her teeth clamping down on her bottom lip, something she always did when she was nervous, “I think… I think she’s started using it for… other stuff as well.”
“Other stuff?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kaylee shook her head, exasperated, “Like sometimes when you’re not here, they’ll have an argument or whatever, and suddenly Susie will be all like “Brad, casserole”, and then he’ll storm out.”
I thought about it for a moment, “Well, could she just be telling him to go out and buy a casserole? Or maybe she’s making a casserole?”
“No, not really,” Kaylee leaned back in her chair, “It gets pretty intense sometimes. Like they’ll start talking about her green card and it’ll escalate into this whole ordeal, sometimes to the point of like… me having to cover my ears even. And then she’ll say “casserole” and he’ll just leave.”
I mulled this over, finding the scenario hard to imagine. And why was I only hearing about this now?
“And like,” Kaylee continued, “All couples fight, so I didn’t think much of it at first, you know? Just seems a bit over the top sometimes, that’s all.”
I came to discover that Kaylee’s definition of “a bit over the top” didn’t quite match up with mine the following week, when a row started brewing on the other side of our wall late Friday afternoon. Needless to say, the tension did not pair well with my idea of a romantic six-month anniversary weekend.
“It’s my money and I get to do whatever I want with it,” Brad was saying, “If I want to spend it down at Mickey’s, you’d better believe I’ll be spending it there. Peter really isn’t my problem, sweetheart.”
“Petr!” Susie retorted, swatting what I could only assume was her palm across a hard surface, “You — make promise, you say — two hundred a month, now — you not give any!”
Brad gave a harsh chuckle, “Promises, promises, what about your promises, Susie? That thing you promised you’d do only the other night? You remember that, right? Or have you already forgotten?”
My stomach dropped. I glanced over at Kaylee, who was staring down at her feet, lips pursed. She stayed frozen in that position, her eyes refusing to meet mine, as the argument on the other side of the wall exacerbated into one progressively louder and beyond anything I could comfortably relay here.
“Brad,” Susie cried eventually over her husband’s angry tirade, “Casserole! Please, casserole!”
And then… silence. I held my breath.
“I’ll give you fucking casserole,” Brad hissed.
Only when we heard the front door slam about five minutes later and Brad coughing and spitting in the stairwell did we heave a sigh of relief. Had this been Kaylee’s experience every time I’d left for work? Were we supposed to call the police? Would that make things worse for Susie? For us?
“What happens next..?” I whispered to Kaylee, who was keenly observing my reaction, “Do they…how long before..?”
“He’ll stay away for a few hours,” she replied, “Most he’s ever gone was about four, I’d say. Then he’ll come back and they’ll…well… carry on.”
“Business as usual,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, my voice cracking in the process.
But by the time the following afternoon had rolled around, Brad had still not returned. It was quiet on the opposite side of our wall. Abnormally so.
“The silence is really…” Kaylee gestured, as though to mask her lack of a suitable word, “…refreshing, isn’t it?”
“Maybe they moved out…” I tried wistfully, a lump gnawing at my throat. I patted my lap and Kaylee plopped down on it, angling her face to fit into the curve of my neck, “Do you want to watch a movie? I could go and rent the new — ”
“No, I’ll just go to bed, I think,” Kaylee whispered, “Not feeling too good.”
I cupped her face in my hands to examine her. She wasn’t burning up, but her eyes glistened and her skin was an odd shade of green.
“Are you alright?” I asked, concerned, “If it’s because of the neighbors, I can go and-”
“No, no,” she said, clearly brushing it off, “I just have a bit of a headache, that’s all. It’s no wonder — all that screaming.”
She slid off my lap and curled up under the covers, along with my hopes of commemorating our half-year anniversary. But by 8 PM, I was feeling pretty out of it myself, which was unusual, considering we’d slept in that same morning.
“Doing alright?” I murmured, as I slid into bed next to Kaylee, who was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. I slipped an ibuprofen into her palm, following it up with a glass of water, “Go on, I already took one.”
She surveyed me, “You too, huh?”
I nodded, “Yeah, just feeling kinda cold. Feverish, you know? Must be some bug I caught at work… Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Her eyes suddenly welled up with tears, “Kaylee?”
“I…” she swallowed, “Well how could I? She won’t stop crying…”
I blinked at her, “Who… who won’t stop crying?”
Kaylee’s expression turned into that of incredulity.
“Who won’t stop crying, Kaylee?”
A tear of her own rolled down the side of her face, nestling in the crevice of her ear.
“Susie…” she whispered, “Can…can you not hear her?”
Puzzled, I turned my attention to the wall, listening intently.
“No,” I said after a pause, “I can’t hear anything. I think maybe you just had a bad dream?”
Momentarily, anger seized her soft features, “It’s not a dream. Well, listen! It’s coming from right behind the wall!”
I squinted in an overt display of skepticism and tried to feel her forehead for a fever, but she swatted my hand away, “Piss off.”
Agonized by my now pounding headache and not wanting to escalate the situation into an argument on our side of the wall, I turned off the light and settled into a fetus position. Things would be normal tomorrow, I told myself, no doubt about it.
Except we didn’t get nearly that far.
Part 2 next week…
