Leah had been married to Gordon for four and a half months and had not had a job in more than six. Now, instead of the pantyhose and high heels she wore when she met Gordon, working in the assistant pool in the tax law firm at which he was a partner, Leah wore a uniform of loafers and jeans with holes in the knees, and drank green tea at ten o’clock in the morning. She gazed out picture windows on a long, gravel driveway that curved around a bend of trees and faded out of view; she walked down a pine-chip trail to the dock on Lake Washington where Gordon housed his cedar canoe, and she fed ducks from the gourmet challahs and pumpernickles she brought home from the organic grocery.
Gordon was older than Leah by about 30 years, and she liked him at first because, unlike the other partners, his voice was gentle as a pediatrician, and he said unusual things to her, like "please," and "thank you," and "when you have time." Gordon folded his napkin in his lap, and used it to blot a tiny bit of vinaigrette off the corner of his mouth when they had lunch together the first time. He was good at selecting wines; he never pressured her with too much touching or the kind of awkward whispered confessions her younger boyfriends had often murmered in her ear. She had not even been sure they were dating until he proposed, but Leah often felt she was viewing the world through a long, distant lens, and this proposal was not the first thing in life to bewilder her. He asked her casually, one day, over a cup of coffee in the office kitchen. She had raised her eyebrows, took a sip from her mug, and nodded her assent. She turned in her two weeks' notice that afternoon.
There was nothing to do. Gordon had a cleaning lady named Consuela who came in for a couple of hours every day to straighten things and dust things and rinse things. Connie was also much older than Leah, and Leah often felt like she was in Connie's way no matter where she sat: at the dining room table, she tried to surf the internet on her laptop, but Connie needed to wipe the surface and change the flowers in the vase. In the living room, if she watched daytime television, Connie needed to run the vacuum cleaner and fluff the pillows. Even in her bedroom, she could not merely stay in bed; Connie needed to tuck the sheets into hospital corners and straighten the duvet. After two or three weeks of this, Leah started going to a yoga class while Connie was at the house, or else taking a walk through the woods, or else wandering through the grocery store, reading the labels on packages of free-range chicken breasts.
Before she married Gordon, Leah ate things like Top Ramen and Saltine crackers and 10 for $10 pasta specials for dinner. Now, they ate out three or four nights a week- and not fast food- and on the other nights, she cooked things that took her several hours to make, bent over pages in thick cookbooks she got from the Bellevue library. Gordon had a way of saying a lot without words, and the pause he took to smile at her said a lot more than any effusive words of gratitude could. Leah had never even heard of osso bucco before she made it the first time. Gordon had seconds, but worked on a case briefing at the table.
There were days Leah thought she could stare at a pinecone, or the lake water lapping the stony shore, or three different kinds of glinting forks in a drawer in the kitchen, until the objects themselves absorbed her and she ceased to exist. More than once, she found herself waking up as if from hypnosis, stirring a cup of coffee that had gone cold in the process. She thought about taking a pottery class. She tried sitting on things that weren't meant for it: the dining room tabletop, a kitchen counter, upside down on the sofa. She spent a week trying to teach herself how to skip rocks, and finally gave up.
"Here, try this," Gordon told her in the evening. He handed her a delicate, bulbous wine glass, 1/3 full of a sweet, golden drink. "Gewürztraminer." She sipped it and turned the pages of a recent crime novel idly.
"I hate book jackets," she murmured. Gordon didn't answer or look up; he readjusted his reading glasses and made another note on his yellow legal pad, then entered some figures on a calculator. Leah looked at him over the lip of her wine glass. Her husband was handsome; he wore none of the middling flab of many men his age. His salt-and-pepper hair lay thick and debonair, and the lines his face bore were distinguished and kind looking. He was the sort of man who was most comfortable in slacks and a buttoned shirt; she could only tell he was feeling casual because he'd removed the customary tie and jacket, and was wiggling his toes inside his argyle trouser socks against the plush pile of his Afghani rug. Leah looked at him through the sweet wine, and he blurred into gold tones and swimming lines.
She drank deeply.
-
In bed, Gordon fell asleep right away. During the rare nights he didn't, his cursory attentions were short-lived and wordless. He insisted on using protection every time; they had agreed, no children. Leah wanted to ask him why he always closed his eyes; why his face held that expression of determination. More than once, she reached her hand up to touch his face, to ease that tension, to brush her fingertips across his rigid sealed eyelids. More than once, her hand faltered; her hand hovered, retreated. She bit her lip and thought of the lakeshore, of the tide washing in and out over smooth stones that time had worn into uniformity.
-
In yoga class, there was a new man; there weren't many men in the class at all. This one was in his mid to late 30s, sweet-faced with wide, expressive dark eyes, athletic body, gorgeously thick black hair. He kept his distance from the rest of the class and practiced his Downward-Facing Dog with intensity and rigid muscles. Leah wondered at the straight line of his back. Everyone else in the class- mostly women who, like her, didn't work, or didn't work much- seemed to collapse into their poses, flop around the yoga studio like they were made of gelatin. They huddled in groups and giggled about the pose names, gossipped about their husbands and their husbands' lovers, sipped expensive fruit smoothies with protein boosts. Yoga was incidental to most class members; something to call the time they spent socially; an excuse to wear sweatpants in public.
The new guy made yoga seem like a mission for world peace.
After yoga class, Leah rolled up her mat, shoved her towel in her gym bag, and drove in Gordon's spare car to the grocery store. She had an idea that she might cook something new tonight- maybe a swordfish steak with something unusual accompanying. She sniffed melons, lingered by pomegranates, gently squeezed citrus fruit to test their ripeness. She turned a corner.
There was the man from yoga class, wearing a sweater, leaning pressed against the frozen dinners case. He looked at Leah, looked quickly away, then looked back at her again.
"You're in my yoga class," Leah said. The man looked strained; he looked wildly around, like he was looking for a way out. Leah took a step back. "Sorry," she added. "You're probably busy."
"Oh," he said. He looked at her for a moment, then relaxed. "No. No, sorry. I'm not."
Leah looked at the wall of gluten-free entrees behind him, then held out her hand. "I'm Leah."
"Yes," he said. He looked at her hand. She paused, then lowered it. "Um. Elliott."
"Nice to meet you," she said, sincerely. Elliott was the first new person she had met since she married Gordon, if you didn't count Connie. Whom Leah had, technically, met prior to their marriage. "Have you been doing yoga long?"
"No," Elliott said. He had no shopping cart, no basket, no merchandise. In the fluorescent lights of the store Leah could see, now, what had not been apparent in the yoga studio: deep, rutted circles under his eyes, a sunkenness in his cheeks over the well-defined jaw, a defined downward pull at the corners of his mouth.
"I was just shopping for dinner," Leah said. "For my husband and me. He's in tax-"
"Look, I need to be somewhere else," Elliott said. He hurried past Leah and out of the aisle. Leah looked down the length of freezers at the corner he'd disappeared around, and held her breath.
-
Leah had dinner keeping warm in the oven when Gordon called from his office. "Why don't you meet me out for dinner tonight?" he said.
"I already cooked," Leah said. She stood in the kitchen, smelling the pomegranate swordfish wafting from the oven. She caught her reflection in the darkened window, and rested her hand, delicately, delicately, on the new wood of the cutting board. She could not see the lake for the darkness pressing in against the panes.
"Oh," Gordon said. He sounded disappointed.
"I guess I can reheat it for lunch tomorrow," Leah said. She turned the oven off the warming setting, leaned against the counter. She wiggled her toes in her socks against the tile floor, and ignored the gaudy hot house orchids and birds of paradise Connie had arranged on the counter.
"Good. Great. I have a client I'd really like for you to meet."
"Sure," Leah said. She picked at a thin slash across the cutting board. Sharp knives. The kitchen seemed so bright.
"So, maybe that new place, the nice one, with the kind of art deco thing going on inside," Gordon pressed her.
"I'll wear a dress," Leah said.
"See you in an hour." Gordon hung up, but Leah stayed on the phone. A dial tone sounded, after a moment, in her ear. She tried to hum along in pitch. Every time she thought she was close, the tone seemed to shift.
And after dinner, when they were finally back home, Gordon went to his study. Leah tried not to bother him when he was in there; it was a strictly work-oriented place, and the large cherry-stained desk and high-backed Windsor chair and thick carpets and walls lined with legal journals and tomes of tort and appeal and tax legislation all intimidated her. When she worked at the firm, Leah never was intimidated; when she worked at the firm, not had impressed Leah as mattering very much to her own happiness. Tonight, Leah pushed open the door that was already open a crack and stepped into the study.
"I thought you might want something to drink," she said, softly. Gordon didn't look up, but rested his hand over his brow and continued studying the sheets laid out in front of him on the desk. It looked like he was peering into the distance, but the distance was only two feet away. Leah quietly padded across the room, still wearing the elegant black dress and stockings she'd put on for dinner. Dinner had comprised of Gordon and his client, a wealthy local land developer, trading tax evasion jokes over lobster while Leah smiled politely every time they laughed and sipped her chardonnay with a growing ache in her chest until the soft tinkle of wine glasses and forks against plates began to ring in her ears like the loudest pealing of church bells and she thought she'd die of a migraine when finally dinner was done. Her head hurt less now; she'd taken a prescription narcotic Gordon had left over from a back injury two years ago, and flushing it down with a pinot noir she'd picked up at the grocery to go with the swordfish, her head felt, finally, marvelously light. She set a glass of the wine in front of Gordon and hovered near his elbow.
Gordon took a drink of the wine and made a face. "What's the rating on this one?" he asked his papers.
"Rating?" Leah answered, blankly.
"Never mind," Gordon grumbled. Leah dug her big toe into the carpet, looked into the depths of her wine glass, and then downed the rest of the crimson liquid.
"There's a new man in my yoga class," she said.
"A man in the yoga class." Gordon repeated it, but not as a question. He put his pen down, took his glasses off, and rubbed the space where the nose pads had left impressions on either side of his nostrils, his eyes pressed closed. Then, he opened them and looked at her wearily.
"I ran into him at the grocery store afterward," Leah continued. She didn't know why she was telling him this, this unimportant, insignificant detail of her day, except this was the first new person she'd met in months; except Gordon still hadn't asked her how her day was; except she hadn't said a single word to anyone all day except her polite hello and goodbye at dinner and the strange exchange she'd had with Elliott in the frozen food aisle. "He was really strange, very awkward to talk to."
"Why did you talk to him then," Gordon said, turning back to his paperwork. Leah shrugged.
"His name was Elliott," she said, wiping some dust off the desklamp. It was a touch lamp; the room went dark. She felt Gordon's hand suddenly touch hers, and a thrill went up her arm and into the pit of her stomach - but he was only turning the lamp back on, and his hand retreated.
Now he was looking at her.
"I have to get some work done," he said briskly. His face looked drawn. His voice - ever gentle - had something new in it. Why did Leah want to call it fear? She studied her husband's eyes for a moment, then nodded.
"Sorry to bother you," she said. She picked up his rejected wine glass and left the room, drinking as she went. She went to bed alone.
-
In the middle of the night, Leah awoke. Gordon wasn't in bed. She wondered if he was still working, and if he was, if she ought to bother him and tell him to come to bed. She looked at the bedside clock. It was 3:17 a.m. She slipped out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes, and tiptoed downstairs. When she got to the kitchen, she hesitated just out of view. Gordon was speaking to someone on the telephone.
"I can't believe you," Gordon was saying in a low hiss. "This is inexcusable." He paused, then, "Stay away from her." Leah frowned, and entered the kitchen.
"Gordon?" she asked. Her voice sounded blurry and buried under pillows; Gordon put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.
"East coast opposition," he said. He was frowning. "Go back to bed." He turned his back on her, and continued into the phone, this time in an urgent whisper, "I mean it. No more."
-
Elliott waited after class for Leah to roll her yoga mat and slip into her shoes again. "Hey," he said. His tone sounded bashful.
"Hi," she said. She was surprised he was talking to her.
"So, listen, when I ran into you in the grocery store," Elliott said. He smiled apologetically. "I was just having a kind of a weird day. Sorry about that. I mean, my god! Who is that rude, anyway?"
"Oh, no, that's okay," Leah said. "I get like that sometimes, myself." She had never, ever been like that to her recollection. When she was single, Leah had been wild and vibrant in her early twenties, and bold and assertive by her thirties. Elliott gave her a friendly, but skeptical, look, and hoisted his gym bag up on his shoulder. "Listen," she said, as Elliott was turning to go. "Um, I've been trying these recipes at home, and no one eats them but me, really, and I'm not sure if I'm just getting used to my cooking or if it's actually getting better. And last night's dinner got postponed and will go to waste if I don't have some help eating it, so..." She glanced hopefully at Elliott. "Would you maybe like to come over for lunch and have some swordfish and maybe a cup of coffee?"
Elliott grimaced. She was sure he was going to say no.
"It's really not far, only ten minutes, maybe. I'll drive and bring you back when you're ready, if you like," she said.
"Oh, no, I can drive myself," Elliott said. He smiled, a bit of a grim smile, but still a smile. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, lunch sounds great."
-
"So, how long have you been married?" Elliott asked Leah when she set a plate in front of him.
"Oh," she said. "A few months." She sat down at an angle to him and smiled. "Cheers," she said, raising a glass of iced tea to him.
"How long did you know him before you got married?" he asked after a thoughtful bite. "This, by the way, is heavenly."
"Thank you," Leah said. She had to agree: the fish was succulent and tender and tasted of just a hint of tangy, sweet pomegranate. She speared a bite of saffron potatoes on her fork and took another bite happily before answering. "We didn't know each other long. Not really. I mean, we worked together but there was nothing until, I guess, all of a sudden there was."
"What did he like about you?" Elliott asked her. He set his fork down. Leah raised her eyebrows.
"Usually I guess people ask the other way around, don't they," she said. She thought for a minute. "I think he and I liked a lot of the same things in one another. It seemed like we could make a life together."
Elliott was quiet for a moment, and then, "You didn't have lives before one another?"
Leah smiled and pushed a stray lock of hair back behind her ear. "Well. He certainly did, but all professional. Gordon's always working." She paused, and her smile wavered, but only for a moment. "Even now, really."
A pause. "And you?" Elliott asked. He wasn't eating.
"I was aimless for a long time," Leah said. "I thought I maybe wanted to make art, but, well. That never pans out."
"It does for some people," he retorted, but in a quiet tone. Leah paused, looking at him carefully. Elliott studied his hands in his laps, and pulled at a cuticle. "I make boats," he said, by way of explanation. "Artisan boats."
Leah frowned. She was tired of feeling interrupted, and argued with. "Anyway," she said, her voice louder than she intended, "I think Gordon and I just were both ready to settle into something, and we saw something in one another that told us we could have a quiet kind of life together." Her heart was pounding. Why was her heart pounding?
"You have a lovely dock," Elliott said. His eyes were scanning the water through the back windows.
"We get a lot of ducks," Leah said, still feeling uncertain. She tightened her grip around her fork. "You're not eating."
"I guess I didn't work up much of an appetite in class after all," he said. He still stared at the lake. Leah started to cut another bite for herself, then gave up and set her fork down halfway. They sat in silence for a moment.
"Would you show me the boat?" he asked suddenly. He was already standing. Leah scrambled to take her napkin off her lap and follow, stumbling, behind him as he went assuredly outside and down the cedar path to the dock.
"How did you know we have a boat?" she asked. Elliott stopped, turned, and looked at her. There was nothing friendly in his face.
"You have a boat house," he said, condescension dripping from his tone like a melting icicle. He turned and continued, and she had to jog to keep up with him. When they reached the boat house, he flung open the door and stepped inside. In the middle, on the risers, was Gordon's cedar canoe. Elliott approached it almost reverently and ran a strong hand along the boat's smooth flank.
"Gordon's very... particular about this boat," Leah said. Her voice seemed to echo in the dark coolness; the lake chopped briskly at the floor beneath their feet.
"Why do you think that is?" Elliott asked, his attention fixated on the seams of the boat, the craftsmanship, the grain of the wood.
"He's never said."
"You've never asked." He was guessing. Leah told herself he was guessing.
"No. I never have." Leah paused. "My husband can be very private."
"Even with his wife?" Elliott's voice was bitter as quinine.
"Even with his wife," Leah echoed softly.
"How can one man hide so much?" Elliott asked. Leah didn't get the impression that he was asking her. She watched his muscular back as he caressed the boat, and then he turned to her. "You don't know, do you."
"I guess anyone can hide anything," Leah said, but Elliott was shaking his head, and there was pity on his face, not clear but multifaceted like the dial tone, like she couldn't quite catch the pitch of it, and then he was before her, and her face was in his hands- rough hands, strong hands- and he was kissing her, his lips were pressed to hers, and she couldn't breathe, it was a jumble and she was pushing him, pushing him with her little hands, pushing on his chest, and then he was away, and he was sobbing, like a child, and shaking his head, and his head was in his hands, and he could not face her.
"There are things you can't hide," Elliott gasped between great, heaving tears. "There are things a person should never hide."
-
In bed, that night, as they lay side by side never touching, Gordon spoke in the darkness. "I don't think you should keep going to that yoga class," he said. He paused. "I don't want you to ask me why."
"No," Leah agreed. "No, I think I'm done with yoga." They were both quiet for a moment. 1500-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Leah ran her hand over them, and pictured Elliott running his hand over the boat. "I think I'm going to go away for a while," she finally rejoined.
"Take a little break," Gordon chimed.
Another long pause. Then: "Just a little vacation. Get away from things for a bit. Maybe give you some space to get through this case," Leah said.
"Maybe after we finish in court, you and I can do something."
"Just the two of us."
"Something quiet," Gordon said. Leah pictured it in her head: a smooth rock was in her hand. She held it between her thumb and her first two fingers, and she brought her arm back, held the stone parallel to the surface of the water. It had been washed over so many times, was a perfect sheen of gray, like the sky, like the depths of the lake. She brought back her arm, brought it back, brought it back, and then, she released. The stone skiffed across the surface of the lake like Gordon's cedar canoe; it was airborne and immaculate. Then, her skipper disappeared into the surface of the water with the tiniest gulping sound, like it was only one of the dregs being swallowed from a glass in a throat too drunk to cry out.
Jan 21, 2010
Jul 15, 2009
You Are Here - Holding Space
“My problem,” I was telling Leah as we headed into the bar that Thursday night, “is that I am an excellent drunk driver.”
“With great power comes great responsibility,” she said sagely, but she seemed a bit distracted. I could tell this whole thing with Will really had her mixed up. Then again, Leah’s always been easily distracted. I chalk it up to her extra sensitivity: it’s her only weakness, in my opinion.
She held the bar’s front door open for me and we entered the cool, cavern-like darkness of the long pub. We used to visit a great deal of different bars, but lately Leah had only felt like seeing Sean—another product of her sensitivity was her tendency toward gargantuan, impossible crushes—and what can I say. She’s my best friend. I humored her preferences, knowing that someday she’d get over him, or the ache would be too much for her sleeve-prone heart. Either way, sometime soon we’d return to the rest of the alcoholic circuit we’d established. In the mean time, Sean was a good bartender, as bartenders go, and Leah’s little crush on him didn’t seem to be hurting anybody.
“Whiskey neat and a gin and tonic?” Sean greeted us when we straddled our barstools.
“Double gin and tonic,” I clarified, grinning. Sean nodded, then glanced at Leah.
“I… I think I’ll have water,” she said. “Or maybe a club soda.” Both Sean and I stared at her for a moment.
“Rough night last night?” Sean finally guessed, serving up my drink and leaning on the bar toward Leah, a look of sincere puzzlement crossing his face. Auburn eyebrows scrunched together over his brown eyes, and I saw her self-consciously avoid his gaze. She shook her head.
“Just ready for a change,” she mumbled. I studied her over the rim of my highball glass, ice cubes numbing my upper lip as they pushed, wet and cold, against my skin. “What?” she asked, noticing my lingering stare.
“Mnnph,” I mumbled into the gin. My voice echoed back at me like I was in a shallow, dark cave.
Whenever I was in a grumpy mood but didn’t want to acknowledge that I was in a grumpy mood, I made a mental list of things I liked so that I had a reserve of positive things to bring up in case Leah was feeling a little slow on conversation herself. Here are the things I liked that night: the smooth feeling of the wood-but-not-lacquered bar beneath my fingers, the way I could make the symbol for the Olympics on the bar top with the condensation rings from my gin and tonic, the fact that Sean had recently had hooks installed under the bar for ladies—namely, Leah and I, the loudest and most frequent complainers—to hang their purses on, and the way I could feel the carbonation up in my sinuses.
Leah’s eyes glowed bright after a very long silence, during which she’d been contemplatively sipping water. “Is there anything in your life you want to change?” she asked. I didn’t answer, swirled the ice cubes and a slice of lime around in my drink. “I mean, do you ever have those moments when you see yourself clearly and you just think, I see now what I have to cut—cut or die?”
“You’re fine the way you are,” I assured her. I was glad: I knew all the things a best friend was supposed to say, and I always said them on cue. She was quiet. Took another sip of water. “Okay,” I said, taking her a little more seriously. “Yes. Sometimes.” I swallowed what remained of my first drink, and nodded at Sean when he raised his eyebrows in the question he didn’t need to ask: want another? “I want to lose twenty pounds,” I offered. She didn’t even dignify this offering with a glance.
“Sometimes I want to live in a tree fort,” she mused.
“Might get cold in the winter,” Sean interjected, sliding the glass across the bar at me. This time, he’d remembered that I liked three lime wedges in my gin-and-tonic, not just one.
“And sometimes I want to go to the desert and lay on a rock and look at the stars all night,” she added. I looked at Sean, and he looked at me, and I could tell he was waiting for one of us to crack, for one of us to lighten up, so he could laugh with us, and everything would be okay again. I felt a little disgusted by his need for everything to be cheerful and easy and buoyant and light. I downed my drink quickly and shoved the glass at him. Here is something I liked: the sound my glass made when I pushed it too hard over the bar, and it nearly toppled, that sound—glass tripping on wood, whoosh.
“We had an infant death today,” I said to Leah, changing the subject. I knew she hated hearing about the kids, knew how each detail made her shudder, but I also knew how hearing about it could pull her out of herself, and I’d have done anything at that point to bring her away from the lost, wandering place she’d gone mentally, away from sacrificing herself to Sean’s ridicule.
Not that Sean had ever ridiculed her, but I couldn’t imagine what he actually thought of us, considering all the excuses we’d given him to think of us as absolutely absurd (at best) or absolutely disgusting (at worst). We didn’t need to add batshit-insane to the already growing list that included drunk, slutty, bitchy, sloppy, underemployed (in Leah’s case) or bizarrely employed (in mine).
Leah looked at me, a frown creasing her brow under blond bangs. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said. “I really, really don’t want to hear about dead babies.” She slugged back her ice water and stood from her stool. “I’ll be right back,” she said, heading for the ladies’ room.
I didn’t want to talk about dead babies either, not really. But this version of Leah, divorced from our normal rowdy, good time, was so difficult to be around. She looked past the things around her, now, including me. Her brow was always furrowed. Her lips were always down-turned. Her shoulders were always hunched forward. And she was always, always sober.
Leah was not a fun sober girl. I shook my head, shook it free of Leah’s problems, shook it free of stillborn infants, shook it free of all the other things I carried inside me, in a dark space. Things I liked about evenings after work included gin, wine, vodka, and, when she was being herself, Leah.
There wasn’t much else.
I dreamed I was in the prep room. On the table before me, a woman’s body, naked, dead. I cut an incision into the woman’s neck, looking for the jugular, the carotid—I could not find them. The universe, instead, gaped at me in all its starry blackness from within the incisions.
Still, I knew I had to bleed her.
I cut wrists, the insides of elbows, between the thighs, looking for an artery, any artery, any lifeline between me and what remained of this woman’s lifeblood. But nothing—only the inky night sky beneath her skin.
Finally, I took my scalpel and cut into the woman’s chest cavity. There, nestled beneath supernovae, I found it: the woman’s still-beating heart. It was radiant in its beauty, in its veined musculature. It throbbed there—it throbbed.
I felt myself being pulled back from the woman as men—men I knew! Men I had loved, had fucked, had lusted after in bars—men who had let me down time and again—crowded this woman’s body at the table. One by one, they prodded dirty fingers into the universe inside this woman, poked roughly between her stars, jabbing at her vibrant, fragile, impossibly-alive heart.
“Stop! I cried, unheeded. “She’s still alive! You’ll infect her! Stop!” I began weeping. “It hurts!”
Because, yes, the more men pushed their calloused, hangnailed, rough hands into the woman’s chest, the more my own heart ached. I pushed through the men, one hand clutching a fold of my scrubs over my own heart. When I pushed through them, I threw my own body on top of the woman’s. “It hurts!” I repeated, exhausted. The men began to fade away, and I lifted my head from the cold torso to look at this woman, the assailed.
My eyes met my own, my very own features.
I passed Will in the hallway of the house we shared, but these days he was a ghost, merely a shade of the roommate I’d once palled around with, causing ruckus and weeding gardens. He spent most of his time at work, I thought, or maybe hiding in the basement with his computers, all the lights off. Certainly, the rare times I came home sober enough to check instead of stumbling upstairs to my bedroom, he was down there at all hours of the night, pale face lit by four glowing screens, fingers flying, flying across the keyboard. The space all around him was always dark, and the light from his screens reflected off his glasses, making him look distant, blind, frightening.
I stopped checking on him.
Sean was tending a table; his cocktailer was late, and the place was getting busy. I studied Leah for a moment before I took the plunge. “Why,” I asked cautiously, pausing for a long pull on the merlot I’d selected tonight, “are you wasting your time hanging around here I could name half a dozen guys at any other bar who’d want to fuck you tonight.”
“You know why,” she answered, almost too quiet for me to hear her over the flirting, clinking glasses, laughter, rock music. “And maybe I don’t want to get fucked anymore.”
“Jesus,” I said. “When was the last time?”
She didn’t hesitate. “A month and two days ago.” She almost smiled, but hid it behind her Diet Coke.
“That’s like some kind of record for you,” I said. I hadn’t intended it, but I knew I sounded bitter, even judgmental. She carefully avoided my eyes.
“When was your last?” she asked levelly.
I paused. I took another drink.
“December,” I said.
:Blow jobs don’t count,” she said. Meanly. We were both silent, watching boys flirt with women at the bar, watching women cross and uncross their legs. We were at an impasse—our first.
I chased a shot of gin with the rest of my glass of merlot, and grimaced when I swallowed the last of it down.
“I don’t think you should drive home tonight,” Leah said. I glanced at her and rolled my eyes.
“I’m fine, and you know it,” I said. We were both quiet. Things I liked about Leah before she became a holier-than-thou bitch included her sense of humor, her willingness to feel other people’s pain, and the way she was always game for a good time. Sean came, finally, back behind the bar. “Can I have another glass?” I asked.
“Sure, Chloe,” he said, filling it promptly with the deep red liquid. I looked at Leah defiantly before I raised my glass to her.
“To my best friend,” I toasted. “The nun.”
She pursed her lips, then raised her glass solemnly. “To my best friend,” she echoed. “Queen of the Twelve Steps.” We both swallowed our drinks in full, eyes locked until we had to tilt our heads back far enough to swallow the dregs. Then we turned, simultaneously, on our barstools back toward the bar, and dropped our glasses hard on the bar. The bar seemed, for how busy it was, suddenly too quiet, the glasses on the bar too loud. The space between our stools was only about four inches, but I knew what stretched between us was a galaxy.
I admit it: I left the bar angry, and I kept a flask under my seat to help me focus on my lists when I was too angry to do it on my own. I took a long pull on the flask before I started the engine, and started listing as I drove toward home. Things I liked about being drunk included having a warm chest so I could forget the burden of a universe I apparently carried inside there, a blurry memory: the better to forget your rejection with, my dear, and the way lights glowed brighter—television sports scores, text messages on my cell phone, taxicab service lights, brake lights.
Brake lights.
Brake lights.
In that moment when I saw in myself, behind my eyes, that great endless nothing of stars and void, there were so many people I wished that I had had the opportunity to love fully. I thought of the endless parade of human bodies I saw at work, day in and day out; someone out there sent in the clothing we dressed them in, someone out there provided pictures so I could do their hair and makeup just so. Someone out there paid for our services, paid for embalming or refrigeration, paid for burial or cremation, paid for the Our Fathers or Open Microphones, Ave Marias or Winds Beneath My Wings.
I wondered: who would put their fingers inside the cavity of my life and pry it open? I thought of Leah, of how she was the only one left. I wondered, sternum crushed against a broken steering wheel post, universe laid bare at last, would Leah believe the fib that I had loved her enough? Things had started to come apart at the seams that night; we had begun to see the big, black spaces gloaming in one another. I had loved Leah, as much as I could love anyone. As much as I could love anyone.
But who can love enough with the space of the universe around her heart? I thought of that great vastness, that huge wheeling of sporadic solar systems, dying stars, moons orbiting, orbiting, even the great rock masses of planets having partners, companions, and me, alone, the lights so bright, a dramatic contrast to all I carried within me. I held it all within me, I held that space, and then, as light closed in on me—so many lights, so many colors, flashing, wheeling, a carnival through blood and broken glass—I released this holding space into what lay beyond. I surrendered to the eternal loneliness, whatever it may prove to be.
Yes, I wished I could have loved more fully. But we always only do our best to those we love best. To my best friend, I thought. The brave and holy and alone.
“With great power comes great responsibility,” she said sagely, but she seemed a bit distracted. I could tell this whole thing with Will really had her mixed up. Then again, Leah’s always been easily distracted. I chalk it up to her extra sensitivity: it’s her only weakness, in my opinion.
She held the bar’s front door open for me and we entered the cool, cavern-like darkness of the long pub. We used to visit a great deal of different bars, but lately Leah had only felt like seeing Sean—another product of her sensitivity was her tendency toward gargantuan, impossible crushes—and what can I say. She’s my best friend. I humored her preferences, knowing that someday she’d get over him, or the ache would be too much for her sleeve-prone heart. Either way, sometime soon we’d return to the rest of the alcoholic circuit we’d established. In the mean time, Sean was a good bartender, as bartenders go, and Leah’s little crush on him didn’t seem to be hurting anybody.
“Whiskey neat and a gin and tonic?” Sean greeted us when we straddled our barstools.
“Double gin and tonic,” I clarified, grinning. Sean nodded, then glanced at Leah.
“I… I think I’ll have water,” she said. “Or maybe a club soda.” Both Sean and I stared at her for a moment.
“Rough night last night?” Sean finally guessed, serving up my drink and leaning on the bar toward Leah, a look of sincere puzzlement crossing his face. Auburn eyebrows scrunched together over his brown eyes, and I saw her self-consciously avoid his gaze. She shook her head.
“Just ready for a change,” she mumbled. I studied her over the rim of my highball glass, ice cubes numbing my upper lip as they pushed, wet and cold, against my skin. “What?” she asked, noticing my lingering stare.
“Mnnph,” I mumbled into the gin. My voice echoed back at me like I was in a shallow, dark cave.
Whenever I was in a grumpy mood but didn’t want to acknowledge that I was in a grumpy mood, I made a mental list of things I liked so that I had a reserve of positive things to bring up in case Leah was feeling a little slow on conversation herself. Here are the things I liked that night: the smooth feeling of the wood-but-not-lacquered bar beneath my fingers, the way I could make the symbol for the Olympics on the bar top with the condensation rings from my gin and tonic, the fact that Sean had recently had hooks installed under the bar for ladies—namely, Leah and I, the loudest and most frequent complainers—to hang their purses on, and the way I could feel the carbonation up in my sinuses.
Leah’s eyes glowed bright after a very long silence, during which she’d been contemplatively sipping water. “Is there anything in your life you want to change?” she asked. I didn’t answer, swirled the ice cubes and a slice of lime around in my drink. “I mean, do you ever have those moments when you see yourself clearly and you just think, I see now what I have to cut—cut or die?”
“You’re fine the way you are,” I assured her. I was glad: I knew all the things a best friend was supposed to say, and I always said them on cue. She was quiet. Took another sip of water. “Okay,” I said, taking her a little more seriously. “Yes. Sometimes.” I swallowed what remained of my first drink, and nodded at Sean when he raised his eyebrows in the question he didn’t need to ask: want another? “I want to lose twenty pounds,” I offered. She didn’t even dignify this offering with a glance.
“Sometimes I want to live in a tree fort,” she mused.
“Might get cold in the winter,” Sean interjected, sliding the glass across the bar at me. This time, he’d remembered that I liked three lime wedges in my gin-and-tonic, not just one.
“And sometimes I want to go to the desert and lay on a rock and look at the stars all night,” she added. I looked at Sean, and he looked at me, and I could tell he was waiting for one of us to crack, for one of us to lighten up, so he could laugh with us, and everything would be okay again. I felt a little disgusted by his need for everything to be cheerful and easy and buoyant and light. I downed my drink quickly and shoved the glass at him. Here is something I liked: the sound my glass made when I pushed it too hard over the bar, and it nearly toppled, that sound—glass tripping on wood, whoosh.
“We had an infant death today,” I said to Leah, changing the subject. I knew she hated hearing about the kids, knew how each detail made her shudder, but I also knew how hearing about it could pull her out of herself, and I’d have done anything at that point to bring her away from the lost, wandering place she’d gone mentally, away from sacrificing herself to Sean’s ridicule.
Not that Sean had ever ridiculed her, but I couldn’t imagine what he actually thought of us, considering all the excuses we’d given him to think of us as absolutely absurd (at best) or absolutely disgusting (at worst). We didn’t need to add batshit-insane to the already growing list that included drunk, slutty, bitchy, sloppy, underemployed (in Leah’s case) or bizarrely employed (in mine).
Leah looked at me, a frown creasing her brow under blond bangs. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said. “I really, really don’t want to hear about dead babies.” She slugged back her ice water and stood from her stool. “I’ll be right back,” she said, heading for the ladies’ room.
I didn’t want to talk about dead babies either, not really. But this version of Leah, divorced from our normal rowdy, good time, was so difficult to be around. She looked past the things around her, now, including me. Her brow was always furrowed. Her lips were always down-turned. Her shoulders were always hunched forward. And she was always, always sober.
Leah was not a fun sober girl. I shook my head, shook it free of Leah’s problems, shook it free of stillborn infants, shook it free of all the other things I carried inside me, in a dark space. Things I liked about evenings after work included gin, wine, vodka, and, when she was being herself, Leah.
There wasn’t much else.
I dreamed I was in the prep room. On the table before me, a woman’s body, naked, dead. I cut an incision into the woman’s neck, looking for the jugular, the carotid—I could not find them. The universe, instead, gaped at me in all its starry blackness from within the incisions.
Still, I knew I had to bleed her.
I cut wrists, the insides of elbows, between the thighs, looking for an artery, any artery, any lifeline between me and what remained of this woman’s lifeblood. But nothing—only the inky night sky beneath her skin.
Finally, I took my scalpel and cut into the woman’s chest cavity. There, nestled beneath supernovae, I found it: the woman’s still-beating heart. It was radiant in its beauty, in its veined musculature. It throbbed there—it throbbed.
I felt myself being pulled back from the woman as men—men I knew! Men I had loved, had fucked, had lusted after in bars—men who had let me down time and again—crowded this woman’s body at the table. One by one, they prodded dirty fingers into the universe inside this woman, poked roughly between her stars, jabbing at her vibrant, fragile, impossibly-alive heart.
“Stop! I cried, unheeded. “She’s still alive! You’ll infect her! Stop!” I began weeping. “It hurts!”
Because, yes, the more men pushed their calloused, hangnailed, rough hands into the woman’s chest, the more my own heart ached. I pushed through the men, one hand clutching a fold of my scrubs over my own heart. When I pushed through them, I threw my own body on top of the woman’s. “It hurts!” I repeated, exhausted. The men began to fade away, and I lifted my head from the cold torso to look at this woman, the assailed.
My eyes met my own, my very own features.
I passed Will in the hallway of the house we shared, but these days he was a ghost, merely a shade of the roommate I’d once palled around with, causing ruckus and weeding gardens. He spent most of his time at work, I thought, or maybe hiding in the basement with his computers, all the lights off. Certainly, the rare times I came home sober enough to check instead of stumbling upstairs to my bedroom, he was down there at all hours of the night, pale face lit by four glowing screens, fingers flying, flying across the keyboard. The space all around him was always dark, and the light from his screens reflected off his glasses, making him look distant, blind, frightening.
I stopped checking on him.
Sean was tending a table; his cocktailer was late, and the place was getting busy. I studied Leah for a moment before I took the plunge. “Why,” I asked cautiously, pausing for a long pull on the merlot I’d selected tonight, “are you wasting your time hanging around here I could name half a dozen guys at any other bar who’d want to fuck you tonight.”
“You know why,” she answered, almost too quiet for me to hear her over the flirting, clinking glasses, laughter, rock music. “And maybe I don’t want to get fucked anymore.”
“Jesus,” I said. “When was the last time?”
She didn’t hesitate. “A month and two days ago.” She almost smiled, but hid it behind her Diet Coke.
“That’s like some kind of record for you,” I said. I hadn’t intended it, but I knew I sounded bitter, even judgmental. She carefully avoided my eyes.
“When was your last?” she asked levelly.
I paused. I took another drink.
“December,” I said.
:Blow jobs don’t count,” she said. Meanly. We were both silent, watching boys flirt with women at the bar, watching women cross and uncross their legs. We were at an impasse—our first.
I chased a shot of gin with the rest of my glass of merlot, and grimaced when I swallowed the last of it down.
“I don’t think you should drive home tonight,” Leah said. I glanced at her and rolled my eyes.
“I’m fine, and you know it,” I said. We were both quiet. Things I liked about Leah before she became a holier-than-thou bitch included her sense of humor, her willingness to feel other people’s pain, and the way she was always game for a good time. Sean came, finally, back behind the bar. “Can I have another glass?” I asked.
“Sure, Chloe,” he said, filling it promptly with the deep red liquid. I looked at Leah defiantly before I raised my glass to her.
“To my best friend,” I toasted. “The nun.”
She pursed her lips, then raised her glass solemnly. “To my best friend,” she echoed. “Queen of the Twelve Steps.” We both swallowed our drinks in full, eyes locked until we had to tilt our heads back far enough to swallow the dregs. Then we turned, simultaneously, on our barstools back toward the bar, and dropped our glasses hard on the bar. The bar seemed, for how busy it was, suddenly too quiet, the glasses on the bar too loud. The space between our stools was only about four inches, but I knew what stretched between us was a galaxy.
I admit it: I left the bar angry, and I kept a flask under my seat to help me focus on my lists when I was too angry to do it on my own. I took a long pull on the flask before I started the engine, and started listing as I drove toward home. Things I liked about being drunk included having a warm chest so I could forget the burden of a universe I apparently carried inside there, a blurry memory: the better to forget your rejection with, my dear, and the way lights glowed brighter—television sports scores, text messages on my cell phone, taxicab service lights, brake lights.
Brake lights.
Brake lights.
In that moment when I saw in myself, behind my eyes, that great endless nothing of stars and void, there were so many people I wished that I had had the opportunity to love fully. I thought of the endless parade of human bodies I saw at work, day in and day out; someone out there sent in the clothing we dressed them in, someone out there provided pictures so I could do their hair and makeup just so. Someone out there paid for our services, paid for embalming or refrigeration, paid for burial or cremation, paid for the Our Fathers or Open Microphones, Ave Marias or Winds Beneath My Wings.
I wondered: who would put their fingers inside the cavity of my life and pry it open? I thought of Leah, of how she was the only one left. I wondered, sternum crushed against a broken steering wheel post, universe laid bare at last, would Leah believe the fib that I had loved her enough? Things had started to come apart at the seams that night; we had begun to see the big, black spaces gloaming in one another. I had loved Leah, as much as I could love anyone. As much as I could love anyone.
But who can love enough with the space of the universe around her heart? I thought of that great vastness, that huge wheeling of sporadic solar systems, dying stars, moons orbiting, orbiting, even the great rock masses of planets having partners, companions, and me, alone, the lights so bright, a dramatic contrast to all I carried within me. I held it all within me, I held that space, and then, as light closed in on me—so many lights, so many colors, flashing, wheeling, a carnival through blood and broken glass—I released this holding space into what lay beyond. I surrendered to the eternal loneliness, whatever it may prove to be.
Yes, I wished I could have loved more fully. But we always only do our best to those we love best. To my best friend, I thought. The brave and holy and alone.
Jul 3, 2009
A Good Husband And Father
Virginia remembered her husband's face: broken veins on the nose, blue eyes like early morning sky through a wet pane and whites the color of elephant ivory, like Virginia's old cameo pendant. He never wanted to leave the country and he let her know he was just doing it for her; let her know how little he wanted to be there but to make her happy he was willing to concede. "Just goes to show how much your husband loves you," he'd recite at her like a scolding school principal, "that he'd do so many things, work hard for so many years, just to make you happy."
And he had worked hard, for so many years, though the children- now in their forties- suspected it was not only to make their mother happy that he did so. It was hardly a secret—from the family or the stool-sitters at his favorite bar—that he wanted to cash in his ticket with a cold million in the bank. So he worked faithfully for the Sears Roebuck Co. for forty-some-odd years, in shipping. Then he came home and worked the farm, with a little help from the kids, twenty acres of "will someone clean the goddam rabbit cages already?" and "who left half a bucket of milk in the stable?"
The farm was his idea, though Virginia was no stranger to cow-milkin' and country preserves herself. Once as a young lady she won the Jackson County blue ribbon for a peach cobbler, and her Daddy had been so proud of her he bought her two rides on the Ferris wheel though he could only afford one. He borrowed the money off one of the parents of his students and never paid him back. Even at 82 she would remember the thrill of the breeze in her hair, the people like miniatures at the natural history museum, tiny, milling around below her. She would remember that she took off her saddle shoes and pretty new white socks and let her bare toes dangle in the thin air, let the skin breathe and cool from the hot day of anticipation and fingers crossed.
Her husband, however, never borrowed money: it was something Virginia respected about him. She also respected that, unlike her happy, stumbling drunk of a father, her husband could hold his liquor, and hold a lot of it. She felt instinctively that there was something manly about being able to drink a lot and still stand up straight, ride a horse, keep dinner down. Her father bore the sheepish look of a young virgin when he'd embarrass himself, as though he were naively unaware of why bartenders, housewives, and music students looked at him the way they did when he tripped, burped, broke things. Her husband, though a bit stoic and cool at times, never embarrassed her.
In their home, it was dinner plates cleared, beds made, indoor voices used at all times. At dinner time, he listened, knife and fork in hand, as the kids gave reports of the school day, of track meets, of marching band practice. He allowed Virginia to request a bit of spending money to get her hair done every week- he couldn't see why she needed to, since she rarely left the farm otherwise, but she appreciated that he was willing to concede; it made her feel womanly, somehow, and part of things, though she couldn't say what things if pressed. Perhaps, too, at dinnertime she would let him know about an item they were running low on: flour, perhaps, or black thread for the sewing machine. Would he mind picking some up the next day before he came home? And with a gracious sigh—for it was the end of a long day—he would agree to retrieve the necessary items. If he had time.
So it was, he said and they both felt, hardly unfair after those many years of hard labor that he got to choose the manner in which he spent his retirement. First, they sold the farm. No use continuing to work yourself to skin and bones when you don't need to, and they didn't need to. Retirement was good in the 80s. Next, he purchased a cabin on the Kenai River in Alaska and relocated. He bought a boat, and fishing gear, and a small cannery. Virginia ran the cannery and he spent days fishing, hunting, having a beer with the local guys. Virginia didn't have any strong opinions either way about the move to Alaska. She had always thought it would be nice to spend their retirement seeing new, exotic places, but what good was travel if only one of them was happy doing it? No, the cabin, and the fish, and the cold all suited her just fine, too. She was fine with it.
Anyway, he did all the work: kept the cannery in fish, maintained a good relationship with the locals, protected their investment from the native groups trying to "reclaim the land." And Virginia kept on like she always had, except, of course, she had it much easier: no kids to worry about, no big farm to work. Having so much less to worry about, it was like she was in retirement, too. He felt proud for being able to provide that for her. For both of them.
And he wasn't unromantic. On their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, he paid for her to have her hair done again (they'd let it go as an expense they couldn't afford on retirement, not to mention the nearest salon was twenty miles down the highway: an unreasonable distance for a frivolous routine) and then had her picture taken. She wore a blouse and necklace he chose for her, and he framed and kept the only copy of the photo. He bought her dinner in town at a fancy restaurant, with tablecloths and lit candles, and gave her flowers.
When she asked for this trip, he thought about it for a few days. He hated the idea of traveling outside the country: if they wanted to travel, they could buy an RV and see the States. He hated the idea of all those foreigners with their needy, starving children—he saw them on TV at night—and their foreign tongues twisting around foreign words. He couldn't trust a man he couldn't understand. He told her all this.
Not to mention, you hear stories, he argued. Stories of honest Americans going overseas and providing their good business to foreign businesses, and what do they get for it? They get kidnapped or shot down. The U.S. Government gets ransom notes for their trouble.
Still, he reasoned, those folks were probably naive, probably not street-wise. He knew better. He could handle a few days in some dirty foreign town. Morocco: wasn't that where Casablanca was? It was, she told him. That had some American businesses in it, surely. He conceded. Virginia looked so hopeful, anyway. He didn't mind. It was only a few days.
When they arrived (in Rabat, not Casablanca, to his disappointment), they checked directly into the air-conditioned, carpeted hotel, but Virginia wanted to go poking through street markets and tents, looking at exotic jewelry, scarves for her daughters, folk toys for the grand kids, maybe even a book of Moroccan stories for the granddaughter who liked to read so much. All he wanted to do was take a nap after a long day, not wander out in the hot crowds. But this was Virginia's trip. They would go.
At the market, people with earthy brown skin barked prices at one another, shouted through hanging chicken carcasses and over sacks full of grains, spices, beads. It was a little like the farmers' market back home, where they'd brought their eggs and fresh milk every Saturday to pull in some extra income, pay for clarinet reeds and track shoes. But this was louder, hotter, full of strange lusts and foreign mystery. Virginia was entranced. He didn't like it.
Before they left the States, the kids gave him a hard time. He'd listened patiently to their calls: "I can't believe you're letting Mom drag you overseas, Dad." "You're actually going to go? That's hard to swallow." He insisted that he would do what he had to do to make their mother happy. He insisted it wouldn't hurt him to go, just once. Virginia felt lucky to have such a good husband, he who was also such a good father. Patient. Loving.
He spotted, through the bazaar, a business, full of men in suits and ties or, like him, shorts and polo shirts, drinking tea, having a smoke together, quieter, in the shade. A fan oscillated, touching its cool air briefly on each gentleman. He could see a bartender mixing a martini, and his throat scratched for something cold and familiar. "C'mon," he said vaguely over his shoulder. Virginia looked up from the gold-plated earrings she was fingering, delicately glinting in the slanting afternoon sun, and after an apologetic glance at the merchant, joined her husband weaving through the crowded passages to the Cafe de Rabat.
At the door, a man put his hand up. "Aucunes femmes permises," he demanded, staring her down. Virginia's shoulders drooped, and her husband looked from the man and back to her curiously. She recognized the words from high school French.
"What did he say to you?" her husband asked. She sighed, then smiled patiently.
"It's a gentlemen's establishment," she explained. She noticed a huddle of women in head scarves and long robes waiting a little way down the wall, sharing a bench, one filing her nails, one chattering in a scolding tone at a toddler-aged girl trying to put dirt in her mouth. "I'll wait out here with the other wives. You go ahead and have a drink."
He nodded and smiled his first smile of the trip. "When in Rome, right?" She smiled back, a tired look passing over her thin-etched wrinkles. "I'll just have a drink or two and be right out again." He went into the cafe, and Virginia sat down at the bench next to a heavy-set woman with a lock of deep auburn hair falling out from under the chador she wore. Virginia smiled pleasantly at her, suddenly aware of her bare arms, her knees showing at the bottom of her shorts. She woman smiled a whisper of a smile back at her, returned to a book she was reading. Virginia tried to see the title of the book, but it was in Arabic. The lilting calligraphic lines of text looked like old-fashioned wallpaper patterns to her, or the delicate embroidery on the hem of a skirt she'd once admired.
The afternoon sun baked on, forcing the shadows of merchant carts to stretch like lean, lazy dogs in the dirt paths between stalls. After she sat still long enough, Virginia could smell the meat from a butcher's stall rotting in the thick heat, could smell the onions and cloves of garlic and strings of peppers decomposing from the rafters where they hung. Women with children hanging off their skirts in ages varying from infancy through adolescence poked through goods, haggled prices, stared hungrily at items they could not afford.
A shout from inside the cafe startled her from her observations, and she stood with the other women to peer just over the window ledge into the cafe. She was transported to her childhood, her father's study window, where the rich scent of his vanilla pipe tobacco drifted out the window and reached her in the garden where she played. There, too, she'd stood with her nose on a windowsill, looking into a place she was not allowed. Aucunes femmes permises. Would it always be true? she wondered idly.
Her eyes focused again on the scene in front of her. A short, stocky white man was pressed against the bar, surrounded by a throng of young local men. One of them had a knife. Her husband was in the middle of it, too, taller and leaner than the rest of them, but somehow weaker and more withered looking than the others, too. He was standing up for the other American, shouting something about those punks leaving a guy in peace to enjoy a drink.
The next movement was so quick, half-hidden by the other customers pressing in as they were, that she almost missed it, but her eyes drifted to the mirror behind the bar where she saw a flash of blade, a sudden shift in the crowd's posture, and her husband crumpled as if in slow motion. She saw and would remember forever his face, the veins in his nose, the fear in his eyes, pale and already grey looking next to the dark mess of alarmed faces around him.
There was a cry as the youth picked his wallet from his pocket and dashed out of the cafe, pursued by the other members of his gang shouting in evil triumph; and another cry as Virginia saw her husband on the ground, his blood trickling between the grouted tiles on the floor, red, and thin, and a little foreign looking in an otherwise pristine establishment. The women around her, in their dark scarves and kohl-rimmed eyes, stopped their chattering and waited for her reaction, but she could only watch his hand, which trembled still on the tiles, beating a tattoo that thumped strangely in her ears like a tribal war drum, or a quickened pulse. Virginia put her hand to her chest, the old gold band still firmly around her ring finger, and inhaled a shaky breath of heat and dirt and spice.
And he had worked hard, for so many years, though the children- now in their forties- suspected it was not only to make their mother happy that he did so. It was hardly a secret—from the family or the stool-sitters at his favorite bar—that he wanted to cash in his ticket with a cold million in the bank. So he worked faithfully for the Sears Roebuck Co. for forty-some-odd years, in shipping. Then he came home and worked the farm, with a little help from the kids, twenty acres of "will someone clean the goddam rabbit cages already?" and "who left half a bucket of milk in the stable?"
The farm was his idea, though Virginia was no stranger to cow-milkin' and country preserves herself. Once as a young lady she won the Jackson County blue ribbon for a peach cobbler, and her Daddy had been so proud of her he bought her two rides on the Ferris wheel though he could only afford one. He borrowed the money off one of the parents of his students and never paid him back. Even at 82 she would remember the thrill of the breeze in her hair, the people like miniatures at the natural history museum, tiny, milling around below her. She would remember that she took off her saddle shoes and pretty new white socks and let her bare toes dangle in the thin air, let the skin breathe and cool from the hot day of anticipation and fingers crossed.
Her husband, however, never borrowed money: it was something Virginia respected about him. She also respected that, unlike her happy, stumbling drunk of a father, her husband could hold his liquor, and hold a lot of it. She felt instinctively that there was something manly about being able to drink a lot and still stand up straight, ride a horse, keep dinner down. Her father bore the sheepish look of a young virgin when he'd embarrass himself, as though he were naively unaware of why bartenders, housewives, and music students looked at him the way they did when he tripped, burped, broke things. Her husband, though a bit stoic and cool at times, never embarrassed her.
In their home, it was dinner plates cleared, beds made, indoor voices used at all times. At dinner time, he listened, knife and fork in hand, as the kids gave reports of the school day, of track meets, of marching band practice. He allowed Virginia to request a bit of spending money to get her hair done every week- he couldn't see why she needed to, since she rarely left the farm otherwise, but she appreciated that he was willing to concede; it made her feel womanly, somehow, and part of things, though she couldn't say what things if pressed. Perhaps, too, at dinnertime she would let him know about an item they were running low on: flour, perhaps, or black thread for the sewing machine. Would he mind picking some up the next day before he came home? And with a gracious sigh—for it was the end of a long day—he would agree to retrieve the necessary items. If he had time.
So it was, he said and they both felt, hardly unfair after those many years of hard labor that he got to choose the manner in which he spent his retirement. First, they sold the farm. No use continuing to work yourself to skin and bones when you don't need to, and they didn't need to. Retirement was good in the 80s. Next, he purchased a cabin on the Kenai River in Alaska and relocated. He bought a boat, and fishing gear, and a small cannery. Virginia ran the cannery and he spent days fishing, hunting, having a beer with the local guys. Virginia didn't have any strong opinions either way about the move to Alaska. She had always thought it would be nice to spend their retirement seeing new, exotic places, but what good was travel if only one of them was happy doing it? No, the cabin, and the fish, and the cold all suited her just fine, too. She was fine with it.
Anyway, he did all the work: kept the cannery in fish, maintained a good relationship with the locals, protected their investment from the native groups trying to "reclaim the land." And Virginia kept on like she always had, except, of course, she had it much easier: no kids to worry about, no big farm to work. Having so much less to worry about, it was like she was in retirement, too. He felt proud for being able to provide that for her. For both of them.
And he wasn't unromantic. On their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, he paid for her to have her hair done again (they'd let it go as an expense they couldn't afford on retirement, not to mention the nearest salon was twenty miles down the highway: an unreasonable distance for a frivolous routine) and then had her picture taken. She wore a blouse and necklace he chose for her, and he framed and kept the only copy of the photo. He bought her dinner in town at a fancy restaurant, with tablecloths and lit candles, and gave her flowers.
When she asked for this trip, he thought about it for a few days. He hated the idea of traveling outside the country: if they wanted to travel, they could buy an RV and see the States. He hated the idea of all those foreigners with their needy, starving children—he saw them on TV at night—and their foreign tongues twisting around foreign words. He couldn't trust a man he couldn't understand. He told her all this.
Not to mention, you hear stories, he argued. Stories of honest Americans going overseas and providing their good business to foreign businesses, and what do they get for it? They get kidnapped or shot down. The U.S. Government gets ransom notes for their trouble.
Still, he reasoned, those folks were probably naive, probably not street-wise. He knew better. He could handle a few days in some dirty foreign town. Morocco: wasn't that where Casablanca was? It was, she told him. That had some American businesses in it, surely. He conceded. Virginia looked so hopeful, anyway. He didn't mind. It was only a few days.
When they arrived (in Rabat, not Casablanca, to his disappointment), they checked directly into the air-conditioned, carpeted hotel, but Virginia wanted to go poking through street markets and tents, looking at exotic jewelry, scarves for her daughters, folk toys for the grand kids, maybe even a book of Moroccan stories for the granddaughter who liked to read so much. All he wanted to do was take a nap after a long day, not wander out in the hot crowds. But this was Virginia's trip. They would go.
At the market, people with earthy brown skin barked prices at one another, shouted through hanging chicken carcasses and over sacks full of grains, spices, beads. It was a little like the farmers' market back home, where they'd brought their eggs and fresh milk every Saturday to pull in some extra income, pay for clarinet reeds and track shoes. But this was louder, hotter, full of strange lusts and foreign mystery. Virginia was entranced. He didn't like it.
Before they left the States, the kids gave him a hard time. He'd listened patiently to their calls: "I can't believe you're letting Mom drag you overseas, Dad." "You're actually going to go? That's hard to swallow." He insisted that he would do what he had to do to make their mother happy. He insisted it wouldn't hurt him to go, just once. Virginia felt lucky to have such a good husband, he who was also such a good father. Patient. Loving.
He spotted, through the bazaar, a business, full of men in suits and ties or, like him, shorts and polo shirts, drinking tea, having a smoke together, quieter, in the shade. A fan oscillated, touching its cool air briefly on each gentleman. He could see a bartender mixing a martini, and his throat scratched for something cold and familiar. "C'mon," he said vaguely over his shoulder. Virginia looked up from the gold-plated earrings she was fingering, delicately glinting in the slanting afternoon sun, and after an apologetic glance at the merchant, joined her husband weaving through the crowded passages to the Cafe de Rabat.
At the door, a man put his hand up. "Aucunes femmes permises," he demanded, staring her down. Virginia's shoulders drooped, and her husband looked from the man and back to her curiously. She recognized the words from high school French.
"What did he say to you?" her husband asked. She sighed, then smiled patiently.
"It's a gentlemen's establishment," she explained. She noticed a huddle of women in head scarves and long robes waiting a little way down the wall, sharing a bench, one filing her nails, one chattering in a scolding tone at a toddler-aged girl trying to put dirt in her mouth. "I'll wait out here with the other wives. You go ahead and have a drink."
He nodded and smiled his first smile of the trip. "When in Rome, right?" She smiled back, a tired look passing over her thin-etched wrinkles. "I'll just have a drink or two and be right out again." He went into the cafe, and Virginia sat down at the bench next to a heavy-set woman with a lock of deep auburn hair falling out from under the chador she wore. Virginia smiled pleasantly at her, suddenly aware of her bare arms, her knees showing at the bottom of her shorts. She woman smiled a whisper of a smile back at her, returned to a book she was reading. Virginia tried to see the title of the book, but it was in Arabic. The lilting calligraphic lines of text looked like old-fashioned wallpaper patterns to her, or the delicate embroidery on the hem of a skirt she'd once admired.
The afternoon sun baked on, forcing the shadows of merchant carts to stretch like lean, lazy dogs in the dirt paths between stalls. After she sat still long enough, Virginia could smell the meat from a butcher's stall rotting in the thick heat, could smell the onions and cloves of garlic and strings of peppers decomposing from the rafters where they hung. Women with children hanging off their skirts in ages varying from infancy through adolescence poked through goods, haggled prices, stared hungrily at items they could not afford.
A shout from inside the cafe startled her from her observations, and she stood with the other women to peer just over the window ledge into the cafe. She was transported to her childhood, her father's study window, where the rich scent of his vanilla pipe tobacco drifted out the window and reached her in the garden where she played. There, too, she'd stood with her nose on a windowsill, looking into a place she was not allowed. Aucunes femmes permises. Would it always be true? she wondered idly.
Her eyes focused again on the scene in front of her. A short, stocky white man was pressed against the bar, surrounded by a throng of young local men. One of them had a knife. Her husband was in the middle of it, too, taller and leaner than the rest of them, but somehow weaker and more withered looking than the others, too. He was standing up for the other American, shouting something about those punks leaving a guy in peace to enjoy a drink.
The next movement was so quick, half-hidden by the other customers pressing in as they were, that she almost missed it, but her eyes drifted to the mirror behind the bar where she saw a flash of blade, a sudden shift in the crowd's posture, and her husband crumpled as if in slow motion. She saw and would remember forever his face, the veins in his nose, the fear in his eyes, pale and already grey looking next to the dark mess of alarmed faces around him.
There was a cry as the youth picked his wallet from his pocket and dashed out of the cafe, pursued by the other members of his gang shouting in evil triumph; and another cry as Virginia saw her husband on the ground, his blood trickling between the grouted tiles on the floor, red, and thin, and a little foreign looking in an otherwise pristine establishment. The women around her, in their dark scarves and kohl-rimmed eyes, stopped their chattering and waited for her reaction, but she could only watch his hand, which trembled still on the tiles, beating a tattoo that thumped strangely in her ears like a tribal war drum, or a quickened pulse. Virginia put her hand to her chest, the old gold band still firmly around her ring finger, and inhaled a shaky breath of heat and dirt and spice.
The Unlikeliest Places
When Sook-Yung dreamt of her son, Edward, it was never as she remembered him in the daylight. When she thought of him, awake, it was as he had been: a six-year-old boy with bowl-cut black hair, pale cheeks, an easy smile. She remembered him with intravenous tubes, blipping hospital machines, and disarming curiosity about all of the processes surrounding his frail body. His nurses in the oncology ward loved him; Sook-Yung could tell they were pretending there was nothing wrong with him, as though the body into which they poked needles and fed chemotherapy did not connect to the charming boy so full of questions, so full of the things that gave life its fire.
When Sook-Yung dreamt of Edward, though, it was of Edward’s lifeless body, dressed for casketing in a formal robe the color of saffron from her grandmother’s village in North Vietnam. His skin is even paler in death than it had been in life, in illness, and she dreamt of him in the unlikeliest places. She had her first dream of Edward while she dozed off at his bedside the night he died, and when she awoke, he was gone, had flat lined, alone.
In her dream, Edward is dead, laying on the grass in the middle of a golf course, deep in the rough, and garden snakes weave sinuously out of his nostrils, his ears, pushing past his thin, ashen lips and out of his mouth. She will awaken with the sweet perfume of fresh-cut grass in her sinuses, the hypnotic rhythm of the snakes’ undulation still moving through her pulse.
And Edward was dead, and she believed, half-hidden in her heart, that she had somehow killed him, through the bizarre power of this dream.
Sook-Yung did not remember driving home that night to her family. She remembered opening the front door of their home to a mostly dark house, where the blue light of the television spilled into the hall from the living room. Looking in, Sook-Yung saw her middle son, Henry, sprawled on his stomach, playing video games. He lay awake far past his bedtime, but Sook-Yung was grateful only to enter unnoticed, and she left him unaware of her presence, in the living room playing Super Mario Kart.
She couldn’t feel her feet touching the ground. It was the strangest sensation. She entered the kitchen and pulled out a chair, sat in it, placed her canvas purse on the table in front of her. She still gripped her keys in her hand, still wore the heavy hiking jacket she’d put on to go to the hospital the previous morning.
She still sat there at the kitchen table hours later, after the sun rose, still wearing her jacket, still holding her keys, when her husband came into the kitchen. “Sook-Yung?” he said, scratching his scalp through his thick black hair. His face bore the creases of his pillowcase, and he had not bothered tying his terrycloth robe over the underwear he wore to bed every night. The little belly he’d begun to sprout pushed the waistband of these blue and white pinstriped boxers forward, but failed still to spill over their top. Sook-Yung’s eyes moved slower than she willed them to move, but she took in the sight of him, her husband, Charles, wearing only one tube sock. “Sook-Yung, when did you get home?”
He asked her in Vietnamese. His tone carried gently across the kitchen to her, but the sound of Vietnamese in their home startled her; Charles and Sook-Yung had made it their policy to speak only English in the home, to make it easier for their children in public. She shook her head slowly, like she was cleaning water out of her ears after a deep swim in a green lake, and stared at him, her eyes wide, her lips drawn into as straight and tight a line as she could draw them.
And Charles did not have to ask her what had happened. They had been waiting for this, the inevitable. Sook-Yung did not tell him about her dream.
Charles took control of things, and they seemed to happen around Sook-Yung, whom he convinced to go to bed. But she could only lie there, still wearing her jeans, tee shirt, and tennis shoes, the heavy comforter drawn up to her chin, her eyes studying the popcorn ceiling above her. The claustrophobic feeling of wearing shoes under the covers bothered her, but she did not remove them.
She did not want to dream the death of another one of her children. She could hear Charles’ voice coming from the telephone in the kitchen, calling the relatives, calling Grandfather, asking about the monks, about proper feng shui for burial, making appointments with the funeral home, the cemetery, the Buddhist monks that Grandfather recommended.
“Mom?” Sook-Yung looked down the long, cream expanse of her comforter past her feet to the open doorway, where her eldest son, George, stood, dressed for school, backpack slung over his shoulder. “Why are you still in bed?”
No one had yet told George, Sook-Yung realized. No one had told her oldest son that his little brother was gone. She stared at him for a long moment, and then, mercifully, Charles appeared behind George, put his hands on George’s shoulders. “Come with me, Georgie,” Charles said softly. He looked at Sook-Yung over George’s head, and steered his son away from the bedroom. Sook-Yung registered, for one fleeting moment, the furrow, very slight, between her husband’s eyes, registered the drawn lines around his mouth, his deep-etched frown. “I want to have a talk with you and Henry,” Charles told their son. George looked back, over his shoulder, at his mother once more. She saw it on his face: her twelve-year-old already knew what Charles would tell him, had been prepared for this news for a long time, had been prepared for this news for the many long months of Edward’s illness, had learned to live with this absence already, was resigned to it.
The boys did not go to school that day, but followed their father’s instructions and did homework quietly in their rooms, watched television downstairs in the den, and kept to themselves. Sook-Yung did not get out of bed at all until six o’clock that evening. She brushed her teeth in the bathroom, mesmerized by the deep circles already forming under her eyes. She wiped toothpaste spittle from the corner of her mouth absently, unable to draw her eyes from this woman reflected in front of her: this woman who appeared so sad, so lost, and so tired. Sook-Yung felt deep pity for the woman in the mirror.
She pulled off her tee shirt and her tennis shoes, unbuttoned her jeans and stepped out of them; over the past several months, Sook-Yung had missed many meals, choosing instead to watch Edward feed intravenously, waiting by his bed in case he woke up and felt frightened; now, her jeans fit loosely and fell off her hips whenever she undid the top button. She found a pair of sweatpants, dropped on Charles’ side of the bed, and pulled them on, cinching them tight at her waist. She unhooked her bra, dug a tank top out of a drawer under her side of the bed, and pulled it on over her matted hair.
She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the pink carpet. Charles, not Sook-Yung, liked this color. She saw her socks on the carpet, dingy from having worn them two days in a row. She trembled an exhaling sigh and lay down, pulling her knees up to her chest, then dragging the comforter back over her body, around her shoulders. She had left the light on in the bathroom, but the door hung mostly closed. Only a little end-of-day light came through the curtained window.
Sook-Yung felt her eyes draw heavier, as though each eyelash was made of lead, but she willed them to stay open, imagined tiny men crawling along her eyebrow and securing each eyelash to a hair in her eyebrows with nearly invisible but immeasurably strong cables. Her eyes filled with tears, which she at first believed were merely the result of holding them open for too long. She did not realize she had been holding her breath until she felt her chest begin to burn, and she exhaled and quickly inhaled, pulling air into her exhausted lungs with as much strength as she could manage. The deep breath turned into a cry, and the tears overran her eyes. She imagined the little men in her eyebrows severing the cables, and she squeezed her eyes shut, burying her face in a pillow, shoulders trembling under the weight of her moans. She turned bleary eyes out away from the pillow and apologized to the empty room: “I can’t imagine why I’m crying.”
Sook-Yung did not fall asleep until mid-morning the next day. When she did, she dreamt: She wanders in a grocery store, with all of the lights extinguished. She pushes a shopping cart through dim aisles, and encounters no one. She pulls cans from the shelves and squints at the nutrition facts on boxes of cereal. She rounds the corner at the end of an aisle and comes face to face with the butcher’s section, where a single light flickers in a hip-height freezer, full of turkeys. She leaves her shopping cart and walks to the freezer case, staring at the frozen carcasses.
Between two birds, she sees a piece of silk the color of marigolds peeking through. She moves frozen turkeys like miners move boulders after a shaft collapses, as though a life depends on it, and when she is through, Edward lays in the middle of the freezer case, his lips blue, his eyebrows frosted with ice, his eyes wide and unseeing.
They had to keep their appointment at the funeral home that day. Charles sat beside Sook-Yung on the bed and brushed the hair away from her face. He kissed her forehead, and murmured her name twice before her eyes blinked open. “We have an appointment today to make Edward’s arrangements. You want to come?” he said. She blinked again. His frown deepened, and he shoved some of his hair off of his forehead. Sook-Yung took comfort from that movement; it was a trademark of Charles’s, and she anchored herself on that island of familiarity. She took a deep breath, opened her mouth to speak. But Charles stood from the bed.
“You don’t have to. Dad and I can handle it on our own. You can stay in bed till the funeral if you want to. I’ve got it under control.” He spoke these sentences rapid-fire, facing away from her, and yet they cut into her as though he had turned and aimed them, like bullets, directly into her gut.
Sook-Yung pulled the blankets over her head and did not watch Charles leave.
She dreams she walks in a forest, full of tall, ancient pine trees, growing so thick they share root systems that weave like sea serpents above the forest floor, growing so thick their branches obscure the sky. She hears birds, cawing in the branches, but cannot see them until they begin swooping across her path, diving near, but not really at, her head. Instead, they seem to urge her forward on the path, so she walks.
She walks silently: the fallen pine needles are damp and muffle the sound of her footsteps. As she walks on, she notices the birds are perching in lower branches, and some of them are eating, feasting on something bright, threads of gold hang from their hungry beaks. The path bends around an ancient tree, and Sook-Yung hesitates. She knows what she will find. But she knows she has to continue walking, sees her feet continue in direct spite of her will, her will to flee and look at anything but what she will find around the tree.
And yet, around the tree, there is a hole in the trunk of another tree. The birds congregate on the branches of this great pine, and this hollow contains a bright nestle of yellow silk. Sook-Yung’s heart hangs heavy; her chest feels tight, as she walks toward this vision. When she reaches it, she places her hands on the rough, worn bark beneath the opening, and leans forward. A bird launches from inside the darkened nook, startling her. It carries something thick and dripping in its beak—a human eye. Inside the hollow of the trunk, Sook-Yung now sees, Edward sits, crouching, wearing his funereal robes, shredded in places, missing buttons. One of his eyes has been gouged out of his skull, and patches of his hair are missing. Some bald patches are covered in rough bark, cobwebbing, a worm wriggles on the nastily exposed skin. The thin line of his mouth extends far into his cheek where it has been torn open, but he opens his mouth, stares at her with his gaping eye socket, and says, “Mom?”
Henry startled Sook-Yung awake. “Mom?” he repeated. Sook-Yung gasped for an awful breath, stared at her second son, her eight-year-old, and sat up straight in bed. “Mom, today is the funeral.”
She did not know how long it had been since she had left her room.
Henry looked pale—as Edward had been—and his young brow was creased. He dragged his foot back and forth across the rose-colored carpet uneasily. “Dad said to wake you up. He said you had to come to Eddie’s funeral.” Sook-Yung clenched her fists around the comforter, trying to stop the shaking in her limbs. She stared at Henry, and forced herself to smile what she hoped was a reassuring smile. It froze on her face; Henry took one look at her and ran out of her bedroom, leaving the door open.
She tremblingly faced her own reflection in the mirror above her dresser. A woman sat there, cowering behind bed sheets, her hair lank and knotted, hanging over one puffy eye. The other eye glowered out of the reflection, and she bared her teeth in a ferocious scowl. Who let this stranger into my house, into my bed? Sook-Yung wondered. The woman in the reflection slowly let the monstrous grimace slide from her face, her mouth and jaw slackening, and it was several moments before Sook-Yung caught, in a blazing moment of recognition, the idea, however faint, however unlikely, that this woman in the reflection was her own self.
But it was amazing, the transformative powers of hot water, soap, and a blow drier. And twenty minutes later, when Charles came storming into their room, trying to finish tying his tie around his neck, he came up short, too surprised to bother hiding his surprise, to see Sook-Yung dressed, fastening a string of pearls around her neck. “I thought we would have to have the funeral tomorrow,” she said, once Charles had resumed tying his tie.
“Why did you think that?”
“I thought it was always four days,” she said. Charles was quiet for a moment.
“It has been four days, Sook-Yung,” he said, gently. There was a controlled element under his voice that told Sook-Yung that his gentleness was intentional, not his first impulse. “The monks say we have to have Edward in the ground by two, so the service has to end by one oh eight.”
“I see.” Sook-Yung smoothed the front of the white shift dress she would wear for the last time. Then her eyes grew wide. “Charles, I didn’t bake the sweet rolls.”
“The sweet rolls?” He seemed distracted, studying himself in the mirror. “Oh—right. No, Henry baked them.”
“Henry baked… By himself?”
“Georgie helped him.”
Sook-Yung was silent. It was the matter-of-fact tone in Charles’s voice, the nonchalance, her children were cooking, and Charles saw nothing out of the ordinary in this. What have I missed? she wondered, How many months have I lost at the side of a hospital bed? Sook-Yung’s cheeks flushed in shame.
“We have everything else ready. Well. Some of it the monks will bring. But we have everything we’re supposed to have.” Charles turned away from her. “Are you ready?” Sook-Yung did not answer him, but they walked to the car together. At the car, George was already in the passenger seat; Henry played near the end of the driveway, dragging a stick through the dirt in their flowerbeds.
“Henry,” Sook-Yung called. He looked at her, but did not put down the stick, did not come to her.
“Henry,” Charles said. Henry reluctantly put the stick on the ground and shuffled toward the car. Sook-Yung stared at George through the passenger window, but he stared resolutely ahead, his jaw firm. She got into the car behind him and said nothing, fastening her seatbelt.
At the funeral home, they shuffled to the chapel quietly. Funeral directors met Charles warmly, and murmured condolences. Charles began to walk Sook-Yung to the front of the chapel, but she stopped short. Up ahead, Edward lay in his casket, lined with white crepe. His skin was pale. His lips were thin. His eyes were shut, dark lashes splayed against his ashen cheeks. The saffron robe in which he was dressed—sent when he was diagnosed with leukemia all the way from her grandmother’s village in Vietnam—reflected a warm light on his chin.
“They did a good job,” Charles remarked. Sook-Yung nodded.
He led her to a seat in the front row and stood over her until she sat down, then walked purposefully to the funeral directors in stiff black suits in the back of the chapel. His voice carried forward to her. She felt oppressively close to Edward, was sure he would rise up out of his casket and point to her, tell them all it had been her dreams that killed him and kept him dead.
Family members arrived, the monks arrived, and they in turn laid out the food, the candles, and the incense around Edward’s coffin with precision, with much vocal deliberation.
And then, it started: monks in long black robes chanted rapidly in Vietnamese the dharmas that would best help Edward move forward into his new life. Sook-Yung wanted to tell them that English would be best, that Edward did not speak Vietnamese. For his own success, they had raised him without a word of their native tongue.
In a moment of horrible timing, Sook-Yung laughed at the preposterous irony of this predicament: a belly laugh, a true guffaw, cutting through the chanting, the bells, the knocking wood block metronome. And then, realizing the horror she had created, realizing her monstrous intrusion on the progression of her son’s spirit, Sook-Yung clapped her hand to her mouth. She stood, abruptly, incapable of doing anything else. Beside her, her sister, Linh, sat, wearing Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses that obscured even her cheekbones, even her eyebrows, wearing a teeshirt and jeans and a couple dozen gold bangles on her wrist. Linh turned her face up toward Sook-Yung and hissed at her, “Where do you think you’re going?” But Sook-Yung ignored her, and walked forward to the casket.
She put both her hands on the lip of the casket, and leaned over her son’s body, staring at his face. It did not move. He did not speak. Then, when she could take no more, she careened away from the coffin, first swerving toward her chair, then away from it, down the center aisle, headed straight for a funeral director who happened to stand in her way. She could not unclench her fist; she could not unclench the tightness in her stomach. “Bathroom,” she choked out at the flustered man, who steered her in its general direction, repelling the force of her wild wandering.
She waited for the bathroom door to slam shut behind her before she dropped to her knees and sobbed the huge, shattering cries she had waited so long to cry. The tile beneath her fingers felt gritty, and the large floral display between the two sinks seemed too appropriate, too aware that the people around it would be grieving, would take offense at any shows of color too bright; the false hydrangeas and baby’s breath—baby’s breath!—bunched in their vase like shirts tucked into the pants of a too-fat man. Like Charles’ shirts were beginning to fit.
She cried herself to exhaustion, and when she was through, when she was empty, she lay her face down on the cool tile, and she slept.
She dreams she is in Edward’s bedroom. A stuffed frog, covered in green terrycloth, sprawls across his pillow as though on a cotton lily pad. The child’s comforter bears trains across it in primary colors. The curtains are patterned with blue skies and white, cotton-ball clouds. In her dream, Sook-Yung steps on a Lego, feels the pain shoot into her foot with relief. She sits on the edge of Edward’s bed and holds his frog to her chest. She looks around the room, wondering where his body will lie, what new state of mutilation she will encounter.
The room is silent and still. No snakes slither, no ice forms, no birds scavenge pieces of her son away. She looks for the telltale sign of his presence, that saffron robe, and sees nothing even of the right color. On his bookshelf, Dr. Seuss and Encyclopedia Brown lean against Paddington Bear, and a toy chest next to that overflows with more stuffed animals and action figures and a football.
She rises, bends over, and looks under the bed. No Edward. She throws open the closet door. No Edward. She calls his name, but no sound comes from her mouth. She runs to the bedroom door and throws it open, but rather than the hallway in her own home, his bedroom door opens onto the center aisle of the chapel at the funeral home. She stares along it, and it seems to stretch for miles.
At the end stands Edward’s casket. She walks toward it, and though the distance seems infinite, she finds herself at its end immediately. But Edward’s casket is empty, and she cannot find him.
“Mrs. Nguyen?” The funeral director knelt beside her on the bathroom floor. Sook-Yung opened her eyes. “The ceremony is almost over. They are ready to process with Edward up to the gravesite your husband and his father chose.” He handed her a glass of water and helped her to sit up. “Will you be all right?”
She blinked. She swallowed the water dutifully. Sook-Yung nodded, handing the glass back to this man. He looked at her carefully, then stood to his feet. He gave her a hand, and she accepted it, pulling on his arm to steady herself, to bring herself back up, standing.
At the graveside, relatives burned Monopoly money, lit incense, listened to the continued—but much abbreviated—chanting of the monks before they lowered Edward’s casket into the grave. The chilly autumn wind kept blowing the candles out, and the monks tried desperately to keep them lit, one grabbing an oversized, black umbrella and standing with it extended, like a shield, to block the breeze; but the tricky wind found its way around this effort, and continued shifting, extinguishing the candles almost as soon as they were lit.
Charles kept hovering around the monks, trying to keep incense sticks upright, supplying them with a cigarette lighter when the stupid candle blew out, checking his watch anxiously to be certain the rites would complete by the appointed time. George stood near Charles, moving when he moved, a dutiful shadow.
Sook-Yung stood away from them all, in the sunlight. It warmed her a little on such a cold day. Henry came to her, tugging on his tie at the neck, and laced his fingers through hers. They watched as Edward’s casket lowered into the vault, already in the ground, and then watched as George and Charles threw handfuls of dirt over the lid.
George turned and motioned for Henry to join them, and, after glancing at his mother, Henry dropped her hand and jogged over to where George and Charles stood next to the mound of earth. He, too, grabbed a handful and dropped it in on his brother’s casket.
Sook-Yung wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself tightly against the wind. Her nieces—Linh’s children—were text messaging on their cell phones or flirting with one of the young, attractive monks who monitored the burning barrel of paper monies. The wind blew some of the incense toward her, and Sook-Yung inhaled deeply, and closed her eyes, and exhaled.
When Sook-Yung dreamt of Edward, though, it was of Edward’s lifeless body, dressed for casketing in a formal robe the color of saffron from her grandmother’s village in North Vietnam. His skin is even paler in death than it had been in life, in illness, and she dreamt of him in the unlikeliest places. She had her first dream of Edward while she dozed off at his bedside the night he died, and when she awoke, he was gone, had flat lined, alone.
In her dream, Edward is dead, laying on the grass in the middle of a golf course, deep in the rough, and garden snakes weave sinuously out of his nostrils, his ears, pushing past his thin, ashen lips and out of his mouth. She will awaken with the sweet perfume of fresh-cut grass in her sinuses, the hypnotic rhythm of the snakes’ undulation still moving through her pulse.
And Edward was dead, and she believed, half-hidden in her heart, that she had somehow killed him, through the bizarre power of this dream.
Sook-Yung did not remember driving home that night to her family. She remembered opening the front door of their home to a mostly dark house, where the blue light of the television spilled into the hall from the living room. Looking in, Sook-Yung saw her middle son, Henry, sprawled on his stomach, playing video games. He lay awake far past his bedtime, but Sook-Yung was grateful only to enter unnoticed, and she left him unaware of her presence, in the living room playing Super Mario Kart.
She couldn’t feel her feet touching the ground. It was the strangest sensation. She entered the kitchen and pulled out a chair, sat in it, placed her canvas purse on the table in front of her. She still gripped her keys in her hand, still wore the heavy hiking jacket she’d put on to go to the hospital the previous morning.
She still sat there at the kitchen table hours later, after the sun rose, still wearing her jacket, still holding her keys, when her husband came into the kitchen. “Sook-Yung?” he said, scratching his scalp through his thick black hair. His face bore the creases of his pillowcase, and he had not bothered tying his terrycloth robe over the underwear he wore to bed every night. The little belly he’d begun to sprout pushed the waistband of these blue and white pinstriped boxers forward, but failed still to spill over their top. Sook-Yung’s eyes moved slower than she willed them to move, but she took in the sight of him, her husband, Charles, wearing only one tube sock. “Sook-Yung, when did you get home?”
He asked her in Vietnamese. His tone carried gently across the kitchen to her, but the sound of Vietnamese in their home startled her; Charles and Sook-Yung had made it their policy to speak only English in the home, to make it easier for their children in public. She shook her head slowly, like she was cleaning water out of her ears after a deep swim in a green lake, and stared at him, her eyes wide, her lips drawn into as straight and tight a line as she could draw them.
And Charles did not have to ask her what had happened. They had been waiting for this, the inevitable. Sook-Yung did not tell him about her dream.
Charles took control of things, and they seemed to happen around Sook-Yung, whom he convinced to go to bed. But she could only lie there, still wearing her jeans, tee shirt, and tennis shoes, the heavy comforter drawn up to her chin, her eyes studying the popcorn ceiling above her. The claustrophobic feeling of wearing shoes under the covers bothered her, but she did not remove them.
She did not want to dream the death of another one of her children. She could hear Charles’ voice coming from the telephone in the kitchen, calling the relatives, calling Grandfather, asking about the monks, about proper feng shui for burial, making appointments with the funeral home, the cemetery, the Buddhist monks that Grandfather recommended.
“Mom?” Sook-Yung looked down the long, cream expanse of her comforter past her feet to the open doorway, where her eldest son, George, stood, dressed for school, backpack slung over his shoulder. “Why are you still in bed?”
No one had yet told George, Sook-Yung realized. No one had told her oldest son that his little brother was gone. She stared at him for a long moment, and then, mercifully, Charles appeared behind George, put his hands on George’s shoulders. “Come with me, Georgie,” Charles said softly. He looked at Sook-Yung over George’s head, and steered his son away from the bedroom. Sook-Yung registered, for one fleeting moment, the furrow, very slight, between her husband’s eyes, registered the drawn lines around his mouth, his deep-etched frown. “I want to have a talk with you and Henry,” Charles told their son. George looked back, over his shoulder, at his mother once more. She saw it on his face: her twelve-year-old already knew what Charles would tell him, had been prepared for this news for a long time, had been prepared for this news for the many long months of Edward’s illness, had learned to live with this absence already, was resigned to it.
The boys did not go to school that day, but followed their father’s instructions and did homework quietly in their rooms, watched television downstairs in the den, and kept to themselves. Sook-Yung did not get out of bed at all until six o’clock that evening. She brushed her teeth in the bathroom, mesmerized by the deep circles already forming under her eyes. She wiped toothpaste spittle from the corner of her mouth absently, unable to draw her eyes from this woman reflected in front of her: this woman who appeared so sad, so lost, and so tired. Sook-Yung felt deep pity for the woman in the mirror.
She pulled off her tee shirt and her tennis shoes, unbuttoned her jeans and stepped out of them; over the past several months, Sook-Yung had missed many meals, choosing instead to watch Edward feed intravenously, waiting by his bed in case he woke up and felt frightened; now, her jeans fit loosely and fell off her hips whenever she undid the top button. She found a pair of sweatpants, dropped on Charles’ side of the bed, and pulled them on, cinching them tight at her waist. She unhooked her bra, dug a tank top out of a drawer under her side of the bed, and pulled it on over her matted hair.
She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the pink carpet. Charles, not Sook-Yung, liked this color. She saw her socks on the carpet, dingy from having worn them two days in a row. She trembled an exhaling sigh and lay down, pulling her knees up to her chest, then dragging the comforter back over her body, around her shoulders. She had left the light on in the bathroom, but the door hung mostly closed. Only a little end-of-day light came through the curtained window.
Sook-Yung felt her eyes draw heavier, as though each eyelash was made of lead, but she willed them to stay open, imagined tiny men crawling along her eyebrow and securing each eyelash to a hair in her eyebrows with nearly invisible but immeasurably strong cables. Her eyes filled with tears, which she at first believed were merely the result of holding them open for too long. She did not realize she had been holding her breath until she felt her chest begin to burn, and she exhaled and quickly inhaled, pulling air into her exhausted lungs with as much strength as she could manage. The deep breath turned into a cry, and the tears overran her eyes. She imagined the little men in her eyebrows severing the cables, and she squeezed her eyes shut, burying her face in a pillow, shoulders trembling under the weight of her moans. She turned bleary eyes out away from the pillow and apologized to the empty room: “I can’t imagine why I’m crying.”
Sook-Yung did not fall asleep until mid-morning the next day. When she did, she dreamt: She wanders in a grocery store, with all of the lights extinguished. She pushes a shopping cart through dim aisles, and encounters no one. She pulls cans from the shelves and squints at the nutrition facts on boxes of cereal. She rounds the corner at the end of an aisle and comes face to face with the butcher’s section, where a single light flickers in a hip-height freezer, full of turkeys. She leaves her shopping cart and walks to the freezer case, staring at the frozen carcasses.
Between two birds, she sees a piece of silk the color of marigolds peeking through. She moves frozen turkeys like miners move boulders after a shaft collapses, as though a life depends on it, and when she is through, Edward lays in the middle of the freezer case, his lips blue, his eyebrows frosted with ice, his eyes wide and unseeing.
They had to keep their appointment at the funeral home that day. Charles sat beside Sook-Yung on the bed and brushed the hair away from her face. He kissed her forehead, and murmured her name twice before her eyes blinked open. “We have an appointment today to make Edward’s arrangements. You want to come?” he said. She blinked again. His frown deepened, and he shoved some of his hair off of his forehead. Sook-Yung took comfort from that movement; it was a trademark of Charles’s, and she anchored herself on that island of familiarity. She took a deep breath, opened her mouth to speak. But Charles stood from the bed.
“You don’t have to. Dad and I can handle it on our own. You can stay in bed till the funeral if you want to. I’ve got it under control.” He spoke these sentences rapid-fire, facing away from her, and yet they cut into her as though he had turned and aimed them, like bullets, directly into her gut.
Sook-Yung pulled the blankets over her head and did not watch Charles leave.
She dreams she walks in a forest, full of tall, ancient pine trees, growing so thick they share root systems that weave like sea serpents above the forest floor, growing so thick their branches obscure the sky. She hears birds, cawing in the branches, but cannot see them until they begin swooping across her path, diving near, but not really at, her head. Instead, they seem to urge her forward on the path, so she walks.
She walks silently: the fallen pine needles are damp and muffle the sound of her footsteps. As she walks on, she notices the birds are perching in lower branches, and some of them are eating, feasting on something bright, threads of gold hang from their hungry beaks. The path bends around an ancient tree, and Sook-Yung hesitates. She knows what she will find. But she knows she has to continue walking, sees her feet continue in direct spite of her will, her will to flee and look at anything but what she will find around the tree.
And yet, around the tree, there is a hole in the trunk of another tree. The birds congregate on the branches of this great pine, and this hollow contains a bright nestle of yellow silk. Sook-Yung’s heart hangs heavy; her chest feels tight, as she walks toward this vision. When she reaches it, she places her hands on the rough, worn bark beneath the opening, and leans forward. A bird launches from inside the darkened nook, startling her. It carries something thick and dripping in its beak—a human eye. Inside the hollow of the trunk, Sook-Yung now sees, Edward sits, crouching, wearing his funereal robes, shredded in places, missing buttons. One of his eyes has been gouged out of his skull, and patches of his hair are missing. Some bald patches are covered in rough bark, cobwebbing, a worm wriggles on the nastily exposed skin. The thin line of his mouth extends far into his cheek where it has been torn open, but he opens his mouth, stares at her with his gaping eye socket, and says, “Mom?”
Henry startled Sook-Yung awake. “Mom?” he repeated. Sook-Yung gasped for an awful breath, stared at her second son, her eight-year-old, and sat up straight in bed. “Mom, today is the funeral.”
She did not know how long it had been since she had left her room.
Henry looked pale—as Edward had been—and his young brow was creased. He dragged his foot back and forth across the rose-colored carpet uneasily. “Dad said to wake you up. He said you had to come to Eddie’s funeral.” Sook-Yung clenched her fists around the comforter, trying to stop the shaking in her limbs. She stared at Henry, and forced herself to smile what she hoped was a reassuring smile. It froze on her face; Henry took one look at her and ran out of her bedroom, leaving the door open.
She tremblingly faced her own reflection in the mirror above her dresser. A woman sat there, cowering behind bed sheets, her hair lank and knotted, hanging over one puffy eye. The other eye glowered out of the reflection, and she bared her teeth in a ferocious scowl. Who let this stranger into my house, into my bed? Sook-Yung wondered. The woman in the reflection slowly let the monstrous grimace slide from her face, her mouth and jaw slackening, and it was several moments before Sook-Yung caught, in a blazing moment of recognition, the idea, however faint, however unlikely, that this woman in the reflection was her own self.
But it was amazing, the transformative powers of hot water, soap, and a blow drier. And twenty minutes later, when Charles came storming into their room, trying to finish tying his tie around his neck, he came up short, too surprised to bother hiding his surprise, to see Sook-Yung dressed, fastening a string of pearls around her neck. “I thought we would have to have the funeral tomorrow,” she said, once Charles had resumed tying his tie.
“Why did you think that?”
“I thought it was always four days,” she said. Charles was quiet for a moment.
“It has been four days, Sook-Yung,” he said, gently. There was a controlled element under his voice that told Sook-Yung that his gentleness was intentional, not his first impulse. “The monks say we have to have Edward in the ground by two, so the service has to end by one oh eight.”
“I see.” Sook-Yung smoothed the front of the white shift dress she would wear for the last time. Then her eyes grew wide. “Charles, I didn’t bake the sweet rolls.”
“The sweet rolls?” He seemed distracted, studying himself in the mirror. “Oh—right. No, Henry baked them.”
“Henry baked… By himself?”
“Georgie helped him.”
Sook-Yung was silent. It was the matter-of-fact tone in Charles’s voice, the nonchalance, her children were cooking, and Charles saw nothing out of the ordinary in this. What have I missed? she wondered, How many months have I lost at the side of a hospital bed? Sook-Yung’s cheeks flushed in shame.
“We have everything else ready. Well. Some of it the monks will bring. But we have everything we’re supposed to have.” Charles turned away from her. “Are you ready?” Sook-Yung did not answer him, but they walked to the car together. At the car, George was already in the passenger seat; Henry played near the end of the driveway, dragging a stick through the dirt in their flowerbeds.
“Henry,” Sook-Yung called. He looked at her, but did not put down the stick, did not come to her.
“Henry,” Charles said. Henry reluctantly put the stick on the ground and shuffled toward the car. Sook-Yung stared at George through the passenger window, but he stared resolutely ahead, his jaw firm. She got into the car behind him and said nothing, fastening her seatbelt.
At the funeral home, they shuffled to the chapel quietly. Funeral directors met Charles warmly, and murmured condolences. Charles began to walk Sook-Yung to the front of the chapel, but she stopped short. Up ahead, Edward lay in his casket, lined with white crepe. His skin was pale. His lips were thin. His eyes were shut, dark lashes splayed against his ashen cheeks. The saffron robe in which he was dressed—sent when he was diagnosed with leukemia all the way from her grandmother’s village in Vietnam—reflected a warm light on his chin.
“They did a good job,” Charles remarked. Sook-Yung nodded.
He led her to a seat in the front row and stood over her until she sat down, then walked purposefully to the funeral directors in stiff black suits in the back of the chapel. His voice carried forward to her. She felt oppressively close to Edward, was sure he would rise up out of his casket and point to her, tell them all it had been her dreams that killed him and kept him dead.
Family members arrived, the monks arrived, and they in turn laid out the food, the candles, and the incense around Edward’s coffin with precision, with much vocal deliberation.
And then, it started: monks in long black robes chanted rapidly in Vietnamese the dharmas that would best help Edward move forward into his new life. Sook-Yung wanted to tell them that English would be best, that Edward did not speak Vietnamese. For his own success, they had raised him without a word of their native tongue.
In a moment of horrible timing, Sook-Yung laughed at the preposterous irony of this predicament: a belly laugh, a true guffaw, cutting through the chanting, the bells, the knocking wood block metronome. And then, realizing the horror she had created, realizing her monstrous intrusion on the progression of her son’s spirit, Sook-Yung clapped her hand to her mouth. She stood, abruptly, incapable of doing anything else. Beside her, her sister, Linh, sat, wearing Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses that obscured even her cheekbones, even her eyebrows, wearing a teeshirt and jeans and a couple dozen gold bangles on her wrist. Linh turned her face up toward Sook-Yung and hissed at her, “Where do you think you’re going?” But Sook-Yung ignored her, and walked forward to the casket.
She put both her hands on the lip of the casket, and leaned over her son’s body, staring at his face. It did not move. He did not speak. Then, when she could take no more, she careened away from the coffin, first swerving toward her chair, then away from it, down the center aisle, headed straight for a funeral director who happened to stand in her way. She could not unclench her fist; she could not unclench the tightness in her stomach. “Bathroom,” she choked out at the flustered man, who steered her in its general direction, repelling the force of her wild wandering.
She waited for the bathroom door to slam shut behind her before she dropped to her knees and sobbed the huge, shattering cries she had waited so long to cry. The tile beneath her fingers felt gritty, and the large floral display between the two sinks seemed too appropriate, too aware that the people around it would be grieving, would take offense at any shows of color too bright; the false hydrangeas and baby’s breath—baby’s breath!—bunched in their vase like shirts tucked into the pants of a too-fat man. Like Charles’ shirts were beginning to fit.
She cried herself to exhaustion, and when she was through, when she was empty, she lay her face down on the cool tile, and she slept.
She dreams she is in Edward’s bedroom. A stuffed frog, covered in green terrycloth, sprawls across his pillow as though on a cotton lily pad. The child’s comforter bears trains across it in primary colors. The curtains are patterned with blue skies and white, cotton-ball clouds. In her dream, Sook-Yung steps on a Lego, feels the pain shoot into her foot with relief. She sits on the edge of Edward’s bed and holds his frog to her chest. She looks around the room, wondering where his body will lie, what new state of mutilation she will encounter.
The room is silent and still. No snakes slither, no ice forms, no birds scavenge pieces of her son away. She looks for the telltale sign of his presence, that saffron robe, and sees nothing even of the right color. On his bookshelf, Dr. Seuss and Encyclopedia Brown lean against Paddington Bear, and a toy chest next to that overflows with more stuffed animals and action figures and a football.
She rises, bends over, and looks under the bed. No Edward. She throws open the closet door. No Edward. She calls his name, but no sound comes from her mouth. She runs to the bedroom door and throws it open, but rather than the hallway in her own home, his bedroom door opens onto the center aisle of the chapel at the funeral home. She stares along it, and it seems to stretch for miles.
At the end stands Edward’s casket. She walks toward it, and though the distance seems infinite, she finds herself at its end immediately. But Edward’s casket is empty, and she cannot find him.
“Mrs. Nguyen?” The funeral director knelt beside her on the bathroom floor. Sook-Yung opened her eyes. “The ceremony is almost over. They are ready to process with Edward up to the gravesite your husband and his father chose.” He handed her a glass of water and helped her to sit up. “Will you be all right?”
She blinked. She swallowed the water dutifully. Sook-Yung nodded, handing the glass back to this man. He looked at her carefully, then stood to his feet. He gave her a hand, and she accepted it, pulling on his arm to steady herself, to bring herself back up, standing.
At the graveside, relatives burned Monopoly money, lit incense, listened to the continued—but much abbreviated—chanting of the monks before they lowered Edward’s casket into the grave. The chilly autumn wind kept blowing the candles out, and the monks tried desperately to keep them lit, one grabbing an oversized, black umbrella and standing with it extended, like a shield, to block the breeze; but the tricky wind found its way around this effort, and continued shifting, extinguishing the candles almost as soon as they were lit.
Charles kept hovering around the monks, trying to keep incense sticks upright, supplying them with a cigarette lighter when the stupid candle blew out, checking his watch anxiously to be certain the rites would complete by the appointed time. George stood near Charles, moving when he moved, a dutiful shadow.
Sook-Yung stood away from them all, in the sunlight. It warmed her a little on such a cold day. Henry came to her, tugging on his tie at the neck, and laced his fingers through hers. They watched as Edward’s casket lowered into the vault, already in the ground, and then watched as George and Charles threw handfuls of dirt over the lid.
George turned and motioned for Henry to join them, and, after glancing at his mother, Henry dropped her hand and jogged over to where George and Charles stood next to the mound of earth. He, too, grabbed a handful and dropped it in on his brother’s casket.
Sook-Yung wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself tightly against the wind. Her nieces—Linh’s children—were text messaging on their cell phones or flirting with one of the young, attractive monks who monitored the burning barrel of paper monies. The wind blew some of the incense toward her, and Sook-Yung inhaled deeply, and closed her eyes, and exhaled.
Yet In My Flesh
Children discovered the bones of Agnes Day strewn across the twenty acres of land she kept but never tended. She preferred things wild and not “confined by the foibles and follies of man.” When the Sheriff arrived on the scene where Walt Tracey’s boy was frantically waving a human clavicle in front of his eager boy-scout face, he knew it had to have had something to do with those damn dogs.
The cedars yawned up into the winter sunlight in gestures of praise and adoration, their branches swinging mercilessly down to the needle-strewn forest floor where the Sheriff and Coroner’s men unearthed shallow burials of shins, phalanges, half a jaw with a gold tooth still set in it. Bob Henricks, a temporary deputy who got these jobs occasionally because he was the only man in town who owned a metal detector, found the jaw and pried the gold piece loose before announcing his discovery to the rest of the party, sans one tooth now safely resting in his breast pocket behind two Bic pens and a pack of chew.
The boys who tagged along for the thrill of the hunt were the first to stumble across one of the mad dogs. Hiding in a thicket, wiry grey and brown fur bristling along the length of its rabid back, the wild thing let its voice rumble like a broken tractor motor through bared yellow teeth. The boys turned tail and ran, sliding back to the home’s driveway with sneakers or hiking books and wide, white eyes. They kicked up sweet, musty tufts of dry land behind them as they insisted a man with a gun come to see the dog.
Eventually, the Sheriff called the city pound—not his jurisdiction, not this time—which sent an officer who came and collected no fewer than forty-seven dogs, all foaming at the mouth and bloody of tooth and eye. “How the hell’d she get so many damn dogs?” the pound official wondered as volunteers hauled one dog after another out the back door to the yard where a single crack! announced another mutt’s demise.
The pastor at the Baptist church offered his services for funeral arrangements, though Agnes never attended a church service one at his fellowship or any of the other two dozen or so protestant establishments in town. (Agnes never attended much of anything except soup sales at the local Safeway after her retirement from the town hospital. She walked the four miles in to town once a week to stock up on groceries; she caught a ride back from a park ranger who headed out her stretch of highway to check on a flock of sand hill cranes and the habitat they only visited for about three days per year. The park ranger delivered Agnes, her soup, and a monstrous bag of dry dog food—store brand—to the bottom of her gravel driveway every Thursday or Wednesday. She never asked for help, and he sometimes watched her struggle the forty pounds of dry dog food over a shoulder up the long, curving drive.) The funeral was a lonely and sparse one, attended mostly by local law enforcement and a couple of old hospital secretaries who didn’t know Agnes well but didn’t feel right not having folks at her wake.
“You know it started when she retired,” Cecilia Maddox, an old LPN, remarked to Loretta McClung, a retired hospital administrator, at the service. She spoke out of the corner of her lined, lipstuck lips to the woman perched in her black suit and veiled hat on the rickety wooden chair beside her. “She got lonely, with no patients left to care for, and went and got herself some mutts to keep her company.”
“What’s wrong with that? I got myself a little Pomeranian when I retired, named him Ralph and feed him twice a day.” Loretta stretched herself up to her fullest height, which still did not break five feet, and swung her ancient legs off the front of the chair.
“But Agnes never did keep those dogs civilized,” Cecilia preached. “And she didn’t have them neutered, either. They bred.”
The two dogs, both mutts, Agnes Day had adopted some fifteen years back, and were indeed the progenitors of the innumerable wild creatures the Sheriff and his deputies hauled into the pound the day they unearthed Agnes’ bones. Sheriff wrote as much in his report, which he filed late one evening about a week after the funeral. It was rare he had paperwork of this magnitude to file; the usual petty misdemeanors, public drunkenness, teenagers shoplifting condoms and the like, required little to no reporting at all. A woman’s bones picked clean and found scattered all over her property was something else.
Sheriff sat at his desk in the large HQ office, the ceiling fan on low, the desk lamp shining a murky pool of marigold light on the dingy stack of typewritten pages. They described finger joints, eye sockets, femurs. He kneaded his temples with his knuckles and peered down at the paper that recorded his discussion with the park ranger.
“I told her one day when I dropped her off that I noticed she bought an awful lot of dog food for just two dogs, and asked if they weren’t getting a little old,” the Ranger told him. “She told me they’d had puppies and she wasn’t even sure if the original two were around anymore. Sounds like they done and gone wild out that stretch of land.”
Sheriff rubbed his night-dry eyes with the meat of his thumb and stared out the crooked blinds to the gravel parking lot, lit by a single flickering street lamp. In his mind’s eye, he saw the foaming muzzle of one of the dogs he’d helped to drag into the back of the dogcatcher’s truck. He saw the crazed, rolling eye of the hound, the fur matted and bedraggled. He saw a chunk of ear missing. He saw the dog lunge for the cage bars; he saw the dog turn on another dog. He heard the snarling and the whining and the madness in guttural warnings and the choke of the truck engine.
He saw Agnes Day in his mind’s eye, opening p the light-swinging screen door that faced her driveway. He saw her rip open the bag of dog food, saw her put her cupped hand to her mouth and call for the dogs, saw the affection in her eye as they approached the clearing around her house. He saw the sparse mourners at the funeral, heard the minister’s words: This is my body, broken for you. He saw Agnes’ affection change to terror as the pack thrust their ribbed and suffering bodies at her, dozens of them, ripping at flesh, at sweatshirt, at bone. He heard the minister: Taste and see that the Lord is good. He saw her hands in the midst of them, her children, he saw her blood, he saw her. He heard the minister’s word, saw the flash of canine teeth, heard the minister’s tenor: See—He saw the claws and the strings of flesh, he saw the rickety wooden chairs in the church, he saw the gravel and the dog food and the half-buried shards of bone, he saw the minister adjust his collar—See—he saw—I make all things new.
The cedars yawned up into the winter sunlight in gestures of praise and adoration, their branches swinging mercilessly down to the needle-strewn forest floor where the Sheriff and Coroner’s men unearthed shallow burials of shins, phalanges, half a jaw with a gold tooth still set in it. Bob Henricks, a temporary deputy who got these jobs occasionally because he was the only man in town who owned a metal detector, found the jaw and pried the gold piece loose before announcing his discovery to the rest of the party, sans one tooth now safely resting in his breast pocket behind two Bic pens and a pack of chew.
The boys who tagged along for the thrill of the hunt were the first to stumble across one of the mad dogs. Hiding in a thicket, wiry grey and brown fur bristling along the length of its rabid back, the wild thing let its voice rumble like a broken tractor motor through bared yellow teeth. The boys turned tail and ran, sliding back to the home’s driveway with sneakers or hiking books and wide, white eyes. They kicked up sweet, musty tufts of dry land behind them as they insisted a man with a gun come to see the dog.
Eventually, the Sheriff called the city pound—not his jurisdiction, not this time—which sent an officer who came and collected no fewer than forty-seven dogs, all foaming at the mouth and bloody of tooth and eye. “How the hell’d she get so many damn dogs?” the pound official wondered as volunteers hauled one dog after another out the back door to the yard where a single crack! announced another mutt’s demise.
The pastor at the Baptist church offered his services for funeral arrangements, though Agnes never attended a church service one at his fellowship or any of the other two dozen or so protestant establishments in town. (Agnes never attended much of anything except soup sales at the local Safeway after her retirement from the town hospital. She walked the four miles in to town once a week to stock up on groceries; she caught a ride back from a park ranger who headed out her stretch of highway to check on a flock of sand hill cranes and the habitat they only visited for about three days per year. The park ranger delivered Agnes, her soup, and a monstrous bag of dry dog food—store brand—to the bottom of her gravel driveway every Thursday or Wednesday. She never asked for help, and he sometimes watched her struggle the forty pounds of dry dog food over a shoulder up the long, curving drive.) The funeral was a lonely and sparse one, attended mostly by local law enforcement and a couple of old hospital secretaries who didn’t know Agnes well but didn’t feel right not having folks at her wake.
“You know it started when she retired,” Cecilia Maddox, an old LPN, remarked to Loretta McClung, a retired hospital administrator, at the service. She spoke out of the corner of her lined, lipstuck lips to the woman perched in her black suit and veiled hat on the rickety wooden chair beside her. “She got lonely, with no patients left to care for, and went and got herself some mutts to keep her company.”
“What’s wrong with that? I got myself a little Pomeranian when I retired, named him Ralph and feed him twice a day.” Loretta stretched herself up to her fullest height, which still did not break five feet, and swung her ancient legs off the front of the chair.
“But Agnes never did keep those dogs civilized,” Cecilia preached. “And she didn’t have them neutered, either. They bred.”
The two dogs, both mutts, Agnes Day had adopted some fifteen years back, and were indeed the progenitors of the innumerable wild creatures the Sheriff and his deputies hauled into the pound the day they unearthed Agnes’ bones. Sheriff wrote as much in his report, which he filed late one evening about a week after the funeral. It was rare he had paperwork of this magnitude to file; the usual petty misdemeanors, public drunkenness, teenagers shoplifting condoms and the like, required little to no reporting at all. A woman’s bones picked clean and found scattered all over her property was something else.
Sheriff sat at his desk in the large HQ office, the ceiling fan on low, the desk lamp shining a murky pool of marigold light on the dingy stack of typewritten pages. They described finger joints, eye sockets, femurs. He kneaded his temples with his knuckles and peered down at the paper that recorded his discussion with the park ranger.
“I told her one day when I dropped her off that I noticed she bought an awful lot of dog food for just two dogs, and asked if they weren’t getting a little old,” the Ranger told him. “She told me they’d had puppies and she wasn’t even sure if the original two were around anymore. Sounds like they done and gone wild out that stretch of land.”
Sheriff rubbed his night-dry eyes with the meat of his thumb and stared out the crooked blinds to the gravel parking lot, lit by a single flickering street lamp. In his mind’s eye, he saw the foaming muzzle of one of the dogs he’d helped to drag into the back of the dogcatcher’s truck. He saw the crazed, rolling eye of the hound, the fur matted and bedraggled. He saw a chunk of ear missing. He saw the dog lunge for the cage bars; he saw the dog turn on another dog. He heard the snarling and the whining and the madness in guttural warnings and the choke of the truck engine.
He saw Agnes Day in his mind’s eye, opening p the light-swinging screen door that faced her driveway. He saw her rip open the bag of dog food, saw her put her cupped hand to her mouth and call for the dogs, saw the affection in her eye as they approached the clearing around her house. He saw the sparse mourners at the funeral, heard the minister’s words: This is my body, broken for you. He saw Agnes’ affection change to terror as the pack thrust their ribbed and suffering bodies at her, dozens of them, ripping at flesh, at sweatshirt, at bone. He heard the minister: Taste and see that the Lord is good. He saw her hands in the midst of them, her children, he saw her blood, he saw her. He heard the minister’s word, saw the flash of canine teeth, heard the minister’s tenor: See—He saw the claws and the strings of flesh, he saw the rickety wooden chairs in the church, he saw the gravel and the dog food and the half-buried shards of bone, he saw the minister adjust his collar—See—he saw—I make all things new.
You Are Here - A Bed Big Enough for All of Us
I had wanted to sleep with Will for some time; not merely because his full lips and firm arms reminded me of tangled sheets and arching backs, but because he had a way of blushing when I caught him staring at my tits that made me blush, too. He lived with a friend of mine, Chloe, and every time I was at their house, he’d join us for a glass of wine or a Scotch neat on the back porch. He wrote computer code: not just professionally, but also as a hobby. He believed that when his body dies, he will have found a way to electronically maintain his consciousness in a computer, floating somewhere in space, perpetually aware.
One time I asked him on a date and he pawed the earth beside his front door step with the toe of his sneaker, shoved his hands in his pockets, looked anywhere but at me. “I don’t really want a girlfriend right now,” he mumbled, his ears’ tips turning pink. “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I just don’t have time for those things, the attention, the… Well, I don’t have time. Sorry.” It was a week before he’d resume joining us, Chloe and I, and a few more weeks before he addressed me directly again.
Chloe was an embalmer by trade and worked weird hours sometimes at a funeral home north of the city. One time she let me sneak in to watch her “do a prep” in the early hours of a Sunday morning and the body, I mean the man she was working on, was old and bloated and his veins were all distorted and difficult to access because of the chemotherapy he’d been on for so long. “Liver cancer,” she guessed, noting the yellow tinge of his epidermis. She massaged his body as she drained the blood from his arteries, forcing great waves of sanguine to rush out of the places she’d opened up on his neck; some blood escaped his nostrils and tinted his white mustache pink, and that same pink tone—the exact same—was the color Will turned any time I complimented him.
It wasn’t that I wanted to have Will as a boyfriend, exactly. There were others I slept with or had feelings for around that time—Charles, the six-feet-nine bouncer at a raunchy nightclub I avoided downtown, for instance, would have made a physically impressive and imposing boyfriend. I liked sleeping with Charles because his entire pillar-like body engulfed me; I felt like I was a teddy bear in his arms. I had a raging crush on Sean, my favorite bartender in the city, an Irish Catholic boy with a face like Adonis, who officially kept a chilly professional distance but wore more frequently the shirts I complimented, and called me “sweetie” when the other bartender wasn’t around. There was also John, the young, dreamy, punk green-haired man who worked at the newsstand where I bought the New York Times every Sunday for five dollars just so I could read and laugh at the letters to the editor in the Sunday Book Review. (One time Joyce Carol Oates wrote in to criticize a review of a new biography of Flannery O’Connor. I’d read the review—and the biography—and much of O’Connor’s work, too—and laughed to myself. Yes, Ms. Oates, I thought, you’ve hit the nail on the head again.) John liked to do it once at night, stay over, and then have sex three or four more times in the morning, bright and early, before he had to go to work. I actually got more sleep this way. I liked John. I could see John and I retiring in the country somewhere when we were older, raising little revolutionary children, living off the land, reading Marx and Engels at night by a fire.
Will would never retire to the country. Will was the type to hole up in some swanky condo in a well-wired suburb, writing code until his fingers fell off. Will was a Virgo, and would probably always be single, in some way. I figured even if he eventually married, he’d marry a shadow of a woman, someone he could ignore perpetually, someone who wouldn’t notice she was ignored entirely, or, if she noticed, wouldn’t mind too much, relishing security or financial providence or a quiet life. Maybe she’d be a closet lesbian.
A Leo myself, I needed more attention than that. A secret dread lived in the deepest cockles of my heart, that what I did, which was work on the same epic-style poem for going on six years at that point, was mostly for the brownie points describing my project brought me at the gallery openings, art parties, and tavern concerts I attended on an almost nightly basis. I was a Real Artist with an Impressive Project, and it seemed that the longer I worked on it, the more impressed people were with it. They ascribed a certain sense of romance to the young artist working on her opus for six whole years. I also feared, in a similar region of my heart that I would never, ever reach the end of this poem.
The problem with the various guys I slept with was that we always went to my place. It seemed everyone had a huge commute from the downtown area, where I’d been lucky enough to find a studio on the cheap, or they had roommates. Bringing a girl home when you have roommates—especially a girl you sleep with semi-regularly—whiffs of girlfriend. None of us wanted to tackle that. But my apartment was abysmal: on the large side for a studio, but full of nothing. I had few possessions. I’d moved a lot as a girl and felt claustrophobic when I amassed too much. So, I owned one twin bed and a handful of pots and pans; my clothes lived in baskets under the bed. A kitchen cabinet hosted my laptop computer, on which resided my compulsive collection of Baroque music and, of course, the Great Epic Poem. It was a sparse space, not sexy. And how to fit a 6’9” body builder into a twin bed with a woman who weighs more than Twiggy?
We somehow always made it work.
But the bed: it was small and narrow and too short, inevitably, for anyone’s legs, as soon as we snuggled into one another. It was made for solo sleeping, restless turning in the night, alone, the kind of sleep that brought sweat and insomnia and bitterness. Sleeping with men I met in bars didn’t fit in this bed with the celestial-printed sheets, didn’t fit with all the sprawling limbs, missed entirely the desperate clinging, the nipple suckling, the long looks in deep eyes. Their eyelashes were always longer than mine, and it seemed I could never see through them.
And Will had a tendency to avoid: though he flirted, he never came close, never touched my body. Not until later.
Chloe and I had a tendency to drink a lot. We had regular joints, knew the bartenders, kind of hated them but in a lustful way. Not just Sean, but Daren, Corey, Alphonse, Demetrius, too. It was like a collection of Greek Gods who both gratified and repulsed us at once. I wanted all of them. She hated each of them with a physical passion, shooting empty wine and highball glasses across the bar at them; you could see her need to break things in her eyes.
When I ran into Will on the street, with Chloe, it was unexpected, to say the least. We truly didn’t know his normal route home, didn’t anticipate seeing him on the street. He’d kept shooting us down for social engagements outside that porch, had continually avoided seeing us off that one neighborhood. Now here he was, a backpack on, off work and ready to drink a Scotch or four. As it turned out, so were we.
We found a place with an outdoor patio, but it was close—on the same block—to Sean’s bar, and when Chloe begged out on account of her early mornings, I couldn’t resist dragging Will to Sean’s bar for more drinks, and, mostly, to feel less pathetic in front of my stronger crush. For here was Will, flirting, inhibitions down, touching my shoulder, my knee, looking me in the eye, flushing that bloody-mustache pink, shaking his head in disbelief at things I said, echoing over and over: “Yes, exactly! That’s it exactly!”
My cheeks were flushed with Bunnahabhain Scotch and flattery, and I knew I looked my prettiest that way. I kept catching Sean’s eye over Will’s shoulder, kept blushing and looking away. I’m certain Will thought it was for him. I suppose, then, it was no surprise when he stumbled home after me—after seven Scotches each, really—to “pop in” for a little while before he headed home. Nor was it any surprise when, the moment I closed the door in that empty, empty studio, I felt his hands exploring the curve of my waist, pushing fingers through belt loops in anticipation of other entries. How could I do anything but relax my shoulders against his? How could I do anything but wait for what I knew, then, would happen?
Our limbs kept falling off the bed.
He vomited in my sink four times the next morning; I kept mine down without a tinge of nausea.
I can still recall how every breath felt catching under the sweaty, taut skin of my chest.
I wasn’t sure whom to tell; was it Parve to tell Chloe and expose the fact that we’d slept together to Will’s roommate? Or was that taboo? I lay on my bed the next night, naked, alone, my legs crossed, my fingers pressing into my ribs, anxious, playing them like the keyboard keys on my laptop. I typed: What now?
Sunday morning John gave me that look, his snub nose tilted toward the newsstand, his eyes eyeing the hem of my skirt. I handed him five dollars and didn’t say a word, didn’t respond to his text message.
Charles called twice on Monday. He did not leave voicemails, which made it easier to ignore him.
On Tuesday, Chloe knocked on my studio door. She wore sunglasses, but ripped them off when I answered the door, exposing eyes wide with something: excitement, it turned out.
“It happened, didn’t it,” she demanded. “You slept with Will.”
“Um—” was all I got out before she rushed into the space, spinning and bending and nearly keeling over in excitement.
“How was it! How was he! What’s going to happen next!” None of her questions seemed to bear question marks, and she was waving those sunglasses around in the air, a laser pointer to her enthusiasm. “YOU SLEPT WITH WILL!” she crowed.
“I know,” I said. I blushed a little. I blushed? Yes. Yes, I blushed, pink with something. Pleasure? Shame?
I was distracted when I tried to work on the poem. Who could focus on quatrains, on pentameter, on verb choices, when that question lingered? I found myself staring over the edge of my laptop at the blank walls of my studio. There was a place where the plaster peeled, revealing very old, whitened brick. I focused all of my breathing on that place.
Down at the waterfront, I listened to the tide slapping the boardwalk’s supportive pillars. It was almost summer, but still, I wore a sweater and pulled it tighter around me. When I got Will’s text message, I set my shoulders and started walking. “Meet in five by the pier?”
He was pale, and wouldn’t look me in the eyes. He looked frail enough, all of a sudden, to fall over in a strong burst of wind. The warm tone of the sun on the water only washed him out further, so he was transparent, and I felt an impulse to wrap him in my sweater and sing him lullabies.
“Will, are you all right? You look awful,” I said.
His voice came back small and thin and reedy, higher than normal, unsupported. “I need to make this brief,” he said. “I don’t ever want to talk to you or see you again.” He paused, searching the horizon for something. “We can’t be friends.” He released a shuddering breath, then turned and fled back along the length of the pier.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the handrail he’d been leaning on.
“He says he’s going to move when the lease is up,” Chloe mumbled into her gin and tonic. “We’ve lived together for three years.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I didn’t even convince myself of my apology, but she nodded.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. She was more convincing. At the other end of the bar, Sean kept glancing at us as he pulled four pints of Guinness for a table full of rugby players. “I guess I knew Will had some intimacy issues, but Jesus.” Chloe shook her head. “This is over the top.”
“You can say that again.” I slugged back the rest of my vodka soda, shook my head, and stood up from the bar.
“Well at least you never really like, loved Will,” she proffered. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I know rejection stings, but this was just sex, wasn’t it?” I nodded numbly, then sighed.
“I have to pee,” I said.
Sitting on the toilet, jeans around my ankles, I leaned forward and sighed. I couldn’t even get into drinking that night, though Chloe seemed more than capable. The light in the ladies’ room flickered, dim though it was, and I tried to remind myself that what Chloe said was true: Will was just a guy I’d wanted to sleep with. But was anyone ever really just someone I wanted to sleep with, or were they all people I wanted to fill that tiny, tiny bed with me? Were they all people I wanted to fill that tiny, tiny space in my heart that caused more ache than such a negligible sliver warranted?
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, and thought of Sean out there, pouring drinks for us and never judging our drunkenness, never judging our coping mechanisms; I had seen the skeptical looks he gave some of the clientele, but he spared us his disapproval. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, hands dripping, the paper towel dispenser temporarily out of order. I saw the corners of my mouth drawn down, and I saw the circles that had begun to gather under my eyes. I’m not very old, I thought, but I will be, someday. I wiped my hands on my jeans and left the bathroom.
Sean and Chloe were talking when I got back to the bar.
“I think Chloe might be ready to go home,” he told me. He smiled grimly.
“What? No!” Chloe was good and drunk, and it showed in the way her words were too loud, too close together. She had lost all sense of meter. “I’m just saying I think you two would be so, so so so so so good together. Really.” Sean bit his lip and looked away, occupying himself with wiping down the bar, and it took me a moment to realize that Chloe had been talking about me. To Sean.
“All right, Chloe,” I said. I glanced at Sean. “I’ll come back for the tab tomorrow, okay?”
“Nooo, I got it,” Chloe said. She started patting herself down in unlikely places for her wallet.
“It’s fine,” Sean said. He winked at me and smiled—a gentle smile, this time. “See you girls soon.”
Chloe let me support her as we walked down the street toward my apartment. “I said too much back there, didn’t I?” she asked after a few minutes of fresh air. I didn’t answer. “Hey,” she said, softer. I turned and looked at her, and brushed a loose strand of her black bangs out of her eyes. We both understood the apology inherently.
“We’ve all been there,” I said. She nodded, and reached for my hand.
Chloe stayed with me that night, the two of us side by side, our arms pinned tight, on that twin bed, the cover pulled up to our bare collarbones. Chloe slept the colorless and heavy sleep that too much alcohol always promises to bring, but I lay awake, the bare walls seeming to recede away for an eternity of space, the distant sounds of sirens occasionally punctuating the long night. I thought of the people who’d been in this bed with me: Charles, and how safe his body made me feel; John, and the ghosts of children we’d never have together; Will and his great passion and even greater fear; Chloe, now, and her fiercely loyal friendship; me, whatever I was, whatever I would someday be; and my dreams, all of them, of Sean and a life shared with people who never leave, a life shared with people who saw the value of staying and being part of a beautiful, varied tribe, and that dream of a bed big enough for all of us, and enough of us to fill a bed so big.
One time I asked him on a date and he pawed the earth beside his front door step with the toe of his sneaker, shoved his hands in his pockets, looked anywhere but at me. “I don’t really want a girlfriend right now,” he mumbled, his ears’ tips turning pink. “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I just don’t have time for those things, the attention, the… Well, I don’t have time. Sorry.” It was a week before he’d resume joining us, Chloe and I, and a few more weeks before he addressed me directly again.
Chloe was an embalmer by trade and worked weird hours sometimes at a funeral home north of the city. One time she let me sneak in to watch her “do a prep” in the early hours of a Sunday morning and the body, I mean the man she was working on, was old and bloated and his veins were all distorted and difficult to access because of the chemotherapy he’d been on for so long. “Liver cancer,” she guessed, noting the yellow tinge of his epidermis. She massaged his body as she drained the blood from his arteries, forcing great waves of sanguine to rush out of the places she’d opened up on his neck; some blood escaped his nostrils and tinted his white mustache pink, and that same pink tone—the exact same—was the color Will turned any time I complimented him.
It wasn’t that I wanted to have Will as a boyfriend, exactly. There were others I slept with or had feelings for around that time—Charles, the six-feet-nine bouncer at a raunchy nightclub I avoided downtown, for instance, would have made a physically impressive and imposing boyfriend. I liked sleeping with Charles because his entire pillar-like body engulfed me; I felt like I was a teddy bear in his arms. I had a raging crush on Sean, my favorite bartender in the city, an Irish Catholic boy with a face like Adonis, who officially kept a chilly professional distance but wore more frequently the shirts I complimented, and called me “sweetie” when the other bartender wasn’t around. There was also John, the young, dreamy, punk green-haired man who worked at the newsstand where I bought the New York Times every Sunday for five dollars just so I could read and laugh at the letters to the editor in the Sunday Book Review. (One time Joyce Carol Oates wrote in to criticize a review of a new biography of Flannery O’Connor. I’d read the review—and the biography—and much of O’Connor’s work, too—and laughed to myself. Yes, Ms. Oates, I thought, you’ve hit the nail on the head again.) John liked to do it once at night, stay over, and then have sex three or four more times in the morning, bright and early, before he had to go to work. I actually got more sleep this way. I liked John. I could see John and I retiring in the country somewhere when we were older, raising little revolutionary children, living off the land, reading Marx and Engels at night by a fire.
Will would never retire to the country. Will was the type to hole up in some swanky condo in a well-wired suburb, writing code until his fingers fell off. Will was a Virgo, and would probably always be single, in some way. I figured even if he eventually married, he’d marry a shadow of a woman, someone he could ignore perpetually, someone who wouldn’t notice she was ignored entirely, or, if she noticed, wouldn’t mind too much, relishing security or financial providence or a quiet life. Maybe she’d be a closet lesbian.
A Leo myself, I needed more attention than that. A secret dread lived in the deepest cockles of my heart, that what I did, which was work on the same epic-style poem for going on six years at that point, was mostly for the brownie points describing my project brought me at the gallery openings, art parties, and tavern concerts I attended on an almost nightly basis. I was a Real Artist with an Impressive Project, and it seemed that the longer I worked on it, the more impressed people were with it. They ascribed a certain sense of romance to the young artist working on her opus for six whole years. I also feared, in a similar region of my heart that I would never, ever reach the end of this poem.
The problem with the various guys I slept with was that we always went to my place. It seemed everyone had a huge commute from the downtown area, where I’d been lucky enough to find a studio on the cheap, or they had roommates. Bringing a girl home when you have roommates—especially a girl you sleep with semi-regularly—whiffs of girlfriend. None of us wanted to tackle that. But my apartment was abysmal: on the large side for a studio, but full of nothing. I had few possessions. I’d moved a lot as a girl and felt claustrophobic when I amassed too much. So, I owned one twin bed and a handful of pots and pans; my clothes lived in baskets under the bed. A kitchen cabinet hosted my laptop computer, on which resided my compulsive collection of Baroque music and, of course, the Great Epic Poem. It was a sparse space, not sexy. And how to fit a 6’9” body builder into a twin bed with a woman who weighs more than Twiggy?
We somehow always made it work.
But the bed: it was small and narrow and too short, inevitably, for anyone’s legs, as soon as we snuggled into one another. It was made for solo sleeping, restless turning in the night, alone, the kind of sleep that brought sweat and insomnia and bitterness. Sleeping with men I met in bars didn’t fit in this bed with the celestial-printed sheets, didn’t fit with all the sprawling limbs, missed entirely the desperate clinging, the nipple suckling, the long looks in deep eyes. Their eyelashes were always longer than mine, and it seemed I could never see through them.
And Will had a tendency to avoid: though he flirted, he never came close, never touched my body. Not until later.
Chloe and I had a tendency to drink a lot. We had regular joints, knew the bartenders, kind of hated them but in a lustful way. Not just Sean, but Daren, Corey, Alphonse, Demetrius, too. It was like a collection of Greek Gods who both gratified and repulsed us at once. I wanted all of them. She hated each of them with a physical passion, shooting empty wine and highball glasses across the bar at them; you could see her need to break things in her eyes.
When I ran into Will on the street, with Chloe, it was unexpected, to say the least. We truly didn’t know his normal route home, didn’t anticipate seeing him on the street. He’d kept shooting us down for social engagements outside that porch, had continually avoided seeing us off that one neighborhood. Now here he was, a backpack on, off work and ready to drink a Scotch or four. As it turned out, so were we.
We found a place with an outdoor patio, but it was close—on the same block—to Sean’s bar, and when Chloe begged out on account of her early mornings, I couldn’t resist dragging Will to Sean’s bar for more drinks, and, mostly, to feel less pathetic in front of my stronger crush. For here was Will, flirting, inhibitions down, touching my shoulder, my knee, looking me in the eye, flushing that bloody-mustache pink, shaking his head in disbelief at things I said, echoing over and over: “Yes, exactly! That’s it exactly!”
My cheeks were flushed with Bunnahabhain Scotch and flattery, and I knew I looked my prettiest that way. I kept catching Sean’s eye over Will’s shoulder, kept blushing and looking away. I’m certain Will thought it was for him. I suppose, then, it was no surprise when he stumbled home after me—after seven Scotches each, really—to “pop in” for a little while before he headed home. Nor was it any surprise when, the moment I closed the door in that empty, empty studio, I felt his hands exploring the curve of my waist, pushing fingers through belt loops in anticipation of other entries. How could I do anything but relax my shoulders against his? How could I do anything but wait for what I knew, then, would happen?
Our limbs kept falling off the bed.
He vomited in my sink four times the next morning; I kept mine down without a tinge of nausea.
I can still recall how every breath felt catching under the sweaty, taut skin of my chest.
I wasn’t sure whom to tell; was it Parve to tell Chloe and expose the fact that we’d slept together to Will’s roommate? Or was that taboo? I lay on my bed the next night, naked, alone, my legs crossed, my fingers pressing into my ribs, anxious, playing them like the keyboard keys on my laptop. I typed: What now?
Sunday morning John gave me that look, his snub nose tilted toward the newsstand, his eyes eyeing the hem of my skirt. I handed him five dollars and didn’t say a word, didn’t respond to his text message.
Charles called twice on Monday. He did not leave voicemails, which made it easier to ignore him.
On Tuesday, Chloe knocked on my studio door. She wore sunglasses, but ripped them off when I answered the door, exposing eyes wide with something: excitement, it turned out.
“It happened, didn’t it,” she demanded. “You slept with Will.”
“Um—” was all I got out before she rushed into the space, spinning and bending and nearly keeling over in excitement.
“How was it! How was he! What’s going to happen next!” None of her questions seemed to bear question marks, and she was waving those sunglasses around in the air, a laser pointer to her enthusiasm. “YOU SLEPT WITH WILL!” she crowed.
“I know,” I said. I blushed a little. I blushed? Yes. Yes, I blushed, pink with something. Pleasure? Shame?
I was distracted when I tried to work on the poem. Who could focus on quatrains, on pentameter, on verb choices, when that question lingered? I found myself staring over the edge of my laptop at the blank walls of my studio. There was a place where the plaster peeled, revealing very old, whitened brick. I focused all of my breathing on that place.
Down at the waterfront, I listened to the tide slapping the boardwalk’s supportive pillars. It was almost summer, but still, I wore a sweater and pulled it tighter around me. When I got Will’s text message, I set my shoulders and started walking. “Meet in five by the pier?”
He was pale, and wouldn’t look me in the eyes. He looked frail enough, all of a sudden, to fall over in a strong burst of wind. The warm tone of the sun on the water only washed him out further, so he was transparent, and I felt an impulse to wrap him in my sweater and sing him lullabies.
“Will, are you all right? You look awful,” I said.
His voice came back small and thin and reedy, higher than normal, unsupported. “I need to make this brief,” he said. “I don’t ever want to talk to you or see you again.” He paused, searching the horizon for something. “We can’t be friends.” He released a shuddering breath, then turned and fled back along the length of the pier.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the handrail he’d been leaning on.
“He says he’s going to move when the lease is up,” Chloe mumbled into her gin and tonic. “We’ve lived together for three years.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I didn’t even convince myself of my apology, but she nodded.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. She was more convincing. At the other end of the bar, Sean kept glancing at us as he pulled four pints of Guinness for a table full of rugby players. “I guess I knew Will had some intimacy issues, but Jesus.” Chloe shook her head. “This is over the top.”
“You can say that again.” I slugged back the rest of my vodka soda, shook my head, and stood up from the bar.
“Well at least you never really like, loved Will,” she proffered. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I know rejection stings, but this was just sex, wasn’t it?” I nodded numbly, then sighed.
“I have to pee,” I said.
Sitting on the toilet, jeans around my ankles, I leaned forward and sighed. I couldn’t even get into drinking that night, though Chloe seemed more than capable. The light in the ladies’ room flickered, dim though it was, and I tried to remind myself that what Chloe said was true: Will was just a guy I’d wanted to sleep with. But was anyone ever really just someone I wanted to sleep with, or were they all people I wanted to fill that tiny, tiny bed with me? Were they all people I wanted to fill that tiny, tiny space in my heart that caused more ache than such a negligible sliver warranted?
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, and thought of Sean out there, pouring drinks for us and never judging our drunkenness, never judging our coping mechanisms; I had seen the skeptical looks he gave some of the clientele, but he spared us his disapproval. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, hands dripping, the paper towel dispenser temporarily out of order. I saw the corners of my mouth drawn down, and I saw the circles that had begun to gather under my eyes. I’m not very old, I thought, but I will be, someday. I wiped my hands on my jeans and left the bathroom.
Sean and Chloe were talking when I got back to the bar.
“I think Chloe might be ready to go home,” he told me. He smiled grimly.
“What? No!” Chloe was good and drunk, and it showed in the way her words were too loud, too close together. She had lost all sense of meter. “I’m just saying I think you two would be so, so so so so so good together. Really.” Sean bit his lip and looked away, occupying himself with wiping down the bar, and it took me a moment to realize that Chloe had been talking about me. To Sean.
“All right, Chloe,” I said. I glanced at Sean. “I’ll come back for the tab tomorrow, okay?”
“Nooo, I got it,” Chloe said. She started patting herself down in unlikely places for her wallet.
“It’s fine,” Sean said. He winked at me and smiled—a gentle smile, this time. “See you girls soon.”
Chloe let me support her as we walked down the street toward my apartment. “I said too much back there, didn’t I?” she asked after a few minutes of fresh air. I didn’t answer. “Hey,” she said, softer. I turned and looked at her, and brushed a loose strand of her black bangs out of her eyes. We both understood the apology inherently.
“We’ve all been there,” I said. She nodded, and reached for my hand.
Chloe stayed with me that night, the two of us side by side, our arms pinned tight, on that twin bed, the cover pulled up to our bare collarbones. Chloe slept the colorless and heavy sleep that too much alcohol always promises to bring, but I lay awake, the bare walls seeming to recede away for an eternity of space, the distant sounds of sirens occasionally punctuating the long night. I thought of the people who’d been in this bed with me: Charles, and how safe his body made me feel; John, and the ghosts of children we’d never have together; Will and his great passion and even greater fear; Chloe, now, and her fiercely loyal friendship; me, whatever I was, whatever I would someday be; and my dreams, all of them, of Sean and a life shared with people who never leave, a life shared with people who saw the value of staying and being part of a beautiful, varied tribe, and that dream of a bed big enough for all of us, and enough of us to fill a bed so big.
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