by Claudia Dey
A woman’s white indoor tracksuit is meant for domestic operations inside the home. It should not be seen by anyone but immediate family. It is most appropriately worn first thing in the morning and just before bedtime. It should not be worn for longer than thirty-minute intervals, and is considered strictly a bridge outfit between nightwear and daywear. A woman’s camouflage outdoor tracksuit is solely for work on her property. It can be seen by neighbors though this is not optimal. To protect herself, limited use of a woman’s outdoor tracksuit is best.
* * *
THE WOMEN HUNG AROUND on the porch, but were not invited in.
I watched The Heavy lower you into the bathtub. He soaped your body, and then placed your body between clean sheets, and then, joining me, stood by the door, waited for you to wake. The startled look you had when you did. Then recognizing the bedroom, recognizing him, and lifting your arms. Love. For the first time, you felt love. Love was uneasy. Who knew?
When you were strong enough, you would hand-wash your underwear and hang them to dry from the shower rod in The Heavy’s bathroom. There was always a pair of underwear hanging there, pink then black then pink then black, and I felt so sharply how your underwear was underwear from elsewhere. The Heavy had had only one lover by the time you came to us, and she had very different underwear. White. Territory-issue. Futureless.
The Heavy talked about how you were the only woman I took a liking to. “Are you going to eat my throat while I’m sleeping so you can have her to yourself?” he would ask while running his meaty hand through my fur.
* * *
ONE NIGHT (we had buried Lana Barbara Sr. that day), you whispered to me, “I am done with young men.” You and Pony had gone swimming in the reservoir. No wind, and your black final resting dresses hung from a tree branch, not moving. Later, when Pony was in her bedroom, in front of her mirror, repeating chants from her cassette recorder, practicing the splits so she could one day do them across the hood of a speeding car in a glam metal music video, we were in the bedroom, and you looked at me in the way that says, Hold me to this, Gena Rowlands. “I am done. I am done with young men.” And then you paused. “Make me swear to it.”
No way, I said.
My mother had taught me that, like us, human beings are composed of instinct above all else.
Young men. In your other life, you had smoked their cigarettes and made their mothers fall in love with you. They had left wilted flowers stolen from cemeteries on your front porch and slapped your face on a moving train. They had sent you erotic letters, broken into your bedroom. Your bedroom on that cul-de-sac still had a dollhouse in one corner. Dolls were real to you. You felt their eyes bore into you. Some nights, you turned the dolls so they faced away from your bed. That way, you could not sense their accusation. The dolls blamed you for having no agency. For being unable to do anything but be held and stroked and owned and thrown against a wall if it came to that.
You told me you had spent your childhood in a tree reading a book. This was your idea of happiness. No one bothered you. No one interrupted your thinking. You discovered your native thinking. Your deepest, long-form thinking. When you came down from the tree, all you felt was hunger. And all you could feel around you was the hunger of others. The way the young men looked at you. You preferred the tree. But you slept with the young men.
“It was actually only one.” I licked your hand, heard a groan come from my throat. “It felt like more at the time because it was new. I was new. I wasn’t even sixteen. I did it for two reasons. Rebellion, of course.” Here, you began to braid my coat.
And?
“Lust, I guess.”
Though he was only twenty when you met, The Heavy was not a young man. Had never been. He was not carefree. Not reckless. Not a braggart. He did not know how to manipulate a moment so it went in his favor. If anything, he tried to do the opposite. Other men spoke about sex, speed, and money: “Rig the 390 horsepower alongside the 780, then you’ll have yourself one fine rig.” The Heavy did not care to impress. He was talked about as rude, grave, unmanly. He was a bad shot, the men said, the worst shot in the territory. While Traps lectured him—“When you see your target, you cannot think of where it is coming from and where it is going. You cannot think of what might be following it”—The Heavy only heard the voices of the animals. He would never kill anything. Traps beside him, wearing dead animals like scarves, presenting their skins as gifts.
We think people look away when they lie, that they add small motions to distract from their lies. You were not that kind of liar.
I have never seen anything killed.
I have never lost anything.
I’m—and then recalling the name of the woman in the popular song, the popular song that, as you approached the territory, seemed to be the only song you could find, despite it being two decades old. You borrowed your name from the radio. You thought it would fit in with the other women’s names. You could be her, only her, this invented woman. New start. “I’m Billie Jean.” You said the name to The Heavy from the bathtub, where the August before, he had nearly bled to death. “Billie Jean.” You repeated the name as much for yourself as for him.
* * *
BEFORE YOU SPRANG from the bed that late October evening and ran out the front door, I said, You’re stooped and shrunken like a starved animal.
“I am a starved animal.”
I followed you down the stairs, and you stood in the hallway with the truck keys in your hand. A cigarette in the other. It was stale, not lit. Pony Darlene was inert on the couch. Telephone receiver against her left ear. Gauze and tape up and down her right arm from the bloodwork. On her T-shirt, she wore a laminated pin that said FAINTER. She had been blacking out lately. She needed protecting.
She had never kissed a boy, never received a telephone call from a boy. But once a week, on Saturday night, she stood on the shoulder of the north highway, in the waitress uniform you stole, and Pony Darlene subsequently stole from you, and she put her beautiful face into the slick lap of that reptilian man, Traps, in exchange for gasoline. She was doing this act for you. But you were grieving, and grief is oblivion. You did not notice your daughter scavenging through garbage at the roadside, looking for money. She was saving up. You did not notice Pony Darlene had a plan.
You told me you lived for her. She was the one who kept you here. The prospect of dying was one you could no longer consider. It was a terrible pressure, motherhood. It had a way of fucking with your options. Life before a child was all miscellany, and in that miscellany, a woman could off herself. Now, there was no way.
Pony Darlene joined you by the doorway. You studied your daughter at length, her lithe body, the faint hair above her lip. She was sorting through herself, and studying you reciprocally—also with horror, adoration. Wanting you, not wanting you.
And then you turned to me. “I had forgotten all about you.”
I laughed. This was one of your better lies.
When you kicked your winter coat with your bare foot and made for the door, I saw you were serious about leaving. You lunged for the knob just as Pony lost consciousness. The northwest wind assaulted us. Outside, there was snow. It was cold. Ice fell from the sky. The sky was black, thin, and low.
You drove too quickly for me, Billie Jean. Your motions had taken on a new will, a violence. I could not keep up. I watched the sun rise and set. I lost your scent.
I thought about dying. I thought about my mother.
She had nearly beaten the truck back to the house when Traps’s front right tire caught her left hind leg. How he could not have seen her, I do not know, and will never forgive. My mother had told me to stay with the dying man, The Heavy, before she sprinted for help. I did as I was instructed. A human body contains a great deal of blood. If you give it the chance, blood will leave you at a determined pace. Like fire, it was a matter of minutes. After she was hi
t, my mother could still run to the woods behind the house. That was where I would find her the next day. The birds knew, even in death, to leave her alone. Eighteen years later, her bones are still there. She had told me Traps had a weakness, and that one day, I would find it out. She had told me The Heavy had no weaknesses. She never got the chance to meet you.
You will ditch the truck. As soon as you can, you will ditch the truck and walk in that single-minded way of yours into the forest, and look for the tree of your childhood. The place where everything is clear. Where happiness was once found. For it, you were willing to leave your daughter behind. The Heavy. Me.
How could you leave me behind?
* * *
BEFORE WE STARTED to see the boy running, before you timed our runs to coincide with his, you thought, What the hell am I doing? And you looked down at me, keeping pace, and said, “What the hell are we doing?” We are running a band of empty gravel, I answered. And we panted in unison.
Running was like play-chasing. I would watch the other dogs, sprinting at me and then away from me, looking over their shoulders, cueing me, Come on, Come on, and I would tell them, I will chase when I chase. Why would I imitate an emergency? I have other ways to thrill myself. When there is nothing at your back, why pretend there is? But, at your calves, Billie Jean, it was clear I loved it, and you would ask, “Maybe I am doing this for you?” When one morning, the boy ran by on the other side of the gravel, I saw you were not doing this for me.
You sat beside him in the bed of his father’s black truck. The truck was what the people of the territory called souped-up. It was perched on what the people called monster tires. The Heavy had to help you into the truck bed; it was so high off the ground. You held The Heavy’s hand and stepped up onto his thigh in your territory-issue workboots. I followed.
It was the day we buried Lana’s mother. Three years after the big party. You and Pony Darlene wore your matching final resting dresses; later, you would hang the black dresses over a tree branch and sink your bodies into the reservoir. I hated the water. They say every dog knows how to swim. False. Have we not learned the dangers of making generalizations about an entire species? From the shoreline, I would watch you both, I will admit, rigid with fear.
Pony Darlene asked if she could meet us at the Banquet Hall. She wanted to be the last one in the graveyard. Why she would want this was a mystery to me. The graveyard was a bleak place, a rough and treeless expanse, the headstones competing for size with whatever building materials—trailer siding, sheets of plywood, corrugated plastic—the widows could get their hands on. Headstone Saturdays. All around us, heaps of lumber and aluminum, the things not burned in bonfires, were held together with duct tape, the territory dogs frantic and circling the gaudy masses with their snouts in the dirt and rock, barking and whining at the dead. You. Come. Here. Get. The owners shouted for their dogs until they were hoarse.
Pony explained that she wanted to pick up the speeches and the flowers that had accumulated that day. She would put them in a book for her friend. Lana was contemplating her mother’s actions. She was gutted, but she explained to Pony she also needed to understand. She was tempted to mix alcohol with pills to feel what her mother had felt. Her last feelings. Get a sense of where she went. Not enough to kill herself. “Obvs, Pony. Swear, Pony. My will has not been broken, Pony.” (I could hear Lana’s voice through the receiver when Pony was in the living room and I was directly above her on the second floor.) Lana’s mother had told Lana that she just loved doing the dishes. The task had such a definite beginning, middle, and end, and this gave her a great satisfaction.
Lana’s mother did her shift at the Banquet Hall. She served dinner. She cleaned up. She watched her night soaps. She put on her indoor tracksuit. And then she killed herself in their toolshed. Where her portrait is now rotting between two slats of wood. She made killing herself look so easy. Easy as doing the dishes. Beginning, middle, end. Suddenly, Pony had a sense of mortality. At night, she thought about death. Thinking about sex immediately followed. Death then sex. With Lana’s mother’s suicide arrived Pony’s coming of age. Death then sex. These dark twins spiraled through her mind. She was possessed by dangerous questions. They were like kerosene. She had a new volatility and did not know whether she was haunted or aroused (both, I tried to tell her). When Pony left the final resting book for her friend a couple of weeks later, Lana replied with a postcard in our mailbox. Pony felt it summed up her state and tacked it to her wall immediately. It said, SIGH!!!
So we left the truck with Pony and caught a ride with Traps, and over his father’s loud music, the boy told you he liked to run. No one else in town ran for sport. It was a motion the territory people did not understand. They left that motion to the animals they hunted, skinned, quartered, and ate.
“I like to run,” he said.
As Traps’s truck pulled away (The Heavy was in the passenger seat with Debra Marie wedged between the two men), Pony Darlene leapt and waved to you from the headstones, her coltish limbs, her hands white with paper. You lifted yours in response. You felt something turn in your stomach. You had never become used to the love. I have become used to everything else, you would say to me, but I will never get used to my love for her. As the truck gained speed, Pony grew small, and it was when she had vanished from view and all you could see was dust, you knew you needed to get to know the boy beside you.
The thought came on like a spell. You had exchanged words with him in the territory—greetings, mostly. He had stood in the doorway to your bedroom the night of the party. His father, Traps, was referred to as your husband’s best friend, but you spent no time at each other’s tables. The friendship occurred between the men. It was never extended to the wives, to the children. You were relieved by the separateness; there were only so many faces. The Heavy kept up with Traps out of cunning. (A double note here: one, we were both happy he had some of this in him; two, I had seen some odd pairings in nature—baby rabbits asleep on the slumbering bodies of red foxes, both peaceful and curled like fists—but The Heavy and Traps’s pairing was the most unlikely of all.) I reasoned it out this way: The Heavy could not stand to see pity in the eyes of the men, and the friendship with Traps—a man surrounded by trucks, and built like them—went toward erasing the pity.
Whereas Traps took up all of the available space, the boy had an economy to him, a precision. You could not conceive how the boy had come from this man. This filthy peacock of a man. In his cowboy boots. His fur trapper hat. A cheater, a salesman, and (I know this is low on the scale, but it still offends me) an amateur. If you are going to make collages, make good collages. You looked closely at your life. Pulled it apart and examined it. There was nothing to drive you from it. When The Heavy walked into a room, you wanted him. Only him. He had a wildness in him. A goodness. On your way north, you had watched herds cross great plains. He was a herd, and he had folded you into it.
But now, in the truck bed, you felt only divided. You worked out the boy’s age. Eighteen. You were thirty-two. Fifteen years. Acceptable. Not acceptable. Forgivable. Not forgivable. You judged yourself while you still could. No part of your body touched the boy’s. About this, you were vigilant. You kept your shoulders from banging against his. Your legs and arms apart. It was a treacherous road, and in the metal box, you were both rattled and thrown around. The wind rushed at you. And when your hair whipped across it, the boy did not lift his hands to cover his face.
“I also run,” you lied.
This was your first lie to the boy. And your last.
* * *
YOU DID NOT sweat without purpose. You were calculated. You did not swim the reservoir so much as you completed circuits across it. From one end to the other, from one end to the other. Your tireless body. The way you moved, I wondered if you moved only to punish yourself. To be in motion was to beat something out of you. And even when you did lie on your back to look up at the
night sky, it was not without strategy. You knew the worth of floating. You measured it out before submitting yourself to it. Weightlessness had worth, and so you went for weightlessness, and eventually, when you thought she was ready, taught it to your daughter. Your always-willing daughter.
I could not watch, had to look away. Your strong hands supporting Pony Darlene at the neck like it was broken; her body prone on the surface as if on a stretcher. You told your daughter she was a natural swimmer. This thrilled Pony. Swimming was a skill you had brought with you from your former life. At last, she had a piece of it. Got a sense of where you had come from. Pony started to read about the ocean, pictured you living near the ocean. It was a fast-moving river, you wanted to tell Pony, but did not. I would have crossed that river for you, Pony, you wanted to say. I would cross anything for you.
When Pony Darlene entered the Banquet Hall to have her blood drawn and, for the first time, was assigned to you, you had a hard time getting your body to move. She was thirteen, the age a territory girl (or boy) begins doing her bloodwork two or, if her body can handle it, three times a week. “You good?” Rita Star in her pastel dress (they were rotated through the days, pale yellow, pale pink, pale green), seeing your hesitation, challenged you. “You good?” you shot back, and in your powder-blue dress, with your straight face, you led Pony to the cot in the corner, your station.
It was the duty of the women in the territory to draw blood from the teenagers. Only One Hundred, given her poor eyesight, was exempt. The men felt their wives––their sure hands, their soft voices––would be better with the needles and, if required, in offering comfort.