by Karen Brown
With boys, we stumbled onto places. Hamonassett Beach, under a woolen blanket. A cold day, almost wintry, with a haze. The sea roared up and back. There were pebbles in the sand, mussel shells, breathtakingly sharp and glinting, the revelation of an arm with a wristwatch against the tempting darkness of the blanket’s depths. You never wanted to emerge, blinking, to place yourself. You were underwater, all legs, all needy mouths, craving sustenance.
There was the front seat of a ’64 Mustang, the gearshift impossibly placed, the pine tree air freshener dangling from the radio dial, something playing, headlights off, the backdrop the assorted wrecks of the Mobil station’s lot. Or the backseat of his mother’s Chrysler Country Squire, the long, vinyl seat cushion, the hot summer afternoon through all the wide windows, the tall reservoir grass waving outside, brushing against the tires, a few blackbirds perched to watch. There were basements, old recliners with torn upholstery, the throaty start of the furnace revving up, the smell of laundry detergent, dryer lint floating like milkweed. Or rec room shag between your shoulder blades, the record snagged on “Gold Dust Woman,” the backyard floodlights triggered again and again by prowling neighborhood dogs, upstairs, the boy you really wanted with someone else.
Later, there was a bed in an apartment, or a house. And still, you ended up on the couch, in your grandmother’s wing chair, in the tub, in the shower, steamy and scalded, the hot water always running out, the steam peeling the wallpaper. You missed the places you would find before, so you found them again.
He took my hand and we slipped down the restroom hallway, and outside, through the door to the alley. Acacia hung over a fence from someone’s yard. It was dusk. I had left my book and the card behind on the table. The note had said: To Lise, Do not forget to remember me, Charles.
I wanted time to gather him in, to distinguish his face, but he placed his mouth on mine, and it dreamed up, out of nowhere, a place all its own. I let myself fall in. I was languid. I was mercuric. A warm breeze, eddies of it, circled in. He pressed me up against the brick wall. There was the exhaust fan’s whirring, his soft open hands’ sliding, the general disdainful clank of dishes. The yellow acacia blooms tumbled over into the cobblestones, into my hair. One tucked itself along his collar. The dishwasher came out in his dirty apron for a smoke. My skirt was up. Our clothes were luminous in the dim light. The breeze brought the smoke by, mixed it with the acacia, the fruit trees in the backyards, the smell of fried plantains. The dishwasher looked, then looked away.
There was never space, but always some clever way to wriggle up or on top or beneath. Bucket seats and bench seats, vinyl or leather and armrests and contours you could not fit. Sometimes, spread out on starched white motel sheets. Golf courses and reservoirs and parks after hours. My knees in pine needles, my back against roots of trees, lake docks, the deck of tossing boats. In heatless cabins, surrounded by snow. The agonizing interruptions: policemen shining their flashlights, roommates wandering in, parents slamming doors downstairs. Clothes half off, damp skin stark in the glare. The boy’s guilty glance up, his apology, his regret, everything dwindling to a kind of starving.
In the alley, his mouth wandered down. He held my arms back against the brick. I tasted everything I could along his neck. The rest of it: Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. At first you thought, Isn’t just this mouth enough? The different mouths of boys. New Year’s Eve, fifteen, drunk on Chianti, two bottles we had been instructed to bring from our mother’s house to that of a friend. We crossed the pasture in the snow, passing the heavy bottles, the snow crunching under our feet. Overhead the stars were out, blurry in the black night. The wine made our lips sweet. We went instead to a party. Inside the house was hot. I lost my coat. At midnight I started kissing boys, one after the other. Their mouths tasted different but the same. Their tongues slid around, quick or slow. I held each one to me, my hands on the backs of their necks, on their shoulders. I was passed on, like the bottle of wine. In the end, I found myself standing alone in the snow on the front lawn. One boy I’d kissed fought with his girlfriend and put his fist through the garage door window, and the police came.
Later, you discovered the limitations of your mouth on his. It would go on. He would wear some sad, tortured guise. We would be breathless, getting nowhere, our lips numb, everything raw and overdone, the waiting drawn out like a tight wire. You wanted the end of it, even though you knew once it was over, you would not have a need to remember what you did not know of him to begin with. Your heart, free of grief and dreams, would be ready to move on.
His hands were soft and boyish. His hands were calloused and covered with brown hair. His fingers were thick and stubby. His hands, his fingers, were small and beautiful. I felt his face. I felt through his shirt—the collarbones, the tops of his arms, and underneath the planes of his chest. My hands dipped past his waist to the bones of his hips, below the undone button of his pants. My hands forgot themselves. It was always this: you give something and take something, until the edges blur and you are not sure if you are giving or taking enough, taking or giving too much. Then suddenly, clearly, you see that doesn’t matter.
It was a selfish relinquishing. You wanted the ache of his mouth, to be ravished. Some of them refused to do it. They were afraid of themselves, of everything waiting, feverish, under my clothes. I let them pretend to love me, to profess it, like a password, like a secret code. His voice was soft and lulling. His voice was hoarse with longing. He told me what he wanted. He told me nothing and guided my hands. In the shadows thrown by cars’ map lights, in the deep ends of pools, our legs thrashing strangely pale, on the countertops of kitchens, there was the silent language of need, the repository of wordless inquiries and assents. He grabbed my hair and pulled me down, he put his hands on my shoulders and gave a little push.
The way it should have been: I learn his name. He invites me to sit with his friends, finds another plastic chair and pulls it in. We listen to the mambo band. We fan away mosquitoes. Sitting together, I find little to say and never talk about the poets who took their lives. I bum a cigarette and sit silently, seeming mysterious. Maybe the boy across the table, the one I never noticed, likes me better. He will be the one, later, to ask me out. I will think, wistfully, longingly, of someone else. There will be a time set, a place to meet. He will decide, Well, what of her? I will never love him. This in the alley would never have happened with him.
This: the weeds between the cobblestones, the litter of wilted petals, the remains of the dishwasher’s smoke, me pressed against the brick. The back of his shirt wet. I heard my own breathing, ragged and soft, his voice, still bemused, saying things into my hair. His hands held my face, slid down and up again, finding me with his palms, his thumbs. I was mute, catching my breath. His eyes closed. I watched him keep them that way, until the end. It was done when his hands dropped away like stones. I clung to him and he zipped his pants. He placed his mouth on my neck. He brushed my hair from my face and stepped back, adjusting his clothes. He left with the delicate, telling part of him I could never urge with my tongue. I heard his footfalls. Through the kitchen’s screen door I heard the dishwasher clear his throat.
I was the girl who does know better but. I was the newspaper, folded and abandoned on the train. I was the whore tidying her room, achy and pleased. I was the woman driving home with the secret between my legs. I was poised on the rail of the bridge, clutching the cables, caught by the wind, euphoric with the desire to douse myself in cold, black water. Berryman waved to the people first. “Here I go,” he must have said, stepping off into his high-flung moment.
He went back to his friends at the table. In the torchlight and the din of too much beer, no one detected my traces. Once in a while, I looked for him. But he had left for Cambridge, he was running drugs from Haiti, working the Alaskan pipeline, teaching English in Japan. He was never there to refute me and so he surrendere
d himself to my memory.
Some nights, I dreamed he told me everything.
Later. At last. I said I knew him.
the returning
The night Fay’s grandmother died a balmy wind shook the leaves on the mango trees in the backyard. Everyone gathered at the house, which the Realtor, later, advertised for sale as a “dollhouse.” It was Fay and her father and her aunt and uncle. Fay’s mother stayed at home. “Call me when it’s over,” she told Fay from her bedroom. Fay could not remember what her mother had been doing, just that she had called to her on the stairs, and the door had been open only a crack, and the darkness beyond the lit stairwell seemed dense and unfathomable. Fay was twelve. The mango leaves in the wind had reminded her of pompoms. Her grandmother had been moved from the hospital, where she would not die, into her own bedroom at home, and Fay and her aunt lay down on either side of her on the double bed, and Fay’s father and uncle went outside for a cigarette. It was Fay who noticed a settling calm about the covers and woke her aunt. They went out into the backyard, and Fay’s uncle pointed out the full moon, and Fay’s father took the cigarette from his mouth and sang out part of a popular song on the radio at the time, one that opened with a tribal chant, “Hey yeh yah!”
Years later, when Fay gave birth to her daughter, she would look at the shape of her baby’s bald skull and recall, fleetingly, her grandmother with her wig off, dying under the layer of pale green comforter. Fay and her neighbor both had babies at the same time and they would push them in strollers around their neighborhood and wonder if their husbands were having affairs. Her neighbor, Vionet, was ten years older, wore dark lipstick and sunglasses, and radiated a sultry distance that intimidated Fay, who despite her advantage of youth, her hair its own natural color, her body still slim and boyish, could not walk beside Vionet without feeling plain and despairing.
“Why do you think he would sleep with someone else?” Fay asked her. It was an early morning walk, and Vionet had her coffee mug. Her baby, Claude, was asleep under a blue checked blanket.
“Because,” she began. She gulped her coffee. Her hand on the stroller handle was white at the knuckles. Fay heard the sand and pebbles grind under the rubber tires. She listened to the garbage truck accelerate on the next street. Her own baby, Sylvie, made a squeaking sound, and Fay reached around and replaced the pacifier in her mouth.
“I don’t think he can get back to that moment anymore,” Vionet said.
It was October, approaching the date that Fay’s grandmother died. The air, nudged into currents, dislodged petals from the flowering trees. The light on the lawn changed its slant through the wood blinds. It was this way every year.
“What do you mean?” she asked Vionet. She looked over at her, but could not determine anything beneath the calm, slightly flushed cheek, the hair tightly pulled back, the black sunglasses reflecting nothing.
“You know,” Vionet said. “It’s how you stay in love. You can place yourself back into the moment you first felt something for him. You return.”
Fay nodded. “Oh, yes.” Fay often pretended to understand things she did not. It was safer than voicing an objection. But she could not remember a single moment when she knew she loved her husband. To which moment out of the manifold moments, she wondered, should she return? Their days were full of small kindnesses that Fay had always accepted as love. She ironed his shirts. He placed diagonals of toast on a plate with her tea. She was still moved by some unspoken tenderness when he came home after a haircut, and she saw the pale place above his ears revealed. To which moment would he return? she wondered now. It was not the sort of thing she would ever ask.
“So,” Fay said, “he’s forgotten.”
Vionet stopped in the street so abruptly that Fay ended up several paces ahead.
“Maybe,” Vionet said. Her coffee had sloshed out onto her hand, and she wiped it on the jacket she had tied around her waist.
“Remind him,” Fay suggested. “Make a new one.”
Vionet began walking again. “He may have made a new one with someone else,” she said. Fay could only read the shape of Vionet’s mouth, a downturned line, the wry emphasis she placed on the words.
“If yours was first, it may take precedence.”
Vionet stopped again. She lowered her sunglasses and stared at Fay.
“Of course mine wasn’t first,” she said. She confided in Fay that her husband had been married when he met Vionet, that they had been sleeping together when the wife found out and filed for divorce. Fay wanted to know how the wife had found out, if they had been caught in bed together, or she had discovered a charge receipt for a motel, or simply a long, dark hair on his shirt. They had walked the strollers into the local park and placed them in the shade. The park was empty this early. Vionet lit a cigarette.
“No,” she said. She blew smoke rings, like Fay and her friends did in high school, and looked over at Fay and grinned. “Don’t you want one?” She held the cigarette out to Fay, its filter reddened by her lipstick. When Fay smoked she was beset with longing for some other life, and so she rationed herself to one a day. Soon, the babies would wake up, and she would go home and start her routine. Later, if the babies slept at the same time, Fay might go over and lie out in the sun on Vionet’s terra-cotta patio in her swimsuit, and Vionet might make them sloe gin fizzes, or margaritas, or some other drink from the recipe book kept by the blender on her kitchen counter, and then Fay would have her cigarette. And if not then, then much later, at night outside in her own walled courtyard shrouded by crepe myrtle and bamboo, where against the backdrop of the sky a cloud formed like magician’s smoke.
On the metal bench, Vionet sighed. “He told her,” she said. “He felt he owed it to her.” A group of preschoolers were let out of the building behind them. Their little shrieks woke Claude, then Sylvie. Fay wanted to take Vionet’s hand and squeeze it, to reassure her. She could not imagine waiting for such an inevitable moment—a husband arriving home from work, blank-faced, pitiable in his need to unburden himself of his guilt.
Fay knew about infidelity from her grandmother. Fay’s grandfather had divorced her grandmother for someone else late in life, and she had ended up in her little cottage by the Air Force base with her dog, Ollie, and her cats, Ricket and Sundry, and her bottle of vodka hidden in the litterbox. She had squandered her divorce settlement money on elaborate Christmas gifts for her children and for Fay—TVs and dolls with expensive accessories, bicycles and sets of blue, leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica for each household. When they refused the gifts she cried and drank and pulled what Fay’s father called “a lockout,” and so they all saw it made her happy, spending her money, and for the next few years they let her. Fay determined now that her grandmother’s divorce had triggered this miserable outcome, first poverty, then alcoholism, then cancer. She only half believed that her ownership of the entire American Girl doll collection, stored away in boxes for Sylvie, had anything to do with it.
Fay and Vionet walked home. Claude screamed from his stroller, his little face red and scrunched. Sylvie was plugged with her pacifier and sucked vigorously. Watching her, Fay felt her breasts tighten. Vionet moved quickly, spurred by Claude’s wails. The sun warmed up the pavement. The bougainvillea draped in places over the sidewalk. Fay thought of nothing but feeding Sylvie, settling into the cushion of the couch, closing her eyes and smelling Sylvie’s hair and her own milk. Neither of them paid any attention to the car. It came from behind, a heavy sedan with a sun-faded hood. Its driver, the tiny news article would claim, was an elderly woman named Mrs. Henry Culligan who lived with her sister and hadn’t driven in years. The car approached the intersection and sat there idling for an unusual length of time. Fay remembered its taillights blinking on and off, on and off. She smelled its exhaust. And then Vionet crossed the street. Did she look back to check on Fay? Fay worried over this later. Mrs. Culligan began to turn and then, the reports claimed, seeing she should not, grew flustered and pressed her foot to the gas
instead of the brake. The car’s impact was unavoidable. It could not be taken back, nor could its striking the stroller, and sparing Vionet. Fay watched Vionet make a flaying movement with her arms, her fingers grasping air. Her sunglasses fell to the sidewalk. Fay remembered her own mouth opening and no scream coming out. Just her heart stopped in her chest, a dull, impenetrable silence. Around them the silence expanded, wide and encompassing. Fay felt that she and Vionet had been caught there like insects under a large glass.
Much later, Fay would remember other details. Vionet’s bloody clothes and hands, Fay’s own T-shirt soaked with milk. How when the paramedics arrived they had to lift them both up from the pavement where they sat, clutching their babies. Fay would not look when they tried to take Claude from Vionet’s arms. Her own child cried, full and piercing. The paramedic asked her if Sylvie was all right.
“She’s hungry,” Fay said, dumbly, her legs weak.
The man looked down at her shirt and flushed. “Okay,” he said, backing off. He was young, with a freshly shaven chin, and small, competent hands that held Fay’s elbows in a way that made her think of a lover.
Vionet and Fay did not talk much after. Vionet kept to herself. She and her husband moved to another neighborhood, and Fay heard that she had another baby, which is what Fay would have suggested she do, if Vionet had ever asked. In the new neighborhood, among different people, Vionet could walk the baby, and no one would think about Claude. No one would even know, unless Vionet chose to tell them. Though she missed Vionet, had loved her like a sister, Fay understood that things were never forgotten, deaths and births and the moments of recognizing love. You simply stepped away from them and kept silent, and the idea of forgetting them occurred to you, as close and sweet as a kiss.