by K M Cholewa
“Weird how?”
“Well,” she said, proceeding to slice, “it’s like I’m responsible for my moods now. I need to be something other than I am for someone else, which feels . . . dishonest? And yet, the right thing to do.” She put down the knife and dumped the mushrooms into a bowl. “Sometimes, I think I should just be myself and hope that’s the best example. But shouldn’t I be trying to make things better? At the same time, though, I have no illusions that I have the power to fix the thing that’s been broken.” She laughed. “How’s that for an answer?”
The front door creaked open, and Geneva’s cat, Voodoo, pushed through, tail in the air and walking high on his toes. He made his way to the kitchen, confident of a warm reception. He leapt onto Paris’s lap.
“So, you’re wondering if you should pretend everything’s okay for Rachael’s sake,” Paris said.
“Right.”
“Maybe everything is okay.”
“Now you sound like Geneva.”
Paris stroked Voodoo’s back. Tatum poured salad dressing over the mushrooms and tossed them.
“You know,” she said, “Vincent once said something like, it’s dangerous to want to affect someone’s life. It gives that person too much power.”
Paris furrowed his brow.
“Dangerous,” he said, as though this were the key word. “Dangerous for whom?”
“For the person trying to do the affecting,” she said. “Anyway, if my job is to try to help her feel better, which means different than she does, I’m completely inadequate for the job. I’ve never tried to change my own feelings. How would I know how to change someone else’s?”
Paris pursed his lips.
“So you just let her be sad?” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Probably most of the time. Is that bad?”
“I don’t know if there’s a right and a wrong.”
“But there’s better and worse.”
Paris considered Rachael. She had exactly what he wanted: Tatum. And Tatum was concerned that she wasn’t enough.
Voodoo leapt from his lap. Tatum looked over her shoulder and saw Paris’s inward focus.
“What is it?” she said.
Paris hesitated. He drew himself up in the chair and took a deep breath.
“I threw away all my drawings,” he said.
Tatum stopped her work at the sink. She turned to face him. She crossed her arms over her chest.
Paris put up a hand as if to say it’s not important. Not the point.
“It was months ago,” he said. “The point is, sometimes I find my attention on the drawer. I’ve even opened it and looked inside. I haven’t started using it for something else. I don’t know,” he said. “What I think I’m trying to say is, for some reason, things that aren’t there are sometimes treated as more important than things that are.”
Tatum continued to look at him with concern.
“Like Rachael’s parents, for her,” he said. He poked with one finger the foil that covered the cornbread. “Maybe, for you, like Vincent.”
The comment hit some brake, brought the room to a standstill. Paris knew he had been obtuse, but he hadn’t done it on purpose. He had been trying to say too many things at once. He wanted her to know of his own difficulty appreciating what they had together instead of wishing for more. But it was also true that he wanted her to know: Vincent was gone, but he was right here.
The moment could tip either way. The distinction between hope and fear is a fine one. If you fall to the side of hope, you keep falling. That’s the attraction of fear. With fear, you get to land.
“You think I spend more time thinking about Vincent than paying attention to Rachael?” Tatum said, landing squarely. “I don’t.”
Paris was surprised at the meaning she took from it. Apparently, him in that role, Vincent’s role, could not even occur to her.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I don’t think that.”
Tatum turned her back to him and busied herself with cleaning up.
“I don’t think that,” Paris repeated.
He picked up his cornbread and headed down the hall for the back door. His heart banged in his chest. You idiot, you idiot, he repeated in his head. At the back door, he paused with his hand on the knob. His mind scrambled for a buoy, something solid to take hold of. Simple things. His job. His apartment. The women that crept to his counter as if out from parallel universes. The world belonged to itself. Not to him. Let it be.
But he turned to go back to the kitchen not knowing why. He took two steps and ran smack into Tatum coming around the corner.
“I’m freaking,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Are we good?” Tatum asked. “I need us to be good.”
“We’re good.”
There had been the one kiss in the park, but no others. Though they were friends, they had not been the sort that hugged in their comings and goings. Each other’s presence, not body, had been each other’s comfort. They looked at each other, relieved, but still frightened. It was not clear what arrived where first, but Paris’s free arm wrapped around Tatum while he held the cornbread in the other. Tatum’s forehead rested on his shoulder. Then they stepped apart, weak smiles all around.
“I’ll be right out,” Tatum said, looking at the ground. She turned and returned to the kitchen.
Let it be, Paris counseled himself to keep from following her back up the hall. Let it be good.
He stepped through the back door, and eyes turned to meet him in greeting. Geneva was starting up the gas grill. Her neighbor, Ron, the old librarian, was just breaking through the hedge, wearing a yellow fleece pullover and carrying a ceramic tray. Rachael stomped on a thin sheet of ice, freeing the water beneath. Paris placed the cornbread on the card table and took a seat on the steps he had just come down, a twin to the steps that led to the patio from Geneva’s back door.
Rachael hadn’t raised her head, but even so, Paris could see the shard cut deep in Rachael’s eyes. She was not like him. She was at home in her hunger. She wanted and knew she deserved what she wanted. That she didn’t have it was an error of cosmic proportion.
“Happy Birthdays,” Paris said to Rachael and Geneva. “How’s nine compared to eight?” he asked Rachael.
Rachael didn’t look up from the puddle.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s my first day.”
19
“We’re all related,” Geneva said, waving the copper-headed brush in the air. “Trees, plants, dogs, cats, you, me. We all evolved from microbes.”
The yard was south facing and made the most of the sun. Geneva and Rachael prepared for the barbecue in a percussion of melt dropping from windowsills, rooftops, and gutters. The snowdrifts against the garage grew soft and hollow as the snowline in the tiered flowerbeds retreated. The scent of mud rose up from beneath winter’s clean, fresh breath. Rachael poured sunflower seeds into a cupped hand made of stone that hung by fine chain links from a thumb-sized jut off the trunk of the apple tree. Geneva had been scraping the grill and rhapsodizing, caught up in spring’s false alarm.
“What’s a microbe?” Rachael said, hauling the bag of seed back to the tiny patio.
“The microbe,” Geneva said, “is the mother of us all.”
Rachael stashed the seed in an old, metal milk box.
“At the beginning of time,” Geneva said, “our time, anyway, microbes floated in ancient oceans. Everything evolved from microbes.”
“What did they look like?”
“Microbes?”
Geneva thought for a second, not knowing the answer for sure. Rachael pressed lightly with a pointed toe on a fragile film of ice where a small puddle had formed in a dip of the bricks in the patio. Bubbles jostled beneath the ice’s surface.
“Well,” Geneva said, “you or I couldn’t see them with our eyes. We’d need a microscope.”
“Do they look like bugs?”
“Not really,” Geneva said. “More like a flower, I think. No faces or butts.”
Rachael scrunched her brow.
“How’d they know where they were going?”
“Well, they weren’t going anywhere,” Geneva said. “They just floated around, and that was good enough.”
Rachael imagined the flower creatures, spinning and drifting. She considered what costume a kid might wear to be one. She idly spun slow circles and decided on her color. Seafoam.
“Know what a fish calls planet Earth?” Geneva said.
“What?”
“Planet Water. It’s all perspective.”
Paris came through Tatum’s back door just as Ron cut through the hedge carrying a blue ceramic platter. Rachael stopped spinning and stomped on the ice sheet. The cold water penetrated the exterior of her boot but stopped short of her skin. Paris. Vincent. Her father. Rachael put them together in her mind. But she knew Paris was different. He wanted to be here. Rachael wasn’t sure but thought maybe it meant that he was less important.
Geneva, Paris, and Ron greeted one another. Geneva admired the blue ceramic plate laden with cut red and yellow peppers and broccoli florets that Ron had carried through the hedge. He said he made the plate himself. That he had taken a class.
“Everything’s organic,” he said, as he placed the tray on the card table.
“Wonderful,” Geneva said. “Even the yellow peppers? They must have cost an arm and a leg.”
“Seven eighty-nine a pound.”
Rachael, again, spun in place, floated in an imaginary sea. She was more restrained than before, arms closer to her sides, chin closer to the chest. She tried to make it look as though she were examining the ground and not that she was imagining herself a flower, drifting without intent. The cool air around her was water, and it rippled through her petals. She stole a peek from beneath her brow. Paris was watching. Rachael thought he pretended to be drifting too, but that really, he was swimming. They were both on the Planet Water. In it.
“I once bought an organic cabbage at Earth’s Bounty,” Geneva said, hand on a hip, pointing with the copper brush. “Four dollars and ninety-nine cents. For one little head of cabbage. I ate it to the core.”
“Well, it’s worth it to me,” Ron said. “I never shop for produce at the regular supermarket, not since being fooled by a peach.” He turned to Rachael. “So, you’re the birthday girl.”
“Geneva too,” Rachael said. She liked Ron well enough. When he looked at her, he smiled like she proved his point. “How could you get fooled by a peach?”
Ron folded his arms across his chest, glad to be asked. His legs were planted widely, in the at-ease position.
“Like I said, I don’t buy fruit at the supermarket,” he said, “but there were these peaches. Gorgeous, humped beauties. I bought six. They had a little give but weren’t quite there. So I left them in a brown paper bag for two days, and next I looked, brown spots. They were heading south. So I cut into one. Hard as a rock right below the first inch of give. Not a speck of flavor. Fooled by a peach.” He said it as though it were both unbelievable and unforgivable.
“Seduced by a mirage,” Geneva said, turning knobs on the gas grill. “But even when the senses are fooled, the body never is. Can’t extract nutrition from cardboard.”
“Gave me cause to pause,” Ron said. “Shouldn’t our animal instincts protect us from impostors?”
Flames kicked up from the grill. Geneva adjusted the heat.
“First the peaches,” Paris said, deadpan, from where he sat on the steps, “next it’ll be the cantaloupes.”
“No joke,” Ron said, shaking his head.
Tatum emerged through her back door carrying the mushrooms in one hand and a bowl of chips in the other. She wore her hat and gloves.
“For all we know,” Geneva was saying, “we may have all eaten our last good peach and not even know it.”
“And you call me negative,” Tatum said as she came down the stairs.
Rachael noticed that as her aunt stepped past Paris, he extended one finger from where his hand rested on his knee to touch the fabric of her skirt as it rustled past. He never looked up.
“Look at all the colors,” Tatum said to Rachael, referring to the red and yellow peppers and the green of the broccoli florets, all assembled on the blue ceramic platter. “Why don’t you get your camera?” she said. “This could be a good picture.”
Rachael’s camera sat on the table among the plates of food. She came over and picked it up but did not take a picture. Tatum pulled up a plastic lawn chair and took a seat. Rachael took a chip from the bowl.
“What are they teaching you in school these days?” Ron asked Rachael.
“Multiplying,” she said. “What we want to be when we grow up. State things, like the state bird and state tree.”
“The state tree,” Ron said. “The P-pine. Nothing like it.”
“It’s the Ponderosa Pine,” Rachael said.
“They were darn near fireproof,” Ron said, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Their canopies are so high brushfires never touched them. Then we decided to protect them by putting out fires that needed to burn. We ended up with a lot of fuel on the ground. Little trees. Fuses. They took the fire right up to the canopy and the dry needles. They called it ‘managing’ the forests,” he said with a laugh. “Now, when the state burns, it burns hot and fast. Did they tell you about that?” he asked Rachael.
She shook her head no. “The grizzly bear is the state animal,” she said.
“We’ve managed to get rid of most of them too,” he said. He looked up through the barren branches, letting his eyes slide across the baby blue sky. “We’ve taken so much from this place,” he said. “Trees, gold, silver, minerals, coal, wildlife. There are places I look at, and all I can see is the beauty that’s gone. Clear cuts. Subdivisions.”
“And yet, there’s so much beauty left,” Geneva said, not wanting to go too far down that road.
“True,” Ron said. “But it’s hard to watch what you love disappear.”
An awkward silence followed.
Tatum reached out and touched Rachael’s fingers.
“You cold?” she said.
“Aw, hell,” Ron said.
“I’ve got hot apple cider,” Geneva said, abandoning the grill. She pointed a finger at each of them. “Yes, yes, yes?” she said, getting a count.
“Do you need another sweater?” Tatum said to Rachael.
“I can get it,” Rachael said as she climbed the steps to their back door.
Her bedroom was at the rear of the duplex, and having failed to close the solid door, she listened to the adult conversation drifting in through the screen. She looked through her bedroom window at Tatum sitting beside the table. She couldn’t see Paris, but she could see Ron’s back, his gray hair messy above his pullover. She heard Geneva next door. Music starting up and spilling through the walls. A woman’s voice and a piano. “. . . And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”
Rachael aimed her camera through the window at Tatum and clicked.
Geneva reemerged into the yard carrying a tray of mugs with steam rising into the air. She slid the tray onto the table
“I think living in a beautiful place inoculates one against runaway consumerism,” she said. “It satisfies. It’s un-American.”
“Beauty is a tourist attraction,” Paris said from the steps.
Tatum looked in the direction of Paris’s voice. Rachael watched from the window. She could see that her aunt was more than listening to Paris. She was looking at him and thinking secret thoughts.
Then Tatum looked up to the window and caught Rachael watching her. She neither smiled nor waved. Rachael could tell she was thinking secret thoughts about her, just like she had when she had looked at Paris. Rachael turned away from the window, put down her camera, put on a sweater, a
nd rejoined the party.
The group then stood around the card table, skewering vegetables, scallops, and small chunks of chicken. The afternoon wore on, full of aimless talk punctuated with expressions of amazement at and gratitude for the warmth of the day. Geneva placed skewers on the grill. During cracks in the conversation when silence snuck in, glances and small smiles were exchanged in recognition of the thin layer of melancholy shimmering at the edges of the afternoon, making it all the sweeter.
The sun slanted too soon. The thin mountain atmosphere fought futilely to hold the heat. They would eat the cake inside. Rachael went in while the grown-ups cleaned up. In the kitchen, she pulled a glass from the dish rack and placed it on the table. She retrieved the half-gallon carton of milk from the refrigerator. It was one of the things that was different here, like calling adults by first names. Her mother didn’t let her pour from the carton unless she was in the kitchen too. The milk poured smooth and formed a perfect, white surface, white as snow.
The previous weekend, when the snow was new, Rachael and Tatum had walked the six blocks to the north hills to watch the dogs crisscrossing over the sparkling fresh blanket. Owners trailed leisurely behind with leashes bunched up in mittened fists.
“What do you think new snow smells like?” her aunt had asked her. “Do you think it smells like the sky?”
Rachael had watched the dogs burrowing through the drifts. They looked back at her now and then, staring out from frosty muzzles. Her aunt had started spinning slow circles, arms extended, looking up at the sky.
“My sister loved new snow,” she told Rachael. “She’d get mad at me if I tromped through it first.”
At some point, Aunt Tatum’s stories had stopped being about “your mother” and were instead about “my sister.” Tatum’s sister was a child, not unlike Rachael herself.
The phone rang in the background of Rachael’s thoughts. But she was remembering new snow and how back at home when a fresh blanket fell, she was allowed to play only on the side of the house with the fewest windows so her mother could look out at smooth, white perfection. The phone continued to ring, intruding upon Rachael’s thoughts. She had never answered her aunt’s phone before, but she stepped toward it and tentatively picked up.