Oola

by Brittany Newell

  “Wait!” Oola lifted her head, voice shrill. “Leave it for another hour.”

  “What?” I reeled backward. “Why the fuck would I do that?”

  She rolled into a sitting position and put on her shirt. She looked at me quickly, forcing a casual smile. “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Oola, that’s crazy.”

  “Just one more hour,” she said. She couldn’t keep the plea from her tone. She began aimlessly gathering clothes from the floor, though I knew she wasn’t cleaning. I continued to kneel on the bed, waving the tweezers uselessly. “Oola,” I called. She was stuffing my sweater into her sock drawer. “Of all your games, this is the dumbest.”

  “You old fart,” she muttered. “Don’t freak out.”

  “Don’t do that!” I said. “This is a life-or-death matter.” I could feel her eyes roll, like billiard balls, over my stomach. “It is! This isn’t something you get over, like the flu. It stays with you forever.”

  She pressed a T-shirt to her face, sniffing to see if it needed a wash. “Say that again,” she mumbled. I stared at her with mute belligerence. “You heard me,” she said. I complied, and she sighed as one does when slipping into the bath. “But doesn’t that sound nice?”

  “I hate you,” I said, brimming with the opposite.

  She smiled slyly and let the clothes in her arms fall back to the floor. “It’s almost … poetic.”

  “You use my weakness against me.”

  “I thought it was your strength,” she said, slipping back into bed.

  “Don’t bullshit me now.”

  We resumed our nightly check-in, though she was careful to keep her shirt on throughout. When the hour came, I ceremoniously removed the tick (she didn’t so much as wince) and flushed it down the toilet. We stood solemnly on either side of the bowl. “Goodbye, my fickle love,” she called. “So much for forever.”

  “To some, it’s just a word.” I shook my head in grave disgust.

  “Just a word indeed.” She did too. “The bastard. I gave him everything.”

  “No!”

  She contorted to point out the pinprick on her back where the tick had latched, still bull’s-eyed but losing color. “I’m a marked woman now.” She considered. “And a hungry one too.”

  “Seconded.” Inspection finished, we went downstairs. I fried potatoes with onions and garlic and urged her to eat more than her share. “Ticks hate garlic,” I told her in a burst of folk wisdom. “That’s why they say it wards off vampires.” The odor filled the cabin and I suspect the woods outside as well.

  We feasted and then went to bed. Tomorrow was a busy day, as all tomorrows were. We had our routine to repeat and perfect. We’d made a promise to ourselves, and by proxy to the trees, to wake up at dawn. To betray this promise would be catastrophic, as surely as the sea’s stern mutter or Theo’s scratching at the door. The little devil always knew when I was awake. In this entire endeavor, he was my accomplice, a shadow of a shadow. He loved Oola but he understood me. We were the ugly things she’d chosen to love. At 5:00 a.m., when I awoke thirty minutes before Oola, he’d be watching us both. We engaged in many staring contests, my eyes bleared with sleep, his yellow and hex-like. In truth he was our witness.

  Sometimes he’d disappear for days and Oola would start to worry, thinking coyotes had carried him off. “Do you think a condor could pick him up?” she asked me. But he always came back, usually with a half-dead rodent clenched in his teeth. These gifts he dropped at Oola’s feet, purring proudly. For someone who didn’t eat meat, she was awfully touched by his presents.

  “For me?” she cried. “What a gentleman!” She scooped him into her T-shirt. Something oozed from the vole’s split ear, and it made gibbering sounds, but neither Theo nor Oola took notice. “My hero, my hunter!” She nuzzled his scruff and he slitted his eyes in contentment. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit jealous, watching this interaction from the corner of the porch.

  Later, of course, Oola felt bad for the creatures. If Theo hadn’t finished them off, she picked them up with tissue paper, long after they’d bled to death.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the mangled snouts, surprisingly unsqueamish as she eased them into Ziploc bags. “Theo didn’t mean it.” She made tombstones out of Popsicle sticks. We buried them in the garden, in a steadily growing plot. “Play a fugue?” I suggested, but she just shook her head.

  Theo was, as it turned out, a prodigious hunter. By the time summer ended and the fog tendriled in, the little graves numbered 27 and counting.

  Public Pool

  One day in late summer, Oola came down for lunch fully dressed in frayed shorts and an XL T-shirt. It read: GO FRACK YOURSELF. “We need to get some air,” she said.

  She didn’t sit down. She plucked the keys off the hook and walked resolutely to the truck.

  I followed, mug in hand.

  We drove for over an hour to the public pool, a concrete ditch on the outskirts of Salinas with water the color of veins seen through skin. The flagstones frothed with dandelions; heavy-lidded children in bad-smelling swimsuits picked the flowers as if posing for postcards. They held the weeds between thumb and forefinger. The whole place seemed to stoop, bathers walking belly-first toward bone-colored beach chairs whose plastic ribs had gone soft. It was five dollars to get in, fifty cents for a locker. Mildew frilled the corners of the changing room as I stepped into my trunks.

  Oola took her time in the women’s room. I waited for her on the edge of the pool. I kicked up little tide pools with my feet. Sullen children with scraped shins gave me the side eye.

  After ten minutes she emerged, clutching a beach towel about her in an unusual bout of shyness. The late-afternoon sun hit her at an angle, blanching the part of her face that was turned away from me. She was looking around, nervously sifting through the flabby families and oiled men for a familiar face.

  I didn’t wave. I waited until she spotted me. Hey, you, I mouthed.

  She gave me the evil eye, but I could see in her shoulders that she was relieved. She speed-walked toward me, making no noise in the afternoon heat. She trod on more than a few dandelions, which poofed sadly at her feet.

  “Fuck you,” she said softly when she reached me. “There’s lots of creeps here.” She stood above me like a radio tower. I tugged at one corner of her towel, which she held tight to her body.

  “What gives? It’s like ninety degrees out.”

  She rolled her eyes and didn’t answer.

  “Suit yourself,” I said. I eased into the water. She stayed still, eyes fixed on the chain-link fence that surrounded the pool. I swam a few feet away to get a new perspective. Perhaps from there I’d be able to see what was distracting her. I paddled slowly, cleaving the water with my palms like one parting a drug-induced thicket.

  By the time I emerged, she’d entered the pool from the opposite side. She did laps with a dogged expression, surfacing for air less and less frequently. I swam in her direction, but the closer I got, the longer she stayed underwater, the flat crown of her head like a yellowish jellyfish. I worried in spite of myself each time her face disappeared, not knowing how long it would be before, with a gasp imperceptible to everyone but me, she’d break again. On impulse, I reached for her arm, not to drag her up but just to touch.

  She surfaced with a start and flinched away from me. Her face was uniquely bared, wet hair slicked forcibly backward and knotted at the nape. Her watery frown wobbled in the sunlight. I was reminded of the baby photos I’d once thumbed through, color-faded backgrounds bearing a bald and budding Oola. The straps of her bikini were tied too tight; they left rosy indents in her flesh. I could count her eyebrow hairs.

  “Jesus, Leif.” She splashed me, not altogether playfully.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She sighed, causing a ripple around us. She swam slowly toward the pool’s edge and rested a hand on the tiles. She looked down at her figure, distorted by the water. It squiggled in and out of focus, h
er legs drawn out like sentences (I stand accused) and her waist like cotton wool, breasts just blips on someone’s radar rather than the main affair. Water rolled down her nose, into her eyes; she hoisted herself onto the pool edge and rubbed her eyes just like the many kids bearing bored witness to our tussle. They’d have rather that she drowned, that I slapped her, if only for the thrill of it, for her scream to echo off chain-links and the chance her suit might slip. The force of her fists seemed to soften her, to nudge something back into place, for when she dropped her hands and stared at me, it was with something like pity.

  “Please,” she said in an undertone. I paddled closer, treading water. “I’m a bit sick of this, that’s all.”

  “Of what?” This question was, of course, sheer ritual; I’d known what was on her mind since I’d caught sight of her packing her beach bag some hours ago, in the stretch before breakfast. She’d first put on a summer dress, stood still for a long moment, then in a panic stripped it off and grabbed my T-shirt from the hamper. I was curious to see how she would format her struggle, how she would order the words that hovered between us like gnats.

  She tapped my forehead lightly. “Leif,” she said. “Don’t, like, make me out to be some superstar.”

  “You needn’t worry there, babe.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “That sounded weird. What I mean is…” She screwed up her eyes and looked as directly at the sun as she seemed to be able to stand. She couldn’t face me, but still she kept one hand on me. “You know what my grandma told me? Everything will reveal itself as evil under light.” She worried a zit on the corner of her lip. “I’m ninety percent sure she was talking about Michael Jackson. She made such a fuss whenever I mentioned him. Everyone in our town had a personal relationship with Michael, good or bad. He lived only a few miles away. I think my grandmother was most offended that he never passed through. Anyway…” She placed her hands in her lap. “The point is, I’m bloated. I’m cranky. I don’t know what your book’s like, but … I can’t be your thing, OK?”

  “My thing?”

  “You know. The thing that makes you feel OK about everything that’s awful. Your excuse for eating meat. The, like, sin-eraser, I don’t know.”

  At last, I was surprised. “You’re not my thing. You’re everything.”

  “I’m no saint, Leif.” She didn’t meet my eye. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I soothed. “Of course. That’s not what it’s about.”

  I rested my chin on her thigh and she half-smiled. “I just need to make sure,” she said. “You are a fiction writer. I know how you get carried away.”

  How could she know how wrong she was? I’d no plan to make a model of her, not now, not ever. “Don’t worry,” I said, and my eyes scaled her body, moving over the breasts squished into her bikini top, the dependable trifold of her stomach as she slouched, the skinny arms, the leaking belly button, coming to land upon the reddish raised skin at the junction of her leg and pelvis: razor burn from hasty shaving. “I’m not squeamish,” I assured her, studying the ingrown hairs. The skin was the color of chewed gum and almost had the toothy indents of it too. Shall I go on? I wouldn’t want to disappoint, not you, not Oola. I examined the puckers and blush of this sensitive zone, the way her normally smooth flesh was spiked along the inner thigh, the freeze-frame of a shiver. I petted the stubble, I pressed my cheek to its heat, I touched the bumps as one might a keyboard. All while treading water, smiling calmly up at her. The sun set slowly in her scalp: her head looked like pineapple upside-down cake.

  I meant it when I said, Don’t worry, when I held the slick clump of her hair in my hand and whispered, Don’t you fret, on the walk back to the truck. The asphalt of the parking lot scalded our bare feet. There were wet spots on her shirt where her bikini soaked through, and I hovered my hands over these blotches like an old-fashioned fortune-teller. The impassive children, having abandoned their dandelions, continued to spy.

  “Wanna know what my grandmother told me?” I asked.

  “Shoot.” She leaned against the truck door, waiting.

  “The dark bits have all the protein.”

  And though she snorted and purred, “Just your luck. Dinner’s served,” I could see that she only half-comprehended what I had just said. The drive back to the cabin was lighthearted, pink-lit; she flicked through the radio stations before settling on the mariachi that was ubiquitous in this region.

  Were she actually a saint, I’d dip my hanky in her blood.

  * * *

  THAT WAS THE NIGHT WHEN the water first began to taste salty.

  We arrived back at the cabin at dusk. As we pulled up the drive, Oola sniffed her raised arm. “Jesus,” she said. “I smell awful.”

  “Chlorine?”

  She shook her head. “I took a shower at the pool. Nearly got accosted by a seventy-year-old woman who said she liked my hair, but I did it.” She continued sniffing at her skin, burying her nose in the crook of her arm. “What the fuck.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” I told her, but she didn’t seem to hear. She was snuffling like a police dog, hot on the track. “What does it smell like exactly?”

  She glanced at me over the hand she’d pressed to her face, knuckles wedged into her nostrils. “What do you think?” she said. “Like shit.”

  But as we ambled across the lawn and into the kitchen, she reconsidered. “Not like shit-shit,” she said, resting in the doorway and gazing out at the sky, the rosy color of the inner ear and other private fleshly whorls, her wrist smooshed to her nose. “More like dog. Or, like, the mud underneath mud. You know that smell?”

  I stepped closer and took a whiff. “You smell fine to me.” This was an understatement: She smelled like wet wood and cigarettes and citrus shampoo and, under that, garlic, a cocktail I recognized from our traveling days, when we would sit close to each other at a bus stop and assess our next move, or when we were actually riding a bus, falling asleep with our bags in our laps and our necks dangerously crooked. This would be the first time we’d rested all day, and the smell of her would drift up from beneath her many layers of clothing and luggage, as if it had been waiting for the perfect opportunity, gathering steam, to move me in a dire and inexplicable way. She would lift her arm to point out the window, unleashing her smell in the process, and say, “All those kids watching the train go by will grow up to do drugs,” overwhelming me with both an odor and an observation that could only come from her. Or she might sit up suddenly and announce, “We have to remember to do all the things that are only acceptable when you’re young.”

  “Like what? Being slutty?”

  “More like eating a doughnut alone in a cafeteria at three p.m.”

  I would nod. “OK. Go back to sleep.” And she’d resettle her body against me, mingling her smell with mine, which she alternately described as “enjoyably vile” and “like an angel eating cottage cheese,” but which I, of course, never noticed.

  “Here,” I said, joining her in the doorway. I held out two glasses from the tap. “Drink this. Sometimes this happens to me when I have bad breath. I think everything reeks. My senses get polluted or something.”

  She took it. “Thanks.”

  We swallowed at the same time and locked eyes.

  “Whoa,” she said.

  I went back to the sink and poured myself another glass. It tasted saltier than the first one. I drank it down and then another.

  “Something must be wrong with the pipes,” I said, wiping my mouth. I was still thirsty and poured myself a fourth.

  “You can drink that? It tastes awful.”

  I pounded my glass on the counter. “I’m insatiable.”

  “Funny, you saying that.” She set her glass down on the floor, right in the middle of everything. “I’m gonna shower.”

  “Again?”

  She nodded, already halfway up the stairs. I watched her go, lips tingling from the water. Already I was getting used to the taste; it was briny, metal
lic, but not in a bad way. If you drank four glasses, your thirst would be quenched. In the weeks to come, we would learn to stop mentioning it, and the subsequent tingle in the corners of our mouths would cease to surprise us. We upped our coffee and wine intake. We kept our mouths clamped shut when in the shower. We stopped washing our hands. It never completely went away, the tap’s oceany aftertaste, but it became so that I only noticed it when drunk or very, very sad. In those moments, the saltiness that I’d long since accepted and lumped into The Way Things Are would resurface sip by sip. The taste wouldn’t shock or offend me but slowly work its way into my consciousness, like a complicated insult that takes time to register. Oola, for her part, never mentioned it again.

  Nude Beach

  She’d told me on several occasions that she never really liked fucking.

  “What about when we first got together?” I protested. “You know, in the desert? All we ever did was fuck.”

  “I know,” she said. “I liked it, but not in the regular way.”

  “You mean, not like me?”

  She nodded, unfazed. “I liked it, but not because it was sex. Sex is whatever. Getting off is whatever. I liked it because it was interesting. I liked you.” She smiled and spoke with no irony. “An adventure. I wanted to see what we’d do next.”

  This doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a highly sexual person. She just didn’t like fucking itself. Other flailings were most interesting to her—she performed sex (one of the many men who ogled her might say exuded it) so frequently, and indeed viewed the world through such a sexual lens, that her lust was used up over the course of a day. She didn’t need privacy or even the strict removal of clothing to strip down, nor did she need the altered world of a bedroom to reveal herself. She speculated on everyone’s sex life: old, young, fat, femme, rugged, ruined, none were safe from that cocked eyebrow and sly grin. “Before I’d ever had sex,” she mused, “before I’d ever seen a cock, I dreamed about hands on my face.”