“What are you doing here?”
“That’s not very polite,” Don said pretending to be hurt. Sylvia laughed through her teeth, the sudden air sounding like a hiss in the room. “I just come to see how you are, that’s all.”
“You see me all the time, Don. You know how I am.”
“I know.”
“Have you been talking to Ava?”
“What about Ava?”
Sylvia stared Don down, debated about whether to get into it with him. “What I do with my time is my business.”
“Who said it wasn’t.”
“Well, just mind your business.”
Don held up his hands in surrender. “Whatever you want. Call me Bennet ’cause I ain’t in it.”
Sylvia glared at Don. How she got hooked up to this idiot she could not say. “You should call Ava sometime. Do you know how to use a phone? Apparently not, you’re here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean with what? Call her and find out.” Sylvia took the stack of dish towels to the kitchen drawer. She considered walking out the door and leaving Don where he sat.
“How’s that little girl you’ve shacked up with?” she yelled.
Don was surprised, though he shouldn’t have been. Of course Sylvia would know about Jonnie. There are secrets in a small town but only if you blind yourself and refuse to know them. Once enough people suspect the abuse, the other woman, the drugs you take, there is a tipping point and the information spills over and out to everyone. Don had learned that the hard way.
“She’s all right. All right. A little girl.”
Sylvia came back into the room and sat opposite Don on the couch. She laughed at him. He clearly didn’t think she knew about Jonnie, but she had seen them together months before. The two of them standing innocently enough at the Laundromat. Don stared with intention into Jonnie’s face like he was interested in her conversation. Don interested in somebody’s ideas! Sylvia had smelled a rat right then.
For a few months when Sylvia was eighteen and worked at the cotton mill sewing elastic bands on women’s underwear, she had taken an older man up on his clumsy advances and shared her body with him a few times. The men at the mill congratulated the man with nods and sly grins. The women were haughty and mostly silent. Sylvia didn’t care. After work and a few times when he told his dull stupid wife he was somewhere else they’d gone together to the reservoir and parked at one of the secluded exits. Both of them had been nervous at first, but that thrill of deceit, the power that came from so much at stake made them both feel bigger and more important than either thought they had a right to be. Sylvia had not felt sorry for the plump, tired wife. It was hard for Sylvia to understand how she’d felt then, how she’d had no pity for the woman at all. If she thought of her at all, she imagined her ugly at waking, her hair a wicked spiked halo, the skin of her heels flaking. Sylvia was sure the wife was common and too comfortable, belching at the table, wearing unflattering hand-me-downs from her grown children. But most confusing to Sylvia now, was how she hated the wife. How dare she have the gall to feel safe in her own skin? That was reason enough to destroy her. By the time Sylvia told her sister about it, the affair was over anyway. Lana wouldn’t judge her, like she wanted her to, like she needed her to, but offered sad forgiveness. Sylvia had not wanted to be forgiven, at least not then.
Sylvia returned to the living room, not sure what to do with herself, not sure what to do with Don.
Don kneeled in front of the chair she’d sat in and put his head on the fleshy part of her thigh. He didn’t want Sylvia to see his face.
“You ever going to let me come back here?” Don said into the soiled denim of Sylvia’s lap.
“Why should I? I see you more now than I ever did. Besides that, I don’t live here anymore. Did you forget that too?” Sylvia asked. What she wanted to feel for Don was underneath the meanness, a smooth emotion like a river pebble, cool words, without venom that declared that she didn’t care anymore.
Don raised his head and looked up into Sylvia’s face.
“You got a drink?”
“Get some water.”
Don grunted his way up, his skinny legs like pipe cleaners in his blue jeans. Sylvia wondered what he might have looked like if he’d fattened up a little. She’d figured he would the way most people do. Most men don’t stay rail thin but spread in the middle, and their faces broaden in a way she thought manly. Not Don. He was strong though, stronger than he looked. Sylvia thought his hair especially unruly today, spiky like the goldenrod bushes she liked, uncut, not careful shrubs, but radiant and irreverent. She knew that wildness was nothing to admire. Anything out of control was beautiful only to the distant looker, the woman passing by swiftly in the moving car.
Don searched the fridge, sliced a small section of butter into his hand. Butter greases the insides, his mother used to say. Every morning if they had it his mother gave all three of them still living at home a pat to eat before they separated to school and work. Don held (just for a moment) the slippery fat between his fingers before he popped it in his mouth. Of course the bad stuff would slip out of his body riding out like on a greased slide. His sister would do a quick chew then swallow hers to get it over with. But his baby brother, Nate, struggled and whined making the whole process a much bigger production than it had to be. Don hadn’t thought about eating butter for a long time, but now the moment seemed a kind of communion with the three of them standing and waiting for the fat to melt on their tongues. He hadn’t meant to think about that right now, but there in his wife’s kitchen, his sister’s narrow back rushing out the door, the way he was accustomed to thinking about her, always leaving, always gone. Dead now. And a clear picture of Nate, just as he was back then, a skinny kid, his face squeezed from worry, standing beside him, waiting for the world to let him down. Don had not meant to think about any of that. You are way the hell too old when butter can bring down a whole world of experience to you.
Don brought a bloody-looking drink made from carrots and beets to Sylvia. He took a long drink. “What is this red mess?”
“Don’t drink Ava’s stuff. Find something else.”
“Good god.” Don shuddered. “What the holy hell!” Don said and wiped his mouth, shook his head in disbelief.
“I told you not to drink it.” Sylvia shrugged. “She didn’t make that for you. She’s got enough on her without you taking her special food.”
Don took another swig just to make sure.
“What did you take another drink for?” Sylvia laughed. “I swear to God you are an idiot.”
“That’s some nasty mess.”
Sylvia laughed. He could always make her laugh, even if she also despised him at the same time.
Don replaced the container in fridge and wiped his mouth. Several familiar pictures stared back at him from Ava’s fridge. Ava and Henry at the beach in lounge chairs. Ava standing with the tellers at the bank, a flickering cake on her desk. Her happy face reminded him momentarily of Jonnie. He hadn’t forgotten about Jonnie at all. But anybody paying attention knew they weren’t a forever couple. That was easy math. Sylvia would always be in the picture, it was as simple as that.
The kitchen was his favorite part of the house. Each instrument, pan, and object had a reason to be, a function you could name. There had been days when he let himself in the house just to look around and touch the hard things with purpose, the oversize spoons, turners and graters, pots and chopping boards, all there, all seeming more necessary that he was.
Sylvia was still folding the towels, creasing the stained washcloths, stacking them for the closet. Her semiretirement has meant that she had time for things like folding laundry in her child’s house. The joy. She would admit that she did like the idea that Ava would come home and see her chores already done.
“That juice hit the spot.” He sighed.
“Do you know anything you haven’t heard before?” Sylvia rolled her eyes at Don’s willing face.
“Let’s sit here.” Don pointed to the space in front of the couch.
“I’m not getting on the floor with you.”
“It’s clean. Come on.”
“I do the cleaning around here and I know it ain’t. Forget it. I need to take a nap anyway.”
“Do you still love me, baby?” Don hadn’t meant to say that. It wasn’t a trick or some line to get Sylvia’s attention, but an honest question, one he wanted to know the answer to.
“Why do you want to start all that mess?” Sylvia yelled flecks of angry spit in his direction. The quick meanness of it startled him.
“I don’t know,” he said as he reached up to her, coaxed her shoulders forward, guided her to the floor. She rested her head on his shoulder, though that’s not what she was set on doing at all. She looked twisted and uncomfortable leaning into him like that, and Don worried over the contortions Sylvia had to do to be close. Don smoothed her hair, wanting Sylvia to be soothed, if just for a minute, like she was finally okay, finally awake from a bad dream. He loved the way Sylvia could open herself up for him, as easily and quickly as a child, her ire and disappointment forgiven or at least held in abeyance as her body slackened and fear rippled through and then escaped her face like an ousted demon. Just as quickly as she leaned into him she sat upright.
“JJ Ferguson came by here yesterday.”
“About time.”
“You know how many years it’s been? You understand that don’t you?”
“What did he want?”
“Why don’t you understand anything, Don? What makes you such an ignorant ass?”
“I’m not ignorant.”
“I’m happy to see him. Do you understand that?” Sylvia knew Don couldn’t understand. He had never really wanted anybody, not really, not more than a few minutes. Not in the ways she’d wanted. Nobody but his mother anyway. Any longing that went beyond his own gut, his own selfish pleasure, was beyond his comprehension.
“You don’t know, Don. Why I waste my damn time, I’ll never know.”
“I know you’re not happy to see me.”
Sylvia laughed. “I haven’t been happy to see you in about twenty years.”
“How did he look?
“JJ? He looked like you’d expect. Older. Good.”
“Did he say anything? What did he have to say for himself after all this time?”
“What could he say? I’m just glad he came.”
“He’s up there on the Brushy Mountains. I bet he’s got a view. Hard to believe. I’d have liked to have built up there, but it wasn’t in the cards for me.” Don clapped his hands hard, like the idea was finished in his mind.
Sylvia searched Don’s face for the joke. She wasn’t sure he’d ever really wanted anything except the next gullible woman. Maybe sex was what he thought he actually had access to in this world, the best thing he had a chance in hell of getting. This was the problem with Don. He’d screwed her over all their lives, with women, with general trifling ways, and now she was feeling sorry for him. If the world was even a little bit fair, she would have never met this man. Sylvia closed her eyes and stretched her legs out in front of her, swung her arms overhead, tried to make herself as long as she could. If it were a good day when she opened her eyes, Don would be gone.
“You should have fixed the house you had,” she said.
Don laughed and pulled up Sylvia from the couch and led her into the guest room that had become her room. The bed was heaped with clothes, clean and dirty, some free weights Sylvia always planned to use with her exercise tape, and her large rolling suitcase.
“You going somewhere?” Don asked, a flutter of nerves worming its way into his stomach.
“Where am I gonna go?” Sylvia snapped. “Lana wanted it.”
Sylvia had a collection of postcards that Lana had sent her over the years from Europe, from Kenya, from several tropical ports of call. People sent postcards to bring their loved one into the strange place with them, and Sylvia was grateful to be remembered. Even if she did feel that the postcards were designed to inspire envy. Still Sylvia kept them all. In her whole life she’d never received any other mail from her sister. No cards or notes in Lana’s tight controlled handwriting had come with baby or birthday gifts. Besides, the postcards were so much better than suffering through the albums of pictures with Lana and her husband, Gus, smiling in front of monuments and statues all over the world, groups of middle-aged white people clustered all around them.
Don ignored her tone, tried not to let Sylvia see his exhale of relief. “Lana’s always wanting something,” he said.
“Don, let her alone, she don’t need to be in this.”
But she was there. Sylvia had always loved Lana but she’d always envied her too. Lana was the beautiful girl with the no-nonsense attitude and the long ponytail that swung from the back of her head. Hair Sylvia used to dream of sneaking up behind her and cutting off with pruning shears and lofting the hair in the air over her head like a prize. When Devon was born she finally got over the pettiness. She didn’t have time for it. All the issues that had separated the sisters, Sylvia just didn’t care about them anymore. Devon helped them be the sisters they were meant to be. Lana had no children. She was married to a man more than twenty years older who had counted himself lucky that he’d made it out of his first marriage childless. Too bad, too bad. Lana would have been a wonderful mother, much better than Sylvia. Everyone, including every child, always liked Lana better.
Don took off his shirt, then his jeans. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m thinking about my sister, do you mind?”
“She ain’t welcome as far as I’m concerned.” Don reached down to take off his socks.
Jonnie had soaked all of Don’s athletic socks in a bucket with bleach to get them white again. She’d been so proud of herself and presented his clean socks to him like a gift. Like white socks would ever be anything that mattered to him. “Are you going with her?”
“What did I tell you about my business, Don?”
“Okay. I’m just thinking about you. I know you don’t like happy people congregated in one place.”
Sylvia laughed. Don was a shit, always had been, but his concern softened her. He still had that power over her. Sylvia stood in front of the bed waiting for directions. Nothing about Sylvia was shy, but her relationship with Don, this marriage that wasn’t a marriage, confused her, angered her and finally defeated her. She was not in uncharted land with Don, but he disoriented her and gave her the feeling that everything familiar was gone, suddenly oddly shaped like it was covered in drifts of snow.
“Come here, Syl,” Don whispered and pulled Sylvia into him, swayed with her, hummed in her ear.
Sylvia grinned though she hadn’t meant to. Nobody in the world but Don would think about dancing in the middle of the mess they were in.
Sylvia looked so young when she really smiled and Don felt a surge of warmth for her, for the fun young girl who drank beer as well as he ever did, let the foam dribble on her chin, if she wanted. The girl who from the day he saw her naked liked for him to take in her whole long body, her legs thick and strong as tree trunks, the pooch of her belly, her big heavy breasts, nipples dark as plums. She convinced him that she was the way a woman should look and anything else was a compromise. At first he was afraid to tell her how good she was and lived in terror that she would realize the whole truth and walk away. A young man won’t believe that holding back the truth won’t keep a woman close.
When Sylvia laughed it was the only time she was truly a beautiful woman. Her grandmother’s tiny freckles weren’t pinched into a seagull shape on her cheeks, her mother’s disappointed mouth finally twisted into happiness. “JJ Ferguson. Can you believe it?”
“Here, look at my face, but follow my feet.” Don pulled her into his body. Sylvia stiffened, unsure. “What’s wrong? Are you worried about that boy? Does he want something from you?” Don knew that one event doesn’t make another, but many e
lements converge and mix together like the ingredients of a cake, to set the events that rupture the membranes of our everyday lives. By the time you see the thing and recognize it for the danger it presents, it is, of course, too late.
Sylvia thought quickly about Marcus but realized Don must mean JJ. He wants everything from me, Sylvia thought, but she didn’t know how to say it right.
“I knew he’d come back sometime.” Sylvia had never felt that sad and wonderful last time feeling with Don. She had wanted to lock the door of her feelings on Don, let him live the life he wanted with whomever he chose, but not with her. Sylvia found hating Don easy, but the prospect of never seeing him again never quite settled into finality in her mind.
Don let it go. He wouldn’t pressure Sylvia. She so seldom seemed happy he would back down and let her enjoy the moment. Sylvia tried not to look at Don’s face. He was ugly close up, as were most men. In his embrace, Sylvia knew Don was following a script he’d learned from another woman. Sylvia knew that men need direction from the woman they choose. It makes them feel cared for and safe. She leaned into Don’s naked chest and tried to pretend that was all there was to it. She was the most stable part of Don’s world. Always had been. He would stray, but didn’t he always come back? Didn’t he end up wanting her? But feeling his body move from the care he’d taken from that child hurt her more than she’d anticipated. Sylvia remembered when Jonnie was born, a fat, bald-headed baby with the mystery father.
Don’s leg caressed Sylvia’s thigh, half expecting to see a spot like a tobacco stain, but quickly took in the whole of the woman he was next to. Bodies are often the same, often interchangeable. Don had seen many women’s thighs and underarms, drooping behinds, secret crevices and folds—and though some were longer or fatter or darker or younger, all blurred into one body, one body he’d spent the last forty years screwing in the dark spaces all over town.
Don shifted Sylvia’s weight to the other foot, moved her, however awkwardly into a tiny square in the space between her disheveled bed and the wall. Sylvia was not going to cry. What was there to cry about? She should have never stopped crying years ago, if she was going to cry. As quickly as the feeling came, she felt an old hardness building, the dike that kept Don away from the best part of herself, a part she held for him, a gift really, but he would never have it, not all of it.
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