Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  The sky was mixed, and Morgan dipped glass jars in the lake water. Taylor saw a transparent, flickering creature caught in one jar but Morgan didn’t seem to notice. They set up in the grass looking over a crescent of sand and across the water. Morgan provided sporadic instruction but didn’t seem moved by the fact that Taylor had never before painted.

  The sky had a collar of tumbled clouds. A water bird came in for a ski landing. It made perfect sense that water was the basis for everything, thought Taylor.

  Morgan pointed out the Microsoft city across the lake. “My dad calls it the military-industrial complex.” She was showing off a little bit, thought Taylor. They both put it in their paintings when the sun hit it: the towers beamed out and made the water look like oil. They painted the floating bridges that looked like dams, motorboats, sailboats, a U-shaped swallow.

  Morgan laughed when Taylor said she thought it was one of life’s miracles that people knew how to get other people out of the water.

  She stopped laughing. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You can’t swim?”

  Was it possible Taylor had never been so happy? It wasn’t that she was good at painting. She was obviously terrible. Morgan leaned back to assess her own painting. “Well,” she said, “this is what I would look like if I were a lake instead of a Morgan.”

  Taylor produced an unbecoming cry of surprise before she could stop herself. But it was true. Her seemingly secret Taylor-ness was laid bare in the amateur landscape. She had no technique to save herself from drowning but she felt emboldened. She could swim, she could paint: how many other things could she do simply by trying?

  The clouds got darker over Microsoft and there were rain lines and a flashbulb of lightning. Morgan made no move to pack up. Suddenly she cried, “It’s a double!” It was. Two of each color, at first bleary, then sharper, as if—said Morgan condescendingly—God adjusted the binoculars. The colors intensified, and then suddenly the rainbow was heavy enough to lay its tracks across the water.

  It was strange: Taylor found she couldn’t keep her eyes on it. She watched a crow spear the soft bank and haul out a worm. She wished she could say that beauty was demanding.

  But Morgan must have felt the same. “I can’t stand it any longer,” she said, and she began dumping the jars of used water.

  The girls were cold when they got back and Morgan said they would take turns showering. Morgan went first and Taylor was alone in the bedroom. The eaves were stoopingly low and the walls were a shade of purple that reminded Taylor of roll-down maps in a social studies classroom. Morgan’s jeans lay over the pillow on her bed. Taylor went completely still and quiet before she lifted them; the risk seemed dizzyingly fateful, and even as she unzipped her own jeans and struggled damply out of them she knew it wasn’t worth it. Still. She wanted to know Morgan.

  Morgan’s jeans were damp too, and now, over the vaguely shoe-store smell of Morgan’s bedroom, there was the unmistakable odor of pee like heated pineapple. Taylor’s nose seemed to whistle so she breathed shallowly through her mouth and she tasted the sweet-and-sour. Just as she was pulling the waist around her waist there was a knock on the bedroom door. She stopped breathing.

  Morgan’s father must have stopped breathing too, she imagined, in order to listen. But she had to think. What was her best bet? Would he go away if she didn’t answer, or would silence be his cue to enter? It wasn’t like she was in the bathroom. Then, “Is one of you in there?”

  “Just a moment,” said Taylor. She needed an hour. An eternity of him not coming in the bedroom. Should she try to get out of Morgan’s jeans and back into her own? Had he even heard her? Would he barge in when she was naked? She focused on the strip of light at the bottom of the door. She could hear herself in her own ears.

  He said, “Morgnificent?”

  Taylor held still. The door began to open.

  It seemed as if he didn’t see her at first. Then he was staring at her openly. She found she had pinned herself against the closet door. Was he incapable of hiding his true feelings? Grownups were more childish than teenagers. She knew she wouldn’t scream or fight. She was a rag doll, she was Morgan in Morgan’s jeans. She waited.

  “You and Morg could have been separated at birth,” he said finally.

  “There you are!” Morgan exclaimed when she returned from the shower. She looked at Taylor strangely. “I thought you might have been making friends with my dad or something.”

  When it was Taylor’s turn she took all of her clothes into the bathroom with her.

  Morgan’s father had a showpiece coffee machine that looked like the prototype for an elaborate steampunk engine. He said it had cost more than Morgan’s pickup. Morgan handled the seething invention while he bragged about it. Taylor received a mug fit for a giant. She didn’t say she had never had a “latte.”

  “Are you trying to keep her up all night?” laughed Morgan’s father. Morgan sucked hers down, keeping one eye on Taylor.

  Taylor thought she would get better at fashioning trees, interpreting shadow, expressing those grounded, native (said Morgan) runt berries along the lakeshore. Better at painting the sky drinking up the water.

  But back at school, in their AP classes, there was no obvious ending. Just the slightly discomfiting feeling that there had been no beginning, either.

  And later, when Taylor went over it, she was unsettled that Morgan made the coffee. Like a young wife to her father. Her long plain hair in two barrettes, braided belt around the waist of those blue jeans.

  Between each ring of the phone Taylor said to herself, I don’t know if it’s him yet. Swiftly she pulled on a pair of clean white pants. He said she was like a colt, the off-center gait, persistent girlishness. A navy sweater, she’d looked better in the green one, known she would never have the strength to wear it. She twisted her hair up.

  She cleared her throat. She wished she’d had a drink of water instead of pulling on her pants—she could’ve answered naked. Too late now. Six rings and people would think she’d been in the bathroom. He’d think—he’d see her streaming out of the bathroom before she’d even flushed the toilet.

  People opened up or closed up with other people. They never stayed the same.

  Emily with the bra straps, Adina who would be a lawyer, Chunni the ballroom dancer, they all thought she stayed the same. It was the opposite.

  The phone kept ringing. The last thing was shoes. Boots. He liked it when she ran around the park with his daughter.

  Through courtship, marriage, and divorce, Taylor’s parents had taught at the same large, suburban blue-collar high school. When Taylor left for college (her guidance counselor leered about West Coast quotas, but it was unclear to Taylor who was being taken advantage of), her parents promptly, if separately, retired from teaching. There was the little harbor of their pensions. All on her own, Taylor’s mother opened a florist shop in an undersubscribed strip mall. When Taylor came home for Christmas her mother’s house was filled with flowers that smelled like frozen peas and formaldehyde. The camellia bloomed in the front yard and Taylor cut a stem with four strawberry-pink flowers and put it in a juice glass on the kitchen table. Later the same day her mother had already tossed it. It was disconcerting that Taylor had had no idea her mother wanted to be a florist. Suddenly there was the possibility that even boring lives were secret.

  Taylor’s sophomore year of college her mother hired a landscaping company to exhume the camellia and put in a matching pair of inky Japanese maples. Her eyes twinkled when she told Taylor the neighbors took note, that certain neighbors were now looking into their own landscape accents. Otherwise it was a subdued development of nine-hundred-square-foot ranches with their driveways on the left and a welcome bush to the right of their walkways. Taylor’s parents had sacrificed, long ago, to live in a better school district. Her mother had bought out her father.

  Light lurked in the sky until ten o’clock at night in the summer, when Taylor was home working with her mother. There was a miraculo
us small-business loan for menopausal (her mother joked) single women business owners, and Taylor’s mother had bought a van with a refrigerated chamber. One afternoon they were picking through peaked corsages, saving baby thickets of baby’s breath, when an order came in from Seattle. “Well, well,” said Taylor’s mother. “You just have to stick to your guns. Your dreams.” She was brisk with pride. In less than an hour they were on the road, bearing the delivery.

  Riding in the passenger seat of the van was like bouncing on a trampoline, even more so as they ticked off the Seattle exits below Northgate where the heavy commuter stretch was grooved and rutted. There was traffic. Taylor’s mother kept stuttering the brakes, which she claimed made them last longer. Taylor watched a seaplane scud down on Lake Union as they waited in the long line on the freeway bridge facing the city towers.

  Taylor read the directions out loud once they took their exit, and soon they were twirled along park-like, lakeshore streets with no grid logic. Suddenly Taylor said, “Is this Madrona?”

  Then she was embarrassed. As if she thought she had some claim to it. They passed gaudy deck-and-glass numbers, enhanced stucco remodels of older Craftsmans. She felt something wasn’t quite right, what should have been the same was different.

  They overshot the address and had to find a place to turn around. Retracing the route more carefully, Taylor spotted the numbers engraved in old brick, shrouded in laurel, at the head of a long, obscured driveway. They pulled through giant wrought-iron gates tipped with lances and stamped with red and gold escutcheons. These Japanese maples were like weeping willows at midnight.

  They parked as quietly and inconspicuously as possible, and Taylor’s mother set out to find the foreman. The brick mansion and flanking carriage houses blocked the view of the lake and the mountains. The driveway was forested with red cedars and a flotilla of hydrangeas so constantly gardened, Taylor imagined, it never quit producing blossom heads of Aegean blue and antique indigo.

  Quiet fell. Maybe wealth was quiet—or at least it didn’t speak to those who didn’t have it. Taylor undid her seatbelt and turned toward the van’s compartment. She could not remember a single instance in her childhood when either of her parents had patronized a florist. It seemed for a moment that she could not remember anything about her childhood, and she wondered if she was, in fact, still a child, and going to college out east was a dream she would wake from, shake off.

  She forced herself out of her reverie. The refrigerated chamber behind her was sealed with a dwarf door, the stainless-steel handle like some kind of ancient folk weapon. It was cold to the touch. Her mother would return any moment and Taylor would have the flowers unloaded and ready.

  Almost at the same moment she opened the refrigerator door, the van began to tremble. Taylor pressed herself back in her seat as if she’d been chastened. Outside, the black drive was crumbling around the van like pie crust. She felt the front wheels buckle. She felt the earth—as if the whole thing were a muscle—seize and shudder. She was falling down, over edges and false edges of earth, rocks fell with her, clumps of sod, sprays of acid-tasting soil. She managed to catch herself on the rung of a root. Still the contents of the earth rained down around her.

  She must have blacked out. It seemed like a long time later that she heard the van’s alarm bleating from far, far above her.

  She lay in the underground darkness. She could smell packed wet earth and the kind of mold that finds its way into the molecular structure of concrete. Mold that looks like the man in the moon on a basement wall.

  Her mother had set up the laundry area in the basement as a guest room. “Your summer suite,” she’d shown Taylor. She’d seemed a little bit embarrassed to have kicked Taylor out of her old bedroom. A little bit resentful that Taylor was grown up, moved away, but knowing she shouldn’t be. Taylor’s bedroom she now used as an office.

  Almost before Taylor woke she realized it was the wrong dream. A florist had nothing to do with earth, everything to do with water. The earthquake dream—she’d never told anyone. Not her mother. Her decision to remain out east had tapered into private silence. Her mother didn’t know if she could keep the shop open. Two nail salons had popped up and then vanished in the same strip mall, a music and movies store had gone into foreclosure, the liquor store had tried both reducing and increasing its hours. “I’m going to do more balloons,” her mother promised. There was the gap opening, widening, until there was more gap than earth between her and her mother.

  She grabbed the phone as if she were jumping off a bridge.

  “Are you at the library?”

  He laughed. But it sounded too smooth, someone else was in the room with him. His wife would be stretching on the floor at his feet. Taylor could see her rolling up, vertebra by vertebra, hollowing her abdomen, ready now to begin marking steps and poses.

  Was he an official liar who told run-on stories that didn’t end until he, the liar, believed every ornate detail? Were his excuses baroque, frosted with rosettes and angels? He’d called her an angel.

  He wondered if she could come for dinner on Friday. “En famille,” he said, in a brighter register than usual. “And you can’t bring anything at all but your lovely self, Miss Taylor.” She tried to breathe normally.

  His house was on a residential connector street. The first time she was over he’d called it “our shelter house,” which he’d had to explain was a reference to a certain kind of glossy magazine, of which she was totally ignorant. In fact he’d said, “You had to be there,” and it stung her.

  “Do you feel ridiculous following the winding walkway?” he’d said cleverly, possibly making it up to her. Taylor had laughed, turning left and right and left again behind him.

  That first time she was surprised his house was so modest. The entry had a coat closet with a thin tri-fold door and loose handles. He was not the kind of man who would fix handles on the weekends. There was a single futon sofa in the living room and unframed dance posters thumb-tacked into sheetrock marrow. He’d bent to turn on a lamp, but it was the middle of the day, and it made the room feel like a school or a hospital.

  He hadn’t seemed to care what she thought of his house. She felt like one of his daughter’s friends, mute but hungry for after-school cookies.

  Now, carving across the front yard in order to follow the walkway, Taylor wondered if the house would have changed with his wife inside it. Was it really her house? The front door was evergreen plastic. He had opened it before, so Taylor hadn’t noticed. He had taken her coat before. She had shed her skin with her coat so he would hold it.

  She pressed the bell. She could hear it like a fire alarm inside. She was in two places at once, the flimsiness between worlds. She wished she had knocked instead. She could have been the new babysitter.

  She hadn’t really noticed the landscaping tufts before. She looked sideways and traced the artificial rock facing that formed a low wall between the yard and the sunken driveway. Last time, his daughter had walked along the top of that wall rather than fall into line on the walkway.

  Taylor heard rapid footsteps. She took a step backward.

  “It’s Taylor!” cried his wife, throwing the door open.

  She was stringy, hollow-eyed, with an enormous bony mouth that suggested her skeleton. No makeup. They faced each other. Her eyes skittered down the full length of Taylor.

  “You found us okay?” She had stringy hair, too, that she pulled to the side and then wove into its own knotlet. “That weird bear left under the highway?” she persisted.

  Taylor nodded. It wasn’t a lie.

  Taylor folded her coat over her arm. The other times she’d been here, she’d taken off her shoes like he did. His wife had bare feet. She didn’t ask Taylor to take her shoes off and so Taylor didn’t.

  His wife seemed flat-footed, or ostentatiously tired, for a dancer. Her hair was inching its way out of the knot against her shoulder. She urged Taylor onto the futon sofa. She sighed. “It’s totally Andy to remember the
beer and forget the salad.”

  “Oh, I could have—” Taylor started. But his wife wasn’t apologizing for his absence.

  Taylor found herself looking across the room at one of the dance posters. An extraordinarily long-limbed black woman swept in a snow-white sundress. The skirt made a half circle. One long leg seemed to hang from a hook in the sky. Her arms were endless, bare and gleaming.

  They all drank beer with the rice casserole, and the salad was dotted with pomegranate seeds his wife had wrested from pomegranate tissue. His daughter picked out the rubies and then erected a tent of spinach leaves. She dropped her fork. Without thinking, it appeared to Taylor, his wife leaned down and retrieved it.

  There was no feeling in his look, neither intimacy nor animosity. Some packaged cookies for dessert, and Taylor excused herself. She was tipsy, compromised, she never should have come. She drank water from her hands in the bathroom. She sat down on the burgundy bathmat, it had a weird, tinsel-like texture.

  When she returned to the table he got up and began clearing.

  “May I help?” said Taylor.

  “No way,” he and his wife said together.

  His wife opened the green door for her. “Where’s your coat?” she said. Taylor took it off her arm, where it had weighted her down the entire evening.

  He called her from the library. He was doing research, he really needed to come up with a big idea, he couldn’t go on like this, creatively he was impoverished, hand to mouth, he needed to talk to her, now did she see how hard it could be to live with a self-fulfilled artist like his wife? Did she want to meet at Stone Ladies?

  She was self-aware enough to know she was depressed. How could it not be obvious that she was cold, insignificant?

  But he came up behind her. “Hey, lovely lady.” He wore cowboy Levi’s, the kind that make men look saddle-sore and bandylegged. The thighs were faded to gauze bandage material.

  He led her to the stone steps that terraced toward the pond. He motioned for her to sit beside him. She knew she’d freeze. She avoided the dried curl of an earthworm.