“Remember when you told me I needed to do the ark animals? And I didn’t believe you. You said, ‘You need this,’ and I just laughed. How could you have known that, Jess? Because it’s true,” I felt comfortable telling him, “I did need it, and it saved me. All I had before was Ruth to be alive for. The same way…” The same way my mother only had me to be alive for. God help her.
“People are like sheepdogs,” he said, but his straight face crumpled when I raised up on my elbow to gape at him. “It’s true. A sheepdog isn’t happy unless he’s herding. That’s his one and only job, that’s his work. You weren’t doing your job, but now you are and you feel better. That’s why you’re here with me right now.”
“But what is my job? Making giraffes?”
“Making something. Maybe it doesn’t matter what.”
“Yeah. No,” I realized, “it does matter. It can’t be just for me—it has to be more than stenciling wallpaper or refinishing the furniture.” Hooking rugs. Shudder. “But I don’t know what, and when this is over I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“You’ll find out.”
“What happened to me? I lost my artist’s eye, I forgot how to see. Once—I did a self-portrait out of all the numbers that defined me, my Social Security number, telephone, address, my birth date. For nothing, just for myself. I used to do collages, I did contour drawings, conceptual art, I did rubbings of textures, like—sidewalks and tree bark, bricks. I tried to paint an emotion. I made connections between things, I could see sculptures in tree limbs, I could see Renaissance Madonnas in fruit, I could see. But then I lost it, I went to sleep. I never thought I’d get it back.”
“Your sheep.”
“My herd. I got my work back.” I moved over him, began to kiss him passionately. “I’m not saying I’m any good—that’s a different subject.” I wanted him, but I couldn’t stop talking. “But I know what I’m supposed to do now. In general, not specifically. Jess, Jess. You are so…mmm. Do you have other girlfriends? Do you like my hair short? You’ve never said.”
Well, we’d talk later. Those were reminders; I stuck them in like stick-on notes before Jess shut me up by kissing me back. We made love again, slowly, and so sweetly it made me cry. And it worked this time, and it didn’t remind me of anything.
Then it was time to go. “Four o’clock, you have to milk cows.” This was going to be a challenging affair, I could see. A daytime affair. “At least it’s spring,” I said, watching him dress. God, he was good to look at. “Warm. I’m looking forward to a lot of outdoor trysts. Rolls in the hay.” I tried a lewd wink, not difficult considering I was flat on my back where he’d left me, naked and uncovered.
“I like your hair,” he said, pulling his T-shirt over his head. He looked different to me, more substantial or something. His whole body was real now, not a rumor.
“You never mentioned it. So naturally I assumed you hated it.”
“I didn’t know what I was allowed to say. I couldn’t tell what the new rules were.”
“You didn’t used to have any rules.”
“I changed.” He smiled.
“Is that my fault? Do you blame me?”
“I used to. Now I try not to blame anyone for anything about myself.”
A model I should try to follow more often. “Anyway,” I said, privately defensive, “I don’t think you’ve changed that much. It’s more that you’ve adapted. Really. You’re not your house, Jess.”
“It doesn’t matter. Everybody changes.”
But he was sadder, quieter, he’d grown more discreet. I knew some who would say he had room for a little discretion, that curbing his impulsive ways was just part of growing up. I didn’t agree with them, now or twenty years ago. Jess had changed because of me—that wasn’t ego, it was the truth. But I couldn’t despair, even if part of him was lost, because under it all, older, wiser, sadder, gentler, stronger, he really was still Jess. Still mine.
“I might fall asleep,” I said, stretching, showing off. What a long time it had been since I’d felt any sexual power at all. You didn’t know what you’d missed until you got it back.
“Not for long.” His socks had holes in the heels. He pulled on his work boots and tied the laces in knots instead of bows because they were both broken. He needed taking care of! This just got better and better.
“Not for long?”
“Just a catnap.”
“Why, are you kicking me out? Got another girl coming at five?”
“Heh heh.” He leaned over me. He put his hand on my stomach. His whiskers felt prickly on the skin between my breasts. “Got you coming at five, play your cards right.”
“Oh, you’re coming back,” I said, thrilled. And already the puns were starting, the lovely, corny sex jokes. I could’ve died from happiness.
“I’ve got to talk to Mr. Green for a few minutes, get the boys started with the milking. Don’t you go away.”
“Don’t you worry.” I sat up when he turned to look at me from the doorway. “Mr. Green’s going to know, isn’t he?”
“Probably, unless I make something up. Want me to?”
“No, I don’t care. Not at all. But…”
“Other people.”
“Some other people. Ruth. Especially.” No need to mention my mother; she was a given.
“Will she hate this?”
“I honestly don’t know. Ruth loves you, Jess, but I don’t think she’s ready for this.”
“She’s loyal to Stephen.”
“Yes. Very. More than that, though. It’s a funny age,” I tried to explain. “She’s using you to grow up. Sometimes you’re her father, sometimes you’re her friend. And sometimes, more than a friend.”
“I know that. I’ve tried to be careful.”
Of course he knew that. I wanted to tell him then that I loved him. The feeling was on me, strong as a flood. What was the barrier? Habit, I decided, listening to the fall of his footsteps on the stairs, the opening and closing of a door. Habit and caution. Jess wasn’t the only one who had grown discreet in his old age. But our lives had taken a turn, and by some miracle we were back at the tricky place that had confounded us—me—years ago. Only an idiot would pass up a second chance.
19
Not That I Care
WE’RE SUPPOSED TO be keeping journals for English. Mrs. Fitzgerald says to write in them every day, preferably first thing in the morning before our censoring brains wake up, so what we say will be freer, like an extension of our dreaming selves, or failing that, right before going to sleep because sometimes the tired mind is as uninhibited as the just-awake one, so it’s the same thing.
Yeah, right. I don’t have time to eat breakfast in the morning, much less jot down Deep Thoughts, and at night I might get two sentences down before I fall asleep. I think I’ve got sleeping sickness. It’s like the opposite of insomnia. What is that, somnia? I’ll ask Krystal. Anyway, I do like writing in my journal, but the only time I can fit it in—and we have to show Mrs. Fitzgerald, she goes down the rows on Fridays to see how our notebooks are filling up; she doesn’t read what we’ve written but she looks to see if there are pages with words on them—so I guess you could copy the newspaper or a book or something into your notebook to fool her, but I don’t know anybody who’s doing that—the only time I can fit it in is when I’m in class. So instead of paying attention in math, say, or biology, I’m writing in my journal, and Mr. Tambor and Ms. Reedy just think I’m taking notes. It’s cool.
What’s hard about writing in a journal is always having in the back of your mind the thought that somebody besides you is reading it. (Which could happen—Brad Leavitt left his journal on the bus and Linda Morrissy, a sophomore, found it and brought it to Mrs. Fitzgerald the next day, who gave it back to Brad. So that’s a minimum of two people who could’ve read Brad’s journal, not to mention potentially Linda Morrissy’s entire family and all her friends, plus Mrs. Fitzgerald’s friends and her husband and her college student son, and all her son�
��s friends. Time, we see, is the only limiting factor.) Anyway, Mrs. Fitzgerald says the only way to get over feeling self-conscious is to write down some embarrassing things about yourself. Don’t embellish them, don’t let yourself come off as the hero or the innocent victim, just spit it out, something really stupid you did or said, and don’t censor it. (But then really make sure you don’t leave your notebook on the bus.)
I’ve been practicing that. The hard part is deciding what to pick among all the humiliating possibilities. So much to choose from. Once I wrote, “I used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror with the door open and pretend the laughter and applause from a program on TV downstairs was for me. I was a famous, beloved performer, and everybody in the audience clapped and laughed uproariously just at my facial expressions, they were so hilarious. I practiced looking surprised and humble during long bursts of applause.”
That’s the kind of thing that gets you warmed up. You get over being paranoid about confessing something like that, and then you can start writing the real stuff. Like, “I hate my mother. Who’s not even my mother anymore, she’s turned into some completely different person. It’s like the aliens snatched her, implanted a chip in her brain, and sent her back down, and now she’s just impersonating herself. She’s doing a really shitty job, too.”
School sucks. Caitlin is definitely making it with Donny Hartman now, so she and Jamie have, like, circled the wagons and I’m not allowed in, like it’s too huge a deal to be a three-way secret. Meanwhile, I am so not interested. I’ve always known they were better friends with each other than with me. But when I first moved here from Chicago they were having one of their breaks from each other and I got to know Jamie first, then Caitlin after they made up. So I was always the third wheel, which was okay until now, when I’m not much of a wheel at all. I’m getting to be pretty good friends with Becky Driver, but even she has people she’s known about a hundred years longer than me.
Raven at least is talking to me again. Except what he’s talking to me about is suicide, so that’s not too cheerful. Not his suicide, just in general, I mean, I’m not worried he’ll jump off a bridge or anything. We went to the movies once, but I don’t know if it was a date because I just met him at the theater on a Friday after work and we sat with a bunch of other kids from school. We held hands while we watched, but then Mark Terry and Sharon Waxman drove me home because they live nearer. Figure that one out. Not that I care.
So school is a wasteland and even work is sort of boring these days—and then, then I get home at six-thirty after a long, hard day and I’m tired and hungry and maybe in the mood for a couple of laughs and some chitchat, a little human contact, not much but some, you know, to keep up the pretense that in my house there still lives an actual family—but what do I get? Nada, because there’s nobody home. The house feels shut up, like nobody lives there—I told Mom we should rent it out to crackheads during the day, that way we’d at least get some money from it, and they wouldn’t leave it any messier than it already is. All she can say is, “It’s temporary.” Everything is supposedly going back to normal in one week, when the stupid ark sails.
I wish it was tomorrow. It’s getting worse, it’s all she can talk about—should the horse be a palomino or a regular reddish brown one, wouldn’t it be neat if it rained on the seventeenth, should Jess paint the ark white or a color or not at all, and on and on, like I’m somebody who cares. She didn’t like it when I told her the first thing Noah did when he landed on land—this is in the Bible—was to get out, build an altar, and sacrifice some animals. Too bad for that species! Instant extinction! She keeps saying she’s almost finished, but she gets home later and later every night, and she’s so weird, either really quiet and off in her own little world or else laughing and talking like she’s high, and trying to make me happy by telling dumb jokes or tickling me or saying let’s go get ice cream—and that’s almost worse because it’s, like, nothing to do with me, I’m just the one who happens to be there, and whatever mood she’s in I’m the one it gets inflicted on.
What if I died? What if the house caught on fire when I was in it and she was out? What if I was asleep and she was the only one who could’ve saved me, but she was over at Jess’s making aardvarks? When she came home she’d turn into our street, wondering what all the fire engines were doing there, why all the flashing lights, who the ambulance was for. The closer she got to our house, the scareder she’d get. And then she’d see it—the stretcher with the body on it in the front yard, the sheet pulled up over the face. The cops would try to hold her back, but she’d break free and throw herself on top of it. “My baby!” I’d have died of smoke inhalation, not burns, so my face would still look nice. In fact I would look very peaceful and beautiful. Mom would completely break down. She’d be ruined.
Sometimes I go over to Modean’s after work and play with the baby. It’s better than starting my homework or trying to figure out what’s for dinner when Mom hasn’t left me a clue. Modean always talks to me, asks me about school and work, how my life’s going. She bought an aroma-therapy kit at Krystal’s, and once she let me do an essential oils treatment on her. She said it was great, she wants to do it again sometime. She’s a really great mother. Harry’s going to grow up without any hang-ups at all, he’ll be like the poster child for good parenting. Unlike me, the poster child for neglect.
I call up Gram sometimes and we talk about how stupid the ark is. She’s definitely on my side. “Is your mother home yet?” she says, and I’ll say, “No,” and she goes, “I’m coming over there right now and making your dinner. It’s seven o’clock!” But Mom always strolls in around then, so Gram never actually comes over, at least not so far. I wish she would. Wouldn’t Mom be embarrassed?
If I just had my driver’s license, this wouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t feel like solitary confinement around here because I could get out anytime I wanted, like being in prison but with the door open. I told Gram it’s like time stopped and I’ll never get older than fifteen and three-quarters. She said wait till I’m her age and see what I think about time.
What I should do is report Mom. She’s starting to get famous, ha-ha, in Clayborne because of the ark; they did a front-page story on her and Jess in the Morning Record, and also a feature in the Richmond paper, about how wonderfully zany and nutty it is that they’re doing this and what inspired them and blah blah, it was like gag me, I could hardly read the articles. So what I should do is call up child welfare and turn her in for neglect. Then you’d have some headlines! “Ark Lady Cruel to Latch-Key Daughter.” “Ark Artist Implores Court to Keep Child, But Loses.” They’d put me with a kind, loving foster family. She wouldn’t even be allowed to visit. No—she could visit, but only an hour a week, and she’d spend the whole time crying. I’d be nice to her, but then it would be time to go back to my foster family. She’d promise to reform and be the best mother ever, but the court would say I had to stay with the foster family until I was eighteen. Then it would be time for college. She’d have missed the best years of my life, and she’d have only herself to blame.
That’s better than the house-fire fantasy. It’s more grown-up, plus I’m alive at the end. I think I’ll put it in my journal.
20
Giveaway Intimacies
CHRIS CALLED WHILE I was baby-sitting for Harry at my house on Saturday afternoon.
“Carrie, hi! How are you?”
“I’m so glad you called,” I said, shifting the baby to my other hip and getting a better grip on the phone. “I’ve been wanting to call you for weeks.” I heard relief in her big, braying laugh, and knew I’d said just the right thing. “In fact I was going to call you today or tomorrow, Chris, I really was—”
“Oh, sure.”
“No, I was! Because the crunch is finally over and I’ve got some time to breathe. It’s been so crazy, honestly, you can’t believe how hectic.”
“No, I do believe it. I’ve been reading about you in the paper.”
&nbs
p; “Oh, God.”
“You’re a famous person.”
“Famous lunatic. Anyway, it’s all over but the sailing, and that’s the day after tomorrow.”
“Yep, and we’ll be there, the whole family.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Absolutely not! We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
That was my worst fear and my secret hope, that lots of people would turn out for the launch at Point Park on Monday: an actual crowd. “Well, I’ll look for you among the hordes,” I joked—sarcastic humor was good for warding off disappointment.
“You sound great, Carrie. You sound a lot better than the last time we talked.”
“Do I? Well, I’m feeling pretty good, to tell you the truth.”
“I’m glad, that’s a relief, because I still feel awful about what happened.”
The baby grabbed a fistful of my hair. To distract him, I found his training cup on the counter, still half full of orange juice. “Why should you feel bad?”
“I just do. I feel like Betty Currie.” We laughed, and it was like old times. “I really miss you,” Chris said. “It’s dull at work all by myself. I guess it was dull before you came, but I didn’t notice.”
“I miss you, too.”
“God, Carrie. I look at him now. I believe everything you told me, I truly do, and yet—when I look at him, I still can’t picture it. I can’t believe he’d do such a thing. But I do believe it, that’s not what I—”
“No, I know exactly what you mean. I couldn’t believe it either, the whole time it was happening.”
I didn’t mean the night Brian mauled me in my front hall, I meant the day he called me into his office and fired me. He did it on a Friday, and he waited till late, after Chris had gone home. I couldn’t understand what he was saying at first, I thought it was a joke. I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. “You’re serious,” I said, staring at him in utter dis-belief. “You’re firing me.” He said, “I don’t want to. I wish I could keep you,” rubbing his hands together with fake boyish nervousness. His forehead was pink and wrinkled with worry, eyes brimming sympathy. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, he tried to say with his face, and for half a minute I believed it, actually thought there was some truth in his halting explanation—that I wasn’t working out, he really needed somebody with more personal initiative, somebody he wouldn’t have to give any direction to at all. But when he spread his hands and said, “Almost like a partner, an equal,” the truth hit, and I knew he was lying.
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