States of Motion

by Laura Hulthen Thomas

  “Take the turn, goddamn it,” he instructed.

  Tammy drew in her breath and held it. Mr. Salisbury looked at Jerrell. Understanding flashed between them about the ancient ways of women, the commandments they laid down. The flesh they offered, the blossoming of their beautiful hearts, and then the bloom’s vengeful withering that might take years, or only a moment. A repossession. A theft. Then they left, and the reasons they gave were never the whole story.

  “Nothing to it, Ace,” Jerrell said.

  An Uneven Recovery

  The downturn had come to this: Donder and Blitzen would be the Arnold family’s sole source of income.

  When the usual kid down the street couldn’t pet-sit during the neighbors’ Volunteer Vacation building schools in the Appalachians, Helen rather sheepishly asked if Arthur, Gina’s thirteen-year-old, could do the job.

  Gina rather sheepishly asked what the daily pay rate was.

  “We usually pay Randy ten dollars a day for three visits,” Helen replied delicately. “We can go a little higher for Arthur, since maybe you’d want to help out …” Hard to tell from the glissando of sympathy in Helen’s frosty tone whether she knew of the Arnold’s financial calamity.

  “Fifteen a day and I’ll be there every time.” The words popped out, prompt and desperate. When she was growing up, her father had coached Gina for times like these with his own father’s Depression-era slogans. Any port in a storm was one. Pride won’t pay the bills was another.

  Gina was willing to bet that feeding the neighbor cats wasn’t the type of work Dad had foreseen.

  She and Helen stood warily opposed on either side of the split rail fence marking the boundary between their yards that, at the beginning of that summer, had been in hot dispute. Behind Helen, Candy was mulching the row of sullen firs the neighbor women had planted to settle the spat. The dispute began when the women asked Red to move Arthur’s play structure, which they claimed blocked their view of the subdivision’s wetlands. When Red refused, the women produced a mortgage survey as proof the Sommerville-Smith property extended six yards past the Arnold side of the fence, right down the middle of the Rugged Rumpus’s sandbox. Red parried with transit level and tripod to prove the Arnolds actually owned a three-yard strip of the Sommerville-Smith lawn. Gina wouldn’t go so far as to say that Red’s zeal had made the hostilities worse, but he’d treated the episode like gainful employment. He was hustling to replace the architecture work that had evaporated overnight in the real-estate crash. Gina’s own bookkeeping job for Jim Price, a developer, had shriveled just as abruptly. Jim was a former University of Michigan gymnast who’d been equally nimble in the Ann Arbor real-estate market, but when six major tenants folded in one month, Jim decided to perform his own stunts with the books. Gina was let go with ten minutes to gather her belongings and that pride Dad was always warning against. After months of searching, the escort now seemed like a ceremonial usher into long-term unemployment.

  She couldn’t exactly blame Red for his defense of their property line. The Arnolds may lose their home, but in the meantime Red wasn’t about to lose any yardage. Then, on the hottest day of the summer, Candy, who worked the counter at the landscaping business just down Wagner Road, had planted a line of young evergreens along the fence line right up the middle of the disputed green zone on the Sommerville-Smith side of the fence. A month later, the evergreens remained hunkered in their defiant adolescent slump.

  Through it all, Arthur remained buddies with the neighbor women’s kids, Colten and Priscilla. A thaw of sorts, for the good of the children, was underway at the fence.

  “I don’t want to put you out.” Helen’s sympathy might be genuine. Or merely curious.

  Candy launched a pitchfork into the fresh mulch. “The kittens have a self-feeder,” she said. “Nothing to it.” She hefted the mulch toward the first fir in line. The sweet earthy odor of mushrooms and orange peel drifted from Candy’s hand-fermented compost.

  “Well, there’s the vitamins for their coat,” Helen said. “The litter box, of course, but Arthur knows how to clean that. Some daily TLC is a must. The kittens are so cuddly, can’t stand it when we’re away …”

  Kittens, indeed. Donder and Blitzen were ancient. Arthur thought Donder was at least, improbably, twenty years old. Gina calculated two weeks at fifteen a day. Might cover the electric bill. “What a great responsibility experience for Arthur, Helen. Thanks for thinking of him.”

  Helen fanned her hair with slender fingers. Glorious hair, an auburn cascade that swept her shoulders with offhand glamour. She was in marketing for a private health system that catered to executives. Spin doctor for the criminal class, Red had described her job once to Arthur, bitterly, but that was soon after the property dispute. Before the recession, Red held an easy-going, big-tent heart toward clients, the sub-trades, neighbors, and family. He pursued contemplative hobbies like fly-fishing and nature photography. Lately his steadfastness had run off the rails in little ways, like his crack about Helen’s job, or uncalled-for remarks to Gina like grow up, honey. Last week she’d caught him cleaning out his fishing vest, dumping his beloved flies into the trash. He’d claimed they were worn beyond repair. “Well, we love Arthur, and with all he’s going through, maybe, who knows, Dondie and Blitz can provide him some comfort.”

  Gina had kept the details of their fortune’s freefall fiercely private. Negotiations with the mortgage and utility companies and glum squabbles over the car payment she and Red conducted scrupulously out of Arthur’s earshot. “With what he’s going through?”

  “With Red’s old injury flaring up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “From the war. Arthur has shared with us. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “From the war,” Gina repeated. A field mouse scuttled from the mulch under the fir and darted into a crabgrass patch on the Arnold side of the fence.

  Candy spiked another load. “Arthur is so open with us. I think we share a deep sense of trust.” She fixed a disapproving squint as if Gina were a painful sunspot she wished to blink away. “Kids really have a radar about which adults in their lives are on the up and up.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Gina addressed Helen, who was watching the mouse rustle the crabgrass. Gina hadn’t so much as plucked a weed all summer. The Rugged Rumpus sandbox was a riot of thistles. When Arthur and the Sommerville-Smith kids slid down the bumpy slide they flew squealing into doilies of Queen Anne’s lace. Neither Red nor Gina could summon the gumption to do any yardwork beyond mowing. Gina would have expected that chronic unemployment would thrust the Arnolds into a single-minded determination to keep up with chores, if only to distract from the circumstances. But even dusting a shelf left her with an odd sense of shame.

  “Gulf I,” Helen said brightly. “The airdrop behind Saddam’s Republican Guard. That hard landing in the desert. Of course Arthur couldn’t give many details. It was so long before he was born. I may have the story wrong. But he does seem very secure on his Desert Storm facts. You’d never know, though, to watch him mow that Red was missing a leg. Although Candy and I always did think it was odd that he never wears shorts in the summer. Even on the hottest days.”

  “Jesus.” Gina gripped the fence rail. A cluster of hornets rose from the clover, zigzagged to the play structure’s tire swing.

  “Don’t come down on Arthur for telling us,” Candy said. “Although I don’t understand why your family feels Red’s war service has to be a secret. Secrets are so toxic to kids.”

  “Arthur says Red’s wound has been acting up.” Helen appraised Gina’s perspiration as if assessing a misfired PR strategy. “I know a very good infection specialist.”

  “I think we’ve got that infection under control now, thanks.”

  “Because I would feel terrible about imposing the kittens on you, if you had your hands full.”

  “No imposition at all.”

  Helen watched Gina’s knuckles whiten. A satisfaction dusted her sym
pathy. She gathered her hair up to fan her neck. Gina’s shaggy bob, long past any dignified hold on style, roped wetly at her shoulders. She hadn’t purchased a cut since Red’s final client skipped town to dodge his fee. “When we were bickering over the property line I had no idea I was haranguing a retired general.”

  “Who prosecuted a bullshit war.” Candy parted the second fir’s branches, piled mulch in a perfect ring around the trunk. Beyond her, the lawn’s slow slope shone a perfect jade. No grub patches, no parched grass. Velvety, freshly showered dahlias lined the women’s cherry-stained deck. Gina’s shaggy yard was beginning to resemble the artificial marsh the girls were so bent on viewing.

  Gina uncurled her fingers from the rail. “Arthur loves to exaggerate. Red’s rank was colonel.”

  “Well. Colt tells some doozies sometimes.” Helen’s gaze flickered over the evergreens drooping in the heat. “Do you think you could water these guys for us, too? Candy says they need a bit of coaxing through these hot days.”

  As Gina hastened into the house to nurse anxiety over Arthur’s latest lies—pathological or just imaginative?—she felt Helen and Candy’s smug gazes on her back, the neighborly nosiness that she hoped hadn’t guessed that the French doors Gina slammed behind her were the family’s true infected limbs.

  Two days later, Gina lay sprawled on the neighbor women’s spotless laundry room floor jimmying the self-feeder’s jammed release. Fifteen minutes into the job and already a major equipment glitch. When she realized the cats hadn’t been able to eat since the neighbors left the previous night, Gina hastily placed a bowl of EVO in front of their rheumy eyes. But the cats refused to eat. They doddered like old farts relying on a shared cane right back to the self-feeder. As Gina fiddled with the lever, a single EVO pellet disgorged and skidded across the polished bamboo floor. The cats bumped bony heads to snag it. Ropes of drool descended on the pellet. Gina wondered how on earth Candy maintained her floorboards’ professional luster.

  Dunderheads. The cats nestled close to lick each other’s crowns. Whoever had won the pellet, the other certainly didn’t hold a grudge.

  Had Arthur had ever put two and two together to realize that Donder and Blitzen were the namesakes of his ritual Christmastime childhood blunder? He always mispronounced the final pair as Dunder and Mitzie. Arthur’s error perfectly captured these old gentlemen. Their smoky Siamese markings were about as regal as a raccoon’s. Some mysterious residue sluiced Blitzen’s fur. Donder’s favorite pastime involved licking the goo from Blitzen’s back before coughing up spiny hairballs. OK, so she wasn’t a cat person, but Gina found the tarnished pair ghoulish.

  To her horror, the cats loved her.

  Gina couldn’t believe Candy and Helen starved the creatures for affection. Yet as soon as she’d disabled the garage security and unlocked the pass door, the cats had bolted to her. Glinting cataracts caught the brief twinkle of sunshine through the door like mewling little Havishams. Helen and Candy had drawn all the blinds for energy savings. The slit of light Gina brought with her would be their only glimpse of the sun.

  Gina regretted scheduling this visit during Arthur’s after-school fencing lesson. He was over here all the time playing with Priscilla and Colten. He’d know how to handle this pair. Gina had never even laid eyes on them, had never been invited into Candy and Helen’s home. She suspected the women thought Gina was anti–gay rights, or at least, anti–gay marriage. Why they would assume this Gina couldn’t guess. Her only parenting PC transgression had been to hand Priscilla a juice box to take home two summers ago. Fifteen minutes later, Priscilla returned to surrender the juice box, informing Gina that her mommies didn’t allow her to drink sugar. OK, maybe she’d made some crack to Red later on, something about the ladies and shame on them for sending the child and taking things too far; and perhaps Arthur had overheard and repeated the fragments he’d remembered to Colten; and highlights like ladies and shame and too far had round-robined its way to the women. This would have been about the time they’d flown to Maryland to tie the knot. So, who knew what connections they’d drawn between juice and prejudice.

  At last she maneuvered the feeder handle just so. EVO pellets poured cheerily into the dispenser. Relieved, she stepped aside to let the cats have at it, but now they refused to eat until she sprawled back on the floor with them, cooing and coaxing. She’d performed the same routine with old folks in the group home where she’d worked during college, scooping spoonfuls of soft mashed pot roast into aged caverns with the same gusto she’d once fed Arthur rice cereal at the other end of the life scale. As the cats ate greedily, Gina wondered at their neediness. Helen and Candy worked long hours. Who on earth gave Donder and Blitzen such pampering during the day?

  Perhaps if the wretches could gain a few pounds before the girls’ return, she could stretch this gig out a bit.

  After the feeding, the cats set to cleaning each other’s whiskers. While they were distracted, Gina scooped the litter box, skated to the patio door with the bag of dirty cat litter, and tossed it on the deck. She swept open the vertical blinds to let in the sun and left the slider cracked to air out the stale odor of ossified poo. She moved to the kitchen sink to wet a dishcloth, scrubbed soggy cat pellets from her bare legs, wrung out the towel, and hung it from the shining stainless-steel Jenn-Air oven pull. Did every surface in this house positively gleam?

  Gina’s own kitchen had turned as shabby as her landscaping; but then, she’d never indulged in trendy commercial-grade appliances and granite. Keep your nut small was one of Dad’s sayings. As a kid Gina had no idea what he meant until he’d shown her a squirrel packing his cheeks with fallen acorns from the oaks bordering the car dealership lot. His jaw looked like a lumpy sack of potatoes. Gina had giggled. The sound sent the squirrel scampering and dropping his nuts along Jackson Road’s shoulder. Dad had pinned that Depression-era look on her he’d inherited from his dad, survival pride masking a deep, exhausted unhappiness. Look, Virginia. When you’re greedy, you end up losing your nuts.

  Dad wasn’t keeping his nut small now. He’d splurged on the Rugged Rumpus and then crowded the plastic swings and seesaw with a real tire, the spare to his Town Car. “Give the boy something genuine to play with,” he’d said when Gina pointed out there wasn’t room for the tire. Dad had watched Arthur spin happily under the coiled chains, his sand-dollar hair a silvery blur under the bright sun. This new attitude of delight Dad called revelatory and Gina called phony. His recent consorting with that phony psychic Madame Bozek had cultivated a late-stage joyful outlook that shone every bit as artificial to Gina’s experience of her father as the neighbors’ gleaming kitchen surfaces.

  Gina had bit her tongue against reminding Dad that “something genuine” had once meant reselling tires to earn a buck for his struggling family. Dad, wading in the years just shy of golden, was determined to airbrush his own distant hard times.

  A spiral-bound notebook was splayed open sloppily on the women’s butcher-block island. Gina drifted over to leaf through the dog-eared pages. Brief notes in two different scripts filled the pages. One hand flowed in a schoolgirl cursive that might still dot an i with a heart. The companion hand formed terse, chunky letters. The uptight penmanship must belong to Helen, the schoolgirl script to Candy.

  Donder sidled past, wheezing.

  You make me high Sweetie-Pie!

  And on the facing page, the stalwart response: you rock my world every day every hour every moment

  On the next page the script announced You are my sun and moon! The block letters answered and all the beams in between. Candy lobbed exclamations. Helen tossed out punctuation with the trash. The lovey talk was sprinkled through with household chore reminders. Don’t forget! Recycling today! Grateful for your love! or picking up roast at sparrow babe do me tonight. Nauseating.

  From the living room, Donder unleashed a muscular hack. Blitzen, mewling, rubbed Gina’s ankles. Gina nudged him and turned another page, this one smeared with something dark—chocola
te, she hoped as her fingers landed squarely on the smudge—and saw single lines of script, centered perfectly on one page like parted lips:

  I love you!

  i love you

  Blitzen snuggled stubbornly with her ankle. Gina didn’t have the heart to push him away again. When was the last time she’d said those words to Red, or he to her? She always blamed money trouble for siphoning their affection, refused to do the math on whether they’d lost the habits of love before they’d lost their jobs.

  She stepped over the tenacious Blitzen and trundled to the living room. A moist hairball studded with mysterious fibers hunkered on the midnight-blue carpet near the cherry entertainment center. At least Dunderhead still possessed enough youthful contrition to flee the scene. Gina trod off to fetch the carpet cleaner and towel, spritzed and scrubbed lightly. Although the mess reeked of EVO and sour goo, the ball cleaned up easily.

  Gina pitched the goo in the stainless-steel trash canister in the kitchen and nursed a childish pleasure in hanging the towel on the Jenn-Air without rinsing it. She moved to close the patio slider. Calculated that the job had taken exactly twice as long as she’d planned. But Blitzen was in the way, tail drooping over the door track’s grooves.

  “Good way to lose that tail, Mister.” Gina swatted the smoky rump with her sneaker toe. Blitzen squatted fiercely and raised a mirrored gaze. For once the blind look was not accompanied by a pitiful mewling. But Blitzen’s silent appraisal, locked on Gina’s eyes, was far creepier than the boys’ typical noisy cavalcade.

  Well, the cat must want something. Gina clicked through her list. She hadn’t fed the boys their vitamins, but would Blitzen miss that useless supplement? For their coats, indeed. Then the silence tipped her. “Where’s Donder?”

  Blitzen flicked his tail crookedly. Gina followed the cat’s blank stare out the glass. Old Donder emerged from the dahlia bed to limp purposefully down the sloping backyard. The scoundrel was cutting a jagged beeline to Candy’s evergreens.