States of Motion

by Laura Hulthen Thomas

  “Jesus, Red. How are we going to deal with this now?”

  “Nothing. It’ll give the girls something to remember us by.”

  Gina kicked at the post. “Next you’ll light your pants on fire. Why do you wear them, anyway? Are you self-conscious about the limp?”

  “What limp?”

  “The limp. You know you hobble around when the weather turns.”

  “Do you consider this weather turned?” Red wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Why, after fifteen years of marriage, are you asking about my summer pants?”

  “Arthur told the girls it’s because you lost a leg in Desert Storm.”

  Red grinned. “Arthur learned about Desert Storm already? I didn’t even get to Vietnam until AP History.”

  Gina folded her arms. “It doesn’t faze you that our son is telling the neighbors you’re a general who lost a leg in service to your country?”

  “I’m honored he’d make me a general.”

  “Or maybe he feels he has to make up status for you.” She bit her lip as soon as the words leaped between them.

  Red turned away and launched a flame at a knot of dandelions. “Ginny, tell me what to do differently and I’ll do it. It’s natural for Arthur to feel that way. Just like it’s natural for you to work out your frustrations by blaming me. I wish our reactions to this could be different. But it’s all very … expected.”

  Sunlight flashed on his goggles. His thinning hair, pure silver now, ran sweat. When Arthur was two, Gina had suffered complications in her pregnancy’s eighth month. The baby strangled on the umbilical cord. She’d had to deliver him stillborn. Another son. Overnight the brassy hair that gave Red his nickname leeched its color, turned gossamer. Now the silver strands were light-traps, especially in the sunshine. Quicksilver, as if all his bright energy had risen to the surface. She wanted to fly to him then, nestle her cheek to his chin’s grizzle that sprang back from a shave like grass from a firm step, wrap him up in the playful hug he’d tried to give her.

  “Red, I don’t blame you for our … situation.”

  Red paused to roll up his sleeves, his ritual before concentrating on a design. “That’s good, because it’s not my fault. Ginny, can you ask your dad for a loan until this client signs?”

  Her lovey impulse toward him evaporated. “I can’t do that.”

  “You have to.”

  “Absolutely not. What do mean by loan, anyway? Is your phantom client the collateral?”

  “OK, then, don’t call it a loan.” Red maintained a steady tone she could almost call professional. “Call it a gift.”

  “My dad doesn’t give gifts. Look, I am not going to beg my dad for money. Even if I did, he wouldn’t help. I promised myself a long time ago I wouldn’t put myself through that ever again.”

  Red looked at her through the goggles, fogged over with sweat. His pants were etched with ash and dirt around the clean patch left by the kneepads, his bony knees outlined like faces wiped clean of their topography. “Please, Gina.”

  Gina shook her head. A cluster of hornets darted from the tire swing’s rubber rim. “You know better than to ask me that. And you better take care of those things before the neighbor kids get stung the next time they’re over and there’s real hell to pay from the girls.” Gina pointed at the swing.

  Red strode to the tire, aimed the wand and torched a hornet. The flaming body dropped into a patch of clover.

  “Jesus, Red. What did you do that for?”

  “It’s what you want, right?” Confused, the hornets buzzed in a crooked spiral. Red launched another flame into their loop. Several bodies popped and sputtered to the grass.

  “Hey.” Gina retreated to the fence as the survivors regrouped and revved toward her. “Cut that out.”

  Red left her to duck and weave until the hornets swarmed past her into the neighbors’ yard. He pumped the propane and aimed the wand at the Rugged Rumpus slide, incinerating the Queen Anne’s lace with a smooth sweep of flame. The heat dimpled the slide’s plastic lip. “You want to know why I don’t wear shorts? Because you told me my knees were knobby. You said they were a turnoff.”

  “I did not!”

  “You did.” He paused. “At Ludington. On our honeymoon. I remember it because it was the first time you’d said anything even remotely mean to me.” Like their wedding, their honeymoon had been delayed by her mother’s death. The romantic ceremony at Cobblestone Farm was cancelled. Eventually they’d exchanged quiet vows at the new county courthouse on Main Street Red had designed. The honeymoon was an afterthought, Ludington chosen for the easy drive. Gina remembered lying on white, hot sand. One day she’d walked blindly with a group of tourists out to the lighthouse bisecting the bay. Lake Michigan stretched to the horizon, a brilliant accordion of every shade of blue. The tourists exclaimed over the lake’s beauty, but the water’s endless stretch struck Gina not as pretty, but sensible.

  All that week she was surrounded by family picnics in the lakeside park. The aroma of smoldering brats mingled with the squeals of shaggy-haired kids, their wet swim trunks drawing shimmering streaks on shiny metal slides. The odor of charcoal had led her back to her mother’s tiny bedroom on the day she died. The body splayed on the bed, flushed as if from the summer heat, was almost nude. Her mother was wearing her new lace support bra and Lycra hose, as if she’d known Gina was bringing the mother-of-the-bride dress and was simply waiting to try it on. But she couldn’t know. The tailor had called Gina to tell her the dress was done early. This visit was to be a surprise. Two charcoal grills smoldered near the only window. The doorjamb and window casings were stuffed with towels. On top of the bookcase by the closet, a row of candles burned brightly, the only light in the dusky room. Flames licked the dropped tile ceiling. Gina remembered hanging the dress carefully on the closet doorknob. She remembered clambering on a chair to blow out the candles. She had to blow hard to extinguish the broad, bright flames, she remembered. Only after the black, curling wicks were trailing smoke did she throw open the window and douse the charcoal.

  She never would understand why she hadn’t immediately rushed to let in the fresh air, call 911, start CPR, scream her mother’s name. Perhaps the fumes fogged her reasoning. Or perhaps she couldn’t bear to touch the body, lurid with the legs sprawled, the arms thrown wide as if tied to the bedposts. Her mother bore the desolate, pleading pose of a violent death, not a self-inflicted one. Afterward she would carry a sadness that she’d blown out the candles at all. As she waited to die, her mother would have watched those flames graze the ceiling. The light would have been her mother’s last glimpse of brilliance. Gina would always feel she’d smothered her mother’s final comfort.

  She remembered the harsh odor of charcoal in the state park, and Lake Michigan’s stretch of blue, but she didn’t remember Red’s knees. “That’s not fair. I wasn’t exactly myself on that trip. Anyway, I would never say such a thing.”

  From the house, a door creaked. Arthur’s sand-dollar hair bobbing across the brown lawn was the one reliable buoy to her spirits. He ran up to the tire swing, threw a deft parry at the swaying chain. “Hey, Dad. That flamethrower’s neat.”

  “Does the job, buddy.” Red ruffled his hair.

  Arthur playacted a thrust at Red’s tank. “Shouldn’t we do the cats now, Mom?”

  Red turned back to the weeds without countering Arthur’s game. Arthur didn’t seem to notice Red had cut him off. As Gina slipped through the fence rails after Arthur, Red’s quiet please followed her, not, quite yet, a plea.

  When she opened the pass door into the back foyer, Donder and Blitzen crashed into Gina’s ankles, mewling gratefully. “Pet them, honey. Quick,” Gina pleaded.

  “Kinda hard to do when they’re fastened to you.” But Arthur bent over dutifully to pass a hand over their bony skulls. The cats flashed him their baleful cataracts and pressed stubbornly against Gina’s shins.

  “You’re over here all the time,” she complained. “Why don’t they run to you?�
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  “They only like girls.” He scratched between their eyes and then bravely sledded his fingers down each lumpy spine. “Why is their fur always wet, Mom?”

  “Just because they’re old, I guess.”

  “Why does that make their fur slimy?”

  “I don’t fully understand the biology behind that. Isn’t there a game you can play with Dunder and Mitzie here while I deal with the litter box?”

  “It’s Donder and Blitzen, Mom.” Arthur threw her a look just shy of adolescent condescension. “You know. Like Santa and all that.”

  “I know, honey.” Gina wavered between exasperation and an uneasy embarrassment that he wouldn’t recall one of her favorite memories. “Don’t you remember how you used to call Santa’s last reindeer Dunder and Mitzie?”

  “No.” Now disdain flooded his expression. All that was missing was the eye roll, as if she were imagining the whole sweet story.

  “Well, you did.”

  Arthur did roll his eyes then. “Well, I wasn’t wrong. In my German language exploratory we learned that Dunder is the original German spelling.”

  “Oh. Guess you were just precocious, then.” Gina tried to smile lightly at his scowl.

  “We also learned that Dunder and Blitzen mean thunder and lightning.”

  Gina’s smile froze. The doddering pair teemed unsteadily at her sneakers like fat earthworms on LSD. “Doesn’t exactly describe this pair of dashing old men, does it?”

  “They aren’t men, Mom. They’re girls.”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  Arthur lifted Blitzen up by the front paws. “See?”

  “Oh.” Gina squinted halfheartedly under the sagging belly. “Why would Candice and Helen name girl cats after Santa’s reindeer?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Boy reindeer?”

  Arthur frowned at her. “That’s sexist, Mom. And dumb. Everyone knows Santa’s reindeer are girls.”

  “They are not.”

  Arthur sighed. “Both girl and boy reindeer get antlers, but the boys drop their antlers in the fall. Only girl reindeer have antlers in the winter. Santa’s reindeer have to be girls.”

  “I’ve never in my life heard that. You’re making it up.”

  Arthur herded the cats toward the kitchen. “Look it up. I’ll check their food. You do the box.”

  “We’re switching next time.” Gina headed south to the basement to perform the dirty work while Arthur corralled the old folks.

  She puzzled over why she felt regret over bringing up the childish memory. Maybe her vague sense of shame had to do with his fastball into adolescence. Since the winter he’d sprouted dark, gangly hairs above his lip. He’d shot up five inches, his lanky legs still coated with a little boy’s silky down. His voice was sinking fast under a restless Adam’s apple. Thank God he wasn’t towering over her yet, although by the end of the summer she might be staring at that bounding Adam’s apple while demanding he clean his room.

  Another child might have spared Arthur her chronic, anxious babying. After she’d delivered her stillborn boy, she suffered tender, leaking breasts through the memorial. For weeks afterward she was confused by an odd sensation of adrenaline that didn’t feel like grief. She chased toddler Arthur around the house wrapped in a sensation of floating. Sometimes her ascent felt like being borne aloft by a pair of soft, sturdy arms. In those moments her breasts hurt as if her nipples had been bitten raw by pearly baby’s teeth.

  One night after Arthur was in bed and Gina roved the house, agitated and unmoored, Red sat her down on the den couch. He lit a candle on the sofa table and held her hand. He must have bought it just for her, since Gina never kept candles in the house. I never wanted to tell you this. I was afraid it would upset you. But I know why your mother was burning candles.

  The flame was stunted, smoking. The wick was too short. A syrupy lavender odor filled the den, sickening sweet.

  She hoped the monoxide would combust when it rose high enough. She was hoping to spare you the sight of her.

  The smoke formed a silver filament she could almost climb, through the ceiling and Arthur’s room and the attic to dissolve in the night sky’s velvet. Gina was, suddenly, grateful for the vision she would forever carry of her mother splayed rudely on the bed. She’d seen her baby’s final pose, too, the limp body blue and soundless on the table that for a living baby would have been warmed. These final glimpses of her mother and her son should be cherished, not mourned, she understood now.

  If her first impulse hadn’t been to blow out her mother’s candles, Gina might have been caught in the explosion, but she didn’t think of this. She let go of Red’s hand. The candle on the sofa table sputtered out in the rising pool of lavender wax.

  The floating ceased then. It was around that time that Gina contacted Dad for the first time since her mother’s death. From the beginning, Dad loved Arthur with a gentleness Gina never thought he could feel for anyone. She never did tell him about the miscarriage, partly out of distrust of revealing anything personal to him, partly to protect the happiness Arthur and Dad shared that, although she didn’t want to admit it, comforted her.

  After a while, she and Red gave up trying for another pregnancy. They coddled Arthur fiercely. Nurturing his sweetness, they called it.

  Gina scooped the litter box and tiptoed up the stairs, hoping Arthur’s attentions would distract the cats. As she rounded the corner into the kitchen, they crashed into her ankles like kamikazes on their final run.

  “Arthur,” she whined. “What are you doing?”

  From the living room the pump of the carpet-cleaner dispenser preceded his voice. “Cleaning up a hairball. Looks like vomit.”

  “Jesus.” Gina waded through the cats to deposit the garbage outside the patio slider.

  “There’s pine needles in the vomit, Mom. And bark.” The vigorous sound of spritzing wafted into the kitchen.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You didn’t let them out, did you? They’re too old to go outside.”

  “Of course not, honey.” Gina nudged the cats away from the door and shuffled over to the kitchen sink to draw a drink of water. Through the window she watched Red head back to the garage. The low evening sun bathed the evergreens in a warm orange glow. She drank to a needy mewling chorus. “I’m not petting you,” she told them. “You’re bad girls. Who left the hairball bomb?” Donder winked a glassy eye. “I thought so.” No sign of matted blood on Donder’s fur, Gina saw with relief. She could barely see the scrape’s jagged line.

  “What?” Arthur called out.

  “Nothing.”

  “Talking just agitates them.” Offered cheerfully, like plain-old helpful advice.

  Were they agitated, or just plain addled? The cats set to licking each other’s whiskers. Gina moved to the lovey notebook, opened it to the middle, eavesdropped on the snippets of affection, errands, and orders the girls swapped lightly like blown kisses. Lick me like a lollipop, the playful script suggested a few pages in. The block writing answered with a crude drawing of a sucker whose bold lines resembled the folds of the female anatomy. The couple was snug in the secure harness of dual incomes and dual kids and dual cats brimming with needs easily met. An unexpected crest of tears surprised her. Gina brought a hand to her cheek too late, and a drop landed squarely on Helen’s scrawl. The babe in it’ll get better babe bled into better until the ink cobwebbed.

  What in Candy and Helen’s life needed to get better? Gina rubbed her tears into the paper and flipped through the notebook’s midsection, skimming. Clinical references to Monistat, Diflucan, and extra yogurt purchases populated the pages up until about the time the women had locked horns with Red over the property line. Was the neighbors’ only setback during this downturn a stubborn bout of yeast?

  The cats finished their shared bath and decided to clean Gina’s sneaker laces. She suppressed a mean impulse to kick them away.

  “Did you change their water, Mom?”

  Arthu
r’s deep voice startled her, as it often did these days. He was standing in the den doorway. She snapped the notebook shut. “Of course,” she fibbed.

  “We aren’t allowed to look in that book.” He studied her doubtfully. The bottle of carpet cleaner and the sodden rag he clutched reeked like a sterilized locker room. The cats mewled louder as if complaining of the fumes. “I don’t think anyone’s supposed to.”

  “Oh. I was just. You know, checking to see whether the um ladies had left any more instructions about the cats.”

  “It’s not that kind of book.” Arthur was giving her one those new unnervingly adult stares. “Colt got in big trouble when he looked in it once.” He paused. “Is it true you don’t like Candy and Helen because they’re gay?”

  “What? No! That’s ridiculous. Why, did they say that?”

  “Candy and Helen would never say anything mean. Which means maybe it’s true?”

  It was the first time you ever said anything remotely mean to me.

  Red’s knees. She did remember. His legs stretched in the sand, toes pointed at Lake Michigan, the kneecaps funny bald domes gleaming in the sun. She’d rapped the bone until he winced. Under her knuckle the cap felt like a skull. What had she said? Something about how bare they looked attached to his hairy legs, that was all. Better use sunscreen. She’d said that, too. Were those comments so cutting he’d carried them for fifteen years?

  Arthur was still clutching the rag and dispenser, awaiting her answer. Wait—did she dislike the women because they were gay? She’d never considered herself remotely prejudiced. No, she’d liked them fine before the property dispute. Well, any high regard really dated from before the juice box affair, although the neighbors’ showy, cultivated tastes and trendy helicopter parenting always had struck her as smug. Too, they’d always seemed so disapproving of her heterosexual, single-child, petless lifestyle as privileged, or at least, lacking imagination.

  “Of course they wouldn’t mean to be mean but it is mean to think that I would …” She let the words trail as she dropped her gaze to his T-shirt. Streaks of spit up, hair, and white stains spattered the fabric like the sloppy toddler art projects he’d once presented proudly to her. “Arthur. You’re a mess.” She paused, letting the fact of the white stains sink in. The locker room fumes came into focus. Her gaze slid to the bottle in his hand. Not carpet cleaner. Clorox with Bleach. “You didn’t use that on the carpet, did you?”