Circle View

by Brad Barkley

  Ray pitched that evening. I caught him looking my way when the innings changed, as he walked toward the dugout. The rest of the game he cast his eye toward me more than his strike zone. I wore cut-off jeans, a halter top made from two red bandannas. After the Hornets lost, he walked over carrying his glove and ball. My girlfriends went for the exit.

  “You look like that chick from Li’l Abner,” he said, a lump of tobacco like a thumb in his cheek.

  “You look like that dog from Orphan Annie,” I said back. He laughed and whooped and spat, winked at the old men.

  “Listen, I’m sweating awful,” he said, “mind if I borrow one of those?” He pointed to my bandannas, and I blushed to match them. Even now, a trickle of Baptist upbringing runs in me like a faucet dripping. He asked what I thought of his game. I repeated everything I heard the two old men complain about.

  “Your curve broke too soon,” I said. “Couldn’t find the inside, the slider wasn’t working, and your fastball was off.” He raised his eyebrows, impressed. Then he turned, pointed over his shoulder with his thumb at the stitching across his back.

  “Brower,” he said, “Ray.”

  “Rawlings,” I answered, “Charlotte.”

  “Rawlings? That’s the name on this ball.” He held up the grass-stained baseball.

  “Give me that,” I told him, reaching with red-painted nails.

  He grinned, snatched it away. “This ball is game weary,” he said. “Snagged hide, lopsided. A throwaway.” He made to toss it in the trash barrel.

  “It’s mine,” I said, and grabbed it, tucked it safe in my bag. He spat again.

  “You’re a real queen,” he said, and grinned. Let me tell you, in a young man, boyishness is a seductive thing; by middle age it’s a tumor on the personality. Three weeks later, we were married.

  It’s Saturday, and Ray sits home filling out bill-me-later subscription cards for my Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Banking News (I’m a teller at First Federal). Five-year subscriptions on each, in the name of his best friend, Earl. All because Earl mailed us a giftwrapped box of rotten banana peels and fish heads. I stand at the sink eating an English muffin and doing arm curls with the Sears catalog. Lately, I’ve been trying to improve myself, and have even looked in the community college listings for a course to take on one of Ray’s nights out. Right now it’s a toss-up between Knot Tying For Sportsmen and Basic Auto Mechanics.

  I do a curl, take a bite—pain shoots through me like a hot needle, from my tooth straight down my arm.

  I keep my head in emergencies. Three years ago, at First Federal, I had just popped on a rubber thumb to begin the final drawer tally for the day, when in walked two men wearing Halloween masks, Casper the Ghost and Spiderman. One of them jammed a stubby pistol in my cheek and told me to fill the grocery sack the other man tossed on the counter. I bent, stuffed in some bills, then a dye bomb, then more bills to cover it. They rolled up the bag, walked out the tinted doors. Channel Five News that night showed police dragging the suspects out of their Vega, which had crashed in a ditch when the bomb exploded. The insides of the car and outsides of the robbers were covered with the red dye, which comes off, the label warned, only when the skin cells wear away. The robbers looked like they’d been turned inside out. The next week, Mr. Tuttle put my picture in the bank lobby with “Hero of the Week” written underneath.

  I hold an ice cube to my jaw as I dial the dentist; a recording tells me Dr. Jackson is on vacation, his patients are to be seen by Dr. Neuman. I call his office and he answers, tells me to come right down.

  “Ray, will you drive me to the dentist?” I say, trying not to move my mouth.

  “Earl’s bringing over his remote-control dune buggy,” he says. He signs Earl’s name to an offer for free information on Eva Gabor wigs.

  The pain jumps down my arm again, and I shiver. “I want you to take me, Ray.”

  “You telling me you can’t play injured, Charlotte? Now, be a good girl and don’t bite the doctor.” He whacks me on the rear. When I look at him, he grins and turns back to his work.

  Dr. Neuman’s office feels cool, smells of cinnamon mouthwash. Magazine stacks dot the wicker furniture like sprouted flowers, and Beethoven music plays in the background. The doc himself sits at the receptionist’s desk. I read his nametag and study his hands, which are spread out over a pile of bills. His ring finger sits empty, which I still have good radar for noticing after ten years off the market.

  “Marge doesn’t work Saturdays,” he says. “You’ll have to excuse me.” He glances up, and I find myself nailed by eyes blue as the plastic ice blocks that keep beer chilled in the cooler. Back in the examining room, he lowers me in the vinyl chair, points at me the thing that looks like a headlight mounted on a silver tea tray. I see my reflection, the inside of my mouth full of gray fillings. Dr. Neuman bends over me, moves his face near mine; his breath has the same sweet cinnamon smell as his office. Beneath thin hair his scalp glows pink. He isn’t dressed like a dentist; under his white lab coat hang faded jeans and a beat-up alligator shirt.

  I need a new crown. Dr. Neuman—Alex, he asks me to call him—fits a temporary till the new one can be ordered. He draws novocaine into a hypo, stings my palate with a quick jab. Then he sits and waits for my jaw to numb. We talk about dentistry and oral hygiene, my job at the bank, the weather. Every so often, he reaches up and touches my face, testing for numbness. I ask about the silver tools lined up on the machine beside me, and accidentally spray a stream of water on the green wall. Alex laughs. His thin hair and build are close to Ray’s—with a small paunch dimpling above his belt—but he has those blue eyes and a voice that lifts when he speaks, a sound like fresh-hung laundry snapping in the wind.

  I want never to leave this vinyl chair—laid back, carrying along my end of the conversation. About the only men I’ve talked to in ten years are the moon-faced jokers that orbit Ray, all like rowdy school boys on a field trip. As I speak to Alex, the novocaine spreads over my face like sweet cream spilled on a tabletop.

  “Do you like sports?” I ask.

  “Sailing,” he says. “I like the ocean, riding the waves. I make time for it.”

  He fixes the temporary tooth, smiles, pats my arm.

  “Take care of that crown,” he says, taking me in with those eyes.

  “Thank you,” I tell him. “I will.”

  At home I decide on the knot tying class; it meets only one night a week, on Ray’s poker night. As I fill out the application, it occurs to me that knot tying would be useful if I ever went on a sailboat. I tell Ray I’ve signed up.

  “How much?” he asks. “Why in hell do you want to learn that?”

  I tell him I will pay from my bank bonus, that knots are a part of everyday life and knowing how to recognize them might be helpful someday. He shakes his head, turns back to his VCR to watch a Braves game he taped two days before. He does that, watches yesterday’s games. I couldn’t watch a game where the box scores have been posted, cleats hung in lockers, knees untaped, stadium emptied. Old news. Ray will replay Atlanta games three or four times.

  “I was almost a Brave,” he likes to say. “That close.” His cronies eat it up.

  Things with Ray got worse when I thought they’d get better: after he quit baseball. When the Braves wouldn’t offer him a coaching job, he went to work for Boren Brick, loading trucks. No more playing for a living, I thought, and I was right—playing became a full-time hobby. I lived with the pranks, his buddies, because I thought he would outgrow them—when you plant a bulb, you expect a tulip to sprout up. He quit the team six years ago; I had just turned twenty-three, Ray was thirty-two, too old to play, by then his chance at the bigs something long since behind him, something lost in his youth the way tonsils are removed from children. Since then we’ve been through twenty-four seasons of the year. I’ve worked to love him, and he’s buried himself in his pranks.

  The class meets in a yellow concrete-block room at the YWCA. Our instructor walks
in late wearing a noose of thick rope loosely hung around his neck. He rolls his tongue as he tells us his name: Wolfgang Kubler. Wolf, he asks us to call him, wears steel-frame glasses on his wide face; when he speaks strands of gray hair shake across his forehead. He says he worked thirty years in the German merchant marine, and tells us knots are a matter of life and death. His mastery of knot tying came after a badly hitched guy rope securing a lifeboat on his ship snapped, severing his pinky finger down to the first joint. He shows us the stub.

  Seven of us are in the class. We have to go around the room and introduce ourselves. Jay and Tim, two pimply boy scouts, sit slumped against the back wall. Next to me grins a young couple, Pete and Marie, camping enthusiasts, they say. Jimbo, an aging-hippie mountain climber, and Robin, my age, strawberry blond and a macramé artist, sit on either side of me. All have some reason to be there, a purposeful interest in knots.

  “I’m Charlotte,” I say, “Rowlings—like the baseball.” Easy as that I bring my old name out of mothballs, as if being called after a baseball gives me some connection with sports and knot tying, some reason for being in a yellow room at the Y while my husband gambles away his paycheck.

  Wolf hands out a xerox page with drawings of all the knots we have to learn: dove hitch, carrick bend, Turk’s head—a page full. Wolf paces the room in cowboy boots, lectures us with his brick-hard accent. He tells us—stopping to pound the desk—that knots are best learned by untying them, that yanking a hitch gives life to a rope, that good knots are part of a universal design (he whispers this, and points to spider webs in corners of the room).

  I cut down an old clothesline strung between two oaks in the backyard, and fill it with blackwall hitches, cat’s paws, figure-eights. My drape cords soon hang with bowlines and timber hitches. I knot lamp cords (“Go ahead,” Ray tells me, “fry your butt.”), shoestrings, loose strands of my own long hair. Ray’s friends ask him when he’s going to jerk a knot in my tail. I ignore them and keep practicing my knots, tying the house together. Wolf, in our third meeting, explains that knots have purpose, each its own job to do. He teaches us sailing knots, how lanyards pass through deadeyes to extend shrouds. The ocean devours what is not secured, he says, and I shiver to think of Alex out on rough seas without me to rope everything down.

  Saturday, I go for my tooth. Alex first fills a cavity that has shown up on the X-ray. He wears a blue work shirt, jeans, boat shoes, and no lab coat. He rolls up his sleeves as he starts to work, showing arms dusted with bleached hair. Again, as the cement sets, we talk.

  “I wanted to show you something,” he says, then reaches in his pocket and hands me a photo of two hazy white shapes, one large and one small, floating beneath the surface of slate-colored water.

  “Beluga whales,” Alex says. “Spotted them in the North Atlantic, near Nova Scotia. They must’ve separated from the herd. Nearly fell overboard taking the picture.” A corner of the blue deck of his sailboat cuts into the side of the picture. On it is tangled a fraying rope, lying in a heap. Beyond that, the ocean foams, bitten all over with whitecaps. Seeing that rough water and nothing but a frayed, tangled rope makes my heart skip. But the whales are beautiful, the pair of them, drifting like clouds just under the water. I want to see one for myself, and tell him so. He laughs, his voice lifts: “Maybe I should take you with me sometime,” he says.

  “I know knots,” I tell him, and tie a quick, tiny bowline in a length of dental floss. He laughs again; a real laugh, shot up out of surprise, not mired in menace like the laughs of Ray and his cohorts. I see how easy it would be to bring Alex along, something I haven’t practiced in ten years, how readily I might lean forward in the vinyl chair, touch the wrinkled corners of his eyes, and kiss him. Then the trickle of Baptist in me warms my face.

  “You have any kids?” I ask. “A wife?”

  He turns dentist on me then—checks my chart, holds X-rays to the light, adjusts the water flow swirling in the spit basin. As he works he gives me his story, how his marriage came unglued after his son, James, died at fourteen months with a heart defect. Alex tells me this matter-of-factly, like a TV show detective. Then he examines my mouth.

  “A chip in your front tooth, here,” he says. “You might want to consider bonding.”

  “I might,” I tell him. That evening I sit home practicing knots on my bathrobe sash, thinking of those white whales swimming the ocean.

  The plastic tube out of the box from the Winn Dixie tells me as loud as a flashing neon sign: pregnant, with child, knocked up. I’ve had clues to what was happening, so I shouldn’t be surprised but I am anyway. Like when the men walked in the bank and took the money—sometimes things sneak in when you aren’t looking. Sitting on the toilet with the test kit in my hand, I have one good thought: fatherhood might legitimize Ray’s toy buying, his game playing. I think that when I tell him, he might whoop out loud like the night we decided to get married, or pick me up by the waist and dance me around as he did the year the Hornets won the Sally League pennant.

  When I sit that night and tell him, whisper it to him, he leans his elbows on the dinette table, rubs the back of his neck.

  “I thought you were careful,” he says.

  My face heats up. “You’re wrong, Ray,” I say, standing, “I’m not careful, I’m dangerous.” I run and lay on the bed, rubbing my stomach, the bundle of new cells inside—what Wolfgang Kubler might call a good knot.

  A week later Ray’s pals show up drunk on the front porch. They open the screen door, letting in moths and mosquitoes. Charlie, Earl, and the others storm the living room, carrying wrapped packages.

  “A baby shower!” Charlie says, “For the man! Get it?” He laughs and pulls out a bottle of Jim Beam. “You get it?” he says again.

  They pour drinks into Ray, call him “daddy,” and “the old man,” slap his back, get him good and drunk. As the guys scream, Ray unwraps his gifts: a doll baby wearing a Pampers full of rubber doggie-doo, Doctor Spock’s book with Playboy photos pasted on every page, and, finally, an eighteen-pound boat anchor with a thick chain, the anchor pinned in a diaper. The anchor has them rolling, spilling drinks on the rug. In the midst of it all, I watch Ray look up at the stucco ceiling, shaking his head.

  “A baby,” he says. “A damn baby.” He looks more miserable than I’ve ever seen him.

  “An anchor with a diaper!” Charlie screams. “You get it?” Ray nods; he gets it. So do I.

  The house is still all evening till Ray says, “Listen,” and I prick right up. I’ve been waiting for this since his friends left. He looks at me, his eyes red and drowsy.

  “We don’t need a baby,” he says. “You ought to have it taken care of.” He looks down, trying to balance the salt shaker on its edge. We sit for a while without saying anything. Then I stand up to walk away. “I’ll think about it,” I tell him.

  The next afternoon Ray calls to say he’s made the appointment for me. As we speak I clove-hitch the phone cord, and understand that the life we have together is no place to bring a baby. There is a long space of silence while I let the clove hitch unwind itself.

  “Ray, could you go with me this time?”

  “Hey, no problem,” he says.

  I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I tell him. My voice stretches out thin over the phone wire; when he hangs up, the connection snaps, like the guy rope securing the lifeboat on Wolf’s ship, and some small part of me severs.

  At the Family Planning Clinic, the nurse gives me forms to fill out, and I sit in the middle of a big green vinyl couch. The couch is empty (Ray, of course, has not come), but there are others waiting there with me. Two young girls, teenagers, sit with their boyfriends (no wedding rings) on orange loveseats. The boyfriends, skinny and pimpled, remind me of the scouts from knot-tying class. The four of them look like movie-goers waiting for the show to begin.

  The forms finished, I’m told to wait, and sit again on the empty couch. I pull the Venetian blind cord into my lap (the room dims, no one notices), and twi
st it with my fingers. Tonight is to be my last class at the Y, but given the circumstances, I figure to miss it. I rub at my stomach, the baby forming there, a half-hitch of tissue growing eyes, hands. I think, this is the one good thing to come of us, and I am about to undo it. A dizziness swarms over me, this baby already locked in, changing my chemistry. I close my eyes.

  “Are you okay?” one of the teenage girls asks.

  “I think so.” I lean back into the couch, holding to the thin cord of the Venetian blinds. When I open my eyes I see the work of my hands, that with the gray cord I have made a tiny noose, shaped like the one Wolf wore around his neck the first night of class. It isn’t a knot we have studied or practiced. I can’t see how I have come to know it. The knot is perfectly done; you could hang some tiny doll with it. The thought stirs up nausea and a heat that sticks my skin to the vinyl couch. I feel lost on the couch, pulled down by it. Panic sets in like a steel wire drawn through me. I close my eyes again, think of ten years of my life, stolen away, of these wide-eyed teens, that they have found this much trouble so young. I think about Ray, that he is not here to be afraid for me. Then everything explodes inside me, shaking my heart with one clear notion: I want to keep this baby, my daughter. I untie the noose and yank on the cord, letting in the light from outside.

  At home, Ray is watching taped baseball; I run in and undo every knot in the house, Ray saying “What the hell is this?” over and over, a broken record. I don’t answer him. With my clothesline empty of knots I leave for my last class of Knot Tying For Sportsmen, run to the car with my hand held over my baby. My picture of her inside me is like those hazy white shapes of whales near the surface. I think that some day, when she is old enough, I could take her out to the middle of the ocean with me and someone like Alex, that we could find whales to show her, dozens of them surrounding us, with waves pitching over the sides of the boat, but everything would be tied down secure, and we would all know we were safe, and that none of us could be washed away.