A Ford in the River

by Charles Rose

  To this my wife said nothing. I was hoping nothing must have meant no. I stared at the Oaxacan hat. I thought of it sailing over the fence, clearing the rooftops, the pines.

  “What was between us, was,” she said. “I’m only interested in what happens now.”

  We stayed out in the backyard awhile. I looked at the dogwood next door, thickly blossoming in radiant white. Zack’s white hair didn’t match up to it; his needed another coat of paint. It had turned white during a hurricane was what Zack had told us in Oaxaca. Dorinda tilted the Oaxacan hat the way she would do in Oaxaca, at the zocalo where we would go some nights to listen to the mariachi band. Now she seemed to be breathing in Mexican air. Her breasts were rising and falling, no longer slack in her nightgown. She smiled at Singalong pacing the picket fence, at our neighbor’s lime green lawn. I realized she was feeling good and said nothing more about Zack. If she could feel good wearing her nightgown she could spend more weekends with Zack. If her lips would stay closed I would welcome him, with open arms and broadmindedness, but not even his acupuncture friend could stop the pulley lines spreading her lips, or the spasm twisting her face and neck. She pulled the hat off, let it drop. I looked away from her baldness.

  “Quick like a bunny,” she said.

  Was Zack quick like a bunny?—my peripheral thought as I made a dash, for the nausea pills in the medicine cabinet. I was back in half a minute or so, sloshing water in the usual paper cup. Dorinda stayed out in the backyard with the pulley line working her upper lip and her teeth sinking into her lower lip. It took awhile for her to feel better. She told me I should wear the hat but for the time being I left it where it was. We moved on back to the screen porch. We sat down; we took our time.

  “Can this really go on?” I asked my wife, with a glance at the flowering crown of thorns. “Do you think we can really continue this way?”

  “I have to continue some way,” she said. The Oaxacan hat blew about the backyard but neither one of us went out to get it. “All I can do is continue. When I look inside I see nothing. Zack is helping me look outside.”

  “Outside,” I asked. “What is outside?”

  “I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.” Dorinda smiled. “I know, you think that song stinks.”

  “I think Zack’s songs lack something too,” I said.

  “I want more than the sun in the morning,” she said. Singalong scratched on the screen door. He wanted in. Dorinda got up. “You’re not the one,” she said, “who has to choose a life.”

  “I’m choosing a life just by being here. Here for you,” I said. “That’s choosing.”

  “I think you believe you are here for me.” Singalong sat on our back steps. I was watching Dorinda approaching Singalong. “But you aren’t, you’re here, that’s all.”

  “I agree one hundred per cent,” I said. “So I’m here and Zack’s out there.”

  “That’s right. And sometimes I like it out there.”

  Dorinda opened the screen door. Singalong eased in silently like the interloper he could be sometimes. Dorinda moved a fern to catch more light, looking too thin in her nightgown. I saw her again in a hospital, on a gurney pushed down corridors. The lights overhead, in fluorescent squares, then rectangles, were passing over her. It shouldn’t come down to this arrangement, her life coming down to this—why certain rectangles were longitudinal; others, in sections, lateral. Something she had to avoid thinking about, the arrangement of fluorescent lights on the ceilings of hospital corridors.

  It was only a matter of time before Zack and Tami came down to see us. Dorinda asked them to come for the Fourth of July. They pulled in on the third of July, before I got back from the station. When I saw Zack’s white convertible occupying my spot in the carport, I let my hatchback idle awhile. I turned on the air while the motor ran, but the compressor had not been miraculously restored. In July the car was an oven, but today the humidity was down. I turned everything off and got out of the car. Singalong came out to greet me.

  Zack and Tami were with Dorinda. Tami sat on one side of the bed, her long legs crossed, looking beautiful. Zack was standing in front of a window, adjusting a venetian blind. In the slatted gloom of the bedroom, his hair seemed two-toned, gray and white. He said Dorinda was looking better. Singalong hopped up on the bed and dug his claws in Dorinda’s nightgown.

  That night we ate out, at the Carriage House. Zack had gifts for us, from Paris, cheap medallions and overpriced T-shirts from the Porte de Cligancourt flea market, a gilt Eiffel Tower from the Monoprix. He had a story about the Eiffel Tower.

  “Up there it’s all second-class. Rich and poor, on this creaking elevator. The cable has never been changed. All this for one hundred francs.” He sat with his fingers touching, his hands arched, eyes set deep in thought. “If you wanted to take it to the top you had to wait in line for a while,” Zack said. “It was the same way going down. People were jammed against the doors.” He paused, his fingers still touching. Dorinda put a hand on my knee. She was liking Zack’s Paris story.

  “There were people from all over, just hanging up there in the wind. Someone asked if we were going up. Some guy from North Africa or somewhere had an answer. What he said was don’t you wish we could. Go up. Up in the sky,” he said.

  “Up, up, and away,” Tami said.

  “The point is we were together,” Zack said. “Our little group on the Eiffel tower was meant to go down, not up. But remember we were up in one sense. All of us had one hundred francs. The North African must have had a lot more than that. So why worry?”

  “He was worried about eternity,” was what Tami said, not Dorinda.

  “He must not have been a Muslim,” I said. “If he had been he wouldn’t have said what he said.”

  “He wouldn’t have been there at all,” Zack said. “Muslims all know they’re going up. And when they get there,” Zack grinned at Tami, “when they’re rolling around in Paradise, guess what happens to the men. These Muslims have virgins begging for it.”

  Tami was not a Muslim, she said. She would not qualify for Paradise.

  We had our dinner and I got down to the gig. I played “Undying Flame of My Heart,” with straight-up, two-five-one chords. I wasn’t about to stretch. I saw Dorinda only had eyes for Zack. Since the candle’s flame didn’t block his view, he could keep his eyes on Dorinda. She looked like she did when I met her, casual and sure of herself, in a bar with a man at her side. Her eyes moved left of the candle flame, then right as she turned from Tami to Zack. I kept the keyboard on organ, and turned my face away from our table.

  They left before I finished the gig. I was putting the keyboard back in its case, unplugging the speakers, packing up. Zack came back in, through the doors up front. He offered to give me a hand, and I said he could carry the speakers. I knew he had something to say to me, but he would want me to feel comfortable before he actually got down to it. We finished loading the hatchback. It was hot; we were both sweating. He told me he thought I played well tonight. A few couples were still in the Carriage House, watching the baseball scores come in on TV. Others were getting into their cars.

  The darkness was lanced by headlights, throwing Zack’s face into sharp relief. “With me she’ll have all that she can ever want.” Men were joking, women were laughing. One couple was having an argument over which of them would drive the other home.

  “All she wants right now is to live,” I said.

  Zack moved a little closer. “The question is how well will she live. I can give her so much more.”

  I looked at him and quietly said, “I want her with me.”

  “I know that. I can understand that. I’m only asking you to think of her.”

  The next day was the Fourth of July. The sun was shining on the patio. Zack and Tami came back from the picket fence, holding hands, a loving couple. Dorinda joined them on the patio, after spooning out w
et cat food for Singalong in the kitchen. She was wearing the Oaxacan hat. She sat down next to Tami, on one end of the patio. Zack crossed his legs on the other end. Singalong scarfed up the cat food. I mixed a stiff gin and tonic.

  From the kitchen I watched what was going on out there. Dorinda lifted the hat from her head and handed it over to Tami. Tami handed the hat to Zack. Zack was getting to his feet now. He lowered the hat on Tami’s head. Tami pulled on the brim but the hat didn’t fit. Zack held out the hat to Dorinda. Dorinda shook her sun-soaked pale bald head, nothing doing. So Zack lowered the hat on his own head. He turned the brim up in front of his face; then he stooped to receive Dorinda’s kiss. Then, taking Dorinda by the hand, he lifted her out of her lawn chair. Again she kissed him. This time they embraced.

  Barreling out to the patio, I left the French doors open. It was the humiliation that got to me, Dorinda playing Zack’s game, one of many, liking it, letting me know she did, stroking Zack’s face, the back of his neck. Finally, Dorinda slipped out of Zack’s embrace. She took possession of the hat, came to me, gazed up at me, lifted the hat up over my head.

  “Nothing doing,” I said. “I’m not playing Zack’s game.”

  “All right, then don’t,” Dorinda said, and put the hat back on her head. That ended the hat-passing game.

  That night I did barbecued chicken on the grill. We stayed out in the backyard drinking Zack’s cognac. Firecrackers were going off up and down the block. Zack had picked up bottle rockets. They were lined up on the patio, trained on Seymour Smith’s backyard. Dorinda and Tami twirled sparklers.

  It was Zack who lit the first fuse. I heard the hiss and flitter of the rocket launching, the lift off, the sputtering arc. Zack looked pleased with himself. He must have known I’d grown up with bottle rockets. Getting down on his hands and knees with his skinny butt in the air, he was sighting, measuring along the fuse. This one made a beautiful arc and detonated high over Seymour Smith’s house.

  Dorinda got up and went to Zack. She said she wanted to go out for cigarettes. Zack said he would drive her. He suggested we all do a tour of the town, watch the fireworks display at the city park. No thanks, Tami said; she’d rather stay here with me. I said I’d keep Tami company. That’s how Dorinda wanted it. Before she left with Zack she handed me the Oxacan hat, with a faint smile of culpability.

  “You keep it for me. Where I’m going I won’t need it.”

  Tami said she wanted to wear it, which was all right with me, why not? She kept it on over drinks in the kitchen, slow dancing in the living room. In the guest bedroom she took it off, arranged it over her naked navel, the plaited straw of the crown poking up. She asked me to tell her a story, a bedtime story, just for her. Zack never told her stories. I couldn’t think of any stories but the ones I told Dorinda.

  There was this grasshopper on casters. He really thought he was hell on wheels. There was this butterfly girl with gossamer wings who was kind to this foolish grasshopper, who got him out of all kind of scrapes, saved him from cats and marauding birds, literally lifted him up sometimes. Tami put my hand on her tummy, but I couldn’t tell Tami this story. I left Tami hugging her beautiful legs. Singalong was in the kitchen. He was waiting for me to feed him so I filled his bowl with dry cat food. Then I went to the medicine cabinet, in the bathroom, to look for Dorinda’s nausea pills. They were missing, as I had expected.

  I stayed up, playing some tapes. I played John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, a little Miles, some Bill Evans. I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. The sky lightened over the rooftops. Singalong paced on the screen porch, unable to push through the screen door. I let him out and went outside. I thought of turning on the lawn sprinkler.

  I heard a monoplane, like an outboard on a windy lake. The monoplane flew in out of the east and started circling high overhead. A second plane circled around the first. I saw a pink rectangular parachute, all the beauty of it flying open, then Zack’s wind-surfing raucous blue parachute flapping open in witless mimicry. A man and a woman in gliding descent, still a long way above the pines. The parachutes scudded in billowing flight, the pink one moving below the blue, the lines taut, harnesses snugly in place.

  Tami pulled on my shirtsleeve. The egg white of her eyes stood out. “You want to know how it’s done? You have to climb out of the airplane. You have to work your way up the strut. Your instructor will give you the go sign and then you let go of the strut.”

  Tami was wearing the Oxacan hat.

  It has gone into remission.

  Singalong wants to stay where he is, curled up in Dorinda’s lap. Sing isn’t happy when she asks him to move. His ears are set back when I pick him up, when I set him down on the floor of the porch. He goes to the screen door and waits. Let Singalong stalk the unwary bird, the chipmunk that forgets to look.

  “You might have a lot of time left,” I said, thinking medicine cabinet, pills. I wouldn’t be doing that for awhile. “What is it? What do you really want?”

  Dorinda gets up and goes to the door. She looks out at the backyard as if she might really hate to leave it. But when she turns to me, she has gone far away.

  “I know you care for me,” she says. “But you’re not connected to me anymore. You haven’t been since I became ill. Everything that is you is inside you.”

  “That’s where you are, Dorinda,” I said, knowing she already knew that and that it wouldn’t help for me to say it. “You’re the one who’s not connected.”

  Dorinda tilts the Oaxacan hat. “I’m connected to Zack for the present,” she says. She asks me to look after Singalong. “You’ll feed him. Change his litter?”

  I say I will look after Singalong. And her plants, I say I will look after them.

  It has been turning cold again, at night. Most of the plants I have moved inside—the potted palms, the bougainvillea, the little Japanese tree with its jade-green leaves, the plant with the thorns, a scattering of tiny red flowers. I have been making up new bedtime stories. I’ve changed the grasshopper to a cricket on wheels. Something new, a cricket on wheels.

  Singalong is on the bed table, his tail wrapped around his forepaws. Dorinda has put down her water cup. I think of Dorinda with Singalong, imagine a summer day, and begin.

  White Orchid

  Lorna Wiggins had taken to sitting out on the back porch, leafing through real estate brochures, woolgathering. She might meet a man on Destin Beach, win the Georgia lottery. Someone solid but fun to be with. And if she won the lottery she could say goodbye to handing out license plates, sitting in front of a computer screen.

  It was time to move the sprinkler. Tendonitis clawed at her ankles as she forced herself to her feet. She ducked under the arcing spray, catching drops in her hair. Traced the sinuous hose to a leaky spigot. Stooping, she turned off the water, unscrewed the hose. She dragged hose and sprinkler to the front yard, found another spigot behind dense spirea bushes. She heard her sprinkler harmonizing with her neighbor’s across Shelton Mill Road. Mr. Kayline, his wife had left him a year ago, not long after Brad left Lorna.

  She turned the lights on in the living room. Found a magazine that had come in the mail. Smoked a cigarette, suddenly realizing it was the next to last one in the pack. Braxton came out of his room, trousers puffing over Reeboks she had given up on urging him to tie. A sweatshirt lumped over his belly.

  “I won’t be having dinner at home tonight,” Braxton informed her in a snooty English accent he’d picked up from Monty Python reruns.

  “And tomorrow night and the night after that?”

  “Depends on what happens tonight. Tonight is very important to me. I have a date with a chahming young lady.”

  He didn’t ask her for money.

  “You could get me a pack of cigarettes?”

  “With what, pray tell. I’m nearly broke.” Braxton smoothed out his hair. His pale blue eyes begged her to see things his way.


  She handed him a twenty. “Never mind about the cigarettes. And I expect you back here tonight.”

  “I’ll be back at the stroke of midnight.” She felt Braxton’s hands on her shoulders. “Don’t worry about me, Mom. You need to worry about yourself. Smoking two packs a day, I’d say that was something to worry about.”

  “Really.”

  “Really and truly.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You won’t so what can I do?”

  “You can get a job. You can consider graduating from high school. You can do anything but what you’re doing.”

  “What I’m doing? I’m improving my mind.”

  “How does doing nothing improve your mind?”

  “It opens it up to what really matters.”

  She didn’t ask like what. She knew what. Meditation. Letting out all the bad air. Being in tune with the grass and the trees.

  “This girl I met. She likes what I like.”

  “So if all you’re going to do is meditate, what do you need money for?”

  “For sushi. There’s this Japanese sushi bar where we hang out a lot. And gas for my car.”

  “And car insurance, which I’m paying for. And your Reeboks, and your iPod.”

  “That’s entertainment, Mom. It’s the icing on the cake.”

  He seemed so sure of himself. And if whoever this girl was dumped him? He’d be back in his room or they’d be watching television and he’d take over the remote for the night.

  Lorna picked up chicken, potato salad, coleslaw at the Lazy Bee. Josh was clerking tonight. He had graduated from Beauregard High yet here he was working in his father’s convenience store. Someday Braxton might graduate, and if that day ever came find a decent job. But finding a wife, what woman would want a man looking and acting like Braxton? Brad used to say he’ll grow out of it. Brad did what he could to make a man of him. Took him quail hunting, but Braxton refused to kill a bird. Took him fishing, but Braxton snarled up his fish line, and when he did catch a fish he threw it back in.