by Tara Ison
ISN’T SHE FINISHED yet? I ask. I move aside the plastic grocery bag of skinless chicken breasts, broccolini, whole-grain pitas, fruit, and skim milk and sit closer to him in the booth.
She’s a work-in-progress, he tells me. He leans past me to riffle in the bag. Oh, shit. I forgot to tell you. No more dairy. She’s switching to soy.
I’m sorry.
That’s okay. I can stop on my way home, I guess.
We don’t speak for a moment, just eat our pasta primaveras without garlic, our salads with fennel and grape tomatoes. I’d ordered a forty-dollar bottle of Pinot Grigio, and we drink it.
So, I say, what’s she doing this time?
Tummy tuck. The liposuction made her pretty saggy. Although she says it was even like that before, from having a kid. He glances under the table, at the seat to the other side of me. Hey, didn’t you get my e-mail?
He has abandoned his old treatment, started all over again, same story but a completely different take. I’m realizing, I think, that this is what he always does. I wonder if he’ll ever be ready to go to script.
Yeah, I got it. I printed it out for myself, but I had finals today, I couldn’t get to the copy place. I’m sorry.
Shit. I’m supposed to be copying right now.
I’ll go tomorrow. Maybe I can drop the copies off at your place?
Excuse me?
Oh, yeah. Well, maybe you can get away and meet me tomorrow afternoon? Or tomorrow night?
Maybe. It depends. I’ll just do it myself. He nudges me with his elbow. How’d your finals go?
Okay. They’re over. Just one semester left.
Yeah, congratulations. Then it’s welcome to the real fucking world, kiddo.
I know.
Wait’ll you have to pay bills. Wait’ll you have to find a decent place to live.
Fine by me. I can’t wait to get out of there. I’m so fucking sick of being treated like a kid.
He shrugs. You just don’t appreciate what you’ve got.
So, what did they do to her? I ask.
It’s like this . . . he leans over and reaches under my shirt, trying to pull up a handful of belly flesh. It’s like they squeeze as much of her stomach skin as they can get. . . .
He pulls, and there isn’t much to grab, so it hurts. But I like the hold he has on me.
. . . and they staple it like this—he makes those kachunk noises—she’s got these dozens of staples all across her gut. He finishes kachunking across my torso. And they cut off all the extra.
Won’t that leave a scar?
She says she can wear a belt over it or something. And you can rub vitamin E over the scar so it won’t be so bad.
You didn’t ask me to get any vitamin E.
You do that later, after they take the staples out. Right now her stomach’s all puffed up, like she’s pregnant. She looks like shit. And it hurts, she can barely move.
Right now I’m out celebrating finals being over with my friend Stacy, I tell him.
Yeah?
I can stay out pretty late.
Yeah, listen . . . I actually better get going soon. No dessert, even.
What do you mean?
I’m sorry. But now that I have to stop at the store and everything . . . and she’s in bad shape this time, I probably need to get back. . . .
Oh.
He lets go of his grip on my stomach to scoop up the last of his pasta.
Come on, no big deal. You look like you’re going to cry. I need to take care of her, all right? Don’t be so fucking selfish. She’s really hurting. You want to be a big girl about this, or what?
I DECIDE I might as well stop at the copy place tonight, maybe he’ll be able to slip out for breakfast tomorrow and wouldn’t it be a good idea if I had copies ready for him then. The treatment for his new script is twelve pages long, and the original has been cut up into pieces and scotch-taped and paperclipped back together—I don’t want to trust the counter guys to do it right, so I grab a key for the self-service machines and stand in line with my manila folder. Although it’s almost midnight, there’s a long wait. The whole mall is busy. It looks like half of Los Angeles is out strolling in couples or having coffee at the coffee place, ice cream at the ice cream place, or in here copying their screenplays and treatments. I glance at the pages of his treatment as the copied pages collate, wondering how he’s changed his story, but I’m thinking about the girlfriend, how she keeps coming back and back and back for more work. How much more of herself she can replace, shore up, wire together? I marvel at what she’s putting herself through, how she can keep standing all the pain, how worth it it all must be.
I finish at the copy machine and go to the central table for stapling. I staple and staple, still thinking about the girlfriend at his home in his bed right now, with all that pain, and those icepacks and punctures and clipped-shut swollen seams, and I glance up, outside, to see strolling past the coffee place what looks like my boyfriend, I’m sure it is, I think, holding hands with someone, both of them slipping their tongues around ice cream cones in perfect and blithe sync. I can’t tell if it’s a grown-up-looking little girl or a girlish, well-held-together mature woman. I can’t tell if it’s a mother or a daughter, or either, and does it even matter, I realize I don’t know which story to believe, which is more real or more made up. Maybe no one was ever in pain or thrall. I just see the hand-holding, and the stroll, and my insides are all going to spill, like I’ve been gutted, split open, then left alone on a hook to hang.
I look down and see I’ve stapled a finger, clean through the very tip, where it’s all nerve and just a very little flesh, no blood, really. Driven through and punched tight, and it feels like absolutely nothing at all. Surprising, that it feels like nothing. I would have thought it would feel completely like something else.
DADDY?
It’s late and my father’s bedroom light is out. But I knock, anyway. I was thinking that just maybe he’d be waiting up, that he’d grill me about where I was or who I was with. I can’t remember the last time he did that. I can’t remember the last time he questioned me as he used to, the last time he was worried or strict, the last time he braided my hair or bathed me, told me I was pretty or wonderful or smart, dressed me, came into my room at night, sweet, undressed me, punished me, cared. The special kind of father things.
There’s no answer, but I open the door and go in, anyway.
NEEDLES
They’re in Needles for the night. At least, that was the plan. But Rick had shut his phone off against her early in the day’s white glare and she’d lost sight of the weaving truck after his angry, game-play cutoff on the westbound I-40, just past the Arizona border. Day’s end she spotted the heat-rippled Needles off-ramp and the Motel 6 sign. Worth a try. She has her panting, paw-sweat little dog with her, and all Motel 6’s take little dogs—it’s been their chain of choice the last three nights since leaving Des Moines. Her driving her car in front, hands clenched at 10 and 2, Rick coasting along back of her in the rental truck, with a diminishing cooler of beer and a year’s worth of her accumulated thrift store crap she just couldn’t bring herself to leave behind this time, homeward bound, heading west, convoy ho. She’s sick of baking macadam, and pink-furred roadkill bounced to the shoulder, and Christian radio static. She’s sick of strategy and bluff. No truck in the Motel 6 parking lot, but she doesn’t care, she’s stopping for the night.
But yeah, he’s checked in, as planned. She tells the graveyard-shift teenager behind the counter, a girl with flayed hair and eyelined, won’t-ever-make-it-further-into-California-than-this eyes, that she’s his girlfriend. The girl shrugs, slaps on the counter a second key ringed on a red plastic diamond. It’s after nine at night and there’s still burning air going, still blaze and blistering skin.
The window AC in Room 117 is gasping out chill. No actual Rick, but his backpack is flung on one of the twin beds. On the nightstand, a bucket of soggy ice and a motel tumbler with gathered ocher drops. Beer for
the road, bourbon at rest stops. The usual game. She’s known this for twelve years and still begged him out to Iowa at the end of her visiting professor term to help get her moved back home again, or just moved back, just get her moved. He’d listened to the usual conditions, and still promised, agreed. They know the rules printed inside the cardboard lid by heart by now. She fills her little dog’s water bowl from the tap, throws in a few ice cubes, and the dog laps and laps. She’s tempted to cool-shower rinse, grab a patty melt at the Denny’s next door, get into a rough-sheeted twin bed and sleep. But there is still the token move. She gives her little dog yesterday’s sweat-stiff T-shirt to bunk into, and a kiss, a stomach rub, and heads out.
She hunts the four-street grid of Needles, finds the truck parked crooked and blocking a trailer’s driveway on the last gravel road before desert scrub. A loose pyramid of fist-smashed beer cans on the passenger seat, her moving boxes stuffed tight and pressed rhomboid in the bed. There are three bars on this block, and she picks the saddest postcard one, with Xmas lights still looped above the faux-adobe entrance, unlit. The air inside is damp, sour saloon air, and he’s at the far end of the bar, gulping from a tumbler and nodding passionately at an old soaked-and-smoked man with shaky cracked hands, mumbling into an old man’s clutched glass. She gets up close behind him and she knows he knows she’s there without turning around.
Get out of here, he says. I’m busy. I love this guy.
Let’s get some sleep, Rick.
I quit. I’m out. I’m hitting the road. Be in L.A. by morning. You get your stuff later somewhere.
Come on, she says.
You have to listen to him. You have to love this guy. You have to.
I can’t, she says. You know that.
She touches his bare elbow, below his sleeve, but he both jerks away and shoves at her.
I’m not playing anymore, he says. You can’t do this to me, like always, like you do.
If he lurches out, she decides while he rants, if he makes it into the truck, drives off with all her worldly crap in the world onto black lost desert roads, she’s calling the highway patrol. That’s the next move. The new plan. When he begins to cry like he does she gets him off his stool, gets him under an arm and out the door and into her car, glad it’s finally gone dark and moon-glow cool. He’s crying, all shakes and bourbon sweat. She gets him back to the icy Motel 6 room, gets him onto one of the twin beds. She locks the chain lock, flops on the other bed next to her sleep-shivering little dog.
I’m so disgusting, he says. I’m so sorry.
I’m sorry, too, she says. For all of it.
He cries and cries, until she goes to him. She edges onto the cliff of nylon comforter, rubs his arm, gives him a pat on the head like a pet, but not like a dog. He grips her T-shirt hem.
Please lie here with me, he says, his voice cracking. That’s all, I promise. Just lie.
She moves, lies carefully on her side in front of him. He curls behind her, sour mouth gulping at her hair, arm locked around her ribs, like they do.
This is all I ever wanted from you, he cries. All I want, I swear. Why can’t I have just this?
APOLOGY
He comes home for dinner three hours late, but at least he’s come home. It’s a good sign, she’s sure. A sign of healing, the first delicate crust of a scab. She’s made a meal of his favorites from long ago, from when she was good and attentive to that kind of thing—a real meal, one that demanded hours of preparation and produced a cruel steam burn on her wrist. A meal of remorse.
Honey, just sometimes? he’d pleaded to her months ago, jabbing at the Styrofoam, You’re a great cook, can’t we have a real dinner, not takeout, just once?
And just once can’t you open a fucking can? she’d bitched back, impatient and frayed.
Now she wishes she’d chewed off her tongue, met him halfway. Now, all ready for him: veal roast carved into limp petals, lobster risotto with saffron, asparagus with hollandaise, all served on the wedding crystal and china and silverware they’ve rarely ever used. A pear tart with fresh pears, and a from-scratch graham cracker crust. A meal made with much care.
Forgive me, all the food says.
She’s tried to keep the tart warm without drying it out. She’s tried to keep the sauces fresh with hourly infusions of butter and Marsala wine, tried to keep tamped down the impatience and fray. By the time he comes home, late, but at least he’s come home, it’s a good sign, she’s put Esther and Justin to bed over protests; it will be just the two of them at this dinner, him and her at the dining room table with vanilla votives lit, the first time in a long time. He’s come back, he’s home, so what if he’s late? This special, shared, intimate meal: Now they’ll be able to move on, heal. But instead of eating her dinner when he arrives, he just stands there a moment, not meeting her eyes and dumping his duffel bag on the freshly waxed entryway floor, and she can see pressed into his face the memory of the last time he came home, six days ago, came home early from work, three or four hours earlier than usual, earlier than he was supposed to, when he stood in the entryway hearing, first, the silence of the house, then, hearing. My house, in my house! he’d wailed, like wronged husbands in noir or camp, and he was right, she knew, although It’s my house, too! she’d wanted to assert back, even then, but didn’t. The kids at school and daycare, and she, his wife, supposed to be at work, and yet there was something to hear. He glowers now, he walks down the hall and away from her, she hears him pause at what would be the door to their bedroom, then he passes it, goes straight into the kids’ room, wakes them up to say hello, to let them know he’s come home. She hears crying, all of them wracked. He’s three hours late because he’s shattered, crippled, rent, all her fault, truly, and her heart goes out to him now, literally; she can see her heart cracking through her chest and hurtling toward him in dripping, contrite offering. Her sauces have congealed, but it’s all her fault, really, and at least he’s home. He has spent six days and five nights at his cousin Don’s, whom he cannot stand but was better than her, until the phone calls from Esther brought him back. Their little girl getting hysterical on the phone, pleading with him to come home, not understanding. I know you did something bad, Mommy, she said to her mother every day he was gone. She looked at her mother with an accusatory scowl, with his face, she’s such his child, but was too scared to really let her have it; she sensed, primally, her mother might be all she had left. You did something bad and that’s why Daddy isn’t here.
She knows he will stay with the kids until they fall back into reassured, open-mouthed, hiccupping sleep. Presents for them in his pockets, probably, candy or stickers or temporary tattoos, he’ll tease them and soothe. But his return won’t absolve her, in their eyes; he has come home a weeping open wound. He wants them to see him bleed. Now, he’ll turn them against her. She cleans up the kitchen, the offered and unaccepted food, and imagines with guilt the baby calf, force-fattened and cramped into a box, the live lobster thrust in boiling water, both of them dying for this showy display of contrition she’d tried to make, all for nothing.
She puts away the crystal, the china, because he hates it when she leaves things dirty or lying around, scratches the dead, smoky votives free of clinging wax and puts them to soak, polishes the sterling flatware by hand, accidentally slices a fingertip replacing the carving knife in its box, and when she comes into the living room she finds him on the living room couch, asleep, fully dressed and curled into an anguished fetal ball. He has made up a bed for himself with Esther’s little girl-sized Beauty and the Beast sheets, a scratchy sofa pillow under his head. She, as she has done for the last five nights, goes to sleep in their double bed, alone. She puts her fingertip with its tiny, trifling cut in her mouth, sucks. She curls onto her side, presses her knees together, feels her naked thighs feel each other, hard. It hits her in full. She’s soiled it, their house, their bedroom, their bed. She knows he’s still seeing her naked at two in the afternoon, their flowered bedsheets grabbed to her breast and h
er most extravagant lace bra and panties on the floor. He still hears the voice behind him from the dark loom of their walk-in closet, such nice closets this house has, a selling point for them six years ago, her pregnant with Esther and both of them so interested in cabinetry, termite inspections, the condition of carpet pile. She still hears that voice, too, male, nervous, stupid—Hey, man, you caught us, I’m sorry, man, a sheepish huff of laughter—and thinks, What was I doing, what was I thinking? Wrapped in the cheap percale sheets he’d always hated but she’d insisted on buying—Honey, can’t you make the bed in the mornings, how long does that take, really? he’d complained, Hey, I have to be at work earlier than you do, she’d carped right back, You make the damn bed—two ugly sets for the price of one. She’d been trying to save money, she wanted to have another baby, have four of them together in this magazine house, symmetrical and sheltered. But now she knows he still smells it in this house, in their bed. The acidic, musky leak of what she’s done. The stain it’s left. He can’t be expected to forgive because of a silly pear tart and lobster risotto. He can’t be expected to ever breathe that taint in again, of course not. What was she thinking, pinning hope on that one take-it-all-back meal, that one weak try at cleansing, restoring, that one sad chalkboard sweep?
She gets up early to make him breakfast, another thing she’d let go of doing but it’ll be easier now that she’s going to quit her job, won’t be working anymore, and finds the Beast wrapped around his neck, Beauty in a kicked-off crumple at his feet.
No one could ever love you as much as I do, he’d said when he proposed, the sweetest, purest vow she’d ever heard, a happy promise, all that love.
WHEN HE COMES home a few nights later, he sniffs at the scent of blister and singe. He doesn’t look at her, just around the house, sniffing, a question on his face. She opens the sliding glass door with a sort of bow and he follows her out to the backyard, where she shows him the barbecue pit’s fluttery, charred mound: two flowered, percale double-sized sets, fitted and flat, pillow-slips, matching comforter, all now blackened with flame or drifted away as smoke. She shows him around the side of the house, near the trash cans: the maple bed frame, the mattress and box spring, all disassembled and dragged outside on her back, now waiting for Goodwill. She’s purified the tainted air. She’s cleansed the soul of the house. He kicks at the barbecue pit heap; ashes float, something cracks. He follows her back into the house, then, yes, into their bedroom, where he stops this time at the sight of newness, the alkaline smell of laundry detergent and carpet deodorant and lemon-oiled wood. A new oak bedroom set, a California king mattress this time, new pima cotton sheets and duvet with fresh sateen comforter, everything unused, unslept in, unsoiled.