The Folded World

by Amity Gaige

  “Jesus,” said Charlie. And then, over his shoulder, “Over this way, Opal!”

  At the end of the aisle, he entered a small clearing, where the salesman was bent over into a box, rummaging around, as if he’d been there for hours.

  “Jesus H.,” said Charlie. “Big place.”

  The man stood up. “We’re the biggest mattress warehouse in the Northeast.”

  “I’ll bet.” Charlie stepped backward, looking for Opal.

  “You want to wait for your wife?”

  Charlie bobbed forward, laughing, waving his hand. “No, no. She’s not my wife. No. She’s my friend. We work together. We’re partners.” He waved his hand again.

  The mattress man nodded. “Doesn’t matter to me what people do,” he said.

  “Well. I’m just telling you she’s not my wife.”

  “I’m not one to judge,” said the mattress man.

  “Like I said—” Charlie stopped. “Why don’t you go ahead and show me what you’ve got.”

  The salesman showed Charlie four or five box spring models, which only varied in terms of price. Once Charlie picked the box spring, the salesman explained that of course you couldn’t put the box spring straight on the floor on account of air circulation problems but you could buy, for example, in an end-of-the-year closeout sale, this very simple metal bed frame on self-locking wheels. Charlie stepped backward into the aisle again, but Opal was still nowhere in sight.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll take the frame, too. Okay?”

  “Good choice. All for one low price.”

  “Fine,” said Charlie, dusting off his hands. “So how do I get back to where I came from?”

  The salesman stepped into the aisle and explained it, gesturing. He ripped off Charlie’s bill, and Charlie carried it flapping in front of him as he ran back down the aisle, stopping momentarily at two identical crossroads, lost.

  “Opal?” he shouted.

  He jogged back in the other direction. Then he tried jumping up to see over the stacks of mattresses. Jogging to the end of what seemed like an impassable aisle, he heard quiet, strangled breathing. He stopped short, coming slowly around the corner to see Opal sitting on a low metal shelf.

  “Jesus!” Charlie knelt in front of her. “Are you all right?”

  Her face contorted and turned pink. She put both hands on her head.

  “Oh. No, don’t cry.”

  “I have a headache,” she said.

  “Oh, man,” said Charlie. “I’m sorry. I guess I—I—”

  His hands itched. He didn’t like seeing her sitting there on a shelf like something for sale. It wasn’t right—it wasn’t Christian—not to comfort somebody weeping like that. He put one arm around her shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” he said gently. “I’m sorry I left you behind.”

  She sniffled, suddenly erect, as if struck with a new and pleasant idea.

  “You left me behind,” she said, not unkindly. It was as if the small truth of what happened had entered, shouting down the larger illusion.

  “That’s all. I’m sorry. But it’s all right now. I found you. Plus, congratulations. You got a brand new box spring and a frame with self-locking wheels.”

  He took off his jacket and put it over her shoulders. Opal looked down at the jacket, toying with the zipper. Charlie heard a cough and looked up.

  The salesman was gazing down at them. With a tight, unpleasant smirk, the man winked.

  Back in Norris Park, Charlie leaned across Opal and pushed her door open.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m really late for my next appointment. So I want to tell you that your box spring is going to be delivered next week by somebody named Mario.”

  Opal nodded vigorously. “No problem,” she said.

  “Is your headache better?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. She did not get out of the car.

  “I’ve—So I’ve really got to go. But listen. If you need help setting it up, you can call me. But Mario will probably do it all for you. OK?”

  “Call the switchboard for you?”

  “Yes, call the switchboard.”

  Opal looked down at her nicotine-stained hands.

  “That was fun,” she said.

  “It was?” said Charlie, surprised. “Well, that’s great.” He laughed. “That’s great.” He chucked her on the shoulder.

  He watched her as she got out.

  “Oh, hey, Opal,” he called. “Sorry. Can I have my jacket back?”

  She pulled the jacket off and pushed it through the window.

  “Hey thanks, man.” Charlie waved. And then—looking clean, fresh, happy, completely normal, almost like a sister, fair and skinny and duck-toed—she marched up to her house and disappeared inside.

  He pulled out toward the highway. After driving for a while, he realized his eyes were moist. In his heart, a feeling of redoubling gladness, almost as he had felt as a child in church, or at the end of a movie wherein the world is narrowly saved.

  At the beginning, when they give them to you in the hospital, you cannot believe they intend to entrust such things to you, and sometimes when you first go out with them in the world you forget to pull the stroller along. And then (this is what she was realizing) there comes a point beyond which you cannot function naturally without them. The only pose that feels comfortable is the pose of holding a child. Walking alone and aimlessly, hugging her coat closed, she felt like a teenager, casting about for a struggle or a temptation. The precious hour she had wrangled to arrange the babysitter now became an hour to kill. The girl, Joanne—a serious, peach-complexioned girl who lived next door with her parents—was studying child development at the same community college where Alice had once registered for Foundations of English Literature. Although Alice had lingered for a long time in the apartment explaining things, it appeared that Joanne was completely adept with the twins, moving in the dim nursery light between the cribs and the changing table, testing the warmth of the formula by dropping it soberly on her wrist. The girl was at least more academically qualified for mothering than Alice herself.

  She walked with her emptiness past the record store, the cheese shop, the campaign office. Her jeans chafed her thighs. She wondered how long the feeling of bereftness would linger if you were to be separated from them permanently. Motherhood destroyed, in a way, one’s ability to be alone. The threads between her and her babies stretched and sagged but would never snap. In fact, the more they sagged, the less likely they were to snap. All humanity, then, was bound each to each by an infinity of stretched webbing. Even he, she thought, looking so isolate and so beautiful, even he had a mother. Through the cold glass window, she could see him sitting at the cash register, working a pair of scissors across a sheet of acetate.

  “Hi,” said Alice, pausing inside the shop door.

  “Well, hi,” he said, his scissors open. He looked at her for a moment in the doorway, then with slightly more recognition said again, “Hi.”

  “Hi. I finished the book.”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  “The book about remembering, by Proust?”

  “Oh.” He nodded. Then he said, “You finished that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You finished that whole book?”

  “Well you know, the first book. Took me two weeks.” Alice wiped her nose with her hand, then stood there, too embarrassed to turn back conversationally, for she saw that she was bragging. “I loved it. It was really—Everything was so—” She kicked at the floor with her clog. She had yet to really look into his face. When she did, she was alarmed by the complete levelness of his expression, and how it looked exactly the same as last time, how she had not exaggerated it in her memory. He was dressed in denim overalls and a loose white undershirt. His eyes, crow-black and steady, had not left her face.

  A man in a hunting vest walked up to the register. “Where’s your military history?”

  The boy got up and walked s
lowly across the room and pointed at a shelf with his scissors.

  “Don’t you know the rule about scissors?” Alice said.

  He looked down at his hands. She walked up to him. Taking the scissors out of his hands, she closed the blades, and returned them to him handle out.

  “Hold them like that.”

  He stood looking down at the scissors.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” she said. “It’s just something they tell children.”

  He looked up and nodded. Then he smiled.

  “Where are those babies of yours?” he said, pointing at her with the scissor handle.

  “With a babysitter. Our first time.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Everything’s OK.” Abruptly the young man turned around and began to walk toward the back of the store. “I have something for you.”

  Alice pursued. “You do?”

  He ducked into a small storeroom. She stood at the doorway watching him dig around in the boxes, his shoulder blades working. The room was painted blue and glowed like an aquarium in the winter light. It smelled of must. She leaned against the doorway, watching him. A black cat leapt off of a shelf behind the register and walked around her legs. She knelt, rubbing its silky head.

  “This is where my uncle keeps new books that I haven’t shelved yet.” The young man peered at her under his arm. “Keep an eye on the store, would you?”

  “Oh,” Alice said. “Oh no. They’re looting the place.”

  He stood in alarm.

  “No. It was a joke.”

  He came out of the storeroom and looked anyway. Then he handed Alice a large, water-stained volume.

  “Clarissa,” she said.

  “You can have it for free. It’s a duplicate.”

  Her eyes widened with pleasure. She opened the book and then put her nose inside and took a long sniff. He looked down at her, shaking his head.

  “Don’t smell it,” he said. “Read it.”

  She was laughing. She laughed for a long moment, aware that her laughter was odd, sourceless, but she couldn’t help it, clutching the heavy book to her chest. She felt so entirely grateful.

  He said, “Your hair is like oil on water.”

  Alice stopped laughing and stared at him with an open mouth. His face grew serious. He edged past her, out of the doorway. He went to the register and popped it open. He withdrew a sleeve of quarters and cracked it like an egg against the drawer.

  Alice walked up to him. She put Clarissa on the counter.

  “Have you read this?” she asked him softly.

  “No.”

  “We could read it together. At the same time. Like a book club with two people in it. You said yourself it was a duplicate.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, spilling out his quarters. “I don’t think I could concentrate that long.”

  “Come on, if I can read it—with twins—you sure can.”

  “I’m more of a writer these days. I’m not much of a reader anymore.”

  The door opened, and a gust of cold air poured in.

  “What do you write?” she asked.

  “Poems. Tiny ones.”

  “You write tiny poems and I read large books.” Alice leaned forward. “What are your poems about? I’d genuinely like to know.”

  He looked up. “How I went crazy,” he said.

  “Sweetheart?”

  Alice whirled around, one hand to her chest.

  “Hey, baby,” Charlie said, grinning, rubbing his arms. “Whoa, it’s cold out there.” He looked back outside, then he smiled at the other customers in the store as if they’d been expecting him. “Great place. No wonder you like it so much.”

  He walked up to her and gave her a full-mouthed kiss. Alice neatened her hair. She pressed at the bridge of her nose.

  “You surprised me,” she whispered. “Where’d you come from?”

  “I saw you through the window. I had an appointment around the corner and when I saw you I couldn’t resist. I thought,” Charlie grimaced, “maybe I’d give you a lift home, if you wanted, it’s so damned cold.”

  “Oh. Sure.” Alice looked down, tucking a strand of hair in her mouth. “I’ll take a lift. Thanks.”

  Charlie leaned over.

  “Hey,” he whispered. “I missed you, is the truth of it.”

  Then he leaned back, holding her by both shoulders. She was looking fixedly at the cords of his neck and the reddish hairy tuft of his chest hair when he exclaimed, “By God. Hal? Is that you?”

  Alice spun around. The young black-eyed clerk was smiling at her husband, reaching out a hand. She gasped hoarsely.

  “Jesus, you look great,” said Charlie, moving past Alice to shake the boy’s hand. “Damn, how are you? It’s been a long time.”

  “I don’t remember your name,” said Hal.

  “I’m Charlie. Charlie Shade.”

  “I remember you,” said Hal. “I remember you a lot. Just not your name.”

  Charlie clapped the young man’s shoulder. “You look great, man.”

  “I feel good.” Hal nodded his head and put his hands in the pockets of his overalls. He looked quickly at Alice. “I remember you. How’s Mattoon?”

  Charlie laughed. “I told you about Mattoon? Jesus, I was fresh out of school when I met you. Totally green.”

  “I thought you were good. You were a human being. My mother still talks about you.”

  Charlie laughed, motioning for Alice. She came and stood under his arm.

  “Hot damn,” Charlie said, looking around the bookstore. “What a great gig. Surrounded by books. Now you can read all you want. Hal here is very well-read.”

  “Well,” said Hal. “My uncle runs it. I just help out Mondays and Wednesdays. Sweep. Shelve.”

  “That’s excellent,” said Charlie. He stopped, smiled down at Alice. Her mouth was open and she was blinking rapidly. “Hey. Did Hal here help you find what you needed?”

  He kissed her again, rather demonstratively this time, and then looked at Hal and immediately felt bad for kissing the pretty woman that Hal kept stealing glances at. Somehow, he felt very tenderly toward her, to see her caught flirting like this, her face flushed with the pleasure of books and attractive company. He preferred seeing this Alice to an Alice sitting cross-legged in front of the television, folding onesies, hair pulled back unevenly with barrettes. Besides, she was his. He could understand how Hal felt. He had seen her through the bookstore window himself. He kissed the top of her head.

  Alice was looking down at Clarissa.

  “She reads a lot of books,” said Charlie to the silent pair.

  “Good for business,” said Hal.

  “She reads a hell of a lot. She’ll read everything in here, I bet you.”

  “Yeah,” said Hal, laughing. “Maybe.”

  “Well this is incredible,” said Charlie, shaking his head. “Running into you, Hal. It’s a real pleasure to see you.”

  Hal scratched the back of his neck, nodding.

  “All right, my man,” said Charlie, holding out his hand to the side. The boy put his pencil between his teeth and reached sheepishly for the hand.

  Charlie turned to Alice. “Ready to go?”

  Alice nodded.

  “Thanks a lot for the book,” she said, not looking up.

  “All right,” said Hal.

  They walked toward the door.

  “See you,” said Alice.

  “See you,” said Hal.

  Charlie turned. “Hal,” he said. “Great to see you, man. I mean it.”

  “Well,” Charlie said, laughing shortly. “I’ll be. Hal.”

  He held the door as Alice bent into the car and sat down. He came around to the other side and got in. He pulled the car into traffic.

  “I’ll be damned.” Charlie shook his head at the passing landscape. “What a good-looking kid, huh? He looks—” He raised his eyebrows, thinking about it. His face was fuller now, elastic, comprehending. “—perfectly healthy. No kidding. If he�
��s lucky, if he takes it easy, he may be completely out of the woods. A fair number of people who have a psychotic episode don’t actually develop a full-blown illness, you know. He’s got a damned good chance, looks like to me. Don’t you think?”

  Suddenly Alice turned from the window. “Dammit, Charlie. I wish I didn’t know what I know.”

  “What do you mean? About Hal? He’ll never find out that you know.”

  “I know,” Alice said, pointing to her chest. “I know that I know. I know everything about him. I know that his mother has a green dress!”

  “It’s all right. Hey now, calm down. It’s not a problem. Hell, I might have made some of it up. The green dress, I probably made that up.”

  “You couldn’t have made it up. It’s too good.”

  Charlie opened his mouth, then closed it.

  “I shouldn’t have asked you to tell me about people,” said Alice. “It was selfish. I know you’re not supposed to tell me. It’s not right. Now look. It—collapsed.”

  “Hey, everybody does it sometimes. It’s all right. You’re not some stranger. You’re my wife. Everybody does it sometimes. It’s just a weird funny thing that it all came together like that. That’s just the danger of working in the same town for a while. You start seeing your clients all over the place. In fact,” said Charlie, turning down their street a little wildly, the wheels whining, “Hal’s a success story. He’s back. Do you think he looked ashamed to see me? Not at all. Proud. When I met him, he was half his weight, terrified. Crazy. Now look at him, standing so straight. A working man.”

  “And his college scholarship?” asked Alice. “His wrestling career?”

  Charlie pulled up to their apartment building and turned off the car. He put his arm over the back of Alice’s seat and looked at her.

  “You’re a good person. You have deep, genuine love for all people, real people and people in stories. I forget sometimes how deep you take it all in. I’m sorry I put you in an awkward position.”