by Amity Gaige
Charlie swallowed. He laughed, rubbing his jaw.
“Ha!” he said. “I’ll get out of your way, then. Sure. I certainly don’t want to be in your way. Since everything was going so nicely.”
He pulled the package of sour balls out of his pocket and tossed them on the chair next to Opal, along with the Redbook and the Newports. Opal’s eyes were closed, and she was leaning against the chair. He spoke anyway.
“I’m leaving some things for you, Opal. I’ll be back soon. You let the nurse know if you need anything. Bubble gum. Cassettes, maybe. Anything.” He put his hands in his empty pockets. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, softening now that he was turning tail like this, chased away by a twenty-year-old nurse. “You take care and try to just take it easy. Listen to the nurses and doctors as best you can. And when you’re ready, we’ll be there for you. And you can go back home and take care of yourself and do whatever you want.”
He stood there another moment. Opal did not move.
“But whatever happens, we won’t forget you.” He wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I won’t forget you.”
When she still did not open her eyes, Charlie nodded at the nurse.
“OK,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I’ll go.”
The breeze smelled of moss and trees and police horses. The park grounds popped and thawed around her. Spring would come. One day, soon, it would be here, flowered, offered, complete in itself. Alice took off her jacket and folded it beside her.
A squirrel pounced across the path and rested its paws inquiringly on the foot of her bench. She lifted the grocery bag onto her lap.
“Are you kidding?” she said to the squirrel. “No, you can’t have my stuff.”
The squirrel persisted, rose on his haunches, sniffing.
“Get lost,” said a voice behind her. The squirrel darted into the underbrush.
Alice stood, reflexively clutching her groceries. Standing beside the bench was a motionless figure.
“Jesus,” she said, heart pounding. “You surprised me.”
As he peered down into his lunch bag, she stared at the familiar white-scarred temple, the close shaven head, a brow bone like a burnished wooden beam.
“Salami,” Hal said, looking up from the bench. “Do you like salami?”
Alice swallowed. She pushed at the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know. I guess.”
“Want to trade?”
“Trade? I don’t have anything to trade,” Alice looked into her grocery bag. “Saran Wrap? A bottle of Drano?”
The boy smiled. “You should never offer a mental patient a bottle of Drano for lunch. He might accept.” He gestured beside him, at the bench. “Sit.”
“I actually have to get home soon,” Alice said, pinching her arms where they met around the soggy bag. “My mother is watching the twins for a bit—”
Hal looked at her, sandwich in hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I make you uncomfortable? I mean, about the Drano?”
“No.”
“A dumb joke.”
“No.”
“Hey, it’s all right.”
“Please. I’m just a generally clumsy person.”
“Will you please just sit down already?” said Hal, mouth full.
Alice sat. She placed the bag of groceries at her feet.
“All right,” she said. “OK. To tell you the truth, I feel awkward. Now. Knowing you, through my husband.”
“Knowing—”
“About you.”
“About my visit to the nuthatch? Hell, everybody knows about that.” Hal laughed. “I was All-American.”
Alice squinted.
“I was an All-American wrestler. You don’t just—slip away.”
“I see.”
“In fact, they say—they say I’m supposed to talk about it now. You know,” Hal withdrew a juice box, rolling his eyes, “to air it out.”
Alice leaned against the bench with her elbow, facing him. “So then, are you better now? Do you have to—go back?”
He gazed at her with his even, uncompromising expression. The juice rose up the straw and into his mouth.
She looked away. “See? Those are insensitive questions.”
“Hey, don’t be—hard on yourself. Sometimes it just takes me a minute. To—hear things.” The young man weighed his remaining sandwich in his wide, flat hand. “I’m not otherwise specified. Psychosis N.O.S. It doesn’t count unless it lasts. You’ve got to be crazy for a long time before they take you seriously. I’m crazy on a—probationary basis. You?”
“Am I crazy? I don’t think so.” She smiled. “But there’s always time.”
He looked at her fondly for a moment, his expression softening.
“Sure,” he said. “Don’t rush it.”
He tossed the soggy sandwich up and down lightly in his hand. “Where’s that bastard squirrel?”
“I think he’s over there,” said Alice. “In that tree.”
Hal threw the sandwich whole into the tree. The squirrel scampered away from it.
“You’ve got to break it into crumbs,” Alice laughed.
“Who says?”
“I do. I say.”
“He’s too good to eat it whole?”
“Well, it’s just, like, a courtesy. Like cutting a child’s meat. Haven’t you ever fed a duck or a pigeon or anything?”
Before she knew it, he was up and scaling the tree. He clawed at the slippery trunk with his sneakers and then he was up, up crouching in the branches, collecting the parts of the sandwich. With his jacket hitched up, Alice saw the band of his white briefs glowing in the afternoon shadows. He jumped down, flushed, happy to be given a physical challenge. He returned to her side on the bench and tore the sandwich into bits, laying them precisely and clownishly in the grass.
Alice leaned back and folded her arms.
“You’re very disarming, you know,” she said. “It’s nice.”
“I’m disarming?” He stood up and moved just to the other side of her on the bench, where there was hardly any room for him. He squeezed in between her body and the rail.
“Yeah, you are. Disarming.” She giggled. “Why did you move just over there?”
“I wanted to look at you from this side.”
Alice bent her head. He was looking at her, breathing from the climb. She felt his ribs go up and down against her arm, his breath on the side of her face.
“This is your good side,” he said after a moment. “The other one’s pretty good too.”
“If you say so,” she said softly.
He leaned back, spreading out his legs. She moved over an inch.
“Your hair is almost as pretty as my mother’s.”
“Really,” Alice said. “Only almost?”
“Almost. She was a beauty.”
“Is she—still alive?”
“I think so. I mean, I haven’t seen her since this morning.”
“God,” Alice said, elbowing him. “Don’t joke about stuff like that.”
He leaned forward on his knees, smiling. “I got you. Look, you’re smiling. You’re not going to have any arms left at this rate.”
And then, suddenly, without warning, he kissed her face. On the cheek, softly, as if somehow it could have been accidental.
“Sorry,” he said immediately.
Alice’s mouth fell open. She was unable to respond or to look away. His shoulders were squared toward her. He held the rolled top of the lunch bag, looking like a huge man-child in his varsity jacket. He leaned forward again. She turned away, catching her breath, his lips to her skin.
“I’m sorry,” he said into her ear, this time with a touch of insincerity. “I just wanted to kiss you on your good side.”
Abruptly, he stood. He looked down at her, his thumbs in his jacket pockets. He flapped his jacket open and closed.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m crazy. Remember?”
Then he smiled, a smile so sudden and explosive and foretelling it wa
s like getting smiled at through the leaves of a jungle. It made her speechless. He fell back and began to jog away. She was overcome with an urge to laugh. He jogged across the shadowy park, Cross Hill Varsity stitched across his jacket. Hands in his pockets, trotting along athletically, he seemed completely free of conscience or memory—memory, even, of her. He picked up a stick and whipped it into a bush. It was as if she was not there at all, behind him, her head full of pudding. And perhaps she was not. Perhaps with a kid who looked like that, he only dreamt you up. She pressed the palm of her hand to her cheek. She might as well have been leaning against her high school locker, still afraid that the heat running up her thighs was some sort of black magic that would be her ruin, as if she had no will, no reason.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, catching her breath.
Marlene dried her hands at the sink and replaced the damp dishcloth to the faucet. Beside it, the bottles were drying upside down on their racks, the nipples floating in warm water. Passing the nursery, she peered in once again.
Her daughter lay, still asleep, on the narrow bed. She had been sleeping there for hours, as if under a spell. Marlene could smell her buttery body heat, which she remembered well from all those years of cohabitation, all those years in high school, those deep sleeping years, those pajamas-all-Sunday years. Paused there, Marlene smiled at the sleeping figure, trying to affect the roll of Loving Mother in the Doorway. And yet, underneath, a growing gloom. For secretly she dreaded the idea of going back to Gloucester now. A tall empty house. The company of an irascible cat. Rows and rows of library books, long ignored and smelling of malaise. She scratched her chin. On the other hand, of course, she couldn’t stay forever. Perhaps she was encouraging some strain of laziness in Alice. To be able to sleep like that, like a teenager, in the middle of a weekday afternoon? With two infants in constant need of care?
She brought two bottles into the nursery and sunk them in the warmer. As if in collusion with their mother, the girls were sleeping deeply. She picked up Evelyn and sat in the rocking chair, slipping the nipple into her mouth before the infant had a chance to cry. Frances awoke, her wide purple eyes watching dispassionately through the bars of her crib. She was a cooperative baby. She did not care overmuch about herself.
Alice, Marlene remembered, had been sweet too. White as a sack of flour, with a whorl of black hair. Aside from her fair skin, the infant had claimed every other trait of the Portuguese in her. Marlene’s mother had been Portuguese, her father Quebequois. Marlene herself had wanted so much to be blonde, strawberry blonde like her father. But instead, she was dark-haired, dark-stained, her skin tanned easily, and for this she was always being banished to the shade by her father. She was bequeathed only his tallness. She remembered his reddish blond head bobbing up and down on the far side of a boxwood hedge. Always going somewhere with such resolve. Always tall. With a pale, aristocratic, consternated forehead, dented at the temples. His speech was touched with an elegant accent, for he sometimes emphasized the odd syllable, as in, Put on your jacket, Marlene. And although he was not a warm man, she knew in her heart that he loved her, if only as much as he loved himself, for in substance they were much the same. In groups they pretended to be sociable and gay, but alone together they watched all things with the same silent intensity. She never loved him more clearly than when the circus came to Gloucester: Watching the sequined man lower his head into the jaws of the great white tiger Albermarle, all the children squealing and their parents clutching them to their breasts, her father had known not to touch her or to exclaim or pretend to be frightened, and, driving home afterward, their identical satisfactions fused and shimmered in the silence.
But it was lost, all of it. The adorable stories caught in the throat. She had not spoken to Robert Bussard in as many years as Alice had lived, for he had disowned her when he learned of her pregnancy. She was nineteen; the front window curtains had been gently drawn closed against her. Among the Catholic immigrants of their particular circle in Gloucester, this action had been looked upon as just, somehow necessary. She was a girl with a good head and better things had been meant for her, but even if her father could have ignored the illogic of this going-to-wasteness, she was unmarried, and her sin was absolute. Small communications—secret packages, visits—were exchanged between herself and her mother, until Inez Bussard had died some fifteen years ago. But with her father, whom she had loved the most, an absolute, history-annihilating break. He still lived in the old house just out of town. She often heard of his reputation for moral clarity, as if his banishment of his daughter inspired utmost respect, it was so pitiless and unremitting. Once, not long ago, she had driven past the house to see if the curtains were still drawn. She had not planned to; her hands drove her there. Sailing past it—small, vinyl sided, geraniumed—she caught her own face in the sunlit car window, a smile so solicitous and pure it took her years to recover from glimpsing it.
And for all that, what? When to this day, she had only ever been intimate with one man. Only with one man, in one place for one week—a dark-paneled boardinghouse that smelled of Brylcream. Better to have been a whore, to drown herself in a short happy life of sex and silk and grease. Instead, how earnest it had been, how pious, even in the way they undressed and folded their clothes to the side. It was as if they were lovemaking for the pleasure of God. During, on her back, she had watched wasps fret in the eaves of that great, dark house. Somebody was practicing violin down the hall. Her lover dented the bed with his largeness, his broad back spangled with moles. A friend of a friend from a dance hall. She remembered his back but not his face. She remembered the wasps and the dark-paneled walls and the sense of being in church, but not his face. Sometimes in Alice’s face she sought his face. She could no longer summon his mouth or ears or habits, and what did it matter? What in the world did they have to do with one another?
“Mother?”
Marlene looked up. Alice was sitting upright on the bed, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“Hello.” Marlene walked over to the crib with Evelyn. She scooted the child, who had sunk into a milky trance, back up into her arms. “You slept like the dead.”
“How are the girls?”
“They’re fine. I’m going to miss them when I go.”
“You can come back and visit again. Soon, I hope.”
“It won’t be the same,” Marlene said. Then, quickly, in concession, “Are you going to have a bath? Would you like me to draw it for you?”
“No, thanks,” Alice murmured. She bent down into the crib and touched Frances’s cheek. As if remembering something else, something private and smooth, she closed her eyes and touched the side of her own face.
Marlene cleared her throat. “So. Where did you go this afternoon? What sorts of errands did you run?”
Alice opened her eyes. “Little things, here and there.”
“Like what? What sorts of things? Tell me, for fun.”
“Just things.”
“Like what?”
Alice raised the child from the crib and pressed her nose against her scalp. Her hair tumbled out of its loose knot. “And what a good girl you are, Frances. Did you have a nice afternoon? Did you have fun with Grammy? Aren’t you lucky to have Grammy to watch you and to play with you?”
“Well,” said Marlene, hoisting Evelyn onto the changing table, and snapping open her onesie. “I don’t know if they feel lucky. But they like me all right. It’s you they love. So, where did you go? I’m just curious. Tell me.”
Alice sat down in the chair with Frances. “Is this bottle for her?”
“Yes. I fed Evelyn already. And now, obviously, I’m changing her.”
The two women worked in silence. Once the dark-haired child was cleaned and snapped into a fresh onesie, Marlene placed her in her crib and flipped on the mobile. The infant’s eyes lit up as the shapes spun predictably overhead. Alice lay her sister down beside her.
“Two sweethearts,” she said, yawning. “Isn’t ev
eryone happy now?”
“And what about you?” Marlene hadn’t quite meant to vocalize it, but there it was, said. “Are you happy?”
Alice froze, leaning over the crib.
“Happy enough, of course. Before, just last year, I never saw a couple so much in love as you and Charlie. Nowadays. Well, honestly, it seems a little strained. You’re both rather—” Marlene shrugged, “distant with each other. Does he always come home so late? What does he do? I mean, is it work exactly?”
Alice leaned back, cinching closed her robe.
“Now please don’t get huffy, darling. Why can’t I ask you questions like normal mothers do? You’ve always been so private—” Pausing, Marlene smoothed the back of her daughter’s hair. “Of course, with newborns, it’s just impossible to be as moony as you two were before. But I wonder—Sometimes you seem so distant, darling. Melancholy. You used to write such dark poems when you were a child. I was afraid I’d come home one day to find you swinging from a beam.” Marlene placed a hand on her daughter’s arm. “It’s all right to be sad. Sometimes, after childbirth, the hormones make one very emotional. You can feel—out of your head. Why won’t you talk to me and tell me things? Confide in me.”
“Because I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Alice drew away, eyes bright. “I don’t have anything to confide. I love my children. And I couldn’t ask for a better man than Charlie.”
“But that’s not what I’m asking.”
“I think I will have a bath,” said Alice, stepping past. “If you don’t mind.”
“I love the smell of you wet,” he murmured, wedged between toilet and sink. “I mean shower wet. Dark and wet and secret.”
“Charlie,” she said. “It’s too small in here for the both of us.”
He stroked the arm of her silk robe, which parted slightly in front. Slyly, he pressed his nose into her hair. “I’m having very, very indecent ideas.”
“Sure,” she smiled at his reflection. “Now that you’re home, it’s party time.”
“That’s right. You said it.”