"Well, it can't look good," Chad said, looking out the kitchen window at his father. Over Chad's shoulder I could see the shadow Jon's rifle cast in the snow. "And won't the school bus be by soon?"
I was about to go to the door, to call out to Jon to forget it, to put the rifle away, come in and drink his coffee and get ready for work, but then he fired—loud, and heart-stopping, and some small animal's final surprise in this world on the roof of our house.
I KISSED them both good-bye after breakfast. "Be careful driving to Kalamazoo," I said to Chad, and he nodded. He knew I'd taken the day off again to be with him, but this girl, this girl in Kalamazoo, had been expecting him, he said.
I don't remember much about this particular prom date except that I didn't think she was beautiful enough to keep Chad's attention very long. Pretty hair, straight and brown, and green eyes—but in her short prom dress standing on our front lawn, wearing her wristband corsage (which I'd paid for and picked up from the florist only an hour before), her legs looked like the trunks of two fruit trees. Thin enough, but shapeless. Her panty hose were too dark for the bridal white she was wearing, and her makeup was of the orangey too-thick variety. Her name was Ophelia. (Ophelia!) And her stepfather was a cop, her mother was a dental hygienist. And Chad had told me they were just friends, which I felt certain was all they'd ever been, and all they were now, despite this trip to Kalamazoo to see her.
"So, what will you do all day with Ophelia?" I asked.
"Lunch," he said. "She's going to show me her campus."
"Drive carefully," I said. "I'll pick Dad up from work."
"Good job, Mom," he said, and winked.
***
MIDAFTERNOON, I decided to take a nap. A deep exhaustion had begun to settle on my eyelids as I folded Chad's laundry—the T-shirts, the boxer shorts, warm from the dryer, all that soft cotton smelling, now, of powdered flowers and well water, as if, rather than washing and drying my son's laundry in a machine, I'd left it in the rain and sun in a garden for many summers, gone back to find it softened, sweetened. I put what I was folding—a plain gray T-shirt I'd never seen before—back in the basket.
Outside, the sun was straining through the snow clouds, so I pulled the shades. I lay down on the bed and pulled the quilt at the foot of it over me. I closed my eyes, waiting to drift into sleep on the scent of laundry, winter dust, the furnace, the silence of a house with no one but a wife and mother in it, when I thought of it.
The note.
Be Mine.
I opened my eyes.
Sherry (Cherie!).
I rolled onto my side. I rolled onto my stomach, and then, again, onto my back—the thrill of it starting behind my knees, traveling like a man's hands straight up my thighs, between my legs.
How long had it been since I'd masturbated?
Years?
Before Jon and I were married, it was something I did every day. Twice a day! Sometimes in the bath or the shower. Always before I went to sleep. Once on a plane. I'd been on my way to New York to visit a friend. I had three seats to myself. I pulled my down jacket over my lap, and as the plane was hurtling itself down the runway, and then heading nose-first into the sky, rumbling and vibrating and shaking in that disconcerting plastic manner of planes as they leave the earth, I slid my whole hand down the front of my jeans and brought myself to such a fast and shattering climax that I worried, afterward, that I might have moaned and not known it. But I looked around. No one seemed to know.
In those days, everything filled me with longing. The sight of a man loosening his tie. A couple walking down the street with their arms around one another. The tip of my own pinky between my own teeth.
Mostly, then, I think, it was my own body that I wanted. Even the ugly men—the ones I felt afraid of, or repulsed by—when they looked at me, passing me on the street or lingering at the counter when I was ringing up their books and magazines, made my heart race.
Sometimes, even, being looked at, my nipples would stiffen. I would get wet.
I was wild, I think, for myself. Sometimes I would take a hand mirror, put it between my legs, watch myself touch myself. I could come in seconds, or I could draw it out for an hour, force my fingers away from my clitoris and lie on my bed with my legs spread—naked, panting, bringing myself so close that I became a girl at the edge of an abyss of pleasure, touching my own breasts, licking my fingers, and then finally allowing myself to plunge into it, torso soaked with sweat, and letting myself thrash myself to orgasm.
This afternoon, it was slower, and my hands between my legs, with some imagination, became the hands of a stranger. But I brought myself to a climax that surprised me. A rocking wildness that brought tears to my eyes, as if, making love to myself, I had been returned to a lover for whom I'd been violently pining for a long time.
When I woke—slowly, languidly, a pleasurable rising from the depths of something to its surface—I went to the bathroom and looked, again, at myself in the mirror.
The horror of the night before had slipped away. In the afternoon light, I looked younger, softer. I could see it, still, my younger face. My hair, still long and dark, was mussed, but shiny. I was, again, a woman you might glimpse in a hallway and remember.
TOMORROW Chad goes back. He couldn't stay the whole week, he said, because he needed to get back to study for a calculus exam he had on Monday. "You can't study here?" I asked. "No," he said. "I can't study here."
We're having Garrett to dinner tonight When I told Chad I'd seen him up at the college, he just shrugged. When I told him I'd invited Garrett to dinner, he said, "Great," but didn't seem particularly interested. "Aren't you friends anymore with Garrett?" I asked, and he said, "I haven't been friends with Garrett since seventh grade, Mom." I asked him if he wanted to call Garrett, to tell him what time we'd be eating, and Chad said, "Why don't you?"
Garrett answered the phone in the middle of the first ring, as if he'd been there, waiting. It was a local number. Did he still live in his childhood house, now that his parents were dead? Did he live alone? "Garrett," I said, "this is Sherry Seymour. Chad's mother."
"Yeah!" he said. "How's Chad?"
"Chad's fine. He's great. He's here. He's excited to see you. Can you still come to dinner?"
"Sure, yes. I'd love that What time, Mrs. Seymour?"
"Seven o'clock?"
"Okay. Yeah. Great!"
After we hung up, I listened to the emptiness on the line for a moment. There was another voice, there, in the air—a man's voice. I recognized the word "already," but the rest was just mumbling, the implication of sentence structure, of meaning. When we were in fifth grade, sixth grade, we used to believe these voices that could sometimes be heard on the line between phone calls, or under phone calls, were the voices of the dead. At slumber parties, we'd listen for them through a dead receiver.
And why not? Couldn't there be some remnant of them in the air, still speaking? Couldn't an instrument capable of transporting voices across oceans, across time zones, manage somehow to pick up the voices of the dead?
No.
Of course not.
I hung up.
Tacos.
I'll make tacos. A guy's dinner. Jon will like it, too. Chips and guacamole, and lots of shredded cheese, chopped onion, tomatoes.
GARRETT came to the door in a starched white shirt, carrying a massive red rose wrapped in cellophane with the price, $1.99, still stuck on it with a green tag.
He politely pulled his boots off on the porch and spent the evening in his socks, one of which had a hole at the big toe. His hair was even shorter than it had been when I saw him in the hallway last week—a buzz cut so close to his scalp I could see the pale skin there—and he smelled of Dial soap. As Garrett stood beside Chad with his shaggy hair down over his collar and falling into his eyes and his Berkeley sweatshirt with its ragged sleeves, they looked like boys from entirely different worlds.
I put the rose in a vase and put the vase on the table. I gave both of t
he boys a beer. It was Jon's idea, but I'd agreed. No reason to pretend that the legal drinking age had anything to do with their drinking beer, which they've certainly been doing for years now. But after each of them had a second one, I didn't offer them any more.
I had, myself, three big cold glasses of white wine—Sue's drink, a bottle of Sauterne she gave me for my birthday last year, trying to convert me from my Merlot—and relaxed.
I put a candle beside the vase, and the flickering light on the rose made it look like a beating heart at the center of the table.
After the second glass of wine, the men around me became beautiful, ravenous strangers. Seconds, thirds, they ate as I sipped and nibbled and passed dishes to them.
Beautiful, ravenous strangers:
Jon in his flannel shirt, telling jokes, "A woman sits down next to a man on an airplane..."
And Chad, with his hair grown out like that, the bristly half beard that's grown since he's been here, having not shaved his face once despite that razor beside his father's on the bathroom sink.
And Garrett—whose ten-year-old face I could no longer find in this new one.
Where, I wondered, had he gone, that little boy ramming Matchbox cars against the legs of my coffee table? Garrett, honey, can you take those toys to Chad's room? I don't want the furniture to get scratched up. I could still recall the expression of deep apologetic despair on his face when he looked up at me. I remember I took it back when I saw that despair.
Oh, I see now, there aren't any scratches. Just keep doing what you're doing.
But it had, actually, scratched up the legs of the coffee table, and those scratches were still there—a bit of blond etched out of the mahogany, a secret message written by a prisoner, in code, with his fingernails.
It seemed that Chad was purposely refusing to talk about Berkeley with Garrett. Whenever the subject of California, of dorm life, of San Francisco or the ocean came up, Chad changed the subject to tacos. More cheese. Are there any more onions? Please pass the salsa. After a while, Jon drew Garrett out on the subject of hunting, of motorcycles, of cars. Garrett talked about a red Mustang he was fixing up. He kept it in his garage (he does still live in his parents' house, which he now refers to as his). On the weekends and after classes he works on it. Once or twice I thought I saw a look pass over Chad's face—pity, boredom, contempt?
Or was it simply the curiosity, and the lack of comprehension, a college boy from California would naturally have for the life of a hometown boy studying auto mechanics at the community college? A path not taken. Never even a path. For only a split second I wondered if it would have been, somehow, better, to have raised Garrett, rather than Chad. A boy with a keen understanding of motors. One who stuck close to home, whose work was physical and dirty and crucial.
I never would have thought so when I was reading Greek myths at bedtime to Chad, or driving him to piano lessons, begging him to practice (then letting him quit when he didn't).
I never would have thought so those summers when I told him, no, he shouldn't get a job. He should enjoy himself. He would only be fifteen, sixteen, for a whole leisurely summer once in his life.
Early on, I could see how competitive he was, but I never once said, "Chad, you don't always have to be the best at everything, you know," although there were times I should have said it. Even in second grade, he had to be the best reader, the boy to finish his math sheets first. Later, he had to win the essay contests, have the highest scores on the standardized tests.
Was it only an illusion, or did he always have them, too? It always seemed that he did, but, surely, that couldn't have been the case.
Still, I never once let go of the idea that everything had to be just so, did I? He had to have all of it—the lessons, the software, the whole Scholastic encyclopedia, sent to us one by one for six months in the mail, although he almost never used them. Occasionally, I took one off the shelf and paged through it myself. Apples, Arizona. I wanted his life to be ordered like that. I'd read about it in a child development book. The importance of order. His homework supervised. His self-esteem promoted. I never buckled him into his baby seat without double-checking that it was correctly installed. I never let him ride even his tricycle around in the driveway without his helmet on.
Would it have been better, or any different, if I'd provided, instead, the kind of house the Millers, who'd lived down the block from me when I was growing up, had provided for their children? The garbage spilling out of their garage into their yard? The older children watching the younger children while the parents worked? Unspayed cats living and procreating in their backyard—some with little cat bites taken out of their ears, rolling in the dirt of their front yard, interchangeable, yowling all night, sneaking down the block to shit in my sandbox.
Once, one of their cats came up on our front steps carrying something dark and bloody and writhing in its mouth while my mother and I were sitting on the porch, drinking lemonade and waiting for my father to get home from work.
"Oh my god," my mother said, leaping to her feet. "It's got a rat."
But in high school I got to know one of the Miller boys. Not well—just chatting in the cafeteria, and we had one class together—but well enough to find that he was a warm, funny boy. He laughed mostly at himself. It was easy to tell him the story about his cat bringing a rat to our house. ("Hey," he said, "we always wondered where that rat went!") His hair was red and tangled and he always smelled, I thought, like dandelions, and it was clear that what I had imagined taking place in his house because of the disorder—violence, neglect—had been something else, something I couldn't imagine.
I poured myself another glass of wine and pushed my plate away. Jon reached across the table and stroked my hand. He said, looking at me, but speaking to Chad, "You know, your beautiful mother here has a secret admirer."
I opened my mouth to protest, but nothing came out.
"Yeah?" Chad asked, and put his taco down. "What's that all about?"
"She's been getting secret love notes in her mailbox at school."
"From who?" Chad asked.
"Someone who's in love with her, naturally," Jon said.
"A crackpot," I said, and sipped from my glass. I could taste the grapes in it. Melted, oversweet—a sweetness like something rotting. Something green, left too long in the sun, withered on the vine. "Or someone making fun of an old lady."
"Or somebody sucking up for a grade," Chad said.
Jon gave him a cold look. "How would you suck up for a grade by leaving anonymous notes?"
"Well, maybe he'll come around later and reveal his true identity after he flunks a test or something," Chad said. "It's brilliant, really." He picked up his taco and bit into it, as if he were satisfied with his explanation, as if the conversation were now over.
I couldn't help defending myself. "I don't give tests," I said.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot," Chad said with his mouth full. "You don't flunk anybody either, do you?"
I shrugged, a little sheepishly. I am, I admit it, an easy teacher. So many of my students have had hard enough lives—been in jail, been pregnant teenagers, had parents abandon them, failed miserably all through school—that I hate to make their lives any harder. With some exceptions, these are older people and inner-city kids who've found their way to the community college despite the odds, despite themselves. But Chad had never liked the whole idea of it, even when he was eleven years old. "It's not a college," he'd said, "if you can get a degree in auto mechanics or air-conditioner maintenance. That's not college." I never tried to explain.
"No," Garrett said. I looked over at him. "I know who it is," Garrett said.
"Who?" Chad said. "Do tell, bro." He put his taco down again.
"It's Bram Smith. My Auto II teacher. He was joking one day about this gorgeous teacher in the English department, that we should all go over and sign up for a lit class. I knew right then that he was talking about you." Garrett looked over at me.
Was I drunk?<
br />
Was I imagining that Garrett was looking at me appreciatively, that his eyes softened on my face as if he truly thought I might be the teacher his Auto II instructor had described as gorgeous?
I shook my head. "Bram Smith," I said. "But I don't know him."
"He's part-time," Garrett said. "He's great." Garrett smiled. "Apparendy he thinks you are, too."
Chad sighed and leaned back in his chair. His eyes were narrowed in Garrett's direction. "How old's this redneck?"
"Chad," Jon said, drumming his fingers on the table, annoyed. "Are you jealous or something?"
"No," Chad said. "But if some greaser is stalking my mother I think I ought to—"
"Chad," I said—in that tone, and immediately regretted it. Saying it made it obvious that I was thinking it: Garrett is a "greaser." I softened, and said, "I don't think anyone's going to bother to stalk me."
"He's about thirty, I think," Garrett said.
"Well he better stay away from my mother." Chad was still looking at Garrett as he said this. Was I mistaken, or did Garrett, looking down at his plate, suppress a smile?
The discussion was over, and dinner was over, and in the bright overhead light of the kitchen, scraping plates, I felt such an emptiness—too much wine, and I'd barely eaten anything—that I was surprised I didn't simply float away with it. From the living room, I could hear Jon and the boys laugh about something. The television. I could feel the white wine in my chest, rising out of me, burning and fragrant, as if I had been sipping perfume all night, as if I had eaten a cheap bouquet of grocery store roses and now could only wait for them to pass through me, to be shat out, flushed away.
Bram Smith.
Maybe, once, I'd glimpsed someone who might have been Bram Smith, Auto II instructor, at an all-faculty meeting.
But could that have been him—a tall man in an olive green T-shirt, muscled, with dark hair and one of those mustache and beard combinations that went only as far as his upper lip and chin, neatly trimmed, both elegant and masculine, the kind of man I'd quit looking at ten years ago at least, and who, I thought, had also quit looking at me?
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