by Maria Flook
“Richard was saying that the new thing is stain-release fibers,” she said. She was relieved to talk about this. The night had a peculiar density; the surfaces looked furred by the odd moonlight. The shrubs seemed waffled and grotesque, and she wanted to turn around and go back.
They entered a park with a small amphitheater, several old magnolias, and a mammoth apple tree in the middle of the sloping lawn. The tree had an incredible circumference; the branches opened out and turned down at the edges, making a scalloped canopy, like the dark awnings at funeral sites. They stooped low and crawled under the foliage until they could stand erect inside, encircled by the branches. Tracy jumped into the roomy hollow where the tree forked. He pulled Margaret up beside him.
Margaret said, “I ran away from home and hid in this tree. I waited until dark so Elizabeth would worry.”
“You were seeking the proper effects even back then? The world was a prop for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You had to utilize these great abstract powers like day and night to call attention to yourself.”
“Jesus, did I do that?”
“You and your brother. Sleepwalking through Siberia. Absolutely no self-awareness.”
She looked at Tracy; she was unwilling to argue about it.
A white tomcat moved toward them. Its coat looked thick and mirrory in the moonlight, like suds. They watched it walk to the trunk of the tree, tail lifted; then it jumped up to the first gnarl and used its claws to go higher. It kept climbing above them until they could no longer see it.
“It must be his hangout,” Tracy said, and he pulled Margaret down from her perch. The ground was damp, littered with tiny green knobs, misshapen fruit that had fallen before ripening. Tracy’s body was familiar, its angles, its nervous zones. He held her and then he pushed her off. She looked at the dirt. She saw a white scrap, a piece of paper with someone’s gas mileage written on it. The figures were followed by question marks and exclamation points. Tracy stepped up to her again, rubbed the heel of his hand against her eye socket, a slight pressure that made her see dots and flashes. This pleased her. His hand smelled of tree bark and chlorophyll.
She heard the white cat crying, making his inquiries from a great height. “It’s gone up too high,” Margaret said. “It wants to get down.”
Tracy didn’t answer. Margaret circled the tree trunk and turned around. She saw the apple branches waving open and snapping closed again. Tracy was gone. She called his name. Nothing. She fingered the papery leaves and found her way outside the dense switches. She couldn’t see Tracy anywhere on the big lawn. The giant magnolias had a leathery severity in the night. Without illumination, the colorless ruled, the deep encircled the pale. She walked toward home, stopping once or twice to turn around and shout Tracy’s name. She knew he was going to jump out from behind something. It was just a matter of when it would happen. She studied the shaggy hemlocks, the long bulwarks of forsythia where Tracy could be crouching. Her tri-octave, full-diaphragmatic scream was what he was after. He wanted her throat to tear with one harsh syllable. He once told her, “All fear is self-inflicted. We carry it around, concealed on our persons, like a little shiv. We use it against ourselves. We have only ourselves to blame.”
Panic loosened her gait and she walked down the street in a loose zigzag like a drunken woman. Then she broke into a run. There he was, standing in the center of the black asphalt. Tracy was holding the tomcat in the crook of his arm, but the animal’s hind legs were pumping, its ears were flattened back. She stumbled into her lover and lost her ability to stand up. She felt her words form and stray from her lips; she was whimpering. Even as the cat struggled, she rested her face against its white fur. She heard something—a taut snarl evolving from its gut and surfacing at full volume, as if one central cry escaped from all three of them.
They were sitting three abreast in the front seat of the car. It was a first-edition powder-blue Plymouth Duster. “This is a magazine specimen. It’s mint,” Cam was telling Tracy. Cam had bought the car years ago for Darcy’s birthday. It was the maiden Duster 340, the high-performance model. He was telling them everything. “A two-door—it’s more aerodynamic. It’s a V8 with four-barrel carburetion, high-flow cylinder heads.” He brushed his hand around the three-spoked steering wheel, the chrome horn ring, thin as a wrist bangle. “Today it’s horn pads; they don’t make chrome horn rings like this anymore,” Cam said.
“That’s probably true.” Tracy looked pretty tickled. Margaret worried that Tracy might start to laugh or make remarks. Cam’s enthusiasm could have a peculiar effect on Tracy.
“Mags with chrome nuts. Wire wheel covers, fourteen-inchers. Check them out when we stop.”
“Oh, sure,” Margaret said.
Cam said, “No kidding, Margaret, this Duster is more than just a souped-up Valiant; it’s a little hot. Don’t you think it’s hot?”
“It’s a real piece of Americana,” Tracy said.
Margaret liked the car. It had a split-back bench seat with a folding center armrest. She could sit high on the little knob of the armrest or push the armrest in between the seats and ride the usual way. She liked sitting high on that cushioned perch, her arms resting across each seat. She could pluck at Cam’s collar tab, or finger Tracy’s hair at the back of his neck. Cam drove into the parking lot of a big Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“Watch this,” he said.
“I don’t see anything,” Margaret said.
“Just wait a minute,” Cam said.
They circled the restaurant and came out on the other side of the building. The far side had a metallicized plate-glass window, like a bronzed mirror, and she saw them reflected, the Duster a dreamy golden image. Margaret watched the smooth lines of the car, its swept-back roof and ventless windows. Its powder-blue aura like cue chalk.
“What a great idea,” Tracy said, “people buying buckets of chicken just so they can see their cars on that fantasy screen. Go through again.”
Cam steered around the restaurant once more.
“Ultra neon,” Tracy said, as they cruised past the window.
“It’s really nice,” Margaret said. “I like the decal on the fender, that little cyclone.”
“It’s a tumbleweed,” Tracy said. “We’re tumbling tumbleweeds.”
“No, that’s a cyclone, isn’t it?” Margaret said.
“Dust devil,” Cam said.
Cam drove onto the highway. The car had power, a steady acceleration, a lilting forward propulsion. Tracy said, “Great car. People think it’s a nice middle-of-the-road vehicle; that’s its secret. It looks benign, but it’s peopled by love-starved maniacs!”
Margaret didn’t disagree with this, but she looked at Cam to see if he allowed himself to be included. He was smiling. Maybe just happy to be in the Duster. She liked the surroundings—the vinyl seats glazed and plumped, the dashboard that gleamed with chrome inlays. Margaret punched the radio buttons.
“Oh Christ, it’s WMAR,” Tracy said.
“WMAR?” Cam was asking. “Never heard of it.”
“It’s Radio Margaret, we’re sunk if she’s at the controls.”
“You each get one veto, that’s all.” She turned up the volume when she found something.
They stopped for ice and she spilled it over the asphalt as they filled the cooler. An ice cube on the asphalt is a beautiful sight, Margaret thought. It floated on a river of its own making and quickly flattened, disappeared into that speckled dark. Cam arranged cans in the ice and tapped the lid until it fit.
“Do you have to drink beer to buy a speedboat?” Tracy asked. “I’m going to try to get us a Nehi.”
“A Nehi soda?” Margaret said. “Are you crazy?”
“I thought this was a nostalgia cruise, a little side trip to jog the memory. These roadside stands have everything—”
“We’re not going on any psycho side trips. We’re here to look at a boat,” Margaret said. Tracy went into the Quick Stop and came o
ut with three Philadelphia Phillies sun visors.
“It’s going to scorch us,” he said to Cam, who didn’t want to wear the visor. “Okay, suit yourself. Doctors will start shaving little bumps from your face. Old salts always end up like that.”
Margaret took her visor and let it slip down over her nose. “It’s too big.”
“Too big? I’ve never heard you complain,” Tracy said.
“Tracy is always making references to his dick.”
“I’d hate to be trapped in your mind,” Cam told Tracy.
“It’s cramped, but it’s rent controlled. Give me the hat,” Tracy said. He worked to tighten the plastic band.
Then they were driving. Margaret watched the road for a moment and shut her eyes, letting the feeling swell, increase, that pleasure of sitting between two men. She knew there was a bit of something, a swirl of vanity and greed, which she had to monitor. She couldn’t be dreaming these things. She looked at her brother. He was very appealing to look at, and she studied him without feeling self-conscious; perhaps because their intimacy was tested over years, it was proved. She knew his profile, its crooked jog when it met the cleft of his chin. His eyes were hazel with gold flecks, the color of light tea, almost translucent, but the pupils were always oversized, making him look on the edge of alarm. His eyelashes weren’t unnaturally long, but they grew dense at their roots and shaded a thin line along his lids as if they had been penciled. It was odd for a man to have such accentuated eyes. Tracy was looking at her looking at Cam, so she knew she was dreaming too long.
When she and Cam were teenagers and the home situation became stiff or itchy, they drove down to the shore. The roads were flat, running straight through the tomato fields. Cam pressed the gas pedal to the floor and let go of the steering wheel. He locked his hands behind his head and shut his eyes until Margaret screamed at him. The landscape was lush, groomed and parted. Rows of beans and lopes. There were truck stands at every crossroad, melons stacked high in pyramids like shiny bomblets. Cam drove like a practiced madman. They would be ripping at eighty and ninety. It was a cleansing forward motion. A first refreshment before the refreshment of the sea. There might be someone standing beside the road, a farmer or a kid with a ball. They blistered past and dust ballooned over the road. When Margaret looked back she couldn’t see the figure. They might have killed somebody. When they reached Rehoboth or Ocean City, they fell into the water. It was a fixation, brown and sudsy, clouds of sand churning in the breakers, the swells and suction of the sea that rinsed them of their little pains, anxieties. Rinsed them of home.
Tracy kept studying her.
“I was daydreaming,” she told him. “Shit. It will be good to see the boats. I haven’t been on a speedboat since you had the Lucifer,” she told Cam.
“Lucifer?” Tracy looked across at Cam. “You named your boat Lucifer? Did you have one of those novelty plates that say BORN TO RAISE HELL?”
“It was better than naming a boat after your wife,” Cam said.
“Yeah, there’s too many of those cruisers with the wife’s nickname: Dottie, Evie, you just have to go along the docks and count them,” Margaret said.
Cam said, “I saw a boat once—it was called Miss Take. I liked that.”
Tracy said, “I need a little poetry in a ship’s name, like in Newport—that old sloop, The Black Pearl. Then there’s the one called Soulsearcher. You could go down with a ship if the name was right.”
“Sailboats always have those romantic tags, Latin ones even. A speedboat has to have a real jock name,” Margaret said.
“If I buy this one we’re going to see today,” Cam said, “Laurence gets the final say. It’s really going to be for him.”
“Then he should be coming along,” Tracy said.
“Look,” Cam said, “there’s no question he’ll be coming with me every time.” The fields blurred as Cam’s foot moved down on the accelerator.
“Shit, slow down. This is scarier than I remember,” Margaret told him.
“Schoolteacher,” Cam said.
“Well, I’ve got a kid now. You’ve got Laurence.”
Tracy told them, “Make that three sprouts.” Cam was disgusted. He toed the accelerator, but it was a brief protest and he slowed the car. They didn’t talk for a moment, reined in by the thought of their children.
Cam started to tell them about Darcy. She was reluctant to trade cars for the day. “She knew what kind of fun we could have in the Duster,” Cam said.
“Jealous,” Tracy said.
Cam shook his head. “Not even that, just mean. I left mine there and took this one.”
Margaret told Cam he was asking for trouble.
“I just switched cars for the day. I left her the Bronco.”
“You might find a bucket of fish guts dumped on your front seat when you come back. I saw that once in Providence. You don’t think fish are so bloody, they seem so pure, straight agua pumping through their veins. Then you see some mackerel guts sinking into the upholstery,” Tracy said.
“Look, I gave her this car in the first place.” “That makes it a pretty self-conscious gesture. You’re making your point with the Duster.”
“Can you translate?” Cam asked Margaret. “No, don’t bother.”
Tracy said, “What’s the problem? What is it? English as a second language?”
Margaret pulled her chin in tight and let them shoot it back and forth.
“Go ahead,” Tracy said to Margaret, “be interpreter for us like you do for those poor souls in the joint.”
“No, thanks,” she said.
“Evaluate,” Tracy said.
“Is that what you do?” Cam said.
“I write reports. I write down the subjective, the objective, the assessment, and then the plan. The S.O.A.P.”
“The S.O.A.P.? You mean it’s that head-shrinking stuff?”
“It’s my job. We make assessments and then we make plans.”
Tracy said, “You know, it’s all that Behavior Mod, and then the moral lesson.”
Cam said, “That’s how you make a living?”
“You clean swimming pools, isn’t that right? Well, I’ve had jobs,” Margaret said. “Every kind of clerk. Then I was a chambermaid. Don’t get me started on that.”
Cam pressed his thumb down on her kneecap and lifted it off.
Let’s forget our work, he might be trying to say.
She would tell him, Okay. Let’s ride the Duster out of the realm of toil and monetary needs.
Tracy might say, We’ll roll into the lowland of the senses. Down to the seaside. When it was quiet for a minute, these dreams overwhelmed her.
…
Before she started working in the prison, she had a housekeeping job at the River Lodge. Even after she left the motel job, the idea of the single hair stayed with her. She told Cam, “I didn’t mind making the beds, tearing the dirty sheets loose and wadding them down into a hamper that was nailed to a trolley. The televisions were going in the rooms, soap operas, and the women told me who was cheating on who, but I couldn’t keep up.
“Then I had to hunt down these private hairs. One kinky hair left unattended would get my supervisor all worked up.”
“Just one hair?” Cam said.
“One of them. Maybe in the tub, or back in a corner, curled around the ceramic doorstop. She’d always find it.”
Tracy plucked a glossy hair from his belly and twirled it against Margaret’s cheek. “Will you stop?” she told him. He laid the hair against her bare knee. She brushed it away. “I wasn’t supposed to use water to clean the tub or sink. Water leaves spots. Washing hairs down the drain creates a clog, you know?”
“The implication being—that water itself, like the corkscrew hairs, is yet another kind of filth?” Tracy said.
“That’s right. So I quit,” Margaret said.
She had not yet met Tracy. When her savings ran out, she developed a new sense of reality. It all had to do with having no money. Cam said it
must have been hard to scrub bathrooms after she had been used to a comfortable lifestyle with her husband.
“That breadstick? I’ll take my job at the prison,” she told Cam.
“Why can’t you teach regular school or do Avon?”
“Mary Kay,” Tracy said. “Mary Kay gives you a company car, a pink Caddie when you sell ten thousand powder puffs.”
Margaret said, “I don’t like to sell. I work for the state. The state isn’t run like a business and I don’t have someone breathing down my neck about making a profit.
“All I had to do was take the civil service examination at the state employment office. Next, I went for an interview for the position of corrections officer ‘with a possible emphasis in tutorial work as an English instructor.’ I showed them I could spell multisyllable words and they hired me.”
Tracy said, “I told her she didn’t have to go work in a prison. I make almost enough at the newspaper—”
“Almost enough? Almost enough isn’t enough,” Cam said.
Tracy turned in his seat. “We do fine. I host some high school dances with the disc jockey from WPRO. The kids like my column. I’m a fucking celebrity—”
“With the Cranston pubescent scene,” Margaret said.
“I get a couple hundred a week for these disco horror shows, but what does Miss Do-Gooder want? She wants to walk into a maximum-security setting and conjugate verbs with the foreign exchange students. Colombian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Hmong Chinese. She teaches them how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ They get back on the street and do you think they remember Miss Manners? You should have seen Margaret the first day on the job—”
“What do you mean?” Margaret said. “I looked fine.” She told Cam, “I had a plain tan skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Two-inch heels—”
“She looked like an airline stewardess,” Tracy told Cam. “What will it be, coffee, tea, or hootch? ‘What’s hootch?’ she asks me.”
Cam said, “There’s a lot to learn about law enforcement.” He was smiling at Margaret. “You need a dictionary of slang. What’s a screw?”