Fragile

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  She looks thinner than when he left; the whole house looks more sparse. Things have changed. Laura has been, as she put it, frantic, charging around the house getting rid of things, decluttering, neutralizing, preparing the house to put it on the market. Tris isn’t quite sure what the rush is, why all of a sudden there is such a pressing need to sell this place he has grown comfortable in over twenty-seven years, but it must have something to do with the surge of manic energy that has overtaken her in the past six months. It’s as if there is a new, strange woman in the house living with him, a thinner, harder, colder version of the woman he used to know, bent on survival at all costs. Bound and determined to get out of this place and move on, whether he decides to join her or not.

  As Tris walks across the kitchen floor to empty his pockets of keys, wallet, cell phone, pen, and loose change, he hears a funny echo. The precise clump of his shoes on the wood is louder, more pronounced than he recalls. And then he realizes that it is because all the knick-knacks that used to be on the counter and breakfast table are gone. The framed photographs of the children and grandchildren have disappeared, the heavy glass candlesticks, the vase that once held fresh-cut flowers from the garden, the basket that contained a stack of paper napkins, the wooden bowl for fresh fruit, the drift of three-day-old newspapers and last week’s magazines and unpaid bills: all gone. Even the small metal box where he flings the loose change from his pockets when he arrives home is gone. Decluttered. He is left holding a fistful of quarters, nickels, and dimes, with nowhere to put them except back in his pocket.

  She probably cashed in all those old coins for bills—probably twenty or thirty dollars worth sitting there, accumulating—and threw away the box. That’s what this is all about, when he gets right down to it: Cashing in. For nearly forty-three years this woman has been relying on him to feed her, clothe her, support her children, but now that time is nearly finished, and she is busy declaring her freedom from him. Wiping away all the accumulated clutter that his hard work bought. His useful life as breadwinner, sole supporter, will be over in a few short weeks. The equity in this house built up over the years, another kind of accumulation, will soon become her chief source of income, and his status has been downgraded accordingly.

  “Why are you painting the kitchen brown?” The place has smelled like wet paint for weeks. First the guest bedrooms where the kids used to sleep, then the downstairs bath and the living room, now this. All the wallpaper gone. All the bright cheerful colors that made the house feel like an Italian villa: gone. And in their place gallons of white or beige paint, ugly no-colors that make the house feel empty and bare, like another hotel room he is visiting.

  “It’s not brown, it’s taupe.”

  “Oh, taupe.” He opens an empty drawer to the left of the sink where a tangled jumble of extension cords, measuring tape, glue sticks, hammers, pliers, screw drivers, batteries, and nonfunctional flashlights used to live, fishes the coins out of his pocket and drops them in. “Never heard of it.”

  “Cindy says we have to neutralize as much as possible to get the maximum value out of the house.” She takes another swipe at the wall with her paint brush, keeping her back to him while she talks. “Neutralize and declutter. People don’t want to see a house that looks like the current owners are living there. They want everything to be immaculate, to look like they could move right in without a trace of the former owners. People want to be able to flip the house in a year or two. They don’t plan on staying in one place forever like we did.”

  This comes as a form of accusation: They could have made more money if he had been clever enough to sell their house and move to a new place every few years. Ever since her pal Cindy got her real estate license in the spring, Laura has been dispensing Cindy’s found wisdom about housing prices in the Bay Area and whether or not the overheated market is a bubble that’s about to burst. Tris feels as if he is listening to a tape recording of Cindy after she’s had two or three Margueritas, all these newfound and strongly held opinions coming out of Laura’s mouth about chemicals in the food she eats, zoning ordinances, and who should be elected to the local school board.

  “Well, the current owner would like something for dinner. I’m starving. They never feed you on these flights anymore. They actually had the gall to walk up and down the aisle offering a box with a stale sandwich and a bag of pretzels for five dollars.”

  Laura twists her head around to see if he is serious about eating, then returns to her painting. Her iron red hair drapes the crew-neck collar of her t-shirt, but even her hair, which Tris has prized as his wife’s most resonant feature, seems somehow drained of color, more filaments of silver in it than ever before.

  “It’s too early for dinner,” she says, her wrist avidly spreading taupe across the wall. “I had no idea when you would get here. Or even if you would get here.” The way she says this implies that he has forfeited any chance of dinner tonight. “I haven’t even started thinking about dinner yet.”

  “It’s not too early where I came from. It’s late for me.”

  “You need to get out there with those guys, the contractors. I don’t trust them.”

  “And why is that?”

  “It’s a father and son. Tell me how many fathers and sons can work together without getting mad at each other and screwing something up.”

  “That’s just you, speaking from your own experience. With our own son.”

  “No, there’s something about his eyes, the son. I don’t like the way he looked around the house, like he was casing the place to see what we have to steal.”

  “You’re getting paranoid. Besides, what can they screw up? They’re just tearing out the deck.”

  “I have good reason to be paranoid, with all these strange men tromping in and out of the house.” She puts down the paint brush and turns to look at him. The face he sees is a familiar face, a worn out face. She’s been working herself too hard. He takes a step towards her, anticipating that she may finally want to embrace him, to welcome him home, but she brushes past to look out the window towards the pool in back of the house. “I can’t even see what they’re doing. I want you to go out there and see what’s going on.”

  He places his hand on the shoulder of her paint-spackled shirt and finds it to be hard, rigid, like the shoulder of a teenage boy. Despite his touch, she does not turn to him, and he doesn’t dare go any further. He removes his hand and steps away.

  Tris exits the decluttered house through the sliding glass door at the back of the sunken family room. The pebbled concrete of the pool deck bounces hot sheets of afternoon sun into his face as he circles towards the side of the house. A shimmer of wavering green light hugs the rounded cornices of the pool wall, making him pause for a moment. The water is supple, dense, a body at rest breathing with a rhythm of its own. There is a barely perceptible skin of dust or dirt floating on the water, a film of disuse that may be fallen ash from brush fires in the hills or merely the residue of the ever-present smog. At the shallow end, a collection of brittle cypress leaves and a deflating rubber raft hover near the intake of the water filter. The floor of the liver-shaped pool tilts down at a steep angle to the drain at the bottom of the deep end, which is darkened by the distended shadow of the diving board. The children who grew up in this house and their children too when they came to visit once loved to fling themselves off this flexible plank into the water, shouting slogans from action hero movies or cartoons they had seen, pretending to imitate famous people or inanimate objects.

  As each generation grew older, the fascination of the board faded away, and Tris considers now whether any of them will ever disturb the still water of the pool again. A vibration stirs the skin of dust on the water, a momentary breeze that makes the deep end look cool and inviting. Would he sink or float? What makes a twenty-story ocean liner float on top of the deep sea while a helpless human form plunges to the bottom of a pool? The wavering drain at the bottom stares up at him, menacing. A faint whiff of chlorine turns hi
m away.

  From around the corner of the house he hears voices, the contractors busy with their work. This section of his small lot has always felt barren and forlorn. Here, the spiny shrubs are untended and overgrown, and a faint trembling of apprehension lifts in his stomach as he turns into the irregular side yard where the cedar deck is being hacked into pieces.

  Perhaps Laura is right to be concerned about the contractors and day laborers that have been parading through the house lately. Any one of these men could overpower her, alone in the house, pin her down on one of the tarps they throw on the floor and rape her. Perhaps one of these men will steal something from him—credit cards, jewelry, important papers. Yet, as with most of the world’s catastrophes, it seems like a horror that could only afflict someone else.

  Two men in loose jeans and t-shirts are bent over their work, their arms jerking as they pry up boards near the wrought-iron railing at the far side of the deck. Tris watches them for a moment, wondering what it would be like to make a living with his hands instead of his wits, giving an honest day’s work with sweat and tired muscles instead of always talking to people, persuading, convincing, and apologizing to them. One of the men, the shorter one, round with a belly that folds upon itself as he bends to his task, grunts and calls to his partner, the one who must be his son. The broad cedar deck, once stained a vivid red, has faded to a dead brown laced with an emerald layer of moss that has creeped over it during years of neglect. In the shadow of the house, the air smells of dried pine needles.

  The younger man says something in Spanish, his words coming out mumbled and soft. The older laborer looks up and sniffs, like a dog that hears a noise in the distance too high-pitched for humans. Then he produces a laugh, a quick stifled snort that indicates he is aware of Tris’s presence. He hoists a pickaxe high above his head, then wrenches his shoulders to slam it down into the mid-section of a cedar board at his feet. The wood snaps and buckles in two. Ragged splinters tear apart from each broken end of the board. For a brief moment, the two segments still hang together by the connective tissue of several fibers that have refused to yield. Then, with a sudden explosion of force that startles Tris, the younger man hurls the heavy head of a sledgehammer into the crease where the two parts of the board are joined. As the black bulk of the hammer crashes into the wood, Tris fears for an instant that it will smash the feet of the father, so close by. But these two are accustomed to wreaking their havoc together. The blow delivered by the son is followed in quick succession by the blunt end of the father’s awl digging into the shattered wood and lifting it with a dry creaking crack apart and away from the body of the other boards.

  Tris nods at the men, hoping they will acknowledge his presence, but they drive on with their plangent work, hands grasping, arms churning, brows lathered with sweat. They have no time for pleasantries with him. The sun is gathering itself to the far hills beyond the broad freeways and shopping malls, the shadows of the pine arbors are growing longer. With a final sudden crack, a great section of board flies free from the rest, skidding across the planks, revealing the moist hidden dirt that lies beneath. Tris inches closer as they snatch loose another section of rotting wood. The earth beneath these boards has been covered for years, fallow and rich, desecrated only by a few stray scraps of litter that have blown in from the open end by the firepit, a damp plastic grocery bag, a paper coffee cup, a fast food hamburger wrapper.

  The younger worker, the son, kicks one of the rotten boards they have knocked loose with his boot, kicks it aside as if he is angry at it, a piece of debris that stands between him and the end of the day, where dinner and a six pack of beer await. In the rich earth newly exposed, Tris sees something move. He steps closer to get a better look. Yes, there, squirming into the dirt to escape whatever it was that came crashing down upon them, tiny white globules, like burrowing sacs of milk, brown and white larvae-like creatures tunneling into the muck. To think of this swarm of mindless life, carrying on its activities hidden beneath their feet, digging, reproducing; the sight of them pinches his lips together in disgust. With his eyes calm and intense, the son steps into the hole and stomps the solid tread of his boot onto the writhing bugs. Several are smashed instantly, popping open to emit an oozing milky fluid. Others squirm away quickly, the bulbous tail ends of their abdomens disappearing into the earth.

  “What are they?” Tris asks, shielding his mouth with his hand.

  “Comején,” the older man says, glancing at the wall of the house.

  “What?” Tris wonders if either of them speaks any English. “No comprende.”

  The son digs his heel in, squashing a few of the stragglers, intent on his task. Thankful for this break, the father lays the pickaxe down on the deck.

  “Termitas,” he says, pronouncing the word slowly, for Tris’s benefit. The son heaves the sledgehammer into the boards once more, cracking loose another chunk of rotten wood, exposing another hive of the industrious insects. Tris’s mind flicks towards the house, imagining the teeming hidden life that could be eating away at the foundations. The son kicks the wood he has just broken, knocking it vaguely in the direction of the pile of debris he is creating, but mostly just knocking it away from here as soon as we could. We love the Florida lifestyle.” She goes on telling, aggrandizing all of it as if the things we do each day, eating, sleeping, watching TV and the rest are any better in a different place because the weather is warmer or the sun is shining instead of the rain or there is an ocean down the street instead of a cornfield. “Fourteen years ago, the first night on Sanibel, we couldn’t believe we were there, like a different world, but it was so cold that night, record cold they said. It nearly snowed, and it was like we brought the winter down with us.”

  Burt laughing, his hand goes to fork a piece of lettuce into his mouth. “The guys at the club I was playing with the next day gave me so much grief about it. We nearly froze our … well, I won’t say it. I was so thrilled to be playing golf in January, I had nothing but a polo shirt on, and they said ‘Burt you old snowbird, you brought this damn cold with you.’”

  Margaret, we never did call her Maggie, she wouldn’t deign to be called it even back in grade school, always Margaret, reaches for the butter, reaches across and spreads it as if she is anointing someone’s foot. Words coming out even as she lifts the bread to eat. “It never has been that cold again. Every winter since is just like May or June up here.”

  “That’s right,” he says. “You maybe get four or five months a year of decent weather here, maybe four, but we live for winter. Just the right coolness in the morning, breeze off the gulf. Sweater weather, we call it. And then sixty-five and sunny by noon.”

  Bread delicious with butter, iced tea ice crackling in the glass with lemon and lots of sugar, and chicken with a sauce, asparagus and little slivers of potato garnished with flecks of green, like eating a coin that melts in your mouth. I haven’t had a meal like this in a very long time, maybe since Elmer’s funeral. But he is going on again. “Where’s the wine?” He practically shouts it across the room. Some of the others sitting across the table turn to look. “You’d think they could at least manage to get a decent bottle of wine on the table.”

  “Burt, it’s okay. You can’t expect a place like this, practically falling down of its own weight, to do any better.”

  “Well hell, if they won’t feed us properly they should at least give us something to drink.” The others are looking now. He knows he’s making a scene. “I do believe there is a jigaboo liquor store that operates not two blocks from here up Illinois Street. I can go and buy us a good bottle of scotch if you like.”

  “No darling, you should probably take a … ”

  “I need a good stiff one. Finally got out of this two-bit hick town, and now I remember why I left.”

  “Oh come Burt, we can be cordial. The meal is not the reason we are here. We’re here to see all these wonderful people we grew up with, Amelia, and can you believe we saw Jonesy McCutcheon by the bandstand?�
� He is desecrating this place, a great vibration welling up. These rafters have withstood more than this spattering of words though, have seen the span of two centuries.

  “Hey Mele,” he calls me that now, as if we’re old friends. “Whatever happened to Tris Holloway? Do you ever see him?” His face smiling, teeth jutting out like a wall of bone draped with flesh, like he knows something.

  “Yes,” she says. “Tris Holloway. Dear lord, I haven’t thought about old Tris in all these years. He was such a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Whatever happened to Tris?”

  “I really don’t know. I haven’t seen him in many years myself.”

  “Oh really?” he says, latching on to something. Pleased to have found something to prod me with, his teeth a wall of bone. “I thought the two of you were an item back when. Always over at Haag’s together at the soda fountain. I remember you Geists traveled in a pack, you and Elmer and Tris and Louise.

  “Yes,” she says, smiling too, joining in this remembrance, “but Tris wasn’t really a Geist, he was a Holloway. Burt, you know that.”

  “Oh yes,” his teeth clamping together on the words like something he bit off and chewed. “But didn’t he seem like a Geist? He and Elmer were always out smoking in the back of the gym along that wall where the boiler room was.” What to say? Words coming up unbidden, words from a page we read together, for by grace are ye saved, and all that will come is this:

  “We were friends, just friends.” Words hanging in the air for them to do with what they please. You were just a dream I followed too far, the only proof I have that the last fifty years ever happened to her as if it really were an accident, telling the story again to this doctor leaning over her, staring at her eyes and nodding with an imperceptible slow twitch of his chin, the same way she told it to Tom and then the girls again in their turn, convincing herself a little more each time that the fragment of porcelain merely slipped and gouged her. With the television silenced, the girls have left the room again, in search of entertainment. Tom stands with his hands locked together over the crotch of his puffy khaki pants and observes the doctor in action, perhaps again out of purely technical curiosity, studying the methods of another type of professional. The key is to repeat the story exactly the same way each time, inserting a few details along the way to make it seem as realistic as possible without giving away the most important—and most subjective—detail: what went on in her head at the moment the “accident” happened. Who’s to say but Holly what she was thinking, what swirling stream of thoughts was passing through her at that precise instant. Perhaps she did simply drop the jagged fragment or let it slip. The more she tells people this, the more convincing it seems.