Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  I veered off 80 and followed some frosted gravel roads through finger-lake and deer country.

  Raf’s parents lived near here, on the farm where he grew up. “He used to be a tractor,” I said aloud. I didn’t want to visit the parents. There was too much Raf in Raf’s dad’s smile.

  The northern horizon was sherbet green.

  I passed storm-shocked trees that sprayed snow like aerosol, horses picking over the puddled land, barbed-wire fences covered with frizzled ivy, rows of broken brown corn stalks, a silver-capped water tower, a park with a hundred picnic tables turned onto their tops.

  The evening sun put an oily finish on the snow. I saw spots when I looked straight at it—yellow, blue, magenta.

  I drove by a roller rink with tilted skates for a logo, heaps of cut timber, the twin spikes of winking radio towers, a tidy prop plane on display to the road.

  I passed a parched orchard, electric towers shaped like huge party dresses, a cluster of floodlights trained on a gorge, a white bowling alley blinking in the late sun, trees with rusty pine cones, fields of twisted weeds, crowd scenes of cattails.

  And tires along the roadside; parts and strips and hunks, and some were whole.

  The sky shook loose more snow.

  Now I had an idea for a long poem on enantiotropy. Barny, the physicist, had talked about it. He said this is the method for something becoming its own opposite, which it does because of a critical pressure, usually; becomes the reverse of what it was or ever intended to be.

  My car was hydroplaning. For a weightless moment it went airborne. The steering wheel lost command.

  Now the radio speakers yelped as the car let down. I’d been narrating the episode, I realized; for no one, carefully detailing it aloud.

  I guided off after a FOOD-PHONE-GAS sign.

  An eighteen-wheeler, also exiting, raised rooster tails of slush that boomed onto my windshield. When my wiper blades stroked the water away, fixed ahead was a funny melting world: a building like a stone hunting lodge, people, dozens of squat and stout fuel pumps.

  I was shuffling boot to boot inside a souvenir shop holding a cold phone receiver that smelled of lipstick and hairspray. I had it in mind to call my mom to tell her about the postcard and that Raf was or had been there in Wasnascawa.

  “Shame, shame,” I was saying now, seated on a bent leg on the floor. I was in the position of a schoolyard marble shooter. My left palm stung. I studied the corrugated tread on my boot. Some people were watching me watch the boot.

  “Oops,” a man said. “Still in one piece?”

  I saw my canvas handbag a yard away. “What happened to me?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” said one of the watchers.

  “I fell? I’ve never done that. I’ve never fallen down and not known it. I don’t remember falling.”

  My left leg hurt, hip socket to knee joint.

  “Thank you,” I told whoever was helping me. “So crazy.”

  A black man was helping me. His face was shaped like a pear. His cheeks bulged; his bald forehead was narrow. He wore a Dickie’s shirt and chinos.

  When I bent to scoop up my handbag he held me by the elbow.

  “Well, that could mean something,” he said, “that falling down.”

  “I know what it means,” said one of the watchers.

  “You’re wrong. Go fuck!” I yelled, and the four or five of them rushed away.

  “Come on, little chicken,” the black man said. He led me to dining tables—a cafeteria. Above the frying vats was a mural—a battle scene from the Revolutionary War.

  I limped. “Who are you?” I asked the man.

  “You better sit down,” he said.

  “Why? Are you calling the police?” I didn’t sit down.

  “No, just wait here. Name’s Richard,” he said.

  I kept my gaze on the napkin dispenser and slid onto a chair before an orange tabletop. I looked at the paper napkins until the Richard man returned. He brought a mug of tea with a saucer clapped over it.

  “All for you, now listen up,” he said.

  “My father says, ‘Listen up,’ ” I said. “Mario, my father. He says it all the time.”

  “I’m no advice giver. I don’t call police. I just say what I would do. I’d drink your tea. Then I’d take the cot room we have. We have a room with cots. I’d watch a little TV, and then I’d get some sleep.”

  “I’m drinking it,” I said. I fixed a stare on the Revolutionary War mural, at its purple streaks of trees, its redcoats, muskets, cannons. I drank my tea.

  From outside, the turnpike traffic sounded like saw blades and knives being sharpened.

  Through the window I saw squiggly trees, and the light—a misty fluorescent pink now.

  “Just one of those things,” the Richard man was saying. “Only I’d be smart about it.” He repeated: “I don’t give advice or call the authorities. But if I were stoned, or I fell down in public and couldn’t remember it, I wouldn’t be ashamed. I wouldn’t apologize. I wouldn’t feel guilty just yet.”

  “May I leave?”

  “It would be foolish,” he said.

  “I want to go,” I said. “I’m going.”

  At the next motel, in the vending area, I saw a figure in the shadows under the stairs. “What’re you doing back there?” I asked.

  “Nothin’. My quarter rolled.”

  A man drifted into the light and stood on the rug runner before the plump red soda machine.

  “I’m a guest here,” he said.

  The man was a salesman. He wore a Sigma Chi ring, a wedding band, and a ring etched with baseball bats—an American League champ ring.

  His suit was uniform blue, and his loosened tie was shiny. He looked overfed.

  “You thought I was somebody you knew? Who? Do I look like somebody? Your husband?”

  “No, actually not at all. Although, who knows? I haven’t seen him in a while,” I said.

  “Tell me about divorce,” said the salesman. “I been on the other end, of course.”

  I was thinking this man had been handsome and agile once, but now he was neither of those and he didn’t know it. He stood with his wide shoes set far apart.

  I dripped change into the soda machine.

  “Some cases,” the salesman said, “it’s divorce. Mine, it was burglary. It was hit the road, Jack, and don’t even take your p.j.’s. I had to start over at thirty-one, with nothing. Meantime, she’s doing the town. I know all women aren’t that way, but I didn’t for a while. She’s got every barkeep in every bar in Hagerstown knowing her by name—and I mean first name.”

  “No longer bitter?” I said.

  My pink can of soda chunked down into the PULL HERE bin.

  “Everybody says it, but it’s my kid I feel worst about. Maybe he don’t need a father, but he’s got that for a mother.”

  “What’ll you have?” I said.

  “You’re buying? In that case, root beer.”

  “How long you been here?” the salesman asked. He sat on the corner of my bed.

  “Only an hour or so.”

  “You get lonely on the road,” he said. “Get a load of me. Did that sound like a come-on or what? ‘You get lonely on the road. . . .’ ”

  He had a strong jaw and his hair was neatly combed. People had perhaps told this man he looked like a hefty young version of Dan Rather.

  “Were you an outfielder?” I asked him.

  “My ring,” he said and glanced at it. “Naw, shortstop. Batted—damn, I almost forgot. Fifth, actually.” He was grinning and trying not to. “Are you a fan?”

  “No,” I said. “My husband was, a little.”

  “He’s where?” the salesman asked.

  I shrugged and didn’t answer.

  He said, “All I meant was I get lonesome on the road, so I go into these ladies’ rooms. . . .” He shook his head. “I wind up talking to a woman in her room. It doesn’t mean
anything. The truth is, I’m still very tight with my ex-wife.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “I had a reason for inviting you in, but it wasn’t sex.”

  He seemed confused. “It wasn’t? Or not right away, you mean. Not yet, you’re saying.”

  “Not ever at all. I wanted you to listen to something. I could read it, and then you could tell me whether or not your attention starts to flag.”

  “All right, sure,” the salesman said.

  I opened my laptop machine and brought the long poem up on the screen.

  I said, “Just let me know if your mind wanders, O.K.?”

  The salesman waved his hand after thirty seconds. “Stop. Start again, slower,” he said. “That first part was really long.”

  “ ‘Enantiotropy,’ ” I read, and reread the first stanza.

  “Boy oh boy,” said the salesman.

  “Do you still want to listen, or should I just quit?” I asked.

  “I’m listening. . . .”

  I read all sixteen pages of the poem.

  “You wrote that? That’s all yours!” he said. “It’s science? Or social science? What would you classify it?”

  “Well, it’s a poem now, is all.”

  He said, “I get that. Yeah. Which I liked. I liked it a lot but . . .”

  “What? Go ahead and tell me.”

  “I liked the poetical writing,” he said.

  “Never mind, fine. You don’t need to say anything else. What’s your name again?” I asked.

  “Jeff.”

  “Jeff. Great. I only wanted for someone to listen. Now I see it could be better. That it still needs tinkering.”

  “O.K., but can I ask you something?” he said. “Why’d you write that? Did somebody make you, or assign it to you, or what?”

  “No, I just got interested in the idea.”

  During my reading, Jeff had stripped off his jacket. His thick waist had lifted the tube of his vest. His shoulders were wide, though; his biceps hard with muscle.

  “Did you do free weights? My husband again. He did them for a while.”

  “Believe me,” Jeff said, “I have done free weights. I’m in one-seventy, you wanna talk more or anything. We could go to dinner. You know, we ought to. I’m on an account.”

  “Good, because I’m not, and these motel stops are breaking me.”

  “So let’s do. One-seventy,” he said again.

  I hiked a mile along the mud ridges behind the motel after I spoke to Raymond.

  “Good, good, this is good, talk to him,” Pru had said and surrendered the phone.

  “Paige,” Raymond said—just my name.

  “Hi, I finally got you. I wanted to say I’m sorry for the way I left.”

  “Case of this time she does the leavin’.”

  “Oh, please don’t think that, Raymond. Remember how you said Raf’s just ashamed and confused? That he’s not running from me? Well, I’m all of those, and scared.”

  “Of?”

  “Not sure . . .”

  “That was horseshit about Raf,” Raymond said. “You left the next morning. Couldn’t of thrown a dart straighter at the bull’s-eye. You were runnin’ from me.”

  I thought about saying I was running after Raf; telling Raymond I’d got the postcard. But running after, running from—neither was true and both were.

  I stood in some glacial valley now. There were rock-mean mountains all around and, crowding down on them, the white northern sky.

  A boy loitered by the door of my room when I got back. His hair was fluffy, shoulder length. His clothes were weathered blues. He puffed on a cigarette; flicked it. The heel of his engineer’s boot was braced on my car’s fender.

  “You own this?” he asked.

  “I’m the driver . . .”

  “Same thing to me,” the boy said.

  Now he sat where Jeff had, on the bed, and smoked a Marlboro. He said, “I’ve trashed some motel rooms in my day.”

  “You’re just out of high school, right? I bet you like heavy metal bands. You’ve probably been in bands. And you like getting high, but you don’t do coke.”

  “No, I don’t do coke,” the boy said. “Everything else you said is wrong.”

  “You drink a lot of beer, I would guess; and have smoked great amounts of reefer in your day.”

  “I’ve got reefer. Beer makes me yak. I’d rather have liquor than either one of ’em,” the boy said, fidgeting with a threaded bracelet on his wrist.

  I said, “Your girlfriend dresses you.”

  “She’ll maybe pick out a shirt or something.”

  “Your dad’s, hmm, a franchiser? And recently divorced from your mom. You still sort of live with her, only she’s been dating a man you hate so you hardly ever go home except for meals and to do your laundry.”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” the boy said.

  “Your grades were pretty low and you almost didn’t graduate. So you’re thinking vocational school, trade school.”

  “My father fuckin’ owns this town,” he said.

  I said, “He works, and you see him once a month.”

  “Yeah, you know everything,” said the boy. His lean grin tried to take away some of the flush rising up like a slap mark on his neck. “You know you invited me in here.”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry. And the reason was—believe it or not—I wrote a poem I want to read to you.”

  “Get out,” the boy said.

  “No, it’s really true.”

  “ ’Kay,” he said. “Then what happens?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have any liquor. And I’m almost broke. It’s Saturday. We could smoke your reefer and watch cartoons.”

  The wall was a blazing persimmon. The TV was yelling; Jeff was yelling, and trying to look past me into the room. He kept asking, “Is that your son?”

  I was cocooned in the bed’s comforter, wearing it like a cape. “It’s TV!” I said to Jeff. “We’re just watching TV!”

  “Are you in trouble here? Tell me. You can tell me, I’m a cop.”

  “A cop? You are not. You’re a salesman. You were born one, you can’t get out of it.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m really a police officer. Whoever told you I was a salesman?”

  “You were a shortstop, now you’re a salesman, remember?”

  “I was a shortstop fifteen years ago and that was only . . . no shit, what’s going on here?”

  Jeff swung the door open and looked around the room, “What is going on?” he asked the boy. “I’m the police. I came by to take this woman to dinner.”

  To me, Jeff said, “O.K., skip dinner. I’ll leave you alone with this. But cool it on the TV volume or you’ll get yourself tossed out.”

  “You really the heat?” the boy asked him.

  “Not really really,” I said.

  “I come by to take you to dinner, I find Sodom and Gomorrah,” Jeff said. “Well, cops can party too, babe.”

  “Babe?”

  He said, “I’ll be in room one-seventy, you need me.”

  I dreamt a disembodied hand touched my breast. I dreamt I was driving the Buffalo Speedway. I dreamt I fell down and hurt my leg, and Raymond’s dog, Connie, was woofing.

  Jeff ate a sausage wound in dough. He tasted his coffee, dabbed his mouth with a paper napkin.

  His tie was noosed high on his thick throat. He had his vest buttoned. His dark hair lay flat and wet from his morning shower. He wore a bristling camel’s-hair topcoat.

  “Crow-suns,” he said. “They got ham, sausage, egg or no egg. I like the sausage. It’s embarrassing but I like road food. You sure look like holy hell, Paige. Holy hell itself.”

  It was early morning. I had a paper cup of orange juice before me that I hadn’t touched. I’d checked out and followed Jeff in his Celica back to 95. We drove thirty miles to this exit with the breakfast Burger King.

  “That was a kid you were with. I
can’t see that. A boy, not a man. Yeck,” Jeff said.

  “With?” I said. “Why argue?”

  After a bit, he said, “I mean, if last night was any sample, hey, no wonder you lost your husband. I don’t make judgments; I’m not the judging kind. But that was a bad scene—pot, I could smell it. A kid. Not like I haven’t heard of such stuff but don’t you go to church?”

  I looked at him.

  “What church do you go to? I want to know. The Black Sabbath Church of Evil Sin?”

  “Yes, that one. You’ve said it all now, Jeff. You can calm down.”

  “I’m calm. You better eat though, lady. Let me buy you some animal protein.”

  “No, really, thanks.”

  “Where are you going, besides east?” he asked me. “I just realized I don’t even know.”

  I said, “I’ll follow your car for a while. Then, I suppose, I won’t follow it.”

  “Makes sense,” Jeff said.

  Against disease in Cameroon, we took Proquanil and Paludrine, Fansidar plus Chloroquine. Mario drank his tea without milk or sugar but with a little salt; the same for fruit juice. We ate no salads, nothing that might’ve been rinsed in bad water. Bilharzia or hepatitis happened from bathing in the rivers or lakes, but the sea was safe. The first two weeks, every day, we swallowed an antibiotic named Trimethoprimsulphamethoxazole.

  Beat Like a Heart

  AS I CROSSED THE Rhode Island–Massachusetts border, a string orchestra on the car radio made music for a green, graceful landscape and not what I saw in this horizontal stretch, which seemed optionless and menacing, with clouds that were dirty, industrial, shaped like attacking fish.

  I felt forces at work on me, vise grips closing down with each revolution of the earth.

  Thumbtacked to the front door of the Brookline place was a puffy manila envelope, sealed and—no postmark or stamp—hand delivered. Inside was a single sheet of paper, ripped from a grocery sack into the ragged profile of some forgotten country.

  I stood in the bike clatter and yelp of the neighbor kids, in cold sunlight, and read the pencil writing.

  Paige,

  They got me this time, or HAD me. The poleeze.