by David Miller
“I love you, too,” said Two, the hot lunch of him lifting off his skin in a steam, a slight choke in the voice, collared and sputtering.
The postcards from her friends said, Mary, what are you doing!? Or else they said, Sounds great to me. One of them said, You hog, and then there were a lot of exclamation points.
She painted her room a resonant white. Hope White, it was called, like the heroine of a nurse novel. She began collecting white furniture, small things, for juveniles, only they were for her. She sat in them and at them and felt the edge of a childhood she’d never quite had or couldn’t quite remember float back to her, cleansing and restoring. She bathed in Lysol, capfuls under the running tap. She moved her other furniture – the large red, black, and brown pieces – out onto the sidewalk and watched the city haul them away on Mondays, until her room was spare and milky as a bone.
“You’ve redecorated,” said Number One.
“Do you really love me?” said Number Two. He never looked around. He stepped toward her, slowly, wanting to know only this.
In the park, after a Lysol bath, she sat on the paint-flaked slats of a bench and read. Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? … He who has clean hands … There was much casting of lots for raiment. In the other book there was a shark that kept circling.
The same eleven-year-old girl, lips waxed a greenish peach, came by to spit on her.
“What?” said Mary, aghast.
“Nothin’,” said the girl. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she mocked, and her shoulders moved around as children’s do when they play dress-up, a bad imitation of a movie star. She had a cheap shoulder bag with a long strap, and she hoisted it up over her head and arranged it in a diagonal across her chest.
Mary stood and walked away with what might have been indignation in someone else but in her was a horrified scurry. They could see! Everyone could see what she was, what she was doing! She wasn’t fooling a soul. What she needed was plans. At a time like this, plans could save a person. They could organize time and space for a while, like little sculptures. At home Mary made soup and ate it, staring at the radiator. She would plan a trip! She would travel to some place far away, some place unlittered and pure.
She bought guidebooks about Canada: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island. She stayed in her room, away from spitters, alternately flipped and perused the pages of her books, her head filling like a suitcase with the names of hotels and local monuments and exchange rates and historical episodes, a fearful excitement building in her to an exhaustion, travel moving up through her like a blood, until she felt she had already been to Canada, already been traveling there for months, and now had to fall back, alone, on her bed and rest.
Mary went to Number One’s office to return some of the fliers and to tell him she was going away. It smelled of cigarettes and cigars, a public place, like a train. He closed the door.
“I’m worried about you. You seem distant. And you’re always dressed in white. What’s going on?”
“I’m saving myself for marriage,” she said. “Not yours.”
Number One looked at her. He had been about to say “Mine?” but there wasn’t enough room for both of them there, like two men on a base. They were arriving at punch lines together these days. They had begun to do imitations of each other, that most violent and satisfying end to love.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been in to work,” said Mary. “But I’ve decided I have to go away for a while. I’m going to Canada. You’ll be able to return to your other life.”
“What other life? The one where I walk the streets at two in the morning dressed as Himmler? That one?” On his desk was a news clipping about a representative from Nebraska who’d been having affairs far away from home. The headline read: RUNNING FOR PUBLIC ORIFICE: WHO SHOULD CAST THE FIRST STONE? The dark at the edge of Mary’s vision grew inward, then back out again. She grabbed the arm of a chair and sat down.
“My life is very strange,” said Mary.
One looked at her steadily. She looked tired and lost. “You know,” he said, “you’re not the only woman who has ever been involved with a married – a man with marital entanglements.” He usually called their romance a situation. Or sometimes, to entertain, grownuppery. All the words caused Mary to feel faint.
“Not the only woman?” said Mary. “And here I thought I was blazing new paths.” When she was little her mother had said, “Would you jump off a cliff just because everybody else did?”
“Yes,” Mary had said.
“Would you?” said her mother.
Mary had tried again. “No,” she said. There were only two answers. Which could it be?
“Let me take you out to dinner,” said Number One.
Mary was staring past him out the window. There were women who leaped through such glass. Just got a running start and did it.
“I have to go to Canada for a while,” she murmured.
“Canada.” One smiled. “You’ve always been such an adventuress. Did you get your shots?” This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.
She handed him his fliers. He put them in a pile near a rhinoceros paperweight, and he slid his hand down his face like a boy with a squeegee. She stood and kissed his ear, which was a delicate thing, a sea creature with the wind of her kiss trapped inside.
To boy number two she said, “I must take a trip.”
He held her around the waist, afraid and tight. “Marry me,” he said, “or else.”
“Else,” she said. She always wanted the thing not proposed. The other thing.
“Maybe in two years,” she mumbled, trying to step back. They might buy a car, a house at the edge of the Heights. They would grow overweight and rear sullen and lazy children. Two boys.
And a girl.
Number One would send her postcards with jokes on the back. You hog.
She touched Number Two’s arm. He was sweet to her, in his way, though his hair split into greasy V’s and the strange, occasional panic in him poured worrisomely through the veins of his arms.
“I need a break,” said Mary. “I’m going to go to Canada.”
He let go of her and went to the window, his knuckles hard little men on the sill.
She went to Ottawa for two weeks. It was British and empty and there were no sidewalk cafés as it was already October and who knew when the canals might freeze. She went to the National Gallery and stood before the Paul Peels and Tom Thompsons, their Mother Goose names, their naked children and fiery leaves. She took a tour of Parliament, which was richly wooden and crimson velvet and just that month scandalized by the personal lives of several of its members. “So to speak” – the guide winked, and the jaws in the group went slack.
Mary went to a restaurant that had once been a mill, and she smiled at the waiters and stared at the stone walls. At night, alone in her hotel room, she imagined the cool bridal bleach of the sheets healing her, holding her like a shroud, working their white temporarily through her skin and into the thinking blood of her. Every morning at seven someone phoned her from the desk downstairs to wake her up.
“What is there to do today?” Mary inquired.
“You want Montreal, miss. This is Ottawa.”
French. She hadn’t wanted anything French.
“Breakfast until ten in the Union Jack Room, miss.”
She sent postcards to Boy Number One and to Boy Number Two. She wrote on them, I will be home next Tuesday on the two o’clock bus. She put Number One’s in an envelope and mailed it to his post office box. She took another tour of Parliament, then went to a church and tried to pray for a very long time. “O father who is the father,” she began. “Who is the father of us all …” As a child she had liked to pray and had always improvised. She had closed her eyes tight as stitches and in the midst of all the colors, she was sure she saw God swimming toward her with messages and advice, a large fortune cookie in a beard and a robe, flowing, flowing. Now the chant of
it made her dizzy. She opened her eyes. The church was hushed and modern, lit like a library, and full of women on their knees, as if they might never get up.
She slept fitfully on the way home, the bus rumbling beneath her, urging her to dreams and occasionally to wonder, half in and half out of them, whether anyone would be there at the station to greet her. Boy Number Two would probably not be. He was poor and carless and feeling unappreciated. Perhaps One, in a dash from the office, in a characteristically rash gesture, would take a break from campaign considerations and be waiting with flowers. It wasn’t entirely a long shot.
Mary struggled off the bus with her bag. She was still groggy from sleep, and this aspect of life, getting on and off things, had always seemed difficult. Someone spoke her name. She looked to one side and heard it again. “Mary.” She looked up and up, and there he was: Boy Number Two in a holey sweater and his hair in V’s.
“An announcement,” called the PA system. “An announcement for all passengers on …”
“Hi!” said Mary. The peculiar mix of gratitude and disappointment she always felt with Two settled in her joints like the beginnings of flu. They kissed on the cheek and then on the mouth, at which point he insisted on taking her bag.
They passed through the crowd uneasily, trying to talk but then not trying. The bus station was a piazza of homelessness and danger, everywhere the heartspin of greetings and departures: humid, ambivalent. Someone waved to them: a bare-legged woman with green ooze and flies buzzing close. An old man with something white curled in the curl of his ear approached and asked them for a dollar. “For food!” he assured them. “Not drink! Not drink! For food!”
Two pulled a dollar from his pocket. “There you go, my man,” he said. It suddenly seemed to Mary that she would have to choose, that even if you didn’t know who in the world to love, it was important to choose. You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one’s heart to knock against like a spook in the house.
Two had no money for a cab but wanted to walk Mary home, one arm clamped around her back and upper arms. They made their way like this across the city. It used to be that Two would put a big, limp fish hand in the middle of her spine, but Mary would manage to escape, stopping and pointing out something – “Look, Halley’s Comet! Look, a star!” – so now he clamped her tightly, pressed against his side so that her shoulders curved front and their hips bumped each other.
Mary longed to wriggle away.
At her door she thanked him. “You don’t want me to come upstairs with you?” Two asked. “I haven’t seen you in so long.” He stepped back, away from her.
“I’m so tired,” said Mary. “I’m sorry.” The Hamilton Pork men stood around, waiting for another delivery and grinning. Two gave her back her suitcase and said, “See ya,” a small mat of Dixie cup and gum stuck to one shoe.
Mary went upstairs to listen to the messages on her machine. There was a message from an old school friend, a wrong number, a strange girl’s voice saying, “Who are you? What is your name?” and the quick, harried voice of Number One. “I’ve forgotten when you were coming home. Is it today?” Then another wrong number. “Who are you? What is your name?” Then Number One’s voice again: “I guess it’s not today, either.”
She lay down to rest and didn’t unpack her bag. When the phone rang, she leaped up, and the leap knocked her purse and several books off the bed.
“It’s you,” said Boy Number One.
“Yes,” said Mary. She felt a small, short blizzard come to her eyes and then go.
“Mary, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, and tried to swallow. When tenderness ended, there was a lull before the hate, and things could spill out into it. There was always so much to keep back, so much scratching behind the face. You tried to shoo things away, a broomed woman with a porch to protect.
“Did you have a good trip?”
“Fine. I was hoping you might be there to meet me.”
“I lost your postcard and forgot what –”
“That’s OK. My brother picked me up instead. I see what my life is: I tell my brother when I’m going to be home, and I tell you when I’m going to be home. Who’s there to greet me? My brother. We’re not even that close, as siblings go.”
One sighed. “What happened was your brother and I flipped a coin and he lost. I thought he was a very good sport about it, though.” The line fell still. “I didn’t know you had a brother,” said One.
Mary lay back on her bed, cradled the phone close. “How does the campaign look?” she asked.
“Money’s still coming in, and the party’s pleased with the radio spots. I’ve grown weary of it all. Maybe you could help me. What does the word constituent mean? They keep talking about constituents.” She was supposed to laugh.
“Yes, well, Canada was a vision,” said Mary. “All modern and clean and prosperous. At least it looked that way. There’s something terribly wrong with Cleveland.”
“Cleveland doesn’t have the right people in Washington. Canada does.” Number One was for the redistribution of wealth. He was for cutting defense spending. He was for the U.S. out of Latin America. He’d been to Hollywood benefits. But he’d never once given a coin to a beggar. Number Two did that.
“Charity that crude dehumanizes,” said Number One.
“Get yourself a cola, my man,” said Number Two.
“I have to come pick up my paycheck,” said Mary.
“Sandy should have it,” said One. “I may not be able to see you, Mary. That’s partly why I’m calling. I’m terribly busy.”
“Fund-raisers?” She wrapped the phone cord around one leg, which she had lifted into the air for exercise.
“That and the boys. My wife says they’re suffering a bit, acting out the rottenness in our marriage.”
“And here I thought you and she were doing that,” said Mary. “Now everybody’s getting into the act.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to have two boys,” he said. “You just don’t know.”
Mary stretched out on her stomach, alone in bed. A dismantled Number Three, huge, torn raggedly at the seams, terrorized the city. The phone rang endlessly. Mary’s machine picked it up. Hello? Hello?
“I know you’re there. Will you please pick up the phone?”
“I know you’re there. Will you please pick up the phone?”
“I know you’re there. I know you’re there with someone.” There was a slight choking sound. Later there were calls where nobody said anything at all.
In the morning he called again, and she answered. “Hello?”
“You slept with someone last night, didn’t you?” said Two.
There was a long silence. “I wasn’t going to,” Mary said finally, “but I kept getting these creepy calls, and I got scared and didn’t want to be alone.”
“Oh, God,” he whispered, a curse or was it love, before the phone crashed, then hummed, the last verse of something long.
In the park a young woman of about twenty was swirling about, dancing to some tape-recorded arias and Gregorian chants. A small crowd had gathered. Mary watched briefly: This was what happened to you when you were from Youngstown and had been dreamy and unpopular in high school. You grew up and did these sorts of dances.
Mary sat down at a bench some distance away. The little girl who had twice spat on her walked by slowly, appraising. Mary looked up. “Don’t spit on me,” she said. Her life had come to this: pleading not to be spat on. Was it any better than some flay-limbed dance to boom box Monteverdi? It had its moments.
Not of dignity, exactly, but of something.
“I’m not going to spit on you,” sneered the girl.
“Good,” said Mary.
The girl sat down at the far end of the bench. Mary kept reading her book but could feel the girl’s eyes, a stare scraping along the edge of her, until she finally had to turn and say, “What?”
“Just looking,” said the girl. “Not spitting.”
Mary closed her book. “Are you waiting for someone?”
“Yup,” said the girl. “I’m waiting for all my boyfriends to come over and give me a kiss.” She closed her eyes and smacked her lips in the air.
“Oh,” said Mary, and opened her book again. The sun was beating down on the survivor. Blisters and sores. Poultices of algae paste. The water tight as glass and the wind, blue-faced, holding its breath. How did one get here? How did one’s eye-patched, rot-toothed life lead one along so cruelly, like a trick, to the middle of the sea?
At home the phone rang, but Mary let the machine pick it up. It was nobody. The machine clicked and went through its business, rewound. Beneath her the hooks and pulleys across the meat store ceiling rattled and bumped. In a dream the phone rang again and she picked it up. It was somebody she knew only vaguely. A neighbor of Boy Number Two. “I have some bad news,” he said in the dream.
In the park the little girl sat closer, like a small animal – a squirrel, a munk, investigating. She pointed and said, “I live that way; is that the way you live?”
“Don’t you have to be in school?” asked Mary. She let her book fall to her lap, but she kept a finger in the page and her dark glasses on.
The girl sighed. “School,” she said, and she flubbed her lips in a horse snort. “I told you. I’m waiting for my boyfriends.”
“But you’re always waiting for them,” said Mary. “And they never get here.”
“They’re unreliable.” The girl spat, but away from Mary, more in the direction of the music institute. “They’re dead.”
Mary stood up, closed her book, started walking. “One in the sky, one in the ground,” the girl called, running after Mary. “Hey, do you live this way? I thought so.” She followed behind Mary in a kind of traipse, block after block. When they got as far as the Hamilton Pork Company, Mary stopped. She clutched her stomach and turned to look at the girl, who had pulled up alongside her, perspiring slightly. It was way too warm for fall. The girl stared at the meat displayed in the windows, the phallic harangue of sausages, marbled, desiccated, strung up as for a carnival.