by Abby Frucht
When they lead me upstairs to the bedroom, I see that the sheet has already been folded back and the heating pad, plugged in and turned to a low setting, spread open on the pillow.
I lie down on the bed, arranging the heating pad dutifully under the curve of my neck.
“Sorry about that,” I say apologetically to Daniel. “I didn’t want to go to sleep earlier. Nothing hurts. I’m only numb. I don’t need these things. You’re teaching him to worry.”
I gesture toward Stevie and take one of his proffered Band-Aids, a butterfly. Having unwrapped it, I press its narrow wings over the bridge of my nose, then wrinkle the nose at Stevie.
Daniel gives me one of his level gazes. I am hoping he is going to ask me why I’m carrying a ladle.
Instead he asks, “How do you feel? And what do you mean you’re only numb? What part of your body is numb?”
“Danka made soup,” is my answer, as I swallow the syrupy, licorice drink. “And not numb, really. Just sleepy, I guess. At rest. In peace. But don’t touch me, please.”
I say this last without thinking, and then there’s a silence during which I could rescue us, take it back, un-say it, somehow. Instead I hear myself repeating it, softly, over and over the way I whispered to the dog. My fingertips are sticky from the drink, and tacky when I try to push Daniel away. “Get your paws off me,” I finally say.
“Great,” says Daniel. “And what did you say was your name?”
Stevie begins to cry.
STILL THE SUMMER goes on, in its strange, slow, spellbound way. On Morgan Street close to the creek, the fruit trees hold fast to their blossoms, first wilted, now flaccid and brown. Our own cherry tree is belatedly making its fruit, and when occasionally there is a breeze, the myriad pink globes tick faintly upon it while overhead our big evergreens creak and sigh. Cats fight late at night in the trees. When a dog barks, it does so thoughtfully as if waiting for reply. Several people around town claim to have heard coyotes howling. The air temperature, having climbed past ninety degrees to ninety-four, then ninety-eight, then ninety-nine, now drops to ninety-five. There has been thunder as well, along with a few sonic booms, and of course Nikki’s music, which somehow registers so acutely the vicissitudes of weather as to predict the slightest changes in barometric pressure, the way arthritics feel such fluctuations in their ankles and wrists. Her music these days is a somewhat frenetic hum, mildly electric, purple-sounding, phosphorescent. Like neon lights. Nikki must know this, must accordingly plan her atmosphere, her studio lighted only through a half-open door by the indirect glare of the fluorescent bulb above her kitchen sink. I often watch her through the window. I ‘ll be sitting on the hood of our still-defunct car in our driveway, as I’ve taken to doing while Daniel weighs his sugars, mixes his nectars. If it’s raining I’ll climb inside and turn the windshield wipers on, and sometimes the headlights, and once in a while, the radio. Tonight, with Stevie sitting in my lap, I unroll a ribbon of licorice and lean back against the windshield from where we have a view of Nikki and her apparatus, her digital sampler, her keyboard, her fingers darting from knob to button, button to knob – and of her pained-looking face. I’ve told her I do this. She doesn’t mind. Every so often, while realigning some wires, or adjusting her foot pedals and earphones, she’ll look at us and flash us a thumbs-up or down. Stevie waves. To him, each nightly performance is like a new, interactive video game. After he waves, Nikki comes to the window, raises the mike to her lips and mouths an invitation for us to come in. Still I can’t shake the new, uncomfortable suspicion of Nikki getting ready for bed at night; unwrapping her sarong, draping it over a chair, then slipping a bracelet off her ankle before removing her teeth from her mouth and dropping them into a glass. When – toothless – she climbs into bed, it must be like a retreat; she wraps silence around her along with the sheets. I can’t tell her this, of course, so instead I comment on her music, how it sounds like a downed live wire. How pleased Nikki seems by the simile; she bids me sit down and plays it again, the same hum, the same buzz, the same potent force lying untouched on a sidewalk while around it mingle all the small noises of a summer night.
One day there’s a fight in the post office. Everyone is mystified about the man who started it. They call him a live wire, a loaded gun because he had no cause to go off the way he did, all of a sudden, kicking Gail’s ex-lover George in the shins then punching the eyeglasses off George’s face and down George’s shirt collar into his shirt. Even though the local bookstore has formally closed, George still works there, packing and shipping remainders. He has taken to wearing man-tailored shirts, in pastels and pinstripes, but his eyeglasses are the same thick-lensed wire-framed ones he used to keep wearing even while screwing Gail’s rival, the one with the antique dresses. When he fished the eyeglasses from inside his shirt, only one earpiece was bent, but by then his attacker had disappeared, screaming, after George bit his finger “down to the marrow.” The fight took place in the lobby, which stays open so people can get to their boxes or to the stamp machine after the service windows have been shuttered closed. Behind them where we work-filing change-of-address cards, sorting, stamping, weighing, bundling-two big fans whir deafeningly. So no one even heard the screams, or George’s yelling. He had to bang on the shutters, and when we got to him he blamed us for everything. His nose was running, some envelopes lay scattered on the floor, and one pane of glass was broken in the door. We all rushed outside to have a look and see who we could see, but there was nothing, only heat, and some blood on the wide pressed-stone stairway, a trail of drops that, still glistening, led down to the street.
“A live wire,” someone murmured. “A loaded gun.”
Someone else said, “It’s gonna be a long, hot couple of months,” while someone else asked George what he thought he might have done to deserve it. That was a joke; everybody knows George is a pain in the neck. George was bent over massaging first one shin and then the other, and when he straightened back up there was blood on his lip but we didn’t ask whose; his or the other guy’s. He said, “I didn’t even see him, that’s what I did to deserve it.”
But the street was the scariest thing of all, how empty it was, nothing but heat waves and flecks of mica and no cars anywhere as if the man had made his getaway in every single one of them.
THEN COMES the Fourth of July, the anniversary of the day I first met Daniel eleven years ago in St. Louis. Every year I put on my commemorative costume, a variation on the clothes I was wearing when he set eyes on me. I was four-feet, eight-inches tall, dressed in an over-sized T-shirt, no jeans, no hose, no socks, just clogs and alligator earrings. Daniel told me later he didn’t know I was a grown person until he looked into my eyes and what he saw there– “your womanliness,” he called it-shocked him into falling in love with me. For tonight I’ve painted my toenails glow-in-the-dark blue, but my earrings are filigreed roses no bigger than split peas. I’ve put on a little eye make-up, too, because the Fourth of July is serious business – even Emily might be there. The festivities take place at the reservoir close to our house, but still we go early to reserve our box seat, a hunk of concrete that juts out over the water. Arriving just after seven with our pillows and blankets, we spread our traditional French breads with strawberry butter. From here we’ll have a view of the crowd gathering on the field below, and of the launching pad, and of the fireworks reflected on the surface of the water. There’s a rusty pipe embedded in the concrete that makes a fine bucket for wine; we drop some ice cubes in and slide the bottle in after. After that we light a citronella candle, lean back on our hands and watch the water for bullfrog rings. Stevie stacks plastic wine cups and knocks them over. A Frisbee game starts on the sunken field as Simon and Ben, awaiting the show on a blanket on the slope, raise the hand-held zoom at the sky and peer into it hopefully. More and more picnickers limp by on the footpath. Still, there are fewer than usual, because so many people have moved away. Just last week the public library shut it’s doors, although the books are sti
ll shelved in the glass-floored stacks, the newspaper open on the rack in the reading room. “Tax base,” the librarian whispered hoarsely to me, “not to mention insurance.” Next year, I can’t help thinking, if this keeps up, there won’t be a Fourth of July at all.
Not until just before nine, when darkness has started to fall, do I notice my new friend, Emily, in her own box seat precisely across the reservoir from ours, sharing a loaf of identical French bread with her boyfriend. Standing up, I wave my loaf in figure eights until Emily jumps up too and waves hers in response, our very first communication since the day of the lawn party when we introduced ourselves. Now we try a little pantomime, our two figures gesticulating over the gleam of the water, but our messages are fuzzy in the dusk. I try to tell her with my bread that after the fireworks I’ll meet her midway on the footpath, and that we’ll sit together on the bench where we talked about our mothers. Emily’s bread nods fine and points in the direction of the launching pad. The first of the fireworks is a dud, and after that a few nosedive and pop in the water, but still we stare at the blue black bowl of sky, wait patiently and are rewarded by explosions of color that in the galvanized air are peculiarly muffled. The finale is purple chrysanthemums, and when they’ve dropped all their petals I can’t remember on which side of the reservoir I’d told Emily I’d meet her.
I send Daniel and Stevie home to the porch, then stand unmoving in the current of the crowd which is thinner even than I had thought, just a smattering of clusters of people all limping toward the street, but no Emily.
No Emily anywhere.
If only I still had my loaf of French bread it would lead me straight to her, like a divining rod. But Daniel ate the last of it. Probably she’s forgotten me, anyway, and right now is strolling home through the old arboretum, gathering azaleas and sticking them into her boyfriend’s buttonholes.
Back on the porch, Daniel only nods sympathetically, as if he’s known all along how foolish I was to think that Emily would meet me. Finally he says, “I bet you forgot the wine.”
He’s right. I left the half-full bottle in its ice bucket; by now it will be thoroughly chilled.
“So what?” I say.
“So it’s up to you.”
So I go back for it. The crowd has dispersed but trucks are cruising on the road and making U-turns, then drifting past the reservoir as if to catch sight of a few, residual sparks. One looks like the pick-up that chased me and Danka that night in Bloomingham, but tonight it’s filled with teenage girls, not boys, while two big dogs crouch in the back. They watch over me as I walk along. In the reservoir driveway a car is parked, hazards blinking, no driver in sight, while on the other side of the water some people smash bottles one after another, popping them under their boot soles and kicking the glass around. Early in the day there was a fair in town, with a dunking booth, several games, and an old car that for a dollar could be whacked three times with a sledge hammer. The people smashing bottles are the same ones who kept paying for the privilege of wrecking the car, leaving only, once the hulk was towed, a layer of shattered windshield like ice-blue hailstones.
Our concrete slab is frosted with starlight; it looks alone as an iceberg, the water not lapping but only trembling with each pop of a bottle, each belated, distant firecracker. Emily isn’t sitting on it; when something sways it is only a cattail. The city of algae is thinning out, its clumps of fluid skyscrapers dissolving into luminous threads where once, whole neighborhoods blossomed and clung.
At once I sit, and caress with my fingers the chilled, wet lip of the wine bottle. For days, since the Doberman Affair, Daniel and I haven’t touched each other. Not even sitting on this iceberg did our hands make contact tearing chunks from our shared loaves of bread. Stevie sat between us with his stacked wine glasses, eating chunks of peeled apple and the last of our supply of walnut meats. How indulgent we are of our son between us; no sooner do I lay my hand on one of Stevie’s shoulders than Daniel lays his on the other, and if I stroke Stevies bare neck for even a second, Daniel will claim it when I let go. But we never so much as breathe on each other.
Emily would understand.
That is, she would ask the right questions, and at the end we would both understand.
Since when have you not been touching? she might ask, were she sitting with me on the iceberg.
Since the night of the day of the Doberman pinscher, I’d tell her. And then, We were in bed, and I had told him not to touch me, but it didn’t work out, I mean we started to do things anyway, and he was rolling my nipples the way he does, the way I like. He was lying on his back, and soon I was lying on mine arched over his belly. Ordinarily. … So I took his fingers – grabbed them, really, and shoved them up inside where they seemed to dissolve. To disintegrate. To not be there. I couldn’t feel anything. We put his penis in me instead. After a minute I started to cry, I couldn’t feel anything at all, only desire, only terrible, unfulfillable desire. I climbed off, I was sobbing, I took him into my mouth. I could taste my insides, my thighs were flooding the mattress, but there was nothing he could do for me. Nothing. I sucked and licked, but Daniel had lost his energy. Later on he asked, “Just what did you want, anyway?” and I said something really mean, I said, “You should talk, Daniel.”
Then Emily might suggest, shaking her head in puzzlement. “I think you ought to try and–” but beyond that, the statement fades out. I know it would be simple, useful, obvious. I know it would help, but how? What I really want to know is – Have I fallen out of love? Except it doesn’t feel like falling. It feels as if the love itself were lifted away. And what I really want to know is-What lifted it? And will it come back down?
So I sit on the iceberg and wonder. They are still popping bottles across the water, although the intermittent firecrackers seem to have come to an end. Someone slams the car door in the reservoir driveway, flicks off the hazards, drives to the end with no headlights at all, then does a U-turn too fast. Burnt rubber. Were Emily sitting here we would have finished the wine by now, having passed the chilled bottle back and forth. Alone, I haven’t had a sip. I lift the bottle from the pipe, put its lip to my lips and tilt it.
No wine at all.
But something else is in the bottle; a tightly coiled ribbon of paper that when I flip the bottle upside-down and shake it, won’t fall out. I try reaching in with a finger, to no avail.
So I carry the bottle home and stare into it under the porch light. Even from here, we can hear the glass breaking at the reservoir, the popping and the hooting.
“Emily left a message in our wine bottle,” I say to Daniel in wonder, “printed on – get this – a roll of caps.”
“Caps?” asked Daniel.
“You know. Gunpowder. You hit it with a rock and it discharges.”
I point out to him the red coil of paper with Emily’s neat, risky message printed along its length. We take the bottle into the kitchen, wrap it up in a dishtowel, slide Daniel’s microscope out of harm’s way and tap the towel several times with a hammer. When we pull back the towel, the bottle’s still whole, intact. We wrap it up again and hit it more bravely. From over my shoulder, Daniel reads Emily’s message aloud.
WEDNESDAY EVENING UNDER THE ELM, he reads.
That’s it.
“What’s evening?” I ask exasperatedly. It gets dark around here around nine. Is evening six o’clock, seven o’clock, or eight o’clock?
“And which elm?” Daniel asks.
“The one behind the slatted bench at the reservoir,” I tell him, suddenly confident. It makes a lacy, spreading shade that will flicker on Emily’s perfect hair. Her hair is blonde satin, all of a piece, and she’ll have dotted a little perfume under the tresses that I’ll smell when she shakes them in puzzlement.
I think you ought to try and – let’s see-tell me how you got together in the first place. You and Daniel. Was it passionate?
It was like breathing, I will answer. We didn’t even fall in love. We were already in love when we met
each other, like brother and sister, like two halves of one soul. We never looked at each other objectively, after the first hour or so. I felt as comfortable with Daniel’s body as I felt with my own.
Just be patient for a while, Emily will say, with a shake of her head, a faint whiff of jasmine. I think you need–
Need what? I wonder later, in bed with an understanding Daniel. He’s in push-up position, his weight on his palms and toes, straddling me, just looking, not touching at all, a little worried around the eyes. The bedsheet, draped over his shoulders and haunches, makes a soft white tent that trembles with our breathing. We are breathing in counterpoint, my in to his out, my belly to his breast, my pudenda to his belly, not touching but hovering.
“Just be patient for a while,” I whisper to Daniel, when he’s made his careful way to the opposite side of the bed. “I think I need… I think I need a little…”
“Listen,” says Daniel, because it’s raining outside, and he knows I like the sound. He falls asleep as I listen, so I get up to go outside, barefoot and dressed in his cast off T-shirt. Down the front steps I go, across the lawn to the car, and not until I’m on the hood do I notice that the bottoms of my feet are still dry, and that my bare arms are dry, and that the car itself is dry, and that no rain is falling at all. I still hear it, however, in fact it’s picking up speed. I hear it sliding in the gutters, gushing from the downspout, sliding down glass.
I lift my palms into the air-nothing-and no smell of rain, either. Soon the sound of it slows. Plunk, plunk. Plunk. Plunk. Like drops in a bucket, and then I know that what I’m hearing is not rain at all, just Nikki, trying to tell us it’s going to rain. I swivel round on the car hood to look in her window; she’s there at the sampler, pulling a disk from the drive. When she sees me she raises her eyebrows, beckons me close, comes up to the window and mouths something I can’t make out.
“What?” I say, so that she’ll talk a little louder. She doesn’t, though. She goes around to her door, sticks her head out a minute, and tells me, in nearly a whisper, “Just remembered. Some man who look like a bird been round here lookin’ for you.”