by Abby Frucht
Dear Deets, I read,
Our missing you fills up our mouths whenever, haven’t… stand in the doorway and wait, and water the flowers, and chop tomatoes for gazpacho hoping you’ll be here to eat it with us. Your arms and… everywhere we look… Why haven’t you followed? Is it only that you don’t know where to… bag, shut the light, and walk out the door… think, and remember, and follow your noses, and it will be like the first times all over again, meeting each other, falling in… our missing you fills up…on the road, to the screech of your four… drive fast… and bring your baseball mitts too so… with… the grapes here are beautiful, seedless, purple and round with… else, just, your fingernail… frayed bits of dental… three bathrooms here, believe it or… please hurry and fill up our tumblers, as Edwards… a kiss for the roads, our tongues on your… we swear if you don’t get here any minutes we’ll.
Testicles, I remember, and scream.
Soon I turn to the sketch of the road and the house and the two, identical stick-figured women. No smudges here, but the picture is different, somehow, a bit grayer around the edges, while in the doorway the women, stick-hands on stick-hips, appear less jaunty somehow than they did before, less energetic, more resigned. They must have waited too long. They look close to collapse, as if had I opened the letter not today but tomorrow I might have found them on the threshold like a heap of pick-up sticks, their arms and legs akimbo, their hands and feet confused. Around them the page looks blank and pale, and as I fold it up I’m thinking how sad it all is, all those caterpillar-nibbled sentiments and crumbling postures, how sad to wait and wait and then, exhausted, fall to pieces. I think of Leah full of hope, missing Ben, wanting him to follow, then waiting, waiting, waiting, losing hope all at once, giving up, and forgetting.
How could I not have thought of this before?
Those few lines in the letter, now faded and smudged. Barely readable, but not gone, not quite.
Something about a clue. Something about packing your bag. Something about hurrying. Something about falling in love….
We mean to do it again and again, Deets, with you, Deets, and you, Deets – with you… Make up your mind that you’re coming to us, and you’ll find what you need to show you the way.
So, I set out to look for Ben.
But first I fold the letter on the crease, slide it back into its envelope and into the pocket of my jeans, along with a few other letters to be dropped at the post office on my way back through town. Crossing the square I catch sight of William, Danka’s husband, looking elegant and distracted as the White Rabbit in the looking glass. I have to pause in my step so he won’t knock me down, and as he passes I hear that he’s whispering, over and over, “Cariatharim, Abu Gosh. Cariatharim, Abu Gosh. Cariatharim, Abu Gosh.”
So, he’s found the City of Repose.
So of course I must tell Danka, but no sooner than I must tell Ben about the letter and the clue, or perhaps I should tell Ben first and then Danka, or Danka first and then Ben, or perhaps I should tell both of them at once, somehow, somewhere.
I climb the steps to the post office two at a time and trade my overdue letters for a set of jeep keys. The jeeps are parked in the back, so I have to go out through the sorting room, nodding helios and goodbyes to the other TLCs standing in a huddle near the fan. The fan is turned low. Apparently there is some sort of conference in progress of which rightfully I should be a part.
“Liz!” someone calls, and they beckon me over, but I pretend not to know what they want. Instead I throw them a kiss and push open the door. Still, having glanced only once at their faces I know full well what’s happening. I’ve been expecting it. Everyone has. We’re being merged. In other words, we’re closing. The windows will be shuttered. The fans will be still, the radio silent, the stamp rolls, stamp books and stamp sheets dispersed. We’ll be expected to hand in our mailbags, but we’ll all keep souvenirs; a strap, a buckle, a pocket, a patch. We’ll be happy to give up our trousers and our faulty cans of Mace, along with our blouses and blue knee socks. We’ll hang on to our visors and rain hats and wear them now and then, here and there, whereever we end up living. Behind the closed shutters, the door to the safe will be left ajar and my cot left inside with some old mail sacks on it, making odd, twisted shapes in the endless dark.
I won’t miss it, though, I realize, as I head for the jeep. In the sunlight it beckons and glints, and as I slide inside I know it will take me somewhere, somewhere special, somewhere I need to go. I turn the key in the ignition, put my foot on the pedal and drive, just drive, and find that I’ve driven to the old depot. But I don’t stop there. The jeep bumps from the pavement onto the grass and eases through a strip of woods to where the railroad ties start. The jeep straddles the tracks. The tall weeds whisper between the wheels before popping up behind them as straight as can be.
Maybe this is where I’ll find Ben, I say to myself. Maybe he’ll be looking for his woodchucks in the woods.
Or maybe this is where I’ll find Danka. Maybe she’ll be looking for Joe.
MY MAILBAG is of a comfortable, practical, sensible weight, evenly distributed, designed for equilibrium. Unless I am digging around inside of it or slipping letters into one of its pockets I don’t notice that it’s there; its very nearness and familiarity assure it of the status of, say, an article of clothing, so that more than once I’ve sat down at the dinner table still wearing it the way a shopkeeper might dine with a pencil still wedged behind one ear. Too, the mailbag seems as accustomed to me as I am to it; removed and slung over a chair, for instance, it holds in its creases echoes of the unshapely shape of my body; my “boyish” hips, my “boyishly” articulated shoulders and small, pointed breasts, along with what Daniel calls my “womanliness “-what he saw in my eyes that first day we met. When pressed for explanation, Daniel names a few qualities that change each time I ask: sometimes gravity and melancholy, sometimes mirth and impulsivity, sometimes dreaminess and meditation, or meditation and gravity, or dreaminess and mirth.
Even so I would never have imagined that without my mail-bag in tow I would feel the way I do, stripped naked, bare-boned. Not to mention the fact that with no backpack, no stroller, no Stevie, I feel fluid and limbless as water, helplessly flowing. There is a moment of panic, then a queer, contented calm as I walk through the tunnel of ancient magnolias to the hill where I can look at the hedge apple tree. In the limbs the gnarled fruits look bright and strange and heavy like all that is left of my body, whose very center is desire like a fist I’m sitting on, opening and painfully closing.
The greenhouse, when I’ve paused at the crest of the hill to look down on it, shows evidence of continued domesticity. On the stone slab under the hedge apple tree is a ramshackle, woven beach chair with no legs, the kind you sit on at the barest, frothiest edge of the surf, while just outside the door in a terra cotta pot is a totem pole with no faces carved on it, just text. Joe must have carved it himself; the letters, though crude, have a certain, primitive grace. I can’t read it because it’s in German, but I imagine it says either No Trespassing or Welcome, and not knowing which, I open the door and step over the threshold, and gaze down at the bedroll of burlap and woodchips on which I long to stay put for a moment at least, like water in an eddy, turbulent as ever, waiting for release.
On the edge of the sink stands the body of the doll, headless beneath her umbrella of Queen Anne’s lace.
I pull the door shut behind me and take off my clothes, with just an instant of regret that I hadn’t listened harder to Gail’s advice long ago on that night she first appeared on my porch. She would have made me a loin cloth of wedding gown lace tied with ribbons of satin studded with pearls. I‘d slide my hand underneath it, feel the smoothness without and the softness within. Above me the sun beats hard on the glass, and around me the greenhouse is pure, white heat. I lie still in the throb of it, arching my back, my legs parting to open, then faltering, slowing, stopping altogether.
There are footsteps outside,
soft on the grass. I swear I can hear the flap of his boots, and Eva’s deep, measured panting.
So this is where the postal jeep has brought me, I think: to Joe.
Except he doesn’t come inside. When finally I sit up to look, pressing my face to the algae-streaked glass, it’s not Joe I see but Daniel, and Stevie in the backpack, each of them carrying a radio. Stevie’s is a toy that plays Jack and Jill, but Daniel’s is for real.
IN RETROSPECT I know it’s because I didn’t want to see it. For how obvious it was, Daniel looking so busy, the strap of the radio slung over one shoulder, on his face an expression I‘d grown accustomed to seeing on Ben’s – worried and sad, with a hint of desperation just rising to the surface of the brow. He sat down on the beach chair and let Stevie turn the knob on the radio, then gazed at its secretive, squat, square shape as if it could tell him everything. He was deep in concentration, as he most often is.
At first I thought he was looking for Red, Ben’s woodchuck.
When the radio beeped, Daniel swiveled the antenna. Swivel, beep beep, swivel swivel, beep beep. Stevie beeped in response, and Daniel put a finger to his lips while cocking his head and listening. For a moment he looked away, dropped his guard, sighed, rested his cheek on the palm of his hand. I had never seen him do this before. I had never seen him cry. He was just on the edge, just holding back because Stevie was there. He was wearing Gail’s sunglasses, not on his face but clipped by the ear piece to the pocket of his T-shirt, blinking in the sunlight. I was thinking of the feel of the jeep keys tight in my fingers, and of the seat of the postal jeep breathing under my weight, and I only thought that Daniel’s face was not appropriate for the face of someone looking for a woodchuck, even if the woodchuck was Ben’s.
For a moment I supposed that Daniel was looking not for Red but for Leah herself, and crazily I wondered if Daniel was in love with Leah, had been in love with her all along or perhaps had just recently fallen in love with the memory of her as if it were an echo whose source he had to locate. When the radio hummed, he swiveled the antennae, and when it beeped-with a higher pitch, with more certainty, than it had before – he got out of the beach chair again and turned not toward the woods and not toward the railroad tracks but toward the little greenhouse at which I thought that maybe he too was looking for Joe. I didn’t think about why. I only pulled on my clothes in a kind of a daze, still steeped in the hot, liquid wash of my body. I slid my feet into my sandals and then stood for a minute, too excited to move. Daniel leveled the antenna toward the totem pole, and squinted. The beeping was fierce when I walked out the door.
AND IN RETROSPECT I know I must have been thrown off balance by what Daniel had done, as if by doing it he had protected me from the knowledge of it. I was wearing my giant oval locket earrings containing photos of Daniel and Stevie, and riding home in the postal jeep they swung wildly to and fro but I thought nothing of it, I thought only of opening the earrings when I got home, and looking at the photos, and then looking at the real things, at Stevie and Daniel, and then looking at the photos again. I thought of doing this day after day, ritualistically. Daniel was driving. I held Stevie in my lap and breathed as if nostalgically the scent of his curls.
We saw no people at all for the entire drive, and only one or two U-Hauls parked here and there at the curbs. The sidewalks were swept free of blossoms, the edges of the lawns neatly trimmed. There were clouds in the sky but their shadows hadn’t fallen; they hung reluctantly above among the tops of the trees and threw a silvery gaze on the bright, clean streets. How abandoned looked the streets, with not a sound to be heard above the purr of the jeep on the smooth asphalt, but there was nothing new about it-that eerie pitch of peace and quiet, that breaking point that wouldn’t break. We had seen it before, and we knew that it signaled a fresh exodus, and that when morning came we would see how the town had grown smaller again overnight. I told Daniel that the post office was closing, but he told me he already knew. Other than that we didn’t talk until we nearly reached our house, when Stevie started snoring. Beneath the hiked-up hem of his T-shirt his pale belly quivered in dreams. When we’d parked, we heard our stereo playing from out in the street. Our speakers are in the living room. On the couch was a clown wig of purple yarn. Two giant, clown sneakers lay askew on the floor, pigeon toed. Daniel kicked a clown nose and followed me upstairs where I laid Stevie in his crib, then down into the kitchen, where Arnie sat cross-legged on top of the refrigerator, practicing tricks. He held a glass of clouded water that turned suddenly blue when he dipped a finger in. Applause broke out from the corner of the room, where Gail sat in a terry cloth bathrobe, carefully pinning a hemline in the fabric of my own wedding dress, or rather, what was left of it; a sort of mini dress, camisole style. The shoulder straps were strings of seed pearls. It was summery, simple, romantic, with lace insets in the sides.
“Hurray,” said Gail, with a mouthful of pins, drops of shower water glistening in the tendrils of her hair.
Arnie grinned. He wore a suit jacket over his naked chest, and I could see his chest swelling with pride.
“Tincture of Iodine,” said Daniel when the clapping had stopped. “And cornstarch on your finger.”
“God damn it,” said Arnie, deflating.
“Really?” said Gail, as Arnie hopped down to the floor, box of cornstarch in one hand, glass of blue water in the other. He dumped the blue tinted water in the sink, filled the glass at the tap, added a few drops of iodine from a bottle in the pocket of his jacket, moistened his finger and was just about to demonstrate when Gail said she’d better hurry or she wouldn’t make her plane.
“What plane?” said Arnie casually, but I could see that he was scared. He raised the glass to his mouth as if for a sip, then made a face at the smell of the poison. He put the glass on the counter and gazed questioningly at Daniel, who shrugged and took a seat at the table, leaning back against the door frame so that he watched us from under half-closed lids. Watched me, I should say, and never in my life have I felt so much the subject of a person’s concentration; I was like a single actor on a stage and Daniel the sole, huge audience or more specifically, Daniel the scientist and myself the cell throbbing under the microscope. For weeks I’d grown accustomed to Daniel’s steady, endless gaze under which everything I did-the tying of a shoe, the scrubbing of a pot-seemed designed to emphasize that whatever I was doing was not what Daniel wanted me to do, for I was not touching him. I might be polishing an apple but I was not touching him. I might be sleeping but I was not touching him. I might be staring back at him, but not touching him, and all the while he’d be watching, or if not exactly watching-if he was in the other room, say, or even upstairs – then still he’d be aware of me and of what I was doing and of what I wasn’t doing. Aware of me, yes, monitoring me, yes, but as a scientist might monitor the progress of an event. Not to change it, but simply to predict and understand it. How passive that gaze had come to feel, on my back, on my hands, on my feet, and now how eerie to begin – just now-to suspect that it had changed.
He had taken Gail’s sunglasses out of his pocket and laid them on the table, and now sat quietly with the radio in his lap, his finger just hovering over the dial barely moving even when Gail said the dress was for me, and that I could wear it on the plane.
“I’m think St. Lucia, St. Kitts, or St. John,” Gail went on. “I haven’t decided yet. St. Lucia is volcanic, and there’s the bay where they filmed Doctor Doolittle. I know a guy who cooks banana fritters in the cabin of a boat moored there. Pretty tasty, actually. I could go check it out. He might not remember me.”
“He’ll remember you,” said Arnie, who put a hand on my shoulder, then let it drop to his side.
“St. Kitts is smaller, cleaner, and better kept-up,” said Gail. “Black sand, I think. Seems to me there was someone-but maybe that was St. John. I have things there in several boutiques. Caftans. Sun hats. A sun hat would go really well with this dress. What do you think? Cream lace at the hem, or black? I wonder
if it was St. John, come to think of it. That guy was pretty sweet. You know what it’s like when you like someone from the beginning. That’s what it was like.”
She was stitching careful tucks in the bodice of the mini dress, forming small, breastlike hollows of the gently luminous cloth. I was touched by those tucks, because they did look like me – like my body, my breasts – but very suddenly I wanted Gail to leave, with Arnie if possible, but certainly not with me. I wanted our house to ourselves, to me and to Daniel and Stevie, and I wanted those clown shoes out of the living room even if it meant they had to walk out alone. I was impatient even with Arnie, with the way he tensed up when Gail bit off the thread. The thread was of silk, and her bright green eyes were fixed although not on the knot she was tying. She was gazing at my ring, the one that had slipped off her finger, the scarab I had taken for myself. The wad of masking tape, which Daniel had so meticulously wrapped around the band, was gluey at the edges but still secure. I’d grown fond of the ring, of its clumsy size, of the strange, foreign shape of the beetle. Still, it was Gail’s. I pulled it off my finger, unwrapped the strip of masking tape, then with a fingernail scraped the residue of glue from the thick gold band. Just as I was handing it over, Gail stood up and went out to her suitcase on the porch, digging around for her pin cushion, I supposed. I gave the scarab to Arnie, who held the ring between thumb and forefinger while delivering it to Gail. He slipped out of his jacket, draped the jacket over the ring, waved his free hand around, and pulled the jacket away. The ring was still there, but Gail was nowhere in sight. Not even her suitcase was where it had been. The porch swing shivered, and something moved in the yard, low to the ground. It was Eva in her lilac bandanna, nose in the grass, rump in the air, tail swaying a little with every step. That’s what I like about Eva, I thought; she’s true to her nature, and so feminine. She is fueled by the spur of the moment. Now she slunk past Nikki’s fence just as Arnie stepped into the yard. He’d been standing on the porch, looking here and there for Gail.