by Abby Frucht
“No, it isn’t,” I defended. “It’s just the way she wants to be. Undesirable. Invisible. Nikki doesn’t want to be sexual, ever,” I told him, and remembered what she told me once while sweeping her steps. There were no dust balls, just a fine, misty cloud that fell past her braceleted ankles. “I want to be like the tree in the forest,’ she’d said. When I fall, no one will hear me.’
“Or social,” I added. “She only wants to retreat. It’s not the solitude itself that she’s after. It’s the act of retreating. Long. Drawn out. Like sitting backwards on a train. First she stops writing music. Then she stops recording. Then she shuts off the power. Then she stops talking. Then she takes out her teeth. Then –”
I stopped. I didn’t know what came next. Her tongue? Or perhaps she’d stop opening the door, even to me. Perhaps she’d stop coming downstairs, even. Last time I saw her, her hair was undone. No corn rows, no clattering beads. Only a magnificent, silent afro, spongy, enormous, and dense, beneath which her ears were invisible.
“She likes to read,” I said to Daniel. “She likes sweeping, too.”
“Sleeping?”
“Sweeping. She likes cleanliness. She likes to know that everything’s where it belongs.”
“Like what. Her teeth?”
“Daniel… It’s sad, okay? I know. I know. It’s weird. But it’s not grotesque.”
“It is grotesque. And anyway what does Nikki have to do with what we were talking about?”
“What were we talking about?” I asked. I stepped out of the shower and covered myself with a towel, Nikki-style, a knotted rosette blooming over my sternum, and retreated to the bedroom where I lay on the bed to sleep. Daniel followed from the shower, placed a dripping wet hand on the secret, firm curve of my belly and shook his head in wonder.
“I can’t believe you don’t know what we’re talking about,” he said to me. “I don’t believe it, actually.”
“Believe it,” I said.
STEVIE HAS STARTED to walk, penguin-style, but only inside the house, not out. If walking really is controlled falling, then there’s proof in each one of his steps. How it catapults him forward, free of balance, slave to gravity, ahead of himself by as far as his eye will take him, before the next foot shoots out and sends him forward again. He shuns tables, chairs, hands, walls, anything that might redirect the impetus of his body and send it where it doesn’t mean to go. He likes unimpeded trajectories, corner to corner, the longest straight path from here to there, provided there is far enough away. His favored route is hallway to kitchen, kitchen to living room, living room to study and then living room again. We wonder what will happen when he starts outside.
Outside, for now, retards him. He falls. Or else he’s like a sail against a too-stiff wind, straining and straining, motionless.
Sometimes he spins a slow circle, looking carefully around. Other times he tilts skyward. Other times, he bows, forehead to the sidewalk, butt in the air. It’s as if there is too much space, as if the space exerts a pressure, as if the pressure holds him still.
He looks with special admiration at the trees, as if they’re waiting, like he is, for the purest, surest moment in which to take their first steps. As if they’ve waited all these years.
Outside, his favorite spot is the smallest of the three balancing posts at station three of the Fit Trail at the edge of the playing fields, on which he perches unaided once we’ve lifted him on top of it. There, if he wedges the toe of one sneaker into the instep of the other, he can stand on both feet, and once that pose is accomplished he shoos us away and extends both arms for balance for as long as he wants, admiring the vast acreage of the playing fields—the goal posts, track, and tennis courts, the bleachers, baseball diamond, and football field-while we stand and admire him. He could be the earth’s axis, so seriously does he take his new position, so profoundly do we stare at his perfect balance. Daniel says that it’s all inner ear, but I say it’s all patience and watchfulness. Daniel says that in this town anybody who is watchful must also be patient. While I stand on one foot, Daniel straddles one-half of some parallel bars, and for a while we join Stevie in his reverie of space, which in this town and in this oddly prolonged summer becomes equally a reverie of time. We did this yesterday, too, and we’ll do it tomorrow, although tomorrow we might do it at the third reservoir, where from the gravel path the soy fields still look green and steamy as if trapped in summer, and not a person in sight. Stevie is like a lighthouse keeper, scanning the damp, windswept radius for no company other than that of the landscape itself. How patient he is. How watchful. Is this from child- or adulthood? Daniel says it’s from neither. Daniel says it merely comes from being so innocent in a town that is disappearing. Neither of us has actually put it so bluntly before-a town that is disappearing-and in the dense, thrilling silence we lift Stevie off the balancing post, hoist him onto Daniel’s shoulders, and carry him to where the running trail veers off into the soaked, unmown grass of the cross-country route. The grass is waist-high on us, taller than Stevie. We push through it to the trees, then parallel the woods until we come to the spot from where the highway is just visible. State Route 139. Stevie likes waving at cars and trucks, and if we’re lucky, we’ll see one, although there aren’t so many even on the highway, these days.
Today, as I’d been hoping, there are two cars, travelling caravan-style, practically bumper to bumper. First comes William in his suburban wood panelled station wagon, then Danka just behind in her little black cat of an Audi.
“Wave to Thank You,” says Daniel.
Stevie waves happily.
The Audi is crammed with Danka’s suitcases of clothing and cosmetics. From the open windows of William’s station wagon float the strains of Ranata Tarraga playing Tres Pavanos.
They are headed for the City of Repose.
William had found, in an atlas he had purchased from the library of the college museum on the day the museum officially folded, a reference to a biblical city corresponding to the City of Repose. On the map it lay north of Jerusalem, a speck in what appeared to be a mountain range composed chiefly of sand and eminent ruins. Cariatharim, Abu Gosh. William, looking closely with his magnifying glass, had decided that the speck was a drawing of a palm tree, and told Danka that night of a grove of such trees on a sand dune in the desert near the ruins of a castle. He had already packed their hammock, he said. The hammock had been a gift from William to Danka many years ago, and had been strung in their yard in the shade of a pine tree until this summer, when the tree was chopped down.
He’d bring anything she wanted, he told her, including her soup pots and little black shoes. He knew all about her soups, and her crazy midnight drives, and he knew she made fun of his aprons, and he knew that she thought him a fool. He knew she never read the books that he bought her, and that she hated the tapes he played. But he surmised that deep down, she needed them, and that deep down, she needed him, too. He actually said, “I can’t imagine your life without me in it,” and went on to describe the things that she needed the most. She needed to watch him fold his jockey shorts after the laundry. She needed his finickiness, his elegant manners, his chivalry, and the way, before dozing off to sleep, he pulled the afghan from its place on the arm of the couch and wrapped himself in it. She needed everything about him that she claimed she couldn’t stand.
One day, sooner or later, she would realize this. But for now, she only had to believe him. He was going to the City of Repose, and he wanted her to come although he wasn’t going to force her to do it, he said.
“Damn straight he’s not forcing me to do it,” said Danka. “He couldn’t force me if he wanted. He couldn’t force me with my hands behind my back.”
“But are you going?” I asked.
“No way,” Danka said.
I had found her just where I had thought she might be, on the grassy plateau near the railroad tracks where I first found the pole lamp and the head of the doll. First, I’d gone to her house, but found only William, up late, packi
ng his books in a trunk. I wanted mainly to say goodbye, because I knew she’d be leaving one way or another. It was midnight when I found her, and the moon shed an eerie, silver light on the tracks. Because the ground was still moist, Danka sat on her suitcase, smoking a cigarette and trying not to look impatient. I knew just what she was doing; waiting for her trouble to roll down the tracks and rescue her. When I said hello, she didn’t turn around. I was wearing my seashell earrings, two miniature windchimes that lately Daniel breathed against whenever we made love. Their faint chiming as I walked was like the murmer of arousal.
“Don’t you seem relaxed,” said Danka suspiciously when I had sat down beside her. “Don’t you seem like your little Daniel is everything a woman ever wanted.”
“It’s been good,” I conceded. “Wonderful, really. Better than I ever dreamed.”
Danka blew an angry smoke ring into the night.
“But it isn’t what you would expect,” I went on. “Not that different from before. Not unfamiliar, at all. He does things basically the same, the way he always did, and I do the same things, too. No fancy new tricks. But there’s something about it… Something about the way my skin is prepared for his touch, alert to it, but ready to be surprised. And his skin, too. Something electric, preceeding my touch, then following it –”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” said Danka.
“And then we sort of sink into each other–”
“God damn you,” said Danka.
“until there’s no hard edge between body and soul. We’re falling in love, again, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean. To me it’s all a bunch of hopscotch.”
“Hogwash,” I said, “but it isn’t, you know. It’s necessary, Danka, if not always entirely dependable. It takes you out of yourself. It gives you a context. It makes you see things more clearly. Think about it. It’s adaptive.” I was shocked. Not even my Daniel would say such a thing. “What’s a kiss, Danka? It’s a scent mark. So you know who’s who, so you can find each other.”
“I’ll never know.”
“Yes, you will.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Yes, you will,” I persisted..
There was a brief, careful silence, broken simultaneously by each of us telling the other what we knew about William and the City of Repose. I told her he’d been packing earlier that night, and she told me what he said about the way she needed him. Then she told me no way she was going to go.
At this she climbed off her suitcase, opened it, and started rummaging around. Half of William’s mail-order drugstore was in there. Hand creams, bath oils, perfumes, depilatories, shampoos, douches, and soaps, all of the highest quality, the soaps packaged in fine wrapping, the perfumes in crystal, the hair brush and mirror tied with black velvet. Also a zippered cosmetics pouch, some mascaras, and several cartons of cigarettes.
“What’s in the paper bag?” I asked, as Danka pulled out a bottle of nail polish remover along with some cotton balls. Her nails were flaking and chipped from her walk through the brambles. I reached for the paper bag and looked inside. Turnips. Bulky and misshapen, they put me in mind of Joe’s fondness for the hedge apples plunking to the ground just next to the greenhouse, and then of his woodchuck stew. Joe would not have understood Danka’s Skarzysko soup, I knew. He might have found it delectable, even when it had cooled. For a moment I regretted it wasn’t Joe for whom Danka was cleaning her nails. This she did with unusual care, rubbling the cuticles clean. Soon she fished in her suitcase for a bottle of Cappucino polish, unscrewed it, and pulled the little brush daintily out. I wanted to tell her that William was right. In the City of Repose, I would tell her, he’ll fan you with a palm leaf and bring you cool drinks on brass trays while you sway in the hammock scheming of mean men and nasty places. William knows how sad you are, Danka, and he knows you’re not as tough as you think you are, but he’ll never say a word. He’s not boring, I’d say, only tactful and devoted.
Instead, I said, “Maybe you should spend the night here. Then, when you go home in the morning, William will already have left.”
Danka spread her fingers to the breeze and held them wide open. The breeze whistled as it came down the tracks. In the woods at our backs, darkness rustled the tops of the trees, but no dogs barked in the tract house yards.
I wanted to say, This is the last night we’ll see each other.
I wanted to say, Give me a piece of your sorrow, just enough to fill the ladle you forced on me.
Instead I said, “William was packing his aprons, every one of them. Imagine all the drawer space you’ll have when he’s gone.”
“I can’t believe he said what he said to me,” said Danka. “Even William. Imagine saying that to a person. I cant imagine your life without me in it,” she mimicked.
“He’s awkward,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
Danka’s eyes flooded with tears, and I got up to go. I pulled a grass stem from her hair and slid it into my pocket.
“GUESS WHAT?” I say to Daniel when Danka’s little black Audi has vanished over the hill. “The Epicurean’s going to close.”
That is, it will close in a couple of days at which time I might buy out any remaining stock at a fraction of its retail value and in the meantime there will be no more apples in the basket and no more fresh croissants.
“No more licorice either,” I add with a grin, but I feel like a black hole in space. I haven’t told him how hungry I’ve been. Late last night on the porch swing I ate a whole, raw zucchinni along with ajar of pickled, pearl onions, and still, when I slept, I dreamt about food. I’ve never felt like this before, well, maybe one time, but that was years ago and for the life of me I can’t remember what Dr. Kirschner said. It was my very first time in her office; a routine exam-pap smear, pelvic, breast palpation. It was winter, I recall, I had a bit of a cough, so she looked in my ears, eyes, and throat before placing the stethoscope over my lungs. How cold the instrument felt, but her fingertips were warm, the nails enameled. She wore a wedding ring, then. On the ceiling was a poster of William Hurt.
“Take a hard breath,” she instructed, instead of a deep breath. I smiled. For a moment I just sat there not breathing at all. Then I drew in a breath with an edge like a knife, and held it.
“Very good,” said Doctor Kirshner. “Hang on. Hang on. Now, relax,” she said, “and tell me how you’ve been feeling.”
“So hungry I could eat this examining gown,” I said.
“They are nice, aren’t they?” said the Doctor, fondly stroking the cloth of the gown. It was cotton, not the usual paper, with little clusters of strawberries on it.
“I mean it,” I said, and I must have said it fiercely, because she left for a minute and came back with a package of oyster crackers.
“Lie down,” she said. “Bend your knees. Put your feet in the stirrups. Have a little something to eat. Drink something, too.”
She filled a cup at the faucet. I had to drink lying down. I nearly choked on the lukewarm water, which tasted of wax from the paper cup. Through my hunger I could see William Hurt, who seemed to gaze not at me but at the doctor’s bent head. Her hair, at that time, was cut not in spikes but in graduated layers, all an even, dull blonde. From overhead she must have appeared demure, even mousy. William Hurt could not see her eyes – no mascara, no liner, no shadow- or the aggrieved purse of her lips. From my damp perspective she only looked annoyed; tapping her pencil, then tossing both pencil and clipboard onto the counter in order to pull on her plastic gloves. The gloves fit with a snap. She slid the speculum into my body and cranked it with more care than any doctor had ever cranked it before. That’s when I knew she would always be my doctor. I didn’t care how aggrieved she was. I didn’t even much care what she said, after that. She cranked the speculum a final notch, then gave a little hoot when she peered inside.
IN JUST A COUPLE of days, Stevie is walking outside as comfortably as if he’d been doing i
t forever, and as fast. He doesn’t wander in circles as most children do, or get distracted by what’s to the right or the left, or turn around and walk back to where he was before. For our afternoon walks, we simply set him on the sidewalk and wait for him to take off. Today, for our picnic, he leads us to the golf course and veers through a hedge onto the green itself, where a footbridge crosses a narrow lagoon. Just over the rim of a sand pit, we can see the squat shape of the clubhouse and that the rear service doors have been left ajar. It is Stevie who, ahead of us, first goes inside, and by the time we’ve caught up he has found the Coke machine. All the EMPTY lights are on, but in the pantry behind the untended bar we find a box of mint-flavored toothpicks in cellophane wrappers.
“How long are we going to stay here?’’ I ask Daniel, meaning not the clubhouse and not the golf course but the town, but at that moment Stevie heads out again, into the woods. Soon he leads us up the short rise to the reservoir along the trail that is overgrown. It’s a big surprise, when we’ve rounded the top, to see that there’s somebody there.
For a moment I feel I’ve been trespassed, and I know Daniel feels it too although we don’t say a word about it, just spread out our blanket. Daniel takes off his T-shirt and shorts but I stay in my dress for the moment. It’s the one Gail made from my wedding gown, about the size of a pillow case, Daniel jokes, and rests his head on my belly. Stevie rests his head on Daniel’s belly and together we crane our necks for a look at our company, someone sitting in an inner tube afloat in what appears to be the perfect center of the reservoir. Her toes dangle in the water. Her face is tilted toward the sky.
“Who can it be?” I ask Daniel, but he only rocks his head against my belly, sighs, takes my hand, slides it onto his chest and holds it there. His chest is fuzzy and warm. Stevie, also naked except for his sneakers, plays among the flat rocks at the edge of the water.
“Let’s eat,” I finally say.
“Not until we swim. Otherwise we won’t go in at all,” says Daniel. He sits up as he speaks, stretches, rises, makes his way past Stevie into the water, steps carefully-slowly-in, then dives underneath and does not come up.