by Mary Miller
“It’s gotten weirdly foggy out,” I say to the girl, and she says she’s glad she’s inside because it’s spooky as hell out, and then she goes into a story about how she saw an owl for the first time in her life, how it turned its whole neck around to look at her.
“Owls are predators. They could take off with a small dog, easy.” I glance at her name tag, tell myself to remember it this time.
“You be careful out there,” she says.
Back at the house, the boy and I sit on the porch. It’s the end of October but it’s still warm and bullfroggy. My dog licks my leg and I want to pick her up and carry her upstairs to my bedroom where she’d be uncomfortable but I’d shut her in and make her stay with me anyway. She doesn’t like stairs. Occasionally, I carry her up them, though she’s thirty pounds and acts like I’m torturing her the whole time.
“What’s wrong with her eye?” the boy asks.
“Nothing. She’s an Australian shepherd mix.”
“Is she blind?”
“No—she can see just fine.”
The bottom half of her left eye is blue-gray and craggy; it looks like a mountain range. This is what I tell him. He doesn’t say anything. “Can’t you see it? Can’t you see the mountain in her eye?” I want to touch his leg, most of all, which is so thick with muscle it is nearly fat. I want to grab his arm, so near me I could rub my own against it. I’ve heard he’s in love with another of my students, a talented girl from Georgia with very short hair. She told me she writes at least 1,500 words a day, every day, which depressed me. I hate to hear how hard people are working.
“Why are you still here?” I ask, but this only makes him ask if he should leave and that’s not what I was getting at; it’s also the only response to my question. Soon he will be with this other girl, this young girl he loves, and they’ll get engaged and live in a small apartment where they’ll write their stories and drink their Starbucks, dream their big dreams. They will do things in the proper order and they’ll be happy. I can see it all so clearly. Don’t mess it up, I want to tell him. Don’t fuck things up because once you start fucking up it’s so hard to stop and there comes a point at which you simply don’t know how to do anything else anymore.
AT ONE TIME THIS WAS THE LONGEST COVERED WALKWAY IN THE WORLD
“I’m dead,” the boy says.
“You’re not dead,” his father says.
“I’m dead,” the boy insists, draping his body over the arm of his chair. The people at the next table look at him, at me, and smile.
“Don’t be weird, son,” his father says, opening the boy’s shark book. “Look at this one—what kind is this?”
The boy looks at it. “Hammerhead,” he says. His father turns the pages, and he says: “cow shark, prickly shark, zebra.” He takes a swig of his root beer, which is in a brown bottle like our beers.
“Did you know that you shouldn’t wear a watch or other shiny things in the ocean?” I ask the boy. “A shark will think you’re a fish and try to eat you.” He shakes his head. “It’s the glint,” I say, “like fish scales,” tipping my bare wrist back and forth, but he doesn’t know what a glint is. He’s only four. I look at his father, my boyfriend, who is texting someone, probably his ex-wife.
The boy’s burger comes and his father cuts it in half and the boy takes a bite out of one half and puts it down and then picks up the other half and takes a bite. My boyfriend waves the waitress over and asks for ketchup. I order another beer. There is something wrong with my stomach, an ulcer maybe, and I know I shouldn’t be drinking but I seem to be incapable of living the kind of life where I eat nutritious meals and exercise and go to bed at a decent hour, or I can only live like this for a short period of time before fucking it all up again.
Flies circle the boy’s burger. One lands on the edge of the basket and makes its way along the rim. The boy and I watch it while my boyfriend stares at his phone. The fly moves so fast I can’t see its individual legs and then it stops abruptly and crosses one leg over another and scrubs them together. I wave my hand around. My boyfriend sets his phone down and unfolds a napkin, lays it over his son’s food.
It is August, too hot to be sitting outside. I look at the kid, who would never pass for mine, and hate him a little. He has a white scar that snakes up the middle finger of his left hand (from a skateboarding accident when he was two, he tells me), blond hair, and brown eyes. My boyfriend’s eyes are blue. I want to ask my boyfriend what color his ex-wife’s eyes are because if they’re blue then the boy isn’t his and we could be spending our nights alone.
On Saturday afternoon, I go over to my boyfriend’s house to swim. He lives with his mother because his ex-wife got the house and everything in it. He talks about his circumstances constantly—the things he used to have, how he owned his own home at twenty, how badly he wants to get out of this town but can’t.
He and his wife grew apart, he says, which could mean anything, but more than likely it means she found him intolerable or fell in love with someone else.
On the kitchen counter, there’s a paper bag containing beer and vodka and mixers and I know I won’t be going home tonight, that I’ll end up staying in the guest bedroom, wishing his body was pressed against mine. And in the morning, I’ll wake up and tiptoe into the room where he and his son will be passed out on top of the covers with their hands in their pants. I like the idea of the boy, how much a father can love his son, but I don’t like the actual son, who is screaming because he can’t find his swim trunks.
“Where did you last see them?” I ask, bending down so I’m eye level, my voice high and false. I don’t even speak this way to dogs.
“Would you grab him a Capri Sun?” my boyfriend says to me. “Let’s put on Jamie’s,” he says to the boy, leading him into the other room with a hand on his back.
I pluck the tiny straw off, unwrap it and poke the uneven side into the pouch as indicated, while my boyfriend helps the boy into his cousin’s swim trunks. Then he comes back into the kitchen to mix two vodka and tonics and the three of us go outside.
They do backflips off the diving board and swim butterfly as I paddle back and forth, avoiding their wake, because I have my contacts in, because they remind me I’m a girl. I wonder how my boyfriend would act with a daughter, if he’d teach her to change a flat tire and skateboard and play soccer, or if he’d love her less because he’d failed to teach her to do these things. One time my father tried to teach me to drive a stick shift; for weeks after, I practiced in my sleep.
My boyfriend wraps his limbs around one of the wooden beams that holds up the porch, shimmies up it in increments like a bug, and climbs onto the roof. The roof is flat. I could see myself up there: looking at the stars, smoking a joint. He jogs to the other end and then turns and runs, launching himself into the middle of the pool.
He swims beneath me, raking his fingers down my body as he goes.
Later, the three of us are in bed, watching men surf the biggest waves in the world from his laptop. When the waves break, the men get lost in the white foaminess and Jet Skis rush out to search for them.
“Is she going home?” the boy asks. “I think she should go home now.”
“She’s staying here tonight,” he says, an arm around each of us. I’m not uncomfortable with the situation, but then I think about it and decide that I should be uncomfortable and then I am.
“Come tuck me in,” I say, yanking on my boyfriend’s arm. He follows me back to the guest bedroom and turns the fan on, stands there while I take off my shorts and move all the pillows to one side and get under the covers. He sits beside me, pulls the sheet up to my neck like my mother used to do. Then he kisses my forehead and closes the door behind him.
My boyfriend has his son every other night. Every other night, I don’t see him, or I see him and the boy, or I feel guilty because he has passed the boy off on his mother. This afternoon, he has passed the boy off. He comes over to my house and stands on his head and falls and then stands on
his head and falls again and I picture the guy who lives below me looking at his ceiling, waiting for the next thud. “Let’s go kick the soccer ball,” he says, jumping up. I don’t know how to play soccer, though I used to watch my ex-husband play. I’d hand him bananas for leg cramps, cold bottles of water.
He skateboards on the sidewalk while I follow, his soccer ball under my arm like an athlete, circling back so I won’t get too far behind. Talking the whole time. His energy makes me nervous and dull, like I have nothing to say that might interest him, like I won’t be able to hold his attention for long. When he’s like this, I find myself unable to locate words, lose my train of thought. I jog to keep up and the cars don’t honk like they do when I’m just a white girl in a dress walking alone. He leads me to the train station. It is one of the things I like most, how he doesn’t force me into the position of having to admit I don’t know what I want.
“At one time this was the longest covered walkway in the world,” he says, and I lie on his skateboard, which is actually a longboard, a type I’ve never seen, and he pushes me down the covered walkway. I turn my head to look at the rusted train cars and a series of low, redbrick buildings, the puffy clouds splotched with dark spots. The sun disappears behind one of them and the world goes dim and I’m reminded that the ugly derelict things only make the world more beautiful. I put my feet on the concrete to stop myself, and he bends down and kisses me. I touch his face, slick with sweat.
He pulls a bandanna from his pocket and offers it to me first. Then we kick the soccer ball back and forth. I try to kick it up into my hands like he does, but I miss until he says, “Like that, but put your hands out.” It’s like magic. Like keep your eye on the ball.
He does a backflip, lands on his feet. “You should do that in the grass,” I say, as a bus pulls up. No one gets on or off. The driver stares straight ahead and keeps his hands on the wheel.
“Come on,” he says, skating while I dribble. “Don’t let it get too far ahead of you,” he says, “stay in control of it.” Cars fly by. I look at the people inside, more grotesque than the ones walking around in the world, turning their heads to look at us. I wonder if they just pick up fried chicken and drive back home, if they ever go anywhere besides Walmart. I kick the ball into the street and he skates out to retrieve it, kicks it to me. We’re like a gang, the two of us, and the kid tucked safely away at his mother’s so we can recall the cute things he said about how babies are made and life after death and smile.
I follow him to a park, a small grassy area and a fountain. The last time we were here, we saw a couple with a picnic basket being photographed in the dark. He reminds me of this. I remind him how he slipped and fell on his back so perfectly I thought he’d done it on purpose.
We walk over to the fountain, which is surrounded by concrete benches, spaced in such a way that you shouldn’t jump from one to the other of them, but he does, and then I stand on one and look at the next one and he says, “You can do it.” He holds out his hand and I swat at it and jump, and then jump another, following him around the fountain feeling drunk and careless, like if I hurt myself it will be his fault, which makes hurting myself seem okay, necessary even. And then we stop and take off our shoes and cover up as many water holes as we can with our feet and hands.
I shower while he goes outside to smoke. He comes back and smashes his forehead to the frosted glass, his hands cupping either side of his face. I pretend not to see him and then I look at him, surprised, and turn the water off.
He hands me a bundle of tiny weed-like flowers so small they can’t be put in water; they would float like tea leaves.
“You make me so happy,” I say.
“That makes me happy,” he says, digging the pads of his fingers into my scalp. My hair drips onto the mat.
“How come?”
He shrugs and says, “I’m going to take a quick shower and then let’s go out.” He loves going to bars, drinking and stepping into hair-trigger conversations that could easily deteriorate into fights. He won’t admit this, though—he says it’s his face, that it attracts fists.
While we wait for our sushi, we sit at the bar and drink, draw on napkins with tiny pencils. I write: I ♥ Richie. He draws a picture of a dinosaur, smoking and taking a shit. The caption above it says Dinos died from Sneezys.
“What’s a sneezy?”
“It’s a blunt,” he says, “or a whore who won’t leave you alone.”
“That’s like every entry in the Urban Dictionary.”
I push my napkin in front of him and tell him I love him. He doesn’t say anything and then he says he can’t say it back. If I’d thought there’d been a chance of it, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.
“How do you know you love me?” he asks.
“I don’t know—because sometimes it’s all I can think. Sometimes it’s the only thing that’ll stay in my head.”
He considers this and says, “It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It only means I can’t say it.” And then he gives me some reasons but I don’t listen. Probably he is saying love is terrifying and financially ruinous and stuff like that. I scratch out I ♥ Richie and flip the napkin over. I draw more hearts, dozens of them, in all sizes, that grow closer and closer together until there’s no more room. Then I pencil them in. I’ve always doodled hearts; it has nothing to do with anything.
I think about the things he does for me—how he insists on paying and pulls out chairs, how he walks on the outside of the street when there’s no sidewalk so he’ll be the one that gets hit, and wonder why these things don’t matter more—they are actual things, whereas the other is just a group of words I’ve said to a bunch of people who are no longer around, people I don’t even think about.
On the way back to my house, he stops at the gas station. He likes the make-your-own-six-packs, always gets two of each so we can drink the same thing at the same time.
He opens a couple of Fat Tires and we sit on my floor and look at his pictures from India on his laptop: he’s in a rickshaw, a hookah bar, a train station. He took a picture of his feet from every bed he slept in. There are pictures of him with other mustached men who called him brother. Somewhere, in a camera belonging to a girl from Arkansas, there’s a picture of him holding a dead baby he plucked out of the Ganges; he thought it was a pile of rags. “We weren’t supposed to take pictures on the Ganges,” he says, “fucking bitch.” He tells me how the girl from Arkansas kept trying to have sex with him. Except for his ex-wife, all of his stories involving women sound like this: the girl wanted to fuck him, and he did, or didn’t, and either way she was angry. He lost jobs, friends, places to live.
When the slideshow is over, he shows me a picture of him and his ex-wife dressed as Adam and Eve for Halloween. His hair is disheveled; he’s holding an apple and looking away from the camera. Her face looks kind of like a boy’s, but she has long hair and skinny legs and large breasts. They are possibly the most beautiful couple I have ever seen.
Today, a postcard arrives while I’m eating cheese toast he made in the oven, watching him walk around with his shirt off. It’s from a man named Frank, an older gay man he knew in Tallahassee. He would come home from work and find Frank passed out on his patio furniture. Now, Frank writes him letters, dozens of them that go unopened. I read the card to myself and then read it aloud: German friends, a tourist trap, an island. It is like a regular postcard in that it says nothing.
“I hate it when he calls them his German friends like I don’t know them,” he says.
I put the postcard on the stack, wondering if there are any checks inside the envelopes and if he’d be willing to cash them. Then I pick up an empty box of Diet Dr Pepper. “I thought you didn’t drink this stuff,” I say, turning it upside down.
“It’s a mask,” he says. He shows me the two, lopsided eyeholes. His room is full of helmets and trucks and plastic men with movable parts. Once, he sent me a picture of himself wearing a chest plate, holding a sword and shield: Did anyone o
rder a knight in shining armor? I watch him undress behind his open door, and glance at his mother in the kitchen, painting watercolors. I wonder what she thinks of me, if she wonders what I’m doing here. I go to the bathroom and put my swimsuit on. The bathroom is decorated in sailboats—on the shower curtain and bath mat, hanging above the toilet—though we are nowhere near the ocean.
I open the sliding glass door, where the dogs lick my hands, and take a towel from a chairback. My boyfriend comes out and picks up his clippers, tends his marijuana plant. His mother doesn’t know it’s a marijuana plant; when she had a party last week for the diabetes children, he had to relocate it.
“Come smell,” he says.
I lean into the hairy little pods, say it smells good, and then go lie down. I think about his ex-wife in a flesh-colored suit, leaves covering her nipples and vagina, and try to read but there are the dogs and the sun and my boyfriend, who is shirtless, who likes to climb things and fling himself off.
“I’m your cabana boy,” he says, bringing me a beer. “Pale Ale okay?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Don’t be too polite to the cabana boy,” he says. “Cabana boys should be treated like shit.” He tells me all I have to do when I want another is to hold up my empty bottle and waggle it. I try it out and he says, “Yes, good, like that,” and goes back to pruning his plant. Then he chases the leaves and pine straw out of the pool with a net while I squeeze my breasts together, arrange my body into what I hope are alluring shapes. He doesn’t notice. After a while, I go to the bathroom to check my face and hair and body in the mirror. I lean into it and wonder if he can see me, why he doesn’t see me.
When I come back out, his ex-wife is there, their kid. She’s not as pretty in person, moving around.