“Yes, Cora’s with her. Sure you don’t want anything?”
“Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe I wanted endless orange slices slipped between my lips, and bits of hay in my hair.
Jim lingered. “Okay,” he said finally. After he left, I realized he had wanted me to go along.
I WAS THIRSTY. MY SUNGLASSES KEPT SLIDING down my slick nose. The hair at the back of my neck now lay flat with damp. I had a brushed-by-an-otter sensation. And then, while I stood in line at the lemonade stand, the atmosphere around me changed. The vibrancy of the colors and the vitality of the beating drums became diluted, as if a drop or two of water, or tears, had trickled into the kaleidoscope and clouded my view.
I smelled him before I saw him, a teary hyacinth note that sneaked through the cracks in the thick wall of fair food scents, stole into my nostrils, and spoke of sadness and silver hair, of silver charms and the metal of train tracks so cool against the neck.
And I heard him after I smelled him, speaking a name I knew, and speaking it with great familiarity and intimacy because it was the name of the little lass he stirred from bed each morning and folded back in each night, whose hand he now held. “What size do you want, Nettie?” he said. They stood in line, a few spots in front of me, he in his black-and-white-checkered trousers, she with her yellow hair crowned in a feathered souvenir headdress. I watched them get their drinks. Simon pushed his wallet into his pocket. Just before they turned, I left the line and walked away.
I forced my legs to carry me once more past all the vendors’ stands. Could it be, could it be, could it be that he had come for me? I stopped at the fry bread trailer, but Jim was not there. I looked toward the grass on the outskirts of the arbor, where Granma and Ruby sat in matching chairs. Beside them, Josie, flushed from dancing, stood and wove Cora’s locks into twin braids. Cora craned her neck first one way and then another, looking, squinting through her spectacles, her mouth an opened oval of worry, and Josie clasped her head firmly in her hands and centered it again. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” called the MC, “it’s time for the Hoop Dancers. All you lovely Hoop Dancers, this is your time to shine.”
“Margie!” A small, hot hand clasped mine. “Hello!”
“Hello, hello!” I bent down to embrace her. Her feathers stuck to my damp face. “What are you doing here, Annette?” I looked up at him. “What are you doing here?” I asked again.
He hugged me hard, sighed into my neck, said my name over and over. I hadn’t been held so close for so long, I almost swooned from the sweetness of it, and from a simultaneous sick feeling in my stomach. The ladybug left her station at the back of my neck and resettled in her usual spot behind my eyes, and she was still, and so was I.
“Let me see you,” he said, lifting up my sunglasses and staring into my face.
He, I noticed right away, was not wearing any sunglasses. I looked into his eyes and discovered that the once-impenetrable gems had developed little inclusions, little openings, and I could see sentiments shining through them, like sunlight through the slits in shut blinds. I wanted to hug Simon again.
“You look different,” I said.
“Let’s go,” he replied.
In a way, it was a relief. This was the end to the queasy anticipation. This was the “old friend” I would find at Crow Fair. Of course everything would come full circle, I thought, glancing at the Hoop Dancers twirling their closed rings. Of course everything would come back to Simon, who had, I supposed, started it all. Still …
“I want …” I said. “I wasn’t … expecting …”
“I drove a thousand miles to get to you, and it’s a thousand miles home.”
“Is this the place where you brought my Strawberry Shortcake suitcase?” Annette asked.
“How did you know I was here?”
“The long letter you wrote me. I got it after I gave Bumble the one I wrote to you. You told me you were on the Crow Reservation. We’ve been driving all over this godforsaken place for three days.” Annette nodded. She looked pale, and there were bits of blue cotton candy glued to her chin. “When I heard this big fair was happening, I thought maybe I’d run into you here. And here you are.” He pulled me close. “My Margie, come. You’re so tan and lovely, how long your hair is, come, I want to eat you up.”
Annette looked away, entranced by a Fancy Dancer’s fluorescent clothes. “Dad, what are all these costumes?” she asked.
“But, I’m not … I don’t know if I’m ready, today …”
Simon didn’t hear. “We’re going to get you out of this mess. I’m going to try to get into Nettie’s trust fund. We’ll pay for a good lawyer. We’ll get you back in school.” He paused. He poured his eyes straight into my mine. And, just as it had been in those crushy classroom days when he had called me “beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful,” it was heaven to be seen. “You must have felt like you were dying here,” he said. “It’s so empty. Count on Bumble to arrange for you to come to a place like this.” He shook his head. “Surely there were better options. Who have you been staying with? Have they treated you well? Are they here?”
“Simon, I—”
“You have a lot to tell me. I can see it in your face. You’ve been lonely. I’ve been lonely, too.”
“I can leave tomorrow,” I said.
“No, today. What reason could you possibly have to stay? Come, Margie. We’ve spent three nights at a strange hotel in Billings called the War Bonnet Inn, and tonight will be our last. That will have been more than enough—”
“There are so many bunnies at that hotel, Dad!” Annette noted.
“This is true.”
“Can we get one when we get home?”
“Maybe, sweetheart. If Margie wants.” He squeezed my hand with his cushiony palm. His own hand shook. I was moved, captured, entranced. I remembered our jasmine nights. “Come now,” he said. “Our car’s not far.”
SIMON’S TOMATO RED 2002 was haphazardly parked, blocking the entrance to one of the teepees in the camp. He opened the passenger door for me, and I slipped in and rolled down the window. I was hot, so hot, so thirsty, and it was hard to see anything clearly through my foggy sunglasses, and my heart pounded in my ears, but still I could hear the MC calling, calling over the sound system, for the “young ladies, lovely young ladies from near and far who will do the Fancy Shawl Dance for us at this fabulous Crow Fair, ladies, you butterfly girls, young Fancy Shawl Dancers, come into the arbor and out of your cocoons …”
I turned my face away from Simon beside me. I pressed it into the nook between the passenger seat and the door. I pressed my wet face into the sliver of space there, bending the bill of my buffalo hat.
“Okay, Margie.” Simon stroked me. “Okay, don’t cry. It’s all over. You’re coming home.”
“Go,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s just go.”
14 SEAHORSE (Hippocampus borboniensis)
FIVE MILES OUT OF CROW AGENCY, I pulled my face out from the space between the seat and the door. I took off my cap and placed it on my lap, upside down so I couldn’t see the buffalo. I grabbed Simon’s hand. Annette reached forward and petted my hair. “I’ll brush your hair and you can brush mine,” she said.
ANNETTE HAD BEEN RIGHT about the War Bonnet Inn. It was inexplicably populated by an abundance of bunnies. There were hundreds of them hopping all over the hotel grounds, their calico colors vivid in the late-afternoon light. They hopped in the parking lot, on the sidewalk outside the lobby, and in the outdoor corridors between rooms. “I’m tempted to devise some plan to save them,” Simon said, “but they actually seem to be doing quite well. Maybe they don’t need saving at all. And anyway,” he gave me a weary glance, “those days are over.”
I told Annette about Charlotte. “Perhaps she can be our pet when we get back home,” she said.
“I hope,” I said. “If Ptarmigan is willing to give her back.”
“A rabbit—in the house?” Simon asked. “You lived with a rabbit in your house
?”
“My studio apartment,” I said. “After I left your place.” He bowed his head, and I felt sorry for mentioning it. “There are house rabbits,” I added. “Many people have them.”
“Is that sanitary?” he asked.
I recalled the scoured, snowy surfaces of Simon’s shadowy abode, the way the big heavy outer doors led to a second set of inner doors, which opened to a spotless, solar-powered realm of closed windows and white walls, everything clean, everything “green.” It would be nice, at least, to sleep in a big bed again, I thought.
Simon had left the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the doorknob of their hotel room. Inside, his suitcase was opened, and his and Annette’s clothes spilled out onto the floor. The beds were unmade, and in the bathroom all the complimentary soaps and pocket-sized shampoo bottles were scattered about in disarray, while a soaking wet towel languished on the linoleum.
“Sorry it’s not very tidy,” he said. “I guess I’ve been pretty preoccupied with tracking you down.”
“I don’t have any of my things,” I said, picturing the Strawberry Shortcake suitcase and all of its contents tucked into its usual corner in Cora’s bedroom. I could never ask Jim and Granma to ship it to me. I could never speak to them again after the way I had left. I felt gray inside, not rosy or healthy, but gray with shame.
“It’s okay,” Simon said. “You can wear something of mine. And you”—he coaxed the TV remote gently out of Annette’s hand—“need a bath.”
I stood in the bathroom and watched the dirt of the day, along with a few fine cotton candy filaments, slide from her slim sylph’s body into the water. She told me about the seahorses in the nature documentary she’d watched on TV the night before.
“Did you know seahorses are raised by their fathers?” I asked.
“I wish I had that kind of tail,” she said, “to curl around whatever I wanted. I would curl it around you right now.”
Simon called me back out to him. The air conditioner droned, and the whole room smelled of Annette’s teensy bar of strongly perfumed hotel soap. He sat me down on the bed, pushed my hair behind my ears. “Did you get my letter?” His voice was low and intimate. I nodded. “Did you understand everything?”
“Yes.”
“Margie, I made a mistake, pushing something special out of my life because I was afraid of losing it. I mean you. I’d rather have you, and face my fear of losing you, than be without you. I want to do the brave thing. I’ve worked through my troubles. I’ve missed you, my rara avis.* I want you.”
I stared into Simon’s face. The new lights in his eyes sent sharp sparks into my left ovary, as did the familiar shakiness of his smile. “Thank you,” he said, “for coming with me, and for giving me a chance. I think we can be a family.”
I pressed my face into his neck.
“Who was it you were with?” he asked.
“A family,” I said. Impossible—it was impossible, I thought, to speak of them, to speak of her soap opera, to speak of his ink stains, to speak of her spectacles.
I ran my fingers over his strong Russian cheekbones, pinched his earlobes. We lay down beside each other and embraced. A long time passed. Just by lying there beside me, fully clothed, he coaxed all the loneliness out of my limbs and brought blood back into my touch-starved body, but there was nothing, nothing to be done about the stifled sob that had formed an enormous lump in my throat.
“Simon.”
Annette splashed and sang to herself in the tub. “She’s okay,” he said. “She won’t hear.” But I pushed him away. When he got up to answer her calls (“Dad! How do I do this drain?”), I rose and looked out the window. The room was on the second floor. It was already almost dusk, and in the pearl light I could see, not too distant, the new strip mall where we had gone to get the supplies for Cora’s leggings. I had to turn away. The dusk was the same no matter where it happened, I thought. It held the secrets of all hearts and made them visible for a few minutes, held them suspended in the air like thousands of tiny beads.
ANNETTE SNORED IN THE BED BESIDE OURS. Simon pulled me to him and we pressed close together as we had in days of old, noses touching. I felt his pulse quicken, and he stirred in secret and familiar ways beneath the sheets.
“No, Simon,” I murmured. “I can’t—”
“Oh, dear,” he said in his bone-dry way. “It’s like we’re already married.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just can’t. I’m too tired. My heart—I mean, my head aches.”
“I know, I know. It’s all right.” He pressed his mouth into my cheek and whispered, “Go to sleep, go to sleep,” and I breathed in his hyacinths. He stroked my forehead and my hair. “My girl,” he said, “my dear girl.” And as I drifted off (it was easy to sleep in his remembered arms), pondering those words, I recalled what Granma, what Evelyn, what the root digger had told me about being a girl. “You’re a girl,” she had said, “as long as you allow life to happen to you.” And when I woke up hours later at dark face time, for no reason other than it had become my habit, and I heard not Granma’s soft sneakered footsteps but only the whirr of the air conditioner against a sterile silence, I remembered the rest of what she had said. “You become a woman,” she had told me, “when you start living according to your own instincts, your own intelligence, and your own desires. You’re a woman when you take hold of yourself.” And though it terrified me, I knew, staring into the dark, which one I wanted to be.
I HAD GONE TO SIMON, both the first time and the second, because he had demanded it of me in his warm way. What if I went to Jim, even though he had not demanded, not even asked, because it was what I wanted, because I desired it? Ever since the sweetness of the orange, and even long before then, I had been waiting, passive, nervous—waiting for something the way a girl waits.
All summer, I had loved to step into the bathroom when he was done and steep in the steam of the shower he had taken. Doing so reminded me of the feeling of the hill houses—a humid intimacy, so safe. All summer, I had listened for the sounds of him. I had catalogued each one in my mind—the friendly rumble of his truck approaching the house, the slow squeak and click of the screen door when he came through it, the jangly racket of his lunch pail and thermos when he laid them down for the night, his footfalls, which, in spite of his size, were only slightly heavier than his mother’s, his voice, his contented humming, and especially the rich mellow tone of his “hello,” because the last “o” sound was as round, full, perfect, and pregnant as the letter itself, and always lifted up in a lilt, as if the end of the word liked to take a few steps up a prairie hillock to stand a bit closer to the sun.
What was it, to pay such attention to the most everyday tokens of another person’s existence? Why could a clanging lunch pail carry such charms?
WE PULLED OUT OF THE HOTEL PARKING LOT amidst a confusion of rabbits, who zipped around with the elated energy of prey awakening to find they had survived to see another day. “Goodbye, War Bonnet bunnies!” Annette called out in her scratchy morning voice.
“Is there anything you want to stop and see on our drive?” Simon asked. I knew he meant landmarks or national parks.
“I want …” I said. I could not look at him, at his new eyes, at his hopeful face. “I want …” I could not say I wanted to see prairie dogs, grasshoppers, and Bighorns, that I wanted to see a lone old woman standing on a little hill in darkness to pray, to see lightning tearing through the sky, to see a full moon rising with a child jumping up to reach it, or that I wanted to see a man who was splattered with colors, a happy man suffused with the sap of life, and shy—I knew it, just like me—shy. “I want …” I began again. Simon and Annette waited. Simon even laughed. I took his hand. “I want to go back,” I said.
His face was like a still lake with a single stone thrown in.
“I know,” he said. “We’re on our way back—”
“No. Back.”
After a long pause he spoke. “Margie, I don’t understand. What could
there possibly be for you in that place?”
“Please,” I said. “If you love me—and you’ve never said it, not once, and you didn’t write it in your letter to me, either.” Simon’s face crumpled, and I was instantly sorry I’d said those words. “But if you really love me, or even if you don’t,” I was crying then, “you’ll take me back.”
“Dad?” Annette said. She looked at me and back at him.
“I’m so sorry,” I cried. “I didn’t know for sure until I left. I never expected it. I think my heart really is there.”
They looked at me with confounded eyes.
“I’m knitted in,” I said.
HALFWAY DOWN THE DIRT ROAD leading to the house, I asked Simon to pull over. I wanted to walk the rest of the way. I took off my charm bracelet and put it on Annette’s wrist. “This is for you,” I said.
She examined the silver bird and the half of a heart. Then she looked up at me, petted my hair in the soothing way she sometimes had, preternaturally parental, and said, “All right, don’t be sad.” I kissed her.
I kissed Simon. I kissed his mouth, his cheekbones. I kissed the plump lobes of his ears, one after the other. I kissed both of his shut eyes. His salt and mine mingled. “I don’t have any regrets,” I said.
“Margie.” He choked on my name and sucked in his breath.
“It’s only because of you”—I couldn’t speak very well at all—“that I found it.”
WALKING TOWARD THE HOUSE, I noticed something unfamiliar, something that hadn’t been there the morning before. Vivid patches of dark and light pink had emerged all over the land and lined both sides of the road, and a new, fragile fragrance was in the air. Looking closer, I saw countless five-petaled flowers of fuchsia and antique rose rising out of leafy shrubs, some exuberantly opened to face the sun, some still shyly hidden in tight buds; I realized they were wild roses, and that they had just begun to bloom.
The Lovebird Page 27