Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  This is an evening that Maureen works at the delicatessen. Katie wishes she was home with her for company. They could watch Donahue tapes and chew on other people’s problems. She could find out what happened to the other sister.

  She is undressed and ready to shower when someone knocks at the back door. “I’ll be a minute!” she yells loudly, and pulls back on some clothes.

  It is Jeff, not Fish. She hesitates for a fraction of a moment before she tells him to come in, and he asks, “Are we friends? Are you mad at me?”

  The disappointment is palpable. She feels like someone who opens a present and finds a mixer, or a book of synonyms.

  “I’m not mad. I thought you were.”

  “Would you like to go somewhere for a drink, or dessert?”

  “Not really.” She brushes at her old jeans and shirt. Jeff is obviously waiting. Like it or not, she is cast as hostess. “I could make tea.”

  Jeff leans against the door jamb as she prepares jasmine tea. In a navy and white baseball jersey and crisp canvas pants, he cuts a handsome, stylish figure, dressed for a casual visit. She feels sloppy. He is looking at her, really looking, and she feels her body, naked under the jeans and shirt. Lately there have appeared on her body spots of sensation the size of elongated quarters, at the side of her left breast near her armpit, on the outside of her arm just above the elbow, and a larger area on her right hip, high. Sometimes the spots burn slightly. Sometimes they prickle, and she twists and strains to look for signs of a rash, but there never is one. She feels a slight burning now. She feels her nipples, irritated by the cotton of her shirt. She thinks of him touching her—of someone touching her—and she feels a stab of pulsation along the creases of her labia.

  “I should have called,” Jeff says. She shakes her head to show he didn’t need to bother. She honestly hasn’t given him much thought. She has been waiting to hear from Fish. “I should have come sooner,” he says, and she shakes her head again in the same way. She concentrates on the tea. The pale flowers puff in the water and rise, then sink again. She hands him a mug and steps past him.

  Settled in the front room, she holds the steaming cup near her face.

  “You’ve been working hard?” she asks. It is the only thing she can think to say. The week since she last saw him seems a long time.

  He smiles. “My work is often intense, often tedious, but never really hard. I like it too much. Plants confound you, but they don’t play politics.” He stops abruptly and glances behind him.

  She realizes that she has been staring over his shoulder, and that he can see she isn’t listening. Her cheeks burn. She looks at him with determined earnestness, and sees that he has changed his hair. “What have you done?” she asks, brushing at her own forehead.

  “I’ve let the front grow more. It’s not really new, Kate. It happens like wheat growing, a little at a time. Only you just noticed.” He leans toward her. “Do I look too ragged?”

  “I like it.”

  “I’m sorry if I bullied you.”

  “I’m sorry if I overreacted.”

  They look at one another shyly and sip the fragrant tea. When, in a few moments, they both set their cups down on the glass at the same time, they laugh. She thinks, he’s a nice man. He likes me, and the more he shows it, the worse I act. It is mystifying. I am a bitch, she thinks. It doesn’t bother her to know so, she just wonders when Jeff will see it for himself.

  “I bought tapes,” he says.

  “What group?” He likes jazz, singers she never has heard of. Maybe they are contemporary, and she isn’t.

  “French tapes. I started listening to one last night. Comment-allez vous, Je voudrais, that elementary stuff.”

  “Is it coming back to you?”

  “Perfectly. I remember how in high school I used to memorize everything, and then the teacher and the tapes went too fast and I never recognized anything as it went by.”

  “You have to have a gift for it, like for music. I don’t.”

  “I’ll be in the Bordeaux region for the September harvest. Then maybe I’ll stay on and go to Italy. I bought Italian tapes, too, on impulse. Now I’ll be incompetent in three languages. I thought-maybe you’d like to come over later, at the end of the summer. When all the college students go home. You could use the tapes if you want.” He shrugs. “It was just an idea.”

  Katie doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t remember anything about Italy, except for martyrs and lions in the Coliseum, and a picture she saw of Mussolini hung upside down.

  “There’s something I came to tell you,” he says. He has the resolute look of a teacher. He takes a deep breath. “I had a girlfriend once, this was some years ago, when I was first out of college. She smoked, and I hated it. I nagged her about it. Finally she said, ‘Look, smoking is a habit, I’m really hooked, and it would be hard to give it up. If you want me to, then you have to give up something and suffer, too. You have to know what I’m going through.’

  “So I gave up sugar. I didn’t put it in my coffee, I didn’t put it on my cereal. I even started making my own bread, and not putting sugar or honey in it, and if I bought bread I only bought French bread at the bakery, flour, yeast, water, salt. I worried if the little bit of sugar they use to start the yeast counted.”

  Katie fidgets. The spot under her arm is on fire. She knows that he means to tell her something, but she is completely lost as to what that is. He seems to feel it is for her good.

  “I could get more tea,” she says. She reaches for the cups on the glass table, and one of them rocks noisily against the other. He puts his hand out to stay her gesture.

  “Wait. One weekend we went somewhere with another couple. They were giving me a hard time about my sugar fetish, they called it, and she kept watching us, hearing their remarks, looking on coolly and not offering any support. I wanted to shout—it’s all for her! She made me do it! As if I’d done something wrong, instead of only something I didn’t want to do.

  “That morning we were driving back. I woke up early and she wasn’t in the cabin. I thought she might be putting her things in the car. I went out to look for her. It was windy and damp. I found her standing out by the car, smoking. When I saw her, I just about went nuts. I started screaming at her. She laughed at me, and she said, ‘Well, now you can eat whatever you want, can’t you?’”

  “So it didn’t work.” Katie thinks the girl sounds cool.

  “It most certainly didn’t work. I’d become obsessed with her habit, as if she didn’t have a choice in the matter, and she had worked me so that I was doing something I didn’t care to do, didn’t care about. I wasn’t fat or diabetic, I didn’t eat too many sweets. I’d have given up eggs, or listening to the radio, I’d have done sit-ups. She was the one who came up with sugar.

  “I swore I’d never again get wrapped up in other people’s decisions. I’d never try to be in charge. The other day, that was what I was doing, though. I wanted you to get on with it, according to my schedule. I’m sorry, I had no right.”

  Katie feels a rush of relief and sympathy. She could tell him he isn’t the first person to make her angry, trying to tell her what to do, something she seems to invite.

  “Whenever I minded something Fish did, whenever he saw that I minded, he did something worse. He had to let me know I couldn’t make him start or stop anything.” She remembers that her other story about Fish led to a quarrel. “Never mind,” she says wearily. She hopes they won’t analyze old scenes.

  “It’s okay, Kate. Katie. Go on. Really.”

  “Once we went up to a mountain lake to fish. It was spring. We were high on the nice weather. It was the middle of the week, so nobody else would be up there, and we felt great about that.” It has always been important not to go where other people go. She wonders what they missed, avoiding anything that had a trail. “When we got out of the truck, we saw that all along the shore of the lake, way up past where we’d parked, there was this groundcover of baby frogs. Everywhere you looked,
a mass of wiggling, tiny frogs, hardly more than tadpoles. It was fantastic! Fish bent down to look closer, and I made a noise, ugh, you know? He looked up at me, all excited, and when he saw my face, he was disgusted with me for being so squeamish. ‘When did you ever see anything like it?’ he asked me, and he lay down right on the baby frogs, spread-eagle on his back, his arms flung way out, laughing and yelling at me, lying on this blanket of frogs.

  “What will I see in Italy to top that?” she asks.

  Jeff turns red across his cheeks and nose. Before he says anything, she touches his hand. “I’m joking. I know about Italy. Florence, Venice. It’d be nice to see them, to be able to say, I saw this church, I saw that statue. Michelangelo. Spaghetti.” She feels heady. He is at one end of a line and she at the other. Sometimes he tugs, and she follows, or does not, but sometimes she lets the line go slack entirely, and then jerks it like a kid with a trout on the line, and he does not let go! She feels clever to have thought it; the pleasure of metaphor is new to her, like al dente pasta after a childhood of overcooked spaghetti. If everything has two meanings, your life occupies more space in the universe, because it is both life and a game of life. It is a show and a rerun.

  Jeff reaches up to brush back his new, longer hair. She can see his impatience. He reminds her of her mother. “The good part,” he says, “is doing it, not talking about it later.”

  “That’s how you see it,” she says pleasantly. She thinks that at the door, when he says goodbye, she will say, Have a nice trip. She picks the cups up, and this time they touch with a single bell-like ring, like a tiny, graceful signal at the end of a round.

  42

  She draws on an old cotton kimono she bought in a thrift store in Vancouver, B. C. Its blue flowers have faded to pale gray. It was rainy the day she bought it, and she felt happy. The memory stirs her. It also reminds her how little she has demanded to be happy. If it rained, and they found a place to be dry. If they were hungry, and they found cheap food. If she spent the day with Fish, and her chest didn’t ache with trying to say the right thing. On a day like that, she was happy.

  She towel-dries her hair and combs it, and looks at the clock to see if Maureen might be home. She has some books to return, they could talk about them. There is a whole new language of terms to learn, when you start looking into psychology. It seems that if you learn them, you take on power. You learn better ways. If you speak a different life, you can live it. What else do all those therapists do, but help you see that? Why can’t you do it by yourself?

  She is at the front door when she hears a knock at the back. It is Fish. He stands looking at her through the screen until, with a sigh, she opens the door and lets him in. He is carrying a bottle in each hand, and wearing a bright blue shirt with an ASPEN logo.

  “I thought you gave it up.” Where did he ever find such a silly shirt? Aspen. The last place he would ever go.

  “Guzzling, getting shit-faced, drinking alone. I have, I swear I have utterly rejected such asshole behavior. But this stuff is nice—” He holds up a bottle of pale wine. “I thought we could share it.”

  “Share it?”

  He grins. “I read up on what to say.”

  He makes her laugh. Adrenaline gushes in her, making her head feel full and her heart race.

  She has two cheap wine glasses. Fish pours the pinot noir. He holds his glass out for her to tap. “To us,” he says. “To clean water and air, steady employment, benign moles—”

  “All right, moles, then,” she says, and drinks. She feels as if she has been on springs, and they have suddenly come undone beneath her. Once she settles, she will be on firmer ground.

  “I haven’t eaten,” she says. “This will hit me in the head.” It is a nice wine.

  “And then will you seduce me?”

  “I’ll probably fall asleep.”

  “I’d feed you, if anything’s open.”

  “There must be something here.” She opens a cupboard door, revealing mostly bare shelves. There is a package of Ritz Crackers. She eats a cracker and drinks more wine. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “Lawyer’s orders?” he says bitterly.

  “Why no, I don’t think it would occur to her that I’d want to be with you.”

  “You must have laid on a lot of shit.”

  “I said I wanted a divorce. I gave her money.” She hopes they aren’t going to descend into hostility, or even a large distance between them. She likes being with him. She doesn’t have to pass a test. If anyone has to prove anything, he does. And to her. She tries to remember what she learned about detachment in the Al Anon meeting. You are not supposed to create a crisis, but you aren’t supposed to prevent one, either. A recipe for living life as it presents itself. She feels like trying out her detachment. It doesn’t mean you have to be unfriendly.

  “Give me a cracker,” Fish says. He is studying her. He can see something different in her. If it makes him wary, he will throw it back at her. If it only teases, he will look for the promise behind the tease.

  I survived while you were gone, she thinks. That’s really all there is to say, except, Now I’ll decide if you can stay.

  She holds a cracker between her teeth. It sticks out of her mouth. “Come get it,” she says giddily.

  When he is close enough, he puts his hands along the sides of her breasts. His thumb grasps her at the tender spot on her skin. “I can’t figure it,” he says, and bites off the cracker.

  “Me either.” They make a lot of noise, chewing.

  “What do you want to do tonight?”

  “I want to move around. Walk, maybe.”

  “You don’t want to—?” He looks away.

  “I do,” she says, and feels her face flush. “But not until later, not until I’ve wanted to for hours.”

  He looks back at her. “To taunt?”

  “To anticipate.”

  “Should I open the other bottle?”

  They drink. Every few moments Fish reaches over and touches her somewhere. Each time, her nerves jump, as if he has shocked her. She thinks he looks much better than he did when he first came home. He already has a tan on his face and arms.

  She hears Maureen calling her, and a tap-tap-tap at the door. She talks to her through a partly open door. “Someone’s here,” she says.

  “Someone?”

  She only mouths the word. “Fish.”

  “Really,” Maureen says.

  “Why not!” Katie snaps.

  Maureen seems to lean away, as though Katie has slapped her. “You do what you’re ready to do.”

  “Don’t we though?” Katie says. Her head is spinning.

  “Do you want to come over when he leaves?”

  Katie shakes her head. Maureen would never understand.

  “You’re drinking.”

  Katie pushes her head forward from her neck. “You have a one-track mind, Maureen.”

  “It makes a difference.”

  “It matters to you, but not to me. Don’t come over and try to make me be good.”

  Maureen is hurt. “That’s never what I’m doing. I come over to look after my own good. I come over to help myself. And I thought we were friends.”

  “So do you want to come in?” Katie says stiffly. She hates to make Maureen mad, or hurt her feelings—Maureen’s face is far away, its contours fuzzy—but she only has so much energy. You can only ponder your life for so long a time; then you have to jump back in. For her, that means Fish. At least tonight.

  Maureen smiles slightly. “No kiddo. I can see that wouldn’t be helping anybody.”

  “I’m hungry,” Katie tells Fish. She feels queasy all of a sudden.

  “Shit, everything’s closed by now,” Fish says. He is comfortably sprawled on the cushions.

  “The Safeway’s open. We can buy some cheese or something.”

  “I know! Let’s go to the house where I’m working. I’ll cook you an egg.” He pops up so quickly, Katie blinks.

  “They let
you cook?”

  “I usually make breakfast there instead of at Michael’s. This woman is completely cool, Katie. Being laid-back is on her list, along with wearing hand-woven clothing and belonging to Amnesty International. She digs having me as her carpenter. Besides, she isn’t there. She’s in San Francisco, and her kid’s in Hawaii.”

  “I’ll throw on some jeans,” she says.

  The night is balmy and clear, and she can smell grass and new leaves in the air. They leave his truck parked at her apartment and walk in long strides on the avenue. They pass three kids in pajamas, sprawled on a lawn. One is looking straight up at the sky through binoculars. Behind them, the house is completely dark.

  “This woman has good taste,” Fish tells her. “She’s a retired anthropologist. Another Californian looking for cheaper living.”

  A man Katie often sees on the streets comes toward them. He wears a too-short ragged sweater over his shirt, and a watch cap. He carries a long stick, whittled on the end. They pass him as he stops to spear something from the edge of a yard. He carries a McDonald’s bag, which Katie supposes is full of paper and butts. Fish doesn’t seem to have noticed the bum, nor does he seem to have noticed the moon. The moon is huge and full and straight ahead, as if at the end of the avenue. Katie takes Fish’s arm, but before she can think of what to say, to make him look up, he starts talking again.

  “She said she looked first for a cottage. Of course all she could find were dumps—I could have told her that, except I didn’t know then, did I?—” He is talking very fast. “And those duck-pond jobs east of the high school, with those teensy-weensy yards, French doors, and fucking toy bridge over the creek. So she bought this big house, and she’s going to, do the bed and breakfast number. I’m going to do a basement apartment for her kid, she’s got the first floor—I’m putting in a cedar-lined shower—and upstairs for guests. It’s great, Katie, she wants the best of everything. She says, take my time. She’s a fucking money wheel.”

  She tugs his arm, to make him pause. She points at the moon. She feels a swelling of emotion, something in her chest and throat. She thinks it has to do with the sky, and the children back on the lawn. She has an urge to run back and join them. Fish waits, as if she has stopped to scratch an itch. She feels suddenly deflated and foolish. She does not know how to pass her feelings over to him. She can only do that when they make love.