More of This World or Maybe Another

by Barb Johnson

  “I write poetry,” Maggie says. She winds the spirals of her hair into a tight rope and then releases it. It blooms back into a dark hurricane cloud. “But I might be changing to photography, or I might join the Peace Corps. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What does anything depend on?”

  This, Delia decides, is how artists are, how she herself wants to be. Everything isn’t necessarily logical or practical. Life can be this way or that way or some other way altogether when you’re an artist.

  Maggie pulls a couple of actual wineglasses from a shelf over the sink. “What I wouldn’t give to wake up with the key to a Laundromat in my pocket and know for sure that I was about to do something good with my day. Something productive.”

  “Trade you,” Delia offers.

  “You have too much life smarts. College would bore you in a minute.”

  Still fooling with the wine opener, Delia wonders what in the world has given Maggie the impression that she has life smarts. To her relief, the cork comes out of the bottle smoothly and with a satisfying pop. While Delia pours, Maggie crosses the small trailer to her bed, which is the only place to sit. On a small door—a bathroom? a closet?—hangs a picture of a woman reading at a podium. Delia wants to ask about it but doesn’t want to seem ignorant. It’s probably somebody famous.

  Maggie pats the bed. “Come. Sit. Talk.”

  Delia hands Maggie a glass of wine. “Salut,” she says and sits on the batik-printed bedspread. The spread is a sari or some other foreign word Delia can’t think of right now. She’s seen them in the flea market. When they toast, the glasses ring with a long, clear tone. Crystal. It dawns on her just this minute what the expression “crystal clear” means and why crystal is better than regular glass. The sound is beautiful.

  Delia sits with her back to the wall, perpendicular to Maggie, whose smooth, bare legs are draped across the bed’s pillows.

  “So,” Maggie says, taking a sip of wine, “what kind of artist are you?”

  “That’s one of the things I thought I might find out at college.” If they’ll take me, Delia wants to add. She’s still not sure exactly how all that works.

  Maggie pulls a book from one of the many stacks against the wall and hands it to Delia. “Have you read this?” she asks. The Poems of Richard Wilbur.

  Delia wonders if it’s a book everyone knows about, if she should know about it. She’s been reading at the Laundromat, trying to get ready for college. She starts to lie and say she’s read the book—she feels so far behind everyone her age—but then she wonders if maybe Maggie is going to lend it to her, which will give Delia an excuse to come back to the little Airstream.

  “I haven’t,” Delia admits.

  She’s discovered that, to make Calvin fit into the picture, she’s been shaving away at pieces of herself. The piece that loves to read, for instance, because Calvin is dyslexic and having books in the house just reminds him of his long struggle with school, he says. And Delia has realized that she shaved away the part of herself that deep down thinks real, true love probably has more attraction to it than what she feels for Calvin. All this redesigning has left her sleepy and dense. Shaving at herself seems like cheating or lying or some other kind of sin. Maybe it’s what everyone does. Her hesitation with the wedding, her doubts, might be perfectly natural, like everyone says. But she wonders if her crankiness with Calvin might be from having to listen to the shaved pieces of herself shouting at her: WakeUpWakeUpWakeUp.

  “Here,” Maggie says, putting out her hand to take the book back from Delia. Holding the book feels good, and Delia tightens her grip, makes Maggie tug just a little before she lets go.

  While Maggie flips through the poems, Delia studies a tear in the thigh of her own jeans, the ones she wore when she painted the Laundromat. When she put them on, she thought the paint spatters, the tear, looked sexy and artistic, but they could easily be mistaken for bad grooming, she sees now. The ripped fabric hangs open like an entryway to something private, and she smoothes it closed.

  Maggie wags the poems in the air when she finds what she’s looking for. “It’s a poem about laundry,” she says, “and souls.” She scoots closer to Delia. The book rests easily in her hand, her long fingers spread across its back. The toes of her bare feet come to rest on Delia’s thigh where Maggie pushes the denim flap open with one perfectly painted toenail.

  Delia shifts away a little. The touching feels weird. Or should, she thinks. She scratches at an old scar on her forehead, the one she keeps hidden beneath her bangs.

  While Maggie reads, Delia sips at the cool wine. She drifts in and out of the poem, tightening and loosening her focus until the meaning dissolves into how the letter S sounds moist in Maggie’s mouth, the N’s like something. Something that makes Delia fidget. Something quick that she wants to last longer. Nnnn.

  Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone….

  The way Maggie says the word lovers gives Delia the shivers. There are nuns in the poem—even nuns sounds a little dirty—and dark habits. And the mention of a difficult balance, which makes Delia think of vertigo at first. Delia crosses her legs, looks down at the chipped red paint on her own toenails. How long since she’s looked at her own feet? At anyone’s feet? They seem so personal, suddenly, so bare and exposed. It’s like she’s been on vacation from her body. She wipes her moist palms on her jeans, then takes a bigger sip of wine than she means to so that she has to hold it in her mouth and swallow a little at a time.

  Outside, some hooting starts up, and the sound snaps and pops in the stillness of the trailer. Delia and Maggie both put their heads up to the small window to see what the fuss is about. Calvin is doing handstands, walking along on his palms. The scrawny artists try to copy his moves. They’re already in love with him. Calvin takes the feet of Benny Alto Sax and raises them into the air, then walks the upended musician neatly over to the fire pit. The artists follow and squat around the brick-lined pit, where the fire has gone out. Calvin makes a pyramid with his hands to show the proper way to stack the wood, and the guys nod, some of them pushing on the one who must’ve been the architect of the faulty first attempt. City kids, Calvin’s expression says.

  Maggie points at Calvin. “He’s a cutie, all right.”

  Her arm is touching Delia’s while they stare out the window, their faces so, so close. “Yeah,” Delia says because it’s true. Everyone always thinks that Calvin is adorable. Delia misses thinking it, too.

  Delia and Maggie take their wine outside and go to help with the preparations. More women have arrived. Girls, really. Next to Maggie, they all seem insubstantial, like the graphite shadow left on the page after something is erased. Delia’s introduced, but she forgets the names as fast as she hears them.

  Calvin commandeers a guitar, and the musicians fire up some big band music, which Calvin hates but says nothing about. Maggie grabs Delia’s hand. They stutter-step out to the grass at the edge of the bayou to dance under a pale slice of moon.

  It’s dark now, even darker near the water. When Maggie pulls Delia into her arms, tiny fishes wiggle up Delia’s spine. In the humid night air, the music bends at their backs, and they both are sweating. They spin and spin until the whole world goes dreamy, the faces around the fire blurring to a patch of warm color. Still, Delia can’t stop worrying that she and Maggie will slip, will fall. The line where the ground stops and the water starts is nearly invisible in the dim light.

  It’s when their cheeks touch, when Delia’s hand slips smoothly around Maggie’s waist, that Delia begins to worry that she likes it, the touching. She begins to worry that Calvin will see it, will know. Before she can make words for what, exactly, Calvin will know, she loses the moment entirely; she can only feel a strange longing for it, a simultaneous fear of it, as though she isn’t in it at all. Then the moment comes back on a sweet cloud of perfume that rushes under Delia’s feet, lifting her, suspending her over the bayou, and the moon and the dancing and the longing cook
themselves down to something thick and liquid inside her, and when she looks Maggie in the eye, they come this close, this close to kissing. Before they do, though (how much before? a second, maybe?), the music stops for good like that dream Delia has, the one where she’s flying, and as soon as she knows it, she wakes up. Just like that, the music stops, and Calvin calls for her. “Where y’at, baby?” he hollers. “The fish is ready!”

  Delia sits with Calvin on the other side of the fire from Maggie while everyone is eating their fish. When she sneaks a look through the flames, she catches Maggie looking back. They both turn their heads away then, and there’s the food to compliment and the fire and the meal to enjoy. And every once in a while, the secret look.

  Later that evening, out by the water, when everyone is saying their good nights, Maggie leans in and whispers something to Delia, something Delia can’t make out exactly, but which her body recognizes. The mysterious words set the fishes wiggling along her spine again. Maggie pulls back after the whisper and kisses Delia on the cheek like a European, left and right and left.

  Delia repeats the Euro kiss, the final part nearly landing on Maggie’s mouth. Nnnn.

  “Hey,” Maggie says, “wait here for a second.”

  While she’s waiting, Delia turns to look for Calvin, who’s gone up on the grassy path to say good-bye to Benny Alto Sax and the others. He and a few of the guys have found a bottle of starter fluid, and they’re squirting it from the path over to the fire just to watch the flames leap in the air.

  Delia jumps when she feels a hand on her shoulder. She turns around to find Maggie holding out the Richard Wilbur book.

  “I hope you’ll come again,” Maggie says.

  “I hope…” Delia starts, but then she doesn’t know how to say what she hopes. Her eyes skim past the book to Maggie’s wrist and then they glide over the curve of her forearm, up to her shoulder, coming to rest at the place where a whorl of Maggie’s hair dips behind a perfect ear.

  Delia imagines squeezing the hurricane cloud of that hair. She feels giddy with the thought of it, with the notion that this is something she could do, that she might do. She might just wrap her fingers in Maggie’s hair and then…what? And then kiss her, that’s what. She almost says it, too. She opens her mouth as she reaches for the book of poems. “I want to…” but before she can form the words, vertigo makes her knees go weak, and she can feel her heart pounding in her fingertips as the world spins out from under her. She tugs at the book just a little, just enough to say yes, before she lets go. Before she lets herself fall.

  If the Holy Spirit Comes for You

  Dooley cradles Reet’s head in the crook of his arm, and the pig’s breath comes out in moist puffs that warm and then chill Dooley’s face. He’s not supposed to name the animals, but he does it anyway. Scooching deeper into the hay at the corner of the barn, he turns Reet’s floppy head toward his little sister, T-Ya. “Feel her nose,” Dooley tells her and leans across so she can reach the pig’s face.

  T-Ya runs two little fingers down Reet’s snout. “Bawoney!” she squeals, pulling her hand away, sniffing it and then holding it to her chest. T-Ya is only three and says all kinds of things that don’t make sense, so it takes Dooley a few seconds to get what she means. He touches Reet’s nose, and his stomach turns. It does feel a little like baloney.

  Dooley has brought T-Ya down to the barn to keep her from waking their mother so early. He wouldn’t mind spending the whole day in here, but today’s his thirteenth birthday, and his uncles will probably be by to get him any minute, another reason Dooley’s come outside. If he stayed up in his bed, the uncles would come in and pull him right out from under the covers, and he’d be on a hunting trip before he could say, Hold up, hoss. His mama wouldn’t go against them, and his daddy, their brother, is offshore. The uncles want to make his birthday special on account of his daddy being gone, and hunting is special to them. They go every Sunday morning of the season, while Dooley’s aunts and cousins are at Mass.

  In catechism, Dooley learned that the Holy Spirit will give you the courage to do what you need to do in life, like go hunting, for instance. Recently, though, he’s begun to wonder if maybe killing is wrong, which would make hunting wrong, even if you eat what you kill. Dooley’s oldest brother, who went off to the war to shoot at strangers, now lives downriver on a houseboat that he never leaves and won’t let anyone visit. Every so often, Dooley meets up with him in the woods at the edge of the river. Once, he told Dooley that if you let yourself believe it’s okay to kill one thing, it opens the door to killing everything. “When I kill another,” his brother said, “I kill myself.” That’s the kind of crazy talk he came back from the war with.

  “But what if the Holy Spirit tells me to go hunting?” Dooley asked. “What if the Holy Spirit says, ‘Go on, Dooley. Man shall have dominion over the animals.’”

  “The Holy Spirit might give you the courage to do it,” his brother warned, “but God will leave you once it’s done.” That might be more crazy talk, but it might be true. Dooley figures if he never aims a gun at anything, he won’t have to find out.

  At the edge of the hay, T-Ya pushes at Reet’s hindquarters. “Laps!” she says, a word she’s learned from their uncles. Baloney. Laps. The words she uses seem random to Dooley, and he wonders how she lines them up in her mind.

  “Reach me that tape,” Dooley tells T-Ya, who pulls a roll of duct tape from its hiding place under an old orange crate. He wraps a neck brace he’s made out of cardboard around Reet’s neck and tapes it in place. Flipping two long benches onto their sides, Dooley makes a chute that’s not much wider than the piglet. He hasn’t told anyone about the brace and the chute, in case they don’t work. He’s almost positive they will, though. When he puts Reet down to walk the straight line between the benches, she staggers forward a little, banging into the sides, and then tries to back out of the chute. Dooley blocks the opening. “C’mon now, girl.”

  A while back, Uncle Philippe tried to talk Dooley’s daddy into killing Reet. “There she goes,” Philippe called out over the snuffling of the pigs, “running her laps to stay thin.” Reet was a breech birth. She was the smallest, the peeshwank, of her litter, and she stumbled around the pen in circles, her head hanging to the side, flopping, her eyes searching back behind her for the place she meant to stop. She had trouble feeding.

  “You ain’t got much pig there as it is, hoss,” Uncle Philippe told Dooley’s daddy in his older-brother tone. “You better shoot her now while you can still get a po-boy outta the deal.”

  Dooley listened to Uncle Philippe’s advice from the other side of the pen, watched his daddy’s face to see what he might be about to do. Uncle Philippe is the oldest brother, the boss. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,’” Uncle Philippe is always saying. “The oldest brother is boss for life.” Dooley wonders if, by the time he’s grown, his oldest brother will finally leave the houseboat and get back to being the boss.

  After Uncle Philippe left, Dooley’s daddy didn’t say another thing about Reet until just before he went offshore last week. He pulled Dooley aside in the hayloft. When his daddy’s face went sad and serious, Dooley looked away. “She’s miserable, son,” his daddy whispered so T-Ya couldn’t hear. Dooley ran his finger along a split in one of the barn’s framing posts and waited for the rest to come. His daddy squeezed Dooley’s shoulder. “We need to put her down.”

  All the other piglets had been sold, and for a whole month, it was only Reet there in the pen with Patsy, her mama. Reet wasn’t miserable, Dooley knew. She just had a different approach to things. So after his daddy went offshore, Dooley made the neck brace for the piglet. He figured if he went out to the barn every morning and worked with her, he could teach her how to hold her head up and quit her circling. Probably by the time his daddy gets back, Reet will be able to show what all she learned and Dooley’s daddy will see that she is a happy pig who can walk in a straight line.

  In the bluish light of
the lamps that hang from the barn’s ceiling, T-Ya claps her hands at the end of the chute, and Reet wobbles toward her.

  “Call her,” Dooley says. “Say, ‘C’mon, Reet, just a little more!’”

  Reet trips and Dooley loops his hands under her belly and stands her up.

  T-Ya pretends to fall. “Laps!” she says, landing on her back, throwing her little legs in the air.

  Dooley nudges Reet, and this time she just takes off and doesn’t stop until she gets to T-Ya at the end. She made it to the end twice yesterday. Three times is Dooley’s goal for the day.

  From outside the barn, where it’s still dark, Dooley hears his uncles’ three-wheelers screaming down the highway. He takes off Reet’s neck brace and puts her in with her mama. “Let’s go,” Dooley says to T-Ya after he puts the brace and the tape under the orange crate.

  They slip out of the barn and hurry down the path, past the house, and out toward the blacktop road. Four of his uncles swarm in on the oyster-shell driveway riding ATVs; Dooley’s Uncle Philippe follows in his truck. The passenger door of the truck fires open right in front of Dooley, and Uncle Philippe pats the front seat.

  “I can’t go,” Dooley says through a cloud of exhaust that grabs at his voice.

  “C’mon,” Uncle Philippe says. “We just going over to the back woods. Maybe get us some ducks or a couple rabbits for your birthday dinner. If we see a buck, it’s all yours.”

  “I gotta serve at early Mass,” Dooley says, “but I might can go next week.” A double lie because Dooley and his mama watch Mass on TV when his daddy’s offshore like he is now. And, of course, Dooley’s not going to shoot anything, next week or ever.

  “Father Faison took his first buck in that same woods back there,” Uncle Drouet says. Meaning it’s okay to skip out of serving at Mass, Dooley guesses. Father Faison will understand. It occurs to Dooley that the uncles might volunteer to call the priest and ask permission. There’s no end to the trouble that lying will get you.