by Joni Rodgers
“I don’t know if I’m ready to say that yet,” Kit said. “I’m not even sure about the survival part.”
“I was always so buried in stuff I was supposed to do,” Carmen tried to explain, “I never had any time for stuff I wanted to do. And then, it was like I just realized one day—hey, that is what I’m supposed to do. Stuff that matters to me. Carl Jung: ‘The greatest sin is to be unconscious.’”
“But how do you do that without coming off as completely selfish?” Kit asked. “Am I supposed to take a break from folding the laundry in order to paint a little or take a break from painting to fold a little laundry?”
“Haven’t you figured it out, Kit? You’re damned no matter what you do. We’re the first ones to live on the flip side of ‘having it all.’ The Thomas Hardy rule of thumb is still in effect: mothers are not allowed to have lives, the clitoris is Satan’s earlobe, and strong women must be punished. But if you don’t earn a full-time income, you’re lazy.”
Kit nodded and refilled their glasses.
“I think the key to survival is knowing the difference between ministry and servitude,” Carmen said. “Nurse the baby, make love to the man, run the household—that’s ministry. That’s you giving something no one else could have given. But picking up the socks of somebody who is perfectly capable of picking up their own little socks—that’s servitude. In addition to which, you’re taking away from them the gratification of doing it for themselves.”
“Wow,” Kit stared at her.
“Oh, I’m into Mary Hugh Scott right now. Passion of Being Woman. You should read it.”
“Maybe so,” Kit said.
“Sorry.” Carmen suddenly seemed embarrassed. “My husband always tells me I read too much. ‘Oh, boy,’ he always says, ‘bring out the soapbox. Here comes Alexandra Firestein. Traditional marriage is the daily rape of womankind,’” she wryly imitated his imitation. “You probably think Mel’s hooked up with some kind of nut.”
“Not at all,” Kit reassured her. “But I can’t quite picture him participating in this type of conversation.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was just trying to get me in the sack,” Carmen laughed, but when Kit didn’t, she added, “He might be a little more open-minded than you thought.”
“If he is, I wish he’d have let me know it before,” Kit said. “Maybe somehow it could have all come together—the laundry and the lovemaking and the painting. Maybe if we’d given each other a chance to be something other than what everybody else expected us to be.”
“‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’” Carmen rested her chin on her hand. “Who said that? Kierkegaard?”
“Yeah, I think it was,” Kit said, wondering who the heck Keer Kergarg was.
“Maybe it’s not too late, though. Maybe you guys will work it out.”
Kit glanced up at her in surprise.
“Oh. Huh-uh,” Carmen shook her head. “Don’t look at me. Mel’s great. I love him. We’ve been buds for a long time, and he was a godsend for Abee. And since we’ve been... I mean, since we started ... this last couple weeks, he’s been just what I needed when I really, really needed it, but...” She shook her head again. “I just got out from under one man. I don’t intend to give that kind of control to anybody ever again.”
“Me neither,” Kit said, and she meant it, though she hoped that didn’t mean she’d never again feel a man on top of her.
“I’m heading out to Albuquerque,” Carmen said, with firm resolve and only a little fear. “I got an offer from one of the regional airlines out there. I’d have been there already, but it won’t be long now for Abee. I want to stay close until then.” She used a spoon to poke a lemon slice deeper into her ice tea. “I am gonna miss the man, though. I’ll admit to that.”
“Me too,” Kit confided.
“The thing that’s so amazing about Mel,” Carmen said, “I mean besides...”
“Right.”
“It’s the way he’s so neat and tidy. I never knew any guy who picked up after himself and did his little laundry so nice, and he’s always busy with projects instead of loafing around watching TV or whatever.”
“Mel?” Kit said skeptically. “Mel Prizer? Big guy? Receding hairline?”
“And he’s so cute, the way he’s so involved with the kids.” Carmen took another watermelon wedge and dabbed a few seeds away with her finger. “He always packs my lunch for me, asks me how it’s going, and he’s actually interested. He talks to me like he has some respect for what I do.”
For the first moment since they met, Kit felt a sharp stab of jealousy. She had almost adjusted to the idea of this woman having and touching Mel’s private body, but the idea that he freely gave her the respect Kit had never bothered to hope for—that hurt.
She suddenly knew how Mel must feel, watching that guy from the hangar drive around in the shiny blue Falcon, hearing the motor purr like a panther, knowing he’d traded it all for a mashed apart Mustang. He must be mourning those four years he spent closed up in the garage, working away at the wrong end of the drivetrain.
“He is the sweetest, most sensitive man I’ve ever known. But I guess you know,” Carmen concluded, “that’s just Mel.”
“That’s Mel?” Kit echoed. “My Mel?”
Carmen shifted uncomfortably, and Kit caught herself.
“I mean, he’s not my Mel, he’s—he’s—I guess he’s pretty much his own Mel these days. But I’ve got to tell you, Carmen, the last person I would describe as ‘thoughtful and sensitive’ is Melvin Thadeus Prizer.”
“Thadeus?” Carmen giggled. “That’s so cute! I can’t stand it!”
“I think his mother was trying to get him back for leaving her stomach like an empty kangaroo pouch.”
“You know what Tank’s middle name is? Wilmer. Timothy Wilmer is his name. How could you not love a guy named Wilmer?” Carmen traced one finger around the rim of her glass. “That’s the other reason me and Mel would never work out,” she sighed. “We’re both still hung up on our exes.”
Mel cleared his throat near the back door.
“Are you ready to go, K... Carmen?”
“Oh umm ... I guess.” She turned to Kit, not really expecting her to invite them all to stay for lunch, but looking like she possibly was hoping. “Yeah. I’m ready.” She got up from the table and set the mixing bowl by the sink.
“Well,” Kit said, “this certainly has been...”
“Yeah. It was great meeting you, Kit. So maybe sometime, if you wanted to umm... well... It was great meeting you.”
“Yeah.” Kit took the strong, slender hand Carmen extended. “Maybe sometime though. That would be great.”
“Okay,” she smiled with her perfect teeth.
They started out, but Mel turned at the doorway.
“I fixed that upstairs toilet. It sounded like it was running.”
“Thanks,” Kit nodded.
“So, I guess I’ll see ya Sunday,” he said awkwardly.
“Yeah. See ya then.”
A long moment of silence followed.
“So...,” Carmen broke it. “Mel?”
“Kit—” he blurted suddenly, “that whole thing up in the bedroom with the sand dunes and cactus and Redbone and all, it’s really...”
“Cool,” Carmen supplied, “Very cool.”
“Yeah,” Mel sounded surprised and a little sad. “I didn’t even know you could draw a camel.”
Kit smiled and shrugged.
“I like it,” he told her.
“I’m glad. Thank you for saying that.”
“You’re a muralist is what you are,” Carmen told her. “You should be doing walls of whole buildings and office lobbies and restaurants and stuff like that.”
“What I get paid for, though, is kitchen chairs and baby furniture.” Kit realized she hadn’t yet thought beyond that.
‘“We work to become,’” Carmen quoted philosophically, “‘not to acquire.’”
“Well, I should get back to work, before I become bankrupt.”
“See ya Sunday,” Mel repeated and pulled the door open.
“Oh, Mel, wait!” Kit caught his hand. “What’s the deal with the puppies?”
“Huh?”
“Those puppies Mitzi likes. What are they?”
“They’re um ... they’re called the jabber puppies,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“The jabber puppies,” he enunciated. “Jabber. Puppies.”
“I don’t get it,” Kit said.
“Because they go, they go like jabber jabber, you know?” He looked the same way he had when they opened the door and saw him naked.
“C’mon, Mel, do it,” Carmen prodded. “I love it when he does this.”
“They just go like Jabber! Jabber-jabber!” Mel’s bark was even more shrill than Mitzi’s, and the sound brought her bursting through the door.
“Jabber!” He made yapping mouths with his hands, and they nipped and tickled on her rib cage. “Jabber-jabber-jabber!”
“Daddy!” she giggled and squealed in delight. “Do it to Sarah! Do it to Sarah!” and the puppies jabbered and yapped and chased both little girls out to the truck.
“I can’t stand it.” Carmen turned to Kit at the doorway, exuding one last breath of juniper. “He is so cute!”
“I haven’t been sleeping,” Kit told Ander as he traced the trailing vines with his fingertips. “Would you like to see the dining room? It has an ocean now.”
Deep beneath the surface, Bette Midler could be seen singing, “shiver me timbers, I’m sailing away,” and swishing her mermaid tail, the Harlettes harmonizing at her side.
They walked through the house, room by room, saying nothing, and Kit felt, as she pointed to each place and person she’d projected onto the walls around her, that she was seeing it all for the first time.
“What’s that noise?” she wondered again as they climbed the stairs.
But Ander only breathed in the aspen trees, whose leaves guttered and trembled and showed their white sides, predicting rain. He paused at each of the Max Parish columns, examining the spiraling ivy that clung and climbed to the blue ceiling, peering into the distance to see the Count Basie Orchestra set up on the other side of the shimmering water.
“You gave me this,” Kit said. “You taught me how, made me believe I could.”
“No,” he shook his head. “No, Kit, this all is not from me.”
“I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you, Ander. You don’t know what it means to me now, that I have something to be.”
“No.” He touched the cellos and violas that flew on golden wings above Basie’s head. “All this is only from you.”
“Ander,” she stepped over to him, serene as the geese gliding out onto the water behind them, “would you like to see the bedroom?”
Ander nodded with the willow tree that swayed over the head of Lightning Hopkins, who sat cross-legged in the grass with Janis Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald. The breeze raised the branches around them in the same easy way with which Ander lifted Kit’s spring-green maternity dress over her head.
She swung the door wide to see Mel standing naked before the saguaros, his wide hands supporting Carmen’s hips, her slender brown legs locked around him. Beyond Carmen’s back, as it arched and rounded, Redbone tethered his camel in the sun-shy cool of the desert dusk. Kit looked up into the stars on the ceiling, not wary, not wondering how Ander could be behind and below and around her, cupping her breasts and nuzzling between her thighs and teasing across her lips all at once. Hands and mouths crossed paths. A delicate tongue darted down her leg.
Mel made life to her, plain and big and honest. Ander penetrated her with colors, ways, and visions. Kit had always thought that when two women press their hips together, there must be a great emptiness between them, but Carmen whispered the thousand things that fill it up, taking Kit’s nipple between her perfect pearl teeth. Kit responded, softened, gave over to the quickening, the colloquy, the juniper, and the familiar rhythm.
But that noise, she wanted to tell them. What is that noise? It buzzed like a cicada just beyond her eardrum, and with each stroke and moan and tremble, it came closer and closer until it touched the back of her neck like ice water ... bowm-pa-dip-dowm-bumpa-dippa-dit...
“No,” she said, and then spoke louder so as to be heard over the whining of the synthesizer, “No! That is not what I do!”
“Love’s not something you do,” Redbone shrugged, “it’s something you are.”
“Hnuh!”
Kit sat up, drenched in sweat, nightshirt clinging to her body, hair plastered to her cheek, air wrenching out of her lungs.
“Whoa ... geez ...”
She groped in the dark at the side of her bed, searching for the lamp switch, but she strangled a shriek as it glared to life.
“Thirsty, Kitten?” the camel asked.
Neeva smiled, and her lighter flashed.
Kit screamed and flamed and was immolated.
The climb up to the tree fort was getting tougher each day. Towering six feet above her head, the structure was a redwood monument to all the seemingly impossible tasks she was faced with these days, and Cooper had been taking full advantage of the sanctuary.
“Cooper,” she called, hoping to avoid the ascent. “Cooper Theodore Prizer, you get on down here, and I mean it!”
There was no answer, but she could hear him crying quietly through the whispering rush of leaves. Mel had nailed ten two-by-four remnants to the trunk of the tree for a ladder, and Kit pulled herself up the first few before threatening, “I’m coming up there!”
“Go away!”
“I will not!”
“I hate you! You’re always on her side!”
“I am not,” Kit said. She didn’t have to yell because she was on the eighth two-by-four now, her elbows on the floor of the fort. “I’m on both sides. But I am mad at you right now. You know it’s hard for me to get up here, what with the baby and all.”
“Then stay down there. I don’t want any girls up here. Or any babies.”
“Cooper, you watch the way you’re talking to me.”
He sat sullen with his back to the tree trunk.
“Yes, ma’am,” Kit prompted.
“Yes, ma’am,” he exaggerated.
“And when I tell you to come down out of here, you do it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s better.”
Struggling her way through the trapdoor onto the floor, Kit tried to think of what she was supposed to say to him next. Fortunately, it took her a long moment to get her breath.
“Coo,” she said finally, “we can’t keep on like this. You making trouble every minute, me being mad and yelling. It’s not doing anybody any good. You and me, Coo, we need to stick together and help each other. We need each other.”
“I don’t need you,” Cooper pushed the heel of his hand across his cheek.
Kit nodded and scootched over to lean against the tree beside him.
“I won’t bother to argue with you on that. We both know you do need me. And we both know this isn’t about me being on Mitzi’s side. And we both know you have no excuse for throwing a dead lizard on her, Coo. That was just plain mean. You get some kind of kick out of being mean to people?”
“Just her.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate her! She’s stupid.”
“That’s not true, Cooper. You love her. And she’s smart. This isn’t about her at all. This is about you being sad and scared and mad at me and Daddy for messing things up, and you want to do something with this great big ol’ ugly blob of rotten feelings you have inside. You want somebody else to feel as bad as you do, and Mitzi’s an easy target. You’re bigger than her, and you know just how to make her unhappy, so you don’t have to be unhappy all alone. But that’s not right, Cooper. That stinks. It’s wrong and mean and rotten, and I don’t think you’re a mean rotten kid. I think y
ou’re a good kid. So, stop acting mean and rotten before Dad and I have to do something we don’t want to do, okay?”
Cooper sat digging the stiff tip of his shoelace through a hole in his sock.
“Okay?” Kit repeated, trying to make it sound strict.
“Whatever,” he mumbled.
“Your daddy’s gonna be here soon. You don’t want him to see us fighting, do you?”
“I don’t care.”
“What are y’all doing this weekend, anyway?”
Cooper shrugged.
“I bet it’ll be something fun,” she tried again.
Another shrug.
“Coo...” Kit didn’t know where to take it. She’d never felt this kind of distance between them before. “I sure wish...”
“Whatever,” Cooper said, as if that settled the matter.
The matter didn’t exactly feel settled to Kit, but the overwhelming weariness that overtook her about this time every day was dragging at her shoulders. She closed her eyes, letting her head lay back against the tree trunk. The murmur of the leaves, the chickering of the cicadas, the almost imperceptible sway of the tree itself became an ocean, a ray of light, a womb.
Suddenly, Kit jolted awake. Cooper was down the ladder, running across the lawn, and the trapdoor had slammed shut behind him. It took her a moment to realize he’d left the dead lizard on her chest, it’s stiffened forelegs tickling the sensitive sun-browned skin above the scooped neckline of her maternity shirt. She shrieked and batted it away, struggling to her hands and knees.
“Cooper Prizer!” she bellowed and yanked the trapdoor open.
But he was already around the side of the house, tormenting Mitzi with cold water from the garden hose spray gun. Kit cussed and started crying and let the trapdoor bang shut again. It caught her knuckles as it came down, and she cussed again, raising her injured fingers to her mouth, sucking the blood away. The stinging sensation was not nearly enough punishment. She’d failed at marriage. Now she was failing at motherhood.
And to put the frosting on the cake, Mel was pulling into the driveway just in time to see her clumbering down out of this goddang tree. She’d managed to maneuver her burgeoning bottom half through the trapdoor and locate a two-by-four with her toes when he wheeled the lawnmower out of the shed below.