by Julia Slavin
“Ahhh,” Phil sighed, kneeling on the living room floor, inhaling the fumes off the top of a freshly pried-open can of paint. He loved the smells: the mineral scent of oil base, the sharp pine bouquet of paint thinner and turpentine. Even a new brush has a distinctly sweet chemical odor.
“Straight up, straight down, Karen,” Phil suggested rather than ordered. He never barked orders, and when I did something well he praised me, made it seem as if it were my idea in the first place. “Try smaller strokes, that’s right. Loosen up your wrist or you’ll get tired. Relax. You’re being too hard on yourself. That’s it. Beautiful job. You want to rest? Go ahead.” I’d sit against a dry wall and smoke and watch him painstakingly sand the woodwork with the finest-grain sandpaper. “Sand after each coat so it’s smooth,” he said. “And always paint with the grain. When that dries we’ll sand again and put on another coat.” I hated sanding so Phil never made me do it. But I loved painting after he’d sanded, like putting frosting on a warm cake.
I was putting a third coat on some molding when I felt hands on my sides and the sensation of an electric sting shoot down my spine. Phil grabbed me around the waist, put his foot between mine and tripped me, bringing me to the floor. “Takedown,” he said. He slipped one arm around the back of my thigh and cradled my neck with the other. “Pinning combination.” I stayed still, waiting for it to be over. Soon he took his arm away from my thigh and put his hand between my legs. I pushed it away. He propped himself up on his elbows. “We’re taking the rest of the day off.” He was still breathing hard from the wrestling move. “We’re going on a picnic.”
We made sandwiches and packed some fruit and stopped at the grocery for drinks. I had some pot and we sat on a bench in the park and laughed at people, tried to remember the theme music from McHale’s Navy, and kept getting it mixed up with Hogan’s Heroes. But then Phil started to come down from the pot and got in one of his bad moods. Why did I wear shorts? he wanted to know. Why didn’t I wear a dress so that he could screw me in the woods, and why wouldn’t I kiss him?
“I don’t own a dress,” I said.
“I want you to kiss me,” he said. He’d been trying to kiss me all summer but I wouldn’t kiss him. Girlfriends kissed their boyfriends, and we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. “It’s not normal,” Phil said. “Not to kiss somebody. You kiss me or everything stops.”
“Everything has stopped,” I said.
He put his face in his hands, and I saw his back shaking up and down because he was crying. I hadn’t seen him cry since he’d gotten beaten up in the seventh grade by eighth-graders for being a pip-squeak and he looked just as weak and pathetic now as he did then.
That night he asked where I was going. “None of your goddamn business,” I said, and walked to McDonald’s. Phil stayed two blocks behind me the whole way. I stood in line for an orange drink, and Phil came in and stood next to me. He told me to get something more, he’d pay. I walked over to a booth where some of the tenth-grade girls were smoking cigarettes and drinking Diet Cokes. I asked them for a cigarette. They let me sit with them while I smoked it. One of the girls was Kim Roston. Kim was the most popular girl in my junior high school when I was in eighth grade and she was in ninth. All the boys wanted her but she went for bigger stock. Her boyfriends were in high school, and now that she was going into high school, she wanted to meet boys in college. She held her cigarette between two French-manicured nails, took a slow drag, blew a smoke ring, then let the rest waft upward. Her best friend, Sharon Day, kept an eye on the parking lot, looking for someone who’d give them a ride to a concert at the college.
I saw Phil over by the doors step in front of a girl he knew, hands in his pockets, with a cigarette dangling from his lip like a gangster in a movie. He looked down at her, stood too close, and moved from side to side so that she couldn’t get around him. Finally he let her go, and she moved away blushing.
“Karen,” Kim Roston said. I didn’t know she knew my name. “Your stepbrother’s cute.” I had never noticed until Kim pointed it out that he really was cute. He wasn’t tall. By the time I was thirteen we were eye to eye, but he was broad and strong. He had a thick, powerful neck, round copper eyes, and long, black, straight hair.
Sharon spotted a boy she knew circling the parking lot in a tan Dodge. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a ride. The girls gathered cigarettes and bags, jangled charm bracelets, and checked for lipstick on their teeth in compact mirrors. I thought they might ask me along but they smiled politely and said good-bye. Then the only people in McDonald’s were Phil and me. He was sitting at a table by the doors. We looked at each other and looked away. He pretended not to notice me walking out. He’d gotten busy with the hem of his jeans as though there were something wrong with it. When I passed his table he looked out the window to the far end of the parking lot as if there were someone out there he knew.
The hill leading down to the tracks behind McDonald’s had fresh mud from that morning’s rain. I held my arms out like a surfer and slid down. I looked back and saw Phil standing at the top of the trail. He surfed down after me. I started walking down the tracks. “We live the other way,” he called. He followed behind me and I picked up my pace. I walked as fast as I could, swinging my arms to go faster. Phil jogged behind me. I started to run. He kept up. Soon my breath got short and I had to stop. “Can we please turn around now?” he said.
“You can,” I said.
“I’m responsible for you. I promised Mom and Dad.” I kept walking, picking up speed as I got my breath back. “Oh, fuck it,” he said finally, and walked in the other direction. I stopped and watched him. Five yards down he stopped and looked all around himself. “Look,” he said. The entire ravine was lit in green by fireflies, millions of them, glowing in the trees and bushes and hovering overhead. I walked back to where Phil was standing and we watched together. He captured a bug in his hands and opened them slightly so that I could see it light up the small hollow space. “If you squeeze the stuff out of them it’ll keep glowing on your hand for a minute.”
“Let’s do it,” I said. He shook his head. “I want to see.”
“I don’t want to kill it,” he said. He gave me the bug so that I could watch my own hands light up.
“I want to try it,” I said. Phil walked on without me. I let the bug go.
As we followed the tracks homeward, Phil picked up some gravel and asked me how much I wanted to bet he could hit that tree with a rock, or that beer can, and we tried to see who could walk on the rail the longest without falling off. I got ten feet before I slipped but Phil stayed on, even jumped over to the other rail without falling. Soon he got bored with walking on the rail and came down to the ties, and I got up on the rail and held on to his shoulder for balance until I got bored. Then we walked on the ties, which were placed too close together for walking, mismatched with the human stride, so we stepped in between or hopscotched them, two or three at a time.
I went to the library to see if a book could explain why I was so swollen and itching between my legs. I was certain I’d contracted a disfiguring venereal disease but found I just had a case of vaginitis. The book was old and prescribed a cornstarch bath as a remedy. Phil came into the bathroom while I was in the tub and looked at my nipples, which stuck out of the cornstarch water like berries in milk. I slid down so that he couldn’t see anything.
“It’s okay. I’m not going to do anything,” he said. “I came in to tell you we’re going out to dinner.” I hadn’t been out anywhere except McDonald’s all summer. “And there’s a present. An apology present. For everything.” He stood at the door looking at me and I slid down further, until the water was up to my eyes.
My present was carefully laid across my bed. It was a dress. It was thin, soft cotton with a tiny rose pattern on a purple background, with a zipper below a round opening in the back. It fit tightly at my waist and flared slightly at my hips. The neckline was a simple scoop and the sleeves were capped. Except for smudges of linen whit
e that wouldn’t wash off my elbow, the back of my knuckles and the tops of my shins, I thought I looked like a model.
We drove to The Magic Pan in the Jaguar. Phil said he liked the Jag fine but if you wanted to mess with a British car you’d better have a degree in electrical engineering. But all I could think of was how the rose material of the dress looked against my sand-colored knees and where the sleeves stopped and the freckled skin of my arms began. At the restaurant I ordered a piña colada and the waitress brought it to me, never questioning my age. I crossed my legs. I lit a long Eve cigarette and smoked. After dinner we went for a walk around the playground at the park. I swung on the candy-cane-painted swing set and Phil threw pebbles though a basketball hoop. I opened my legs and let the air blow through the skirt of my dress while I swung.
We walked across a bridge over the creek to a field of baseball diamonds, and Phil talked about cars and wrestling and college and how he was thinking of not going right away, maybe joining the merchant marine or traveling for a year. I felt the dress grazing the back of my thighs, the material clinging to my waist. He put his hand on my back, where the dress was open, and I reached around and pushed it away. But soon his hand sneaked back and I let him keep it there.
When we got home I went to my room and locked the door and took off my shoes and underwear. I lay on my stomach and reached back and unzipped my dress, pretending it was my husband’s hand unzipping it for me, and my husband’s hands taking it off. After I took off my dress I lay naked with my imaginary husband. We weren’t going to have sex, we were just going to be naked together, the way people who have been married a long time can just be naked together and think nothing of it.
My mother called from Guayaquil. I ran downstairs to take the call. My stepfather had gone on to the Galapagos but she’d stayed in Guayaquil because she wouldn’t go on that boat. She wanted to come home but was afraid to fly alone, so she was waiting at the hotel for my stepfather, and Ed Miller was right, Guayaquil was the worst place in the world. Then she said she needed to get back so that she and I could get settled in St. Petersburg, Florida, before the school year started. St. Petersburg because her mother lived there and my mother said I could use a grandparent. I asked her where we’d live: Would we live in a house or would we have to live in an apartment?
“I don’t know,” she said.
My stepfather had a lot of money, I said. So we’d get a lot of money, right?
“I just don’t know.”
I told my mother that at least I wouldn’t be grounded anymore, and was serious, but she laughed her sweet laugh, which I hadn’t heard in a long time. The sound hit me somewhere between my stomach and hips like a tickle, and I felt myself go limp. I stumbled and sat on the floor. I said more things I knew would make her laugh. Then I told her I wanted a horse. She said, “We’ll see.”
When there was nothing left to say the call got disconnected, as though only the sound of her voice could keep the line alive. I stood at the window. Outside, my stepfather’s impeccable lawn swept down to the street. A man jogged by with a collie. The headlights from a station wagon tore a swatch in the darkness. I walked from room to room. The street lamps shone through the windows, lighting up ghosts: the sheet over the dining room table like an elegant cloth, ready to be set for dinner; the drop cloth over the piano swaying slightly; a phantom audience of chairs. There was so much more painting to be done but I didn’t feel overwhelmed by it anymore because I’d already moved to Florida. I was already living in a big house with a pool and picking oranges in our yard and playing with my horse. I gathered some paint stirrers that were spread around the mantel and on the floor and piled them on top of a paint can. I checked that the front door was locked. I closed a window in the living room because it had started to rain, and picked up the freshly washed towels on the stairs.
Phil lay on his father’s side of the bed reading Sports Illustrated. When he saw me leaning against the door of our parents’ bedroom, he put down the magazine and stared. It was the first time I’d ever let him look at me naked, all at once, not parts at a time. I stood there for a long time because now I wanted him to see me. He held the covers open and I got in the huge bed with him. He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow so he could look. He said I was pretty red between my legs and asked if it was very uncomfortable. I said I was feeling a lot better, especially since I’d found out I didn’t have gonorrhea, and he laughed. He wanted to kiss me and I let him. And then we were like a couple, like a married couple in a king-size bed. For the next five days, while we waited for my mother, we painted together, we took walks after dinner, we held hands, we kissed good night.
He Came Apart
His hair comes out in my hands. Two clumps of golden straw. The bare spots on his head like those mysterious circles carved in Scottish wheat fields. I reach back in and pull gently. “No more.” He jolts up in bed. “Stop messing with me. For God’s sake, leave it alone!” Ridiculously, I try to put it back. I balance the little nest on top of his head and chase him to the mirror; he wants to see if it’s really true. Later in the shower, the rest of it washes off his head and clogs the drain.
“No male-pattern baldness, anywhere in your family, ever? No change of diet? No medications? No harsh detergents?”
“No. No. And no. You’re humiliating me. Stop.”
I go through the checklist again and we start quarreling. He’s furious with me for being insensitive, for thinking only of myself because I begin a phase-one environmental investigation of our flat, where we meet every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons and some evenings if we can get away, trying to find poison, discoloration in the water, dusty air vents, anything, wondering what it would do to my career if I lost my hair. I stop short in the kitchen, thinking of my husband’s thick silver hair, which grayed in his early twenties, and how beautiful it is. I want to go home, but I can’t leave Gus this way.
I come up behind him as he stands before the bathroom mirror, looking back and forth between his sudden baldness and his eyebrows, which have rubbed off in his hands. “Bald men are sexy,” I try to reassure. “And who needs eyebrows?” I think about what I’d do if I lost mine. I could pencil them in, but that always looks fake. He stomps back to the bedroom, flops down on the chaise, and clicks the remote. CNN has footage of the plane crash off Greenland. There were two babies on board. People had actually put on life vests, believing there was such a thing as a water landing. I need to see my son. “Gus, sweetheart, I know it’s bad timing, but I have to leave. I have to do my special twenty minutes with William.”
“Fine. Go. I have no claim here.” He clicks the remote to C-SPAN and, just like that, his thumb flies off his hand. We look at each other in horror for a moment, then fall to our knees in a frenzied search. “Surgeons have revolutionized this type of reconstruction,” I say with my head under the chaise. But by the time I discover the thumb under the ottoman, it has shriveled to the size of a peanut shell and a thick film of bluish skin has grown over the wound on Gus’s hand.
“Don’t be pouty,” I say, buckling the belt on my dress. “Your hair will grow back. I love you still.”
“Go do your special twenty minutes.” He’s looking in our empty refrigerator.
“Put your arms around me.” He turns to face me and as he wraps me in his arms, the right one tumbles to the floor.
Amid the chaos, the alarms, and shouting, my own face mocks me from the magazine rack by the checkout counter. Soda cans explode in the aisle like grenades, an elderly woman has slipped on some banana pudding, grapefruits bounce from their display, and balloons saying CRAZY AUTUMN SAVINGS try to escape through the ceiling. Security guards rush by, their heavy soles clomping on the linoleum, their keys and cuffs tinkling. And there I am. Three covers in one month. Mothers Day, Parents This Week, and the palace coup Pretty Mom. I stare back at myself as the store falls in around me. This is my problem, I know, my son, but like the manager taking the ball from a spent pitcher, the
store personnel are going to have to take over. “Here’s the little whip-persnapper.” A guard hands me my four-year-old, forcing him into the seat of the cart and strapping him down with the seat belt. I fit a bag of Skittles into his hand. “And may I just say you are even more beautiful in person than you are on the Phlufff … box?” I smile and thank the guard, though I’m horribly embarrassed about all the trouble. Crystal, the checkout woman, reaches for the groceries on the conveyor belt.
“He senses your absence, Jeanette.” She nods toward William as Cocoa Puffs, Bugles, Eggos, Hawaiian Punch, Doritos, and Doughnut O’s shuttle across the scanner. “He knows your heart is elsewhere. He acts out. End things with Gus. Cold turkey.” As she says this, DELI reads out on the register screen. “You owe it to yourself. You owe it to Frank. You owe it to little Will.” She hits the button, which tallies up the groceries for my family. Then comes the part I hate, when she scans the groceries for Gus and me. Vegetable pâté, gherkins, sparkling cider, herbal tea, kosher salt, natural beer, artichokes. She holds up a bag of something she doesn’t recognize.
“Star fruit,” I say. She frowns at the price, then puts on half-eye glasses and examines a vegetable that looks like a bed of baby snakes. “Fiddlehead ferns. I’m not ready to give him up, Crystal. Especially now. He’s sick. He needs me.”
“Hmpf.” She hits the tally on the second set of groceries. The nine items are nearly as expensive as the cartful of food for my family. I push the OK button on the ATM and move out.
There’s no answer when I try to call Gus from the Eau d’Oeuvre cologne shoot. I start to leave a message on Frank’s voice mail when the director shouts from the set, “I need Mommy and the B.O.M. Let’s go, people.” B.O.M. is for baby-of-the-moment, which their mothers hate because they know they’re out on the street in a matter of months, sometimes weeks. I stand in front of a huge orange seamless sheet of paper; I’m dressed in a yellow tennis skirt, a yellow polo, and yellow sneakers. The director snatches Averille from his mother. Averille is supposed to be a girl in the ad, so he’s referred to by the crew as April. He’s got a big yellow bow on his head and he’s wearing a white ruffled dress. The pinkest cheeks I’ve ever seen, the sweetest smile. An angel. “All yours.” I take him in my arms. He coos and snuggles into my chest. Sure enough, the smell of him makes my milk run. Because of all the shoots I’ve done with babies, I never stopped lactating after I weaned William. The way they smell, their soft skin, their downy hair, the way they seem to love you, I never have the chance to dry up.