Sweet Talk

by Stephanie Vaughn

  The policeman who filled out the report tried to write “Miscellaneous Household Goods” on the clipboarded form, but I made him list everything I could remember, as the three of us sat on the curb—the skis and rackets, the chess set, a baseball bat, twelve boxes of books, two rugs that I had braided, an oak bed frame Sam had refinished. I inventoried the kitchen items: two bread pans, two cake pans, three skillets. I mentioned every fork and every measuring cup and every piece of bric-a-brac I could recall—the trash of our life, suddenly made valuable by the theft. When the policeman had left without giving us any hope of ever recovering our things, I told Sam I was going to pack and shower. A half hour later when I came out with the suitcases, he was still on the curb, sitting in the full sun, his cotton shirt beginning to stain in wing shapes across his shoulder blades. I reached down to touch him and he flinched. It was a shock—feeling the tremble of his flesh, the vulnerability of it, and for the first time since California I tried to imagine what it was like driving with a woman who said she didn’t want him, in a van he didn’t like but had to buy in order to travel to a possible job on the other side of the continent, which might not be worth reaching.

  On the last leg of the trip, Sam was agreeable and compliant. If I wanted to stop for coffee, he stopped immediately. If I wanted him to go slower in thick traffic, he eased his foot off the pedal without a look of regret or annoyance. I got out the dictionary. Operose, ophelimity, ophryitis. He said he’d never heard of any of those words. Which president died in a bathtub? He couldn’t remember. I tried to sing to keep him company. He told me it wasn’t necessary. I played a few tunes on a comb. He gazed pleasantly at the turnpike, so pleasantly that I could have made him up. I could have invented him and put him on a mountainside terrace and set him going. “Sammy,” I said, “that stuff wasn’t much. I won’t miss it.”

  “Good,” he said.

  Then I said, “It was Harding who died in the tub.”

  About 3 A.M. green exit signs began to appear announcing the past and the future: Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Patrick Henry Airport. “Let’s go to the beach,” I said. “Let’s just go all the way to the edge of the continent.” It was a ludicrous idea.

  “Sure. Why not.”

  He drove on past Newport News and over an arching bridge toward Virginia Beach. We arrived there just at dawn and found our way into a residential neighborhood full of small pastel houses and sandy lawns. “Could we just stop right here?” I said. I had an idea. I had a plan. He shrugged as if to say what the heck, I don’t care, and if you want to drive into the ocean that will be fine, too.

  We were parked on a street that ran due east toward the water—I could see just a glimmer of ocean between two hotels about a mile away. “All right,” I said, with the forced, brusque cheerfulness of a high-school coach. “Let’s get out and do some stretching exercises.” Sam sat behind the wheel and watched me touch my toes. “Come on, Sammy. Let’s get loose. We haven’t done anything with our bodies since California.” He yawned, got out of the van, and did a few arm rolls and toe touches. “All right now,” I said. “Do you think a two-block handicap is about right?” He had always given me a two-block advantage during our foot races in California. He yawned again. “How about a one-and-a-half-block lead, then?” He crossed his arms and leaned against the van, watching me. I couldn’t tell whether he had nodded, but I said anyway, “I’ll give you a wave when I’m ready.” I walked down the middle of the street past houses that had towels hanging over porch rails and toys lying on front walks. Even a mile from the water, I smelled the salt and seaweed in the air. It made me feel light-headed and for a moment I tried to picture Sam and myself in one of those houses with tricycles and toilet trainers and small latched gates. We had never discussed having a child. When I turned to wave, he was still leaning against the van.

  I started out in a jog, then picked up the pace, and hit what seemed to be about the quarter-mile mark doing a fast easy run. Ahead of me the stretch of water between the two hotels was undulating with gold. I listened for the sound of Sam’s footsteps but heard only the soft taps of my own tennis shoes. The sea drew closer and the sky above it fanned out in ribs of orange and purple silk. I was afraid to look back. I was afraid that if I turned to see him, Sam might recede forever into the damp gray of the western sky. I slowed down in case I had gone too fast and he wanted to catch up. I concentrated on the water and listened to the still, heavy air. By the time I reached the three-quarters mark, I realized that I was probably running alone.

  I hadn’t wanted to lose him.

  I wondered whether he had waited by the van or was already headed for Newport News. I imagined him at a phone booth calling another woman collect in California, and then I realized that I didn’t actually know whether there was another woman or not. For a wild moment I hoped there was and that she was rich and would send him money. I had caught my second wind and was breathing easily. I looked toward the shore without seeing it and was sorry I hadn’t measured the distance and thought to clock it, since now I was running against time and myself, and then I heard him—the unmistakable sound of a sprint and the heavy, whooping intake of his breath. He passed me just as we crossed the main street in front of the hotels, and he reached the water twenty feet ahead of me.

  “Goddammit, Day,” I said. “You were on the grass, weren’t you?” We were walking along the hard, wet edge of the beach, breathing hard. “You were sneaking across those lawns. That’s a form of cheating.” I drummed his arm lightly with my fists pretending to beat him up. “I slowed down because I thought you weren’t there.” We leaned over from the waist, hands on our hips, breathing toward the sand. The water rolled up the berm near our feet and flickered like topaz.

  “You were always a lousy loser,” he said.

  I said, “You should talk.”

  We’re on TV in the Universe

  My theory of the universe is that it’s not moving outward from a Big Bang nor collapsing backward into the center. It’s moving back and forth, breathing in and out, just like lungs. Sometimes, when the universe is running uphill, it breathes faster, and the stars from our vantage point in the Milky Way whip left and right like windshield wipers. The universe, when it is in deep sleep at five o’clock in the morning, has a heartbeat of 124 beats per minute, the same heartbeat that an unhatched chicken has just before it begins to crash its head against the shell.

  Last winter I wrecked my car during an ice storm on Interstate 17. I had a chicken in a cage on the front seat beside me. I had the cage strapped in with the passenger seat belt, and a towel draped over the cage, so that the chicken wouldn’t have to look at the weather. I was on my way to a party, and I was wearing my only party outfit, a black satin dress with a giant silver belt that was actually a music box in disguise—when you pressed the buckle, it played “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The chicken was actually a young rooster who hadn’t yet learned his own music. When he tried to crow a cock-a-doodle-do, he made a horrible scraping metal sound that came out “er-err-errr.” It was early evening, black and snowy, the roadbed hissing beneath my tires, the chicken going “er-err-errr” every so often beneath the towel.

  “So you don’t want to go to a party?” I said to the chicken. I knew by then that I was driving on a chancy road, and I was trying to keep myself going with the chicken talk. “So you don’t want to party?” I said. “You want to go back home and become drumsticks and Hot Buffalo Wings?”

  “Er-err-errr,” the chicken said.

  “Just kidding,” I said. The chicken was going to be a present for a man who lived in the country and owned ducks, geese, and a swan. One thing I knew about this man was that he liked his birds the way some people like dogs and cats, and he probably wouldn’t eat them. I was trying to picture the chicken in his new home when I crossed a bridge over the Susquehanna and encountered the silence of black ice. The tires lost their hiss, the chicken shut up, and about fifty yards after I hit the ice, I hit a Tioga Count
y Sheriff’s Department car. The car was parked on the road berm just beyond the bridge, and inside the car a sheriff was radioing for a tow truck, as if he knew I was coming and that when I got there, our two cars were going to need help.

  My car did a kind of simple dance step down the highway on its way to meet the sheriff’s car. It threw its hips to the left, it threw its hips to the right, left, right, left, right, then turned and slid, as if it were making a rock-and-roll move toward the arms of a partner.

  Before the impact, when my car was still grace on ice, when my car was no longer in touch with the planet but now sliding above a thin layer of air and water, four thousand pounds of chrome and steel, bronze metallic paint, power steering, power brakes, AC, AM/FM, good tires, fine upholstery, all the things you like to see in an ad when you’re looking for a big, used American car, when it was gliding through that galaxy of flashing lights, on its way through Andromeda, Sirius, and the Crab Nebula, it crossed my mind that surely it was against the laws of physics to hit a patrol car. If you were sliding above ice, you might hit a regular car, or a pole, or a fence, or an asteroid, but you could not hit the car of a man with a badge, a gun, bulletproof windows, citation forms in his pocket, handcuffs, the power to arrest you, a man working hard on a bad night.

  Just about all of those things did really fly through my head and, recognizing the impossibility of the event, as my car slid sideways toward the side of the other car, I felt weightless and invisible. I felt harmless and happy.

  Even for a sheriff, Officer Mike Cook was very tall. Officer Cook was linebacker tall, he was Jack-and-the-Beanstalk tall, he was as tall as my desire to be back home. Looking up at him, at the black silhouette of his hat, at the crazed lights on the top of his car slinging snowfish around his head, I lost contact with my native language. He put his hands on his hips and waited. When he perceived that words for me were as ephemeral as snowflakes, he said in his deep patrolman’s voice, his made-for-TV-voice, “We’re not having a very good evening, are we?”

  We, he said. Officer Cook had embraced me with his pronoun.

  It was then that I knew I loved Officer Cook, the blackness of his huge wet boots, the tenderness of his large hands as he lighted the flares and placed them along the roadside. People died that night on Interstate 17, and we were alive. We were alive! I loved Officer Cook for having survived the double whump of my car smashing into his car, nose to tail, and tail to nose, and then having thought of something to say about it afterward. We hit him twice, the chicken and I, before we spun out again heading back down the road in the direction we had been going before the accident. It took me a moment to realize that we were still moving and that the wheels had caught their traction again and needed an application of the brakes.

  “Is it over?” I said to the chicken. When I lifted the towel, he was walking in small circles around the cage, looking for an escape perhaps. Poor creature, who in the early A.M. that day had been a resident of Old MacDonald’s Pet Shop eating yellow corn and practicing his ridiculous crow in front of cooing children.

  The reason Officer Cook had been radioing for a tow truck was that another car had already hit the ice slick and had departed from the road. It had slid down a steep bank and been caught by drifts. The owner was standing now on the safe side of the guard rail waiting for the truck. He was a juggler, a college kid who had just driven four hundred miles on his way home from a Springsteen concert.

  “I’m only twenty miles from home,” he said.

  “Me too,” I said. “Twenty miles from home and ten miles from a big party.”

  He had three snowballs and was tossing them in the air as we talked. He tossed them so high that they disappeared into the feathered darkness before they met his lightning hands again.

  “You want a ride home?” he said. “Your car’s done for the night.” In fact, my car was going to need three thousand dollars in body work plus the four-hundred-dollar transmission job I had been postponing, and therefore it was done forever. I looked down at his red Mustang held by snow.

  “How do you know your car’s not done for the night?”

  “My car didn’t hit a police car,” he said.

  I don’t know why the TV crew didn’t put the juggler in the picture, maybe because they believed that the real story lay in the irony of a patrolman’s needing help. The crew arrived breathlessly, a van from a station in Binghamton. One of them had a video camera, and the other did the talking. Officer Cook, who was back in his car talking on the radio, got out in order to say, “We don’t want any more vehicles on this roadside. Move along now.”

  Traffic was moving very slowly past us in the far lane, cars, an eighteen-wheel rig, their drivers invisible behind black glass, straining to see us, I imagined, our little tableau, a cautionary tale.

  “How many cars involved here?” the TV man said.

  “Three,” Officer Cook said, turning to get in his car.

  “Anybody hurt? Anybody injured?”

  “I don’t think so,” Officer Cook said. “Get off the road,” he said, and slammed his door.

  Just then I leaned against the car so that I could prop my elbows on the roof, and my belt buckle broke into “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The TV man turned and took me in for the first time and then noticed the juggler, who by then was throwing five snowballs into the air and was all concentration.

  “Did you hit the cop, or did he hit you?”

  “I hit him,” I said. I could see the TV man thinking about it—here were a juggler in the snow, a cop with a wrecked car, and a woman who sounded like a brass band, maybe there was a story here—and then he shook his head no.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said to his cameraman.

  They jogged to the van, and before they got in I heard the TV man say, “I know there’s a better wreck somewhere down the road.”

  I looked at the juggler, who dropped his hands and let the balls fall past him like tiny comets. “You fail the wreck test,” he said. “They’re looking for an A-plus wreck. They’re looking for something with bodies.”

  The belt had arrived at the piccolo section of the march, the silvery shooting-star solo of the brave little instrument soaring above the heavy brass ones. The juggler and I paused to listen to it. We tapped our feet in the slush and kept time with our bodies. When the march was over, the juggler said, “Nice belt.”

  The happiest person I met that night was the tow-truck driver. She was making lots of money in the bad weather and knew how to handle the roads. “My policy is people first and then their wrecks,” she told us. “You might have some aches and pains, or your feet might be froze.” So we got in the cab, the juggler, the chicken, and I, and rode one mile to the exit and a gas station, where we waited for the tow truck to bring in our cars. Officer Cook had to stay behind and wait for a policeman to come and fill out an accident report. That was the last I saw of him until the eleven o’clock news.

  At the station, there were already three other drivers waiting for their cars. We all still had that adrenaline high you get from a close call, and we kept taking turns describing our accidents. We kept embellishing as we went, so that the accidents got more frightening as we added the sounds of breaking glass (my taillights) and the screech of metal (the juggler’s bumper scraping the end of the guardrail), things you hear but don’t listen to when the car is still moving. Someone wanted to know if I was a veterinarian. In the spirit of the moment, I said, “Not exactly,” and they all looked skeptical—We’re all truth-tellers here, they seemed to say. “Actually, this is a birthday present for a veterinarian who lives in the country,” I said. That was true enough to make sense of where I was and how I happened to arrive there with a live chicken. I played John Philip Sousa for them. The juggler juggled some soda cans. We asked him what the hardest things were to juggle and he said, “Live lobsters.” A famous juggler in New York City had tried live lobsters once on a dare from someone in the audience, but the lobsters kept snapping at him. The chick
en drank some water from a paper cup and, feeling more himself again, began to speak his peculiar chicken language.

  In the end, I didn’t accept a ride home with the juggler, because I had decided he was probably doing a little speed. Instead, I took a room at Koch’s Universe Motel, which had a giant neon sign depicting stars and spaceships. I gave the chicken to the tow-truck driver. She had three children who wanted a pet, and she was the only one at the gas station who promised she wouldn’t eat it. At eleven o’clock I got a glimpse of Officer Cook on TV. The camera panned over his car, pausing at the crushed front fender and the popped hood. Then it cut to him just long enough for him to say, “We don’t want any more vehicles on this roadside,” and then the report hurried on to the “better wrecks.” Just before Officer Cook got to the word “roadside,” I got a hazy look at myself in the background, separated from Officer Cook by the hood of his car and streaks of falling snow. There we were, together again. There we were, the two of us locked forever in the frame of a TV screen, bouncing off of satellites and caroming over the planet. We were still going places. We were leading off the transmission from earth in front of sports and weather, the late-night talk shows, and old movies. We were going to be up there with everybody who had ever been on TV. Truman and Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ. You name it. Pete Rose and Gloria Steinem. We were moving fast, already on our way to the moon. Pretty soon we’d be passing through the orbit of Mars, then Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. We’d be going to Andromeda and who knows where else. What a vacation.

  A confession now. What was I doing on the road with a live chicken and a musical belt? I was going to a party where I imagined that I would be noticed as an interesting person. The Poultry Woman. The Marching Band Woman. A woman you would like to discover at a party. There were going to be famous people at that party, Watkins Glen race drivers, glass sculptors from Corning, writers from New York City, maybe even athletes and actors. I was between jobs again and living alone. When I set out in bad weather I had a feeling. Something was going to change for me that night, something that was going to relocate me in the universe. Watching television in the motel, I thought about it. I was right. Something happened.