by Ted Sanders
I don’t even remember, but that’s a year off if it’s off at all. I crack my lips and let loose an answer: “Yap.”
Dorlene shakes her head. “That’s awfully young for you, but I’m guessing you’re accustomed to it.” I think I’ll object to that, but then she says, “She’ll be even more formidable when she’s older. I’m serious to god.”
I laugh, and loosen. It’s so hard to imagine Triti being either of those things. “I guess she will,” I say.
Dorlene finishes off her cigarette and arcs it out over the edge of the porch. My own’s gone dark in my hand, but I hang on to it. Dorlene props an elbow on my knee and taps a finger against her cheek. “Chickens,” she says dreamily, out of the blue. She says it like they’ve just occurred to her as the solution to a problem she’s having. “I’ve been hearing chickens. Roosters, I think.” She looks brightly back at me. “Triti has chickens?”
The storm door creaks. I jump a little. Triti herself appears. Even before I see who it is I feel a hitch at being caught out here with Dorlene, us talking the way we are and her standing like she is. But before Triti’s even all the way out, Dorlene has slipped from between my knees and moved to the edge of the porch. Another little sweep of warmth surges through the seat of me.
Triti has a plate and one of her omnipresent Nalgene bottles. The thighs of her jeans are still dark with wet. She says, “There you are,” without looking specifically at either me or Dorlene. She comes to stand beside the swing. “May I?”
I make more room than I need to, and Triti hesitates, just a bit. When she sits, she sits as far into her end as I’ve scooched into mine. The swing saws wonkily. She and I start into some clumsy small talk about the abundance of the food and the fineness of the weather and the farm itself. Dorlene watches, leaning against a post, and then says, “Tweedy, how long have you been out here?”
“You mean today?” says Triti, but none of us laugh. She tries the joke because her escape to the farm the summer before last—in the middle of the worst of it all, depending on how you measure it—is a brittle and complicated part of the whole history. I don’t know all Triti’s reasons myself, but if moving out here was an evacuation, a kind of rescue attempt, no one was saved. The farm was so foreign and removed and unstained compared to town—to the house Lisa still lives in, to my first dingy sublet, to Triti’s low long apartment and the tangled blocks around it where I used to hide my car—that coming out here became a woolgathering expedition, a kind of make-believe. And Triti belonged here, so hard and so fast. Her and the farmhouse, the land. The dog. I got swept up. If the farm was an abstract thing that didn’t have much to do with the logistical brutalities still happening in town—necessary things, things that mattered—still Triti had this way of putting down roots, spreading bedrock. Because of her, there was a time when the farm felt much more real than anything town would allow. But that was our last lie, I guess—nothing I could have managed on my own—and I think what that lie brought was the end of things. Or that’s how I see it. I couldn’t say how it is for Triti.
Triti shrugs and pops a piece of ambrosia salad into her mouth with her fingers. “I don’t know. Over a year.”
“It’s far from town. Don’t you get lonely?” Dorlene says. Lonely comes out like a moan.
Triti swallows. “Well, you know, I think I was looking for lonely.” I see her—in a flicker of blankness—ask herself how true that is.
“It suits you.”
“Loneliness.”
“The farm.” Triti goes on eating with her fingers, watching her own process studiously, like she was afraid she’d fail at it. “I thought it would be nice to have neighbors whose houses I couldn’t hit with a stone. A driveway used by no one I hadn’t invited.”
I start to prattle, pushing the flow of talk out and away. I start in about Tom and his near miss with the lighter fluid, but I don’t get far.
“Tweedy,” Dorlene says, cutting right across me. But all she says is, “I’d like to use the restroom, if that’s possible.”
A hesitation, a comic and unexpected beat in which Triti and I both—I know it—are considering Dorlene and a toilet for the first time. Triti recovers and gives Dorlene the bathroom spiel. To get to it you have to go through Triti’s bedroom itself, a strange consequence of the layout and the fact that the upstairs is all but shut down. Dorlene listens like she’s interviewing Triti for a job, and Triti ends up nattering on a sentence or two too long. She apologizes to Dorlene—for the architecture of the house, the nonexistent messiness of her room, the iron stains in the toilet bowl. Dorlene listens until she’s done and curtsies as she thanks her. We watch Dorlene across the porch. When she reaches the door we—the both of us—look deferentially away.
Triti waits for a long ten count after the door bangs closed. I’m not sure how long I’d have waited—maybe the whole time—but Triti leans over my plate. “So, what’s all this about? Is that tabouli? You’re trying to impress someone.” She says this like Dorlene hasn’t just been out here between my legs, like she hasn’t been waiting for her to get out of earshot.
“Dorlene asked me to get her some food.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t say ah.”
We sit there. I’ve got one of her cookies on my plate, and I know she knows it. But she points instead to the red chips, all but untouched. “Do you even know what those are?”
“I thought they were sweet potatoes.”
“They’re beets.”
Beet chips, for crying out loud. Honestly, I wasn’t even aware this was a thing you could do. Suddenly they look very red to me, bloodred, like they were made of flesh or something. I pinch one; it feels like vellum. I think about the sound of Dorlene’s nibbling. It’s possible, I think, that she didn’t know what they were either. “Did you make them?”
“Susan made them.”
“Fat Susan?”
“I don’t know why we have to call her Fat Susan. There’s only one Susan.”
“I think one of the Gottlieb girls is a Susan.”
“None of the Gottlieb girls made beet chips,” says Triti.
“You don’t know that,” I tell her.
Triti has some of the yellow gristly stuff on her plate. She pokes it with a fork and makes a face. I ask her what it is.
“I thought it was potatoes.” She points at the slab of the stuff on my plate. “What did you think it was?”
“I didn’t. There was this girl standing there, and I—”
She cuts me off with a hum, deep and vocal. I wait for her to start in. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m savoring. These are the words that explain everything. Your whole life, maybe? There was this girl.… I think maybe none of the details that come after that even matter.” She pauses, thinks. “I’m not trying to be mean.”
And she isn’t. I consider flipping the yellow crud out into the lawn.
Triti leans out to look closely at me. I realize we’ve gotten the swing going again without me realizing it, just a little. Her hair hangs from her cocked head, swaying slightly, pink on the inside. “I’m sorry,” she says again. An apology this time. “I’m not complaining. I was that girl once.”
“The girl who talked me into crud?”
“Is that what we’re saying?”
“I’m not.” Out ahead of us, down by the fringe of the corn, Lord Jim goes by slow. He slips back into the cornrows now and again, his long body weaving through the stalks, becoming a procession of ghosts. “There’s that dog,” I say.
“Aroof,” Triti calls out, thrusting and snapping her jaw. It’s not very loud, but it carries like a thrown thing. This is something she does. “Barooo-roff.” Lord Jim turns his head to look at her, not even slowing.
“He’s getting old, right?” I say. “For a big dog.”
“He’s in his prime,” she declares, still watching him. A few of the kids down there move through the dusk to intercept him, the swayback girl among them. The dog stops for them like a patient trol
ley, wagging faintly and staring straight ahead, panting. They bustle around him, giddy at his very presence, touching him and crooning. “He’s a good dog,” Triti says. A minute or two on, Jim’s admirers—admitting to themselves the stoic detachment I can see in the dog even from here—step away. After a beat he plows into motion, picking up his patrol again as though nothing had interrupted him. The swayback girl laughs throatily.
“God, that dog’s huge,” I say.
“You never liked him.”
I open my mouth to object, but if I’m honest she’s almost right. And listen, I grew up with dogs, still consider myself a dog person—even though with Lisa it was the cats. But Jim has always made me nervous. I think nervous is the right word. He’s pony sized, first of all, but that’s not the main thing. I’ve tried describing this to Triti before, and so with practice I can say it’s Jim’s indifference that makes me tense, his particular brand of it: massive and vigilant. If there is such a thing. Like he was with those kids just now, what Triti takes for gentle and I call ominous. Lord Jim doesn’t, for example, ever really look at you. Not directly. He comes up beside you with that impossible head, his mouth cracked, panting just a little no matter what the heat, and he fixes his gaze off somewhere else, on some middle distance, maybe fixing on the property lines he’s forever ranging. But the whole while, you know he’s on to you. His awareness rolls off him like armor, or like a threat. Or like both of those things—like a ward. Maybe it’s just me, but because of his size, and because the whole farmyard is so totally his territory—more than it could ever be Tom’s, or even Triti’s, or anyone’s—when Jim moves around the property he moves with the blindly implacable confidence of a ship, and you get the sense that your presence is irrelevant to his passage. Or it’s more like, his approach is a function of his own gravity, and it’s you who is drifting into his path, but he is too polite to mention it. He is just quietly and massively there.
Triti would say that what I see in Lord Jim is a matter of him being a herding dog. “He’s herding you,” she says, all the time. “He’s a herder.” And she would maybe know, because she’s one herself. One time last spring, when we were out here at the farm alone, we went out into the yard in the middle of the night naked. Because we could, you know. The grass was hard and cold and caked to the lumpy ground like baby hair. Triti shone. And just as we were lying down in the grass together, under the wide moon that had led us out to do exactly this thing, Lord Jim came up from nowhere, glowing like something celestial himself, and he came right up beside us, above us both, so close that you could feel his heat and his breath and his stink. I was so aware I was naked. I felt like a woman must feel.
But Triti got up on her bare feet and she leaned into him, sinking her hands into his fur, muscling him away. She steered him up to the house, talking to him, repeating his name and saying stuff to him that seemed to matter. She took him up the back steps and locked him in the porch—a spectacle in its own right, since he wasn’t allowed in the house. And then Triti came back down to me in the yard and got me going again. She got on me. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin and when I rolled her over onto the stony earth she lay there and watched me hard like I was all the reasons she could even begin to spread herself in the first place. Like this was the only lesson I’d ever need. The whole time, Jim stood in the back porch like a horse in a stable, looking out but not at us, outsized and patient there in that airlock, and the branches moved over the moon.
“He’s just different than dogs I’ve had,” I say to Triti now, here and now, here beside me on this swing.
“That’s because he has a job. You never gave your dogs jobs. Probably they had weak character because of it.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, “it’s either them or me.”
Triti sighs. Jim has passed out of sight down below. The kids wander goofily off, too, and neither of us makes the jokes we ought to about the way they are. As we watch them the thought returns to me, as it sometimes does, that they’re about Triti’s age. I wonder if she ever thinks of it.
Dorlene’s taking a long time. I flash stupidly across the worry of her falling into the toilet, which is uncomfortably high even for me. I look back through the window at Triti’s bedroom door.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Triti says.
“That means you’re thinking it too.”
“Only via you.”
“I doubt that.”
“You like her.”
I shrug. “She’s bright.”
Triti starts to laugh. “Oh my god, you like her like her.” I start to prickle, but Triti steps right back in and sort of saves me. “You all do. Fucking boys.”
A shape appears in the screen door, hovering. The porch light fires up, blinding us, and then goes dark again. Ernest’s voice slides out to us. “Oops. Private party?” he says. The sound and the sight of him is like a car in a forest.
“Not anymore,” Triti tells him.
Ernest comes out and takes a seat on the edge of the porch, leaning back against one of the posts. He’s toting a wineglass half-filled with a precariously tilting red that looks almost black in this light.
“Are you swooning too?” Triti asks him.
“Who isn’t?” he says.
“I’m not.”
Ernest chuckles. “Right.”
“I thought she would be taller. I thought Tom was exaggerating.”
I swing my head at her. “You knew?”
“Oh, right. God, he didn’t tell you. I forgot.”
Ernest starts to laugh and then so does Triti.
“You knew too?” I say to Ernest.
He lays out his hands. “I never claimed not to,” he says, and the sense I had earlier about this all being some joke comes barreling back over me.
“Did you think she would be taller?” Triti says to Ernest.
“I saw pictures.”
“So did I.”
“Didn’t do her justice.”
“No.”
Ernest says, “Tom’s words to me were: you could fit her in a carry-on.”
“I think I could,” says Triti.
“But he also said—what was it?—but you’d be the one that felt like luggage?”
“Hm,” Triti says.
“Jesus Christ,” I say.
And right then Dorlene’s voice steps out of the window, from right behind me and Triti. It grips us like we were children. Even Ernest goes stiff. “David,” the voice says, and it’s like it’s not even asking—I mean, it’s naming me like I’m a fact. But it’s a sad voice. Or not sad—resigned, maybe.
I turn. She’s backlit now that the dark has begun to settle in, her nose and brow gray behind the screen, her fingers up on the windowsill under her chin.
“Hey,” I say.
Dorlene sighs. I hear her feet scuffle on the wooden floor, and I imagine she’s on her tiptoes. “David,” she coos, “I’m so sorry, but I wonder if we couldn’t get my bag from your car. I’m needing it, I’m afraid. Ernest, Tweedy, I’m sorry. Would this moment be all right?”
And suddenly we’re all scrambling, throwing politenesses and alacrity at Dorlene. Triti and I get up out of the swing at not quite the same moment, sending it reeling. It bangs back into us both at the knees, me and then her. Somehow we all end up going inside. We head over to Dorlene like supplicants, and that’s how she receives us, watching the three of us approach with her head slightly cocked and her chin high. She is flawlessly calm, regal.
“I didn’t mean to summon the bunch,” she says. Ernest seems surprised to be here—his eyebrows shoot up at the word summon.
“I want to apologize,” Triti says. “I feel bad because we were talking about you and I think you might’ve heard us.”
Dorlene sighs, a cartoon bird. “You’re all so funny.” She reaches out and lays a hand on one of the faded wet patches barely visible now on Triti’s jeans, right at eye level, and she rubs her hand across it, back and forth, fast and hard. Triti’s thigh shimm
ies. Her boobs jiggle. Dorlene leans into it, her hand making a sound like a tiny zipper being worked up and down.
“Ow,” Triti says.
Dorlene pulls her hand away. She smells it, delicately. “You’re damp. Mr. Shamblin took all your towels.”
“Yes,” says Triti. “He did.” And anyone can see that Dorlene’s thrown her.
Dorlene looks at me. “David,” she says again, like I’m hers, and she turns.
I follow her through the dining room, where a handful of people mill with plates. Through the kitchen, nearly empty now. Out on the back steps, Dorlene has to turn sideways, toddler-style, to navigate the short steep flight of peeling wooden stairs. We’re outside before I know it, and almost everyone’s here, getting what they want from the grill. The smell of meat climbs and clings inside my nose, but for some reason I’m not interested. I wonder if Dorlene is hungry—she’s eaten almost nothing. I wonder if I ought to get her something or at least offer, but almost before we’ve touched ground, Bob Everitt totters up to us beaming, the stub of a bratwurst in his hand.
“You’re just in time for the show,” he says to us.
“The show,” I say deadpan, just as Dorlene says, “Is there to be a show, Mr. Everitt?”
Bob turns right to her, ignoring me. He glances over his shoulder. “Tom’s still trying to light that fire. They’ve escalated to gasoline.”
Dorlene starts to cuss her way into an elegant complaint, but I don’t stay to hear it. I go right on down the hill, into the half-dark, down to where Tom’s silhouette is crossing the yard from the garage, heading for the brushpile, the shadows of kids all around him like rats. They’re ribbing him and he’s loving it, giving it back before it’s even delivered, his voice bounding merrily up toward me. The big red gas can hangs from his hand, the yellow spout glowing.