Joy

by Erin McGraw

  New words are boiling up in me, new ideas. I’m recognizing just what kind of God I’ve been worshiping all this time, and every day the impulse to share becomes a little stronger. Randy saw something in my expression the Sunday after Theresa got her breast cancer diagnosis; he grabbed me by the shoulders and steered me away from her. “Don’t take her faith away. It’s all she has.”

  “Then she doesn’t have anything.”

  “It’s not your job to tell her that.”

  Randy’s voice was tired. His mouth drooped, his eyes blinked too much; everything about him looked defeated, but here he was at church again, hoping in the Lord always. I said, “You knew, didn’t you? Way deep inside, you knew there was never going to be a miracle.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, his eyes on his shoes.

  Since he doesn’t want to sit next to me, I sit alone for the service, studying Theresa, half shy when she lets Pastor Michael lay his healing hands on her. Her face is rapt.

  I’m not a mean person. After service, I head for the parking lot. Theresa’s the one who speeds up to catch me, grabbing me by the wrist. “I need you,” she said. “Teach me. I don’t know how to cope with stage IV cancer. How do I pray in the face of that? How do I hope?”

  Her eyes, her whole face is shining. She looks like the glory of the Lord. I say, “Keep God in your every breath. Keep him before you.”

  “Will he save me?” she says.

  “He will,” I say, going under. “You can’t imagine what he will do for you.”

  Breaking Glass

  Not thinking, I mention the Year of Breaking Glass in front of Ben. His face tightens, but he doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, or doesn’t hear the faint yearning in my voice.

  The year was more like two years, on and off. Glass exploded and covered my couch or kitchen sink, and Ben’s wife stood outside of my house with a shotgun. I lived outside city limits; we heard gunshots every day, but I’d never been shot at before. I’d hardly even been yelled at. I was aflame with guilt. It was thrilling, and so was the sex.

  Shattered: two marriages, five childhoods, eleven windows, one car. Ben and I picked our way across rubble every day. Eventually we made a path, and the sex settled down. Since he came home to me every day, I wasn’t thinking about him all the time. I was thinking about his wife.

  After she cleaned out their savings accounts, she got a job at a Porsche dealership. Her father had been a touring-car racer, and had taught her some moves. Sometimes I sit in the dealership parking lot and watch her demonstrate torque vectoring on the closed track. The car makes a U-turn so tight it almost retraces its tracks, as sexy as a hand resting on the curve of a back.

  Like every divorced woman, she dropped ten pounds and dyed her hair. If Ben met her for the first time tomorrow, he’d find out her favorite song and be sure to get her number. I know his moves. I also know how much he’d love a perfectly designed, perfectly functioning car. He likes perfection, as he used to tell me on milky afternoons on the floor of his classroom, the door locked after the kids left. When I finally go over to the dealership, I’m just saving him time.

  “Unless you want to buy a car, I’m not interested in talking to you. And I know Ben can’t afford this,” she says.

  “I make money, too,” I say. Not much—I teach at the same school as Ben.

  “The thing that puts Porsche ahead of its competitors is handling,” she says. Her shoes easily cost $300. She doesn’t bother trying to pronounce the heavy German word correctly. When she eases into the driver’s seat to demonstrate the gearbox, her skirt rides up her thighs.

  Ben comes home an hour after I do and pads around the kitchen, mixing us drinks while I boil ravioli. He kisses me and I tell him to brush his teeth. “That bad?” he says.

  “Could use a little freshening.”

  He pulls my head to his shoulder, using more force than he has to. “Love me?”

  “Yup.”

  Zero to sixty in 4.3 seconds. I’ve been letting my hair go gray, and on the spot decide to start dyeing again. Ben comes back into the kitchen and breathes mint at me. I hold up sauce for him to taste, and he says, “Now it doesn’t taste good.” The gin does, though. It’s been a long time since we had gin for dinner, and when the room spins we fall to the couch, not the bed.

  “We’re getting old,” I say.

  “That’s been happening.” I want to sleep on the couch, but he makes me come to bed with him.

  When I return to the dealership, Ben’s wife shows me the 911, so beautiful I can barely speak in its presence. “How do you plan to explain this to Ben?” she says.

  The driver’s seat is tilted back so that I feel cupped. It’s enough to make me feel as if I’ve never been held before. “I have no idea.”

  “Well, that’s your M.O.” She must use something to keep her skin dewy. The blood of ex-husbands, Ben would say. I have an ex-husband, too, but he is not part of this story. The monthly payments on a 911, even with my income, would cripple us.

  That night is Ben’s night to cook, and he reheats the untouched ravioli sauce. I sit at the counter, swirling my wine. “I have something to tell you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I want to buy you a car.”

  Relief arcs across his face. “What if I don’t want a car?”

  “You’ll let me buy it as a favor to you.”

  “I’m constantly surprised at what I’ll do,” he says. He doesn’t care for ravioli, and tomato sauce sometimes inflames his delicate stomach. We are near the end of the month, and he is concerned about deposits getting made. The alimony is a substantial percentage of his teacher’s salary. He is convinced that his ex-wife is hiding income from the courts so that his payments remain high.

  Through the bad time, through the broken glass, he told me that I showed him what forgiveness looked like. While I huddled alone, afraid to turn on the lights because they would show her where the windows were, I clutched the memory of those words. Now I sit up at night and watch TV in well-lit rooms.

  The next time I go to the dealership I tell his ex-wife, “He and I drink too much.”

  “No surprise there.”

  “His blood pressure is high.”

  “Your problem, not mine.”

  “I dream of you waiting outside of our house.”

  “I’ve moved on.”

  “Those are happy dreams.”

  She revs the engine of today’s car, the Boxster, and says something I can’t hear. When the engine settles down again, she says, “I shot out the windows of a cheater, but she was passionate. Don’t just become a bitch.”

  “It worked for you.”

  She flashes some more thigh. “We have financing plans.”

  When I get home, I stand in the middle of the kitchen and drop a potted fern onto the tile floor. Dirt and clay shards and leaves fly. I’m dropping wineglasses by the time Ben comes up from his study. He grabs my hand, not gently.

  “You’re cleaning this up, not me,” he says.

  “What if I say no?”

  He’s thinking. My breath is ragged, my heart a frantic bird. “Christ,” he whispers, and walks away. I haven’t even told him about the car in the garage.

  Sympathy

  After the concert, we agreed that the kid, so skinny his T-shirt hung on him like a dress, yelled, “Jesus! It’s called classic rock! Is that hard?” Half yelled. Strangling on its outrage, his voice twisted itself into a tight wire.

  I said the T-shirt was Lou Reed, John said it was Led Zeppelin. He said the kid’s hair was dark, but he shouldn’t have contested me, because I notice things like this: it was almost white, an unhealthy, mushroomy color, like the kid lived in a closet. We were all in line for beer at a Stones concert, and the kid was at the brink of tears. The Coliseum speakers were crashing pre-concert “Honky Tonk Women” and the median age was sixty.

  John’s choice, not mine. When I got to pick, we went to club
s where you could hear ice cubes clink while the singer at the piano breathily crooned “Where or When.” Median age, seventy. “They make us look young,” I said.

  “That is not a good thing,” he said. “You used to listen to the Doors.”

  “I grew up.”

  “You’re gonna regret that.”

  Did he think he could pass for twenty-five in that arena, wearing athletic shoes that gripped the metal risers and jeans that strained across his gut? The kid in the T-shirt spun out of line, gargling his anger, and rammed into John, knocking him back a step. The kid’s eyes were all pupil, and tears washed down his face in a sheet. “What are you all doing here?” he said.

  “Waiting for beer.”

  “No! What are you all doing here?” The kid had to scream to be heard over the P.A. music, but he was all about screaming.

  “I love the Stones, man. Soundtrack of my youth.”

  The kid’s mouth twisted. “They’re not supposed to be a soundtrack. What’s a soundtrack anyway, background music? That’s a desecration.”

  John and I exchanged a look, surprised that the kid knew the word.

  “It’s music! It’s the whole, hot—It isn’t a goddamn soundtrack.” He cocked his fist, but John caught the kid’s skinny wrist and held it.

  “Okay, son. Take it easy.”

  The kid actually started to dance in rage, trying to yank away from John and screeching, “I. Am. Not. Your. Son.” Just then the lights went down and John let go of the kid in order to reach for me, which is when the kid socked him in the jaw and raced away. By the time the lasers started and Keith Richards banged out the opening of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the kid had vanished.

  “Rock and roll,” John said, rubbing his jaw.

  It wasn’t much of a hit, and we might have forgotten about the kid except that at the end of the show, during the din that you’d only know was “Satisfaction” if you listened to the crowd screaming the words, crowd surfing started up by the stage. The kid, maybe 120 pounds, was made to be tossed, and even from our seats up in row MM we could see his T-shirt flapping, and his sticklike arms beating against the air. “He’s gonna get hurt,” John said. “I won’t cry.”

  The song shifted to “Sympathy for the Devil,” and the crowd was roaring the chorus while Ronnie Wood shredded through a solo nobody could hear. The kid was getting flipped like a fish; a hundred camera flashes made him glitter. He raised his arms, and the hands underneath heaved him way up, flinging him into the dark auditorium air, where he disappeared.

  A roar ripped across the crowd; even people who hadn’t seen what happened were yelling. Mick stood at the front of the stage, his hand shading his eyes, rocking back and forth on his high heels. Then he shrugged and danced back upstage, and the roar from the audience got louder, and the kid was probably underneath fifty pairs of feet by now. Heat broke across me like a wave. “We just saw that kid get killed,” I yelled to John.

  “No, we didn’t,” he said.

  “We—,” I started, but he put his wet hand across my mouth. I could talk into his skin; nothing was going to change. I licked his salty palm. All of us were running with sweat.

  “Listen.” Keith and Ronnie were head-to-head, trading licks, pushing each other harder and harder and Charlie behind them driving like a train, the kind of jam you come to a concert to hear. Somewhere on the floor of the Coliseum, people were dancing on top of the kid.

  After the last encore, John and I made our way out with the other ninety thousand people, our heads full of bees. When we got into the light, I could see the red mark the kid had left on his cheek. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking.

  We didn’t talk going home. He was letting the music ebb out of him. When we were younger, we’d have sex before we left the parking lot, which was one thing music meant then.

  When we got home I washed my face. He took the dog out. I stood at the window after he came back in, pointlessly looking for constellations. I have bad night vision, and can only see the North Star if somebody shows it to me.

  “You coming to bed?”

  “Yeah.”

  We had a good marriage. John knew I was also thinking of that skinny body, spitting with fury, sailing into the dark stadium air. I was the one who thought he came back down.

  After John died, I kept the house. I don’t go into the rooms that used to be his. In my office, I keep a small sound system, which is fine for me. I listen to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. “Witchcraft.” “That Old Black Magic.” “Blame It on My Youth.”

  Ava Gardner Goes Home

  1952

  I used up all my capital for this: a visit to my sister’s house at the junction of Nowhere and No Reason. Panic, which started ticking when I told Myra that Frank and I were coming, took over on the flight from Durham to Winston-Salem, and by the time we got to her house I was chewing gum and smoking at the same time, my foot rattling like a machine gun. Every building in town is a dull cube, the Hanes factory squatting in the shadow of the water tower. Frank never would have agreed to come if he’d had a recording session, a movie, a single foxhole he could hide in. But these days it’s his wife who’s paying the bills, and I get to insist on a trip that I myself have never made since I left North Carolina with a bad suitcase and a drawl. I got rid of them both.

  The whole town is in Myra’s house. By herself, Myra cooked enough to feed the Tenth Battalion, and still everybody arrives with a covered dish. Four boxes are stacked next to the sink, each holding a red velvet cake. After the kitchen table was covered with dishes, my cousin balanced a plank on chairs so we wouldn’t have to put food on the floor. Frank’s eyes are darting around the room while he talks to my cousins, their friends, every salesman and gas-pump jockey in fifty miles. I need to get him a drink now. Me, too.

  I say, “Betty Louise, just look at you! You could be a princess.”

  Betty Louise, who was my friend, opens her mouth and closes it again. She blushes and says, “Look who finally came home.”

  “I’m happy to be here.”

  “Bringing glamour to poor old Winston-Salem.”

  “It’s good to be out of Hollywood.”

  “I can’t think why.”

  “You’re my people, Betty Louise.” I try to hold her gaze, but she won’t let me, fingering her flimsy skirt. If Edith Head had tried to dress me like my people from Grabtown, North Carolina, she wouldn’t have come close to these rayon floral dresses in brown and green. Everyone is wearing their best. I think about the mink Frank got me and I want to vomit. “How’s your mama, Betty Louise?”

  “What’s it like, in Hollywood? Are there”—her face goes so red it’s almost purple—“orgies?”

  “Not that I know about. Listen, Betty Louise—do you think there’s any hooch around here?”

  “Not that I know about.”

  Myra wriggles through the crowd to get to me, staring at my cigarette. “Ava, can’t you get that husband of yours to eat?”

  “Look at him. I lost that battle a long time ago.” His face looks especially gaunt with everybody pressed up against him, the girls who want him to sing and the men talking about the war and then saying, “Oh, but you wouldn’t know about that, would you?” He looks at me and I smile, meaning thank you, and he glares, meaning you’ll pay. I glare back, meaning you owe me more than this, you prick, and Myra interrupts us, “Ava, look who’s here to see you! You remember Dr. Milton!”

  His perfectly round face glistens; sweat beads along the part in his greasy hair. Even though it’s November, it must be ninety degrees in Myra’s front room, and my tight dress lining sticks to my back and thighs. Frank’s probably sweated right through his suit coat. Dr. Milton says, “Every time you have a new picture, I tell people that you sat in my chair.”

  That is clearly not all he tells people. His fat hands twitch toward me, and I flash my best smile across the room at my rigid, furious husband. “I tell the Hollywood dentists that it all started here,” I say to D
r. Milton, then sight Myra’s husband, Bronnie, on the other side of the cakes. Bronnie always knows where the bourbon is. “Please, eat, and help us with this food—I need to greet my sweet brother-in-law.” Dr. Milton looks at his sleeve after I touch his arm, and nobody can blame me for wanting to wash my hand.

  Bronnie used to throw mud at me. Now he can hardly speak. When I whisper to him about liquor, he swallows and nods. I glance at Frank, backed right up to the wood-paneled wall by men who are mostly, one way or another, my kin. He looks like he’s drowning. I’m drowning, too, but I’ve gone to his damn mother’s house often enough. Does he think I’ve forgotten the years he didn’t get divorced, expecting me to sit and wait for him? And now we’re married, and not even Hedda Hopper can count the times he’s been unfaithful. She can count my times, and does.

  Sweat is running in a steady line down my neck. There’s no way to sneak outside without dragging the whole houseful with us, so I announce that city-boy Frank has never seen country stars, and we all troop out. It’s cold enough in back to see our breath, and prickly sourwood leaves attach themselves to my stockings. In the dark I’m counting on Bronnie to get a flask to the men, which will work its way to Frank. “Get one for me, too,” I told him. Myra doesn’t need to know.

  I keep greeting people, hugging the girls and smiling at the men, hearing the crowd around Frank getting louder. He’s acting, the Hollywood bumpkin come back to find what real America means. “Gee whiz,” he says, and it’s good that the darkness covers my face. And his. He’s not a real actor; he’s One-Take Charlie. He can drop into a character for a few minutes, but then it drains away and he’s just Frank again, the washed-up crooner who still sneaks back to see long-suffering, sainted Nancy, the mother of his children.

  Three nieces come toward me, giggling and shoving each other and pointing at my shoes. “Do you get to keep the clothes you wear in the pictures?”