Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  and do you have faith in God above,

  if the Bible tells you so.

  Awww—

  He goes to catch my hand near his face, I slip it back, but smile.

  “It’s true,” I say. “The song is full of those between bits. Every version of it. I’ve got three different cuts on my iPod, two live, and it all comes down to the same thing. You have to trust me.”

  His face sobers then. “Alright,” he says. “I will.”

  Uh-oh. Uh-oh. My fuckup.

  “You think I’m a nut,” I say, backpedaling. “Don’t you?”

  “Is that what you want me to think?”

  “I can see by the look on your face that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Actually it’s not.”

  Oh no.

  “Actually,” he says, “I was thinking I’ve never really known anyone quite like you.” Which is of course a statement, three words more than I can absorb, that leaves me completely undone.

  “I need to be clear,” I say. “I am thoroughly replaceable.”

  He grins. “I’ll make a note.”

  “I can’t cook.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Not a thing,” I say.

  “There’s the grilled cheese.”

  “That’s the extent of it. Why do you think I live at home?”

  “Is that why?”

  “Work in restaurants?”

  He laughs.

  “And I kill plants. Indoor. Outdoor. You name it—”

  “The gamut.”

  “You know the old adage, Ray—all the fish in the sea.”

  “I’ve heard it.”

  He leans back in his seat, his eyes dark in the funky overhead light, this stale indoor restaurant light I’m suddenly not so enamored with anymore. There’s a baby crying several booths away. A mother hushing.

  “You are working so hard to convince me,” he says.

  It has started again, that thudding in my chest so loud I am sure he can hear it. A different feeling, lower down.

  The waitress has brought our food. Bless you. Her name is Karen. Bless you, Karen. Gears shift when the food arrives. Buffer on the table. Intimacy blown back. In the background now, McLean’s masterpiece is winding down.

  I rein myself in, cut off a piece of on-the-barbie chicken. I cut along the black tic-tac-toe of the grill line. As a kid, I kept my food in piles. Ate in order. Green things first. Then potatoes. Meat last. I couldn’t stand anything getting mushed up together. Even touching. Something to do, perhaps, with being my mother’s daughter, needing to be unlike her. Just about from the get-go. I couldn’t stand it when worlds blended and lines blurred.

  “How’s your chicken?” Ray asks.

  “They don’t spare the salt. That’s a good thing, though, in my book.”

  “So tell me more,” he says, “about California.”

  What to tell really? They do a lot of hiking, biking, surfing, out there. A lot of Pilates. But they don’t fuck like we do on the East Coast. I decide not to cite this. So what else? The obvious selling point—it’s as far west as you can go without falling into the next ocean.

  I started in LA. Hooked up with an old boyfriend from my New York life, who rented a basement apartment I called The Cave, after Plato. He was an actor, had been in soaps and a Levi’s print ad I’d actually seen. I moved in with him having no other real anchor, no reason not to, but I lasted there less than three months. The sun shining day after day—the slick of the men, the acid-peeled youth of the women—that jaded, interminable sunshine drove me clear out of my mind—I slipped off—a bag of clothes, two boxes of books—slipped north to San Francisco where the moods of the weather were more my style.

  I tell Ray this easily. It’s practiced, glib, a real-seeming story. True in the factual sense. And he nods, satisfied apparently. I don’t mean to do it, to lie, exactly, I don’t want to start out on that foot with him. And yet. I spear a piece of lettuce with my fork. It is too much, I think, to bare too much. So much to feel—

  Years before I saw Cocteau’s film, I read the myth of Orpheus and even young, I understood: she tricked him. Eurydice. Ran all the way back to the underworld to keep herself free.

  “I liked California,” I say.

  “But you left.”

  “Yes, well, I’m not known for my unassailable logic.”

  He looks at me—the look I’ve seen before that makes it feel like he’s stepping down on a corner of me, keeping me close.

  What can I say that is true?

  Sometimes late, when I get home from work and can’t sleep, I go out for a run. The world at night is water. Scents. Sound. The less dominant senses, shelved off to the side in daylight, are tall. Acute.

  You meet yourself differently at night. You are shadow and breath, and the moon is there, of course, and it is beautiful. It hits your skin, and you are luminous, incandescent, with a borrowed glow that is not and has never been yours. Oh yeah. There’s a thought to fling across the table at him—

  He is more than halfway through his steak. He’s telling me now about a bike he has. A ’69 Triumph Bonneville. He bought it in pieces—kept the pieces in milk crates in his garage until he’d collected them all, then built it back.

  The echo of course is not lost on me. Parallel acts of reconstruction. One brother’s milk crates of Bonnie-parts, the other with his scrap metal, his chassis and beer keg.

  They are so different, I tell myself. They couldn’t be more different.

  Ray has always had bikes. Once, in the car with my father, waiting for the light at Hixbridge, I saw Ray come flying up Handy Hill. It was a different bike then, a Kawasaki, I think, some rice-burner. I recognized him easily. No one wore helmets back then. His girlfriend at the time was up on the bitch seat behind him. She had black hair, big tits, played ultimate Frisbee. That day they blew by on his bike, she was in short shorts and a yellow halter top. So much skin, I remember thinking at the time. If they took a digger, it wouldn’t be pretty. But Ray Varick wasn’t the kind who’d let a girl fall.

  He has finished eating. He pushes his plate away. “Can I get you to split a dessert?” he asks.

  “Depends on my choices.”

  He shakes his head, again that half smile, and plucks the dessert menu from the metal clip-stand behind the condiments. He starts reading it off. “Chocolate Thunder from Down Under.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.”

  “What else?”

  “Sydney’s Sinful Sundae.”

  I reach for the card. “Let me see that—”

  He holds it away. “You don’t like either of those?”

  “Something more simple. Ice cream?”

  “Vanilla?”

  “That would do.”

  “Come on. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “Fell by the wayside.”

  “All of it?”

  “Just about.”

  He waits then, straight-faced, keeping that dessert menu out of my reach. Waits.

  “Alright,” I say.

  “Alright?”

  “I want a ride on that bike of yours.”

  “I want to see you naked.”

  I burst out laughing. “Well, it’s a damn good thing, Ray, you don’t lay all your cards down at once.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says, slipping the dessert menu across to me. “I don’t.”

  PART IV

  THE ROAD

  LIGHTBULB

  JANE

  July 23, 2004

  “You know what I love about this game, Janie?” Ada says to me now. “You can have the idea of a word, you can be close, almost there, but you don’t quite have the letters you need to make it happen. You’re a trifle short. One letter short. And you hope it’ll all come together. You reckon without the host and take a chance, hoping you’ll draw just what you need. And sometimes you do. Sometimes you reach your hand into the box, pull out that one letter you were looking for. And sometim
es, you reach your hand in and get skunked.”

  She is relaxed now. Chatty. Why shouldn’t she be? Seventy-two points ahead.

  She unpacks her lunch: a ham sandwich, orange crackers, a ziplock bag of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.

  She won’t eat the sandwich. She’ll nibble a few of the orange crackers, offer me one though we both know I won’t take it, and then slowly, through the course of the game, she’ll snack away on those macadamia nuts, her fingers, nails glossed that fire-engine red, slipping daintily into the plastic, withdrawing them one by one without making a sound.

  “Sun’s bright,” she remarks.

  “Is.”

  She shifts on the bench toward the shade.

  She starts in again, talking about Huck and the skiff, the argument they had.

  “Driving me all over hell’s half-acre about that damn boat,” she says. “This morning was the worst, him yip-yapping on about the bottom, the rot and the leaks and how long it took this spring for the wood to get tight, so much salt and dirt and paint stuck in those seams, and I told him, if he hadn’t tried to rescue that stupid woman in the daysailer gone aground on the flat up the west branch last summer—tore the cleat off the transom doing that, I tell you, Janie—this morning, I almost gave him what for.”

  “He’s nuts about you, Ada.”

  “He’s a pain in the neck.”

  I move an I on my rack, place it after the X. “You wouldn’t know what to do without him.”

  “I’d have one long glorious stretch of peace and relaxation.”

  “You get that anyhow,” I say lightly. Her hand, moving toward the bag of chocolates, stops.

  “That wasn’t so nice.”

  I smile. “You’re always the first to say, Ada, no one gets out alive.”

  “You’re just sore I’m winning.”

  I laugh. “You won’t be winning long.”

  She pauses for a moment. “Why is it you always go to bat for Huck?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Always try to sell me a bill of goods about how wonderful he is.”

  “That’s not it,” I say.

  “What then?”

  I don’t answer. I remember he fell one day coming out of the wharf store—it was years ago, he was just a boy—on the run that day, trying to catch up with me, to return my book I’d left behind on the counter by mistake. He came flying out of the store, tripped, went sprawling—how confused he seemed, that pained, bewildered look—he was sweet on me, I realized, I glimpsed it in his face. How young he seemed that day, so much younger even than he must have been at the time—I remember his pant cuffs unhemmed.

  He wasn’t anyone who really crossed my mind. Not in that way. I was older, and he was Ada Varick’s son. “That woman.” There was another time, though, this even farther back. My father was alive and I was walking with him up at the Head and Huck passed us, gave me a nudge going by, threw his hip out, and his hip caught mine. My father reached back, quick—I’d never seen my father move so fast—he grabbed Huck hard by the arm. I saw his fingers twist, Huck’s wrist seeming to melt into my father’s closing hand, the skin color turned. My father’s back was to me, but I heard him say—“You keep away from my girl.”

  I play a little word, F-I-D. Off the E in T-I-N-C-T-U-R-E, Ada runs M-O-R-E-L back. Edible mushroom. Nightshade.

  My mind has begun to click. Seeing words. Combinations of words. Hooks on the board exposed. Colored number squares I can nail a high-point letter to. Thinking ahead. One move, two moves out. Seeing words I can build off words.

  I set the X above the I in F-I-D, and make XI twice. On the across, the I tags a pink double word. Thirty-three points.

  “There you go,” she remarks. “Starting in with your dinks.”

  “Just like you called it, Ada.”

  I reach to draw my new letters, her hand reaching to put down her next word almost brushes mine, brief, that touch, half imagined, a dragonfly’s wing, flutter of air pushed away.

  She sets down H-E-I-S-T for sixteen. I have drawn the J—love it—another eight-pointer—and I’ve still got an H and a Y—good balance in my rack between those high scorers and the little vowels you need to make them work.

  It’s a key. That balance. Hard to keep.

  Above M-O-R-E-L, I make H-A-J, the J working twice, J-O—sweetheart—the H nabs a triple-letter square.

  “What is that?” Ada says. “Haj?”

  “Thirty-four altogether.”

  “And what the heck does it mean?” she asks, irked.

  “I used to know,” I say, and smile.

  She gives a little snort, sets down an I and an N, predictable, to make J-O-I-N. Doubled. Twenty-two. Not so much.

  I lay down C-O-Y parallel to H-A-J, weaving more dinks on the vertical. O-H. Y-A-M. Words interlocking into words. Edging back. Picking away at her lead.

  “You’re going to build us both right into that corner,” she says, her voice casual, but under that veil she is all in a snit. “What is it, Janie, you like so much about a corner?”

  I draw an S—desirable S. The second V.

  “Two walls at your back,” I answer. “What’s not to like?”

  She shakes her head. “You just can’t think like that.”

  I need to, Ada, sometimes, think like that.

  Slight rips in the surface. It’s tattered stuff. This world of the seen. Dribs and drabs of the other slinking through. Why not a corner?

  I know better though than to pose that reasoning aloud to Ada. Not the sort of logic a woman like her will buy.

  I tally the score—close again now—fourteen points only between us.

  Ada is studying the board, frowning at the growing asymmetry of it, the upper left quadrant still somewhat open, but the other edges thickening, shunted down. My doing. I take my cheese sandwich from the bag in the shade and unwrap it; wet stains through the paper, tomato seeds in their juice drip. I wipe them on the napkin. A crow shrieks, somewhere in the pine trees.

  Her hands touch the word toward the right of the grid we have built thus far. That one she played early on. W-E-L-K-I-N. A lovely word. It must strike her that way as well. More than ordinary. Vault of the sky. She straightens the tiles.

  She’s only talked to me once about Green. Rarely mentions him by name. Only did that one time, a month or so after Vivienne died. When we met here for Scrabble that day, it was just the two of us, Ada and me. And at one point, Ada groaned about what slow going it was, without the irrepressible Vivi to buoy things up, didn’t the game just seem to drag, tiles in the box-lid lasting forever.

  She asked me then if I’d ever noticed how one loss seemed to bring up every other. She looked at me, saying it, as she will sometimes, because she knew this would be a thing I’d understand. Loss is exactly this way, of course, and I nodded because I knew, and I nodded because I needed her to go on—a knot tight and sudden in my throat—I needed her to be the one to tell the story, the one who kept telling it. And she told me then how ten days before Junie’s boat went down off Georges Bank, she was messing around in her bedroom closet looking for a sweater, a brown cardigan with hand-cut shell buttons she knew was in there, but somehow couldn’t find, and she flicked the light-switch on the closet wall, and the bulb flared, then shorted out, and she messed around in the closet some more, and finally gave up finding the sweater and took another to wear instead. She forgot all about that bulb being out until ten days later when she got the news about Junie’s boat and the storm they’d run into that took them down, and then it seemed that bulb being out in the closet was all she could think about—Yes, it is this, isn’t it? The littlest thing can keep you distracted, a blown bulb, a screen door come slightly off one hinge—some sort of small household thing, fixable of course—you keep your mind set on that so the edges of what you know and do not want to know soften, so you won’t lose yourself looking into the glare because the sharpest grief is not dark—it is bright, endless, an insoluble glare.

  For Ada t
hen, that little thing to cling to was a blown bulb in her dressing closet, and she started in on Huck about that bulb, asking him to replace it for her and, being Huck, of course, he didn’t listen, kept putting her off, and finally she dragged a chair in, climbed up on it, and went to fix that light herself, and as she was screwing the new bulb in, must have gripped it too tightly, because the glass broke in her hand, and she felt it cut her, felt it and didn’t feel it both at the same time—and it struck her then, she told me, standing there on that chair in the dark of the closet, that maybe, there was no difference between feeling and not feeling, maybe in fact it didn’t matter none at all if a light was out or her hand was cut and so she squeezed and still couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything, but heard a soft wet grinding in her palm and the crinkling of glass. And it was Huck who came into the room and found her there. “Aw, Ma,” he said, “I told you I would get to it.” And she turned on him then. “But you didn’t,” she practically screamed, “I kept asking, and asking, and you didn’t, and you know, Huck, it was the one thing I asked of you, the one you promised always you’d look after.” And Huck looked at her, and she saw the words, the absoluteness of them, strike into his face and the hole those words made going in, and they both knew it wasn’t the lightbulb she was talking of, but Green, and Huck being in the car the night Green died, never trying to stop him. And neither of them said a thing for a moment, then Huck told her to go into the bathroom, and get that glass out of her hand, and she went, and while she was soaking it there in the sink, letting the water run to rinse out the cut, she could hear him in the closet, sweeping up the rest of it, only moving quiet-like and slow, not like Huck, but someone else who took their time. When she came out of the bathroom again, he was gone, and there was a new bulb screwed in, so bright, it was harsh, and she stood awhile in the doorway of that closet, her hand on the switch. She snapped the light out, snapped it on, off again, on again, and she knew there was a fraction-of-a-second lapse, a moment lost, between the time that light changed, and the time it took her eyes to see it change.