by Sands Hall
He reached for her wrist. “Don’t go yet. I’ve gone on and on. What about you?”
“Is Willy having an affair? Is Johnny going to be screwed up for the rest of his life by our fights and by his dad’s drinking? Did I wind up marrying Pop, God forbid? Is our marriage over? Does anyone ever really love anyone? Does anyone ever really know anyone?”
“Sue.”
“Maybe I’m imagining. I’ll keep you posted.” Sue sat down again and leaned across the table. “It’s so tacky. Some little twit who works at the store. Pert breasts, long legs. She wore halter tops all summer. Frayed jean shorts cut off just below the crotch so there’s this nice little wedge of rear visible all the time. Stats were up just because farmers come in to admire her cute little ass while they’re buying tenpenny nails.” She laughed. “Now she’s had to put on some clothes. Why do overalls look so adorable on a little butt like that?”
She tapped fingernails on the table. “The worst of it is realizing she’s me about twenty years ago. Maybe Willy wants me to still look that way, but I’m me, you know? We’re supposed to love growing old together. I have wrinkles and some cellulite. I have gray in my hair.”
“You’re beautiful,” Jake said.
She shook her head gratefully at him.
“Goddamn men,” Jake said.
“Goddamn men. And eat something. Coffee isn’t enough.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She squeezed his hand and disappeared. Jake ordered eggs, leafed through the paper.
Walking to his car he could smell snow coming, brittle and sweet. He zipped his jacket. They’d had several snowfalls. Soon winter would come in earnest, howling around Fable Valley. Which meant parkas, frosted breath, puddles of water. Meant taking time to warm the car up to scrape the windshield. Meant Lizzie on tiptoe, nose a cold spot pressed against his cheek.
There it was again. The stuck CD playing Lizzielizzie lizzielizzie. He continually had to bump the CD player to some other track, any other track. Shiny book covers in the windows of LodeStar Books. Posters outside Mountain Music. The new lyric he’d jokingly tossed into rehearsal the other day. You’re my muddy, muddy river, I’m a glass-bottomed boat. Randy had struck up a low bass riff, Santiago had found some satisfyingly heavy blues chords to move under it. They’d jammed on the tune until Randy cracked them up by singing, loudly and off-key, “Yes, I’m floating on your river, baby, horny as a goat.”
Lizzielizzielizzie. The evasive ongoing decision regarding the lyric Love comes back versus Will love come back? What he’d do with the rest of this day, besides go out and hassle Rich Pack about December’s rent, overdue again. Any other track in the CD of his mind except that melancholic, discordant, bittersweet one called LIZZIE.
CHAPTER 20
MAUD
I can suck melancholy out of a song
as a weasel sucks eggs.
—AS YOU LIKE IT
“He’s such an asshole,” Lizzie said.
“But so cute.” Maud sat cross-legged on the Navajo rug in Lizzie’s living room. She giggled, rocking back on the heels of her hands. This devil-may-care feeling—Marengoing—had swirled around her since that first dance with Rich. Exhilaration came and went, leaving her at times hung over with a double dose of reality. And Marengoing was like a cocktail, a powerful mixed drink made with Rich and several clear liquors—vodka, tequila, gin, a little sparkling water, and something red, grenadine or cranberry juice. Or maybe it was more like a disease. She was Marengoing when she could least afford it, when she really had to get serious about her life, her future. She had so little time.
Sobriety fell over her as if someone had cracked an egg on her head. The gloomy white albumen of reason fell past her ears, the yolk slid down over one eye.
“Anyway, Rich is not your type.” Lizzie pushed a jam-soaked lock of hair out of Theo’s sleeping face.
“Type!” Maud laughed. “Who on earth knows what my type is? I’ve tried everything. Nothing’s worked.”
“You have certainly not tried everything,” Lizzie said.
But Maud collapsed backwards, chuckling up at the stained beams that crossed the ceiling. “And you know what else?” She felt her belly rise and fall, felt her legs stretched out long and lean against the rug, against the flagstones beneath the rug. She had lost weight; she could feel her hipbones sharp as knives when she ran a hand over her belly and her thighs in the night. She found herself in a heightened state that had little to do with eating, a state that was a rejection of something as mundane as food: Marengoing. “You know what else?” She propped herself up on her elbows. “Lizard, he lives in a trailer.”
She was suffused with the cliché of it. She was living in someone else’s set design, creating her role around someone else’s casting: Hadn’t Rich practically worn his cowboy hat to bed? She collapsed again with laughter, responding only minimally to Lizzie’s “Shh!”
She stopped, however, when Lizzie didn’t join in. She watched her sister smooth hair out of Theo’s face. She’d learned to shut a portion of her heart against scenes, masques, crèches such as these: a child in Christopher Robin mackintosh and rubber boots running towards his father; a mother at a checkout stand carrying an infant, articulated tendons in her forearm testament to weight gladly and commonly carried. Against these visions of devotion, Maud erected a curtain, storm windows. If she moved the curtain aside for an instant, or cleared the steamed-up window with a knuckle, what she saw could make her pant with longing. She laughed again. “A trailer! My cowboy lives in a trailer!”
“Jake’s trailer,” Lizzie said. Maud nodded, but did not pursue this. She’d gone to Farquaarts a second time, by herself. She felt clumsy, standing with a beer beside another woman, making small talk neither one could hear over the din of the salsa band. It was for Rich Maud had come, and she was relieved when he arrived, though she pretended to be deep in animated conversation as he made his way towards her. He placed light fingers on her shoulder. Again they danced. He was not particularly graceful, but he was always game for one more.
After Thanksgiving she went a third time, again alone, and when he invited her back to his place, she accepted. She’d had too many beers, was feeling jovial and sexy, a delightful combination: one word implying cherubic rotundity, the other a lean and dark concavity; one word happy, the other passionate. As they walked past the darkened store windows of Main Street, she marked his vehicle a block before they got to it. The red pickup gleamed beneath a streetlight, and as he opened the passenger door for her—he did this with a flourish, doffing his cowboy hat—she laughed.
“What?” he said.
“You have a red pickup!” She put a hand on his arm. He couldn’t know she was admiring the choices of the director of this movie, the insights of the props master. “It suits you.”
He patted the roof of the truck. “She’s new.”
As he started the engine, Maud had an image of him clucking to horses. “Giddiup!” she said gaily, holding an imaginary bonnet in place. Rich, who clearly couldn’t hear over the roar of the engine, smiled and nodded. She felt a lurch of uncertainty and stared out the window, swallowing convulsively. At a stoplight he put a hand on her thigh. She closed her fingers over his, grateful for this connection.
He stopped to get them a six-pack and then drove miles out of town. They bounced and swayed over deep ruts. The headlights, on high beam, lit an occasional fir tree, a bank of black pines, the snow that was everywhere now. She wondered how a snowplow managed way out here. As she was about to ask, a rabbit darted out and froze in front of the truck. Rich swore, braking. The hand he threw out to hold Maud back touched her breast. “Sorry,” he said, curt.
She began to regret coming. She could not walk home from wherever she was in the middle of the night, and it would be difficult, after the expectations she had raised, to ask Rich to drive her. As they bucked along she braced herself with an arm stretched out against the dashboard. A steep slope loomed ahead of them. “Come on, gi
rl,” Rich said. The pickup’s engine whined as they breasted the hilltop. In the headlights a trailer gleamed. Rich turned off the ignition. A dog barked steadily. “Home sweet home.”
A collie leapt to greet him. “That’s Betsy.” Maud held out her hand. The dog growled and backed away. “Now, Betsy!” Rich scolded. “Don’t you be jealous.”
Maud followed him along a shoveled path that ran the length of the trailer. He paused before opening the door. “It’s a mess, beautiful lady. I wasn’t expecting company.”
The trailer was warm and smelled of wool and cooking and something tangy, citrusy—a shampoo or soap. This last was a scent she associated with Rich, and she breathed in, grateful for its clean aroma. He rustled in the dark, scratched a match. “I could flick a switch,” he said, “but this’ll be prettier.” The wavering light of a kerosene lantern filled the room. Maud made out a counter, a pile of bowls in a sink. A plaid blanket and sheets were a tangled cocoon of fabric on a bed that took up the middle of the trailer.
“Told you it was a mess.” Rich crossed to a small refrigerator, pulling out two bottles from the six-pack before stowing the rest. He held one bottle in the crook of his arm as he twisted the cap off the other. Maud thought of him holding an infant there, curled against that delicate bend of elbow and arm.
He tapped her bottle with his before drinking. Maud poured some of her beer into the sink. “For the gods.”
“You’re so amazing.” Rich pronounced this as if he wasn’t sure it was such a good thing to be amazing. Maud sat on the edge of the bed. She moistened the tip of her tongue with beer. She was sobering up fast. “Look, Rich.” Silence congealed around them. “Maybe I don’t think I can stay here.”
Rich tipped his bottle up. His Adam’s apple bounced.
“I mean, I could sleep here—” This wasn’t at all what she meant to say, but she blundered on. “I wouldn’t want to make you drive me back to town, but maybe we shouldn’t—” She moved her hands in a gesture at once round and deflated. The word fuck was too harsh. But the phrase making love was inappropriate, hardly what she felt them capable of doing.
Rich blinked several times. “Whatever. Whatever you want, beautiful lady.”
Maud gripped the edge of the mattress. So she would be “beautiful lady” to Rich, as she had been “babe” to Miles. She stared hard at her hand, willing back tears. What was she doing? She had slept with, fornicated with, coupled with, Driver, only a few months before, only two nights after leaving Miles. When she didn’t really know for certain she was leaving him. And now she was here, ready to lie with, “know”—but surely not mate with—a boy young enough to be her son. What possessed her? To come here? To come to Marengo? To leave her life? She could be lying beside Miles on the couch in their living room, bathed in blue-TV-screen-light, listening to the thwock thwock of police helicopters in the skies above L.A.
She gripped the edge of the mattress and the material there more firmly. The slide of the sheet against her hand let her know it was old and had not been washed in some time.
“Maud?” Rich sat beside her, placing his beer bottle on the floor. “You seemed so—peppy. What happened?”
Peppy. She tried to smile at him, at the taut skin above his cheekbones, an aspect of his face she admired, something she loved about him, actually missed when she was away from him. But she was frightened at how easy it was to find things to love about not only Rich but about some of the other men in the last few months she had spoken to, sat with, watched. She found herself in love with the way a pair of eyes wrinkled when they smiled, the way a muscle bulged inside a T-shirt, the way lips shaped the word Marengo, the way a knuckle smoothed a mustache. She was entranced with the slant of hips in blue jeans, teeth set crookedly inside a kind smile; the way someone might say, Yesterday down in Fairfield, or how a hand might lie upturned and open on a table, fingernails honestly dirty—from digging holes for fence posts, repairing an engine. It astonished her, frightened her, moved her, what it meant, this propensity to love. She had no vessel into which—whom—she could pour this love. What was she to do with it all?
She put a finger against the smooth skin at the side of his eye and drew it down over his cheekbone, down over the soft stubble on his chin, so different—comparisons rose within her—from Miles’ rougher version. “I’m just, ah, new.” She shook her head. She wasn’t new; she’d probably been making love longer than Rich had been alive. She stared at the bottle in her hand as if it were a TelePrompTer, as if her lines might scroll up, neat printing against its brown surface, and tell her what it was she was supposed to say next.
With a sudden out-breath, Rich rose. “I’m so rude.” He crossed to the slanting shelves above the sink. “A lady like yourself shouldn’t be drinking out of a bottle.” He took her beer and tipped it into a wineglass. “I only have one.” He poured his own into a green cup decorated with dinosaurs. Maud recognized a few—Tyrannosaurus rex, pterodactyl—from Theo’s plastic collection. She wondered if Jeep had left the cup here. With that thought a multitude of other complications arose within her. She felt like someone in a horror movie, batting at dark shapes that came at her no matter which way she turned, how she tried to escape.
Rich clacked his cup against her glass. “Here’s to you,” he said, “whatever you want.”
They’d kissed then. He pushed her skirt up above her knee, stroked his hand along her calf and thigh. “Such legs,” he said, “the legs of a sixteen-year-old.” Maud had stared at them, as if they weren’t hers. Again she thought of Jeep.
“So,” Lizzie said softly. “Did the earth move?”
Hannah was asleep on the other couch, the lavender afghan thrown over her. Summer was spending the night at a friend’s.
Maud shook her head. “Pretty disappointing, actually. Too much beer. I got sad.”
“Maud, you complicate everything.”
“It’s true, I do. And talking around the edges of safe sex doesn’t exactly lubricate matters, does it? I hate condoms.”
“Ain’t it the truth,” Lizzie whispered. “You take all this time and sweet trouble to get everything wet and ready and there’s this huge erection staring at you and then he has to rear back and one of you has to roll this thing on—”
They laughed. Lizzie put a finger to her lips.
“He called it the ‘glove of love,’ ” Maud said. “Dropped it in the wastebasket.”
He’d held it between thumb and forefinger, the opaque sac sagging with its load of semen, all those wasted babies, carried it across the room as if he were disposing of a dead mouse by its tail. He went outside to pee, came back in with Betsy at his heels. When he slid back into bed his body was cold. She moved to hold him but he stayed on his back. “Hot,” he said. She rested light fingers on his thigh, which he patted, and then withdrew his hand. Betsy leapt onto the bed. “Night, lady,” Rich said, and Maud didn’t know which of them he was referring to. He breathed deep sighs almost immediately. She suffered her usual sleeplessness, made all the worse by the fact she didn’t want to move for fear of waking him, or Betsy, who slept protectively across his feet.
“You should be warned.” Lizzie shook her head. “Things might get a little weird with Jeep.”
Maud nodded. She felt sad suddenly, the same melancholy that had gripped her the next morning as she’d waited, shivering beside the truck, for Rich to drive her back into town, watching his shuttered face as he locked the trailer door and patted Betsy goodbye.
“She knows. She was giggling when I sat down after that first dance with him. She winked at me.”
“And she tells me she’s glad you guys seem to be having a good time. She’s trying really hard. But she’s hurting.”
The Rich to whom Jeep occasionally referred was a dark, mean creature, a troll beneath a bridge disfigured with evil intentions. Not the tall, handsome, sexy-if-distant Marlboro man Maud had come to know.
“She still has a thing for that shit.” Lizzie rubbed her hands along her th
ighs, and suddenly clapped them. “Now here’s a thought! Let him get you pregnant.”
Maud snorted. “How to Totally Complicate Life: Five Quick and Easy Lessons. The best-selling self-destruct book by Maud Maxwell.”
“The man doesn’t exist who just says, ‘Okay, honey darlin’, let’s make a kid!’ ” Lizzie used a deep, jocular voice. “You keep moaning about how you want one. Go for it. Grow your own.”
The Taos motel room rose up, the smell of rain, the whispered I can’t. “I tried that with Miles. It didn’t work.”
“You’re not ruthless enough.” Lizzie slid to the floor. “Here’s what you do. First of all, no rubbers, no caps, no jellies or foams or any of that crap.” She checked Maud’s face for agreement. “Then what you do, as soon as it’s over? You put your feet up in the air.”
She hoisted her legs above her, balancing her bottom on her hands. “Put your feet way up there so that none of those little spermies can escape. Then you’ve got to shake it down, shake it down.” She kicked her legs in the air. “That’s how I got Hannah, I know it. The second Blair and I finished, I knew it would be a girl. I wanted her so badly. This is exactly what I did, and there came Hannah.”
Maud put her own feet in the air. Her skirt fell over her face. She batted it out of the way and watched her legs bicycling in the air overhead. “Like this?”
“Bounce a little, shake them down in there.”
Maud began to laugh. “Shake it down.”
“Bounce, Maud. Shake it down.”
They laughed so hard Maud had to drop her legs. “Come on, you have to practice,” Lizzie said. “Give it to yourself as a Christmas present. If this affair lasts that long.”
Maud hoisted her feet back up. Tears seeped out of her eyes, down her cheeks. She swiped at them with the hem of her skirt.
Their laughter woke Hannah. She peered at them. “What are you doing?”
“We’re shaking it down,” Lizzie said. “Want to join us?”