by Sands Hall
She chose to wear a skirt. A short black skirt and a red shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps. Black stockings, her red cowboy boots. She stomped down the stairs into the kitchen.
“Wow! You look real cute.” Jeep sat on a bar stool in front of Theo’s high chair, holding a spoon full of something orange and gooey. “He’s not eating anything.”
“He won’t eat for me either. It’s another tooth.”
“There’s supposed to be a really bad storm brewing.” With her hair scooped up in a high ponytail, Jeep looked about twelve years old. Except for her body. Lizzie ran a hand up the back of her own upper thigh, checking for an extra bulge, softness. At some point, she thought, no matter what you did or didn’t do, a body simply started to sag. But this made her think of Sam, and this made her stomp into the kitchen. “Don’t leave these open,” she said, slamming a kitchen cabinet shut.
Jeep slurped another spoonful of pureed carrots into Theo’s mouth. “You never wear skirts. You meeting someone?”
“Shit.” Lizzie stopped in midstride, ignoring Theo’s “Shit!” She flipped pages of her appointment book and slapped her hand on an open page. “I can’t postpone it again. I’ll be home late.”
Jeep screwed her lips up and off to one side.
Lizzie wrapped a muffler around her neck. “I’ll come as quick as I can. I know you have AA.”
Making engine noises, Jeep headed the spoon in for a landing at Theo’s mouth.
Lizzie paused in the middle of zipping up her parka. “Jeep. You have a date!”
The red in Jeep’s cheeks deepened.
“Who’s it with?” Lizzie walked over to stand in front of her. “Jeep Sarah-Ann Smythe. Are you going out with Rich?”
Jeep shrugged.
“Are you?”
“He says it’s different this time.” Jeep got up, tugging at the back of her jeans. “I knew you wouldn’t approve.”
“What’s to approve?”
Jeep ran warm water over a cloth and began to wipe Theo’s hands and face. “I wanted to talk to you about it, I really did. It happened so fast. He says he’s learned things. He says it’ll be different. He says he’s really changed. He says he learned a lot from Maud—” She stopped.
“Maud? He says he’s learned a lot from Maud?”
Jeep lowered Theo to the floor and began to wipe down the high chair. He squatted, playing with his animals.
“What on earth would he, could he, learn?” Lizzie gathered up paperwork she needed to turn in to the office and shook these. “Ten months ago your heart was broken. You had all these realizations about what had attracted you to Rich, reasons you told me weren’t good ones.”
Jeep’s head was bent, her shoulders round. “He’s nicer than I made him sound.”
“Jeep.” Lizzie did not speak aloud the thought that nevertheless thrummed in the air between them: You tried to KILL yourself. Because of him.
Jeep nodded, shrugged, her hands in her pockets. Lizzie swooped towards her, held her hard. “You don’t want me hurt,” Jeep said into her shoulder.
Lizzie shook her.
“He’s changed. He really has.”
“Good,” Lizzie said, though she didn’t believe it. Theo started to cry. Lizzie kissed the top of his head. “Theo’s a mess. There goes any hope of weaning him this week. The Orajel is in my bathroom. Rub it on his gums. I’ll try not to be more than an hour late. God knows what Cal and I can talk about that long.”
Outside, the temperature had plummeted. By the time she dashed across the driveway to her car the fingers with which she held her collar closed were brittle with cold. She shivered as she waited for the engine to warm up. Winter’s wind howled around the house. Prowling, Jake had called it when the girls used to climb into bed to complain about the noise. In the field beyond, naked branches stretched up towards an implacable gray sky.
She stopped in town to drop the girls’ books at the library and then headed up the hill to campus. In the office she said hello to Pat behind the desk and checked her box, which contained the usual assortment of invitations, departmental notifications, flyers. Nothing from Cal.
Surprised, she scribbled him a note and put it in his box: See you around 5:00 for that long-awaited drink?
She had scheduled midterm student conferences for the entire three-hour class—reviewing portfolios, discussing progress made, progress that needed to be made. Somehow the first hour and a half inched by. Lizzie wanted to throw back her head and howl when she considered that another hour and a half still awaited her. The idea of a drink with Cal began to hold deep appeal. She would knock back a shot of tequila alongside her margarita. She would cross her legs on the bar stool. She would buy the second round.
Aaron and Yvette arrived together. They’d signed up for the two last slots. Yvette sat outside the studio during Aaron’s appointment. “Here you’re on the right track,” Lizzie made herself say.
“Thanks, Ms. Maxwell,” he said when they were done, riding hard on the Ms. He swayed towards the door, some inner rhythm lifting him up on the tips of his bulky, round-toed boots, his walk a kind of bebop, ragtime dance. As he disappeared around the corner, Lizzie heard him say in a bad French accent, “You’re up, my leetle mushroom.”
Lizzie wanted to tell Yvette that she should not allow herself to be anybody’s little anything, but instead worked hard to make Yvette realize what was and what was not excellent in her work. When she handed back Yvette’s portfolio, the girl held it clasped to her chest, resting her chin on its edge. “Maybe you’ll think it’s, like, really weird that I’m telling you this.” Her eyes grew shiny. “And it’s not because I’m ass-licking or brownnosing or whatever. But I just love this class and I’m just really grateful for everything, even how tough you are, not everyone likes that but I do and you’re teaching me things the way I always thought it would be but it never was.”
Lizzie felt her own eyes burn. “You’re doing the work.”
Yvette’s thin shoulders, sheathed in black, moved up and down. “No,” she said. “I mean, I am, but, you know.”
As they emerged from the classroom, Aaron, slouched against the opposite wall, straightened, brightened, looking over Lizzie’s shoulder for Yvette. Not one glance, Lizzie thought, for her, for her legs in their black stockings, the miniskirt, the red heeled boots.
She unlocked her office. A note lay on the Navajo rug. She stepped past it to sit at her desk, putting her head in her hands. She was off track. She needed to paint. She’d let the girls and Maud and her anger about Sam get in her way. Jake prowling around, taking up her energy. Sam. She groaned. She needed to get back to tubes of paint and the smell of turpentine, to the safety of a canvas, to the depths of work.
But first she’d take Cal up on that margarita. She wheeled her chair across the floor to pick up the note.
Lizzie—
My turn to call it off. Can’t make it today. Sorry.
Cal
She careened out of her office and knocked on Cal’s door. As she held out the note to him she saw that her hand was shaking. Cal took in her outfit and looked away, as if something outside the window had all his attention.
“Sure you don’t want to hit El Toro for a quick one?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Something’s come up, I guess.”
Lizzie stood in the hallway feeling like a fool. “Well,” she said. “Well. I’ve certainly done it to you enough.”
Cal raised his hands to his hair as if he wanted to pull some of it out. “Something’s come up.”
Lizzie waved a hand. “I’ve always got so much to do.”
“That’s what I figured.”
She stood between their two offices after his door had closed. She’d been looking forward more than she could say to sitting in El Toro’s squeaky equipales, stirring a short red straw through a mess of crushed green ice opposite a man who found her attractive. She’d wanted to listen to canned mariachi music and know that she could still cast a spell
. She’d wanted to dip chips in salsa and know a world existed that wasn’t all children, and old men waiting for death, and ridiculously young love. Love love love that never lasted.
The wind hit her like a blast of ice as she stepped outside. Snow swirled and spat through the lights cast by the lamps in the parking lot. She jogged to her car and started the engine. She let it run, deliberating, then used the nearby phone booth to call Maud. “You’re there!” she said when her sister answered. “I’m freezing to death in a phone booth but crazy as it sounds I’m dying for a icy, muy grande margarita. I’m buying. I hardly got to see you today.”
“Oh, Lizard,” Maud said. “I’d love to.”
Lizzie flexed her cold knees. Through the booth’s smudged glass she watched as teachers and students exited the Art Building, stood for a stunned second at the top of the stairs, then ran to their cars. Cal emerged and lingered on the top step, peering through the blowing snow. Lizzie turned sideways in the booth, hoping he wouldn’t see her.
“I called Sara.” Maud spoke quickly. “I told her we had to visit Sam, ASAP. She said she’d have to talk to Driver. I blew my top and then had to apologize. But I think she’s pretty distressed about all this herself.”
“Let’s have a drink and talk about it.”
“I’d really like to do that, Lizzie.”
“But? How will you have a life if you’re rehearsing or working all the time?”
“I’ve decided work is holy, Lizzie.” Maud giggled. “Chekhov said it: Work is life. But tonight they’re blocking the scene where Viola pretends she’s a man and gives Orsino some guy advice.” She sounded very merry. “The fact is, Jake’s here, Lizard. We’re having that beer?”
Lizzie put a second hand on the phone, holding it as if someone might tug it out of her hands. She looked over her shoulder at Cal, who still stood on the steps, peering shortsightedly out into the parking lot. Was he looking for her? Had he changed his mind?
“Lizzie?”
“Well, good for you! You do have a life. I was just thinking you’d like to join me and another teacher here. We’re heading out to El Toro, but maybe you can join us some other time. It’s fucking cold out here. I’ll call you tomorrow.” She hung up, wondering where in Maud’s house Jake was sitting. Couch? Armchair? Was Maud making dinner? Would they then retire to the bedroom, to the futon Maud had borrowed from her?
She shook her mind away from this, a cat taking its paw out of water, and watched Cal wave at a car pulling up next to the Art Building. He started down the stairs, sliding in his haste. He got in. The car did not immediately drive off.
So ugly duckling Cal had found someone to love him. That someone was greeting him with a kiss. She stayed in the phone booth until the car had driven away.
Her own car was warm. The engine and the heater had been running all this time. Waiting for a light to change, she watched people on the sidewalk bow their heads and shoulders against the sideways onslaught of snow. She hated the darkness, the need for headlights this early, the fact that she no longer had it in her to sashay into El Toro, sit at the bar, and have a margarita by her own fucking self-sufficient self. A man being interviewed on All Things Considered asked his listeners to imagine their funeral service: “Who would come?” his high voice queried. “What might they say—your family, your friends, your co-workers—what might they say, were they given a chance to speak?”
Lizzie switched the radio off and drove with the sound of the engine and the wipers and the heater for company. Hannah would cry. And Theo would too, when he wanted to nurse. Summer might sob hysterically, but she would do it as she always did, privately, letting no one know. Maybe Cal would show up at her funeral. Lizzie grinned. He would look somber, but his big buck teeth would part his lips. He would have his new dame on his arm. Sam would come. Surely Sara would bring Sam. Unless he was too sick to come. And of course her parents, her father irritable at the emotion dredged up out of him. They would arrive in a bustle of luggage and perfume, flying in from whatever part of the world Leopold Maxwell’s think-tank expertise might have taken him. Her mother would wear dark glasses over her reddened eyes, as she had for days after Kennedy was assassinated. Maud would weep, copiously. And maybe Jake would. Lizzie drove for a while, imagining Jake’s response to news of her death.
But what would people say at her funeral? What did anyone know about her? Not much. Not like Maud, who already had a bevy of buddies in Marengo, and more, it seemed, all the time. A local stonemason, it turned out when Lizzie’d run into him, took a weekly African dance class with her. The other day Lizzie had been startled to hear her voice on the local radio station, reciting a Shakespearean sonnet—something the station said they would do once a week until Shakespeare’s birthday. Even the man at the checkout counter at Safeway knew her—hailed her, not Lizzie. “How’s that play of yours going?”
And now Maud had Jake. We might have a beer or something.
The snow whirled at her windshield. Lizzie flicked the wipers on high.
Maud hadn’t said tonight.
She groaned when she saw that a red pickup sat beside Jeep’s boat-like Plymouth in the driveway. She sat in the car, staring up the hill at Sam’s empty husk of a trailer.
Even though the front door was closed, music blasted from the house. The kitchen was empty. Lizzie followed the throbbing air into the living room.
The rug had been rolled up. Jeep danced with a tall man in a cowboy hat. They seemed lost in a sensual limbo, their bodies continuously, sinuously connected. Theo, Summer, and Hannah sat in a row on the couch with their mouths open. If she were in any other kind of mood at all, Lizzie thought even as she crossed the room and punched the CD player’s power button, she would find the scene amusing.
After the tumultuous pound of music the silence almost hurt. Jeep screwed her lips up. The man put a hand to his hat, as if to keep it from flying away.
“Mami!” Theo slid off the couch and fastened onto her knee. “Mami.”
“You must be Rich,” Lizzie said. Her voice sounded clipped, brittle.
“Rich Pack, ma’am.” Rich put out a hand. His shake was floppy. Lizzie increased the pressure of her own grip to strengthen his. This was Maud’s cowboy, she thought, patting Theo’s head with her other hand. She’d seen him at bars, but always at a distance. Their lives, even with Jeep as a common point of interest, had never overlapped. And he was indeed a cowboy. The red kerchief knotted around his neck only added to the cliché. And Lizard, you know what else? He lives in a trailer! Maud, falling backwards on the rug in laughter.
“We thought you’d be later.” Jeep’s voice emerged small, scared. She waited to be reprimanded.
“Glad to meet you.” Rich still held her hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Oh?” Lizzie disengaged her fingers. His eyes mocked her. He held on to her thumb for an extra millisecond. “My appointment got canceled. You’re free to go.”
Jeep’s hair was haywire, her eyes wide. Rich grinned at Lizzie, moving his eyes slowly up her boots, knees, thighs, frankly admiring the legs beneath the skirt.
“What was that music?” Lizzie stepped to the CD player.
“We danced too,” Hannah said. “For a little while.”
“Mom hates rap.” Summer slid off the couch.
“I don’t hate anything. Have you two done your homework?” Lizzie replaced the CD in its plastic case and handed it to Rich. “Yours, I presume?”
As Rich took the CD his fingers lingered against hers. She bent over the waist-high music console to write out a check, aware of exactly how much rear leg she was exposing. “I think that’s right,” she said, handing it to Jeep, who folded it without looking and put it in her back pocket. They both knew the check could have waited for another day; they had a rolling account. Jeep picked up a few of Theo’s toys, draped the girls’ sweaters over the back of a chair, began to unroll the rug. Rich and Lizzie watched her.
“Don’t worry about that,” Lizzie s
aid, cocking a hip. “Go ahead and take off. Hasta luego. Hope I didn’t foul up any dinner plans.”
Jeep kept going with the rug. She looked suddenly plump, messy, in her carefully-torn-at-the-knee jeans. She stood on the opposite side of the room, looking back and forth between Lizzie and Rich. Her blue eyes glistened.
An image of her sister, nun-like, hands clasped at her waist, made Lizzie feel as if someone had just poked her with a pin. All the exhilarated air went out of her. What was she doing? She scooped Theo up and buried her face in his neck, making gurgling baby sounds until he began to chortle. She turned on the porch light and shooed Rich and Jeep out of the house. She pretended not to see the hand Rich extended in her direction as he said, “Nice to meet you, lovely lady.”
She turned the flame on under the stew she’d made the day before. “Not that stuff again,” Summer said.
“Did you like him, Ma?” Hannah hung on her arm. “Jeep really likes him.”
“Hot dogs, then.” Lizzie put Theo down. He began to cry.
Summer jumped around the kitchen, yelling, “Hot dogs! Yay!” Theo cried, “Mami, Mami.”
Lizzie banged the frying pan onto the stove. “Shut up! I can’t hold you and make dinner too.” To Hannah she said, “You have twenty minutes to do some homework. You too, Summer.”
Her tone sent them both out of the room without protest. She gave Theo a toy and made dinner. The meal was a quiet affair. Even Summer ate every bite, corn, broccoli, hot dog and all. Lizzie wondered if—what—Maud was feeding Jake. She got herself another beer.
“Aunt Maudie says she never drinks by herself,” Hannah said.
“I’m not by myself, am I? I’m with you.”
The dishes washed, the girls finished their homework at the kitchen table. Lizzie picked up the living room and, in spite of her resolutions, allowed Theo to nurse. She broke her resolutions every day, but how was a mother to see her child suffer through the trauma of teething and weaning at the same time? She leaned her head back against the couch and closed her eyes, relishing the pull at her left breast. Theo squirmed and released her nipple with a pop, waving at her too-tightly encircling arm. “Okay, okay,” she whispered.