Sycamore

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Sycamore Page 10

by Bryn Chancellor


  Thanks. She is. Listen to me! You came in to get your car fixed, and here I throw my entire life in your lap. Let me go check on your car. You have things to do. I’m Rose Prentiss, by the way. Nice to meet you, Laura. Hey, I hope you like it here. Don’t listen to me. It’s not so bad, really, once you get used to it.

  Azaleas

  A woman walked into a bar. She said to the bartender, “A man walks into a bar.” The bartender said, “Ouch.” The bartender knew his jokes. He knew his customers. He knew this customer once as his high school Humanities teacher, and he still called her Ms. G even when she said, “It’s just Esther now, honey.” He knew her as the woman who owned the bakery that made his stomach growl in the mornings when he rode by on his bike, the teacher he’d always loved just a little. She seemed a bit drunk already, and the bartender frowned as she pulled herself onto a barstool. She lived around the corner, though, and had most certainly walked instead of driving, so he poured her a short whiskey and Coke, no ice. She drummed her fingers, and her silver rings caught the light.

  Esther took her drink and thanked the bartender, a boy she could bookmark in her mental file of former students, from hair-spray helmets to pixie bangs, at Sycamore High (Go Lobos!). Beto Navarro, younger brother of Luz Navarro, who by all accounts raised him. This corner bar, the Pickaxe, could be straight out of that time too. For years students—herself included, back in the day—had snuck in here with fake IDs after school dances, reeking of knockoff perfume sprays and strawberry wine. Either that, or they drove out to the Drag, a patch of desert on the outskirts of town, and built bonfires out of wood pallets stolen from behind Bashas’. She had taught this boy and half the rest of them in this bar, too. All these teenage-now-adults roaming around town and showing up in her bakery, their faces and bodies broader and creased, their own teenage children in tow. She still pictured them with their soft cheeks and springy curls, so she was startled to see this boy’s retreating hairline, the deep lines around his eyes and mouth. Of course he was long out of short pants—she chuckled into her highball at this phrasing. Speaking of which, she should get herself some. Shorts. Or pants. She was wearing a full-length black polyester slip as a dress under a flannel shirt Sam had left behind, and she slithered half off the vinyl barstool, revealing a good breadth of pale plump thigh, before catching herself. “Whoa Nelly!” she said. At forty-eight, a few years into her second career as a bakery owner, she favored loose drawstring pants and flowery A-line skirts; as everyone in town knew, she was a smart, creative woman with her ducks in a row. At the very least, she usually wore clothes. This slippery slip business would get out. Oh well. Couldn’t be helped. Tonight, after getting a little stewed in the living room, staring at the newspaper and its awful news and at the square lighted windows of the guest house where Dani Newell was surely thinking about the same news, Esther was not thinking about clothes. She was thinking of flash floods, the speed at which the water gushed, whipping through the channels of the high desert like a comet, rolling mud and boulders with monstrous force. She was thinking about what it felt like to gasp for air. To be choked and held under.

  Jess Winters. Bones in a wash, for Christ’s sake. Drowned, then. At best. Esther knew it was she. Had to be. The truth clicked into place like a well-oiled lock. That girl was no runaway, though Esther had once thought otherwise. The day Jess had showed up in her class, all wild brown hair and silver earrings and narrowed eyes, Esther had taken one look at her and sighed in both exasperation and pity. Capital T Trouble and Troubled. She’d thought she could see it a mile off. She was thirty then and more than a wee bit smug about how much she knew about the world. Thirty, ha! She’d been wrong, of course. Trouble had found Jess, but she was not the source of it. She was a smart, gorgeous kid with a bonfire of an imagination.

  Righting herself on the stool, Esther ignored the bartender’s glance of concern. Since Sam moved out a month ago and ran off to San Francisco and married Kevin, a man not yet thirty (thirty!) he’d met online, her friends had adopted the same look. Iris circled her as if she were a wounded animal, poking her with offers of hot tea and walks. Iris didn’t ask questions. Iris knew she would talk when she was ready. Iris was maddeningly sane that way. Esther loved having an older friend. When she’d been a teacher, she’d always been the one shelling out advice. It was nice to be advised sometimes, to ask. Iris did say, “So what, Esther? So what if he’s making a mistake? So what? He’s in love.”

  She twisted her rings, starting with the ones on her left pinkie and working her way across to the right pinkie, a nervous habit she channeled into jokes and mixing bowls. She glanced at the bartender. Beto Navarro. A boy, all grown up. Two young women at the end of the bar, probably Syc students—she didn’t know them or their parents—threw glances and smiles at him, tossed their glossy hair, and Esther watched him with new eyes. Yes. Handsome now, his gawkiness stretched into angularity, a lean ranginess. She watched the flexing muscle of his forearms as he squeezed a rag, and a little heat snuck in her belly. He was what, thirty-four, thirty-five now? Oh, his brother, that lovely Tomás. He’d died in the Gulf War—no, in the run-up to the war, in training. Humvee crash. What a terrible thing. Of course, people said that about her, too, having lost both parents when she was five and been raised by her grandmother. She remembered being happy when Beto started palling around with Angie Juarez and Rose Prentiss. Kid needed a friend. All of them had. She had always remembered him for his large forehead, how the skin seemed almost translucent, and she remembered, too, that he’d been a wonderful writer, his otherworldly stories underpinned by an almost painful beauty. No, he didn’t write much anymore, he told her. No, no kids of his own. Never married, nope, not him, he said with a laugh. She didn’t have to say, Me neither—everyone knew this about her. Everyone here knew her, or thought they did. He said he still worked at the auto shop with Angie. Still had the paper route twice a week, but picked up some weekend bar shifts to save up for vacation. “Keeps me young,” he said. He showed her a picture of his nieces, Luz’s girls. Luz still worked at the P.O.—with Maud, she thought. Esther had been at Maud’s house earlier; she and Iris had brought food and stayed with her. Maud had played with the burger and potato salad on her plate and then before the sun set, said, “I think I’ll hit the hay early tonight.” Esther took a large wallop of her drink, let it burn.

  Staring at the bartender’s broad forehead and strong arms, as the twitch of heat intensified, Esther thought of herself at Jess Winters’s age, the only age Jess would ever be: seventeen, the age at which Esther had lost her virginity, an awkward, embarrassing event that catapulted her into life as a sexual creature. After that, she had warded off pregnancy with a potent cocktail of birth control, condoms, and long stretches of celibacy. She ticked off on her fingers the number of men she had slept with in her forty-eight years. Twelve. Like the months. Like the steps of AA. Like the apostles. The last one set loose a hacking laugh. So that was what she’d been doing in erratic bursts these past years: dating the apostles. The absurdity comforted her, and the tightness in her lungs eased. She decided she’d make the apostles her shtick, the way some people had six toes or had climbed Everest or could tie cherry stems in knots with their tongue. Sam would love it. She’d call and tell him when he and Kevin got home from their honeymoon.

  “Beto, can I borrow your pen?” When he handed it to her, she grabbed a napkin from the fanned pile in front of her and scrawled down the rest of the apostles’ names, somehow still lodged in her brain from years of Sunday school indoctrination at the church not four blocks from this bar, in this town she’d never left. She held up the napkin with the twelve names and laughed. She laughed and laughed, falling forward until her forehead bounced off the padded bar rim.

  “Ms. G,” said the bartender/mechanic/former student with the sexy forearms. “Hey. Hey. Ms. G.”

  “I’m good, Beto,” she said. “It’s just Esther now. Maybe some water.”

  She righted herself on the stool and ran h
er fingers over the list, transposing the apostles’ names over the real ones from her memories, trying to figure out how to construct such a joke.

  Andrew, the first. Seventeen years old, she straddled him in the vinyl backseat of his VW bug in the parking lot next to Juarez Autos, which now housed Starz Nails but then was only gravel overrun with bristly foxtails and tumbleweeds. Poor Andrew fumbled with her triple-hook bra while she joked to shroud her smarts and long chin and frizzy hair and the roll of fat at her waist. She wasn’t thinking of the boy beneath her. She had been saving for college, and she was almost there, ready to beat cheeks out of Sycamore to the university in Tempe, only an hour-and-a-half drive but a world away from Grandmother’s House of Repression. She was thinking about urban skylines, coffee, poetry, letters to the editor about global injustices, foreign accents, moody singer-songwriters, everything that existed elsewhere. Despite the dubious yearbook honor of “class clown,” she was a dreamy girl. She believed in things like signs, and ESP, and kismet, snarfed them down as if they were a side of hot, salty fries. But later for dreams. First, the virginity. Andrew pumped once, grunted, shuddered. He looked at her but ducked his head, his chin tucked in shame and vulnerability. He looked close to tears. She smiled hard and chucked him on the shoulder. “Wow, that was great!” she said, her voice as high and pitched as a circus tent. He dropped her at her house—the same house she would inherit when Grandmother died and in which she would live for forty-three of her forty-eight years. If someone had told her that then, she would have laughed and laughed. Hilarious. Then, she could only see that the lights were off and she could sneak in the window without Grandmother knowing she’d been gone. She slid between the two azaleas, whose magenta flowers had burned in a late freeze. The now-brown blooms crumbled and stuck to her pant legs. They flaked across the carpet like fish food.

  Thomas was her first semester at Sycamore College, which had given her a tuition scholarship plus room and board—away from her grandmother, even if down the street; she’d save money and leave town before the ink dried on the diploma. A philosophy major, Thomas drank a twelve-pack every day and had the sweetest Carolina drawl. He slept with her even though he doubted everything, including his sexuality, poor kid. It did not go well. She could not remember that boy without thinking of Sam, who’d arrived in town a few years later to teach at the high school. Twenty-two years old, with the sleek, buoyant beauty of a seal. Once, early on, they drank too much wine and fumbled around in her living room before he pulled away, tears in his eyes. “Goddamn,” he said. “I don’t want to pretend with you, okay? I don’t want to pretend anymore. Do you know what I’m saying?” She did. “Would you like a cinnamon roll?” she asked, because she had learned she liked to feed people, and herself, when she was nervous, or sad. Happy, too. “I made them this morning,” she said. He laughed and cried at the same time. “Yes, please,” he said. And so they ate them straight from the pan, wiping their faces and hands on paper towels. She didn’t know yet how their lives would become entwined, feed off each other, a twenty-year-plus friendship that would fill them full to bursting.

  But that was later. Next up was Matthew, whom she met in one of those themed secret-pal dorm games—he was Sid and she was Nancy. So punk rock. He wanted to start a band, said she could write the songs. Save the world with their angst and rock and roll. But soon he dumped her for a sorority girl, and she cried in her dorm bunk for two days. She wrote haikus about minor chords and tuning pegs.

  James the Lesser gave her impetigo around her mouth about the time she moved Grandmother into the senior care home. She wrote a limerick about a young woman who wore a rubber Richard Nixon mask to conceal her scabby face rash and brought it to her poetry class. It did not go well. “Always with the jokes,” her professor said, her voice tired, waving her white sheet of paper in surrender instead of asking, again, “Why should I care? What is at stake here?”

  James the Greater was tall and spindly-legged, a runner she met at the track. She had moved back into Grandmother’s house and started teaching at Sycamore High—a short-term assignment, she’d move on in a year or so—and was in one of her zealous exercise periods, when she still stuffed her chunky waist into brand-name jeans and hadn’t learned the wonders of drawstrings and A-lines. He did a dead-on impression of Ronald Reagan—It’s morning in America again—and he praised her fledgling poems and made her feel like a million bucks. She mistook this for intimacy because she was twenty-three, and he had eyes as blue as a gas flame. But when it counted—when she was late, and he said, “How?” and she said, “This ain’t the Immaculate Conception, for Christ’s sake”—he ran as fast and far as his long legs could carry him. She wasn’t pregnant after all, but she held onto his two hundred dollars anyway.

  Thaddeus—not Thad, but Thad-deus—was from back east, taught at Sycamore High for a grand total of two years. Wire-rims, soft hands, read Kant and Hegel on their camping trips while she set up the tent and ate bags of wicked marshmallows and drank his wicked Rolling Rocks and wrote a villanelle about his goatee. Thad-deus had a mean streak. One night, after they’d been out drinking, he called her a stupid, fat bitch. Sam said, “We can break his kneecaps. I know a guy,” and she laughed too loud and made a giant batch of peach-walnut muffins she snuck out and ate over the sink in the middle of the night. When she visited her grandmother in the home, Grandmother said, “You don’t watch it, you’re going to end up washed up, a fat spinster with no one but that queer friend of yours for company. You’re going to die alone.” And she fired back, “Like you?” It was one of the last exchanges they’d have. She stormed out, but she stayed with Thad-deus for two more months.

  Philip was a divorced parent of one of her seniors. He’d split from the mother and moved two hundred miles away to the foothills of Tucson, so in between visits, they had phone sex, during which she often did the dishes or spackled her walls or worked on a sestina about a UN ambassador who was having sex from pay phones around the globe. When the boy graduated and Philip took his vacation in Sycamore, it was over by the end of the week. Sam gave her what she called the Eyebrow: the damn thing cranked up so high it disappeared into his hairline.

  John was married, two kids, lived in Sedona. At the Sycamore Arts Festival, having told his wife he was at a conference, he bought her a silver ring and slid it on her left finger. Esther was old enough to know better, she was about to turn thirty (thirty, ha!), but she let him. In return, she bought him a leather bracelet. Sam unleashed the Eyebrow again but said nothing. On the night of her birthday, the married man didn’t show up for their clandestine date, and she sat alone in her bedroom, too embarrassed to tell Sam. The next day, she had what would turn out to be her last conversation with Jess Winters. Jess’s words ran through her mind as she drove fast down the back roads toward her house: Oh my god, fuck poetry. Why can’t you answer a question straight for once? If you can’t tell me what to do, tell me what you would do. What would she do? Without hesitating, she chucked the goddamn ring out of her sunroof.

  She met Bartholomew in an online Scrabble group, and they took to chatting on IM though not in person. The sex was surprisingly good despite the typos and Times New Roman font. A comma splice here, a dangling participle there, but it did the job.

  Simon the Zealot was a Scottish slam poet—awful teeth, a butterfly tattoo on his skinny rump—who wandered into town one summer during his travels. Six months in, he needed a green card and married a waitress in Phoenix. Late one night, she drove down there and contemplated setting fire to his garbage can but settled instead for tipping it over. The bastard didn’t recycle, which gave her a split second of comfort as she strewed beer bottles and soup cans and something resembling a human liver out onto his dusty lawn. Later, she told Sam, “I’m that woman now. I’m the woman out on the fucking lawn.” Sam rolled a joint and they knocked back a bottle of wine, and it was a good old-fashioned rip-roaring pity party, because, Jesus Christ on a Crutch. How hard was it to find someone, anyway? Sam said
, “Hey. Why does Jesus have a crutch? I mean, he can heal lepers but not sprained ankles?” And with that, they lay on the kitchen floor in hysterics, contemplating holy injuries and knowing they were going straight to hell.

  Simon Peter called Peter was short. Troll-short. Think jockey. One day he stopped calling. He disappeared so fast that for a few days she thought she had imagined the whole thing until she found his plaid flannel shirt in her laundry. When she held it to her face, it smelled of aftershave and cigarettes, a hint of something bitter, like marigolds. The truth of him emerged, again, when she was late, again, when her breasts swelled and the smell of coffee made bile rise in her throat. At thirty-six, she was the oldest woman in the Flagstaff clinic by a good decade. As she waited, she picked off her chipped lavender nail polish and fixed her gaze on the gardening magazine in her lap. She traced one of the titles, We Love Azaleas!, over and over, up and down the yellow letters. Months later, she wrote a poem of the same title, exclamation mark and all, though it wasn’t funny, that one. Not a joke in sight. She didn’t tell Sam. She told no one.

  Judas. The last one, two years ago now, a customer new to town who showed up at Yum when she was up to her elbows in flour and debt and worry—what kind of maniac left a stable teaching job with a pension and weeks off in summers to open a bakery?—when her ovaries were in their last gasp and spewing hormones everywhere and she was swollen again, a sensation that harkened azaleas, and she thought her breasts might explode right there over the stainless steel prep table and new industrial mixer (she’d named the mixer Spinster. No one got the joke but her, but she thought it was hilarious. Spinster: Christ, what a word). Judas had gapped front teeth, an immunization scar on his left upper arm shaped like a clover. She often traced it as he slept. His hands were preposterously large; even now, she could feel the ghost of his colossal palm pressed flat against the small of her back, a sausage-sized thumb smoothing her eyebrows.

 

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