A Different Bed Every Time

by Jac Jemc

The engineer who no longer engineered looked at her with the boned vision of envy and disgust. The engineer would not play the game and so Odette said she was heading home. He asked if he could give her a ride, but Odette refused and walked the miles carefully in her heels, hesitating and imaginative.

  Odette returned to the restaurant to see the waitress the next night.

  The waitress remembered her. “What is it you want from me?” the waitress asked.

  Odette started, “Well, I believe in a slanted precision to all things…”

  “No,” the waitress said. “What’s your order?”

  Odette sighed. She ordered and said nothing as each course was delivered to her. Odette sat, eating and remembering how she sometimes forgot to pretend romance into situations. She thought about how she needed to stop the self-conscious bullshit and buy into a grand gesture or two.

  The waitress returned, and Odette caught her arm. “I’ve spilled so many sing-alongs of what I knew I was supposed to say. I’m not doing that here.” Odette saw the startle turn to tears and knew her time was limited, so she played every card. “I’ve tried talking to other people, and you confuse me best. I want my memories to meet yours. I want to collapse beneath your complexities. I want to feel a million small surgeries knit us together. I don’t want to let myself down and I don’t want to avoid the hardest options. Come have a drink with me when your shift ends.”

  The waitress lied and told the truth and said, “Yes,” figuring she’d change her mind later.

  At the end of the night the waitress didn’t know where Odette had gone, and so she packed up and headed out. Odette sat smiling on a bench a couple blocks down “With so many events and so many memories, it’s easy to forget which is which.”

  The waitress took Odette’s proffered arm and they headed down the street to the 400 Club, where she apologized for not being dressed right. Odette said, “Get serious. Your face dresses you up.” Odette could tell the waitress was impressed, and then Odette wondered if she wanted a woman who could be impressed by this schmaltz.

  The banker was alone, down the bar. He wandered closer and grinned, all sly and circular, at Odette and the waitress. “Didn’t I saw you in half once?” he asked and Odette turned to the waitress and shook her head. “What’s your friend’s name?”

  Odette didn’t know her name, so she kept quiet. This problem was out of her hands, but Odette hoped it would grow less familiar. Odette looked into the waitress’s eyes and her wish came true: the waitress brought her lips right up to Odette’s ear and whispered her name, so only she would hear: Farrah. Odette was over the moon; she loved this name so much. She turned to the banker, and said, “This one’s mine,” and the banker took “no” for an answer.

  Farrah began telling stories but never looked Odette in the eye. Closing time snuck up on them and they would need to exit into the hurrying air. Odette said nothing, just listened to Farrah tell it. Odette tuned in and out as she stared at this lovely girl: “My knife digs into apple upon apple…This god who had recently named his rivals…Three sisters sit in a dark room as their father walks through unaware of their presence and when he is out of earshot, they slap hands…Cicadas emerge like specters.” Here was a girl who knew the game without naming it.

  Odette dropped Farrah at her apartment, kissed her cheek. “The things we say can crystallize our future in many ways.” And with that, Odette climbed back in the cab and Farrah remained standing on the stoop, trying to remember all of the things she’d said.

  In the cab, sleep had made a fist of itself, and Odette was unsure she would make it the long ride home without being knocked out. But by the time the driver pulled up to her building she had caught a second wind and was laughing giddily at the unavoidability of death and taxis.

  She didn’t fall into her bed, but instead filled her bathtub with water and clipped strand after strand of pearls until every pearl she owned rested on the bottom of the tub. She dunked her head underwater and rescued each pearl, sucking it into her mouth and then spitting it onto the fluffy bath mat. She experienced an abstract panic many times as she lost a pearl and found it again.

  She trawled the bottom of the tub with her soft lips. Coming up empty, she found she’d rescued each pearl. She scooped the pearls into a soap dish, her lungs tired and her neck aching from the angles. She shed her clothes, loosened her body onto her big bed, and slept—mute, dreamless.

  A Heaven Gone

  Misery is an awful kinship. Windows of humor roll down low and whistle at our glorious legs and gawk at the stiff and enthronging death of accidents. The hump backed light of the moon is the funnel cloud of direction, sawn off and mighty. We smoke bouquets of tobacco and flex our thumbs like whales surfacing through the sunny thickness of the air. The bright edge of the sea is half a country away and we are dry and walking through muddy woodsmoke curtains that call themselves the great wide open. We drape our emptiness on the spiky pickets along the way, old plastic bags we’ve no use for. At night the caliginous demons of shadowy ditches beside us are full or not, and the violence of air passing us behind vehicles is cozy and cool. We watch some sort of bird fly up the sky in a frenzy and analyze the constellations of oak trees out at the edge of that field. We are a heaven gone from where we came from now and the filth of myths covers most of this journey. I am growing fat even now beneath this hunger and I am sorry. The humble pair of us just needs a ride to the other ocean, free of bullets and wrinkles. One of us is sure to die feeling all of this. We load our possessions into a truck and close our hands around them again too soon to throw them down to the dusty ground again. I start to think things are blowing up around me when nothing is happening, in entire moments of quiet. I descend even myself and lose hope but then there are pauses where I discover it again and this hope vamps until it becomes arrhythmic again and I lose the beat and the melody. Then it’s just the same used silences to try to fill me up. Our conversations resort to double entendres and factoids, and our imaginations begin to travel that impossible and outward journey where even we don’t know how long it’s been that the sun has been high or that a car hasn’t passed. Our consolation is that even dry land creates horizons and we are always standing at someone else’s. Our showy outsides, old and dirty as they are, lie and say there’s a jingling being right beneath all that dust. It keeps raining all the time for a while and then not. We find a barn and are tempted by it, but not enough. We imagine the horse in the middle of it, silhouetted by the slatted walls. We stop thinking and rely on the fossilization of opinions we made long ago. Our attraction to each other changes or at least wanders. We drink whiskey in a cab with a fragrant lion of a man. We try a train but those are filled with sorrows and stories of women. We feel certain of something and then it repeats itself so we lose certainty. We take it all too seriously and then don’t care. After it’d happened, they told us, “It will take time to heal, take a long walk home.” A factory of road rolls somewhere out of sight before us and creates the tarred surfaces for our feet to move upon. Some days, the way the ground moves, the distance we’ve traveled feels more like the zigzag of beads on an abacus than an arrow. We feel much like tumbleweeds rolling until a truck sweeps us up and pitches us out again. We examine each reliquary dashboard with its beliefs and statues. Estranged youth: that is what we are called again. People ask what we’re estranging ourselves from and we say spirits and rivers and hectic, exotic pistols and childhood and jobs and crime, just to keep it exciting. In each cab we shoulder ignorance and we keep our mouths shut when we can. When we can’t we descend the thickets of weeds beside the shoulder. We dance at the bulges of cannonball thunder. We don’t talk about it when the rain doesn’t come. “Gotta be kidding,” we say again and again. Occasionally nickels and dimes slap the ground at our feet. We flap around trying to gather the coins. It’s too many degrees, but we’re getting close. It is not beautiful. We are listening less and less. Birds of paper blow by again and again. Then, finally: a bay. Our feet travel us onto
the solid land of a deck. Backwards like the lee of encouragement the water passes smears of history and the clustering eyeballs. Unrecoverable flotsam in the paint and thin ropes of bridges make up most of my collection. There is nothing solid out here but that on which we stand. We have barely begun, but already we are left alone by the land.

  Like Lightning

  Jenny, with her wasp waist and breath like stinging lemons. Jenny’s husband is very ill. Full, alienated clauses of time are being pulled through IVs, sucked into his life-thirsty body. Jenny thinks, “Maybe my mid-gut will quit before his,” and quickly stops her thoughts.

  Six children bang the ground around her. Six children who have emerged from her thorax: newfangled, right-handed. Six glorious exits that became entrances.

  The swinging fraudulence of “forever” brushes the side of her face again and again and again, rubbing it raw. She is surrounded, albeit alone, with six beehive minds, quick to omit the worst facts.

  Friends travel into his room to make blank truces, lastditch efforts to make indelible marks on him.

  Jenny’s eyes, full of so many angles, sense the world framing these instants for her memory. She is compelled to doubt almost everything. She often misses the point. Some foreign filmmaker’s mind is converting everything to images.

  Summer is spent in a carefully air-conditioned laboratory of a room.

  Time quickens. The silt of everyday encounters adds up to more. Six weeks drop away, leave Jenny so tired she doesn’t have the energy or space to flap her wings into flight. Her balance is off. She is heavy with the loneliness that awaits.

  Then, one day, an anonymous deliveryman arrives with cases of an expected yet unknown substance. As her husband turns back to make sure she follows him, his breath halts. Simple marching songs play in the air. She doesn’t care to concern herself with the truth. Not even a single question presents itself. This moment has been living within her for months.

  This darkness cradles the room until the light of six unborn stars bursts in to shine full sentences of future upon her.

  Before We Pass This Way Again

  The final sight of him almost went unnoticed. She might have said “Thank you” rather than “Farewell,” but by then Louie knew her own mind. She recognized the sound of him leaving for what it was.

  When it came down to just the two of them, they went to McDonald’s almost every day. Louie got good at faking what a treat it was. Her father’d flip in the Townes van Zandt tape as they pulled out of the driveway. He knew the importance of consistency. To Louie, this meant they’d known each other a long time. Louie even silently picked them a song—“Be Here to Love Me Today.” When the first chords of this song sounded, her father’s hand always went to the volume knob, twisted it clockwise. They both sang along. Louie’s father got a word wrong, mistook one verse for another, and hummed the rest of the line like he meant it.

  Him eating a Big Mac, her chicken nuggets, he gave her advice, probably because he didn’t know what else to do. Most of the time it was completely unrelated to the trials of growing up appropriate to Louie’s age: “Never be grateful to a boy. He’s benefiting from the deal, and if you play it right, he’ll be grateful for whatever attention you give him. He’s the one should be grateful to you.” Louie nodded her head solemnly, unblinking. She didn’t like to talk to boys. She didn’t want to ask what deal her father was talking about.

  With her father, she didn’t go to church on Sundays anymore. They slept late and they headed out to the cemetery first thing. Louie kicked freshly cut grass from the headstone and it clung to her patent leather shoes. “Why do women die?” she asked her father. He shook his head like he missed her mother too. After a moment, he’d take her hand and lead her back to the truck. They drove in silence to the bar. That was just the way he did things: cheap fast food to eat and top-shelf liquor for drinking.

  “Do you remember your mama?” he asked as he pulled out the bar stool for her. Louie wished he’d asked at the cemetery. At her mother’s grave, her head had been clear with grass and sunshine; here she felt dizzy with the yeasty smell of old beer and the ammonia they used to try to scrub it away. She answered, though, because he hardly ever asked about her mama. “Of course. It hasn’t even been a year yet, Daddy.” Her father nodded at this and then looked down the bar. The bartender headed toward them, stopping to pour a Coke and scoop a dozen cherries into a cocktail glass for Louie. The bartender then looked at her father. “Jack?” was all she said and he nodded. He didn’t need to say much because he never really changed.

  Her grandparents wanted to see her. It’d been months, they said. They wanted to make sure she was clean and eating well. Really, though, they missed their daughter and wanted to see what remained of her. To ensure the safety of that last little bit. They’d never trusted Louie’s father.

  He brought Louie out to their farm. The dust from the truck still settling, Louie hopped to the ground and ran to her grandparents.

  Why he stuck around was anyone’s guess. They all assumed he’d slow down to let Louie out and return to pick her up when she was ready to come on home. It was summer; Louie had nowhere to be. She could stay all season, if she wanted.

  After dinner one night her father nudged Louie’s knee with his own. “Sing for your grandparents.”

  She looked up from her cobbler, terrified.

  “She’s got a real pretty voice.” He nodded at his mother- and father-in-law. It was probably the first he’d spoken since they’d arrived. Everyone seemed a little stunned. Louie’s grandparents looked at her expectantly because they didn’t know how to look at her father.

  “Go on, Lou. You know the one I like.” He placed his big, rough hand on the table and began to drum it lightly. Right away she knew it was the song she’d claimed as their own. She started crying. Everyone thought it was because she didn’t want to sing.

  The next morning, her father and grandfather drank coffee on the porch while Louie chased the cat around the yard. Her grandmother sat on a swing that still hung from a branch of the tree out front. She snapped her old Polaroid camera, all of the pictures coming out golden.

  The cat ran beneath the porch and Louie fell to the ground, exhausted. Her grandmother called to her, “Come here and sit on my lap, Louise. You’ll get your new dress all dirty.” She was too big for her grandmother’s lap, but Louie went to her anyway. Her grandmother leaned down to lift her and Louie kissed her cheek and escaped behind the swing to push her grandmother’s ample behind. “Louise! I’m too heavy!” Louie continued though, and her grandmother laughed at her feeble attempts.

  After a walk down the road to visit the horses at the neighbor’s stable, the four of them drove into town for lunch. At the diner, Louie examined the menu carefully and asked if she could order spaghetti for lunch. Her grandfather kissed her forehead and said, “Anything you want.”

  Louie pressed her luck and asked for a milkshake as well.

  “With your spaghetti?” her grandmother asked. Louie didn’t know how to answer, so she didn’t, but her grandfather repeated himself. “Anything you want.”

  When the waitress came again, Louie ordered and her father said, “I’ll have the same.”

  Everyone looked at him with lifted eyebrows, but no one said a word.

  The silence was long after the waitress left. “Sing for your grandparents? Please, Lou?” Her father didn’t pose it as a command this time; he asked her.

  Louie had stayed up half the night preoccupied with the thought of singing. Now that her father made the request again, she felt that with a little time she could get up the courage to do it. She needed a moment to gather herself and in that moment her grandparents took her silence for fear and began bickering about whose turn it was to sweep the porch once they got back to the farm.

  Louie dragged the crayons she was given across the paper tablecloth as she began to hum. Her father’s eyes leaned toward what she was drawing: a horse like the silver one she’d seen that aftern
oon. Soon the humming formed into words, like her father’s botched lyrics rewound. She sang their song slowly and mournfully. She was already to the second verse when her grandmother hushed her grandfather and nodded to Louie, who continued to draw as her voice grew. She knew she had their attention, but she thought if she looked up the fear might erase her voice. Her father watched her hands. Louie’s voice was soft, too small to silence a room, but it filled their booth and spilled over just a little bit to the tables beside. She finished like it was nothing. Her grandparents’ eyes brimmed. Their food arrived and everyone ate in silence.

  It was Louie’s father who finally spoke, after their plates were cleared. He lit a cigarette. “If I might take the liberty to say it, your Chandra’s voice bent around corners better’n any slide guitar’s song. I remember one afternoon when she was pregnant with Lou, we were sittin’ in our kitchen and she started hummin’, soft, all edges she kept tight to.

  “Through the window, her voice carried. We’d raised the storm glass so the breeze could skate in underneath. We sat at the table, drops of water gathering on our juice glasses.

  “I remember she was singin’ ’bout stallions, but it was that voice that galloped at the first thunder crack. The rain started slow, sped up as her song did.

  “Sometimes I wasn’t sure the sounds she was makin’ anyone else’d call singin’. It was more like talkin’, but there was this clarity to it that made me cool all over.

  “I don’t know where she found those words. She’d come to me to learn earlier that year: saddles, bridles, gaits. She wanted it, so she learned quick. Now she was singin’ of the horses like she’d been born to’m.

  “I was afraid to move. I didn’t want to spook’er into silence. The sound was risin’ out of her like heat. The rain was pourin’, bouncin’ off the windowsill onto our bare arms.