A man and a woman have married. In a quiet room, they kiss, the woman’s head thrown back to expose her throat, the man’s face impassive. They are just starting out; they call each other Honey and Dear. When the man wants to go out for a paper, he does it. When the woman wants to take a nap, she lies down. They are not being watched by tiny masked faces. They do not think of bruises in the shape of lemons. They are not forced to recall lullabies that make them remember other, bitter things.
When a commercial interrupts, James watches that too. He loves TV more than anything he can think of. It is small and neat; it is easy to understand. Wives love their husbands. Children love their fathers.
Brothers love their brothers.
In real life, he is away from home for weeks at a time, traveling state to state, selling farm machinery. When he comes back, Ellen’s clothing has spilled over into his dresser drawers. The children do their homework at his desk by the phone. He doesn’t know where to sit at the table: beside his mother like he used to? Or next to Ellen, his wife? He doesn’t know which hanger to use to hang his coat: one of the stuffed gardenia-scented ones? A wire one? Cedar?
And then the children, the smooth skin of their foreheads so delicate, so uncertain. Kiss Daddy hello, they must be told. He hates the wet bite of their lips. He hates setting down his luggage, crouching, swooping them into his arms.
And Ellen, wearing clothes he doesn’t remember, using words he doesn’t know. Remember the time we—? she says. He does not. The distance between them grows like a shadow at the end of a long hard day. Before they were married, they spent the night together in his car. The weather had turned bad, the roads swallowed in ice. They pulled into a ditch to wait it out and were buried together in the snow, forever close, forever sharing secrets. It was April 1959, and they married one month later, in May, the first buds just starting to show, and everyone eyeing Ellen’s flat stomach, and the whispers, All night they were together in his car—
She looks at him now as if he were an appliance she doesn’t think can be fixed. She wants to move away from Vinegar Hill and into a house of their own, a house where everything will be even more different, and he will feel even more out of place.
The children are growing up, she says. Soon you won’t know them anymore. Soon they won’t know you.
That’s right, he says, that’s good.
But of course he doesn’t really say it; it would be a terrible thing to say. And it isn’t always true. Sometimes he feels his mind swallow him whole, the way a snake swallows a plain, white egg, and inside the belly of his mind he is not afraid of his children. They come to him, soft as deer. Daddy, look! they say, showing him this, showing him that, and he always knows what to say, without Ellen there to coach him.
Talk to them, she says. Say something.
But what?
He finished his last trip ahead of schedule and came home two nights early, just as Ellen and the children were sitting down for supper. The table looked different to him, smaller, and he realized that the center leaf was missing. The children were in their pajamas; Ellen had flour in her hair.
“Where’s Ma and Pa?” he said.
“At Senior Citizens’,” Ellen told him too brightly. “Kids, squish over for Daddy.” She got a plate from the kitchen and filled it with chicken and dumplings. The children slowly edged toward Ellen’s chair, leaving a small space for James between the table and the wall.
“I don’t like chicken and dumplings,” he said.
“I know that,” Ellen said. She did not look at him as she set the plate down hard. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“We love chicken and dumplings,” Amy said. Herbert nodded, his cheeks bulging.
“I thought you didn’t like them,” James said.
“Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean we have to feel the same way,” Ellen said, and the children lifted their pointed chins, a gesture of Ellen’s he vaguely recognized. After supper, she played with them in the living room, hauling them up by the feet into handstands, then letting go. Their spindly bodies collapsed, knitted together, jumped up for more. Me next! Me next! they squealed. Each time a child crashed to the floor, James imagined a splintered bone. Their faces turned red; their hair swung in their eyes. Their shirts fell down to expose soft, puckered bellies.
“Careful!” he shouted, as Amy tipped over backward. “No more of this roughhousing!”
Ellen crouched, put her head to the floor, and pushed her body upward, uncoiling into a perfect, pointy-toed handstand. Her hips tilted slightly, keeping balance. Her breasts and belly flattened into one sleek line. James stared at her, shocked, for he realized she was angry. That night, when he got into bed, she rolled as far away from him as she could. “I will not live with a stranger,” she said so quietly he almost couldn’t hear.
This time, when he came home, he told her, I’ll put them to bed tonight. But he stood in the doorway. He did not know what to say. He did not kiss them good night. He did not want to touch them.
Hasenfuss. Mama’s boy.
All set? she asked, when he came into the bedroom.
Yes.
How did it go?
I sang a lullaby.
Did you kiss them good night?
When he didn’t answer, she got out of bed, pulling both quilts along with her. “Ellie?” he said, but she disappeared down the hall toward the children’s room. For a while, he lay shivering beneath the sheet, wondering what he should do. Then he got up to find a spare blanket. He looked in the chest of drawers and in the closet. He even bent to look under the bed. Finally, he called to Ellen through the wall, softly, not wanting to wake the children or his parents, but she didn’t answer. So he put on his robe and lay back down, remembering how they had huddled together for warmth, the old Chevy swallowed in white, and how nothing wrong happened between them, although after that, it was obvious, they had to get married. What else could they do?
The TV flickers in the misty darkness. James’s head sinks to his chin.
You’re their father, she said.
Why would he dream of bees?
They love you, she said.
He cannot remember the end of the song. Mitch would know, but Mitch is dead. He is buried in Saint Michael’s Cemetery, asleep in the ground like the twin brothers that died. He had a mind like a steel trap, but James cannot remember anything. He swallows, licks his lips. Without their faces before him, he cannot even remember what the children look like. Eyes, fingers. Sunken cheeks. Jack-o’-lantern smiles.
What kind of man cannot remember his own children?
The commercial ends; the lovers reappear. The woman twirls before the man, an angel in a long pale gown.
In the morning, he pretends to sleep as Ellen moves around the room, dressing for work in the semi-darkness. She steps into one of her teacher dresses, brown or blue—he cannot tell—that buttons up the front. A wide plastic belt cinches her waist. Her lips are outlined in lipstick; her short hair is curled tight, sprayed close to her head. He can see everything without opening his eyes. When her lips touch his cheek, he has felt it coming and does not wince, does not react to her sigh.
He would stay in this bed all day if he could stand it, his head half buried in his stiff, musty pillow, the blankets pulled up to his neck, bunched under his chin. But if he lies awake for long, his mind will wander and he’ll find himself stretched out on hard, cool pine, hearing the buzz of flies and the beating of wings. The smell of vanilla. His mother’s fierce scream.
He opens his eyes. In the kitchen, Ellen says something sharp to the children; one of them answers back, Wait. No one answered back in his grandmother’s kitchen. Children were to be seen and not heard. He ate whatever was set before him. If he didn’t clean his plate, it meant he must be ill, and his grandmother gave him tablespoons of cod-liver oil. He remembers the oily taste, its slow, thick descent into his belly. His grandmother always watched him for signs of illness because his lungs were weak. In win
ter, he caught colds that lingered on for months. Feverish, he’d lie in bed, staring at the blankets his mother hung over the windows because light was dangerous to sick people. He tried not to fall asleep because he believed that was when people died.
Plates clatter, jackets rattle, quick footsteps brush the floor. James struggles not to listen, but it’s too late, he’s awake now, and the day stretching out in front of him like a field of snow, the distant fence posts frail as shadows, unable to contain him.
The front door slams. James is relieved. Now he hears Fritz rumble, Mary-Margaret moan. There are footsteps in the hall, the sound of the shower kicking in; once, twice. Mary-Margaret scratches at the door and pokes her head into the room. He can smell the salve she rubs into her joints.
“Jimmy,” she says. “Are you sick?”
“No, Mother. I’m resting.”
“He wants us to play cards at Senior Citizens’.”
She means Fritz.
“Good, Mother,” James says. “Go.”
“I could stay home, if you wanted. You can ask him.”
“No, Mother,” James says. “I just need to rest.” He closes his eyes, waits until he hears the click of the door. The way she fusses over him makes him feel unmanly. It embarrasses him to think that he came from inside her body, his face pushing out through her woman’s parts, his mouth clamped to her woman’s nipple.
It is only after they leave for Senior Citizens’ that James finally gets up, moving slowly down the hall to the bathroom as if he were floating there. He has one more day at home before he goes back on the road, this time a familiar route near Rochester, driving fast in the company car, stopping to eat at diners with names like Sal’s and the Eggery and Dew Drop Inn. He no longer notices the flat land twisting into hills along the Mississippi, doesn’t taste the bacon and hash and toast gleaming with oil. His mind swallows him whole, and he lives in its belly for days. It’s the driving that does it, and the lull of the road and the steadiness of the engine like a heartbeat. He shakes men’s hands, smiles briefly at waitresses in coffee shops, but he is cocooned, invisible, serene.
Returning home is being torn from all that. Returning home is waking up at four-thirty on a winter morning, his grandmother’s hand in his hair, and breaking ice in the basin to wash his face and neck. They milked thirty-six cows between them: James, Mitch, and Fritz, while Ann got breakfast in the house and Mary-Margaret sat wrapped in a shawl by the stove, sickly like James, never much help.
He brushes his teeth, shaves, steps into the shower, feeling as though he is not actually doing any of these things, but is watching himself, or someone like himself, from a window that’s too small for him to see the entire picture. He has had that feeling before; it is how he imagines a dead person feels. Once, when he was eight or nine, Mitch invented a game called Dead. He took James out to the barn, to one of the small rooms under the haymow where the bins of grain were stored. It was August. There had been no rain for weeks, but today the air felt different: moist, hot, waiting. Thunder rolled in the distance, but it was a hollow, meaningless sound. Mitch pulled a candle from his pocket, lit it, used the hot wax drippings to fix it to a board.
Take off your clothes, Mitch said. When you’re dead, your clothes are the first things to rot.
Bits of hay stuck to James’s arms and legs. He could smell Mitch’s sweat—bitter, like onions. As he took off his clothes, it was as if he were watching another boy slip out of his shorts and T-shirt, fold them in half, place them gently on the floor. Mitch tied this other boy’s wrists and ankles with rope. He blindfolded him with a sock that was still warm.
Dead people can’t move, Mitch said. Dead people can’t speak or hear, and he pushed the other sock into the boy’s mouth and stuffed warm wax into his ears. He lifted the boy into one of the bins of grain, and covered his feet and legs, his crotch and belly, his chest and shoulders. James heard the beating of the boy’s heart, the sound of his breath rushing through his wide nostrils. And then James, too, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, couldn’t pray.
The soap is shaped like a heart. Rose-scented. Stinging in his eyes. The water drums his skull, and he opens his eyes into the stream, trying to flush out the soap, the smell of roses too strong, too sharp, ever to be mistaken for real ones. There were real roses at Mitch’s funeral, and they were no more fragrant than ice. Now James is alive to remember their odor and it is Mitch who remembers nothing, it is Mitch who is dead. His casket was kept closed, the wooden lid covered with roses; they said there wasn’t enough of Mitch left to recognize him anyway.
Mitch, the handsome one. Muscles like stones in his upper arms. Thighs thick as James’s waist.
Mitch would have found a way to open the coffin to see if that really was his brother in there. But James was afraid, and now he’ll never know. He’ll never be absolutely sure. Sometimes he feels Mitch’s hand hard on his shoulder. Sometimes he sees Mitch staring at him out of a stranger’s eyes.
Hands the size of platters. Mind like a steel trap.
When James gets out of the shower, the mirror is steamed the color of milk. He stares into it, sees nothing. Feels nothing. Fritz and Mary-Margaret are at Senior Citizens’ playing pinochle, sheepshead, rummy. Mitch is dead and Ellen at work and the children safely in school. The day stretches out like a field of snow.
For lunch, James eats sausage on buttered bread, reading the newspaper in the living room. Last night, a Milwaukee man came home from work and shot his wife, their two children, the dog, and then himself. A portrait of the family stretches across the front page; beside it, there’s a small, blurred snapshot of the dog. All of them look ordinary, although neighbors say that the man had a temper, that the woman had been seen standing in the front window wearing her panties and bra. James reads the weather forecast; snow, but not enough for a travel advisory. There’s an article about a local high school coach whom James doesn’t recognize. There’s a letter to the editor about a boy just home from Vietnam.
After finishing the paper, James wanders around the house, opening drawers and poking in closets. It is January, but there are still signs of Christmas. A half-eaten candy cane on his desk, its end sucked to a sharp point. Used wrapping paper folded neatly on the counter, pressed flat under the Bible, to wrap next year’s gifts. A dying poinsettia on the windowsill, a gift to Ellen from the children, a gift she had liked.
One week before Christmas, finishing up his last route of the year, James had stopped for coffee at a restaurant in a little town one hundred miles from home. He cupped the chipped white mug between his hands, half-listening to the conversations of the people at the tables around him. Aunt Emma’s so hard to buy for, a woman said, and he realized he didn’t have a Christmas gift for Ellen. He paid for his coffee, then walked across the street to a small, shabby house with a sign hanging from the gutter that said Naughty Maudie’s Lingerie. A cardboard lady in a Santa Claus hat and a nightgown stood in the window. THINK OF HER AT X-MAS was painted in block letters on the glass.
The shop was in the front room, and it was cluttered with mannequin parts, hangers, balls of tissue paper, and piles of small cardboard boxes. Nightgowns hung in a row from the ceiling. James thought they looked nice. He reached up to pluck at a white, lacy hem, wondering which one Ellen would like best.
“That the one you want?” a woman said. She was sitting at a card table at the back of the room. Behind her, James could see down the hallway to the kitchen, where several other women sat around a table piled with dirty pots and pans. They stared at him, and he looked away. Here he was not invisible. He could feel himself unraveling, becoming hesitant, unsure.
“Yes,” he said. “How much is this?”
“Twenty,” the woman said. She got up, grabbed a box off a pile, and brought it over to James. “I got the identical thing in here,” she said. When she handed it to him, she let her hip brush his. “Who’s this for?”
“For my wife,” James said. “For Christmas.”
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��You want I should model it for you?” the woman said. “Or maybe another girl?” She nodded to the women in the kitchen. James could smell her teeth. He shifted, not knowing what she wanted from him. She was laughing at him. Maybe he should turn around and go.
“Do you gift wrap?” he asked.
“Sorry,” she said, and she stepped away. She took the box from James and stuffed it into a plastic bag. On Christmas Day, when Ellen opened the box, he realized he’d never checked the size. The nightgown was an extra large. Later, in their bedroom, Ellen took off her clothes and picked up his hands and pressed them against her ribs. She guided him so they stood in front of the dresser mirror. James wished desperately to turn out the light. Her body, pressed against his own, was twisted and pale.
“Don’t you remember what I’m like?” she said. She moved his hands over her stomach and hips. “Does this feel like an extra large?” He kissed her, but as soon as she let go of his hands, he pulled them away. Her body wanted to swallow his body, her breath suck away his breath. Her warm weight would fill him like water, like blood, until he felt her pulse beating in his ears.
James plucks the dying leaves from the poinsettia and throws them into the trash. He peeks out the kitchen window, then goes into the living room and stares out at the street. He sits down and tries to open the drawer to the coffee table, but the coffee table has been turned around, so the little drawer opens toward the TV. He is certain it opened toward the couch the last time he was home. Inside the drawer, he finds expired coupons, rubber bands and pens, a crumpled school paper of Amy’s entitled A Rainy Day. Her handwriting is large and careful; her apostrophes and periods are small hearts.
When it’s rainy I like to catch worms. I keep them in jars of dirt. If you cut a worm in half, one end will be a new worm, but the other end dies.
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