She’d take this guy on. She would.
(Seven categories … ?)
Poverty. Her husband grew up in a concrete house by a swamp. Her husband’s family picked garbage to eat and her husband grew up among them. His brother spent half his life in prison and came out with so many tattoos he looked like a comic book.
Political strife. On her mother’s side she was descended from a race that had been chased over every continent. For thousands of years her people had had to move at a moment’s notice, hide their coins in their hair like magicians. In Europe her people had been rounded up, placed in cattle cars, and incinerated without ceremony. Practically every relation she should have had was never born. The world still despised her race today. Don’t think she never felt it.
(Political strife, boff! That’s a little finger waving itself.)
And what is his ethnicity, might she ask?
Hmm. Brown eyes. She’d been hoping for blue.
Well, anyway, tough guy.
He was drawn by her purposeful tread. When she’d clearly cleared the top he’d do it, her full childish figure delineated by the sky. He could hear the cheers of the other shooters of America, he could hear their voices.
The girl kept climbing. She didn’t look back over her shoulder to check that her mother was still there. She believed her mother could no longer see her. The sun blinking over the dune, the sand heavy under her feet, her hat blowing (print of whales and waves), the arc of earth in front of her. To her she was going on alone.
In fact, that may have been the first full thought of her life forming on that dune, a strange sand flower, her mind, blooming into existence that very moment: that she was alone.
She didn’t mean alone alone, of course. Obviously there were people milling around, struggling in the heat, feet slogging, sliding down as they trudged up. At least two kids in the vicinity were throwing tantrums and another was rolling past her, laughing. But no one was watching her at that moment, looking at her.
The shooter was watching the girl. Her mother was watching the girl. Did you think she’d let her daughter toddle off unattended? Child was four. She was only twelve feet away, now fourteen.
A young woman, a soldier in Nevada, was watching the girl through a drone-based surveillance camera in the sky. Practicing. She was scooting around overhead, focusing in on objects, in this case, the girl, to see how much detail she could get. Could she see each of the girl’s fingers, could she see the shape of her eyes? Could she see the design on her shirt (little fishes, sea-themed head to toe, mermaids on her shoe tips)? Skill-building exercise. Taking a break while the first lieutenant was gone getting a sandwich.
Her father below could make out the girl’s tiny figure. He had the baby, weeping miserably into his shirt, in one arm, and he was squinting under the other arm to see his daughter. Look at her go, the little locomotive—but why was his wife sitting in the sand?
The girl’s grandmother at home was watching in her mind’s eye. The grandmother always had been a little witchy. While pulling on her Salvation Army volunteer smock, she had a flash of the child’s shirt in the sun.
In this moment more people were watching this small, unremarkable human tread through hot sand (her mind blinking on like a night-light, like an alarm) than many humans are contemplated in a week.
No one was watching the shooter. Maybe this had been his problem from the very start. Unseen man. It certainly was a problem today.
Other things were happening. The heat was too strong—the mother had underestimated it—and the girl could get heatstroke and die. The father was right about sand: the girl planted her next step four inches from a tick that carried a new sand-borne disease related to Lyme. The girl was about to spontaneously develop a deadly cancer (it can happen like that). She could in this moment become someone who would grow up to be an alcoholic.
But no kidding there was a shooter on the ground. He’d released the safety now, he was adjusting his scope. The girl, drawing a bead on her.
A thousand miles away a family was at an amusement park and it was awful. The boy was sick. The in-laws were cheap and wouldn’t spend any money. It was cold. They were snapping the Mickey Mouse photo. The father was trying to get his money’s worth, exhorting them to “draw on a smile” with their invisible pens. They were all grimacing and the boy had torn off his ears.
Dune. Ridge of crushed shells and stones and evaporated water. Built by air and ice. An accumulation of simplest elements.
The mother. She’d told him all she could to save her daughter’s life, all she was able to, though there was more that she could not tell him, because she could not speak it, not even in her mind.
At a certain moment six years before, none of this might have happened. No little girl in the sand, no baby screaming at the edge of the parking lot, or at least not this particular one for the shooter to now glance back at irritably to see where the racket was coming from.
There’d been one night in particular at a hotel. They’d been trying to create a rekindling “getaway” (despite all their debt, despite the baby who hadn’t made it out alive) but there’d been a scene and he’d gotten away, left, and walked the dark, foreign streets while she sat alone on the bed and wept, “Don’t you dare come back, don’t you dare,” but he’d dared, and at the time it had seemed like a supreme loyalty after all that had been said between them in that room (though where else was he going to go? she thought six years later on a dry hill, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen feet now from her daughter), and they’d made it through.
Now in the sand the sound in her head went, Six years later she was walking up the dune with her daughter …
These things happen but one goes up the dune anyway, bareheaded, no bulletproof vest, face opened to the sky, and if everyone else has peeled off—father, baby, brother, and so many more—if you yourself won’t make it, you sit in the sand and you send the girl on without you, as you must, and if that doesn’t work, you hope something will and that one day she will know that to see her in front of you was all you ever wanted.
Will he shoot?
I don’t have access to his brain, to all of it, only to his intention and then I am swept out (like a fluff blowing off the table). The sun might be too bright, for one thing, too late in the afternoon. They were all looking dead west. He might have waited too long. He might have to come back tomorrow. He had the whole summer, his whole life, really, before him.
But the girl was perfect, the other shooters of America were saying. The most obvious example in the area of what it is to be human: one’s continual encounter with inequity. The marking of that encounter. The world would be horrified by the first shot landing on a little blond girl. Then he’d work down, plucking off the others. Or not. One could be enough. This one.
One mile away another mother was buying them nothing from the gift shop.
Four miles away another father was pulling up to a cabin.
The girl reached the dune’s top. She stood in the hot sand, the parking lot below on one side, the lake in the distance on the other, her mother twenty feet down. For the first time she knew what it was like to be her. The foreignness of herself to herself, the surprise of her existence.
He released the safety, winked into the scope, finger trembling to pull the trigger, shoot, send the girl rolling, spewing blood, her mouth in the sand.
If she lives, if the shooter doesn’t pull the trigger, later the surprise of herself will dull. She’ll grow familiar (or frightening) to herself, then bored (or desperate). Then will come that inconvenient teenage self-hatred, like an avalanche, the worst of it hurled at the poor mother, another entry in the ledger of bad luck.
But the girl would soften later, she would unstiffen over the years, over the decades, by degrees, until one day thirty years after this day on the dune, she would achieve the middle-age calm that is happiness. The simplicity of the formula somehow takes that many years to reach. She would take a trip to Hawaii and bring her aging moth
er, leaving her own children and sister behind, and she and her mother would have the time of their lives (well, not exactly, but it would have its moments).
And the baby, if he doesn’t shoot? What will become of her? Same as anyone, though she would never reach the top of this dune, this particular one. She would grow up and climb others—sand dunes, snow dunes, grassy hills, mountains, slopes of all sorts—but her father hadn’t carried her up this one and they’d never come back (“Why on earth would we voluntarily go there more than once?” he’d say), so that would be that. But many other people would climb it, if he doesn’t shoot, nothing exceptional there. It’s a tourist attraction, after all. In summer season hundreds of people a day would clomp up that dune through the sand, take photos of themselves, and go back down. Those photos would wind up in all sorts of spaces and arrangements online, six races regularly represented (though the average skewed heavily white and Latino). A mound of sand, sky behind, arms open in conquest. Something about the light made the people look fit, an optical illusion.
If he shoots, one doesn’t want to think what will become of this family.
The gun will go off. He will shoot. He must. But here, now? He had casings all over the floor of the car. He could feel every cell as the air touched it and changed it. He’d never felt younger.
His brothers, the other shooters of America. He saluted them.
But they were impatient. Stop stalling. Get on with it.
Don’t, don’t do it, the mother screamed over the dune, though the shooter couldn’t hear her. She’d do anything. Not this one. Please. Not her.
Somebody, help.
Thirty miles away another family was arriving. Tangled up in three seats, they looked as though they’d been in that row for days, though the flight was only two hours. They were wearily watching a movie. The protagonist on the tiny screen was the hope of civilization. He embodied all the world’s longings and sadnesses. When he flew away, it got dark, and civilization waited for him to come back, which he did, barely in time. He was there to save them.
Just then, below, the shooter pulled the trigger. Above, the screen blinked off. The plane was descending. Out the window the glinting waves were like spilled jewels or glowing undersea algae or floating space junk. The earth was made of water and filled with floating islands of light. They were diving right into the thickest part of the biggest, widest island.
Bride
He came back at last to make her his wife.
Or not exactly.
One thing that happened while Davids was away was the woman he loved met an office-supply-store manager, married him, bought a house in the west suburbs, and then had a difficult birth that resulted in a too-small baby who gradually grew to be not quite too small and then about normal-sized. Davids had, from afar, heard rumors of this baby while it was still housed inside the woman he (formerly) loved, and then its existence was confirmed officially by an announcement from the happy family itself—a preprinted card inside an envelope with a bit of tissue, the entire inside an additional envelope.
So as custom commands he sent a gift in the name of friendship because that is what he supposed they were now—friends—and he put his belongings back into boxes and moved back, not to make her his wife.
Who was she now?
She phoned of all things.
“Come see us,” she said. “I’m having a party. Bring someone. Meet my husband.”
“I think I’d rather not,” he said. “I’d rather just see you.”
“I’m a two now,” she said. “Actually a three. So if you want to see me, you see us all.”
Where had he been all this time?
He had left (her) in the first place because she used to say with frequency and urgency that she might chuck everything at any moment, why, she might run away to the city! Except she couldn’t, because she lived in a city and you can’t run away to someplace if you’re there. She said it so convincingly that he himself ran away—to a small town, if you please, took a temporary job transfer, with plans to come back when she asked, which she didn’t. A year passed. He heard stories. An office-supply-store manager. A wedding. The water sculptures at the wedding. They had had pouring water and strewn petals and strolling troubadours. And he thought it unfair of her to go off and take care of things so neatly and quickly, in less than two short years, while he’d been waiting around in that small town. He came back to the city, not because his temporary transfer had ended and he was sent back (it hadn’t, he quit) but because he’d been away for nearly two long years—in which time marriage, house, child, etc.—and he hadn’t found anything he wanted in that town and had found plenty he did not.
“I sent you a gift,” he said.
“Oh yes, we got it. We’re months behind in our thank-yous. I’m sorry. We’re getting to your thank-you.”
(We.)
“I don’t need a thank-you.”
“I always send thank-yous.”
“You may toss my thank-you in the trash.”
“But I do want to thank you.”
“I feel thanked, I’m thanked. Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Why did he have to sound like such a bully? Pushing her around, demanding or not demanding thank-yous?
In the end he agreed to go to the party and meet the office-supply-store manager and the child who now existed but was still small. Agreed to go despite the fact that everything appeared to be wrong where he was living, dark all the time, more so than in other neighborhoods, and his new job was awful, not as bad as all that, but uncomfortable—unfamiliar people younger than he, less educated, watery coffee in the break room, a billboard for ovens outside his window, a slap of tile on the floor, the usual mayhem on the street. While he was still on the phone, linking triangles on his scratch pad, she said something about the curtains, about choosing them, and what she said was “It’s loads of fun.”
He did not use those words to describe his experience, ever.
Then she said, “Want to hear the baby coo? Listen.”
He heard something, it might have been what she wanted.
“Did you hear? Did you hear him coo? Now he’s not doing it.”
He drove out to the suburbs, followed the directions the woman he formerly loved had given him and he couldn’t believe how far it was and how many highways got involved. It was an immense plain out there, everything beige or gray, rectangles and horizontals, flat fallow fields. Gasoline signs jutted into the sky. He kept driving. He drove until he thought perhaps he should stop on these cloned roads, turn back, return without what he’d come for (her) and with what he’d meant to drop off (present: wrapped square in trunk, containing elementary puzzle). He drove until he wondered if someone had tossed her out here and left and she needed to be saved. And then he saw, pulling up (because he’d finally arrived), that this was serious business because how else could she have ended up on this obstacle-course board amid all the empty landscapes of one’s dreams?
He sat in his car at the end of the block. He did not want to go through with this.
Then the woman he loved was coming out of the house, a regular-sized baby in her arms, held awkwardly, looking exactly the same as she always had, exactly, coming over the lighted grass to greet the other guests just arriving, hadn’t seen him yet at the end of the block, sitting in the growing dark, low behind the wheel. Was it beautiful, that exact way she looked? Was it not beautiful? He couldn’t tell, he knew her so well, had such physical pain when he looked at her, he couldn’t tell what she looked like at all.
Witnesses: none. No one looked his way. Everyone looked at the bright figures on the lawn.
He drove right by.
Another part of their conversation on the phone went like this:
“I’m sorry about the way things turned out. I meant to tell you.”
“You did,” he said. “You did tell me. I got the card.”
“Card?”
�
�You sent me a card. An announcement.”
He stopped to get a sandwich. Had to. He’d eat and then go back not to claim her. He could not swallow this and the chunks of meat the office-supply-store manager would stab off the grill. The place he stopped was a bar near the entrance of the highway, the sort of place he’d avoided all his life, built of chrome or plastic, a glossy orange square they’d molded down so that it stood on its plot without tipping over like a tinker.
He went in.
There was a wedding party in there, in this sports place, and he sat down at the bar, ordered a veggie-snack.
The bride and one of the groomsmen came over and sat on one side of him, the bride beside him in her giant dress, which she moved with her arms like carrying laundry. “Look at those legs,” Davids heard her say to the groomsman. “You’ve been working out.” She reached out and touched the groomsman’s thigh.
Davids moved his food away from them and shifted on his stool.
“I’d like to feel those wrapped around my waist,” the bride said.
Davids waved for the check.
Then a man who had to be the groom came walking over in a slouch. “What the hell is going on here,” he said. “One hour into the thing and you’re flirting?”
Wait Till You See Me Dance Page 11