Traveling Light

by Thalasinos, Andrea

  Heavenly had warned against making snap decisions, but removing the ring wasn’t a decision; it was a breather. Still, guilt oozed through the cracks in Paula’s logic. She looked at the empty finger; the skin looked younger.

  This wasn’t about Roger. Why did it have to be “about” anything other than taking a long drive? Roger was the one who’d chosen to lock her out of the bedroom that first week, deciding not to share his bed or get help when she’d asked him to. She couldn’t sleep on that rose-colored mohair couch another night if her life depended on it.

  She’d warned him five years ago that her feelings were changing. “We need to go to a counselor,” she’d warned. But acknowledge and ignore—that was Roger’s strategy, thinking he could smile in that adorable way of his and pull his wife back whenever he wanted her. He’d tap her shoulder on late Sunday afternoons (after she’d already eaten too much ice cream) and invite her up to lie down with him on a space he’d cleared for lovemaking. She’d cringe, try to break down her defenses, conjure up a mystery man in a fantasy that would get her through however long it would take. “You’re so beautiful,” he’d say every time as if that were the only phrase he knew. But still, her heart rushing blindly with hope—he loves me. Even when it was more like masturbating on each other’s bodies, she’d stare at the plaster medallion on the ceiling rather than face the disintegration of their marriage.

  * * *

  Early on in their marriage when Roger had been at a particle physics conference in Frankfurt, she’d gotten a call from the Staten Island Police. A neighbor had lodged a complaint about shutters banging against a house after a windstorm. Paula had known that Roger owned investment property there but had never seen it. So she phoned Roger, who told her to call the property management company. She asked about a key. “They have one if they need to enter,” he said briskly, “But they won’t need to; it’s the outside shutters.”

  After a phone call, the company insisted on meeting her at the house where their representative would assess the damage. She could have picked it out even without an address. The downstairs curtains were drawn; towels were tacked over the upstairs windows. A new roof and gutters had been put on earlier that season after Roger had received a citation. From time to time he’d get notices from the authorities, neighbors fed up with the abandoned house that was an eyesore. This time it had been an easy fix. The company reattached the loosened shutter to satisfy the complaint from the neighbors, and as their truck pulled away, Paula had stood watching the house until a few minutes later, wondering what she was waiting for to happen.

  During the first weeks of their marriage Roger caught Paula “snooping” around the brownstone. She’d hoped to find something of his mother’s, since he spoke so highly of her. The mountains of his parents’ belongings seemed to be layered with antiques.

  She followed a “burrow” path into a side room and discovered a box containing delicately embroidered tablecloths and napkins. Sifting through the box, she pulled out an embroidered table runner; chilly puffs of mildew made her turn and cough. The linen had been marked with the tracings of mice teeth, and the runner fell open in her hands like a cut-out string of paper dolls. Elation turned to disappointment after she found that the whole box had been similarly chewed and stained with mouse urine.

  “What are you doing?” Roger had asked in a voice that startled her.

  “Oh.” She’d dropped the cloth and yanked out her hand, hopping back down onto the burrow path. She’d looked up at him and smiled, trying to regain her poise. “Just looking around. I live here now, remember?” she’d kidded, thinking humor might diffuse the strangeness. “Did your mother embroider these?”

  “Just leave it all,” he’d said. “I’m taking care of it.”

  She looked at the box. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to display some of your parents’ antiques?”

  But Roger didn’t answer. While he’d made strides, moving around boxes in those first few months, she often wondered where he’d put them. Nothing ever seemed to end up on the curb. The attic was locked. When she asked he’d say, “You don’t have to worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried.” She’d offer to help, but he’d refuse with a look that was both pained and fearful. Then after another breakdown, followed by weeks of him hiding in his darkened bedroom watching the science-fiction channel, the boxes slowly migrated back downstairs.

  “Give me a weekend and a Dumpster and I’ll clear this place out,” she’d shouted.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he’d yelled back, his voice trembling, his bottom chin quivering. That was the moment when she knew she’d pushed as far as she could push.

  * * *

  Coming up to one of the last exits for the Poconos, she thought back to her first marriage, at eighteen years old, to Joey, an ironworker. When Eleni had tried to bribe her into coming to work for the furrier, Paula instead went to work at Pet World, her dream job since second grade.

  She lost her virginity on her first date with Joey, a guy she’d met on the bus. The next week he proposed. Better take it, she’d thought at the time. No one else’ll want you now. Eleni had always been far more worried about what was between Paula’s legs than between her ears. It was an Island thing, remnants of a past Eleni had drummed into her daughter’s head since girlhood. Even the use of tampons was prohibited, as was bike riding, lest it make her a “bad” girl.

  Sex was love. Paula and Joey married within the month.

  The problem with Joey was that after the rings slipped on, the gloves came off. Unable to sustain an erection on their wedding night, he put his fist through the plasterboard above her head.

  “That’s okay; don’t worry about it,” she’d tried to console.

  “Shut up,” he’d yelled.

  “Why are you getting mad? It’ll be okay,” she cooed, only it seemed to make him even angrier. Too bad his bout with impotency hadn’t struck on the first date before all that cervix-banging sex.

  After five months of Joey hollering so close to her face she could smell what he’d eaten for dinner, Paula plotted her escape. Once he kicked in the bedroom door because his toast had gotten too dark. “How come you’re so fucking good at pissing me off?” It was news to her that she was good at anything.

  Waiting until Joey left for work one morning, she stuffed her things into a paper grocery bag, surrendering the thin gold wedding band on the night table, and left without leaving a note. Papers were filed. Eleni arranged for a Greek lawyer. “Be careful now,” Eleni had warned. “Men use divorced women.”

  Marriage number two at age twenty to Marco came and went just as quickly. He’d come into Pet World looking to buy an iguana, claiming to have been an experienced iguana owner. He’d wandered around the store talking about how much he loved animals. The way he’d pick up the hamsters and softly stroke them made him seem like such a gentle soul. A few days after his iguana purchase Marco came back, just to see her and visit the animals. Even Mr. Sanchez, the owner, nudged her. “He’s sweet on you,” he said, and his wife agreed.

  Within days Paula and Marco had taken several tumbles between the sheets, talking to each other in their own baby-talk sort of hamster language they’d invented, and they were quickly inseparable. When Marco proposed it surprised her, but his puppy-dog eyes won a “yes” out of her. Besides, Eleni’s voice of practicality echoed in Paula’s skull: “Better take it. Who wants a twenty-year-old divorcée? You might never get asked again.”

  But a week after the wedding, a very pregnant woman came into Pet World asking about food for iguanas. She tearfully explained how the love of her life had disappeared and left her with his pet iguana. “So what was the guy’s name?” Paula asked. “Marco,” the woman said.

  That evening Paula laid it all out before him. “I was gonna tell you.” He’d broken down and started to cry. She’d just stopped taking the pill that morning at his insistence and sat mortified. She’d run into the bathroom and swallowed one, half-coughing and ch
oking on it. “Don’t leave me,” he’d cried. “I love you.”

  She’d assured him and waited until he left for work the following day and then packed up her things. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Paula said in time with each yank of her T-shirt, bra and underpants from the dresser drawer he’d so graciously cleared. She set the gold band on his dresser next to the jar of quarters he’d collected, pocketing just enough for bus fare.

  She’d headed back to Eleni’s. Thank God she’d kept her job at Pet World despite Marco’s insistence that she quit to stay home. Sitting on the bus, she dug her fingernails into her forearm, leaving little half-moon-patterned bruises.

  After the second marriage fell apart, Heavenly called from the pay phone in her upstate college dorm. “Hey, kukla mou,” she sarcastically used Eleni’s nickname for Paula of “my little doll.” “Stop marrying every guy you fuck, okay? Break out of that old-world bullshit. Get a boyfriend.”

  Twenty and divorced twice. Paula was far too ashamed to date, finding ways of keeping relationships platonic. Instead, she turned her sights toward academia—the coldest, most unavailable suitor this side of the moon. Community College of New York, then CUNY, where she made dean’s list every semester, and then graduate school at Berkeley. She figured if she was in school she was safe. Academia asks no personal questions and is only too happy to suck the marrow out of all the little sublimators like her, hiding out.

  It took eight years for Paula to rack up as many degrees as institutionally possible at Berkeley and land an academic position at NYU. Each degree served as an evidentiary hearing about her self-worth, and the further she went in school, the more she felt exonerated. Maybe she wasn’t a loser. But Eleni, in her self-appointed role as one-woman Greek chorus, warned, “Stop with the education, already. Men don’t like too-smart women. Be smart, but not too smart.”

  Roger’s early criticisms (which he insisted were mere observations) were “you talk in paragraphs” and “you certainly do swear a lot.”

  “Does it bother you?” she’d asked, fully prepared to never utter “fuck” again.

  “I don’t know what I think about the swearing.” He’d tilted his head in a thoughtful way, mulling it over as she waited.

  As for her shameful marital past, as she called it, he’d not batted an eye. After a few dates of “really, really, really liking him” the whole confession came tumbling out in a dark restaurant ironically called The Monastery. After two glasses of wine and the sordid tales of Joey and Marco, Roger had sweetly touched her hand. “Consider them the warm-up act for me.”

  To a starving heart such words were narcotic. Some call it love, but acceptance is the most potent drug there is. It creates a loyalty that’s as blinding as it is liberating. Like March’s first bright, warm day after the dark introspection of winter, it’s an affirmation that indeed there is safe harbor and possibly, after all, even a God.

  After six months of dating, Roger took Paula to Gdańsk, the Polish city on the Baltic where his parents were born. And then he proposed. “My parents would have loved you as much as I do,” he’d declared in the shadows of the massive shipyards. He’d stroked her hair and fingered one of her curls. She’d shied away, aware of how the ocean air turned her hair into Brillo. “What, sweetie?” He’d laced his fingers between hers. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh,” she’d said in a worried tone, pulling on her coiling strands. “It’s just that my hair is so ugly right now.”

  Then he’d softly chided her and their bodies melted together to form a new synthesis, or what Roger had called the urge to merge. “Everything about you is beautiful—you are the most beautiful thing on earth.”

  She realized that he really meant it and for a second she could see herself as he did. Then he’d whisked her off to Brussels, the diamond capital of the world. He introduced her to his colleagues in the United States, France and England. His awkwardly large frame would curve and almost cup around her as if to give shelter. “This”—he’d pause—“is Paula,” a name his body language translated to mean “the most precious substance in the universe.”

  * * *

  Just outside of Toledo, Paula called it quits for the night and fell asleep quickly in a hotel room. She’d forgotten to wriggle under the coverlet or close the drapes. The morning sun woke her and the scent of bacon and toast lured her to the hotel lobby. She’d left Fotis up in the room. Hungry guests politely elbowed their way closer to heaps of scrambled eggs, bacon and sausages. A nearby basket of fruit looked as perfect as a still life. She pressed a fingernail into an apple’s red skin just to make sure it was real and then pocketed it for later.

  She loaded a paper plate with bacon, scrambled eggs and sausages. “Whoa ho, hope you left some for the rest of us,” a man with a Green Bay Packers jersey teased.

  After Fotis ate he and Paula spent half an hour walking down a dirt path through a little grove of trees behind the hotel. Soon she didn’t even hear the steady din of the interstate. Fotis paused to look up at the trees like he’d never seen so many packed together before.

  “Dhen birazi.” She gestured with her arm to follow. “Tha pao.”

  Littered along the path were crushed beer cans, a few amber beer bottles and an empty Doritos bag.

  Paula called Eleni after retrieving the message: “I’m your mother; call me.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “I still don’t understand why you’re driving all the way to Timbuktu,” her mother continued as if she’d been talking nonstop since their previous conversation.

  Paula strolled down the path as her mother continued. No “Hello”? No “How are you?” “You could’ve gone out to the Island, to the beach, if you wanted to take a break,” Eleni said. “It’s gorgeous out.”

  “It’s gorgeous here, too, Ma,” Paula countered as she watched Fotis sniff a Snickers wrapper.

  “Your husband called me twice from France,” Eleni said. “In ten years he doesn’t call me once, and now he’s called twice.”

  “Did you ask him what he wants?”

  “Of course not,” Eleni said in her scolding way, as if Paula were still thirteen. “He left messages saying it’s important, and he needs to talk to me.”

  “So answer it next time, see what he wants.” Paula shut her eyes, picturing Roger’s face.

  “I don’t wanna answer it,” her mother said. “It might be Stavraikis.” This was an elderly man who’d come over to watch TV with Eleni on weekday evenings. While she enjoyed his company at times, Stavraikis would often fall asleep almost immediately and snore so loudly that she’d have to turn the volume way up to hear anything else.

  “He wants his wife, is what he wants,” Paula’s mother said. “I want him to stop calling.”

  “So answer it; tell him to stop.”

  “I’m not gonna tell him that.” Eleni’s sheepish tone surprised Paula. She’d often thought Eleni was either afraid of or maybe in awe of Roger, the astrophysicist. “A Real Scientist,” Eleni would say, and raise her eyebrows. She knew there was something fishy about them as a couple; Eleni’s bird-like eyes saw everything.

  Paula’s preemptive Saturday afternoon visits to Queens always seemed to assuage Eleni’s curiosity. “You know I’ve never once tasted your cooking,” she would say with a sly and suspicious eye. Paula would take Eleni out for birthdays, Mother’s Days, buy her new purses, shoes, outfits for Christmas and Easter.

  “Sorry Roger can’t make it; he’s busy with work,” Paula would apologize.

  “Dhen birazi,” Eleni would say. “Husbands work. That’s what they do.”

  “Look, Ma,” Paula continued. “I’ll call from Chicago. I’ll be there sometime later today.”

  “Christos kai Panayia, Paula, Chicago?” Eleni said. Paula guessed her mother had crossed herself. “That’s so far.”

  “Ma, I told you. I’m driving to Bernie and Jeannine’s in Canada.”

  “Why Canada? It’s so far.” If you left New York you must be running from someone.<
br />
  Paula hated when her mother fretted. It stirred a deep sense of responsibility to protect the aging woman. “Mom, I’ve told you,” Paula sighed.

  “Hhhh. Canada?” Eleni asked. “What if something happens?”

  “To me?”

  “No, to me.”

  “Call Heavenly; call Stavraikis.”

  “But Stavraikis doesn’t always answer; he can’t hear good.”

  “So call nine-one-one, Ma, I don’t know.” She hadn’t thought to make arrangements for someone to check in on Eleni. “No, Paula, I haven’t died in my sleep,” Eleni would say as if her daughter’s calls were bothersome, but God help Paula if she forgot to call.

  “I was just in Montreal this past March for that conference. Remember? It’s the same thing.”

  “It’s not the same thing.” Eleni sounded more afraid than angry. “That’s work.”

  Paula had nothing to add.

  “I don’t like this, Paula, don’t like it one little bit.” Eleni’s mistrust was contagious. Fotis looked up at Paula from the base of a tree.

  “I didn’t like it yesterday when you told me about this cockamamie scheme and I like it even less today.”

  “There’s nothing cockamamie.” She almost added and I’m not doing anything wrong. “I have Theo’s dog with me.”

  “Uch ooo, Christos kai Panayia. That Theo and his dog.” Paula could picture her mother’s hand covering her face. They’d exhausted the topic of Theo’s nephew and the funeral by the time Paula made it to Ohio. “Why now go see this advisor?” Eleni grilled.

  “Bernie’s my old advisor from grad school,” she said. “The one you met in California with Jeannine, his wife. Remember you flew out?”

  “I know who he is; don’t talk to me like I’m senile.”