Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  She made herself say: “I love you.” Then she said: “Ned.”

  It was true that she loved him, she thought. And she did appreciate Ned asking the way he had. The impossibly vague it. She considered its imprecision appropriate. How could one better capture the cloudy concept of “making a life together”? It was a fine word. It also allowed her to rationalize, while she kept her breaths shallow and her eyes on the dancing man, that Ned might have been talking about going somewhere for the weekend, or trying the new Indian restaurant on Vine.

  “I’m just talking,” Marlene said, rolling the top of her pretzel bag closed with a clip she kept in her lunch pack. “But I want you to do what’s right for you. You’re past thirty, and this guy’s been hanging around for half your life. What the hell are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Marlene sighed. “Did he press you to say anything else?”

  “He just said I should think about it.” Knox tried, unsuccessfully, to picture something other than Ned’s face just after he said this. He had been rubbing at his glasses with the corner of their picnic blanket, his eyes cast down, when his mouth flashed into a little smile. He had looked apologetic, as if he were telling the glasses to be patient, that in another moment they would be clean.

  Knox concentrated on Brad Toffey as he stood and began swinging his arms in wide circles. Round, round, round, faster and faster. She allowed herself to be lulled into imagining that it didn’t matter what she did, really, and wasn’t this the chief beauty of her life? It traveled in concentric circles around her, like orbiting matter, and her job was to stay fixed and let that happen. Look at Marlene—did she really care what Knox’s reply to anybody’s proposal might be? She was zipping the pretzel bag into her lunch pack, along with her balled sandwich wrapper and empty Diet Coke can. In thirty seconds she would be smacking a Winston out of the pack she kept in her skirt pocket, offering Knox a cigarette of her own, which Knox would refuse. The information they traded with each other was immaterial compared with the fact that they were simply placed in proximity to each other in the universe and found the proximity pleasant. Marlene’s husband’s colon cancer scare last year could have been a heart murmur; Knox could be holding forth on the fallout of a one-night stand or the progress of a lesbian courtship right now, instead of on Ned Bale’s ongoing … pursuit of her. The events she hauled in from the outside like lunch could be real or not real; what was important was the cadence, not the content, of the babble between them. Actually, this wasn’t altogether true—Knox had risen and fallen according to the daily news of Jimmy’s recovery from surgery and felt deliriously buoyant when Marlene told her the tumor was officially benign. She hoarded specific details about Marlene’s life: the hell-raising, punked-out daughter on scholarship at Wake Forest, the cardinal at her kitchen window that Marlene believed was an emissary from her dead Papaw. It was just that Knox sensed she could be whoever she wanted to be, expend as much or as little effort as she chose, and their break time companionship would not oxidize with untruth or neglect. It would simply … remain.

  “Did Brad take his medication this morning?” Marlene asked. She was peering out the window. Outside, Brad lay on his back in the bleached grass, bicycling his slender legs at the sky.

  “He did,” Knox said. “He’s just being Brad, I guess.”

  “I don’t know how he moves in this heat.” Marlene looked at her. “You want a cigarette?”

  “No thanks, Mar.”

  “Well. I guess I’ll call everybody in,” Marlene said, fiddling with the matchbook in her palm. “Unless you want to give me any more gory details.”

  Knox did want to. She wanted to tell Marlene about the dancer, how she had seen something magnificent in the way he pounded on the board with his slight feet, their tops corded with tendons and flashing pale, even in the darkness—and in the way he had stood between acts, looking wildly expectant, one hand pressing at the small of his thin back, two fingers of the other hand thrust between his lips. He’d blown a wolf whistle that knifed the air so cleanly, without reverberation, like a child’s scream. She wanted to tell her about driving home with Ned, how they had talked and laughed together about the usual nothings, and how, once he’d parked his truck, Knox had entered his house without asking and taken the toothbrush she always used out of the bathroom cabinet and begun to brush her teeth with it when Ned came into the bathroom and put his arms around her waist and pulled her backward against him, more roughly than he might have on another night; but she didn’t comment, only swallowed the bits of foam and water in her mouth and let him turn her to face him, let him pull her shirt over her head and scratch her breasts with the stubble on his cheeks and chin as he sank lower until his tongue was circling one of her nipples, then the other. How she watched him work from above for a moment, and ran her fingers through his hair, making little tents with it, until Ned pulled her onto her knees and she knelt, facing him, while he unbuttoned her shorts with such concentration that Knox wondered if he might be deliberately avoiding her gaze. How she placed her hands in his hair again and felt the smooth knobs that his skull made behind his ears, and then moved her hands onto the back of his neck and guided his head toward hers, so that they were both closer together and blurred to each other. That had seemed a kindness, to let herself be blurred.

  But there was no way to tell Marlene these things. Knox pushed up from her chair now, said, “I’ll call them in, you just enjoy your smoke,” and leaned out the lunchroom door to yell “Time for class!” into the heat, so loudly that it startled her.

  KNOX ROSE most mornings at 7:00 a.m., made coffee, and took it with her onto the porch of her cabin, careful to tie her robe tight around her because of the number of farmworkers who were always around. She had to duck a little through her front door; time had made her tall, with a tendency to pull her thin shoulders forward, so that even she was tempted to yank them back when she passed her own reflection. She was too large, really, for her house, which had been a sharecropper’s cabin during the days the farm was used for hemp and tobacco, and so had to move carefully in every room but the double-height living room, crouching low when she climbed down from her sleeping loft so as not to trip herself on her own, steep staircase.

  On the porch, Knox would sit for a few minutes, usually staring out at the pond that her cabin overlooked. She would sip her coffee and nod hello at the swan that blew itself across the mottled surface of the water. The swan had been a gift to her parents from a local client with a mind for the picturesque; but it had been mean from the first, even more so after its mate had stumbled, sick, into the next field two winters ago and been kicked at and trampled by a spooked horse. Knox had tried to mourn along with the survivor—swans mated for life, she knew—but it took to croaking at her in staccato bursts every time she looked at it sideways. It would scream and lift its outrageous wings for emphasis, so that all the exposed water seemed white with their reflection, and Knox had to force herself to sit calmly until the ritual was done and the swan moved away, its webs bright in the murk, scissoring.

  When the last dregs of coffee had gone cold in her cup she dressed and drove the twelve miles or so into town, where she parked at the literacy center. During the school year, Knox worked with people of all ages who were learning to read; in the summers, she taught dyslexic children, many of whom commuted from other counties and boarded during the week in a small dormitory down the block. She spent the morning in tutoring sessions, rubbing the backs of T-shirts and repeating sounds:

  “Guh, guh, guh.”

  “Huh, huh, huh.”

  Her students rubbed block letters and repeated after her, tracing a G, an H, that Marlene had covered in sandpaper, hoping to make the tactile memory of it more vivid. They tried to distract her.

  “I totaled my four-wheeler so bad this weekend.”

  “You did?” Knox would say. “Guh, guh, guh.”

  “Your hair looks good today, Miz Bolling.”

  �
��Thank you, Brooke. After me—huh, huh, huh.”

  She worked through lunch, serving the potato salad family style at her assigned cafeteria table. She worked until her break time with Marlene, and then headed back into the bald fluorescence of her classroom, where she worked with the middle school and olders for the rest of the afternoon. She moved from desk to desk as the students labored through movie reviews, descriptions of their houses, whatever pieces of paragraph Knox could convince them to devote their attention to long enough to keep composing sentences, forming words. Words looked warped to them; letters misbehaved on the page. Even spoken sentences could reconstitute themselves in midair and be rendered nonsensical for the ones with auditory problems, so Knox often found herself beginning again with an explanation or command. She guided each of them toward the letter table when they needed to take a break from their compositions to reestablish the curvature and sound of one of the ABC’s, make their pencils push through a letter as if for the first time.

  At four o’clock or so, Knox would close the door of her classroom behind her and head home. She took the rural route home instead of the highway. This tacked an extra twenty minutes onto her drive, but she preferred to avoid the subdivisions and access roads that were lapping up against the town boundary like so much dirty water. The route she took soothed her. She drove through the corridors near the city center that delineated the older, more established neighborhoods, then past the college campus, the modest rows of houses where groups of students—she among them, once—clustered, marking their presence with mismatched porch furniture, too many cars in the stunted drives. She passed Rupp Arena, the looming Baptist church, the courthouse, and the handful of high-rises and shopping courts that made up the haphazard and dying downtown, then sped over the viaduct and into the open country that she recognized as much by feel as by sight. Knox could remember lying on the backseat of their mother’s car, Charlotte beside her, and guessing where they were by the sensation of the road as it curved and dipped, and the blur of treetops she could just make out through the top of the open car window. “We’re at Middlebrook Farm now,” Knox would say, and Charlotte would sit up and look, say, “You’re right!” her dark hair lifting in the breeze. Then she’d lie back down, cover Knox’s face with her hands, count to twenty. “Now where are we, Knoxie?” How sweet it was to answer “Train tracks, coming up,” without thinking, then bump over them while her sister laughed, bracing herself against the jolts the worn shocks of her mother’s car couldn’t quite absorb.

  The road ran east to west. Knox often had to flip the sun visor down on her drive home, but in the warm weather she liked driving into the sinking light, getting dazed by it. The ripe yellow-green of the fields in late afternoon could make her almost dizzy with pleasure. She sped toward the stud division of her parents’ farm, where Ned supervised the days and breeding schedules of the fourteen stallions, and on those days when she felt like it, or when she and Ned had plans for supper, she turned into that drive and walked down the pathway that ran from the farm office to the stallion barn. She might find Ned in the breeding shed, shouldering with all his weight into the side of a mounted stallion, trying to keep him on balance and unhurt until he’d had a successful cover. The grooms would be helping him, four or five men circling and supporting two tons of quivering, copulating horseflesh, calling “Whup,” “Steady,” “All right,” for the few minutes it took. Or she might find Ned in the little room off the shed, equipped as it was with microscopes for checking sperm motility and with video machines for going over the breeding tapes made for shareholders and the owners of the mares that had been vanned in from other farms. In the anteroom, with its plastic windows that looked onto the padded ring where Danny Boy or Banjo Man had met his mare, Ned would stare at one of the two television monitors, a petri dish full of the day’s sample having been slid into place on the microscope tray. Above him, on a screen, pale villi undulated against a gray ground, making Knox think each time, That is what white noise would look like, if white noise were visible.

  When he wasn’t supervising a breeding, Ned might be giving a tour, leading a curious couple who’d stopped in on a cross-country driving trip from stall to stall in the stallion barn, recounting the racing careers of each of his charges, his hands deep in the pockets of the loose khakis he always wore. When he took his right hand out to adjust the bill of his cap or tug on a bridle to get one of the stallions to raise his head from the feed bucket for a snapshot, one of the tourists might ask before they thought: What happened? What happened to your hand? Knox had heard this question get asked once, having left her car to idle in the drive and run up to the barn with a quick request or bit of news, she couldn’t remember which. She’d hung back in the barn’s entrance, her hip flush against the fieldstone that curved up toward the central cupola, and waited for Ned to come clean the way he did for the foreign exchanges down at the Rosebud when they got curious after a few beers. Three years had passed since Dynamite, now dead, possessed of a wide cruel streak unusual even in a top stallion, had bitten Ned’s right index finger off at the top knuckle and spat the tip into the sawdust they used to soften the floor of the breeding shed. One of the grooms had hustled the horse back into his stall while the other two ran to her father’s office for help. Her father had called 911, then thought better of waiting for an ambulance and gone for Ned with the idea of getting him in his car and driving him to the closest hospital. He’d found Ned dead quiet, standing in the middle of the shed, squeezing his right hand with his left. There was blood, but not as much blood as you might have expected, her father had said. He’d asked Ned where the piece of finger was, and Ned told him, “Here. In my pocket.”

  At the hospital, they’d offered to helicopter in a hand surgeon from Louisville. He could be there well within the hour, which was plenty of time. Knox’s father was relieved; he put his arm around Ned’s shoulders and said something like, Let’s sit down here to wait. It won’t be long.

  But Ned just looked at him, pale, and shrugged against the pressure of her father’s arm. He kept gripping at the towel that was wrapped around his closed fist, said, I don’t see why I have to wait, let’s get this over with now, let’s do it. Her father protested, according to both of them, that Ned had to hang on until the surgeon got there. There was nothing to do but sit, and he’d find someone to give Ned some more painkillers until it was time to prep him, which would be in just a minute. The bit of finger had been taken by a nurse who had met them at the doors to the hospital—put, everyone assumed, on ice. Her father talked sense to Ned until Ned told him, in a harsh voice her father had never heard him use, I don’t need it, Ben. I can live without it. And when her father had creased his eyes in a show of patience and opened his mouth, Ned had said, Get off me, Ben, I’m in too much pain.

  That had done it, Ned said. His head was in her lap when he finally told her the story himself. Knox watched his face redden and his mouth twitch into his sorry, half-formed smile as he spoke of pushing her father away. Her father had promoted him to stallion manager when he was only twenty-two. He had paid for Ned’s first car and cosigned for the Lexington apartment that Ned’s mother still lived in.

  It was the shock, Knoxie, he said. All I could think was I wanted to get home. I was embarrassed. That horse had bullied me.

  I know, Knox said. She tried to imagine how Dynamite had gotten enough leverage to rip the flesh off at the knuckle. She wanted to ask about that, to pull Ned away from himself and back into a recounting of the action, the quick yank of the stallion’s head. Embarrassed—she had felt embarrassed, too, when Ned grazed her cheek for the first time with the bandaged place, and she had barely been able to keep herself from jumping.

  I could have waited, Ned went on, but I just yelled for them to stitch me up, and then your dad drove me home. I am one idiotic fuck, Ugly.

  He was trying to laugh, which made Knox look away. You’re not, she said, before shaming herself into looking back. She didn’t want him to laugh jus
t then, when he didn’t mean it. It had been too late to do anything about his finger by the next morning, when her father called her, assuming that Ned had stayed over when he hadn’t answered the phone at his own house. “I thought for sure he’d be with you,” her father had said, forcing Knox to ask what had happened. She drove to Ned’s and found him asleep on the couch, still in yesterday’s clothes. When she woke him, he looked at her in fear, as if he knew that she would be angry with him for his foolishness and regret.

  But what he told the nosy tourist in the barn that day, the day Knox came upon him with a group and decided to watch him from the threshold, was: “You know, my girlfriend shot it off. She hated for me to point out better-looking women.” He was moving as he spoke, pulling a brass rod out of its latch and sliding a stall door smoothly open to reveal the stallion inside. His voice was sure and easy.

  After a second, people began to laugh. Knox could hear release in the laughter, which lasted just a beat too long: the young man hadn’t felt the need to satisfy their curiosity with something true, thank God. Knox zeroed in on a guy in maroon University of Alabama shorts and a silvery brush cut as he clasped his wife closer and nodded with exaggerated vigor into her face. She grinned up at him, nodding back. Marlene probably wouldn’t appreciate the fact that Knox had found this funny. It had been all she could do at the time not to walk up to Ned and grip him in a half nelson, just to give the people their money’s worth. Play the pussy whip, the ball breaker—it would be easy. She could improvise her indignation, would prefer some light fakery to the reality of Ned’s need for her, his sad, sweaty head in her lap. Other women seemed to crave weakness in their men—or at least frequent displays of vulnerability. Charlotte had seemed to, for some unknown reason, in her own husband, who trailed her like a puppy, Knox thought. But Knox craved moments like these, when Ned, or her father, held people in the thrall of a joke or gesture and kept the world in love with them and their maleness. She didn’t know why. In the end, she had decided to stay hidden, and made her way to the little shaded parking lot behind the farm office without letting Ned see her. She had been glad for him that day, in a way she hadn’t, not really, when he had finally steeled himself to accept sympathy and free Guinness from the grooms at the Rosebud Bar.