Alice shook out her hair and put on white-framed sunglasses. She looked fresh. “Whatever. I’m the retired one. I’ve got the obligations of a preschooler. Brad used to tell me how envious he was.”
Marissa tightened her grip on the wheel as she swung up the on-ramp to the westbound interstate, and said nothing until twenty miles later, when the next hamlet, Pine Oil, came and went. Then she asked what she should do with Brad’s suits.
“I gave my husband’s to Goodwill. It felt odd, but that’s what I did.”
Marissa nodded. “I was moving one of Brad’s this morning. I felt for him inside a sleeve. Isn’t that pathetic?”
Alice gave her a worried glance. “How far are we going?”
“Baton Rouge is only forty minutes farther. There’s a store in the new mall that carries really comfortable retro shoes, kind of like Peter Fox pumps.”
Alice remained silent, so Marissa drove on, reluctantly grateful for the company. Already she had noticed that Alice knew when and when not to talk.
But by the time she saw the light standards of the mall south of the interstate, she was seduced by the smooth current of traffic and remembered the snarled, glaring parking lots. She raced past the exit, the truck swinging around a cloverleaf like a bug caught in a whirlpool.
Alice glanced at her watch. “You’re kidnapping me.”
“I don’t know where I’m going,” she cried. “I thought I wanted some shoes.”
“It’s all right. Calm down. You know, they sell those same shoes at the big flea market down Airline Highway a few miles. Seconds, but you can’t tell.” She tilted her head and looked at Marissa. “Quarter-price, sometimes.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Well, we’ve got to go somewhere.”
On an overpass they rode above the boiling exhausts of a smoking tanker truck, and Marissa felt a quick lightness in her stomach, as though she were escaping all forty-six years of her life. She hoped that if someone curious to see what grief was like rang her doorbell tomorrow, no one would be there to answer.
She followed Alice’s directions. Five miles south of Baton Rouge, she was in a new country. “What say we stay out as long as we can stand it?”
Alice bent forward and studied her eyes a long moment. “You’re all right?”
“Yes.”
She folded her arms. “Well, no one’s exactly holding their breath for us to come home.”
Marissa considered the statement and then accelerated, glad she’d left her garage door wide, her wastebaskets, hose racks, and other plastic sins plain and bright for her neighbors to gape at in despair. The subdivision had so many rules, and Brad had followed every one, swept the pine straw off the roof, avoided putting up a Christmas decoration that was over forty-eight inches tall, bought only apple-green trash cans.
She stole a glance at Alice, whose pretty face was holding that unreadable stewardess expression she must have habitually turned on a cabin full of passengers intent on seeing in her features the meaning of the sudden plunge in altitude, the sickening lurch.
They came at last to the sprawling flea market, a series of long, open-sided sheds scintillating under the sun. The parking lot was a long plane of clamshells, and Marissa charged through its bleached light while collarless dogs swirled in the dust spooling behind the truck.
They stopped next to a dealer selling antiques, tools, and what appeared to be stolen highway signs. Right in front of them was a dented six-foot green panel proclaiming SHREVEPORT.
Alice gave out a short, bitter laugh and said, “I crashed there once.”
“What?”
“At the airport. One of my first flights ever. I was working for Mid-South Lines and we came down with no landing gear in the last DC-6 in commercial service anywhere.” She put a hand to her throat.
“Were you hurt?”
“It was a crash, Marissa. We skidded into a hangar, knocked the place down, and blew up. The blast killed the copilot and ten passengers. Hell yes I was hurt. My pelvis was crushed and everything inside as well.”
Marissa put the truck in park and stared at the road sign. “My God, how did you keep flying after that?”
Alice looked her in the eye. “The pilot and I were in the same little hospital for a month, and that’s the man I married. He said there was no way one of us would ever get killed in a plane crash. It would be celestial double jeopardy. That’s what he said. It was like we were insured against disaster.” She popped her door open. “He was a super guy but not much of a fortune-teller.”
“I’m sorry I never knew your husband.” She wondered if he and Brad would have become friends, would have talked about cars and planes, gone swimming. “How long has it been since you lost him?”
“Twenty years, nine months.” Alice stood in the clamshells and straightened her sundress. “Two weeks, two days.” She looked at her watch and said quietly, “Fourteen hours, fifteen minutes, and nine seconds.”
—
They found that every flat space was covered with old dresses, new wrenches, Navaho blankets, guitars, stuffed elk heads, gold chains, perfumes, rings, incense, dead batteries, and live ducks.
“This is some place,” Alice said. “These pickers come from as far away as Colorado. Let’s start walking. The shoe man is around here somewhere.”
“I don’t know. It’s pretty hot.” Marissa put a hand up to shade her eyes.
Alice tugged at her arm and pointed. “Those shoes are way at the end of this shed, I think. I see something down at the other end I want to check out first. I’ll catch up with you.” They walked in opposite directions, Marissa through rafts of shotguns, hand tools, shiny table lamps, wagon wheels, truck fenders, and corroded oscillating fans. Alice limped toward bright racks of formal clothing, price tags spinning from sleeves in the hot wind like tethered butterflies.
Marissa approached a table and picked up a toy metal sedan and had the momentary urge to call her husband about it. Then she put it down, wondering, if he were still alive and she’d bought this for him, would it have carried any meaning for him? Under the table, listing on an army blanket, a leprous metal clock shaped like a horse looked up at her with coppery eyes, and she remembered an identical monstrosity on her dead uncle’s mantel along with other glinting knickknacks—a brass paperweight shaped like the Empire State Building, a tiny ceramic hula girl with a real grass skirt. He’d offered it to her when she was six or seven, but Marissa had just shrugged, looked blankly at him, and said no thank you. She couldn’t remember when he’d died. George was his name, and his trinkets were sold to the four winds. She suddenly felt that the old man was like one of her favorite books that her mother had thrown away. She missed it years later with a sense of violation, of theft. She walked on, considering the value of keeping objects that belonged to dead people. Maybe some were links to the self, keeping the former owners, who’d formed her in small ways and large, tacked onto her history. She looked ahead at the many thousands of orphaned items. “Oh, boy,” she sighed.
She searched her way down to a table of stout, elegant shoes, new stock, still in original boxes. They were pliant yet substantial in her hands, so she slipped on a pair of navy-and-cream spectator pumps and knew at once that she could stand for days in the things, could float down the long halls of the office. She paid for the shoes and stepped out into a grassy field, the pumps in a box under her arm, and spotted a Gibson guitar exactly like the one Brad kept in the attic and, farther on, a Communion dress like her grandmother’s, an Allis-Chalmers tractor like her grandfather’s. She kept walking through disparate items large and small washed up into the sprawling market from estate sales and attic cleanings all over America, a tide of obsolete loot showing the conscious choices of dead people, their green glass teacups, black ceramic panthers, bulbous aluminum coffeemakers, and inlaid wooden clocks, all their treasures and tastes dragged down to Louisiana and spread out like a big incoherent novel that mocked what people both cherished and needed. Marissa
walked on through so much merchandise she became lost and had to stop at a booth selling neckties to ask directions.
Heading back to her truck she saw, through the abraded Lexan of a shallow display case, a pair of metal flight attendant’s wings for the airline Alice had worked for, probably the type she wore when she first took to the sky. They were dusty and tagged fifty cents. Maybe, she thought, if she gave them to Alice she’d lay off about the garage door. Maybe, like that poem she’d written, the wings might bring out something new in herself as well. She might even be able to talk more easily to Alice. Find out why she’d watched Brad all the time. What she saw in him. Go over for coffee and spend some of her new free time. She purchased the silvery wings and looked around, almost embarrassed. Then she began to feel very tired, very aware of how big the flea market was and how exciting all these treasures would have been to that tinkering ghost in her attic.
She spotted Alice a hundred yards away and began walking toward her, sweating in the heat. Alice had several bags at her feet and was turning something over in her hands. Marissa strained to see what it was as she replaced it on the counter and then picked it up again, putting her finger on it as though testing an apparatus. From fifty feet away Marissa saw it was a yellow toy, a rusted metal truck.
—
At two o’clock they got back on the interstate, and Baton Rouge began shrinking in the truck’s oversized rearview mirrors like something overcooked. Marissa had a faint headache and her stomach was growling. Alice was quiet, her eyes narrowed as though she was worn out by all the shopping. At Denham Springs they stopped at a restaurant and to escape the crowd sat outside despite the wind and western flash of heat. They ordered sandwiches and watched the interstate traffic.
Alice crossed her legs slowly and bent down to rub her right calf. “What I couldn’t believe is that it was Brad’s heart that gave out. He always outswam me down at the club.”
Marissa glanced at her sharply, recalling that she was a member of the subdivision’s country club, a posh and leisure-wracked place she had been to only twice. The slow, liquored civility of the club’s patrons made her feel ill. “Maybe it was the stress. After the truck plant closed, he wasn’t the same. We had to cut back. He was worried about his retirement.” She studied her companion’s lotioned skin, her cornsilk hair. “You spend a lot of time on your hair, don’t you?”
“At my age most of my money goes for maintenance. I need more upkeep than my house does.”
“I see you spend a lot on your yard. Your azaleas, your fence. Do you know how many times you’ve painted that fence?”
Alice shrugged. “Got to keep up with the neighbors.”
Marissa looked away. “Yeah. Brad was a slave to our yard.”
“He enjoyed it.”
“He enjoyed everything. Like swimming with the neighbors.” The comment was nearly an accusation. She wondered how Alice had looked, scissoring through the country club’s jeweled waters. She shifted in her chair, looked down at her plain white walking shoes, and balled up her napkin in a fist. “With Brad I could be young, because, you know, I was young with him once. I don’t feel that way today.”
The cloth awning popped in the breeze, and a teenage waitress lolled out and freshened their drinks. Alice took a swallow, then stared at the glass. “I’m sorry about your losing him. At least you had a good husband a lot longer than I did.”
The statement surprised and embarrassed her. Marissa turned and pretended to look into the restaurant. “You ran into him at the club a lot?”
“He’d come in all by himself and look for someone to pace him in the pool.”
Marissa felt a subtle light-headedness, a sensation she’d known as a predecessor to panic. “I never learned to swim. The water always went up my nose.”
“Sometimes he told me you were too tired to even talk to him at night when you got home from work. That you didn’t want to learn to play golf.”
Marissa suddenly imagined Alice in a one-piece swimsuit, springing out of the pool, a running gloss on her long body, and she turned to her with her face’s question.
When Alice saw that look, her own expression changed, as though a lightning bolt had just zinged past her plane’s windows. “The two of us would swim a couple laps, until my foot started hurting, and he’d keep going for maybe an hour.”
“I knew he played golf with you a few times, in a group,” Marissa said, still focused on Alice, who was, she remembered, still a stranger to her.
“I guess you could say we were pals,” Alice said, her voice growing smaller as though she was biting the inside of her cheek.
“Pals,” Marissa repeated, drawing the word out. “Pals and what else?” she asked rudely.
Alice straightened up in her chair. “Well, you never did a damn thing with him. Every afternoon that you worked late, he’d come back from his job and roam around the neighborhood like a stray dog, then settle in at his workbench. And on Saturdays at the club, when most of the men were golfing or gambling in the bar, he exercised. Killing time, he called it.”
Marissa’s face flushed and she put both feet on the concrete. “Look, maybe I spent too much time with the accounts now and then,” she said, “but the money I brought home made it easier for him to buy his junky little toys.” She looked into Alice’s eyes, trying to read some signal of how things really were. “Maybe sometimes he wasn’t so good for me as well.”
Alice tried to show nothing, then said, “He was better to you than you thought he was.”
At that moment, the waitress came out, took one glance at the two of them, and said, “Jeez, is it that hot out here?”
—
On I-12 East, she began burning up the lanes. Outside of Walker, a state patrolman chased her down and wrote her a ticket, which she took with a nod, putting only one overpass between her truck and his radar before pushing her speed back over ninety. She was as angry as she’d ever been, at losing her husband, at wasting time on this trip, but most of all at Alice. For saying what she’d said. It was a half hour before she could stand to ask, “How the hell well did you know Brad?”
Alice turned in her seat. “Why are you upset?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because I don’t know you, and Brad does. Did.” She made a face. “It’s my fault, I know. I haven’t been much of a neighbor, but my God, you’ve done all these things with him, and I’ve hardly looked at you all these years.”
“Marissa, nothing went on between us, if that’s what you’re worrying about.” Alice sounded disappointed, as if the whole day had boiled down to a single cliché.
Marissa was upset that she was jealous. As the miles ticked by, she replayed in her mind every stewardess joke she could remember, but nothing gave her the least relief. At last she pulled into the subdivision and drove straight into her open garage. Alice gathered her purchases and crossed the street without a word, her back bent over from the ride. Marissa did not close the garage door.
Later that night she picked up a framed photograph of Brad, looked carefully at his smirk, and understood there were many things she didn’t know. She frowned at him and ran her fingertips over the glass, something she imagined widows do all the time, hoping to read the Braille of loss. But the image gave her no signals, and then she had the startling vision of the frame forty years in the future, sitting on a dusty table at a roadside flea market a thousand miles away, a young housewife buying it for a quarter and discarding the stranger inside. She slammed the picture down on her dresser. “Aw, crap,” she said. “It’s all crap if you don’t know anything about it.”
—
The next morning, the bedside phone rang and it was Alice. “I can imagine what you’re going through,” she said. “How’re you making out, anyway?”
“I am making out just fine,” she snapped. “How are you making out?”
“Listen, I want you to come over right now.”
In the dresser mirror, Marissa watched the straight line of her mouth. “Why don’
t we just leave things as they are?”
“In about fifteen minutes?”
“No.”
There was a sigh on the line. “You’ve never been over here. If you don’t come I’ll go over there and drag you kicking and screaming.”
She let her head fall back and looked at the ceiling, growing angry again. “Oh, all right, already.”
“And Marissa, you must’ve been really tired when we got back yesterday, because you forgot to close the garage door.”
She was speechless, and for an instant wanted to scream bitch and insensitive, soulless tramp, but then realized. Alice was making a joke. “Damn it, for a minute I thought you were serious. I didn’t know how to take you.”
“You’ve got a problem like that,” she said, hanging up.
She kicked around the bedroom getting ready, throwing her nightgown at the dresser, brushing her short hair straight back as though trying to tear it out. She left the house through the garage, crossed the street, and went into Alice’s kitchen without knocking. The room was luminous, many windows laden with light.
Alice came in looking freshly showered, her legs flashing tan below her short bathrobe. Her smile was nervous, a little forced. Marissa took a chair at the breakfast table but couldn’t keep her eyes off her, wondering what Brad had thought of all this skin and movement.
Finally, Alice sat down and put a hand on the table, palm up. “You doing okay, sweetie?”
She sounded as if she were dealing with an airsick passenger, and Marissa said, quietly, “No, I am not okay.”
Alice pulled back her hand. “I don’t know what to say to make you feel any better. But I want you to look across the street through my windows.”
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