by Neil Hetzner
After dinner, after her coat was on, and after hugs and promises had been made, Nita agreed to take several flats of seeds home with her. The tyro gardener’s anxious questions were dismissed by Bett with a stiff-shouldered sweep of her arm.
“Just keep them warm and moist, they’ll be fine.”
As she drove north through a night so dark that the work of spring could not be seen, Nita, like some fretful puppy with a bone, gnawed at the same images over and over again. The power of attorney. An ivory-colored, clean-nailed hand turning the black knob on a silvery, stainless steel machine. A nest of glowworms writhing. Her father. Father and daughter, turncoats, holding hands and holding tight onto the railing of a small boat, holding out against the nausea as the boat rose and rose before dropping back under the swells of an oily green sea. The hurting hardness of a blunt-featured unexpectedly gentle man. Buried in the dark on the floor beside Nita, seeds’ hardnesses turning soft and doubling and doubling and doubling and doubling in exponential hope of breaking through to light.
Nita stopped at her office. At the reception desk, the black plastic message holder was stuffed with dozens of pieces of paper. She started to go through them, but after a few minutes she walked down the corridor to her unlighted office and dropped the unread messages onto her desk. She worried that the car might become too cold for the new growth she was transplanting to her home.
Chapter 25
Dilly let her head fall forward. The hot sting of the shower began to melt the knots in her neck muscles. Slowly her head dropped lower as muscles were stretched free from stress and the tightness from a day of yard work. Like a cat working itself against a chair rung, she twisted her spine to push her shoulder blades up under the scalding jet. After many minutes of being pummeled by spray she began the breast exam she had started to give herself during each shower. Dilly pushed against her pink sodden flesh with the flattened surface of her straightened fingers. She rubbed and patted and probed. She lifted each sac and rolled the soapy flesh between her inquisitive fingers. With her eyes squeezed tight, Dilly concentrated on seeing inside her skin to learn if there had been any betrayal in the last twenty-four hours.
After her shower was finished, Dilly stood in the fog of the bathroom doing things long absent from her nighttime ritual. She plucked three short brown hairs from the bridge of her nose. She rubbed a drop of cologne into each armpit. She toweled her short thick curls until they were dry. She took a fingertip of baby oil and rubbed it between her labia. After putting on her best nightgown and just before she left the room she rubbed and pinched her nipples until they were erect.
The light from the lamp on Bill’s nightstand was too low and too yellow to tell whether he did much more than glance at her.
“A little quiet’s nice, huh?”
“Mmmmmm.”
Bill dropped his head back toward the black binder that was open on his lap. Dilly sat down in front of her dressing table and began to brush her hair.
“Spring takes so much energy. Of all the seasons, I think it takes the most. What’s amazing is that every fall I always think that we’ve done a good job of putting the yard to bed and every spring I find a million things that need doing. The bittersweet terrifies me. We’re going to wake up one day and not be able to get out of the house. Like Briar Rose. Do you think we should have something done?”
Dilly’s inflection raised Bill’s head.
“What?”
“I’m babbling. You’re working and, as usual, I’m babbling.”
Bill used a hand holding a red pen to brush off her remarks.
“No. What’d you ask?”
“Are you worried about the bittersweet?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to lose some trees.”
“It’s not really that bad, is it?”
Dilly wanted to tell her husband to look up and look around. In the first years of their marriage Bill and Dilly had spent much of their free time planning and working together on home projects. But, as Bill advanced in his career, he tended to take more and more time for work away from the hours they had used to share.
This day, a late April Sunday, Bill had gone to the office early in the morning. Lunch was over before he had returned. In the afternoon—an afternoon of high floating clouds and zigzagging insects still drunk from a winter’s sleep—Bill had stayed seated before the computer. As Dilly raked the mocha icing of rotting autumn leaves from the dark brown dirt around the base of bushes, as she groaned to push filled wheelbarrows across the lumpy yard, as she lopped at dangling branches and unwove the web of bittersweet from its prey, she would look toward the window where Bill was working to see the submarine green of his pulsing screen. It seemed to Dilly that, unlike what was going on around her in the yard, that it had been much longer than a winter since Bill had surfaced from his self-containment.
Work, work, work.
Dilly was sure that Bill used it to insulate himself from the world around him. Golf was negotiable. Television and fishing, football and drinking, all of these things that men used to separate themselves from women were discussable. But, work was not. Work was inviolable. It shielded and protected and prevented. It gave Bill the separation that, she suspected, he wanted. It gave him the most selfish of rewards—distance within a family—while providing him with the most unselfish of excuses—the work was done for them.
Dilly, too, knew the righteous feeling of self-serving self-sacrifice. She was not so deluded that she couldn’t imagine Bill looking up from his screen and out the window and thinking the same thoughts of her. She knew she should use that ironic sharing to gentle her thoughts, but she chose not to. Instead, as she cut brush and hauled her loads to the midden hidden at the back of the yard, she used the similarity of their behaviors to try to become angry.
Bill was selfish. He was blind to the loneliness which overwhelmed her every day at the moment the house emptied. He chose to ignore her growing fear that her life’s ebbing had turned torrential. He was stoical against her inveigling they have a fourth child. He was becoming so cold and so hard that the brushings of each life against the other brought neither the warmth of love nor even the heat of anger. They had gone from the smooth exciting rubbings of new love to the often angry friction of raising a family to disconnection. Separation.
Dilly’s fierce brushing began to make her scalp hurt.
“How’s your work? Did you make some progress today?”
“Yes, I did. But I still have a long way to go.”
“What is it?”
“The environmental specs on the modular co-generation plants we want to sell to hospitals and small manufacturers.”
“Could that be big?”
“Very big. A lot of places could make money with this.”
“How’s that?”
“It depends on the business, but if there’s enough waste to burn they can end up with more electricity than they can use. They sell the overage to the utility. “
“What if the utilities don’t want to buy it?”
“They have to buy it. By law.”
“Really?”
When Bill looked at Dilly with the same look that he gave to Roger when Roger asked an inane question, she felt the same way she had on their early dates. She grew flustered. She needed to keep things moving smoothly.
“When do you need to have it done?”
“About two months ago. Everybody dogs it. Like they think time has an on/off switch that they can flip when they want. Then suddenly everybody is very alert because some vice president has gone crazy and left blood where there once was an engineer. It’s the same old problem. An engineer’s an engineer, but, if he’s any good, then, in their wisdom, they make him a project manager. But no one wants to remember that if the guy had had any people skills in the first place, he probably wouldn’t have become an engineer. Most engineers are the kind of guys that couldn’t get out on the dance floor in high school. Why would
anybody think that just because ten or fifteen years have gone by they would have learned how to dance? They take a good engineer and either make him a manager or push him into sales. But either way they never issue him any tools. No one ever wants to train anyone.”
Dilly had heard this speech of Bill’s many times before. It was delivered to family and in-laws at almost every holiday gathering. He almost always gave it on those occasions when they were invited to have dinner with people who weren’t engineers. And he frequently gave it to her and the kids at the kitchen table when he was feeling dissatisfied, which, lately, was often. Having heard it so many times, Dilly knew that Bill was on the verge of exploding in righteous anger over the difficulties he had had in getting the firm to pay for his MBA courses.
“They’ll train a guy in hydrostatics or circuitry or PV theory, but cut him loose when it comes to marketing or motivation.”
“But if you keep working the way you do, someday…”
Dilly read Bill’s look and corrected herself.
“…someday soon, you’ll be in a position to change that.”
Bill’s face was painted with the fierce disinterest of a young boy left unchosen for a schoolyard team. Dilly put her hairbrush down, inhaled deeply, held it and tried to will her breasts to rise and her nipples to harden.
“Do you want me to rub your neck?”
Bill was leery. Over the last months the most uncomfortable moments of the day had been those at bedtime. The tension of work, the after-images of too much sugar or caffeine, the well-worn, over-written, over-wrought palimpsests of parenthood, but most of all, the ever-present and unresolved issue of whether to have another child would be carried into their bedroom, and, unlike dirt and grease and plaque, those physical prices of a day, not be shed before they entered their bed. The herbal smell of smooth-oiled cheeks and the menthol sharpness of clean breath would be fouled by the untended accumulation of their thoughts.
There had been many nights when Bill had looked down at Dilly, flat on her back under the tautly tucked covers, and looked to the empty space on his side of the bed and wondered how there could possibly be enough room for his anger-swollen, regret-filled body. He would insinuate himself inside the tight seal of the covers and slide down along the edge of the mattress before lying rigid and afraid that at any moment all of these things, these remembered and unforgiven hurts and fears and slights, all of these cumbersome feelings, as large and as intractable as cheap foam bolsters, that all of this baggage that they had brought to what once had been their sanctuary, that all these things would break free, overwhelm and push him from their bed.
There also had been nights, rare nights, when there had been a lightning strike’s moment when he knew there must be some word, some small incantation, which if he could but say it would clear their bed of all else but an unencumbered, history-less, memory-less them. But, though recognizing the moment, he never was quite sure what the word was, nor its precise and correct pronunciation and, as a result, he chose to remain mute, to hold tight to his small space, to try to sleep his familiar, vulnerable vertiginous sleep.
Did he want his neck rubbed? What had Molly Bloom said through the rolling bass of Professor Mahaney’s voice in a small classroom almost twenty years ago? Yes and yes and yes and yes. Yes he wanted his neck rubbed and, yes, small warm kisses brushed onto his hair and, yes, a foal’s nip of lip along the tingling ridge of an ear. Yes, he wanted the weight of her wanting sitting heavy on his chest. Yes, he wanted the mass of her breasts swung over him, a double pendulum, slowly swinging in an endless time of their own making. Yes, he wanted the mindlessness of their early couplings when they still had had the wisdom to shuck off the day with the abandon with which they had shed their clothes. Yes, he wanted that naked warmth and wisdom back, but somehow he knew that he was no longer deft enough to strip himself of all the encumbrances. He could get undressed, but he was long past the point of getting naked for his mate.
“No, no thanks. That’s okay.”
As he said no Bill shook his head in harmony then let that movement segue into a rolling back and forth, a rotating of his tired head upon its stiffened neck.
Dilly drew close with her hands extended so that in her white gown she resembled a faith healer going down into her congregation.
“No. That’s okay.”
“Sssshhhh.”
In seconds her fingers found the knots of muscles and Dilly began the careful kneading that untied them. Later, in fake fever, she found another part which, with frantic kneading, she knotted into desire. After Bill had come inside her Dilly held her legs tight against one another until the bones on the inside of her knees grew sore. She held Bill’s seed as fiercely as a dog a rat. She held onto her duplicity as triumphantly as a rat his scrap. She lay awake breathing slowly, willing her egg down from its blood dark nest. Her shadowy smile grew as wide as a leer as she listened to the ragged breathing of the cuckolded man who had once been her husband before he had left her for his unending assignation with work and old age.
* * *
Bill Koster-Phelps awoke with a strong sense of unease. He wondered what catalytic process had occurred during sleep to change last night’s feeling of triumph and satiation into such a gnawing worry. Next to him, Dilly was breathing deeply. He realized how rare it was to see his wife’s face in repose. He almost always fell asleep while she continued to read, and it was unusual for him to find her in bed when he awoke. As Bill stared at the relaxed flesh of Dilly’s brow and the slackness of her mouth he recalled times from early in their marriage when he would awake to find her in fitful sleep after having spent part of the night sitting up to relieve an unborn’s crush upon her organs or to tend a squally baby. Back then he would stare at her in the early morning mustard glow of curtained sunlight. With his face half-buried in the warm yeasty dough of his pillow, his half-open eyes would trace the fleshy curves of her face. He would follow the swirl of bright down that began in front of her ears before spreading out along her broad cheeks. He would push his cheek deeper into the pillow so that he might look below her jaw line to the thickening of her neck. He would look at Dilly’s fleshy failings and try to note them with an engineer’s detachment, but on most of those mornings the facts, though noted, would mean nothing. Bill would stare at all the imperfect pieces of the human being asleep next to him and feel a singular sense of well-being. This was his wife. His mate. She who loved him. Mother of their children and nurturer of their love. His wife, his life.
As he stared down Bill wondered at the peacefulness of Dilly’s sleep. All of the turmoil of the last months—her dissatisfaction with an empty house, their arguments over another child, her worries about Bett, her anger about the war, their frequent go-nowhere discussions of money—had become gouged so deeply into her flesh that he had begun to notice the occasional fleck of pink make-up caught in the creases. For some mysterious reason, this morning her flesh bore no trace of the emotional erosion it had suffered. Her forehead was smooth; her eyebrows sat upon their ridges as relaxed as tawny cats draped on a warm porch rail. The long lines which had been cut deep at both sides of her mouth had been shortened and spackled. Bill wanted to credit his efforts in the previous night’s lovemaking with her transformation, but the engineer in him knew enough to be cautious in his claim. In the minutes that he stared at his deep-sleeping wife, Bill’s thoughts grew as taut as his body had been several hours before. Finally, with his own brow deeply creased, Bill eased himself from the bed. Twice during the few steps to the bathroom he turned to stare at his wife as sharply as a novice hiker at a snapping sound in a quiet woods.
During his shower, and while dressing and drinking coffee, and during his disjointed conversation with the whirlwind of his children and his late rising, unapologetic wife and during the drive to work and throughout the day as he studied blueprints and paged through government regulations, Bill’s brow frequently furrowed with the effort of playing and replaying the previous night’s and early morning
’s images. Late in the afternoon Bill took ten minutes to study the yellow pages. He made two calls. In the first he learned that only his signature was required on the consent form. In the second he made an appointment with a Dr. Osterin.
As he drove home Bill wondered whether he really had what it took to be a good manager. Had he been outplayed? The closer he got to his home the stronger grew his sense of unease. As he walked toward the back door he tried to look past the thickening evening shadows to see what awaited him. He guessed Dilly would continue her tenderness of the previous night. That would be a clue. Stepping onto the stoop he worried that his decision was tattooed upon his face. He tried to clear his mind of the phone calls so his face would look to be preoccupied with nothing more than work.
Coming inside, Bill thought the house smelled strange. The odor was vaguely familiar but not to be identified. Dilly heard his step as he entered the kitchen. She turned to show him the flesh of her full face and a quick arc of smile before turning back to whatever she was doing at the sink.
“Good day?”
“Busy.”
“Same here. Hungry?”
“Ummmm.”
“Not too long. Running a little late. Got going again in the yard and lost the time.”
With Dilly’s back to him Bill felt free to look around the kitchen to try to identify the source of the smell that continued to tease him.
“Where’re the kids?”
“Where’s Jimmy Hoffa? Spring just doesn’t turn a young man’s fancy”—she twisted her torso to find his eyes with her own—”it turns everyone crazy. It’s been a madhouse since they got home. Oh, the Dodger wants to play baseball.”