Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041)

by Gonzales, Manuel

  What about spooking my boy? I wanted to say, but instead I just took Victor from him and sat him in my lap and tried again to calm him down, and then he must have seen Ralph’s unicorn because all of a sudden he became quiet and still, and all three of us sat there looking at it.

  After he first told me it was a unicorn, and after I got over the initial shock of the thing, and when I was still just playing along, I asked him, “Does it have a name?” ignoring for the moment the unreality of the thing he was showing me, or, rather, the unreality of his belief in it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The Chinaman told me her name was Fable, but that name’s for crap if you ask me. So I’m thinking of changing it to Sabre Bitch,” and then he laughed, and then, slightly more seriously, he said, “Or maybe just Sabre, you know, ’cause of the kids.”

  Then he pulled up a canvas bag, like a bag you might see in a cartoon expecting it to be full of oats or something, and he opened it and started rooting around in it with a scoop. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he needed to feed it soon, and I asked him what you were supposed to feed a thing like this, and he told me fairy dust, and I laughed and he said, “That’s no joke.” Then he opened the bag wide and showed me the fine, phosphorescent powder inside it. “The Chinaman threw it in as part of the package.”

  “Fairy dust,” I said, my skepticism not even thinly veiled. “It looks like play sand you can buy at Walmart.” Then I spat on the ground and said, “Fairy dust” again.

  Ralph laughed a nervous, unfamiliar laugh. “That’s what I thought, too, so I told him no thanks,” Ralph said. “But then he grabbed my arm, grabbed me by the wrist, and he shook his head real serious, and I asked, ‘What is it?’ And I don’t know, he could’ve been lying, but. You know what he said?” I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “I shit you not, he told me it was ground-up fairies, and that I had to feed the unicorn half a cup of this stuff four times a day.” He laughed that nervous laugh again. I scoffed. “That’s what he told me, Mano. And I believe him.”

  I looked inside the bag again, trying to picture that fine powder as something other than pink and blue play sand. “How do you feed it this crap, anyway?” I asked.

  “You mix it,” he said. “With water or whiskey or beer, but that shit will get expensive, so I figure water will do.”

  That was this morning, and something in the way he sat there in his chair gazing at the unicorn made me think something subtle had changed, and when I asked him how Sabre Bitch was doing, he snapped at me. “Watch your language,” he said, and I said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” and then I stopped, and then I said, “Sure thing, Ralph, won’t happen again,” feeling contrite and like I needed to apologize some more, though I couldn’t have said why.

  I dipped my hand into the cooler and pulled out an empty can and crushed it and then said, “Jesus, man, it’s not even one.”

  He looked at me and then at what was in my hand and then he said, “Not me. For her. She got hungry, so I mixed her up something to eat.”

  “What happened to water?”

  “She didn’t like it with water, so I mixed some of the beer in there, too.”

  And then we didn’t say much else to each other, and we sat there looking at his unicorn until Melissa came home and started hollering at Ralph because he had apparently forgotten to pick the kids up from her mother’s, and then, distractedly, he said, “Hey, man, I have to go, okay? I’ll see you later,” and then he stood up and he looked down at me and Victor, who was still quiet in my lap, who had been there so quiet and so still for so long that in retrospect I should have been worried about him, about what might have come over him, and Ralph waited until, grudgingly, I stood up, too, and then placed Victor back in his stroller, and he stood there, Ralph did, watching us until we were out of sight and almost halfway home.

  “It’s not real,” Sheila said as she stood pressed up to the kitchen counter. She was cutting up a cucumber, cutting one slice at a time, sprinkling that slice with salt, and then eating it. Watching her, I felt impatient, like I should grab the knife and cut the whole cucumber and put it all on a plate and set her down somewhere so she could give my story the attention it deserved.

  “I think it is,” I said.

  “It’s a goat,” she said. “One of those poor little goats with its horns twisted together.”

  “It’s real,” I said.

  “It can’t be,” she said.

  “Sheila,” I said.

  “Meme,” she said. She called me Meme when she didn’t know what else to say to me, when she couldn’t refute the logic of my argument because there wasn’t any, when she wondered, not for the first or last time, I’m sure, who this man was she married.

  “I think you should see it,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said. “We’re going there Monday for dinner. I can see it then.”

  I had already grabbed my shoes and socks and her shoes and Victor’s shoes, and I was looking for Victor. “You don’t want to go now?” I asked.

  She sighed and moved from the kitchen counter and sat heavily on the couch. “I’m tired, honey.”

  There was something shaky in her voice by this point, which I chose to ignore. “Oh. Okay,” I said. Then I said, “Well, since you’re back, you mind staying with Victor while I go?”

  She took one of the pillows off the couch and threw it at me, not at all playfully, and said, “Jesus Christ, Meme, I just got home and you haven’t even once asked me how the open house went, and all you’ve done since I got here is talk about Ralph’s stupid goat.”

  “It’s not a goat,” I said before I could think better of it.

  “Fuck,” she cried, and picked up another pillow, but kept it squeezed tight against her chest. “Fine,” she said. “Go, I don’t care. Go to Rafael’s and look at his fucking goat,” she said.

  I knew that if I left to go see that animal that the trouble I would come back to would be far greater than any trouble I’d come home to before in the four years we’d been married, that the trouble would involve an anger I couldn’t rightly imagine, a different kind of anger, I could tell, which had already begun to brew inside her, and still, for a moment, for the smallest of moments, I considered going anyway.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I got so caught up, is all. I’m sorry.” Then I said, “How did the open house go?”

  But she didn’t give in that easily, and so I opened up a beer for her and poured it into a glass like she liked it and then sat next to her on the couch and picked up one of her feet and began to give her a clumsy massage and then asked her again how it had gone. And then she told me that it went awfully and she started crying, and then Victor toddled into the room, and I sat down on the couch next to her and picked Victor up so he wouldn’t bother his mother, but she took him and hugged him and I made a joke, I don’t remember it now, but she laughed. Then Victor made a sound, one of his weird little squeaks, and this made her laugh, too, and then we were fine, or close to it. Close enough that she could tell me about the open house, and I could tell her it wasn’t as bad as she thought it was—though maybe it was, and maybe it was worse than that, even—and then we talked about other things, and then it was time for dinner and I took us all out for hamburgers, and when we came back, I gave Victor a bath and read him his stories and put him to bed so Sheila could rest. And when I came out of his room, I found her in the living room wearing this pair of old, faded maroon workout shorts that, as dumb as it sounds, never failed to rile me up when she was wearing them, and she reached out her hand to me and I grabbed it thinking she wanted me to help her off the couch, but instead she pulled me down onto it, and we had a nice little romp there, and then we watched some TV, and then we went to bed where we had a second go at it, and finally she fell asleep, and as she slept, I crept out of the house and hoofed it over to Ralph’s place.

  Whe
n I got there, I found Ralph sitting in his chair dressed in his robe, and by the drape of it and by a flap of it that hung open at the top of his thigh, I could tell he wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Worried I might have intruded on some private and disturbing moment, I stopped and was about to turn back around, but then saw the heavy rise and fall of his chest and realized he had fallen asleep. I was quiet then as I opened the gate and took my seat next to him, gently flipping the robe back into place to cover his nethers. The unicorn hardly noticed me or my quiet administrations. As far as I could tell from watching it, the unicorn hardly noticed anyone. It was generally quite still, or not still, not exactly still. It seemed to have a way of standing still that made it look like it was in constant motion, or as if it existed in another place at the same moment it existed in our place, a shimmering, jittery, vibrating kind of stillness.

  I didn’t know how long I had been sitting there until Ralph stirred in his chair, coughed or sneezed or groaned, I don’t remember, and this broke my concentration, and I looked up from watching the unicorn, took notice of the early morning light cresting over the horizon, and then, checking my watch, realized it was nearly seven in the morning, and that surely by now Sheila was awake and aware of my absence.

  I smoothed things over by coming home with coffee and breakfast and acting like I woke up earlier than normal, a fire in my belly, full of energy and a need to get outside and greet this day, and by the looks of the expression she threw me, Sheila didn’t buy one word of it, but she didn’t say anything about it, either, and the morning proceeded. Just before lunch, Ralph called to tell me that dinner was a no-go, and he gave some excuse about Melissa and a sensitive stomach, but I could tell by the sound of him it was something else, which I didn’t push to find out about. I called Sheila’s office and left her the message, and then I grabbed Victor and his things, and then I walked him over to my mom’s house and left him with her, and about five minutes after that, I showed up unannounced at Ralph’s house.

  I was hoping at worst to find him sitting outside the shed looking at the unicorn, and, at best, that no one would be home at all, or that Melissa would have him holed up inside so they could finish their fight or whatever had changed their plans, and that way I could sit there all by myself. Instead, I found Melissa sitting in one of the lawn chairs, a People magazine spread out across her thighs, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She heard me coming and saw me before I could turn around and sneak back home.

  “Hi there,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said. “Ralph around?”

  She lowered her sunglasses and looked at me over their rim. “No,” she said, dragging out the o. “Was he expecting you?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “I was around, and, you know,” I began to explain, trailing off as she moved a stack of magazines out of the second lawn chair. Then I said, “Where is he?”

  She looked at me again and smiled a secretive, mean-spirited kind of smile and asked, “Don’t you know?” Then she said, “Mr. Industrious got himself a job.”

  “You mean work?” I asked.

  “A job,” she said. And for a moment that hung in the air between us. For as long as I had known him, Ralph had only ever had one job, which he’d quit after less than a year. Instead of a job, he’d find work, he’d make money, just enough, enough to get by, and when he needed more, he’d find more work and make more money. I didn’t know what he did. He fixed roofs sometimes, and he sold products sometimes, and he made phone calls of some kind or other from his home sometimes. He must have done other things, too, because sometimes he would be gone for a week, for two weeks, for a month, and then he’d be home again, flush with cash, which would last him another week, a week and a half at most. For a time, I remember, he was buying cars and motorcycles around town and driving them up to Massachusetts and New York and Chicago, where he’d try to sell them, and then, once he was there, he would wait around until he could find someone who needed a car or a truck driven back down to Texas. It was a strange and not altogether enviable life that he’d cobbled together, but through this he’d managed to avoid finding full-time work since those months right out of high school he spent working as a stock boy at the Fiesta.

  The morning was quiet between us as we both tried to operate under this new set of circumstances, and then the unicorn made a sound. Not a whinny, exactly, and not like it was saying something, exactly, not like it was trying to speak to us, but not like it wasn’t, either. Saying something or trying to say something, maybe, something melodic and interesting and worth paying attention to. Melissa opened her magazine back up and then closed it again and looked up at the unicorn and then slapped at a mosquito that had landed on her leg.

  “Growing up,” she said, “I was dolphins.”

  “Dolphins?” I asked.

  “My sister, she was unicorns. Christ. Unicorn everything. Unicorn stickers, unicorn posters, unicorn folders and book covers, and a unicorn backpack. Unicorn shirts, and this unicorn figurine she kept with her even after high school. Every goddamn thing in her room, covered with unicorns.” She took a drag off her cigarette. “Hell, I should get her out here to see this. That’ll screw her over.”

  From what Ralph had told me, Melissa and her sister didn’t get on too well. She was younger and not prettier than Melissa, but pretty in a way, this according to Ralph, that made everyone act like she was prettier than Melissa, which was a serious blow to Melissa’s ego and had been eating at her for some long time now. Then a year ago she moved up to Wisconsin and found work in television broadcasting for a local news station, which wasn’t why there was bad blood between them, but the move and her success had only seemed to make the bad blood worse.

  “How would that screw her over if she likes unicorns?” I asked.

  She laughed and said, “This? This thing is not a unicorn. I mean, fuck, maybe it is, with that horn, and it looks kind of like a horse, I guess, and it does something, anyway,” she said. “It’s done something to Ralph, at least,” she said. She turned and looked at me over her sunglasses again. “To you, too.” She sighed. “But my sister, if I convinced my sister that this was what a unicorn really was, she’d hate it.” She took one last drag off her cigarette and then stubbed it out and then pulled out another one and lit it, and then she said, “God, she’d hate it. Course, she wouldn’t believe it. Nothing I could say or do would make her believe it, so I guess it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Sheila doesn’t believe it,” I said. “Or maybe she does. I don’t know.” Then I said, “What about you? Do you believe it?”

  “It’s because of that thing, you know,” she said, ignoring my question, waving her cigarette at the unicorn. “The job.” She slapped at her leg again. “He didn’t even tell me he got a job,” she said. “I wake up and it’s still dark out and I hear him rustling around the room, and I find the light and turn it on, and there he is, his hair smoothed back, and his face shaved clean, and he’s wearing pants and a shirt and a tie.” Then she said, “I don’t even know where it is he’s working.”

  I didn’t know what to say to any of this, or that I should say anything, so I kept my mouth shut and let her speak her mind as long as she wanted, so long as she didn’t decide it was too hot outside or that she was tired of sitting out there with the unicorn, because I had this feeling that if she left, she’d make me leave, too.

  “And you know,” she said, “two days ago I would’ve given anything to get him out of this chair and into the house, to help me with the kids, to do any goddamn thing that wasn’t to do with this unicorn. And now this. I know what he wants to do,” she said. “Build a fence, maybe buy the lot next to us, make it into a pasture or some shit.” She slapped her leg again, and I started to get the feeling that when she did that she was, in her mind anyway, slapping the unicorn, or maybe she was slapping Ralph. “Six years, I’ve been with this man for six years, and I never told him he ha
d to get a job, I never pushed him, though I sure as hell wouldn’t have minded. Six years, I’ve done without and I’ve held on, because I figure, give him space, let him find his own way, and then, boy, things will turn around. He’s a man of special talents, I thought, and he can’t be locked into a job that doesn’t let him use those talents, that doesn’t appreciate them.” Then she said, “Ha. Ha, ha, joke’s on me.” She looked at me and smiled and said, “Less than a week with this thing and he’s already found a job to take care of it.”

  She looked, then, back at that creature standing in her side yard, and she stared at it with a trying-to-move-it-with-her-mind kind of intensity, and this went on for an uncomfortably long time, and I wondered if she was trying to move it with her mind, or wish it out of existence, or look into its heart to see if she could figure out what it was about this animal that had inspired in her layabout husband the sudden urge to clean up and work and provide. Then she shook her head at it, giving up on whatever she was trying to do. It pawed its hooves against the ground and shook its mane and dipped its horn. Then she took a long drag off her cigarette and, coughing as she exhaled, she said to me, “Don’t you worry, though. One of these days, while Ralph’s at work, I aim to make a pair of pants out of that animal.” She winked and took another drag, a shorter one. “Maybe a jacket, too.” Then she was quiet, smoking her cigarette, and it was right about then, I think, that I got the notion that I should steal this creature from them.

  My mom called then and told me I had to come pick up Victor or have Sheila come get him because she had to get to a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t seem too generous about the situation, but really she’d already called a few times, and since I’d blithely ignored these calls, she had every right to her indignation. There was a moment, just after I hung up the phone, when I considered calling Sheila and feeding her some story, asking her to swing by and pick up Victor, but I didn’t, only because Melissa was sitting right there, listening intently to what I said, and the idea of letting her overhear me lie so easily to my wife made me feel guilty and at the same time thrilled in a way that made me uncomfortable.