“Did you have to ride him?”
“I sat on him all morning,” he joked.
I marked a red X through Australia, mistakenly labeled as Antarctica.
“Did you know his dad’s in Iraq?” Mr. Ball said. “I think that’s part of his problem. Why he’s acting out. Sometimes when I take him aside—not to yell at him, but just to talk—he gets all teary-eyed. Like he just needs a man to talk to him.”
I nodded. “I can see that.”
On the radio the music switched from a rock song to a car dealership commercial and I looked at the clock on the wall. Ten minutes before I had to head to PE.
“Let me ask you something,” Mr. Ball said.
I scanned the map of the world printed on the worksheet in front of me.
“Sure.”
“Did you go to college?
“I did.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Penn.”
“That’s a good school.”
“It’s not bad.”
“So tell me something.”
I looked up from the page in my hand and saw that Mr. Ball had stopped marking the paper on his desk and leaned forward, as if to make sure he heard my answer. I raised my eyebrows.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
I started to laugh but I realized he was serious. I thought for a second to tell him about Miles—the way he spoke, the way he listened, the way I felt around him—but I stopped myself. How could I tell him that Miles was what I had been looking for my entire life? That the great lonely space inside me, deep and wide as a canyon, shrank to nothing when Miles stepped into the room? That even in that shitty job in that god-awful town, I still considered myself a lucky, lucky girl? Instead I shrugged my shoulders.
“I ask myself that every day,” I said.
6
I try to imagine the sacrifices my mother made to mold her life to my father’s. I think of her days in the mountains of north Georgia, where clouds covered the sun much of the time, and the winters—nothing like blue-skied south Florida winters—hung heavy and gray for months. I know she quit teaching when they left Miami and I try to understand how she filled her time on the farm. She must have cooked for my father. I remember the table set with pork chops, okra, and collard greens. She must have washed his jeans and folded his shirts, even the white ones that had yellowed under the arms. She must have stripped the sheets from the bed and thrown them in the wash with the other dirty laundry, the unsaid things. She must have lived this life and still loved my father, because after he died she never remarried.
“What’s that old saying?” she said. “ ‘If you’ve had the best, you know you never can replace that’?”
* * *
Cavender’s Boot City is in Temple, Texas, twenty-seven miles outside Fort Hood and thirty-six miles from Waco, where David Koresh and his Branch Davidians once lived. I wanted to point this out to Miles on the drive there, to take a jab at that land of holy-rolling crazies, but he was a fiercely proud Texan, the kind who lived by the slogan “American by birth, Texan by the grace of God.” So I let it pass.
In the store I followed him to the back, to the shelves of simple work boots, the strong Texan boots, not the showy versions tourists bought in Austin to take back to New York.
“Dime-store cowboys,” he called them.
On a shelf in the back half of the store I found a pair of riding boots in rich sorrel leather. They were hand-worked with stitching running up the shaft, and I traced the thread with one finger, following the dips and knots the color of straw. They were undeniably beautiful but I worried if they were right for me.
For that matter, was Miles? Here was a man who voted Republican, who drove a pickup and owned a shotgun, who could ride a horse and rope a cow. He went to church most Sundays, with or without me. More without than with as time went on. He tithed from every paycheck. He prayed before meals, even in restaurants, and we became the sort of couple—hands held, heads bowed over our plates in public—that used to dismay me. When my roommate in Tallahassee said in the first month Miles and I were dating “You two are going to get married,” I laughed.
“No way,” I said. “He’s way too country for me.”
But one day, after a game of tennis on the cracked courts of Fort Rucker, Miles looked across the bed of his truck and said, “When I’m with you, no matter what we’re doing—tennis or whatever—I want it to go on forever.” Until that moment I had always said I would never get married because I could not imagine loving someone enough to be with them forever. But really I could not imagine someone loving me that much.
In Cavender’s I handed Miles the boots.
“What do you think?”
He turned them over to inspect the heel and ran his fingers down the leather shaft.
“Looks good,” he said.
I sat on a wooden bench and slipped the leg of my jeans up to my knee. I stuck one foot down into the boot and worked the heel until my ankle slipped in.
“Try walking around,” Miles said. “How do they feel?”
“They feel good.”
“A little tight?”
“A little. In the ankles.”
“That’ll stretch out.”
I walked the length of the store while Miles watched from the bench. When I sat down beside him, he leaned over to whisper in my ear.
“Those boots look good on you,” he said.
I extended one foot and tilted the boot to both sides.
Did they?
I called my mother on a weekend afternoon while Miles was in the field. The day was overcast and humid, brooding weather.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I said when she picked up. “I feel like I’m wasting my life.”
My mother was quiet on her end of the phone.
“I have a crappy job,” I said. “We live in this shitty apartment. My car’s on its last leg. I don’t know what to do.”
The weak sun cast a pale light through the kitchen window. People passed in front of the door on their way to the laundry room, and their shadows cut the light that seeped under the frame.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, and when my mother was silent: “Should I leave?”
“I don’t think that’s the solution,” she said.
I sat at the breakfast bar and looked over our tiny kitchen—at the loaf of bread stacked on top of the refrigerator, the yellow box of off-brand cookies on the counter.
“Then what do I do?”
My mother breathed a long slow breath. “Do you love him?”
I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them I took in the pot holders by the stove, the calendar tacked to the wall, the weekly menu I’d written. A shopping list was pinned to the corkboard beside a note in Miles’s handwriting. I saw how all those bits of domesticity formed the working fabric of our relationship and I realized that this was how people built a life together. Not in the plans or schemes or worries or fears but in the day-to-day. The dish soap, the spoon rest, the coupons.
“I love him more than anything,” I said.
Perhaps my mother considered her own life then. The mountains of north Georgia, the red earth and the daffodils in spring, my father on his tractor waving at the house.
“Then you stay,” she said.
* * *
In late November Miles and I drove to Austin for the weekend. He booked us a room in a fancy hotel and we ate venison and wild boar at an expensive restaurant. I wore my good dress. When we came back to the room, Miles got down on one knee. I cried and he cried and the next thing I knew, he was slipping a ring on my finger.
But in the night I got up to use the bathroom and stood for a long time in front of the mirror. People say we always think we look like ourselves, even as we age, even as we put on weight, even as we’re cratered with uncertainty. I turned my face from side to side, trying to determine if I resembled the woman I had once been.
At school on Monday the other a
ides fussed over my ring. I blushed as I held out my hand and the diamonds glinted in the glare from the fluorescent lights. Later in the week Ms. Walker stopped me in the hallway.
“You coming to the party tonight?” she said.
Her second-grade class trailed after her in a line and slumped against the wall as we talked.
“Is that tonight?” I said.
“You got other plans?”
“Miles is in the field.”
“Then come over.”
I pulled into her driveway a little after eight, and when I knocked on the front door a woman answered. She was curved like Ms. Walker—not heavy exactly but full-figured. Pretty with good hair.
“Come on in,” she said.
I followed her through the coatroom and into the living room, where people milled. Some of the teachers from school were there but mostly it was women I didn’t know. I saw a plate of cheese cubes on a side table next to a bowl of spinach dip and I headed there.
“Girl, there you are.” Ms. Walker gave me a hug. “Glad you could come.”
“You look great,” I said.
She did. She had on dark red lip gloss and tight brown pants.
“Let me get you something to drink,” she said. “Can I get you some wine?”
“Wine would be great.”
She filled a glass with chardonnay from a gallon-size bottle, the kind you buy at Walmart for $8.99. The doorbell rang and she handed me the glass.
“Let me go get that,” she said.
I took a sip and started in on the cheese. I ate cube after cube of orange squares. When women began moving to the couch, I filled a paper plate and followed them to the sectional. The cushions sank as I sat. Ms. Walker flipped on the big flat-screen TV at the center of the room and scanned the channels until she found an Oprah rerun.
“Did you see the episode where she—”
“And that time when she—”
“That outfit she wore when—”
I sipped my chardonnay and shifted on the couch. If someone looked in my direction, I smiled.
“Let’s play that game,” the friend who had answered the door said. “The game with the questions.”
Ms. Walker turned from the kitchen counter.
“The paper’s right there on the table.”
The friend picked up squares of blank paper and a handful of pens.
“Pay attention now,” she said.
The hum of conversation died down.
“We thought we’d play a little game so everybody can get to know one another,” she said. “Here’s how this is going to work. I’m going to hand out these pieces of paper. You write down a question for the group—don’t put your name on it—and fold it up and put it in this jar I’m going to pass around.”
The conversations started up again, louder.
The woman on my left turned to me. “We put our name on it?”
I shook my head. “Just your question.”
A woman standing in the kitchen raised her hand. “I’ve got a question.”
“Girl, we’re not in school,” the pretty friend said. “You don’t have to raise your hand.”
“Well, what kind of question are we asking?”
“Anything you want.”
I looked at the blank scrap of paper in my hand. Anything? I thought about something dirty, something funny, something crazy. But I didn’t know these women or how it would go over. Something I already knew the answer to? The women on either side of me scrawled on the paper they pressed against their thighs. The pretty friend folded up her piece of paper and dropped it into a ceramic jar on the table next to the cheese.
“I’m going to start passing this around,” she said. “Just drop your question in.”
Should I ask about sex? About school? About books? I discarded every question that came to mind while the jar worked its way around the couch.
“You want us to fold it up?” a woman three cushions over asked. She balanced the jar on her round knees. “Or just drop it in?”
“Do whatever you want,” the friend said.
The woman crumpled the paper into a ball the size of a marble. I needed a question. Any question. So I wrote what I worried about every day. I wrote the question that I thought about when I woke up in the morning and that pressed me into sleep at night.
What if you love someone with all your heart but you’re afraid that being with him means giving up the life you imagined for yourself?
I folded the slip of paper just as the jar reached me and dropped my question in. The container finished making its way around the room and already the pockets of conversation were starting up again. I clutched my paper plate in my hand, crimping the cardboard edges.
Please don’t pick mine, I thought. Please pick another question.
The pretty friend held the jar over her head.
“I’m going to choose now,” she said.
The room grew quieter but not quiet. Ms. Walker leaned against the counter and talked to another teacher. Three women at the far end of the couch ate tiny meatballs and talked in low voices. One burst out with a loud laugh.
“Hush,” Ms. Walker’s friend said.
The woman with the meatballs covered her mouth with her hand and one of the other women slapped her knee. They all three laughed.
The pretty friend stirred the jar dramatically.
“Come on, pick one!” Ms. Walker shouted from the kitchen.
“I’m getting there,” the friend said. She gave her hand a final swirl and then with her perfectly manicured nails lifted a folded slip of paper.
Not mine, I prayed.
She unfolded the paper and skimmed the question. She cleared her throat and the room waited.
“What if you love someone,” she paraphrased, “but being with them means giving up your own life?”
There was a lull as people considered the question. I looked at the floor. The meatball women started talking again in low voices, their feet pushed close together.
“And I said, ‘If you’re not going to bother to treat me like a lady, then don’t bother—’ ”
The woman next to her nodded vigorously. A woman at the end of the couch stood up to fix herself another plate of cheese, and I thought the moment might pass. But Ms. Walker stepped out of the kitchen and leaned over her friend’s shoulder to read the paper. She looked pointedly in my direction.
“You figure out how to make it work,” she said. “That’s what marriage is.”
* * *
On a clear day at the end of the year, Miles and I drove through the hills that surround Killeen. The day was cool enough that we rolled down the windows and let the dry air blow into the car. Thistle bushes grew beside the road and mesquite trees crouched back from the shoulder. Sunlight filtered through the open sunroof and the wind flowed into the car and back out, taking with it the air we exhaled and the evaporating sweat from our bodies. We drove until we spotted a vegetable stand beside the highway.
“Should we stop?” Miles asked.
“Sure,” I said.
Inside the wood frame of the market stall, heat radiated from the corrugated tin roof. Rays of sunlight angled into the shed and illuminated the motes of dust that rose in our wake. Miles pointed to the clear plastic bags of water hanging from the rafters.
“Keeps the flies off,” the man behind the counter said.
He laughed a dry, old man’s laugh.
“You in the military?” he asked Miles.
“Yes, sir.”
“Thought so. Always can tell by the hair.”
He leaned back and propped his hands on the wooden countertop.
“Used to be in the military myself.”
I worked my way around the stand while the man talked to Miles about the Army, bases they both knew, tours overseas. I put a jar of honey on the counter beside a pound of tomatoes. The man poked at the keys of a large cash register while he talked, and Miles pulled bills from his wallet and passed them across the counter
.
“You all take care,” the man said as we walked back to the car, and to Miles: “Watch out for yourself over there.”
“I will,” Miles said.
The tires kicked up dust as we pulled back onto the asphalt and the low hum of the road worked its way through the undercarriage.
“Are you going to sell vegetables out of the back of your pickup when you get done with the Army?”
Miles laughed.
“Nah,” he said. “I think I’ll be a teacher. Maybe coach football.”
I looked through the windshield and nodded thoughtfully.
“They have this Troops to Teachers program,” he said. “The Army’ll pay for you to go back to college and get your degree. When you’re done, you teach in a public school somewhere.”
“That sounds all right,” I said.
Miles looked at me. “Yeah?”
I took his hand and held it over the console.
“Yeah.”
He drove for a few minutes without speaking, then asked, “How about you? What do you want to do when this Army business is over?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
Miles squeezed my hand.
“Seriously,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
“I want to be a writer.”
Miles held the steering wheel and I could feel him considering.
“What would you write? Books?”
“Books, articles—I don’t know. I’d like to travel too. To write from overseas.”
Miles was quiet for a time. Finally he said, “I like that idea.”
“You do?”
“It feels right.”
I smiled to myself and watched the road wind through the hills. Anything seemed possible in that land bare of everything but rye grass and barbed wire, and it was easy to imagine a future where our plans would come to pass. We followed the dashed line dividing the asphalt until the road spit us out at the foot of a rise where a stoplight blinked. Miles slowed and I pointed to a hand-lettered sign in the grass.
“ ‘House for Sale,’ ” I read. “Want to give it a try?”
Unremarried Widow Page 6