Love & Darts (9781937316075)

by Jones, Nath

  There were other pictures on the wall but Mrs. B. looked past them and let her eyes rest on another one of Jeanie. She was onstage lighting a candle. It was the honor society induction ceremony her freshman year of high school. No one in the family had heard about the upcoming event. There was no mention of it from Jeanie. Mr. B. had been reading the paper and saw his own daughter’s name among those listed to be honored that evening. Confounded, frustrated, confused, he stood up and wandered into the utility room where Mrs. B. was folding towels. He read the article aloud to his wife and then stared at her. It was close to six o’clock. The paper said the ceremony started at seven thirty. They had decided to confront their child with the paper and had gone together down this hall to their daughter’s door to ask Jeanie about it. She said that, yes, she was being inducted but that she didn’t understand why they had to make a big deal out of it. There was no reason to go. She didn’t feel like going. Mr. B. said he didn’t really care what she felt like and that it wasn’t her decision to make. This had escalated to a loud altercation mainly between Mr. B. and Jeanie.

  At seven fifteen the whole family was in the van and they were all in foul moods. There were several complaints of hunger, as dinner was left in cold pots on the stove. B comes early in the alphabet so they hurried. Mrs. B. watched her daughter walk up to the candle and light it without pride. She noticed the smug looks on some of the other students’ faces. She witnessed the honor that some students felt, or even the discomfort at being in the midst of such a formal affair. But as all the inductees stood in a row at the end of the ceremony, there was no contempt in Jeanie’s face. No hostility. No smug countenance. Her face wasn’t blank, really. She just smiled faintly, and waited. Mrs. B. realized that out of all the kids on the stage she only recognized her daughter. None of Jeanie’s friends was there with her; such a simple explanation for all her stubborn noise at the house.

  Mrs. B. ran her finger along the top of the frame, dusting it.

  Another picture on the wall in the hall was of Jeanie and her grandmother. It was the last picture of the two of them before her grandmother had passed away. They were sitting in the garden under a tree with their backs to the camera. The light filtered through the leaves in such a way that only their faces were lit by the sun. Both of them looked at a single pink rose which had struggled its way through the weeds to stand out in the full sun. The profiles of the women were identical. The old lady’s lips were parted in explanation of life, and the young woman listened. It was funny enough to smile, even laugh alone in a hallway, because Jeanie never listened to anyone else but her grandmother. And at the funeral Mrs. B. remembered how Jeanie had insisted on speaking. She had also read a Bible verse, which was written on a tiny piece of paper and remained wedged down in the corner of the picture frame. It read: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick; a wish come true is a staff of life. To despise a word of advice is to ask for trouble; mind what you are told, and you will be rewarded. A wise man’s teaching is a fountain of life for one who would escape the snares of death.”

  Mrs. B. laughed at Jeanie’s hypocrisy. She had never taken anyone’s advice. Not even her grandmother’s even if she did listen and learn. She always found a way to prove everyone wrong, or foolish, and most likely had not even thought of the verse since the day her grandmother was buried. But there were the words. Jeanie knew they mattered once. Mrs. B. said, half aloud, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick; like you, my poor child.”

  She let her eyes pass over Jeanie’s high school graduation picture. She glanced at a shot of Jeanie and her father in front of Jeanie’s sophomore college dorm that overlooked a lake. Mrs. B. looked for a minute at a picture of all her grown children in front of the Christmas tree. There was another picture just like it from the following year, only Jeanie wasn’t there. Mrs. B. reached up and straightened the frame.

  She remembered how Jeanie had disappeared two weeks before Christmas. How when she had called her children to breakfast that morning, Jeanie hadn’t come down. How they had knocked on her door for over an hour, first annoyed, then anxious, then worried and afraid. Mr. B. and one of their sons had pried the door open with a crowbar, and Mrs. B. half expected to find her daughter dead. It was more of a shock to see the bed neatly made in an empty room. She remembered long searches with the police. She remembered agonizing prayer-filled nights with a God she did not know well enough. She remembered Mr. B. taking them all to the movies to take their minds off things. She remembered finding her youngest son crying in the backyard, and how their oldest daughter did nothing but bake cookies one night. Mrs. B. laughed remembering all the cookies that were made. Every possible kind, six dozen of each. Everyone dealing with the unknown—the excruciating weight of time—in their own way.

  Then on Christmas morning, with the bright sun reflecting joy off the snow, there was a phone call. A happy voice filled all the eager receivers in the house with assurance. “Sorry I haven’t called. We’ve been driving forever, and it seems like every gas station’s phone is out of order. How stupid is that? Who’s we? Oh.” She laughed and covered the mouthpiece to scream something at someone nearby. Then back into the phone, “I’m in love. Dad, don’t even say it. I know what you’ll say, and I say you’re wrong. You can fall in love in two weeks, and besides I’ve known him for almost two months. But the first time we talked was two weeks ago at the bakery. He bought me a jelly doughnut, and I swear it’s forever.

  “Don’t you think it’s perfect that I didn’t get in touch with you ‘til today? No. Well, I think it’s perfect. It’s like a Christmas present for all of us. So Merry Christmas!” She would have hung up, but someone asked, and she replied, “Oh. Yeah. I’m not really sure. In Arizona somewhere. I’ll let you know when I have a real place. Maybe you all can come and visit or something. I can smell the turkey from here, Ma!” But there was no turkey that year. No one had thought of it. They just ate cookies and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. And they took the picture in front of the tree anyway that year, missing Jeanie.

  Mrs. B. took a few more steps toward the living room. She stopped in front of a silly and playful picture of Jeanie and her love. Mrs. B. had never looked at it without smiling, but now she wrinkled her eyebrows and sighed. They must have been camping in the desert. There was a tent and a Coleman stove and a lawn chair. Behind them cacti and sagebrush dotted the landscape all the way to the horizon. There were low mountains on the left side of the picture. It was a joke. Just a snapshot taken by a friend. They had all been drinking. Jeanie was pushing against her love’s chest and he, though laughing, had started to fall over. The picture was at least two years old. They had probably wrestled on the ground long after the photographer had forgotten the shot. And Jeanie might only have mailed it for the great smiles on both of their sunlit faces, but in the hall that day, with this boy in her husband’s favorite chair, Mrs. B. saw the picture again for the first time. It was devastating to see it so clearly. Her daughter, her mocking, playful, spritely, sarcastic, frivolous, immature, temperamental, evasive, heedless, reckless, unforgiving, so young daughter pushed him away.

  Mrs. B. considered turning to the doorway and saying, “Was that verse from Grandma’s funeral from Proverbs 13?” But. She didn’t ask knowing there’d be no answer.

  What must that boy think?

  There was a picture that Jeanie had taken of herself. She used a tripod and her father’s best camera which had a timer. There was a dark purple thunderhead sky behind her and a rainbow arched itself back over the spruce trees. Jeanie was dressed from head to toe in yellow and stood—arms thrown up—where the rainbow would have touched the ground. A loud statement and strong opinion shouting, “I am a veritable pot of gold, priceless and unattainable.” It was a summation. Jeanie with a personality that is impossible to find. Jeanie with a transient confidence that appears comfortable between the harshest, most contrasting conditions, where blazing sun meets the million prisms of an ineffable rain. Jeanie who is only a twist of light. Je
anie, a promise easily broken in a dry Arizona summer.

  No one could blame him for his love.

  Mrs. B. drew herself up slowly and walked back into the living room. He had gotten up from the chair and was standing in front of the open door near where she had left him. It hadn’t been that long. The mat under his feet said, “Welcome Home,” and he stared at it.

  Neither of them wanted to have to say anything for fear of tears.

  But. He was a grown man, not a child, so he said, “Sorry about this, Mrs. B. I thought, well, hell, who knows what I was thinking.” He glanced up at her. Her face changed quickly to encourage him with a smile and bright eyes, but he saw her pity first.

  She wanted to pull him into some hug that would be enough. But there he was with all the import and fragility of his manhood. Damn. She restrained herself, giving whatever support she could by leaving him alone.

  He looked down at the shoebox he was holding. There were several small treasures in it. Nothing fancy: a few smooth stones, a picture or two, a blue wax figure of an elephant, a foreign coin, and some other memories no one could possibly share. He laid the box down in the chair he’d gotten up from exhausted from holding such a treasure chest. His hands eased into his pockets and fell asleep at the wrist. He cleared his throat and looked at the clock. He knew that the motion of those hands should mean something, but he didn’t see the time. He thought hard. Both of them wished she would just get over it and come out of her room. She didn’t. She wouldn’t. They both thought she must have fallen asleep by now. They knew her best.

  He laughed a little at his own failure and shook his head. With aspiring, raised eyebrows he said, “Well. No sense beating a dead horse, right?” He left before she could see his tears. Why don’t you ever listen? His car sped away.

  Mrs. B. shut the door. Her hand lingered on the doorknob. She looked down at her wedding ring. She moved over to the chair and picked up the box of trinkets. She sat down heavily and picked through them carefully. She lifted out a framed picture of the couple that was wedged in the bottom of the box and made the cardboard sides bow out.

  Sighing, she leaned her head back against the chair and held it at arm's length to look at it. They were happy. It was their engagement photo. The one they had taken for the newspaper. The frame was separating at one of the corners. Just a cheap frame from the drug store. Nothing special. Mrs. B. pinched it back together. In a minute she stood up and went to a drawer in the kitchen. She pulled out a hammer and a small nail. She wiped her fingerprints off the glass over the picture with her apron. She walked back to the hallway and found a spot just over the light switch for the picture to hang. She held the tiny frame between her knees and pounded the tiny nail into the wall carefully. She hung the picture and backed away from it. She smiled her own smile as a salute to the two in the picture and turned out the hallway light.

  SPARROWS

  I wish you had known Marylyn. She tried crying alone on dry nights in the attic. But no one came to ask her why there was all the sobbing and moaning so there was little point in indulging such drama. She forced herself to be sullen for a while, but she kept forgetting and smiling anyway, regardless of having charity teeth.

  She wasn’t much of a girl. She was the kind of person who was afraid of standing on her own two feet. Not because she didn’t trust her feet, but because she knew the world was quicksand. That timidity was her presence. Her hair was a nasty old brown color like shoes that have never been polished and have walked miles and miles in the loose limestone dust alongside the road. Long and straight, like any girl’s hair should be, but stringy and hers had a habit of getting tangly. Brushing takes time and patience. No one who’s starving knows time and patience.

  One of the boys at school used to laugh at the way her shoulders jutted straight out from her neck. He called her Razorback Marylyn saying her spine and shoulder blades reminded him of his daddy’s razor. It was just another mean name made from harmless nothing and a bit of prejudice. You know how it is; she was poor. And she knew it. Once you know it you can either give up or move on.

  I guess she sustained herself the same way desert plants do. Conservative. Very conservative. Not heedless. She took smiles from strangers in the supermarket as love, and made friends with the people she saw from a distance on a regular basis. Shop clerks, crossing guards, bus drivers—that sort of thing. Just like a desert plant, never expecting too much and adapting, compensating as a result. But not dead. Not at all dead, and in a slow scraggly way moving on in life. No bitterness, no pain, but still dirt poor.

  High school was hard on Marylyn. There was no room for her in the well-dressed crowd of whispers and giggles. No one wanted to waste her time on a girl who didn’t have anything bad to say about anyone. They called her weak and noncompetitive; said she would not thrive. She had nothing against them.

  She spent her lunch hour with her brother and his friends under a sycamore tree near the baseball field. Every day five or six of them sat there in the root dust smoking cigarettes and talking about cars. In the winter, when they couldn’t sit down, they’d shield themselves from the wind with that big tree. Their wet feet coiling away from the slushy mud, they still smoked cigarettes and talked about cars. Marylyn didn’t smoke. She just sat, or stood depending on the weather, and listened. The boys rarely paid much attention to her. They had too many different cars to dream up and then smash to nothing in their minds using all their reasons for impossibility.

  Do you understand the desert? No. I suppose you wouldn’t. You water your lawn and let the faucet run while you’re brushing your teeth. Well, hold your mouth open for five or ten minutes. Then put a drop of water on your lips and remember that’s all you’re going to get. It’s hard to be poor.

  Being alone is virtually impossible. I don’t know what drove her. Instinct, I guess. There was nothing to her. She didn’t speak, really. She had hardly anyone to care about or who cared about her. That brother was always a little bit loose, if you know what I mean. It’s strange really. But the way I look at it, you can either give up or move on. I guess I already said that. The point is, the only way to give up is to die. Marylyn never died during those high school summers. Others did. Suicide and car wrecks.

  But Marylyn wasn’t stupid and wasn’t a smoker. You might think she would have been. Her mother was. When Marylyn was little her brother used to load cap gun charges down in their mother’s cigarettes. The skinny lady would be sitting with one foot pulled up underneath her on the chair in the morning tracing a coffee cup with an absentminded finger and eyeing a sparrow on the sill, all quiet and lonely, then—bang! And the barefoot brother would scurry into the room laughing. “Shouldn’t smoke, Mommy. It’ll kill you.” Sometimes the mother would get up and chase him all over, saying, “Let’s hope it does, kiddo!” but mostly after those infinitesimal explosions she’d put the cigarette down and forget it. Sometimes the brother cried or he screamed, “I hate you. I hope you do die, Mommy. You never let us do anything fun.”

  But it wasn’t ever a matter of her withholding permission. She didn’t ignore her children, or neglect her children, or refuse to answer to her children; there just wasn’t any money. So nothing mattered when the sparrow was holding their mother’s interest. Her thoughts were simple and repetitive. Such wings, such ugly wings, were all you needed to fly.

  Marylyn’s mother was ruled by the tiny bird. He was her prince, but she was little if anything to him. Attention and the power of her longing stare were all he needed to go on with his brash, unforgiving tirades. “This and that about the morning dew! And who but the Murphys, with their splintery old feeder, to forget my breakfast! Never had a mind to go anywhere else, but the winds of this place are atrocious! Too much work to leave!” Then Marylyn’s mother would bow, nodding an apology.

  Flight is the only animate form of perfection. Yet the ugly little sparrow was always bitching about something. The children’s mother, those mornings, stared, amazed at such a pompous spectacle. Sh
e usually smiled. A vague hesitant smile. It’s good to know that humans aren’t the only pompous fools.

  This was the way things were. There was nothing to be done. He was right. Every morning he would scold her, and then rush off in a huff, while Mother shook her head, missing him. Hoping he would come back if she did the dishes.

  Or cleaned up a bit in the living room.

  Marylyn—this is back when she was the little razor-backed girl—stood in the doorway out of her mother’s view, watching the sparrow too. But she had different thoughts. Come to think of it, those mornings must have been Sunday mornings. There wouldn’t have been time to linger any other day. Mothers who work will know. Busy and tired. Always, always, busy and tired. And probably running late. “Ask me again later, dear.”

  Anyway, the little girl grew up that way. Her yellow-walled room closed in on her, and the mother passed away. Always buying and wrecking cars in his mind, the brother talked on about his own big plans and ended up making do with somebody else’s bad habits. He was too used to hand-me-downs, I guess. No big surprises. “Isn’t it a shame about the Baxter boy?” “Oh, well, how could you really expect otherwise—what with a mother like that?” There were plenty of looks of concurrence, nods of assent, but then one intrepid white-hair might point out, “But look at his sister. She’s doing quite well.” “Marylyn?” “Yes. Odd, no doubt. But happy. Doesn’t it seem?” And a quick round of nods would hurry across the circle, followed closely by a plate of vanilla sandwich cookies and more coffee.