Love & Darts (9781937316075)

by Jones, Nath

  The house sits animated but still ready to pounce around me with its penetrating unspoken screams. Ready to emerge as life moving on.

  Sandwich. Bread. Pepperidge Farm white bread. Fresh. Mayonnaise. Salt and pepper. Leftover baked rotisserie chicken breast. Lettuce. Not iceberg but romaine. Or buttercrunch, I think they call it. Tomato. No. Tomato on the side with more mayonnaise and salt and pepper.

  The bed is moving. No. The walls are moving. No. It’s the clouds outside the window streaming by. And the bed is dropping away through the floor I knew didn’t really exist and couldn’t.

  I have to eat. That’s what they say. “You have to eat.” They say if you can feed yourself sufficiently then you don’t have to go to strange places where the doors are heavier than the walls that ripple, haunted and waterlogged with similar muzzled lives. So different than seedy hotels. So same. So eat. I have to eat.

  It’s not pieces of your mind falling into shattered disarray again, unsortable. It’s low blood sugar.

  Sandwich. There must be a way.

  Fight. Like Christina in Wyeth’s muted grass world. Make your way to what you want, what you need, what you have to have. Make a well-deserved sustenance for yourself—your body and mind.

  The store is only three blocks away. You can make it. You can do this alone. But is there any money? Under the table in the hall: don’t you remember seeing a quarter? Yes. But that’s been at least five years ago and it was at home in—well, wherever that was. But the floor was a cheap, lacquered jewelry box from Japan. A tourist trinket and black, almost, under that table. It was dark reddish-fade-to-black hardwood veneer that will never chip off. And the quarter was just there somehow in a beam of sunlight. And I saw it. I didn’t pick it up. But I saw it there just like that under the foyer table on the souvenir floor. Still, just like that years ago. But it wouldn’t be enough to take to the store today anyway.

  Mom said there was money in a drawer. She is always using drawers for things, like money, that shouldn’t be hidden, that need to be seen.

  But pull yourself toward the creation of a sustaining reality.

  Commit to small certainties. The salt will sit on the chicken breast and on the skin from the rotisserie and you will just barely be able to see how you’ve seasoned it.

  I remember sandwiches like that.

  I have to eat.

  I will make a sandwich like that.

  There are three dollars in my coat. I know the money’s there. Or at least I hope it is. Hope it hasn’t been changed. But it’s probably there from the time I bought cigarettes across the street. Good. Yes. Here it is. It’s real. I remembered it right and I am holding it with two hands, touching it, checking, counting, assuring myself again, and counting again, but yes, it’s here. It’s really here. This is one thing that’s not an illusion, an expectation, a hope, a change, a delusion, a hallucination, a must-have-remembered-it-wrong embarrassed moment, a confusion, a frustration, a trust, an unknowing, a worry, a panic, a thought-so-but-no. It’s real.

  So. I won. I’m fine. I remembered it right, which means it’s real, I’m fine, and my broken brain didn’t process it wrong. Not this time. This time I remembered it right. There was three dollars in my coat pocket. I was right. It’s real. It’s right here in my hand. It’s real. I’m looking at it and it’s here. I feel it and it’s real.

  So the coat and the drawer and as long as the floor is there again we’re okay. We’re okay and we’re not going anywhere without shoes and a hat. Where is the hat? I guess it doesn’t matter as long as I have the beach towel memory. The one with the dancing Planters peanut on it from all those lost beach summers. God. When will this glue dry? I need to find my hat. I don’t need to remember a twenty-year-old, navy blue, dancing top-hat-and-cane monocled-peanut towel on a clotheslined breeze.

  Just focus and find the floor. Test it for rotten spots with your leading toe.

  The coat. The drawer. The door. The stairs. And another door to the porch. Fine. I’m okay. I’m okay. Just act normal. No one even knows. No one even knows. No one even knows. No one can see your glazed-cherry-blossom-broken-vase glue drying or all the brain pieces held in place so carefully with direct pressure. Just keep walking. Just be careful. Do everything the right way. Look both ways. Cross the street when other people cross the street. Give up when no one else seems to care. Just relax. Relax. There is nothing emotional or psychological or pathological or anything that needs psychiatric care between here and the grocery store. The sidewalk can’t do that. It didn’t. So breathe in again and just keep going. Sidewalks don’t move. Just keep going. Breathe out again and don’t worry. It didn’t happen.

  It might just be the pills.

  Did I take my pills? Did I take them? Or was that this morning? Or yesterday? Or did the pills go through the wall to the teakettle sound where the floor fell down into the sinkhole of a grass world impossible to traverse while dragging two crippled limbs across the field of color that must be carpet hanging like a pet-door trap that keeps out the elements with the help of towels on clotheslines and quarters and breeze under foyer tables on jewelry box floors from five years ago?

  Just keep walking.

  Don’t hold your breath. Don’t panic. Don’t worry. Don’t cry. Just keep walking.

  Nothing’s happening. Everything’s fine. Everything’s normal. There’s no problem.

  And some people do understand. A lot of people have been through this. There were plenty of people in that hospital. This is not just you. You’re just the only one in your head. But you’re not the only one who this has ever happened to. So. Breathe. Relax. Understand the biochemistry, the physiology, the genetics, the statistics, the probabilities, the diagnoses, the family history, the reasons why.

  I remember someone’s telling me about a huge revolving door in a supermarket with a tank of fish in the middle. The tank is drained now. Broken. I wonder how they drained it. Hope the fish got out okay.

  Don’t worry about that. That doesn’t matter. It’s not related. The money is real and it’s related to the sandwich parts you still need.

  Grocery store. The fruit is amazing, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Where does it all come from? All this fruit to all these grocery stores. Can it possibly be used, all this fruit? It can’t possibly be consumed. I guess it just goes on sale. Is that it? It’s not like the bins of screws at the hardware store. These rot.

  Don’t waste your time reading little stickers of distant provenance and feeling sorry for soft mangoes.

  Mayonnaise. I don’t know where it is. Where is it? Bread. And how about pickles? Yes, pickles. There is definitely enough money with the coat and the drawer.

  Don’t wander. If you can’t find the bread, go back to the produce section and start over. Just go up and down all the aisles. Focus. Concentrate. You’re looking for bread.

  See? There it is. That’s where the bread is. That’s how you do it. That’s how you find things you know must be there.

  You’re done. Now. Go pay.

  Smile at the lady. Just smile at the lady. Pretend. It’s all just pretend. Smile again.

  Don’t look through her. She’ll know.

  Say, “Thank you. Have a nice day.” And say it like no awareness is cascading over you.

  Push. Don’t panic. Fish don’t matter.

  The sky seems more.

  Back to the house. Back to the house. Back to the house. And breathe. Breathe. If you know it, they know it. So just breathe. Breathe. Carry the bag and breathe.

  Up the stairs. There is a lock on the door but the key is here somewhere. I live here so it’s okay. I have the key. That’s allowed. So go ahead, just ease on in.

  Sit.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  Sit. Sandwich.

  But the knife. No way. Not today. Just fingers today. Just pull the chicken apart. And use a spoon for the mayonnaise. It’s good enough. No knife. Not today. Maybe next time, but not today. Knives are too full of potential. Too easy to take
off fingers and toes. Too easy to pull the skin off shins and ankles. Too easy to peel away the eyelids and soft places next to the ears. And so not today. Use the spoon today. Ignore the tremor.

  Salt.

  Pepper.

  And pickles, sitting in the chair by the window.

  Finally.

  SHOULD: HOW MOMMY ATE HER SOUL

  For five years, I’ve been Mommy. My husband calls me Mommy. My daughter calls me Mommy. My mother and father call me Mommy. I didn’t know we wouldn’t be able to pay for three kids. But now we’re doing what we can for two daughters and a son.

  There are more than two thousand hash-marked lines on the beltway between my house and work. I get off at 5:00 a.m. and the only way I get home is by staring at the hash marks off my left front fender. I count them and stay to the right of them.

  I don’t mind my job. I work nights at a security booth for a gated community. The pay is ridiculously good for the work because the community residents place such a pompous regard on limited access. They value my ability to keep people out. But I don’t keep anyone out. The motion-sensored gate does. Not that anyone ever wants to come in who doesn’t live there.

  My job is easy. There are two hundred gated communities around here. If anyone really wants to get into a gated community to kill people in their sleep, rape the women and children, pillage, steal the pool table imported from Italy, or drive really fast up and down the streets being obnoxious, most likely they will do it somewhere else.

  Mostly I get huge tips from high school kids to log times ten minutes before they were supposed to be home. Some nights I’m convinced the parents moved to the gated community just for the logbook. A third party to settle disputes. Often in the early morning there comes a mother in a silk robe driving an SUV. It screeches to a halt behind my booth, and she shuffles up in slippers to scrutinize my entries for the past twelve hours. I don’t mind. I like the kids. But kids shouldn’t be tipping that kind of money. And no woman who’s a mother should be wearing that kind of robe.

  I don’t tell my husband about my tips. That money goes to the lunchroom at Chateau Neuf with me alone. I thought once about taking Katrina, my oldest girl, for some special mommy time. But I knew her sweet innocence would reveal all to her father. So I let her have special time with him and I keep Chateau Neuf for me.

  More often than not after midnight there is no one. And I sleep.

  If I can’t sleep I look out the glass and stare at the gated community’s sewage irrigation fountain. Every community with a covenant has one. A little pond. A pretty fountain. A sign not to swim or fish.

  If I am asleep it is the sound of Mr. Hawthorne’s running shoes which wakes me. He lives at the back of the community, 10974 Eagle’s Wake Trail, Hawthorne, M & N. He runs to the front of the neighborhood and then stretches near the pond. My last duty before I am relieved by the computer is to release Mr. Hawthorne into the world for his run. He is gray-haired and sweet. He always smiles as he goes and shouts, “Thanks, Annie!” with an arm thrown up to the sky.

  I counted the hash marks and I’m home. I’m parking my car.

  I hear my husband inside the house. He’s screaming at my daughter, “Wait for Mommy!” Then he screams toward me, “Hurry up, Mommy!”

  I’m sitting in the garage, in my car. I can hear my husband calling. His voice holds so much. He thinks he’ll be late. He’s convinced that it’s my fault. He was up all night with one of the kids or the baby. If I was any kind of mother I would have been the one there for them. After all they were calling for me, not him. He can’t find the shoes he wants to wear. He forgot to pick up the dry cleaning so he doesn’t have the shirt he wants. If I was any kind of wife I would be the one ironing. There’s no food because no one went shopping this weekend because we had to go to that stupid christening/wedding/high school graduation party/fiftieth anniversary celebration/work picnic/Christmas gala and why should I miss the game just to get groceries?

  His calling me says all of this and more. It doesn’t always say I missed you, I still love you, I need you to work so we can pay for the tree house that we bought on credit and then destroyed in the assembly process. And it never says Welcome home, dear. Did you have a good day at work?

  For some reason I go in. I stare at the fruit bowl during our changing of the guard. He rushes past in a swirl of resentment, late for work.

  Hours later he is back. I hear myself say, “Welcome home, dear. Did you have a good day at work?”

  “You would never believe these assholes.” His voice trails off as he walks down the hall. He keeps talking for two hours from this point. Every day.

  It’s not that I don’t care about his work. I guess I do. I certainly should.

  At the first hour into his monologue there always comes a single line. It doesn’t vary much from this: “If I got a decent night’s sleep once in a while I could handle it.”

  We settle onto the couch. We turn on the TV.

  What my husband doesn’t realize is that for all he knows I don’t sleep. He has never seen me at work. He must assume I am working. And yet he never sees me sleep at home. So the gall of him; even uttering this line in my presence is unbearable. I hear myself say, “I suppose so, honey.”

  And then once he passes out, I leave for work. I don’t count the hash marks. When I drive toward work I just feel them pulling me in, closer, closer, closer, to that little hut.

  I read a note that my boss has left for me in an envelope. It says that I should not park my car in the driveway of the sales model. Someone has likely complained. Though why I cannot imagine. My car is parked there from ten thirty at night until five in the morning. Who could possibly care whether there is a car parked at the model during that time period?

  I’m not sure whether I should move my car.

  Where should I park?

  I decide to leave it for tonight and will call my boss tomorrow to find out where I should park.

  I clock in and start my shift.

  Hours do not help.

  What helps are seconds.

  I know that time is passing if I think about the seconds.

  I’m counting them when I hear the sound of familiar footsteps.

  There is one woman who comes to my booth almost every night. She wears her robe and slippers. She comes with a thermos and a radio and a deck of cards. Her husband is having an affair and her children never obey their curfew. She sits with me in my booth and we have a great time. She watches others pull through the gate. She writes down the time and then we play cards until she passes out in a heap on the cement floor. She has an air mattress that she stows in my booth cubby. Rarely does she bother to inflate it. When she does it fills up the entire booth. She sits on it like a chair with part on the floor and part going up the wall where the door is. It is hysterical. She always brings her stainless steel thermos. Sometimes she just brings coffee but more often it is filled with white Godiva liqueur, Kahlua, and three cups of vodka over ice. She calls her thermos the Stealth Bomber.

  We laugh a lot about the thermos.

  I have never known her name. Her address is 12488 Peregrine Falcon Lane. Her husband is William F. Fessner. She told me once that she kept her maiden name. But she never told me what it was. Interesting. I worry sometimes that I will read in the paper that a certain woman has committed suicide. It will be her and I will never know from her name.

  But we both like the brilliant red leaves on the Virginia creeper around the little gatehouse. We love how unbelievably bright red they are before that first frost, that driving October rain, that mess they become in the street once they fall away.

  MI FANTASMA QUERIDA

  With clenched pain in my chest and numbness radiating down my left arm I woke in my bed an hour ago and thought, “So it will be a heart attack.” If the morning sun were to rise over any other patch of water, then I would be there. But it does not. It rises here and rears back ready for the day. It is an uncommon thing. Swollen light waits, dormant, ju
st below the surface. But it’s my time. I’m eighty-seven. The sun leans into her work. She does not relent and with a submitting grace steps forth into the deepest part of a purple sky. Why call an ambulance or go to any hospital? The sun, like a queen-child of kings and godless men alike, moves across a well-worn sky-path with confidence. When the night takes her, there is rapture.

  I wanted to call my daughter. But what kind of call would that be? Plus, I didn’t want to wake her. I’m in New Jersey and she’s in Denver. There’s a time difference and she only gets a few hours of sleep as it is because of the baby. So when the pain eased enough to sit up, pull on a shirt, and stand, I just muttered a prayer to St. Teresa of Avila for my daughter. Nada te turbe. Nada te espante. Todo se pasa. Dios no se muda. La paciencia todo lo alcanza. My mother said that prayer so often to me as a child. And she told me stories from Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle. Stories I told my daughter. Quien a Dios tiene nada le falta. Solo Dios basta. So that done now I just move from my bed, grab the door to support my weight, ease myself through three rooms and out onto my sagging little porch.

  In agony I bend over and pick up my little fishing pot with the knife, a couple hooks, some drop weights, and a spool of line. I bang the pot between my rocking chair and the window so my ghost will sense it is time to go fishing. She is deaf but senses something. The vibrations maybe? My scent? I don’t know. But I want her with me so we can go down to the beach, down to my little rowboat, to face what is meant for me.