You Were Here

by Gian Sardar

  There’s a woman not far from Luven who has some nice feed sack fabric—flour, too, so close weaves, and since they’d been collected on a trip to Des Moines they come with the added bonus of not being easily recognizable as something recently on a shelf or piled in a corner. Though lately even feed sacks seem to be disappearing, replaced by paper bags that are apparently cheaper. The war’s being over is a great thing, of course, but Eva misses the unity that blurred classes by turning basics into all the rage, everyone working for the same goals: conserve, ration, and repair. Now the lines are obvious once again, designers invigorated, Paris once more holding the reins. Now excess is celebrated in design and costs reflect the extravagance. Now it’s obvious who is who.

  As she debates on colors—blue backgrounds are best with her eyes—she paints her nails, one last stroke of red. The color merges and swims. William’s favorite color. William’s color. She smiles, seeing herself sleeping—taking up most of the bed, apparently—her hand upon his chest, rising and falling. The note he left her is with the others, placed inside the drawer of her nightstand. Each Saturday she must force herself to wait to read his words, their promise a treat after the long bus ride, then later a presence on nights when the stars barely light the sky and the silence of her room begins to blare.

  The phone rings, muffled beneath carpet, flooring, walls. No one calls for her, so there’s no need for the phone to be near her room, which is really the attic; hot, one window that blinks into an elm tree and at night is privy to sounds Eva bets the rest of the world is not.

  The ringing’s stopped. It was probably for her sister, Anna. Most likely it was Jim Dear—the term Eva hears all day long—calling just to hear Anna’s voice, just to say he misses her, to give her more to talk about at the dinner table. It’s always for Anna, whose friends have stayed many and the same. Eva envies her sister, the ease of her existence, the fact that people or moments don’t shift or crack with other meanings, that things are simply what they are. Years ago, Eva and her sister were at Verly’s Market and needed Pine-Sol, which was all the way up on the top shelf. As Eva reached for it, fingertips skimming the bottle, Mr. Verly stood by the coffee. You almost have it, he said a few times. Beside him Mrs. Verly’s mouth became a straight, unforgiving line, and Eva’s cheeks began to burn. Moments later Anna declared they needed a second bottle, and without giving it another thought, she’d gone to the same aisle and done exactly as Eva had, standing on the tips of her toes, fingers reaching. Now, let me get that for you, Mr. Verly said. And that was that. He handed her the bottle and Mrs. Verly never bothered to look up from her clipboard with all its lined papers and precise numbers. On the walk home Eva retraced the encounter in her mind to figure what she had done, as she must have done something. Did she smile at Mr. Verly and not Mrs. Verly when she walked in? Did she forget to tuck her blouse in tighter before reaching to the top shelf? The fault, she knew, came from within her, and with enough time she would find the source. Meanwhile, Anna’s trip to the market had been nothing more than a trip to the market.

  It wasn’t always like this. When Eva was young, she was like everyone else, fishing with her cousins, waving to friends from the tops of trees, playing hopscotch on elm-shaded sidewalks. But then, overnight it seemed, the world shifted and people no longer said hello to her on the street. They stopped inviting her for sleepovers if there were older brothers in the house or fathers who lingered at the breakfast table. The looks from men and women became a tug-of-war, beckoning her closer or warning her to stay away. Nothing was simple. She was twelve years old and didn’t understand why the word pretty was no longer a compliment, why her mother bought her dresses two sizes too big, or why some hugs were not just given at hello or good-bye.

  Now that’s changed. She makes her own clothes and they fit, an uncomfortable fit for many in the town, but to Eva, it no longer matters. Her mind is full of acceptance and the streets she walks along are only half anchored to the earth. Now she stands up straighter and lifts her chin, her sometimes forced confidence a thick pane of glass before her heart. Now the eye contact she makes might be a dare, and the sway of her hips a warning.

  She glances at a magazine. She needs to do something with her hair. Styles are changing. She can’t keep looking like a farm girl—not that she lives on a farm, but Luven is a farm town and it saturates, settles into your pores like a fine, clogging dust, carries on breezes and breaths, fabric and allegiances. Today, when she’d left William, the bus carried her into prairies and farmland, and she could’ve sworn as the highway went deeper into nothingness that she’d seen, actually seen the smooth sophistication of Rochester slipping from the people they passed. The farther south, then the farther west, the harder the faces. Weathered skin, bland clothes, everything in life for function, the word fancy an insult. It worries her that William will one day look at her and see a hint of this, that hundreds of years of farmhand genes will burst through. Clunky, she’s always thought. Farm women are clunky and thick, sturdy and back-heavy as tractors.

  Again the phone rings, but this time the sound is followed by a loud rap on the wall at the base of the stairs, and then the word phone. Eva steps down the stairs, confused. Her mother, Margaret, waits for her with one eyebrow lifted. Margaret hasn’t lived on a farm for decades and yet the world has taken its toll on her as well, her beauty reduced to a faint echo, a whispered past evoked only by eyes the color of a June sky. Your mother, an aunt once said to Eva, could’ve been your twin. But if left alone, grief is a tarnish that only gets darker.

  Now her mother slowly walks from the room, stopping to adjust a coaster on the sideboard. Above is a hole in the wall, left over from a nail. Years ago one of her aunts hung Jesus in the spot, but when Margaret saw the icon, Jesus came down and the nail was pried out with bare fingers. A bit of the wall came loose and Jesus went into a box in the basement.

  Eva picks up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “I have to go back on Monday,” the voice quickly says.

  It takes her a second. “William?” His voice without him. His voice from where his voice has never been.

  “Can you be there?”

  “I have shifts Monday and Tuesday,” she says, and then adds, “but sure. Someone will cover.”

  This is the first time they’ve spoken on the phone. In nine months, the first time.

  “Good,” he says. “One more day.”

  She smiles. “Just one more.”

  She’s about to tell him that she can’t wait when he says good-bye and is gone. So quick, it might not have happened—but she’s holding the phone receiver. Proof. He called. In another world she’d take her mother aside to ask her what she thought. Could you tell? Could you tell how he looks at me? How he stands the moment I enter the room? How he hangs my dresses in the bathroom so the steam lets out the wrinkles?

  It occurs to her that he must’ve been calling from his house. Now and then she tries to picture it, weaving scraps of conversation with her mind’s offerings, an ever-changing collage. A two-story house—after all, he is William Davis of Davis Construction; he can afford the extra space—a small lawn perhaps, neat, always tidy. The door, she’s decided, is wide, with a wrought-iron peephole. But then she pictures the inside, and that’s where the problem lies, as William, to her, is navy walls and deep leather chairs, brass frames and long heavy drapes—but he’s not alone. There is a wife, one Eva tries not to think about, an often futile attempt. But in Minneapolis, his wife’s presence would be unavoidable, and with this thought the long velvet drapes shorten and lighten and become choked with floral print, the walls turn cream, the crown moldings white, and ultimately Eva realizes she has no idea where he sits for his dinners or where he is when he dreams without her.

  Just now, where was his wife when he called Eva? Is there a phone in the living room, a long hall that stole his words before they reached her ears? In her heart she knows he’ll leave his wife—a jagge
d thought, as she knows that with her happiness will come another’s sorrow. Mismatched. That’s what she tells herself they are. After all, if everyone has one perfect person, as she believes they do, then the edges of his marriage simply don’t fit, something both of them must feel.

  “You know you’ve never even told me her name,” Eva had said not long ago as they picnicked deep inside the park, a Friday afternoon freed when two of his meetings were canceled.

  “Yes,” he said. “I realize that.”

  She looked up at him. She herself was not sure she wanted to know the name, in fact had always been thankful it never came up—as in her conscience a nameless, faceless person’s weight was considerably less—but learning the omission had been on purpose was something else entirely. “You’re not going to tell me?”

  To this he said no, and something came loose within her, so she asked why—coy, masking that fluttering, unhooked feeling with a smile.

  “Because I don’t want to hear you say it.”

  With those words, her life cracked open. The noises in the park sloshed over. Piercing geese. Insistent, lapping water. A dog’s steps cracking leaves. She’d been sloughed away, left raw by the realization that he still, despite everything, wished to protect his wife. What did it mean?

  Her mother returns with black coffee—the hour of the day or night never matters—and a deck of cards. On the table she lays the cards out one by one, her hands slender but wrinkled with abuse. “The doctor sure calls late.”

  The doctor. The doctor and the patient and the fake job, the supposed reasons for Eva’s weekly Rochester visits. An imaginary life she’s concocted that pales in comparison to the one she’s actually living, the truth of which bunches beneath her skin: I’m with someone who makes my insides leap—he may be married, but it’s complicated. The money I bring home isn’t from a patient but from the dresses I sell now and then in a little shop by the ice cream parlor. I have talent, the owner says. I have talent and a boyfriend and a stack of notes that make me cry because words, to me, have never been kind . . . until now. But she can say none of this. Her mother might not believe in Jesus, but she still believes in sin.

  “Iris needs to come in for testing on Monday,” Eva says instead. “Her hip’s giving her a lot of pain.”

  “You work on Monday.”

  Eva heads to the stairs. “Someone will cover.”

  “Like I said, it’s late to make a call like this.”

  “He’s known her family for years.”

  The lies are natural, fluid. Before she disappears, she turns and smiles, not caring that Margaret’s eyebrow is once again lifted, not worried that it was Margaret who taught her to lie and like a teacher can spot what was passed along. She knows her mother won’t say anything. Respective secrets are kept silent.

  —

  The next day, Sunday, is long and pointless now that Monday has meaning. Eva has the early shift, one that gets her there at the crack of dawn and lets her out a bit after noon. Not that many people come in, its being Sunday, but truth be told, this is Eva’s favorite shift, as she gets to spend most of the time daydreaming, just standing at the counter and staring at the gas station across the street. Red pumps and bottlebrush grass that’s tall at the base of the station, shooting out as if the building had been dropped onto a liquid that splashed. A Coca-Cola sign in the window: CONTINUOUS QUALITY IS QUALITY YOU TRUST.

  She’s slid the latest Vogue Pattern Book between some menus, and now and then opens to a page. “Make your buttons your most important spring accessory,” a headline encourages. Buttons. Remind me to buy you a few sets. She smiles, then flips to the pattern she’s going to send for, number 6358, a sundress with a camisole top.

  Suddenly Eva’s heart is racing and it takes her a moment to realize why: the smell, the cloying sweetness of alfalfa hay mixed with manure and crushed stalks of corn, all layered with something deeper, musky and damp, something that makes her breath come up short. She looks up. Uncle Lucas—one of her father’s brothers—stands in front of her, his eyes on the Vogue Pattern Book. With one finger he presses on the sundress. “That’s a nice one.” Then he looks back up at her, a long look, and pulls on the brim of his hat before he turns to take his usual booth.

  She finds Gerry refilling ketchup bottles. “Do you mind if I take my break now?”

  He looks at the clock on the wall—it’s too early for a break; she can see he’s about to say no—but then looks out into the diner, at the four customers. Uncle Lucas sits in the back of the booth, arms spread on the table as he waits.

  Gerry nods. “All right. I’ll come get you when your break is over.” He offers a small smile as she tucks her pattern book under her arm.

  Once inside the break room, really just Gerry’s office, walls decorated with calendars from past years, Eva opens the book to the sundress. A darkened print from Lucas’s finger has smudged the bodice. Carefully she tears out the entire page, and tosses it in the trash.

  —

  On her way home, she passes the graveyard and blows a kiss in the direction of her father’s stone. In the background the line of treetops swoops up and down like a crown, rendering the dead and their markers as subjects, colorless gems for a dreary royalty. She’s made it to the corner of the street when she stops, closes her eyes for just a second, and then turns back. You can’t ignore your father like that. Not when he’s had so little.

  White dandelion clocks are scattered like tiny spheres of light. The markers she winds through are all etched with names she knows. Lemahieu, Demuyt, Vershaeve, Verly, Bulcke, Doom. The town’s ancestors, a history of troublesome names. Someone—she’s not sure who, maybe a Bulcke—had long ago been from Leuven in Belgium, which worked its way into Luven by the time it got to Minnesota. Eva’s own last name, Marten, is one of the simplest in Luven, though even that had been different. Before her family came to the States it’d had two a’s, but, like so many other letters deemed unnecessary, that second a dropped deep into the waters at Ellis Island.

  There’s the pink granite stone of a boy Eva’d had a crush on in fourth grade, one who’d still had rounded cheeks and freckles when he’d been asked to be brave in the Netherlands. Just outside the town his family was from—generations and generations, all from Arnhem—was where he’d closed his eyes for the final time, his ancestors’ September sky the last he ever saw. One of three boys from Luven who’d never returned from war. The second boy is by the elm at the back gate. He was a bit older and Eva didn’t know him well, just remembers that before he’d been sent off, he’d arranged to buy a corn picker on the black market, a scandal that died down only when his first step onto the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima turned out to be his last. The people of Luven don’t forget, but when you die, at least they turn it to a whisper.

  It’s the third boy whom she thinks of, though he’s not here—missing, unaccounted for, dead or alive, he has never returned. Eddie Parks. The only one in Luven she saw herself with, a possible future the result of shared history and a pressing intuition. It was his grove of elms that had two perfect climbing trees, and while Eva scaled one, Eddie used to climb the other. They’d flash grins at each other over a canopy of green, the world around them spread in rows. During the winter they raced on frozen ice or balanced along the rafters in his barn, each taking careful steps as the other reached out a hand now and then. And when her world changed, he never did, though sometimes he aimed his smiles to the ground and eventually began opening doors for her, but never once did he reach for her. And now, she’s thought with sorrow on more than one occasion, he never will.

  At last she passes the worn slab that faintly reads Baby Boy Verly, and is then at her father’s headstone. She was almost three when the tractor he was on tipped, and not one memory of him survives. In fact, she believes her first memory could be of the day he was killed, the moment her uncles—dusty from the fields, the corners of their eyes mo
ist—stood in the kitchen and said words that slowly undid Margaret, pulling that one crucial string. In her mind Eva watched from the doorway, a red twilight burning through the window and touching her uncles’ blond heads with fire, while her mother’s dark hair spilled on the kitchen table, her tears silent. Though Eva thinks she remembers this, she can’t be sure, as no one will talk about that day or about her father in general, other than a few scattered words here or there. If only she’d remembered that morning, if only her mind had kept even a faded glimpse of him leaving. At least she would’ve had that: a hand closing a door, a tall figure heading toward the barn. Tall. That’s what everyone says about him. Oh, he was tall.

  This granite slab with the mourning angel, this is the only way she’s known him. His front is shiny, polished and with precisely chiseled lettering. His sides are rough-cut stone and he’s got an eight-inch base on which he’s perched. Sometimes he’s dressed with geraniums, other times with lilies or irises. That’s where she’d gotten the name Iris. She’d visited her father right before the lie dropped from her lips, and that day there’d been a string-tied bunch of vibrant purple irises. There was no need to worry her mother knew the source of inspiration, as Margaret does not visit the graveyard.

  “I’m seeing him tomorrow,” she tells her father, Joseph Marten, son of Mary and Remi Marten, husband to Margaret Marten. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.

  There is, of course, no response. Nothing but the slight rasp of cottonwood leaves, the passing cars on the road. She lies on the grass alongside him, her head near his headstone. For a moment everything is still.

  “I know it’s not good to ask for what I’ve been asking for,” she says, lips brushing the grass as she speaks. She rolls toward the sky, flat and empty as the plains. “I do. But I can’t help feeling it’s not my fault that I want it.” These are things—with the infinite wisdom the dead possess—that he’d understand.