Could she?
The man said, “We’d really appreciate it, sweetie.”
The wind picked up. Her throat was tight now, tighter than before, but she wasn’t sure it was the illness.
Two circles. Two circles was resonable. It wasn’t too much to ask. The man walked over to her and put the kitten in her arms. It opened its eyes. She said, surprising herself, “Thumper! Hello, Thumper.” She could feel the animal’s body, its blood, its heart, all these tiny pulsing sensations on her wrists, beating with her own pulse, thumping, you couldn’t tell them apart.
“Thumper!” the woman cried.
“Thumper’s a good name,” the man said.
“This one’s a live wire,” the woman said.
The man said, “Just show her the map, Sandy,” and she showed Leonora the map.
1
Judith sent her daughter off to school in a denim jumper embroidered with ladybugs. They ran up her belly in a vertical line, splitting her stomach and breastbone in two. Green buttons in the shape of flowers along the hem. The child didn’t care about her clothes, didn’t want cute jumpers or patent-leather Mary Janes or Barbies or glimmering barrettes, and while this was a comfort to Judith, who hadn’t wanted them either, it also frightened her, because did not wanting these things mean the girl would turn out like her mother? What would the girl want? Everyone has to want something; it’s easier to want the regular things, though you don’t get a say. The daughter, her name was Diana, never asked for anything.
It was a damp Tuesday in May. They were late for the bus, so Judith drove Diana to school. She was in the second grade; her teacher was Mrs. Hoop, round, dull, all cream and beige except for the gleaming red fingernails of a prostitute. Judith kissed the girl’s head. She drove home in a misting rain. Then she ate half a tub of cottage cheese while reading a story in the paper about some local girls who’d started a Sally Ride Society. They wanted to be astronauts, wrote letters to NASA, to the President: Send more ladies to space! They were planning another bake sale to raise money for a trip to Cape Canaveral. The optimism and pride of those girls unnerved Judith. There was so much terror in the world, bombs and arms deals and famines, all those dead people in Oklahoma City for god’s sake (the mother of one of the dead lived in the next town over, was regarded as a heroine for spawning a victim, glorious for her tie to the tragedy), and here a gaggle of preteens planned moon missions, baked cup-cakes and decorated them with little stars. All hope was misplaced. The world needed hope desperately, but it always came from the wrong people and went to the wrong things. If she ever came across one of their bake sales she would not buy a thing. The dead son in Oklahoma was twenty-two, had a fiancé. Those girls had no right to the cosmos.
She went to the living room to watch television, a game show. Five minutes later someone knocked on the door. A knock? Who came out here? No one knocked. But that’s what it was, a double knock, a pause, then another. Someone was in their scabby woods knocking on the door of the cottage.
Judith and Sam and Diana lived in a little cottage in a town called Beetle. It was an accident, Beetle—it wasn’t where they’d meant to come. They’d been planning to live in the city, had in fact been moving to the city, on the road, but Judith got scared. This was before Diana was born; this was when Diana was a germ in Judith’s belly, the size of a paper clip. They were on their way to the city when she’d told Sam to pull over, stop the car, and he did, and where he pulled off was Beetle. They laughed at that—who would name a town Beetle? Absurd. The town was nowhere, bland, empty of threat. They bought Cokes at the gas station, stood on greasy asphalt and drank and took in the smell of gasoline, and she said, “I’m staying here.” Sam was still wearing his wedding shoes. “Here?” He didn’t understand. They’d been man and wife for eighteen hours. Here, yes; right here. But the city…? No. She’d changed her mind. She couldn’t go back to that place. “Oh.” She could tell he was disappointed, but the power was hers, wasn’t it? She’d earned the right to her say. She’d paid her dues. So the next day they were driven down a rutted road in the station wagon of a realtor named Sasha, a sexagenarian with pencil-thin eyebrows and hair that floated around her head like a shower cap. She stopped the car. “It needs work,” Sasha said, squinting at the property. “It’s been empty quite a while. There’s a better place over on Coswell…” It was a fairy-tale cottage, tumbledown, overgrown, mossy and wild, with a red door and a cast-iron knocker in the shape of an owl, a claw-foot tub, a stone fireplace, a crumbling chimney, everything swathed in vines and weeds and coated with dirt, so that the total effect called to mind something caught in a spiderweb, a thing stunned and wrapped up but not yet eaten. The price was right. Sam said, “Let’s see the place on Coswell?” but Judith said, “I want this one.” He raised a brow. He had recently taken to raising it. She didn’t like this particularly; it reminded her of her father. Sam looked at the cottage, touched the rusted hinges of its door, its filthy window, sighed. “Well,” he said. He wanted to see her in that big bathtub, so he signed the papers.
Now, eight years later, a knock on their door. Who would knock? No one came here. Their daughter was at school; Sam was at the accounting firm. Judith sat in the cramped living room, smoking a cigarette, still annoyed by the Sally Ride girls, wondering why she should remain annoyed—who cared about a bunch of stargazing kids?—while on the television a woman had to decide which cost more, a jar of peanut butter or a jar of olives, and if she was correct she would take home a catamaran. The deviousness of human boredom, that it pretends to be alleviated by the most meager of exercises. The olives, thought Judith.
The rain had picked up. Thunder, weakly, a mild comfort, like someone clearing their throat in the next room. A knock. Diana was at school learning map skills, Diana had lost one of the decorative buttons on her jumper but didn’t bother looking for it, while across town in a strip mall Sam punched numbers into a temperamental computer and sipped burnt coffee, and here was Judith, already twenty-six, a few community college courses under her belt, a part-time job at the Come & Go, faith and fidelity like apple seeds she’d swallowed by accident, in her but not of her, working their way out. They would come out whole. They were not things you could digest. Or were they? She didn’t know; not knowing was the whole shape of her life; not knowing was liquid; it takes the form of its container. It was May. The woman on the television looked to the audience to help her decide. The olives? The peanut butter? The audience roiled and screamed and gnashed. Then there was a knock on the door. Another.
She rose.
But what if she hadn’t gone to the door? What if she’d stayed sitting in her wicker chair, feet drawn up beneath her, smoking and watching television, watching the woman whose bra did not provide adequate support while she leapt joyously in front of her new boat (the peanut butter)—what if she had remained in this chair and ignored the knock, which now came more urgently—what if she had ignored the knock and stayed in her chair and watched the game show and then her soap opera and waited for her family to return—would she perhaps have borne out the rest of her life just like this?
She’d never know. It’s one of those questions that sits on a shelf in your brain and swings its legs all your days.
He was about her age, she thought, twenty-six, twenty-seven, gangly, wearing a filthy corduroy blazer, jeans, hay-colored scruff on his face. He cleared his throat but did not speak.
“Can I help you?”
He said, stiffly, “Why hello, ma’am.”
She was not ma’am. She wore cutoffs and a pink tank-top, no bra. She didn’t need a bra, even when she leapt for joy. She had never leapt for joy. On her ankle was a gold chain with a tiny heart, a gift from Sam and Diana. She waited for him to say more, but he seemed unsure how to proceed. The air outside smelled of ozone, grass, distant barbecues. They looked at each other. His nose was wide and blunt, like a boxer’s, but his cheekbones were fine. He shifted his weight.
“Listen,” she said at last. “
I’m not interested. If you’re here to sell knives or God or whatnot.”
“Whatnot,” he said. “That would be my category.”
Near his feet sat a suitcase of worn brown leather, its hinges tarnished, the name of an expensive company branded on its side.
“I’m not selling anything. I promise. And I’m not a Christian.” He tugged on the sleeves of his jacket. She saw that he winced slightly, as if preparing for a blow. He took a breath. He blinked. Then he said, “This is my house.”
Behind her, on the television, the audience hissed with displeasure.
“Was,” he said. “It was my house.”
He looked at the straw mat under his feet, at the top of the doorframe, the owl knocker. He worked on keeping his eyes from going inside; he was trying to tell her, with his restrained eyes, that he had manners.
“Your house?”
“I grew up here.” His mouth, at rest, made something of a pout. For some reason it struck her as faintly ludicrous that anyone had lived in these rooms before her. She didn’t believe him. “I should have called first,” he was saying. “Except obviously I had no way to know your phone number.” He rapped on the doorframe, then looked at his hand quizzically, as if he’d not been in possession of it. “See, I haven’t set foot inside this place since I was—” And here he paused, looked down at his feet. He said, “Sixteen.” The word came out tentatively, softly, like the name of a friend he was ratting out. Still he looked at his feet. His shoes were a mess. He was homeless, it was clear, or something like it. He looked up again, now sheepish. “I was on a bus,” he explained. “It was passing through. Old Beetle. What could I do? I got off. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t plan it, but the bus stopped and I was standing up. Why was I standing up? Who knows. I got off. Here I am.” He made a high, wobbling sound that might have been a laugh or a cry or a sneeze or a cross between them, but which he swallowed before she could decide. The sound was awful. That’s when she knew he was telling the truth.
Now he seemed to be looking at her feet. She clenched her toes. He said, “I used to hammer those floorboard nails. Ten cents a pop.”
If she found herself one day passing through her old town, would she get off the bus? Would she knock on the door that had once been her door, the door to that lonely house with its ant-infested cupboards and lingering charred-meat smell and those chugging, ineffectual radiators and carpets her mother neglected to vacuum, even though there was a perfectly functional vacuum cleaner in the closet? What did Grace have against clean carpets? No. Judith would not knock. Only a pathetic person knocks. She did not believe in investigating nostalgia, which is merely the costume self-pity wears. But in this stranger’s sad gaze there was something else. Beyond the nostalgia, that baser sentiment, she sensed—what? She wasn’t sure. Something.
She said, “All right then. You want some water?”
He said that he couldn’t imagine a better thing at this moment than a glass of water.
She liked the duct tape on the toe of his sneaker. She liked his scruff, his contained filth. She invited him in.
On the television a woman was squirting canned orange cheese onto a cracker—it sat there in a dazzling pile, like a castle. Judith turned it off.
“Thank you for trusting me,” the man said.
Judith turned to look at him, his pout, his greasy brow, and she felt a wisp of dread, a wisp of—what else? where? like a whirling sensation, faint, something veering through her stomach the way a top spins across a tabletop, going where it wants to go, captive to nothing—
Hope.
She said, “What the hell makes you think I trust you?”
2
Q said, “Sex is the boat you row all your life. The one with mismatched oars. Sex is a boat chained to the harbor. You call it ardor. You call it lust. There’s an anchor that’s turned to rust. The anchor—here’s the important part—is invisible. You think you’re going someplace but you don’t move. Sex is the boat you row, but pleasure—now that’s something else. Pleasure is a tiny stream of fish running underneath the boat. A flash of silver fish too fast to see, flying not just up your cooch but other places too, places you didn’t know exist. Oh my girl. It’s time to jump from that poor boat, to cease and desist. Judy, you’re a beauty. You’re a smart enough kid. But you’re the Helen-flipping-Keller of pleasure. If you come with me, I’ll treat you to a kind of pleasure you’ve never known, beyond your bones, behind your mind. I’m warning you it will take a long time. You want to get out of your rowboat? You want to get in the water and see if you float? I’ll pick you up at six. Get ready to be fixed. I have to warn you of one thing, though—it’s gonna hurt a little.”
3
He winced when he had an orgasm, embarrassed, swallowed his sounds, turned his head. Poor Sam. How badly he wanted to be bad. It was his hidden desire, his vain and tender secret, but she knew. He couldn’t cry out in pleasure. He couldn’t smoke cigarettes. He couldn’t take his whiskey straight. The guy had manners. He had manners and faith, when all he wanted in his secret heart was to be tough and greedy and rude, to take take take, to live in risk, to moan, to live like it didn’t matter when it ended, it could end tomorrow for all he cared, screw it, drop my ashes in the Sargasso. He wore a leather jacket. He wore his hair long, until someone called him “Princess,” and then he cut it. The way she figured it, he was bad in one way only: he had married her. Was it enough for him? It had to be enough. Badness is the marrow in a bone; he simply didn’t have the strength to crack it open. But he could knock her up, could marry her, he could look at the sweet, wounded faces of his aunt and uncle, he could look at their faces and shrug, he could do only that much, so he did, and then he got his accounting certificate.
Their wedding had been at town hall, in a strange room with a checkerboard linoleum floor that went up the walls, concluding at waist level. The upper walls were the green of a chalk-board. They’d been out of high school for a month. She wore shoes that pinched and pink gloss on her lips. The room was hot. She looked at a poster announcing the dangers of marijuana and she wanted, more than anything in the world, marijuana. Another poster celebrated the history of the postal service. The ceiling had been painted yellow. The room didn’t make sense, but that wasn’t the job of the room. Sense was theirs for the making. What is a wedding but a declaration of sense? It is the possibility that good sense will bring peace. It is the possibility that you’ll learn to stay still, stop fiddling, stop running, stop wondering what would happen if you just got on a bus and kept paying and paying and paying. This is what a wedding means; the marriage, of course, is something else. “All set?” They nodded like scolded children. In a box in Sam’s back pocket, jammed into a single ring slot, were two plain bands. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. High school had just ended; for a little longer three o’clock would feel like freedom, like being released, returned to yourself. They smoothed their hair. She made one final complaint about her ill-fitting shoes. Then, under fluorescent lights, standing before a half-deaf justice of the peace, before her father, before Sam’s aunt and uncle, on a day of low clouds that threatened but did not produce rain, they signed the papers and spoke the vows and were henceforth man and wife. No one said, “You can kiss the bride,” but they kissed anyhow, chastely. He did not look like the same boy who had fucked her in his tiny bedroom while his aunt puttered and hummed in the next room. He did not look like the boy who had, with a raging cry (Jesus! did he not know his aunt was next door? did he not care?—this startled even Judith, who prided herself on not being easily startled)—reached down and tore the condom off his prick, tossed it in the air, slapped it across the room like it was a bee that’d been bothering them, and said, hotly, into her ear, “I want it like this.” At town hall, on his wedding day, he had the clean, composed face of a church boy, patient eyes, combed hair, and an ugly tie he’d borrowed from his uncle.
The wedding took place in Copper Junction, where she’d grown up, and the reception
afterward was in the backyard of her house. Her father tended a charcoal grill, wore an apron for the first time in his life. Sam’s uncle erected a volleyball net. His Aunt Constance, pale-faced, in a new lilac dress, moved tentatively, haltingly, like a person getting over a stomach virus, like she couldn’t turn her head too fast or she’d puke. She hovered around the food table, shooed bugs, made sure the paper napkins didn’t fly away. The kabobs tasted like gasoline. Someone made a pumpkin pie even though it was the wrong season; it remained largely uneaten, as if in deference to certain laws. Endless cans of beer. That feeling of an ice-cold can from the cooler, dripping with water, the pinkness of the palm, the first sighing sip—this was the way she would remember the day. A sudden chill, a fine blurring of relief and discomfort. Hops. A deep swallow, another, a longing she thought might have dissolved but of course didn’t. She felt stupid for holding that kind of idea. What inner thing truly dissolves? Why would some civic procedure, of all things, fix her? She was stupid, but she could forgive herself. That was another thing about weddings: forgiveness was encoded into them. A foil banner—CONGRATS! in shimmering red—brought down by the breeze. Later, as the wind picked up, it moved end-over-end through the yard, a serpent eating its tail, until it got caught in the brambles at the side of the road.
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children Page 17