“Have you ever considered…” Sam spoke lightly. A newspaper—he was doing the crossword—rested on his tented legs. He said, “Perhaps you’re putting your own needs before hers?”
“What am I failing to give her that she needs?”
“I just think she’d like a vacation.”
“I mean besides Donald Duck. What else am I neglecting?”
“You’re a good mother.”
“Was that in question? I didn’t realize.”
“We could camp out along the way.” He scribbled on the edge of the newspaper to get the pen’s ink flowing. He said, “S’mores.”
“I’d rather go to—” But she couldn’t think of someplace else.
He shrugged, went back to his puzzle.
“In any case,” she said. “I have no idea what that even means: good mother. Who can say? Not us, of all people.”
She looked down at the cover of her book, a close-up of a heavily lipsticked mouth opened in fear or in ecstasy, you couldn’t tell which.
She said, “I feed her. I love her. Enough. Do I have to wear mouse ears to prove it?”
He didn’t bring up Orlando again.
She slept with her head on his chest. His body was trim, long. It had not altogether lost its boyishness. The knobbiness remained, the startled breath and hairless chest. But now there were things that were not boy. For example the ability to grow a mustache. In certain lights, the faintest touch of gray at his temples. The way his mouth curled when he was unhappy, or how his brow rose and the nostrils widened when he was pleased. The definitiveness of his expressions, that’s what she meant. This was new. During their first days together, he could not utter a feeling or wish without questioning it, contradicting himself, squeezing up his face as if to say: But is that right? Is that what I feel? What do I feel? Tell me. Tell me! That habit had stopped. He had been a fast-breathing, guilty, horny, desperate kid. Now he was stronger, she believed, in body and in mind. But the boy was not fully gone. He underlay the man. In bed she could see him, the boy: he lay like a body within the body, removed as a corpse, but he was not dead.
She reached across his torso and grabbed his upper arm. His skin was warm and smooth. She was eye to eye with his Adam’s apple, watched it beat. Maybe she would have been happier if he had more fully transformed. She wondered. If he had lost the boy in him, perhaps the girl in her (that hungry, charmless, unwashed thing, a shoplifter, a lover of dumb thrills, a nail-biter, an escape artist) would have likewise vanished. It was like the presence of boy in him confirmed the girl in her, and this was cause for great disappointment, because she wanted that girl exorcised. She wanted that girl strung up, wanted someone to poke at her with a stick, wanted a public ritual, a crowd to finish her off once and for all.
He told her to have sweet dreams, and she said she hoped the same for him. They lay in the darkness. Down the hall, their child dreamed of boats taking on water, of holes in their hulls she plugged with chewing gum.
8
Judith stood in the kitchen while Pax waited. She poured two glasses of bourbon, then combed her hair with her fingers. What was she doing? Why was she hesitating to go back in there? The rain started again. The pink kitchen, in the absence of sunshine, in the dusky light of a rainy afternoon, had become darker, not tongue but throat. Finally she returned to the living room. He said, “Man, I could go for some chocolate cake.” He’d finally lit the cigarette. He took dainty, courteous puffs.
“I’m not much of a cook,” she said.
In less than an hour her daughter would come home from school. Judith’s body felt calm, calmer by the moment, but a certain urgency was building in her mind. He would leave. She would never see him again. What did she want? She sat down next to him, legs pulled under her, knees pressed lightly into the side of his thigh.
He said, “Basically I’ve lived my whole life on buses. I ran away at sixteen. Took the first bus I saw. Got off here and there. I made fruit pyramids in Seattle. Baked bread in Tulsa. This girl and I had a place for a few months. But sooner or later I always found myself back on the bus.”
“Fruit pyramids.”
“Her name was Becky. She was a good girl.” He paused, said, “I feel like a voyeur. Like—how is it? Like a spy into my future. Like if I hadn’t left—if I hadn’t run away—this would have been my life. This old house. A kid. A wife. Maybe even you? It’s like I’m seeing some version of the life I’ve run away from. It’s like I’m a voyeur into my own existence.”
She pressed an index finger into his ribs. He did not show awareness that she had touched him. What was she after? She was suddenly irritated by her passivity, and by his jabber, and by the clock which showed just forty-five minutes until her daughter returned.
“Listen to me. God knows I’m no philosopher. I’m just a wanderer. A mucked-up, dirty, hobo American. But this place”—he opened his hand to the room—“it’s me when I was me, or when I could have become me. The me I was supposed to be. I mean I want to come back. It’s such a shitty house! No offense. But it is, right? No place to raise a kid.”
“Drink your bourbon.”
But he said, “Keep your daughter safe.”
“Don’t worry about my daughter.”
“Keep her safe.”
“Don’t!”
“I think I may be the ghost under her bed. My mother kissed my cheek. In that room. Then my eyelids, my ears, my mouth, my neck, my—”
She said, “Stop with the mother already.”
Did he not imagine she had one too? That they all did? That his was not the only one lurking?
He stopped.
Diana would come trundling home. And then Sam, the accountant, her cock-a-doodle, her one true everlasting, he would come home with his briefcase under his arm, sighing mightily like a man from the mines, and she would pour him a drink, and he would stay here until the day he died. Pax’s was not the only sorrow in the house. You could tell him this, and he would say he understood, and he would think he understood, but the truth was he did not understand, and not understanding such an important thing is what makes a person ride a bus all his life. Judith leaned in close to him. She said, “There are no ghosts under my daughter’s bed.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry I said so.” He seemed to mean it. Now she felt a stab of pity. He was still a boy. He’d dissected his suffering as a kid takes apart a car engine, emerges greasy, soiled—the car won’t run, but signs of his effort are everywhere. There was silence for a minute, peace, but then he was talking again, on and on, about a kind of ice cream he’d been addicted to as a kid, about the dog he never got, about some guy he’d met on a bus with a peacock feather in his hat. Her pity went away. Would he shut up? Could she make him shut up? Who was he to come into her home and speak aloud any flitting thing that haunted his brain? Why had she allowed this?
Then it occurred to her that she was allowed to do the same.
She said, “What, do you think, would make a woman drive her whole family into an oncoming train?”
Because he did not have a monopoly on sorrow. Because she had never before asked it.
He raised his eyebrows. “Is this some kind of riddle?”
He had found, as if from a suitcase of disguises, a cool, professorial face.
“No.”
“Is there a right answer, or is it hypothetical?”
She said, “Both. Neither. I don’t know.”
But it did not provide the release she expected. It felt, simply, like a betrayal of her husband, as if she had revealed what kind of underwear Sam wore, or had mimicked the sound he made when he ejaculated.
Pax’s eyes were closed. He appeared to be thinking. He said, “Shame.” He opened his eyes. “What are people ashamed of?”
Her mind was empty.
“Or—wait.” He rubbed his temples. “I have it. What’s the only thing stronger than shame?” The question hung like a cobweb between them. It had no obvious source or color or use. “Fear of shame,” he sa
id. “A fear of shame so strong you’ll do whatever it takes to earn it. People do the sickest, weirdest things. Anything to lay claim to whatever feeling you fear the most. I wish it weren’t so, but all the evidence points to it.” He looked at her a long moment. He blinked. “You thinking of going this route?”
Now is when she kissed him. She leaned in. His breath was warm and sweet, strawberry jam caught in the corners of his mouth.
What had happened in this house? Just the same mundane horror that happened everywhere. It was an ordinary house. But of course there was no house that wasn’t its own chamber of horrors, that didn’t, somewhere, have a hidden door, a hidden mouth. Diana would come home soon. Judith would pour her a cup of juice. They would sit at the kitchen table and play Operation. When it was Judith’s turn she would lift her instrument, pause before the body. She would retrieve the spare rib. The child would murmur encouragement, as Judith had done for the child. Judith would feel unnaturally in control of her hands. She could empty the whole body. She could! The Adam’s apple. The funny bone. She could win, if there wasn’t the unassailable rule that her daughter must win. The funny bone on the table. Her daughter watching solemnly. Why did the child have to win? Why did such a rule exist? What was its purpose except to fool the child, except to make her future that much harder to bear? The charley horse. The broken heart. The wishbone. Each and every blasted part. Would her hand have ever felt steadier? Would her hand have ever felt more her hand? No.
She tasted cigarettes and strawberry jam. As they kissed he made a sound like someone waking (a rising hum), and then like someone falling asleep (a descending sigh), these two sounds back and forth, as if entering and leaving consciousness even as he kissed her, here and nowhere, nowhere and here. Finally they pulled apart.
“That’s exactly what I’m taking about,” he said. “It’s what I’ve been saying all along.”
“What have you been saying?”
Disappointment passed over his face. “How shame makes you an outlaw. How it makes you an outlaw and a voyeur. That’s me. Both. Plus—can I be honest?—lonely.”
She took off her shirt. He looked impassively at her breasts. She took his hand, placed it on her chest; when she let go, his hand fell away.
“My stepfather came into the room. He found us. He saw it. I tried to hurt him.”
“It’s done. Whatever happened, it’s done now.”
“It’s not. It’s never.”
She said, “Look at what is right in front of you.” Her nipples were pale brown, faintly flecked with darker spots, like eggshell.
He squinted, said, “I don’t know how.”
She felt very little. He barely touched her, floated above her body, his motions resembling push-ups. The act concluded with a familiar sound, a creaking like an infant’s mechanical squall. They lay on the splintery wood floor. What she felt was sad release, the cruel pleasure of knowing the world moves along without you. She said his name but immediately regretted it, because he took this as an invitation to speak.
“You know what’s nice about you?” he said. “You’re at peace. You know what you want, don’t fight it. You’ve got no need for morality or theories or, shit, buses.”
“What are you talking about?”
She felt the urge to hit him. He wasn’t allowed to talk about her—he knew nothing!
Diana was walking home from school with a stick in one hand and a book about oceanic mysteries in the other.
He said, “You’re a blessing, Judith.”
She said, “I’m not blessing you.”
“You don’t need to try. It just happens.”
She said, “Look at my face.”
“I’m looking.”
“You’re not.”
He was.
She wanted only Sam now.
“I saw it when you opened the door,” he said. He stroked her cheek. “You have no use for shame. None. You’re beyond it. You know how primitive it is. Me, it’s all I’ve got. Tomorrow you’ll wake up like it’s any other day. You’ve got a girl to raise. Dishes to wash. That’s magnificent, isn’t it? That’s what I call good goddamn luck.”
PART 5
LEONORA
A few years before, another winter, her father took her out in a snowstorm. The brother was too young; her father made a big show about how her brother was too young for what they were going to do. It worked: Leonora felt proud and important. Ha! She stuck her tongue out at the boy as he sulked and whined; their mother had to placate him by letting him destroy a roll of cellophane wrap. But a little way into the walk it occurred to her that perhaps she was too young. For the weather was getting worse, and it seemed they’d gone much too far. What began as a quiet, peaceful storm soon became rigid, twisting sheets of snow and ice, a violent mix that stung their faces, burned the membranes of their eyes and noses. The wind picked up, and soon it raged. Soon you couldn’t see the streetlights. No cars, no buses, no people. It became difficult to stand up straight. In the distance an awful sound, like a train stopping short, a thrilling, spangly, dangerous screeching. “That sound! What’s that sound?” she cried, but her father couldn’t hear her. Where were they? Nothing was familiar. Just sheets of white, and wind, and pockets of moony blue. She couldn’t see her feet or her hands stretched out before her. Yet this was the city! Her city! She knew it so well. Her father grabbed her hand. He pressed his mouth to her ear, yelled instructions: “Walk backwards. Soldier on. Gut it out.”
Soldier on? Gut it out? That wasn’t how her father talked, not with that barbed-wire voice. He gripped her arm, spun her around so that the wind, now, was at their backs, and for one brief moment she could see where they were, which was in front of the dry cleaners, two blocks from home. The dry cleaners. Their dry cleaners. Yet seeing this, making out the familiar words (Schneiderman’s Since 1952), frightened her more, not less; disoriented her more, not less. That you could feel so lost, so small, and yet be so close to home—this knowledge penetrated her body as mere coldness never could. Soldier on. Gut it out. Her father, an economist, bookish, quiet, with a thin and lank body, with eyes her mother called “Bambi eyes,” he didn’t talk like that. Now his hat flew off. The wind tried to take hers too, but it was tied beneath her chin; she was just a little girl, she still wore hats like that. She lunged forward, to rescue his hat, his favorite brown corduroy newsboy hat—she couldn’t bear his losing that hat—but he clamped his hand on her arm with great strength. (The next day the bruise would show.) He pulled her backwards. She didn’t know if they were in the street or on the sidewalk, feared walking into a telephone pole or a car or falling down the stairs of the subway. Her father led her this way—she was impassive, free of volition, and finally she closed her eyes. She found it was easiest to accept her helplessness, to submit wholly to it. Plus it didn’t hurt so much when her eyes were closed. In this manner they made their way home. Snot froze on her face. The ends of her hair, where they’d flown into her mouth, froze too. Her arm throbbed. She couldn’t feel her feet.
Her mother seemed irritated but not worried, and gave them mugs of warm milk. Her brother sat in front of the fireplace, cellophane wrap binding his legs together, chanting “I’m a merman” and flapping his legs. Her mother wore sweatpants and a big white T-shirt. That was all. No sweater, no socks. She was always warm enough.
At home he became her father again, fast-blinking, distracted, clutching a hot-water bottle, the afghan drawn over his shoulders, bloodshot eyes on a paperback in his lap. The other person was gone.
Gut it out. Soldier on.
These words came to her in the backseat of the strangers’ car. She’d forgotten them for so long, forgotten her father’s alien voice, forgotten the ice striking her face, but now she remembered.
Gut it out.
She was on the floor of the car. A green sedan. She was hidden underneath a blanket that smelled like balsa wood and mud. Their car. She was in their car. Sandy and whatever the man’s name was. The man called the wom
an “Sandy.” She needed to remember this name, feared that in the blast of details, in the rush of smells, voices, sounds, colors, she’d lose it. She hadn’t heard his name, the man’s, she didn’t know his name, which made his touch—one hand on her back, one on her head—criminal. He should at least have introduced himself, she thought. Or was that crazy? What did his manners matter? But they mattered. Everything mattered. The smell mattered. The car mattered. The woman with the bowl cut, Sandy, Sandy, drove. Sandy complained about the cold, about the flipping broken heater. It was horrible, all these flippings, flipping this and flipping that, it was worse than the word itself. Trash on the floor, newspapers, fast food debris, batteries. She was down on that floor, mustardy Styrofoam for a pillow, a blanket on top of her. Three points of pressure: his hand on her back; his hand on her head; the floor hump pressing into her stomach.
Gut it out.
She had never been hit before. She had never ridden in a car this way before.
He said, “I wish there was another way, sweetie.”
He said, “Don’t get the wrong idea.”
He said, “This is no good, Sandy. She’s gonna get the wrong idea.”
At first she knew exactly where they were. This was her neighborhood, the back of her hand. She followed their turns, visualized their route, said the street names under her breath. She would remember everything! When they neared Wing Dings she had said, “There it is,” though of course they didn’t care about Wing Dings. They’d passed her school. They’d passed the place where she’d once been tempted to shoplift an eraser in the shape of an ice cream cone, and she hadn’t—hadn’t! She’d wanted it badly, wanted it desperately, but she hadn’t taken it. Very soon she lost her sense of direction. Her cheek didn’t hurt anymore. Then he pulled the blanket off her and said she could sit on the seat next to him, provided she sat very still, provided she was a good girl, he knew she was a good girl, he hoped she didn’t have the wrong idea. She sat up. He clasped her, his right arm around her shoulder, its hand squeezing her elbow, his other hand across his lap and pressing her hand to the seat, like they were at a scary movie.
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children Page 20