Nearer Than The Sky

by T. Greenwood

  “I’m not sad,” I said, my chest heaving. “Why don’t I feel sad?”

  He didn’t answer; he only pulled me in closer to him. He touched my eyelids with his fingers and pressed my good ear into his soft sweater. And for a few moments, he gave me complete silence and darkness, with only the fading scent of pine to remind me that I was alive.

  Because there was no food in Ma’s cupboards, we drove into town that night to get some pizza. It was nice to sit in the passenger’s seat again. To not worry about hidden spots of ice or an elk appearing in our headlights. It was a bright night. The clouds had cleared and the sky was littered with stars, suspended like shining marionettes.

  We decided to go to Anthony’s, the place just north of the tracks, the one with wooden booths scarred with graffiti and wallpaper that looked like bookshelves. There were pool tables in the back and they served the pizza with bowls of ranch dressing for dipping. In high school my girlfriends and I could get served beer there. There was a guy who worked there who would give us paper Coke cups filled with Budweiser instead of soda. We’d get drunk in the back room and play video games with the tokens he slipped us with our change.

  Peter parked the car next to the train station and helped me tie the wool scarf tightly around my neck. I felt like a mummy.

  “I swear, you’re going to get sick unless you bundle up,” he said.

  I breathed the smell of wool for a second and then pulled the scarf down, uncovering my mouth. “What about you?” I said, motioning to his bare neck and mittenless hands.

  “I’ve got a natural scarf,” he said, rubbing his scruffy chin and neck.

  “Are you growing a beard again this winter?”

  “Depends,” he said. “Will you still kiss me?”

  “I suppose,” I said. I actually liked it when Peter let his beard grow. It wasn’t prickly like you’d imagine.

  “Kiss me now?” he asked, leaning toward me.

  I kissed him and felt everything grow weak and warm. Peter still has the ability to make me feel the way I used to feel when we first met. Most people wouldn’t believe it. Fourteen years is a long time to share a life. And there are times, of course, when one of us grows bored or annoyed. What used to be butterflies may now be something less striking than the orange and black of a monarch. Something more common and predictable, a loping gray moth with slow beating wings. But its wings still flicker.

  We were greeted by a blast of hot air when we opened the door to the pizza place. The music coming from the jukebox was loud, the rhythm steady underneath our feet. It was busy inside. There were groups of high school kids huddled inside the wooden booths. Little kids crawling across the big wooden tables reaching for another piece of pizza.

  “Same as usual?” he asked.

  “Mmm hmm,” I nodded, distracted by a couple in the far corner. The girl was probably only fifteen or sixteen. The boy looked older. They were sitting on the same side of a booth. His arm was stretched across the back of the seat. She was crying softly, and he was staring straight ahead. Her face was blotchy with tears. She could have been inside her bedroom instead of a pizza place full of people. She was fiddling with a pair of pink mittens and crying. A bent silver pizza pan with two remaining slices was on the table in front of them. He reached across her and grabbed a napkin from the dispenser. He handed it to her absently and kept staring ahead as she blew her nose. Finally, he stood up and started to walk toward the door. She stood up and followed behind him. When he turned around, he shook his head no. I watched her shoulders tremble and then she sat back down in the booth alone. He walked briskly past Peter and me, hands shoved into his pockets and head lowered. The girl looked helplessly after him, wiping at her eyes with the crisp white napkin. It made my heart ache.

  We brought the pitcher of beer and the plastic tumblers to a table in the pool room. We sat down in a booth and Peter filled both glasses, carefully tilting them as he poured so there wasn’t too much foam.

  “Thanks,” I said and sipped at mine.

  He nodded and reached across the table for my hand.

  “You got a dollar?”

  “Sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket and finding a couple of wrinkled bills. I’d found a whole stash of loose change and small bills hidden in a Tupperware bowl in Ma’s kitchen.

  “I’ll be back. I’m gonna pick something on the jukebox.” He motioned to the glowing jukebox in the other room. It was too quiet here without music.

  We were the only ones in the back room except for a couple of bikers. Their bikes were parked outside the window so they could see them. One of them was smoking clove cigarettes, and the room smelled strangely like the minestrone Joe made at the restaurant. They were talking softly, their bandannaed heads leaning close across the table. One of them was stroking his long gray beard. Probably a couple of guys on their way through to California or stopping on their way to the Grand Canyon. There were a lot of people who came and went through Mountainview. Not a lot of people who stayed, though.

  Peter came back in behind the waitress who was carrying our pizza. “Hamburger, onions, and extra cheese?” she asked.

  “Thanks,” Peter said, startling her. She turned around and handed it to him. He winked at her and she blushed.

  “I’ll be back with the ranch,” she smiled.

  “Indie’s famous cheeseburger pizza,” Peter said, setting the pizza down.

  “I haven’t had one of these in a long time.” I smiled. “I wish they made them at Lotus.” Lotus Pizza is our local pizza place in Echo Hollow. It is sort of a trendy college hangout. Pizzas with white or wheat crust. Pesto, artichoke hearts, goat cheese. I prefer the standard greasy variety they serve at Anthony’s.

  The songs Peter had picked were what we call our sappy songs, nostalgic songs (for us, anyway) that are guaranteed to be on almost any jukebox in any pizza place or bar in the country. The repertoire of sappy songs has grown over the years, but there is something comforting in knowing that for a dollar you can transcend space and time.

  I ate and ate until my stomach ached. We ordered another pitcher and were laughing about something Chuck Moony had said when one of the biker guys came up and asked us to play pool.

  “What do you think?” Peter asked, squeezing my knee under the table.

  “Sure,” I smiled. It had been a long time since I’d had a cheeseburger pizza, but it had been even longer since I’d played pool.

  “Rack ’em up.” He smiled. His voice sounded like a crumpled brown paper bag.

  I racked the balls carefully and Peter selected a cue from the rack on the wall.

  When it was my turn, the guy who had been smoking cloves said, “You’re not some sort of shark, are you?” As if that were impossible.

  I shrugged my shoulders and flirted, just a little. Then I shot. My hands and eyes had not forgotten. When I was still working at the paper, I used to meet Peter and Joe at Finnegan’s Wake to play once or twice a week. I made four balls in, and the bigger guy snorted.

  We won the first game and lost the second. The two guys bought us another pitcher of beer and I was starting to feel a little drunk. It felt nice, though, to have Peter’s hand on the small of my back. Two bikers transformed into gentle bears. I think this is what Daddy loved about Rusty’s so much. Where else would you see a couple like Peter and I yukking it up with a couple of guys whose lives were stored in the back compartments of their Harleys?

  When the waitress came in and told us they were trying to close up, I felt a little anxious.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” I said to Peter as we put on our jackets.

  “You want to get a room across the street?” he asked. “We can do that, you know.”

  “The Montenegro?”

  The Montenegro was the oldest hotel in Mountainview. I’d never stayed there, but I’d snuck upstairs from the hotel bar once to use the restroom when the line downstairs was too long. The lobby was red-velvety and chandeliered. The wallpaper in the stairwell
was faded, as were the chaise longues. The rooms were named after the stars who had stayed there. Their names were engraved in copper plaques on the doors. BING CROSBY. FRANK SINATRA. AUDREY HEPBURN. Peter and I were given keys to the BETTY GRABLE suite. I’d asked for Frank Sinatra’s room, but it was occupied. I couldn’t remember what Betty Grable looked like.

  Peter led me by my hand up the winding stairs to our room. We didn’t have any bags for the eager bellboy, but Peter tipped him anyway.

  The Betty Grable room was small but cozy. There was a marble fireplace and a big oak bed elaborately carved and impossibly high. I climbed up the built-in steps, lay down, and stared at the ceiling. Peter was inspecting the velvet curtains, peering through them at the street below. He wandered into the bathroom and turned on the light.

  “Was it expensive?” I asked.

  “It was worth it. Come look at the bathtub,” he said.

  I got up and poked my head in. In the middle of the room was one of those deep clawfoot tubs. The feet were ornate and gold. The fixtures were all gaudy; the frame around the mirror looked like it belonged in Versailles instead of inside the Montenegro. I stared at my face, half expecting that Betty Grable might be looking back at me.

  “You want to take a bath?” Peter asked, stepping into the empty tub. The edges came up past his knees.

  I nodded. I hadn’t showered in a couple of days. The water pressure in Ma’s shower was weak, and the few showers I’d taken left me feeling as if I were still covered with a slight film of soap. Now my hair felt heavy and in need of washing.

  While Peter turned on the water and started a fire in the fireplace, I took off all of my clothes. I looked at the autographed picture of Betty Grable hanging above the bed, at her antiquated hourglass figure, and touched my stomach, noticing that the softness of my belly was gone. When I was with Peter my appetite was healthy. Without him, I ate sporadically: a whole box of macaroni and cheese or nothing at all.

  “It’s ready,” Peter said finally. It had taken almost twenty minutes for the tub to fill up.

  He was already inside the bathtub, up to his neck in steamy water. He’d propped the window open so we could look down at the street.

  In the tub, I ran my fingers across the familiar rivers of the scars on Peter’s legs. I sat with my back to his chest, and let his arms and legs close around me. I let the hot water close around me. I let the ghost of Betty Grable, whoever she was, close around me, and forgot for a while about going home.

  “I could reserve the room for the rest of the week,” he whispered after we had crawled under the covers.

  He didn’t want to be in that house either, and something about that made me feel angry. Just for a moment. But instead of answering him, I only pretended that I’d already fallen asleep.

  Lily’s picture was in the newspaper. Ma bought ten copies at the Foodmart. She cut out the article from one of the copies and stuck it to the refrigerator. The photo was of Lily wearing the Stars and Stripes costume with the white vinyl boots that zipped up, standing with one leg on the ground and the other bent at the knee and raised as if she were marching. She was holding her baton over her head and smiling. Ma had taken the picture herself before Lily got sick. For the first whole day of summer vacation, Ma had sat at the kitchen table with Daddy’s big electric typewriter. Benny and I weren’t allowed in the kitchen—even to get a bowl of cereal or something to drink. She wanted to get it to the newspaper before Lily got out of the hospital, and that meant she had to deliver it to the Mountainview Tribune’s office by five o’clock. From my room, I could hear her pounding at the keys and Daddy saying, “Judy, it’s electric. You don’t have to pound so hard.” From the doorway, I could see the strained expression on her face. Her shoulders hunched over like they were when she was sewing. All day, she sat there throwing away draft after draft of the article into the wastebasket by the sink. By the time she finished, she’d gone through a whole box of typing paper. But finally I heard the pounding stop, and she was holding the finished article up, reading it aloud to Daddy.

  JUNE 15, 1978. LILY BROWN, BEAUTY PAGEANT HOPEFUL, SERIOUSLY ILL. Mountainview, Arizona. Lily Brown, a local elementary school student and contestant in the upcoming Miss Desert Flower contest, was recently hospitalized. Though a diagnosis has not yet been made, the Brown family remains hopeful that she will recover soon and be able to attend the pageant in Phoenix next week. The doctors are also optimistic. Though this is Lily Brown’s first pageant, she is not nervous at all. From her hospital room, she said, “I just want to meet the other girls and have fun. It doesn’t matter if I win or lose.” Lily is also good-natured about her illness. “The doctors and nurses here are very nice.” The family requests that any gifts or cards be sent to the hospital, in care of Lily’s mother, Mrs. Judy Brown.

  Lily was home from the hospital by the time the newspaper came out. There was something wrong with her stomach, Ma said. She would be on medication for a long time. But they would still be leaving for the pageant next week. Ma was a nurse; Lily would be just fine.

  I didn’t have a birthday party. Ma said that taking care of Lily and keeping Benny out of her hair was enough stress without a bunch of sixth-grade girls to boot. I reminded her that the school year was done, and I was technically a seventh grader now. She said she didn’t care if I was a senior in high school. I would have a family party and that would have to be enough. You want your sister to get better, don’t you? she’d asked me. Aren’t you being a little selfish? And so I gave in. Daddy said he’d take me and Benny out for pizza after I got my presents.

  Ma got my cake at the Foodmart. It was white with blue flowers on it. I would rather have had chocolate, but she said they were all out of chocolate and that white cake would have to do. I sat at the kitchen table with the cake glowing in front of me, twelve small flames and only one wish. I thought about the Spalding personalized two-piece pool cue from the catalog. I had been dropping hints for a whole month. I even left the catalog open on the table once, hoping they might notice that I’d circled the picture with a red pen. Daddy had even hinted the last time I was at the bar playing pool with Ike that he bet I’d play like a pro if I had a decent cue. He’d even winked at me.

  But when Ma brought my presents into the kitchen, there were only three small packages on the table. And none of them matched the dimensions described in the catalog.

  I unwrapped the present from Benny first. It was wrapped in tissue paper, with a Christmas bow stuck on the front. Inside was a God’s-eye made from two crossed sticks and about a hundred different colors of yarn.

  “I made it at school.” He smiled. “It’s a gawdzeye. Here, you can wear it.” He grabbed it from my hands and helped me loop the circle of yarn over my head. It hung against my chest, the bark on the sticks scratchy against my skin.

  “I love it, Benny. Thank you,” I said, kissing him on the cheek.

  “I made it at school. Miss Casey said mine was the prettiest. I used all of the rainbow colors. Even black.” He reached for it and pressed it into my chest. “It’s called a gawdzeye.”

  “I want to give mine,” Lily said. She was sitting at the table with us for the first time since she got home. She’d been propped up on the couch in the living room for days, pale and sleepy. She handed me a package that Ma had obviously wrapped for her. I carefully undid the tape and pulled out a package of barrettes. There were four barrettes on the cardboard card. Each had a row of tiny rhinestones.

  “Lily picked those out herself. Aren’t they pretty, Indie?” Ma said, taking the barrettes from me and holding them up to the light.

  “They’re nice, but I’m getting my hair cut anyway,” I said.

  Lily’s bottom lip quivered, but I couldn’t stop. “You can’t really wear barrettes with short hair.”

  “Indie,” Ma said, her voice stern. “They’re lovely, Lily. And you are so thoughtful. She didn’t have to do anything, you know. She’s been in the hospital, for Chrissakes.”

 
I grabbed for the last present and tore it open. It didn’t even matter that it was the pair of jeans I’d been begging for since my best friend, Starry, came to school wearing a pair just like them. Because it wasn’t the Spalding personalized pool cue, and the cake was white instead of chocolate, and because as hard as I wished I never got what I really wanted.

  “Thanks,” I said and balled up the wrapping paper.

  “You are the single most ungrateful child I have ever seen,” Ma said, low and steady.

  I could see Daddy getting ready to stand up and walk away. He always ran away when Ma started. He always ran away and left me to deal with her. For once, I wanted to be the one to escape.

  “Thank you,” I said, staring back at her, my voice rising. “I love it. I love everything. It’s exactly what I wanted.”

  “Where are you going?” she said then, turning to Daddy, who was tying his shoes.

  “Why do you care?” I asked.

  “Indie, if you don’t shut your mouth this very second, I’m going to . . .”

  “What?” I screamed, standing up, throwing the jeans on the floor. “Wreck my birthday?”

  “That is enough,” she said and stood up.

  Daddy was standing near the front door, his hand on the knob. Benny had crawled underneath the table. I looked at Daddy, pleading with my eyes for him to stay. Maybe it was because he hadn’t left yet. Maybe it was because it was my birthday. But Ma only said, “I thought you were going to get pizza.” Then she picked Lily up and carried her into the living room.

  Benny crawled out from under the table at the sound of pizza and Daddy said, “Come on, then. Let’s get a move on.”

  At the pizza place, I kept waiting for Daddy to disappear, to pretend he had to go to the bathroom or to the car only to come back with the pool cue wrapped in purple paper. But he never left the table except when Benny dropped his pizza on his lap and burned himself.

  Rich was carrying Violet in a front carrier. Lily followed behind him, pale and even thinner than she’d seemed in Phoenix. They walked up the driveway like some strange army. Purposeful and certain. Peter squeezed my hand before he opened the door and let them in. Outside the sun was shining so brightly, it was almost deceiving. The thermometer read thirty-five degrees. For some reason it struck me as funny that we were only a couple of degrees from freezing. As if thirty-five degrees in November was only cold.