Drastic

by Maud Casey

  “He speaks Italian,” she says and dips my other hand. “He ordered in Italian at dinner.” She says this shyly and cocks her head in a way that has evolved from a day years before I was born. Maybe she was walking down the street and did it accidentally—or on purpose, when a family like the one she didn’t have yet walked by or she was thinking about a lover. She caught her reflection in a store window, briefly, and saw herself years from then.

  “A romantic,” I say, smiling, and I help her dip her other hand. We sit quietly at the kitchen table looking at our pink wax gloves, until there is a knock at the door.

  My mother stands up and then holds up her hands, says, “How will I open it?”

  It’s Raymond, who didn’t see my mother’s car parked on the street instead of in the driveway. “I’ll come back later,” he says through the window. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he says, looking only at my mother’s hands.

  “The door’s unlocked,” my mother says. “Just push.” She’s laughing and having a good time, and I’m beginning to think I have a crush on her too.

  Raymond finally pushes the door open. I convince Raymond, who is sure that my mother is laughing at him, to have a seat at the kitchen table.

  “Wax dip?” I ask, but he shakes his head.

  “The last thing I need is soft hands,” he says. We all smile instead of laughing out loud because it is suddenly so quiet with the three of us sitting around the hot pot on the kitchen table. Outside, the sky slowly darkens all around the neighborhood, all around town.

  “I should go,” Raymond says. “I forgot what I came for.” My mother walks him to the door. She tells him to come by anytime, though he already has. Through the window I watch him cross the street, moving through time with all his clumsy yearning. Those moves are not so foreign. When my mother returns to the kitchen table, we slide the wax gloves off whole. Our hands are left greasy, and the wax husks sit empty on the table between us, each with its distinct imprint of vein, knuckles, age, and time. Years from now, when these days spent at home with my mother blend together and seem small, this night will distinguish itself from the rest.

  DIRT

  DELIA is dreaming that her husband, Austin, stands above her on the bed, contorting his features into a face that might at any moment stick out its tongue. He wiggles terrible fingers at her. This is not the first time, and tonight Delia wonders, in her dream, if it’s a dream at all. The thought scares her because he is the only person she knows in this new place full of dust and impossible sunshine.

  When Delia wakes up, Austin is standing at the foot of the bed, already sweating in the soaring early morning temperatures. He is just out of the shower, but what is simply water and what is perspiration is as indistinguishable to Delia as her days in this house filled with a dead woman’s belongings. Delia spends her days drinking bottomless cups of tea as she carefully fingers objects: the giant ladle that hangs above the kitchen sink, the remaining sliver of English Lavender soap in the bathroom, the pictures of dead relatives, Austin’s aunt now among them.

  The house is a gift to Austin, willed to him fully furnished by his favorite dead aunt. Delia feels the imprint of the old woman’s bones in the bed that she and Austin share. The bed is the wedding bed of some ancient betrothed couple, which makes Delia feel somehow improper as she sleeps. On the headboard, enclosed in an oval of faded blue, is a small painting of the bed’s original owners, then young and newly married, joining hands in profile. The woman has one long red spit curl, which Delia traces every night in an attempt to find the courage to fit herself into someone else’s surroundings the way Austin says he has.

  “You need to get out,” Austin says, roughing his fingers through his hair to dry it. A small lizard clings to the wall behind him. Delia thinks she can hear it trying not to breathe; she sees its small, ticking pulse in the loose skin of its neck. Throughout the first week, Austin tried to show Delia what was wonderful about the house. Just yesterday Austin pointed out a china teapot decorated with tiny blue flowers that could never actually grow in this desert. He picked the teapot up from its brown and white crocheted doily in order to show Delia the detailing. As he lifted the lid, tiny black spiders spilled over the side like some dark liquid. This is a place where people are longing to end up, Austin had told her, denying the spiders with the urgency of his voice. He said it as if coming to this place had been the plan all along, then replaced the lid, catching several black legs underneath. He had gestured toward the window where Delia could see their leathery-faced old neighbor as she watered the spiky plants outside her house from a plastic milk jug. The water seemed to pass from the mouth of the jug directly into the thirsty air.

  “I’m leaving,” Austin says, shifting his weight impatiently from one leg to the other as he fools with a shirt cuff. He had signed himself up with a temporary agency the minute they arrived, eager to be productive even for somebody else’s benefit. His current assignment is floor at a department store’s going-out-of-business sale. He sorts towels in the bath section, discerning Sea Foam from Mint. He tells Delia he is pleased that he fits in with his fellow workers, that his boss commented on his “drive,” that in this way he is on the right track to permanent employment. Delia wonders at the way Austin has settled so quickly. She is astonished at the ease with which he holds up objects in the house to her, as if they had always been his and not left behind.

  With her own tentative fingers, Delia feels the sponginess of her arm. She is bloated, like a cactus storing water. She looks at Austin’s fingers playing with his shirt, and yesterday afternoon drifts back to her like a vision seen through heat lifting off a highway. Delia had been reading on the couch printed with giant red peacocks in the living room while Austin opened drawers in a nearby table. He’d found an old telephone message that his aunt had written down and said something about how interesting it was that these frivolous things lingered after death. Delia was not paying much attention until she began to feel sure out of the corner of her eye that Austin was making a face. It was a child’s face that said she did not belong, as if she were another child who was too thin or too tall, too fat or too short, and always unable to play the game other children demanded she play. Austin’s head seemed to rock back and forth like a just popped jack-in-the-box, but Delia could not look up to see if this was true.

  “I’ll go for a walk,” she says to Austin because she knows he hates her fear, and because she is afraid. Austin’s shirt clings to his damp back as he goes down the stairs without saying good-bye, and Delia knows their relationship has changed. “I’m the sort of person who won’t do anything great,” Austin used to say. “Excitement happens in other places, not in my life. There’s nothing that says it has to.” Delia remembers when Austin first said this to her years ago across a table in a diner, an elbow resting dangerously near spilled mustard. His younger face did not mean what he said. Then, Austin anticipated greatness; he’d expected excitement. His eyes revealed he knew he was saying something clever but she knew by the steadiness of his voice that they would be married, and something inside her relaxed so that she was able to take in the detail of the waitress’s creased face when she came over to ask if they had everything they needed.

  When Austin got the news that his aunt had left him a house in the desert, suddenly it was if they were being called to the place where excitement was. He embraced Delia as if trying to squeeze some secret meaning out of her. Delia saw the way Austin had become more and more afraid that he was, in fact, the sort of person who would not do anything great, that he’d become the very person he’d tried to ward off by saying it out loud. Delia saw that Austin equated the movement from the East to the West with accomplishment. The house was something to move toward, something to move into. Now Austin is impatient with the way she doesn’t unpack her bags or send out change-of-address cards. He is frustrated by the way she will not look for a job and the way she reuses one cup, one plate, and one set of silverware like some timid guest. He is anxiou
s for her to adjust, as if it is she who is keeping them from the greatness and excitement that is due Austin. So he brings her bright cactus fruit. Certain Indian tribes make jam from this stuff, he says, and she knows this is something he was told by the man in the nearby plant store where he goes to get his facts straight.

  Delia is made uneasy by the hostile thorns of the plants that surround this home. She does not want to live with spiders and lizards that crawl into the teacups for cover. The sun shines constantly over all of it, blindingly cheerful. “You worry yourself needlessly. Don’t think in such grand proportions,” Austin says as he leaves to sort the cotton-combed towels from the extra fluffy. He explains to her that studies have shown that sunshine cures depression. Delia wonders about this on the days that she watches her leathery-faced neighbor sit in her gravel yard, sprawled in a beach chair so far from the ocean. Every day Delia watches her neighbor turn her face to a sun that can no longer penetrate her rough skin.

  Delia hasn’t always been afraid. As a child, she yearned for horrible things to consume her body and her life. She envied the little girl in her second grade class who went suddenly deaf and was kidnapped by her stepmother. When the little girl was returned to her rightful home, people looked at her with concern, unable to ask how she was except with futile hand gestures that meant nothing in the sign language that the girl was still struggling to learn. The little girl smiled in a way that showed she was braver than anybody. Delia would have liked the attention this girl received as someone who knew something of the world. Now Delia’s body swells to protect itself from its environment. Her skin seems thicker. Now she spends hours at a time waiting for the sound of a surprise—a popped cork, a crumpling bag as someone unpacks a cake—to tell her their new life is just distraction leading up to the surprise, something to tell her this is a practical joke and not really her life.

  Outside there is the chirring of a bug that Austin does not yet know the name of while inside Delia sways tremulous like a flame before reaching for the broom. In the mornings she sweeps up the tracked-in dirt. The dirt is everywhere. Here, everyone’s yard is dirt. Delia has noticed that her leathery-faced neighbor sometimes arranges her dirt with a broom, brushing it back and forth, stirring it up into a small brown cyclone around her. The dirt sticks to Delia’s damp, hot skin and she tastes grains of it between her teeth.

  Delia turns on the radio as she sweeps, to a news program about two brothers who both play classical guitar. Delia listens through the swish of the broom to the announcer, who says that the brothers perform one piece together, one brother’s arms wrapped around the other from behind as they both pick at the same guitar to play the same song. The brothers, according to the announcer, start and end the song at exactly the same time with no apparent signals. Delia pokes at a thick cobweb as the announcer says that even the brothers find it strange. She imagines this is what a good marriage should be and searches in her mind for a moment like this between her and Austin, but all she can come up with are the terra-cotta hands sticking out from the wall in the News and Gifts airport shop. Delia and Austin’s flight from the East had stopped in Denver, and they had stepped into the shop to buy a newspaper. The terra-cotta hands reached out from the wall on shortened forearms, offering books from some anonymous source. This is what Delia is reminded of as she brushes at her face with her own quick hands for something that isn’t there.

  Delia steps out the door to go for a walk so that she can find something to bring back to Austin to say that she has left the house. As she shuts the door behind her, she has a vision of Austin, almost unrecognizable, prancing from one foot to the other on her side of the bed. He points at her with first one index finger and then the other, smiling wide like a clown in what seems like a dream and which Delia now recognizes as the dream that she had several nights ago. Next door she sees a curtain in a front window move and knows her neighbor has watched her venture out. The dirt in her yard is in a flurry from her sweeping; gold flecks sparkle in the sun that has wrapped itself around the day. Delia goes left instead of right when she reaches the end of her street because she has never gone that way before and because she worries that if she goes right, it will disturb her not to recognize what she’s already seen. Jesus rises up all around her, black and brown and yellow, in the painted murals of her neighborhood.

  Delia kicks a stone that someone has painted blue, past festively colored stucco houses guarded by dogs that give a few obligatory barks and then lie down again. She kicks the stone down the middle of a street with no cars and feels the sweat run down her back in salty streams. She feels certain that she once felt passionately about her life but pictures only a girl she glimpsed in a china store where she worked before she met Austin. The girl carefully touched a small china elephant under a sign that read PLEASE DO NOT HANDLE. She touched it with her long fingers like delicate tentacles, sensing something important about not only the object but the gesture itself.

  The blue-painted stone disappears into the open doorway of a creaky one-story house like any other on this street. SNOWCONES, TOYS, ANTIQUES reads a sign over the door, and Delia remembers that she must bring something back to show Austin. She nearly trips over the hose that runs from a spigot on the front of the house around to a side pen where it shoots water into a bucket already overflowing. The water runs over the sides and floods the yard with puddles that turn dust to dirt. Chickens perch carefully on stones while two ducks sit in the puddles, trying to float. A brown and white goat trails his long beard through dirt and water alike.

  A tall, thick man with hair parted at his ear, thin strands swept over his head, appears in the doorway. “Houdini,” he says, nodding his head toward the goat, who now lowers himself into the mud. The man bends at his trunklike waist to pick up the painted-blue pebble. He slowly puts the stone into his mouth and rolls it back and forth between his cheeks before offering it to Delia. “This is not really blue,” he says.

  “Are you looking for something in particular?” a woman’s voice asks before she appears to push the man out of the doorway with a familiar aggressiveness. He steps back laughing and pinches her arm with fingers that know just when to stop. She takes the blue stone from his hand and holds it up to the light. “This means you will travel.” She takes it back to the counter where there are several rows of stones and a small book titled Fortunes.

  “I’ve already traveled,” Delia says, but still she looks into the front room, at the novena whose candleholders are filled with precariously balanced, dusty red goblets. Nearby is a dresser with drawers pulled out and filled with candy wrappers, pencils, and silverware. The floors of this room slant into another room stuffed with a vanity scattered with cigar boxes and atomizers made of different-colored tinted glass. Empty frames cover the wall over a TV that sits on wooden crates, turned on with no volume, as if someone almost lives here or has just left the room. On the screen an older woman and a younger woman gesture furiously at each other as their mouths open and close without a sound. Tiny feather dusters hang unused, for sale.

  “I’m just learning,” the woman says, indicating the Fortunes book. “Look around, it’s all for sale.”

  The stones sliding around on the glass counter cause Delia to taste the salt of sea glass from someplace far away, from before she knew Austin’s face. It is the taste of a time before she was fearful, when she still envied the deaf and kidnapped little girl. She thinks of the second day in the dead aunt’s house. She carried her suitcases up the stairs with Austin carrying his close behind her. She stopped to get a better grip, and as she did she looked under her arm and there was Austin wearing a secret, wicked smile. He ran his fingers quickly through his hair, but she could have sworn he’d been giving her the finger.

  “Gotta get back to love,” the man says, as if it were a place, and he walks into a back room where Delia sees a love seat partially stripped. Every other piece of furniture in the room is unfinished, like somebody’s abandoned New Year’s resolutions.

  �
��Let me try,” the woman says, as if to say, “Let me try again,” as if she’s known Delia for years. “I’ve got it all arranged, according to your height and some liberties I’ve taken.” The stones make zigzags across the counter. Delia is sure that the woman has abandoned the Fortunes book.

  “Don’t tell me,” the woman says. “You’re married.” She laughs as Delia looks at her wedding ring. The woman’s hands are covered with rings. One in particular catches Delia’s eye. It has two dark blue stones in a serpentine pattern that seems to climb up the woman’s finger.

  “That’s a beautiful ring,” Delia says, touching a stone so smooth it makes her sleepy with contentment.

  “These are for sale too,” the woman says, spreading her fingers like a mannequin’s. Delia thinks of the news story of the brothers who play classical guitar together. In this woman cutting deals with the world, Delia has found a similar moment of perfection. The rings must have flown in through the front door and slipped themselves onto the woman’s fingers. Someday they will fly off her fingers and out the back door. The relationship the woman has with the rings has more to do with the way she reached up to take them from the air as they flew in the door than with the rings themselves. Delia pictures Austin’s aunt wandering through the antiques store, opening and closing old cookie tins that once belonged to someone else. She imagines bringing the old teapot covered with flowers and filled with spiders and placing it anonymously among other people’s martini glasses and clay angels. In her mind she walks through Austin’s aunt’s house and gives it all away, everything that Austin has held up to her.

  “You have children,” the woman says, then laughs and studies Delia’s face. “You don’t have children?”