The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  “I suppose you’re going to dump your boyfriend when he’s done screwing me.”

  “Screwing you?” Dan tittered, turning away. “Dream on.”

  After he left, she sank down next to the rose bush’s twisted trunk. Dan didn’t know it, but she’d buried a handful of Dad’s ashes underneath. To have him nearby, she reasoned to herself, for advice and support. She knew it was ridiculous; Dad had never been much use for either.

  The day shuffled like a vagrant toward evening. A thorn pressed into her knee, but she didn’t move. At the far end of the garden, Paramus tore an Anaheim chile loose and tossed it into the air.

  Maybe it was her fault; she’d turned him into this. She should have let the mean world have him. Now she didn’t know how to defend herself, only him.

  He came and went, spending all his time with Steven, waiting her out. Well, she could wait too.

  “If I had your patience,” Dad had said once. “You’d still have a mother.”

  Which wasn’t true, of course. He blamed himself, but their mother hadn’t left because of anything he’d done. It just wasn’t the life she wanted, being a mother out in the farthest of the suburbs. She read magazines like Harper’s and The Atlantic, and something called Barking Muse—an artist in search of an art. She never found it, as far as Nora knew. She ended up in another suburb a little closer to the city, a little less provincial, but not so different. Nora visited her once, and that was enough.

  “She would have made us all miserable,” Nora said.

  Dad started to object, to defend her, but what was the point? Nora had been there, she’d seen them all falling lower and lower in her esteem. They were strangers in the end, people she might have nodded to on the street, or might just as easily have walked right past.

  “Anyway, she couldn’t cook for shit,” Nora added.

  “Don’t say ‘shit.’”

  “She couldn’t.”

  “No,” Dad said. “She was a terrible cook.”

  Nora, on the other hand, was an excellent one. Especially with her own vegetables, the beautiful tomatoes and beets and cucumbers she coaxed from the depleted ground. She never used a cookbook, she knew what went together, what worked without anyone having to teach her. The doctor told her once that Dad had probably lived ten years longer because of her cooking. She doubted that, but it was nice to hear. What happiness could top that?

  She spilled a little wine on the papers, pushed them to the side of the cutting board. She’d picked some carrots earlier in the day, and now a little water was dripping from the greens, mixing with the wine and wicking up into the sheaf of documents. Steven had dropped off a fresh copy the day before—something new had been added, she hadn’t paid attention to what—and told her he felt bad about the whole thing.

  “It’s your job.”

  “Yeah, but still.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll work out.”

  The front door slammed, and she heard Dan slump into the sprung armchair by the fireplace they used now as a magazine dump. They hadn’t lit a fire in it since Dad passed.

  “He’s leaving me.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Oh.”

  “He says I’m heartless.”

  “It’s just a fight. It won’t last.”

  She washed the dirt from the carrots and started to peel them. What an invention, the peeler! So simple and perfect, the way it stripped the rough outer layer off so cleanly, curling it like a party ribbon. She hated to throw the peelings away, even into the compost. Something beautiful should be done with them—the carrot underneath was utilitarian and nourishing; the beauty was in the peel.

  “Do you think I’m heartless?” Dan asked.

  She began arranging the pieces on a paper towel, finding a natural pattern in the disorder. Or, more accurately, appreciating their natural disorder’s beauty.

  “You do! Jesus.”

  He jumped up and started pacing behind her, back and forth across the loose board by the pantry that creaked in an oddly soothing, familiar rhythm.

  “You can be a little cold,” she said.

  “What the hell do you know? Look at you—what a piece of work!”

  “That’s right. I’m a goddamn masterpiece.”

  The creaking stopped. He tried to laugh, but it was a failure. She looked at his face, red and indrawn, saw that indeed it wasn’t a child’s anymore. The frown lines slashing down on either side of his nose were like their mother’s. Nora didn’t know why that should surprise her, but it did.

  Dan started pacing again, treading each time over the loose floorboard. Dad had spent a whole weekend once trying to fix it.

  “What bullshit!”

  She wondered what note it was, the creak. Maybe she could locate it on the piano, give a name to it.

  “I poured my heart out!” Dan continued. “What in god’s name does everyone want from me?”

  She let him go on like that, he’d get tired eventually. Tomorrow he’d pout, but that would end too. And she’d sign the papers. What was there here anymore, really, to hold on to? Habit, that’s all.

  She’d find a place closer to town, or farther away. Something had to give if she didn’t want to end up like Dad, with a pile of sticks tacked together that did nothing and went nowhere. In her case, of course, it would be the garden. Rows and rows of weedy, thin vegetables dribbling off into briars and piles of compost.

  She looked out the kitchen window at the rose bush stunted with over-tending, at the squash vines creeping already toward the garage wall, all roots and runners.

  “What was I thinking?” she said, very quietly.

  Dan cursed and threw a pewter tankard to the floor. It bounced just in front of Paramus, who dribbled a little pee on the floor.

  Poor little thing, all lost and helpless. Who was going to watch over him now?

  The dog, of course, she’d take with her.

  THE SHALLOW END

  THE FIRST TIME HE SAW the eye in the back fence, he thought it was just a peculiarity of paint swirled on a knot. The fence was dimpled and pitted, with multiple coats of paint peeling independently, an abstract canvas across which images often appeared transiently, morphing or disappearing when Ludlow looked too closely or away. The eye, though, winked. That was a first.

  He winked back.

  After a week or so of this—as can happen—the strange became the ordinary. He and the eye would acknowledge each other and go about their morning business, Ludlow scraping out songs on his half-tuned Yamaha or just watching the sky drag past above the pecan tree. The eye observed, or pulled away and left a hole behind, with sometimes a pair of legs scissoring up toward the back door of the house he could see just the corner of. It was always gone by lunch time when he sat down at the little living room table across from the picture of his daughter propped up in its silver frame with a seashell in each corner.

  “I suspect someone’s attached to it,” he said.

  He knew the picture couldn’t answer back, but it didn’t hurt anyone to pretend. To try to imagine what Jeannie might say in a given situation.

  “A child’s my guess,” for instance.

  “A girl, I think.”

  “Does she say anything?”

  “No. Not a thing.”

  “Shyness can be overpowering.”

  He smiled at the picture. The young often had a wisdom we’d long let go of.

  In the afternoon, he generally fed the fish. Sitting on the diving board, he’d dribble a handful of pellets into the sluggish pool at the deep end. Sometimes he’d see the fish’s back, mottled white and orange like a burn victim, but generally all that showed was a ring spreading out where its mouth broke the surface and sucked the food in.

  “You can feed it if you want,” he said to the eye, which often returned around that time. It blinked once and vanished. He heard the screen door squeak open and glide quietly closed. Unlike his, which always slapped loudly, banging twice befo
re settling uneasily into its warped frame.

  “The bottom of the sea is so near,” he sang, “your face I can see so clear.”

  The fish rose with a slurping sound, rippling the carpet of algae.

  He never drank on open mic night, even though the drinks and beers were half-price for performers. He’d seen people fall off their stools on stage and launch into obscene tirades; he needed his wits about him. He lost his place so easily as it was—even though they were his own songs—when he looked out and saw all those faces looking up at him.

  People had started recording him lately on their phones, so he was making an impression. The applause had gotten more raucous too—and the laughter, but that was just the liquor. The feeling that he was finally connecting was deeply satisfying. He found it hard to wipe the smile off his face when he was up there.

  “What are you playing tonight?” somebody asked while he was waiting to go on.

  “Something new,” he said.

  He half-recognized him; a poet, he thought. He wore a wool scarf wrapped twice around his neck even though outside the last of the sun was glaring off the blacktop and a little twister of dust was whirling by.

  “If it’s anything like ‘Sobbing for Apples,’” the poet said, “it’ll be a hit.”

  Ludlow smiled and thanked him. He didn’t really like talking before a show, it broke his concentration. But mutual support was the thing here. Everybody leaned on everybody else, like trees in a forest. He took out his notebook, jotted that down.

  During the chorus of “Friday Night Fights” he dropped his pick, which broke the mood a little. He could hear it rattling around inside the guitar, sliding from side to side as he tilted the body and shook it. They cut him short after that, which was a little disappointing. But he got a big hand anyway.

  The sun dragged him out of bed the next day, too warm and too bright. He ate breakfast with sunglasses on, going through two bowls of cereal, three fried eggs, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There was a strange kind of void down around his stomach—like hunger, but not quite—that skittered out of the way whenever he tried to pinpoint it. He swallowed, tried to force a burp, but nothing came up. He squeezed his arms around his chest and felt a little quiver just under the skin—a squirrel inside the walls, sprinting around and over studs, clawing up the insulation.

  He looked for the eye in the fence, but it wasn’t there. He put his own eye to the hole after thrashing through a dead wild rose bush and a tangle of blackberry vines that left his forearms peppered with drops of blood. He wasn’t prepared for the order on the other side. The trim edges of the lawn, the precise lines as if Euclid himself had been pushing the mower. The two bistro tables, the chairs and chaises and cantilevered umbrella, all arranged in perfect balance. It was remarkable.

  Looking back at his own yard—the dandelions blitzing across the lawn, the humps thrust up by ground squirrels, the pool nearly empty save for the opaque pond by the drain—he thought about something someone had said, that a man’s mind is reflected in his surroundings. Meaning, of course, that a tidy home denotes a tidy mind. But it could be just as true, couldn’t it, that a fully occupied mind has no time for the mundane chores of cleaning and scrubbing, for the idle worry of other people’s opinions? An orderly world, it might be said, is the sure sign of an empty head.

  And anyway, the dandelions added some color to the yard—the foot soldiers of summer, he liked to call them—and the squirrel burrows gave it character, a little contour to the unbroken flatness. As for the pool, there was a kind of sludgy comfort about it. At night the hose dripping into the deep end lulled him to sleep, and in the morning the sun glanced from its algaed surface with a soft, muted glow.

  Back up on his patio, beneath the crooked shade of his sagging eaves, he watched a light breeze work through the razor-straight tops of the oleanders on the other side of the fence. He sipped his warm beer, in which he could taste a faint must from the pool. A blend of decay and renewal, muck and fish. He dozed, dodging troubling dreams that came hurtling toward him like pinballs. In the midst of them, he was yanked awake by the harsh scrape of metal across cement—a chair or a table wrenched across the neighbor’s patio. He sat up, saw the back door snapped open. A man’s head, round and slightly balding.

  “Cin?” it called, sibilants whistling from between clamped teeth. “Cin!”

  The girl—Cin, apparently—whose shadow Ludlow could see against the fence beneath the whorls of wisteria along the garage wall (the only unruly thing on the property), didn’t answer. The head moved down the steps, crossed the patio and straightened whatever had been displaced. Ludlow thought he could hear breathing, slightly ragged, as if this little movement had required a disproportionate effort. After a minute the head climbed the steps again and went back inside, and the shadow in the corner slid slowly down the fence.

  “It’s short for Cindy, which you probably guessed.”

  “I thought maybe.”

  “I wish he wouldn’t do that, shorten it like that. Cin. I mean, if that doesn’t give you a complex.”

  “It’s a pretty short name already.”

  “Exactly.”

  They were attaching a new hinge to the gate he’d forgotten was there, behind the wall of blackberry and pyracantha, until she’d wriggled through and popped her head out like a gopher. She could help, she’d said, looking around. Tidy things up, knock some of the brush back. Ludlow had reluctantly consented, and together they’d pulled the vines down and pried the gate free. He suspected it was the fish she was interested in.

  “You’re not a pedophile or anything are you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart. I have a daughter myself.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, testing the swing of the gate.

  “How would I know?”

  “No, right.” The pneumatic shock eased it back into place silently. “She’s up north somewhere.”

  “Somewhere? I wish my dad was that laid back. I can’t go down the street.”

  “Well, he cares about you.”

  “I’m sure you care about your daughter.”

  “Jeannie.”

  “Okay.”

  “Of course, yes. But it’s how you measure these things that gets tricky. I mean, how you feel against what you do. Living up to your feelings.”

  “Are you like a psychologist or something?”

  “No.”

  “You sound like one. My mom’s one.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do.”

  “Is she any good?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s been in bed a few months now though, so she’s probably a little rusty.” Behind them, the fish slurped a stray pellet from the surface. “Is that him?”

  Ludlow didn’t know whether the fish was male or female. He decided it probably didn’t matter.

  “That’s him.”

  Cindy crouched and waddled slowly toward the edge of the pool, peered over the side into the murk.

  “I wasn’t sure what you were doing out here at first,” she said. “Sitting on the diving board all the time.”

  “Now you know.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “No.”

  He had had one once, but Ludlow couldn’t remember it.

  Cindy grinned.

  “How about A. Diem?”

  “Very good.”

  “Get it?”

  “I kind of saw that coming, to tell you the truth.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “All the same.”

  She pulled a loose strand of hair into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully.

  “Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a carp,” Ludlow said.

  “Okay. How about Byron then?”

  “Like the poet?”

  “No, like the kid in my class
. He looks like him. Around the mouth especially. And the eyes.”

  “Too bad for him.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The surface of the pool rippled as a dorsal fin sliced through the algae. Byron flicked his tail, clearing a short-lived hole in the muck, then sank out of sight again.

  “Are you coming to my graduation?”

  “Of course.”

  Jeannie’s voice had lost some of its childish warble, and her lisp was nearly gone.

  “You’ll need tickets. And my signature, of course.”

  “Okay.”

  “And can you talk to mother?”

  “Is she there?”

  “God no.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen her—”

  “You don’t know where she is?”

  “I have an idea.”

  A drawn-out sigh from Jeannie’s end, the same sigh she’d used so effectively when petitioning for emancipation. Thirteen years old and outgrown her parents. But hasn’t everybody by then?

  “Well, if you do hear from her, tell her about graduation.”

  “I sure will, honey.”

  Jeannie laughed. “Honey,” she said, and hung up.

  The fish had been hers, three years old already when she’d left it behind as easily as she had them. Well past any goldfish lifespan Ludlow had anticipated. He wondered if it missed her, if it even remembered her. The man at the aquarium had said goldfish forgot everything they’d known after a single lap around the bowl. Everything fresh and new each time around. What a wonderful place! Look at that pirate’s chest!

  The man had also explained why the fish was no bigger after three years than it had been on its little stand at the fair when he’d won it for her, licking a dime on the sly to make it stick.

  “They grow to the size of their containers.”

  A practical adaptation that didn’t, unfortunately, apply to children. Jeannie had outgrown her container way ahead of time.

  He turned the picture on the table toward him.

  “This is better, isn’t it honey?”