Living Things

by Landon Houle

  Up the stairs. Onto the stage, and hand by hand, the clapping stops. The room then is so very quiet, and everyone is staring at Lynn, the silly goose, who’s having a hard time now remembering just exactly what it is she’s doing. She smiles at the crowd, and they smile back. A patient group. Not so bad when you get down to it. And someone out there yells, Speech! Then a ripple of laughter, patient but uneasy.

  Lynn’s hand fumbles at her side, and her thumb catches in the pockets they make in such dresses, pockets meant for tissues because the mother of the bride is always crying, because never is there not some shade of despair, and that’s the truth, and her thumb catches the pocket, and she finds the cards on which she wrote the words to introduce the oldest living member of the board who is, oh yes, her husband, and she looks at the cards, and the writing is hers, the lines familiar and yet wholly illegible. What words are these she doesn’t know, and she says something in the microphone—what?—and the faces in the crowd smear and run, and Lynn herself isn’t a ship after all. She’s more like the water, more nothing than anything, and David is there, but they aren’t in the building anymore. She isn’t on stage, and they aren’t in the country club, but they must have been because there they are, still in the tuxedo and the dress, Lynn’s skirt fanned across the seat of the Buick.

  What a picture we are, Lynn says. This isn’t what she means, but David must know. Too late, the question comes: What happened?

  But David knows. David understands, and says, It’ll be all right. They’re going to Paulie’s, but Paulie’s isn’t Paulie’s anymore. It’s Mike’s.

  Same difference, Lynn answers. She doesn’t know if that’s true, and she hasn’t even thought about it. She just speaks, and like that, the world is nothing but runs and puddles until it snaps back into the finest expression of realism. Everything is okay. Everything is just as it seems. Old times.

  We’ve always had, she says, each other.

  Paulie’s isn’t far, and soon, there is the familiar crunch of loose rock under the tires, the same glow of neon in the blue night. It’s the time of day when things darken by the second. David parks and cuts the engine. Lynn can hear him breathing. She has the sense that something has gone horribly wrong. Recently. A long time ago. Now. You got the flashlight? she says. She tries to be funny, tries to make what has become an old joke. She can make out his face. She can tell that he’s smiling, and not for the first time, she thinks how much he looks like Gary.

  Another car pulls up and stops. All the doors pop open, and they seem to pour—the girls—like a stream that bobbles over rocks, like Black Creek itself, the very river Ed champions and pretends to love, a creek Lynn and Gary used to swim, waters that glitter and duck and will pull you down if you aren’t careful.

  The girls hold each other up as they make their way across the lot, and they are dressed to show. Legs, arms, bellies, and the greater part of chests exposed, and Lynn says, Goodness.

  For a minute David says nothing. Lynn watches him watch the girls, and the way he feels isn’t perversion so much as a powerful and unusual attraction. This is the way he feels too much, and when David does speak, he says, They’re lonely. Everybody can see that.

  Lynn looks at the girls. No. They can’t.

  David breathes and something inside him hums.

  When he left, Lynn says, all we had was each other.

  The group has gone inside but for one, a girl who stands by the door.

  It was more than him, though, Lynn says.

  The girl lights a cigarette. She smokes and stands on one foot. She looks out into the lot.

  I’ve been meaning to tell you, Lynn says.

  She stops. Behind Paulie’s, there’s a dark field, a round slope of a thing with just a sliver of night sky that makes a person feel like she’s very nearly underground.

  She could tell him the truth now. She could tell him about his father, things David has known for years and some things he hasn’t.

  About those planes, she says. About the one he gave you.

  It’s special, David says and maybe he’s talking about the little Sesna, but he’s looking at Paulie’s or the girl or the field that’s bigger than everything. Special are the certain times, the certain places when and where you can measure the curve of the Earth as clearly as if you were above it. Special is Lynn in the sailor dress and David himself and the picture they make and whatever was and whatever is more than Gary, what only begins with being alone in the world.

  It’s something else, David says. There isn’t a question, but Lynn understands because she’s his mother, because she can see things other people can’t. She knows more than anything, David wants an answer, and so finally, because she doesn’t have her sketchbook, because she can’t show him the shape of a person’s mouth or the turn of an ear, because too much time has passed, she tries to tell him anything she knows for sure. Yes, she says. It’s something else.

  RARE AND IMPERILED

  She was ashamed to admit it now, but Sarah had thought she'd go inside whatever it was anyway. It wasn’t an arena or some kind of center. More like a club, a bar, what—mostly in other countries, she thought—was sometimes still called a discotheque. Lonnie had learned this word in Spanish class. She’d had to write it several times on a worksheet, and when Sarah had seen those letters made by Lonnie’s loops and turns, she’d said it herself over and over again. Discotheque. Like she couldn’t help it, like she was somehow helped by it, then and now as she drove the ten miles from the larger town, Florence, to the smaller town, Black Creek, where she and Lonnie and no one else—Sarah remembered, Sarah corrected herself—no one else lived in the house on Quinby Place.

  Discoteca. Discoteca. Vamos a la discoteca.

  Lonnie must have known all along that Sarah wouldn’t be going to the concert, that Lonnie herself wouldn’t allow it, and wasn’t it strange that your fifteen-year-old daughter would be telling you what you could, and more often could not, do? But this was the way it was or at least the way it was for Sarah and Lonnie.

  Every now and then, Sarah would try to take some minor stand usually involving chores, which seemed these days—even though it was just the two of them—to be the bulk of life. You would think, she said or thought she said, we were running a farm.

  She tried to be funny, tried to—as her husband might say—take a load off. But then, before she knew it, she was yelling about trash or Lonnie’s room or the dishes Lonnie still hadn’t washed. Little stuff. Dumb stuff that Sarah didn’t really even care about, but lately she found herself in a state of panic. There was a flash of heat and a pounding in her chest. She felt a rush of anxiety that might have taken a much darker form had she not willed herself to focus on the concrete objects before her—the dirty glass, for example, and other things she thought should worry good mothers and good fathers, and she was trying to play both roles now. She was all Lonnie had, and she was yelling from the tops of her lungs until her throat cracked, until Lonnie stormed out and went wherever Lonnie went, places Sarah was sure her daughter would somehow get hurt. Abducted. Killed. Or otherwise lost forever.

  All right, Sarah said. It was still daylight when she dropped Lonnie off at the club, just around suppertime—the wrong time, the worst time, Sarah thought, to be in a bar. When the sun showed white and hard every time the door opened. When you were somehow more keenly aware of all the places you weren’t—at a table, for instance, eating a meal like a regular person with a regular family. It wouldn’t matter if the music was good, only that it was loud enough to drown out your sense of things, and Sarah suspected that even if the music was loud, it wasn’t going to be good. Lonnie said the band was getting big, but they weren’t the headliners. They weren’t even the opening act. They were somewhere high on the card of the club’s little festival, but you wouldn’t know it to hear Lonnie talk. To hear Lonnie talk was to witness the kind of brittle faith that might also be called denial from a certain perspective.

  All right, Sarah said again. The ca
r idled, and she lowered her head to look up at Lonnie through the passenger side window. Sarah, the photographer, should have been interested in that angle, the way the subject appeared larger than she was, but now Sarah, the scared mother, couldn’t get past the feeling of being deep below everything. The car seemed to press down upon her with the amazing weight of water or a great mound of dirt, and peering down at her was this giant of a girl who just happened—that’s how it felt, that Lonnie just happened to be her daughter. I’ll be fine, Sarah said, and when Lonnie didn’t hear her, when Sarah had to repeat herself, she added, because a child shouldn’t worry whether her mother is fine or not, I’ll be at the house.

  But now, the house was the last place Sarah wanted to be, and when it came time to turn off the highway which had turned into Main, Sarah kept going. Sarah kept going and then turned down a different street that, if she kept on, would lead her back, a different way to the same town she’d just left. All the roads around here were nothing but circles. So to keep from going where she’d already been, Sarah swerved too fast into the parking lot of the gas station that was also a package store, and in so doing, she nearly hit a woman in jeans who was bending over to pick up what must have been a penny.

  The woman kept standing where it wasn’t safe to stand, right in the middle of the lot, and hearing the engine and perhaps feeling the heat from it, she straightened and turned, but she didn’t stagger backward. She didn’t jump out of the way. She stood in the space as if she were a truck or at least the size of one, and she watched the car lurch to a crooked stop in the next space over. She saw the front tires pop the block and then roll back. She blinked when the engine shifted down but kept running.

  Inside the car, Sarah uncovered her face. That is, her hand moved from her chapped lips to the base of her neck, and she mouthed, I’m sorry.

  The lines around the woman’s eyes cinched up, but then so did her chin, and she shook her head. No problem, she said, and through the glass, Sarah was startled to hear the voice, to hear it perfectly fine. Sarah rolled down the window and said, It’s been a rough one.

  The woman’s jaw moved, and she was a series of creases and pocks. She had the kind of face that looked beaten even when it wasn’t, but her body had held. Any place else, she might have been fifty. Sixty, even. Here, in Black Creek, the woman could have been thirty-five.

  She held up what she’d bent down for, and it wasn’t a penny but a bobby pin, and still the woman said, My lucky day.

  Inexplicably then, at least it seemed inexplicable to Sarah, the woman stuck out her hand, as if the bobby pin—bent and rusted as it was—were not a bobby pin but some exotic flower, which she tucked, as one would a hibiscus say, above Sarah’s ear. Now it’s yours, the woman said.

  Sarah’s first impulse was to recoil, and in fact, she did jump back when she felt the woman’s fingers brush against the top of her ear, but she was buckled in the car, and there weren't many places she could go.

  The woman was studying her. That’s a real pretty dress. Wow-wee.

  It was a skirt and an embarrassing one at that—too short, silver sequins of all things. Sarah pulled at it and said, Well. Her finger found the button in the door, and the window went up and might have gone on going up if the woman hadn’t lunged forward. Didn’t she lunge? But maybe she had only bent down as cool as a car hop with a tray full of French fries and soda pops. Maybe she only leaned closer and said, I’ve got this real nice top.

  Sarah made a sound. A cough. A whimper.

  I mean, the woman said, it isn’t as pretty as all that.

  She had both arms folded across the window, and with a fingernail, she scraped at a scab on her elbow. It’s red, and the neck comes down like this. She drew an arrow on her own chest, and then she did a shimmy. Yeah.

  Sarah didn’t know what to do, so she nodded.

  I bet you got a man. She said her man called Howard was there in the store. See him? she said, hitching the strap of her backpack purse. He’s in the suit.

  And sure enough, there was a hefty little bald man in a gray jacket and gray pants. He stood at the counter, and he had one hand inside his jacket, and the clerk pushed a button, and the register drawer opened, and the clerk handed some money across the counter. Howard didn’t move, and the clerk handed him some more.

  All right, Sarah said. Her hand was a claw on the door. She felt the bobby pin pulling at her hair.

  You wouldn’t think it to look at him, the woman said, but she didn’t finish. She didn’t say what you would think or how it would be wrong.

  I better get on, Sarah said.

  The engine was still running, and above it, the woman laughed or rather made a kind of hissing sound. You haven’t even gone in to get what you came for. You’d give me three guesses, but I only need one.

  Sarah shook her head. She told herself she hadn’t come here for anything. She’d come here to keep from going anywhere else. She pressed the switch, and the window sprang up another inch, and the woman said, Hey! with such force that Sarah jerked back, and she didn’t notice when one of her earrings, a gaudy bobbling thing fell into the floorboard.

  The woman’s jaw squared. You almost hit me back there, she said, though it wasn’t back there at all, but at the very place where the woman still stood big as a truck, now smiling, now showing her gums. You could have killed me.

  Sarah opened her mouth. She was suddenly aware of her own teeth, the bulk of them, the way they wanted to chatter.

  I think I might be owed, the woman said, and just then, the glass door of the store opened and there on that door were stickers about being eighteen and older, about things that were for sale or else lost, and against this greasy glass and its sad little papers and ghostly fingerprints, there was a string of bells, and the woman sang, In a one-horse open sleigh. Hey! Isn’t that right, Howard? Isn’t it fun?

  And in front of the door which was now closing, the man in the gray suit stood and did not look up at first, as if his name was not Howard at all, and the woman hollered at him. Let’s roll. This pretty lady’s giving us a ride.

  Sarah shook her head, but what she thought was, I don’t want to go home. And what she said was discotheque, and anyway, it didn’t matter what she thought or said or did because here was the woman opening the passenger side door, and here was the woman falling into the seat with her backpack purse and reaching behind her for the belt and clicking it into place as if they all were the best of friends, as if they were setting out for a Saturday morning of shopping or whatever it was people did when they were together, but it wasn’t Saturday. It was Friday, and the woman said, Hurry up. Howard has an appointment. Howard has a very important meeting. Howard! She waved at him until he shoved whatever slip of paper he’d been studying into his jacket pocket and came around and got into the backseat.

  They both stared at Sarah until the woman said, Come on then, pretty lady. She tapped the steering wheel. I’ll show you where.

  In the mirror, Howard’s face was backward of what it really must have been—the scar above his eyebrow, the mole on his left cheek, the ear that was just a bit lower—all of this was on the wrong side, but the bottom lip that hung out fat and purple, this could not have been any other way.

  The woman had switched on the radio. Playing now was a commercial for artificial knees, a woman carefully detailing the extent of her pain.

  Just like my mama, the woman said.

  Sarah thought the woman was talking to the radio, that the lady in pain was just like the woman’s mama, but the woman pointed at Sarah and said, No. You. You’re just like her.

  I’m not old enough, Sarah said, to be your mama.

  I saw your face, the woman said. I saw that face you made. She turned the dial on the dash until she found a song Sarah didn’t know. She didn’t know, Lonnie said, any songs. Lonnie said Sarah wouldn’t like the concert anyway. And discotheque, Lonnie said, was a stupid word.

  When a person says something, the woman said, it’s decent to say s
omething back.

  Sarah blinked. Why?

  Because it’s manners.

  I mean, why am I like your mama? How?

  The woman watched Sarah. Then she spoke. Mama never liked playing music in the car. Said you were liable to get hit by a truck. Run over by a train. That happened to somebody she knew. Cut the man’s head right off.

  Sarah stared at the road.

  Because Mama said when you got the radio on you won’t hear what’s coming next, the woman said. You won’t know until it’s too late. She reached for the knob, turned it up a few more notches. Howard, you know this song.

  The woman had a way. Even when what she said was a question, she wasn’t really asking. Sarah, trying it on for herself, said, What’s your name?

  Still her voice lifted and shook just like it did when she yelled at Lonnie, as if something inside were rattling and might, at any moment, turn loose.

  Tarja, the woman said.

  Tarja, Sarah said. Something in the mirror, a car, caught her eye.

  Yeah. What about it?

  Nothing.

  You don’t like it.

  I like it. It’s nice.

  Nice.

  It’s pretty is what I mean. It’s a real pretty name.

  Tarja’s eyes were on Sarah. She considered. She searched. Then finally, she smiled. Finally, she showed the gums that were mostly pink but also in some places white. It is pretty, she said, even if nobody thinks so.

  Sarah nodded and blinked. She checked the mirror. In the backseat, Howard pointed at something. He pressed his finger to the glass. His purple lip moved, but he said nothing.

  Is he okay? Sarah said.

  Tarja looked at the road in front of them. Just drive.

  They were passing the last of what, in Black Creek, amounted to subdivisions—Wessex, King’s Gate, the Country Club Estates. They were coming up on the turnoff, which they might have gone down had they been turning back toward the town where Lonnie was. Thinking of Lonnie, Sarah let her foot off the gas, but Lonnie didn’t want her around. She’d made that clear, and Tarja said, Keep going.