by Lee Matalone
Today is an unusual day, one in which a client from D.C. is in town and suggests meeting for a friendly, casual lunch. Which means I must make myself up. I must brush my hair in the way that clients prefer, slicked and smooth and even around my face, like a doll. I must present myself as someone employable, someone capable of producing content that presents their brands as respectable business entities.
This is not the work I had planned for myself as a young English major enthralled with Keats and Blake, but it is fine. This work gives me flexibility. How many people can say that they can design their days around their own wants, whims, and needs? I am lucky.
In the mirror I see that I should not lock myself away. It is not unfeasible that someone would find me worth taking out to dinner, worth fucking, lipstick or not.
With an alcohol-soaked Q-tip, I clean up the lines. I stick my forefinger between my lips and slide it out, as some mothers teach their daughters, lining my knuckle with a halo of red, soon to be washed away in the foam of the tap.
I am a woman. I must paint within the lines.
After our workdays finished, Pat and I entered into a ritual. The bath was our moment of coming together, of union, our disparate days converging at this point in the house, upstairs above the downstairs hall closet, in the spot adjacent to our bedroom, where this ritual would terminate. Unlike me he worked a traditional job that required sport coats and office hours. These things needed to be washed away, just as my computer screen eyes needed to be cleansed.
Into the center of the basin he’d lower himself, cold porcelain on warm skin, and I’d start filling, and he would always say, Make it hotter, knowing that I liked the water scalding, and I’d turn the heat up higher but not as hot as I would have wanted it to be, and then I’d perch behind him on the ledge of the tub, my thighs a vise around his torso, the soles of my feet scrubbing his legs, exfoliating the day off of his skin, our legs reddening rapidly in the hot soak. Over the peaks of his shoulders that protruded out of the water, our shared sea, I’d empty cups of water, my hands skimming bathwater like we were in a faulty boat filling fast, the ocean overtaking us, our schooner sinking, and I was responsible for saving us, naked me, without a plug, without the gills for breathing underwater.
After, he’d lift me off the back of the basin and pull me by the hand to the bedroom, to the bed. Dampening the sheets, we’d eventually fall asleep, on a bed sudsy and cold.
“How many lightbulbs do we need?” Pat and I walked through the automatic doors of Lowe’s.
“Four, I think,” I said. “No. Five. Five bulbs.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. You’re always asking if I’m sure. Can’t you have faith in my sureness?”
The aisles shone a greasy blue. They must have been freshly soaked and sudsed the night before, not yet to be tarnished by garden-soiled boots. That Sunday morning, the aisles were spare, possessing a holy quietude.
“Blink,” he said. “There’s something in your eye.”
We paused in the intermediate space between the aisles and the registers, out in the open. I blinked.
“I can’t feel anything.”
“I’m telling you,” he said. “It’s there.”
“It’s not. I feel fine. The eye is fine.”
“Dear.”
It was just like my mother said it would be. Like pulling off a Band-Aid, she said, taking some skin with it. How did she know what it would be like to tell him about M., I asked, since she had never strayed in either of her marriages? True, she said, but her patients would tell her stories. From their experiences, she said, neglecting to mention her own intimacy with being strayed upon, she understood the quality of that particular strain of pain.
The orientation of the skin of his eyes and cheeks and lips did not register as anger. He said, I understand. I understand. I understand, over and over. That repetition. I understand. I understand. I understand.
The lightbulbs.
Four or five.
One for the lamp on the table by the bed. Two for the lamps in the downstairs living area. One for the floor lamp in my office. One extra bulb, just in case.
This is a sacred place. If I said any more I’d tear the tender mystery of it. But to give a slightly rounder impression, to add a little more fullness to your understanding but not enough to burst, it’s like this: Imagine the happiest of your personal rituals. It’s not about any period of extended contentedness in your life, but the habitual, iterable moments of contained joy that slow time. Maybe it’s sitting on the couch and watching British murder mysteries with your cat, your feet soaking in a paraffin bath. Maybe it’s walking in the woods with your aging mother, holding hands, smoking a shared cigarette as the winter air reddens the corresponding apples of your cheeks. For me, it’s our moments in the bath. Enough.
“All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair, and perhaps a bidet,” Jean Rhys wrote in Good Morning, Midnight. “A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that’s all any room is.”
Beau
Out on the town we are Bonnie and Clyde. We are bitches, troublemakers, outlaws. We talk too loudly at restaurants. We laugh at children falling on the sidewalk. We hold hands and dance on street corners, even when there is no music, because there is no music. We are just as inclined to make it ourselves.
In Chloe’s house we are something else altogether. Not lovers, but something deeper and more stable.
“Pass me the magazine,” she says, her arm materializing from out behind the transparent shower curtain liner. In the new house, she has yet to buy a substantial cloth curtain. This is not because she lacks for money. In addition to what Pat has given her, she has her own source of income. She is a savvy person and long ago figured out how to use words to coerce, sell, provide her a living that doesn’t require her to go to an office and follow someone else’s orders. She is not rich—her earnings lay in writing, after all—but she is no freeloader either. She can afford the curtain. Simply put, the naked shower curtain liner is part of her avoidance, another component of dealing with all that has happened.
“But we’re talking,” I say, sitting on top of a stack of unfolded towels piled atop the toilet seat.
“We are not talking. You are talking and I am letting you talk.”
“Then tell me something. Tell me who this man is you’re going out with this week.”
“Some architect from the internet.”
“Architects are some of the most neurotic people I know. Why would you subject yourself to an architect?”
“He speaks four languages. He designs buildings for a living. It could be a productive relationship.”
“If you’re going to sleep with him, I don’t want to know the details.”
She throws the curtain open and tosses a cupped hand of water in my direction. On the floor around my ankles, miniature pools of soapy bathwater settle like lily pads. This is new for us, this shared bath time, since she has been alone in the new house, since Pat has sequestered himself inside their house, since she has started over.
But our playing is not entirely new. For the entirety of our relationship, this has been a game of ours. We raise flags of passion that turn out to be just shadows. Through repeated trial and error, we’re discovering that we want nothing of the other’s wetness.
In the bath a patchwork of bubbles frame her breasts like scales on a fish. Her limbs are lithe and translucent, her veins swimming blue against the edges of her skin. She is one of those people that doesn’t seem to fit on this earth, where CPAs hover in cubicles and cell phones yawp about war and the latest technological upgrade. I let her know that I see her, that her otherness is seen.
I’ve often wondered how nice it would be, though, if the shadows turned out to have substance.
“Excuse me,” she says. “What are you thinking? Your eyes glazed over. Is this too weird?”
“It’s not weird at all,” I assure her.
�
�I’m getting out though.” She pulls the curtain closed around her. “It’s not a date,” she adds. “I met him at a Denny’s, not online,” as if that clarifies things. “Just friends.”
I pick up a wrinkled towel from beneath my seat and extend a hand into the shower curtain. I do not look.
She pulls the curtain open. A smile attempts to pull her lips up over her teeth. She is learning happiness again. She turns off the water.
We are like an old country-western duo, lovers or siblings, sometimes it’s hard to tell which with those couples. They both share that same glowing head of hair and set of long eyelashes to bat at the camera. Which we do. We do a lot of lash batting at one another, at waiters and bar-backs when we’re out together. Flirting: another ritual.
In her new solitude, we have become closer, our two bubbles of consciousness pressing up against one another. We are like conjoined twins, Chloe and I.
“Chloe, I’m coming over.”
“I’m really busy here. I’m painting. I’m elbow deep in paint. I’m getting white all over my phone. Are you going to buy me a new phone?”
“When will you be done painting? Will you let me come over then? Actually, I don’t care. I’m coming over anyway.”
“You can’t just come over whenever you feel like it,” she says. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I know that I’m coming over. How long has it been since you left the house?”
“I left for groceries.”
“When was that?” I prod. “Last month?”
“Three days ago, actually.”
“Put on a clean shirt. I’m taking you out.”
“You’re a pain in my ass.”
“I love you, you know that,” I say.
Without hesitation, she says, “I love you, too.”
I hear her sigh, hear her exhaling past the dead phone line, her solitude escaping mine, her bubble bouncing away from me.
We are Cash and Carter, except we’ve never shared the same bed.
“Sculpture is the art of control freaks,” I tell my students. “It is the art of people who feel the world pulling away from them. Sculpting comes from an irrational need to shape a reality that is incapable of being shaped.”
The kids sign up for my art history classes in droves. Aside from the art students, the econ majors especially take a liking to my course. They all think I know something, that I have some secret about the world that I’m going to divulge in this fifty-minute class in this generic lecture hall situated in the hills of old Virginia.
Despite what the students believe, every teacher knows that we are just making it up as we go along.
If I know that it’s all a sham, then how do I have the confidence to unload all of this pseudo-philosophical shit on them? All I can say is that, over the years, the words have leaked out of my mouth more and more until the leak became a river of platitudes.
I am not a young man anymore. I know because I have heard myself starting to say these things. In my forties, I’ve aged light-years.
Even before my sister died, ours was not a happy family. When the local men came on horseback in February, chanting, Donnez-moi quelque chose pour le Mardi Gras! my brothers, Jules and John and Leon, and my sisters, Alice and Adele, would join me on the front porch with Mama to see the festivities. Daddy would come outside, too, wearing an expressionless face. Even he, the a-socialite, couldn’t avoid the duties to this community. He told Alice to go around back and get Maybelline, my favorite hen, and when Alice came back from around the side of the house she handed her to Daddy and instead of tossing her up in the air like culture intended, he set her down right there on the ground, and she, not moving an inch, not even scurrying like chickens do, when she had just started pecking at some piece of rock, he cocked his leg and kicked her, lodging her into the air. Inside, he huffed at us, and we all did as we were told.
I swear right before she flew Maybelline looked at me, saying goodbye (Mayb didn’t succumb from that kick, but after that violence she could only hop on one leg and to Daddy she was now useless and, well—).
When we got her as a chick, all fluff and down, Mama had told me Maybelline would never be dinner as long as she had control over the situation, which we both knew was never. Daddy knew I loved Maybelline and perhaps that’s why he did it, to get the love out of me, to show me that little boys weren’t supposed to love so much. Boys weren’t put on this earth to love certain creatures.
I text her, marijuana, melatonin, Ambien, if necessary. But please, dear, sleep. I know, but sleep.
“You comin’?” Mama threw her arm around that littlest Guillory boy, little old me sitting at the kitchen table. It was Saturday and my brothers and sisters were out, running around with the other kids who rode ATVs or bicycles or walked a mile to find one another. Daddy was Somewhere. He did his own thing on Saturdays. We knew he was at Annie’s Lounge, but Mama never bothered to know more than that. He had a tough job, she said, a preacher who didn’t believe the gospel, he deserved a rest after the long week.
That petite boy, petite even for eight, didn’t talk back then. I didn’t say much at all, and if I did, it was only when spoken to. So to Mama, I nodded. Of course I want to go.
In the Ford Taurus we borrowed from a church-friend of Mama’s, we drove the twenty minutes into town, Tammy Wynette or Conway Twitty or BeauSoleil on the radio, her hand holding mine. Like that little boy, Mama wasn’t a talker or smiler, but you could feel in her touch that she carried so much love inside her she’d burst if her lips bared, exposing that love to oxygen.
“Anne-Marie! Don’t think I don’t know what you’re looking for. Aisle six. We moved the blonde over an aisle.” Miss Dominique came down from behind the tall purple-painted counter to give my mother a hug. Everyone in Lake Charles had a story, Mama and Miss Dom included. At fourteen, Mama was married to a thirty-year-old man who enjoyed tying her up and burning cigarettes on her legs, so when she escaped she stayed in the only halfway house in town. That’s where she met thirteen-year-old Dominique, raped by her father and her brother until one night she walked out of her house and down Goos until she got to a gas station where a white lady picked her up and fed her dinner and gave her a shower and called the shelter the next morning. I never heard any of this from Mama. I heard it from my sister Adele, who had found an old diary of Mama’s when they were helping her move her stuff from San Antonio back to Louisiana following my father’s death.
There were always secrets, unsaids in my family.
“Helping your mama with her Easter hair today, Beau?”
A nod. Yes, of course, as always.
Miss Dominique pressed a purple kiss to my cheek.
That diary contained multitudes of buried pains. My mother and Miss Dom had never really gotten away from bad men. The new men weren’t as bad as their firsts, those abusers, but they weren’t good either. The new husbands were bad in the way that many men are, incapable of loving without self-interest, a type of fluid, shifting loving that led to them seeking love elsewhere, at the bar, at church, at—. They weren’t men full of love like the women, love that broke them.
We didn’t have much money, but Easter was coming up in a few days and there was going to be a big picnic at the church. Daddy said Mama could spend a little to get herself made up. A preacher’s wife had to be presentable. Get long hair, like Rapunzel, is what Mama understood I was saying when I grabbed the plastic-wrapped hair, sunny-blond like Dolly Parton. Mama then, she did smile. She took the bag and we checked out.
“Unlike your mama and me, you don’t need to buy hair. You have beautiful hair all on your own,” Miss Dom said, placing the hair into a bag of its own, making sure Mama felt the specialness of this special occasion.
“I’ll be seeing you Sunday?” Mama said.
Miss Dom came around and wrapped her arms around Mama, holding on to her, and tears fell down both of their cheeks and they sniffled quietly, not saying a word, letting unspoken truths pass between them. Miss D
om took a kerchief out of her pocket and wiped my mother’s face, holding my mother’s cheeks between her hands, holding her together.
Back in our driveway, the bayou behind our house humming with cicadas, Mama sitting on a metal fold-out chair folded out on the cement, I wove Miss Parton into my quiet mother’s unassuming, shoulder-length hair. I tried to weave into Mama, the way Miss Dom showed me, that Parton laugh. I tried to weave that Parton boisterousness, that bubbly, smiley, no-shame-about-them-breasts woman, into my mother’s hair. I didn’t know who my mother was. I couldn’t tell if my father had driven the joy out of her or if it was never there at all.
When I was finished, she held the blush compact to review what I’d tried to do for her. We looked at her together in the mirror, and that woman I’ve never known, she put her hand on my shoulder, the sky erupting in chemical-induced pink neon behind us.
While I was admiring, Alice, dressed in one of Mama’s white grandma nightgowns knotted at the knee with knee-high muck boots, emerged from our teeny tiny two-bedroom house, came up behind me, lifted me up in the air by my armpits, and swung me round and round and round and round until vision fell away and everything was wet wet heat and the hissing of the cicadas and the softness of Alice’s cotton dress.
Mama shouting at Alice, Alice laughing, Alice ignoring Mama, me laughing, Alice painting my face with the blood that had erupted from the re-opened wounds on her arms, me laughing, paint me a warrior, paint me a warrior, paint me a warrior (Alice, the only one who could get me to talk), she painting me in herself, Alice another type of warrior, whoever said warriors can’t succumb, too, that warriors can’t feel hurt like normal people did, people like me who were confused about our place in the world but who were made for this world and all its pleasures, who wanted all those pleasures but weren’t quite sure what to do with them, we normal, confused people, Alice knew what she wanted she just wanted to be happy, an impossible thing, an impossible thing, an impossible thing.
“Go inside and clean yourselves up,” Mama said.
Through the bathroom window, I watched Mama sitting out there on that metal chair. I watched her until the pink dissipated into gray and then black, until the screen door shuttered and the house met the dark outside. I did not hear the door shutter again but it did early in the morning when even the cicadas were sleeping.