by Lee Matalone
There’s something haunted about Leger’s sculptures of tulle and cotton, an eeriness to the empty spaces that his looming (and notably, magnificent) cream puff ships and tutu castles create. To make weighty things weightless—to construct a replica of the Titanic out of cotton balls, to remake the White House in tulle—in other words, to strip objects of the substance of their power, makes the viewer question what she has assumed about the nature of things. The spoon is metal, but maybe we can bend it with our minds. A family seems to be happy and functional, but what hard truths loom behind the smiles on the Christmas cards? What is Leger up to? It seems he is attempting to upset capital-A America. What we have believed about ourselves isn’t right at all. Leger shows us how wrong we all have been.
She says M. once told her, There is no niche for a miniaturist.
“A miniaturist. He was talking about me.”
“Well, Bachelard said miniature is one of the refuges of greatness, so. Fuck him.”
“That must make you a Gigantist.”
“Someone who makes mountains out of molehills.”
“But in the best way.”
“Thanks, Chlo.”
Alice was in the hospital, and Mama and Daddy and all of the kids were there, too, because they were all at a church function when I called and told them that Alice had done it again and that it was bad and that they needed to come and get her, quick quick. (Why hadn’t I gone to church with them? Rebelliousness was rearing its head in me, Not today, I’d said, which happened to be my first refusal of the family, a story but not for this story.) They swung by the house so fast the car barely stopped moving, Daddy practically running through the screen door and scooping Alice up out of the tub and wrapping her in a towel before tossing her bleeding in the backseat with the kids, who screamed with her sopping, cold body on their laps.
I wasn’t given instructions on what to do with myself. I was not to turn on the TV, that much I knew, not when Daddy didn’t specifically say I could. I did have a marker though that I’d stolen from school. An Icy Blue like Alice’s eyes. So I picked that up, and I drew pictures of the world I knew. I drew Maybelline and Miss Dom’s purple lips (in blue, though, of course) and the screen door half ajar, the way Mama left it when the nights were especially suffocating and we needed more air, we needed to breathe. I drew the backseat of the truck and the bayou brimming with blue crawfish and blue horses with blue-masked men in blue-flagged clothing. I painted the world blue. Then I looked in the mirror and with that marker I drew blue cartoon tears on my cheeks. It had been years since I was allowed to cry and sometime at school when a little girl had started to cry when she couldn’t write her cursive “S” Ms. Boudreaux had knelt down beside her and instead of saying, Shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up she said, It’s okay to cry, Tiffany, crying is healthy, get out that hurt and you’ll feel much better. I didn’t think I could cry but maybe this was close enough, maybe. All I had to do was draw the tears. All I had to do was draw.
Chloe and I are dancing, two-stepping, shit-talking, in the Tractor Supply. We came here for garden supplies, Carhartt, dog food.
“Can we have one?” she says, gazing into the large cardboard box filled with chicks, little female Brahmas selling for $1.50 a pop. Another box replete with Rhode Island Reds, another full of Stars.
“I’m not sure now is the best time to start a chicken family,” I say. “You don’t even have a kitchen table.”
“One day I will have chickens,” she says.
“One day you will have chickens,” I say. “I will help you build a coop, too, if you like.”
She extends her hand and we shake to a future coop.
We model overalls, camouflage, buy Sprites and jerky at the checkout.
In the truck she cries. I turn the radio up just enough so she feels alone.
Some of us are homeless in spirit. That’s just the way it will always be for those who grew up moving from place to place, those who grew up not knowing the foundation of a happily betrothed mother and father with two-point-five children and a little fluffy white dog. Just like the kids with the happy homes, though, we’re still tethered to the memories of our childhoods. Even when we move, the memories follow us from place to place.
Certain visions won’t unstick: the leaves pasted to Alice’s legs, Lake Charles lake-mud having affixed the natural decorations to her clammy skin. The water had taken her and reincarnated her as a trout, a lonesome creature of the lake. She had spent her whole life—all sixteen years of it—punishing herself for things she never did, eating and eating her agony and then starving and cutting it away. Her fishiness just affirmed the world’s cruelty. She couldn’t become some soft, cuddly puppy or rare and worshipped panda bear. In that swampy, chemical-saturated lake, she was doomed to swim in circles, forever forlorn.
A wealthy family found her kayak a few days later. The boat had drifted to another edge of the lake and deposited itself beneath the private dock of some oil-man. Apparently, that mother never recovered from finding our dead sister, with her arms carved up like some stigmata she had only heard about in Mass. One of the ropes with which she had tied herself to the kayak still trailed from one of the carrying handles. She wanted us to find her, knowing we’d take some small comfort in being able to put her to rest.
No one knew how she had gotten the boat out there. My family didn’t own a kayak. We asked friends if they had given her the boat or if they’d helped her load it into the bed of their truck, had helped her get out there, maybe just for an evening excursion, but no one knew anything.
Alice, it was always going to be Alice. The front row just nodded through Father Broussard’s eulogy.
We, people who’d lived in the same part of the swamp for one hundred and fifty years, moved to Texas, where Daddy found another job in oil refining. Louisiana was too much for us. We couldn’t stand the swamps, the bays and bayous, the water that constantly taunted us, You are not in control, give up, give up. From then on we all feared the water. We knew it could suck us right up, turn us back into fish.
In college no one knew I was a Louisiana boy. Texas confused my accent. When people asked me where I was from, I told them I never had a place that felt like home. I avoided the question. Now, when people ask, thinking my accent some peculiar scholarly affectation, I say home wasn’t something meant for me.
It’s not an issue of geography. I’ve lived in Virginia for nearly twenty years now. But it’s not home. I can’t explain to you what that means. People associate home with comfort, a place to set down one’s haunches, where one can make love and argue in privacy. Rest. Calm. Those things are unknown to me. I couldn’t rest if I tried.
I was told boys weren’t meant to love certain creatures. But I also said I was getting rebellious. When people say that about children, when they use that word rebel like it’s the equivalent of taking the Lord’s name in vain, like it’s uttering the name of the Antichrist, what they mean is that the young ones are learning to be people apart from their parents. What I mean to say is that as Alice became a fish, I was getting to be myself. I was opening my mouth and the love couldn’t help but come out.
Two boys stand outside a gas station off of I-10, on the outskirts of Lake Charles, Louisiana. In the wet, heavy summer night, the cigarette smoke conjured in anticipation alit by a lone streetlamp, they discover a new kind of love in the other’s mouth.
As soon as it’s discovered, it’s gone. Tongues retreat, beads of sweat on their necks and in their armpits continue to bead, to multiply. The crosses pressed to the other’s Adam’s apple settle back against their owner’s shivering chest.
The boys, as boys do, moved on. They created their own lives apart from one another, but, as boys do, they never did forget, they never grew up entirely.
Master Bedroom
“You’ve been sleeping on the floor this whole time?” Beau looks at the futon mattress, which I have been sleeping on since I moved into the house three months ago, surrounded by a sea of
wood.
Up to this point, we have avoided going into this room together. No one has seen this room. Considerate, understanding, he’s never asked why I keep the door shut.
“I understand.” He doesn’t touch me, though he feels my body vibrating next to his within the doorframe. “But it’s really about time that you stop sleeping on the floor.”
I am suddenly repulsed. The futon is a gray Band-Aid left on the edge of the pool.
There are many types of beds. They are much more than an arrangement of various wooden beams designed to support a mattress, where two people—or three or four—sleep, read, fuck, dream. There are marriage beds, but then there are marriage beds that also double as beds for lovers. There are race car beds designed for boys in Pull-Ups and beds with frilly, itchy pink comforters designed for girls (but Mom knows that Denise wants the race car bed and so she buys it for her, target marketing be damned). There are beds for giving birth in and there are beds for dying in.
A bed can be a very unholy cradle.
“Le Corbusier was a Fascist,” M. said, when Pat and I were still a we, in the bed he shared with his wife.
“I know nothing about him. As I said, it’s Beau’s work.”
“Is it la Villa Savoye? Reconstructed in paperclips? That makes sense.” He sat up, taking the sports drink from the bedside table.
I could never imagine him running. It is nearly impossible to imagine some people in motion, sweating and huffing in neon athletic shoes on a paved suburban road.
“I just had coffee with my friend who’s a fellow at the Centre Le Corbusier.” He passed me the green-yellow drink. “Not that that’s related in any way.”
Outside the bedroom window stretched a large backyard, the vast green expanse like one you’d see in TV advertisements for ritzy lawn care services, with children hula-hooping or kicking a soccer ball, a mother throwing a Frisbee for a shepherd or retriever dog with a finely combed coat. Yet, while similar in dimension to these yards of domestic fantasy, M.’s yard was empty, overgrown, the wooden beams of the fence at the rear of the property falling into the earth. Instead of housing these domestic symbols, the grass spread its legs and shouted: I will remain untamed, empty.
“I’m getting up,” I narrated, “to flip the record.” Nude, I stood in front of the living room’s bay window. Down the block, houses adorned with Christmas lights illuminated the dark street. My own home, some three hundred miles away, was also decorated, the lights on the roof hung by my husband, who was waiting for me in our bed to return from a visit to an old friend.
“This house, it doesn’t feel like you. Not like the old apartment,” I said, getting back into his bed.
“You’re right. That apartment was perfect.”
“This house was built for a family.”
“This is true,” he said. “I constantly feel like I’ve broken into someone else’s house. Robbing the cradle.”
“Who are your neighbors?”
“Mostly people with children.”
“Is there anywhere in this town where people without children live?”
“I haven’t found it yet.”
He pulled the sheets up over our shoulders. Over the bed, a fleece blanket with our university’s logo lay atop a cheap down-and-feather duvet. A young professor with student debt couldn’t afford expensive things, though he had never been one for expensive or ornate things. His old apartment, the one I knew when we were students together, featured crooked bookshelves, books stacked on the floor against the wall, books on the coffee table, a bed pushed up against the window, which he would open in the winter, the radiator warming the sheets under which our bodies were carefully tucked, our noses grazing the cold air. We didn’t mind.
Under his cheap marriage sheets, we clung to one another, to an idea compelling because of its sheer alienness to our normal lives and routines. He and I, peanut butter and kamacite. We would never be together.
“Will this ever happen for us?”
“Falling asleep?” he asked. “I do believe we will fall asleep at some point.”
“You know how I feel about you,” I said, searching for his eyes in the dark.
“Yes. And I feel the same way, as I told you yesterday.”
In the middle of the night, I had to push him off of me. I rolled to the side of the bed where he told me to sleep. I could smell the traces of her shampoo on the pillow, something lightly coconut-y, something expensive and natural, as well as the shavings of her dry skin on the sheets. But I couldn’t smell their intimacy and that was a comfort. He was mine in a way that he wasn’t hers. We were each other’s in a way that was not real but not unreal either.
That was the first and last time we slept together. I would go back to my home, to my marriage. I would finally figure out how to be a good wife.
I sleep with my phone by my ear. People say that you shouldn’t do that, that as you slumber, electromagnetic waves will radiate out from the device and give you brain cancer.
But, I think, what if Pat calls, and the phone is on the other side of the room, on the dresser or plugged into the outlet in the bathroom, and he is vomiting or writhing in our, his, bed? I wouldn’t forgive myself. I will risk the potentiality of my own cancer.
Unlike M., I chose work that could give me a different life, a life of linen sheets and goose down. From a young age I had an instinct for fine things, always managing to stop at the cashmere on the rack of sweaters. My materialism can’t be helped.
I’d try to train myself out of it for the right reason. I’d give up this house and all of its furniture to be with him. Not him. What M. and I have cannot coexist alongside co-signed leases, shared utility bills, arguments over dirty dishes. We’ve never had anything of substance and we never will.
Some days I think Pat has no chance and some days I think he will be healthy again. But either way I have fear that I will still end up without him. I’m still hoping that my marriage can become intact again.
“The problem of your house has not yet been stated.”
“What are you talking about?” I whisper into the phone, as if there’s someone in the adjoining room whom I don’t want to expose to our conversation. Though I am completely alone in the house. There is no one to overhear.
“You don’t think your mother knows anything,” she says. “But I’ve been around.”
“Who said that I thought you knew nothing?” I say. “I know you know nearly everything.”
“What problem is your house solving?”
“When did you say you are coming to visit? I need to know so I can make sure the guest room is finished by the time you get here.”
“The end of December,” she says. “I told you that. Are you hearing what I’m asking?”
“Christmas? I’m hearing what you’re saying.”
“Christmas if you like. What I’m saying is that you’ll never make a house you’re happy with until you know what its function is to you.”
“I’ve never heard you talk like this.”
“That’s because you never listen,” she says. “I’ve always talked this way.”
“I’m not sure that’s true.”
“Think about what I said.”
“What kind of pillows do you like? Firm, medium, or soft?”
“You know what I like.”
“Firm, then,” I say.
“Do you remember when you’d sleep at the end of my bed?”
“I remember I was far too old to be doing that.”
“I think you did that up until you were ten years old. You wouldn’t go to bed in your own room.”
“I don’t know what that was about. I don’t know where the fear was coming from.”
“Come on. You know.”
“I know now. I didn’t then.”
“You knew what we had was special.”
“You were all I had.”
“Remember the firm pillows,” my mother reminds me. “I can’t sleep with that soft shit.”
&n
bsp; I am committed to absolutely no Christmas decorations this year. And certainly not in the bedroom. Nothing could be less erotic than Santa. Though, maybe a Santa with a big white beard and crimson cheeks on the bureau could calm my body, could distract it from what it wants. At this point, I’m not writing anything off.
Yes, Tito, you can sleep with me. Pat would not have approved, as you well know. But you are fine now. Crawl here under the sheets. Curl your body up against mine. The rules have changed.
Over email, a college classmate who now lives in the Deep South, suffering the loss of a girlfriend (to California), his job (to the economy), and his recently adopted puppy (to a tractor trailer), writes that in the Deep South, bad things tend to take place in August. The heat, the crime, the apathy, the heartbreak.
Funny, I reply. Here in the North, in the northern South, it’s the other way around. Up North, bad things always seem to happen around Christmas, New Year’s.
On a trip Pat and I took to Paris, the first thing I noticed was the staring. Mostly men. You’d pass by on the street and they’d look you dead in the eye, longer than a second, long enough to make you uncomfortable. I couldn’t get them to take their eyes off of me. This behavior unsettled me. This happens in New York, too, I realized. How strange that in an overcrowded place, people do not have the courtesy to avert their eyes and give you your one-by-one foot of space.
Now, I’d take their eyes, any eyes. How things change.
“Good morning, Reno,” the police officer says cheerfully over the radio, the sun a white shadow on his horizon. When he speaks, the phone glows a blue aureole on the pillow, a UFO’s reminder. We are not alone.
Guest Bathroom
“Is it a window or an interpretable transparency?” Beau looks at the edges of the window in the shower, a rectangular transom painted shut.