2
IT WAS close to dawn, and still, she could not sleep. She lay in the dark on her back, and it was as if she had no arms or legs, eyes or ears, her face an abstraction. Her husband was curled on his side, one hand between his knees, and he was snoring lightly, though she barely heard it. Nor could she quite hear the air-conditioning unit in their window, their room probably too cool, though she did not care or reach for the light blanket at her feet. She breathed deeply through her nose, but she smelled nothing—not the cotton sheets or pillowcases, not Bobby’s dried sweat or the skin of his bald head inches away, not the sticky red wine at the bottom of her glass on the bedside table or the wax of the chamomile candle beside it she’d blown out hours ago—nothing. And she should be able to see the contours of their room, but it was like staring into the shadows of a shadow and she closed her eyes, but that left her floating alone in her own darkness and she opened them again to this nothingness she’d been inside of for weeks—at meals together at their small table in his red kitchen; working side by side in the study—her on the novel she’d resurrected with his help, him on the revision of his dissertation to make it more palatable to the masses; and later, making love, his breathy grunts in her ear, his tongue in her mouth, she seemed to be watching it all from far away, once again stuck alone in this non-feeling that now swung her legs off the bed and into the bathroom.
Plugged into the socket beneath the toilet paper dispenser was a night-light shaped like a saxophone, its dim glow spreading over the floor where Susan knelt rummaging under the sink for the scissors. They were cool and heavy and when she flicked on the overhead light, she squinted at a face she no longer seemed to recognize. It was small, her eyes dark, though she’d worn very little makeup for years, not even to cover the lines at the corners of her eyes and lips. The overall effect, she thought, was weariness. She was forty-three years old, and she’d grown weary.
Now she was holding her long hair between two fingers, and she began to cut into it, the snipping sound muffled in her ear. She dropped the hair into the wastebasket and kept cutting, then she turned off the light and walked into her writing room. Such a joke. She sat at her desk, and it occurred to her only then that she was naked. She ran her fingers over her shorn head, felt stray hairs fall to her shoulders and breasts. That was something at least, that she could feel that.
She ran the cursor to where she’d last left off: and she saw the young woman she knew had been her mother curled on that linoleum, and the sting in her side became a burn and then was gone as quickly as it had come, and Susan Lori sat in her own stench feeling the soft open utility of her own organs, and my God, how could he have done it?
Those big hands and thick forearms. All that power and he still reached for what he reached for.
And so what was Susan Lori to him? What was she to anyone?
Her fingers hovered. There was such ugliness to all this. But she remembered the toilet, and she remembered that image of her mother curled on the floor.
She pressed return until there was just a blank screen. Sweat came out on her forehead and the back of her neck. Her mouth tasted like ash. And as Susan Lori washed her hands with scalding water and pink liquid soap, she looked into a smudged mirror and saw the same dark beauty of her mother, but without the cheap insecurity in that Polaroid Susan had of her at fifteen, without the need for anything or anybody that would make her own reflection in the mirror look better to her in some way.
Susan Lori did not know if her mother had ever looked into a mirror like this, but leaving that bathroom and not caring whether her foul smell followed her or not, Susan Lori may as well have hoisted a shield and drawn a sword, for she scanned the room for the man with the big hands and thick forearms, but he was not there, and the men she passed in the booth were ghosts as dead to her as her own shit moving through the sewer pipes under the street of the parole officer of the father she no longer wanted to meet or talk to in any way.
Of course Susan Lori knew that man she saw could have been someone else. But in that hot factory town on that brown river that smelled vaguely like gasoline and dried mud, every man and boy looking so hungrily at her as she waited to see the one who had taken her mother from her, a part of Susan Lori began to see all men as invaders. And whether their intent was to give pleasure or to inflict pain, whether they used their fingers or sharp objects never meant for a woman, she had been carried to where she had never before allowed herself to go: the final moment of her mother’s suffering.
Susan stared at that last line. She felt the blood descend to her fingertips, smelled the dusty throw rug under her bare feet, heard a car pass by outside, saw the pale blue of daylight filtering through the curtains.
Outside two warblers were calling to one another, and she crawled back into bed beside Bobby and pulled the sheet up to her throat. She could hear his rising and falling breath, could smell the hard wax of the candle on the lamp table beside her. She grew too cold and pulled the light blanket up over them both, then she closed her eyes, her body sinking more deeply into the mattress, and soon she was floating down a brown river past mill buildings toward the sea, the kind waitress in her dirty apron smiling and waving at her from the banks. When Susan woke, bright sunlight lay across Bobby’s side of the bed and he’d been gone for hours.
In the bathroom she avoided the mirror, but her neck felt cool and naked, and she dressed and walked down the dark hallway for the kitchen. Propped against the coffee maker was a note written in Bobby’s left-handed sprawl: Baby, your hair. —LOVE, B
This was his way of saying he was worried about her, which he’d been for weeks now. She’d taken the semester off from teaching to work on her “novel” and her MFA chores, but she spent most of her days sleeping or trying to read or pretending she wanted to eat or to make love to a man she felt so far away from, and the thing is she did not know if it was him or just everything, for that was how it always showed its leaving and its return, her no longer being able to take pleasure in the small pleasures: a glass of Malbec after a long day of work; the smell of the bay blowing across the sunlit campus; a fresh sliced tomato on blue porcelain; a student’s inspired and well-written paper. She’d begin to feel the slow drifting away from all of it, her anomie back in her house, some black hook that lifted her then hung her just out of reach of whatever it was she thought she loved. It had started when she was very young, and she’d nearly grown used to it, like some black birthmark across her face.
“Enemy?” Bobby had asked her the first time she’d opened that window into herself. They were sitting together on the couch in his study on a weekday afternoon, both their classes done for the day, and he’d poured them some wine she did not want.
“No,” she’d told him. “Anomie. Alienation. I don’t know, estrangement.” But it had become their word for it, her enemy.
Outside the window the sun shone on the roof of her car, the dark roast beginning to drip. It was a Saturday and she remembered vaguely Bobby telling her he planned to spend the day cleaning and organizing his office on campus. She’d made a life with Bobby Dunn. She had, and so she could only hope that she was wrong about what she did not feel. Maybe she was wrong.
She was tempted to read over what she’d written the night before, but she was afraid she would do what she always did, which was to judge it as shit then delete it and sit staring at nothing once again. No, it was as if some small flame had been lit inside her, and it would take very little to blow it out. Bobby loved the novel she’d been trying to work on again. He thought it was “genius,” but he was wrong. It was shit, every word of it false. It was from the point of view of a Mexican girl living in some tenement in Culiacán, but every time Susan tried to be her with mere words, she kept seeing—not some Mexican city—but the brick shops of Oak Street in Arcadia where Susan had grown up, her grandmother’s antique store on the first floor of the building below her. And Susan wasn’t up there alone, either. She was with Gustavo, his dark eyes and rough hands and
straw cowboy hat he’d set aside until they were done. The girl she was really writing about was herself so why not just write about herself?
Because she’d never been very fond of her own company, that’s why.
But she kept seeing her old room in their house in Arcadia, the pine bookcases her stepgrandfather had bought at an auction sale, her single bed in the corner where there was a wall lamp she’d lie under reading for days. There was her desk at the window overlooking the woods where she took pride writing essays on Leaves of Grass and The Pearl and Jane Eyre.
There was making love with Gustavo in that bed.
She needed to go back there, her memory of it a jumble of old dry pieces that could only feed the flame of this new writing, this sense that she was walking into some eternal room where someone she forgot she knew was sitting there waiting for her.
She poured her coffee into one of Bobby’s black mugs and carried it down the hall into her office. Her laptop was open the way she’d left it, its screen dark. She sat down and tapped it bright again.
the final moment of her mother’s suffering.
It was a weekday afternoon, and she and Bobby had just made love on their unmade bed. She lay on her side facing him, the late sun through the window across his face and shoulders, his big hand on her hip. From his study spilled Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Susan had grown used to its discordant noise, the way you do the sounds of construction in a house next door to you, the hammer taps and whirring saws and wood dropping onto wood. She’d smiled at him. “You and Ornette, I’ll never get it.”
“It’s easy. There’s no tonal center.”
She just stared at him.
“Nothing’s predetermined. There are no harmonic rules. Look, life’s one big fucking mess, Susan. To shape it too much is a lie.” He smiled back at her, and maybe it was what he’d just said and then his smile in that light that did it, the rest of the room in shadow.
“Bobby?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not really an orphan.”
“No?”
“No.”
And so she told him of the mother she’d lost the way she had and the father who still lived. She told him of finding all this out just days before going back to college her senior year. She told him about driving up north to find her father.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yep.”
“You don’t remember him at all?”
“No, not really. Glimpses here and there. And maybe his shoulders. I don’t know. Something about his shoulders.”
Bobby began to look at her differently. He began to look at her as if she were broken and in need of fixing. He’d always been attentive, but now he was more so, calling her to ask what she wanted for dinner. Walking up behind her at the kitchen sink and massaging her shoulders, making love with her like she’d been sick a long time and he didn’t want her to have a relapse. She hadn’t been sick, but telling Bobby had brought shame back to the surface of her skin like a fever she’d never quite shaken, and this was why she’d never told anyone before and now she regretted having done it.
Jesus Christ. She opened her email and wrote in Lois’s address, then, in the subject line, Coming for a visit?
But what was she going to tell her? That she was writing a book about herself? Lois would consider that airing their family’s dirty laundry, and she would use that cliché too, and she would want no part of it. No, Susan couldn’t tell her that, but maybe she could tell her the partial truth.
Hi, Noni,
Would it be all right if I stayed with you for a little while? (Bobby and I are taking a break right now. I can explain when I see you.) Love, Susan
Her face heated at this small betrayal of her husband, who knew nothing of this “break,” but she pressed send before she could change her mind.
3
IT WAS just after dawn and already fossil hunters were out on Bone River. From where she sat on her screened porch, smoking her first Carlton of the day, sipping a hazelnut coffee with cream and two Splendas, Lois could see their canoe slip along behind the live oaks and dangling Spanish moss, and she could hear their low, expectant voices too. It put her off, this intrusion into her solitude. They called this northern part of the river Bone Alley because of all the mastodon and shark’s teeth you could find, but that wasn’t Lois’s thing, and she never understood it.
She inhaled deeply on her cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. She was tired from yesterday’s Antiques Fair, walking up and down Oak Street inspecting the vendors’ tables, making sure they weren’t peddling any Tupperware or guns, books or CDs or handmade jewelry. Everything had to be dated no later than 1950, and she’d only caught one item, a hardcover published in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye. The vendor was a small woman who wore a Devil Rays cap perched low over cataract sunglasses. Around her wrist was a medical bracelet of some kind, and that may have softened another volunteer inspector but not Lois.
“You can’t sell this one. Pre-1950 only.”
“It’s a classic.”
“It’s from ’51. Put it away or I’ll have to ask you to pack your things and leave.”
The woman put her hands on her narrow hips. She had the knobby elbows of a bar drinker, and Lois didn’t like her.
“You’re Lois Dubie, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve heard about you.” The woman snatched the book from Lois’s hand and dropped it into a bin at her feet. “I’ve heard about you, all right.”
Lois knew her reputation. Not long ago, checking her business emails, she found one from her only employee, Marianne, defending her. Her life hasn’t been easy, you know. Why don’t you all cut her some slack.
Lois had scrolled down. It was a group email from other antique shop owners in town. The subject was This 4th Saturday Antiques Fair, and most of it was logistical, but Ann Barlow of Ye Olde Treasures chimed in that someone other than the ever-so-warm Lois Dubie should be the vendor inspector. Others had agreed in their mousy ways, and Lois couldn’t give two shits.
You’re bitter, honey. It’s made you mean. Those were Don’s words in her head. Sometimes a floorboard would creak on its own, and Lois would turn her head and expect to see him. Tall, bearded Don who even in his sixties pulled his hair back in a short ponytail. When she was young, she never would have looked at him twice. She would’ve thought him a hippie, one of those stoned boys lying half naked on some blanket on the beach, losers who weren’t man enough to fight for their country. But Don was the first antiques picker she’d met right after she and Suzie moved down here, and he stood in her shop she’d only bought and opened three days earlier when she hadn’t known a damn thing about antiques other than that they were old. Something about the way he stood there on the floorboards made her trust him. Or maybe it was what he’d said, “You need a specialty. This shop’s never had enough of a focus. I bet she sold it to you cheap.” He’d smiled at her and handed her his card:
Donald Lamson, Jr.
Antiques Acquisition
Specializing in Auctions and Private Sales
Arcadia, Florida
A sparrow alighted on the clothesline. It had gray wings with some yellow in them, a seaside bird of some kind, too far inland from its own. The fossil hunters’ canoe was out of sight, though Lois could still hear their damned voices, and she stubbed out her cigarette and opened the computer in her lap. She was eighty-two and swore she’d never buy one for herself, but you couldn’t be in business these days without one, especially when you specialized in the selling of period furniture and vintage toys. What would’ve taken months to find years ago could now be found in half a minute. Don died before seeing this. She didn’t know if he would have liked it or not. He was a man who came alive when he was face-to-face with others, a born salesman. He might have appreciated how easy it was now to find auctions and estate sales, but that’s it, she was sure. Then he’d be off in his pressed khakis and plaid shirt, his sloping
shoulders and gray ponytail, his warm, mostly honest smile.
Lois sipped her coffee and logged into her email. She wanted another cigarette but thought the better of it. She’d cut down to six a day, and her sense of smell was returning. The sun had risen only an hour ago, but its heat already carried the scents of the river—its sandy banks and dead wood and dried Spanish moss, its gator and turtle shit. It was going to be another baking day, and she thought about calling in sick to the shop, but no, Sundays were busy and she didn’t want to drive Marianne too hard.
Opening bright on the screen was a stack of unopened emails. She squinted at them all. She’d left her reading glasses back in the house somewhere, though she didn’t really need them as much as she used to. It was the only thing about getting old that had come as a pleasant surprise. Her eyes had begun to correct themselves.
Lois ignored all the self-congratulatory emails from the other shop owners lauding Another Successful Fourth Saturday! and she scrolled down looking for anything from her son or daughter-in-law. Paul had gained so much weight over the years. She worried about him. He was in his fifties now and that air freight job of his had him sitting at a desk all day and into the night. His son, Paul Jr., was husky too, but he worked in construction, which helped him keep it off.
There was nothing. Just junk the filter hadn’t caught, and some mass mailings from toy archives she didn’t want to open: E. T. Burrows, Fritzel, Halsam, and Wyandotte. Between the last two was: Coming for a visit? Lois tapped it open. Suzie.
Hi, Noni. She only called her that when she needed something. The rest of the time it was Lois. Would it be all right if I stayed with you for a little while? (Bobby and I are taking a break right now. I can explain when I see you.) Love, Susan
“Taking a break” ? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Lois peered closer to the screen. She’d sent this yesterday. Now Susan would think she was giving her the cold shoulder. But then again, why shouldn’t she? Hadn’t her granddaughter been doing that to her for years? Only calling when she needed something? A loan? A place to stay? That one time she and the commercial fisherman with the long red hair wanted to borrow her only car “just for two days, Noni. Please.”
Gone So Long Page 3