America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  There were no more questions to be asked, there was no more probing to be done, without mentioning Fay, which he would not then or ever. It was only ever going to be a look that passed between them, a source of power that allowed her certain freedoms in behavior.

  His elbow on his knee, his chin in his hand, he nodded, and then he stood and brought the chair back to where it lived. In their room, the covers and sheets he had tugged at and smoothed that morning had been slept in again. The bed looked like an envelope ripped open. Lying in his undershirt and briefs, he turned out his bedside lamp. He chose a memory of her and he followed it, Fay reaching for oranges in a grove they had driven to some months back, her mouth twisting as she punctured the fruit with her teeth. Her gestures clunky, her complexion gone patchy with joy—hands on his abdomen, he fell asleep.

  He woke to Elise reaching for him, slipping two fingers beneath the elastic band of his underwear. It had been six months or seven. After he came his mind floated awhile, passing over the ends of sentences he’d heard that day, some childhood bike crash whose lead-up he always remembered, then settled on the buck outside, that thought unrelenting. He slipped on his long johns and was out the door, pausing in the living room to grab the things he needed, moving two inches every few seconds so as not to wake his wife. On the porch outside, where the temperature had dropped, he thought, nine and a half degrees, he slipped on his boots and laced them, pulled them tighter than they needed to be.

  Strung up on a pine, lit variously by his moving headlamp, the animal reminded him little of what it had been, the expression it had made midjump. He could hear Ernie instructing him as he moved his knife in precise, centric lines above the hooves. His thumb between the skin and fat, his index finger fur-side, he began to pull and it came away easily, working with him to become separate from the body.

  HE HAD GUTTED IT WITHIN the hour, and it bled out through the morning, through his next day of work. Of course he considered she would have to watch that through the window. They ate it for the duration of their time in California—he insisted on it.

  13.

  The image of Elise waiting for her, in the depth of two P.M. blue, was less frightening than threatening, less the sound of the crash than the broken window through which anything could come. Walking toward Elise, she believed that if someone were to push a hand up the other woman’s neck and into the blue-black of that hair, she would feel it in hers. Vincent’s wife dangled her feet in the pool.

  The shirt she wore was his, Fay knew, and hated, yellow gabardine onto the tag of which Elise had sewn his initials—VK, letters Fay had thought about and drawn on the backs of receipts and sometimes her hands, the narrow angles that went so well together. She had taken it off him before. Elise wore his denim well, too, a button fly, a cord of rope cinched around it. She was taller than Fay had noticed during those nights at the bar, the rounds of her shoulders as big and perfect as Christmas oranges.

  Fay settled on a canvas chaise near her, fingering the pilled military green canvas where it met the metal curve on the frame. She found herself looking for a pair of shoes, then understanding that there were none, that Elise had driven there barefoot. In forty-five minutes the first customer would show. She could hear Lloyd where he moved somewhere behind the shed, investigating a plant with his mouth. There was the sound of the planes. After sitting still a minute she slipped off her sandals, a weft of red and orange leather coming loose at the heels and toes.

  “You have beautiful feet,” Elise said, using a hand while she looked for the word, two fingers tracing a line that moved up and out.

  “The metatarsal?” Fay said.

  “The metatarsal. Did you think I wouldn’t find out, or didn’t care?”

  “They’re not beautiful. They look bubonic.”

  It was all she could say. She sat up straighter, a chin hooked on her shoulder as she surveyed the line of the backrest, the seat she did not deserve. Standing up, she waited for a question she could answer.

  “You’ll be amazed by how quickly it happens to you,” Elise said, “that you’re on just the other side of real beauty.”

  “I thought it was his job to think about. I thought worrying about another person’s marriage was useless.”

  “Your face, your body. Elbows go first.”

  “If not me, someone else, I thought.”

  “This you were wrong about. Not to my knowing, at least, or no one who mattered. Immediately, with him, him with you, there was a change. It used to be he was so quiet I’d think he’d left, and then the whistling. You came into his life and then I always knew where he was in the house. ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’ ‘Way Down South in Dixie.’”

  “But you’re so beautiful. Everybody looks at you.”

  “Everybody looks at anything with lots of moving parts. A separate comb for the eyebrow, a different cream for mornings.”

  “The truth is I almost never thought of you,” Fay said. “He never told me your name.”

  Fay had not known she would say it. The tear that ran down his wife’s face, the low muddle of vowels that came from her mouth, seemed to surprise Elise, a choice her body had made without her. Elise ran the heel of her hand along her lash line and took her feet from the water, crossing them in front of her so that her heels touched her thighs. Hands on her knees, she looked like a very young girl, someone whose greatest ambition was to master the spelling of her own name.

  “I guess he didn’t choose you for your manners.”

  “I’m sorry.” Fay sat again, her hand on the lip of the pool not far from his wife’s.

  “Are you? Do you have any sense of the long tradition you’re acting in here, the very old story?”

  Elise had pulled a pack of cigarettes from her front pocket and was gesturing with one, seeming glad for the power an accessory granted her. Surveying Fay’s hand, she ashed less than an inch from it.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Fay said. “If you’ll allow me this, I’ll say nothing about his being married appealed to me.”

  “I won’t. Allow you that.”

  That the mockery in her voice was tender, somehow, made it worse, Fay thought. The clouds beyond the inn’s U of buildings had formed a kind of wall, a view of the sky that seemed to separate this part of the world from the rest. She was tied to this woman, she understood now, had been since the moment Vincent placed a finger on her ear. To love a man who belonged to someone else was, inevitably, to love who he had become in service to who they made together, the jokes and compromises, the turns in language. There would be terms he used for both of them, Fay thought now, rosebud, babe, certain observations or anecdotes he tested out on each. Had he told Elise about the badge he had designed for himself as a child, the symbol he had drawn everywhere, taken from the dollar—an eye in a pyramid. Elise cupped some water in her hand and let it down the back of her neck. Had he slept with them both on the same day, had his violence or passion with one meant his kindness or quiet with another.

  “It’s possible when I was your age I would have seen it the same way, although I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to act on it. Of course I wasn’t running around the Mojave Desert in just my overalls. You probably believe that this is limited to you, to the two of you, to whatever—”

  Fay gestured toward her cigarettes and Elise nodded.

  “Bond. To whatever strange, sad thing you see in how you are together. It has no say on what your relationships will be like later in your life, you think, it has no effect on the men who know about the affair you two have had, their wives if they’ve told them. You think this is a mistake of place and time and unhappy for the three people it directly touches, if you’re nice enough to include me. You probably imagine, sure, some trouble in the meanwhile, dust that will settle or blow away.”

  The conversation was splitting Fay in half, creating one part of her that wanted to argue about the ideas set down, another that felt hot under accusation and told her to run.

  “I wouldn’t
say that exactly, but—”

  “You wouldn’t say anything exactly. You’re what, nineteen? Twenty? The whole point of you is that nothing is exact. That’s the appeal of you to others and even the appeal of you to yourself. Let me finish.”

  Fay looked around her to the things she knew well, begging them to return her to the time before this. The trough where Lloyd’s name was painted, the curtains of the rooms that moved erratically like the lips of people sleeping. She saw something then that she couldn’t understand, that Charlie’s window was open, close enough to hear, and she believed she saw the light shift when her sister moved through it. It was the first time, in their life together, that her sister had not come to her rescue.

  “I want you to hear this clearly. Every time a younger woman takes up with an older man, there is a little bit of power taken from some woman somewhere else, and I don’t mean just the person he’s lying to. Because it sends a message to the man that his options extend in a way his wife’s do not. That message, then, is printed on him for other men to see. Those men go home a little different, that night or another. Maybe they try less at small things, how-are-yous, a cold that comes on in the middle of the night it’s their job to get up for. The little additive concessions of marriage. They think, What am I giving my whole self over for just yet. If I wanted to, if I saw it, there’s still some window I could scramble through. Maybe it’s only open a crack in their minds, but this lets in a breeze.”

  “I’m not going to see him again,” Fay said, blinking, not yet convinced, with the remote hope this would keep Elise from talking longer. She remembered the feeling of being caught stealing, age six, the town grocery, four malted balls taken from the five-sided glass jar with a low opening in front, two along either row of molars, her mother putting out a hand and barking in the spring light of the open door. This was her feeling now, that nothing could fix what she had done, what her body had insisted on taking.

  “And the side of the women. For your sake we’ll just leave aside matters of money, here, though that’s forgetting a great big part of the fire. Can you imagine what this does to birthdays, to mirrors? We start to believe we are lucky just to be returned to. Every year is another mile made on a deflating tire.”

  Her voice kept catching on itself, snagging on peaks, certain words in that moment painful to pronounce. Birthdays. Mirrors. Elise took his shirt from where she’d tucked it and wiped at her face, speaking for a moment through the fabric, shrouded.

  “And when it comes to others, other marriages, the women we know and confess to, the news is not good either. The ones whose husbands leave we examine for signs of failure, did she stop taking care of herself, we say, and dark old parts of us see it maybe as contagious. Single women become a misfortune we avoid like any other. We say hello in the grocery store, but we don’t look into their carts.”

  Fay was trying to focus on her next few hours, imagining the hot towels under her hands and the napkins to be restocked, and then she was weeping a little also, the specific pain of having humiliated yourself, having chosen that. On her body still were marks he had left, ribbons where she was sore that changed how she moved. Why had she needed no convincing? Lies to herself about her independence aside, she saw how she had wanted to become Elise. Then, now. She did not want to be the forbidden thing. She wanted to be the trusted clock on the sunny wall.

  “Maybe we’re having a few too many tears,” Elise said, “over someone who once canceled his birthday party because he found out a rare owl was roosting just a five-hour drive away.”

  “The other day he drew the waitress a flowchart about what he wanted to eat,” Fay said. “If not mashed potatoes, then string beans, but only string beans if no greens with roast chicken.”

  “She throw that away in your sight, or . . . ?”

  “Waited until the kitchen, sadly. He said, Does that make sense? And she said, No, and not dollars neither.”

  “Did you give her the Nobel for her perfect work there?”

  They laughed and fell quiet again, separating at the places where they touched, knees, the backs of arms.

  “Nice to know what a nasty thing you are,” Elise said. “I was thinking ingénue, I was thinking pink Play-Doh brain.”

  “Will you tell him about this?”

  “I was actually thinking I’d take a photo of the two us, frame it in the kitchen and wait.”

  “Why not take a few, consider a collage?”

  “Macaroni frame.”

  When the first car pulled up, Fay did not move. Whoever it was could wait. In the last she saw of Elise, her head leaning out the driver’s-side door into the dust, wrist bent right over the wheel, it was possible to imagine some other reason for their knowing each other, that she was not leaving but picking Fay up for a last-minute trip. They would pull money straight from their pockets, they would turn at a sign that said VACANCY.

  “Forget him,” she sang. The blue of the day had rolled over, was stretching into something thinner, the clouds now like what was left on a plate.

  “Forgotten,” Fay said.

  14.

  There was something about her, the men’s faces said, that had become a little off-putting. Gone was the woman who sensed an empty glass behind her, gone the three-part pivots to empty an ashtray and grab the seltzer gun in one go. The quips, the authoritarian bellow when somebody got antsy and started rocking the cigarette machine. The books she had returned to reading any chance she got, dog-eared and underlined in forest green—they were gone, their tenancy of her time vacated and replaced by a cheer they all could feel was suspect.

  It was a subtle change, visible to them only because they’d grown so fond of the way she slammed doors and drawers shut with a raised back foot. That equine gesture had not been the first or last that had earned her the commendation a horse worth betting on. Now she took indirect trips between deserted tables and the bar, carrying glasses only a few at a time, and she was inordinately touched by the most minor human expressions, smiling too long at a pair of pilots with their arms around each other’s necks. When business was slow she could be seen with both hands dangling far across the bar, her head pillowed by her forearm.

  Her etiquette became exaggerated, rich in apologies, some unnecessary and some when she had forgotten a drink or a meal, another change that became dependable. Charlie, who had retained a more active interest in her business since the episode with Elise, watched Fay with a dark curiosity, sometimes intervening, listening for the drinks she took and reminding her which she had missed, slinging an arm around her hip or slipping a saliva’d finger in her ear when she seemed lost to the room.

  They had started closing together again, as they had when Fay had first arrived—still recognizably the girl their parents had groomed, still shocked by the decision she had made to come, in many ways her first.

  At the end of a long week together, the corners swept, the nozzles of the cola machine sunk in pint glasses of hot water and lemon, they hung their feet in the pool, their skin made a fluorescent pale green by the underwater light Charlie had saved for and installed herself. They had emptied the pool to do so, and after brought Lloyd and a pack of beers down the steps. The horse had hated it, paced around them making viscous snorts and tipping his head at the world above.

  “Fay.”

  “Charlie.”

  “What is it I always told you?”

  Fay rotated her submerged ankle in polite curiosity.

  “Happiness is good health and a bad memory. Farts are art. Don’t trust that fuckin’ expiration date. Always a few more days left.”

  Her imitation was perfect, the characteristic pointer finger flung toward God.

  Charlie caught the laugh in her throat and dismissed it. Grabbing her sister’s hair, she squeezed too hard.

  “I belong to you, is what I meant.”

  “Ah. That. And the inverse, of course.”

  “Which, Fay, is and will be true. But I’m a little worried here. I have this
nagging little committee in my head that says maybe I failed you. Maybe this was not the place for you to come, the incessant committee says, or maybe it was, but now it’s not the place for you to stay.”

  Fay sewed up her face into something smaller, her lips diminishing, her eyebrows pushing to meet.

  “Where would I go?”

  “Committee is divided on that. Votes and recalls, all day long. Gavel on the podium. But I’m wondering if back to the parents, maybe just for the time that you’re—”

  “The time that I’m what?”

  “Oh fuck it, Fay,” Charlie said, the alcoholic impatience showing itself. “Do I have to mime it for you? How long has it been since you bled?”

  It had been impossible that she was pregnant, far too expensive a thought, so she had not examined it. She could have been naked in front of her sister, the way she went about feeling herself then, detecting the places where she was softer, acknowledging for the first time the inflammation of her breasts.

  “Jesus Christ—was a carpenter,” Fay said. Vestiges of her early life always arrived in her mouth when the present was hard to speak.

  She snorted and began to cry simultaneously, a sonic contradiction that amplified as it bounced over the water. Charlie ran her oil-smudged hands over the chest pockets of her overalls, searching for her pack, and in that moment Fay slipped into the pool. The cream of her shift bloomed around her, fat and wide when she floated, slick and straight when she kicked her legs back. She swam hard for ten minutes, surfacing just to tap the curb at either end, and when she finally crawled heaving onto the concrete she looked like something the ocean has rejected and spat back onto sand, each stringy part of her pulled a different way.

  Fay turned her cheek and opened one eye in Charlie’s direction.