Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  My boyfriend’s proposal is For me to come with you to New Mexico, we have to get married first.

  My desire to be an archaeologist is an ambition people puzzle over, asking questions I’m startled to find I have answers for: the response to Grad school! You must really be smart then is an apologetic claim to freakish good luck, while the aggrieved challenge Well you’re not likely to make much money doing that calls for rueful concurrence. So, someone will say. So—you like bones? For once I know how to disarm the Midwestern readiness to feel injured by another’s strangeness. I seem to have assembled the ingredients for adulthood. Marriage helps my credibility, as does my husband’s having a bachelor’s in business administration; his level-headed degree weights the pan of the scales opposite far-fetched archaeology.

  My mother-in-law lit a cigarette and towed the pine tree through the snow, dragging one-handed while her little dog barked after her from the garage. Instead of shoving the tree up over the curb’s steep snowbank into the street, she stopped. I’d believed her incapable of leaving a task half done and when she dropped the tree I was a little offended by this last-minute deviation from who I understood her to be: What was she doing, confusing things now, and would there be worse to come? She stood out there smoking while her dog ratcheted up its barking, ruining the street’s five a.m. O little town stillness and the perfect getaway I was trying for. My nonchalance in climbing out of the car failed—the dog skidded away to face me rigid-legged, its barking turned personal, harsh claps of denunciation raked from the bottom of its lungs, jolting it backwards. Carrying on like this, I told the dog, then thought how Midwestern that was, gerund as rebuke, fragment as accusation. My husband and I were not simply leaving town. We were going as far away as we could get: New Mexico. My mother-in-law’s back was to me, but I could tell her left hand had characteristic hold of her right elbow, a hip-slung, outlaw pose, her right hand moving the cigarette toward its Revlon-red kiss—the morning following the heart surgery awaiting her five years down the line, the surgeon would enter the waiting room to report She’s conscious and asking for lipstick and then stand waiting for the laugh he’d anticipated as her daughters began scrabbling through their purses, comparing their uncapped shades, saying Ugh, no and She won’t think that’s red enough and In the ballpark? Theirs was the only family other than my own I’d ever seen the inside of, and I should have learned more from them, but instead of amazement at my mother-in-law’s honesty or gratitude for her acceptance, I nursed a viper of condescension under my black thrift shop sweater and copied her most foolish and naive remarks down in the spiral-ring notebook I’d been carrying around ever since the directors at the Texas archaeological dig required an hour of note-writing a day. My mother-in-law had been seventeen when the son of neighboring farmers returned from the navy as a lieutenant and proposed. In her dealings with her husband and grown children I never saw her hold anything back. Love as plain as that ought to have made her wonderful in my eyes, this redheaded mother out there at the curb with the Christmas tree, exhaling wraiths of smoke, this person deeply, disobligingly herself. Whoever she was, out there in the dark, I was married to the repercussions and echoes of her uncensored largeness of heart. The whole time she stood out there smoking, her dog maintained its shattering performance. Finally my mother-in-law came tramping back into the garage and cradled the little dog against her chest, saying What’s got you so upset, flicking ash from its topknot, watching dry-eyed while my husband finished giving the Chevrolet engine a final going-over. His Saturdays since the wedding had been spent leaning in under the propped-up hood to make sure the engine was good for the twelve hundred miles to New Mexico, where I was due to start school in five days. As long as we didn’t get held up by storms in the plains we could make it; without yet having driven a single mile, we shared the pleasing riskiness of cutting it close. As a couple we disliked responsibility and often relied on an emergency flare of desperation to get things done at the last minute. The inside of the car was a shambles, jammed to its vinyl roof with my blaze-orange Samsonite graduation-gift luggage, boxes of books and dishes, clothes bundled straight from the dryer into garbage bags. The trunk held our newspaper-wrapped pots and pans and our army-surplus parkas laid over a rabble of sneakers and high heels and the tar-stained boots of our first night, with, for bedrock, a wrestling trophy and carpenter’s tools wedged in around the spare tire. The black toy poodle in my mother-in-law’s arms kept tipping its head back to lick her chin. Whenever it did she would say It’s okay, Peekie, and the dog would lick her chin while she held her cigarette off to the side so as not to bother its bugged-out eyes. I had been around long enough to have witnessed her grief when the previous Peekie, let out the back door for the two a.m. pee necessitated by its advanced age, had failed to return. After hours of flashlight searching it was concluded that a raccoon had gotten the little dog. Within a month my father-in-law brought home the downy black handful of purebred puppy who grew into the current Peekie. My husband slammed the Chevrolet’s trunk—the fishhook bottom of the first J, the only letter visible in a chink between piled boxes, was the last trace of JUST MARRIED left on the rear window—and reached around the dog to hug his mother’s shoulders; she held her cigarette aloft so as not to burn his hair. When he got in behind the wheel we grinned at each other. The whole ravishing drive lay before us, the hard plains states we would drive through, nights whose stars would come out for us, motel beds we would set creaking. We could have rested like that for a while, on the brink, but my mother-in-law would have wondered what was wrong, and it fell over us, the mood of finally really needing to say good-bye, and she came to the driver’s side and handed in some money. My husband said Hey this is five hundred dollars, Ma.

  When she bent closer her dog licked his nose. Don’t stop at just any motel, you look for a nice one.

  You can’t give us five hundred dollars, Ma.

  For just in case.

  Mom, hey, Ma, we’ll be—

  My bingo money is mine to do what I want with.

  We didn’t feel bad, we just didn’t feel as good as we had a minute ago. We were reminded of all we were going to need to pay for.

  You kids be safe.

  It was like something was taken from us, our having to say we would be safe, something we wanted back, which might be regained if we set off after it in a hurry, but we only got to the end of the block before he stopped the car, gazing over his shoulder as it fishtailed in reverse back to his parents’ house, where it came to a halt, and he left the car running as he got out and climbed over the curb’s jumbled embankment, crouching to the tree, dragging it up and over till it rolled down into the street, getting back in behind the wheel, dusting needles from his hands.

  Down through Illinois, into the snowed-silent corner of Missouri. Even if all went well—unlikely, given the car’s propensity for breakdowns—we were barely going to make it to New Mexico in time for me to show up for the first day of the new semester. When I got there I would be sitting down at the seminar table with others who would already have each other figured out—alliances, rivalries established; my arrival would make me the last addition to a cohort midway through its first year. I could get as far as picturing my intimidated self coming through the door of the seminar room—taking a seat, opening my notebook—but where we would have slept the night before, what kind of job he would have a chance at, how we would manage to pay for first and last month’s rent plus deposit, those were unknowns. Perfectionist interiors, perfectionist planning are not supposed to have a lot of loose ends. The messes she makes can fool those around the perfectionist into believing she’s no such thing, but a paradox of perfectionism is its nurturance of haphazardness, disarray, and negligence. In perfectionism a task can be done two ways: flawlessly, or not at all. The charm of not at all lies in yielding to the guilt-infused sensuousness of procrastination. Letting things slide is an erotics of dread. If you haven’t even made a start on some task facing you, there’s zero chance of y
our having done it badly—according to perfectionist (il)logic, you’re blameless, and since blamelessness is your preferred psychic state, you don’t mind generating a fair amount of chaos to sustain it. Thus, rather than being neatly packed, the interior of the old car was a shambles in which it was impossible to find a toothbrush or clean pair of Levi’s; thus, rather than having planned to arrive in Albuquerque with plenty of time to settle in, we—mostly I, my fault—left it to the last minute.

  But I loved his blitheness regarding last minutes in general: it freed us to take chances. He never minded having to compensate through quick-wittedness for preparations left till almost too late, the same needless little crisis that would have driven a more orderly person crazy with vexation turned him blithe, as if it was a particular pleasure to be called on for some ingenious fix, and also as if only then, when we ourselves had invited chaos, could his quickness and deftness emerge as unambiguous grace. Then it showed: the incisiveness of his least movement, his way of judging exertion precisely, the trim execution, the eloquence his body would always have shown, if allowed. He was not usually willing to let it show, and it interested me how gracefulness so extreme could be dissembled, but it was, it mostly was—for the sake of masculinity, was my assumption, as a defense against ridicule, but also possibly due to the Midwestern dislike of standing out.

  The summer after I’d moved into his place, when my depression at having been cast out by my family was darkest, I had left for two months on an archaeological survey in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, no digging, only endless walking and setting up the theodolite and making careful notebook entries, and while in the testing company of the male prof and grad students on the survey I was fine, tirelessly willing to prove myself ballsy, when I returned to his second-floor apartment all I wanted was to fall apart. This I accomplished in slow motion, by means of reading. Within a Budding Grove and The Centaur and Far from the Madding Crowd. The Professor’s House and Ethan Frome and Great Expectations. In the funky thrift-store 1930s armchair by the bay window, curtains drawn against the Illinois August, a rotating fan aimed at my bare feet lolling over the chair’s arm, I sank deeper into motherless, fatherless depression. One afternoon he startled the apartment by letting himself in early, and when he crossed the room something was wrong—that his body was unharmed, I could tell, once he’d shucked his boots off, from his walk, his usual slightly pugnacious, shoulder-driven walk, though he was broadcasting as much riled-up disturbance as if he’d been in a fight and his sullenness cautioned against my asking Baby, what—? Usually it took him half an hour to wash the tang of chemical smoke from his hair, to scrub the grime from his knuckles and the flecks of ash from the cartilage of his ears, but this afternoon the shower ran and ran, when I stepped over the Carhartts in the hallway and rested my forehead against the bathroom door the same radiation forbade my opening it. I fumbled through the rest of the evening attempting not to transgress against the privacy he required, when we got into bed I understood the potential offensiveness of reaching to touch him, though to have to remain ignorant of the cause of his disturbance confused me. In a dream I heard a dog barking outside our front door, snarl-clotted barks; unsure whether to open the door, I woke; he was crying, and the dread suffusing my dream was relieved, tears must mean he was done holding in whatever it was. Possibly for the first time ever I longed for us to be restored to a previous version of ourselves, for the first time I grasped what it might mean to fall from grace as lovers, and pointless, selfish fear overcame me, though he couldn’t have known I was failing to honor his tears with the empathetic pity he would have shown if it had been me blurting out sobs. Trembling. If it had been me trembling, his arms would have gone around me instantly. Oh no, I said, oh no, baby, what is it? What is it? Because it seemed wrong to try to touch the face he had hidden in his forearms, I instead touched the stain on his pillow, to make his tears more real—it was as if, though he was inches away with wetness streaming down his face, I still somehow did not quite believe him capable of crying—and he started talking at last. He told me they’d been working on a downtown building twelve stories high, at 102 degrees that roof is Venus, from below a steady scorch rising through the soles of their boots, overhead a hazed-over lens of shrunken sun. In the white glare depth tended to vanish, you had to set your boots down precisely in the sweltering two-dimensional world you found yourself treading, had to blink sweat from your eyes as hallucinatory hard-hatted figures passed back and forth through caustic drifts of tar smoke—and this guy, this one guy just kept walking, walked right off the roof, barely time to think He’s gone before, my husband said, insides of his wrists pressed against eyelids, before his friend, his friend who’s like a few feet away goes after him, goes after him over the edge. Walks right off it.

  No. That word is mine.

  We go to the edge, we stand there, someone’s saying their names, I didn’t even know their names.

  After a while: Thinks he can help him.

  After another while: Thinks he can help him.

  He stops there, and I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s stopped him when this, it seems, is the utterance he needs to rehearse over and over in the monotone of shock, to get a look at the intolerable event briefly pinned to reality by the plainest of words. I try to hide how unreal those two deaths are to me. No, not unreal. It’s just I can’t make them matter. I’m scared at not being able to make them matter. Scared, too, that he’ll be able to tell I’m not with him. But those deaths might as well have taken place on another planet. The only death that’s real to me in that bed is the one he’s imagining for himself, walking off that edge because he, too, inclines to thoughtless rushing-after, because he’s always known he needs to help.

  Oklahoma seems to have been ironed flat for the winter sun to perform its cold slow dwindling across, a theater of darkening fields whose furrows arrow toward the horizon, the grisaille of distant woods holding the last embers, and when, after an interval, the woods vanish, taking the horizon with them, that’s all there is to this day—beginning to end, it has been driven through. This falling-snow night chooses us. No one in any of the other vehicles materializing as distant headlights either far ahead of us or far behind is as lucky as we are, tearing ourselves out of an old life. When I glance over, he’s got the aloofness of truly gifted drivers, apartness with a core attunement, tracking incremental shifts, weighing incidents—the alighting, say, of my hand, cupping the nape of his neck, hair that feels blond, the occipital bulge and below that the declivity where the C1 vertebra (So—you like bones) seats itself, enabling the species to stand upright and gaze at the horizon, I like cupping him below the base of his skull because it’s like holding the stem of him, the foramen the essential stuff flows through. Feels like Oklahoma, one of us says in answer to a question several snowy miles back.

  No sign or did I miss it.

  A back road like this, whoever uses it knows where they are.

  He’s driving like he always drives, scarily fast, full of grace, but the wheels now and then lose traction and sluice across ice and a point far in the future blinks into being, the first instant when I will look at him and feel only anger gleams warningly across decades I don’t yet trust to materialize, I am a wife keeping her doubts to herself, a wife in the passenger seat of a vehicle skimming the surface of a winter planet. Just married—he’s my person now and he has some idea what he’s in for and emanates sexy goodwill and steadiness, the times I’ve asked Do you still love me? readily answered Yeah I love you, that amused Yeah the somehow just-right note, my monstrous neediness blotted up by this willingness of his simply to answer, his appearing to find nothing crazy or alienating in compulsive repetition, but more than that, really, it’s as if his interest in me embraces even my worst monotonies, as if it is very simple, whatever I am up to he will help me with, as if, however light my voice when I ask, I’m up to something, the bothersomeness, the plaintive, senseless appetite for I love you is treated by him as my right, as, almost, a
kind of work I am intent on while he does the outward work of getting us across the country, the two of us talking sometimes, enough to keep him awake, not that he needs it, he seems plenty awake, fine with talking or not talking, fine with my not saying anything, fine with my asking Do you still love me?, me permitting him a clear view of the insatiability it feels dangerous to let show, which appears to amuse instead of aggravate him, his patience isn’t tried, metal and glass enclose us, the space within the car turned holy by the endlessness of the drive, the endlessness of my needing to feel loved, by some miracle we have gotten this far without a single breakdown, by another miracle I delight him, I know this is delight, but will his next answer be You’re wearing me out, will he mutter This is a waste of breath, proving his love finite is the calamity I’m after, each time I revise my question for the next state I’m gambling with that calamity, Do you love me in Missouri answered I love you, Do you love me in Oklahoma answered I love you, being loved all the way across the country in the dark, loved so plainly even I believe it, his breath isn’t wasted, his love both variation on and continuation of the love shown by the mother smoking in the half-light of the freezing garage half a continent ago, love by its steadiness opening a space risk can inhabit, his I love yous from those nights in that car had much farther to travel, casting forward a decade and a half to the afternoon when I find myself lying on the kitchen floor of our adobe house in La Puebla—saltillo tiles we were scarcely able to afford, so cool and lovely beneath bare feet, so every-penny-worth-it. I will be lying on my side in a C-curve with our baby, who is only eight or nine months, in the middle, sitting on his diapered bottom, fooling around with something, some toy, wrapped around by my regard, engagement and forgetfulness gleaming back and forth between us, just there with each other, when something passes over him like a cloud or a tremor and he collects himself—I can see this happen—and he stands up without the least hesitation, simply stands right straight up from being seated on his bottom with nothing to hold on to or steady himself, though he has never stood up before and has shown no sign of being ready to do so and will not repeat this daring one-off for an oddly long interval, till after his first birthday, stands up or unfurls as if he has done so a thousand times, and then stands steadily on braced-apart legs and his feat of standing there sturdily and with great gravity and beauty is Baryshnikov to me, and he looks around all lordly at his world and lifts his chin at the realm beyond my C-shaped silently adoring body, and he will let things hang in this balanced radiance for a long, long ravishing moment before plunking back down on his bottom.