Pins & Needles

by Karen Brown

  The notes came first. They were Lily’s idea, grown out of the impossible state of her body, its languidness, its inconceivable separate heartbeat. It had been late afternoon. She had been asleep, and it had begun to rain. The rain on the shop roof was like something rising and building to a heightened pitch, the sound of it hollow and metallic. It woke her, and its thrumming made her lonely. She felt slighted by the condition of her body, as if it no longer had any other use than the one that now occupied it without her permission. She came around from the back of the rows of shelving and found Jamie with his cigarette at the counter. He gave her a look and then glanced over at Geri moping on one of the ladders, her fingers flaying her hair.

  “I like that big head of hair,” he said. “I want to put my hands in it.”

  Lily tore a piece of the computer printout. She wrote down his words with one of the pencils, in cursive script. “Put it in a bin on her list,” she said.

  “Add something else,” he told her, grinning.

  Lily wrote what she believed Jamie would want from Geri, what he wanted to do to her. I can’t keep this a secret, she wrote. I am overcome with lust.

  Jamie stubbed out his cigarette. He looked over Geri’s abandoned list and took off down the aisles. She didn’t find the note at first. They watched her, waiting. They went off with their own lists, keeping an eye on her. Lily climbed to the top of a ladder and found the heat had collected there. She took the bin down to the floor and spent the afternoon counting and losing track and recounting 320 feeder nuts, finally placing them in piles of 25 on the brick floor. At the end of the day lining up to punch out, they noticed Geri’s face, flushed, distracted. Tendrils of her hair stuck to her forehead. She said nothing about a note. But Lily saw her eyes take in the fine sheen on Orlando’s dark skin, the way Matthew’s pants had slid down on his hips. She saw them sweep across the broad space between Jamie’s shoulder blades. Lily saw her wonder what his back looked like without his shirt. In her eyes was lit a kind of startled heat.

  The notes, unsigned, unmentioned, would become the mystery that kept them searching in the bins of parts. Lily wrote confessions of desire and Jamie placed the notes in bins on everyone’s list. Yesterday, I couldn’t breathe, watching you, and, I want, more than anything right now, to taste your mouth. There was a certain stealth required, a cruel urge to unsettle and disconcert. Tish came to work in lip gloss, which she reapplied every hour or so, her thin lips glimmering and suddenly soft. Orlando grew a small, slim mustache and wore sleeveless tank tops. Geri arrived one morning in a halter, her breasts pressing the V of the front, spilling out over the edge of the fabric. Jamie leaned back in his chair, ecstatic. Lily ate the watermelon candies, placing them one after another into her mouth, letting them dissolve on her tongue, and wrote about what hands would feel like on someone’s chest, sliding up a smooth stomach, riding down below the curve of a waist, the rise of hips, the warm, damp place between legs. She felt her body surge and slip into some region of wakefulness, a kind of knowing that mixed with the smell of the oiled parts, the paper and ink of the computer printouts, the artificial watermelon, the plywood counter where she piled the candy’s cellophane wrappers.

  Only Matthew seemed unchanged. He still gave her his quiet, thoughtful glances. He still waited for her in the mornings outside the ladies’ room, his back pressing the brick wall, his arms folded patiently across his chest. He drew her when she least expected it. He would need only one or two quick looks, and those he would take while she was busy, unaware. Once in a while she would catch him and they would meet each other’s expressions without knowing what their own reflected, hers sorrowful and lost, his fueled with love. Tish believed that Matthew had penned her notes. She came to Lily with them all smoothed out and pressed together, in a kind of order.

  “Look at these,” she said.

  Lily looked. She already knew what messages they held. She had, she realized, intended for Tish to believe that Matthew had written them. She had mentioned his large Catholic family, the three sisters, the four brothers, the nieces and nephews, the value he placed on their closeness, the uncreased and simple sacrifice. Lily had thought they would make a nice couple. She had wanted Tish to pursue and capture him, to spare him from herself. In Matthew’s notes she had written things she believed Tish might reveal. Her respect for her father’s stringent rules, her mother’s alcoholism, her loss, at fifteen, of a boyfriend to leukemia. Some of these were things Lily had learned. Others she had made up. She held the scraps of paper in her hands and saw, through the disguised handwriting, the thoughtlessness with which she allowed the notes to lead lives of their own, assume their own history, their stories stretching out to contain moments that had not even happened yet.

  “What should I do?” Tish asked. Her small lips trembled.

  Lily shrugged, wordless with regret. Already, Jamie had tried to approach Geri and been rebuffed. Now, sitting at the top of her tall ladder, twirling her hair, Geri looked down at Orlando’s head, bent counting over a bin, with a wistful longing. Orlando thought his notes came from Tish. He confided in Jamie, raised an eyebrow, and ran his tongue over his lips. “I can taste that gloss,” he said.

  Jamie became surly. “I’m done with this,” he said. They stopped writing and hiding the notes. He sulked for three days, refusing to count anything, smoking his cigarettes and dropping his fist down on the countertop. The spell of the notes faded and was replaced with Jamie’s irritableness. No one had the nerve to approach anyone else. No one knew how to feed all their wanting. Lily felt responsible, her own body, she believed, immune. But then she fell asleep late one afternoon on the green couch, and when she woke she could tell, from the slant of light, the way it colored the grimy brick, the gray metal shelves, that it was later than she’d ever slept. Matthew was there, near the top of one of the rolling ladders.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. His voice floated from above her, resonant and strange. She knew the shop was empty, that everyone had gone.

  “What time is it?” she asked. She imagined her mother waiting outside in the parking lot to pick her up, her exasperation, her refusal to go inside and inquire, the easy assumption that Lily had left with someone else. Now, she imagined her parents sat at the dining table, silent and still assuming that Lily was with a friend, or at the mall, or any number of places that Lily had invented in the past to appease them. Their cutlery clanked against the china. Her father glanced up occasionally as if to speak. In the flickering crystals of the chandelier, in the polished handles of the silver, the colors of the room bled, the magenta of her mother’s blouse, her father’s kelly-green golf shirt, the still brilliant but wilting centerpiece of flowers, all of it tinged with presentiment.

  “I can give you a ride home,” Matthew said. He descended the ladder. She slid over on the couch and motioned for him to sit beside her. He hesitated, then dropped onto the vinyl cushion, casually, looking away. He let his hands rest on his thighs. She stared at the curve of his neck, his cheek. He would not turn to face her.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, barely a whisper.

  Lily could see the twilight slipping through the narrow windows, its sifted particles converging. She felt the air in the shop like a presence on her skin. She rose up onto her knees. She turned his face toward her with her hands. He was caught there, and resigned, he allowed her to look at him. His face stayed impassive. His eyes confounded her, like those of his characters. She slid her hands down his shoulders. She felt the tops of his arms, their hardened muscles. Her hands came to rest on his.

  “Why didn’t you write to me as you?” he asked.

  She felt a conflagration of loss. She felt consumed.

  He did not know, exactly, what to do with her. But he had a restless sense of what he needed, and how to get it. His mouth was soft and clumsy. His hands, large-knuckled, tentative, touched her face, her eyes and mouth, her nose and ears. They smelled of the oil from the bins. They settled on her body like a ble
ssing. She felt the ache in her rise to the surface of his fingers. She had, she admitted, allowed herself to imagine this. She had even created the story of what might come after, his large family ready to take her in, to tend to her, to accept her body and its child as his. She saw bureau drawers layered with tiny, pastel-colored clothes, lamplight in an attic room, a window looking out into the ruffling dusk of waving leaves. She saw herself relent to this unfolding, her loneliness purged in soft breath and fine hair and the lulling scent of milk. But lying with him on the vinyl cushion, their hipbones pressed together, his need released, his love at her disposal, she felt only the betrayal, keen-edged, merciless, and knew nothing in her grasp would ever ward against loss.

  She did not finish out the summer. He would never know how her body swelled, or didn’t; how her breasts filled, or not. She kept only one of his drawings, that of herself just awakened on the couch. He drew it that day from above, on the ladder. In it, the twilight is a color on the brick. The vinyl couch casts its own darker shadow. Her legs are folded, one on top of the other. She looks up. In her eyes he has placed a perfect, earnest love. She leans on one arm and the other curves in a motion of possession over her abdomen. Everything, then, still part of the story.

  she fell to her knees

  Nell met him the first time she went to the house. He came across the backyard with his drink. His clothes were rumpled, as if he’d been lying down in them—a dress shirt, a pair of gray trousers. It was a weekday afternoon. They stood by the seawall and he asked her what she was doing there. The ice in his drink slid around. His eyebrows came together, laughing at her. He had sandy hair in need of a trim. He was the neighbor and had noticed her car. He could fill her in on a number of things about the house, he said. Take that tree, for instance. Nell noted the fine bones of his hand, gesturing, the way his sleeve slid up to reveal his slender wrist. He was younger than she, and in need of saving. He did not so much say this as attempt to hide it. She forgot his name as soon as he said it, and later, she had to ask.

  Nell inherited the house from her mother’s boyfriend, Vince Morrell. She had not seen or spoken to Vince since her mother’s death when she was seven, and her initial desire was to decline the key. It was bronze with a cardboard tag and it dangled from the attorney’s bright fingernails like something plain and easily resisted. Nell asked the woman to sell the house, but she talked Nell into visiting it first. “There may be something you want there,” she said. “For your children.” Nell’s two children were grown now, and away at school, but the attorney made her feel she owed them something: a memento or a souvenir. Nell understood now how she submitted to the coercion—that the attorney’s suit, its wool fabric fitted perfectly against her body, her pearls resting in the hollow of her throat, her scenario of a house holding a secret history that must be passed down, had all undermined Nell’s wish to avoid the place and its contents.

  She went to see the house on a Monday afternoon, driving thirty minutes on the interstate to get there. The neighborhood was announced by a wrought-iron sign—the name Sunset Park written out in ornate lettering. Nell had passed the sign on her visits as a child, every other weekend when her mother was alive. She did not have many memories of the house, and only a few of her mother, who had been denied full custody. In the 1950s, the twisted black iron curls established the neighborhood as lavish and upscale. Now the sign leaned, rusted and off-kilter, its tiered brick base sunk into layers of limestone and sand.

  The house had not been difficult to locate. It was one of those long, rambling ranches, built of hollow block with bricks inlaid on either side of each window in the semblance of shutters. There were wrought-iron supports on the front porch, and a screen door with the outline of a flamingo. The roof was white barrel-tiled, slick with moss, blackened by mold. Azaleas occupied the front beds, rangy and almost leafless with a few early pink blooms. Grapefruit ripened on the tree in the side yard, the branches weighted to the ground with the neglected fruit, and through the carport Nell watched the open bay tremble under pale winter sun. The rest of the neighborhood was composed of new homes interspersed with bare lots of dirt, etched with tractor’s tires, where other ranch houses had been razed. The new houses were large with Mediterranean influences—iron balconies, terra-cotta tile roofs, stucco exteriors painted yellow and pink and a color like beach sand. Built high off the ground to meet flood codes, they towered over the few remaining ranches in a way that made Nell feel uncomfortably part of the space of years that separated the aged doctors and lawyers from their younger counterparts.

  Nell’s mother’s affair and the ensuing divorce had been scandalous for its time. As an adult, Nell admired her mother’s audacity, but as a child, she had resented it. Nell stood outside the front door and found that her hand shook as it fit the key in the lock. She stood on the threshold and remembered how it had felt to believe that she had been overlooked; that in the larger picture of her mother’s life she was inconsequential. Once inside she felt the urge to leave the door open, to keep the outdoors and its humidity accessible, and prevent the smell of the house—dust and mold, the scent of burned linoleum, of charred plaster and ceiling rafters and plastic-coated electrical wires—from invading her clothes. She went through the main rooms and opened all the windows, just glancing at the furnishings—the sofas and their sagging cushions, the tall, glass-beaded lamps, the wallpaper, damp and peeling from the walls, the horrible blackened hole in the kitchen ceiling. All of it made her apprehensive. She walked out through the den’s sliding glass doors, down a small cement path through a stand of tall juniper to the seawall.

  That afternoon, standing there, she met the neighbor. He told her Vince Morrell had set fire to the kitchen. Vince was old and incompetent, and finally a year ago was removed to a nursing home to die.

  “That’s too bad,” she said, absently. The bay water hit the seawall with a languid slosh. Nell tried not to imagine big Vince Morrell, his darkly curling head of hair turned gray and patchy, his thick appendages whittled down to a helpless thinness. She had disliked him as a child because she believed he had taken her mother from her, and she felt sorry for this now. There was a slight breeze off the bay, warm and heavy. It was rancid, like the runoff silt filling up the canals. Nell could not admit a relationship to Vince or the house, so she lied to the neighbor and told him she had purchased it. He gave her an admiring look, as if she impressed him with her business sense, and then the look went on, Nell noticed, intending something else.

  “I would invite you to sit down, but I don’t know about the chairs,” she said. The brick patio was grown through with tall weeds, and four lawn chairs were grouped in its center, their plastic seat slats dangling, their metal frames corroded with rust. The neighbor looked over at the chairs and smiled.

  “Vince and I might have managed those a year ago,” he said.

  Nell did not want to talk about Vince. Behind her, through the open sliding glass doors, the smell of the house came out into the backyard.

  “He was an interesting old guy,” the neighbor said. “God, that was awful, watching them take him off. You know, all that struggling, having to be subdued. You don’t want to watch that happen to anyone.”

  Nell stared at him. He looked a little afraid. “I imagine,” she said.

  He squinted and sipped his drink to the melted ice, and then he glanced down into his glass. “I like your eyes,” he said. “They don’t give much away.”

  Nell found she could not respond. She felt her heart quicken. The neighbor took a sip of his drink. He smiled at her with his wet lips. His own eyes were sad and greenish, like the bay.

  “I don’t suppose you have any gin,” he said. He looked behind her, toward the house.

  “We could see,” she suggested.

  He waited out by the juniper, and Nell went back into the darkened interior. She saw, in her search, a game of backgammon abandoned on a table, the Chinese screen she used to play behind, the chandelier dangling glass beads like he
r mother’s earrings. Everything was covered with dust and cobwebs, acquired in the year since Vince had been removed, or probably before that, when he was too old to dust and clean. She crossed the slate floor in the family room to find the round cabinet filled with dusty bottles. She did not want to emerge too soon with the bottle, to seem that she had any previous knowledge of the place. But she wanted to return to the neighbor, to his empty glass and his rattling ice. She liked the idea of him waiting for her with his barely concealed need. It gave her a kind of power she had not felt since Sweeney, the man with whom she’d had an affair years ago, when her children were young. From outside the open windows came the smell of the bay and the grapefruit that had fallen to rot in the winter grass. When she went out with the bottle, the neighbor was gone.

  ———

  His name was Teddy. He had lost his job, and was supposed to be searching for another. His wife, a pediatrician, crossed the driveway with her hand extended one afternoon as Nell emerged from her car.

  “Are you the new neighbor?” she asked. She had a practiced composure. Her hair flowed thick and blond from its roots, down past her shoulders. Nell clasped her small hand. They told each other their names. Nell felt the wife’s eyes take her in—her blouse, its small tear by a buttonhole, her faded jeans, her hair worn twisted back, her face without makeup, exposed and assailable. Nell saw her eyes feign interest for the minutes they conversed. Then they parted. Teddy’s wife’s heels clipped along the paved driveway, up the long set of stairs. Nell watched her disappear into the house. Later that day, Teddy stood outside the sliding glass doors and the breeze off the bay caught his collar.