by Karen Brown
I went back to the picnic looking for Celia. I felt in disarray. I felt people’s eyes on me and didn’t care. I went around the side of the building, looking for her, though now I wondered if it was her I really wanted to find. It was late afternoon. The band still played, but the sound was muffled, and in the trees of the apple orchard I heard the robins and sparrows assembling before migrating. Along the back of the building was a white painted door, propped open, and inside a narrow hallway and a staircase. I climbed the stairs, quickly, as if they held some kind of escape. In the stairwell I smelled apples, and the polished wood smell of my grandmother’s house. At the top a doorway led into a long dormitory with iron bedsteads in two rows, and mattresses covered with ticking. The farthest end of the room was bathed in shadow. The mattresses were thin and stained. The iron frames peeled white paint. Through the dusty windows the sun came in, a watery orange. And then I felt a shift in the air, a pale, silvery alighting, and I saw Celia and a boy on one of the beds, facing away from me and luminous in the shadow like a candle. The boy’s hair was tousled, and golden. He was shirtless, his bare back frail and perfect, the skin barely covering the bones. All of my desire rose up like some kind of terrible sadness. I fled from the room, as I had the barn the day I saw Auntie Sister.
Behind Davy Thompson the jacaranda petals rained down, down, onto the street’s black pavement. I saw he didn’t reach for his teacup. I imagined the liquid grown cold. His eyes were dazed, looking elsewhere. I was reminded of Nicholas in his pose of listening. I would often still myself to hear what he heard. On our walks through the neighborhood we did this together. Our route took us past wind chimes in doorways, the tumbling of laundry in carport clothes dryers, the smell of fabric softener, blooming magnolia, citrus rotting in the grass, cat urine, and trash left out on Wednesdays. We heard the blankness of birdsong, squirrels’ claws up telephone poles, the darting of lizards in shrubbery, car engines, hammers of workmen, the footsteps of other neighbors approaching, a stroller’s rubber wheels grinding the sandy pavement. And then more—the smell of the juice in the baby’s cup, the gum-softened cracker, the wet diaper, the sunscreen, the trace of lily of the valley in the mother’s perfume. Layers of life to sense, whole worlds beneath the one we looked at every day.
I told Nicholas everything, but he did not need to hear it. “This,” he would say, reaching for what he wanted, frightening me, at first, with his fearlessness. Soon I would grow used to his forays into the yard, to discovering whatever he clutched in his hands. I would trust his desire to know it, to understand its worth and its risk—a piece of a bird’s egg, a dead palmetto bug, the shard of china from a pitcher I threw once years before in a rage at my daughter. I have found that despite myself, in the face of resistance and absence, I cannot withdraw my love.
“Sometimes,” Davy told me, “I leave my apartment late at night, and I walk until morning. I see people in their houses waking up, their lights coming on, their lives lit up like movie sets.”
He told me how he walked down the neighborhood streets at sunrise, and everything—the cracked pavement, the gray and buckling stockade fencing, the line of trash cans along the sidewalk—was burnished. He said the word, burnished. He breathed in heavily.
“Just look at this,” he said. He reached into his blazer pocket. His hand emerged, cradling something fragile, which he leaned forward to set on the coffee table. It was a parakeet, its plumage brilliant green and yellow. Someone’s pet set loose to die in the grass, the thing I had seen him bend to recover earlier.
“This is the problem,” he said, his eyes level with mine. “This—carelessness.” He turned his palms up on his knees. In his eyes was a despair I recognized.
That afternoon at LaSalette I had walked around the building through the crowd of townspeople with their ribs and corn and plates of macaroni salad. I went back out into the open field and sat down in the tall grass. I didn’t move for a long time. I thought of Mary weeping and glorious. Mary of the pyrotechnics, the flash pots, the levitation, the magician’s cloak. Mary with her makeup running, unconsummated and sorrowful, her desire a flood, a river overflowing. I imagined her powder-blue garment touching the earth and small green shoots appearing, new grass, mayflowers, slender speedwell, dandelions. I felt the grass move around me and the wide expanse of sky. I felt my body, small and useless and yet lacking nothing. And I knew there was something to believe, that it had to do with all of my longing, my body’s hard, bulblike promise, and if I waited, patiently, it would come to me.
It didn’t that day. I went home at dusk through the woods to my house. I lived my life on and on and never knew what I waited for.
Outside my little bungalow the cold day stayed gray. The breeze rattled the screen door. It sent the jacaranda petals upward and out to spread onto my front walk. A car passed. The mailman thumped onto my porch and I heard the hinges of the mailbox. The grayness outside moved into the room. Lately, I had begun to let evening fill the house. I watched the things around me dissolve, the darkness benevolent, a color of forgetfulness. I imagined this, the way it would devour me in the wing chair, balancing a teacup on my lap, my white blouse the last to fade. It would spread to Davy on the couch, swallow him up with his dark hair and clothes. We would be invisible to each other then, though our hearts still beat, our bodies pulsed warmth, separated by what we could not see of the other. I reached up and turned on a lamp, left the wing chair and went to the black-haired boy on the couch. I knelt down beside him in the circle the lamp cast. I saw how beautifully the light included us.
“Give me your hands, Davy Thompson,” I said.
They were already there, waiting, smelling of pennies and rising dough, and I took hold of them and placed them on my face. “Now, close your eyes,” I told him. Sometimes, you cannot go on with them open.
confessions
She chose the motels. The first time, they met at the one that sells tropicals in back. There was the handwritten sign up front—A Plethora of Plants—and old, fifties-looking neon flashing Sunny South Motel. Just one strip of rooms with doors the color of a nail polish she once liked back when she wore sundresses with little ties on the shoulder, when she had dreamed of having a daughter and smooth muscled arms from lifting and holding her. Peachy-pink, the inside of a whelk. How she had wanted him. How that drove her there, the wanting maneuvering the car beyond her fear of not knowing, really, anything about him. It was the bright glare of noon. There was the chain-link fence in back, the gate with the bell they rang for the proprietor. He emerged, eventually, from an office in the midst of the nursery plants, tanned and stooped and wearing a straw hat. They stood there waiting, a couple, but still he never knew which they wanted, frangipani or a room. There was a certain number of hours available to both of them. There was the need to get it over with already.
At some point in their history, desire had flooded her. She had kept it to herself, her arms and legs aching with it. She slept less. She grew thin. There he was, on a weekly basis, committed, like herself, to someone else with whom vows had been recited in front of witnesses or the eyes of God. Paperwork had been filed. Finances meshed. For her, there was always the difficulty in getting out of it. Years had gone by before she met him. A languishing despair had set in. She was still not sure how he knew. Had he caught her looking? Had he seen on her face some evidence of her longing? Once he discovered her interest, his wish to experience her body began, a mindful reeling-in with messages contrived to win her. Comments on the way her hair fell in her face, the color and texture of her blouse. A whole other world took shape. His idea of her, her idea of him. Things converged.
The first time it was all business. Nothing subtle. This went here, that fit this. It wasn’t a mystery, sex. Outside the window they could hear the bell on the gate, the proprietor pitching five-gallon jasmine, papaya, and Japanese plum. They heard the voice of a woman inquiring, a child’s whine. They could both imagine the tug of the child on the woman’s arm, the drudgery and selfl
essness. They heard a man’s voice, appeasing, silencing the child, a good father in his Saturday clothes, his topsiders flattening the powdery dirt. In the room the air conditioner dripped rusty water onto the carpet. They lay on the blanket they never pulled back. Their legs were tangled. Their bodies slick.
“Now what?” she said.
“Why are you whispering?” he asked.
They had been mostly quiet. There were things she had wanted to say, her mouth pressed to his ear, along his neck, but hadn’t. She felt she had not taken advantage of the moment. There were the other usual things she had planned never to reveal about herself, and these overwhelmed her in the finished space, in the silence of not knowing what to say next. The two of them were nearly without introduction. No more than a hundred words had ever passed between them. She had guessed some things, imagined others. He seemed confident about her, a strong supposer of who people were. Whatever else he thought he had invented for his own pleasure.
Missing were the hours of putting the pieces of each other together over dinner or in a car driving to destinations. Absent were the precursors, the gazing, the pinning down of faces to memory, the handholding, the quick but potent kiss at the door. They dispensed with that. There was no opportunity, no place absent of potential discovery. And they agreed none of it was necessary. He would never save her from her life. She would never make a mark on his. Their meeting would always be a respite, a dalliance. She lay in the dim room on the blanket. She kept her hands on him as she might a claimed package. She could not predict anything she would take away from this, any moment she would remember later. Already, it had become a blur. Sex in a room. The linens stiff with professional laundering, the dank carpet, the mirrored bureau, the dark television screen like a closed eye.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Just this,” she said, which was not really an answer, and he knew it. But he did not press her further. She thought he assumed she liked it all, which she had, her body almost lifeless on the blanket, her limbs loose, her clothes scattered about the floor, invisible in the shadows and lost to her. “Here I am,” she said. “Naked on a bed.”
She could see him smile in the dark. If they had a deck of cards they could play gin rummy. The television could be turned on, blaring and brilliant, and something viewed, idly. Up the street was the House of Ribs, an old bungalow nestled among live oaks, where people sat out on the porch to eat, drinking sweet tea out of mason jars. They could drive there and bring back food they would never normally eat, spread it out on the bed in its greasy wrappings, in its Styrofoam packaging. But they had not chosen each other for any of that. She felt her role was limited, and she did not worry about being anything else. She would lie there and wait until she would be of use again. And then he began to fill the silence and she let him. She listened to the timbre of his voice, his cheek pressed to the blanket, the way it became part of the room, competing with the air conditioner, the passing traffic, the squeak of the chain-link gate, the proprietor’s movements repositioning the plants on the black tarp.
He gave spare details about himself. He gave his opinion. He gave enough for her to form an impression and a softness for him. Enough, he knew, for her to keep wanting him. He was from a small New England town whose main industry used to be a watch factory. His relatives were all townspeople buried in the old St. Joseph’s cemetery. He grew up on a lake, where he boated and skied. He had an older brother who died as a teenager. He had a way about him when he told her, offhandedly, looking elsewhere. She asked few questions, just listened, her body alongside his, her face propped in her hands, her hair spread over his chest.
His brother had cancer. He was sixteen years old, and they had brought him home to die. She saw the house on the lake, its cedar shingles. The dock with its algae-covered pilings, its weathered gray boards. He would have breathed in the smell of the lake through the windows’ metal screens, the water in summer cold and filled with particles of debris, sour and brown, the pieces clinging to his skin when he swam. He would have listened to the leaves’ dry rustling in the fall, watched them tumble, papery, into the backyard and gather at the lake’s rim. Ducks bobbed on the water, even later when the ice formed sheets like glazing.
After his brother’s death, he would have read beyond the bland stories in the school textbooks, worried over the ideas, the forces at work, the underpinnings of sitting, still and dazed in a school classroom. The sky would always be an upturned bowl. The freshly painted yellow lines would always mark the tar road. He could go back and still smell the lilacs near the garage, the forsythia tangle up along the house. Those photographs would sit on the same shelf, those motes of dust hover, miraculous, sentient, over the plaid upholstered couch. The longing that struck up in him would last and alter itself to different places, show itself as a different form of impatience. He knew what it meant to tire of something, to discover it and move on.
The afternoon waned. She did not know if she was good at being who he wanted. He was polite and kind and would never admit any disappointment. The worry of losing his interest fell on her as she walked to her car under the flurry of orchid tree petals, through the balm of ginger lily. Who was she now? Her past did not define her. She lived the life she had stumbled onto when she was young and didn’t know any better. At some point she had decided there wasn’t any better to know. This afternoon she had gotten what she desired, and she pretended she understood what that was, that she had expected nothing else.
———
The next time it was a place called the Lamplighter. A colonial facade with columns, the rooms stretched out from its sides like two arms, black iron lamppost out front, off the main road. Years ago, a band that played a local club stayed there, and as a teenager she had gone back to a room with the guitar player. She had put him off, believing then she should first win his love, that he should be made to confess it in the throes of wanting her badly enough, like the other boys. But he had resigned himself to kissing her on the bed, sliding his hand up under her shirt, unzipping his pants, and rolling away from her to complete the act that really had nothing to do with her. When she left, he stood with his hands pressed to the plate glass window, half-dressed, watching her with an expression of mild regret. She pretended not to see him. She had gotten lost in the maze of surrounding side streets, amidst the small, squat, cement-block houses still strung with Christmas lights, the overgrown fenced yards, the litter of sun-faded plastic toys, the kiddie pools filled with standing water.
In the heat of summer, the landscape seemed charred and threadbare. The humidity held everything damp and immovable. They met at night, and the windows of the occupied rooms were lit yellow. He had gotten in touch with her after weeks of silence. Nothing was needed beyond this. All of his previously laid groundwork was in place—she still remembered the things he had said to her, the way he looked at her, his mouth on hers, his body without clothes. Along with this she held a small, sad sense of a missed chance she believed meeting him again would eradicate, like an antidote.
He was there first, waiting in the room. He seemed the same, still grinning at her, his eyes with the same ardor. He told her he had not stopped thinking about her.
“What about me?” she asked, kicking off her shoes. She did not know if she should have been flattered by his thoughts of her legs, the way her body felt under his, but she was. She was aware that his thinking of her in this way was all she could expect. She doused any other small hopes. She would never tell him the story of the guitar player, fearing he would wonder about her old longing for love, worry that the remnants of it would resurface and complicate what they had. This time, when he held her down on the bed to kiss her, she felt the weight of his hands, the texture of his skin. She felt the soft hairs below his waist when she undid his pants. The room was dark, their bodies hard to pin down. She felt him out with her hands, blindly, seeing with the tips of her fingers, her palms. She saw him in his boyhood bed, its crocheted spread, the lake l
apping at the dock outside his window, and the sounds of loons in the morning. She saw him wide awake, listening for his brother dying downstairs in the bed set up in the living room. She saw his baseball cards in a special box with a lid. She saw his row of leather-bound books, the titles in gilt italics. Outside his window, a moon, and the curtains blown out and back, the night air rife with the odor of the afternoon’s mown grass.
His hands slid up and down her length. She breathed in their movement, their gentle, urging search for her. She stopped them with her own. He looked up at her, puzzled. How to explain that moment before giving in? That quiet “Don’t.” She could not tell where the resistance came from. But she knew how to back it down, swallow the word, succumb. She knew where to go, which mask to put on. In this way, she avoided the old guitar player story. She circumvented the need for something she would not have, and spared herself.
The room’s darkness was broken a bit by the yellow lamplight from outside, its hazy shine through the curtain’s join. It left a line across the bed, splitting their bodies in two. He bunched a pillow under his head. His hand never stopped moving, reflexively, over some part of her skin. He looked at her in the dark. She felt his eyes on her, questioning. There was the same air-conditioning noise. A car door slammed outside. Footsteps approached. His hand froze midway up her stomach, and the footsteps passed by, on to another room. She heard him exhale.
