by Karen Brown
Janine looked at me as if she knew something and didn’t want to tell.
“You mean you would believe a guy who fed you all that crap about being a model, who carted you all the way to Florida and left you and a two-year-old alone for months at a time in a dumpy apartment?” Her face was flushed and she was waving her hands in the air. “Think about that!” she shouted.
I did. I thought about being in the Impala that my mother bought for me after Marianne was born, about Marianne asleep in the backseat with her legs buried under a pile of my dresses, about me crying and James Copper smoothing my hair and telling me things that I had to believe then—having already driven six hours on the interstate with my mother’s swing records from the 1940s stacked on the floor and all my shoes (twenty pairs in brightly colored boxes) wedged in the trunk. Janine would not understand any of it. I looked at her soft, puffy face and furious eyes. I could never tell her about pulling off at a Stuckey’s while Marianne slept, how he drove around back and pushed my head down into his lap, stroked my hair and my neck and my back. How I imagined the waitresses in their brown uniforms leaving work, squeaking past the car in their white rubber-soled shoes, wondering: What is that man doing alone in that car with his head thrown back? Is he dead?
Janine glared at me as if she wanted to punish me, but then her eyes softened.
She tried to turn away before I could see that she loves me. It was getting dark and she squinted at the empty dirt drive, moved a few steps back so she could see the street.
“Where’s your goddamn car?” she asked.
“At Sears,” I said. I didn’t even look up at her. With Marianne squirming on my lap, I imagined sitting in this spot forever, becoming part of the outdoors with vines in my hair and weeds sprouting from my toes. I was comfortable.
“Even you, Roxanna, have a right to be happy,” Janine said quietly.
“I am happy,” I said. I closed my eyes and listened for the rustling of stems winding around my ankles. Marianne’s legs were making wet marks on my thighs. We wore identical ponytails and I lifted hers, kissed her neck where it was salty, soft. I wanted to cry but decided to hold it in, to wait until it burned in my chest, a sweet pain.
———
Soon after the car was repaired I took Marianne to the beach.
“Florida is a beautiful place,” I told her. “We can be anything we want.”
“I want to be a model,” she said. She can already put on lipstick expertly, without a mirror.
“Then we need tans,” I said. We held hands and smiled, the sand scalding the bottoms of our feet. I had bought Marianne polka-dotted sunglasses and a pair of rubber thongs, but I still couldn’t bear to look at her squatting on the bright towel, holding her knees, her tiny bones poking against the white skin of her back.
“Some things,” she told me, “aren’t very fun, even if they’re supposed to be.”
———
Not long after that I found a job through a modeling agency. I’ve had to work nights, but Janine has been willing to come over and watch Marianne for some time now. Her husband doesn’t mind. She makes him dinner and leaves him with it in front of the TV. “Like an animal,” she tells me, “only I put it on Corelle instead of in a metal bowl.”
She had just arrived last night when my mother called and screamed at me over the phone: “I want my records back, do you hear me!”
“I don’t have those anymore,” I said, as Marianne swished around the room in one of my full slips, moving to the rhythm of “Love Me or Leave Me.” Cicadas whined through the screen door, and the wind was pulling the cream curtains out and back.
“You had no right to do that,” my mother cried, so close to hysteria that I hung up on her. Usually she’ll just call back the next day and ask for Marianne, angry with me without knowing why.
I left Janine and Marianne and drove to my job at a popular nightclub. I dance there, in a square cage made of metal bars enameled black, with a Plexiglas floor. I wear costumes that match the theme of the night—Biker Bash, Wild West, Pajama Party. If someone is sick the manager sometimes asks me to waitress. Either way I make money, but I’d rather be behind the bars where no one can touch me. People my own age come to the club, right out of high school with fake IDs—girls in their mother’s designer clothes, guys with long hair tied back and wearing shoes of expensive leather. I’ve gotten to know them. I watch them fall in love with each other. I see who two-times, who lies, which ones to trust. They act out their lives in the club while I dance and watch them. Older men throw money onto the square floor of the cage, and I fold the bills into tiny squares, tucking them in the toes of my patent leather pumps.
This job is only temporary. I don’t have any other plans, but I know things will change soon. I felt it last night, driving home at two a.m. with the car windows down, in the way the air moved the hair on my arms. I had to stop at a convenience store to buy cigarettes for Janine, and I saw a man in a green army coat sitting on a duffel bag under the pay phone. He looked straight at me, and I was startled by his eyes, the silence of his face like that of a statue. When I came back out, a police car was parked next to mine, and the cop was telling the man to leave, waving his stick in the air while he talked. I opened my car door and the man stood up and looked at me again. I motioned toward him with my hand.
“Let’s go,” I said. I felt bold and strange. He got in the car, leaving the cop openmouthed, and we drove away.
His name is Jeffrey. He smells of the outside, of fresh open air.
“I’m nomadic,” he told me, laughing quietly.
When we reached my house I went inside alone, gave Janine her cigarettes, and watched her walk home. Then I sneaked Jeffrey in. I showed him Marianne, sleeping in the bedroom. Her body was nearly invisible under the patterned sheet: a small raised spot, a fold that I could flatten with my hand. Jeffrey and I slept without clothes on the prickly material of the secondhand couch. Before dawn he disappeared, and I crept back into the bed I share with Marianne. Her fingers curled around the pale sheet, revealing small crescents of dirt under her fingernails. As I brushed her thin hair from her face my hand shook.
In the morning a train went by, rattling everything in the house. Open windows banged shut by themselves. I sat on the edge of the bed, awakened by the noise. I’d been dreaming about Marianne’s father, a boy I barely knew except for his mouth and the dull weight of his hips. In the dream I see the Chevelle parked in our yard, the white paint shimmering pink and blue in the sun. A ripe orange falls from a neighbor’s tree onto the hood, plunk, and rolls to the street. He stands inside the door and, without words, I know what is expected of me. I do not undress, but I am back on the tiled floor again, the blue-gray slate under the dim hall light. My mother’s green umbrella leans beside the door, my shoulder blades push against the ice-cold tile. Somewhere up the carpeted steps my mother sleeps, dreamless.
I crouched on the edge of the bed, far from Marianne, my knees pulled up close to my chest. The train and the dream seemed the same, and I tried to hold my breath until it passed, but the rumbling and clattering didn’t stop so I gave up and breathed in the dust and grease sifting under the door. I tasted the memory in my mouth, sharp, unwanted. The train moaned in the distance, the iron bulk of it now past our house, the dust settling at the foot of the bed. And I was filled with guilt and shame for the thing, though I do not remember ever wanting to do it, and I do not remember ever saying I would. Suddenly I was sick, hunched retching over a brown plastic wastebasket. I watched Marianne turn and sigh, and sleep on.
This afternoon Jeffrey showed up at the front door, wearing the same green army coat with the brass buttons, but looking younger in the daylight with a blond beard that must have grown overnight. Marianne hid in the bedroom for two hours, until Jeffrey made her a wand out of the TV aerial and some aluminum foil.
“It’s magical,” he said. She watched him through the crack in the door. “C’mon, Marianne.”
She tiptoed a
cross the linoleum floor and slipped between my knees. “I still don’t like you,” she told him as she grabbed the wand. On her fingers she wore rings with colored plastic stones attached to tarnished metal bands.
“Do you have bells on your toes?” Jeffrey asked.
Marianne showed him her bare feet—rings on each of her big toes. She wiggled them at him and smiled. “How do you like that?” she asked.
“I like that a lot,” he said. “You have very pretty feet.”
Within minutes Marianne is showing him her dress-up clothes, modeling a flowered kimono and my patent pumps, taking him outside to look at the yard. They walk up the white gravel bed, step onto the railroad track, and wave at me where I lean in the frame of the back door with my arms wrapped around my waist. Marianne moves her shoulders up and down and claps her hands. She does a little dance on the track. The phone rings but I decide not to answer it. I am immovable in the doorway, watching them smiling at me, watching Jeffrey take Marianne’s hand and help her down the graveled slant. Then they move toward me, fast, running, like people in a home movie.
For dinner we eat tacos from the fast-food place down the street.
“Time for bed,” I tell Marianne, but she shrieks, pulling away from me and leaping onto Jeffrey’s lap.
“We’re going to wait for the train tonight, Roxanna,” she says. She picks up a crayon and, holding it between two fingers, raises it to her mouth and exhales.
Jeffrey looks at me but I try to avoid his eyes, which are sad and soft like a saint’s. We go outside and unfold two of those old lounge chairs. It’s almost dark, surprisingly cool.
“This is like spring in Massachusetts,” I say.
“This is magic weather,” Marianne whispers, clutching the wand. We adjust the chairs until they lean almost all the way back, and we push them close together so there is no gap. Marianne fits beside me, under my arm. Jeffrey drapes his big green coat over us all. Underneath it he holds my hand.
“What are we waiting for?” I ask.
“The magic circus train,” Marianne says. She turns toward Jeffrey and he smiles.
I do not want her liking this man, climbing up onto his lap, believing in him, but I’ve grown tired of holding back. The bare yard dissolves in the dark, yet overhead the stars are blinding. My toes peek out from under the heavy coat, alive, covered with skin instead of moss.
While we wait for the train, I imagine a man tied to the tracks. I make out the shape of him—lying prone on top of the glowing white gravel—but the face of the man changes. It is Marianne’s father, it is James Copper, and then it is Jeffrey with his pale blue eyes pleading, with his only possessions crammed in a duffel bag by the door. He will mark me in some way, like the rest, leave the imprints of his arms and fingerprints like tattoos under my clothes. I do not care. Marianne’s breathing moves her against me, slow, gentle breaths that spill out mist into the green night. She, too, will learn the cycle of things, the irresistible wheel that draws us into its spokes. Even now, as we sit in these lawn chairs, the three of us together under the dark, wide sky and the overbright stars, our lives happen—all around, just then, forever.
mouth of friend and stranger
I saw him first. He was safe in his group of friends, his friends cushioning us from each other. I didn’t know him. I had my copy of Lowell, just purchased from the used bookstore, and I sat alone. We were at the Cuban restaurant, outdoors at the plastic patio tables lit by tiki torchlight. The mambo band played. Or we were in the dim space on the swiveling stools of the bar next door. We were passing each other on the sidewalk by the beauty salon in the Mediterranean-style plaza—Cuts for Ten Dollars. Any of those ways. He wore a pin-striped shirt. His hair was mussed. At first, nothing seemed to pass between us. He was from Missouri. He was a law student. Or he wrote poetry at Yale. He was an auto mechanic. He sold famous knives.
In his eyes I saw the boys who played baseball with the girls on the wide lawns of the street of my childhood. Their hands all knuckles, stuffed in their gloves. That intense look, the boy thing underneath, always something to prove. Chestnuts fell onto the lawn in their spiny casings. The leaves floated down, one by one. The fathers’ cars sat shiny and streamlined in each driveway. The mothers’ station wagons sat beside them, two long cars taking up little space in the scheme of the long winding tarred drives. Lampposts with yellow light. He could have been one of those boys, grown up. In him, I saw the games of manhunt and freeze tag, the scuffle of bodies in the dark, my childhood handprints glowing on the skin of his forearm.
I followed him into the restaurant. The steamy, heavy smell of the place—picadillo and roast pork, chorizo and boliche. The painted tables thrown together with their chairs on the cement floor. We stood by the restrooms and waited. The air freshener, the smell of the soap in the dispenser, the urine and stale perfume, seeped out under the doors. He looked at my legs, at the outlines of them all the way up under my skirt. I watched him look. Then I waited for him in the little hallway outside the bathroom door. As he passed me I grabbed the cuff of his sleeve. I held his arm captive, and he let me. He turned around, not very surprised. I felt the weight of the sleeve of his shirt, read the expression on his face, his eyebrows up, his mouth half smiling, not ready to give in to anything.
“Sit with me,” I said.
He shrugged and grinned. He was singled out, chosen. I was someone he was happy to have done this. Everything, at that point, pleased him.
You learned about presenting yourself. Here I am, you would say, rounding the stair landing, facing your parents and their friends in the dining room. A dinner party, Mrs. Winslow lolling, drunk on sidecars, my father in the kitchen filling fresh glasses. The men wore ties, the women silk dresses. In the dimmed chandelier light the food dried on the bone china, the candles burned down to their wicks. Everyone turned, everyone poured their attention. My mother with her eyes bright, distracted, the other women tight-lipped, the men rubbing their chins. I passed through the room and felt my hair swing along my waist, the back of my neck tightening, aware. I cut a swath through their silence. I felt the silence fall about me, pressing close enough to kiss.
In church, you held the missal just so in your hands. You bent your head, smiled sweetly, devout. Around you the fathers in their suits stank like the morning’s hangover. The mothers’ hands were veined and thin, their mouths drooped, tired in their lipstick. You smelled the sheets on their skin through their clothes. You felt their heat and guilt, their shining relief at the end, when we filed out into the morning sunlight, into spring and all the dogwoods blooming. I kept my hands folded. My thoughts were always chaste. In confession, I made up sins to say, my voice quaking with the sin of saying them.
Outside, his group of friends never missed him. I watched them laughing in the growing dark, in the torchlight, through the plate-glass window. We sat at an empty table inside and talked. We brushed aside the waitress suggesting drinks. Even then, we had other ideas. I told him things he didn’t really care to hear. Who I was, where I was from, what it was like there this time of year, still buried under winter. He took the book from me, still in its bag from the bookstore, and slid it out. He held it in the palms of his hands and read the cover, rubbed his thumbs along the spine, and riffled the pages. Life Studies. Something dropped out onto the table.
“What’s this?” he said. He picked it up and looked at it, some printed verse on heavy paper, the cover of a card. He read part of it out loud. His voice was low and bemused.
Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me . . . He shook his head.
He handed it to me. It was decorated with a figure in robes, with prancing lambs holding staffs. On the back was a note to someone, written in a slanted hand.
“It’s St. Patrick’s breastplate. A charm,” I told him. “To protect him against the Druids.”
His eyes were doubtful of me. I slid my chair close. I
put my leg up on his. He propped his face on one hand, still with that quizzical look.
“I like the bridge jumpers,” I said. “Berryman. Kees?” I told him Berryman’s father shot himself here in this city, in 1926.
“Where, do you think?” he asked.
“Maybe down the street, behind that stucco apartment building.”
He glanced over his shoulder, slowly, toward the patio and his circle of friends. His fingers found the hem of my skirt and slid up.
“I like good old Tennyson,” he said. “The early Swinburne.”
Under the table things happened.
“Would I not hurt thee perfectly?” he said.
I leaned over and placed my forehead at the base of his neck. I breathed in the smell of him under his shirt. His hand swam up, his fingers graceful swimmers. Behind us the waitresses whispered, girls with dark, curling hair and red fingernails. He took my arm and we pushed the chairs back, and looked around. Who knows what you look for when your knees tremble at the swishing fabric of your skirt? A place with a door, a corner to drape yourself against him. A place to be supine, prostrate, to feel Swinburne’s delicious things—pleasure, sorrow, sleep, sin, to wax amorous.
The palm of his hand was hot, concentrating on my fingers.
Once, my childhood girlfriend and I took a bedspread out into the pasture. We knew what we were doing, walking out there. We had a plan. At the base of my spine was a small tingle. It was April. The trees in the old apple orchard blossomed white and pink. Below the little wizened trunks, beneath the gnarled branches, the damp ground looked snow-covered. We laid the bedspread out on the white ground. We pulled the ends in around ourselves and took off our clothes. We pretended to be the babysitter with her boyfriend on the couch, the glow of the television lighting up her stomach’s bared skin, his hand creeping up, their mouths pressed together. We knew to move against each other, to make soft moans. Under the canopy of flowers, with the smell of the wet new grass, we did not know what our pretending meant, where our bodies took us, close enough to being lovers. A man and woman came by, two strangers. The man held a pair of clippers. The woman’s arms were full of blossoms. They looked at us on the spread. We were covered up, but our shoulders were bare, our skin flushed, giving them ideas. They looked at us a long time, wondering, then moved on.
