by K M Cholewa
“Hey Rachael,” Tatum said, stepping in.
Tatum’s hair was dark like Rachael’s. She wore browns and tans like an explorer, and a black wool ski cap on her head. Rachael knew who she was.
“She’s dead,” Rachael said.
Tatum looked up the staircase. She took the edge of the door away from Rachael and closed it. She placed her backpack on the floor and led Rachael by the shoulder to the steps and sat down on the second to bottom one. She turned Rachael to face her. She took her hands.
Rachael pulled her hands away.
“I’m sorry,” Tatum said, dropping her own hands into her lap but still studying Rachael’s face.
Somehow, Tatum’s sudden presence did not surprise Rachael. She knew that her mother didn’t like her. And she knew, without knowing why or how, that the girl in the mirror was like her.
The sound of a car engine on the long driveway caught both of their attention. Neither moved as they heard someone approach, turn a key in the lock, and enter. It was Miss Geri. She looked down at them, and her face shifted. She knew without asking. Geri frowned sympathetically and touched Rachael’s head. Tatum stood and introduced herself.
“I’m Margaret’s sister,” she said, extending her hand. “Tatum.” She paused then, still holding Miss Geri’s hand. “I drove all night,” she said.
Miss Geri pulled Tatum to her and hugged her even though they had just met. Rachael watched her aunt’s eyes shut tight over Miss Geri’s shoulder. The hug bothered Rachael, and she was about to tell them to stop when they let go anyway. Geri started up the stairs, and Tatum followed. On the third step, Tatum looked back over her shoulder at Rachael.
“You coming?” she said.
Rachael shook her head no.
Tatum stared at her for another second as though waiting for a change of mind.
“All right,” she said and continued up the steps.
In the Cloud 9 motel, Rachael cracked her eyes drowsily. Over the other bed, she could see the top of Tatum’s head leaned back against the wall. Tatum sat on the floor near the bathroom. In her half-sleep, Rachael knew what Tatum was doing. She was eavesdropping, listening to secrets.
Rachael’s lids fell, and the world was dark. Tatum and Miss Geri ascended the stairs and disappeared on the landing. Rachael stood in her pajamas near the front door on the cool, marble floor. She about-faced and met her own reflection from the top of her head down as far as her shoulders in the entryway mirror. She was pretty. It was fact. She had been a fairy for Halloween, her dress a gauzy and sequined sea foam.
Rachael placed a small palm to the glass. Her stomach rumbled, but it was part of the past, just an echo. She pressed the tip of her nose to the nose beyond the mirror’s cool surface. She looked into her own green eyes. Her feet were cold on the marble floor. The chill from the mirror comforted her. Cold like winter water, icy, but not ice.
10
Geneva drove her Saab north past the Scratchgravel Hills, gripping the steering wheel a bit too tight. Earlier that morning, her mood had been foul, her thoughts like an IV dripping resentment into her bloodstream. Jet-lagged, she would have preferred to putter at home. But Ralph had to be her first priority. She hadn’t seen him for two weeks. Too long, she was sure, by good society’s standards.
Such a difference it is to be driven by responsibility as opposed to desire. She would advise against it, if asked. She knew responsibility could crowd out desire like weeds in the flowerbed. After too many years, you go to the garden to pull. Duty calls. You forget that flowers once grew there. You kneel without question and labor.
But no. She would not think these thoughts. They were not conducive to carrying out gladly the task of the day. Love shrinks on the witness stand. Questioning it did a marriage no good.
The blue of the sky was hot and bright as Geneva took the curves through the canyon, through the cliff walls rising in mudstone layers of red and green. She knew well that she had not been born with the stuff that greases the skids for married life. Acceptance. Amnesia. Marriage required a duck’s back. Geneva was born with a porcupine’s topography, a back like a pine-covered hillside. Nothing rolled down it, nothing shrugged off. Experience tangled. Words jammed. She’d find the emotional debris, pick it up, dissect it, and smear it on a slide, view it under the power of magnification, all grotesquely large. Making studies of feelings is big business — therapy, talk shows — but Geneva learned the hard way that the scientific mind applied to love instead of test tubes leads not to high fives and by-George-I-think-we’ve-got-its. Picking through their love in a petri dish, to Ralph, had seemed a lot like looking for problems. And problems are, well, problematic, negative indicators, cause for alarm. And Ralph’s alarm led to his anxiety, which led, for Geneva, to frustration. A stray musing or theory on their relationship, she found, inevitably morphed into conflict. There were two speeds: agreement and argument. What she had been seeking was exploration.
It took her years to realize that her mental tinkering was not a quality that had attracted Ralph, as she had believed. Because it was one of her most defining characteristics, it was hard for her to imagine anyone loving her without loving it.
But so it was.
For the sake of peace, then, she learned to work quietly in her mental lab.
The roads were clear and the miles added up quickly. Canyon Creek reflected the sky on its way to the Missouri. As she drove, Geneva worked to cast past choices in a more positive light. Was it so bad a lesson to learn to keep the peace? Peace is sought everywhere, marched for by throngs, and she had established it simply by keeping her thoughts to herself. It would be different, of course, had she died in her silence. But she had not. She simply lived in seclusion, mentally speaking, for which there is something to be said. Folks climb mountains to reach monasteries because they’re good places to be if you’ve got a lot to think about. You don’t make it in one if you don’t.
So you see, I wasn’t a doormat, she said silently to some other point of view that lived inside of her. Then she hit the gas pedal hard, hoping to leave her thoughts behind, choking on her dust.
Earlier that morning, when infested with such thoughts, Geneva had taken measures to jar her mind into better thinking, measures not currently available as she hugged the mountain curves. Those who consume drugs, legal or otherwise, are seeking relief. Some want to feel better. Some don’t want to feel at all. Then there were those like Geneva, those who were seeking to melt the ice in their minds, having found themselves frozen into one of its frosty corners. It wasn’t about feeling better but coming to new conclusions. Optional conclusions. Geneva believed there was a danger in allowing any one opinion to be left alone to run amok in her mind.
So she had retrieved an empty water glass from the kitchen and headed to the bedroom. She grabbed her toiletry bag, still packed, off the pillow and had rummaged, finding her sewing kit readily. She dug out her tiny travel scissors and a sewing needle. Then she reached to the floor for the underpants she had worn home from the airport. She pulled the thick sanitary napkin from the crotch, and she cut into it. She pulled out two sticky chunks of hashish bundled in plastic wrap.
Here in her bedroom, it now seemed a bold move. Were she instead in prison, her assessment would no doubt be different. At the time, though, it seemed neither bold nor stupid. Had it seemed either, she wouldn’t have done it. It had felt nothing more than practical. She still had a few ancient buds from Vincent, but Vincent didn’t come around much anymore since he and Tatum had split up, not even to see Geneva. He had been her only connection. Packing her Kotex in her hotel room in Amsterdam, Geneva hadn’t felt any risk of anyone being interested in the contents of her underpants.
Geneva nicked off a small chunk from the smaller of the two hunks of hash. She stabbed it onto the end of her sewing needle. She pulled a pack of matches from the nightstand’s drawer and lit the speared morsel. When it started to
smoke, she placed it on her nightstand, covering it with the inverted glass.
“Eva’s medicine,” Geneva had said, as the glass filled with smoke. That’s what Vincent’s mother used to call pot. Geneva crouched on the floor beside her nightstand and slid the glass to the edge letting the lip hang just over the side. She sucked the blue curling ribbons of smoke from beneath the glass and slid it back to fill again. Sitting on the bed holding the smoke in her lungs, her thoughts of Vincent turned to thoughts of Tatum. She thought of Tatum’s sister getting cut down in the prime of life while Ralph lingered. She exhaled slowly. She remembered a conversation she had with Tatum following Tatum’s mastectomy. Tatum had been sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat while Geneva emptied the plastic drains that caught the blood and fluid from the wound that was once a breast. Tatum hadn’t told Geneva that she and Vincent had split up, but it was obvious that he wasn’t around.
“What’s become of our boy, Vincent?” she had asked Tatum.
Tatum was drugged up pretty good, but not too impaired.
“I bugged him. He left,” she said. “Plain and simple.”
“Bugged him how?”
“It was a naturally occurring phenomenon,” she said. “I don’t blame him. I could’ve shut up more. Reached out more.”
“Maybe the talking was the reaching,” Geneva said.
Tatum crossed her hands over her collarbone and looked toward the ceiling as Geneva reattached the drains.
“Can a person shut up and still be who they are?” Tatum had asked her. “I mean, if you shut up because you think you’re bugging someone, are you being a good person for shutting up, or are you not you anymore?”
Geneva considered her own silence in her marriage as she secured the drains. It had not been a practice she had undertaken unconsciously. She had considered it at length. Had chosen it as a higher path. If talking leads to pain and frustration, is it not a kindness, to oneself at least, to shut one’s pie hole?
“All shutting up is not created equal,” she finally said. “Women waste a lot of creative energy talking. Maybe we’d be wiser to pursue the intimacy of the apes.”
“Would that be the enlightened relationship?” Tatum asked. “Grooming each other and listening to the wind?”
Geneva offered Tatum a steady arm, and Tatum rose slowly from the toilet.
“For me,” Geneva told her, “the enlightened relationship would run along the lines of a Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday kind of bond. But with steamy sex. Friends. Comrades. Equals. Hot sex.”
Geneva recalled the conversation as she blew past an ancient pickup truck doing its damnedest to go fifty. The peaks of the Sawtooth Range rose ragged against the western sky. Hot sex. It was the last thing she needed to be thinking about then, and it was the last thing she needed to be thinking about now. She had exacerbated the feeling that morning. Buzzed and turned on by notions of sex between equals, she had gone to the living room, flipping through the playlists in her mind. Marvin Gaye? Al Green? Roberta Flack?
She had surveyed her albums, eyes slowing at the S’s and T’s. She zeroed in on the band Traffic. She owned two of their albums, the same two anyone who had Traffic albums would have, Mr. Fantasy and Low Spark. She pulled Low Spark from the shelf and let it glide from its sleeve. She placed it on the turntable and skipped to the title track.
The needle hit the groove and from the friction between the two came the sound of piano and sax, coming on, moving in as though approaching from a distance. Geneva had stepped backward away from the turntable. A puttering of bongos, seeming to mind their own business, did their thing, a self-involved rhythm, while the chords of a piano minded the beat. Geneva dropped her robe over the arm of a chair and stood in the middle of the room where the effect from the stereo was best appreciated. There, she raised her arms forward slowly, leading with the backs of her wrists. She let them rise to Frankenstein level and held them there, suspended, shoulders relaxing before she released her arms slowly back to her sides. Reaching up then, out from her hips, she stretched her arms overhead toward the ceiling and then dipped into a hip. The sound was still all sax and chords and bongos as Geneva alternated arms and alternated hips, reaching with one as she dipped with the other. She eased into harmony, into sync, if not with the universe, if not with the voices in her head, then at least with this song. She rolled her shoulders up and back as the vocals broke through.
The stretching, and the hash, did its work on her. She felt her blood in her veins. Body and spirit reintegrated. The combination amounted, for Geneva, to sexuality. Her sense of it.
A mixed blessing, it was, to have that pot stirred.
And now on the road, just remembering her morning, she was horny again. Always a potential side effect of feeling good. Both a gift and a burden.
Geneva arrived at Parkview with only an hour left for visiting. The staff knew her and nodded in greeting. Alone with Ralph in his room, Geneva didn’t talk aloud to him the way she knew many family members did to their comatose or catatonic loved ones. But she did try to emanate. She thought at him. She believed it a more effective method of communication given the circumstances.
And she brought him music. She was convinced he liked the Beach Boys, and she put Pet Sounds on the CD player she had bought for his room.
Ralph didn’t look good, she thought, standing over him as he slept. But do the addled ever? His skin was tragically pasty, his mouth slack. A smother party waiting to happen. No more disappearing into Europe. She sent Ralph the telepathic message. Then she fingered his hand, a useless thing. She felt a small storehouse of tears behind her eyes. Nothing that needed to fall, just a stash in the psychic attic.
She looked softly at Ralph in all his frailty. In a way, she supposed, she had always considered him frail, if not of body then of emotional wherewithal. But once she learned to keep her restless mind to herself, he had been endlessly kind. Entirely devoted. She was Geneva. His Gen. He loved her. It was simple.
But the problem with simplicity, for Geneva, was that it couldn’t be understood. So she didn’t feel his love and nor could she see with her own logic that it was so.
The Beach Boys harmonized. Geneva looked at the picture of her and Ralph on his nightstand. It was of the two of them sitting on a neighbor’s deck. It was taken in 1974. In it, Geneva has a great tan — they were real back then and considered healthy. Ralph was wild about tan lines, white breasts and bottoms. Up until last year, the picture had sat on her nightstand at home.
She touched the edge of the frame. Dated as it was, it was still Geneva’s favorite picture of them. The sky behind them was blue, and Geneva wore big hoop earrings and an orange scarf tied around her head. Her face is bold and ecstatic. Being a woman then, she thought, was such a blast. A collective, violent awakening.
Her eyes drifted from her own image to Ralph’s. Everything looked too big on him. His hair. His ears. His shirt collar. You couldn’t tell from the picture, she thought, that he was a good man. But, of course, he was. After all, Geneva had picked him, and she had always had an uncanny ability to weed through a room of men, right down to the one, or the ones, if there were any at all, that were the real deal. Character, or at least its humble beginnings. Potential. Which is not the same thing, however, as having what it takes to actualize potential. The two, one learns, are surprisingly unrelated — a fact she had learned too late.
Geneva looked away from the picture and laid her hand on Ralph’s chest and thought about the promise she had made to him. Her word. To love him. I didn’t promise to love a memory, she thought. I promised to love a man. Whoever he is. Whoever he might become.
Some marry Democrats who become Republicans. Some marry drunks who become Bible thumpers. Everyone marries a person who becomes an older person. Ralph had become a person with Alzheimer’s. What did it mean to love him for who he was right now?
Geneva used curiosity the way other people used commitment or hope. So
mething to hold love’s place while it was off-duty, in need of time to itself.
Her hand rose and fell with Ralph’s audible breathing. His chest was too thin, and yet, at the same time, paunchy. She thought of how his body had been hers for creature comfort and for moving large objects. He had only asked one thing of her ever: that she trust him.
Geneva didn’t like her thoughts. She fiddled with a button of Ralph’s pajama top to distract herself and changed the direction her mind was taking. She unbuttoned it and slipped her hand through to the flaky skin below. She contemplated the difference between loving a memory of him and loving the man on the bed before her. She cocked her head, considering it while she undid the rest of his pajama top, pushing it to the sides. Her hand drifted down his sternum to his stomach and over the gray, curly hairs beneath his navel. She had loved his torso in their day, stingy with hair between the pecs but shaping an oval between his lower ribcage stretching down beneath the pants’ line. Her eyes traveled with her hand. It had been so long, so long since they were lovers and she could use the bodily drumming between them to drown out her uncomfortable thoughts.
She made small circles with her fingertips on the soft skin above his pajama bottoms. Reaching further down then, she dipped her hand into the pants and patted at the crotch of his adult diaper. The coast was clear. She slipped her hand inside, and idly, she fingered his balls and the limp slug of his dick. As far as she could tell, Ralph hadn’t registered a thing. She held his balls, stroking them with her thumb. Despite her intention to remain in the present, memories washed over her. Not weddings and vacations but simple things. Watching him stand in the yard watering a newly seeded dry patch in the lawn. The way he would set the alarm clock at night before going to the bathroom and then, on his way back to bed, he would flick the alarm button back off and on, as though for good luck. Ralph’s penis grew meatier. Geneva withdrew her hand, tugging Ralph’s dick upward with it.
