We All Love the Beautiful Girls

by Joanne Proulx

  She settles back in her seat and takes a long pull of moist air, in through the nose, out through the nose, yoga style. She isn’t proud she followed him—once—but given all the crap going on with Peter and the fact her husband takes a bat out with him every night, she thinks she had a right.

  Down by the river, she’d watched him hit to some scrawny boy in gigantic jean shorts. A boy running for balls in the poorly lit outfield. A boy who wasn’t Finn. Crouched in the long grass that separates the graffiti bridge from the ball diamond, in a thick chorus of crickets, that’s what Mia had been thinking. That it should have been Finn and Michael out there playing, although even at the time, she knew she was being maudlin and romantic. Finn never liked baseball. Even as a kid, he’d come into the house out of sorts after playing catch with his father, put off by Michael’s constant chirping and the speed with which he insisted on throwing the ball. Even if he could, Mia can’t imagine Finn picking up a glove now.

  The drizzle turns to rain. The wind gusts up. When she closes her window, the slap of wipers fills the car—neither of them has thought to turn on the radio. She glances over at her husband, stiff and unhappy behind the wheel. “Listen,” she says, “I’m just off three months of wound care. Why don’t you take care of Finn’s rehab?”

  His answer is immediate. “Because you’re better with him than I am.”

  In silence they loop up and over the canal. Even though it’s concrete, even in the rain, the Canal Bridge, beautifully lit from below, gracefully arching over the narrow waterway, reminds Mia of Paris, a place she’s always dreamt of living, although that dream feels pretty far off now.

  They are almost across the bridge when the wiper blade on Michael’s side flies off into the darkness. “Shit!” He pulls into the first free parking spot on Main Street, a metal arm—all that’s left of the wiper—scratching away at the glass. He turns off the wipers; the windshield becomes a slide of water. Cursing, he climbs out of the Jeep and rustles through the trunk, but comes up empty. Beneath the back hatch, he tugs off a sock, rolls it into a ball and uses some dental floss Mia finds in her purse to tie it to the arm. He’s soaked when he climbs back, but the low-tech, MacGyveresque fix clears an arc on the windshield just wide enough to see through.

  As they cruise slowly home, the balled-up sock slaps back and forth like an angry foot. Mia can’t help laughing.

  “Jesus,” Michael says. “People will think we hit some kid.” Which shouldn’t be funny, but is.

  In their driveway, the engine ticks to quiet. The child’s foot slides to still. Mia peers up at the house: the porch light casts a welcoming glow, but all the windows are dark. The front steps need painting. And she’s been lazy with the flowerbeds, weedy and colourless except for a determined daisy and a few straggly poppies fallen over in the rain.

  Michael takes the keys from the ignition. “When’s his next appointment?”

  “Friday morning. Ten o’clock.”

  “I’ll take him.”

  “Great. And we have a meeting with David that day at eleven thirty.”

  “David.” Michael scoffs the name, never mind the man worked pro bono half of March and all of April.

  “I’m reminding you because you missed the last one.”

  “Okay, Mia. All right.”

  “Well, you did.” She stares at the sock on the windshield. Without the slapstick motion, it’s just a sad little still life, a skinny metal stick ending in a tethered lump, one side flattened wet against the glass.

  —

  FINN IS ASLEEP in the upstairs den, commercials flickering soundlessly over him. While Michael hunts for the remote, Mia rattles his shoulder. They go to and fro, mother gently shaking son—get up, honey, go to bed—son lazily fending off mother, until Michael steps in and yanks away the blanket. Fingers gripping fingers, hand gripping elbow, he pulls the boy to his feet.

  Too rough, Mia thinks, but Finn is up and on his way to his room. She watches him stumble along the hallway, half-asleep, the clubby red end of his arm hanging limply from his sleeve. She imagines a wall encircling her heart—just a couple courses of stone, poorly stacked and readily crumbled, but still, the beginning of a boundary that’s never existed.

  Never mind him missing the last term of school. Never mind he barely even looks at that arm. Never mind that his life will be so much harder now, despite what she said in the car. Never mind, never mind, never mind.

  I am separate, she tells herself. We are not one.

  —

  IN BED, MICHAEL tucks in behind her and starts massaging her neck. He tells her he just wants them to get along. She says that’s what she wants too, but still she has to remind herself to breathe, to relax, to try to enjoy the back rub. But when Michael slips two fingers under the waistband of her underwear, she catches his wrist. She does not want this. Cannot have it. Neither her body nor her mind will allow it.

  “I’m tired.” Beneath the sheet, she returns his hand to him.

  “You’re always tired.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I am.”

  He huffs. Rolls away. Reaches for his iPad. They lie in the soft grey glow. She cannot.

  —

  HERE’S HOW IT GOES. How it’s gone pretty much since the day Jess backed me into the bathroom. I set my alarm for 2 a.m. Sometimes I don’t need it, but I set it anyway. When it goes off, I don’t want to look totally desperate, so I’ll wait a couple minutes before I pull back the curtain. Her bedroom window’s right next to the fire escape on the second floor of the house behind ours. Her light. If it’s on, I get up, check that my parents are sleeping and fumble on my lamp. If it’s not, I let the curtain drop. On good nights, I tell myself tomorrow. Tomorrow, she’ll be here and it’s love that powers the universe. On bad nights, I bang my stump against the wall and punish it for her absence.

  If I can’t get back to sleep and I’m feeling really pathetic, I’ll slide open the top drawer of my desk and check out the Ziploc. I don’t take the ribbon out and fondle it or anything, don’t usually even touch the bag. I just stare down into the drawer and think about how there was a little piece of her in the piece of me that got cut off that night and wonder if that means anything. If anything means anything at all.

  Usually I just get up and grab the light blue Staedtler fibre-tip pen from the ten-pack my mom left on my desk, along with a new Hilroy notebook, so I could practise my amputee writing skills up here in private. Marker in hand, I’ll stand on my bed with my feet sinking into my mattress and redraw the shorelines on the world map. National Geographic. Scale 1:24,031,000.

  I don’t remember how I even got started on the map, but it’s mindless and monotonous and a lot easier than wobbling my name in the notebook. The shorelines are easy to follow and the blue is almost the same blue as the oceans, so unless you look really closely, you can’t even tell Newfoundland’s underwater and Iceland’s pretty much gone.

  While I shrink countries with my jerky left hand I remind myself of the rules: Jess is the one who makes them. I’m the one who obeys. No texting. Ever. No calls. Ever. Eric checks her phone. No likes, no comments, no tweets. All contact or signs of desperation forbidden.

  What’s allowed: I can wait for her to come to me. When she does, we can bang. We can laugh about stupid stuff after, when we’re lying in bed. We can talk about when we were younger. We cannot say the word love. What we’re doing? What we’ve been doing since she backed me into the bathroom? Just hanging out like we always have. Casually hanging out and fucking in my bed.

  Tonight, the alarm chimes. Minutes troll past like dead-eyed fish. 2:04, I pull back the curtain. Her window’s a bright rectangle lighting up both our backyards. I drop back on the bed, annihilated by relief. When I look again, Jess is at her window, a perfect silhouette.

  Five minutes later, she’s lying beside me. Her lips on mine, moving in slow motion, so we’re kissing but also sort of breathing into each other, speaking a private breathy language. My good hand on the back of her ne
ck, my bad arm tucked under my head. I’m careful with my positioning. But the smell is gone so I am no longer completely repulsive. And honestly? Almost four months out of the hospital and not that much has changed.

  Jess still comes over two or three nights a week, same as before. Lately, she’s been coming over a lot, so I’m not worried about that so much anymore. And I still wear plaid shirts over white tees only now I wear long-sleeved ones all the time. And jeans, the buttons and zippers are no problem—even belts are okay, necessary even, since I’ve lost some weight. And I mostly wear flip-flops since it’s warmed up. One day when my parents were out, I picked up a hockey stick in the garage and tried taking a shot. The puck dragged across the concrete and stopped a couple feet short of the wall. So yeah, I only did that once. I did go spring skiing with Frankie, but I felt like an idiot because, well, one pole. And I’m kind of off video games. And school. Writing in public. Listening to people talk.

  Jess pulls back a bit so I can almost bring her into focus. Your bed is super comfy, she says.

  Your lips are super comfy.

  Seriously. Why is your bed so amazing?

  Memory foam? Bamboo sheets? Me?

  She laughs. The sheets are soft.

  You’re soft. I stroke her neck. Your skin.

  She sighs. Listen, she says, all serious. Eric’s going to Vegas on the weekend.

  Really? For how long?

  Three days.

  That’s good, I say. That’s really, really good.

  This is good, she says, and rolls me onto my back. I slide the arm under my pillow as she swings up on top of me. I reach for her boob but she guides my hand between her legs and slowly starts rocking.

  Michael hits the switch, the lights sizzle on, and like a moth to flame, the kid appears. No matter what time Michael shows up, from under the bridge he appears. Always alone. Always wearing the same stoner smile, the same baggy shorts, the same red running shoes. Tonight, almost without speaking, Michael and the boy head for the equipment shed and drag out the Arm. Both of them serious as they roll the old pitching machine across the damp dirt field, like wrestling some Eastern-bloc beast, five hundred pounds of blood-rust steel, five feet high and three feet wide, reluctant, utilitarian, without a whisper of grace to its line or form. This is no plastic-construct, whiny-engined, glorified leaf blower that farts out a ball with a suck and pop of forced air. The thing looks like it could drop from the belly of an old MiG-3 and land unscathed in any field of dreams, ready to rip one across home plate at eighty-five miles an hour.

  The Arm, its name and patent number stamped into a small oval plate riveted to the frame. When Michael checked it out online, he’d been surprised to learn it had been manufactured in the 80s by a now-defunct company once operating out of Kansas City, Missouri—not in WWII Russia as the machine would want you to believe.

  It had taken Michael a night of tinkering to get it in shape. Even when he had it pitching, and pitching hard, he’d had to keep adjusting the release mechanism with a sturdy pair of plumber’s pliers after the thing misfired half a dozen times. The mechanical arm would ratchet back, gears clicking, springs compressing, until it was parallel to the ground. A ball would roll down the tubular feed and drop onto the end of the pitching sleeve. Fully cocked, dangerous with energy, there’d be the usual click, but no release, no small white missile launched. The kid or Michael would have to risk his neck tripping the arm, live with unsprung torque. The ball would fly wild into the backstop, and they’d both stare at it dropped in the dirt behind home plate like a live grenade.

  While Michael lines up the throwing arm, the kid starts feeding in the balls. Two hundred baseballs clatter into the caged hopper, balls the boy pulls from an old army-green duffle bag they now stash in the shed, along with a couple gloves and a fifty-foot extension cord Michael found in his basement on top of a tangle of Christmas lights. He’d bought the balls with cash, no longer “spare,” what with grocery bills and utility bills and lawyer’s bills—Christ, spare—even the word sounds quaint. Regardless, Michael hadn’t thought twice about spending the money. Still, he’d spread his purchases among various sporting goods stores across the city. He was probably just being paranoid, but in the back of his mind he knew some bylaw existed that forbade the breaking into of sheds and the unauthorized use of city lights and equipment and electrical power. Still, it was all petty stuff, nothing that would land them in any real trouble if someone started poking around. Besides, it’s a risk Michael’s willing to take.

  Since finding the Arm, he feels a tug toward the diamond, like he did when he was a kid at school, daydreaming about the go-kart he was piecing together in his father’s garage. It’s given him a focus, something to look forward to, something he hasn’t yet fucked up. After the rain kept him away yesterday, tonight he hadn’t even waited for Mia to head upstairs before slinking out of the house. And really, he has nothing to hide. She hasn’t asked a lot of questions, but she knows he goes out pretty much every night. She’s seen the baseball bat.

  “You up, Cheerio?”

  “I’ll catch, Dirk.” It’s what Michael calls him. A name he came up with to offset Cheerio, and the kid doesn’t seem to mind.

  Michael makes sure the boy is off to the side when he punches the red on-off button. The Arm chugs to life, the mechanical sleeve ticking up and back. The first ball drops and releases, hard and fast and inside. Michael grasps the metal frame and inches the machine left. The next ball flies straight over home plate.

  The kid smiles as he steps in, the bat resting easy on his shoulder. A ball comets from the machine, a micro-planet of blasting white, catching the light, the eye, streaking toward the bat, the anticipation of connection, redirection, right field, left field, centre field, the sex-scream dream of the back wall, it’s going, it’s going, it’s what they come for, it’s what they come for every night…The boy swings, all shoulders and arms, a delayed lurch of his hips. The ball slams into the backstop and falls to the ground behind home plate.

  The boy misses the next ball and the next.

  If it were his kid up there, if it were Finn at bat, if such a thing were still possible, Michael would be getting tense, shouting instructions: time the pitch, shift your weight, keep your eye on the goddamn ball. But this kid, this bridge-dwelling perma-stoner, this shorts-to-the-ankle smasher of locks, this perpetual misser of balls, he’s not Michael’s responsibility. Let him struggle. Let him suffer his own weakness.

  The boy swings again but the ball takes no notice of his flailing stick of wood.

  “Fuck!” The kid lurches away from the plate. “Can you slow that bitch down?”

  “Slow as she’ll go, my gangsta friend. Slow as she’ll go.”

  “Motherfucker.” He glares at the Arm, which keeps hammering balls into the backstop. “Motherfucking fucker.”

  “I’m getting lonely out here, Dirk.” Michael punches his glove.

  The hopper’s half-empty before the kid finally connects. And after he makes contact, he finds a groove, he figures it out, Michael can’t get to the balls fast enough. He keeps slipping, the balls fall in front of him, behind him, small white bombs dropping into wet green grass.

  “What do you think of that, Grandpa Cheerio,” the kid hollers after he knocks one over Michael’s head. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”

  When there’s a scatterplot of balls in right field, the kid bunts a few into the dirt ten feet in front of home plate. But it’s only for show, because soon he settles in and does what he likes best, binging balls off the Arm, shivering its metal cage. Michael knows he should tell the kid to knock it off, but there’s something deeply satisfying about the way the machine shrieks and shakes when a ball connects. Besides, the thing’s a beast, built to take the abuse.

  “Bitch!” The kid whoops every time he dings it. “Bitch.”

  —

  I DON’T KNOW what Jess is doing. Fourth night in a row she’s in my bed. She’s never come over four nights straight. An
d this time she brought a ten-pack of McNuggets. Which she’s feeding me, because apparently I’m too skinny. I don’t ask why she’s not with her boyfriend on his last night in town. I don’t give a shit about him. I hope his plane crashes on the way to Vegas. Or on the way back. Either’s good with me.

  Jess tears a McNugget in two, dips it into the little container of barbecue sauce that’s balanced on my stomach and pops it into my mouth. Waits for me to swallow. Pops in the second half.

  I lift my head off the pillow, grab a golden nugget from the cardboard package and try to feed it to her, but she turns away. They’re for you, she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. She puts her hand on my chest, where it has always belonged. Slides her fingers along my ribs, following the grooves of my bones.

  She feeds me another couple pieces of chicken. Greasy and bready. Pretty moist. As I chew, she licks crumbs off her fingers.

  You sure you don’t want one?

  You need the calories, she says.

  Yeah. I don’t say anything about my knife and fork issues. Or tell her I don’t really like McFrankenfood anymore. I lift my good hand and tease her bottom lip with my thumb. Let it rest, until she pulls it into her mouth and sucks on it, her eyes locked on mine. We’re both kind of trembly when she finally stops. I drop the barbecue sauce onto the floor. She drops her head onto my chest.

  Anda makan saya, she says, all her soft a’s warm on my belly.

  Indonesian?

  Yeah.

  What does it mean?

  You feed me, she says. You feed me what I need.

  Your mother says you need pants. My dad’s talking to the windshield. I thought we’d go shopping when you’re done. Since we’re on this side of town.

  I’m hanging out with Eli after.

  Oh. The light ahead turns yellow. He hits the gas and we fly through on the red. How’s it going, anyway?