The detective’s stomach looked like stone covered with skin. He was buttoning up his white shirt.
“Who? Who was interviewed? Who said my father was ‘jealous’and ‘impulsive?’ My father, if you couldn’t tell this for yourself when you interviewed him, is one of the dullest men on the planet. Obviously, whoever was interviewed never met him.”
I imagined my father then, wearing a clown suit, having a pie thrown in his face by Detective Scieziesciez. There was pie in my father’s eyes, and he was wiping it out, and the image made me grimace with protective rage.
“That’s not what their former neighbors at the Ramblewood apartment complex had to say. Bob and Mattie Freelander. They said your father suspected your mother had a thing for Bob Freelander, and that your father set a trash can on fire and tossed it onto their patio.”
“What? What?” I gasped. I was standing now, fastening my bra behind me as quickly as I could. “Who are these people? My parents lived in that apartment two decades ago.”
The detective shrugged. “So? A man’s nature doesn’t change in two decades.”
“A ‘man’s nature.’” I started to laugh, but it sounded like an animal heaving something up. “My father hasn’t got a ‘nature.’”
Detective Scieziesciez regained his composure as I lost mine. He sat on the edge of his water bed looking at me, distant and concerned, though there were already dark rings of sweat under his arms, and he’d just put on his shirt. I couldn’t find my panties. I had to get on my knees.
“Kat,” he said to me at his feet, “any man is capable of anything. Trust me. I know. Any man could kill his wife if he caught her with another man—a younger man, a richer man. Men kill. I know.”
“Oh,” I huffed at him. My panties were under his nightstand. I sat on the floor to pull them on. “You don’t know shit,” I said “If my father’s such a dangerous character, why the hell didn’t you arrest him, Detective?”
“You can’t arrest someone just because he’s capable of murder.” He stared blankly at my panties. They were lacy and white. “There wasn’t any evidence. And he passed a lie detector test. Your father’s a cool guy, if my suspicions are correct. He knew what he was doing when he got rid of her. In my professional opinion, your father caught your mother in the act, killed her, and dumped her. Maybe the Chagrin River. It was January. She’d have slipped right under the ice. By spring, she’d have washed to Lake Erie. We won’t be finding your mother. Hence,” he shrugged, “this case is closed.”
“But,” I tell Dr. Phaler, “that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I don’t really expect to hear from my mother, ever again. I’ve accepted that.”
“Still,” Dr. Phaler says, shaking her head, “that must be a fairly hard thing to accept.”
“Yes,” I say, waving it away with my hand, feeling annoyed. She’s leading me, like a horse. I will not drink. “But my problem right now is Phil. I want to break up with him. I don’t know how.”
Dr. Phaler runs her tongue over her top teeth. I notice that her glasses aren’t hanging from the usual chain around her neck and that her eyes, like her outfit, are green. Didn’t they used to be blue? She’s gotten contacts, I guess. “Tell me more.”
“Well, he’s been so good to me. But we’ve changed. Or, I have. I want to date another guy. I met this other guy.” An image of Aaron flashes, then, across the ceiling tiles when I look up—red bandanna around his neck, playing a guitar. I’m not sure, but I imagine Aaron plays the guitar, and badly. I imagine one day he’ll own a big, smelly dog—a black Labrador, and he’ll take it with him in his truck when he moves to Oregon.
Then I imagine Detective Scieziesciez holding a gun to Aaron’s head, forcing him to open the back of that truck.
“Do you have to break up with Phil to date someone else?”
I think about that. “Well. It doesn’t seem fair—”
“Has Phil treated you fairly?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well. Have you and Phil started kissing again? Or having sex? Is he making any plans for his future?”
“His mother—” I start to say.
Dr. Phaler waves now, and now she looks impatient, dismissive. “With or without his mother.”
“No.” I look at my hands.
“And has he ever come up with any satisfactory explanations for why that is?”
“Why what?” I ask. “You mean, kissing? I told you before, he says he doesn’t see any reason to kiss.”
“Any reason to kiss?” Dr. Phaler laughs out loud. “Who needs a reason to kiss?”
“You’re right,” I say, nodding. “But he’s been so good. You know. He was there for me when my mother disappeared.” She’s looking at my neck. Maybe she’s biting her tongue. The silence feels, when I swallow, like the white of an egg, or sperm, on the back of my throat.
Then she says, carefully, “Kat, have you ever considered that he might have been there for you when your mother disappeared because he felt guilty?”
“About what?” I’ve shouted it. I touch my throat. I’m surprised at how loud my voice has become, and I lower it. “What would Phil have to feel guilty about?”
“What do you think?” She says it calmly, without accusation. “Don’t you have any clues?” There’s an empty look on her face. A ceiling tile. It’s as if the Dr. Phaler I said good-bye to last August has been replaced by a fresh, more determined Dr. Phaler—a Dr. Phaler committed to scraping the ice off her windshield with an ink pen. All business. Ready to go. Chip, chip, chip. Jaw set in some direction I’m not sure I want to go.
“No,” I say. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“I know,” she says. “But I think it’s something you need to consider. You need to consider why Phil might have stuck around all this time, despite the fact that he doesn’t even love you enough to kiss you.”
I see my hands in my lap as if from far away, and they are the hands of a stranger, shaking. Perhaps I sound angry when I say, “Maybe you should tell me what you think. Obviously, you think something.”
“Well, Kat, you’ve told me quite a lot about your mother’s behavior just before she left. Don’t you think Phil might have had something to do with that?”
“What do you mean? What did I tell you? All I said was that I thought they were flirting—that she was flirting with him. Why should he feel guilty about that?”
But I can tell Dr. Phaler’s done. Her arms have settled on her armrests, roosting, and her mouth is closed again. She nods. My hour’s up.
Where did it go?
I’m not done.
“Do you think there’s something I don’t know? Are you saying you think there was something between my mother and Phil? Why didn’t you say anything until now?”
Am I hysterical?
Is this what hysteria is? I picture a can of trash with wings landing on my shoulder in flames, and hear my voice coming out of a narrow hole, a rabbit hole.
I’ve shrunk, I think, looking at Dr. Phaler, who is too far away, now, to see.
I am a pinprick, a little piece of who I was. My whole face could fit on a postage stamp.
Dr. Phaler stops nodding. She seems to be thinking. I can tell by her voice that she hasn’t noticed how tiny I’ve become—a miniature of myself in her new, green eyes. She says, “I don’t know. But if you want my opinion, there’s no reason to feel guilty about breaking up with Phil.”
When I get back out to the car—my mother’s station wagon—I realize I’m holding a handkerchief with the initials MP in my fist—in cursive, black, in a corner of the white square trimmed with bric-a-brac. I have no idea how it got in my hand.
I take it back and leave it draped like a veil over the doorknob of Maya Phaler’s office.
PHIL STOOPS TO TAKE OFF HIS BOOTS. IT’S THE FIRST WEEK of January, but the neighbors across the street still have their electric nativity set plugged in. They leave it on all day and night and, in the afternoon, there’s a weak and artificia
l light rising from baby Jesus, as if he’s swaddled in glare, and the Virgin Mary sheds dreary bandages of blue into the cold fog. I shut the door behind him.
“Hi,” he says, a little surly, a little shy. He has thin white lines around his eyes—I’ve never noticed those before—where the sun must not shine. The rest of his face has a winter tan, a wind tan, a reddish bum just under the skin. It makes his hair look even blonder, oddly blond.
“Hi,” I say.
“You sound stuffed up,” he says.
“I’ve been sick,” I say.
I haven’t seen Phil for a few days, not since I went to visit him at Sears, where we had an argument in the break room in front of another salesman. It was Saturday, and Phil had been “working the floor” as he calls it, which means sneaking up on unshaven husbands as they look at the prices on power saws, lawn tractors, dehumidifiers.
The department Phil works in is metal gray. The shelves shine with buffed light and, from floor to ceiling, are filled with the kind of items you might find in a junkyard, or dumped at the side of the road, left in the woods. Wrench sets, claw hammers, hoses, rubber mats to throw on the floor of your car, levelers, flashlights, dolly straps, fireproof safety boxes. You could imagine a grown man in bed beside his wife, a stocking cap on his head—and, above him, in the cartoon bubble that reveals his dreams, a floating menagerie of those items from Sears.
In the bubble above his wife’s sleeping head, there would just be z’s.
I had been standing behind a shelf, among the hand appliances—the planers, strippers, sprayers, drills—when I heard Phil, on the other side, say to someone, “This is the best random-orbit palm-grip sander money can buy,” and I’d laughed out loud.
Phil sold it to the man, who was wearing an orange hunter’s vest and jeans that sagged down over his hips so that, when he leaned over the counter to sign his credit card receipt, I could see the two mounds of the man’s buttocks, and the sad crack between them.
I felt sorry for that man, who kept looking at his palm-grip sander over and over again as Phil rang it up, as though he knew, somewhere in his heart, having done this so many times before in his forty-nine years as a consumer, that he was making a terrible mistake. The palm-grip sander with its random orbit would not turn out to be what he’d wanted, or needed, but he would own it now for the rest of his life. It would hang above his workbench in the basement as another painful reminder of his gullibility, poor judgment, while the waste around him accumulated like rain in old tires, or rusty lengths of pipe in the countryside.
Where would it finally go, I wondered, looking at the overstocked shelves at Sears—all this junk?
Where does it go?
For instance, those tires that are always wearing away, going bald on the highway—where is that rubber when it’s no longer on those tires? Does it fade into the atmosphere—gaseous, a breath of rubbery air inhaled, exhaled? Or does it wrap the road in snakeskin like a jacket? Weren’t we driving, every day, over and over our own shed rubber?
Still, Ohio is crammed with rubber factories—Goodrich, Diamond, Industrial Rubber Inc.—making more and more. Where does it go? Those eraser shavings—ten tons of that must be worn away every year in elementary schools all over America. Those children in their rubber-soled shoes should be knee-deep in that pink ash by now. We all should be—
But we aren’t.
All this stuff, I thought, looking at it, rubbed away, worn away—friction turning our things to weather and air. Where does it go?
It has to go somewhere.
The man left with his palm-grip sander in a gray plastic sack that said SEARS in maroon letters, and Phil, who had been smiling and standing up straight in his striped tie and white shirt, sagged, then glared at me. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
I stopped smiling. “Well, Phil. Doesn’t it strike you as just a little silly: ‘This is the best random-orbit palm-grip sander money can buy?’” I imitated him, a slow baritone. “Just a bit melodramatic, or something?”
“Sorry to be so ridiculous,” he said and turned his back to me. “I can take a break now, if you want to have lunch. If you’re not too clever to have lunch with an asshole like me.”
“Phil,” I said, following him into the break room. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot that you don’t have a sense of humor anymore.”
He turned around fast.
Behind him, a canteen vending machine whirred, warm, its miniature cans of ravioli and SpaghettiOs waiting. I hadn’t meant to sound so mean. He looked like he’d been slapped.
“Just get out of here,” he said, and a salesman at the break room table looked up from his Sports Illustrated with a noodle hanging off his lower lip. Phil made a shooing motion with his hand. “Just go.”
I left.
The automatic doors that led from Sears back to the parking lot hesitated before they opened, and when I walked through them, they tried to close on me, then stopped themselves short before jarring all the way open to let me pass.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I say to Phil now.
“No,” he says. “Let’s just sit in the living room if your dad’s not home.” His feet in their wool socks move nervously over the carpet—nervous, toothless animals. He sits in my father’s armchair in the living room, and I sit across from him on the couch.
“Look,” I say. “We both know this isn’t working out.”
“No,” he shakes his head. “It’s not. You’re too smart for me now, college girl.”
I sigh. This will be harder than I’d hoped it would be, harder than Dr. Phaler would have had me believe. “That’s not it,” I say. “There’s been something wrong a lot longer than that.”
Phil looks like a lifeguard out of work for the winter—wind-tanned, but his hair is turning darker around the roots. For the first time I notice he must be trying to grow a mustache, and I imagine Phil with his bristling, hardware-salesman mustache. The knees of his jeans have begun to wear away, and I try to feel the compassion I used to feel. “Poor little boy with a blind mother,” I remember my mother whispering as she watched him load Mrs. Hillman into a car to drive her to a doctor’s appointment, folding her into the passenger seat in her big winter coat, stuffing her in.
But Phil seems weak to me. I used to imagine a little satin heart with his name embroidered on it in my chest. A pincushion. A souvenir. The kind of thing you might buy in a gift shop, something that says “Las Vegas” or “Be Mine.” But now, there’s a cold, white stone in there instead—as if, during an apathetic kiss, something dead from inside him had slipped into my mouth, and I’d swallowed it whole.
It didn’t used to be like this.
I could still remember dancing with him in the gym: How young we’d been! A sudsy bloodbath of energy. Fat, in my pink dress, I was a sad valentine made by a child, made out of cotton balls, dime-store doilies, and paste—sentimental, pathetic, a little desperate, but sincere. And Phil was stooped but not yet bent, jerking to the music in his blue tux. Whatever burdens he already had, they did not seem permanent.
And all those sweaty nights on the couch, his kisses like blurred stars all up and down my neck. I was still fat. Together we were wading into a tepid lake. Carefully. The mud was soft and as loose as flesh.
But that was a long time ago.
“It’s over,” I say. “You’d better leave.”
“Okay,” he says, standing up. He doesn’t seem surprised in the least. “But there’s something you should know.”
“What?” I ask. Whatever it is, I think, I won’t care. Phil looks dilapidated, shrugging on his plaid coat.
“Your father knows perfectly well where your mother is,” he says.
“Excuse me?” Sarcastic.
“You heard me.” He’s putting his boots on. Reptilian. They’re army green, prehistoric-looking. The slick boots of a swamp dinosaur. Waterproof. Fireproof. “He’s keeping her up his sleeve.”
I sigh and roll my eyes. Typical Phil, I think—mangling his
clichés up to the bitter end. I picture my father with my mother slipped into his shirt on a stage in a kind of vaudeville show—aping in a top hat, the whole audience guffawing at the absurdity of this joke.
“What do you mean?” I ask, impatient.
“Ask him,” Phil says, opening the front door, stepping through it. “Don’t ask me.”
I SIT IN THE LIVING ROOM IN ONE OF THE GREEN-WINGED chairs for a long time. My father has gone to work. Outside, a plow scrapes through the streets, throwing snow to the side of the road, and the snow sounds soft, physical, a solid wave lapping at the curb, tossed out of the way. I picture a cow standing on railroad tracks, the huge machine of a train on the way, and the muffled, vulnerable sound of that cow in its path.
And then I remember the sound of her voice, which was as much a part of my mother as her body, but disconnected from her, hovering around and above her, as voices do. She had a soft voice, though it was often edged with sarcasm, judgment, displeasure. I picture vowels, wrapped in light, rising from her in clouds, as if something tangible could be made out of sound. I think, If the phone rang now, if I picked it up, and my mother spoke to me through the receiver, would it mean she existed any more physically than she does already, living in my memory, in her silence?
“Have fun,” she’d said, here, in the living room, as I left through the front door with Phil on the night of the Winter Formal four years ago.
“Have fun.” I’d handed her the corsage box he’d brought with him when he’d come to pick me up. The rose that was in it, surrounded by its baby’s breath, was pinned above my breast, and the box was empty. When my mother took it out of my hands, I could see it was lighter than she’d thought it would be, and cold. Phil must have kept it in his refrigerator at home. As I left for my first date, in the living room my mother was still holding that cold emptiness in her hand.
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