I stick a fork into the biggest potato of the bunch, bumping slow against the side of the pot. The tines slide smooth through the skin and flesh into the center, without that slight sandpaper friction you can feel when they’re not quite done. I dump them into the strainer to cool for a bit. I will not peel a hot potato.
I lean forward, press my face to the screen for some fresh air. It’s a nice night out, just barely a little coy implication of a chill in the air. The wires of the mesh blur, and spread, and pass from my vision. When you get close enough to something, when you hold it right up to your eyes, you can see right through it. Frank throws the ball for her for nearly two hours while darkness spreads outward from the woods, where night always seems to originate. The tennis ball tears a bright green streak through it. After a little bit, I can’t even see Daisy chase after the thing. The night swallows her.
“Fancy,” Frank calls. He shakes his head. “Willy—Snuffy—” He looks to me through the screen, his face pained.
“Daisy,” I shout.
It doesn’t matter, though. I can already hear the thump and whisper of her thick paws as they break the grass and scatter wet leaves. She gallops out of the darkness and into the half-circle of light from the bulb on the back patio, and offers up the tennis ball between her teeth. That’s how it’s always been with him and the dogs: No matter how far they’ve run or what name he calls them by, they always come back to him.
“Supper’s about ready,” I say. It’s seven-thirty. Usually he’d be real grumpy about having to wait this late to eat, but he lumbers in as I’m pulling the pork tenderloin out of the oven and doesn’t seem to notice or care. He holds the door open and gestures like a fine gentleman for Daisy to precede him through it, which she does, broken tail wagging and jowls still bulging around the tennis ball. He scrapes his muddy heels on the mat and takes a long time to untie his shoes and set them on a piece of newspaper I lay over the tile, then he drags a chair to the door, sits heavily, and wipes her belly and paws with a dish towel. “Drop it,” he says, pointing to the floor. She looks back over her shoulder, whimpering a little, and when he reaches for the ball, she scampers backwards and starts shaking it again with an enthusiasm so vigorous it slings strands of her saliva up and around to lash the top of her muzzle, iridescent like the paths of snails.
He makes her sit, and points to the ground about five times, telling her to drop it, before he finally reaches into her mouth with his own fingers, and still she won’t let it go, starts growling and pulling her lips back to show her big ivory teeth, and he thinks it’s funny. He thinks it’s downright adorable. Starts patting her on the head and scratching under her chin while he works the ball gently out of her jaws and slips it into his pocket. Then he heads straight for the cabinet to start setting the table, opens it right up and reaches for a stack of china.
“Wash your hands,” I say. “Unless you want dog slobber all over your turnip greens.”
“Dog slobber’s good for you,” he says. “It’s got antibacterial qualities. ‘And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.’”
“I used to watch Fancy eat her own waste in the backyard,” I say. “Do you think her slobber had antibacterial qualities?”
He washes his hands, then goes back to the cabinet and stands there a long time, staring at the dishes. When he finally stacks our plates in an empty corner of the counter, the top one is our nice china, with a country house etched in blue on the cold white background. The bottom is bright yellow plastic.
“You can give me one of those, too,” I say. I try to hand the china back to him, but he starts laying the cutlery on the table: silver in my spot, blue plastic in his. He puts a sippy cup where his glass should go. I pour tea into it, and he snaps the lid into place. Takes him a minute to get it lined up right.
“Smells good,” he says as I scoop the turnip greens.
“Well. I thought we ought to celebrate.”
He sets the vinegar, in its faceted bottle with a glass stopper like something a rich lady would keep her perfume in, on the table, and we settle down to eat. My back hurts from standing so long over the stove. Daisy sits next to his chair, her glistening black nose right on the edge of the table, nostrils dilating so wide you can see the pink inside them. She puts one paw on his leg and stares at him imperiously. He brushes her away.
“You go on.” I shoo her from the table. She trots toward the hall but stops in the doorway to look balefully over her shoulder. “I don’t intend to raise a beggar,” I say, and she goes on down the hall. The animals always did like him better. They could smell something on me, I think, that they didn’t trust.
Frank stabs at his greens three or four times with the blunt blue tines of his fork before he manages to skewer a bite. He washes it down with a swill of tea sucked through its tiny plastic spout and gets a funny look on his face, smacks his lips together real quick, as if there’s a strange taste on them he can’t quite place.
“You don’t have to use those,” I say.
“I don’t mind.”
“You should eat off a regular plate.”
“A plate’s a plate,” he says. “It don’t matter.”
“I can take them back. I’ve still got the receipt.”
He cuts off a sliver of tenderloin, chews it slow and ruminant with a look on his face like he’s listening intently to something far away coming closer through the trees. He does the same thing with his potato salad, chews one bite and listens close, still trying to track the snap and rustle, but this bite confirms what the last one did: there was nothing there after all. Just the wind shuffling leaves across the dirt, the creak of branches settling under their own heavy weight. Just the dog bringing back her tennis ball.
He swallows and sets his fork down.
“Don’t you like it?” I say. He should like it. I know what he likes by now, and I don’t cook meals he doesn’t like.
“It’s fine,” he says.
“The potato salad’ll be better tomorrow. I started it too late, it didn’t have long enough to sit.”
“It’s real good.” He folds his hands in his lap.
“If you’re doing this to make a point, you’ve made it. I don’t care how you eat. You can buy a whole new set of fine china and eat off that if you want. I don’t care.”
“You’re still mad about that?” he says.
“It looks like you are.”
“I ain’t mad anymore. I ain’t thought about that in weeks. I just ain’t hungry.”
I don’t believe that for a second. He’s doing this to be spiteful, I know he is.
“You shouldn’t starve yourself just because you’re embarrassed for me to watch you eat,” I say. “I don’t care if your hands shake.”
“I just ain’t hungry.”
“You are too hungry. You haven’t eaten a full meal in weeks and you’ve just been outside moving around for two hours. You have to be hungry.”
“I’ll build back up to it,” he says. “My stomach’s probably shrunk from being out of commission so long.”
“It hasn’t been out of commission. You haven’t been using it.”
He shrugs.
“There’s a difference.”
He wipes the corner of his mouth and waits politely for me to finish my meal. I don’t like how good-natured he’s acting. It’s not like him.
“The tenderloin’s perfectly good,” I say. “There’s not a thing wrong with it.”
“Tenderloin?” he says, as if he’s never heard the word before in his life. “Loins that are tender? That don’t sound like something we ought to be eating.” He chuckles.
“Stop rambling and eat your dinner.”
He sighs. “It’s just that nothing you cook has any taste anymore.”
“What?”
“You ought to put some salt in it or something.”
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“I can’t put any more salt in,” I say, and I have to speak real slow to keep my voice under control, “because you have high blood pressure. If I put any more salt in, it’ll kill you.”
“Well, you’d better do something,” he says, “and quick.” And chuckles, chuckles as if that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. He gapes at the clock in surprise. “Good Lord,” he says, “it’s eight o’clock already,” and he takes himself to the living room and turns on a rerun of Win, Lose, or Paw. On the screen, three women are faking heart attacks to see whose dog can dial nine-one-one fastest on an oversized foam keypad.
“How the time does fly,” he says to himself, or to Daisy, as he settles in his chair. I go back to the kitchen and saw off another bite of tenderloin already turning cold. The knife clinks against the plate. Between them threads of muscle snap and fray.
The electronic dog’s howl they use as a buzzer when your time’s up sets Daisy to wailing. She’s got a harsh howl, real deep and shrill at the same time, sounds like some endless existential sorrow erupting up out of the earth itself, just using her as its rusty trumpet. She goes on for so long, and Frank doesn’t do a thing to hush her up, issues not one word of rebuke, that I walk into the living room to make sure he’s okay. And there she is, sitting in the very middle of the room, howling up at the ceiling some awful loss she’s trying to sing herself free of, while he watches her and grins.
“I believe we might go on Win, Lose, or Paw ourselves,” Frank yells over her. He bends down close. “What do you think? A hundred thousand dollars’ll buy you a whole lot of biscuits.”
She pauses for a second and looks at him, considering this proposition. Then she throws her head back and starts howling again.
“Make her hush up,” I say.
“She’s fine,” Frank says. “She’s acclimating herself.”
“How is howling at the ceiling acclimating herself?”
“She’s feeling the place out. By the sound of it.”
“She’s not a bat,” I say. “I got her because she was the only quiet one in the place.”
“Looks like she fooled you.”
“The neighbors might hear.”
“Daisy.” He snaps his fingers. “Hush.” She quiets down and trots over, rubs her head against his dangling hand. The threat of the neighbors never fails.
“I wish she’d been around to dial nine-one-one when you were lying out there in the yard,” I say. “Maybe they could have got you to the hospital before you lost your mind.” He starts chuckling again. “I don’t know what you think is so funny. Nobody’s told a single joke this entire evening.”
He raises his eyebrows, like a recalcitrant teenage boy who doesn’t understand why his teacher’s so upset by his poor behavior, and stares at the television. Three men are gobbling handfuls of their cat’s wet food to see who can eat the most without throwing up.
At least he’s out of the bed. That’s something. At least he’s moving around.
You learn to ask for less and less.
TEN
The day of his mama’s funeral was the only time I ever saw her. He found her one night when he got home from my shop, slumped over the kitchen table. We’d been together four years by then. He was going to graduate from college in the spring.
“She’s dead,” he said over the phone, in a calm, consoling voice, as though he was afraid of the carnage this devastating news might wreak on my fragile constitution.
“Who’s dead?”
“Mama.”
“Oh,” I said.
“They think it was a heart attack.” His voice wobbled a little. “She was peeling potatoes. Had the knife still in her hand and all the parings heaped up in her lap. I thought the house was on fire when I first got there. From the smell of it. The water she was going to boil them in had evaporated away. The bottom of the pot was all crusty and burnt.”
“Who peels potatoes before they boil them?” I said. “All the flavor cooks right out.”
The silence on his end took the form of a strange, mechanical clicking over the line.
“Are you all right?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe I am.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I tried my best to mean it.
He was so busy making the arrangements, and greeting his oversized family, and writing a florid, sentimental obituary about what a fine Christian woman and loving but firm mother she was that I didn’t see him for the next two days, which was really for the best—the less sorrow I had to feign, the better—but he snuck me into the church the morning of her funeral, a couple hours before the service, told the preacher he needed some time alone with her. I didn’t want to go—I hate funerals—but he sounded desperate.
“You ought to meet her,” he said early that morning, over the phone again. I was leaned against the wall of my kitchenette, half asleep, the phone wedged between my shoulder and face. “At least once.”
I met him at the heavy double doors of the church, wearing his gray suit and tie and far too much menthol cologne. He never wore cologne, it smelled medicinal on him. We hugged and quickly let each other go, stood quietly for a minute on the pulpy boards of the porch. It was a clear, cool morning at the end of September. A cold front had rumbled through in the night, left its rain behind in wide, deep puddles that reflected the first autumn sky of the year, the kind of blue so startling children demand a reason. They reflected the trees that rose out of them, too, as if those trees had no roots but reached with their branches as deep into a sky at our feet as they did into the one above our heads, as if you could take one step and fall forever upwards. The world was a bright, strange place, I thought, where none of us belonged.
The church looked from the outside like a glorified shanty, with white paint peeling in curls from clapboard walls that a wind of no great strength could have blown over, but inside, the dark wood floorboards were oiled and polished till they shone, as if the flood had swept beneath the doors of the church and gathered into pools: as if our feet would step through them, crashing down to the murky bottom beneath, and darken the cuffs of our pants.
She was tall and sturdy, like him, barely fit into her coffin. It looked like the thing was trying to squeeze her out. The hands folded on her chest were big, with thick, blunt fingers like a man’s, and she had a man’s stern, set face but a head of lustrous gray curls so delicate and well-coiffed they looked out of place on the rest of her. She must have tended them real carefully; they had that sort of graceful, natural curve achieved only by painstaking daily labor. It was downright pitiful, though, the job they’d done on her. They’d caked her in makeup, painted her lips and cheekbones with color more vivid than I’ve ever seen on anybody living, and still her face sagged on both sides toward the brocade pillow, looked like wax melting. I could’ve done a better job myself.
“Looks just like she’s asleep,” Frank said, his voice wavering, uncertain. He squeezed my hand, quick and furtive, and let it go. “Don’t she?”
It’s all one big waste of time, embalming. A good professional mount will last you a thousand times longer than pumping somebody’s veins full of formaldehyde and painting them over with makeup will. Formaldehyde might keep them for a while, but you’ve still got to put them in the ground sooner or later, and soon as water gets into that coffin—and it will, no matter how hard you try to keep it out, no matter how many nesting Russian dolls of caskets and vaults you wrap around somebody, water always finds its way in—it washes the chemicals right out and the body starts to decompose so vehement and rapid and anaerobic you’d think it was making up for the late start. You ought to just skip all the moaning and crying, get them in the ground a little quicker, and save yourself the trouble.
And not once in my life have I seen an embalmed corpse that looked as if the person was sleeping. I don’t know why everybody insists on saying that.
“She does,” I said. “She really does. She looks just right.”
He
leaned down and kissed her forehead. I wanted to squeeze his hand; I wanted to wrap my arms around him and hold him up. Instead we stood there for a long while, our arms hanging heavy at our sides, and I waited for something to happen, for some moment of recognition where I would see the two of them there, see the parts of her that were in him, and understand why he loved her so terribly, when even I might love her for a moment. The light undulated with clouds crossing a window; the floor rippled under our feet. Then he went home, to ride back over with his family, and I sat in my car and waited for the service to begin. It was the last one I ever went to. I didn’t sign the condolence book, and I sat in the back pew, with three or four empty ones between me and the aggrieved, so I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone. Her family had come up from Kinston, and they filled most of the place, but I could see Frank in the front row, between two women who looked unsettlingly like her, his blond head bent low but still stuck up above everyone else’s. He was hunched forward, with his elbows on his knees, like he was about to be sick.
The preacher, a bald man with a goatee and a shiny, bulbous forehead, all of which left me with the impression that he would murder children if given much of a chance, availed himself of this opportunity to remind us that the Resurrection promised us in Scripture—I’ve always hated how they call it that, as if it’s the only thing that’s ever been written, or even the best—was not one of the spirit alone but truly one of the body, and urged us not to forget, or, worse, deliberately ignore this fact: that the true believer, he who has faith in the sacrifice and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation therein must also have faith that on the Day of Judgment—you could hear the breathy emphasis of the capital letters in his speech—when He returns to this troubled world, the body of this Fanchon Kirkman Clifton, and here he pointed down from his pulpit to her, with her man-hands folded atop her bosom and pink chalk smeared across her cheeks, this body, he said, pointing, this very body now laid out before us shall rise whole at one uttered word of command from Our Lord. The earth covering her hallowed grave shall rend, and the lid of her coffin swing wide, and this body before us rise and meet her soul in the skies above, to be whole again for all eternity, never to be torn asunder.
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