The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  Susan shook her head. “A good father wouldn’t let that old thing in the house.” She pointed at Meckie. “And a really good father’ d promise not to leave –”

  “Ah,” I said. “I see.”

  Susan frequently complained about my field trips – my “animal habits,” she called them. She also said I didn’t make enough money. Absolutely true. “If you joined an honest-to-goodness research institute, instead of teaching, you’d have more security and benefits,” she said. “You’re thirty-four, Josh. We need to be more settled.” Also true – and the only course of action now that we were about to have a child. But I liked chasing cats around the globe. It kept me on my toes, and made me feel younger than I was.

  ______

  One evening, late in her second trimester, after a wheezy, throbbing day in which Susan had had second thoughts – about the baby, about me, about virtually the entire planet (oddly, these black moods were always followed by weeks of maternal rapture) – I snapped a picture of her in the bath. Dime-sized bubbles of soap wavered and popped on her belly. “It’s all over for me,” she said when she saw me with the camera. She mourned her lost youth. “From now on, it’s chicken broth and buckets of drool.” At that instant she looked to me more sensual than ever. Radiant and pink, with her red hair pulled back. I wanted to cuddle under a Buick with her. “Talk to me,” I said.

  “It’s your fault I’m this way.”

  The flashcube sizzled.

  ______

  Perilous, the first year of our marriage. Several near breakups. I hated to remember it now, but I couldn’t forget in light of this permanent bond, this pencil-shaped new person that was about to be visited upon us.

  Our joint therapist had once described Susan’s restlessness as “low-level depression.” He said she was suffering from poor self-esteem, stemming from her childhood (her father was a stern Lutheran minister). “Until she corrects her self-image,” the doctor told us, “she can’t be happy.” This may have been the case, but it seemed to me at the time that Susie’s biggest problem was low-level horniness: a constant mild ache, wherever she was, to run her hands along the naked flesh of a stranger.

  I was fairly well-acquainted with this sort of thing myself. But I felt that a person had to be disciplined, otherwise you left sticky messes in your wake.

  For months after we’d introduced ourselves at college we circled each other warily. She was dating someone. A banker. My banker, as it happened. I was seeing several women. We felt an attraction, a grab, at the very least a tug – the emotional equivalent of a stubbed toe, perhaps. We had a series of coincidental half-meetings in restaurants and malls, hurried conversations, and one night, when we both failed to float safe excuses, a half-attempt at sex. Susan stopped us. She was still partially committed to the banker, she said, and could only go so far.

  I began to call her every day. I suggested we meet in disaster areas (earthquakes, tornadoes) where buildings and electrical power had been halved. We could sit together in candlelight, I said, sipping straight Half-and-Half (leaving it unfinished, of course) and listen to bootleg tapes I’d bought in high school. I had the Beatles in rehearsal: they ran through parts of songs, then quit. “I’ll only wear half my clothes if you’ll just wear half of yours,” I said.

  I had no romantic illusions about Susie. I was never intrigued by the mystery of unattainability. I simply felt lucky and at home when I heard her voice.

  After the wedding she’d sometimes insist, “I never wanted a husband.”

  “Then why did you marry me?” I’d say.

  She wouldn’t answer. She’d just look at me and repeat, “I never wanted a husband.”

  ______

  I went to the vet and asked her if I could prepare Meckie for the baby, so that animal and child wouldn’t be in each other’s way. She gave me a short list of tips.

  1) Before the Big Day arrives, expose your cat to small infants. If you can’t find a neighbor baby ask relatives and friends to videotape their children. Play the tapes for your pet.

  2) Familiarize your cat with baby smells. Powder, food, clothes. If possible, bring home a dirty diaper and let the cat get acquainted with the scent.

  One night I called Frank Peterson, the vice principal at the high school where I taught. His wife Janet had just had a baby. “Frank? Joshua Storey here. Fine, fine,” I said into the phone. “Yeah, I heard, that’s great. Susie’s eight months along herself. I know, they get that way –”

  “Get what way?” Susan snapped.

  “Listen, we have this kitty over here, and I was wondering if we could borrow one of little Michael’s diapers, a soiled one, yeah, to show it … oh sure, we’d wash it before we brought it back,” I promised.

  Susan dog-eared her copy of Henry Kissinger’s American Foreign Policy, on which she had an upcoming exam. “For God’s sake,” she said. “Haven’t these people heard of Pampers?”

  3) Set up the crib before the infant arrives and train your pet to stay away from it. Otherwise, the cat may want to sleep with your child.

  In a tiny room just off the kitchen I cleared a space next to the washer and dryer, built the crib, hung pink curtains, and taped up several pages torn from a Dumbo coloring book I’d found at the store. I sat in a corner of the room gripping a water pistol, a finely detailed German Luger, and squirted Meckie whenever she came near the crib. She glared at me, hatefully. “Screw you both,” I said to my wife and my cat on particularly bad days. Susan wasn’t talking much. Okra stems lay in the shoebox at her feet. I called my mother for advice. “Be patient with her, Josh. Her body’s going through changes.”

  “You’re telling me. She’s as big as the World Trade Center.”

  “What are you feeding her?”

  I glanced at the box. “Size nines,” I said.

  ______

  “What will our baby look like?” Susie asked me one night. “I mean, genetically speaking, what are the possibilities?”

  “It’s hard to predict,” I said. I pictured various members of our families. “She could be big as a battleship or small as a bath toy.”

  Susie wasn’t pleased. She was so large by now she couldn’t haul herself out of a chair without my help.

  One evening after dinner she wanted to take my picture. “With your shirt off,” she demanded, posing me by a window.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “When our daughter’s old enough to appreciate men, I want her to see how young and sexy her father was.”

  “Somehow you just made me feel old.”

  She popped a flashcube onto the camera. “Flex your muscles, Josh. A little Schwarzenegger action.”

  “Our kid’s going to think her parents were pornographers,” I said. I was depressed. That morning I’d resigned my post at the high school, effective at the end of the summer. Bio-Systems Research, Inc. of Toledo, Ohio, a small outfit on a farm road south of Lake Erie, had hired me to write grant proposals at three times the salary I was making as a teacher. Instantly I’d become a better potential father in Susie’s eyes, a more upstanding citizen, but my schedule looked daunting to me and I wouldn’t earn a vacation for another two years.

  “Glad to have you on our team,” Wayne Miller, my new boss, had told me at lunch. “We’ve been trying to bag federal dollars for months. We’re going to need you ‘round the clock here at first.”

  I was going to miss chasing cats. With my long hours I feared I’d miss seeing Jessie grow up.

  Susie circled me with the camera, standing on tiptoe or crouching (sort of), as though she couldn’t see me.

  “Josh?”

  “Yes?”

  “Smile.”

  ______

  In Buenos Aires, shortly after the military coup in March ’76, I saw a gorgeous gray Angora with only three legs, limping from car to car. Under the tense scrutiny of several heavily armed young soldiers, I coaxed the cat out of a jeep and took it to a vet. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

  In
the days before Jessie was born I’d lie in bed with Susan, rubbing baby oil on her belly, trying to calm her fears about the world. “Our little girl’ll be so helpless …,” she’d say. I practiced my lullabies on her, from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats:

  The Rum Tum Tugger is artful and knowing.

  The Rum Tum Tugger doesn’t care for a cuddle;

  But he’ll leap on your lap in the middle of your sewing,

  For there’s nothing he enjoys like a horrible muddle.

  ______

  The night Susan gave birth I decided I couldn’t be a father after all. I’d driven her (fumbling with the gear shift, finding fifth when I wanted third) to the hospital early in the afternoon, but Potts said it was a false alarm. “She’ll probably be in labor yet for several hours,” he told me.

  The maternity wing’s waiting room was empty except for myself and two other expectant dads who’d obviously been through the process before. They seemed relaxed, and were having a mild argument about the causes of sudden infant death syndrome.

  I found Potts again and asked him what I’d miss if I left for twenty minutes. “Go get yourself some dinner,” he said. “She’ll be all right.”

  At home I treated Meckie to half a pound of mozzarella. (I had been saving it for pizza, but Susan informed me that morning we’d have to start watching our calories – “For the baby’s sake,” she said. “We need to stay fit.”) I stood in the middle of the kitchen with the grater in my hand, and let the cheese filings fall to the floor. Meckie purred around my ankles.

  After my hot pot pie I took a walk around the block. The red lights of the radio tower at the end of our street darkened nearby roofs; the tower’s guy wires creaked. A cold lake breeze gave me goosebumps. I didn’t know my neighbors very well but I’d become intimate with their cars. Tonight the Moore’s Datsun was warm. Its windows were down – the interior smelled of French fries. The Ryersons had finally washed their station wagon.

  Yellow lights burned in windows up and down the neighborhood. Dinnertime. Squash, potatoes, beets. I felt keenly the rhythms of the families around me.

  In Fred and Alice Dorfman’s level drive I noticed a plastic baby doll, left by their daughter after play. The driveway was spotted with oil. I recalled the dream I’d had about the Fair-lane, but this coincidence didn’t startle me as much as the doll itself. Its features were lifelike and lovely. And casual. As though infancy, or birth itself, could be taken for granted – a notion so at odds with what I’d felt for months now, I became disoriented and somehow frightened.

  I lingered in the street. Then, I remember, I ran back home, switched off all the lights. I hopped into the Honda and raced without thinking through town. Video stores lined the highway. Life-sized cardboard Rambos stood in the store windows, preening. Slick muscles and guns. Several filling stations appeared to be failing along this strip of road. Owners had taped hand-lettered signs to their pumps: “Sorry, No Gas.”

  In a gravel parking lot just outside the city, teenaged boys crumpled cans of beer. They carried bowling balls in rhinestone-studded bags.

  I imagined my daughter sitting beside me in the car, her umbilical cord wrapped like a seat belt around her waist. Take a look around, Jess, this is it, I thought.

  Diesel trucks kicked up dust in my lane. To my right, the tattered husks of old drive-in movie screens. The torn white canvases on which actors used to dance, kiss, sing, flapped now in the breeze like huge cicada shells.

  Past fields of mint and wild onion I drove. Their loamy smells stung tears into my eyes. For a long time, with the radio on, I didn’t slow down or stop.

  ______

  Sometimes when you’ve been joking with a friend, then you shake hands and part, you may still have the trace of a smile on your lips – a little facial echo of a happy moment. That’s how Susan looked in her hospital bed when I walked into her room from the nursery.

  She reached out her hand to me. The space around her pillow smelled of roses (I’d bought a dozen at an all-night Safeway when I’d driven back to town) and rubbing alcohol.

  “Hi,” I said. I kissed her eyebrows.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  “Does she have all her fingers and toes?”

  “Yes, and she came with her own little American Express card.”

  Susan smiled. “Josh,” she said.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I think I want to rest for a minute.”

  “Okay,” I whispered. “Angel of God –”

  She squeezed my hand. “My guardian dear …” But she slept before I reached the next line.

  ______

  This afternoon the baby and I lie on the floor staring in delight and disgust at the Knife’s latest gift: a half-dead pigeon, one wing meekly thumping the carpet. I say, “We’d better get this out of here before your mother sees it, Jess.”

  But Susie’s standing in the doorway, laughing, with the camera. She’s quit fighting the squalor that baby and pet and an occasionally still-ambivalent husband – not to mention her own uncertainties – have brought to her life. She’s not very good with the Kodak; heads and feet tend to be missing from her shots. I once read that cats (depending on their gene-patterns) can’t see many colors. They can’t tell gray from green. Complex shapes are fairly easy for them to resolve, but they can’t distinguish human faces.

  Meckie stares at me as though I’ll snatch her catch. She’s right. Then I’ll vacuum the carpet.

  But first, I think, I’ll lie still for a while. It’s pleasant here on the floor. I watch my wife twist the lens and try to pull our daughter into focus.

  MUSTANGS

  Yesterday Philip, my nine-year-old, found my old drum set in the closet. The cymbals had turned pale green. They sounded like tin. The snare rattled and wheezed. “You play?” Philip asked.

  “I used to. In junior high and high school.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “Grew up. Got busy.”

  “You could’ve been on MTV.”

  “I wasn’t that good,” I said, though my riffs were snappy enough, in the spring of’69, to shake his mother’s hips at a high school dance.

  Philip weighed an old pair of sticks in his hands. He bashed the hi-hat with delight. “How much did this stuff cost?” he asked.

  “Not much. I pieced it together over a couple of years, mowing lawns.” A Gretsch tom-tom, a Slingerland bass drum, a Yamaha snare. Ludwig cymbals. As a beginner I used a matched grip, holding the sticks like two hammers: that’s how Ringo did it, and that was good enough for me. The music teacher at school told me this wasn’t the “proper way to be percussive.”

  “The sticks must oppose each other,” he said. “The right one straight, the left one held like a fork. Tension and opposition are what give the music fire. Like the act of passion, do you understand?”

  I said I did, a little.

  I’d joined the junior high marching band, the Pride of the Mustangs. We wore green and white uniforms and hats with plumes. We marched in parades through the city.

  “Where was this?” Philip asked. “In Texas?”

  “Yes.” Midland, Texas. Twenty years and half-a-country away from me now.

  I remember, in the ninth grade, in the big Thanksgiving Day parade, I dropped my left stick as the band turned a corner on Main Street. I couldn’t stop to pick it up – the trombonists were right behind me with their dangerous slides. Elephants and horses and shitting zebras followed our fat little twirlers, marching steadily in broken rows. For several blocks, until the parade was over, I kicked the stick ahead of me.

  The marching snare, strapped to my left leg, pounded my right knee whenever I high-stepped: black and blue for the sake of the beat. Mr. Webber, the band director, drilled us after school on a practice football field, yelling at us through a cardboard megaphone whenever someone made a mistake, rehearsing us for hours in sun or wind or rain. From him, I learned the most I’ll ever know
about self-discipline.

  But in those days, when I was just a little older than Philip is now, I wasn’t interested in discipline. I yearned for girls and a life of rock and roll – until the chilly night, one winter, I fell in love playing “Me and Bobby McGee” behind a sad young lady named Ida Mae Weaver.

  It happened this way. I had a friend named Jackie Waldrip. He played French horn in the Pride of the Mustangs but his hero was Jimi Hendrix, and he’d bought an old Gibson guitar at a yard sale. When marching season was over, we practiced Beatles tunes in my garage after school. Jackie knew a couple of other guitarists, whose names I’ve forgotten now, and we formed a “pop quartet” – that’s what the fan-zines called the boy-groups who were topping the charts of the day. Psychedelia was at its peak then – this was ’67-We called ourselves “Crystal Creation.” I drew an exploding diamond on a piece of poster board and taped it to the front of my bass drum.

  Jackie was a quiet kid with a sorrowful demeanor, even when he smiled. His brown hair looked like pigeon feathers, plucked and scattered. Musically, he was much more gifted than the rest of the “Crystals,” but he always deferred to the bass player on arrangements. I thought the bass player was a moron. He knew zip about song structure and didn’t even own any Beatles albums. Jackie adjusted to my pace even when I rushed a phrase. He looked up to me, though with his skills and gravity of presence, he should’ve been the leader.

  My mother brought us iced tea and Mars bars whenever we took a break. “You sound real good, boys,” she’d say, trying to hide her smile.

  We always rehearsed in my garage because it was large and new. My father was an oil man – which is what I’ve since become, running pipe up to Alaska out of Portland, Oregon – and we had a nicer home than most of my friends. Jackie never talked about his parents. I hadn’t been to his house. I got the idea that his folks embarrassed him somehow, or maybe they were sick or something.

  Often he’d stay for dinner after the other “Crystals” had left. Baked squash was his favorite food. That’s one of my strongest memories about Jackie Waldrip – I don’t know why. “He could eat a pound of this stuff,” my mother told me. “Don’t they feed him at home?”