Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  Mackenzie shifted uncomfortably.

  No one working on the play got paid for their time. They all did it in the hopes that a producer or an agent might come and see it. She hated the way Kyle looked up at Jason. For an instant, Mackenzie felt panic. She remembered once accidently finding pictures of Jason with another woman. She had looked in his drawer for a book of stamps and found instead the photographs. In them, he was in the Pacific with a woman, cliffs rising behind them, the clouds above them fat and white, the type of clouds people searched for shapes in. She had studied those pictures and imagined Jason and this woman finding dragons and Nixon’s face in the clouds. Mackenzie had tried to figure out who could have taken the pictures. Was there a boat nearby? Or someone on the beach? But the angles and distance seemed all wrong for either of those. For days later she had felt unsettled, remembering the easy way his arms held the woman up, above the waves.

  She felt that feeling now, as if the ease in which Jason spoke to Kyle, and the manner in which she looked at him, sweeping upward lazily with her eyes, connoted an intimacy that excluded her.

  Kyle studied the tip of her long red braid.

  “Jason,” Mackenzie said.

  Sam sat straight up.

  Jason turned toward her.

  Somehow, to say his name out loud was all that Mackenzie needed, an affirmation that they were still together, that Kyle was some unimportant person on the far border of their lives.

  He shielded his eyes against the light.

  Mackenzie smiled and waved, like a beauty queen in a parade.

  “Is it fixed?” Jason said. “Are we ready?”

  “What?” Mackenzie said, in mid-wave.

  Kyle laughed.

  A woman’s voice behind Mackenzie said, “Ready to roll.”

  Mackenzie realized how foolish she must look, sitting there, waving like that, when all along Jason had thought it was the projectionist calling to him.

  “Jawhol, my commandant,” Kyle said, and raised her hand outward. Her voice was high and girlish.

  Mackenzie looked around, uncomfortable, unsure if Kyle was imitating her own upraised hand, or responding to the projectionist. She dropped her hand.

  Jason winked. Or Mackenzie thought he winked. But before she could decide, the room went dark and the screen filled with a black and white Paul McCartney.

  “Yesterday,” he sang, “all my troubles seemed so far away. … Now it looks as though they’re here to stay …”

  Sam sighed, a big deep sigh, and rested his head on Mackenzie’s arm.

  Neat stacks of pink cosmetics cases lined the table in front of Daisy. She stood, pulling papers out of her briefcase. A sticker inside the lid said, THINK PINK! Her sales manager, Brenda, peered over her shoulder into the briefcase.

  “I know they’re in here somewhere,” Daisy said.

  “A Meg Griffith called twice today about her order,” Brenda said. She had short salt and pepper hair, the bangs pulled back with a giant pink clip, as if a butterfly had landed on her head.

  “I can probably remember what she ordered,” Daisy said. She thought of Meg’s plain round face. “Don’t put too much,” she had said, over and over.

  “Yes,” Brenda said, “but what about all the other orders you’ve lost?”

  “Look,” Daisy said, “I’m the top salesperson in this district. Almost in the region.” She thought of her pink car outside, the smell of its leather. She’d earned that car.

  Brenda’s face remained the same, expressionless. Daisy saw the penciled outline of her lips, an effort to make them fuller.

  “I’m sure it’s at home,” she said.

  She closed the briefcase, the locks snapping shut loudly in the quiet room. Outside the door a woman talked excitedly, nonstop. Daisy imagined Willie, still in her bed. She’d known him one week and was yet to sleep without him. It had been that way with Alexander once they’d started. She’d sneak him into her room at home every night that summer. They could hear the television, her mother and Iris talking, the refrigerator door opening and closing.

  Brenda said something that Daisy didn’t hear.

  “… you know,” Brenda finished.

  Since Willie, she’d been unable to think clearly. In the middle of the meeting this morning she’d grown short of breath just thinking about him. She’d looked, confused and inhaling tiny quick breaths, at the graph Brenda pointed to, its points stretching upward like pink fantasy mountains. Yesterday she’d gotten lost driving home from the supermarket. It was only five minutes from home but she’d driven somehow to the Beltway headed toward Washington.

  She felt, mostly, afraid. Iris had told her a long time ago that it wasn’t right to do so much for a man, to give so much. She used to tell Daisy, “You’re losing yourself, trying to be what Alexander wants.” And Daisy hadn’t listened. Right before they split up, he had told her, almost nonchalantly, that he’d had an affair once, with a student. Daisy had become obsessed with the girl: Who was she? How did she wear her hair? What did you talk about? She had made him tell her every detail, even though he’d insist, “This has got to stop. It was nothing.” And then the girl had actually called once, to tell him she’d won some sort of grant. Daisy had listened in on the extension. The girl had a very ordinary voice. She didn’t say anything special or brilliant. At the end, she’d said, “I wish you well,” like an old aunt might say. And then Daisy had felt awful, because she had tried to be like this girl, like this image she had of this girl, hoping that would make Alexander love her again.

  The day he’d left for Boston, she’d watched the Mustang drive away from their apartment in Georgetown, and she’d felt an incredible loneliness mixed with a kind of joy. She’d thought briefly that now she’d be able to sleep late or say whatever she wanted without Alexander’s scrutiny. But then, in a flash, she felt abandoned, like a puppy thrown into the woods to fend for itself. And she ran after the car, waving her arms and yelling to him.

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” she’d shouted. “Just come back.”

  She kept running, even though the car had disappeared from view. By the time she reached Wisconsin Avenue, she was yelling, “Goddam you, you bastard.”

  A group of girls from the college had stopped walking to stare at her.

  “Oh, well,” one of them said, “you win some, you lose some.”

  The other girls had laughed.

  “Goddam you all too,” Daisy said. She was crying then, and their images blurred before her. “Go and read some books, why don’t you? Go to the goddam library.”

  She’d walked away from them, walked until she could stop crying, then went into Au Pied de Couchon and drank an entire carafe of white wine before she realized that she’d probably left the front door unlocked and she was almost an hour late to pick up Sam at the sitter’s. She thought of going home and opening the door and the apartment looking empty, like no one lived there at all, the bookshelves empty and the walls bare, because all of those things had been Alexander’s. She’d watched him pack them into liquor store boxes, seal the boxes with sturdy tape.

  She ordered another carafe of wine and shared it with a man who said he was famous, a blues singer in town to perform at the Bayou. He was very tall and skinny, like the rubber man in comic books. His mustache was so fair it seemed more a trick of light than real.

  “You’ll come to my hotel,” he’d said. His accent was a mixture of southern and French, which later she’d realize was Cajun.

  She’d nodded. She thought of Sam’s sitter, calling the house, looking all over for her. She thought of how Alexander would never come back to her, she had done everything all wrong.

  The blues singer brought her to the Four Seasons. On a table in the room sat a huge fruit basket, with pomegranates and kiwi and ripe bananas. He’d left her in bed, where she finished off the bottle of champagne they’d ordered and ate almost all the fruit. She’d wondered if he really was famous. His skinny bones had left tiny bruises on her ribs and hip
s. She’d known, sitting there, that her life had started to change drastically.

  Remembering this, Daisy felt sick, suffocated.

  “I’ll call in the order,” she said.

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?” Brenda said. The hair clip wobbled as if it were about to take off.

  Daisy walked out of the office quickly. What would she do if Willie had left her? She thought again of the blues singer, his trickle of a mustache, his sharp bones.

  In her car, she rolled down all the windows and drove fast, gulping the cold air and trying not to be sick.

  “Listen,” Jason said. “A traffic jam.”

  He made a sound like passing cars, honking horns and squealing brakes.

  Jason could imitate almost any sound. Gunshots. Birds’ wings flapping. Running feet.

  Sam and Mackenzie applauded.

  “Bravo!” Mackenzie said.

  Sam picked the onions off his Tandoori chicken with his chopsticks.

  “So,” Mackenzie said, “the play.”

  “Kyle is driving me crazy.”

  “Oh?” Mackenzie frowned. The girl was bothering her too. Before they’d left the rehearsal, she’d called to Jason and thrown him kisses. She’d kissed her hand and then had blown the imaginary kisses to him.

  “She has no frame of reference for this play. She’s playing someone ten years older than herself,” Jason said. “Everybody’s an expert.”

  Mackenzie tried to quickly calculate how old that made Kyle.

  “What is she?” Mackenzie said. “Twenty?”

  “When are you coming back?” he said.

  “I thought maybe you’d fallen in love with Kyle.”

  Sam rolled his eyes.

  “Everything’s like this,” she said, and shook her hands back and forth.

  “Everything’s not,” he said.

  “Real soon we’ll be in Rhode Island having that big Porter dinner.”

  Sam nodded.

  “Mackenzie,” Jason said, “San Francisco’s a big city.”

  “I’ll find her.” She cracked the papadum into pieces.

  Jason reached into his bag.

  “Your mail,” he said.

  Mackenzie looked through it quickly.

  She wasn’t surprised to find the postcard from her mother. A picture of a diner with a rotating sign. The sign was shaped like the earth and pierced by a star. When Mackenzie turned it over, she didn’t expect to find a message. “This man,” her mother had written, “travels around the country photographing diners. I ate at this one. A double cheeseburger was only 89t₵. 89₵ I said to the waitress (whose name, by the way, was Bunny!). And she said, If you don’t like it, go somewheres else.”

  “Your mother?” Jason said. “Does she say where she is?”

  Mackenzie shook her head.

  “The Galaxy Diner,” she said. “Redmond, Colorado. She tells me what she ate for lunch like I saw her last week.”

  She thought of what Jams had told her about her mother using symbols and hidden meanings. This, however, seemed pretty straightforward. Mackenzie could imagine her mother telling this story, describing the waitress in detail and laughing, hard, at the punchline. For days afterward she would use it in her everyday conversation. If you don’t like it, go somewheres else. Until she got bored and found a new story.

  “My family,” Mackenzie said, “used to be so normal.”

  “Really?” Jason said. “Mine never was. My sister has anorexia, my brother is screwed up from the war, and my parents moved to Sarasota, Florida, and act like very old people.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” she said.

  “Also, I live here, my sister’s in LA and my brother lives in a cabin in Eugene, Oregon. For Christmas this year he sent me a giant pine cone, snow from Mt. Shasta, which of course melted en route, and what he claims is an ear from Vietnam.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  Jason laughed. “I’m not. My sister wrote me a letter last month and said she calls herself Star now. All her life she’s Amy and now she calls herself Star. My mother called me from Florida to ask me if I thought she at least could still call Amy Amy.”

  “We spent every August in Cape Cod,” Mackenzie said. “If it rained, we’d play Monopoly and everyone was always the same piece. Alexander was always the hot rod and John-Glenn was the hat—”

  “Baby,” Jason said, “nobody’s really normal. I mean …”

  “Please,” she said, “don’t get philosophical on me. Okay?”

  The painting was too large for the living room. It ate up one entire wall. The familiar gray and black blotches of paint hovered behind the twin wicker chairs Daisy had painted white. White with a tint of pink so pale it was almost not there at all. Between the chairs was a small round wicker table in the same shade of white, with a floral skirt around it. And there, behind all that, was one of Willie’s paintings.

  Daisy stared at it for a long time. Across the canvas, flecks of gold and orange and red shimmered. She tried first to figure out what it was, then why it was there in her living room. Perhaps, since Willie himself wasn’t there, he had left it as collateral, proof that he would be back. He’d also left a pot of chili simmering on the stove.

  “He’s coming back,” Daisy said out loud.

  Inside, she still felt a terrible sadness, and saw Alexander’s Mustang growing smaller and smaller as he left her behind.

  The gold in the painting shone like real gold. Daisy leaned closer to it and touched the flecks lightly. She saw then a white ribbon and bow wrapped around one bottom corner. She smiled. It was, she guessed, her Christmas present.

  The doorbell rang, startling her.

  Allison and Brandy came in before Daisy even reached the door.

  “P.U.” Brandy said. “I smell Mexican food.”

  The sky was dark behind them and a lazy snow had started to fall.

  “I saw you drive up,” Allison said. “I’m desperate for help.”

  She plopped onto the couch and held up a cookbook.

  “What do I make for hors d’oeuvres?” she said. “I mean, ranch dressing and carrots is not going to make it for Brad’s friends.”

  “Why is Sam’s room locked?” Brandy shouted from down the hall.

  “It’s being painted,” Daisy lied.

  “It is?” Allison said. “What color? I like that blue in there.”

  “How about buying a party platter at Giant?” Daisy said.

  Since she’d met Willie, Daisy had been avoiding Allison, afraid she’d blurt out something about Sam. Or Alexander. She wanted to start fresh with Willie, like he was the first guy she’d ever known. Like all those other men had never happened. She wanted it to be right.

  “Janet always has toys laid out for me,” Brandy said. She sat next to her mother on the couch. “Coloring books. New crayons. Lady Di paper dolls.” She pointed to the painting. “What is that?” she said.

  Allison laughed. “See how worried I am? I didn’t even notice that huge painting.”

  “Painting?” Brandy said. “It’s a wall, isn’t it? Paintings are littler. And they’re of something. Janet has paintings in her apartment. One is of a bowl of fruit and one is of …” she hesitated, “of flowers. Chris-an-the-mums.” She smiled, proud.

  “Paintings can be any size,” Allison said.

  “Willie and I may not be able to come tomorrow,” Daisy said. “To the party.”

  “You have to,” Allison said.

  Daisy closed her eyes. Why didn’t I just tell him all along? she thought.

  “Daisy.”

  “Look, you’ve got to go,” Daisy said. “I’ve got to figure some stuff out and he’ll be back soon.”

  “Who?” Brandy said. “Sam? Sam’s coming back today?”

  “Get the party platter from Giant,” Daisy said. “It has meats and cheeses. Tiny cream puffs and éclairs.”

  Allison stood, still holding the cookbook open.

  P
easant Caviar, Daisy read across the top of the page.

  “Please come,” Allison said.

  “One time,” Brandy said, studying the painting, “Janet took crackers and put a little piece of cheese and an olive on some, and ham and cheese on some other ones.”

  “Stop it,” Allison said. “I’m sick of Janet. Do you hear me?”

  Brandy turned around to face her.

  “Brad’s fingers,” she said, “look just like hot dogs.”

  When they left, Daisy took a glass of wine into Sam’s room. She lay on his bed. “I never met a lasagna I didn’t like,” Garfield said. The room was odorless, sterile, without any indication that a little boy used it except for the pennants she’d hung on the wall. Sam seemed sometimes to be just a shadow, a small gray shadow that haunted her.

  She tried to think of Sam’s personality, who he was, who he had been before Alexander had died. Once, in the apartment in Georgetown, when they’d all still been together, Sam had stood on the dining room table and sung “I’m a Little Tea Pot” for them. He had bent his arms to form the handle and the spout and gave an exaggerated bow to “pour out.” Alexander had applauded and had swung Sam into the air. “A real star,” he’d said. “A singer and a scholar.” But Daisy had found it effeminate, like the way he imitated the Nutcracker’s sugar plum fairies.

  Perhaps, she thought, if she’d had a daughter it would have been better, like Allison and Brandy. Alexander had been able to relate to Sam so easily. The two of them used to whisper and laugh together all the time. They used to imitate the Three Stooges, knocking each other on the head and falling on the floor.

  Daisy fought an urge to pull the stickers of smiling faces off the headboard and throw them out.

  Instead, she undressed and climbed under the Garfield sheets. She sniffed the pillow, thought she caught a whiff of toothpaste. She felt like a very bad person, thinking these things about Sam, wishing, almost, that he didn’t exist at all, that none of the Porters did, thinking that she herself hadn’t existed until the day she’d met Willie.

  She fell asleep, and woke to the sound of the front door closing. Daisy jumped up and tried to dress quickly, knocking over the empty wineglass as she grabbed for her clothes. She ran out of the room half-dressed, barefoot, pants unzipped and only the lace camisole on top, her sweater clutched in her hands. She slammed the door closed just as Willie appeared in the hall. There was snow in his hair and beard.