by Lily Tuck
When Helen left for good, she again went to stay with her mother. By this time it was spring—the dogwood was out and the Virginia countryside had never looked lovelier. As the taxi drove Helen away from their—now Robert’s—house, she noticed that the crab apple trees that lined the driveway were in full bloom and, all at once, she realized that she was seeing those crab apple trees for the last time. She would not be there in the fall to pick the crab apples the way she did each year, pulling a child’s red wagon behind her up and down the driveway to put the crab apples in. And later, she would not boil the crab apples with sugar and pectin and make them into jelly. The basement of the house was filled with crab apple jelly jars which, in the heat of the arguments and accusations, she had forgotten about. If it had not been for the plane leaving so soon, Helen would have asked the taxi driver to turn around and she would have gone back and packed up all her crab apple jelly jars. Or she would have smashed them.
A few months after Robert and Margo were married, someone described to Helen—the same person probably who had told Helen about seeing Robert in his green Toyota pickup truck sitting next to a woman with a lot of hair—how, as soon as Helen had left, Margo had wanted to exorcise the house of Helen’s presence, or was it Helen’s karma? before she, Margo, moved in. Apparently, Margo had driven all the way to Richmond to fetch half a dozen Buddhist priests to come and chant and tie a red cotton string around the house—the string then had to be left to rot. Margo had lit candles and placed bunches of fresh rosemary, or was it bunches of fresh sage? in each room to purify it. And had it? Helen had wanted to ask. She was secretly flattered that Margo had gone to so much trouble to get rid of her.
As for the peanut shells littering the floor of Robert’s green Toyota pickup truck, Helen has never made the connection. Instead, when she found them, she yelled at Robert: “Who the hell were you out driving with? A goddamn monkey?” Then, determined to show Robert, she got into the green Toyota pickup truck and turned on the ignition. She was either going to drive his truck into a ditch or drive his truck into a tree. Without looking behind her, Helen shifted into reverse and backed over Oliver, the brown standard poodle, who had been standing there waiting to go for a ride.
Oliver did not die right away. Instead, unable to move, he lay in the driveway with his stomach crushed. His eyes followed Helen as she took off her jacket to cover him, his brown tail wagged a bit, but that, according to what Helen was told later, was just a reflex action.
When, finally, Helen sees Duane walk through the gate, she waves to him. She stands up. She stands as tall and as straight as she can. When she kisses him, Duane’s lips, Helen notices, are exactly level with hers.
Horses
The horses ran up and down the field as if they were chasing down a steer and no longer belonged to Michelle or to anyone. Her first night, they pushed open the gate and got into the garbage, into the garden, and trampled the flowers. In the next room, she heard Michelle get out of bed and yell at them.
“Git! Goddamn!”
The next morning, out the kitchen window, Carol can see them standing head to tail at the far corner of the field, and she feels as if someone had drawn in lines—the kind of lines in a textbook between, say, a tree and its shadow to show how perspective works—connecting her hands in the sink rinsing broken dahlias under the tap water to the two horses in the field. Meanwhile, she hears Michelle explaining about her on the telephone.
“Was that him?” Carol says after Michelle has hung up.
Carol is visiting Michelle in California. She has known Michelle ever since they were roommates in college where they both majored in art. After graduation, Carol married John and Michelle went on to get her master’s degree in psychology. At present, Michelle works counseling patients at a hospital in nearby Bakersfield—pronounced Bikersfield, she tells Carol.
“Bikersfield,” Carol repeats.
And the job, Michelle also tells Carol, is not depressing, the way Carol or other people might think, on the contrary, Carol would be surprised at how optimistic some of the patients are and how strong their will to live is, and anyway, the hospital is where she met Kevin.
“Oh, Kevin was sick?” Carol asks.
Michelle shakes her head. “No, he drove someone in. A friend of his dropped a boat trailer on his finger. He chopped off his index finger. Kevin was there when it happened, he picked up the finger and put it in his pocket. The guy was in shock, Kevin said. When they got to the emergency room, Kevin gave the finger to the attending doctor. I guess that’s what attracted me to Kevin—well, not attracted me exactly, but I admired him for doing something like that.”
“Yuk, is that really true?” Carol says. “And did the doctor sew the finger back on?”
Michelle drives an orange pickup. Her dog sits on Carol’s lap on the way to Sequoia National Park. His head hangs out the open truck window and his nails dig into Carol’s bare legs. She can feel the dog’s saliva on her face blown back by the wind. Instead of wiping it off, Carol lets the saliva dry on her cheek.
“Push him off,” Michelle has told her, but Carol has not. She likes the weight of the small, warm, panting dog. The dog makes her feel less temporary, less like a visitor, as if she, too, might live here. Also, Carol feels well. She feels as if nothing bad can happen to her. She will not get cancer, she will not be in a car accident. She will not hear that harm has come to anyone she loves—not to her children, not to her mother, not to Michelle, not even to John, her husband.
“Huge. These redwoods are huge,” Carol says to Michelle. “You know what else I am thinking about? I am thinking about John. Sometimes when I am away some place, some place different, I have this idea that if John were to see me, John would not recognize me. No one would. Not my mother, not my children. They would walk right past me like I was a stranger.”
Michelle’s arm on the wheel is muscular and brown. She drives one-handed, relaxed, and as if she likes to drive.
“I like the idea that no one can picture me here. It gives me freedom,” Carol continues. “In Europe, I never feel this way, I feel the opposite. In Europe, everyone is always watching—I’m afraid to butter my baguette. But tell me more about Kevin.”
Michelle says, “There’s not much more to tell. He’s like one of those leftover hippies from the sixties. He lives in a trailer, he chops his own wood, he smokes pot occasionally. He’s okay.”
Carol says, “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“I like him,” Michelle hesitates. “Maybe it’s because you are here and I am seeing him differently. I am seeing him through your eyes. He’s not your type, Carol. He’s not anyone you would ever go out with. He’s not like John.”
“Oh, John,” Carol says.
“You’ll see, and his daughter—like you, she’s from the East Coast—arrived last night. I’ve never met her.”
“How old is she? The daughter,” Carol says.
On the path through the woods, Michelle’s dog trots ahead of them, and before Carol sees Kevin, before she reaches the waterfall and the pool, Carol can hear Kevin saying, “Hey, Max. Hey, big fellow.”
Then she sees him. Kevin is bent over, patting Michelle’s dog; Kevin is naked.
When Michelle says, “Kevin, Carol, my friend from New York. Carol, Kevin,” Carol tries to look at Kevin only in the face, at his light brown beard flecked with gray.
“I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re Michelle’s best friend,” Kevin tells her.
“Mine, too,” Carol answers him lamely.
“Oh, and this is my daughter, Melanie—Carol, Michelle.”
Lying on her stomach on a towel spread out on the rocks, Melanie is reading a book. Melanie, too, is naked. Melanie is eighteen or nineteen years old; Carol had thought Melanie would be younger, much younger—a little girl. Melanie barely glances up at the two women, but Carol can see that Melanie does not resemble her father—Melanie’s nose, for instance, is more pointed, more aquiline—her skin, too, is smooth a
nd tanned; Melanie, Carol thinks, is beautiful.
Max, Michelle’s dog, is running excitedly back and forth on the rocks. His tail wagging, he sniffs into crevices, laps at the water inside them. At the pool’s edge, he gives a few shrill pointless barks.
“Max! Quit that,” Michelle says.
Michelle is already spreading down towels, opening up the picnic basket. Next to her, nearly standing over her, his hands on his jutting-out hip bones, Kevin is watching Michelle. Unlike Melanie, Kevin is light-skinned. His tan is uneven—blotchy—his buttocks, his stomach, his chest, are much paler than the rest of him, except that Carol does not want to look too closely.
“Here,” Michelle tells Kevin, “you can help me unpack this stuff.”
“Does your dog like the water?” Melanie turns slightly to ask Michelle.
At the sound of her voice, Max trots over to Melanie. He begins to sniff her.
“What’s his name? Max?” Melanie sits up. “What kind of a dog is he?” Melanie’s breasts are wide and womanly and with one hand, she reaches out to pat the dog. The dog does not lift his head; he is intent on smelling her, as, full of purpose, he moves up along her legs.
Michelle says, “He’s just a mutt. His mother was a Yorkshire; I have no idea what his dad was.”
Max’s head is level with Melanie’s thigh, his tail is wagging harder as she strokes his back. Then, giving a little snort, Max shoves his small square muzzle right between Melanie’s legs.
“Hey, no, that tickles.” Melanie pushes away Max’s brindle head and laughs.
“You want a beer, Carol?”
Carol, who has been watching Melanie, quickly looks away.
“Let me do that.”
“All done. Sit down, Carol, relax. Enjoy.”
Michelle has not taken off her bathing suit. She has pulled down the straps and she is lying on her back next to Kevin, her eyes are closed. Relieved, Carol has done the same thing.
“Bliss,” Carol says.
Farther away and lying crosswise from them, Melanie has resumed reading her book.
“What are you reading?” Carol had asked her but she did not catch Melanie’s answer.
“You guys are so lucky to live here,” Carol continues. “I could lie in the sun all day. So peaceful. And I love the sound of running water. Some people don’t. Some people say the sound of running water makes them anxious. The temperature too, is perfect, just perfect.” As Carol says this, she wishes she could think of something else besides the weather to talk to Kevin about.
Less talkative than usual, Michelle does not even appear to be listening to Carol, so that staring up at the sky—a cloudless, stubborn blue—Carol wishes for she does not know what: John naked, Kevin dressed.
“Michelle tells me that you travel a lot,” Kevin says to Carol after a while.
“My husband does a lot of business in Europe,” Carol answers. “He goes over all the time. Sometimes I go with him.”
“You’re lucky,” Kevin says. “I’ve never been to Europe. I’d love to see the museums over there, the architecture. And you know where else I’d like to go?” he asks.
“No, where?”
“I’d like to go to China. I’d like to travel all over China, go to Shanghai and Beijing, visit the Forbidden City, take a boat down the Yangtze River, but mainly I’d like to walk along the Great Wall. I read in a magazine somewhere that the Great Wall is the one manmade thing on earth that the astronauts could see clearly from the moon. Have you been, Carol?”
“China. No,” Carol says.
No one speaks for a moment, then Michelle says, “Oh, I don’t know what made me think of this but you know what I read in a magazine the other day? In one of those men’s magazines—I read about a competition. A competition for the photograph of the smallest prick.”
“Gee,” Kevin sits up, “maybe I should have—”
“Wait, Kevin, let me finish. And you know what? They got hundreds of pictures of perfectly normal-size pricks.”
“Is that true?” Melanie raises her head.
“Oops. Sorry. I forgot you were here, Melanie—but isn’t that sad? Carol, isn’t that one of the saddest things you’ve ever heard?”
Carol says, “That’s pretty funny. I guess every man—”
Kevin says, “You girls want to go for a swim before we eat?”
As Kevin stands up, his foot knocks into Carol’s leg. She opens her eyes just as Kevin steps over her.
The sun is shining directly on the pool but the water is so deep it is black, black except for where the waterfall falls into it, and there the water is lighter and a swirling green. At the opposite edge of the pool where the water runs down and disappears over the rocks, the black turns into a different color green.
“Cold?” Carol sits up to watch.
“Come on in, Carol,” Kevin answers as Michelle, her face in the water, kicks vigorously and swims past him.
“No, it’s not bad, I’ve been in already,” Melanie says as she shuts her book and stands up. “You want to go in?” Melanie asks the dog, Max, who is lying on his side in the sun.
Poised on her tiptoes at the edge of the rocks, Melanie does a perfect little dive. Her legs tucked neatly together, her toes pointed, her brown buttocks clamped shut, in one swift motion all of her slides into the water with a single splashless ripple.
From the water, Melanie calls out to the dog, “Max, here boy! Come on!”
Max has stood up. Slowly, he stretches himself out on the rock, then, uncertain, he arches his back. In the air, his tail wags back and forth, rhythmically, like a metronome.
“Come on,” Melanie calls out to him again. “I wish I had a stick.”
“I’ll get you one.”
Carol walks a little way back up the path they came from through the woods. She got up too quickly, and because of the beer and the sun, she feels a little dizzy, a little unsteady on her feet. She also remembers how well she had felt earlier that morning in the pickup truck with Michelle. That feeling of well-being is gone.
For no reason she can think of, Carol is now reminded of spring vacation of her junior year when she and Michelle went to Italy to look at art. Carol remembers how excited she and Michelle were—neither one of them had ever been to Europe before. Carol also remembers how she had packed so carefully for the trip—all her best clothes—in a suitcase she had bought especially. An expensive suitcase. Nor will Carol ever forget how the moment they landed in Rome, their first stop, she realized, all of a sudden, that she had forgotten the key to her new suitcase. The key—she could see the little brass key in her head—was lying on top of her bureau in her room in the dorm. Carol and Michelle had then taken a taxi through a maze of narrow dark streets to a locksmith the concierge in the hotel had recommended to them, but the locksmith could not get Carol’s suitcase open either. The locksmith said, or he said it in sign language since Carol could only speak a few words of Italian and he spoke no English, that he would have to break the lock, and Carol had told him: No, mai, grazie. Her expensive new suitcase would be ruined. So during the entire trip, the two weeks, through all of Italy—Rome, Florence, Venice, Verona, Milan—everywhere she went, Carol had lugged her heavy suitcase which she never could open.
When Carol returns with a stick, Max is already in the water. Rigid, his head is pointing straight up, his legs splash water as he swims in an aimless ungainly wet circle.
“Atta boy, Max,” Melanie says as she swims next to him. “Good boy.”
“Come on in, Carol,” Kevin says again, while next to him Michelle treads water and watches her dog, Max.
Carol takes a deep breath and dives into the pool. Her dive, she knows, is not as neat and perfect as Melanie’s. At the last minute, her legs bend in an awkward split. Also, she does not know how deep, and the water, she feels in a rush that could stop her heart, is as cold as ice. For a panicky instant, her arms and legs feel useless; she is a stone and not buoyant.
When Carol breaks through, she tri
es not to gasp at the air. Her hair partly covers her face and the strap of her bathing suit has let go. Max is paddling next to her, and his soaked head looks shrunken. For all his thrashing, the dog is not making any headway. In the water, Carol turns away to adjust her bathing suit. To catch her breath.
Before she realizes that the water she is swimming in has changed color and before Carol hears Michelle call out a warning, “Carol, watch out! Don’t get too close to the edge,” Carol feels the pull of the current. She also hears Melanie say, “Maybe I should take him out. What do you think, Michelle? Max doesn’t really like the water.” Michelle’s answer—“Poor Max is getting all tired out”—floats past Carol as she struggles to make her way toward the other side of the pool at the same time as she watches Melanie reach over and pick up the dog in her arms and swim easily with a one-arm stroke, the dog pressed against her bare breasts; even as Carol pushes as hard as she can against the water, she still watches Melanie hold the small dog and clamber out of the water. With the dog in her arms, Melanie has to balance herself with one hand to get her footing to climb on to the rocks, as she does this, she has to lean way over so her buttocks part, and Carol can see her pale anus and the wet pubic hair that hangs down in dark dripping strands between Melanie’s legs.
Carol is all right again. Carol is free of the current. She can swim back toward the rocks and toward where Max is shaking the water from his coat and to where Melanie has picked up a towel and is getting ready to dry him. Next to her, in the pool, Kevin is holding Carol by the shoulders, he is saying something to her that she only half hears, only half understands, something that to her sounds like whoathere, whoatheregirl while, underwater, she feels parts of Kevin’s soft flesh brush up against her, parts that she cannot identify but that she can imagine—the calf of his leg, his belly, his penis maybe—and that to Carol feel like useless appendages.
Limbo
What I remember about Peru is: flying in a plane over the Andes and fainting; stealing a statue of the baby Jesus; and threatening to eat a dog turd.
