Out there, between dressing rooms or in a room near mine, two girls—teens, I judge by their ‘likes’ and ‘ums’—talk about jeans, which ones the boys like, which ones they won’t buy because boys don’t ask out the girls in the jeans that sit too close to the belly button. One of them says tell me about it, and the other says she and Bobby had sex for the first time two nights ago, so she thinks she’s ready for the really low waistline because her mom always said super-low-rise jeans were for those girls, and now she, finally, is one of them.
The friend says omigod, because she and Daniel had sex for the first time two months ago, and she had thought she was way behind.
They bring to mind my own first time, years ago, in a one-person tent on a lakeside sand-and-gravel clearing. Pit-sparks popped and fireflies blinked and dead-skunk smell drifted over from the highway behind the trees. I remember his name, but it—he—is little more than scenery in the larger memory. When it was over, we went for a walk. “Was everything…all right?” he said. Fine, I told him, wondering what “all right” would have been.
One of them squeals at something and the other says “Oh my god!” but I don’t find out why. Only giggles follow, and whispers.
I don’t really want to try on the dress. Where to wear it, anyway?
The satin falls in waves to my ankles. I rub it, take it between my thumb and fingers and slide one layer against the other, feel the ribbed resistance in the fine grain. Silk-smooth and slippery.
My first efforts had failed because—maybe—the blankets were too heavy, or the air too cold. The cat was making too much noise or the downstairs neighbors would hear or I couldn’t stand the way my own hands felt because they shouldn’t have been mine.
But here in this nowhere, I am nobody. All memories exist on the other side of the curtain.
And that’s all it takes, really.
“Is it on, yet?” Denise’s voice comes from somewhere down the line of dressing rooms.
The first time we kissed, his hair was long and thick and my hand caught in the coarseness of it circling my fingers like netting.
“Not yet,” I say, and I hope she doesn’t come in, but to make sure, I say, “Don’t come in.” I get up only to slide my jeans beneath me, then sit back down, barely feeling the seam that presses into the skin on the underside of my thigh. My body surprises me, the reaction more immediate than I would have expected, and the rest comes just as quickly, my breath held.
We stand in front of a three-way mirror. I can’t deny the yellow is flattering.
“You look gorgeous,” she says.
“So do you.” And she does—a Renaissance-era painting, full and rosy and dark. Her eyes are narrow and as dark as her hair. “Yes,” she says and turns to me. “You should get yours, too.”
“I thought you were buying the other one.”
“I’ll get both.”
I show her the price tag hanging from my strap.
“And? Mine’s four twenty-five.”
“Which one?”
“This one. The other one is only two hundred.”
“You can afford those?”
“Hazard pay.” She spins to make the dress fan. “He said he wants me to keep myself happy while he’s gone. He didn’t say how.” She bends forward, inspects her cleavage, uses cupped hands to nudge them high. “I might need this taken in, some. You think?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I will. I don’t want to look saggy like his mother. Did I tell you she called?”
“No.”
“Does Jake’s mom call you?”
“No. I mean, sometimes.”
“William’s called yesterday,” she says, and then, “Come on.” She leads me back to our dressing rooms. “And every few days before that. ‘Have you heard from William?’ ‘How’s the house’? What does she mean, ‘How’s the house’? What could happen to it?” She holds my arms straight out. “My god, it really is stunning on you, just like I said it would be. You have to buy it, and you have to come with me to the party. Look.” She pushes me past the curtain and holds me in front of the mirror. I don’t know that ‘stunning’ is the word, but I do like what I see, for a change. The way the padded bodice adds more than a cup size. The way the rest clings to my hips and waist. I swivel to this side and to that side and the bottom sways. I am a bell, a wind-dancing daffodil.
“See?” She sticks her face in the mirror, then opens her mouth and digs clumps of lipstick from the corners with her fingernail.
“What party?” I say.
“Some of the ones still here thought it would be fun to have a formal. Or maybe the idea came from their women friends, or their wives. I really don’t know. But it ended up sounding like a good idea. Don’t you agree?”
“Sure.”
“It’s not until next month, but that allows time for alterations.”
I look at my watch. Twelve thirty-three. It’s been dark for Jake for a couple of hours, now. “And they expect a lot of women to come alone? I mean, it won’t be—People won’t look at us funny?”
She pulls away from the glass and studies the points of her shoes. “I won’t be going alone. But you can. What I mean is, one will think anything of it. You can ride with us so you’re not by yourself.”
“Us?”
She slides off her shoes and picks them up and holds them by their ankle straps. “Me and Brian.” She looks again at the mirror and plays with her dress straps. “He’s Rear-D. Rear detachment? He almost doesn’t want to go because he’s afraid he’ll have to see some of the wives who call him. You wouldn’t believe. ‘I have a cold! So, like, my husband needs to come home!’” Her wife-voice is high, nasal. “From war, Mia. Are they serious?” She shrugs. “Anyway, the Rear-D guys are good for a party.” She swings the curtain shut and the rings knock the wall. “Hurry up and change, okay? Want to get a coffee?”
I let the dress fall off, let gravity pull it down over my skin, and it feels like slipping out of a bath. Naked again, or nearly enough, in front of the mirror and the shadows emphasize the tonelessness of my arms, the lines between my ribs. It’s no wonder clothing stores are so successful. In this light, anything looks better than naked.
________
“It’s not as if I never looked for a job,” Denise says, “but you know how it is. Why would you drive a taxi unless you had no other options?” Rain streaks the window behind our table. Air-conditioning season, now, and it’s on southern-standard high. I fold my arms to cover my nipples. Denise sits back in her chair, hands flat on the table, and I try not to look at her shirt.
There were options. Like teaching.
“Did you graduate from high school?” she says. She sucks latte foam through the hole in the plastic cover.
I tell her I did.
“College?”
“Sure.”
“See? But that doesn’t mean anything here. There’s nothing,” she laughs, and not with much humor, “we can do with our degrees. I applied to every major hotel in town. Not one of them contacted me. When I called them to follow up, they said they were looking for cleaning people. Front desk clerks. And I didn’t even try at some of the smaller places. Have you seen them? The one-floor wonders on the side of the road?”
I have seen them. “I drop people there, sometimes. What about them?” Blackout curtains stay drawn across small windows, and doors open a sliver when cars pull into the lot. People live in them, not stay in them. Tourists and visitors are steered to hotel-city, a two-block cluster of accommodations just off the interstate.
“Mia, they should be condemned. The lobbies are ten feet by ten feet, the grounds are littered, and,” she shudders, “they’re scary. I checked the papers for a month straight for other jobs, so it’s not like I’m not looking. I am. And do you know what I found? Telemarketing. In a cubicle! I wouldn’t even get to be a supervisor. ‘We only promote from within, sweetie, and it’s based on seniority.’ Luckily, my husband understands. I told him after the firs
t month of living here and looking for work that I can’t—cannot—settle. It sounds selfish, and maybe because it is, but that’s just the way it’s going to be. I don’t want another job. I want a career.” She blows into the cup. “William knows. When the right thing comes along, I’ll take it.”
I know what I’m supposed to say. That it’s his fault, really, because he brought her here, and that if she can’t find work, William can’t blame her for holding out for something better. It’s technically true, but more than that, it’s convenient, so I say everything I am supposed to say, the way people do.
“It must be a little harder for you, not being married. You two don’t get the extra pay. Do you have health insurance?”
“No.”
“What happens if something happens to him over there?”
I look at my cup. “It’s okay. It’s taken care of.”
“He put you down as his beneficiary, right?”
“I guess. Sure.”
“Still. Just because you’re not married doesn’t mean you should be stuck driving a cab. I assume you moved here to be with him, so…Wait. Unless you like driving a cab, of course! It’s just so…It’s so…What is it?” She looks to the beamed ceiling. “Something. No offense.”
I want to tell her that offense is taken, if even just a little, and that I drive by choice, not by necessity. I was a professor, an adjunct, but telling her that would sound like a defense of some kind, and she would ask Why? Why don’t you teach anymore?
“I was no good.”
She looks at me. “What was no good?”
“Pardon?”
“You said something was no good. What was no good?”
“Um…the school,” I say, and then I tell her I used to teach and add some things—anything—about the school, about the students not knowing the basic sentence structure they should have learned before being admitted to college (“I didn’t sign on to teach basic English”), about school politics, scheduling conflicts, a lack of opportunity for tenure, low pay, a poor paper supply that left the copiers empty just when I needed them for handouts, warm water in the drinking fountains.
I finish off with a complaint about bad parking and the price of lot passes, “Which, if you consider what we’re paid, is stupidly expensive.”
“You gave up a job as a professor—a professor—”
“Instructor. Adjunct.”
“—to drive a taxi?”
“I thought it would be fun,” I say, which is true, “and it is,” I say, which is not.
She smiles. “Wow.”
“What?”
“I have this weird kind of respect for you now. To give up something like that. Are you going back to it when you two move to a place with a better school?”
I say, “Oh, definitely, you know, for the money,” and, “Did you know they have art here?” I point over her shoulder at paintings hanging on the far side of the room.
“Mm,” she says. “So, when are you and Jake getting married?”
I tell her, “Some time after he gets back,” and sip coffee. Admitting there are no wedding plans will plunge us into the inevitable woman-talk of stereotypical men dragging their feet toward marriage, the Us women (when it should be ‘we’ women) need to push them into things like that or they’ll never commit; you know how men are, eye-roll, and Amen, sister.
The paintings must be originals. Typed labels display…something too far away, too small to read…beside the unframed canvasses. It is the white one—a white house covered in snow—that grabs me.
“Excuse me.”
I get up to read the tag.
Emily’s at Dawn, 1981. G.D. (Oil.) The house is old, chipped paint giving way to dull wood, the structure itself slanting rightward with the shallow decline of the snow-draped yard. The sky is winter-morning gray, but early sun shines through the haze and catches the shadow of an adjacent shed, spreading it across the undisturbed driveway. White sheers fall behind long, wood-framed windows, and the distinct, warm, brightness of dawn (but controlled—no brash oranges and golds, here) touches the half of the house closest to what would be considered the back yard, the slope, and inside is, must be, a woman, Emily, who would be middle-aged, yes, with long, wavy hair and wearing gray wool socks and a flowing white bathrobe. Happy in her kitchen, warm in her winter house. Brewing coffee, probably, unaware of the adoring man standing at the end of her driveway and watching her house morning after morning, who painted this rendering of his love, ‘pure as the undriven snow,’ no doubt, and like the house, worn but warm, hidden, the way she is hidden behind the windows to—
“What a dingy old house. You can drive five minutes from here and take twenty pictures of houses like that, and that’s art?” Denise says, passing on her way to the counter.
—her kitchen. No light comes from inside, but sunlight stripes the sheers and must (must!) spear through them and across hardwood floors, patching the wall, setting fire to Emily’s hair when she passes. The floorboards are deep mahogany and the distressed kitchen table holds dried flowers in the center in a crude pottery vase and there’s bright sun porch just past the kitchen and—
—and I have to have it. Have to possess it.
I check the tag for the price.
Denise, behind me with her refreshed cup, says, “One thousand two-hundred? Dollars?” She adjusts the cardboard sleeve. “It must be a typo. Excuse me,” she says, turning to the girl behind the counter. “Is this one thousand two-hundred dollars, or a hundred and twenty?”
The girl comes out from behind a grinder, twisting a rag in a carafe. “It’s twelve hundred.”
“Who’s the artist?”
“Doesn’t it say on the label?”
“Yes, it says on the label, but they’re just initials. Is he or she famous?”
The girl twists and twists the rag. “No.”
“Then what makes him…or her…?”
“Him.”
“What makes him think anyone would buy this…house…for one thousand dollars?”
“It’s not a house,” the girl says.
“It’s not a house?”
“No.”
Denise points at the canvas, her finger touching oil siding. “This isn’t a house?”
“Please don’t touch that,” the girl says. “Yes, it’s a house. But the painting is not a painting of a house.”
Denise cups both hands around her latte. “Well, I guess I’m ignorant then, aren’t I?”
Twist, “No, ma’am,” twist.
Denise leans in to me. “Would you pay a thousand dollars for this?”
I look at the girl. She sets the carafe on the counter and waves the rag in the air. I follow Denise outside.
Before pulling away from the curb in front of my apartment, Denise tells me she’ll call in a few weeks about the party and suggests I think about wearing “some kind of pretty yellow flower, but a small one,” behind my ear—“It’ll make you look so feminine!”—and adds that I might not want to mention the party in a letter to Jake. “Sometimes it just makes them feel worse when they can’t be a part of something,” she says.
APRIL 8, TUESDAY
Hot today. Heat dances on cartops. I watch the mailman come and go, his bag weighing heavy. When he’s rounded next door’s lilac bushes, I go down to check my box. Two envelopes, one of them a letter from Jake. His name, rightward slanting and angular, in the return address corner. The envelope is fat—four pages, at least—and by the time I reach my door it’s torn and the letter is out, fanned wide in my hands, and it’s not four pages, no, but six. Six! I open the door and slam it shut behind me and accidentally kick Chancey on the way to the chair, stuff myself into a corner and read.
March 1
Mia, Mia,
I miss you crazy for only having left yesterday.
I’m still on a plane. Or, I’m on one again. We had a layover at an airport with a bar, but we weren’t allowed to drink anything but water or Coke or whatever because we were in unifo
rm. Doesn’t war mean anything to anyone, anymore?
We’ve been flying for five hours this time and pretty much everyone is sleeping, except the guy next to me. He’s reading a book, The Executioner’s Song. I guess that’s interesting. I don’t want to say the title works because I don’t want to give you the impression that I feel like I’m heading for my death, but it does. It works. And part of me does feel like I’m heading for my death, but not in a real way. I can’t explain it. I suppose when you know you’re going to war, you know there’s a chance you’ll get killed. I’ve heard people say the chances of getting killed where I’m going are about the same as they are at home, but at home I’m reasonably confident that people aren’t trying to shoot me down while I fly the traffic pattern. Which still makes me sound scared, but truthfully Mia, I’m not. I’m sad, though. Leaving you was tough. I can’t believe I can still count how many hours it’s been since I was holding you.
Twenty-eight.
We had to go back into the hangar after we’d all gone outside to get on the plane, which turned out to not be ours. I went out to the lot to see if you were still there, and I saw you at the light at the end of the street, so I was waving and jumping up and down like a crazy man, but I was too late. If I’d come out just one minute sooner! Damn it!
Anyw
March 8
Well, we’re here. Sorry that last bit ended so abruptly, but I got tired and passed out without even knowing it. At least I finished the sentence. I woke up with Smythe (the guy reading next to me) punching my arm because I guess my head fell on his shoulder. He said I was snoring and that I drooled on him. I didn’t, though—he was kidding. You know I only drool for you, baby.
‘Here,’ by the way, is a place in the dirt with some tents and stuff. Not much else. If you want to know what I’ve been up to, I’ll tell you: a whole lot of nothing.
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