Homefront

by Kristen Tsetsi

  Her eyes are deep and dark, not plain and light like mine, and her nose is narrow, low, elongating the face. My cheeks are round, but hers are sharp—pointed, even—and with dark hollows underneath. Her jaw is weak, the mouth thin with a down-turned upper lip. I check the eyes again. The bottom lids are missing, just upper lashes and irises and whites that pour into the face.

  “Almost there.” He draws the hair in straight, quick lines criss-crossing over my forehead, uses scribbles to cover my ears and shoulders, then drops his pencil on the floor and picks up his drink and steps backward until he is standing beside me. “Beautiful,” he says.

  I tell him thank you, but that it looks nothing like me, though—slowly—I’m starting to see it.

  “It’s you, all right.” He sits on the couch.

  I turn the chair back to the living room and tuck my feet, but I can’t get comfortable.

  He closes his eyes and swoops his fingers in front of his face, drawing closed an invisible curtain. “I see,” he says. “What I see with my eyes closed is what you see there.” He points at the canvas, opens his eyes. “Artist. Capital ‘A’.” He squints at me. “Doctor.” He laughs. “Donny Donaldson. Doctor. Artist.” He lights a cigarette. “Doctist.”

  “Actor,” I say. It’s too bright because he turned on all the lights again, said the one lamp wasn’t enough to ‘reveal’ me. “Where’s the light switch?”

  “There by the door.”

  I hold steady both ways with a hand on the back of the couch.

  “What do you mean, ‘actor’? You think I lie, or—damn, just like my wife,” he says. “Do somethin’ for her and two minutes later she’s kickin’ you in the head. Don’t like me doin’ nothin’ for others, neither. Got mad ‘cause I helped out a friend—so what if it’s a woman?—and took everythin’, went to her mother’s.”

  I try to remember. He said she was somewhere else, that she left to stay with someone, but not her mother. “I thought you said she was at a man’s house.”

  “Now, why would I say that?”

  “I don’t know. But you did. I remember.”

  “You think I’d be sittin’ here with you if my wife was with some other man? What kind of a man would I be to let that happen? You think I’m some piece of shit, candy-ass that’d let someone get on his wife?”

  “But you said—”

  “Naw. I thought you had somethin’ beautiful and kind and decent inside, but then you go and say what you did.”

  “Donny.”

  “Don’t you know me? I ain’t goin’ to lie to you. Not you. You’re my angel. I love you.” He slides off the couch and hobbles over to me on his knees, stopping at my legs. “I know you don’t mean what you say, and sometimes what comes out of you is ‘cause you’re upset about things. Let me do my—let me fix it for you.”

  “I don’t need you to fix—”

  “Doctor Donaldson! I want to help.”

  He is close enough for kissing, his eyes shining and brown and two inches from mine, but he doesn't waver, doesn't fall in. His hands wrap tight around the chair arms. I close my eyes and he is Donny-in-the-picture, peacenik hippie. The before image.

  “Donny.” I open my eyes and reach out for him and he pushes off to stand. My drink falls in my lap and bleeds through, cold, to my thighs.

  “You know Judy?—Naw, you don’t know Judy. I’m the only one that knows her, ‘cause she’s like me. Artist, but she’s better. Genius. You should see what she—me and her, no one else gets her, you hear what I’m sayin’? I tried to tell Emily—no, not sex, not lust, not with me and Judy. We don’t live in the world of sex and lust and—Sex! Sex! She’s always makin’ something real into somethin’ else. Y’see? We, me and Judy, we are the—the earth, or—the veins, like blood. The love and the shit of it, all of it, and you can’t talk about it, can’t tell someone about it. That’s why, art. You…people like you…you take good bourbon and you mix it with Coke ‘cause you can’t take it, got to make the hot go away.” He bends to grab my hands and closes them in his, kneels again in front of me. “Artist,” he says. “Understan’?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  He leans forward until our shoulders touch and holds me and whatever he said is already gone, lost in settling bourbon-heat. I am in someone’s arms, snug, not tight, and breath falls on my neck just under my earlobe. I hug him back and his hair brushes my eyelashes and I hug him back and feel a pulse that isn’t mine and I hug him back until he stops and pulls away, telling me again that he loves me, that I am an angel. He stands again and asks if I’m ready, now, for another bourbon. “You ain’t drivin’ tonight,” he says. He smoothes my hair off my forehead. “But don’t worry. I got clean sheets for the pullout.”

  APRIL 17, THURSDAY

  Before-morning darkness. I can feel it without opening my eyes, recognize the shape of my chair and the fold my body forms to fit. Chancey purrs on my hip. A commercial jingle plays. I feel around for the remote control and find it under my arm, press the power button, try to remember how I got home. Not my car. Lionel. He charged full price and accepted the tip. I might have begged him for my job back while we waited for my burger and shake at the drive-through, and he might have said to ask again later, when I’m sober.

  My head throbs and I’m thirsty.

  I close my eyes.

  ________

  Scratching, rapid and insistent. The corner of my chair is sleep-breath rancid and my back and shoulders ache when I stand.

  Chancey’s bowls are empty. I fill the water dish. Pour in food. Chancey doesn’t come, but instead guards the front door, meowing. Through the peephole I spot the rear end of one of the downstairs cats, the gray one, and across the hall a couple of newspapers in yellow cellophane on the neighbor’s straw welcome mat. I push Chancey aside and go out to the hallway, carry the gray cat down the stairs and drop it in apartment three’s open doorway. Back upstairs I check the wrapped papers, find today’s, and bring it in. I open it to the classifieds and fix a drink.

  Secretary. Secretary. Medical technician. Truck driver. Factory worker. Factory worker. I crumple the page, my fingertips ink-sticky and black, and toss it in the living room for the cat.

  ________

  Blue sky outside and green-studded, slender branches on the oak. The woman from downstairs—I try to remember her name…Safia?—stands out on the sidewalk, looks up at her first floor window and waves, then turns her back to the wind and exhales, the smoke immediately whipped away from her cigarette. She is barefoot with colored toenails, and the frayed hem of her peasant skirt blows around her ankles. Sitting nearby in the grass, her black cat. I open the window.

  “Safia,” I call down—hoping it is, in fact, her name—and mime smoking. “Can I have one?”

  “Of course!” she says. She points, jabbing over my head, and nods.

  I’d meant to meet her, to take it and smoke it alone, but she’s already picking up her cat and carrying it to the stoop. “Come on up,” I shout just before the main door slams.

  Smoke spirals stretch and unwind over the table. Safia drinks black coffee, brought along in a bright yellow mug. Three in the afternoon seems late for coffee. Maybe she thinks three in the afternoon seems early for my alcohol breath.

  She looks around, eyes pausing on wall hangings, the clock, the open bottle on the counter, me. I smile and say, “Thank you. Again. And I’m really sorry. I’m buying some today, and—so, I mean, I’ll pay you back.”

  She shakes her head, waves me off. “I have never seen any of the other apartments in the building. It is hard to believe the same floor plan can look so different.”

  There is a wedge of an accent I hadn’t noticed before. I nod, say, “Mm,” and, “I thought so, too. Isn’t it strange?” The only one I’ve seen, aside from a small part of her kitchen, is my own.

  “Safia!” Her name comes loud, suddenly, from somewhere.

  “One moment,” she says to me. “Yes?” She leans under the raised window, her nos
e pressing against the screen.

  “I’m going. Do you need anything?”

  “Fish oil,” she says, and her husband, standing curbside, writes it in the air before leaving. We watch out the window, listen for the starting engine, and smile fast at one another when we make eye contact. She waves at their car when it passes.

  I say, “Have you been married long?”

  “Not long, no. Nearly one year.”

  Nothing to say, again, so I ask how long they’d known each other before marrying.

  She shrugs and takes a sip from the yellow mug, then sets it down and looks out the window. “Not long.”

  Her skin is dark, lotion-smooth, and her hair has, since the last time I saw her, been dyed a sort of bronze, an attempt at blonde, maybe, and strikingly ‘American.’ She turns her face to the heavy breeze and closes her eyes.

  I have a feeling I could disappear right now, and when I did she would hum or sigh, finish her coffee, and glide out of my apartment, never even here.

  Pulse-circles vibrate in our glasses under the low pass of a Chinook. They’ve been flying often, lately, following the pattern, crossing west to east over the roof.

  “Chinook,” I say and watch it disappear.

  “They are so loud,” Safia says. “So late, sometimes—thump thump thump thump thump—and I wake up and cannot go back to sleep. I wish they would all go away. Go to Iraq. Go to the moon. Let them go anywhere, but let them be quiet.”

  I put out my cigarette, then chase burning tobacco bits and flatten them to ash. I take—without asking—another one from the pack she’s left on the table and light it. “Not Iraq, maybe.”

  “No? But, the faster they go, the more that go, the quicker it is over. It is a stupid war,” she says.

  “Mm.”

  She tilts her head. “Mm?”

  “I’m just sur—A lot of people don’t talk about—well, they won’t say that. Not that.”

  “Say what?”

  “That it’s a stupid war. I mean, I know people think it, but—well, you know. It’s just not popular to go around saying it.”

  “But I can say I like the war, and no problems?”

  “You can say anything you want. It’s just—well, because people are getting killed, and everything. Not agreeing with it isn’t—it won’t make you popular.”

  “Yes. I know. Your husband is there?”

  “He’s not my—Yes.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I did not mean I want them to go there. I do not hate them. It is not their fault. I only meant to say, please, that I want peace at night. Only that.”

  I hear something tapping, bouncing. Her foot, maybe. She looks inside her coffee mug and then out the window.

  I say, “Let’s not talk about it. Okay? There’s enough unpleasantness as there is, don’t you think?” There is enough unpleasantness, don’t you think?

  Olivia would say that.

  “Oh, no. Not so much. The war is only one thing, and there is much beauty.” She rests her chin on her hand and her hair falls forward in waves. Her appearance is almost threatening. Brown, such brown, eyes, and a small circle of a mouth. Perfect, barely-pointed chin. I tuck my own hair behind my ears and, oily, it stays put. I’m glad there is no Jake here today to witness this, this contrast. Gentle, flowing spirit-woman and awkward, gawky waif. If not for the cigarettes, I might suddenly have something else to do, might have to ask her to leave, but here she is after having come up the stairs to give me something.

  “Are you hungry?” I say. “I’m—I haven’t eaten, yet, and I’m about to have a late lunch. Or early dinner.”

  “Oh! Lunch? Well…” She looks—startled? trapped?—at the clock, then out the window again, and says, “I—eh—”

  “It’s no trouble. And I owe you.”

  “Oh, no, no. It is only cigarettes! I have manymanymany.”

  “Please. Let me just make you a sandwich, or something. You didn’t say you already ate, so I have you there. It’s too late, now.”

  “If not now, it will be later?”

  “Yes.”

  She shrugs and smiles, tucks her hair behind her ear. “Yes. Lunch.”

  I open the cabinets to a rolled, half-bag of chips and a can of sliced mushrooms. It’s been a long time since I last shopped. In the refrigerator is enough meat and cheese—none of it really rotten-smelling—for two thin sandwiches, and there’s bread in the freezer. I show her what I have and she nods, “Yes, that is good, thank you,” and while I tear lettuce and separate meat slices, she bounces her heels.

  “When does he return?” she says.

  “I don’t know.”

  “No?”

  “Six months. More.” An unusual odor comes from the open jar of mayonnaise.

  “No good?” she says.

  I hand it to her and she smells it, hands it back. “I would like some. It is fine. Are you ill?”

  “No. I don’t think so. It’s probably just because…with orange juice, maybe…”

  “Dairy and citrus. And vodka.” She makes a face. “No good.”

  I make my sandwich dry and set them both on the table.

  “It must be very romantic,” she says, chewing. “It is nice to miss a person, sometimes.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  We look outside when a car honks. Paul.

  “I love to think of the day when the missing is over,” she says. “What a wonderful day. What is more romantic than a war? The best movies are about war’s sad and happy times, and love, and…and correspondence! I like to write with my hand, on paper, so personal. And to receive is like a look at his soul, inside thoughts, and no talk, talk, talk.” She yap-yaps with her thumb and fingers. “It all means so much nothing. I fall in love with a letter.”

  “Does Paul write you? Notes, or…?” My glass is empty and I can’t refill it, not with her here. Watching.

  She wipes her mouth with her hand, laughs a little. “Paul does not like to write. Oh, notes, yes. ‘I am at the store. Love Paul.’ No,” she sighs. “It is the idea, maybe. I would fall in love with them, I meant to say. Paul and me, we are together all of the time.”

  “Try to enjoy it,” I say. “It’s better than—”

  Three raps pound the door and Safia cringes. “He is always so loud,” she says. “I want to hit him in the head.”

  “Come in,” I say.

  Paul opens the door and steps in, but barely. “Hello, ladies.” He nods at me. “Hi. Eating lunch?”

  “Hello!” she says. “You are done, already?”

  “Oh, yeah. No lines. This is always the best time. Anyway, I don’t want to bug you, or anything, just wanted to see where you were. I got you a pressss-ennnnt.”

  “A present?” She claps. “I will be there in a moment.” Paul waves and backs out and closes the door. Safia eats the last bite of her sandwich, smiles, and plays with her mug.

  “Don’t you want to know what the present is?”

  “Oh, it will be there.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to wait, if I were you.”

  “Well, I cannot eat and leave. We will have a cigarette.”

  “No, no. I can’t smoke any more. Go. You must be dying to know what he got you.”

  “I am! Thank you, again. This was a good lunch, and not necessary. I am sorry to go so fast,” she says. “Are you—?”

  “Oh, no. Go. I understand. Really. Don’t worry. I have to do something, anyway.”

  “Yes? Okay, then. I hope I did not keep you!”

  “I invited you.”

  She laughs. “Well, please. Come down to see me.”

  She grabs her cigarettes and hurries out, leaving her mug on the table. I wash it and set it upside down on a paper towel and make another drink, then pick up the phone and dial L.D.’s number. Shellie answers, and I hang up.

  APRIL 18, FRIDAY

  The phone rings, and it’s Denise. She says as much. But then she jus
t breathes into the phone. “Yeah? Hello?” I stare at the ceiling.

  “Hi!” Her voice is sudden, sugary, sweet. “I’m calling to remind you about next weekend, and to tell you that I can’t go to the mall tomorrow. I’m sorry! I won’t be around.”

  “Okay… Thanks for letting me know.”

  More quiet.

  I wait.

  She says, “And we’ll—I mean, I’ll—Either way, seven-thirty on Saturday. Be ready, all right?”

  “Okay. Thanks. See you—”

  “Mia?”

  “Yes?”

  “What have you heard about leave?”

  “What leave?”

  “You know, they get two weeks. Fourteen days. Not now, but sometime in the middle, William said. Has Jake said anything? Such as when it will be, specifically? Or, more specifically than ‘sometime in the middle’? How are we supposed to know when the middle is?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

  She laughs.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing. Nothing is funny. That’s—That’s just great.”

  “Well, okay. Is that all?”

  I hear something clicking rhythmically on the other end. “He didn’t tell you anything? Really? Could he have said something about it before he left, maybe? Such as, if it were to happen, exactly or approximately when that might be?”

  “All I remember him saying is that it would be a possibility, and only if they were gone a long time. I guess…I guess if William said they’ll be getting leave, that means they’ll be gone a long time.” I think about this for a minute.

  “I guess. Mmm…” Something’s in her mouth when she says, “Will you ask about it next time you talk?”

  “Can’t you ask William?”

  “I already talked to him, and he would only say so mu—he just said he didn’t know for sure. I’d appreciate it if you asked.”