Homefront

by Kristen Tsetsi

  “I’ll find someone else, thanks.” She stands on her toes, looks around, then comes back down and stirs the ice cubes in her drink. “It’s just, everyone expects me to, like, sit by the phone for a year, and be this…this…I don’t know what. But he has his life over there, and I have my life over here. That’s all I know. And it took me long enough to figure it out.”

  “Yes,” says the other man, his eyes dull. “He can’t be expected to have all the fun, can he?”

  "Marc,” she says to him, “Will you dance with me?”

  “I think Rick has—”

  “I don’t want to dance with Rick. Besides, he can’t be trusted.”

  “What makes you think I can?”

  “Please?”

  “Sorry, Char. My knee.”

  Rick waits, attention shifting, then reaches past me for a cracker and says, “Dance?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Charlene says, “I’ll be gentle.”

  Marc nods at the dance floor, smiles thin, says, “I can’t keep up.”

  “Oh, come on,” she says. “I promise you won’t get hurt.”

  “Charlene.” Marc shifts on his bad leg. “You’re almost irresistible.”

  She slumps, sagging in her strapless top, and grabs Dick’s Fiancé by the hand. “Come on.” She drags her through a cloud of poker-game smoke.

  Rick salutes Marc. “Thanks for tryin’, buddy.” He scoops two punches from the bowl, crosses the floor, and hands a glass to a girl in a blue dress. Only Marc and I are left staring out at the bodies randomly bonding and separating.

  My glass is empty again, so I refill it, then tug Marc’s shirt sleeve. “What happened?” I say. “To your knee.”

  “Explosion,” he says, like flat tire.

  “So. It really happens, then.” They—casualties—are real people, after all.

  “As far as I know. It felt real enough.”

  “You must be happy to be home.”

  The dance ends and quiet falls under laughter and dragging feet and somebody screams for a DJ—“Who the hell is in control of the music, here?”—to play something, anything, or everyone’ll go somewhere else.

  “Not especially happy, no,” he says.

  “Are you going back?”

  “If I can.”

  “What are your chances? Of going back, I mean.”

  “They don’t know, yet.” He looks at his watch.

  “Well, do you think they’re pretty good?”

  “Do you want a refill?”

  “I mean, how serious did your injury have to be for them to send you home?”

  “Refill, or no?”

  “Yes, please.” The cup he hands me is punch sticky. “Sloppy, but thank you. What were we talking about?”

  “We were talking about you.”

  “Nope,” I say. “We weren’t.”

  “Are you having a good time?”

  “That’s not what—”

  “I’m asking it now.”

  Where is Denise? Somewhere. “I’m having a great time.” Marc’s aftershave smells like citrus. “Delicious.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You smell good. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He looks at his watch.

  “Going somewhere?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m not sure.”

  “How can you not be sure?”

  “Plenty of ways.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’d rather—”

  “You’re standing right next to me and looking at your watch. What is that, if not an invitation to me to…for me to?…to me to. . . ask what you’re doing?”

  He says nothing.

  “Are you meeting someone?”

  “No.”

  “You like this. Don’t you? You’re playing a game, right? You’re making me ask you questions in some backward flirting thing.”

  “No.” He looks down at me. “Do you know your dress doesn’t fit you very well?”

  “What?”

  “First thing I noticed. It’s tight.”

  The punch is lovely and sweet and poor Marc has hurt his leg. “It’s fucking stunning,” I tell him.

  “Maybe. On someone.”

  “I don’t. . .” I refill my cup. “Why would you say that?”

  He swirls his drink and looks down into it. “I just thought you should know. In case another party like this comes along and you consider wearing it again.”

  I slide my hands over the material on my breasts and smooth the small wrinkles crossing my hips and know he is wrong, the dress is wonderful, and I am wonderful in it. “You’re an as—”

  “Don’t bother. Listen, I’m only standing here because this is where the food is. If you don’t want to be bothered by me, there are plenty of other places for you to stand.”

  “I like it here.”

  “Fine.”

  “I like your wedding ring, too. Where’s your wife?”

  He sighs and looks at his watch again.

  “Why don’t you leave?”

  “Because,” he says. “She won’t be asleep, yet.”

  “Don’t want to wake up your daughter?”

  “I don’t have kids.”

  “Jesus. Never mind.”

  And there is Denise, and there is Brian, both of them coming in from outside.

  “Look,” he says. “If you had a husband, and he stayed out until after you went to bed, would you think he were having fun?”

  “Depends on when I go to bed.”

  “Eleven, usually.”

  “When he comes home, is he rumpled and smelling of another woman?”

  “Rumpled, sure. I can do that. And alcohol instead of another woman.”

  “Then, yes. I would think he had oodles of fun. D’you like that word, ‘oodles’?”

  Denise and Brian push through the bodies on the floor and disappear down a hallway. I empty my glass and fill my glass and drink from my glass and twirl until my gown fans like a yellow umbrella.

  “You’re going to make yourself sick,” he says.

  “Worry about her, not me,” I say, and my shoes, the heels high, spin like ice skates and heads blur by in a steady speckled stream and I’ve no control, anymore, because my arms pull me around and around and I’m one with—

  He catches my hand and stops me, holds me up, says, “I don’t want you to throw up on my clothes,” then waits until I can stand on my own before releasing me. “Don’t mean to ruin your fun,” he says, “but trust me, you’ll have a better time without the spinning.”

  I throw my drink at him, thrilled because I’ve never thrown a drink at anyone, and a pastel stain spreads on his white shirt and the hairs on his neck spring up as the punch drips down his chest. “Sorry,” I say. “Not your job.”

  He holds his shirt away from his skin and walks away toward the bathroom.

  I move through the house. Hallway wall sconces, floating wax discs in shallow bathtub water, tea lights in holders on the windowsills and light strings nailed around doorframes. No one else is in the kitchen when I find it, and the clomping of my heels is lost in thudding techno. Multicolored liquor bottles line the counter like a bar display.

  I check the refrigerator for orange juice and find only beer and water and a single orange with a spot of green mold. I mix something else, blue and clear and red and soda, colorful and tasty and strong in a red plastic cup, and take it back out to the living room.

  Couples of one kind or another fill the floor and hands slide over hips and pelvises glide. Open mouths, almost kissing, fingers breast-stroking blankets of air, all in dim light like afterglow, and they all know each other, or seem to, laughing, touching shoulders. I inch around the room with a smile, always a smile, alone without Denise or Charlene or Dick’s Fiancé or Marc, until a plastic chair bumps the backs of my knees and I sit, back straight, smile stuck on so I look alone on purpose. A rest from al
l the dancing. My glass empties fast and I skirt the floor to mix another, thinking I hear someone say, “Who is she?” and remembering I look like a movie star—a goddamn movie star—tonight, if nothing else.

  ________

  I don’t dance, but I am, and Denise is, too, monster with a red mouth and matching body all beautiful and vaginal—she would love to be called vaginal, so I shout it over the music, “You look vaginal!” and she shouts back, “Damn straight!”—and in that instant we connect because we get one another and we move closer and dance the way girls dance in movies, part-time lesbians for show, her arms coming around me from behind and her hands sliding down my waist and over my hips and we’re laughing and watching the men watch us and she puts her mouth to my ear and yells, “This’ll be good,” and runs her splayed fingers over my pelvis, not touching me but almost—they think she’s touching me, you can tell by their eyes—and we laugh and separate and move on our own, in our own heads, until a man grabs her and a voice says in my ear, “You’re something.” For a moment he is behind me and we’re dancing the way Denise and I were dancing and then he touches me and I spin and Marc is smiling and smelling faintly of punch and watching his hips close the distance to mine.

  I pull away. “Thirsty,” I say, and he takes my hand and says, “It’s just dancing.”

  “I’m done dancing.”

  “But you do it so well.”

  My heels are too high, so I take them off and carry them to the kitchen and lean against the counter. He follows me, just close enough, and stands between me and the doorway with his arms crossed. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  “And I’m sorry about—all that, what happened earlier.”

  He says something else, about his wife, about how she’s been strange since he came back injured, “Broken, she said,” and in the middle of his kiss I tell him to stop, get off, and he does, but his hands still touch my back. I yank free to find Denise because it’s time to leave, it’s been fun but it’s time to go. She and Brian stand across the bamboo and her lips touch his neck. When I reach her, I yell, “Let’s go.”

  Her hair has fallen out of its clip and hangs in loose strands and her lipstick has faded to a sick pink stain.

  “What are you doing?” She pulls my hand away from her hair.

  “Time to go.’

  Her head dips and her eyes blink slow. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Brian strokes Denise’s shoulder and she twists away.

  I say, “I don’t feel well.”

  “The bathroom is down the hall.”

  My head spins and I reach for her arm. “We have to go,” I say, and she says, “Mia, let go.”

  Brian says, “Throw up. Then see how you feel.” He looks at Denise, but she does not look at him. She tugs at a loose piece of hair and steps away from him and it’s true, what people said. She was with someone the whole time.

  “I thought you loved William.”

  “You’re drunk,” she says. “There’s nothing happening, here.”

  ________

  Denise’s fingers twist into a white braid on her lap.

  Brian smokes a thin cigar and blows his smoke into the wind. “Hell of a night.”

  “Too windy back there?” Denise says.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because he can put it out.”

  “No,” he says. “I can’t.”

  “Brian.”

  “Denise.”

  “I just don’t want her to be uncomfortable.”

  “She said she’s not. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  He laughs.

  “Is something funny?” she says.

  “You are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “No,” he says. “You’re not.”

  I rest my head on the window, good and cool.

  “What do you mean, I’m not?” she says.

  “You said it first.” Brian taps in the ashtray and turns up the radio.

  “You said it differently.”

  “Well.”

  She sighs and looks out the window.

  “This is it,” he says.

  Denise slides the stone of her wedding ring around her finger.

  “Did you hear me?” he says.

  “Not now.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Now. This time.” He looks at me in the rearview mirror. “How you doing?”

  “Fine,” I say.

  “You’re not going to throw up again?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Denise?” He pushes into a higher gear. “How are you doing, baby?”

  She shakes her head.

  “What was that? I didn’t hear you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Everyone is fine,” he says. “Wonderful.”

  Somewhere on me is the smell of Marc’s aftershave.

  I rub my fingers over my skin and smell them until I find the spot, the back of my shoulder near Jake’s favorite mole.

  ________

  Denise stares straight ahead when I get out of the car. Her nose is red in the light from the open door.

  ________

  In the dark and in my head I am with him, with Marc in my bed and his arms are around me and his stranger’s mouth is kissing me the way he kissed me in the kitchen, the way I saw Brian kiss Denise before they disappeared down the hall, after Denise said she wanted to stay a little longer and after they thought I was locked away in the bathroom. I imagine them together and then I think of him, of Brian, and then of Marc and of Jake, all of them touching invisible me and I pretend I am Denise, not me, and spread my legs and arch my back the way I think she would.

  APRIL 27, SUNDAY

  Denise calls while I’m sleeping and says she’s coming over with coffee from the café downtown, the one with “that awful girl.” I ask her to find out whether the house painting has been sold.

  “Oh, that thing? Now I want to know, too. Could you imagine someone buying it?”

  “It was gone,” she says in the doorway, each hand holding a capped foam cup. Her eyes are red, swollen, and a loose band holds back her hair. She pushes past me, muttering that anyone would have to be crazy to pay more than ten dollars “for that stupid picture of a house” and hands me a cup, drops her bag on the floor by the couch, and falls into the cushions. “I swear, this summer is going to be oppressive. Have you been outside?”

  “No, not yet.” I wonder who could have bought the painting and if the coffee girl might give me the name, not that I would know what to do with it if she did.

  Denise complains some more, looking at me and looking away, touching her hair and taking short, quick sips from the hole in the plastic top.

  “So,” she says. “You must have questions.”

  “About what?”

  She shakes her head and reaches into her bag and pulls out an envelope. “These are for you.”

  I’d forgotten about the pictures. I snatch them from her and she waits while I sift through them.

  Jake standing in front of an Apache.

  Jake sitting on a pile of sandbags.

  Jake posing beside the painting of an Apache and pointing at the sun hanging low under a dusty sky.

  Jake with a cigarette, the pack tucked in his shirt sleeve.

  “Which one?”

  “Hm?”

  “You’re smiling. Which one?”

  I show her.

  “He looks good, doesn’t he?”

  “Different.” In miniature, as part of the matte-finished grain, he’s beautiful—painfully—in his way. Bronze-brown skin, tanned and dirt-stained, and the expression on his face—new, to me—is one of certainty and of confidence and of correctness in time and place and purpose. The pictures I already have, ones we’ve taken over the years in front of statues or lakes or rivers or famous buildings, are of a different person. Jak
e of this country, all-American boy who rarely traveled outside of his state. Light, clean, and basic. Unlike this new Jake, flat in my hands, who—just an image, yes, but—leaves me feeling like the girl with a crush on the boy she hardly knows and wonders if she’ll ever have.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “They’re yours.”

  I stack them—there must be ten or eleven—and set them on the table and straighten the edges. Denise gets up and smoothes her pants and walks around the room, pretending to study wall hangings and knickknacks. She squints at pictures she turns right-side-up on the shelves—“Oh, you’ve been there? William and I were there last year,” and, to another, “That’s one of the places he wants to visit when he gets back.”—and when she runs out of things to pick up or point at, she sits back down. “Your tree is dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Why is it still up?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Do you want me to help you?”

  “No. Thanks. Chancey likes it.”

  She drinks more coffee, her eyes on the ceiling, and then fumbles in her bag for a cigarette. “Want one?”

  “Please.”

  Cigarettes lit, we sit smoking with no breeze coming in through the open windows. The cloud hangs in the middle of the room.

  She bites her nails.

  I look at the clock. Eight o’clock, Jake’s.

  The remote control sits on the arm of the chair. For three days, I’ve been disciplined, have watched only half an hour before going to bed, much of it replayed footage from the first days of the war. Explosions, explosions, gas masks and bunkers, Just over a month since the official start of the conflict, Janie and Tom. The killing of the third in command must not have been important to the media. The story was brief, buried, gone in two days. They’re onto something bigger, now: war protestors spray-painting an Ohio recruitment office, then burning a Mercedes belonging to a high ranking marine.

  “Why were the pictures upside down?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Your pictures on the shelves. They were upside down.”