Licorice

by Abby Frucht

  “That flooze,” he says after a minute. “I know who she is. She never even got close.”

  “She’s not a flooze, actually,” I defend. “She’s–”

  “At that party last spring I had to play Toss the Nacho in the Cleavage in order to get her to pick on somebody else.”

  “She doesn’t actually have a cleavage,” I argue. “She–”

  “Jesus. What if Leah comes back right this second and sees me holding this thing.”

  We glance at the sidewalk, in both directions, and Ben peers through the zoom at the ladder-back chairs. One has been white-washed. The others, mahogany, look waxy and bare.

  Ben has tossed the letter to the ground, a gesture muted by humidity. The dampness holds the paper aloft so it balances on top of a stiff blade of grass. When he has left in search of Daniel and the boys, I slide off the car hood, pick the letter up and drop it back into the pocket of my mailbag thinking I’ll give the lace to Arnie, who keeps a shoeboxful of snippets of Gail. Once, when I rescued a whole pair of briefs, Arnie was so happy he nearly fell out of his tree. We meet sometimes at the reservoir and talk about what he wants from life: Gail, and Gail’s kids, and a house to be shared with Gail, and Gail’s sandals in the closet next to his along with Gail’s scarves and hosiery and Gail’s locket with the photo of Gail inside. Sometimes I forget that I am talking to a man, when I’m talking to Arnie, although I never quite imagine I am talking to a woman, either. Usually I sit on the bench, and Arnie sits up in the crotch of the elm, so if I don’t feel like craning my neck it’s as if I’m talking to air.

  I want this and that and this, the air always begins. I want Gail and Gail and Gail, breathing eddies on the surface of the reservoir. The water spins around, and cattails sigh against the rocks on the sloping banks.

  I say, “Hang on. I’ll do what I can.”

  IN THE SAME POCKET of my mailbag is a second letter I need to deal with. It’s not the usual forget-me-not, the usual Come see me with no address or phone number, no map, no way to get there. This one was postmarked in Erie like the others, but inside, there’s a clue. It’s for someone named Deets, and it begins all at once with the crazy message:

  Please please don’t say say that you won’t won’t forgive us, that would break our hearts harder than we ever ever broke yours. Really, we mean it. And really, we didn’t know we would want you as much as we do. Our missing you fills up our mouths whenever we open them, Deets. Why haven’t you followed? Every morning we stand in the doorway and wait, and water the flowers, and chop tomatoes for gazpacho hoping you’ll be here to eat it with us. Your arms and legs are everywhere we look; today beneath the dogwood we saw you lounging with some books, and yesterday on the porch steps, and tonight we’ll hear you singing in the shower. Edwards is gone now, we’ve said our farewell. Not that we didn’t find Edwards lovable but that Edwards proved no substitute for you. For example Edwards when cooking Indian chicken used cashews as the recipe dictates instead of peanuts as we all prefer. With Edwards we always felt we were missing somethings. Now the house is empty even of men’s trousers which every time we looked at we saw only that you weren’t in them, anyway. Why haven’t you followed? Is it only that you don’t know where to go? Really Deets, do you think we would leave you like that, forever? No way, but we thought you would figure things out. All you need to do is this: Pack your bags, shut the lights, and walk out the doors. Make up your mind that you’re coming to us, and you’ll find what you need to show you the way. Just think, and remember, and follow your noses, and it will be like the first times all over again, meeting each other, and falling in love. We mean to do it again and again, Deets, with you, Deets, and you, Deets-with you. Our missing you fills up our arms even when we hold each other, and it fills up our glasses of wine. Every night we drink to you, to your headlights on the road, to the screech of your four bald tires. Is that how you will come? If so, drive fast, and strap the kayak to the top, we can’t imagine you without it, and bring your baseball mitts too so we can put them on the tables and fill them with fruit just as we are accustomed; the grapes here are beautiful, seedless, purple and round with gold flames on the insides. You don’t have to bring us anything else, just your smells, your gestures, your footprints on the wood floor after showering along with your habits, the bad ones too, because we miss your torn socks on the stairways, we miss your fingernail clippings, your frayed bits of dental floss clogging the drains in the bathrooms. We have three bathrooms here, believe it or not, and in each is a supply of your Head & Shoulders although you know very well we don’t need it ourselves, we need all of you, that’s all, please hurry and fill up our tumblers, as Edwards would say. Edwards did say nice things, every once in a while, but not nearly so nice as you. Here’s a kiss for the roads, our tongues on your sweet testicles we swear if you don’t get here any minutes we’ll scream.

  On page two is a little drawing of a house in the doorway of which stand two stick figures, elaborately breasted, stick-hands on stick-hips, cockeyed and waiting for Deets. Dear Deets, says the letter, above the love note and under the date. The date was sometime last week. The surname, Deets, is not listed in the phone book or with the operator or in a single one of the extinct directories I’ve managed to dig up here and there, and no one I know knows a person with Deets for a nickname. On the envelope beneath the word Deets is the address 19 Oak Street, which seemed simple enough when I tried to deliver it because Oak Street is just off Cedar not three blocks from where Morgan meets the reservoir. It’s a proper street more reserved-looking than most; green shutters, white-washed chimneys, not a flower pot out of place and the sprinklers timed even on the lawns of the houses of the people who have moved. The porches are tastefully numbered, in brass or wrought iron, from ONE to EIGHTEEN and then TWENTY, TWENTY-ONE, TWENTY-TWO. No number nineteen at all. I checked the side and back doors for student apartments, but found only a woman in kerchief and pedal-pushers, picking cones off a pine tree and dropping them into a basket. She held the basket by its handle in the crook of her arm. From the backs of her sneakers popped two cotton balls.

  At my approach she stood still as a frightened deer, actually on tiptoe. Only after I spoke did she let herself down. Her accent was Irish.

  “Deets?” she repeated. “Can’t say I’ve noticed.”

  And she couldn’t think of where the number nineteen might be unless her neighbors to the left kept a tenant upstairs.

  They didn’t, I already knew.

  The thing was, there was a spot where a nineteen would likely have been if there had been a house to nail it on. But there was only a barbecue grill whose hollow belly made a bath for finches and jays. Some kitchen tongs still hung from the handle of the grill, while between its slender legs spread a moist patch of mint. Standing there, looking, was when I unsealed the letter for the very first time, hesitating just a minute before reading it through. It seemed a shame not to do this in light of the circumstances, that is, I’d have to send it back to Erie, and then they’d send it back to me, and then I’d send it back to them, and on and on forever like a word not spoken, that kind of thing. I plucked a mint leaf for nibbling while walking home reading of Deets, whoever he is.

  Or was.

  The two stick-women, it occurs to me today, might share not just one man but two-Deet and Deet-and in that case share twice the misdemeanor having left both Deets at once just to move to wherever. Still I see no proper course but to mail the letter back to Erie this minute. Stevie likes to mail letters, as all children do, so I put him in the stroller, let him hold it in his lap, and set out for the mailbox at the corner of our road. Being a TLC, I should have known it had been dismantled. Taken away, really. There’s a storage alcove in the basement of the post office, strewn about with moldy mail sacks and heavy-duty staplers, but no postal boxes. Perhaps they sell them at auction along with the jeeps. Meanwhile in my chest beats that sensation peculiar to the delivery of a letter—generosity, purpose, impatience – but the mailbox is
gone. In its place is the cement pillar upon which it had stood, all covered with moss. It must have been there all along in the shelter of the box, home for brittle-shelled snails no larger than droplets of water. How eternal it looks, like a few other objects I’ve noticed of late around town. They look like ruins, as if they’ll be here forever, after everything else is gone. There’s the water fountain with the dandelion growing out of the drain, and the electric sockets fitted to some trees in the quadrant of the square where, before the fiscal cutbacks, festivals had taken place. The best is a sign-one of those standard, institutional signs designating the names and functions of campus buildings – only this has only an arrow stenciled on it. No name. No function. The arrow points along a paved path running between some low brick dormitories, and that’s where Stevie wants to go, when our search for a mailbox proves unsuccessful. The one on Professor and Forest is gone, and so is the one on Elm.

  IF WALKING, as an anthropologist once said to me, is really nothing more than controlled falling, then Stevie’s halfway there. I try telling him this but it makes him more frustated then he was before. He knows what’s in store, and he knows what it will bring him-independence, adventure, a body that can think with its legs and not only with its mind-but his feet won’t listen yet, they stumble, they trip, they won’t hold him up, they fail him. Lately, he sits forward in the stroller straining like a coachman at the reigns of a carriage, trying to make me take him where he wants us to go. Several hundred yards along the path he points eagerly into the grass, so we veer off the sidewalk and loll around under a shade tree. I pop a licorice lozenge and suck on it carefully so as not to dispel the abandoned, cooling quiet of the clustered dormitories. Near the stoops are some flowerbeds piled with woodchips adorned with small, round, feathery plants. I lay Stevie’s palm on top of one; it’s soft as the head of a beer. The dorms are all locked, and in the few rooms whose drapes are not thoroughly closed there are nothing but stripped beds and dressers. I recall having been in this courtyard before, just once, pre-Stevie at some kind of all-staff picnic where Frisbees buzzed over the tops of the food-laden tables. It was August and the dorms had been opened for airing; small children played in the polished hallways, and we sat on the steps drinking Strohs and feeling the heat. The restrooms were co-ed, and at the door to one was where we first met Mike, of Mike-and-Angela, our friends who have since moved away to Chicago. Mike would not let us in. That is, he would open the door for me but not for Daniel, because his wife was inside.

  “But these restrooms are co-ed,” I explained.

  “We know,” said Mike.

  “I just finished three bottles of beer,” said Daniel.

  “How long is she going to be in there?” I asked, feeling affection, suddenly, for both of them: for Daniel, who needed to go to the bathroom, who bounced clownishly on the balls of his feet, and for this strange, new chivalrous husband inappropriately dressed in a long-sleeved, button-down shirt.

  Then the door swung inward and Angela walked out, blushing when she saw us.

  That blush is still vivid, pink as can be, sudden and sharp as my first, surprise bite of the licorice lozenge. Our friendship went like this: they introduced us to their dogs, who’d spent that evening in a pen. The dogs were knee-high. Three sides of the pen were of fencing, but the fourth was a side of the house. The dogs had been eating the shingles; tearing them, chewing them, spitting them out. Even so, Mike fed them hamburger brought home from the picnic, then led them inside where from the couch they witnessed our first midnight game of Monopoly. Our tokens were makeshift and personal; Angela always used one of my earrings. All things considered, their leave-taking was ordinary as leave-takings go; they knew they were moving, and we knew it too, and so did the dogs, who ate the handles off the camp trunks along with a pile of packed kitchen towels. They stopped by our house as they drove out of town, Angela at the wheel, Mike passing milkbones back to the dogs so they wouldn’t bite the top off the gear shift knob. The tape deck was whirring – Books on Tape – and the motor was on, so we stood in the road and leaned in through the windows for kisses and hugs. Then we stayed there and watched as the car drove away. But around the block it went and came back for more goodbyes.

  This happened once, twice, over and over.

  The woman on the tape said, “Keep the pressure gentle, working the fingers in circles.”

  And then, “by kneading the flesh of either buttock exactly as if you were preparing bread for–”

  And then, “from the genitals, between the buttocks, up the spine and onto the back of the neck.”

  The dog biscuits were gone, but the dogs were only drooling, their spit making pools on the chewed seat covers.

  “We’ll miss you,” I said, sixth or seventh time round.

  “We already miss you,” said Mike. He spread his fingers on Angela’s knee. When he gave it a squeeze she put her foot on the gas, and that time they didn’t come back. We retreated to the porch swing and cried, a little.

  I cried, anyway. Daniel never does. He gets logical, solemn, and cool.

  “If they had never lived here, then we never would have gotten to know them,” he said, or something like that, and fished our car keys from my pocket and gave them to Stevie. Stevie was an infant. He touched the keys to his tongue, then dropped them through the porch slats onto the dirt. Neither one of us moved to retrieve them. Two years later the feeling is different; it’s not like missing Leah and seeing her negative shape, and longing for it to be filled. In fact I don’t miss them at all, I realize with sadness. I only miss missing them. When did this happen? Two years from now I’ll miss missing Leah, and I’ll miss missing missing Mike and Angela.

  SUDDENLY it’s nearly dusk, and the sky has a tornado look about it: buff-colored, distant, still. We get back on the path and follow it resolutely, cutting past some more dorms before the pavement abuts at a curb. No arrow at this end, but Stevie points across the road at a mailbox. Not until I’ve got the chute open do I realize Deets’ letter is no longer in Stevie’s hand, and that it’s not in my pocket or wedged in the seat of the stroller. So we bang the chute shut and cross the road again, looking everywhere into the fast-falling darkness, even into the rooms with the half-drawn drapes, at the bare, striped ticking of the mattress covers.

  Now the wind has picked up, a bit here, a bit there, whipping the pale, frothy tops of the plants. Poor Deets says the wind, Poor stick-figured women, until we reach our street and find Daniel seated on one of the card chairs, quiet as anything, eating an apple. He won’t look at me but he takes Stevie in his arms and holds him close to his chest. He looks shocked, like Ben; at once I know he thought we’d disappeared.

  “Tell Daddy we were mailing a letter,” I whisper into Stevie’s curls. “Tell him we’ve been on our way home.”

  “Fine,” Daniel says.

  He pats the chair next to his so we sit side by side and stare into the curtain of sky. He must have figured it out, I am thinking, but only to an extent. He knows the women leave first, but not that they mostly leave children behind, with lovers, with husbands, with grandparents, with friends. I almost tell him, Don’t worry, I won’t take him from you, but of course I can’t say that; it’s too awful a thought. If I had been by myself, and if I hadn’t lost the letter, and if the mailbox hadn’t been there I might have kept right on walking, not following the road but the vast playing fields on the opposite side, that end overlooking a highway.

  If, I am thinking. If, If, If.

  And then, What if?

  PART THREE

  Stewing

  ONLY WHEN I am seeing my doctor do I realize for the first time how tired I’ve been; a relentless fatigue like the fatigue of pregnancy, the limbs wrapped in near-palpable, cottony substance to be pushed aside with every minor gesture, every flicker of the eyelids, every turn of the head. At first I blame it on my walking but very soon I know that I’ve got it mixed up; it’s not the walking that is causing the fatigue but the fatigue that is maki
ng me walk even further than I need to, because I don’t want it to suck me under.

  “It’s like an excess of gravity,” I say to my doctor. “It must be the weather, the humidity.”

  When I was pregnant I blamed the weather, too, before I knew. It was summer, hot and damp, and each afternoon I napped helplessly on our low bed before the whirring, ticking fan, dreaming of jungles. At dinnertime I rose, found Daniel, and together we sauntered downtown for an ice cream to be eaten on a bench on the square. When friends passed on the road we waved our ice cream sticks in greeting, talked, hung out, then dispersed, went home, and barbecued chicken or burgers. By ten o’clock I was sleeping again, my body dissolved in a pool of heat in which it lay as though limbless, and when at midnight Daniel climbed ever so gently into bed it was as if a tree had fallen on top of me.

  “You all right?” he would whisper.

  I’d be slick with sweat, but inside, thirsty as a rock.

  “Turn the fan on,” I’d tell him, kicking the sheets to the floor.

  “It’s on.”

  “Bring me some water.”

  He did, always, and when I sat up and drank, water spilled in two streams from the flacid edges of my mouth and over the secretive shape of my belly. My ankles felt tangled in air, which to me felt no cooler than the record-breaking June of our arrival in town six years earlier. Then, we’d driven in from St. Louis at midnight, pulling a U-haul, car windows rolled down to let in the seared smell of lightning. There was neither moon nor stars. And no street lamps, either. Just a few scattered porch lights up and down the town, and then a sheet of white lightning that gave us a glimpse of the square. How stark and flat it looked, but studded with trees, like a forest with no undergrowth. We drove several times around it before finding the street on which we were supposed to be living, and each time around there was lightning and a glimpse of the negative spaces flashing among the trees. Our apartment was the second story of a house whose first floor was already occupied; in the stairwell was a desk with a gooseneck lamp, some papers and books, an ashtray, a smell of cigarettes. On our door was a note, folded and taped, whose message -Call if you need help or food, or anything-irked me, so that my first thought upon opening the door was, Why do these people think we’ll need help? Why do they think we won’t have enough food? Why do they think we’ll need anything, even? and my first thought upon stepping into the room was, Oh. Here’s why.