by Abby Frucht
Gail can’t remember which house is Amie’s either, so we are looking for the curtains she made for its windows. We find chintz, madras, gauze, and several American flags.
“Not his,” says Gail.
Several garages have no curtains at all, and inside, these are bare, with not even a shelf of gardening tools.
“Not Amie s,” Gail says, and shifts her suitcase to her other shoulder while bending to pull a grass stem from the strap of her sandal. It’s a long straight stem, and she slides it between her teeth.
“Something’s familiar,” she says, and leads the way along a drive to another garage, set back further then the others near a rusted jungle gym under the shade of a tree. This one has lace curtains, and from the cracked-open door comes the sound of a radio. I stand back near the driveway while Gail bends to peer under the door. Then it opens and she steps in, and before it closes again there’s a rushing, flapping noise while something flies straight past me from inside the garage, then circles and lands with a crash on the jungle gym.
“Arnie Junior,” I say.
The toucan steadies himself on the bar. Held daintily in his beak is a toy telephone, and as I walk up closer he gives it a shake. It rings.
INTERVAL THREE
TURNS OUT there’s a third reservoir we never knew about. Ironically, it’s the working reservoir, the one that provides our water, and that we’ve managed never once to suspect its existence is a source of, for Daniel, both mirth and chagrin. Daniel the scientist. Daniel who can not brush his teeth without charting the direction of the swirl of the water as it goes down the drain. Daniel the conservationist who, when I am brushing my teeth, sneaks up behind me and closes the faucet. Not easy these days, when even my elbow is off-limits to the merest caress of his T-shirt, but Daniel manages. Daniel manages also to appropriate Gail’s tinted eyeglasses whenever Gail is in bed with Arnie in the back room. They come here for variety, Gail says, and to try out their new magic act on Stevie. They’re putting together some kind of show. Stevie’s eye is discerning, and they figure if he catches on to their tricks, then the tricks are no good. Besides, he is duly enthusiastic, and healthier because of it. Healthier, because every time he claps his hands they throw him a kumquat, fresh from Amie’s parents in Arizona. Arnie Junior, outside on his perch on our cherry tree, gnaws on the rinds. Also, he eats the stubs of Gail’s candles, that flicker all night on the sills of our guest room windows. After Arnie and Gail have gone, the house smells pungently of cloves and sandalwood and of Gail’s three-baths-a-night. A bath for each lovemaking session, I guess. Arnie is grateful to me. Already he looks fit as an eagle, in his top hat and cloak. Today, finding the top hat upended on our kitchen table, I reach in and pull out countless shoestrings of licorice.
Daniel doesn’t notice. He’s at the computer, with Stevie on his lap, Stevie’s small fingers hovering over the keyboard.
“W,” Daniel instructs.
Stevie pushes the W.
“H.”
Stevie pushes the H.
Together we gaze at our son. Well, not really. We gaze at each other gazing at our son, just as, in lieu of touching each other, we touch our son’s curls, our son’s fingers, the wings of our son’s shirt collars. Daniel looks fine wearing Gail’s eyeglasses, although the stylish big frames give him a kinky appearance out of touch with the rest of him. He wears them in order to emphasize the fact that from behind the tinted lenses he is staring at me. Constantly. Not imploringly. But penetratingly. Meaningfully. Scientifically. He is trying to figure me out.
He forms hypotheses concerning my behavior, then disguises his experiments with innocent queries.
“How long are you going to be out today?” he asks.
“I didn’t know I was going to be out,” I say, knowing full well the minute I say it that of course I’m going out. I go out fairly often these days after work, still in uniform, my mailbag still slung on my shoulder. “Going out” means I take a walk somewhere before eventually making my way back home. It’s safe with my uniform on, somehow: I can’t imagine leaving town in my oxfords and too-long shorts.
“The usual,” I answer.
Meaning: about half an hour, or maybe less now that by asking he’s made me feel guilty about going at all. Or, maybe more. The crux of this experiment: if I feel guilty, will I come home to him earlier or later? I don’t know, although Daniel, behind the ashy lenses, already has his suspicions.
“I’m just going for a walk, Daniel.”
A raise of the eyebrows.
“If I don’t walk,” I tell him, “I’ll fall asleep.”
Another nod, another lift of the eyebrows. It’s the licorice that’s making me sleepy. This morning I could barely get out of bed. I feel bloated all the time and my ankles are swollen, but even now I am planning my next taste of candy. In the pocket of my mailbag are the shiny black shoestrings I pulled out of the top hat, the ends of which I’ve knotted together for convenience while chewing. The knots are the best part, anyway, sinewy and resistant, and if on my route I run into Daniel I can always bite the knot off, slide it under my tongue and slip the rest of the shoestring back in the bag before he catches sight of it.
“I might head for the new reservoir,” I tell Daniel.
Another nod.
“Daniel?”
Another nod.
“Stevie’s still pressing Ws, Daniel.”
THE THIRD RESERVOIR, off a road leading out of town to the southeast, sits on a hill even steeper than that of the second reservoir adjacent to the golf course. There you climb a slope of loose, sliding gravel amid clouds of yellow dust; here, at the third reservoir, is a stairway so steep that if halfway up you turn to look down at the sign in the parking lot, you get dizzy all at once in the knees. The sign designates a picnic area at the base of the slope, where on a plot of tended grass are several tables and a drinking fountain. We never realized our town had a true, picnic spot. Anyway, nobody ever comes here to eat. There’s no shade except what’s thrown by the outhouse, and the place has a middle-of-nowhere feeling, surrounded by sorghum fields. Crops spread to the east and south; densely planted, broadleaved, newly tasseled. In comparison the picnic spot looks naked, its grills spotless, its single trash can empty but for one orange juice carton, the tops of the redwood tables bare even of bird droppings.
I am a mile, a mile and a half, maybe, from home.
From the top of the steps, the third reservoir looks like water in a sink; its surface unmarred, its shape uniform, with a collar of poured concrete. No algae at all, and no floating, drifting branches. Across the way can be seen the very tops of some trees and some power lines.
Circling the water is a little paved trail, someone’s idea of a joke, I remarked, when Ben first led us to it. Poor Ben was searching for Mamie and Chevy and Red. Mamie and Chevy are females. Chevy left babies still in the burrow, and Marnie left tracks in some mud at the edge of the meadow, heading southeast. Red left nothing. Red is Ben’s favorite woodchuck, a rangy male affectionate with the younger animals who like to have their faces stroked by Red’s red paws. It was Red who greeted Ben whenever Ben arrived at the study site, a greeting with a sound like a bell ringing under water. Several days ago upon Ben’s lunchtime visit, Red stood yipping for longer than usual, clasped his front paws together and shivered excitedly, then ran in a sloppy figure eight among the burrows of the colony; it was that day that Chevy first failed to appear. Ben thought nothing of it, however. Chevy was probably inside with her newborns, he speculated. She was healthy and starting to put on weight, and her molt had been clean and efficient.
On the second day, Red performed the figure eights again, and on the third day, Red himself was gone. Ben crept closer, then closer, to look. His woodchucks, he once told us proudly, sweep their tunnels once a week and leave the mounds of fresh dirt at the entranceways. Chevy’s dirt looked stale, and Ben could hear the mewing of her babies from behind. Mamie’s burrow had no mound of dirt at all. That afternoon, Ben ph
oned us and asked if we’d accompany him to the third reservoir in hopes that we’d find some trace of his woodchucks. From the high asphalt ridge, we scanned the furrows of the sorghum fields, sharing the hand-held zoom among us. Strapped to Ben’s head was his newest devise, a Bionic Ear, which identifies the origin of sounds, he explained. But there were no sounds except for those made by our children-no bells underwater, no mewing, not so much as a rustle in the stand of trees. How dejected Ben looked, dragging his feet in their untied sneakers, the Bionic Ear alert on the crown of his head.
“The only thing I can think of is that they’re dead,” he began, “but if they were, we would smell them. And if they were living, we’d smell them, too. I don’t smell a damn thing anywhere, do you?”
I sniffed, and Stevie sniffed in the backpack behind me, and Simon stopped on the trail and wiggled his nose. I smelled water, that’s all. Daniel, who wanted to make Ben laugh, held the zoom to his nose. Ben scowled. He flicked a switch on his Ear, then bade us sit still at the edge of the water. We held the children in our laps, and gave them some candy to suck on. Stevie and I sat facing in, while the men faced out. The water was utterly still. No dragonflies, even. No frogs, no turtles, just the vast, metallic surface. I caught Daniel’s eye. We both knew what the other was thinking. It wasn’t woodchucks Ben was so worried about. Daniel sighed. Ben gave him a nudge to keep quiet. For what seemed like forever we sat there, then switched positions, so I faced out and the men faced in.
“Woodchucks sometimes climb trees, believe it or not,” said Ben when the children couldn’t keep quiet.
I looked to my left at the tops of the trees. Leaves flashed in the sun. Craning my neck, I could just see the base of the stand of trees where it shaded the first few rows of crops. I caught a glimpse-just a glimpse-of her, standing there.
I did not say a word.
It was Eva, Joe’s dog, wearing a lilac bandanna.
JOE’S CAR is navy blue with scattered rust stains like parched continents on a map of oceans. One windshield wiper is missing, and so is the side-view mirror. Joe doesn’t drive much, anyway, at least not any more, and when he did, in the days when I hadn’t quite noticed him but noticed only his car, it seemed engaged in a game of cat and mouse, a sort of musical parking lot. I rarely saw Joe’s car on the road, but in a parking space behind the public library, or along the southern – always the southern—perimeter of the square, or on one of the side streets – Prospect, Hollywood – where no one would take any notice. This was several years ago when the supermarket was still open so if he parked in the supermarket lot it was only late at night when everyone else had gone home. Then he slept in the car, I suppose. He kept a striped wool blanket always folded on the ledge under the rear window except late at night when you couldn’t see it, when he must have rolled himself in it on the back seat, and the dog always sat in the front passenger seat with just the tip of her nose out the window. I was always with Daniel when I noticed these things; we’d be strolling home from the movies or from visiting some friends, and Joe’s secretive car would be part of the scenery. At the time I was not yet a TLC. I worked nine to five in a place that sold frozen yogurt, that no longer exists. I used to take the shortcut home from work: out the service entrance into the parking lot, then in through the service entrance of the Five and Ten and through the Five and Ten to where the main door faced the square. Then I’d walk across the square and across the church parking lot from where I could see our apartment building and whether Daniel was already seated on the fire escape landing, waiting for me. If he wasn’t, I’d sit there and wait for him. There was a big lawn, and beyond that another parking lot, and beyond that the road that Daniel would be coming home on. Occassionally Joe walked by on that road as I sat watching for Daniel, and sometimes Joe’s path crossed mine in the middle of the square, but I wasn’t so interested in Joe, those days. I was more interested in Eva, Joe’s dog, who trotted a few feet ahead of him, sniffing the air, looking cool, independent, and loyal. She’s a shepherd with a light, easy gait, but somehow she managed never to precede Joe by more than the length of a leash. Somehow I knew even from a distance and without consciously thinking about it that Eva was female; she had a fierce canine femininity, like a wolf’s. It was admirable. In retrospect I wonder if it was Eva’s femininity I was noticing, or if what I was picking up on was the way Eva contrasted with Joe, who followed Eva with his slow, even, masculine rhythm. Perhaps it was the gait that most caught my attention, although I didn’t know it, at the time. It was as if he had all the time in the world. As if there were no place he needed in particular to get to; he just needed to be. He was a presence, like part of the weather-big, far-off, and electric.
But he’s not here now, in the clearing in the woods at the base of the slope of the third reservoir, and neither is Eva, thank goodness, so, having circled the paved trail and climbed down the slope, I can sit on the log near his car and contemplate. He must come to this spot for his drinking water. In the shade under the car are two five-gallon water containers of durable plastic that he must fill in the reservoir, then shove under the car to keep cool. I imagine he makes his way from the potting shed once a day, maybe more, to fill a canteen. The car looks dug-in, as if it hasn’t moved in weeks: no tire tracks at all, and no leftover odor of gasoline. Still I have the feeling if I sat down in it, it would take me somewhere, ultimately. Joe would show up, thirsty, dusty, and there I’d be sitting, looking casually through the contents of his glove compartment or through one of his too-heavy books, my thighs parting under the weight of the spine.
Suddenly there’s a rustling in the trees, and with no second thought I’ve made a leap for Joe’s car and am sitting inside it with my mailbag on my lap before I look up and see-what?-not Eva, not Joe, but two woodchucks, big bellied, low to the ground, who make their way neither up toward the water nor into the sorghum field but along the base of the slope before disappearing around the other curve of it. Male or female, I don’t know, but I must tell Ben, except I can’t get out of the car. Something’s hooked through my belt loop, holding me down. It’s a hand, I know, although I can’t quite see it, but the striped wool blanket is spread out on the back seat with someone curled underneath and just a hand sticking out to grab hold of me.
“Joe,” I say, at which he sits up fast, and drops the blanket from his face, except it’s not Joe’s face at all.
It’s Danka’s.
Scowling at me. Mean women are meaner than mean men, I remember. If I didn’t know her, I’d be scared. But I stay where I am, and so does she. It’s my body that wants him, my legs that won’t budge, my butt that won’t lift itself out of the seat. It’s hot in the car, so I crank open a window. We might sit here all night, breathing in and out the close air of our new rivalry. I want to tell her, He’s mine, he asked Pebbles if I was married, he sticks his flowers in the body of my doll.
“Let’s just both force ourselves to get out at the count of three,” I suggest after a while.
“One two three,” says Danka, and then when we’re both still sitting there, she tells me Joe’s the one who beat up Gail’s old boyfriend, George, in the post office that day.
“He’s the one who beat up someone in the bank lobby, too,” she goes on reverentially. “I know because his car backfires when he drives away. Like a gun going off, a little salute, and when it’s over he’s forgotten what he did, but I won’t let him forget what he does to me, and I won’t let him drive away from me until I am ready, and then I will kick him goodbye. Remember the other night we were talking on the phone and my soup pot boiled over?”
I nod, remembering that I still have her ladle although I don’t use it, of course. From over the phone I could practically taste the most recent concoction – potato peel, ash, turnip broth – as it splattered then stuck to the burner on William’s stove. Danka was thrilled when the soup boiled over, because the smell, she exclaimed, the very terrible, scorched, fragrant odor, was the smell she’d been after, the one
she’d been trying to duplicate. But now she is quiet about it, so I assume it didn’t work, it didn’t free her the way she had hoped, gulp after gulp and she still couldn’t make herself cry.
Now she lights up one of her cigarettes. Feeling sorry for her, thinking I should give her what she wants, I’m climbing out of the car when I hear another rustle. Footsteps this time. I make a leap for the trees and have hidden myself by the time Joe steps into the clearing. Slingshot in hand. No Eva in sight. He stands still for a moment, listening, actually sniffing the air, before taking a step toward the base of the slope. I step hard on a twig in my oxfords, it cracks underfoot, Joe whips around, missile poised, stands there a minute with his eyes glittering. Then he gives a low whistle, for Eva I suppose, stands a few seconds longer before dropping the missile back into its leather pouch. He slides the sling shot into his pocket, then reaches down into his pants and scratches himself. When he reaches the car he doesn’t get in, just squats, pulling the two water containers out from under the fender. One of them is empty, the other nearly so. But he doesn’t climb the hill toward the reservoir. He takes the path that the woodchucks took, so close to my tree I have to hug my arms to keep them from grabbing him when he walks by. No sooner is he gone than Eva trots into the clearing, still wearing her lilac bandanna, and growls at the doors of the car. At this, Danka climbs out, nervous but trying not to show it; smoothing her hair, taking off one of her pumps, spitting on it, and wiping it on the hem of her little black dress.
“Eva,” I say cordially, “This is Danka. Danka, Eva.”
Pleased to know you, says Eva with a lift of her nose before walking a few steps away from us both, squatting, and urinating.
Danka snorts.
I tug a shoestring from the pocket of my mailbag and stick the end in my mouth. Danka blows a smoke ring. We are both looking at it when we hear Joe’s whistle. Eva takes off around the curve of the slope, toward the water fountain. I take off into the sorghum field, close to the trees, and Danka follows. About a quarter of a mile away, we pause at the edge of the road for breath, and for Danka to put on her shoes.
