“We saved you some.” Mena smiles and motions for him to sit at the table with them. “Come sit.”
He sits down and shovels the pasta into his mouth without speaking. She’s the best cook; even lame old spaghetti tastes amazing. But he doesn’t tell her this. He just eats until his stomach feels full and then drinks a glass of milk in one big gulp. He’s got a bag of weed hidden inside his tennis shoe, and he wonders if he’ll be able to smoke some after they go to bed.
“So here we are,” his father says, forcing a smile.
“Yup,” Finn says. “Back in Butt Fuck Nowhere, U. S. of A.”
“Mouth,” his father says.
“Does anybody want dessert?” Mena asks. Her eyes are brimming with tears. “There are still some blood oranges in the cooler.”
Later, with the window cracked open, Finn rolls a joint and listens to the sound of the paper crackling, feels the sweet smoke fill his lungs. He closes his eyes, holds his breath. He can barely sleep without dope anymore. He doesn’t remember the last time he slept through a whole night without smoking. And even when he does, he almost always wakes up after only a few hours, sweating and panicked.
Tonight when sleep finally comes, he dreams about surfing. He’s at the Cove in La Jolla, by himself, about a hundred yards out, just sitting on his board, waiting. He can hear the seals at the Children’s Pool, barking. Hey, she says. Here comes a big one. He looks left and then right, sees Franny paddling out to him. Ready? she asks, and then the wave comes.
The dream is always the same: a table. The curvature of a tarnished spoon in her hand as Dale sips from a white bowl of thick soup.There is wine, both red and white, glasses reflecting the light that emanates from a thick candle dripping wax onto the rough wooden table. There are faces illuminated by the candlelight, laughter, and music, scratchy from an old record in the background. He is sitting next to her (he is always sitting next to her) and the heat of his presence flickers like the heat of the candle. The soup is the best soup she has ever tasted. She cannot get enough; she wants to lift the bowl to her face like a child and drink and drink and drink. There is bread too, crusty sourdough, creamy butter smoothed across its surface. She dips the bread into the soup and puts it to her lips. “Is it good?” he asks, and for the first time she turns away from the feast to look at him. He is smiling, though his eyebrows are raised, waiting for her answer. She looks at the other faces, and they are waiting for her approval too. The woman. The boy. Even the girl, whose face is merely a shadow. A shadow of a shadow. “Is it good?” he repeats, and covers her free hand with his own. She feels his warm skin touching hers. She nods and whispers, “Yes.” All of the faces smile. “It’s delicious.”
Dale Edwards awakens from the dream as she always does, hot and buzzing. She sits up in bed and squints at her clock. It is only seven. She can hear her mother in the kitchen, smell her cooking. Dale’s sense of smell is acute, as if she were an animal, able to discern even the subtle nuances of scent. Today there will be ham steaks pink as babies, fried eggs and frozen crinkled French fries sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning. Since classes let out in May, Dale has awoken to a rotating variety of pungent breakfast aromas, all underscored by the minty scent of her mother’s Kools and weak coffee, heightened by the heat of another Phoenix summer with only a swamp cooler to keep them cool. Her skin is constantly, constantly too hot. Dale had registered for eight o’clock classes every day that spring, managing to avoid the inevitable olfactory by-product of her mother’s cooking and the skin-prickling heat of that house, escaping into the cold classrooms at school. But now she has nowhere to go in the mornings, and the smells and the heat are like a daily assault.
Dale gets out of bed, rubs her hand across her cheek. The deep slumber that comes from her mother’s pilfered sleeping pills inevitably results in a thick crust of saliva trailing from either corner of her mouth to her chin by morning. It is disgusting, she knows, but still. The dream came the first time she took one of the pills, and now she senses that without them she will likely lose the dream, and this is an idea she cannot bear. And besides, without the pills, she is awake all night, her mind racing. Tripping and stumbling over itself in the heat.
She grabs her glasses from her nightstand and vision is restored, making clear all that was hazy. This room, her childhood room, is unchanged in all these years. Pink canopy bed, white painted furniture. Posters of ponies and unicorns and boys who have long since grown into men. She grew up in this room, lived here all through junior college and then left for a while when she got into ASU. She rented a shabby little apartment on campus, but it was too hard. The money, the worry. Her mother needs her. This is the real reason she stays. Because as much as her mother complains (about the extra laundry, the extra groceries, the extra mess), Dale knows that without her, she might finally fall apart.
She keeps telling herself that it’s not her responsibility to keep her mother from going off the deep end, that no twenty-four-year-old woman should be strapped with such a burden. That her needs should come first. And lately, she has so many needs. She can feel the want somewhere at the base of her spine, her whole body yearning for something she can’t articulate. It’s like an itch she can’t locate to scratch.
Dale leaves her computer on all night long; she likes the quiet hum and clicks. If she listens closely, there’s a certain pattern to them, some sort of electric lullaby at work. And when she isn’t able to sleep, the computer is ready and waiting for her. She should be working on the one class she didn’t quite finish last semester. She’d talked her professor into giving her an Incomplete so that she could finish the paper on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She’d started but quickly became sidetracked. This was a problem she knew she had, and not just at school. She was going into her senior year and all she could think about was her senior thesis. It was the only thing that got her butt out of bed and to school every morning last semester. God, last semester, when everything slowed to a sort of puddly stillness. Thirteen weeks had seemed like thirteen years. Sometimes she thinks she’s like a record playing at the wrong speed: first too slow and then too fast. But she knew then and she knows now that she has to finish her junior year in order to get to her senior year, and then she’ll be free to work on the only project she really cares about. She knows she should just finish the stupid Frankenstein paper and e-mail it off to her professor. Take the D she knows it deserves. But she doesn’t care about the Romantics. She only cares about him.
So instead of writing, she searches eBay endlessly for artifacts. The key words are saved in the drop-down menu: Mason, Samuel; Mason novels, The Hour of Lead, Small Sorrows, The Art of Hunting, Paper Rain. She navigates the stuff for sale: first editions, signed hardcovers, movie posters, tattered scripts. She can’t help herself. She’s not sure exactly what she’s looking for, but she knows she’ll know it when she sees it. This is research, she justifies. So far she’s been pretty good ... just a rare signed first edition of his first novel. A review copy of his second. She knows if she’s going to follow through with her plans, she’s going to need to save her money. The temptation is there though. Just last week she bid $800 on one of his high school notebooks. The photos showed a black and white composition book, edges curled. Sam’s name on the cover. The photos of the notebook’s inside pages revealed the notes he’d taken during an English class. His doodles in the margins. And she had to have it. She’d sat rigid-backed at her desk, watching as the auction end time approached, waiting until the last two minutes before she entered her modest bid. But when she was instantly outbid, she suddenly felt that familiar urgency, a need so intense it spread to her tongue. She’d gotten up to $800 when her competitor bid $802 in the final seconds and she lost. She started getting dizzy then, realizing she’d been holding her breath the whole time. She has to be careful. She has to control herself.
This morning, she exhausts each search quickly: no new items up for bid. So she moves to the Web site the publisher set up for Sam. It hasn’t changed
in over two years now, not since his last novel came out. She looks at his serious face, his serious eyes. She clicks on the audio button and listens to Sam’s serious voice, the NPR interview she has almost memorized. Is it good? he asks. She closes her eyes and listens to the inflections in his voice, wonders at the pauses and spaces between the words. She listens for the sorrow that lurks under the surface. She hears it in his breaths.
There are a zillion reviews but only a handful of news articles that appear when she searches his name on Google. One is an interview, from a decade back, archived on The New York Times site. Another is an article Sam wrote for The New Yorker about growing up as the child of a single father. This one brings tears to Dale’s eyes every time she reads it. The last one she finds is the small article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, published last October. This one, too, is unbearable.
While her mother eats, Dale stays inside her room, clicking away at her computer, searching, studying. She thinks of this project as a puzzle, the jigsaw pieces of a life scattered before her, waiting to be assembled. She proposed the thesis to her advisor at the end of the semester, but he was leery. He was leery of all living authors, as if literary value couldn’t possibly be determined until after death. It was here that the lie that set this all into motion was born. When she went from 33 to 78 rpm. Inside his messy office, Dale, feeling the same dizzy feeling she felt whenever she got really upset, blurted out, “I have an interview arranged.We’ve spoken, and he’s agreed to talk to me. About his daughter.”
The truth was that she hadn’t actually spoken to him, but she had been writing letters. And he’d written back. His first letter was just a quick note dashed off on a note card. But the one that came later was the letter that lived in her back pocket, the one whose paper was worn as soft as velvet from the constant friction against her jeans. It was the letter she’d read and reread so many times, she knew its contents by heart. Black ink, medium point pen. Careful cursive: Dear Ms. Edwards, While I am certainly flattered that you have chosen to focus on my work for your project, I think a biography, as you describe it, would be premature at this time. I believe I have much more writing (and living) to do before anyone might find enough biographical information of interest to produce even a slim volume. Though it frustrated her, she was touched by his modesty; he simply didn’t feel worthy of the attention. She kept sending letters, but he didn’t write back again. She knew she just needed to meet with him in person. Talk to him face to face, and then he might really open up.The longing traveled up the ladder of her spine and settled into the spot at the nape of her neck, throbbing. She had to go to him.
Now, in her room, she waits for the scent of ham and potatoes and eggs to dissipate. For the telltale shuffle of her mother’s house slippers. For the “Come on down!” on The Price Is Right. For the whoosh and whir of the swamp cooler. And she looks for the clues in cyberspace that will tell her where to find him.
Sam hasn’t started the new novel. It’s due in six months, and he can’t write. That old ability to conjure, to invoke the imaginary, has disappeared. Every time he tries to work, to imagine, his mind careens with the real stories: the only ones that really matter anymore. The truths. Besides, the words don’t work anyway.They are too flat; on the computer monitor they are dimensionless, just pixels, without even the frail substance of ink. How do you do justice to something real with words made of air?
And so instead, he remembers. But the memories come in fragments, in twinkling pieces of tissue paper and sequins and colored beads inside a kaleidoscope. Trying to capture one moment, to examine it, is nearly impossible, because it appears but is also reflected again and again, making patterns too intricate and beautiful to deconstruct.
This morning, instead of rising to go to the loft to write, he stays in bed. And as the sun comes up over the lake, as its weak light travels through the paned window on the other side of the room, it glances off his arm, refracting onto Mena’s hair and bare shoulders. This sliver, this softly shining shard, reflects a thousand other mornings, each exactly the same as the other: birdsong, stillness, breath, hair. How many mornings has he awoken next to Mena? To the identical fragile scent of Ivory soap and that lilac lotion she uses on her hands?
He turns the kaleidoscope’s wheel, and the pattern shifts, the scents change and he is lying next to Mena, but a different Mena, hair tethered in a tight rubber band, body curled tightly away from him, the whole room smelling of that sweet smell of breast milk.The sheets are the same, but the space between them is wet with milk; Mena is asleep, but not asleep, that strange fugue state in which new mothers reside.The birdsong, the cooing of doves, or the sounds of seals barking or of waves crashing on sand are still there, but underneath, the tissue paper breaths of Finn and Franny, one sleeping in the crook of Mena’s arm, the other in the bassinet next to the bed. He was worried about crushing them, about rolling over, about Mena falling asleep and dropping one of them. But he has watched her (for days now, how many days, weeks now?) as her eyes rest, but her arm remains vigilant, a cradle of bone and skin holding them tight.
Twist, the sun shines through the pale curtains, waking Mena, her eyes (the lashes like a curtain rising), with the look of surprise she always has when she sees him there (as if he might one day just vanish). The warmth in her brown eyes is gratitude. And this is his favorite pattern: both babies (are they babies anymore?) still sleeping in their crib, the space between them closing in, Mena’s skin coming close to his, he can feel the warmth of sunlight and her skin radiating. Always, even before the children, she whispers, morning, morning, morning.
Twist, this moment is the same, but different, two toddlers, heads full of curls the color of spun sugar, pouncing between them, one curling up under the quick of his arm, the other straddling his back, riding like a pony, Mena’s hair spilled across the sheets like ink, morning, morning, morning. This pattern, of four instead of two (it is always two or four, never three, never three) is predictable, certain.
Later, alone, stolen time, her hair cool across his arm, they whisper, morning, morning, which becomes the moaning of desire, hers, his, indiscernible. Until.The padding of feet in the hallway, two identical fists knocking, she covers his mouth with her hand, giggles, and he closes his eyes, smelling that scent of lilac on her palm against his lips.
Twist, all of them, lying on that great expanse, adrift on a sea alone but together and content, this bed their raft. Legs grown, stretching to the edges, but still, four bodies and the gentle nudging, Wake up, Daddy. Get up, get up, get up. And then other mornings when they were alone again in their bed. The kids asleep or making breakfast on their own (he knows the sound of cereal being poured into a bowl, the glug, glug of milk). In this pattern, Mena curls into him like a child herself.
The landscape beyond the window changes: California, Florence that one glorious summer, visits to friends in New York, Portland, Michigan. Hotels and motels and here. Here where he is now. It is once again morning, morning, but the birds, the doves, he can’t remember the word for them anymore. It sounds the same, but it isn’t at all the same. Morning. If there were a name for this pattern: the tear-stained cheeks of Mena, her black hair matted with the sweat of another migraine nightmare, for the way the sun mocks them both. Mourning. There it is. Birdsong, repose, breath, hair. These fragments cannot be reassembled or scrutinized; they just spin endlessly, beautifully, full of splintering sorrow in every configuration.
He should be writing, but words can no longer do justice. To all that old bliss. Or to this impossible sadness.
Mena rises as she always does, when the nightmare ends, and she carefully tiptoes out of the bed and out of the room. He pretends that he is asleep. And he will give her another hour, two, before he follows her into the morning.
Mena quietly walks across the cold dusty floors of the cabin at dawn, leaving Sam to sleep. They have been here almost a week now, and she’s still getting the headaches she thought would go away when they left the house in San Dieg
o. It is only 5:00 A.M., but she knows that trying to go back to sleep would be futile.
It was Sam’s idea to come here. In the morning, after they had gone and picked Finn up at the border station, as he knelt on the cold bathroom tiles, vomiting, Sam sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. “We need to get out of here.”
“What do you mean?” Mena had asked. She was making muffins, stirring blueberries into the bowl. She watched as they smeared in violet streaks across the clean white batter. She would overfill the muffin tins, making enormous muffins, each a meal in itself.
“It’s too much,” he had said. “We’re suffocating here. All of us.”
Mena looked around at the kitchen, at the warm autumn-colored walls that she had painted, at the stained-glass lamp that shone down on the kitchen table. There was a layer of Magic Marker, crayon, glitter glue that had become imbedded in the grains of the wood. This was where the twins did their art projects, where they played Uncle Wiggily and Scrabble and Monopoly.Where they learned how to add and subtract.Where they had made papier-mâché volcanoes and topographical maps. The place where they had been eating together as a family for more than sixteen years. The conversations they’d had in that kitchen rattled around in her mind, loud and loose like pebbles.
She didn’t want to go, but he was right. Franny was everywhere. Pervasive. You couldn’t turn a corner without finding her. She filled the rooms when she was alive; now that she was gone, she permeated them.
“Where would we go?” Mena asked, her voice breaking.
“Finn is going to get himself in too deep.”
Mena nodded, her throat thick, thinking of his red tear-streaked face when they picked him up from the border police. “I’m sorry,” he had cried, and he could have been six instead of sixteen. “I’m sorry.”
The Hungry Season Page 3
