We descended the steps, back into the scouring wind. Where was everybody? Elderly couple, found in their basement, dead of hypothermia. Fourteen-year-old boy poisoned by carbon monoxide in a running car his dad was digging from a snow bank. Another shoveler’s heart attack. Volunteers with snowmobiles taking doctors to hospitals.
Every part of my body was scalding cold, but one part scalded coldest: my neck, my plump child’s neck. The wind was wily, cupping my lowered chin and arrowing along the inch of skin before my parka’s zipper. The wind, like a squirrel wielding knives. How much farther? I tried to step where he was stepping. I tried to block the wind with his body. Family of three or four, frozen dead on the road, hadn’t gone to Mass. Which was a sin. When sinners died, they went to hell.
Finally, I did it, what I’d been contemplating for the last half mile. I shouted at my dad’s back, asking for his scarf. I didn’t want to ask. I wasn’t a child who asked. And I knew he must be cold, too. Yet I asked, and when I did, he turned, already unwrapping his red and black striped scarf. He squatted and tied it around my neck, he wound it once, he wound it twice, he wound it three times, he smiled at me, his handsome Black Irish smile, and behind his scarf, which covered my neck all the way to the tip of my nose, I smiled, too. And thought that I might make it, after all.
Why are people nervous to become parents? Children are so accepting. So stupid. For years—would you believe it?—for years, I’d think of this as a happy memory, my father snugging his scarf around my neck.
But gradually I corrected myself. First, I overheard the late-night argument, the barb about Dad dragging us to church in a blizzard. And in time I recognized the catholicism of rigidity, the Victorian strictures of our house. And eventually I realized that if he were to footslog us over two miles round-trip at nineteen degrees below, he sure as shit should have dressed us in scarves.
And so, with each time my thoughts are blown back to the Blizzard of Seventy-Nine, I unwind that scarf, unwind its loops around my neck. With my self-pity I unwind it; with my self-righteousness I unwind it; even with my care while dressing my own soft children, I unwind it, the very care I take (Here are your mittens, kitten, here your warmest socks) a reprimand of him, and then the scarf is off my neck, yet still I worry it, I pull out the threads, pluck and pull and release them to the wind, the wind that shall never again find the neck of my father, my handsome father, for he is shielded from it, as he is shielded from me, for he is below the earth and has been for years and cares not for the ways I remember him, or remember remembering him.
MARRIED LOVE, II
There will come a day—let it be many years from now—when our kids realize no married couple ever needed to retreat at high noon behind their locked bedroom door to discuss taxes.
YOUR TURN
It’s a kind of parlor game, a question someone asks at the after-party, perhaps, lounging on couches, shoes off, everyone half-inebriated and half-enamored and not ready for the long night to die. What’s your hidden talent? This is no invitation to brag—I got straight A’s in college, I can benchpress 220. Oh no no no, you win this game by trotting out a bizarre and useless skill.
Laura can stand on one leg forever. She moves to the center of the room and slides one heel up the other thigh, squares off in tree pose and balances until we pelt her with pillows. Thisbe can recite the entire back cover of Flowers in the Attic. Gaylord can pour a glass of wine back into the bottle without spilling, even with his eyes closed (how he became aware of that skill God only knows—I’ve never seen him walk away from a full glass). Tommy, who asked the question in the first place, can do achingly beautiful armpit farts. He rises to tuck his wrist under his arm, writhes and contorts, creates and christens—Here’s a burner, here’s a wet one—while everyone laughs and calls out requests. I’m gonna pee myself, Ann warbles.
Which brings us to me. I used to hate this game because I couldn’t think of a hidden talent. But that’s only because my hidden talent is very hidden. I’ve got the biggest bladder you’ve never seen.
It’s not a matter of “holding it.” At home I pee as much as anybody. But when I go out with friends, I simply forget to pee. And then later someone mentions, say, the wallpaper in a certain bathroom and I think, I didn’t see it. Or the next bathroom, or the next. I’ll count back until I realize it’s been six hours since I peed.
One time I needed an ultrasound and the nurse told me not to urinate beforehand because a full bladder elevates the baby, better for viewing. I didn’t pee that whole morning and when the nurse gessoed the wand and lowered it to my abdomen, she shouted for the doctor, “Get in here!” Not about the baby, the baby was fine. About me: “Lookit the size of her bladder!” I never saw the pixelated screen but I like to imagine my supremely visible baby rising and falling, buoyed on a bladder-shaped raft.
Because I can go so long between pees, when I do pee, I pee forever. Like I’ll hear someone enter the next stall, hear her unzip, sit, pee, wipe, flush, zip, and exit, and the whole time, I’ll have been peeing. Like if I’d started peeing when you’d started reading this, I’d still be peeing.
RETURNING FROM SPRING BREAK, JUNIOR YEAR AT NOTRE DAME
Swapped the rosary on my bedpost for Mardi Gras beads.
SMALL FRY
I didn’t have a grandpa, so I studied my friend Lara’s. He dozed before the TV in his wool cardigan. He walked without lifting his feet from the floor. Sometimes in the afternoon he shuffled to the hall closet, ducked inside for a moment, then shuffled back to the couch. Lara’s eyes didn’t swerve from Mighty Mouse, but I had to know what Gramps was doing in that closet, I had to. The next time he shhhed open the door, I snuck up behind him. He whirled around, wild-eyed, but when he saw it was me, only me, he smiled. He allowed me to witness him easing from a coat pocket a palm-sized white paper bag, McDonald’s. He noiselessly uncrimped the top, spread its mouth with his thumb and index finger, reached in and pinched out a single fry. I understood that he was sneaking it. I understood that we must hide things from the mommies and the daddies. He held it out to me, a tiny sword, cold as if pulled from the heart of a stone.
ORANGE-SHAPED HOLE
Yesterday I remembered an event from twenty-five years ago, when I lived in London for a semester, in a flat in Bayswater with six other college girls. I don’t know what resuscitated this memory; I’ve been reading a lot of Brits lately, so maybe it was Virginia Woolf or E. M. Forster. Or then again, maybe nobody. Maybe there’s no trail of smelling salts I could trace to that flat in Bayswater.
Anyway, one day I got a postcard from my Canadian cousin, a grad student at Trinity, in Dublin. Brendan wrote that he’d be visiting friends in London, and he’d look me up. Turns out his friends also lived in Bayswater, just one street over, so he invited me to their dinner party.
I don’t remember what we ate or drank or discussed, I remember only the long table filled with high-spirited bohemians—intellectuals, internationals, the great unwashed—and how I yearned to be one of them. And I remember the hostess, wild-haired, a bit fleshy, but enviable, enviable. At one point she reached into the fruit bowl, plucked an orange, tossed it once in her palm, and then reared her arm back like a pitcher and heaved the orange at her transom window. It smashed through the glass, leaving an orange-shaped hole, and bounced down the hall. Everyone laughed. No one got up to clean the glass.
Why, at nineteen, did that strike me as the height of glamour? And why—this is even harder to parse—why, remembering it now, does it still? Now that I’m old enough to know better, and spend a good part of my day cleaning up others’ messes. Further, why would I have forgotten this, and for so long?
And now I’ve handed you the orange. I’m sorry, but now it’s your orange, too. You’ve just read of a woman remembering an orange thrown through a window, without knowing why she remembers this. You will either remember reading this and know why you remember reading this, or you will remember reading this and not know why you remember reading this,
or you will not remember reading this, possibly forever.
11. AND I’VE BEEN SEARCHING CEASELESSLY FOR YOU EVER SINCE, MON AMOUR
1.Once, many years ago, I sat on the beach, reading and drinking a beer.
2.It was a breezeless afternoon so I decided to cool off by the water.
3.I left my book—a fat novel, The Brothers Karamazov—on my folding chair. I snugged my bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale deeper into its red coozie and screwed the coozie an inch or two into the sand.
4.It was pleasant by the water’s edge. The running sandpipers, with their legs puncturing the silk of the receding surf, reminded me of the jackhammer needle of my mother’s sewing machine.
5.Strolling back maybe ten minutes later, I could easily pick out my blue chair—the beach wasn’t crowded—but not the dark lump of book.
6.Even standing beside my chair, I could see I couldn’t see it.
7.I toed around in the sand. Nothing.
8.When I picked up my coozie, it was light, although the bottle hadn’t tipped.
9.Someone had ignored my towel, my chair, my beach bag with its sunblock and keys and wallet.
10.But stole my fat Russian novel and drank my ale.
HEATING AND COOLING
The A/C won’t work, so I call a repairman. His name, he tells me at the door, is Matthew. I lead him to the office we added on ten years ago—it has a separate system—and point out the little trapdoor in the ceiling. He’s up there a long, long time, and when he finds me in the kitchen, he’s slick with sweat. He says that the access to the heating and cooling is way too small. Very hard to get up there, very hard to navigate once you’re up there. And Matthew is a small man, not much taller than me. Worse, says Matthew, when the unit blows and needs to be replaced, the ceiling will need to come down. He wipes an elbow across his dripping forehead, then digs out his phone. He shows me a photo of his tape measure stretched across the A/C, then stretched across the joists: the A/C is wider. Matthew tells me he emailed a video to his buddies.
It’s not desirable, I know, for one’s house to provide lunch break entertainment for so jaded a guild as the A/C repairmen of Mississippi.
Matthew says a door should be cut high on the wall for repairs, because, as is, it’s near impossible to change a coil or fan unit. He says this door would be at the ass end of the unit, but that that’s better than nothing. He says that if he gains a few (here he pats his wet shirt, stuck to his abs) he couldn’t squeeze up there, even with a shoehorn and a crock full of bacon grease. Matthew: it’s possible that at this point I have a slight crush on Matthew. Small, trim men can be so appealing. Also, authority makes me horny.
I’m willing to concede that, in addition to heating and cooling, there are numerous subjects of which I’m ignorant. Several years ago, on vacation with my former college roommates, the five of us sat around the way we do, drinking and catching up. The quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had just begun airing. One of my roommates, Laura, a biologist and high school teacher, had auditioned for the show, graduating through several levels, though ultimately she wasn’t chosen. She told how part of her was relieved because she would have been embarrassed in front of her students if she got tripped up on a simple question.
“Yeah,” said Beth, director of social work for a big prison and a master of TV trivia, “I’m relieved, too. I mean, what if you used ‘Phone a Friend’ and there I was, your entertainment lifeline, and I couldn’t come up with, like, the name of the car on Knight Rider?”
Denise, former captain of the Notre Dame soccer team and now CMO of a Fortune 500 company, said, “Right, as your sports lifeline, how bad would it have sucked if I didn’t know who won the World Cup?”
They kept talking about Laura’s audition as I worked it out: “You mean—you mean I’m the only one who’s not a . . . what do you call it . . .” (I’d never seen the show) “lifeline?”
The girls exchanged looks: Uh oh.
Laura laid a palm, chilled from her gin and tonic, on my knee. “Oh, B.A., honey. Don’t take it personally. After all, come on”—she smiled, not unkindly—“what are your lifeline areas?”
Let’s see. There’s poetry. Metrical and free verse. So there. And babies. I’m good at babies, at making them and birthing them. I used to be good at making milk for them, too. I recall how my babies would fall asleep while nursing, how their lips would loosen from my nipple, how I could see into the sweet pink grottoes of their mouths, their tongues still flexing a time or two, the pearly milk pooling there or sometimes running from the corner of their lips. Eat all you want: I’ll make more. And let’s not forget I am very good at cookies. My friend Lee Durkee says I bake the best snickerdoodles he’s ever tasted. And he’s never even tried my lemon poppyseed. Or, sweet Jesus, my gingersnaps.
My areas of expertise are scrolling through my mind as Matthew scrolls through photos on his phone, detailing the problems. I’m nodding. Which is to say, faking, which I do when flummoxed by technology or mechanics. I’m like a dog—a bitch, in fact, for I feel ungainly and femaley—a bitch, reading her master, trying to glean her fate from everything but words. If Master points to Car, does this mean Park, or Pound? Matthew says Freon and BTUs and then several unrecognizable terms. I’m still nodding when he leaves.
So I track down the original contractor. I’m hoping he camouflaged some magic attic access, stairs that descend when you pull the sconce beside the bookcase, which probably revolves.
He did not. He built this addition ten years ago and can’t remember why we settled on this design. Neither can I. That’s another thing I’m not good at: remembering. He thinks we knew access would be hard but decided it was worth it for roofline aesthetics. Hmm, I think. I do like aesthetics. I nod. He thinks we decided that the unit would last maybe twenty years or more, and that we’d deal with replacing it then, cutting a hole through the sheetrock. No biggie. I nod, thinking, Would I really have agreed to sew a dress knowing the zipper wasn’t long enough? Would I really have thought, Hey, we’ll just cut the dress off when I’m done? But the longer he talks, the more familiar the idea sounds. I say, Do we need to build that access door Matthew suggested? The contractor huffs a laugh. No, he says, most certainly not. I nod. This contractor—I notice for the first time—this contractor is a handsome man. A big man, tall, with a generous belly pressing taut his striped polo. I bet he shops at stores called Big and Tall. Big and Tall and Yummy. I would like to help him choose his striped polos. Try this one on. And this.
If there was a planet where all the repairmen were repairwomen, I’d rocket there, never to return. I’d still be puzzled when something broke and they explained—I’m nobody’s lifeline, after all—but I wouldn’t be additionally puzzled by my failures as a feminist.
So we’re good then? the contractor asks.
I nod. I’m a good dog. I offer him a cookie.
“IF YOU WERE BORN CATHOLIC,YOU’LL ALWAYS BE CATHOLIC”
My husband sits up after changing the van’s busted tire, grease on his forehead, and I think—though it’s been twenty years—Ash Wednesday.
DISHARMONY
My mother and I argued about her eHarmony profile. I thought she should list her age as seventy-four, not because she couldn’t pull off sixty-four—she could, she’s a beautiful woman—but because if she did meet someone, she’d be beginning their relationship with a lie.
But I don’t feel seventy-four, she’d insist.
Our argument was not long-lived. The lumps turned out to be cancer. After her double mastectomy, she underwent a slow rotation before the full-length mirror. After that, she deleted her profile.
BAD BREAK
The biker bar on Airport Boulevard in West Mobile always attracted a rough crowd, but that crowd seemed particularly rough. Still, I stacked my quarters on a pool table in the dim, cool back room.
By the time I’d gotten my beer, my turn was up. I walked over to the guy running the table. A brown vinyl case leaned in the corner. He’d broug
ht his own cue.
“Pete,” he said, and we shook. He was big and grizzled, black T-shirted belly looping over his belt, red-brown beard and mustache, but he looked out from a pair of youngish eyes, maybe mid-twenties, like me. I thumbed my quarters into the tray, shoved it in with the heel of my hand, and we listened to the balls clatter from the table’s belly into its mouth.
“Lag for break?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “You go.”
I reached in to pull out the molars as he laid the rack on the felt.
Someone walked by and touched his shoulder.
“Crowded tonight,” I said.
“Yeah.” He snugged the fifteen in the triangle. “They’re having a wake.”
“A wake? Wow.”
“Yeah. Guy wrecked. On his bike. Just down the street.”
I selected a cue and chalked it, noticing on a nearby table a framed photo: a big man in a sleeveless leather vest, straddling a motorcycle, cigarette skewering his grin.
He noticed me noticing. “Yeah. That’s him.”
“Wow,” I said again.
He lifted the triangle, flipped it once, and popped it into its slot.
“Friend of yours?” I bent over the table.
“Not really.”
I drew my cue back, did three quick elbow-saws to warm up.
“He was my old man.”
Heating & Cooling Page 2
