21
WHEN THE YOUNGEST of us slept with Marcus Bell, we pretended she hadn’t. Marcus Bell, who mowed yards all summer and whose sweat smelled like fresh-cut grass. Marcus Bell, who had a collection of creepy baseball player bobbleheads on a shelf above his bed, and dark red areolas like pepperoni slices. Marcus, off-limits because the oldest of us had gone out with him. The youngest of us never told about Marcus because it would’ve changed everything, even though that’s why she did it: to change everything. But the change that it brought surprised her. Something about Marcus moving inside her on his lumpy bed made her think of a boat lost in a vast sea. She buoyed him up. He was just a small thing, hardly there at all. She rolled on and on. Filled up with only herself. It was a lonely feeling. She wondered if to Marcus it seemed like he was lost in a sea of grass, like an unending prairie. She tried to explain this lonely feeling to him when he drove her home afterward, but grass clippings had filled his ears and he grew nervous and stared straight ahead at the road and said something about how pretty she was and how he hoped they could have more special times. But she knew they would go on just like before, in ignorance of each other, and she would see him at Mangia Pizza that next week and he would stop by our table and smile the way he did and ask if he could have her pepperoncini and one of the boys with him would laugh. But she would see in Marcus’s eyes that part of him knew he was a boat lost in a vast sea.
So we pretended about Marcus because if the others of us knew, the youngest of us wouldn’t be allowed to go riding anymore with the horsey girl or be invited along to scavenge for theater costumes at thrift stores. But of course we knew. Knew from the smallest things. The way she stopped wearing so much makeup (except a little base and powder to hide the hickeys Marcus had given her). The way she hugged the others of us for no reason. The way she absently cocked her head and listened to the vast sea inside herself.
See how we are? We know and don’t know.
I just wish I had more memories, one of our mothers says from somewhere, and we know we are near our anniversary. Jesus H. Christ, we think, because we know what’s coming. Suddenly one of us has her pixie haircut from sophomore year. Another of us wears the round glasses that made her face look fat before she got contacts. The youngest of us feels her retainer push against the roof of her mouth and can’t help but lisp.
I can still smell their hair after a bath.
We suspect she’s doing laundry, because that’s when these thoughts often come, while matching socks. Laundry is dangerous that way.
They are a great comfort, the firefighter said.
Then we see one of our mothers on the laundry room floor, hands bound with a bra, mouth harnessed with a ligature made from panties. We’re afraid. Don’t leave us like this, we say (the retainer gets in the way, so it sounds lispy and far off).
The firefighter knows something, one of our mothers says through the ligature.
He just might, we say. The new guy always seems to.
Maybe I’m imagining it.
Even so, we say. The plot thickens. We go forward rather than back.
Maybe I’m going crazy.
Her cheek against the floor tile, one of our mothers is conscious of her heart beating. How it sends itself away and returns to itself.
We’ve been there, we say.
She watches the clothes tumble in the dryer window and thinks of tiny particles falling through an endless void and how by chance a few collide with others. How all the stars, planets, animals, and people came to exist by collisions like this and will one day fizzle out into nothing. But in the meantime the particles keep going. Maybe sadder and wiser, but they mosey on (okay, our words, not hers), colliding here and there, a part of us remaining a part of them. And though the physics of all this is over our heads, we’re suddenly there under the utility cabinets in the fluorescent light that’s always on the fritz. Our mother matches socks in her head on the floor and thinks for a moment she can smell our perfume but decides it’s just the fabric softener. She stares into the flickering light for a moment, narrows the gap. See? we say. See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?
22
YEARS BEFORE, WHEN Rosa moved from Chicago to Austin, her boyfriend, David, had followed her. At the time, it seemed like a good fit. She’d take journalism classes and work for the university paper, he’d play in bands, do his music writing. David was obsessed with early-twentieth-century blues and jazz, the musicians from that era who seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Ciphers, he called them. He’d talk excitedly about how these anonymous people had invented modern music out of thin air. How they’d made a place for themselves in the future while their own time passed them by. “Sort of like you,” she’d said to him once over breakfast, and he smiled in a funny way that made her think for some reason of the surf sucking sand from beneath her feet.
David played guitar, trumpet, and clarinet in a band that sounded like a drunken carnival. The band’s songs were filled with dark longings and melodrama. People went crazy from rejection and loneliness. They leaped out of church choir balconies or came too close to a space heater in their gauzy nightgowns. The innocent died while the guilty went on. The band’s lead singer maniacally beat a big bass drum at the front of the stage. The audience sang along drunkenly. For months, Rosa had a crush on the singer, particularly his mouth, then briefly on the singer’s pale girlfriend, who dressed like Fay Wray. For the first eight months she spent Friday and Saturday nights at Liberty Lunch or the Hole in the Wall. She would sometimes have to drive to Melody Mart for new clarinet reeds or to retrieve a pickup amp for David. A gofer. She didn’t mind.
By that first spring, Rosa had her own opinion column in the university paper and a reputation as a first-rate editor. She won a prize for a five-part series she’d written on sexual violence for which she’d interviewed dozens of people—professors, students, janitors, librarians, police, administrators. She stayed late at the paper, smoked more than ever, drank after deadlines with her coworkers, and either came late or didn’t make it to David’s shows. David became sullen and paranoid. He complained about the heat. His prospects. Fire ants. Her fluctuating weight—her quitting cigarettes for a time didn’t help. He lost interest in his 78 record collection, which she’d helped haul down from Chicago, records he used to transcribe old song lyrics for archivists. He seemed to resent her recent success, resented that his gigs had dried up in the early nineties recession and that the bands he played in weren’t serious enough or authentic enough. He threatened to legally change his name to Jelly Roll Morton until she told him it would invalidate the apartment lease. A little later, he threatened the drunken carnival band’s lead singer with his drum mallet, as if imitating one of their songs. He got voted out of one band, then another. He and Rosa fought over rent money and utilities. And, of course, they had less and less sex. The last few times they did, he’d insisted on entering her from behind, which she’d always liked but now found unsettling. Something about his breathing had changed, she thought. He had the dry, metallic smell of their old radiator in Chicago. So she began putting him off, finding reasons to stay away until he was asleep. Planning a way out.
One night, she came home late and the lights were off and David was sitting in the living room listening to gypsy jazz. Beer bottles cluttered the glass coffee table. He’d asked her absently about the newspaper and she told him about recent goings-on. Gossip. Told him a funny story about Graham, the managing editor.
They sat there in the near dark and she took off her shoes, rubbed her feet.
He smiled at her in a way that said he’d been into the medicine cabinet. He made a strange little chuckle in his throat. “Are you fucking him? That Greg or whoever?”
“Do you think that’s funny?”
“No. Not very.” He looked out the window with a stricken face, as if he saw this Greg slinking along the fence line. “You just seem to talk about him a lot.”
“Graham has chronic psoriasis.” Sh
e stared at him.
David downed his beer, opened another. Lit a cigarette.
“Can we turn on some lights in here?” she said.
Django Reinhardt’s “Summertime” came on. David told her that Django Reinhardt started out a decent guitarist but not a great one. The best and worst thing that ever happened to him, David said, was that one night after a show, on the way to bed, he knocked a candle over in his gypsy caravan home that he and his wife, Florine, shared. Florine had beautiful long dark hair. Turned out, David said, the candle set fire to piles of little celluloid flowers Florine made to supplement their measly income.
“Ah, a musician’s life,” Rosa said.
David looked at her. Smiled his medicine-cabinet smile.
The next-door neighbors’ dogs started barking along the back fence.
Anyway, David said, Django’s nightshirt caught fire. Florine tried to smother it with a blanket, but her long hair went up in flames too. Django eventually smothered the flames, dragged her outside, but it was too late, David said. Django was devastated. His wife lost. His fret hand and a leg severely burned. Scar tissue formed on the hand until it resembled something like a claw. Essentially he had to relearn to play the guitar from scratch, David said. He paused and listened intently to Django Reinhardt’s strumming. “Two functional fingers on his fretting hand,” David said. “Two!”
They sat there in the buzzing silence after the song. David fidgeted, took a drag off his cigarette. Leaned over and moved the needle on the record. A jangly, fast-tempo song began to play.
Someday, when you grow lonely
Your heart will break like mine and you’ll want me only
After you’ve gone away…
Rosa felt dizzy. Red celluloid flowers bunched in her head. The room smelled like burning hair. She got up and started for the bathroom, but David stood up and blocked her way. She tried to maneuver around him but her movements seemed slow and clumsy and she wondered for a moment if she was asleep. David grabbed her hand, gripped her hard around the waist and attempted to dance her around the room, to heave her roughly over boxes of books and stacks of 78s. Empty beer bottles clattered to the floor.
“You’re hurting me,” she said, pulling away.
“We’re dancing,” David said, smiling, his eyes jittery in his head. He tried to grab her hand but she pulled away from him, moved toward the back door. He swung his arm out and hit her in the side of the head with the flat of his palm. Everything grew bright and hot. There was a ringing in her ears. In front of her, his face a knot of hatred and contrition. He said he was sorry, that it was an accident. He tried to take her in his arms. Rosa shoved him and he stumbled back, catching his heel on a box of 78s. His body seemed to pause in the air for a moment before he fell and shattered the glass tabletop.
23
FROM THE SIXTH floor of the police station, Michael could see the cars and trucks passing along the interstate below. He followed a northbound red Boar’s Head truck until it rose onto the upper ramp, where it would pass beneath a billboard with the girls’ faces. He never drove north along the interstate and had nearly forgotten why. He never went to Juan in a Million anymore for breakfast because he thought he’d seen the older man eating migas there once. He never told anyone about the camera or tripod lighting or DVDs he’d found in the back of the Volvo. Oh, that, the younger man had said, later, as they drove over to the ice cream shop, as if he’d been meaning to mention it all along. What good is a fire insurance policy without documentation? The younger man smiled in a way that made Michael think of someone leaning in for a kiss. Outside, purpled lawns and houses drifted past. Michael remembered an erection swelling in his jeans and the sudden urge to leap out of the car.
He would have left town already with Alice if it hadn’t been for the recent court visitation order Lucinda had filed through an attorney—a ploy of some kind, he supposed, to eventually get money out of him or maybe out of his dad. How had things gotten so out of hand?
Outside the jail, Michael carried Alice across the intersection at Seventh Street and then under the interstate. Eighteen-wheelers roared overhead. The smell of exhaust made him nauseous. He asked if Alice was hungry and she said the nice lady gave her a Happy Meal and a vanilla milkshake. She was tired and dreamy-eyed now and only wanted to be carried. As they passed under the interstate, Michael thought he saw one of the plainclothes detectives who’d picked them up earlier parked in a white Mercury. They’d want to talk to him again tomorrow, to clear up a few things, Detective Morrow had said. Maybe they’d need to take a drive over near where the ice cream shop used to be. But he wasn’t under arrest, no. There was no need for that. They were just talking. Michael could still feel the weight of Detective Morrow’s hand on his shoulder.
He went through a mental list of all the things he and Alice would need, but it seemed to run on and on like water from a tap. Alice asked to ride on his shoulders, so he raised her up over his head. The wind was blowing from the south now, and the late-afternoon sun warmed his back. He felt oddly at ease for a moment—as if for once his options were clear. As if every moment now had a cellophane sheen that he might poke through to what was really happening.
Alice said, “Look at the shadow on the ground, Daddy. We’re a giant.”
On the other side of the interstate, he flagged down one of the cabs driving by, which he knew rarely stopped near the police station. The cabdriver looked him over, as if debating whether criminals gave kids rides on their shoulders. Michael glanced back at the detective in the white Mercury and then helped Alice into the cab. The wind kicked up, swirling dust and sand, and Michael stumbled into the backseat, nearly blinded.
Michael was twelve, Andrew fifteen.
Their mom taught English at the community college. Student essays were always piled on her desk in the den. She called the students her other babies. Freaks, Andrew and Michael said. Towelheads. Jasbeer Mowat was one. “You want mo wat?” Michael kept saying until their mom got mad. “These folks haven’t been given everything like you two,” she’d snapped. Once in a while she would read a good essay to them. A fifty-year-old woman wrote about going to the doctor for some tests and finding out she had a tumor the size of a cantaloupe in her uterus. Afterward, the woman went home and prepared her husband and kids for the worst. But when she went back for more tests, they found out the tumor was a baby instead. “What kind of idiot doesn’t know they’re pregnant?” Andrew had said, grinning at Michael. She’d tossed the essay down, glared at him, said he’d missed the point, and besides, what did he know, had he ever been pregnant?
But the best essay Michael stole. He stashed it in the air vent beside his bed. He took some shitty ones too, so it wouldn’t look suspicious. Their mom pulled her hair out looking for them. One night, after he’d gotten back from smoking weed and watching Comedy Central at a friend’s house, he’d gone straight to his room, pulled the essay from the vent, and held it under the lamp, its edges brown-smudged from his fingers.
Videsh Deshmuke
English 1310
Personal Narrative
Prof. Kay Greer
Delta Crash
My wife Madya and I were returning from my father’s burial ceremony in India. On the plane, I was thinking of how the last meal I prepared for my father—Emperor’s Saffron Chicken—was not up to his standards. “A little dry for me,” the old bastard said. “And the chutney too lemony.” To think how this bothered me then. I wanted so badly to make up to the dead.
On the plane, I remember my wife’s head turned toward the window. She was suffering from homesickness already. Her short, modern hair and capped teeth made everyone in my family look a second time. Is this you after all, Madya? their glances said. She did not fit anymore. And because of this, we grieved together. I for my father, she for her old life. It was not that she hated our new life, the life of the Indian restaurant we ran together. It was that she could never taste the other life in the same way.
The night
after my father’s burial, I lay on the bed in the dark, weeping. She came and sat beside me and ran her fingernails through my hair for a very long time. She sang a song to me in Hindi. Her skin smelled of tea leaves.
On our flight back to Dallas, I remember the many swimming pools below, winking in the sun. Then the plane dropped beneath us, too sudden. Madya grabbed my hand. The oxygen masks fell from the ceiling. There was an explosion. Blue flame rolled down the aisle, like some child’s enormous lost ball. Then the world was torn in two.
I was strapped in my seat, sitting in a great field. Sirens were screaming. In my nose, the odor of fuel and something I could not name. Clothing was scattered on the ground. Above, I saw blue sky, darkness, blue sky again. Smoke was coming from a dark, crushed shape in the distance. I felt its heat. I knew the shape was part of our plane. Impossible thoughts whirled in my head. I was outside what a moment before I had been inside. My eyes closed. I still felt Madya’s hand in mine. Then I saw my father across the field, hobbling on his bad ankles. He was wearing his white chef’s smock and hat. He came to me. “You are certainly lucky,” he said in Hindi, patting my shoulder. “A big bird crashes like that and you end up sitting here as though you were watching a movie.”
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