Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  My sister came into the bathroom and said, “Oh, honey,” her face creased with empathy. She set the Miracle on the floor beside the tub and surrounded her with pastel toys, which the baby ignored. The Miracle played exclusively with adult things. Keys. Eyeglasses. Cell phones. Just a year old and already she was a severe child.

  Carly had lately taken to gathering the Miracle’s feathery blond hair into a ponytail at the top of her head, a hairdo which resembled nothing more than the sprout of a cartoon turnip. The Miracle seemed not only aware of this resemblance but appropriately suspicious of it. She eyeballed me where I sat in the tub.

  Carly discreetly removed the wine and pot from the chair. She left my cigarettes, the peanut butter cups, a National Geographic and the cowboy mug, which I discovered was inexplicably, disappointingly empty.

  I listened to her in the kitchen, recorking the near-gone bottle and placing it on top of my refrigerator. “Red wine contains resveratrol and antioxidants,” I called to her. “It’s good for the heart.”

  Carly returned to the bathroom and sat on the closed lid of the toilet. She crossed her legs and unwrapped a peanut butter cup. She looked like our mother, sitting that way. She had our mother’s legs, her long fingers. She touched her mouth the same way our mother did in pictures. Our mother was a beauty and an alcoholic. She died when I was ten and Carly was fifteen. She drove drunk into a power pole near Reno High at ten o’clock in the morning. For as long as I can remember, my sister has wanted to be the good mother we never had.

  Carly folded the peanut butter cup in two and offered half to the Miracle. “Don’t tell Daddy,” she said.

  “Thank you!” said the Miracle.

  Carly said, “You’re welcome!” Then, “I know you miss him, Nat. But you can’t stay in the bath smoking pot for the rest of your life. You’ve got to keep moving. Get a hobby. They’re starting a volunteer docent program at the museum. That would be perfect for you.” She nibbled the edge of her peanut butter cup. Carly had never met Ezra.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “Do,” she said. “Meet me for lunch. I’ll introduce you to Liam.” Her boss. Single, she’d mentioned more than once. She gave my foot a chipper little pat. She was happy to have a project.

  • • •

  Ezra and I lasted a year, barely. Every night, I would unlock my back door and get into the bath. I’d drink, read and wait for him. Some nights he never came. Those nights I would stay in the bath until the water got cold and there was no more hot water to warm it. On nights he did come—often from somewhere that left his pupils big and his hands trembling—he’d let himself in through the back door, come into the bathroom, touch the top of my head and sit on the lid of the toilet. I’d prop my foot on the faucet and he’d silently loop his index finger around my big toe. We’d read—me National Geographic and histories and remarkable true stories of people surviving plane crash, shipwreck, avalanche; him the local newspaper and slim volumes of plays. We’d talk and he’d roll us cigarettes. In flush times he would roll me joints too, with little strips of paper rolled up in the end so that I wouldn’t burn my fingertips when I smoked them. Ezra was mostly into booze and coke. He didn’t smoke pot unless he was already especially fucked up. This was also the only time he ever said he loved me.

  • • •

  Weeks passed, and I moved though the world perpetually bewildered, in the way of the shell-shocked and the heartbroken. Some days I did my best. Eventually I even met Carly for lunch, as promised. I waited for her in the gallery, where I was reminded why I disliked art museums in general and the Nevada Museum of Art in particular. The rooms were too well lit, and I didn’t care for the way sound behaved in the place. There was a rooftop terrace where Carly hosted cocktail parties for members and prospective members. It was bloodless. My high school friends had their wedding receptions up there.

  Car and I walked to a deli and ordered Reubens. At one point, and out of absolutely nowhere, she said, “Liam went to Yale.”

  “Cool,” I said, through a mouthful of dressing-sogged rye. Carly looked at me for a moment, pained, then plucked a translucent shred of sauerkraut off my chin.

  On the way back through the courtyard, we passed a sculpture I’d never seen before. It seemed to be made from a hundred arcing pieces of soft gray driftwood, all delicately fitted together and balanced in the perfect form of a horse. It looked as though I could push it over. I loved this about it. “Touch it,” said Carly. I did, and immediately realized that it wasn’t made of wood, but of bronze patinaed to look like wood. The branches I’d thought were carefully interlocked were welded together. Just then, Carly called across the courtyard.

  Liam was good-looking in a way that indeed suggested Connecticut. He was lean and jaunty, though he’d obviously made some effort to coax his hair into a state of semi-unruliness. Carly introduced us, then said, “Well,” and retreated swiftly inside.

  Liam smiled and removed his hands from his pockets as if just remembering some childhood reprimand about having them there. I struck the sculpture with the heel of my hand, and the blow made the hollow sound of a bottomless well.

  “Carly says you have an art degree,” Liam ventured.

  “I thought this was wood.”

  “It was,” he said, in a consoling tone that brought to my attention the fact that I had arrived at a state of needing consolation. He went on hurriedly. “Or, she molded the wood, anyway. Molded the wood and then burnt it out.” He gestured sheepishly to a placard set into a boulder nearby, by way of citation perhaps.

  “That’s terrible,” I said, suddenly feeling nauseous. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” Liam started to speak again, nobly, but I interrupted him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”

  Liam, maintaining his East Coast dignity, said only, “Right.”

  On the walk home, I stopped occasionally to brace myself against the bigtooth maples lining the street. I pressed my hands to my breasts where they’d begun to bloom up from my bra, and longed for a museum that didn’t feel like a museum. I preferred the preserved homes of historic figures. I liked a quill ready to be dipped in a pot of ink, a bonnet tossed onto a rocker, firewood half stacked by a stove. A house waiting for people who would never come. This made sense to me.

  Outside my front door sat a pair of tennis shoes, the heels trampled down, the canvas cracking in the sun. A plaque mounted on the brick above them might have read:

  The End (1 of 3). The day was warm for fall. They had their feet in the Truckee River. They’d been drinking wine since lunch. She was drunk and he was getting there. She was telling him where the phrase Indian summer came from. He didn’t believe her. They were laughing about this when all at once he stopped laughing and said, “A part of me wants this. More than anything.” He was always saying this. She had long since begun to wonder how many parts he had. She knew she’d fallen for a puzzle of a man, all parts and pieces and fractions, but was only now seeing how few of those would ever be hers.

  He took her hand. “I want you seventy percent of the time,” he said. “No. Seventy-five.”

  Fucker, she thought, wanting badly to bite him in all sorts of places, all sorts of contexts. On the apple of his cheek. Through a cutlet of skin gathered from the back of his hand. There was nothing to say. In the silence it occurred to her that they were within walking distance of her apartment, and that they had been all day. She saw the route home the way a bird would.

  He said, “I’m sorry. I hate that I said that.”

  “Then stop,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  She was brave from wine and unseasonable sunshine and the newfound closeness of home. She told him he was making things too hard on her. She told him she was afraid she’d let him do this forever. The saying of these things had been a long time coming—these and many others—and
as she walked home, her feet riverwet inside these tennis shoes, she knew they meant the end of them.

  A second placard, buffed shiny and mounted at chest height just inside the front door:

  The End (2 of 3). Two days later a storm rolled in from the west and Ezra came, for the first time, to the front door. When she opened it he said, “Hey,” and took her by the jaw and kissed her. She tried to find some sign in the way he worked his mouth against hers. But it was his same kiss—as brutal, as consuming. It did to her what it always had. He turned her around and pushed her up against the cool wall of this hallway. He put one hand in her hair roughly and kissed her neck, more teeth than tongue. He worked his other hand up then down her, shucking her clothes to the floor. The front door was still open, a wet autumn smell slipping inside. He pinned his knees into hers and spread her legs apart. She made uncontrollable gasping sounds, muffled by her mouth pressed to the plaster. He pushed harder against her and she tilted her hips into him. Then, as if he felt the fight go out of her, he turned her around so she faced him. He bent and kissed her once on the bridge of her nose. She managed to say, “We need to talk.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Talk.”

  “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  He smiled and kissed her fondly on the mouth and through the kiss he is to have said, “I want you to be quiet and let me fuck you.”

  And she was grateful, so she did. He slipped both his hands under her ass and lifted her, mounting her bare back against this very spot. Her legs bowed around him. She braced herself against his thick shoulders and he rocked into her. She let herself believe that this could be a beginning rather than an end. That this was them. Then she stopped thinking altogether. When he came he made the same quick half breaths he always did. He slackened and they slid slowly down the wall, their limbs loosely threaded together. They were unmoving and sweat-slick, his head resting on her chest. A car drove by, its tires sluicing cleanly through the rainwater. By then it felt natural not to say the thing that needed saying.

  A third, positioned unobtrusively near the unmade bed:

  The End (3 of 3). Afterward, he carried her to bed. Before they slept, she got up and nodded toward the fire escape. “I think I’ll have a cigarette,” she said. Without looking at her he said, “I quit, actually.”

  Just before dawn she woke to the sound of Ezra gathering his clothes from the hallway. Already she could feel two sore spots like crab apples above her ass where he’d worked her hips against the wall. (See placard two.)

  She said nothing. Once he was dressed he sat on the edge of the bed beside her. “I know you’re awake,” he said. She did not move. He rubbed the soft place behind her ear with his thumb. “I love you,” he said, and though she knew it was true she kept her eyes closed and said, “Don’t say that.” She did not want to allow that love could be so fearful and meager and misshapen. He left, and she did not try to stop him. She was through trying to stop him. She had been trying to stop him since the day they met.

  That afternoon—after I’d abandoned poor Liam—Carly called me four times. I ignored her. I walked around my apartment, lightly touching the artifacts Ezra left behind in the year we were together. They were pathetic and few: a bag of white tea gone stale, a screwdriver we meant to use to fix a window screen but never did, some books, a toothbrush I bought him. I decided I would preserve these just as he’d left them, convert my apartment into the Museum of Love Lost. I envisioned other exhibits. An installation of all the clever, evasive text messages he ever sent me, a replica of the bar where we met, handmade dioramas of our finest outings. That night I woke to the sensation of the bedsheets against my nipples. In the dark I saw our happiest moments in miniature.

  Here we are in my bedroom, just come home from a concert. We are made of clay and our limp limbs are clandestinely pinned in place with toothpicks. We’ve been to see a band whose music was frantic and heartsick and whose lead looked so much older than the last time either of us had seen them that we couldn’t help but grow a little older ourselves as we listened.

  Dawn is pressing lightly to the cellophane window beside the bed. My yarn hair is tangled, and if you look closely you can see a slight sweat sheen on us both. I am lying on my back on the handkerchief bedspread, wearing tall red heels that have been hurting my feet. They are Barbie shoes painted with careful strokes of ruby nail polish. Ezra sits at the foot of the bed with my foot in his lap. He is bent over, unclasping the tiny-toothed buckle at my ankle. When he is finished with this shoe he’ll remove the other, then run a finger softly over the place where that strap cut into my ankle. His hands will cup the belly of my calf, make their way up underneath my dress. We’ll make love. Afterward he’ll say, I know I’m a pain in the ass. I’m sorry. I’ll kiss his chest and say, Tell me you’ll be true. I can’t, he’ll say. You know that. But in the diorama he hasn’t said this yet. In the diorama we are frozen, his head bent, his sweet mouth gathered in concentration, his ossified clay fingers fumbling softly at my aluminum-foil buckle. I call it Man Removes Shoe.

  In this one, we are papier-mâché in a restaurant alongside the Truckee. We sit at a dollhouse table on a Popsicle-stick patio stretching over a river of blue and green tissue paper, its crinkled rapids daubed white with foam. A shapely decanter of red wine stands in the center of the table, near empty. We have ordered a meal consisting entirely of appetizers. See the card-stock plates crowding the table. See the remnants of colored-pencil anchovies, prosciutto, bruschetta, oysters, soft white cheese coated with candied nuts, a gutted half round of once-warm bread. We smoke cigarettes rolled from wisps of cotton, and his fingers are sunk deep into my hair of soft felt. He is openmouthed, laughing that laugh of laughs. I am thinking, I would do anything to make you laugh. I call it Us at Our Best.

  • • •

  I hadn’t talked to Ezra in six weeks, and I hadn’t had my period in at least eight. I took a test, then another. I called Carly.

  When I told her she said, “That’s fantastic!” and meant it.

  I said, “Go fuck yourself.”

  When Carly came over that night I was in the bathtub and had been for some time. She set the Miracle on the floor. The turnip sprout was ornamented with a blue velvet bow that perfectly matched her blue velvet dress.

  I handed the Miracle the cardboard core of a toilet paper roll, which she accepted grudgingly and inserted into her mouth. “Is that her birthday outfit?” I asked, though I knew it was. I’d been at the party.

  Carly said, “Have you told him yet?”

  “Please don’t start in on me.”

  “You need to.”

  “Why? I know exactly how it’s going to go: ‘We fucked up.’ ‘Oops. Here’s four hundred dollars.’”

  “He won’t say that. He’s a good person.”

  “No, he’s not. And I know you know that.” I reached for a peanut butter cup. “You should be ashamed of yourself, contributing to the romantic delusions of an unmarried woman with child.”

  She leaned down and placed her hand under the Miracle’s chin. She said, “May I have that?” The baby allowed a wet shred of cardboard pulp to drop from her mouth to her mother’s palm. Carly said, “Thank you,” and the Miracle said, “Thank you!” Carly recrossed her legs and looked around.

  “No wine tonight,” she said. “No cigarettes. No pot. That’s a good sign.”

  “It doesn’t mean what you think.”

  “Tell him first, Nat. It’s the right thing to do.”

  I sat up in the tub and extended my hand to my niece. I wanted her to grab hold of my index finger, wield for me some of that heartening babystrength. I wiggled my fingers at her. She regarded my hand and went on gnawing the tube, perturbed. The Miracle has dignity bordering on cruelty.

  “I’m waiting,” I said.

  “For what?” asked Carly.

  I eased back
into the water. “I want there to be something else to say.”

  • • •

  I used to tell Ezra that I knew no man’s touch before his, that I was conjured up on this Earth for him, my virgin flesh materializing among the video poker machines in the back of that bar on Fourth in the same heavenly instant he walked through the door. We used to laugh about this. But before Ezra there was Sam. Poor, good Sam.

  Sam and I once had a baby, technically. He wanted to have it and I didn’t. Sam said he would support me, whatever I decided, which he did. Of course he did. This was maybe three months before I met Ezra and left Sam for him.

  Sam sat in the waiting room for six hours. That’s how long it takes, though the procedure itself lasts less than ten minutes. He and I arrived at the facility early in the morning, as we’d been instructed. The building was unmarked and located across from the Meadowood Mall, on the Sears side. We were buzzed in through two sets of bulletproof doors. In the waiting room Sam hugged me, then kissed me, then hugged me again. I went back and joined the other women.

  All of them were white and teenagers or close to it, younger than me anyway, except one, who was black and considerably older, forty or forty-five. I was the last to arrive, and I’d passed all those teenage girls’ fathers in the waiting room. There wasn’t a mother in the whole place.

  Except for when she was summoned by a nurse, the black woman talked on her cell phone ceaselessly. To a friend, I gathered. Not the father. She narrated everything we did. I hated her for this. I felt protective of the younger girls, perhaps, though I did nothing to act on this feeling. But her insipid narrating soothed me a little, too, because it had the effect of casting the facility in a less exceptional light, like the lobby of a bank or a chiropractor’s office, not a place where one looked for some kind of meaning, which it was certainly not. I thought this was good for the younger girls to see.