Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  63. Boulder, Colorado

  In the first email, Sofree@spiritpulsings.com writes, Rick and I have, over the years, built between us a citadel of the heart, filled with love and understanding, and when a third party tries to scale its walls, it gets our attention.

  Getting attention is only one of the idioms Sofree and Rick overuse in common, another is field (which means something like aura) and tone (which means something like agenda) and wank, which means something I have yet to discern.

  Further down the page, Sofree uses the word honoring with an article in front of it, as in, the honoring of it, it, in this case, being the triad, being Sofree, Rick, and Madison, as if taking and holding power were as simple as turning a verb into a noun.

  By the time our lunch at the Boulderado rolls around I know Sofree grew up in Miami, the youngest of four sisters, all of whom graduated from Florida State with a major in communications, her favorite book is The Da Vinci Code, she identifies as a flexitarian, and she is about to marry a heart surgeon named Tom.

  When I told Rick I couldn’t understand why five years hadn’t been enough time to get over her, he said, “Because after she found out she was pregnant, it didn’t matter to her whether or not I died,” and when I still didn’t get it, he handed over his therapy journal. As a result I have read hundreds of pages dedicated to Sofree’s beauty, sixteen descriptions of the sex act between them, and at least thirty instances of the words shimmering hair.

  I sit down at the sunny table and Sofree gives me a paperweight in the shape of the goddess Kali. Her hair is in a white-blond pixie, falls in wispy bangs around her eyes and shimmers not at all.

  She says, “I know we agreed not to talk about Rick, but can I ask how you broke the news that we were going to be meeting?”

  It seems a bad sign that we have gotten here right off the bat. I manage a smile. “I said, ‘Rick, I’ve got something to tell you,’ ” I say, “and I know you might not like it . . .”

  “You’re pregnant!” Sofree practically shouts, and gives me her craziest sexiest smile.

  “Very funny,” I say, sincerely, fingering the paperweight. Thinking, What about the triad? What about the love citadel whose walls I’ve so disrespectfully scaled?

  Three middle-of-the-nights this week Rick has woken himself from a dream screaming “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!!” but you don’t have to have taken Divorce 101 to know this is not the good news.

  “I’ve had a releasing . . .” Sofree says, almost a stage whisper.

  “You have?” I say, hearing Cinder’s voice in my head: How could anybody sleep with anybody who so unashamedly cranks out gerunds.

  “After all,” she says, “Rick denied me the ultimate expression of my womanhood.”

  Not hardly, I think, and she takes my hand.

  “Now Pam, I know that when I was with Rick I was on a particular life journey, and I don’t know about your life journey, but I suspect that one of these days you are going to wake up and realize that you deserve more, and if that happens I’ll be here to support you in that fully.”

  What’s impossible to ignore is that she means it. Also that she might be right.

  “Thanks,” I say, and then we go sit in my car and I play for her Nerissa Nields’ new song about asking your enemy to tea, and when it gets to the part that says, See the criminal in me and smile anyway, she throws back her head and laughs.

  64. Lubbock, Texas

  J and B’s coffee shop: best coffee in town, crummy couches, Dave Matthews on the stereo, just a few blocks from Tech. Eight in the morning and nine Lubbock city cops are here, drinking lattes and doing Bible study together, praying and holding hands, in uniform.

  When I tell Bruce, who has taught here for eighteen years, he says, “So what?” and I say, “Well what if the nine of them were wearing turbans with their uniforms and chanting ‘Allah is great’?” and he says, “They wouldn’t be,” and I say, “That’s my point,” and he says, “No, I’m pretty sure that it’s mine.”

  My students here blink at me like sweet stubborn calves. I stand in front of the classroom and think, Don’t talk about religion, don’t talk about religion, so every example I come up with has God in it somewhere. I am talking to them about the importance of listening to the sounds of words, how you can hear the sound of a word more clearly when you don’t know what it means.

  “For example,” I say, “I overheard this phrase last night at the barbecue place: ‘Fifteen naked Pentecostals from Floydada.’ I don’t know what those words mean,” and Travis says, “Sure you do,” and I say, “No I don’t,” and he says, “Well, Floydada is a town,” and I say, “Okay,” and he says, “You know what Pentecostal means,” and I say, “No, I honestly don’t,” and Reagan, the one with straight black bangs that go all the way to her eyelashes, the one who wrote a story about a Muslim named Salim who shot his sister through the breast because he found out she had welcomed Jesus into her heart, says, quietly, and without a hint of irony, “Pentecostal means everything but the snakes.”

  Driving in on Highway 84, racing the trains from eastern New Mexico, there are silver boxes every quarter mile of track that hold the light long after sunset. One of the things these kids are worried about, I have come to understand in three short weeks, is the Rapture. I knew they were thinking, She would know where Marfa is, this Christmas Eve Episcopalian, the whole religion invented in the first place just so Henry could cheat.

  Ethan called to say that while we were together he thought I wanted something from him, and now that we’d been apart he realized I was a person who considered it her job to bring wonder back into the lives of people who had decided there was no wonder left in the world.

  This was overgenerous, if not downright false.

  I’m not saying that Sofree isn’t pretty, I’m just saying she is pretty like a woman in a minivan commercial. I’m just saying I expected more.

  A lot of the time when Rick accuses me of being passive-aggressive I am really being aggressive-aggressive. “I used to be prettier too,” he says, “but now I’m losing my hair, now I have a saggy neck.”

  “I love your saggy neck,” I say, thinking, Now am I being passive-aggressive?

  Bruce says he hopes they turn the burger barn into an exotic dance club, and he’s barely said it before I realize the exact translation of those words if you put them in a woman’s mouth is, It’s such a beautiful day. I think I’ll put on my new leggings and do some stretches in the park.

  65. Powell, Wyoming

  Home of the sugar beet; mountains and mountains of them lining the sides of the road. At the Lamplighter Restaurant, one question the waiter asked us was, “Soup or juice?” Here you don’t live in Willwood, you live on it.

  On the eighteen-seater prop into Cody, there was an enormous nearsighted man who found a way to work the word buttocks into the conversation four times before we even took off.

  The whole country was talking about change, so I made a list down one side of a piece of paper of all the things I wanted to change, and down the other side I wrote what it would take to make it happen. The left side of the paper said things like: (3) Let Rick do his own work, and (6) Let things fall apart a little, and (9) Know that the river is there all the time, even when it’s not; but I really liked reading the right side of the page which said: Light, Freedom, Time / Heart, Faith, Faith, Courage, Faith, Time, Trust, Self-Forgiveness, Self-Worth, and Faith.

  Now I am being shown around by a couple of women engineers from the college, which in Powell means climbing into the front of the half-ton and driving up to the airstrip, then turning back around and driving out to the dam.

  The day before I left Boulder, Rick and I took a solemn vow not to fight before departure. Madison and I played leap-frog all afternoon in the yard while Rick grilled burgers and then we watched Scooby-Doo with real people, which we all enjoyed, and we made a strange little family unit, if a somewhat sad one.

  I put Madison to bed and she asked me ho
w the earth got made, and while I was taking a deep breath and thinking about my answer she said, “I know all about the big explosion and everything, but I’m betting God was a part of it too.”

  When her eyes finally drooped shut I went downstairs and Rick and I started the same old conversation again, the one where he says, How could you possibly love someone like me? and I say, This way and this way and after that even more. But then the washing machine flooded the basement and threw everything off, and after we’d gotten the mess cleaned up he said, “I am experiencing you as very angular right now,” and I said, “Well I am quite surprised to hear that because I’ve never felt so fucking round.”

  “I’m just trying to connect with you,” Rick will say sometimes, like we are in The Mod Squad and he is the guy with the Afro, or like the oldest kid from The Brady Bunch when his friends got him to try pot that first time. Sometimes he says, “In relational terms, Pam, you are the mountain all of this moves through,” which is made somewhat more confusing by the fact that he calls a potholder a handlin’ rag. He sometimes will use chat you up and might could in the very same sentence. This he calls being a highbrow hick.

  I am still a little traumatized from Saturday’s trip to Roll-O-Rama, where Sofree showed up, even though it was our weekend with Madison. These days my inbox is full of emails from her with subject headings like Being to Being that begin, I’m feeling hurt, apologetic, enthusiastic, sincere. Sofree didn’t stay at Roll-O-Rama long, just long enough to up her winning streak at the limbo contest to ten.

  The environmental engineer named Sabrina, mother of three, says, “Yeah, you go to all those birthday parties and see those bitches in their Capri pants, and they’re all like, ‘Yeah, I may have a Ford Freestar full of kids but you know all the men still want to fuck me.’”

  At the Chinese American Restaurant in Cody my fortune cookie says, You are the reasonable person in your present situation.

  Cinder said, “If I ever told Matthew I was experiencing him as angular, in spite of how much he loves me, he would leave me on the spot.” I was safely back at the ocean by then and Fenton the dog was chasing the endangered plovers, making smarter faster plovers, I always reasoned, for the long haul, the winter waves big enough to give even Fenton pause.

  “Can’t you speak with the Originator?” Cinder asked me. “Tell him to wake up and kick a little ass.”

  In the narrow neck of the Tomales Bay inlet, harbor seals rode the current, heads high above the riffles, staring hard at Fenton, and Fenton cocked his head at them, considering, I thought, whether or not they were asking him to play.

  “Not everything is funny,” Cinder said, reaching for an intact sand dollar on the otherwise sea-swept beach, “but an awful lot of things are.”

  66. Boulder, Colorado

  Rick invites me to go downtown for a couple of hours so he can work with his therapist, or more precisely, the woman who used to be his therapist, until she had a nervous breakdown and closed her practice, so now he is her therapist, kind of. What they do mostly is sit in a room and go into trances together, where their faces change colors and even shapes, and sometimes every now and again a bear or a lion shows up. There are two things that make me suspicious of this woman, whose name is Aurora. (I guess that makes three things.)

  First, Rick says when they are done working and she goes back to her house, she leaves energetic hunks of herself all around his apartment; and second, she was his therapist when he met Sofree, and she never once suggested he run.

  I sit on a bench on Pearl Street and send Practical Karen a text about Aurora and she sends me back the same text she has sent me so many times over the years she probably has it saved for future use: Pam, really, what are you trying to prove with this guy? and I text back: I don’t know. I don’t know . . . but something.

  I spend an hour in the Boulder Book Store and wind up with a stack of hardcovers so tall I can hardly balance it and just as it is about to topple I get a call from the 610 area code. A chill goes down my spine because the only people who ever call me from the 610 area code are my father, who is now dead, and the man in charge of my father’s money, which I can’t seem to think of as mine.

  It’s not all that much money and everyone, including Rick, says I ought to pay off the ranch and make my life easier, but the truth is I love to work and I don’t want to make my life easier, and what I like most of all is that every penny that has gone into the ranch has been earned by me.

  Sometimes I think I ought to get the money and take all my friends down the Cleopatra Coast of Turkey in a fifty-foot gulet, but whenever I call the man who calls himself Uncle Stu (though we are not related) to ask for it, he says something like, “A bet against America is a bad bet, Pam,” or “Do you know who went into the factories during the Great War?” and when I say “No” he says, “The women, Pam, the women!” and I don’t know what that has to do with the stock market crashing, but I do know it means he wants me to leave the money alone.

  But this day the call is from Mary Beth Jenkins, who was my mother’s best friend before she died, which seems like a hundred years ago, but was really sixteen. I haven’t spoken to Mary Beth since mom’s funeral, which I think was before the invention of cell phones, but here she is on mine. I always liked Mary Beth because in the sea of suburban Bethlehem housewives she somehow emerged a painter, and a good one, which maybe wasn’t the hardest thing to do since she was married to one of the richest lawyers in town, but likely not the easiest thing either.

  What Mary Beth Jenkins has called to tell me is that my mother has visited her twice since her death, once a few days after the funeral, and once just last night. The first time she came she talked about their friendship—hers and Mary Beth’s—but on this visit, sixteen years later, the subject was me. She told Mary Beth that I was in trouble, emotional, she thought, rather than physical, and she asked Mary Beth to mother me in any way she could.

  Bethlehem is a steel town, and in my eighteen years there I never heard one single person speak of a visitation. So I tell Mary Beth that I might indeed be in some kind of emotional trouble, but if I am I haven’t quite realized it yet, and that I’ll keep her posted, and that we should talk soon.

  When I walk into Rick’s apartment he is burning sage, I presume, to encourage the remaining hunks of Aurora to find their way back to her apartment, and when I tell him about Mary Beth Jenkins he says, “I am not surprised in the least, the first thing Aurora said when she got here was that mothers are everywhere today.”

  67. Denver, Colorado

  This morning, at Ruby’s house, the kids are playing Would You Rather . . . ? and Marla, whose weight is currently at the bottom of her fifty-pound cycle and is therefore all cleavage and ponytails, says, “Pam, would you rather look like you do now forever, or get wise?”

  “Get wise,” I say, “no-brainer.”

  “What if you could look like you looked when you were twenty-five forever?”

  “Same answer,” I say, and Marla narrows her eyes.

  Rick always says, “You are so beautiful on the inside,” except when he says, “You are so beautiful when I am inside you,” which Cinder tells me is even worse.

  “Well,” says Marla, “what if you could have all the wisdom of a lifetime and still look like you looked when you were twenty-five.”

  “Or what?” I say.

  “What, what,” she says.

  I say, “I thought we were playing Would You Rather . . . ?”

  She twists her head like a dog at a foghorn. “Marla,” I say, “you get the wisdom because you don’t anymore look like you did when you were twenty-five.”

  She says, “You don’t understand the rules to this game.”

  68. Albuquerque, New Mexico

  At the entrance to the security line Rick says, “Now you are going to get the story you wanted, that you were broken up with right before your birthday.”

  But that isn’t the story I wanted at all. It’s barely sunrise and we left
the ranch at three and we haven’t had coffee yet. I feel sad beyond measure that we are fighting again, but it seems simpler in the moment to just say, “Fuck you.”

  Rick walks away from me, back toward the parking lot, and I follow. I grab the part of his sleeve where his arm isn’t. “I’m sorry I said that to you,” I say, “really, I am.”

  He says, “If you don’t let go of me, I am going to call that man.”

  What man? I think. “What man?” I say. “What are you talking about?” I am holding his sleeve between two fingers, the way one might hold a feather or a pen.

  “What you are doing right now,” he says, “is illegal.”

  “Illegal?” I say, “Illegal? Have you completely lost your mind?”

  On the way to the airport this morning, Rick asked me what I do when I am feeling my very worst and I thought, Uh-oh.

  Make Your Slots Progressive, one billboard said. A Plutonium Factory, Here? said the next. The sun had not quite risen but it was all glowy over there behind the Sandias, and Venus was sparkling like a crazy woman in the west.

  “If you don’t let go of me,” Rick says now, “I am going to call that man.” I have to guess that he means some imagined member of the relationship police, though there is no one who fits that description in my line of sight. I release Rick’s sleeve, get in line for security.

  Last weekend, when we dropped Madison off, I fell on my face right in front of Tom and Sofree’s house. Someone had cut down a sign and left four inches of aluminum post behind and I tripped over it and went flying. It is the fifth time this month I have hurled myself to the ground, all the way, spread-eagle. Once in Rick’s driveway, once in the arrivals hall of Boise Airport, once over Jude’s computer cord, once carrying a dog bed, so at least it broke the fall.

  “What you want to ask yourself,” Janine said, “is why are you doing it.”

  “I guess I am trying to make sure the ground is there,” I said, and she suggested I try to get down there at least once a day on my own terms.

  On the far side of security a woman wearing a fuchsia scarf approaches, asks if she can help. I try to compose my face in a way that says, Just sad, not crazy, and thank her, but decline.