Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  “God loves you a whole lot, you know,” Scarf Woman says, in a way that sounds not at all generic, but more like she is privy to some top secret information.

  “Well yes,” I say, “I would like it very much if he did.”

  69. Austin, Texas

  Brenda, as it turns out, is tall and broad-shouldered with big mannish hands and a little bitty Melanie Griffith voice, and she’s been chuckling at odd intervals every since we sat down. She is wearing a pumpkin-colored polyester skirt with a zigzag hem and a purple turtleneck, a piece of masking tape over her heart bearing the number of the Iraqi dead.

  My old friend Johnny is sitting right between us, so tight to the table that Brenda and I can’t quite see each other, a tactic I know is somehow related to the Ostrich Principle, if we can’t see each other, maybe it means we are not both really here.

  If one more fifty-year-old man tells me he would like to disappear into South America for a while with nothing in his truck but a whole lot of blank paper I think I might kill myself.

  “Don’t forget your copy of On the Road,” I say, which gets no response whatsoever.

  Howie has ordered three duck appetizers for the table and for the thousandth time is telling the untrue story about my first trip to Austin all those years ago, how I insisted that I was not going to my hotel, insisted that he and I sleep together. Everybody loves this story because we all know and don’t say that Howie only has sex with men, and that those men have only gotten younger, so when he tells them that he and I have been sleeping together for twenty years, in hotels and tipis, and several times below the equator, they know he means sleeping together, and that part is true. What they don’t know is that these days Howie snores like a sailor, so the two nights since I got here, I started out in bed with Howie but wound up retreating to the couch.

  I have no idea how much Brenda knows, not that there’s much to know, beyond the one kiss in Telluride, and the fact that Cinder, Willow, and Nora have decided that when I get tired of listening to Rick pine over Sofree, Johnny is the one at the end of the road. Practical Karen says I’ve got at least two more lifetimes to go before I am emotionally healthy enough to attract a man like Johnny. He lost the wife everybody loved best on a dive trip in Australia a couple of years ago.

  Wade is staring off into space with the exact look of a man whose wife died in a car one week after he had finally had enough and moved out. I don’t know what he’d had enough of. I don’t know how much she’d had to drink. I do know that I have made it to an age where two out of three men at any given table might be widowers, that eventually eventually is gonna run out.

  Back in Denver, the rocket scientist told me the static on my television is actually the lingering echo of the original Big Bang. He told me you can’t get to Pluto without slinging by—like grabbing the post when you are roller-skating—without going to Venus twice and using her gravity as thrust. He was in charge of Mars, he said, more or less, but had recently become interested in the ice plumes on Saturn, was hoping they would send the spaceship whose name is Cassini, through the plumes when the mission was done. He said the real reason that Pluto got demoted from planet status was that the anti-Pluto contingent waited till the last day of the conference, when all the pro-Pluto voters had gone home, when what they should have done instead was upgrade Pluto’s giant moon, whose name is Charon.

  “You are going to tell me that’s a slippery slope,” the rocket scientist said, “but wouldn’t it have made everybody feel more hopeful?”

  The rocket scientist was the third blind date in a month, and I thought, At least this one will be good for some metaphors, but when he kissed me in the parking garage I felt less than nothing, and I didn’t even make it back home before I called Rick.

  Rick and I have tried to break up a whole bunch of times, but either he’s not ready or I’m not ready and the one time we were both ready I couldn’t get the damn dog off the couch.

  “Fenton, let’s go,” I said, three times at some volume, the car loaded and the dog who will not let me out of his sight, who stands sentry at the door at the first sign of suitcases, would not budge.

  Howie says, “This duck is so good it would make you think the rest of the food here would be good, but the funny thing is that it’s not.” When we all look at him blankly he says, “I mean, as opposed to, say, the blooming onion.”

  “This place has blooming onions?” Wade says.

  “No,” Howie says. “My point is that if the blooming onion in a place were really good, it would not necessarily make you think the rest of the food would be really good.” He rakes his fingers through his wavy hair. “Pam,” he says, “do you understand what I am saying?”

  Now that there is something actual to laugh at, Brenda has gone silent as a stone.

  70. Pagosa Springs, Colorado

  Bitter January night in the Amethyst Pool, our hair frozen solid with steam into shapes like helmets and Hailey says I look like Susan Sontag. We all pick out words for the New Year, and Nora’s is guts and Mackenzie’s is mutuality and Hailey’s is intention and I can’t think of one right away, so Hailey says it should be my desires. Nora points out rightly that that is two words and therefore illegal, and I say, “What about laughter?” and Mackenzie says, “What about limits?” but in the end I sell even Nora on spontaneous fun.

  We have all driven down from Creede in two cars to escape the clogged chimney, and we smell just like college students from 1978 who lived in alternative campus housing called the Bandersnatch. When we passed Camp Fun, Rick said, “We just passed a major trauma site.”

  I glanced in my rearview to see that only a handful of the hundreds of trailers that fill the river bottom in summer are still in Camp Fun this deep into winter. A coyote stood on the surface of the frozen river, waiting for something small and warm to move.

  “Camp Fun,” I said, “is a major trauma sight for almost everyone.” It was my birthday and I was sick sick sick of the subject of Sofree-induced pain.

  “I opened up the most fragile version of myself to you,” Rick said, “and you tended it so beautifully, and then you lost interest!” and I thought, Who wouldn’t lose interest? But then I thought, What’s wrong with me, anyway, that this is what I do?

  It is well below zero, maybe twenty below, which is my favorite time to come to the springs, when it hurts to run from pool to pool and even the lobster pot at 109 degrees is a possibility, as long as you remember to hydrate. We are just shrouds to each other, four pink female bodies in the frigid dark with ice-colored hair, our voices the most real thing about us.

  Earlier tonight Brett Favre lost the first last game of his career to Eli Manning, and Rick gave me what Mackenzie calls the look all through sushi, except because of how the chairs were lined up it seemed like he was giving it to her. Just that morning I found the note Mackenzie left for me in the bowels of my Turkish coffeepot: You are everything you are supposed to be. Don’t forget that you give a bunch of really great women several of the best weeks of their lives.

  Now in the hot tub, Hailey makes me tell about the time we pulled up outside Rick’s shop on a Sunday and he was all alone in there at his drafting table and then we saw the backs of his bare legs scurrying up the stairs.

  “I don’t always work with pants on!” he said, when I went up to find him.

  “You don’t?” I asked.

  He said “No!” like, Who does? Then I lifted up the bottom of his shirt and he said, “I am wearing underwear!” like, Who doesn’t?

  71. Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  Driving from Chicago in the minus 6 degree weather, neck craned out the window looking for the lunar eclipse, because the rocket scientist told me to, but the light pollution extends all the way to the Wisconsin border, and I think I am probably facing the wrong direction anyhow.

  If I became the rocket scientist’s girlfriend, the fortune cookie about me being the reasonable one would never ever ever be true.

  In Milwaukee, everything is
frozen solid, the river, the stoplights, even my car door, but when I get to my high-rise hotel room, there is the eclipse right out my window, halfway over and looking strange enough to scare a caveman or an ancient Egyptian to death.

  Trish comes to meet me for breakfast with her sperm-bank in vitro baby and I have no idea how to respond as she details all the ways her life has become a living hell. She knows I thought she was crazy to do it, at her age, alone, with her eighty-hour-a-week job, and now here she is, as if to prove me wrong, but everything she says makes her life sound about ten times worse than I could have imagined.

  The lake is frozen as far out as you can see, blocks of ice heaved up on the shore like wrecked cars, and Cliff Parker, whose law firm is sponsoring my visit, picks me up and takes me to the Milwaukee Country Club for lunch. It is so much like the country club in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, that my father could just barely afford to belong to it takes my breath away, only it is like it is still 1972 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the white wallpaper with little parasol-toting maidens doing tour jetés across it, the four dead gray-haired ladies propped up in the corner as if to look like they are playing bridge.

  The place probably seats two-fifty, not even counting the no-women-allowed grill downstairs, and yet other than the dead ladies in the corner, we are the only ones eating today.

  The point of this luncheon, I quickly understand, is so that Cliff can show me why he is a lawyer and not a writer, to show me the kind of life he gave up writing for. He has invited eight people to the luncheon besides the two of us and exactly none of them show up. I can’t decide if Cliff Parker is a sociopath or just so completely normal that he is incomprehensible to me.

  Our waitress is actually named Trudy, she has a beehive hairdo and is at least a hundred and fourteen years old. We both order the Cobb salad, and for some inexplicable reason it takes forty-five minutes to arrive. The room is being heated to a sultry 85 degrees and there is a squirrel hurling himself repeatedly at the floor-to-ceiling window behind Cliff’s head.

  Over and over he climbs the nearest tree, and then flies—flying squirrel style—and lands splat, with his face against the window, where his paws achieve suction for a little more than one second before he slides, like a cartoon character, down to the bottom of the glass. He does this five or six times before I comment on it, though it makes such a terrible noise every time he hits I can’t believe Cliff doesn’t turn around.

  “Probably rabid,” Cliff says with a casual wave of his hand, and I feel my eyebrows go up and he says, “A lot of the squirrels around here are.”

  72. Bend, Oregon

  In my dream, one guy who is in charge of a monkey is trying to explain to the other guy how difficult it is to manage the monkey’s needs. The monkey has to be placated all the time, he says, the monkey has to be happy, or there is major hell to pay. As he says this, the monkey runs around the room, up to the curtain rod, down to the windowsill, across the floor, and up to the curtain rod again. The other man listens thoughtfully, as a therapist would, offers advice that I understand to be both sage and kind.

  Then the session is over, and the first man says, “Okay, let’s go,” and the monkey reaches up and grabs him around the neck, the way a child would, and wraps his monkey feet around the man’s waist and the man cradles him, quite lovingly I think, and closes the door behind him.

  The other man sits in the vacated room for a moment, stands and then he says, “Let’s go,” and a big furry rat scurries out from the bathroom, jumps up and grabs him around the neck, just as the monkey grabbed the first man, and they walk out of the office together.

  It is Nora’s knock on the door that wakes me so fast I remember all of it. She is here to take me to the place that serves Stumptown coffee, and there I am stumbling around in the shirt I wore the day before, my unhooked bra dangling off my right elbow, saying, “You see how it was, don’t you, the other guy had a rat!”

  The first words Nora ever said to me were, “Robbie Robertson or Rick Danko?” and because there is only one answer to that question I knew we would be friends for life.

  When I arrived in Bend yesterday she picked me up at the airport. At four that morning in Boulder, my cell phone had splashed into the toilet while I was drying my hair, but I didn’t really roast it until I tried to turn it on before it was all the way dry. At SFO I sent an email to Fenton the human that said I was pretty sure Rick had broken up with me for good this time, but by the time I got to Oregon I told Nora that I knew Rick was difficult but I was too, and you could talk all day, psychology up one side and pheromones down the other, but there was nobody alive who could help who they loved.

  Driving up the mountain in Nora’s Prius, I borrowed her cell phone to check my messages, but she had forgotten she was hooked up to Bluetooth, and when I hit the 7 key, there was Rick’s sad Texas voice filling the car, saying he was sorry, that he wanted more than anything for us to keep trying, that I was a mighty fine gal.

  “Welcome to my relationship,” I said to Nora, who knew a thing or two about difficult men, and when we got to the hotel and saw the flowers, I said, “I don’t think Rick is the kind of guy who really sends flowers,” and the lady behind the desk said, “Well, it seems he knew how.”

  Right before Mavis Staples sang “I’ll Take You There,” she kicked off her stilettos and said, “I can dance better without these,” and I thought about all of us, Cinder and Mackenzie, Nora and Hailey and Practical Karen, dancing around my kitchen with our morning lattes.

  I woke this morning with something returned to my chest and made a list of things to be happy about that included (1) Nora was making bouillabaisse, because (3) Seven women were coming from four states to eat it and (5) Rick left another message that said he was off to get a clippins (a haircut) and (7) Anyone who has no monkey probably has a rat and (9) Everybody who said I’d end up bitter turned out to be mistaken (anyway).

  A week after the airport fight, Janine said, “Well, you know I love you, but what I really want to say is that we love you, all of us,” and she stretched her arms out wide to include the whole empty room.

  “That ferry came in just for you,” Fenton the human said last week in Seattle, even though we were standing next to one of the world’s busiest ferry terminals. And watching the late sun make mercury on the surface of the water, seeing the clouds lift off the top of the Olympics, smelling Fenton’s cologne, mixed with chowder and diesel, sound of the horn, sound of the thrusters, I had to admit he was right.

  XE #118

  THIS HAS BECOME MY Friday night routine on the weekends Rick has Madison: Leave the faculty meeting fifteen minutes early, race to the Sacramento airport to catch the 6:56 Express Jet which gets into ABQ just before eleven, drive up the I-25 to Santa Fe, with the methheads on billboards, and the battalions of police cars, sometimes a sobriety-check station, once past a dead man lying on the side of the road.

  If I am feeling too sorry for myself, I stop at Dunkin’ Donuts on St. Francis and get a Vanilla Kreme, white on white, not Boston Kreme, but the even sweeter kind, the kind that makes your teeth ache when you first bite in. The sugar powers me most of the way up 285, across the Colorado state line and on to Creede.

  Rick picks up Madison at noon on Fridays and if they get out of Boulder by twelve-thirty, they’ve already had hours of ranch fun and tucked themselves in by the time I get there, but not before leaving me a Welcome Home Pam-Pam! note with a drawing of a horse or a dog or a butterfly.

  It is two hours and thirty-six airplane minutes from SMF to ABQ. Tonight is clear, no delays, plus I snagged the upgrade. There are four seats in first class on the little commuter, thirty-two in coach. The African-American woman beside me has on her headphones, listening, she informs me, to Sanskrit prayers. The flight attendant doesn’t look twenty.

  Fifteen minutes after takeoff and it feels like we hit the side of a barn. BAM! one time, the water bladder in the tiny galley explodes on impact and a two-inch river runs down the aisle beside
me and then we are falling, falling, falling. The coffeepot is tumbling, weightless, as we have been suddenly freed from gravity, Styrofoam cups are everywhere, and then the plane catches, and shudders, and the pilot pulls the nose back up.

  The woman next to me pulls one headphone away from her ear. “Wind shear,” she says, “most likely. You want some of this action?” she indicates the headphones. I politely decline and then wish I had not.

  I am waiting, I realize, for the pilot to come on and tell us something about what just happened or is about to, but I got a look at him pre-takeoff: very young and cranked hard to one side, most likely just back from Iraq.

  I take out my cell phone (over Flagstaff, if the clouds are just right, I can get two bars even at this altitude) and text Cinder saying, When I talk to myself in that brave ironic voice . . . I don’t know, but I think it might be yours.

  Soon after Rick and I met, I was on a plane bound for Philadelphia that had to make an emergency landing at Dulles because of severe thunderstorms. I was reading his therapy journal and in it Sofree was sexily planting tulips, sexily putting Beth Orton on the stereo, sexily lighting candles around her sexily decorated apartment, sexily putting rennet-free cheese and gluten-free crackers on a sexily hand-thrown plate.

  When I was safely on the ground in Virginia and waiting for the sky to reopen, I called Rick to check in and he said, “I knew this would happen. I finally have a chance to get my life right, so now you are going to die.”

  Tonight, when we land in ABQ the pilot thanks us for choosing Express Jet in the most perfunctory manner possible. I drop my seatmate off at the Skyport Holiday Inn Express to save her waiting for the shuttle, and wave at Psychic Mary as I get on the I-25 headed north.

  73. Zaafrane, Tunisia