by Lynn Pruett
Richard’s house squatted on a shallow plateau in the middle of a steep hill. Fresh yellow paint around the door reflected, like flames, two geraniums placed below the slim windows. I remembered a dab of paint on Richard’s neck, a yellow spot at the base of his skull after he’d tossed me the chocolate kisses, just before he stepped into the hall.
I rapped hard on the door, wondering why it was closed in the heat. I didn’t hear an air conditioner. It was too quiet on the steep hill, in the clipped yard. Nothing moved. I swung my purse against my thigh to hear my keys jingle.
“Come in,” a woman called. Richard’s wife. I didn’t think she’d be here. Before I could run, she opened the door.
I stepped through the doorway into the dark living room. Gradually I noticed the floor-length drapes drawn closed, the sand-colored carpet, two stuffed chairs upholstered in cool violet chintz, the sofa print, geometric birds in chocolate, violet, and teal. It was a desert effect, the desert at night. I shivered. The woman held some mending, a thread between her front teeth, her eyes looking up under shy, lined brows.
She tied a knot and deftly snapped the thread. “May I help you?” she said, with the brittle veneer that passes for politeness to strangers.
We were the same height but Mrs. Reynolds’s coloring was brown, a surprise. I expected a pale, puny woman. I spied the beauty mark Richard had mentioned, a dark mole on her cheek, framed by a stiff curl. Her other moles were hidden in lingerie. “I’m Jessamine Bohannon and I’ve come for Richard.”
Mrs. Reynolds’s face froze. Her mud-colored lips blanched. She stretched her mouth wide several times and coughed. “Oh, do you work with him? In accounts? Purchasing? You’re from Logan’s Yard?”
Mrs. Reynolds’s voice did not change pitch, her face stiffened. She knew. That kept me planted firmly in the heavy carpet. Richard had always assured me that no one, especially his wife, knew about us.
“It’s not my fault,” I said, and, realizing my sentence lay there like a lit match, added, “your divorce.”
Mrs. Reynolds closed her eyes. Her chest heaved but her mouth stayed firmly clenched.
On my right was a china cabinet full of religious figurines. Porcelain scrolls offered scripture lessons in fine-lettered gold.
“Taking inventory?”
I turned back to find myself pinned by Mrs. Reynolds’s eyes.
“Deciding what you want when I’m gone and you live here?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want your things.”
“No. Merely my husband.” Mrs. Reynolds paused. A short whistling came out of her nose. “I suppose I should give you a tour. Please come to the kitchen.” She gripped my elbow with strong fingers and guided me into the next room. “The oven”—she banged open the door—“cooks twenty-five degrees higher than its setting. I asked Richard to fix it but he never did. You should have no problem getting him to do what you want.” She opened all the blond cabinet doors, letting them swing into each other, showing every box and bag wrapped in plastic and secured with a twist tie at the top. “It’s cockroach free. The chill keeps the vermin away.” She slammed back a wooden lid. “And here you’ll store the potatoes. And here.” She dumped a bucket of garbage down a chute.
“Mrs. Reynolds, Mrs. Reynolds, please. Richard hasn’t asked me to marry him.” I shrugged my arm loose and did not add yet because she was already in a frenzy.
“Live in sin then as you already have been!”
“Mrs. Reynolds, he’s just leaving right now. That’s all,” I said, and realized that was the kernel of it all. He’d promised me nothing.
“Oh, no, you don’t, you little bitch.” Mrs. Reynolds’s mouth stopped as if to taste a new forbidden flavor. “Bitch!” she screamed. “Bitch!”
She lunged forward and ripped my blouse open. Her hands so adept at knots were equally skilled at ripping, knowing a garment’s structural weaknesses. In a single yank, my bra was unhooked. “Look at them! Look at them! Perfect! That’s what he wants!”
Mrs. Reynolds tore open her blouse and unsnapped her bra. “Look at mine!”
I backed to the door and ducked my head. “No,” I said.
“Look!”
Mrs. Reynolds had only one breast. Where the other had been, a ridge ran, raised and pink against her brown skin.
I covered my bosom with my arms. The swift memory of Richard’s obsession with my breasts made me gag. I leaned into the refrigerator with my eyes closed, hoping the coolness would keep me from getting sick. My knees gave way and I sank to the hard floor.
“Too ugly for you, my dear?” Mrs. Reynolds stepped closer.
I saw Richard in my mind. His chest sagged, and he was brown and wrinkled on his torso but he’d never been ugly before. Tits, that’s what I was to him. A pair of tits. “I have to leave.”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Reynolds. “It’s too soon.” She shook out her hair, took off her blouse and folded it into a square, then took off her bra and hung it on a cabinet door. Her breaths gradually became silent. “Well. You can’t leave looking like that.” Lightly touching my arm, she helped me stand up, then led me to a closet and took out a navy cardigan. She held it open for me and I forced my arms through the sleeves. Inside the big sweater, I shrank. I was a puppet being pulled along by Mrs. Reynolds.
“You must have some tea. It’s already made.” Before I could escape, Mrs. Reynolds said, “I insist.”
I sank into the sofa while Mrs. Reynolds poured iced tea. The cubes were large and square and had sat in the glass unmelting for as long as I had been there. The tea was the kind Mama served at the truck stop, sweet and sticky.
“When is your wedding day?” Mrs. Reynolds said.
Her words poked my bruised heart. Richard never intended anything but sex, but for me it was holy. My fingers numbed around the glass. I hated her suddenly, this strange ugly woman. I wanted to leave but she had me cornered with her one brown breast staring like an accusing eye. “There isn’t one.”
“So he’s plain leaving me.” Mrs. Reynolds sipped her tea. A change passed over her eyes. The iris and pupil blended into one dark hole that gave off only the impression of energy. There was no spark of intelligence, no hint of expression behind it. She set her mouth in a line that could have been called a smile if it wasn’t for the paralysis of her eyes. She opened her sewing box and took out a pair of large new shears. The blades, ten inches long, shone too brightly to have ever been used on the thick material they were designed for. Mrs. Reynolds slowly rubbed each blade with a scrap of corduroy.
“You know,” she said. “Richard gave these to me at Christmas.” She opened and shut them. Then, as if fascinated by the shirring sound, she clapped the handles faster and faster. Holding the flashing shears above her head, she stepped toward me.
I slipped the quarter roll out of my purse and wrapped my fingers around it. I climbed over the couch and scooted backwards toward the front door, bumping the china cabinet and rattling the contents.
“Are you afraid of me?” Mrs. Reynolds gave a short spurt of a laugh.
I slammed the front door. At the end of the driveway I stopped the car, stripped off the sweater, and threw it in the ditch. My burning fingers fumbled to button the one button remaining on my blouse.
Mrs. Reynolds moved from window to window, shearing the drapes in half. The sashes fell first; the heavy fabric curled slowly toward the floor; the half curtain swayed uncertainly.
I sped up and down the hills and caught sight of Richard’s red Oldsmobile rolling toward home like a marble in a trough. I pulled over behind a rotten barn and watched him drive by. He was singing; an arrangement of daffodils and glads was propped up in the passenger seat.
The car dipped out of sight. I imagined Mrs. Reynolds with her scissors tearing into Richard, slamming his head with the flat of the blades, jabbing him, until he felt like I did.
RICHARD REYNOLDS
Richard Reynolds touched the yellow paint on the door frame. It was dry. He gathered the daffo
dils and glads from the steps where Ann had thrown them. Squatting on the porch, he could see, beneath the clipped drapes, the strange shapes of his living room furniture revealed like internal organs normally covered by skin.
An unpleasant odor rose from the limp flowers. He squeezed the stalks. A gummy residue oozed between his fingers. He switched hands and squeezed again. The sky was cloudless and deep. Huddled in the sliver of shade that cut across the steps, he held out his hand and felt the immediate burn of the sun. His car shimmered red, a mirage of escape. Sighing, he pushed open the front door. From upstairs came Ann’s crying.
He blinked. The living room was hard on his eyes, the lower regions bright, the upper dark as if a cloud covered the ceiling. He opened the slashed drapes. Sunlight streamed in. He slipped quietly across the carpet.
All the kitchen cabinet doors were open. It was easy to locate a glass vase. He filled it with water and carried it out to the living room and set it on the table. Light caught in the glass. The flaming red glads and yellow trumpets arched out of the vase like sparklers.
Richard sank onto the sofa and marveled at the southwestern look of the room. Aqua and purple and muted orange, sand, prints of stylized birds, all angles. He’d never paid much attention before but he saw the room now. It was not a room that belonged in Maridoches, yet it was what Ann had chosen. Now he saw it needed light to be beautiful. But she had not wanted the sun to fade the fabrics.
Ann’s sobs continued steady as rain. How could he ever face her or anyone again? He hated his smallness—he had no idea what to do. Fixing food didn’t seem right. He couldn’t turn on the TV. Talk to Ann? He’d wait and let her come to him.
He hoped she’d look at him and simply listen. He wanted to tell her the truth—to reveal himself as it had been with Jessamine, how scared he’d been that Ann would die from breast cancer and he’d be lost, alone at his age, and how there was Jessamine who made him feel young and untouchable. He recognized how cowardly he’d been, how in his forty-seven years he’d never faced such a difficult thing as Ann’s illness, had never felt so impotent because he could not cure her, could only bring her food she didn’t want or pace uselessly in his office the days they waited the results of the biopsy, the radiation, the prognosis. He wanted to tell her how blamed he felt when she undressed in the bathroom, and how admonished by the bra she always wore under her nightgowns. He was ashamed of how he had fled her illness, how weak his faith had been.
He wished she’d look at him calmly and let him say those things, let him be the struggling boy he felt he was. Oh, if there is a God, then there can be this intimacy between married people—for if not, why are we bound together?
His chest shook. His hands trembled. To ask and be forgiven, that is all he desired.
When Ann came down it was early morning. He heard her bang into the wall at the bottom of the stairs, then run water for coffee.
Richard was stiff. At some point the air conditioner had clicked on, and he felt beneath the sharp-feathered birds that he was sleeping in the desert. He ached all over for having slept huddled up, hugging himself.
Ann appeared, ghastly in the morning light. Her brown hair was mashed against her head. She’d slept with her makeup on. Her eyes looked like large puffed bruises. She carried a cup of coffee. Only one.
He sat up.
She lowered herself into an armchair. “Your acts are reprehensible.”
Richard nodded.
“Take those flowers out of my house.”
Richard picked up the vase and walked through the kitchen past the coffeepot, which was empty and burning. He turned it off. He opened the back door, lifted the lid of the garbage can on the porch, and threw the vase into it. It shattered. He smiled.
He went back into the kitchen and made himself coffee, six cups. He waited for the pot to fill, then selected their largest mug, an orange bowl with a smooth handle. He found a pint of whipping cream, took out the mixer, and beat the cream to a froth. He shaved chocolate from a Tobler bar Ann kept in the freezer—for eons, it seemed. It was always there, that whole chocolate bar. Into the mug he poured a shot of bourbon, the coffee, the whipped cream, and sprinkled on the chocolate shavings.
He carried his creation back to the couch and sat down. “Done,” he said.
“Richard, I want you to confess.”
Richard started. Could his prayers be answered? “I’ll tell you all of it, Ann.”
“I do not want to hear all of it. I have seen enough.”
Richard drew in a mouthful of coffee and licked the whipped cream off his upper lip.
“I do wish you would at least pretend to be grown up,” Ann said. “I have seen her beautiful breasts.”
Richard felt a stab in his stomach and tried to wipe out the image of Jessamine’s breasts covered with whipped cream, the nipples peeking through like cherries on top.
He’d never felt worse in his life. I’m sorry, the truest words he could ever speak, stuck in his throat the way I love you had for so many years. The words ached to be said but they grew and choked him. I am so sorry, I am so sorry.
Ann’s face was set. How could he make her smile? She would never forget. Was this the face he’d see every breakfast and dinner for the rest of his life, this face of pain hardened to disgust? He drank more coffee, appreciated the bourbon bite.
“I want you to confess in church,” Ann said. “In front of God and the congregation so your soul will be cleansed.”
Richard felt light enter him and yet he shrank from it. Confession to God would clear his conscience, but he was frightened. He imagined the shocked faces of the others in the pews, their wagging tongues, Ann’s embarrassment, his own shame. A church confession would not draw the two of them closer; it would not open the door to the closeness of their souls as he wished, had once hoped that that was what marriage meant. He blurted, “But I want to confess to you.”
“You must confess to God in God’s house. Then I can forgive you too.”
He saw she needed that religious force to get her through this, just as she’d needed that faith to help her through the cancer. But his soul, twisting in his gut, still cried out for the hope of intimacy. He gulped the coffee, let it burn, burn all the way down. He looked around at his absurd living room, imitation desert, yet the sand so gritty he felt it on his lips. “I’ll do it for you, Ann.”
REVEREND MARTIN PETERSON
Reverend Martin Peterson and his wife, Stelle, lived in a modern home on Lake Cherokee. One plate-glass wall two stories high faced the lake. In the living room was a fireplace of stone; on the walls, Stelle’s paintings of apples and pomegranates and Old Testament women in shades of blue. Often, after a heated church service, Stelle retreated to the living room, blasted it with fluorescent rays, and took up her brush. Martin, damp as a dishrag, would go upstairs to the bedroom and stuff towels along the bottom of the door to block out Stelle’s light.
They had a deck off the plate-glass wall where Martin wished she’d paint but she said the trees, which he admired for their height and the restful sound of pattering leaves, broke the light and made her palette muddy. They also had a dock and a dock house, which he imagined would make a nice studio for her, a place to store her smelly oils and turpentine. But the dock rocked with waves from motorboats. Motion was the problem there, not light.
Martin never went to the dock. He could not swim. He was fine in the baptismal pool. It was only waist deep. But the lake was vast, dark, and bottomless.
He liked to sit on the upstairs balcony outside the bedroom among the treetops. He watched birds and squirrels and listened to the oaks and enjoyed the scents that swept across him. He wrote his sermons there. Often he was amazed at how inflammatory his words became when he preached, considering the peaceful circumstance of their conception. Repetition, tone, and pitch could change an innocuous phrase into a violent one. Whispering, which he learned from the pines, was a good sound for lulling the crowd, but too much of it, seven minutes to be exact,
and the congregation grew impatient. Invariably someone burst out in tongues. So he’d learned to coax the spirit by speaking softly, with a continuous modulation—and then like the shrill cry of a bird caught in a cat’s grip, a voice from the congregation would shout out in inspired sound.
That was a different music, brasher, to hear; speaking in tongues. The speaker impassioned, the syllables unknown, the phrasing and cadence suggesting a grammar, a language. The congregation listened reverently. The translation would come at times through Martin, vessel of God’s Word. The messages were as new to him as to the congregation. Sometimes Stelle would translate. Her interpretations applauded creativity, expression, and nurture. Occasionally something doctrinal would creep in as an afterthought. He was grateful for her interpretations though he didn’t listen carefully when she spoke. He watched.
Stelle had long thick black hair with a skunk’s streak running from her forehead to the middle of her back. Her face was bony and tanned. Perhaps there was some Cherokee in her family line. She was tall and slim and not particularly feminine. He liked her strength and assumed they were to be together always—their passion put into their ministry.
But this night, Tuesday, he fretted as he lay in their dark bedroom and watched the pines. Beside him Stelle slept. She wore Egyptian cotton pants and a red T-shirt and rested flat on her back, arms crossed across her chest as if for burial. Most of their marriage she’d slept in the nude.
He sighed. Nothing was automatic for Stelle anymore, not since she’d been to a folk art sale and bought small paintings of snakes and black angels and seen in them a new way of looking at God. Something as simple as making tea seemed to require her avid concentration. The choice was more than boiling water and pouring it over a bag of orange pekoe. Now she paused to listen to the kettle’s whistle or to the rumbling of the preboil as if there were some mystic message in the utterance of steam. She breathed in the aroma of the new tea and tossed sticks of cinnamon or sassafras or rosemary into the cup.
