by Owen Thomas
“Ohhhh!” She is laughing; approvingly, I think. It is a raw, unfeminine throaty sound that is twice the size of her body. “I can’t believe you!”
“Actually, you’re right. That’s a little extreme. Let’s just start with changing out all the parents and see how that works.”
“Hmmm…sounds like a story in there somewhere to me.”
“Not one you’d want to hear, believe me.”
“Your folks here?”
“Yeah.”
“Born and raised?”
“Born and raised. One sister, one brother.”
“What do they do?”
“Sister lives out west working in the entertainment industry. Brother still lives at home with my folks.”
“He’s the baby of the family?”
“Yeah. You’re not from Ohio are you?”
“Shucks, boy. How’d you go an’ guess such a dern thing as that?”
She screws up her face into a buck-toothed question and I cannot help but laugh.
“Lyon, Mississippi; little dribble of spit of a town near Clarksdale, just a straight shot up State 61 to Memphis. Got my schoolin’ in Louisiana.”
“What school?”
“Tulane.”
“No shit? I went to Tulane.”
“Really? I’ll be damned. Two Green Waves in Ohio. What are the odds?”
“Class of ’98.”
“I was gone before you showed up. Wha’d you think?”
“Good school,” I say. “I liked college. Maybe too much.”
“You’re one of those who liked college better than livin’ in the real world.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not healthy livin’ in the past, Dave.”
“I’m a history teacher. I’m supposed to live in the past.”
“Still not healthy.”
“It made more sense to me. You know; a simple, graceful existence. Plenty of friends, plenty of beer. The whole world laid out in front of you, all of time and creation suspended by a thread, just dangling out in front of your face, and all you had to do every day was open your eyes and take it all in. Being a student was an easy identity to grasp.”
“And bein’ a teacher?”
“Not so much. Not many friends, no money for beer and hard to take anything in when people are shooting back at you.”
“Now…are people shootin’ at you Dave?” It is a mock sympathy but kind of feels good the way she says it.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Have somethin’ to do with that car of yours?”
“Don’t even wander in that direction.”
“Oh, can’t be that bad.”
“Seriously, Cee Cee. My life is a train wreck.”
“And I sort through wreckage, Dave. That’s what I do. I separate flesh from metal. So why don’t you just get comfortable and tell me your troubles.”
I am suddenly embarrassed and a little ashamed of my creeping self-preoccupation and of how my troubles will look stacked up against the human carnage that Sissy Lewis has experienced and has chosen to make her hobby.
The traffic has grown more congested as four lanes narrow to two, and as flashing lights in the distance mark misfortunes not my own. Long, fat banks of ashen clouds are piling up against the sun in the west. The forecast is for rain with a drop in temperature.
My silence has grown conspicuous. Caitlin looks at me with eyes that are level and unforgiving. There is no playful mocking now. Her face has a harshness to it, a severity that I see has managed to secret itself behind her personality and the sheen of her caramel hair and the way her voice shapes my own language into something altogether different. I cannot explain the lump of compulsion welling in my throat; the urge to tell this stranger – to whom I am related only by way of an unfathomable mascot – everything about my pathetic existence.
“Tell me about your life and times as a Tulane Green Wave,” I say.
Caitlin straightens herself and registers the rejection by refocusing her attention on the narrowing road in front of us. Half a mile ahead an eighteen-wheeler has eaten a taxi. We slow to a crawl. She switches on her scanner and devotes some attention to fine tuning the static. Voices say that two people are dead. Another is not breathing on his own. Truck driver is fine. She stares off into the distance, not answering the question I asked only to keep from answering hers.
The cold fact of my unemployment reintroduces itself and I am numbed by it. I think about what she said. I think about the very need to separate flesh from metal and I wonder how I have come to this place in my life. It is not until we have left the accident long behind and exited the freeway that she answers my question.
“My favorite part about college had to be the dope. What an incredible abundance of weed.”
We explore this newfound commonality – the green in our Green Wave heritage – for the rest of the trip. I keep to myself the knowledge of the government plates on the nondescript brown Chevy Caprice that the accident forced to merge behind us.
CHAPTER 26 – Hollis
He closed his eyes. He opened his eyes.
The room came into focus slowly, its corners mere suggestions, its shadow and light playing a sly game of keep-away from his perception, such as it was.
Hollis lay on his back, blinking so slowly as to suggest that his eyelids moved only as a function of air pressure, opening and closing in syncopated relation to the rise and fall of his lungs, moving the sheet beneath his chin like a starched, white tide.
He closed his eyes. He opened his eyes.
His pulse surged sub-rhythmically in a dull throbbing pain in the back of his head, at the place where his spinal column entered his brain. Too much wine, he thought, and then corrected himself familiarly. Not enough food. Up too late.
He closed his eyes. He opened his eyes.
He had dreamt of water. A sun-streaked, lily-strewn Koi pond on the sculpted estate of Akahito Takada. Floating with his arms out like a Christ-shaped bubble of air on the surface. Susan on the shore, amid pink and lavender bonsais, holding her knees, watching him float. Watching his solitude. Admiring his peace.
He closed his eyes, ladling back into the dream. He opened his eyes.
And then there had been a lake. Buckeye Lake. David and Tilly on the shore. David crossing his arms, watching him fish, watching him bait a hook with a golf ball. Tilly, holding a fish. Holding a fish bowl full of water. Where are the fish? Heinrich Van Susteren, yelling and pointing inexplicably, still upset after all these years.
And then a swimming pool. Back at UNOH, the fighting Dogstars, swimming the anchor leg in the state regional championships. People along the edges of the pool, the entire commercial loan department, standing, dancing, watching him power through the water, chanting: Wally, Wally! Wally Nunn swimming over into his lane; fat, newly retired Wally who was never even a part of his college experience, splashing into his lane in great sloppy slaps at the water, obstructing his rhythm. Wally swimming in a rumpled suit, stroking with one hand and holding a drink in the other, slapping him in the face with his fat leather-shod feet. Women chanting: Kevin, Kevin! And from the left it had been Casual Friday Cowboy Kevin with his long hair and his thigh-tie bandana, pushing the water behind him with handfuls of mail, catching him in the temple with a boot.
He closed his eyes. He opened his eyes.
Swimming down, to escape, down to the bottom of the pool where the chanting was low and garbled and distant and he had been alone again; looking up to the watery light and the effulgent explosions of air with each kick of Wally’s shoes.
And then all was calm, a gently shifting surface above him suddenly pocked with the soft explosions of rain, and he had dreamt he was at the bottom of an ocean looking up into an endless, darkening sky of gray water. The shadow of a rowboat had floated into view with its oars stroking the surface like tendrils, then dipping below, twisting in the filtered light, looking for him. Reaching for him.
Reaching for him. He closed
his eyes.
The sheet pulled sideways across his chest as the form on the edge of his awareness shifted and rolled away from him. He opened his eyes.
Bethany. Beth. Beth! She was suddenly everywhere in his mind, flooding the memory of his senses. Sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste all comparing notes and reproducing her vividly and with such urgency that she existed completely within a single thought. The thought swelled and bulged and glistened in imagined light like a perfectly ripened, dew-streaked fruit beginning to split its own skin for the burgeoning volume of sun-sweetened juice that cannot reasonably be contained.
He closed his eyes. The pulse at the back of his head loosened its grip and moved south, rolling its way toward certain tumescent destiny with a momentum that altogether ruined the harmony between eyelids and lungs. He kept them closed.
She had been exquisite in the dark, against the windows, her skin made of the moon; her burning blonde hair; her bright body, rising and falling in a landscape of perfection, the hills and valleys of her youth, that had taken the breath from his lungs.
For the first time since regaining consciousness, Hollis came alive, and it was here that elemental hydraulics started his day. He was masculine. Vital. Even still. He closed his eyes tighter to keep her in, to keep her from escaping. He imagined that he was still dreaming, reaching upwards in his mind for the boat, arms outstretched. Swimming.
Susan flicked the sheet away and padded off to the bathroom.
Hollis squinted his eyes tighter, trying to seal the water inside. Swimming up. Swimming up. Reaching for the outstretched oar that had become a hand, supple and smooth and gloved in filtered blue light.
But urination, with its distinctive echo, like tiny wet shards of metal scattered across the tile of the bathroom, and then, inevitably, the bellowing flush of the toilet – phooosh – drained from his head the magic water of dreaming. Hollis suddenly came current with the world in which he lived. It was early morning and he was home.
He opened an eye in time to catch his wife, wearing the crew-neck pink cotton nightgown she had owned for one hundred and fifty-eight years, turning out the bathroom light and headed back for the bed. She was not looking at him and he did not, therefore, look away or pretend to be asleep. He regarded her with objective detachment.
She was an old woman, he thought to himself. No. Not old. Older. Older than she had been. Because if she was old, then, chronologically speaking, he was certainly old. And he was not old. Age – or the only component of age that really mattered – was a function of self-conception. It was all in the power of the mind to shape what one was. One was, as one believed. He did not believe himself to be old, and so, he wasn’t.
He gripped himself with a slow, clandestine squeeze so as not to draw her attention. He was hard as a rock, by God. He was vital. He was positively vital. He wasn’t even in the same neighborhood as old.
But Susan. Somewhere along the line, his wife had grown older. Older than she had been. Older than she should be. Her face, sans make up, without the contrivances of expression, in all the honesty of the morning, showed a woman growing old. A woman giving up. A woman resigned to the pull of gravity and a steep downhill slide into the grave. A woman looking for nothing in life but the opportunity to feel old and to feel tired and to feel aggrieved and to be done with it all. She often said her age gave her character.
To hell with character, he thought. Character in the face. Character in the eyes. The look of experience. All excuses for those who refuse to acknowledge that we are but a product of what we believe about ourselves. Character? Where was the vitality? Where was the goddamned, by-the-balls joie de vie?
Susan grabbed her pillow and sat on the edge of the bed. Hollis looked at the curve of his wife’s back, at the pliable ridge of spine beneath the cloth of her nightgown, like a taut, knotted rope. She sat quietly with the pillow in her lap, unaware of him entirely, probably contemplating whether to get up or to sleep another couple of hours.
Susan had known vitality once. She had once known where the balls of life could be found. She had known how to shock him; how to keep him off-balance. She had been full of it once. Absolutely full of it. She had been a force of nature.
Incredibly, there had been a day when he had thought his value in Susan’s life was as an advocate for maturity. He had modeled for her a conservative sensibility born of experience that he did not really possess, and that he would not possess for a very long time. This was back when she still had another two years at Kent State and he was newly out in the world wearing a cheap polyester suit and gaudy ties, selling cookie-cutter, split-level versions of the American Dream to one family at a time.
He had modeled for Susan an attitude of belonging; of entitlement, as though born within the private chambers of a society that did not yet even know his name. He had acted like he owned the real estate to which he had access; as though the homes were all a part of his own private kingdom. He made a point of taking her to a different home every week, many of them not really his to show, slipping a silver key into the lock and pushing open the door. He did not carry her across any thresholds, but the effect was almost the same. It was as though they were all his to give away and she could have her pick.
It’s all a matter of buckling down, Susan, he had told her once while out to dinner in Columbus. It’s not too early to start making your mark in the business world. Teaching is keen; okay? It is. But there’s no money in teaching. Business is where it’s at. You’d be great at anything. Selling real estate like me. Or interior design. Or, shoot, the way you cook, you could go into the restaurant business. Think about it: Kimbell’s Diner, or Sue’s Place, or maybe, just maybe, and here he had reached across the table and folded his hand over hers, Susan Johns’ Bar and Grill.
He had let the name hang in the air for a moment, dangling the future possibilities before her, business and marriage intertwined like part of the same glittery plaything, and then raced on before she could respond. It’s not too late to change your major, and in the meantime you can start making your mark by working small jobs in the right field...
But Susan had been too full of herself to take his lesson in fake-it-‘til-you-make-it entrepreneurialism. Her idealism had gotten in the way of anything so practical as a lucrative career. Idealism, that is, with no small amount of assistance from Lyndon Johnson, Spirew Agnew, Richard Nixon, James Earl Ray, poverty, racism, the entire southeastern quadrant of the continent of Asia and more than just a little Mary Jane.
It was not, he had long since concluded, so much a love of politics as a love of herself in politics that had motivated her. It was the idea in her head of “making a difference” and a sense of herself as the critical participant in whatever hair-brained scheme her fellow flower-children decided on a whim would change the world.
Kent State was hardly a counter-culture stronghold, consisting of mostly conservative to non-political, white, middle-class torchbearers of main-stream American values. Consequently, Susan’s political consciousness came to life beneath a yoke of general complacence that easily deferred to the status quo and that tended to distort even modest public demonstrations – a march of thirty sign-waving students across the campus, or a two hour, sympathetic sit in at Taylor Hall, or a windshield leaflet campaign – as heroic battles of epic proportions. A little drama went a long ways at Kent State and tended to pay big emotional dividends for Susan, transforming the daughter of God-fearing Nancy and Herb Kimbell of Dearborn, Michigan into Ohio’s own Joan of Arc.
Susan pulled the tendrils of hair back from her face and then fluffed and replaced the pillow, slipping her legs and bare feet back beneath the sheets. She rolled onto her side, tugging the covers as she went, physically connecting with him through a tension of fabric. He pulled back slightly, not knowing why. She sighed.
They had been an improbable pair, to say the least. Hollis had pursued a business degree at the University of Northwestern Ohio (back when it was still the Northwestern School of Com
merce) with an eye towards all the traditional markers and trappings of success – a nice home, a nice car, a nice pension, approving parents, an upper-class of society that respected him. Susan, by contrast, had pursued a teaching degree at Kent State with an eye towards changing the world – peace, love, harmony, equality, and a society without classes. Where Hollis was emotionally reserved, Susan was prone to emotional lability. Where Hollis tended toward introspection, expressing only that which had been polished and sculpted for public consumption, Susan tended to express herself in the moment without any regard for the quality of the thought or how it might be perceived. Where Hollis forced himself forward in the world, driven by a quiet internal pressure to succeed and to be accepted, Susan allowed herself to gravitate, as if in a free float, towards those people and things that she loved.
Susan enjoyed marijuana; Hollis did not.
Hollis wore underwear; Susan did not.
But, however improbable, Susan had loved him. Even barefoot and braless and well before the dew was off the lily of her idealism, she had loved him. In his more candid moments, this affection had always baffled him, although it never stopped him from accepting it as genuine.
In the early years, Hollis tended to explain Susan’s attraction for him rather self-deprecatingly as a triumph of shallow physicality over all matters of substance. It was a triumph of genetics. He was a competitive swimmer. She had seen his shoulders and his arms and his thighs and his dripping bare chest. She had seen him win the 200 meter butterfly, leading the fighting UNOH Dogstars to victory against her home team. She had seen him push himself effortlessly out of the pool in his starburst trunks, slicking back his dark curls as she sat demurely with the other freshmen in the bleachers, her nascent political consciousness still swaddled in her brain like an unexploded bomb.
Had they met under other circumstances, maybe two years later, after her brain had taken full control, he probably would never have appealed to her. She probably would have hated him. But Hollis had gotten in line early, when the chemistry of attraction was the only consideration. Biology, he had told himself, had been given a head start, and by the time Susan’s conscience began evaluating the world, he had the unfair advantages of momentum and a relative exemption from scrutiny.
