Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

There was a long silence then. Hannah with her hands on her lap. Me lying faceup in the tall bed in the small room. The tree branch tapping on the window, saying hello to my craziness. And then my mother asking, “Do you want me to leave, is that it?”

  “Can you see me?” I wanted to know. “Can you see my face?” Under the covers I had the shoelace.

  Hannah’s eyes squinted at me.

  “Is it deep?”

  “What, Pilot? Is what deep?”

  “The scratch?”

  “It’s barely there at all, dear.”

  The voices in the hallway tittered and squealed, rising and falling. I tried to think of an emotion besides fear. For a moment or two, I couldn’t name a single one. And then I said, “Love,” finally remembering.

  And my mother said, “I love you, too, Pilot,” putting her hand over mine.

  I could see the water on the flagstones beneath her little feet. I could see the bright afternoon light reflecting in the water, shining like gold. I could see the goose pimples forming on her arms. I could see the individual blades of grass poking up through the cracks in the mortar. I could see my sister’s eyes, mist-green, the color of a pine needle. I could feel the almost-movement behind her, far back behind the pool, in the woods, a faint rustling in the branches. I could see it, see her, my baby sister.

  My brother’s eyes scanned the ersatz-rustic barbecue restaurant, searching the room for Katherine. He wore a white shirt—monogrammed, as usual—a yellow tie, dark blue trousers. He looked formal, Katherine thought from her table across the room, he seemed dressed for dinner at a much nicer place than the Texas Barbecue Chicken and Rib Hacienda off Sky Highway. But his shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and his jacket was missing—probably in the car—and he was the one who had suggested they meet here, wasn’t he?

  She waved.

  He smiled when he saw her, walking over, his mouth like a sideways crescent moon.

  “I was beginning to think I was being stood up.”

  “A patient called just as I was stepping out the door,” he apologized, touching his temple. “She was experiencing motor impairment. I had to—well, you know. I’m really sorry.” He pulled himself up to the fake rough-hewn table. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I had no idea this place was so cheesy.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a little cheese.” Katherine took a sip of water. “I like cheese.”

  “Have you ordered?” He looked at her directly for the first time.

  She shook her head. “I waited.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “You’re a doctor.” She shrugged. “It’s to be expected.” She left her green eyes on Eric for a moment. Usually, this was enough.

  A teenage girl, hair in pigtails, with a fiery Texas-shaped restaurant logo emblazoned across her fake-gingham dress, approached the table. “Are you guys ready to order?” Her voice was a little too friendly for her face. And Katherine noticed a tattoo on her arm—four black, crisscrossing slashes.

  Katherine laughed. “I’ve been reading this menu for a half hour.”

  “I know what I want.” Eric put his enormous menu in the waitress’s hands. “The baby back rack of ribs I’ve heard so much about and a Heineken,” he said.

  “I’ll have the chicken,” Katherine told her. “And another glass of, of water.”

  “Regular or extra spicy?”

  “Spicy,” Eric said.

  “I’ll try that, too.”

  “Try what?” The waitress was looking at a group of people coming through the door.

  “The spicy.” Katherine raised her eyebrows.

  They watched quietly as their waitress slouched toward the kitchen.

  “It’s not very healthy,” Eric said, “but I love this kind of food.”

  “Me, too.”

  They were silent for a moment, their eyes flickering nervously around the restaurant. Two families were here, Katherine noted, one white, one black. There were a few couples. There was a group of students from the junior college.

  “How is your mother?” Katherine was squeezing her hands beneath the table. She had to remember to keep them there.

  “I think she’s all right. For the time being, anyway. I mean, she—”

  “She must be very worried.”

  “Well, I told you about California, right?”

  “He was on the beach.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “He was more or less homeless for a couple of weeks.”

  Katherine nodded. “I was curious about that. Did Pilot accept any treatment after he came back?”

  Eric furrowed his brow. “I gave him some antidepressants.”

  “They helped?”

  “We thought so. But now I don’t even know if he really took them.”

  Outside, the parking lot of this strip mall was filling up. Katherine could feel it. Families and couples were leaving their minivans and four-wheel drives beneath the yellow, overhanging street lamps of East Meadow. They were entering grocery stores and family-theme restaurants, picking up their dry cleaning, a bottle of wine on the way home. Outside, there were faces lit by the glow of dashboards and neon. The smell of exhaust and burning oil permeated the suburban atmosphere.

  “Would you rather not talk about this right now?”

  Eric looked at the ceiling. It seemed to be a habit with him, Katherine noticed, this looking up. “What about you, Katherine?” he said. “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “I grew up in the city.” She leaned forward a bit, eyes narrowing. “As a matter of fact, this is the first and only time I’ve lived outside of it.”

  “And?”

  Katherine exhaled. “And I feel like I’m going to die.”

  Outside the restaurant was a continuously moving stream of cars, a steady burning of gasoline and oil, a consistent grating of metal on brake pads. Katherine thought she could hear the churning of a million pistons.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Have you ever lived in New York?”

  The tattooed waitress arrived at that moment with an enormous platter of food. “Here we go,” she said cheerily. It must have been sitting in the kitchen the whole time, Katherine thought, ready to serve the instant someone made the order.

  “Wow.”

  “You said you were starving.”

  My brother’s face, Katherine realized, was like mine, but larger and stronger. His eyes were as blue, she thought, as the earth from space. He had the face of a winner, our father had always said, the face of the next president. “I’m starving,” she said. “But—”

  “I went to Columbia.”

  “—this is insane.”

  “Brain-surgery school.”

  “A very good brain-surgery school,” Katherine acknowledged. Now she thought she shouldn’t have used the word insane.

  “You?” Eric began cutting into his ribs. They were reddish black, smeared with barbecue sauce.

  “NYU,” she said. “Psychology. Graduate school, too.”

  He nodded. “I’m attracted to you,” he said bluntly. “You should know that, you know, just in case.”

  Did she look shocked? “In case of—”

  “I don’t know.”

  Katherine laughed. “I’m recently divorced, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “We weren’t really married.”

  He smiled slightly. “Not really?”

  “Living in sin.”

  “It’s completely over?”

  “Completely.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I’m very—”

  “—fragile?”

  “Unpredictable.”

  In the clinic, the television was on, a blur of voices and faces. I sat in front of it on a squeaking vinyl couch. Quietly, somewhere behind me, a man was weeping. My mother had gone home.

  “I like that,” Eric said, smiling. “Unpredictability is a good quality.”

  Katherine chewed on a piece of her blackened chicken, gnawi
ng on a sliver of the burnt, brittle skin. It tasted like wood. The sauce was way too spicy. “You’ve—you’ve never been married?”

  “Wanted to,” Eric said from behind a rib bone. “Went to medical school in Virginia. She wouldn’t come with me, though. She was like you.” He was chewing and swallowing rapidly, wolfing it down.

  I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands.

  “Like me?”

  “A New Yorker.”

  “She couldn’t take the idea of living in Virginia just for a few years?”

  “Of living in Virginia with me,” he said, “for any length of time.”

  Katherine laughed. “And how did you like it?”

  Through a smile and a mouthful of coleslaw, my brother said, “She was right.”

  “That’s the only one?”

  “The only one what?”

  “The only girl you ever considered marrying?”

  “I’ve considered it with others,” Eric said. “She just happened to be the only one I ever asked.”

  “Is this getting too personal?”

  “Not at all. It’s my turn, though.”

  Katherine sat back. “Okay.”

  “Your ex-boyfriend’s name?”

  She looked around, as if he were in the room somewhere. “My ex-boyfriend’s name is Mark.” It sounded right, she thought. Ex.

  “What does he do?”

  “Lawyer. Corporate finance.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  “High school sweethearts, if you can believe it.”

  Eric leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I can believe it.”

  “We went to NYU together, too, and then he went to law school—”

  “Where?”

  “Fordham.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we moved in together.”

  “What was the problem?”

  Katherine refolded her napkin. “I didn’t love him, as it turned out.”

  “Oh.”

  She nodded. “It was painful… is painful.”

  “Did he love you?”

  “He says he did.”

  “Does he still?”

  “No.”

  They spent a few more moments chewing. Katherine liked the relaxed way Eric leaned over his plate. She liked the way he had rolled his shirtsleeves over his elbows, the way he licked his fingers and drank his beer directly from the green bottle.

  She said, “Me, too.”

  He was looking at her, a satellite dish ready to receive.

  “I also find you attractive.” She immediately realized she shouldn’t have said it. But she felt as though she had waded too far in now to back out—she had to swim to the other side.

  “Really?”

  “It must happen to you all the time,” she said hurriedly, “being a brain surgeon and everything.”

  “Not as much as I had originally hoped.” Eric wiped his hands on his paper napkin. “But I have met my quota of doctor groupies.”

  “My father was a doctor,” Katherine said.

  “That’s usually the case.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Is it?” She tried to affect a look of modest offense, but the truth is that she was embarrassed.

  “Girls want to marry their dads, don’t they?”

  “I thought I was the only psychologist at this table.”

  “Then you tell me.” Eric touched his napkin to his lips, his whole face a question. “Don’t girls want to marry their fathers and boys want to marry their mothers? Isn’t that the—”

  “That’s what Freud maintained. Sort of.”

  “Wasn’t he right?”

  “I don’t think so, not entirely.”

  “Not entirely?”

  “Will you pass me that bread?”

  “Are you trying to change the subject?”

  “You’re an extremely interesting conversationalist,” Katherine said, using her green eyes to subdue him.

  Eric nodded. “I have a lot of interests.”

  “Do you want to marry your mother?”

  Eric looked at the ceiling again and said, “Good point.”

  Katherine kept on smiling. Too long, she thought later, way too long.

  In the spare enclosure overlooking the highway Katherine scolded herself. She’d been too flirtatious. It was probably the cheap wine. She’d downed three glasses of it before Eric had arrived and then, stupidly, pretended not to have been drinking anything at all, sipping ice water the rest of the meal. Of course he knew she’d been drinking. He was a fucking brain surgeon. He could see it in her eyes—the dilation of the pupils, a slight relaxation of the facial muscles, blood congestion in the cheeks. Was she slurring her words, for Christ’s sake? The truth was, Katherine was afraid of my brother. The truth was, she had never been asked to dinner by a man that handsome.

  She’d panicked. It had suddenly occurred to her that Eric would find it even more unprofessional—his brother’s therapist drinking wine at a barbecue restaurant.

  At home she undressed, pulling off her gray slacks first, then unbuttoning her blouse. She hadn’t shaved her legs in weeks.

  In her tiny bedroom she rushed out of her clothes and threw them on the floor of her closet. Her underwear went in the laundry pile in the corner of the room. She didn’t even have a hamper, not even a trash can. She’d left Mark with everything. He’d wanted it all, too. “You’ll come back,” he’d said. “You’ll come back, and it will all be here, just the way you left it.” So melodramatic.

  “Mark, this is not a soap opera.”

  “You’ll realize how much you love me, that you can’t make it on your own without—”

  “Mark,” she’d said, “this is not an argument.”

  He had brooded then, sulking around the apartment, arms folded.

  Katherine was sorry, had been sorry. She’d be sorry for a long time, in fact. She was well aware of that. She knew she didn’t love Mark. She had never loved him. And then Michele. What else could she do but leave? Katherine didn’t know what the experience of love was, really. She only knew that she’d never had it. She looked at her naked image in the full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door. She was as beautiful as she was ever going to be. Her flesh was getting softer. Her breasts hung slightly lower than they had five years ago. There were lines around her eyes. This was it. She wasn’t going to get any better.

  Katherine was five feet five inches tall, exactly. She had measured herself so many times as a teenager, hoping she’d grow that extra inch or two that would make her taller than Michele, her sister younger by nearly two years. It never happened, of course. Nothing wished for that hard ever happens, it seemed. Michele had grown taller and more beautiful, her body more lithe and slender, like the stalk of a daffodil, her hair yellow-blond like the flower itself. Michele’s eyes, unlike Katherine’s, were permanently soft, like she’d been half drunk, half sad all her life. Michele had never had control of her eyes the way Katherine did.

  Trevor Davidson, John Taborre, Jimmy Schindler.

  These were the names of the boyfriends Michele had managed to steal from Katherine when they were growing up.

  And then, of course, Mark.

  How could Michele have done it? What was she thinking?

  Katherine’s skin was pale but had an olive cast just beneath the surface that made her overall tone like a sheet of fine writing paper. The bridge of her nose was decorated with light freckles from too many unprotected summers at the beach—like flecks of rag inside the linen.

  There were too many imperfections to count.

  One of Katherine’s breasts was slightly larger than the other. None of the men she’d ever been with had ever mentioned it, of course. No one, in fact—not even Michele or her mother—had ever said anything about it. But when she stood in front of the full-length mirror with no clothes on, it was all Katherine could see, the right breast fuller, heavier, almost a C cup, hanging lower, its nipple larger too; the left breast lighter,
the skin tighter, it seemed, pulling it closer to her chest. This breast—the left one—had a single, dark, curling hair sprouting from the light brown areola. Katherine cut it close to the skin every couple of months, but before she knew it, it was there again. Naked, she crossed into the living room, where her mattress lay on the floor. She thought maybe she’d take a bath, stare at the tiles on the ceiling, sip a cup of tea. She stepped into the efficiency kitchen and put the glass kettle she’d bought at the Safeway on the stove top. When did she realize the phone was ringing? The answering machine was already speaking to someone, it seemed. “Hello,” it said. “You’ve reached Katherine DeQuincey-Joy. Please leave a message at the beep.”

  “Katherine,” a voice told the room. “It’s me, Eric. Are you home?”

  She hesitated, then picked up. “Eric?” It was a cheap cordless she’d bought at the local Radio Shack. It had the strangest signal, a high-pitched squeal somewhere inside it.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.” She walked across the length of the apartment, in front of the window, hoping the squeal would go away if she moved.

  “I just wanted to make sure you got home all right.”

  The wine. He’d known about the wine. “Yes, of course. Are you still—”

  “I’m in the car.”

  “Where do you live, anyway?”

  “I live up the road a bit. In the country.”

  Could she hear the road he was on? “I see.” The tires on the asphalt?

  “I had a nice time.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Did you?”

  Katherine smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you, I really did.”

  “Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say.”

  Katherine looked out the window, at the parking lot and the highway beyond it. She had the same view from her office, more or less. This must be what it looks like out there, she thought. Parking lots and highways, a smattering of trees in the distance. “It was nice of you to call.” She would have to do something about this. She would have to avoid Eric in the future.

  “I’m not always such a gentleman.” He laughed a little.

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “You bring it out in me.”

  “Ordinarily I’m sure you’re a terrific bastard.” Could he hear her smiling?