by Ted Sanders
Pain replaces my legs. There’s no room for them anymore. I’ve arrived, come to a strange place I’d scarcely considered—a place where I’m still moving forward but nothing in front of me is. Something strikes me in the head, and fuck, fuck, I’d like to know what, and I swear I feel the red strokes, the first little tendrils of anger beginning to bloom—but they are so far, so slow. And here now: the steering wheel begins to collapse beneath me, certainly it does. Elephants on my chest. I listen for sounds but a great tuneless hum has risen around me, making me thin. I cannot recall what I bring with me, what I’ve found or been given. How silly my name is. I cannot read the dashboard clock, a streaking block of blue. All my held air leaves me, surprising and silent (or maybe it’s married to the din I’m drowning in) and as I’m crushed by what’s carried me I think: I was in the other seat; I was in the other seat when Kathy hit a deer one time. A time like this one, or not at all. That time, a doe came surging fleetly out from Kathy’s side of the woods and ran up alongside us, frantic, blindly headed the way we were headed, and Kathy cried out and turned the wheel, just as the deer met the front bumper. The deer, she peeled away at the same moment, but not before she touched us, not before we saw the shadows of her ribs in the headlight, not before the corner of the car pushed a brief dimple into her hide that I saw, I saw, and as the deer ran back to the trees we pulled over, cussing and shining—breathing, breathing. We got out in wonder. We met at the front of the car and there, in time, we bent to find hairs, fine and brown, glinting in the trim of the headlight.
Airbag
Three
ONCE TRITI’S GONE UP AFTER DORLENE, TAKING MY KEYS WITH her, I walk over to Jim. He’s lying down now, up against the door of the corncrib, runners of his thick fur bulging out through the slits. I stick the toe of my shoe through one, into his side. I do it again, harder. He doesn’t even move. I do it a third time, straining my toes, and now he licks his chops and looks back at me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I ask him, and then I leave.
At the car, Dorlene’s bag is gone. I discover my cigarettes have already been opened. I decide I’ll add one more to the missing, and as I smoke my way up to the house, I see the brushpile is finally alight. I head that way. The whole operation’s been shifted over on top of the burning gas can. Tom’s orchestrating as the kids roll bigger logs over to the blooming fire. I don’t see Triti or Dorlene. I try to envision what either of them might be doing in this instant. On the way down toward Tom, I pass dark figures filing in the other direction, and one graceful swinging shape holds out a wine bottle to me as she passes. She places it practically inside my hand, and the audacity almost makes me let it fall.
“Hey,” I protest, turning, holding the bottle back out to her.
She lifts her hands and goes on by. It’s just some pretty girl I’ve never seen. She lays her hands on her chest. “It’s known no other lover,” she croons low, backstepping into the dark.
It’s some cheap red, a screw-top bottle, nearly full. I’m not much for drinking, but I hang on to it—mostly because I’m not sure how to do anything else. I’m standing there still looking at it when Tom comes up.
“So the fire is happening,” he says.
“Yeah. And you’re alive.”
“Well, I’m something. Where were you?”
“Walking.”
“You and Dorlene,” he declares.
“Just walking. And talking.” I finger my cheek with my tongue. I hold the wine like a football. “I told her about Lisa.”
Tom shakes his head. “Oh, fuck me.”
“What?”
He crosses his arms over his belly. He laughs to himself for me. “Let me just say this.” He rocks back, looking up into the sky for his thoughts. “I think it may be that these are the kinds of conversations, okay, that in certain situations could get you into trouble.” He peers at me, questioning.
“I know,” I say, but I don’t.
He searches the sky again. “Well, I think that maybe in this case it doesn’t matter, okay, but I’m gonna suggest that it’s worth thinking about.”
I keep myself from asking him why it doesn’t matter, not sure he even knows what he’s talking about. I hold up the bottle of wine. “Someone gave me this.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know; some girl.”
He looks down at his feet now, that head still shaking, still that constant grin. He points at the wine with his pinky. “In no way should you take this as an indication of your worth as a human being.”
“When do I ever?” I say, and for some reason that cracks him up.
We pass the bottle, drinking from the neck. The wine is sweet and thick, and as we drink Tom recounts to me the several clever comments that have been directed his way since the near-miss with the gas can. I remind him about the lighter fluid and he tells me lighter fluid is for pussies.
I eyeball the house once in a while, but somewhere along the line—long after Tom and I have taken a seat in the grass, and long after the wine bottle has ceased being heavy, and a good long while after Tom has waded genially into a story I’ve already heard about the time he pulled a woman from a river—I stop looking. And it’s not until Triti is standing right there in front of us that I think about either her or Dorlene at all. She comes up and I realize—or imagine—that I’ve smelled her before I’ve seen her.
“Here,” she says, reaching. My car keys dangle from her hand.
Tom blurts, “What the fuck is this?” He turns from side to side, pantomiming befuddlement.
“How did it go?” I ask Triti.
“Strangely.”
“Where is she?”
Tom says between us, “This is Dorlene you’re talking about.”
“She’s in my room.” Triti looks very tall. Her tits seem huge from down here. “She told me my bathtub was transcendent.”
I summon up the sight. The tub’s an old claw-foot tub, freestanding. Jarringly, there’s a cheap plastic skylight directly overhead, a crude blot of renovation. Because the skylight’s so unexpected, and because the tub has a white shower curtain that goes all the way around, being in there always feels a little like being in a vessel, like a pod in space, or a chrysalis maybe, or a broken bone. Plus for Dorlene, being so short and all, the sight up that white oval chute and out into the night high overhead—trying to visualize it makes me a little woozy, displaces me.
I say, “I think…I think maybe it is.”
Tom toddles ponderously to his feet. “Okay then,” he says. He lumbers off toward the fire, throwing a wave back at us.
“You found some wine,” Triti says when he’s gone.
“Found would be giving me too much credit.”
“Ah.”
“Or not enough.”
“That sounds likely.”
“What did you do with Dorlene’s clothes?” I have no idea why I’m asking that, I don’t.
“I put them in the laundry.”
“She handed them out to you?”
“Oh Jesus, Dave.”
“No, no, it’s not that. It’s not like that.”
“You want to know what she looks like naked? You want me to go check?”
I get a flash of Dorlene’s little legs, bare in the dark—just her legs and nothing else. “No, no, no.”
“She came out after she showered and gave me her clothes. In a plastic bag I gave her. And then I put them in the laundry for her.”
“She let you do that?”
“She didn’t want to go in the basement.”
“Oh.”
“She doesn’t like stairs.”
“Oh.”
“She was sweet, she apologized like a million times. Thanked me.” Triti turns and looks back over her shoulder at the house. “She kissed me on the cheek.”
“Really?”
“She smells funny.”
“I know.”
“I know,” Triti tells me, and I’m just starting to feel the thrill of
that when she says, “I wish you were standing.”
I peer up at her. “I wish you were sitting.”
“Well then,” she says.
“Anyway, I have to pee.” And it’s true. I stand up. I swirl the bottle of wine and upend it; a dark dribble trickles out and disappears. “And I need more wine.”
“And I…. ,” Triti begins, and she looks around us in the dark, everywhere but at me. “I guess I’m going down to the fire.”
“If you think it’s safe.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Bold of you.”
“Don’t mess with anything in my room.”
I rock a little. “Why would I?”
“Don’t dig through my panties or anything.”
“Jesus. I wouldn’t do that,” I say, but I know I’m going to. We just stand there a minute, and somehow she makes it so that I have to walk away first.
It’s very dark, and the air bites. The wine’s hitting me hard; I guess I haven’t eaten much. I head toward the back steps and next thing I know I’m up them and into the back porch, and somewhere along the way I’ve lost the wine bottle, and I wonder if maybe Triti took it from me somehow, or cleaned it up after me. All I know is, I’m in the porch alone and the bottle is gone. It’s very bright and I can’t see outside at all. It’s too warm in here, and cramped.
People talk in the kitchen. I can tell it’s no crowd, but that makes it harder to go in. As I stand there—working up the fortitude and wondering how much I’m swaying—I hear Dorlene. Her voice pierces like a pin, but I can’t make out a word. And then I hear Ernest, lower but clearer: “That’s not what you are.” Dorlene drones nasally again.
I step closer. It occurs to me that I can be seen from the invisible outside, standing in here doing nothing but waiting. I try to look indifferent, patient. For just a moment my mind ports outside to the side yard here, sees me as I must look from that dark, and I’m two places at once. Two people, maybe. And then the voices bring me back, sharper now.
“There are kinds,” Ernest is saying.
“Oh yes, many varieties,” says Dorlene, the last word coming out as a quaint, watery quiver.
“And your kind—your variety—looks like this,” Ernest says.
“Sometimes. I got lucky. I’m very proportionate.”
“Yes, you are,” says Ernest. “And it’s all genetic?”
I walk into the kitchen then, just as Dorlene sighs. She is standing in front of the kitchen sink, looking down at herself. “Yes,” she says. She’s wearing a long purple skirt that skims the ground, and a black cardigan. Under the cardigan she has on a camisole top that—unbelievably—is too small for her. A thin slice of her belly is bared, and her breasts are pert and tight beneath her top. She clearly isn’t wearing a bra. She holds a giant red cup by the edge in one hand, letting it swing like a bucket, not seeing me. Ernest nods at me. Fat Susan is here too, back in her usual seat. She offers a two-finger wave. “But it really starts in the womb,” Dorlene says, tilting her head, her high voice going almost musical. She draws out the word womb into a sad coo. She lays her free hand on herself as she says it, down on her abdomen, but not even where her womb would be, if she even has a womb. She lays it down lower, denting her skirt.
She looks up then, midgesture, and sees me. “David!” she cries, throwing up her hands. A slop of clear liquid swings from her cup and slaps to the floor. “Come here, come here.” I do, but almost flinch as she reaches out and hugs my leg, presses her face against my thigh. She releases me, and in a screeching stage whisper says up to me, “Let’s not tell them what happened earlier. It’ll be our little secret.” She throws a mischievous glance at the others.
“What happened?” Susan says.
“I said it was secret,” says Dorlene.
I pull away. “I have to pee.” I blunder on through to the dining room. The long table of food is looking carcassy, and out in the parlor the video game kids are gone. Someone’s in there, but I don’t see who. My thigh burns from where Dorlene wrapped me up.
I don’t let myself slow through the fastidious clutter of Triti’s room. It’s just like I remember, crowded and pristine—partly the nature of her nesting and partly a gesture of compactness, living in a house she doesn’t own. The smell shocks me back, rising maybe from the old things she gathers: a blue velvet love seat, a wicker birdcage full of origami cranes, an almost life-sized plastic deer that lights up from the inside. It’s got the sterile musk of a museum. And maybe it is a museum. Over her white steamer trunk, just for instance, she’s got the quilt she made and tried to give me two Christmases ago. I don’t know what she thought I would do with it, where I would keep it. But here it is now. And there’s other stuff, too, stuff I don’t want to try to place.
I sail through. I use the bathroom, the smell of the place hitting me like a hospital. I peek into the shower when I’m done; it’s still damp. I look at myself in the mirror. I look wild and alert.
On my way out I peek into Triti’s dresser. I think maybe I will find condoms in there, or something along those lines, but I don’t. Instead it’s just panties, a soft sea of nothing but cotton. I slip my hand into a pair, graze the inner crotch with my finger. I think to myself: Right there. I almost don’t close the drawer before I leave—on purpose, I mean—but I do. I fumble back to the kitchen. When I enter, everyone is looking at me quiet.
“I want some wine,” I say. “Is there wine?”
“Oh, honey,” says Fat Susan, “you see me, don’t you?” She tinkles her fingers against a gallon jug of wine in the center of the table, so big and squat that I didn’t even recognize it for what it was. I get a cup. Susan pours and pours until it’s dangerously full. She titters and she sets the jug back down. We do a little mock toast to the air.
I slump back against the counter between Ernest and Dorlene. “So what are we talking about?”
“Dorlene,” says Ernest.
Dorlene says, “It’s true.”
I swing toward Ernest. “What do you want to know?” I say, and the kitchen gets quiet again. Fat Susan looks at her hands. I sip my wine like all of this is nothing.
“Dave and I used to be neighbors,” Ernest says to the room.
“Is that right?” Dorlene squeaks. I’ve no idea if this is news to her.
“Yes, he and I—and our former wives—used to play Scrabble together.”
The memory of this comes back to me like a yearbook photo, comic and only half-real. “We did,” I say.
“Dirty Scrabble, do you remember that?”
“Dirty Scrabble,” Susan says.
I dig back for it. “Right. Extra points for being obscene.”
“Yes, double word score for every vulgar word. But it always devolved into arguments over ambiguous words.” He stabs at the air with a flat hand. “Hump. Bone. Swap. You were the envelope pusher, as I recall.”
“Finger,” Dorlene says, and a laugh squirts out of me, I don’t know why.
Ernest nods. “Yes, exactly, though you’d get no resistance from me on that one.”
“Or me,” I say. Fat Susan drinks her wine.
“I’m hungry,” Dorlene says. “I’ve been hungry all this day.” She bends at the waist, folding in two like one of those drinking-bird toys, and sets her cup on the floor. She goes over to the fridge and tugs at the door, kicking back hard. I expect the door to fly open—or to stay firmly shut, maybe—but it comes open real gentle and she just stands there, peering inside.
We all stare. It’s a spectacle, no doubt about it: around and above Dorlene, the fridge is huge and unreasonable, like a thing a person shouldn’t own. The crisper drawer is chest high, and the higher shelves look out of reach, and all that stuff in there, all the containers and the greenstuffs and the few packed-away extras of party things, it’s all just…more. Bigger, yeah, but also just more—too plentiful, an absurd extravagance, like food for an army, or for a terrible duration. Milk in massive gallons, two of them. Up on the top shelf, Trit
i’s little herd of sports bottles stands like a forest, thick and multicolored. They don’t seem like bottles at all just now—more like a place you could go. All the colors seem thicker, or deeper or something, and the light coming down from way over Dorlene’s little head glows out around her.
Ernest says, “That is a sight.”
Dorlene dips her chin over her shoulder, spreads a coy smile. “Ernest, are you looking at my bottom?”
A little dark arrow dents my gut. Ernest purses his lips. “Not just then, no.”
“Bottom,” I say.
Dorlene shakes her head, looks into the fridge again. “My, my. I’m serious to god—you boys.”
“Boys,” I say. I drink.
Dorlene reaches up and sets her fingertips against a smooth blue bowl filled with brown eggs. She cocks her head. “These belong to Tweedy. From her chickens. Are they boiled?”
I hesitate. Ernest’s eyes are already on me, his chin tucked in. “Dave would know,” he says, and Dorlene looks back at me.
“I’m sure they are,” I say, like it’s an educated guess, but of course the blue bowl has always been for nothing else.
Dorlene’s face is a question. “Tweedy is very lovely. So truly kind, and helpful. And David, do you think she would mind if I had one?”
“No, I guess. I guess not.”
Dorlene lifts an egg from the bowl. It’s the size of a pear. She shakes it beside her ear with both hands, like a present. “And is there a spoon handy?” I’m right in front of the silverware drawer, but I walk all the way down the counter and pluck a spoon from the drain board.
We all watch as Dorlene cracks the egg open with the handle of the spoon, which—in her grip—is as thick as a tool. She taps deftly all the way around the longest circumference of the egg. She removes the top oval in a single piece and slides it beneath the bottom. Holding the egg like a bowl—it fills her palm—she sets to it with her spoon. Like it was ice cream. She wanders to my side and leans against the cabinets. She carves out bean-sized bites. Outside voices surge and ebb through the window. Dorlene’s teeth graze the spoon now and again.
