by Erin McGraw
“I’m not on vacation. I work.” I almost tip over the table to get up, and when I get my guitar tuned and look at my audience—three couples who all look like they listened to J. D. Souther when they were Corinne’s age—she’s gone.
During the Jackson Browne medley, I envision the two of us. Her long, pretty hair threading into the greasy remaining hank on the back of my neck; her lovely breasts rubbing the grayish skin on my chest and back. And where would this happen? Do I pay my roommate to find another place to sleep, or take Corinne to the rope deck, which smells like tar and bilge? We could find a cozy shadow, four feet from some other couple’s cozy shadow, and romantically couple to the farting sound of the exhaust. My voice cracks on “Doctor My Eyes,” and my three couples are looking at me closely, but no one leaves.
I wake up thinking about her and go to sleep thinking about her. The cruise director put me on this stool because I was old enough to trust, as he told me twice.
The next song up is “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” I could play something else, but I make my choice and sing a song that was on oldies stations when I was Corinne’s age, when dinosaurs walked the earth. I’d bet two hundred bucks that Corinne is in earshot, listening to her little pastime sing his heart out. The woman closest to me moistens her thin lips, leans her head on her husband’s shoulder, and goes to sleep.
Wedding Gown
Wayne is a good man. I’m lucky to get him. People keep telling me those things, as if I need reminding. He took care of his troubled sister from the time he was nineteen years old, tracking her more than once to the houses where she was shooting up and taking her back home. Wayne’s youth was sacrificed on the altar of that girl. I should be grateful that a man like that wants to marry me now, when the skin under my eyes is showing lines and the legs that used to look slim and good in shorts now just look like stalks. I am grateful. But shouldn’t a man have wanted a little more out of his life? Shouldn’t a man have taken some time off from his mess of a sister once in a while, going out to the quarry with a few guns and friends who’ve been drinking? He took care of her to the day she died, and after. He was the one to wash her body for the funeral. People talked.
This is exactly why I need to wear a white dress, even if white makes me look little and washed out. Mama said I could pass for a used cotton ball. She thinks I should have a pink wedding gown. She thinks I look good in pink, which is true, but she forgets that white means something. I’m not talking about how I’ve had other boyfriends. Everybody in town knows that. White means respect for the tradition, and I’m trying to get this right.
I have thoughts that are not helpful. What does it mean that a man who spent ten years chasing down his sister in shooting galleries thinks that marrying me is the natural next move? Mama tells me not to say such things. I don’t see why I shouldn’t. Everybody who saw me pulling in to park at Monica’s Bridal did.
I tried on a dress that Wayne would like—strapless, with lots of flounces on the skirt. The salesgirl had to pin it to hold it up, chattering, “Aren’t you tiny! Not many of the girls who come in are so little.” I looked in the mirror and saw a broomstick rising from a mound of whipped cream. “Maybe something with sleeves,” I said to her, while Mama said, “You can always dye it pink.” She was trying to make this a happy day. One look at her face told me she was remembering my first day of school, my first bike—the days before every room started to seem too small. Once she sent me to school in a turtleneck, and by the time I got home I’d cut out the neck with craft scissors.
I’m too old now to wear a dress designed for a twenty-year-old and Wayne must know that. He’s not a fool and he doesn’t close his eyes when he looks at me. He says, “I like a girl who’s been around the block.” Well, he shouldn’t. He should stand up straighter and get mad enough to snarl at the girl he’s going to marry when she comes home later than she said she would, and drunk besides. When she lets the guys she works with tease her that the fella she’s marrying is fussy as an old lady. Wayne shrugs and says, “People say things,” and then he asks me what I want for dinner. Sometimes the words are right there in my mouth: “Oh, grow a pair.” He fusses at me, tucking in my scarf and putting ChapStick on my lips so I don’t have to dig through my purse for gloss. His eyes are calm when he does these things. He loves to tuck in my scarf.
I was barely fourteen when I went joyriding with Neil Osterman. He was nineteen, and I knew where we were going and what we were going to do there, and I yelled, “Faster!” whenever he slowed down. By the time we got to the quarry he was leaving rubber at every corner, including the one where we’d spun out and got a grill full of green corn. Drunk, of course, both of us, and loud, hollering as we swung on the rope over the glassy water. People think that Neil’s drunk hands slipped on the rope and he fell onto the boy swimming below us, but it wasn’t so simple. Neil was bombing for him and I was hanging on to Neil, screaming either “Go! Go!” or “No! No!” I’d been drinking, too. Was that my sin, or was it the two of us, slick and wet teenage bodies, landing on that little boy, or was it me holding my head up after the funeral that every soul in Winesburg seemed to turn out for? My other sin was continuing to ride with Neil until he got locked up.
Wayne knows all of this. I made sure. I don’t want him coming home from the NAPA shop one day with his mouth folded back against the words he doesn’t want to say to me. He wants to protect me, even now.
“Do you still love Neil? Is that it?” Mama had demanded after she heard that I turned down Wayne a second time. Of course I don’t love Neil. It was Neil’s house that Wayne hauled his sister out of. Without even trying I can conjure Neil’s lazy sneer. He liked to blow cigarette smoke in my mouth when we kissed. No woman in her right mind loves Neil.
The salesgirl brought me another dress, with lacy sleeves that ate at my arms like a tracing of fire ants. The lace rode up in a high collar. “You won’t be able to fasten this yourself, but your mama can help you,” the salesgirl said. Mama looked unhappy. What did she think we were buying, a party dress? The lace pinched, so stiff I could barely bend my elbows.
“Look at you! A bride!” the salesgirl said.
In the mirror stood a girl, skinny as a needle, her skin gray underneath the stupid white lace.
“You’ll be wrapped up too tight to dance at your own wedding,” Mama said.
The salesgirl started to talk about alterations and Mama was saying pink, both of them chattering until I said, “Hush,” as if I had a right.
“Are you crying?” Mama said.
“That’s tears of joy,” the salesgirl said. “I see them a lot.”
“You keep thinking that,” I said. My arms were too stiff at my sides to wipe my eyes, so a drop landed on the dress, spotting it and making it mine now.
Joy
These times come for no reason and too rarely, days and evenings that quiver like a bee’s wing. Though I’m just sitting on my concrete back stoop, looking at my neighbor’s heavy-headed peonies while a beer sweats between my hands, I envision fragrant vines draped from balconies. A breeze floats my sleeve across my arm. Nearby, a bobwhite whistles, and my skin wants to dissolve and let something pure slip free.
Today at work, I sat in my cube and proofread page after page, using the tricks I’ve developed to keep focused, then eventually letting the focus go; no one but me has ever cared when I missed an apostrophe. In the car on the way home, the ease of mere pleasure rose around me like water, and when I opened the car door, it spilled out in an ecstasy of nothing, of the moment I happened to be living. Now, I thought, Now, the word’s meaning teasingly out of reach.
This isn’t the life I meant to have. I’m not saying it’s worse.
When I was fourteen and my sister was nine, she nagged me until I took her to a dog show. Our parents wouldn’t allow pets, so she papered the walls of her bedroom with pictures of snowy-breasted collies or Irish setters, their coats like fire, coursing through rough brush. I loved my sister; it was no hardship to
go with her and look at the pretty dogs. We were allowed into the staging area where a mastiff swabbed my sister from neck to hairline in a single lick, and she hit me when I pulled her away.
The dogs panted on their grooming tables while their people buffed toenails, whitened teeth, brushed and brushed and brushed. The handlers had dog paraphernalia we could never have dreamed of: socks and headbands and jackets with their breeds on them, a car with a German shepherd painted across the hood. The lady with dachshunds wore a ball cap that had a tiny stuffed dachshund sniffing a fire hydrant on the bill. Bets nudged me when she saw it, and we had to run out of the tent because our laughter overcame us. Bets is dead now: car crash. Blood alcohol 0.120. Her pealing laughter used to unfurl all the way across the playground.
From the back of my yard a green scent drifts up, thicker than pine, a heady invitation to bees. Bets would have known the plant, its perfume a bright feather. Nothing you love is ever gone, some people say, and I have no idea whether that’s true. She would have known the scent, I don’t, and here I am opening my mouth to let the sweetness in.
I expected so many things. At sixteen I began to save items for my apartment in Madrid or Leningrad, places I believed I had a right to. A book about French painters, a yellowed comb that I thought was made of bone. My mother would hush my father when he started to laugh. “There’s nothing wrong with ambition,” she told him. I spent a full year sulking when I found out that my community college didn’t teach Russian. My mother kept quiet two years later when I put a down payment on a one-bedroom house six blocks from where I grew up. By then she and Dad were divorced, and she was happy to have me close.
My friend Rayelle used to live across the street, and after my boyfriend and I broke up she came over at night with a six-pack and a listening ear. She would rub my shoulders until I pulled away. Rayelle made this stoop, knocking together the form and pouring the concrete so that I could have something nicer than wood plank steps coming out my back door. Pure kindness on her part. She spent an afternoon staining it, decided she didn’t like how orange the stain came out, sledgehammered the whole thing and started from scratch. “I wanted it to be nice,” Rayelle said. I don’t know where she is now, wouldn’t know where to find her, but the thing she did for me waits every day when I come out back to look for finches, which she taught me to see.
Rayelle wanted me to love her and I didn’t, and she created the stoop for me anyway. Now I remember her every day. That’s how love works. It took me quite a while to figure this out.
Almost a year has passed since a man has come to my house, and sometimes I feel lonely, though not often. At night a street light shines through the bright crabapple leaves in my yard, its color sizzling. Once it was enough to illuminate mating raccoons in the front yard. They uncoupled, washed their hands at the birdbath, then scurried apart without another glance. A younger me would have strained to find a meaning, but what is meaning against the rough coats and velvet hands of two raccoons humping in flat, buzzing light? They were beautiful, is what I’m trying to say.
After my sister was killed I got an Irish setter, a roly-poly puppy who grew into a lug-headed brute. He charged in any direction he pleased, no matter how I tried to restrain him, and when he got away from me he ran for miles, his tongue and tail bright pennants. I loved that dog like breath. He smiled when he saw me, and at night he’d tug off my slippers and socks, then lick my feet from ankles to toes until he’d licked the day away, a trick I never taught him. The day I had to put him down—internal bleeding, no choice—I did all right until nighttime, when I laid on the couch, my feet covered, and tears shuddered out of me in waves.
I won’t get another dog. Without any effort I recall the feel of his lavish coat, its cobwebby strands fine enough to clog the furnace filter. After he came in from a long run, his coat smelled like grass and dirt, a clean smell that I buried my nose in. The memories are on every side, and all I have to do is let them carry me. My sister and I were going to go to Africa when we were old. She wanted to see giraffes.
It comes again, that feeling that will not be commanded or contained or even named. The bobwhite, the thick scent: The pleasure of this moment obliterates thought. Quivering, shapeless emotion spills and floods out of me. I’m surprised the lizard at my feet isn’t washed away.
Maybe this is grief. Who cares what we call it? Joy comes in waves, and will not hear no.
Peru
Mrs. Wright asked if I had kids and I said yes. Then she talked for ninety minutes until I broke in to tell her that the house would never get clean if I didn’t get back to work. At six o’clock she said, “You’re not leaving before you do the floors, are you?”
Cleaning houses means I get to work in air-conditioning, and most of my ladies are nice. Mrs. Wright is nice in her way. She’s lonely, and she wants to talk, and she’s got mice in her kitchen because she puts up dishes dirty. I would rather die than have somebody come into my kitchen and find mouse droppings in the cupboard, but Mrs. Wright doesn’t die. She hires me.
“I really need to get somebody to help,” she says, fanning her hands at the dining room table, invisible under scissors and plates and magazines and a few deflated balloons and a T-shirt and a bag of birdseed from when she had a parrot.
“That’s a problem, sí.”
“Could you clear this?”
“If you want me to throw things away, I can do that.” The birdseed has got to be at least two years old. It’s gray.
“This is a big house. There’s room here to put things.” I smile and ignore how she twists her hands. It’s best not to answer with words, because she meets words with more words. One night I didn’t get home until past eight. My older son, who’s wicked good at art, drew a cartoon of Mrs. Wright talking me into the floor. When Mrs. Wright is not home, I polish that floor until I can see my own face in it.
She’s usually here, though, telling me things. Mr. Wright, an astronomer, left for a trip to Peru and died on a mountaintop there. Mrs. Wright and her son went to Peru to scatter her husband’s ashes because, she says, he was married to his work. I’ve never met the son, though there are pictures around. He’s handsome.
Mrs. Wright herself is jowly and heavy, with a tight permanent wave that couldn’t ever have been pretty. She wraps herself in a shawl covered in pulled threads even though new clothes, tags still on them, are heaped on her bedroom floor. I stack them on the dresser so I can vacuum, and sometimes the stack gets so high it blocks the mirror. The next week, those clothes are swapped out for others, and Mrs. Wright still clutches the dirt-colored shawl. “I like neutrals. You can wear anything with a neutral. Of course, with a personality like mine, there’s no need to wear bright colors. There can be too much of a good thing.”
She knows herself better than I sometimes think.
She has recommended me to her friends, and I caught myself surprised that she has friends. Linda, it’s not up to you to judge, I lecture myself. I meet her friends and find houses that don’t have mouse droppings or a trail of raspberry jam drops from the refrigerator all the way to the piano. Those are houses I can clean in six hours and leave feeling proud.
A lot of weeks I never make it past Mrs. Wright’s downstairs, what with the regular mess in the kitchen and her wanting to tell me about meeting her husband’s parents in the Back Bay, which she describes to me. If I don’t get upstairs, she cuts my pay, but I keep coming back, so who is the one at fault?
Almost every week she gives me something—a blouse, a cookie jar, half of a pound cake. I ask her repeatedly for the things I need: vacuum cleaner bags, detergent, vinegar. Heading upstairs, balancing mop and bucket and dust cloths, I say, “White vinegar. It is sold by the gallon.”
“I remember the smell. If I came home from school right after my mother had cleaned the floor, my eyes would water. She would make me stay out on the porch, even when there was snow on the ground.” I move to go upstairs, but Mrs. Wright is just getting started.
�
�I let my son come into the house whenever he wanted, no matter what he was tracking. My husband kept a tally of the rugs that were ruined, but my son knew he could always come home.
“He turned out to be one of those neat boys—isn’t that funny? He wouldn’t let me come into his room because he had everything the way he wanted it. Even if I promised not to touch anything, he wouldn’t let me come in.
“My husband was neat, too. I knew that about him from the start. Just like he knew that I never planned to spend my life picking things up.”
I clear my throat and Mrs. Wright says, “My son kept only one thing from my husband’s office. I offered to ship him everything in the room, but all he wanted was a sketch our friend drew of my husband looking through a telescope. I don’t know what happened to either one, telescope or friend. He would come over and drink and draw. There used to be stacks of drawings four inches deep.
“I’d say, ‘Draw me,’ but he wouldn’t. He said that nice women didn’t pose. I don’t think my husband ever heard, even though our friend said it all the time. He had a little pointed beard and wasn’t my type.
“I wish he had drawn me. I would like to have that sketch.”
“My son could draw you.” The words spill out of my mouth, and I don’t think Mrs. Wright will hear me. She doesn’t usually.
“When?”
For better than a month I try to pretend I never said anything, though Mrs. Wright meets me at the door and says, “Where’s your son?” She forgets bills and appointments and her son’s birthday. My son is the thing she remembers. The reason I submerge myself once a week in the never-ending bath of her talk is so that my son won’t have to, ever.
After weeks of getting nowhere with me, she calls my house. “Is this Miguel? Your mother works for me, and she tells me that you are an artist.”
