Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  For migraines the doctor said you should avoid chocolate, alcohol, smoking, and stress. The same thing doctors said about everything. The hypnotist guy suggested relaxation therapy. Apparently you could train your mind to fill itself with nothing, like a balloon, watch it float away on a current of pure spiritual ether. Elaine shifted her eyes out of focus so that the colors swam together. The fabric smelled of India, of sun and fruit and jungle and smoke and city sidewalks as dense as rivers.

  She let the cloth drift over her head like a veil. Behind her closed eyes she saw the faces of the villagers, her villagers. Their dark walnut skins and white white smiles, both shy and excited, their slim brown hands and feet that kept endlessly busy with the most ancient and primitive sorts of labor. Planting millet seeds, tending cooking fires, making bricks out of mud, carrying bundles of sticks. It drove you mad that people were still made to live this way, that girl children were routinely given less food than their brothers, that you might spend entire days without meeting one literate person, that none of the villagers would be likely to ever travel fifty miles from the place where they were born, that such a country possessed nuclear weapons. And still they smiled, smiled and sang for her. She loved them, she knew that, of course, but she was not prepared for how much she could miss them at any given moment, half a world away, a longing that felt like a migraine of the heart.

  So much for achieving nothingness. Elaine gave up the effort but remained where she was, the turquoise-and-sky cloth draped over her face. Josie. She didn’t want to think about her, but there she was.

  These days they were being extremely polite with each other. Elaine didn’t try to make conversation except for the barest necessary minimum. Josie didn’t talk any more than she ever did. That meant they passed whole days like cloistered nuns, maneuvering around each other in contemplative silence. Josie came and went as she pleased. Elaine never asked questions anymore. She felt how thoroughly she had failed and was continuing to fail. She thought about talking to Frank, enlisting him in an effort to beat some sense into the girl. She congratulated herself on recognizing a truly bad idea when she had one. Besides, Frank was leaving on vacation, or maybe they’d already gone, she’d lost track. Right this minute Frank and Teeny were probably splashing around in a hot tub, toasting the mountain peaks with vodka and tonics.

  She’d lost track of things at work as well. There were payroll taxes, bank deposits, advertising deadlines waiting for her. She was going to have to get up, regroup, care about such things once more. But she couldn’t bring herself to do so just yet, which was why she was still sitting on the floor with a bolt of fabric tented over her face when Lyla, the part-time girl, walked in looking for her at the beginning of her shift.

  Lyla emitted a faint, dismal shriek. Elaine tried to whip the fabric off her head but her hands snagged and she had to fight her way free. “Oh, hi,” she said blandly. “Is it two o’clock already?”

  “I thought somebody tied you up and killed you or something.”

  “Nope, just resting. Forty winks.” Elaine got to her feet.

  Lyla’s look of alarm was turning to suspicion, as if she’d been left out of a joke. She was a short, heavyset girl, a year behind Josie in school. She had close-set eyes and light brown hair that she wore in lumps. Her mother worked in one of the grade school cafeterias and her father kept retiring from various small enterprises. They were the kind of household that always had a sign in the front yard advertising saw sharpening or small engine repair. Josie and Lyla were not friends. Girls like Josie were not friends with girls like Lyla. Even if they had been in the same class at school, they would have had no use for each other. It was probably just as well that Lyla was not more appealing, that Elaine felt no temptation to make her a kind of substitute daughter. Once Elaine had made the mistake of suggesting that a particular blouse would look pretty on her. Lyla, who wore dreary polyester turtlenecks winter and summer, thrust her jaw out and glowered mightily as if she’d been insulted, which she had, Elaine supposed. Lyla was sullen and stolid, but at least she was a reliable worker. She did as she was told. Not one inch more. If Elaine said she should clean, she cleaned. If not, she could ignore smeared glass, muddy footprints, worse. Stolid, even grudging at times. The kind of girl who would just as soon stab you in the back as look at you.

  So that when Lyla asked, “Is something going on with Josie?” Elaine jumped.

  “What do you mean?”

  Lyla shrugged and kept on unpacking a box of wooden hangers. “I was just wondering about her. If she was in trouble or anything. Did you want all these out? I don’t know if there’s room for them.”

  “Lyla.”

  She stooped to pick up a bit of the packaging material, and when she straightened up Elaine saw the spiteful, ugly step-sister gleam in her eye, the triumph of the despised and lowly. “Oh, it’s probably nothing. Just that the other night I was out at the Big Lots, kind of late, it was just closing, and I thought I saw her drive past in this police car.”

  City of Glass Towers

  Josie and Mitch met at his place most afternoons around four, and hung out until it was dark, when they started feeling restless. They’d go get something to eat and drive around listening to music and not talking much, because they would have done most of that earlier. They were better at talking, Josie thought, when their skins could help. Once it was time for Mitch to go to work, he would drop her off at her car. Josie would wait around to see if it was a slow shift, because then he might come back to see her again. She loved it when he did that, when they could sit together in the squad car with the radio sending out its messages of vigilance and danger, Mitch, as always, looked handsome and severe in his uniform. Even now when she’d seen him put it on piece by piece, she marveled. His service revolver was holstered on his right hip. She could reach out and touch it where she sat. She wanted to shoot it but so far he hadn’t let her.

  At any moment the radio might break in to send him in pursuit of the drunk and disorderlies or traffic accidents or whatever else her fellow citizens were amusing themselves with that evening. He’d kiss her, in a distracted fashion, and tell her to keep the car doors locked on her way home. She worried about him all the time. Even in Springfield there were plenty of guns and plenty of fools who might not have the ambition to be serious criminals but who could sure as hell pull a trigger. She knew that the odds were against this, and besides, it was not the kind of town where anyone died tragically. But as she drove through the quiet streets she couldn’t help feeling a tide of grief building in her, the nerve she plucked when she imagined him dead, gone, murdered, the deep pleasurable shameful wrench she could give herself whenever she chose.

  Some nights it was almost chilly, a reminder that before too long summer would give itself a nudge and start its long slow decline toward winter and school and everything else that was normal and hideous and inescapable. She wondered what would happen then with her and Mitch. It was so hard to imagine the two of them in winter coats, scraping ice off the windshield. It was hard to imagine them anywhere except on these summer streets with the hot roiling smells of asphalt and cigarettes and something cherry-sweet, like candy left out all day in the sun.

  There were times she was brave enough to think about the future, what she would get him for Christmas and Valentine’s Day. When she was eighteen they could move in together because she’d be old enough and no one could stop her. They wouldn’t have to stay in Springfield. They’d be so gone. Everybody would talk about them the way you talked about famous people from dull places, trying to believe they’d ever lived there.

  When she was alone, when she was forced to return to her own uninteresting bed for the few hours that remained of the night, she wavered. That persistent mutinous, sneering voice started up again in her head. He would get tired of her. Of course he would. It didn’t matter how much he liked her now, or said he liked her, or how many tricks she could do in bed. There might be a perfect moment between them, even a series o
f such moments strung together like a necklace, but that proved nothing, it was not a promise or a future or anything else. This was a fool’s paradise. A dream she happened to be walking through with her clothes off, a sealed bubble of heat and delirium, a perverse fairy tale, a city of glass that would shatter whenever she took one step beyond its boundaries.

  She asked him about his old girlfriends. Mitch groaned. “Why do we have to talk about this?”

  “Because I’m a crazy jealous woman.”

  “No kidding.”

  “So?” Josie sent her finger traveling from his chin down the center of his chest, then further south. She was fascinated at having this wealth of body to explore. She couldn’t get over how hairy he was. Not in any disgusting way, just how a man was constructed. The nests of dark hair beneath his arms, the hair down his belly and around his penis, like it was grass planted from seed. Jeff had been blond. It made a difference. “Tell me how many there were.”

  “Before you? There was really only one.”

  “One. Sure.”

  “Yeah, but she was really big and fat, so she counts for three or—”

  She clobbered him with a pillow. They wrestled some. Wrestling just about always turned into having sex. He wound up on top. He raised himself up on his forearms so he could push into her harder. She was always sore these days. She wondered if men ever got sore, wore themselves out, or if they could just keep going until it fell off. There was some kind of bug that did it that way, she remembered, screwed itself to death, left its little bug part inside its mate. Mitch was using his fingers on her down there and she knew some girl had taught him that. Christ God. They were stuck together, slick and rocking. She was only a writhing pulse, everything in her balanced on a high shelf where she sweated and shivered and her vision turned blank, furious white, then she broke and fell down with him, their two hearts finally slowing, each pulling back into its own skin.

  Josie waited until they reached a place where they were able to talk again. “Are you gonna tell me about them?”

  “About who?”

  “You know. Those fat girls.”

  “I can’t believe you even want to hear about them.”

  “I do. I want to know everything about you. I want to suck your brain and know everything you know. That didn’t come out right.” She’d already told him about Jeff. That had been embarrassing only because there was so little to tell. The dorky high school guy she used to sleep with. “Just tell me this one time and I promise I won’t ever pester you about it again.”

  Mitch yawned. “They were just normal girlfriends, OK? I don’t know what to say about them. What you want to hear.”

  “Were they pretty?” Josie asked languidly. And held her breath.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  She waited, but he didn’t say any more. She sighed. “What, you don’t remember?”

  “You want me to tell you they were gorgeous or something?”

  “No-oo.” Josie sighed again at his obstinacy and looked around the bedroom she used to try so hard and so hopelessly to imagine. Now she knew it as well as her own. The closet with some of his clothes, dress shirts and other stuff he never wore, on hangers, the rest in stacks on the floor. The bed was two mattresses piled one on top of the other so you had to roll yourself in and out of it. Magazines, GQ and Sports Illustrated and some weird martial arts kind, within arm’s reach. A plain pine dresser—she’d already sneaked a look through the drawers—with the usual jumble of keys and coins and matchbooks and gum wrappers and receipts on top. His sheets were a bamboo pattern and he didn’t use fabric softener. A weight bench in one corner of the room. A trail of sweat socks across the floor. His whole apartment was like that, neither dirty nor clean in any interesting way, nothing in it that you couldn’t buy at a Wal-Mart. At the same time it was precious to her, because it was his.

  Josie swam up the length of his body and licked at his ear. “I just would like it better if you remembered something special about them. If they were”—she hesitated—“passions.”

  “You’re funny, you know?” Mitch reached over, his eyes still closed, until his hand found something friendly to light on, her left breast. “You don’t have to worry about them. They’re history. Finito.”

  “What about the weird one?”

  “The what?”

  “You said you had this really weird girlfriend once.”

  “Do you remember everything I say? Jeez. She was the one who always wanted to do stuff with the handcuffs.”

  Josie would have liked to ask more about this, but thought better of it. “Who was the last one? Why did you break up with her?”

  “She kept asking me questions, in bed. All right, all right.” Josie was prying his hand loose. “Her name was Marilyn and she works for the Department of Revenue and I met her in a club and we went up to Chicago a few times to see a ballgame. Enough?”

  “What did you like about her?”

  “I don’t know, lots of things. She had great teeth.”

  “That’s how you talk about a horse. God.”

  “She was a good dancer. She had a sense of humor.”

  “This is really hard for you, isn’t it? Trying to come up with reasons you liked to fool around with somebody.”

  “Why do I need reasons? She was a nice girl. Is a nice girl.”

  “So why did you break up with her, really?”

  Mitch stretched out on his back and examined the ceiling for a long, thoughtful time. “We didn’t actually break up. More like we tapered off.”

  Josie rolled over on her stomach, tangling herself in the sheet.

  Her hair fell over her face like a tent, so that even with her eyes open she couldn’t see him, didn’t have to look any farther than the intricate dark gold tangle. “I don’t want to be just another nice girl.”

  She felt the sheet being peeled away, very gently, fold by fold. “But you’re the absolute absolute nicest.”

  She wished they could go places together. At first it was thrilling to have a secret, to hide from everybody and laugh at how they were putting one over on the rest of the world, people who would never have anything worth hiding in their whole dull lives. Then as time went on and no one discovered them, they began to feel a little foolish, even irritable.

  She had thought maybe they could go to the State Fair, just walk around together, no big deal. But even that hadn’t worked out. Of course Mitch had to work extra shifts to help with the crowds. He stood at an intersection right outside the fair entrance, directing traffic and giving directions to all the senior citizens and other lame types. Officer Friendly. It was annoying sometimes, the way he could be such a perfect cop. Like it was easier for him, a relief, when he could put on that badge and a serious face.

  Josie brought him a lemon shake-up and hung around waiting for him to take a break, which he kept saying he was going to do but never did. She’d worn a new white blouse that rode up above her navel and her favorite red shorts and she knew she looked good, too good to spend all night sitting on the curb in the dark. Finally she told Mitch she was going to walk around the fairgrounds by herself and he said OK, sure, when he should have told her to wait, he’d find a way to come with her. Josie stomped off in a mean mood.

  The fair was pathetic. It was so Springfield. You only went to it in the first place for laughs. All the 4-H kids hit town with their stock trailers full of sheep and hogs and goats and champion steers. They brought electric fans and cots and coolers and radios, like they were going camping, like this was what they lived for the rest of the year. And it probably was. It told you something about the place when you saw people spritzing hair spray on a hog. She’d seen them do it.

  Then there were the country kids her age from Pana or Tallula or Mt. Pulaski. They were either totally into farming, clumping around in their work boots to appraise the new combines, or else they were the hoodiest things. The girls always looked like they were trying to win the blue ribbon for sluttiness. But Josie was
almost jealous of them, the couples who lurched along the midway arm-in-arm, those hood boys and the girls with their punked-out orange or purple hair, their tacky black nail polish and black leather that they wore in spite of the soupy heat. At least they weren’t alone.

  She’d wanted to do all the corny fair stuff with Mitch, the Ferris wheel and the Tilt-A-Whirl and the grandstand with its awful yee-haw country music show. She would have made him buy her a steak-on-a-stick and vinegar fries and elephant ears and all the other sinful greasy food you craved because you could only get it once a year. They would have strolled through the carny games as she was doing now, and the disgusting criminal guys who ran them wouldn’t dare leer at her, but would be intimidated into allowing Mitch to win—they had it all rigged, everybody knew that—and for laughs he’d get her a prize, an ugly flourescent-colored teddy bear that they would give away to an appropriate small child.

  Josie bought a corn dog, just to have something to do. She was already tired of walking around by herself, but she wanted Mitch to think she was having a good time without him, maybe even make him worry a little. There was a big carved wooden statue of Abe near the main entrance, fifty feet tall, Abe the Railsplitter, she guessed he was supposed to be, in painted wooden coveralls and suspenders. It wasn’t one of her favorite Abes; the face was carved in big flat ax strokes so he looked like some kind of distorted caricature, Abe as rendered by the Japanese, perhaps. Still, she thought she could go hang with him for a while, commiserate about the unfairness of the fair and everything else.

  “Hey, loser!”

  In spite of herself she turned her head.

  “Yeah, you, Sloan! You’re the only loser I see.”

  It was Tammy and another girl from school named Lauren, and a boy Josie didn’t know, a tall skinny kid with hair that looked like he combed it with a SaladShooter. Josie couldn’t decide if she was glad to see them or not.