Precious

by Sandra Novack

  Natalia continues walking. The streetlight above her flickers.

  When she comes home, she finds Frank in the living room, back unexpectedly from work. At first she sees him in shadow, the living room illuminated only by the window. She jumps slightly, taken aback, but then, as her eyes adjust, she makes out the still-familiar contours of his wide shoulders and neck. He sits in his favorite chair, his cigarette dangling with a slow burn and orange flame. She turns on a light, sees the age in his face, the deep crevices across his flesh. “You scared me,” she says. She smooths her hair, suddenly worried about how she looks.

  Frank leans back, and it seems to her he is deciding something. It is the same look he had when he returned from visiting Ginny, and it is a look that caused an inexplicable though quiet alarm in her. “What is it?” she asks.

  “Work,” he says simply.

  “Yes?” She sits down, across from him.

  “A layoff.”

  She folds her hands and waits for him to explain more, though she doesn’t really need the explanation in more detail. “In all our years of marriage, there’s hardly no other reason you’re ever home early,” she says. To her surprise, she’s relieved to know it’s not them, that he hasn’t decided to give up on them. “Do you want something? Coffee? Are you hungry?”

  “The steel industry is dying, you know,” he tells her. “I never thought that day would come when I started. When I was younger, steel was everything. It was all anyone goddamn talked about.”

  “They’ll call you back in a few weeks, a month at the most, like they always do. What would they do without that plant? I think the town must have been built around it.”

  “What would they do?” Frank grins in an embittered way. “Fill up the hole, bury it, I guess.”

  “I’ve been looking for work.”

  “I know.”

  “I think there’s a good chance I can get hired downtown, maybe at the florist’s, or at the fabric store. I sent in applications. I could do books, numbers, if I had to.”

  “I saw the paper,” he says. “The ads you circled.”

  She falls silent then, not knowing what to say to soothe him. She hates to see him this way, to see how his calloused hands rest idly on the arms of the chair, how without his job Frank Kisch is a man suddenly so very lost and without purpose. She senses his disappointment, his defeat. She could tell him she knows he’s a good man. She could tell him she’s sorry for the fact that he was forced to take a backbreaking job so long ago, all because she was pregnant with their son, the boy dying just at the moment Frank seemed to be anticipating him most, just when he was finished with painting the extra room in their small apartment a powdery blue. She could tell him that it’s not them or even the world that’s bad, it’s just periods of bad luck. She says nothing.

  “Natalia?”

  She looks up, stands, and shakes her head. “I’ll get you a coffee.”

  “Don’t bother.” He gets up and walks to where she stands, feeling absurd in the moment. He stops and they are close—so close she can feel his breath on her forehead. They haven’t been this close since the night together in the kitchen, when she came back home and there was that terrible, rancorous fight. How warm his skin always seems, how the heat emits from his body. Or maybe it’s her. She feels a wave of desire come over her. The moment seems sharply lined, entirely clear. She looks at Frank—his eyes serious in the moment—and wonders if he even remembers the two of them together, their bodies tangled in plea surable ways. He places his wide hand behind her neck and draws her closer. He kisses her hard, with a measure of contempt, or anguish, or love—it is impossible for Natalia to tell, and perhaps it is everything, everything hitting them both all at once, all the years. The force of it all is crushing, tangible, a desperate need pressing in them both. Even if his kiss holds contempt, she takes him to her, thinks, to be touched at all. He is there, like someone lost that she’s managed to find, someone once at great distance but now near. In the bedroom, his hands are rough and quick, his body rank from the day, his pants only half off the entire time. Her skirt is lifted above her slender thighs, her cheek against the pillow. She sees only a blind whiteness, hears only a low moan, a quickened breath. Still, she thinks, to be touched by him at all, to have his firm hands around her, familiar as he lifts her rump, to have him so near, the flesh of his belly against her. There is nothing to hold back. There is everything to risk.

  She says nothing when, later, he pulls from her and composes himself, zipping up his pants and tucking in his shirt. She watches him, wondering if there is always inequity in any relationship, if there is always one person who loves the other more, even if by barely a perceptible amount. She decides only that any love matters, the binding of years. She decides only that she will do anything to keep him close, to not lose him again. “Are you through being angry?” she asks.

  He doesn’t look at her. “No.”

  “How long, then?”

  He ignores her question. “I thought of you when you were gone. I missed you.”

  “You can sleep here, if you want,” she continues, her voice urgent, pressing. “The cot must hurt your back. The draft—”

  But he leaves, closing the door behind him, and she hears him shuffle through the kitchen. She waits, thinking he might come back to their rumpled bed. He might forgive her everything. It strikes her that Frank is still a handsome man, his thick head of hair, his strong features. She thinks of his face up close to hers—close but not touching—the small, complicated spaces that exist between people.

  The next morning, she finds a dollar bill on the kitchen table alongside a note that she suspects Frank penned before he retreated down to the basement. “For last night,” she reads, and then crumples the paper and throws it away. It should hurt—it is meant to hurt—and it does. She stares at the bill for a few moments, folds it and unfolds it in her hands, and then finally places it in the jar she keeps in the kitchen, one filled with spare change.

  Still, if on occasion something good happens from something bad, Frank later apologizes, and there is, in the week that follows, an easing in him if not exactly an acceptance or a forgiveness. On days when they are both home and around each other, they parcel out activities that mostly leave Natalia to the house. If he is not at the unemployment office or out helping his friend Lennie with landscaping work for which he is paid under the table, Frank busies himself. He cuts the weedy grass, which the rains have made long again, flushed with new color. He paints the porch railing and sands down the screen door to keep it from scraping the porch. He washes out the shed and stacks his tools, paint cans, and cement buckets neatly. Over a few days, he rips through the tree in their backyard after judging it deader than dead, an act that practically sends Sissy into hysterics and leaves Natalia to wonder why her daughter has such an unnatural, worrisome attachment to absolutely everything around her. When the chain saw roars to life, wood chips spew out from under its bite and land in the pool, floating idly on the surface. Eva, in an effort to make Sissy feel better, skims the wood chips out and into a bucket. “We can plant something new in its place,” Natalia hears Eva say, with a maturity and consoling tone that surprises her. Frank stacks the wood, piece by piece, next to the shed for winter. He covers it with a tarp, to keep it dry. Natalia pulls down laundry from the line and catches Frank watching her between the fluttery dance of still sheets, flapping like swan wings. She considers this a slow progress between them. Some days she even feels hopeful, the house finally breathing properly again.

  Except Eva. Over the week she seems more and more sullen. Natalia can’t discern what’s wrong, and when she asks, Eva refuses to answer or pretends not to hear. When Eva doesn’t go to work, when she isn’t out with Greg, she takes to her room, the harsh rock music pouring outside the open window, pulsing like a violent heartbeat that sends shock waves through Natalia’s body. If Natalia asks Sissy, Sissy only shrugs or becomes quiet and suddenly dumb, or she awkwardly defends her sister. Ev
a’s entire attitude assaults Natalia, leaves her at first worried but then more persistently angered. She believes that Eva’s moodiness is retaliation, an irascible reaction to Natalia herself, that Eva is only trying to intentionally disrupt whatever fragile order has been accomplished.

  On Wednesday, Natalia wakes thinking of this all. At six she hears Frank rustling around before letting the back door slam shut, and she knows that he’s taken to his car again. In the kitchen she finds he’s left enough coffee for the two of them, and, though the gesture is a small one, she feels a childish longing come over her. She decides to dye her hair the same color it was when she was young. After she rinses and showers, she plucks her eyebrows, surprised by how much she and Eva look alike— the same arched curves, the same darkly concerned eyes. Only the lines of age separate them, the faint ring around Natalia’s neck that she covers today as she did when she was younger, draping a silk scarf around it, knotting it loosely. She puts on a dress—a flowered voile, knee-length, trimmed with black ribbon and set off the shoulder—and inspects herself again in the mirror: thin, with a curved stomach, her arms a bit more stretched by extra flesh and gravity, but otherwise trim. She isn’t so old, she thinks, that she can’t wear a dress like this—one that her daughter might wear. She pins her hair back with bobby pins and applies a coat of lipstick.

  The pool water glistens at this hour, just catching lazy morning light. At seven, the girls are still upstairs, sleeping. She raps on the car door and stands over Frank’s legs, straddling them between her ankles. He pulls himself out from under the vehicle slightly, squints, and wipes an oily wrench with a rag.

  “What’s wrong?” If he notices the dress, he doesn’t let it register beyond a quick glance.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Natalia says, her voice crisp. “I’ve been thinking for days, actually, that we should go for a ride in this Chevy, and I’m already promising I won’t drive and get in an accident. I know that all you do is take this blasted piece of metal apart and put it back together again so that you don’t have to talk to anybody. I’ve watched you. I figured it out years ago.”

  He squints again and pushes himself back under the car. She hears metal hitting metal. “Maybe that’s true,” he says finally, “and maybe it isn’t.”

  “Do you like the dress?”

  “You look like a kid.”

  “Let’s drive,” she tells him, nudging his leg. “I’ll make some sandwiches.”

  Under the car, his voice remains muffled. “What about the girls?” he asks. “They’re asleep.”

  “Eva’s off today, which means all she’ll do is mope and I’m tired of that. We won’t be long. You can put up with me, can’t you? With my being next to you in this dress?” She flounces, even though he doesn’t see.

  Frank says nothing. She hears a bolt drop to the ground and roll slightly before settling. “Maybe,” he says after a few moments pass. “We’ll see.”

  Natalia waits in the house, uncertain and slightly dejected. She pours a glass of iced tea and stands at the back door, watching him tinker. What’s a few hours to claim? There are days and days of work, of tending to the house and children. To her surprise, he eventually pulls himself out from under the car, collects his tools, and places them back in the shed before heading inside. As he walks by her, he strips off his work shirt so that she can see the dark hairs on his back. “Okay,” he says, going into the bathroom. “Make some sandwiches, then.”

  In the car, a little later, Frank doesn’t buckle up; he never does. Once he told Natalia that in the case of extreme accidents it wouldn’t matter and that in the case of a fender bender, it wouldn’t make a difference. The statement itself was designed to make her laugh, and it worked. Now he stops to get gas before turning onto the highway, the same highway he sometimes used to race on with his buddies from high school, late at night, before the road became more traveled, before malls and neighborhoods sprung up out of nowhere along with strings of car dealerships. Natalia keeps the windows open, the air rustling her dress. In her mirror she catches the long strip of asphalt behind them, the blurry sun, the expanse of sky and clouds blossoming like white roses. Frank turns on the radio and fiddles until he finds a good station, but Natalia turns it off, hoping to talk. She reminds herself that he dressed up for her, too—clean shirt, plaid shorts. The thought pleases her, emboldens her. “So,” she begins, “what should we talk about on our ride?”

  Frank takes a swig of soda, rests it between his legs. “You only said you wanted to drive, so I’m driving. There’s nothing worse than talking in a car going fifty-five miles an hour. If the talk isn’t good, your only option is to jump out the window. It gets messy.”

  “I see,” she says. She turns the radio on again, leans back, and looks out at the newly constructed houses that whiz by. Things have changed, in some ways, a fact that leaves her slightly disoriented today, though in other ways they remain unchanged by time, too, and she chooses to focus on these things instead: the ice-cream parlor they pass, one that opened when they first married, the row of shops that still advertised the same attractive discounts, year after year. “Do you remember what it’s like?”

  “What?” he says.

  “To feel peaceful? Or to have a peaceful conversation?”

  “Is this a conversation?”

  “Maybe,” Natalia says, adjusting her scarf. “Maybe it’s the start of one.”

  Frank ducks his head a little, peering out to the landscape and the road. He adjusts the mirror. “It’s a good day for a ride.”

  They fall into another silence, not so strained, not so painful. She waits, trying to think of how to bring him to the place where they might remember, where they might connect again. How long it seems since they first met, the night now clouded in nostalgia. Where would she and Frank even be without her high school friend Frannie, the heavyset girl with a leg stiffened from polio, Natalia’s lab partner? When Natalia turned gray-faced during dissections, it was Frannie whose steady hand made the intricate cuts in frogs and pigs. She cut away the rubbery skin, peeling it back to reveal the intricate organs: the hearts, the lungs, the livers, the reproductive parts and stringy intestines. It was because of Frannie that Natalia met Frank. The girl, she supposed, had as few friends as Natalia did back then, and halfway through the year she invited Natalia over for dinner. It was a spring evening, and because Natalia didn’t drive, because even in her junior year Clara said a car was an unnecessary luxury, Natalia walked the ten blocks to Frannie’s house. She wore a full skirt, a conservative blouse that buttoned to her neck and had a lace collar, one Clara insisted upon and that Natalia herself hated. She had already opened one button by the time she found Frannie sitting on the porch swing. Frannie’s brother, Benjamin, a broad-faced, thick-bodied boy, leaned against the railing, and Frank, next to him, turned his head when Natalia sent up a hello. Seeing her, he grinned like a Cheshire cat, but he turned quickly and went back to his good-natured ribbing of Frannie, who blushed shamelessly and sat with her leg uncomfortably jutting in the opposite direction from which her body leaned.

  “You could sure cause some damage with that leg on a football field,” Frank said. “Yow.”

  They continued joking until they were called inside. After a long dinner during which Frannie’s father mused about politics and music, the four of them discussed school in the backyard. Benjamin and Frank passed a football between them, while Frannie and Natalia sat on the steps, watching them. Benjamin planned on obtaining a scholarship and had plans to go into the major leagues, while Frannie longed to become a vet, even though her mother was pushing for her to work at her father’s law firm, where she had it on good authority that several young men were recently hired as junior lawyers. “She thinks I need someone to take care of me,” Frannie said, fiddling with her brace. “She told me that a girl like me should be thinking of marriage.” When it came around to Natalia and what she wanted, Natalia drew a complete blank. She played with the hem of her skirt. She thought, in
a silly way, that what she most wanted was the moment itself, and that this very moment she wanted to dance. The air felt good on her skin. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just want to feel free.”

  The boys erupted in laughter, and Natalia laughed, too, realizing she sounded foolish. Frank threw the football back to Benjamin and looked over to her. “How about Hollywood? How about fly me to the moon?”

  Natalia shook her head. “I guess after school I’ll get a job doing something.”

  “Not dissecting frogs, I hope.” Frannie got up, limped over to the boys. “Throw it to me.”

  “A movie star,” Frank said, looking up.

  “Please,” Frannie said. She fumbled with the ball but caught it and happily lobbed it back, spinning it in the air like an acorn. “She doesn’t want to be a movie star.”

  “Your plans?” Natalia asked Frank, blushing, changing the subject.

  He grinned. “Everything. The moon and stars and whatever is between them.”

  “He’s smart enough,” Frannie said, announcing that Frank had skipped an entire year in high school. “He’s a whiz. A person like that could do anything. A person like that might even become president of the United States.” Frannie saluted him, stood up straight.

  “It’s still not football,” Benjamin said.

  Frank laughed. “Not much is.” He threw the ball to Natalia, who, surprised, caught it with both hands.

  When it came time to go, Frank offered to give Natalia a ride. She glanced at Frannie and caught her shift uncomfortably.

  “It’s not far,” Natalia said, getting ready to excuse herself. She straightened her skirt. Sometime during the night, she had unbuttoned her shirt again, and now she rebuttoned it. “I can walk.”

  “It’s a beautiful evening for a walk,” Frannie agreed.