Precious

by Sandra Novack

  Look, I say to the leg. I believe in things happening for a reason. I’d like to think there’s a reason you’ve suddenly appeared in my life, in however sheared a fashion.

  Back from the bathroom, Jimmy #3 gasps, Christ, what is that, Anna?

  Hello. I knock on the mahogany, and practice my mother’s too-nonchalant sigh. A leg, silly.

  I see that, he says, waiting for more. He stands in front of me naked, and I admire his lean stomach, the rivulets of blond hair that he continuously sweeps from his eyes and that I am certain will be the cause of a lawsuit someday. He says, finally: So you want to tell me what you’re doing with a wooden leg?

  It’s my father’s leg, I tell him, as if this explains everything.

  I’ll bite he says. So where’s the rest of him?

  I look up, to the vaulted ceilings, the swirling fans that hum in a muted way. Soaring to the heights of the unknown, I guess. Then, when Jimmy appears bumfuzzled, I say, Dead. Just dead, okay?

  He pushes his hair back from his eyes and throws me a quizzical look, the kind of look that says, Are you from this planet? That is Jimmy #3 for you. He has that look down pat, that look that makes me feel displaced, even in my own apartment. He asks: Are you okay?

  Well, I begin. Its not exactly easy to mourn over what I don’t know, I explain. It would be like trying to love a leg w/out loving the person attached to it, don’t you agree?

  He says, That’s a narrow view. It’s still your father’s leg.

  I ignore this. I say, Some relationships are defined by what they aren’t and have never been. Some histories are built upon the void of not-knowing. Would you at least agree with that?

  Absolutely, Jimmy says. Mostly. Like now, for instance, with you. I’m thinking we have sex, but I hardly know you, right? I mean here you are, sitting with your dead father’s leg. What am I supposed to think about that? He collects his pants from the floor and rummages through his pockets until he finds his bottle of antidepressants. He slides two green-and-white pills from the bottle, replaces the cap, and goes back to the bathroom for water. When he comes back, he says, How about next time instead of just having sex, we go out to dinner?

  If you need a pretense, then sure, I say. I lean back against the stiff pillows and stretch. After all, I add, a girl has got to eat.

  Seriously, Anna. I think we should at least try to get to know each other better. Then he adds: You can even bring the leg.

  Ha, ha. Very funny, I tell him. I cross my arms. I am in no mood for acerbities.

  A FEW WEEKS AGO, the same day, in fact, that I read my father’s obituary, I met Jimmy #3 at the CD store. He was rummaging through the Beatles section, sweeping his hair back with his delicate fingers. I was standing behind the counter, the heavy beat of John Bonham’s drumming filling my ears, as well as a middle-aged man’s rather nettlesome complaints about which he called the exorbitant price of the used Paul Simon CD he was purchasing. Jimmy #3 looked up at me, winked, and smiled. I am not trying to castigate him or say that Jimmy #3 cares little for Lennon or McCartney, or even the oft overlooked and always difficult to classify Ringo, nor am I saying that he uses the Beatles to garner sex from girls who work in the store, who wear silk skirts and cowboy boots everyday, good-looking girls, mind you, with curly auburn hair, fair skin, and broad facial features, girls who just found out their absent-anyway father had finally bought that one-way ticket to the spirit in the sky. But when I met him later that night for drinks, he put “Norwegian Wood” on continuous play and sang to me, “I once had a girl“—girl, as in a generic, nondescript, any sort of girl—which I think says a lot about Jimmy #3’s initial intentions.

  Of course I slept with him. I happen to be that kind of girl, the kind of girl who sleeps with men on the first date, that kind of incredibly easy girl.

  I have, in fact, slept with many men. If Jimmy #3 would search my apartment he would find that aside from this leg with its gaping canary hole, I have built something of a shrine to past lovers and/or sexual exchanges: There are Jimmy #1’s buttons, which I scissored off his shirt one deviant night; Roger’s gold cuff links with the pearl inlay lying on my bedroom dresser; Gary’s lighter; Jeff’s dental floss; Jimmy #2’s photograph of Butcher, his golden retriever; Brad’s Dark Side of the Moon CD; Joe’s red thong; Troy’s cherry Chapstick, kept in a candy bowl; Leroy’s guitar strings and pick; Harold’s superball; Lenny’s copy of Strunk and White; Guy’s metaphysical quartz, lying in the crevices of the couch cushions, etc.

  The list depresses me.

  I sometimes think: What would my father say about all this whoredom, if he knew?

  To say I am easy is one thing, but the truth is—the truth as I see it, as it might be—is that, in the absence of my father, I have thrown myself freely into the void of the Jimmys and Johns, the Williams and Guys. I have searched, in every crevice of every naked body, in every deep belly button, for that gossamer love, that of pure, unfettered desire, that kind of soul-filled wanting. So, yes, I am easy … I am exceedingly easy. That is true. And when I have come up empty-handed, as empty as pockets or wooden legs, I have pilfered small trinkets; I have proclaimed love’s trickery through dental floss and pens, cuff links and buttons, which is also to say that love has made me something of a thief.

  THE NEXT DAY I walk. I walk across the noisy, lively city, twenty-five blocks to the tenement house where my father lived when he was not frequenting the veteran’s hospital. It is one of those community living places, the kind of place that is loosely monitored. My legs take me there without so much as a cramp or stumble, over potholes and under the moving trains hoisted up on metal girders, past the river and out into the western side of the city. Though I have never confessed this to anyone, I have often walked here, to this place where my father once lived. I have walked past the broken-down houses, the ghostly shops with spray-painted windows and iron gates shut tightly to the world. I have seen women linger by traffic lights and alleys, waiting to open themselves to strangers. I have stopped and stared at the rows of dirty windows, some lined with dying ferns and orchids. I have stared at the chipped, white trim of the building, the brick side choked with ferocious ivy. I have stood under my father’s window—the third window from the left—and wondered about him. I have imagined in that moment I closed my eyes that my father happened to look out, that he saw my upturned face, my face with its straight nose, a nose like his.

  I stop now and look up to my father’s window. Once there was a plant in the window, but now it’s gone. The sad-looking, too-worn curtains have been taken down. The window now appears lifeless and empty. In a week or two or maybe three, someone new will come and fill the empty rooms. Someone new will come and go. And that’s the way things are, I suppose. Full of comings and goings.

  I could have told Jimmy #3 this, that I sometimes dare to come to this place of expectant waiting. I could have said I haven’t forgotten about my father, that I’ve always wondered about him and what he was like. I could have said all this to Jimmy, if only I might have found the proper words. It is difficult to make a part of something—a feeling, a moment, a thought—into a whore. It’s hard to take what little I know of my father and make that into a history of us, of him and me.

  And so I said nothing.

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, my mother stops by unannounced. She bends forward slightly, plants a dry kiss on my cheek, and then glides past me, her lovely legs, her rock-hard calves, covered in silk stockings. She wears a black summer dress that shows off her pretty back; she wears her hair pinned into a French twist; her perfume—deep, fragile—lingers and drifts. My mother of the perfect smile, the collagen implants, her only flaw (besides her vanity) is that she self-cannibalizes constantly, biting at her nails, working her way to the flesh of her cuticles.

  So at the risk of sounding barbaric, she begins, I was wondering if I might see the leg. I’ve been thinking so much about it—about him, she confesses. She enunciates perfectly, with the precision of an aging beauty queen. W
hen I retrieve the leg from the chair, she reaches for it as she might reach for a lover if she weren’t beyond that stage. She stares at the leg, at the gaping hole. She beholds it in a sad, almost sweet way. She says, If only your father didn’t stay that extra year, after all but a few soldiers came home. He volunteered to stay longer; he had a nihilistic spirit of volunteerism, you know. She shakes her head. Men and their sense of duty, Anna; I honestly don’t understand it.

  I sit down next to her, though she stares off, at nothing in particular. It occurs to me that she holds a small, persistent grudge against my father: When he could have come home to her, he volunteered to stay. He lingered in the jungle and lost his leg in an explosion; he put his duty before her, ranked his order of importance.

  Why, I wonder, does my mother, that impenetrable force of a woman, seem so sad? She puts her finger to her lips and gives a nibble that seems so achingly private I get up and go to the kitchen to dry the already air-dried dishes in the kitchen sink. I put each away, stack each plate neatly atop the next, and I watch her from the kitchen, noting the way she touches the leg, the way she smiles, conjuring something I do not share. And then I feel hungry, so hungry I grab crackers from the cabinet. When I pass by her on the way to my bedroom she says, I’m not a shallow woman, Anna. I just knew when I saw him like that that nothing between us would work.

  Did you ever even try to love him? I ask. After he came home, when he needed you?

  My mother looks offended. Of course, she says. I frightened myself, loving him. You have no idea how love can wreck you, Anna, how love can wreck everything about you.

  I leave her to the leg. In my room, I listen to Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” on 45 and revel in the old-fashioned crackling of the dusty needle as the vinyl spins. I love that airy sound, and that sound covers my mother’s tears. I feel nostalgic myself. I eat crackers and go through memorabilia, run my fingers over Roger’s gold cuff links, flick Gary’s lighter on and off, release the photo of Butcher, the golden retriever, from its frame, pull out Lenny’s Strunk and White and read about possessives.

  Then I get up from my bed, go to the window, and open it. I break up what crackers I’ve left, pulverizing them with my fist. I spread them on the sill and wait until I have a sill full of birds, pecking and scraping for crumbs. In the summer (and more so in the winter) I am visited by many small birds, ones that are brown and sullied-looking and hungry. They fly away and then fly back. They hop nervously across the sill and twitter lightly. I leave them food and twigs that I find on my walks. They carry everything away.

  LATER, JIMMY #3 CALLS. He says, I know we just saw each other, but do you want to go out tonight? On a date? Then he adds: Don’t forget the leg.

  Ha-ha, I tell him.

  After I shower and dress in a red silk skirt, a white wrap top, and cowboy boots, I come out to find my mother still on the couch, sleeping with the leg in her arms. I clear my throat until she rouses herself, rubs her eyes, and gives me the sweet, almost stupefied look. I say, I have a date. And it’s really time for you to get going. I add: Don’t you get enough beauty rest, as it is?

  She seems surprised by the passage of time, and groggy. She says, I was having the most splendid dream, Anna. Your father and I were dancing to a waltz. A Spanish waltz, I think. I never wanted to wake.

  I grab my purse and check my watch. I open the door, but she doesn’t move.

  He’s not picking you up? she asks, and smiles in that rigid way she often does. I couldn’t tolerate that in a man.

  Well, I say. Better than being coddled.

  She frowns. I’m not entirely idle, you know, she says. I had a reason for coming. From her purse she removes a black velvet box, and from the box she removes a ring. It is a modest ring—platinum band, a small, solitaire diamond—and something my mother with all her many lovers wouldn’t be caught dead wearing these days. She takes the ring and holds it up to the light, squints, then places it in the hole of my father’s leg. She smoothes the wrinkles of her dress and says, I feel like I’m finally free.

  I say, You told me he never asked.

  She looks out the window, to the neighboring apartment buildings. She wrings her hands. I say a lot of things. He asked after he lost his leg, and what could I tell him then? Tell me, Anna, what would you have said?

  You said he left us behind.

  She gets up, collects her purse, and, at the door, she stops and faces me. He did leave us behind, she says. He changed. What would it have mattered if you knew? my mother asks.

  Maybe everything, I say. It might have changed everything.

  I BRING THE LEG to dinner. Why not.

  Jimmy #3 arrives at Bandito’s dressed in a sharp button-down and skakis. He sits down, glances at the leg, and says, I wasn’t really serious about that.

  I had a change of heart, I explain. I felt sorry for the leg, being there alone in the apartment like that. Jimmy #3 gives me that look, and then, as if he gets the joke, he laughs. He laughs even though there is nothing funny.

  I prop the leg on the chair between us. It sits there, looking very conspicuous, lording over the salsa.

  The waiters say nothing. I come to Bandito’s a lot. They parade past us, wearing black sombreros and elaborate, frilly tuxes. A man with a heavy mustache comes over, tips his hat, and recites the seviche and molé specials. We order and then sit without speaking. Around us, couples chat, raise glasses. Mariachi music plays and Jimmy sips his drink. So, he asks, finally, Are you going to tell me what’s up with your father, and that leg?

  I’d rather ask you a few preliminary questions first. So listen up, Jimmy. I tap my fingers against the tablecloth, smooth the wrinkled fabric. I want to know a few things before we go any further, I say. I want to know, what kind of man are you? Do you run at the slightest provocation? What is your favorite color, and do you like birds? Are you still, after years of living, afraid of the dark? Are you waiting for your life to open? Do you feel you’ve failed others? Are you brave with your love? I want to know, do you believe that one event can change a lifetime? Do you hold on to the slenderest bit of hope?

  Jimmy’s eyes widen. He says, Whoa, horsey. That’s a lot of questions. I really just wanted to take you out for tacos and get to know you better. He surveys the chips and salsa and the margaritas adorned with festive miniature umbrellas. He removes an umbrella and twirls it around thoughtfully in his fingers. He says, Anna, it’s not as though you’ve been super easy. You’re not the most open woman I’ve ever known. Frankly, you can be a little scary, with all your interest in sex.

  Look, I say. I just don’t know about us. Sometimes I really wonder if there’s any person in the world who is really worth it. The risk, I mean.

  He says, I’d hate to think you’re leaving me for a leg, Anna.

  I don’t wait for dinner, and I don’t finish my margarita. I get up from the table and leave.

  BACK AT HOME that night I lie in bed with the leg, and peer into its hole. I search not for a canary but for my mother’s engagement ring. I shake the leg until I hear it move then fall down into the hollow toe. It should be sumstantial, it should hold weight and meaning, but finally it is just what it is—something carried along. I make a decision then. I ransack the apartment and return with buttons, cuff links and lighters, dental floss, photographs, CDs, and that red thong. I find Strunk and White. I take everything I have pilfered and stuff each item into the leg. The cuff links skip down to the toe. The buttons tap lightly against the wood. The Chapstick follows. I wind the thong into a tight ball and cram it into the hole. I break the CD into pieces. I rip pages and pages from Strunk and White, stuffing each page into the leg. I fill the leg. I open my window and set the leg on the sill. It is a warm summer evening that promises, across this city, a new beginning and start.

  That night, I dream of my father for the first time in years. We meet on the street, and he seems happy to see me, which is surprising. I’ve been trying to find you, I tell him. He says, Me, too; imagine.
It’s a real jungle, isn’t it? Together, we walk around the city. In my dream, we talk easily. I ask him about the years I’ve missed, and he speaks of distant countries, my mother, the war, and all his love.

  When I wake, I check on the leg. I open the window and breathe in the warm air, expecting to find that the leg has been lifted by the waiting birds that are always so hungry. But the leg is still there and there is no miracle. I bring the leg inside again and pack it away for good. When I finish, I call Jimmy at the pharmacy and tell him that I’m sorry.

  Hey, he says, genuinely surprised. Why are you crying?

  Please, I tell him. I want to see you now. I’ll run over there to get you, Jimmy. I’ll run over there just as fast as I can.

  SANDRA NOVACK’S fiction has appeared in publications including The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and Mississippi Review, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband. Please visit her website at www.sandranovack.com.

  Copyright © 2009 by Sandra Novack

  Excerpt from Everyone but You copyright © 2011 by Sandra Novack

  All rights reserved.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Novack, Sandra.

  Precious: a novel / Sandra Novack.

  p. cm.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming title Everyone but You by Sandra Novack. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-791-4

  1. Missing children—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.