(“Dear Diary: I walked away from a twenty-year marriage without regret. My kids were grown up by then and gone. I felt, and still feel, I had time to find out just who Marianna Kensington is. Maybe I am no one! SCARY! But how much scarier to trick yourself into thinking you are perfectly fine... a complete human being! Where I came from, everyone thinks they are just fine. No problems. But they are just blank pages waiting for somebody to write on them. You know what they hate most? A quiet afternoon by themselves. Because the quiet hurts, I mean, the quiet is dangerous. Like a burglar is dangerous. Or like a rapist. It is there suddenly in your living room and there’s no help to be found. It gets you. It has eyes and ears. It knows a lot about you. What a complete and stupid lie your life has been up to now. Squirm, squirm. It feels like uneasiness. Maybe you go to the medicine cabinet to try some more Tranxenes. Or you pick up one of those trashy novels about this woman like yourself who goes out into the world to escape from her life and gets herself into one scrape after another until Mister Right gets into her pants. Jesus, I’d rather eat bloated trash fish dredged up from Boston Harbor! It would be less poisonous to the soul. And it doesn’t hold back the quiet afternoon. The quiet is there in the stupid love scenes. The quiet is there, untouched, cover to cover.”)
“I only hope you can forgive us,” Jeff repeated. But it wasn’t really a matter of forgiveness. Marianna didn’t know if she could trust Thome Granger ever again, much less forgive him. And the most important consideration was not even Thome Granger, but her job and her new life. What was to become of her now? She could turn tail and run back to the safety of the East, or she could grit her teeth and stick this job out. She could fight for the respect of the kitchen crew and especially for the respect of Jorge Mendez. She could do everything in her power to see that Jorge was recognized as her equal in the kitchen. And if Thome Granger ever touched her again, or so much as looked at her offensively, she could threaten him with legal action. Women these days did not have to put up with that sort of sexual intimidation from their employers. More than anything, she did not want to fail! She wanted badly to become a first-rate professional ranch cook. That, she knew, was how one found oneself in this life. That was how one filled in the awful blanks of a blank existence. You did a job, any job, and you did it with dedication and to the best of your ability. You committed yourself. Talent was not a factor. You found the thing you did best and you did it as best you could. No job was menial or less important than any other job. Only the quality of workmanship could be assigned these arbitrary values. An inferior neurosurgeon was a “menial” compared with a prideful auto mechanic or legal secretary. She had never before grasped the simple truth of this universal fact of life. Later that evening she made a crude sign with notepa-per and an India ink marking pen: I AM WHAT I DO. NO MAN CAN PROVIDE MY IDEN TITY. She slept well that night, knowing that in the morning she would wake to that sign, taped to her wall, and that its wisdom would let her approach the new day with self-confidence and courage. Jorge Mendez, whether he knew it or not, had himself a damned good kitchen boss.
Before the month was out, Marianna had the kitchen under control. She’d talked to Jorge several times to clarify their relationship and to assure him that, as far as she was concerned, he was every bit as important as she was. “You will be the corazón of this kitchen, Jorge,” she’d said, “and I will be its alma.” This delighted Jorge. The “heart” and the “soul” of the kitchen would work together in preparing the best ranch cuisine in the West! Marianna studied Spanish every night for an hour in her room and soon was able to utter phrases in dialect that shocked the kitchen boys into gales of approving laughter. “!Qué la chin-gada!” She would shout at minor accidents and setbacks, and the boys would whoop in delight at the immense obscenity. Jorge, as he grew to trust and respect Marianna, became her good friend. Sometimes, in moments of slack activity, they would take their coffee out to the back patio and share opinions about ranch life and life in general. She discovered that Jorge was a man of subtle intelligence and strong feelings. He had been devastated by Thome Granger’s thoughtless, even perverse, hiring of a woman with essentially no experience to supervise the kitchen. But Marianna was not about to let the injustice continue or to allow the prejudice against a gringa go unchallenged. She saw to it that everything done in the kitchen required Jorge’s approval. And, in accepting this responsibility, Jorge became a force to contend with. His demeanor became casual and self-confident; his courtly deference was replaced by a polite assertiveness that sometimes—to Marianna’s delight—furrowed the brow of Thome Granger with confusion and, possibly, fear. Once, when Thome had entered the kitchen on what was ostensibly an inspection tour, he found Jorge sitting at a table reading The Wall Street Journal while Marianna mixed piecrusts. Thome had stared speechless at Jorge, but Jorge merely looked up from his paper and said, “Beef futures opened very high today, Boss.” Thome turned pale but could only say, “Really.” Marianna laughed, remembering the incident. She was in her room, studying her Spanish text. “(Quė es un romance?” she read aloud, as someone tapped lightly on her door. It was Jeff Granger, tall in the doorway. She called him into her room. He entered, almost reluctantly, she thought. Out on the patio, some of the cowboys were playing guitars and singing. The desert was in bloom. The air was fragrant. “Thome’s left the Y Bar Y,” Jeff said. “He’s going to start a new life in a San Francisco brokerage firm.” Marianna didn’t try to conceal her feelings. “I can’t say I’m unhappy,” she said. But it soon became clear to Marianna that there was more on Jeff’s mind than the departure of his brother. “Marianna,” he said, taking her hand, “I think I’ve fallen in love with you.” She let him kiss her, anticipating the electrical surge, but it did not come. She ushered him to the door. “We’ll talk about it, Jeff. Right now I’ve got to do my lesson.” A few minutes later, Jorge Mendez came by. Marianna let him in and closed the door. “Alma,” he said, kissing her hand. “Corazón,” she replied, her heart suddenly racing as she felt not electricity or magnetism in his touch but heat, the simple and generous heat of kitchens. The melodious gringo guitars drew them together in a long and tender embrace, and as some cowboy sang “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” Marianna led Jorge to her bed.
Nothing was meant to be. Sometimes when two strangers meet, their mutual strangeness seems unbridgeable. The stocky brown man of mixed blood in her arms had initially seemed unapproachably alien to Marianna. She quivered at the bizarre unpredictability of life. Passion, long dead, rioted in her loins. No, this was definitely not the man she’d envisioned years ago in her adolescent day-dreams! He was certainly not her type. But what was one’s “type”? Of that, more than ever, she had no idea. Years of careful emotions had dulled her judgment. For to know one’s type is to know one’s needs. Marianna was a desert of unknown needs this random flood was violating, with tender but strongly fluid tillage, into bloom.
She had no regrets. The children were gone. And at least she was getting to know who Marianna Kensington was. She’d been no one, she was sure of that now. How frightening! But how much more frightening to deceive yourself into thinking you were complete when in fact you were a blank page waiting to be filled in! The suburbs were crowded with safe and comfortable women who were essentially blank pages waiting for a violating pen. Silence was their enemy. Silence let the emptiness rise to the surface like a submerged but featureless continent. Silence, given a small opportunity, would enter the house and sit down like a bold intruder. The intruder smiles with his superior knowledge of the little dark mechanisms of your heart. Ignoring him, you pick up the latest Silhouette or Harlequin Romance and try to read, but the words blur together, passion links arms with despair—jealousy, anger, spite kink up like a bicycle chain that throws itself loose from its sprocket and the whole enterprise coasts to a dismal stop halfway to nowhere. You try the good parts—it doesn’t help. Silence slips into the bloated prose. It invades each trumped-up scene. It collects. It is there, smirking, when you be
gin, there in the middle, showing a wider grin, and it waits for you at the dead end—a surprise ending of dead paper, rustling with the last word.
Your Story
This story happened early in the history of the human race, a few years from now. It is your story, though you may have some quibbles. It’s the writer’s story too, but he wants to camouflage it. (The form he’s chosen confirms this.) Look at it this way: He offers a parable of a parable, nut and shell, easily cracked and eaten. But the question is, will it nourish or poison or just lie suspended in the gut like a stone? It points no finger of blame, pats no one on the back, gives no guarantees beyond asserting the commonality of its long-lost roots, which are transplantable anywhere. To make matters worse, the writer (never applauded for his penetrating insights and infamous for his lack of convictions) probably won’t get it right. He’ll need your open-minded help to fill in the blanks or to blank out the excesses. Excess is his forte. He’s made a tidy little career of it. Actually, he’ll need more than your help, but nothing can be done about that. The narcissistic dissembler is on his own:
There once were a husband and wife who were so simple that they had no control over their lives or the lives of their children. Worse, they had no control over what they said. Words gushed out of her mouth like blood from a bad gash—hot, pure, terrible to behold. From his mouth they were like the dark, sour smoke from a doused fire. The two of them were reasonably civilized. They were respected in their community. Their names were ordinary: Gene and Amy Underhill. Names like these do not arouse suspicion or resentment.
One evening, at the dinner table, Amy said to Gene, “Honey, I want to get rid of the children. I’ve had enough of them. I want to get rid of them tomorrow.”
This wasn’t the first time Amy had expressed this wish. She was not one to mince words, but this was the first time she’d set a deadline.
“Well, they are shits,” Gene agreed affably. Gene Underhill was a decent, mild-mannered man who worked as a lab technician for a company that produced titanium-alloy butterfly valves for a secret defense project rumored to be linked to the “Star Wars” program. He spoke his mind freely too, but with far less heat than his wife. He was by nature a cautious, reflective man. His wife’s forthright manner kept him off balance. He was no match for her, and knew it. “I don’t think I’d be able to actually harm them, dear,” he said.
Amy, whose anger was so reliable a stone church could lean against it and not topple, said, “You incredible wimp.”
Gene knew there would be no lovemaking that night, or, if there was, it would be rancorous. Which in itself could be interesting. If the rancor could be harnessed and guided into some infrequently traveled byways. Images of Gortex straps with Velcro fasteners, spandex collars, electrified quirts, suppositories dipped in nonprescription euphorics, Suggesto-Vision videotapes from the Exotica/Erotica section of the neighborhood 7-Eleven store, and so on, occurred to him.
“I read you like a book,” Amy said, noticing the sweat beads forming on Gene’s upper lip. “But you can put fun and games out of your mind until we get this business settled once and for all. Then we’ll party.”
Gene and Amy were eating a dinner of half-warm Big Macs and fries. The children, Buddy and Jill, had been put to bed earlier.
“We could send them away to boarding school,” Gene said hopefully. He dipped his last fry into a kidney-shaped pool of catsup. He made a project out of it to avoid Amy’s eyes.
“Wonderful,” Amy said. “We’ll send them to school in England and you and I will live in a villa on the Cote d’Azur and read French poetry and paint neo-cubist nudes. Jesus, Gene, grow up, will you?”
Gene and Amy were not bad people. They were beleaguered by debts they had foolishly allowed to accumulate until, at twenty-two percent interest, the debts took on an unearthly life of their own and became a fiscal Frankenstein monster that sought to destroy its creators. Gene and Amy were harassed daily by the thousand large and small demands of an underfunded, barely marginal, middle-class lifestyle. Every night they were afflicted by televised world events whose increasingly inventive perversities left them confused, angry, and spiritually at sea. The children, typically, were whiny ingrates who rarely rewarded their parents with a hint of promise, academic or otherwise. “You are a slob, just like your father,” Amy once said to Buddy, in a fit of rage. Jill, on the other hand, filled Amy with silent dread. Her daughter was a miniature of herself, a brooding waxen doll. Sometimes she would catch Jill studying her with eyes that were too knowledgeable. Those dark eyes always seemed judgmental and full of sad reproach. She felt accused of some nameless crime by those eyes and was moved, frequently, to defend herself to her own daughter. It didn’t make sense, but there it was, the heavy load of guilt. Amy once screamed, “I don’t deserve this! I haven’t done anything to you!” but knew, instinctively, it sounded not only crazy but false.
“All right,” Gene said at last. “We’ll do it.” He felt old and heavy. He was prematurely gray and the smile lines around his eyes and mouth had hardened into permanent fissures that gave him the appearance of constant flinching. He was surprised daily by this face of his in the shaving mirror. He was only forty but he looked sixty. And yet he felt no different than he did when he was twenty. The mental picture he carried of himself was of a dark-haired, smooth-skinned boy with a good-natured smile. How had this happened? The last french fry he’d eaten had lodged itself in his chest, under his breastbone, where it scratched at him like a greasy, long-nailed finger. “We’ll do it tomorrow,” he said. “First thing after breakfast.”
Amy got up and kissed him. “I’m so relieved, darling,” she said.
Which means... Gene remarked hopefully to himself, new sweat beads glazing his lip...
“I’m in the moo-ood,” Amy crooned, completing his thought.
They went up to bed. Amy was happy now. Soon, she felt, her problems would be solved. Soon, their priorities would be reordered and they would be able to concentrate on getting out of debt. Amy was only thirty-three years old and had seen enough of empty cupboards and overdrawn checking accounts and her daughter’s accusing eyes. She wanted a secure, predictable life. She wanted to devote most of her time to income management, the search for safe investments, and to the establishment of a first-rate Individual Retirement Account. And she wanted to do this without guilt, or any other distraction.
Amy undressed slowly in the dim bedroom, revealing in tantalizing increments her still lovely body to her eager husband. Gene was already in bed, the chalk of liquid Maalox caking his lips. “Gortex straps,” he suggested, hoarse with emotion.
“All right,” Amy agreed. “Since you’ve decided to face reality like a grown-up, for once.”
I turned my back on them at this point and left them to their constrained pleasures. I went to see the children. I danced my way down the creaky hall to their room. Left foot over right, hop and skip, right foot over left, turn and turn. Among other things, I am a dancer.
The children, never quite as stupid or indifferent as their parents believe, had heard it all. They were frightened, but not especially surprised.
“What will we do?” Jill asked her brother, Buddy.
“Play it dumb, like always,” Buddy said.
Jill was nine and Buddy was going on twelve. They were beautiful children, blond as late summer wheat. They were tucked in their beds, the girl on one side of the room, the boy on the other. I kissed the girl and then the boy. The pages of the boy’s comic book were riffled, as if by wind. I turned in slow, elegant circles between their sweet beds, but they saw only the shadows of their dreams.
The next day was Sunday. The family set out for the woods ostensibly to gather firewood for the coming fall. The children rode in the back of the pickup truck along with the chain saws and gas cans. It was a beautiful morning, cool and clear.
After Gene had turned off the main highway and had entered a narrow dirt road that led to the wooded foothills, Amy said, “Once we
get into the trees, get off the road.”
Gene slipped the Toyota into four-wheel drive, anticipating a rough climb. He leaned his head out the window and yelled back to the kids. “Hang on tight,” he said. “Don’t try to stand up or anything.”
The engine labored as the truck struggled against the steep, loamy ground of the forest. “Keep switching back and forth,” Amy said. “I want them to lose all sense of direction.”
They traveled this way for nearly an hour. Gene, holding the wheel so tightly his hands were cramped and white, was sweating profusely. He was relieved when he found a dry creek bed that led out into a meadow. He accelerated through the wide field, which glowed almost unnaturally, like the core of a nuclear reactor, with wildflowers. He stopped in the middle of this exotic place and unscrewed the thermos. He took a long drink of whiskied coffee. “I’m lost,” he said.
“Good,” said Amy. “Keep driving.”
On the other side of the meadow, the mountains began. Gene found an old logging road. It was very steep and he had to keep the Toyota in its lowest gear to manage the climb. Their ears popped and the air became noticeably cooler. The silver-gray stumps of ancient clear-cuts studded the steep slopes like rooted tables. Patches of snow between the great stumps looked like dropped linen. The air was purer here and the sky was so blue it seemed like the inside of an enameled egg.
They entered an area of standing-dead trees. “Good pickings,” Gene said, stopping the truck and setting the brake.
“Keep going,” Amy said. “We didn’t come all the way up here for firewood, damn it.”
Gene sighed and restarted the engine. They drove for another hour, passing more groves of dead trees, slash piles, and old, abandoned logs that sawyers had left behind for unknown reasons. The sun was low and smoky in the sky. The children, cold and hungry, were whining and tapping on the rear window of the truck cab. “We’re almost there!” Amy yelled through the glass.
Borrowed Hearts Page 14
