Meet Me in the In-Between

by Bella Pollen

  “What happened to you?” I actually don’t know why I said this as meanly as I did, but to her credit, Peta let it go.

  “I’ve been wantin’ to speak to you.” Her tiny child-size teeth were nibbling at the Crayola orange of her lipstick. “Look,” she stammered. “What I did was wrong. I know that.”

  “Uh-uh.” I hadn’t been consciously trying to intimidate but self-righteousness is dangerously habit forming.

  “Please,” Peta said. “This has gotta stop. ’Fore someone gets hurt.”

  “Hurt how?” I scoffed. John had recently alerted me to the whereabouts of the vagus nerve and how to deliver a downwards windmilling blow to it.

  “It was a bad time for me,” Peta mumbled. “You know . . . back then.” Tears gathered in her eyes, her expression that of a pawnshop kitten watching a burlap sack being prepared. “What I’m trying to say is . . .”

  Oh cut to the chase, lady. Where’s my money?

  “ . . . I’ve been havin’ a few problems at home.”

  I softened. God help me, there isn’t a woman in the world who can’t empathise with “problems at home.”

  “Anyway, I’m real sorry,” she finished.

  “Sure,” I heard myself saying. “An apology was all I ever wanted.” But inside my chest, my heart shivered. What kind of revenge fantasy ends with an apology? This wasn’t opposite and equal, this wasn’t post-modern or deconstructed. It was a total washout.

  “Clean slate?” She stuck out a little paw with a wedding band welded to it.

  “Clean slate,” I agreed, grudgingly. When we shook hands, hers was tentative—as though she was expecting me to be wearing a metal hand buzzer. Clack, clack, clack. Off she tripped in her pumps and viscose skirt. As she went, I noticed a run in the back of her stockings and beneath the nylon mesh a poignant little bruise. Who wears stockings in hundred-degree heat? I thought.

  The more pertinent question, though, was this: Now that I had won, what to do with the rest of my life?

  I fantasized about becoming pen pals with Sam Shepard and the inspirational letters he would write me.

  Dear Bella,

  You can’t force a thing to grow. You just gotta wait ’til it pops up out of the ground. Tiny little shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong enough. Strong enough to break the earth even.

  P.S. I wrote this for Buried Child, but I think we both know now that I wrote it for you.

  Love, Sam

  It helped. A little.

  Time passed. The winds grew cooler. The deer hunters came and left. The sky acquired a sickly tinge as the aspen leaves began to blow through the valley. And then one day, a small headline, on page five of the local newspaper:

  LOCAL WOMAN MISSING

  The article didn’t reveal much. Only that Peta Thorn was gone, but the reporter’s casual inclusion that “the grounds of her property were being searched” implied so much more. I did a little sleuthing:

  Investigation search warrant posted to the Thorns’ outbuilding indicated officials were looking for items ranging from human remains to firearms. An inventory list included eight guns, ammunition, shell casings, a sword, hammer, hatchet, drug paraphernalia, and the contents of a burn pile.

  Was poor Peta dead? And what on earth was a burn pile?

  The following week, the story moved to page two:

  NO BODY PARTS FOUND ON PETA THORN’S LAND!

  Not on Peta’s land, no, but a small paragraph adjacent to the article announced that a suspect bucket of cement had been discovered in a nearby motel.

  Our local town doesn’t have much in the way of a crime lab. There was nowhere else for the suspect bucket of cement to go for analysis but back to the airport.

  The Venture desk is now manned by Myra, a cheerful paranoid schizophrenic convinced her double-wide is being monitored by the FBI.

  “They’re clever, I’ll give ’em that,” she can be heard saying, as she marches clients out to their rentals. “They’re trained to leave not so much as a thumbprint—hell, no ways you could ever prove they’d been in. Still, I’m telling ya, these damn devices are so small these days they can hide ’em up a flea’s ass.”

  Inside the terminal, Great Lakes flight 006 was preparing to board. Hardworking Adele had just moved from check-in to security when the sheriff pushed through the door and hauled the bucket of hardened cement onto the conveyer.

  “Girl, I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important,” he said. “But whenever you’re ready . . .”

  I have imagined the scene that followed many times, sometimes in slo-mo, sometimes rinsed through with that extraordinary X-Pro II orange light that renders the opening credits of CSI Miami so very compelling:

  Adele snaps on her security gloves and grasps her wand. Out comes the grey plastic tray. In go the shoes, wash bag, laptop, and one blue bucket containing . . . What the heck? Adele blinks at the screen and turns pale. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she whispers. “Yep, an unlawful item has been slipped into this one, all right.”

  It was not Peta in that bucket, if that’s what you’re worried about. It was her husband’s head, separated from its body by her son. If you want the details, and believe me, I’m the last person to judge, then tap “filial rape, patricide, multiple stabbings, dismemberment, skinning, flesh fed coyotes,” and—this last one is key—“dog motel” into your computer’s search engine. You’ll find them easily enough.

  Problems at home, Peta had said. Problems at home.

  On my side of the socioeconomic divide that means the boiler has broken down, your husband is having a midlife crisis, or maybe your teenager has been caught shoplifting a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut.

  Had I known poor Peta was married to a man rumoured to be connected with the murder of various local children, a man capable of taking his own son up the mountain with the intention of turning him into “his wife,” had I known that her poor boy, abused once too often, would finally snap, I might not have been so quick to take issue with her. I might have had the good sense to steer clear. I might have had a little more heart.

  I like to tell myself that I don’t enjoy the theatre because it relegates me to the role of spectator, and that’s not how I like to learn about the world. I get restless in the back row. I want to climb onto the stage and be pulled into the action, but is there really a difference between those who prefer to watch this stuff from the stalls and those who walk towards it? And if the only difference is proximity, then how close is too close?

  I’m OK with being the girl who likes be thrown into the back of a truck, cowboy style, and told I’ll “do,” but am I really the girl who likes to touch the hand of the woman who sleeps next to the serial killer?

  Our West is full of stories like this. They’re easy to tell, but they’re cheap. Safe in my holiday home, warm in my intarsia-knit sweater, I get so caught up in the fiction of the thing, I forget that for some people it’s real.

  Had I been Peta, ruthlessly stalked and bullied by some ex-customer over a couple of hundred dollars, I might have exacted my own brand of revenge. After all, she had my driver’s license and address on file. It’s not as if there weren’t several members of her immediate family that she could have sent to remonstrate with me. Turns out, Peta Thorn was made of more principled stuff.

  Violence is a tar ball. Prod it and it sticks to you.

  I could have got Peta fired.

  Problems at home, Peta had said, problems at home.

  I could have got her killed for being fired.

  Everyone is the hero of their own life until it’s clear they’re just another disaster tourist, a grubby voyeur, slowing down to gawp at the motorway smash—a spoiled, entitled, holiday home owner who doesn’t have to hold down a full-time job requiring the wearing of itchy tights in hundred-degree heat while trying to protect the members of her family from one another.

  Seems I’m the one who owes the apology.

  I’m sorry, Peta, wherever you are.

&nb
sp; I bet Sam Shepard is also curious about worlds that are different from his. Maybe he too is drawn to the raw and macabre. But I wonder how far he got past the mailbox daubed in blood before he stopped walking and started writing instead.

  If I ever get to see Buried Child again—and I’m still holding out for Sam and me going together—I will not make quips about there being only one dead baby. The next time I’m invited to witness the breakdown of the American dream, I will stay in my seat and be thankful for the sweeties in my pocket.

  PARABLE OF FIRE

  The electrician stayed for a cold beer after finishing up on the generator. He was a wandering stoner with floppy hair and pale eyelashes. I offered him soup, and he told me his name was Hanson and that his no. 1 meal was catfish, which he rolled in egg and crushed cornflakes before dropping into hot Crisco. The word catfish conjured up something prehistoric picking off small children in lakes. Nevertheless I once ate a catfish burger in Memphis and remember it as one of the finest meals of my life.

  After he left I wondered what it would be like to live a solitary existence, visited occasionally by strong singular men like Hanson, who’d teach me how to wield a spanner and then slow waltz me to bed before returning home in the tender gloom of first light. It could work. I could make it work. There were a number of these shy western boys, who would thicken into men before eventually becoming Tommy Lee Jones. Any one of them would keep me from the edge of loneliness.

  I’d been holed up in the barn for days on end, and the novelty of isolation was wearing off. The solo routine that had once felt so liberating now had me talking to the vegetables with the upbeat self-admonishments of a crazy person. “That was stupid,” I remarked to the butternut squash after breaking my little toe on the chair leg. But instead of dispersing into the empty morning, my words were held in the cold tang of air before being echoed back by the walls, a reminder that I was once again alone and would continue to be so for some time. I picked up a Post-it note marked “call home” and, standing in the yellow strip of sunlight from the window, stared at it for an unnecessarily long time.

  Any dialogue with the outside world threatened to sever all those strands of thought I’d spooled in my head, so I tended to put off telephone duty until the day had drifted by and the seven-hour time difference made it no longer feasible. Mostly I managed to ignore how bad this made me feel. Expert at cutting conversations short, I faked crackly reception or blamed the horns and whistles of nonexistent trains. In Sydney, another place I’d hidden away for a while, I took to answering any call, irrespective of the hour, in a sleepy voice tinged with mild reproach. “Do you know what time it is?” I’d yawn, whilst jogging through the surfers on Bondi Beach or collecting my evening’s takeout from the dim sum bar. My feelings on this grotesque level of subterfuge ranged from thinking I was a genius to suspecting that there was something deeply wrong with me. Still, nobody in the world has ever worked out whether Australia is on their today or somebody else’s tomorrow and the interruptions soon dried to nothing.

  I stole these weeks, a couple here and there, only now that the children were old enough. Jesse and Sam were at boarding school, the younger two in the puppy-love phase of a new au pair. Even Mac’s dance card had been fully marked with football fixtures and curry evenings. No one needed me for a bit, not really. At least, it was OK to believe that, wasn’t it? Didn’t every woman occasionally yearn to step away from the roles of mother, lover, wife and all the billable hours they entailed, to a place where nobody’s needs had to be met but her own?

  Mac was supportive of the working mother paradox but found it hard to understand the focus it required, perceiving any move towards myself as a move away from him. I got that. It shut him out of a world that he could never truly be part of—and that was scary for a person who dreaded isolation as much as I sometimes craved it. I was beginning to understand that a relationship is made, not necessarily by how much you have in common with another person, but by your flaws being compatible. What we want and what we need are not always the same. Unable or maybe unwilling to articulate our true feelings, Mac and I had begun sketching out our desires through landscape. I was in love with wilderness, while he was flirting with the English countryside. Roses and hedgerows versus precipices and plains.

  A few days earlier he had called for phone sex. The emptiest hours of his night were my suppertime, and I’d answered the phone on autopilot. There were things I’d been rehearsing saying to him, but the unexpected connection sent me into a spiral of panic. I could feel the words in my head disappearing as though I’d opened a can of alphabet soup and poured the contents down the sink. Reluctantly, I’d gone along with it, pretending to strip down naked and lie on the bed, all the while chopping celery and then peppers, my heart constricting. When I risked the blender, attempting to muffle the noise by throwing a tea towel over it, I heard him hesitate.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Vibrator,” I lied, mustering my sexiest voice and congratulating myself on a crisis averted. Only now did it occur to me that he hadn’t called back since.

  It was the unsayable truth, but to maintain the oneness of first love was to bind each other to a series of impossible expectations. Marriage between two strong-willed people was to repeatedly force irregular shaped pieces of yourself into the jigsaw of another; after a while those pieces became bent out of all recognition. Marriage was a puzzle that required patience and skill to complete, but no matter how often I checked the picture on the lid, there were times when I could no longer get a clear idea of what it was supposed to look like. The conflict this caused was all too familiar, and that’s the real reason I was relieved to be out West, on the side of a mountain, on the opposite shore from Mac, with little interest in bridging the gap.

  “Love you,” he’d said. His official sign-off, and I knew how awful it woud be to tell him I wasn’t buying it. I believe in the constancy of give and receive. I believe, too, that love should be proved over and over again. But “love you,” like “I’m sorry,” can quickly become a complacent phrase, ironed flat of all meaning. Love is not so easily come by and every time I was forced to say it as a reciprocal line to a reflex statement, it became further devalued. “I love you” is something to say when you can’t help yourself, when love is flooding out of you like a bath overflowing, seeping over the floor, water marking everything it touches. And this wasn’t how either of us was feeling right then.

  That night, though, after I’d washed my bowl and played hide-and-seek with an onion that had rolled under the counter, I felt curiously unsettled. The shuttered eyes of the windows appeared to be judging me, and there was a sense of reproach in the shadows of the big room.

  I put the unease down to my still-throbbing toe and redrew my boundaries tighter. Upstairs I lit a candle and picked up a book of original fairy tales I’d stumbled over in the local thrift shop. It was an out-of-print copy and might have been valuable had its binding threads not been loose. I read for an hour, reflecting on how much easier it was to buy into the rape of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilating their feet than the notion of the rageaholic Beast being tamed by Beauty’s patience. Anger was an armour that people did not remove willingly. I closed the book and tossed it onto the bed, remembering a W. H. Auden quote and quickly finding a pen to scribble it down: “A fairy tale demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must be for him no other.”

  I checked my watch, realised it had stopped ticking, and shook it. An old-fashioned clunky thing, it had been found by the children one winter in the same thrift store and presented with delighted pride. You say you never have time, Momma, so that’s what we’re giving you. The thought was so poignant it had made me cry. The watch face was mounted on leather and bolted to a wrist strap made from five elasticised tortoiseshell links. “One for each of the family,” Jesse had said. Considering its age, it was amazing it kept such good time, but as I slipped it off my wrist and tried winding
it, the mechanism refused to budge in either direction.

  An owl hooted outside. A Navajo once told me the owl was an envoy of the supernatural world symbolizing deception and silent observation. Well, wasn’t that why I was here? Weren’t deception and observation the building blocks of fiction? I stretched for the David Foster Wallace book in which he’d written something about fiction and really deep serious sex being among the few experiences “where loneliness could be both confronted and relieved.” My bed was a patchwork of books and research and pages of manuscript strewn haphazardly over the covers. My work is not tidy, and its manifestations drove Mac nuts—the coffee cups, the spreading paper, the obsessive glare at the screen, often heralding a dinner making it to the table late and—it had to be admitted—carcinogenically burnt. But if creativity cannot be tidied, it can be contained, pushed into a smaller and smaller space. Put enough demands on a person and eventually you will force their focus back to you or split their attention in half. I once read a quote from artist Maggi Hambling about having a crying painting in one room and a crying baby in the other. I got that, too. Of course the “us” of marriage needed honouring, but the more rigid a choice Mac presented, the more fluid I found myself becoming until I began to slip through his fingers.

  Behind my eyelids the flickering flame was comforting. Still, the barn was made of reclaimed wood, and what if a spark caught? I looked around at the random kitsch of the room. “What to save in the fire” was a car game the whole family used to play. The children’s choices had been predictable—Leonard Rossiter the dog, and stuffed toys when they were small, graduating to Leonard Rossiter the dog and computers as they grew older. But when it came to Mac, it was always the same. “You,” he would say. “I’d save you.”

  “No, you don’t get it,” I’d tell him. “I’m safe. We’re all safe. You can save whatever you like.”

  “I’d still save you,” he’d repeat, and I’d grin and roll my eyes at the children in the backseat. It was so like him to break the rules of the game to prove a point.