The atmosphere not particularly conducive to comprehensive financial planning, my presentation arouses only mild interest. Heads pore over the glossy pages of tables and graphs while I circulate, answering and posing questions. The overall AIS rate of return has stabilized. It won’t hurt anybody.
Vernon, the principal’s hydrologist husband, is slightly taller than my five-eleven, with an iron gray crew cut and seamed forehead.
“King Midas Mufflers,” he says straight-faced. We work out a few cautious investments as he talks up his wife, who has devised an entire bilingual curriculum through sixth grade. Fifteen years ago, he says, Hualapai had no written language. Now 80 percent of Alav Elementary’s students graduate high school, 30 percent attending college.
“Don’t tell me,” the principal says, joining us. “Hualapai Dread is Fortune 500 now.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “You’re almost breaking even, back to pre-1987. At this pace you’ll have your studio in twenty-five years, max.”
“Gives me something to live for.” With Precious Metals clinging to .5 percent South African, she declines moving her funds.
“Dooley around?” I ask. “I went by her place today.”
“Gone all week,” the white keyboardist-kindergarten teacher yells over. “Her cousin is in a volleyball tournament at Tuba City.”
“That is, if they don’t lose,” Vernon laughs. “She might be home tomorrow.”
“Vernon, why do you want to make it easy for him?” the keyboardist says. “Sure, let him shack up with his Indian dolly again and then take off without a word until his next godlike visitation. Indian people are patient. Indian people will sit up on their hind legs for his scraps of affection. That woman wandered around like a ghost for weeks after he left.”
Quiet.
“I treated her,” I begin, shaking my head, “… inexcusably … there’s no word.” I’m glad to be saying this publicly.
“She makes everyone feel that way,” the principal says. “When I pass her on the street, a little voice inside starts yelling ‘apologize,’ and I don’t know for what.”
Wanting to confess everything, I check myself in time, considering Dooley’s privacy. Apparently she’s told no one. Once again—the market crash, two years ago—I, that self I was, is jerked off the hook. I’m ashamed at my relief, helpless with it.
Aside, the principal says, “Is it true Dooley has 365 separate outfits?”
“I haven’t gone through her wardrobe.”
“You know she doesn’t pay a dime on that place of her mother’s.”
But her jobs, the construction, firefighting.
“One week each, over a year ago,” the principal says.
And yet she’s brilliant, I say, preparing to enter an elite profession in, what, her mid-twenties?
“She’ll love you for that. She’s thirty-five.” Still an undergrad, with brief stints at Eastern Montana, the University of New Mexico, and Arizona State before the University of Arizona.
My obligation to Dooley is simple: face to face, I ensure that she give up, to me, any blame she might feel for what happened. I do all I can to heal her, whatever she asks, and say good-bye. But leaving the doublewide, I find myself wanting to touch Dooley. It’s the first desire of any kind in months. I think of my hand flat on her back, or our fingers linked, and my heart falls open.
She is at home Thursday, after I’ve killed two days. “So you’re here,” she says. I’d written ahead. Her hair shoots over a fluorescent headband, her bare shoulders look hard and smooth.
Arms tight at my sides, I invite her to the Hualapai Dread concert.
Her mouth suddenly twists. “I need a minute with God, to compose myself,” she says. “Please excuse me.”
The sun streams bright around my shadow in the open doorway. It’s more like ten minutes.
“If I don’t stare down fear,” Dooley says, “it will never go away. God will sustain me.”
When I pick her up, her mouth is orange. A stiff ponytail lies across one shoulder. The acid-washed mini is relatively demure. Opposite her mother, the World Series warm-up replays last year’s clinching Dodger victory. Snowed under by the usual video interference, the fielders perform thickly. The camera zooms in for a close-up of Hershiser, baby face smiling seraphically, murderous right arm hidden behind his back. The Dodgers insignia crawls across his chest like a rebellious organ, or a trivial, visible portion of soul. Dread, the memory of a year ago, flexes in the pit of my stomach. I wait for it to subside.
I’m as jittery as Dooley. Desire blows at me and I duck away. Then it comes back. I want to squeeze Dooley to my chest and just hold her. I actually become dizzy. It’s maddening. And still we manage small talk on the drive over. She likes reggae, she says. At the university she goes out dancing a lot, and she’s friends with the trumpet player in a blues band. Her mother is “steady,” she says.
On the outskirts of Worthington Dooley begins a morbid roll call at the passing bars. “That’s Ronnie Sinyalla’s green pickup. Henry Wescogame, Alvin Burt …” The cubicles leak the occasional neon beer emblem. Vehicles are stark under streetlights, or dim shapes like holes in the landscape. Dooley reels off more names. The bars encircle the town, reminding me simultaneously of a bivouacked army and of refugee camps. “Drunks,” Dooley barks, and her fists strike her knees.
The Elks Club is concrete block, windowless. Seated on folding chairs, the crowd of sixty or seventy appears mostly Hualapai, with a few whites, Mexicans, and one black man in a wool cap red, green, and yellow. Though I recognize faces, no one acknowledges us. Dooley and I take the back row. Security guards, flashlights and sticks dangling by their holsters, line one wall.
Somebody has shelled out for new, big speakers. The principal steps up to the mike. “Welcome to the first stop on Hualapai Dread’s world tour,” she says. “We’re going to do Bob Marley’s ‘Exodus.’ Remember, our permit doesn’t allow dancing.” She wrinkles her face.
“Dance on your butts,” the bass player calls.
The insistent power beat isn’t typical of reggae. Dooley juts her shoulders, shimmies. The crowd rocks slowly, introspectively, heads down. Dooley’s wrist bangles jingle. Her enjoyment makes me achingly fond of her, the more so because I’ve seen it so rarely. Even the fraud of her life becomes dear, an invention she’s made, just as an artisan might fashion a vase, pinching the handles like this and elongating the neck like this.
But I’m straitjacketed. I can’t put my arm around her, nudge my shoulder into hers. If our elbows touched, she’d jump.
By the third number, several young men are on the floor. The band disregards them. The principal sings the Mandela song. When the snaking bodies have filled the space between seats and the band, security moves in, surrounding the microphone.
“The authorities remind us that dancing is prohibited,” says the principal. The dancers ignore her. A burly security guard snatches the mike. “Return to your seats immediately or this concert will be stopped.” More rise and take the floor.
Abruptly the hall is blacked out, the music silenced except for the bashing drumbeat. Almost instantly the principal’s voice penetrates: “Truly there is darkness in Babylon.” But our laughter doesn’t restore the power. Footsteps reverberate, flashlights pinpoint an individual face, then vacancy. Chairs crash and the side doors are thrust open. Streetlights reveal a knot of twenty or so in the aisle, swaying, strutting, arms pumping to the drum. Their intensity—eyes closed, mouths grimacing, heads nodding as if to push aside the air—frightens me as much as the security guards converging on them. The cymbals go over with a clang. Thuds, a long, rippling tinkle. Screaming. Grabbing each other by the arm, Dooley and I bolt outside.
The car’s passenger window is smashed, so Dooley dives in my side. We fishtail down the alley as a train of police cruisers hops the curb, flashing lights sweeping the parking lot. Though I rig a seat cover over the hole, cold air whistles in. Dooley clasps her arms around her chest, huddli
ng against the heater vent. She accepts my jacket.
“They couldn’t arrest her, could they? How do they work around here?” I say.
“You saw how it works.”
“Please come back with me. I never dreamed I’d say this. I never dared think I could say this.”
“To your motel?”
I think that’s what I meant, but the wrongness is obvious when the words come out of my mouth, and scrambling, improvising, with confused happiness I hear myself saying, “No, to Flagstaff. I’m not the same person, I swear. Who did what I did. That person is dead.”
“God bless you,” she says. “I’m very happy for you. But I am the same person.”
Downshifting at Alav, my hand repeatedly bumps Dooley’s bare thigh, an accident neither of us bothers to acknowledge. I don’t linger; she doesn’t move.
“How can I maintain an acquaintanceship with such a discourteous person?” Dooley says. “Hunting me down with your plate, then leaving it on my doorstep like a gob of spit.”
It’s a moment before I realize what she’s talking about. “I didn’t mean anything. I just didn’t want to drive off like I owned it.”
“You did own it. I gave it to you. A gift is not a decision. It’s not a question. Someone gives you something.” Now she’s crying. In the darkness her eyebrows have vanished. Her eyes and teeth are pale. The grief-mask cuts deep furrows in her brow. At the triplex I touch her hair. “No, I’m done now,” she says, and she’s out.
As I lie in bed, near sleep, what Dooley told me unrolls like the murals you see in Arizona’s old territorial banks. An armored man extends a gleaming, empty plate toward a dark woman, nearly nude, on her wheeled contrivance. His look is downcast. She scowls, tears running from her eyes. The bicycle wheels rotate over stony ground at the edge of a glorious abyss, voices echoing down a maze of painted corridors, emptying into the river.
You believe what you say, that you’re not the same person. You’re starting clean, you’ve cut free from the drag of the past. Everything is open to you. And then it turns out you’re in history all along, yours and everybody else’s.
I’d like to think a time will come when this story between Dooley and me seems so remote that I’ll look back in disbelief. But I expect I’ll always see the sorrowful mask of her face as I do now, floating just out of reach.
THE MARCH OF THE TOYS
Leah and I met at a refrigerator, a party thudding through the walls. She was flushed and perspiring. I wore a beige dress that screamed, if beige can scream, Don’t look at me! I’m not really here!
I’d recently broken up with a man and was living ineptly, at cross-purposes. Why else attend a dance party, single, with no interest in a partner? I stand, I watch, I go home.
There was only one beer in the fridge.
“Go ahead,” said Leah—though I didn’t yet know her name. “I’ll stick with tequila.”
It shocked me, minutes later, to see her laughing out of control, teeth bared, eyes squinted shut. Ha ha ha ha ha, she laughed, a spooky bird sound. For months after, I disregarded the moment, as if I’d been mistaken. Leah and this person couldn’t be the same.
Her boyfriend was arranging stick pretzels in another woman’s cleavage. Then they left together, he and the pretzel woman. I looked out the window. A white pickup barged off.
I offered Leah a ride.
“I can’t go home,” she said. “What if he never shows up?”
Leah spent the night on my couch. In the morning I served us breakfast.
“This is like the tundra.” Leah gestured around my barren apartment. Six weeks after leaving my lover I’d acquired only a Finnish dining set and a matching overstuffed rattan chair and couch.
Leah was fidgety, anxious to go. When I dropped her at home, the white pickup was in the drive, and she relaxed. Thanking me, she invited me back for dinner. Soothed by the role of spectator at someone else’s drama, I said yes.
The man I’d left, large, balding, mat of hair on his chest, had reminded me of Gerald Ford. Star athlete, a handsome, friendly guy—I’ve never understood the derision heaped on President Ford. Instead of guiding the nation, though, my Jim took long walks and occasional carpentry jobs. As his money ran out, he drank hard liquor, aggravating his ulcer. Our last weeks, he was vomiting nightly. I would wake just before the sound began. After twice finding the toilet filled with blood, I would close my eyes and flush when I entered the bathroom.
My first impression at Leah’s was that I’d entered a sunken living room. But, outside of two standing brass lamps, it was the furniture itself that was low, the long couches and tables. Cushions were strewn everywhere, collecting in mounds along the walls. Leah took a place among them, I beside her. Sitting, we were nearly reclining.
The pillows were boldly quilted, some resembling vegetables, clouds, mustaches. She made them to sell at street fairs, she said, and for steady income taught math at the JC. “Lies,” she laughed. “All I do now is fuck.”
“I take it such an event has occurred since this morning?”
“Why ye-es.” Last night was a farce, she whispered. Eskison, the boyfriend, had taken the pretzel woman for cigarettes, and they were back ten minutes after we left. When Leah wasn’t home, he’d called the party, but no one knew my address. “Idiot,” Leah said, her forefinger making the “crazy” circle at her own head. “Sorry.”
Yeah, but what about the pretzels in the décolletage?
“‘I couldn’t let her get away with dressing like that,’” Leah quoted him sarcastically. She spread her hands. “He sucks.”
Both she and Eskison, who now appeared from the kitchen, seemed light-headed with the reconciliation.
“The rescuer,” he said, shaking my hand. “I should sue you for mental agony. I didn’t sleep a second all night.”
“I countersue you, on the same grounds,” Leah said. They laughed uproariously. Eskison stiffened his body, arms rigid at his sides, eyes bulging—“’What’s she doing?’ ‘What’s he doing?’”
Small and dark, curly hair and beard encircling his face, he was in his mid-twenties, I guessed, Leah approaching forty. I was twenty-five, and subtracting the glamor of youth, he wasn’t so great.
After dinner, while Eskison smoked outside, Leah and I told stories about our neighbors, mine young singles, hers Mexican families established for generations. “You glazed over,” she said. “Am I talking too much? Do you want coffee?”
Teaching myself moment to moment to live with my lover’s absence occupied me so completely, only then had it occurred to me I was going home, to Delaware, the next week.
“Trouble?” Leah asked.
When I was ten, I explained, Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, was diagnosed in my father, and he was given five years to live. Continuing to work a decade, he’d then sold his housepainting business. Fifteen years after the first symptoms, doctors were confounded by his protracted dying.
“That’s awful,” Leah said. Embarrassingly, I couldn’t speak. My mind was blank. After a respectful silence, she added, “Stop by when you’re back, if you need fixing up.”
Then Eskison’s truck started, and Leah’s face sagged.
“Probably going for more beer,” I said.
“Es posible.” Leah waved her hand dismissively. She sat on the couch, crossed her legs, fluffed her hair. Seeing that she was postponing a fit until I left, shortly I did.
The next morning she called to apologize for her “edginess.” I was right about the beer. She wished me luck.
My brother Rick picked me up at Greater Wilmington Airport, in a ‘56 Thunderbird. Top down, we zoomed past slushy ice, Rick’s hair blown back in a crest. Dark birthmark beneath his right eye, cigarette tip pale orange in the wind—dashing Rick.
Home, my mother scurried about the kitchen, her red face puckered and shiny as a baked apple. As usual, during our hug she looked away, as if worried that somewhere something was boiling over.
From the wrinkles across his shir
t I knew that Dad had been lying down. He was so emaciated the skin and white mustache drooped from his face like the shirt from his frame. Wrapping my arms around him, I pressed his back.
Mother cut his meat at the dinner table. After dessert we watched TV in the den. On the seven-foot screen a quarterback threw his pass into the stands. Rick sat hunched, neck in a U, cracking his knuckles. “Got to thrash tonight,” he said, standing.
“Rick!” Mother said. “You won’t see Claire again until God knows when.”
“We’ll do tomorrow.” Rick winked at me.
“Movie, hon?” Dad said.
“I like the game, Dad.” We always watched together. I would sit in his lap, beside him as I got older, sharing sips of beer, breathing the turpentine that never scrubbed out.
By halftime Dad’s jaw dropped and he stared as if aghast at the colored figures piling up on Astroturf. Mother and I stretched him on the hide-a-bed, drawing a comforter to his chin.
“When we bought the couch, nobody guessed how well it fit him,” Mother said. “See? His feet go right down to the end.”
Mother had grown so inward, I didn’t always know how to respond.
Without Rick in the house I was lonely. We hadn’t always been close. Until Dad’s illness I barely acknowledged Rick, four years younger. I was the first, he was the boy. We each had our claim. What I do recall is the garden variety ruthlessness, I “forgetting” to remove the baby gate from the stairs, Rick left wailing as I played loudly below; an older Rick parading buddies through the bathroom while I showered.
When I first learned about Dad, I pushed in loose concrete blocks and crawled under the house. In the dark I dug elbows and heels into the cool earth. Footsteps above rained dust and cobwebs on me. I stuffed dirt in my mouth, cramming it down with my fists. A strand of web stuck to my lip. I couldn’t detach it with tongue or fingers. I gagged, spitting. I screamed. They had to drag me out by the feet.
Gradually, as far as Rick was concerned, I took over for Dad. I walked Rick to tee-ball and then Little League practice, and watched. Sometimes they had me get in the pickle, not often, because I was too fast. The parental stand-in at Open House, I promised to ride Rick about his homework.
All My Relations Page 8
