When the play was over, Eli’s mother and father had stood on the back stoop, clapping their hands. They praised without understanding, their pride unconditional. I sensed the same response to the wedding. Of course it was lovely, because we were the children and the children were always good. Soon everyone was moving inside to eat tuna casseroles and deviled eggs. Eli’s aunts doted on me, while my mother picked an eyelash off my cheek. Eli’s father bent down to kiss me and I felt that same uncertainty that I had all my childhood: that no one was genuinely impressed with me, that I had succeeded, once again, at meeting expectations, adorably.
After the wedding, we did not have the money for a real honeymoon, so we spent the night at his grandfather’s camp. The place smelled like mildew and we had to haul in our own water, but it was better than watching our guests leave, picking up the house, and then retreating to our tiny apartment above his parents’ garage, where we had lived since graduating high school. To stay where we were would have been unbearable. Eli’s parents would have watched the small square windows snap on and then off and they would know precisely what was going on up there.
When we arrived, we unlocked the deadbolt and brought in our suitcases. I swept the small porch of its leaves and broke down some of the spider webs, but not all. We sprayed each other with insect repellent so we could sit outside and watch the forest light change under the leaves, remaining there for a long time drinking wine that my father had insisted we bring, although neither of us liked the taste of wine. Then we turned to each other with purple teeth and went inside.
It was hot inside the cabin, but we found that when we opened the windows, the screens were either missing or full of holes. Eli said that he was sensitive to mosquito bites in a way that made it sound as if we had only just met, as if we had just arrived on a first date and he was telling me about his allergies. He scratched his arm to reveal how welts were already forming from our time on the porch. I found a metal fan in the corner and plugged it into the naked outlet. It started up with a harsh rattling, but we soon became used to the sound and accepted the muggy air blown in our direction as relief. Coming here, sitting on the edge of the sagging pull-out couch, scratching our arms and legs, began to feel foolish and reckless which, I suspect, put us in danger of seeing our marriage in the same light.
We opened the second bottle of wine. I cannot say exactly how it came about. It might have been the heat, the white noise from the fan. We couldn’t think with all the heat and noise and so we began to talk instead. We said things that could not be taken back. All of this chatter, in this womb-like environment seemed safe at first—daring and intimate.
He did not like to receive presents, he told me. They revealed selfishness on the giver’s end, a need for recognition. Also, they were a waste of money. Yes, I agreed. We were thrilled to find that we agreed. We would never give each other a gift, we said, and we felt bold and rebellious.
It was my turn. Holidays, I said. Yes, we both exclaimed. Fuck holidays.
I continued. There had been a man who came into the bakery where I worked. He was older. I could only tell because his whole face changed when he smiled. All the excess showed up around his eyes, which were dark and lively, drawing attention with somewhat annoying success. What I was trying to say was that I thought he was handsome. I thought men in general were handsome. In fact, I was in love with men, with their private pain, their beautiful insecure faces, their tricks of confidence. This was okay with Eli. He understood and would not be threatened. He understood, because there was something he’d always wanted to try. He paused and crossed his legs. He reminded me of someone at a party speaking about politics, someone who wanted to convey boredom about his own radical positions.
“I’ve always liked the idea of being watched,” he said. Yes, of course. This was where the conversation was always meant to lead. Sex. We had not talked about sex. We rarely ever spoke of sex. Once, I had told him to keep his finger out of my belly button. We had been young, maybe sixteen. Having known each other throughout our childhood, this move into a romantic relationship was a time for crossing boundaries of all kinds. Now we could kiss, touch. I had allowed him to be in the bathroom while I peed, which we had once done unintentionally as children, but neither of us wanted to admit to remembering. The finger in the belly button seemed to be a kind of experiment, a test to see first whether I would tolerate it and, second, to find out if ours was a safe kind of intimacy, where chances could be taken. My objection came as a surprise to him. Surely, he must have thought, I could not have found it more invasive than some of the other acts that we had already performed, which meant that it had something to do with me, a part of myself that he had yet to make sense of. I couldn’t remember how I had put it, whether it was “Please don’t do that” or something sharper, but I do know that the word allowed had not been part of it. Eli had introduced it when he asked if there was any other part of my body that he was not allowed to touch. No, I had said. Neither one of us was to blame for his reaction, the insult to his pride, but still, I could not forget it altogether. It was in the language that we used with each other—allowed now meant something more, it carried with it a hint of resentment. It was a spot that would never be filled, like a bubble on the inside of a glass of water.
“I mean watched by a woman,” Eli continued. He said this softly, almost nobly, as if it were for my own protection. I understood. It couldn’t be a man.
“But who?” This was the most important question. I imagined a nicely dressed woman—a librarian type—sitting upright in a chair with her hands folded across her skirt. Surely this was not what he meant.
“I guess I hadn’t thought that far,” he said, although we both knew that this was a lie. Somehow we could not return to where we had just been, to that atmosphere of confidence that we had just had, with the fan roaring, our hot, unconcerned bodies splayed across from each other.
“I’ve never liked your mother,” Eli said.
“I’ve never really liked either of your parents,” was my response. I felt defensive, suddenly, upset that he had chosen this direction. It was not a productive thing to say—that he did not like my mother—he might as well have stated that he did not like the color of my hair, or the size of my breasts. My response had not been out of spite, but had been obligingly honest. I had to deliver it. And in doing so, I found that I did not want to be friendly. That night, I wanted to watch something fall apart, the same way you might have the urge to throw a rock at an ice-covered pond.
I said, “They’re the kind of people that think they turned out okay.”
“Think they turned out okay?”
“Yeah. And they’re smug about it.”
When I woke the next morning, the sunlight had turned the curtains an electric green, and in this light, the cabin looked even more dire than the evening before. The floor was heaped with boxes of Sterno cans, bulk toilet paper, and folded gray rugs. The rugs reminded me of something that you might want to pile on if you were freezing in a trench, something fit for a large wet horse. There were things that I could not see from where I lay but that I was well aware of, like the dried bodies of insects, flaking into dust on the windowsills, the splintered, fist-sized hole in the wall next to the woodstove.
Eli slept with his mouth open. It was like a child’s, soft and expectant without any stubble surrounding it. He was two months older than I, but only because he had been born prematurely. We had heard this story many times by his mother, how he had been so small that his father could hold him in his palms. Everyone had been worried sick. So he was not really older, we had said when we were children, no. He had been shorter as well, until he turned seventeen, when, suddenly, he grew quite tall and thin. We were both pleased by this, although I was sometimes envious of his slenderness. It seemed that even his wrists, which were hairless, had grown longer and more delicate. I sometimes felt overly plump. He could not lift me and when I sat on his lap, I worried that I was hurting his bones. If only I were t
hinner, I often thought, then we would be a better match. I could not fathom that maybe it was more fitting this way, that it would be almost comical if we were both slouched and scrawny with our messy black hair. We would look like a rock band, a comic strip.
Eli awoke while I was using the outhouse.
“I thought we were back home,” he said when I came back. “You weren’t here, so I thought it must be the day of the wedding—you know, because the groom isn’t allowed to see the bride.” He draped his arm over me and I could smell the sour, evaporated smell of last night’s alcohol on his breath and, somehow, in his armpits as well. His kiss was heavy, as if he could not properly predict my distance—and perhaps he could not. It was possible that he was still drunk. It was possible that he remembered nothing from the night before.
We folded up the bed, so that we could sit and have our breakfast. There was no coffee. We talked about what we would do, whether we would walk back down the road, for there was no more road to walk up, and decided that this would feel too much like going home, which, in the end, was what we really wanted. It wasn’t that we were unhappy, we assured each other, but that it was never meant to be a real honeymoon in the first place. We had just needed a destination and the camp had fulfilled that. What we needed now was an excuse, because we were not looking forward to the inevitable flash of concern on his parents’ faces when we pulled into the driveway. We felt defensive just thinking about it. What if our early return was mistaken for unhappiness, or something worse, like youthful ignorance? We would be like children again, playacting. And here we go on our honeymoon, we’d say, skipping over the property line. And now we are back, skipping back over, holding hands.
We decided that Eli would be the one to feign illness, because he, being the man, would be taken more seriously. His illness would not be misconstrued as doubt, or regret, or fear. So we dressed and closed up the suitcases, which had not been unpacked in the first place, and took them to the car.
We made it home before lunch and much to our relief, there was no one around to question us. The neighbor had chickens and other strange, rubber-faced fowl that roamed freely between yards and out into the road. As Eli and I got out of the car, the birds moved toward us up the driveway, their heads low and their long feet opening and closing in soft, suspicious steps. It seemed as though they were not completely convinced that we were real. There was another group of chickens over by the spot where the ceremony had been performed. They scratched at the grass in a kind of jerking moonwalk and pecked, hurriedly, as if trying to erase something that had been on the ground.
The front door of the apartment had a little stoop and a porch light fitted with a dark yellow globe. It was my favorite part of the house. Sometimes, sitting out there on a summer evening, I felt as though life were very cozy and livable. It was there that I often became excited about the future, about all the small domestic triumphs that lay ahead. The door led to a stairway that took us above the garage and into a kitchenette with a wood floor. I also liked the small square window above the sink, how it seemed older than the rest of the building with its wavy panes of glass. I imagined that I might look out onto a quaint village square through a window like that, or a small walled garden. In reality, it was my mother-in-law’s stretched-out tomato plants and three dusty cabbages that I saw whenever I did the dishes. This wasn’t bad or even disappointing, it just didn’t fill me with nostalgia, or repose, or any of the feelings that I wanted to sink into when I came home.
The rest of the apartment was set up like a college dorm, with a flat-screen television propped up on two black crates. The walls were covered with posters that Eli picked up from his job at the video rental. The Usual Suspects, 12 Monkeys, Reservoir Dogs, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. These films could be found on another small bookshelf beneath the window along with other VHS tapes and DVDs, all of which held great significance and genius. There were lines to be memorized, camera tricks to be worshipped, rewound, and explained to me. And I did not dislike this. It was just that there was something inherently masculine and alienating about the whole thing, as if part of Eli’s love for the movies was the fact that I could never completely understand them—and what kept me from fully appreciating them was his confidence that I could not. A wire bookshelf held the majority of Eli’s comic book collection. The rest he kept in plastic sleeves in an ugly cardboard box next to the bed, labeled Eli’s Comics, as if it weren’t obvious, as if they were not always right there, the first thing he saw every morning. The first thing that I would see every morning from now on.
When I left Eli a month later, his reaction was unexpectedly cold. He seemed to believe that cleaning the apartment would protect him from the pain of it, as if I had somehow always been a hindrance to his idea of perfection.
“Look how clean the place is,” he said to me when I went back to pick up the rest of my belongings. He was standing in the living room. Light was seeping in through the closed blinds, as if through a layer of water, and I had the eerie feeling that we had just encountered each other at the bottom of a lake.
“Look how clean the place is,” he said again, and there was something ghostly about him, standing there in the half-light with his hands clasped. Eli liked to be overly careful and mild whenever we had a fight. He had a gentle, terrible anger, and here it was again. He had cleaned and there was a morbid pride in it. See what I am without you—so pure and unsullied. The light, at that angle, seemed to slip into the irises of his eyes as if from the side, like light through a marble. They were so blue and limpid and I remember thinking, Another irretrievable thing.
I made sounds, I hollered and wept and pried open something dark and robust, like a fallen tree pulling up the ground. There was a smell to my sorrow that seeped from my skin, my sweaty palms, and my swollen eyes, like soil that has been plowed. That was me, in my mess, and here was Eli, with his white carpets and his bleached windowsills.
Before we were married, when we were just living together as boyfriend and girlfriend, I had caught him taking pictures of me through the frosted glass of the shower door, my body a pale blur, like a fish under ice.
“What are you doing?” I had wanted to know. I came out dripping, water streaming down my arms to the tips of my fingers, droplets blinking on my eyelashes.
“Take the picture now,” I had said, standing there bristling with goose bumps, and he’d brought the camera to his eye, but he could not do it. The day I went to collect my things, he showed me how white he’d gotten the bottom of the shower, the brightness of the grout between the tiles.
“Look,” he said, and he showed me my corner of the bedroom that had always been piled with clothes, strewn with the black bandit masks of my underwear. That patch of rug was bare, the tassels straight, as if someone had come round with a comb. I was not hurt or alarmed, but rather relieved, as if I’d come across bones that had been picked clean. Here was the very end of it, the absence of decay or unsightly emotional things. I took up my box of possessions—two cookbooks that I had never used, a small houseplant, and a wad of folded letters that I had written to him that he no longer wished to keep. I imagined that the sight of my wiry penmanship straying in and out of the lines would offend his senses. Best to get rid of it, as if it were something thorny and invasive. It was then that I thought to ask for the photos. He shrank back.
“You can’t tell that it’s you,” he said sheepishly, and I saw that light creeping sideways into the blue of his eye.
“Maybe,” I said, “but they were taken without my permission.”
“Some of them,” he said.
It was true.
After I’d caught him, he had told me to get back into the shower. I had thought that he would follow me, but he stayed just on the other side of the door with his camera, telling me what he wanted to see—a hip or a breast, the palm of my hand—and I would place that part against the glass and it would appear to him flattened and white. From inside the shower, I could not hear the click of his
camera, but I could see him bring the dark box up to the blur of his face as I repositioned myself against the cold glass. When, at last, the pile of photos was in my hand, I dropped them into the box and I left the apartment and Eli standing there, knowing that he would probably vacuum the spot on the carpet where I had walked with my shoes.
It was raining when I got into my car. I tossed the box onto the passenger seat beside me and drove until my curiosity became too great. I pulled off to the side of the road where there was a wide shoulder, a place that I knew people to park in the summer and walk down through the trees to the river. I turned the keys in the ignition and the wipers froze halfway across my windshield and the hard drops of rain turned the glass thick and murky and jumping with water. I felt for the pile of photographs and placed them on my lap and there I was, shrouded in steam, each picture drawing attention to a new part of me, that slab of flesh pressed up against the glass of the shower door unnaturally, as if I was looking at meat trapped under cellophane. There was my breast, a fish eye, flat and wary. My belly, a strange oyster. I could not imagine what had compelled Eli to keep these images. They were not beautiful, or womanly, or artistic in any way. I could rip them up and take them down to the river where they would be washed away in little white flakes. I could simply leave them on a boulder and let the rain bead over their glossy surfaces. Eli was right, there was nothing in the photos to identify me. It wouldn’t have mattered if someone found them. I could have allowed him to keep them, allowed his memory of me to become cool and bleary until there was nothing left but these amphibious blobs of flesh.
Prepare Her Page 4
