Fred Yarlett pulls the car into one of the long parking
spaces. Everything here is bigger, the people, the buildings, the
streets, even the mailboxes. It’s like they’ve inflated everything to
fill some of the unfillable space. To make themselves feel in
charge. He thinks how back east they set clocks and make to-do
lists because they’ve filled all the space with strip malls and
skyscrapers. Or projects and police stations.
He unwraps a cherry cigar because he can smoke in the
Lander Bar, and because he’s two thousand miles from his wife’s
hyper-sensitive nose. Orders a Cave Diver Stout, and slips the
befollicled bartender a five. Means for him to keep the change,
but apparently the nonverbal vernacular is different here. Or
maybe people are just less greedy.
Lost your chance, he thinks, leaves a one on the bar, pockets
the other two. Finds a table with a clean ash tray and lights his
cigar. He thinks about how he wouldn’t have worried about the
cleanliness of an ash tray even ten years ago. Looks down at his
tennis shoes: the same blue canvas he’s worn since his thirties.
In the same size nine-and-a-half, with the same dark trouser
socks. He leans the pint against his lips and opens his gullet, lets
the chilled, silky fluid pass his tongue untasted and fill his
stomach. He’s only eaten celery sticks today. He bought them at
a convenience store in Nebraska this morning, mostly because
he’d never seen celery sticks in the same hundred yards as a gas
station before. He always thought of celery as a delicate
vegetable: like women’s fingers, even more fragile: the wrong
odor might destroy a heart.
He remembers a science project his son Kevin did when
he was in grade school. He put a celery stalk in a cup of water
with orange food coloring. Watched the celery turn orange:
soaked up the color through the crescent of straws. Even then,
he would have compared himself to the celery stalk and Elaine to
the colored water. He would have called her the
blood in his veins, his blush, his life force. Somewhere between
Kevin driving and going to college, though, she got fussy.
Difficult. She began to collect things, plastic figurines of bears
that cost between fifteen and fifty dollars each. Tea kettles. She
filled each spare nook with some piece of junk he guessed she
connected with her identity in a sad way. She stopped letting him
touch her at night. He asked her about menopause, about the
bears, but she scoffed and said,
“No, Fred. I’m too young.”
“What’s wrong then?”
“Nothing! Aren’t I allowed to cultivate an interest?”
“Sure. I just don’t see the point,” he said, “It’s so much
money. What does it do?”
“Why do you care?”
“Forget it. Forget it. Sorry I mentioned it.”
He rented the Impala after that conversation. He called
his boss and filed “indefinite absence” over the phone. He wasn’t
leaving, just having some space: a vacation. He hadn’t taken a
vacation alone since before he was married. He called her at
work to tell her. “Fine,” she said, like she says when she’s really
not. He didn’t have the energy to fight her, to coerce her into
discussing it. He didn’t know if he really cared what was the
matter. Thought maybe he’d let it go too long, that it was beyond
repair. He drove west until he stopped.
He moves the froth-spotted glass to the edge of the table.
Slides the chair in on his way out. Gives the bartender a twofinger
salute. He drives the rental into the fat, orange horizon.
The sun is huge, causes no glare though he thinks it should.
Everything is dusted a surreal sepia that doesn’t match anything
back in Jersey. He fiddles with the radio, finds only country and
rap stations. He thinks of his condo, its crisp white angles and
fluorescent lighting, and how just at dinner time the sun glares so
bright through the sliding glass door and into the kitchen that he
and his wife have taken to eating wearing sunglasses. He thinks
of her now, twenty years have passed since her skin was taut
across her back. Since her face glowed. Since she mattered to
him more than poker night. He wonders where the time went,
how he lost track of when things went from being fresh to being
granted.
He follows Main Street out of Lander, along roads that
dip between graduated mountains. He watches for houses.
Drives up on one that is small, humble. A rugged one-storey
cottage, wood siding. There’s a sign out front, black letters spraypainted
on plywood, “Yard Sale Today. 11-3.” He slows the car,
even though it’s 6. A woman shoves boxes against the house. It
doesn’t look like a successful yard sale. Some bikes catch his eye,
and he rolls down the window.
“Mind if I look around?” he says, motioning toward three
or four kid-sized Schwinns that lean under a window.
“Sure. Go ahead.” She nods and her graying perm
bounces by her laugh lines.
“Thanks,” he says. Parks the car. Under the window, he
runs his hand along the olive drab glossy paint of one of the
bicycles, pulls it out into the yard’s brown grass. Flips the kick
stand up and down. Upends the bike and cranks the pedal,
watches the wheel. Perfectly calibrated, barely rusted. He
admires the white pearl vinyl of the banana seat, the tall sissy bar,
the whitewash on the skinny tires.
“How much?” he asks her. She has stopped shoving the
boxes and watches him through a squint.
“I don’t know. How about ten bucks?” She’s got her
hand on her hip, her middle and ring finger laced in a denim belt
loop. He notices the freckles on her knuckles, notices the way the
skin on either side of her kneecaps wrinkles. Soft, he imagines,
like suede.
“Ten bucks? Lemme give you twenty at least. This is
practically mint condition! I had this very bike when I was
thirteen. I don’t know much about these vintage bikes, but I
know they’re coming back in style. I see college kids riding them
back home. You could probably get a hundred or more.”
“All right. Twenty then, but not a penny more. My dad
liked these old bikes, collected ‘em. Mom never got rid of
anything after he passed. I’ll tell you something, if I had kids, I’d
get rid of all my stuff now, just so they wouldn’t have to deal with
it when I senile or incontinent.”
He likes the way her voice flattens out in the middle of
her sentences. The way she is frank. The way she looks him in
the eye. He thinks of the way Elaine’s voice trembles around
strangers. The way she stays at his side during dinners, talks into
his shoulder. The way she used to hover over him at his
Christmas cocktail party before she stopped wanting to go. “I’m
just not social. I’m not going,” she had said one year.
He imagines this woman would take stock of any number
of suits and charm her way through martini after martini. Or
bourbon. She probably drinks bourbon. Her shoulders are
freckled from sun, and she doesn’t hide them. Melanoma
research hasn’t made her coy or paranoid. Her hands look rough,
browned. Not like Elaine’s almost-transparent fingers. He takes
his wallet out of his front pocket and give her the twenty.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Sure,” she says. “If you need a canister set or plastic
serving spoons to match, come on back tomorrow!”
He notices the way her teeth catch the sun before her
eyes do. They look like raw corn kernels on a cob. Her upper lip
is thin, doesn’t naturally fall below her upper teeth. He smiles
and gets back in the car. U-turns back toward town. Watches her
in the rearview till he can’t see her anymore. From a distance, he
can admire the strength in her shoulders, think of the way her
skin might feel between his teeth. Wonder what she smells like.
Back in town, Fred stops at the Highwayman Café for an
asparagus and Swiss cheese omelet. Sees her green eyes wink at
him in the eggs. Winces when he cuts into them. Brings the fork
to his mouth and stops. Food has become less important.
Sustenance, like everything else, yellows.
He is behind the wheel, steering the wide grid of Lander.
Looking for “for sale” signs. Imagining himself into these small,
sturdy houses, a small, sturdy way of life. Envies the tire swings
and short prickly brown grass. Thinks about wood siding, how it
would bloat and mold with the humidity back east. How it would
peel off in chunks like sunburn, after several years. Wonders how
Jersey can be so small but want such huge things from her
residents. Wonders why he never wanted to go west before.
Wonders why it’s taken him almost fifty years to get tired. Thinks
he understands the twenty-somethings’ Kerouakian wanderlust,
their impulse to go west. It is a wonderful, natural urge.
He thinks with regret of the argument he had with Kevin,
his son, just five years before. How he refused to pay for college
farther west than Ohio. His argument was that he didn’t want to
pay for all the transportation, plane tickets, the hassle of
transporting all that stuff. He described in nightmare vision the
rental SUV breaking down in the desert, Kevin’s computer
melting in the sun, becoming so parched he’d have to cut cacti in
half with a Swiss army knife and suck the juice from the spongy
middle. The truth was that he didn’t want Kevin to be so far
away. He didn’t want Kevin to know more of the world than he
did. He was terrified that Kevin would come back home as
someone he no longer knew. He didn’t know then that Kevin
would become unrecognizable after his first semester at Penn
State. That Kevin could have gone to Parsipanny Community
College, eight miles from the condo, and would have changed as
drastically.
He is back in front of her house. The boxes are lined up
with a blue plastic tarp thrown over them. He smirks at the
memory of his condo-lawn regulations. The contract he signed
when they bought it, promising never to clutter the yard. To alert
the landscaper if weeds arrived or if the grass was longer than an
inch. He squints at the glass of her front window, but all he can
see is the car and himself reflected in it. There are no lights on.
He backs up, cranes his neck to see around the side of the house,
looks for lights.
Out of the car, he shuts the door by pressing it, like a
button, with his hip: noiseless. H would be palpitating if he
considered trespassing in this way in Jersey, but he feels
comfortable and open here. Feels certain she’s asleep. He’s at
peace in a way that makes him aware of himself. He counts his
breaths. He can feel his hair growing. He hadn’t heard a single
person honk his horn after Chicago, and all he hears now are
crickets, an occasional cat’s scream. It’s past 10 p.m., and there
are no street lights, but he can see everything. The stars are so
bright, even the sidewalk looks blue. He looks above him at
Orion.
More not to disturb the peace than to avoid waking her,
he tiptoes around the side of the house. The back yard is dark,
no squares of lighted window on the lawn. A big tree. It has a
tire swing hanging from it. He imagines her tanned legs pushing
against the grass, against the trunk, winging her around like a
melee pendulum. He gets into the tire, pushes himself against
the trunk, arches his back against the bark, pushes its roughness
hard into his skin. Wedges balls of his toes against a root that
bulges between the grass, and leans his weight to the side so that
he circles like a compass. He moves with greater speed than he
expected and bangs into the tree. It doesn’t hurt.
Hears a giggle and is so startled he falls off the swing.
Knocks his head on a root. The giggle becomes a laugh. H hears
the groan of a screen door and thinks he must be unconscious.
But he feels a strong, small hand squeeze his shoulder.
“Hey, you okay?” It’s her voice.
He grabs her warm hand and presses it to his chest. He
smiles. He reaches up with his other hand and circles her neck,
rubs his thumb in the soft spot at the base of her skull like it is a
worry stone.
“Really, you okay? Want some water? Can you see me?
How many fingers am I holdin’ up?”
He shakes his head. Her cotton nightgown gaps at the
neck, and he can see a face constellated in her freckles. Lays a
hand on her knee. She looks puzzled, but smiles with one side of
her mouth. He thinks this is a good sign, and he leans in to kiss
her.
She pulls away and says, “Wha?! Hey! You knocked
yourself on the head and now you’re insane. We better go to a
hospital.”
He snaps back to reality. He feels himself blush and is
grateful for the dark. He pulls away from her and cradles his
head in his palms, “I’m sorry. Sorry. I’m fine. It’s just, uh, I
gotta go. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You had a good fall. You were probably
delirious, thought I’m your girlfriend or something. C’mon in.
Let me give you a glass of water.”
“No, really. I’d better not. I’m really sorry about this.”
He feels naked. He feels confused. He doesn’t know why she
isn’t angry, calling the cops. Maybe she is crazy.
“Wait here. I can understand, you’re from out of town,
right? You don’t know me. I’ll bring you a glass of water.”
He wants to say, Lady, I’m trespassing on your property, and
you think I’m worried about you being dangerous? He wants to shake
her and tell her she’s on a one-way train to Rapeville, ask her what
the hell she’s thinking. Thinks for the first time maybe there’s
space for a little east-coast paranoia here. Instead, he says, “Okay.
Okay. I’ll wait.” His right hand tingles under his forehead. He
wishes he could transfer the sensation. Make his brain tingle.
She is back with water in a tall clear glass, ice cubes
tinkling. He takes it, pulls a long gulp. Sits the glass in the grass
between his feet. “Thanks.”
“Are you alright?” She looks worried. She is the weirdest
woman he’s ever met.
“Yes. I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
“It’s just that you have good energy. I could tell that
when you bought that bike. I don’t know what you’re doing here,
but I want you to be well.”
He screwed up his face at her. Christ, a hippie. “I really
must be going.”
“Why don’t you have a beer on the porch with me?
That’s what I was doing when you got here. I was waiting to ask
you until you were done on the swing. Then you fell.” She seems
too eager. Like a high school girl. She seems too sweet. He feels
he should refuse. He would never have fallen if she hadn’t
laughed.
He doesn’t know why, but he says, “Sure. Yeah. That’d
be nice.”
She reaches for his hand, he takes it. She pulls him up
with remarkable power. Leads him to the porch, hands him a
beer out of a big cooler. They sit. They agree to wait for sunrise. |