The Geometry of Love Page 12

  If it’s that husband why don’t you just quit that sonovabitch? My sister has an extra room you can take for awhile. I promise you’d be safe.

  To this there is no answer, and he comes around and leans his body up against the edge of the desk in front of me. He takes my hand, and suddenly I feel overyoung again, small, and, although I know it is wrong, I lay my head down on his thigh and rest, letting him stroke my hair and tell me everything will be fine.

  I remember a moment with her, it was not long after my father was gone. Her face was flushed and quiet, although she is dressed as if she were expecting someone to arrive, I cannot help thinking she is ill. She sits a long time at the table with me, idly handling some potatoes, wondering what to cook, I guess, or perhaps whether. She has some carrots, too, and I stick them in my ears, wiggle them. I am still young enough to make her laugh before she pulls them out of my hands, a little less sourly, Foolishness.

  The kitchen chairs are vinyl cushioned and the pattern is worn, and she hauls herself out of the chair, scrapes the metal legs on the tile, like a moan. She gets up and moves as if to go into her bedroom at the front of the house. Without speaking I watch her go, but as she leaves I get a glimpse of a tiny spot, black like blood, mixed in with the sway of the back of her skirt. She is tired, she says, and wants to lie down. I wait at the table awhile for her to come back, but later I go in to lie on the couch and talk with Susan about what to make for dinner, in our doll world. Later, when Susan and I are quiet, I hear the sound of her moving around again in the next room, the metallic creak of her bedsprings, her slippers on the cool floor, a door closing. There comes then a cry, a sound like weeping, almost, or perhaps it was something else.

  Under my hand the steering wheel is hot and hard, and in one place the plastic shell is cracked to reveal the metal rim beneath it, like the bone inside.

  The land is rolling, now, almost hilly and struck with the scattered greenery of scrub oaks and volunteer cedars, as if they were thrown from the sky and rooted where they scattered, like the pattern of jacks tossed from a child’s hand. As I head north the land grows greener, and the hills build. Around me the other drivers are all on their way somewhere, quick. At the rest stop I go to the bathroom, take a moment to breathe some air that isn’t moving sixty-five miles an hour. I stand in the shade of a mimosa, smoking a cigarette and listening to the traffic noise. At one of the tables across the way a family is packing up after a picnic lunch. The woman’s scolding voice comes to me: Eat your sandwich, Robert. Back by the buildings one of the pay phones rings, and the urgent trill of its bell seems to stop everything in midsentence, picnickers, birdsong, sky. I want to answer it. It rings again, and I know it is, impossibly, you, everything timed right, satellites and clocks, speedometer aligned, dialing for me now. Who else could it be? Answer it, your voice in my head says. Answer it now. I take a hesitant step toward the phones, two more, but then a woman rushes out of the bathroom door. She snatches up the receiver, cutting it off in midring. Hello, David? Yes. Yes. Her boyfriend. Tomorrow at least, she says, skips a beat, finishes tucking her shirt into her jeans, flips her hair to one side, drones low words into the receiver. I pass her by, pretend to have been walking toward the bathroom anyway. As I round the corner of the open door I can here her young voice say: Love me anyway? Then she hangs up.

  Sometimes when the highway is undemanding or quiet, the traffic has all left me behind, I remember the feeling of your hard hands on me, your angry face, the sound of your threats is like an irregular song that comes in the window on the wind. This makes my heart pound, and I turn the radio up loud, talk to myself or sing, anything to drown out the thoughts in my head. I punch the accelerator, and the car jumps as if frightened. Somehow the speed cools me, and I push the pedal to the floor, raising the tachometer’s pitch toward the red, focus myself on the forward speed and motion, on the roar of the engine, on keeping the curve and leaving it behind.

  Eight

  I haven’t decided what to do with your wedding band. I don’t know how it slipped from your hand, but it is in my pocket with its mate, warmed to body temperature, solid, unlinkable rings. I slip them both onto my finger, and yours fits over mine, loose on my finger, a tinkle of metal on metal. We bought them in a little downtown jewelry shop in one of the towns I have passed today, and the fiftyish woman behind the counter looks over her glasses at us, she has a settled look about her, a beauty parlor haircut and a tiny magnifying lens wired to one side of her glasses like an artificial glint in her eye. Her eyes move to you then me, then you again, drawing the ties with her eyes.

  I was about your age when Karl and I got married, she says. She tilts her head toward the back of the store, motioning toward the gray-faced man, and he looks at us from within the yellow halo of his lamp, like a small, private sun over his workbench. The place smells faintly of mothballs, dust, the soured turnings of daily life. I stole the rings out of the case in my daddy’s store. She twists the ring on her finger, admires the stone through the lower half of her glasses. She slides a tray of bands out of the case. When I called up after he says: Don’t come home without that ring on your finger. She wags her finger at us with a smile. In the back Karl shakes his head, listening to the story told and retold, Monday through Friday and 8 A.M. to noon on Saturday.

  After we let the glass door swing shut behind us I could imagine her coming to the window to watch us leave, seeing us climb back into your old truck out front, and I scoot over next to you, straddling the gearshift, to satisfy her.

  I want to shed these rings. I want to fling them into the blur of roadside as it unrolls past my car window. I could stop beside the next hitchhiker I see, let them fall like spare change into his gritty palm. I want them to slip my mind, I wish I could leave them on the sink in the washroom of a gas station. Could I lose them, if I looked away from them now would they be gone when I looked again? Or more rationally: Could I get a good price at one of those pawn shops in the next ratty town, a matched set, barely used. Or shall I wear them both, like a widow?

  My parents are behind the swinging door in the kitchen, voices rising and falling in a song of discontent, a dish breaks, the firecracker of flesh on flesh. When I lay my face on the cool wood floor I can see the movement of their feet under the door, the toings and froings of this dialogue like a dangerous dance. There is my mother’s voice that says No, No, and my father shouts his own part back at her, That’s enough. This happens all over the house, on the porch, the upstairs bath, in the front room or in the hall outside my bedroom, a song of hissing and shushing, of angry voices, the shattering of things thrown. Sometimes at night I can hear them in the parlor down the stairs, their voices rising and falling in a miserable cadence, the sound of feet on the creaking floor, a slamming of doors. Into the night then I can hear the complaint of the porch swing chains; my father is uneasily rocking the seat, as if he were the wind. I imagine him in the dark, silhouetted by the pale light from the house, the coal of his cigarette burning in the dark, his deep heart.

  Dresses, she says one sunny day, dresses for you and me. She unfolds the pattern pieces. Church dresses, she says, around the pins in her mouth. She has hung the black fabric over the sewing room doors in a loose loop of curtain and studied it some days, examining its drape, as if she were choosing something carefully, going over the variations in her head. The fabric clouds the room with the smell of hung laundry, as if it has soaked up the sun and the wind, carried their shadows inside. She has spent more days poking idly through the pattern box for the right pieces.

  With one white hand she smoothes the crinkly paper in a satisfied way, as if she were patting a piecrust or a baby’s diapered bottom. She is unfolding the pattern pieces like a map, each turn revealing more leaves, more choices. One piece tears a little in the corner, and she smoothes it out more carefully, more slowly, the brown paper like the pieces of a puzzle. She is uncertain what picture it will form. The curve of her slender neck, her back over the table are a pattern, to
o, like her face, for something like satisfaction, as if everything had come straight in her mind. Although it took some time, weeks perhaps, I was relieved to find she had settled on what to do, was released from inaction, from the pose in which I had sometimes found her. I remember her standing by the sewing table in the half-light, smoothing the black folds. She fingers it with red-eyed wanting, greed almost, her mouth drawn to a determined line.

  I go off to school in the morning, down the rutted road to catch the bus at the blacktop with the other kids from the farms around. Emmitt stands at the bus stop with his eyes closed.

  Hey Emmitt.

  Sh.

  I said Hey Emmitt, I nudge him with my shoulder.

  I’m sending the bus away, he says in a hiss.

  You’re what?

  With the power of my thoughts, I’m sending the bus away. I’m making Miss Myrna confused so she won’t remember to stop.

  You want to skip? I could see the bright white roof of the bus far down the road. Around us the other kids see it too, and they begin rustling their lunch sacks and picking up their books.

  Alice comes up to the edge of the road. I was here first, she says.

  The bus rumbled nearer, about a mile down the highway, stopping at the section lines to pick up little bunches of kids, one after another.

  I pulled Emmitt by his sleeve back into the brush. The borrow ditch was thick with Johnson grass, and I pushed him face down in the middle of it and crawled in beside him. I didn’t look at Emmitt, only at the backs of the other kids, at the bus slowing up, and felt muddy water soaking up one leg of my jeans. The bus door accordioned open, and the other kids climbed the stairs. As they settled the door stayed open just a heartbeat too long. Then it closed, and the brakes hissed once, twice. I could see Miss Myrna behind the glass door looking into the broad mirror above her seat, and then she shoved the door open again. She was about fifty, somebody’s mother gone to seed. Alice’s reedy voice was in midsentence: hid in the weeds.

  Anybody else going to school today? Miss Myrna called. Anybody hiding in them weeds? A minute went by, and I thought she would climb down and fetch us out by our collars, like stray cats, but she didn’t. She just shuttered the door and eased off the brake. We waited a long time in the weeds, careful of traffic on the highway, someone’s helpful father going off to town and offering a ride to a couple of kids who missed the bus.

  It was a chilly night, coming home from work on Bandera when things began to happen. First it was my car, suddenly powerless, something undone or come loose, and I coasted onto the shoulder, the other cars veering around me in a roar of headlights and speed. I tried the key, and again. It answered with a hiccup, the last leavings of power, and then died. It was late, and I thought you’d be waiting at home (once in a while you check the clock over the stove, drum its plastic face with your impatient finger). I sat for a while in the dark car, wondering what to do next, watching other cars roar past on the street. I tried the key, now and then, but got not a whimper, as if it had been born parked, never went anywhere in its life, the wheels only a careful deceit.

  There was only one set of lights at that hour, and that was the beer place across the way. I locked the doors and hiked over in the dark, jogging across the road. I was a little afraid to go in, walked cautiously among the cars, studied the neon beer sign blinking in the narrow window up front. I waited outside the open door long enough to get my bearings and glimpse the light at the back that meant rest rooms and maybe a phone.

  The man at the door gave me a nod under his cowboy hat, and I said, Phone. He motioned toward the back, and I went in, skirting the edge of the light, following the line of the bar on my right, the irregular puzzle of tables on the other side. It wasn’t crowded, only a few pool players and some men sitting around the bar. A woman was dancing on a tiny U-shape stage behind the bar, dancing in a lazy kind of way, slithery, like a snake but with arms and legs. She didn’t seem to hear the music, didn’t look at the men around her, only over their heads, to someplace behind them, faraway, although the room wasn’t that big. She was wearing only a bikini bottom and her bones showed through her skin like some kind of accessories. Mostly the men at the bar ignored her, stared into their beer or smoked cigarettes, glancing only now and then as if she were indistinguishable from the bar or the floor, from the mirrored wall behind her. The air seemed almost to interfere with the spectacle, thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of beer. I fingered the quarter in my pocket, cool comfort.

  When I got to the phone in back, I cradled the receiver against my shoulder, my back turned to the bar, pressing it close to me to seal out the noise of the music and laughter. It took a moment to connect, and then it dropped that minor ring into my ear, not at all insistent, perhaps, if you please, would you care to answer, while on my end I was telling you, pick it up, please, pick it up, giving my free hand a little shake of impatience. I could imagine the phone trilling in our empty house, and when it stops it is unmissed in the dark rooms. When I turn back to the bar, I scan the turned-away faces and bodies, mapping my escape.

  Hey Darcy, someone called. Hey Darcy, what’re you doing here? Ryan was carrying a glass and a pitcher of beer. His face was overfriendly, peculiar somehow, like a familiar actor working against type. He belonged at a pool table in the back of Jake’s, silently knocking the balls into place and pausing to pinch his cigarette between his lips and inhale.

  Well, let’s just take a look, he said about my car. Instead of turning toward the door he moved deeper into the room, picking a second glass off the bar and leading me to a table. I’ll buy you a beer, and then I’ll just go out and jump you myself, if that’s what you need.

  You just relax, he said, lighting a cigarette. The flare of the lighter gave me a flash of his face, part shadow, part fire. The beer was cool in my hand. I felt as if I needed to get something to happen, but it was like a dream, I could only wait to see what came. I sat still, my hands around the cup, letting his words drift over me. He’d been drinking, but his face seemed so fresh, brand new, and I was breathing suddenly as if I couldn’t quite get enough air. He didn’t hold me there, I know, only with his eyes, with the look on his face, uncompromised.

  I have a place, he said. That we can go.

  I have to go home, I told him. He let that fall, in the pause he topped off our glasses with more beer from the pitcher. My husband, I told him, but he leaned close in answer, brushed his mouth against my neck.

  Your husband, he whispered, his voice was a soft spot, like a bruise, in the hard noise around us. Let me tell you a little thing about your husband. He won’t mind, he said.

  The clock is generally my friend, I think. I am glued to its schedule, 11 A.M., 2 P.M., 7 P.M. When the clock says 9 A.M. my body tells me: Get up. Don’t wait. I am a clock watcher, home by midnight, in bed by 1 A.M. It is as if by managing the time I can keep everything under control. I never slip out the window nor shinny up the flue. I don’t climb fences or run red lights. Once in a while something happens and I get off the track, and it is as if I had one leg over a balcony railing of Common Sense or out on the ledge of The Wrong Thing. Then the surface under me tilts unexpectedly, shifts, my balance point moves, and, don’t look down, everything changes. Ryan is scooting his chair closer to mine, his hand tucks a, loose curl behind my ear, a finger traces the line of my jaw. He has a nice face, a gentle face, but all I can think is that the clock is ticking, and I’m not where I’m supposed to be.

  We laid in the weeds awhile until Emmitt started to complain about the water seeping into his shoes, and we noticed the Johnson grass rubbing, finding the places where it could dig into our bare skin. We got up and brushed ourselves off, and I bent to dig out a burr that had wedged itself into my sock. And Emmitt went from brushing himself to brushing off me, the bits of grass and dirt raining past my underturned face.

  We headed for the creekbed that ran through my mother’s land and, looking down from my attic window, I can’t understand how some
one didn’t see us. We were a couple of school kids, walking along the skirt of the field where the ground turned messy and pocked with weeds. The wheat was just about a foot high, green-brown and speckled with the purple heads of cheat that wiggled and waved like so many dancers. Emmitt took my books into his backpack so I had two hands free, one to hold one of his, I guess.

  Skipping school is a lot like skipping into someone else’s life. By turning aside from the doorway you walk through every day, you enter someone else’s story. It’s like traveling, I suppose, we buy gas, eat in restaurants, browse in stores where the bored clerks look at magazines and drag through their own lives. I suppose it would be the same in exotic places: Tahiti or Scotland, the people you meet, longing to get away. We could all just trade, but who’d want mine? I’d be left like the last one picked in a game of Red Rover, but it seemed to me, in spite of what happened, that some tickle of hope lingered. Sitting in the classroom with Emmitt the day after and the day after that I could look out the window and know the world still breathed outside; if I could only make it happen.

  We dropped down into the creekbed. I could hear the birds making a racket like they do when the sky is so blue, and as we came to the water, here and there were the splashes of panicked frogs punting into the water. The water was stagnant in places, scattered with the cottonwood floaters that were snowing into the air all around us.

  I was not very pretty, and I was more than a little embarrassed to be holding Emmitt’s hand in that way, scared he would feel how sweaty it was, wondering whether I was doing it right, trying to figure out what came next.

  Careful, he said, suddenly serious. I smell a snake.

  Where? We stop. What does a snake smell like?

  Don’t you smell it? Vinegary, he said, sniffing the breeze. An old guy once came by my pop’s, and he sniffed a snake right out of the feed.