The Geometry of Love Read online

  I guess you probably do smell a snake, I told him. Right here one of those big old black-haired snakes about 120 pounds, and I gave him a push toward the water. Then we were both laughing and pushing, but I got the worst of it, I guess. He dragged me right into the water, although the only way he could do it was to go through it himself. I did get my head dunked first although he wasn’t far behind. We were laughing and holding onto each other along the mud bank when he reached over and kissed me on the mouth.

  What’d you do that for?

  I don’t know, he says, did you like it?

  I don’t know. So he did it again. I had my feet pulled up against my body, knees bent in front of me where I sat and he laid his body across me and pitched me with the weight of it back into the mud.

  In those last days, sometimes my mother takes a break from that fabric, she strips the black thread out of the machine and threads through something bright, pink or white, orange or yellow, and sews quick a sun dress for me or some summer skirt with those big square pockets for my hands.

  Laying out that fabric, though, she had spent a long time ironing out the wrinkles and smoothing the selvages together. It is wide stuff so that one edge hangs over the rim of the cutting board, dangles below the table where I like to sit. It is a roof for me, this table, and I like to lie on my back and fiddle with the metal latch that holds the leaves flush. From this place I watch her bare feet on the floor, her hem fresh against her bare calves. I pretend she is hunting for me, and I am hidden. I pretend I am lying on the top of a hill, looking up at the wide, wooden sky. Sometimes she holds pins in her mouth. And once, twice the scissors clatter to the floor with a swift clunk, like the closing of a door.

  She pins the fabric carefully; this is not like the other things she sews. My regular clothes she anchors the pattern pieces with a couple of pins and glides the scissors through without moment. Here she takes each length in a steady scissoring, the metal blades snip, snip running flush against the board in a smooth scrape of hard on hard. It seems to me she hesitates before bringing the scissors down on the first cut, and then she goes ahead.

  I remember standing on a chair in the dining room while she pulled and tucked, the waist, the sleeves, the hem, a serious dress without frill but under the skirt she will later put my white petticoat to fluff it up and show off the lace on the back of my underpants.

  It was almost like burglary, the process of sneaking back into the house that morning. Emmitt and I were wet to the skin, at last, and muddy though we laid on a rock at the creekbed, willing the watery April sun to dry us, fanning away the biting flies until I thought it would have been better to have gone to school.

  As we crept in the back door, the house was quiet but for a voice somewhere, a woman’s laughter, odd and sharp. We took off our shoes and tiptoed past the open doorway from the kitchen and up the back steps, heels up and desperate to be quiet. We trailed two clear sets of wet footprints on the wood, his feet wider than mine and not as arched but both of them naked and clear, a clue to our intentions.

  The second floor was dicey, all the doors shut and not knowing where she would be, imagining footsteps all around and listening for her voice. We navigated the corner and eased my little door shut with its hook and eye latch on the inside.

  Up in my room we sat on the bed for a time and watched the breeze blowing the curtain about. We didn’t speak. I make him turn around so I can change out of my wet things. As I stripped off my clothes I watched the back of his head, willing him to turn around, both wanting and not wanting him to, not knowing which. He, patient, didn’t, and I pulled on a clean pair of jeans and came to sit beside him, barefoot and comfortable. The attic was warm but the breeze from the window cooled us. Down below we could hear that woman’s laugh rising and falling, sometimes, intermingled with a man’s voice. They sounded joyous and proud, these voices, and they came in the window on the breeze from one of the rooms below.

  As we listen the woman’s voice slowly dissolves into my mother’s, pleased, self-possessed, and then it too dissolves into some other sound, into the telling of bedsprings, a headboard banging against a wall, like the beating of my slow heart.

  The sound of it shocked us, and I turned my face away to hide my dismay but he stroked my back and turned me back with an embrace.

  Emmitt laid his hand on the space between my breasts and laid me back on the mattress. I did not resist but only looked into his face as he lay on top of me, covered me with his body, his hips on mine, his thighs, his shoulders, our arms outstretched to shield our heads. I could feel the tight bundle in his pants. He lay across me a long while, unmoving, as if to protect me, and when he got up I could feel the imprint of his body on mine and carried it with me a long time after.

  I think sometimes my heart beats more slowly than other hearts, certainly it takes longer to react, as if it were hearing the world through flesh layered like an onion, my heart buried so deep inside of me it can scarcely be detected. We lay a long while on the bed, unmoving and silent, listening to the activity downstairs change, doors opening and closing, feet on the stairs, outside a motor starting (Mr. Stuart’s beat-up pickup, it had to be). Downstairs it sounded as I might have imagined it would as she opened windows and shook out bedclothes.

  Her feet moved her from room to room, I imagined, straightening, hanging up clothes, we could hear the opening of drawers and closet doors, the gentle tinging of metal hangars as she worked in the closets. We lay there listening, waiting for the next thing to happen, watching the morning get old by the pattern of sun on the floor. She pulled the damp towels out of the bathroom hamper and brought new ones. She carried with her a stack of linens, room to room, and at the end of the hall she had one set left for my room. Usually she left them on the three steps leading to the attic but something today made her try the door.

  Who’s in there? She rattled the hook, and I sat up, wondering what to say. Darcy? she says. Are you in there?

  Emmitt got up and hurriedly began gathering up his shoes and socks, his book bag, and she heard his footsteps on the floor.

  Young lady, you open up this instant.

  There was nowhere for him to go, the roof scattered stars of daylight through the attic’s darkest places. Before I could think, he was out the window, three floors up.

  It’s just me mom, I said at the door. I took a last look at the open window, an innocent eye into the blue sky, and flipped the hook. The door swung wide, and she was in.

  I didn’t feel good. I’ve been sleeping. I rubbed my head for effect.

  And what about the bus? I saw you leave for the bus this morning, and you felt fine.

  A voice called outside, Meredith!? Oh, Meredith. The voice was small, three floors down, but from the window we could see Mr. Stuart beside his pickup, a rifle at his shoulder sighted on the roof. He had gotten most of the way to the blacktop before he looked in the mirror and turned the truck around.

  Look what I’ve caught, he called up. Sitting beside the dormer, near the roof’s edge we could see Emmitt, his hands in the air. He had stopped to put on his shoes but only got so far as his socks. His hair was touched by the breeze, and in the sun his face looked amused and open, untroubled by all the shouting.

  Hey, Mr. Stuart. I don’t mean anything, Emmitt called, half standing, his book bag tangled in his balance.

  You get in here this instant, young man, my mother said. He made a motion as if to come toward us, but his feet went out from under him. We heard a sudden thump and a scattering sound as he slid on his seat, without purchase, to the edge of the roof and out of sight. I thought, of course, he’d died. We could not see him hit but heard the hammerstrike of his breath when he landed two floors down.

  She turned and slapped my face once, twice like a blow from her heart. From the ground I heard Emmitt holler I’m OK. It’s OK.

  His shout from the juniper bushes seemed to say, Don’t worry you-all, false alarm, everybody go back to what you were doing. But there was no going
back, only forward.

  Before she went out the door and downstairs she gave me one more hard look, as if she tasted something bitter and strong. How my mother explained the trouble to his mother I never knew, only that my mother called her from the doctor’s office. Emmitt’s cast was signed by all the other girls at school, and his arm was fine in time for baseball season.

  We sat a long time at the table, Ryan drinking beer after beer, and I was still sipping on the first one, the liquid lukewarm in my mouth. Ryan was leaning his arms on the table, and I breathed in his cigarette smoke, fragrant and bitter, like conversation between us, and he let the butts pile up in the ashtray. I let the place open up around me, first seeing the angles and lines of the furniture around us, the conversation of the men at the next table: Ah, he don’t know nothing, the movement of people threading around the tables, then beyond to the men at the bar, the tinny music, the dancer now crouching, legs wide, on the stage, the men playing pool to one side, the music of the balls dropping, an occasional volley of laughter flies loose of the general din.

  Then an older man alone at the end of the bar shows me his back, a wrinkled neck where his hairline doesn’t quite meet his collar. He has been there a long time, one puffy hand lifts a whiskey glass in a quick jerk to his mouth, then he signals for and drinks another. The man slides off his stool at the end and comes creeping toward us, quiet, almost low to the ground, as if he were stalking us, wanted to see what we were about. As he approaches the face dissolves into Jake’s, somehow wrong, but still amiable, sad. And then he sidles in beside me and replaces Ryan’s hand on my arm with his own. He lays his head on my shoulder without a word, and Ryan looks at me with regret. Don’t drink anymore, Jake says by way of greeting, pitiful almost, giving me a squeeze. I put a hand to his chest to steady him.

  I’ve got to go, he says. I need you to drive me home. Now.

  But my car, I tell him, and he fumbles in his pocket for his own keys.

  He stumbles a little against me when we stand up, and the motion seems to disentangle me from Ryan, seems to sever something between us, and when Jake and I go out the door I don’t look back, can only try to keep Jake upright and moving forward.

  Once we are in the car, I can see through him though, he sits so straight and disapproving. You’ve got one at home like that, he says, and then he lets it go.

  When I got to the house with Jake’s car, you were just coming in from I don’t know where. I didn’t ask, I only watched you hitching your pants up as you slid loose of the truck. You threw a fit, of course, about me leaving my car on the side of the road and coming home with some stranger, you said.

  I’ll take it back tomorrow, I told you, without saying anything else. In bed I turned my back on you, although I hardly think you noticed. I could hear only your heavy breath, like a weight on us both.

  Nine

  I hadn’t really meant to quit school, I just stopped going one day. I laid in bed with the covers kicked off, feeling the day heat up outside like a runner warming up for a race. My mother is downstairs, I can hear the music of plates in the kitchen as she gets the men off. I watch the minute hand on the clock moving, thinking, Now they’re in history class. Mr. McGrath is calling on Alice, but she doesn’t know the answer. Now the bell is ringing, and everybody scatters into the hall. Does anyone notice my empty desk? Is someone waiting at my locker? I cozy my feet into the cool sheets, stretch, let my eyes close again, doze. The semester was winding down, and in the afternoon the classrooms were stifling, airless, even though the windows were wide open, letting in the singsong sound of the younger kids chasing a kickball around in P.E., the clanging of the hardware against the flagpole, the shrill of the teacher’s whistle. All I had to do was show up seven more weeks, but that morning I slept in, and that was the end of it.

  She didn’t say anything about it, only gave a knock on my door about nine o’clock and Get up Darcy. When I came down she told me to change all the sheets upstairs and get everything swept out. When the phone rang around eleven o’clock I thought it might be the school secretary, checking up on me, but I heard my mother say in the hall, No, I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong number, there’s nobody here by that name, and then she hung up. The phone rang again in a little while, but she just stood in the hall with her arms crossed, as if impatient, but not answering it.

  Along about three o’clock she told me I was in charge of dinner and to start the rolls pretty quick or they wouldn’t be ready on time, like it was an afterthought for her too.

  I have always imagined someday I would know what was going on around me, that I would be like anybody else, the sort of woman you see walking downtown, an office worker or maybe a lawyer, clearly on the way somewhere, not at all puzzled about who she is or where she is going, just striding purposefully in her click-click sensible heels. All my shoes are flats, and I don’t have any need for professional clothes.

  The real problem isn’t wardrobe. I know the problem is how to read ahead in these things, how to follow my instincts like a map. At the time that I chose this way, watching your mouth close around a forkful of dinner, watching your hand close into a fist, I must have known how this would turn out, that this turning would take me out onto the interstate, past the 495 loop at last, gunning the engine as if I were getting ready to fly.

  I won’t, you say. I won’t give you a divorce. And you sweep the dishes off the table in front of me, a wholesale smashing, this time everything is happening at once instead of little by little. In this small room, the noise is like the crash of a car accident, unexpectedly sharp and ready with remorse. The beans splash into my lap on the way over the edge, and the food flies in all directions, speckling everything around with spots of gravy or grease, flecks of vegetables and the print of pork chops. When you stand up, you grind the rolls under your foot, smearing them into the general mess, kick the shards of dinner plate into the middle of the room.

  It is the last dinner I will make for us, all of it a melange of risk and ruin. And you, you are huge, as if blown up by rage, standing in the wreckage you have made.

  Get out of my house, I tell you and mean it. My anger has at last outstripped my fear. You do not speak but only turn your face on me like a weapon, as if to say: Take care that this is what you want. It is.

  What you want is possession, I know. I knew that right off, when we were living in the back of the truck and you said: Marry me. I want you to marry me.

  But now you want to make a mess of things to match our marriage, from the countertop you sweep the canisters aside and the things go flying, powdering the room with sugar and flour, raining the coffee on top of it all like confetti, all of it spoiled. You raise the coffee canister over your head to get some height on the event of its breaking. The toaster gashes the opposite wall, its angles smashed out of square; you pull plates from the cabinet and their pieces go everywhere. From the other side of the sink, a loaf of bread, the bowl of onions and potatoes joins the fray, thrown like so many balls into the air, and I wonder suddenly whether you can juggle.

  It was the kitchen that was my heart. It was the place for some other things: warmth, love, certainly, but risk, too, and anger. My mother at the table, picking over the beans. You with one leg propped on the rim, watching me fry pork chops. Even my father, sitting at the table in his socks, sipping his coffee and looking out over the misty fields in the early morning.

  There’s a reason the kitchen is built at the back of the house. A home is a nest, the kitchen burrowed back behind the public rooms, close and scented with last night’s dinner like some private perfume. The bedrooms, too, are deep within the maze of doorways and halls, camouflaged by closet doors and other dead ends. I think that’s why I thought so much of my attic room, its little door was designed to be overlooked. It is the safest place, back in my memory where everything is soft and safe, where I can snuggle up against the other you, the one I carry around in my heart, the one I look for in moments of rest or quiet. Now that one, that you,
is gone.

  It is your face that comes to me now, that awful face you showed me at the last, mouth wide, eyes huge, your hands grabbing anything: The contents of a drawer fly wild; you sweep the glasses out of the cabinet, and they starburst on the tile. The curtains come down, the little spice jars from their shelf, a burner grill pitches with a clatter to the floor as you grab at the loose things that can be ruined and me.

  We are an explosive recipe, half oil, half fire, stirred constantly. But with you it is something else. It is need, as when I bend to look in the oven, and you slide one warm hand under the rim of my skirt, you laugh and snap the elastic of my panties. Or your thing is a hard bundle against my back while I stand at the window, watching children play on the street.

  It is a hot, sunny day, and I am handing you a bottle of beer in the yard while you mow. In one tilt you drain the cold bottle, and you pitch the empty up by the house where there isn’t any grass. You pull me to you with one sweaty arm, I can taste the beer in your kiss, and you push me, protesting, down into the fragrant grass. We do it quickly with the mower roaring beside us, straddling the line of cut/uncut and the long grass surrounds my face, shields me from the little shower of fresh clippings out of the mower chute. But, too, I look into your face above me, with the sun burning behind your head like a halo, your face tight with feeling.

  At first it was a game, of course, as in my mother’s house where everything is forbidden. I remember your laughter, your face against my neck, my breasts, your mouth traces the contours of my belly.

  Lately, though, it’s almost as if you do not want me, but someone else. You like to take me from behind, your eyes squeezed shut, and your thing grinding into me as if to penetrate some secret place I hold inside, to make me into you, your arms molding me like something soft against your straining body. I press my face into the mattress, against the wall or into the surface of some cold floor, hanging over the stove or the sink, over the back of the couch as the television’s blue flutter tattoos my face.