The Geometry of Love Page 14

  I smell something strange on you too, like nervous sweat. You come in at all hours and when I complain of this you push me down onto the floor of the hall, two steps inside the front door. Your body presses into mine as if to smother me, and the night indiscreetly watches us through the screen door.

  When you started staying out late, I told Jake I could work whenever he needed me. We needed the money and, too, I wanted to avoid the knowledge that you were gone somewhere I didn’t know. Out, you said when I asked you. It’s not that I could imagine you with some other woman, only you hanging around bars and parking lots with your friends, your feet on the chair across or hiked onto someone’s bumper. You, distinguishable from the night only by the red burning of your cigarette, your coarse laugh at someone’s joke. You, wasted.

  When I left the club at night, locked the glass doors behind me in a rattling of keys, I told myself you were at home waiting, that I would find you watching TV, and you would come to the door and ask how was my day. Although when I turned into our empty drive, and my headlights flashed across the dark house, I felt relief, that the house was cool and empty, untroubled, mine.

  I want you back.

  I can’t, I say, although I know it only: I won’t.

  I need you.

  I’m sorry. I can’t.

  I am tempted to take the gun. It rests on the table between us, cold and heavy, heavy out of proportion to its size, and powerful. I remember the kick of the shotgun at my mother’s house, the shattered day, a bird’s flight suddenly gone wrong.

  The metal, I imagine, is cool, but it burns in my thoughts, as if the gun were a constant throbbing, like a heartbeat, the pole star around which my thoughts rotate. If, if. I wonder how it feels. I imagine myself pointing it, with two hands and my anger. Is the safety on?

  I can reach across the seat and unbutton the glove compartment, and the gun comes toppling out onto the floorboard. It lies there in the shadow, giving me a whiff of smoke, like a memory, and I lean down to take it into my hand, heft it, let the grip slide home. But then I put it away again.

  When I came into town that long-ago day, carrying my stuff in a backpack on my shoulder, I wasn’t sure whom I’d meet. I knew only that I was finished with my mother’s house, that I had to go someplace, any direction as long as it was someplace different.

  Your truck was parked out front of the drugstore, and I stood awhile outside the dirty glass window, idly looking at the old junk there, old-fashioned curlers and camera flashbulbs, fishing line and sewing thread, tins of aspirin and fingernail clippers, all of it dusty with disuse. I was wondering whether to go in or to wait, whether I should just pass on to the edge of town and hope somebody would pick me up. I wasn’t carrying much, a little over two hundred dollars I took from the envelope in the kitchen, next week’s grocery money, and some clothes. The black dress I took out of my mother’s closet, as if I’d have need of it, and a photo from their wedding day, my father looking so hopeful with the light on his face, as if he were just born and only just made the acquaintance of the sun, Glad to know you, sir.

  When I slid onto the stool next to you, you had a mouthful of cheese sandwich, like a lump in your throat. That’ll do for now if you can’t summon anything else, I thought. And I took a couple of fries off your plate and ate them while I watched you swallow.

  Mr. Henry, looking ever more pinched and faded, asked me if I wanted any lunch, and I said, No, no thanks, considering my finances.

  I figured you’d come, you said. I kicked my bag at my feet in answer. OK, you said, gathering up the last of your lunch. Out on the sidewalk you paused a moment, a thought. How old are you? I lied a little, looking right into your face. You gave me the rest of the sandwich, like a bond, and I swung into the cab beside you. That was so long ago, it’s hard for me to believe in it except as a clip from a movie or a verse from someone else’s song.

  I want a divorce, I tell you, and you look at my face, surprised, as if this could be a surprise for either of us.

  No, you don’t, you say, suddenly genial, soft.

  I’m serious.

  I won’t, you’re my wife. When your gentle hand reaches for me, a caress, I slap it away.

  It is you, you who are the blinding sun, and I am Mercury, pulled in hot and close. It was a hard thing trying to loose myself from you, to fly free of your orbit. One night the sky is spitting out the last drops of a rainstorm when I come home from work, and I haul the garbage cans out of the gravel drive where they have blown.

  The lights are blazing in our house, as if someone were giving a party, but no one is home and I go from room to room, wondering what has happened, turning out lights, but you are gone. The place is a wreck, and I spend an hour or two picking up your clothes from the living room floor, stacking dishes into the sink, tired, smelling of cigarette smoke and grease from the club. I go to make a cup of tea and find the milk is spoiled.

  Time passed, and it was two or three or four when I finished sweeping things up and went to bed, all the windows open, letting in the damp after-rain smell of the early morning. I lay in bed a long time, wishing for something I could not name, feeling my existence only in my clamoring heart. The dog came and laid at the side of the bed, and I dangled an arm over the side for him to nuzzle.

  In the morning when you came home, your shirttail loose and your face scratchy with day-old whiskers, the locksmith had already come and gone, and the house was closed up against the heat of the coming afternoon. Against you.

  Darcy, what’s up? through the blinds I could see you look inquiringly at the key, then check the house number. The mailbox clattered as the lid flipped closed on our names.

  Let me in, you called. Don’t do this, honey. I got held up. I know you’re in there. Answer me.

  Then it was still as I paced the living room with my teacup, waiting for the next move in this game. Your footsteps leave the porch, and I listen to the quiet world around us, as if it were holding its breath. You suddenly raise the stakes. In, the bedroom, there is the sound of breaking glass, the shards falling in on the tile, your boots hitting the floor, you shouting my name, Darcy. You must have heard me shoot the dead bolt back, because I almost got out onto the porch before you pulled me back.

  Ten

  I am a junior in high school, trying out for the basketball team, the Lady Hornets. It can’t be too hard, I thought, doing the math, eight girls out of the hundred in my school. I have sat in the stands during the games, watching the girls driving between baskets as if joined in an intricate dance. I have held my own in the sprints, bouncing at top speed between lines on the gym floor, but when we go to play I pull a hamstring in a fall against Amber Lester. She is a slender girl who slings the ball from hand to hand like a boy. A twang of pain plays my leg like a stringed instrument. She wipes the sweat from her face with the neck of her T-shirt. She holds the ball against one hip, gives me a hand up from the floor, but when the coach’s whistle shrills she swings back into the practice, and I limp to the court side.

  Do it, Emmitt had told me, I know you can. He was still looking out for me, although I think we both knew he was asking me to play against type. It was as if he were offering me a refuge, a role in a play he could name.

  I am breathing hard and trying not to cry. The coach, Mr. Hart, impatient, uses his face like a hatchet, kneels on one knee, speaks to me, insistent, his hands on my leg, fingers searching out the puckered muscle, massaging it, speaking sweat in my face, and I can hear the off-rhythm of the other girls, pounding the court without me.

  I breathe hard, concentrate on the coach. Around us is a tiny scattering of hangers-on and friends of the team members and of the couple of girls trying out. I can hear Emmitt’s voice somewhere in the background, exchanging phone numbers with a girl at cheerleading practice. The sound of the girls’ feet on the court, heavy and incautious, moves me, and I want to go back to them. I watch the coach’s face, hearing not at all his insistent words, drowned out by the noise around us, the o
ther-way-looking of the girl who stands at court side. The others roar down the court. We are cocooned by sound, the effort to breath, the strain to feel the muscle relax and slip loose. His hands on my leg are warm, and I am embarrassed by the sweat that lubricates his touch, his hands, rubbing thumbs and, then, one curious finger that slips into my shorts, runs along the elastic of my panties, the rim of new hair. I push his hand away, a sudden, embarrassing motion. He speaks to me of what? The team. Maybe next year, he says. Get dressed. He slaps a hand against my thigh and sends me limping back to change. When I look back he is standing with the girls, clapping a moment, then he stops, as if in thought, to bring his hand to his face, inhaling my scent.

  The stars outside my attic window are hard and still, like a night-lit echo for every window and streetlight anywhere. I can imagine the rooms behind these stars, all of them occupied with movement and warmth and light.

  My feet on the back stairs are cool against the wood, and the morning speaks to me through the open windows, the spring breeze, outside the landing window a wasp pumps its head again and again against the screen, thunk, thunk, rattling the frame as it batters itself to get in where it will only want out.

  As I come down the stairs in my pajamas I can hear the water running in her bathroom and a sound as if she were scraping her stomach loose, a retching, as she vomits again and again into the bowl.

  My father is already out by the barn, I can hear a sawing of metal on metal somewhere out back. He is putting irrigation pipe together, odds and ends over time collected in the back of the barn from neighbors and unused pieces snagged from construction sites and junkyards. He cannot hear her, and she cannot hear him, but I hear them both, and they sound to me like a song in the round, both voices urgently hoarse, singing one song.

  Some things come again and again to me, as if they were important, as if I hadn’t squeezed all the meaning loose from them even yet, years later and miles away. But I suppose that is how things happen.

  I remember his arms around me. I caught him, unawares as he got out of the truck, my body a rocket, thumping him back against the hard siding of the cab, my legs wrapped around his body, arms tight on his neck. I rub my face against his neck, his skin impossibly tender against my cheek, his tanned neck, a smudge of black-brown in a spot like a thumbprint near the hairline. I give this mark a noisy kiss, like a target. Down, down, he says. He is unsteady since that day he fell from the tractor, missed a step and pitched into the dirt. I wonder, sometimes, that he didn’t lie there all night, my mother and me at the table in the kitchen, chopping and peeling, always more vegetables to peel, more meat to cook.

  I remember his arms around her, in the old days. She was standing at the stove, he circles her waist with his arms and lays his face against her neck. She is pulling pigs in a blanket out of the oven, one by one, bending to take them from the pan in the oven, sliding them steaming onto our plates from the spatula. I can feel the heat from the oven in waves, like the ocean, as she accordions the oven door, open shut, squeeze, pull, after every one. Her gloved hands wave him away, push at his arms as if he were too hot to touch. Get your chair, she says.

  Mama? Are you OK? She is crouched over the toilet, one hand on the rim, one hand on her stomach, seeming to study the contents of the bowl as if it would tell her future. A hank of hair falls across her pale face, filthy with vomit and the sudden sweat. The smell is sweet and strange. Are you OK? This time she hears me but does not look at me. She only holds up one hand, like a traffic cop, to stop me, and then she wordlessly swings the door shut.

  I have family hereabouts, although I do not know them. My Grandpa Bert died before I was born and I remember Grandma June as a small and withered woman with hair the color of storm clouds and a voice like thunder. My mother’s sister, Aunt Anne, lives with my cousins, Lester and Jane, in a house down state. My family is stacked up behind me, like so much cordwood, in vertical time. Their genes are distilled, honed and straightened, into the blood of one child, ungrateful me. I have seen a photo of my grandmother’s parents, as stern and sunless as cave dwellers, her cardigan buttoned up high, his lamb chops white with age. My mother tells a story about her mother, and I suppose her mother before her, all those tired women married to drunkards and layabouts, until there was her. When she was fourteen, Grandma June lined up the children in the basement, like a regiment, and asked, Shall I leave him? He’s a drunk and a violent man, and if you say so we’ll be out of here tomorrow. She went down the line, asking first my mother, then her sister and finally her brother, my Uncle Ned, who shouted Hurrah! Hurrah! as if he were at a parade, but of course she slapped him once hard to make him be quiet. The next day they got up as usual, and she made the beds and cooked the breakfast as always, as if nothing had happened. Ned stayed home from school two days, pretending to have a stomachache.

  We are alone in the house, but for these ghosts and their hand-me-downs, everybody else fallen away or died, the furniture rearranged, although there is a little stain on the wall of the kitchen, like a splash of overlooked coffee-color the size of a quarter, and I am drawn to this place, inexplicable and true somehow, my fingers rub this spot like a charm, as if it would come to me through my fingertips the reason for the way things happened, where my father has gone and why her face is puffy and white in the morning, as if she hadn’t slept or overslept.

  I’ve got to have you, Darcy, is all you say. I’m in the bathroom, finishing up my shower, the last leavings of cool water are dripping from the faucet and outside the open window the crickets have set up a continuous song. I can feel the loopy roughness of the towel on my skin, and it is good, scratches some itch I have acquired, satisfies some new urging. I wrap my hair in the damp towel, ruffle it drier and then comb it out and anticipating my comfortable bed, hot, but the breeze ripples over me like a cool stream. I can hear the house settling down for the night, sense the lights clicking off, the clatter of movement becoming still, from the room next door Mr. Whinery squeezes his bedsprings with his heavy frame.

  It was a sticky day, and I came down in my robe and barefoot for a shower, after all the doors had closed on the second floor. I was just going up again, had reached up to unlatch the door when it came loose in my hand, with you, bare-chested, pushing in behind it.

  I’ve got to have you, you said again, and those are sweet words but dangerous. The belt of my robe is tied in an overhand against my damp skin, but my hair is loose and spiked with moisture.

  You slip the hook into the eye as I make to push past you, the doorknob is useless in my hand. You are quick and have me pushed against the sink, your mouth hungry, your hands fumbling at my belt. I told you I don’t want that, I say, a harsh whisper. I don’t. But your hands are on my bare skin, No. You stroke my face with your greedy hands, your mouth, your mouth on my neck, my breasts.

  Wait. We can’t.

  So beautiful, you say, pausing to look in my face, as if you have remembered your manners.

  One hand holds my neck, caresses my face, you trace a finger across my lips but that turns, quick, to a hand on my mouth, and you cup my buttocks with the other hand to lift me into place. It is a feeling of tearing, of something come loose, and I struggle against you, push away, but I cannot dislodge you, can only press my face away, press my cheek against the hard surface of the mirror, my body encircled by your hard arm, pinned between you and the rim of the sink, my eyes squeezing out sudden tears. I am battered by the beat of your hard breath against my neck, your body pounding into mine, one hand still tight across my mouth. When it is over, you lay me, limp, down on the hard tile and rest your weight against me. I can feel the hot night outside the screen and above us the white curtains fill with the breeze, the night is immovable, unchanged. I can feel the puddled footprints from my shower soaking into the back of my robe, the hard floor behind my head, and I press my hot cheek into the cool tile to weep.

  Your hands again find their caress. There is a little blood, and you whisper, I’m sorry. I want you so
bad. On the floor we do it again, this time tenderly.

  Are you sorry, my mother says, that you don’t have a brother? We are sitting at the kitchen table, and I am picking at a tuna sandwich. It is a day or two after I have quit school, and we are still working out our routine, fumbling with the niceties like what to have for lunch, and who will fix it. Outside the day is hearty and almost hot. Later I will go out to the line to fetch in the laundry but for now the whites flap on the warm wind, birds against the blue, blue sky. We are alone in the house, all the boarders are gone to work or out, and we have thrown open the windows, a welcome to the coming summer.

  I am content to eat in silence, but she pesters me with more uneasy sentences, her eyes on her plate. You father and I thought you’d be the only one, she says, and I cannot tell how this is meant to come out. She rushes on, unstoppable. Sometime, she says, you’ll meet someone who makes you want a child, to have children.

  I can feel the imprint of your hand on my wrist. I remember a frame in which you are suddenly still, the sharp intake of breath. But why?

  You: your ungentle voice raised against me like a weapon. I am looking away from you, watching the pattern of the light on the kitchen floor, as white and ephemeral as the glitter from sequins. When something happens you are not angry anymore; you are regretful, tender. You touch me as if I were a talisman, rub your hand along the line of my arm, along the rim of bone that knits my shoulder to my neck. The light from outside is filtered though the branches of the red oak, its leaves frittering against the breeze, I can hear their murmur, your murmur, as usual: I’m sorry, I’m sorry. And then you pull me to you unresistant.

  Eleven

  In the morning you are gone.