The Geometry of Love Read online

  Our school was a squat brick building with classroom windows running the length of it, and its flat roof made it seem like it was crouching low to the ground. The high school was in a building of its own at the gym end, but the classrooms ran all the way back to kindergarten on our end, and the kids mingled after lunch, the high-schoolers lounging in the lee of the gym, smoking and staying out of the dust stirred up by the younger ones on the packed, red-dirt surface of the playground. The school was on the east end, where the highway came down into town, and the buses stacked up idling diesel every morning and afternoon on the long curved drive. The sign out front said Hawley School and in moveable letters, hectored by the wind, spelled out G HORN TS TAKE STA E.

  It’s hard sometimes to make things even out. I stood outside the kitchen holding my tray and trying not to spill while the others went by. I looked out into the lunchroom, over the heads of the other kids and watched them find their friends, fitting into their saved seats like puzzle pieces coming together. For us, though, it was a matter of filling in around the edges, like making the dinner all come out together, to get the beans done at the same time as the meat and bring the bread out, too. It was in evening things out that Emmitt and I helped each other. He paid for my lunch and I saved him a seat beside me, someone who wanted to eat with the new boy. He was my friend and I was his, too.

  After my father died, my mother pretty much gave up cooking until she had more mouths to feed. When I think of that time I remember her sitting on the back porch, a bowl of unshelled peas in her lap, but her face is turned away, turned to look out across the fields toward town. I wish I could see her face. Sometimes I took the bowl out of her lap and shelled them but then the peas just sat in the bowl, wasted for want of a pan of boiling water. So sometimes I not only took Emmitt’s money but I ate some of his lunch as well.

  My mother went away one day, a Little Trip, she called it later, as in During My Little Trip to Galveston we spent some time on the beach. I came home from school, and she was busy fiddling with the catch on her suitcase. She asked me to haul it down to the front door, and when I came back she looked at me from the mirror and said: You must be very, very good, the bobby pins in her mouth fluttering like bugs’ legs. I sat on the bed behind her, smelling her perfume and watching her reflection as if it were her, the real her, our faces as pale and round as two new nickels. She went to my room and pulled loose some play clothes from the drawer, and a school outfit from the closet and folded them into a grocery sack with pajamas and some panties. Bring your toothbrush, she said. And I fetched it from the bathroom, without any understanding that I was going somewhere too. Now do you want to bring Sally? she asked without waiting for the answer and stuffed my doll face-first into the sack as well.

  When we got downstairs, she was pulling on her gloves, one white finger at a time. Before she pulled on the right glove, she checked her lipstick in the mirror, rubbed at one smudge of pink on her front tooth and twitched the curtain aside with one flesh hand before covering it all over again. You’ll be at Alice’s house tonight and tomorrow night and Saturday, she said, testing the curtain again and then smoothing it back into place, as if no one were watching.

  Then where? I said.

  Why then you’ll be home, silly.

  Where are you going? I asked but out in the yard a car horn sang out, and she rattled the door open, tying a scarf on her head as she skipped down the front steps. I could see her leaning into the passenger side of the car, talking to a woman through the open window, her hands flirting with her words, and then Mrs. Bryant and Alice came in a second car, and my mother called me outside. Bring your things, she said, and when I did she gave me a kiss, a moment with her perfumed cheek, shaded pink and powdery. Then she pushed me into the back seat beside Alice. As we pulled away, I watched a man get out of the other car and carry her little suitcase to the trunk. Out on the road Mrs. Bryant questioned me, reading my face in the rearview mirror and before we could get to the blacktop, the man’s car came up alongside us and passed, in a whirl of faces and motion, four hands, like the flutter of wings, waving so long, so long. I watched the dust the car kicked up behind, like a long good-bye, until it reached the highway and turned south.

  At Alice’s house the music of everyday followed many lines, punctuated with the noise of screen doors slamming, and thunder of second-floor footsteps rattling the glass in the kitchen cabinets. Her brothers were older; I had seen them around school, in the cafeteria or smoking in the parking lot until one or maybe both of them graduated, so that when Mr. Bryant was in town doing the books at Peterson’s, they were home doing farmwork. At the table I was careful: one hand in my lap, using the fork to chase the food around on my plate but never quite getting a bite. When I moved my feet it seemed I always bumped against someone else’s under the table, so I kept them to myself, holding my breath and everything else in close to me. The boys were like horses in the house, limbs spilling everywhere; all elbows and angles, reaching across for another helping of potatoes or the butter until Mrs. Bryant had to scold, Oh, Edwin, if you ask, we’ll pass. I listened politely to their talk about the cattle down by the creek and the wheat across the road, the boys laughing about one of them getting the disc bogged in a low spot. Mrs. Bryant had made a meatloaf, fragranced with sage, and we passed Mr. Bryant our plates, one at a time, in a careful sort of ritual. He chose a slice of meatloaf for us, balancing it on the prongs of a long fork and laying it on the plate, then tipping the spout of the gravy boat across the plate, afterward wiping its rim with one pink finger. Mrs. Bryant added the vegetables, saying solemnly over the din each time, Now, Darcy, would you care for some peas? Why don’t you let me give you some potatoes?

  After dark, Alice and I lay awake in her pink bedroom talking under the covers. She had a flashlight, and we played with it in the dark, long after her parents had sent us to bed, although we could hear the television mumbling in the front room, the laugh track a low rumble their voices did not intersect. She put the flashlight in her mouth, her cheeks shot through with veins, the skin aglow. And we laughed until Mrs. Bryant came upstairs, annoyed, her hair tied up in a flowered scarf, and told us to settle down, tomorrow was a school day. In the morning I went to school with Alice on the bus.

  In the long afternoon, and the Saturday after, we played in the yard, I covertly kept an eye on the brothers kicking up dust with the tractor pulling the disc away to the east. Now and then would come a flicker of hollering laughter in the lulls between rows. Alice and I climbed into the branches of the scrub oak and listened to the fluttering of the leaves in the wind. It was coming on autumn, and they were rimmed with yellow and brown. Mrs. Bryant brought milk and chocolate cookies on a flowered plate out to the screen porch. Although I preferred them with pecans, I sat nicely on the edge of my chair and waited for Alice before taking one.

  When my mother came home she brought her sunburned face close to mine and let her mouth brush my cheek, as if leaving only the afterimage of a kiss. She put a plate on the table between us. From her purse she took a white envelope. She didn’t stop even to take off her gloves but with her white fingers she tore one end from the envelope in a jagged strip. When she poured out a wisp of sand, as white and fine as sugar, I could hear the stream singing on the china, like a slip of music, it poured out in a small pile, as white as her gloves, and she moved the little plate of sand toward me on the table, as if she were serving it to me. I brought my face down low against the table. When I touched the sand, the grains coated my fingers like the speckled lace of her church dress, the one she wore back before we stopped going, before the ladies turned their faces away from her in the pews, and we stood a long time on the steps outside church, waiting for someone to talk to her and seeing only the backs of their flowered hats.

  My mother and I had been a long time together, in that big old house before you came. I had come to believe this was the way of the world, always something to do, washing, cooking, sweeping, how else. There was always som
ebody around, mostly strangers, nobody who knows me but to ask me for another towel or to tell me cream and sugar. And after daddy died there was a man who came around so soon and so often that I almost confuse their faces. I remember this man speaking to me in a funny way, his hand on my cheek, a caress almost, me squirming to get loose, to run.

  My father is a specter, a disappeared man, skirting the edges of my recollections, like a memory. His blurred face is glimpsed as I play on the porch, around the slats on the rail, in, out, in, out, my foot swinging out over open air every other turn. He sits in the rocker, smoking, his face a flash of color, singing a low snatch of idle song: Got a rocket in my pocket, and I cannot stop to play.

  You didn’t wear that to school, she said. I had thought about running upstairs to change right off, vaguely aware that something was wrong with my choices but not knowing exactly what. Darcy, you little idiot, showing up at school looking like somebody’s rag doll. No wonder everybody’s turning their backs. What must people think? She was at the sink, washing the coffee cups. She was always washing the coffee cups. There was one on the table, the lukewarm coffee half-finished, and she was laying a second one in the drainer to dry.

  Can’t you see there’s no mixing prints? My blouse was one she had made with a white collar and patches of yellow flowers but the skirt was all red flowers and green background. Her hands kneaded my arms as if squeezing out tears. Can’t you see? she says again and again, until I have to break loose, run out the swinging kitchen door and stumble fast up the stairs. Her footsteps roar behind me but when we reach my room I crawl up onto the unmade bed, gathering myself up into the corner to make as small a target as I can.

  She doesn’t come after me, but instead sweeps the room for my school clothes, scooping blouses and skirts out of the closet, gathering the strays from the back of the chair, the hamper, the drawers. I remember her figure festive with flowered prints, but the taut look on her face cancels that. The clothes fall in a heap on the bed beside me and then her hands are rough against my skin. She gathers the fabric of my blouse, yanks it over my head and into the pile. Then she fiddles with the clasp of my skirt and tears it loose. I hear her pounding heels on the stairs and then everything is quiet. I am ashamed and shivering in my underwear, pull the blanket up to cover my pale skin.

  And stop that blubbering, she calls from down below.

  Later when I came down in my jeans, the parlor was like a garden with a dozen empty Darcys hanging about. My clothes were hung on doors and laid across the chairs, all of them flat and empty, swaying coolly, unconcerned, with the breeze from the window. She had stitched the skirts to their blouses, leaving a little gap of fabric at the clasps. I could see the back of her head up next to the screen where she sat on the porch, rocking and humming to herself, and I gathered up the clothes and took them back to my room as noiselessly as I could. Later when I come down again she had started dinner and that night we sat in the dining room, eating pork chops, and she let me have bread with butter and sugar and told me stories about Grandma June.

  I stopped for gas in Gainesville, at a little place on the south edge of town, where the land was still dogged by low scrub and dust. It was an old Texaco, I think, converted to a family place. I pumped the gas and sniffed rain in the air, I’d have to hurry. The sun was on its long slide west although the gathering clouds made it seem later than it was. I screwed the gas cap back in until it clicked, flipped the lid closed. When I went to pay, the man behind the counter said, Rain coming.

  Yeah, I said, nodding, trying not to look at his face but looking anyway, wondering if there were news about me here someplace, thinking how big Texas is.

  Sure need it, he says, and I looked at his blue eyes coming through his long weary face, watched his hands at rest, veined and brown, on the glass counter. The place shows the geology of years, the register counter and bookcase in back layered with old papers and faded things: a card of fingernail clippers and key rings is tacked to the wall; a high school football schedule is taped to the counter; packages of chewing gum are stacked up under the glass. He is an oldish man, his hair grayed out, the flip of his bangs permanently stiff where he ruffled it with one greasy hand. The rim of his cap haloes his face, and I want nothing more than to sit on the stool out in front of the counter, not speaking, and watch the rain come in. It would beat hard on the window, washing everything clean. Instead, I bought some Cheetos and said thanks. I got back in my old car and gunned it good.

  I remember lying in bed in my old room long ago, when she woke me. The house was heavy with darkness, and I felt very small, listening to the sound of my own thickening breath and waiting to fall off the edge of the day. The faint line under my closed door widens into a rectangle, a doorway, into the colorless undark of her figure, outlined by the dim light from the house beyond her. She was barefoot on the cool floor, and her footsteps whisper a warning. She brings into my warm room a flood of cool air, as if someone had left a freezer standing open somewhere.

  We were alone in the house, and I think it must have been soon after my father died. She stood some time at the bedside, and I pretended to sleep, although I could feel her looking at me. She barely jostled the bed when she lay down next to me, scarcely tipped the mattress, as if she weren’t flesh at all, only an idea, a dream, an intent. I could feel the stray fabric of her gown, ghostly and frail, the humming warmth of her skin. She lay on her side, facing me, let an arm arc over my head, as if protectively. She was very still, scarcely breathing, and I snuggled my face up against her, breathing in the fresh scent of her hair, unloosed against the pillow, the soap smell of her skin. She raised one hand, as if to stroke my face, but only laid it on the base of my neck, letting it rest there a moment before pushing me away. I moved, fitting my body at the edge of the bed against the wall. I did not try to touch her again, but lay within her orbit, listening to her deepening breath, a presence in the darkness. In this way I fell asleep, her form like a night light comforting me. In the morning she was gone again.

  I remember waiting that winter for my father to come home. It was as if he were gone on a long trip, and she and I were in the kitchen, much as usual, though I was tall enough then to chop onions on a board at the table and didn’t need the stool except to reach the high shelves in the pantry. The warm kitchen light wraps around us like a blanket, the smell of cooking food, of soup, the steam rising off the skillet into my face. I remember the feeling of her beside me, the warm fabric of her blouse presses on my arm, I lay my head to the side to feel it on my cheek. I remember the sound of her heels on the floor as she answered the door some evenings, and stood awhile on the porch, talking with someone outside, their voices a low music. She never brought him in for supper, though I know she invited him, and I watched them through the lace curtains in the dining room, his truck idling out front, sometimes he didn’t come to the porch at all, but waited for her in the cab, and she came shyly to the driver’s side window. When she came back to the kitchen I would sometimes ask her Who’s that? But she said only, Nobody. Back to work you Nosey Parker. Pretty soon she was self-possessed again, drawn up close as if she had let some secret out, without meaning to, and had called it back without harm. This lasted only a while, I think. Until one night he didn’t come, she stood at the counter, looking at the clock every now and then, while pretending not to, as I imagined she would do if I were late, long after dark, from school. On evenings like this, and those that came later, we would sit in the gathering gloom, gray-dark outside and without a light on. Not yet, she’d say, when I reached for the switch. Not yet, as if to say it wasn’t that late, there’s still time.

  I don’t know when I got so big, it seems these memories are only the thoughts from last week. It is a splinter in my heart, the knowledge that I am a woman, a woman like my mother. In the back seat (I could reach back and feel the corner of the suitcase it is folded into) I have the dress she wore when she was twenty-eight, the black dress she wore at my father’s funeral while I stood at
her side, uncomprehending, waiting for the thing to finish, for the man to stop talking so that Aunt Anne’s kids and I could go back home and play hide and seek in the yard.

  Earlier this week, I took this dress from the back of the closet where it had hung for the last couple of years. I slipped out of my clothes and stood a while naked, feeling the breeze from the window on my skin, fingering the dress between two fingers, testing its heft, its drape, in the way she taught me, holding it against my body. The dress, stiff from age and disuse, was coarse against my skin, as if I could feel every stitch of the weave. Zipping myself into it, I felt strange and proud, somehow, that I had mastered her shape. But in the mirror the dress was too strong for me, my skin paled and faded out, my face dismayed.