The Geometry of Love Page 6

  I am a woman, suddenly it seems, to me. Though in some part of my heart I am still a child, playing dress-up, and, too, keeping score.

  In the interim waiting for you I learned to make bread, to fit my hands into the warm dough, bloated with waiting, to turn it against my palms, to manage it into smoothness, like velvet, and set it to wait again under the cloth. The water I learned to test with the inside of my wrist, like milk for a baby, though I think that’s about as close as I’ll get to having a baby, testing the water, warm, warmer, warm enough, on my skin and wondering.

  The bread was hard, the hardest thing yet, to take water or milk, flour, a little sugar and oil to feed the yeast, about as alive as sand, grainy and still. I laid out the dough under the cloth on the counter or in the oven, depending on the weather, letting the heat seep in through the bowl, warm it, give it strength to heave. I hovered over its expanding skin. I idled out on the porch or reading a book in the dining room, until my mother came through to tell me to take something out to the trash barrel or strip the beds upstairs on wash day. And often as not the bread was punched down when I came again, the bowl turned, the cover askew. Sometimes there were fingerprints in the warm dough, like a message from the dead, if I could only read it. It was fluctuating sabotage, I know, the oven turned way up or down, the back door ajar leaks cold air into the hot kitchen. The loaves were small and mean, the fallen rolls textured with orange-skin bumpiness, flat or blackened or skillessly shaped. She was tight-lipped, watching me from the porch as I pitched pieces of the warm loaves like stones among the hens. Eventually though something happened, something turned, and the bread’s floured skin came out of the oven as hot and good as a lover’s glance.

  I like the look of your mouth closing around the soft interior of my bread. Of your greedy fingers pushing a crust through a puddle of my gravy. The crunch of your teeth biting into the skin of my fried chicken. I want to engage your desires, to satisfy your appetites, to fill you up.

  Once you arrived, there were seven places at my mother’s table. From the kitchen I can hear the sound of their boots on the floor, the impatient scraping of chair legs on wood floor as they take their seats. Her damask cloth is protected by a grainy plastic tablecloth with the suggestion of weave imprinted under the pattern of pale flowers. The overhead light gives a pale cast to the room, still warm from the day. The open windows toss a coolness back and forth like a ball. Outside we can hear the scattered wheeze of locusts, tuning up for the evening, the faraway hum of traffic on the highway, a tractor idling somewhere, leaves fluttering on the wind. The men at the table talk a little, easily, someone tells a story, though I scarcely listen, and his voice seems to be a part of something happening in the next room. Mr. Lester, the pharmacist, says, And then she wanted an aspirin for her dog. There are Wallace Charles, a hand at the Watson place, and his friend, Chicky Behrman; Mr. Whinery, who worked at the plant with you, and you, Mr. Wilson, although your red hair makes you seem fresh, scarcely older than me. In the armchair at the end is my mother, passing platters, giving orders. Have some more chicken, Mr. Whinery. I see you need some butter, Mr. Lester. Darcy, pass Mr. Lester the butter. And get more biscuits from the kitchen.

  I could hear the television—the voices an undercurrent from the next room—and the percussion of crusts breaking, the music of forks on plates, the asides of men asking for dishes to be passed. The curtains filtered the pale light, suggesting the withering day, shaded by the pattern of leaves in the window. A little more conversation kicks up here and there around the table, like dust devils on a windy day, spinning in and out before anyone could catch hold.

  In this cozy scene, like a soliloquy, I took my time over you, examined your appetite, measured your desires, felt your silent tug and, too, passed you the biscuits.

  The corn is improperly drained, my mother announces. Take some more butter, Mr. Wilson.

  Four

  Your closed hand falls against my face, and I feel myself falling behind it, falling, the suddenness of it I feel in my ears, it pushes the breath from my lungs, out the O of my surprised mouth, it makes me sit, abruptly, on the kitchen floor with your shadow falling across my face. The blood makes a fresh pattern on my face, and in it our conversation has unexpectedly taken a turn, new topic. I can see on your face a pattern of your own, surprise and regret, anger’s candle flickers out in your eyes, and your raised fist becomes a cradle behind my head.

  Both of us are gentle, suddenly, you press a towel to my face, its whiteness is blinding against the red, as you turn it again and again, like a painter filling out the pattern. Your hands on me, an arm around my waist lifts me upright. My face is wet with blood and tears. I want to find a mirror, to examine the smear of my nose, see the black eyes coming up, merciless.

  Don’t.

  I’m sorry. Your hands flutter, helpless.

  I think you’d better go.

  I’m just trying to get another chance with you.

  No. That’s the way with us.

  I think sometimes if my mother had been at our wedding it might have been different. You would be wedged in between us at the table on Sundays, wiping your boots on the mat at her front door; standing with me at my cousin’s wedding under the eaves of the little church, or carrying our errands into town. You would repair the broken hinge on the chicken house door, unclog the drain in the upstairs bathroom, fill in the broken tiles in the kitchen and, too, in the mosaic of our family life, shattered long ago.

  I have a recurring dream that we are repeating our wedding at my mother’s house. I come down the long staircase in a cascade of lace, and the audience is joyous and loud, all gaily talking at once, outside dogs bark and crop dusters buzz the fields. I can smell sausages cooking and pies baking and chicken sizzling on the stove. The bread is in the oven and stacked beside the makeshift altar are piles of sunflowers and purple coneflowers and Queen Anne’s lace, dropping petals on the carpet like a springtime snow. The lace on my dress rustles with every movement, like the cellophane wrapper on a peppermint candy.

  The guests are a river, all the faces that I know: Emmitt and Alice and even red-haired Cameron Hart from my fourth-hour math class. Mr. Elkhart has brought his cattle, and Mr. Henry serves fountain drinks from the fireplace. Jake is standing by the bar in the dining room, pouring out seconds to the boys from the pool tables in back. The guests are flowing around the room and out the door in a stream of chattering faces and hats and tacky wide ties and floral print dresses. These guests are everywhere: on every chair and sofa in the place, certainly, but also standing in all the aisles and doorways poking out from under the stairs, flat ones lying alongside the aisle where they hope to get a look up my skirt. The tall, shy, skinny ones are wallflowers, lining the room like wallpaper, and more of them peer out from behind the curtains, like spies. The line of guests snakes out into the hall and beyond the open front door, the sun haloing their faces like so many saints. There are little ones on the mantel, some of them dancing, some singing their conversation: Nice day isn’t it? Oh, yes, isn’t it? The ones with wings flutter above our heads, looking for a place to light. A tiny angular family from out of town swings from the light fixture, all of them waving one diminutive hand in the air like bullriders, Yippee-yi-ky-a.

  On the landing, my conspiratorial mother stands with a spoon in her hand like a conductor’s wand. She brings me up short: Try this ice cream. I have forty gallons. The dinner’s done. The guests are here (a squeal and a flutter of fingers down stage right: Ooh, Betty. Glad you could make it. You too Pastor James.) Everybody’s waiting to see what you’ve caught. And now you know, there’s no groom.

  The place where I left you is magically empty, your suit a rumpled puddle at the preacher’s feet. I know she has performed some sleight of hand, some presto-changeo, some magic do-dah. The happy room falls into sudden silence, the planes in the field sputter into hard landings, the dogs fall asleep under the dining room table, the food steams on platters in the kitchen. Somewhere someb
ody drops a plate and it shatters. The family on the light fixture swings silently, metal chain creaking, the bitter bulb throwing streaks of light across the upturned faces, shadowing and filling the room in weird pieces. Every face is turned toward me like so many stars shining, openmouthed and hard, and I look down on them from the staircase, like a single hot sun. From my mother’s dainty white hand I take the cold spoon. Her face is prim, mouth compressed into a disapproving line. I press the frigid sweet onto my tongue. It is bitter and darkly flavored of you.

  When you came I could hardly have known it was you, though it seemed like I was expecting you, was waiting as if for an assignation. After this, I think the rest of my life will read like the back of a cereal box: This product sold by weight and not by volume. I believe I had somehow arranged it, even though I didn’t know the day or the hour. I was taking some of the chicken pieces out of the skillet one afternoon, letting them drain on a fold of paper towel, and the sun came slanting in the sink window like hot oil to help, spilling yellow all over the counter and off onto the floor. In another pan the green beans simmered and steamed, and gravy bubbled idly on the back burner. Dinner was close, and you came in the swinging door behind me, with the sheepishness of a stranger and letting in a puff of cool air from the larger house, relief, on the back of my hot neck.

  I think I knew it was freedom I sniffed on the air that day. Too it was speed and power, nothing like love. You: The tattoo is already smudged an ancient blue in the muscle of your young arm, your tattered shirt, your beard a patchy red stubble on sunburned cheeks. I hadn’t answered your bell in the afternoon. I was busy with the laundry in the basement, and it’s just as well because you were disguised as somebody unimportant, your cap tucked under one arm, like a supplicant. You arrived, I can imagine, with only your soft green duffel stowed in the bed of your old pickup.

  You rented the room with no more than a glance, a quick walk through, mostly focused on the view from the window, the firmness of the mattress, there isn’t much else. My mother waited in the doorway, jingling her ring of keys like a jailer, impatient, while curious you peered past the curtain fluff to where I am hanging the wash out to dry on the line.

  Staying long? she says.

  Depends, you say, as if she weren’t my mother, as if she were some fortyish woman who lets rooms someplace in rural Oklahoma. Maybe she once was beautiful, maybe not. She pats her bun, sensing some discomfort, clears her throat, half smiles. You half watch her, and she is just some woman in an old cotton dress, smoothing her apron like a habit. She is, in other words, no one at all.

  No smoking in the rooms, she says, retreating into ritual. No overnight guests. Forty dollars a week, in advance. Breakfast and dinner at six. You take two bills from your wallet, extend them to her between two skinny fingers. You take another long look out the window, ticking aside the curtain with one hand.

  Out in the yard I am handling the clothespins, snapping them into place. The old sheets are already drying in the sun. I feel the breeze at my back, it pokes a strand of hair into my eye, flourishes the hem of my skirt, tickles my ear like a whisper, telling me: Turn around. Something’s happening. I get only a flesh-colored flash of your face at the window before you pull back, out of sight.

  You said, Miz Johnson, I wonder if I could trouble you for a needle. I was at the stove when I got my first real look at you, a little embarrassed but cool. You held shut a rip in your shirt with one hand and held out a spool of thread with the other. You must have mistaken me for my mother, although your face showed no surprise that I was only a stand-in, too young.

  I’ve got to get this on the table, I say. Can you use a safety pin from the drawer there? I started spooning the corn out into the bowl, letting each spoonful drain off most of the water, the steam billowing up into my hot face. You lay a hand on the knob of the drawer at the end of the counter, and I watch your rough hand lightly pull open the drawer, poke some blunt fingers down into the bowl at front that holds safety pins and stray buttons, rubber bands from the papers and a nub of pencil. Your fingers fumble with the pin, and I stop to help, my hands on your warm skin, slipping a hand inside your collar to corral the torn fabric into place. I find suddenly that I am not breathing, can scarcely breathe so close to you, blush, look away. Dinner’s always at six, hands smoothing my apron, eyes on the stove, the floor, anywhere but on you.

  You’re Mr. Wilson? I’m Darcy.

  Frank. You do all the cooking?

  Since last week, yeah. Chicken’s done.

  It’s odd how careful strangers are with each other’s feelings. I cannot bring myself to pick up the phone to call Jake, to let him know what has happened. But I talk with the woman behind the checkout at the grocery, exchange ideas of the day. I wave a schoolchild across the street in front of my idling car. I smile and nod at the woman walking the dachshund on the sidewalk opposite. Careful, you said as I lifted the chicken pieces out of the oil. It’s hot.

  You took the bowls as I filled them, and I rapped on the sink window for my mother, Mother, dinner’s on. I knew she would be sitting in her apron out on the back porch, where she had stalled coming back from feeding the hens. She had the empty scrap bucket in her lap and was looking back out over the field, watching the blackbirds dive against the high sky. She looked old against that sky, vivid and bright with the slanty-eyed sun. It was coming on evening, although in the summer the sun would stay strong well past 8 P.M.

  We had five extra for dinner that night, including you, and the sound of the cutlery on plates about made me crazy. Someone’s spoon sent up a clatter dissolving sugar in his iced tea. My mother’s conversation was about the food. More pepper in the gravy. Rolls cooked too long, rise them more. Where’s the butter? You all ate fast and I scarcely listened to her for stealing looks at you. Your red hair was flattened with sweat by the band of your hat, and you kept trying to smooth it with the fingers of one hand, between bites. You ate like you couldn’t get enough, and I suppose that was something else in your favor.

  You quit that flirting, she said to me as if we were alone, and I had to fetch more biscuits from the kitchen to give my eyes something to look at.

  After supper, I went to the parlor, and you waited, bare-chested and brown, while I sewed the tear in your shirt. I had to look away when you pulled loose your shirttails and unbuttoned, as if you were revealing something that couldn’t be guessed, unlocking the quick fresh look of your skin. You had a tan line around your worn jeans, a pinched rim of white belly showing under the waistband, like the new skin, vulnerable and soft, under a Band-Aid. I hoped you wouldn’t notice my hand shaking as it snaked the needle through the fabric.

  Where’re you from?

  Here and there, you say, your eyes are skipping around the room, examining it, the magazines on the table, my mother’s little knickknacks and dustables on the shelf by the stairs. You pick up a little statue of a boy with an umbrella and turn it around and around in your hand. I can feel you sniffing about like a dog on a scent, itching to open drawers, pull back curtains, examine everything.

  You have folks?

  Up in Holcomb.

  Kansas? Not far.

  Not far enough.

  I sewed the front panel where it had come loose from the placket, tipped western style. I finish with three stitches to keep it in place, bite through the thread with my teeth, touching the fabric to my mouth like a kiss with a stranger. I could smell you in the fabric, something bittersweet, like game meat sauced with risk. I looked away again while you buttoned up, and it was as if you covered something over again between us. After you went upstairs I sat a while on the couch, considering, and your presence was like the stinger of a stepped-on bee, an echo of something long missing, of desire. I listened to the noises of doors closing and opening upstairs, to the undertow of footsteps and voices in other parts of the house, to the percussion of my mother putting away dishes in the kitchen. I listened for the noise of you entering the room above my head, and it seemed I could he
ar the squeal of your bedsprings as you laid down for a nap after supper. But perhaps I was just imagining it.

  In that house, I needed a place where no one could reach. I am in the parlor, undressing my doll Susan on the rug. Susan’s little underpants have a frill of white lace on the seat. She has a button on her belly to make her hair grow. It is winter, and the late afternoon throws blue-gray shadows over everything. I can hear them behind the swinging door to the kitchen, voices rising, then the thunder of a thrown pan, the crash of crockery. One cry and one crisp smash and I think: coffee cup. My mother’s voice, her words flying like so many pieces of a dish, against the wall behind my father. I won’t. I won’t, and I can’t, she says. Can’t you see I’ve had enough.

  It’s not right, Meredith, he says. This is the most worrisome part, the tone in his voice, like anger only cold, like something hard-edged and sharp.

  I creep to the dining room to look at the closed kitchen door. In the dim room it is lined with light, as if the sun were burning behind it, trapped and trying to get out. I am alone, and I think of all the places to hide: the window seat on the landing, the place under the porch where Sam sleeps, the closet in the third bedroom that smells of mothballs. I hold Susan to my chest and, dripping doll clothes, slip up the stairs (skip the third riser, squeak, squeak) to my room.

  Upstairs, the voices are muffled, I cannot hear the words, but I cannot shake loose of their tempo and tone. I know something bad is about to happen. Outside the clouds are shaking out rain, and I climb into the bed, making a tent of the bedspread, held up by the tent pole of my head, the edges tucked around among the pillows like a nest. I hug Susan close and breathe the warm, used air. And in the bland light seeping through the wave of the spread, I wait for whatever is to come, listening and not listening to the noise downstairs. Until much later my father cracks the door to tell me to get washed for dinner, and I find I have fallen asleep instead.