The Geometry of Love Page 8

  I’ve got something for you in my room, he says as he hikes up his pant leg in that old man’s motion and sits down on the steps again. Something real nice.

  I backed up slowly, but it was as if everything had paused for a moment, although in the window behind him I saw the curtain twitch open and then tick back into place, like a blur at the window, though perhaps it was just the breeze. When I unwrapped the candy it was bitter, like a cough drop, and I spit it out into the dirt.

  Then it was only Mr. Cooley from town. He wore a dirty old cap to protect his tender scalp and the pattern of veins made a weird lace out of the skin on his face. He spent some days in bed, and he left blobs of shaving cream flecked with hair in the sink we shared. He smelled bitterly of it and sweet with something else, as my missing father did. She said Mr. Cooley had lost his wife over the winter, but when she started getting more customers she told him he had to leave.

  You’ll have to help, she said at the beginning and squeezed me to her. Daddy’s never coming home again, and it seemed to me she said this with a secret firmness, as if that were just as well. We had three rooms on the second floor, counting mine, and two on the first floor if you count the little one, Mr. Stuart’s room, off the sleeping porch, and she slept on the first floor, in the room with the bath. She wanted to make a place in the basement as there was a shower down there, but it seemed so dampish and chill I think she gave it up for laundry.

  Take this and this, she said, handing me a couple of shadeless lamps. We were behind the curtain in the basement where some old things were stored, some boxes of Grandma’s and Grandpa’s stuff and a few pieces of furniture she didn’t like anymore. It was stacked up against the north wall, like a dam against the past, and curtained off from the laundry room with a piece of flowered cloth threaded onto a clothesline. And be careful, she said. We spent the afternoon going up and down the back stairs to the basement, carrying things each way, emptying drawers and sweeping on the second floor. She moved all the stuff from the closets, Grandma June’s old dresses in the middle bedroom closet and Grandpa Bert’s straw hat from the shelf. She took up their picture of Jesus and the old glass bottles from the bureau and shoved them into a box for the church’s secondhand shop.

  I was dragging loose the covers from the bed in the middle room when my feet went out from under me, and I fell, smack against the wood floor, the wind knocked loose of me. I lay there a moment to catch my breath, and I could see the undersides of things, all around under the bed and the dresser, the fringe of the old chenille bedspread dangling off the edge of the mattress, all of it refigured by the angle. Way back near the wall under the bed, in among the gathers of dust we had missed I could see the corner of something square, a white border. Get up, now, she said, but I scooted myself under the bed, pushing the dust around with my dress, leaving my bare feet only showing under the rim of the mattress. In the dust there was a paper, and when I pulled it into the light it was a picture of the boy who became my father. It was an old black and white, odd-sized and stained with the years. He was showing off in the backyard, his face overtaken with a grin. In the boy’s face I could see my father, as if he were waiting to come out when the boy’s back is turned. He had his shirt off and was posing, a modest Charles Atlas, his biceps pumped with youth and pride. I could see the north side of the chicken house in the background, the weedy yard around him, all of that unmarked, as if taken yesterday. The boy, though, the boy is frozen only in a moment, twenty years before. He has no idea of the years ahead, cannot think of the years behind. He cannot read the hints about how things will turn out, cannot look into the lens and see tomorrow. He can only smile at the girl (my mother?) holding the camera, and wonder perhaps, see maybe as far ahead as Saturday night and wonder will she? and smile.

  It’s Dad, I told her, and she bent down beside me on the floor, took the picture out of my hand.

  So it is, she said, squinting at the square. Now get that dust swept up, she says, dropping the photo into the waste-basket and bending to brush the dust off the front of my dress.

  But I want it, I tell her, reaching into the pile. No, she says, and brings the whisk broom down on the back of my hand as I reach for it.

  I said, young lady, get the dust out from under there. Take this, and I crawl back under the bed with the broom, rubbing the red place on my hand.

  I kept track of the wastebasket, determined to take the photo out when her back was turned, but she kept us busy, emptying out the rooms and cleaning things up. Later when she finally went downstairs to check the wash, she gathered up the trash and took it out to the scrap barrel herself. I watched from the upstairs window as she piled it into the can. She paused a moment, as if deciding, before she plucked something from the pile. I could see a flash of white as she rubbed it clean on her skirt. She stood motionless, head bowed to the thing and then chucked it into the can. When she lit the barrel, the fire flickered hot into the air, and I had the idea she stood and watched awhile as if warming herself at the flame.

  She moved beds in everywhere, even the sewing room, and stitched new white curtains out of an old sheet for the windows. We lettered a sign for the door: Rooms, $40 wk, in small, black letters and waited.

  In and out of these rooms moved mostly single men although there was that long week when the melon picker and his wife roared their terrific fights into the wall next to mine.

  Everybody smiled at the beginning, when I answered the quick ding of the bell I could tell who needed a room: Hello little girl, is your mother home? he said. He crushed a dirty cap in his hand and usually had a suitcase on the porch beside him. My mother would come out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. He started with something like: Mr. Anderson over at the plant, or Miz Cookson at the store said you had some rooms to let.

  I remember my father for the hank of hair that fell into his eyes. He had a way of flipping that hair flat-handed back across his head, a motion I have seen in his brothers, his father even. I visited his father once, in the nursing home near Enid. Ditching school, I hitched a ride from the bread man in the parking lot at Safeway. I had watched him for a while, watching the muscles in his shoulder working under his blue shirt, and I’m not sure whether I really meant to go. I asked him as he was sliding the last of the racks into the back, and he jingled his keys a moment in one big hand, considering, eyes cocked skyward. You’re the Campbells’ daughter, from over at Bakeson Road. And I said yes, yes, I was, even though I knew their daughter was grown and gone to college down in the city.

  When he said, How’s your mom? I told him she was just fine, now that she had the new leg and all but not to mention it as she was sensitive. He looked me over then as if he knew, but didn’t say anything after that. The rest of the way we rode in silence over to Enid, letting the rattling of the racks do the talking for us. He let me out in the parking lot of the nursing home and watched to make sure I went in.

  The place was all linoleum and stale smells of food and urine. I walked the gray corridor, checking the names on the wall outside each room, as if they were offices. Somebody, though, had tucked construction paper leaves behind the signs, signaling autumn in this seasonless place, where the windows were sealed shut and the hall lights admitted no daylight fluctuations. I had been there before, when I was very small and my father was alive, but it was too long ago. The woman at the desk said he was in the west wing, on the left, and I followed the rooms until found his. I stopped in the doorway, to watch him in the dim room. He was sitting in a wheelchair, motionless, looking away, and the room around him was sterile, blind to his life, as if he were anyone at all. His pajamas were rumpled, overbright, and he looked uneasy, almost liquid, in the way he sat, as if his body could pour out the legs of his pajamas. I opened my mouth to speak, but in that instant he raised one age-freckled hand to his bald forehead in my father’s flat-handed gesture, one weak motion he didn’t need but couldn’t stall. It was as if my father were there inside him, not dead but only lost to us. My father
’s face is dim in my memory, only refreshed and re-refreshed by their wedding photo, the fading black and white my mother kept tucked, frameless, in a book in the drawer by her bed.

  A moment only I froze in the corridor, watching the blue light shadowing him from the window, flashing between his bland face, emotionless, and that of my father, anguished, weeping?, and then the memory churns like smoke and turns away again. In a panic I passed on, making myself look at doors beyond, pretending I was looking not for him at all but for someone else. I smile, at a woman in a wheelchair, study the pattern on the linoleum, the place where the wall meets the floor in a scoop of plastic trim. When I reach the end of the corridor I push my way out into the fresh sunlight, the gravel parking lot, and escape.

  I remember my father sitting on a chair in the kitchen, his slender legs crossed, reading the paper. He was eating breakfast, and the smoke from his waiting cigarette rose in rings from the saucer. I remember my father as he sat on the high seat of the tractor, grinding his way down the row, the disc kicking up a cloud behind him. I remember my father on the couch, lying unmoved by the staticky scramble of the television news, talking to himself. I am a small pajamaed bundle sitting on the landing, as my mother wearily turns off the set. She stands a moment looking at him, her hands on her hips, and says only this: drunk. One hand goes to her eyes, briefly, as if to shade them from the sight, and then she bends to take him in a sort of embrace, his arms over her shoulders, his body dangling without strength, his socked feet dragging heels. In this way she carries him to the downstairs bedroom, and the door swings shut behind them.

  I am waiting for things to snowball, those things I know and can predict to fill the house of my life, to obscure my view of other things. I sit at the breakfast table eating my Cheerios with milk, and reading the paper, a book, the cereal box, without distinction soaking up facts to fill my landscape. I sometimes take the bus to work because it means I can use my eyes to follow the words on the page, to examine the lay of the light on the passing landscape, to watch the faces of the passengers around me, comatose with the effort of proximity. I play a radio at the club or talk to customers. I listen to the click of the balls in back, eavesdrop, anything. Sometimes I prop the front door open with a brick and listen to the traffic sounds on the street out front, counterpoint to the sizzle of meat on the grill, the wheeze of the overhead fan. The voices and sounds sing and speak to me until I go home filled to the brim with words and sounds and smells.

  I want everything to be known and knowable, until surprise has to come flying in over the mountains on wings strong enough to travel long and high.

  I have watched you often enough, sitting at the end of the counter at the club, looking into your mostly empty glass and waiting for me to get off work. In time I can almost forget you are there, you are so quiet and still, not a flicker of interest in your body. All the life in you I can detect is the twitch of your face toward me when you hear me talking to a customer, a man on the third stool, inquires about the weather, Hot enough for you? I pull a Coke for him, and when your face swivels toward mine it looks almost raw but with what, with what?

  My mother is sitting at a picnic table with the other mothers in my class. She is eating potato salad out of the bowl, testing everyone’s cooking with one licked finger. The mothers are all unloading bowls and platters, and she has brought her fried chicken; she picks at a loose fried bit. The spring has turned hot, and the school picnic has been set up in the speckled, buzzing shade of the cottonwoods in the little roadside park where the creek snakes into town. The ground around the tables is pounded hard, weedless, dusty. I can hear the mothers’ conversation like the lyrics of a song over the fresh harmony of children’s laughter. I am drawn to her, cannot pull myself out of her orbit. I hug her leg, pressing my face against her curtained thigh, but she pushes me off, Too hot, too hot for that, she says, with a laugh. When I want to linger she pushes me off with one hand, leaving a smudge of potato salad on my arm. Go on and play, now, she says, impatient. It was at the very start of things happening, and I remember Alice’s face, its sideways look, like suspicion. She was cool to me in school in those days, poking along the rocks by the creek, stepping from stone to stone in her buckled shoes. The soles of her shoes were smooth and hard and so the angles of the rock faces tilted her this way and that, like some changeable thing. I stood awhile, watching her, waiting for her to notice me, but she didn’t look up, gave me only as much invitation as that slippery look of her eyes, aslant, then turned her back on me. I stepped up onto the rocks but this only herded her on closer to the creek, where the rocks were smaller and some of them wet.

  What’re you doing? I asked the back of her head.

  I can’t play with you, she said, turning only to look past me, back at the group of mothers, picking out her own and mine, sitting apart from one another. And Alice went on up, down, on the rocks until those hard soles betrayed her, she slipped, plunk into the brown water, wetting her shoe and the rim of her white anklet. Her mother called Alice, you get away from there now, and she looked a little ashamed, hopping as if she’d hurt that wet foot and ran on down the bank to join the other kids.

  I crossed on the stones and went on down the bank parallel to her, but not with her. A little later Emmitt sprayed me with the opening spritz of a shaken can of root beer, and I chased him until I got close enough to tackle him, both of us laughing, my fingers batting at the fringes of his clothes, and him darting another way, all speed and motion, until I got a hold on the back of his shirt and brought him down. Once I had him on the ground I couldn’t figure out what to do, could only pull him up and chase him again.

  Later my mother will pry me loose from the game of Red Rover we have gotten up, and the two of us will drive home over all the back roads, her platter of chicken bouncing on the car seat between us, inexplicably untouched. I remember Mrs. Bryant saying to Alice, No dear. Take some of this, and holding out to her a spoonful of franks and beans. Alice takes it on her plate and looks back at me with that sideways look, again.

  I used to lie awake at night and listen to you breathing in the bed beside me, happy for the company, listening as if to read the words you form with your breath, as if to slide into your lungs with the air and find you embedded in the dark, damp place you hold inside. I remember the nights in my mother’s house alone upstairs, straining to hear the sounds downstairs, once in awhile finding the sound of the television, a brief bar of music, a snatch of dialogue, the hum of the sewing machine, later the wheeze of bedsprings under tired men or their nicotine coughs, anything to tell me I wasn’t alone in the world, but you sleep with your back to me, curve yourself away to keep it safe.

  Your face comes to me in dreams, hard-edged and angry, and, too, I remember the feeling of your hands on me, of the needy motion of your hands, the weight of your body, skin on skin. With your arms you shelter my face, your mouth on mine.

  I was taking the eggs in the hen house, we kept a dozen or so laying hens and a bantam rooster that strutted around the yard proudly, like something that didn’t have long curvy feathers on its feet.

  I was reaching up under each hen, shooing them sometimes, or slipping a hand into that soft, warm place hunting around for eggs to put in the bowl I carried. I talked to them as I worked, and they looked at me in a hen’s jerky, curious way, tilting their heads to examine me with the black beads of their eyes, as if they didn’t know me at all. It was meringue pie day and I needed a dozen or so eggs. I scarcely heard you coming, only the rooster, little Charlie, squawking his displeasure as you shoved him aside with the arch of your boot. I watched you coming, although by the time you reached the coop your busy manner had dissolved into idleness, an act.

  You do this, too? you said. You going to milk the cow next?

  What cow? I said, impatient.

  Well, you don’t have to be that way. I’m just here to keep you company. You slipped a hand into the nearest nest. The bird, unsettled, pecked at your arm, and I laughed.
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  Your hand was suddenly tight on my arm, your face angry. Don’t laugh, that hurt, but your face softened, the hand has pulled me in close to you, close to a kiss on my upturned face.

  Quick now, I said. Mama’s waiting.

  I felt the look on your face all over my body. I could scarcely breathe, pinched between you and the nesting rail, suddenly sharing space, warmth, breath. Your body pressed along the length of mine, one hand cradling my arched back, anchoring me against you, one hand on my face. You paused, as if deciding, looking into my face. When you kissed me I could taste the breakfast I had cooked, as if a dowry to this moment.

  Later in the hall you slipped a hand up under my blouse to cradle one breast with your cold fingers, a sudden intimacy, before I could push you away.

  It became a game with us. Me at the stove, and you come in behind, talking, looking at supper cooking. When I bend to take the biscuits up you press your hard groin against my backside, one arm around my waist. I threaten you with the hot pan or elbow your muscled stomach, Quit you. I’ve no time for that.

  Lying in bed watching the moon come in through my window I can still feel the pressure of your hand on my breast, your stubbly cheek against my face, your kiss is answered somewhere inside me, like a door opening. This feeling is something I’ve been waiting for, like a train, and I’ve been standing on the platform such a long time, all my life. It is desire, like a hank of hair falling loose, unplaited at last.

  I can feel my heart pounding, too, and the little door of my bedroom answers it with an unaccustomed rattle, as if someone were outside, testing it, teasing the hook and eye, although it is probably only the wind breathing on its threaded way through the house. I cannot hear the soft footsteps on the stairs below, the closing of your door. In time I fall asleep.