A Private State: Stories (9 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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Page 52
was one of Naomi's great worries. These days, she muttered about chapped, terse northerners and tried to set herself apart with foamy scarves. A boost to her blondness hadn't hurt, either. On Sunday, we'd performed the season's first tinting, an afternoon of busy quiet, slicing lemon after lemon, squeezing out the straw-colored meat on the cone of the juicer.
I wet my head at the tap and waited for the juice to find the slightest scratch. It coursed, thicker than seawater around ears, along the nape. My eyes smarted and ran and salt mixed with sour in the corners of my mouth. It never worked. My hair, the color of tea, insisted on its plainness, but Naomi got all kinds of silky highlights.
With our scalps on fire in a watery way, we wrapped our heads in towels and leafed through catalogs. Naomi admired a wicker birdcage. I showed her a gadget of steel that hid a fistful of tools useful in disasters. If we hadn't just doused ourselves in lemon, our splits in taste might have spoiled the mood. But the catalogs, the cool room, the turban slipping from my pulpy headthe whole thing edged us as close as we ever got to calm. Shivering for beauty in the presence of my odd and pretty mother, I felt for a few moments as delicately modeled as the handle of a bone-china pitcher.
Part of the spell was silence, but on Sunday Naomi put down Nordstrom's summer circular, looked at me and said, "I'm thinking about cutting it all off."
"What?" I said, "Your hair?" I didn't believe her. Naomi without long hair would be like the Venus de Milo with arms. Wrong.
"It weighs me down," she said. I waited, very cautious. Mostly,
this
was how I saw Naomi: slinging forks and spoons in separate slots, shifting lanes on highways. She never paused to confide. Then she went back to Nordstrom's and we slipped into our usual state of not being at all sure where the other person stood.
This was why it helped to touch things like trees and fences, which usually stayed where they were put. I realized then I'd
 
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wandered past downtown. My hand was curled around the sign-pole that marked Sheepscot Street, home of the Dusseaults, an older couple from Québec. We'd spoken a few times, though our shaky holds on one another's language often kept us in the realm of mime. Mr. Dusseault's passion was splitting logs. Un, deux, trois, I heard tonight. He counted when he cut. Madame's linens snapped on the line. Where was she? It being Tuesday, probably Lewiston, visiting her sister, a habit I'd learned about on my last visit.
Then a bug zapper flared next door and I knew the real reason my feet had taken me here. Jake and his father lived one house down from the Dusseaults. My fingers wound into a yew bush, I looked for signs that they were home. But the house looked empty. Jake was pulled to other places, too, if I understood his landscapes in the margins of the math book, all thatched huts and men playing minute guitars. I could have told him to give his palms less bounce. If he'd been curious, we could even have talked about our year in L.A., where we'd lived close to a weak spot in the earth's crust. But there was never an opening, and I was much better at imagined conversations than actual ones. I wasn't even sure he knew my name.
I was about to turn back when I heard laughter on the screened porch. It was a porch like ours but larger, with a sofa and a radio playing jazz, scratchy after coming from somewhere further south. After a moment, I recognized Mr. Loiseau. His voice was so relaxed it took a second to connect it to a man who had to prevent the reckless use of Bunsen burners. Then it struck me that I knew the other voice as well, also at a pitch I didn't often hear. In the zapper's flash, I saw Mr. Loiseau's hands were twined into a woman's. I'd heard the voice. It had to be Naomi, but she was letting someone touch her.
Mr. Dusseault's ax rang, and apart from the thud of metal on wood all my mind could hold was a picture of the Doctor calling for her as he drained a beer can hollow. I was stumbling into the
 
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street when a scream went up. Mr. Dusseault was darting around his yard. He raced to his wife's laundry line and grabbed with one hand at a towel. He was moaning now and I saw the flush of blood on the white cloth. ''Mother of God," I heard Naomi say. "He's chopped off part of his hand." She stood up, leaving Mr. Loiseau to stare while Mr. Dusseault tore back to his logs, scrabbling on the ground.
"The poor bastard's looking for it," said Mr. Loiseau. That was when they both saw me. The next thing I remembered I was in Naomi's car holding a towel stuffed with ice and what was left of a thumb, still speckled with pine needles. Naomi told Mr. Dusseault to shut up or else he'd make the bleeding worse. I don't think he understood because he yelled "Ma sainte mère" the whole way to the hospital. I sat in the back, a stream of cold sliding down my thigh, too thin to be anything but melting ice.
Inside St. Dympna's, I saw that spots of red had spattered Naomi's shirt, buttoned askew. Then my father rushed into the waiting room. "Naomi?" he said. As a student he'd burned up yards on playing fields, football curled to his ribs, dodging from men the shape of sides of beef. We watched his old movies sometimes and he'd shake his head, smiling slightly. Tonight, hurtling toward my mother, he looked unnerved and tired. I ran to him and pushed the bundle of Mr. Dusseault's finger into his hands. He cradled it to his chest, as if it were a precious, broken toy.
All kinds of people came blinking into the
E.R.
, bent into their particular hurts. I tried to coil myself into the plastic chair, but I'd grown too tall. Then I saw my parents. "Let's go," my father said. In the car, Naomi didn't bother with the seat belt, but the Doctor didn't seem to notice. "Couldn't save the finger," he said to the windshield. "A bad cut.'' Then silence fell, that terrible kind, where nothing is said but everything that's thought moves sharp and fast. I couldn't have spoken anyway. I felt like I'd swallowed
 
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a pot of paste, as if, inside my throat, all the words had hardened to a clear and solid plug.
They waited 'til I'd shut my door for the night. From my bed, I heard shouts shatter in the kitchen. "Tell her to leave," I thought to my pillow, my voice still glued inside my body. I kept imagining her with Mr. Loiseau and was glad my father hadn't heard the curl of their voices, the pleasure.
"I'll do anything you want," he yelled. "What do you want, Naomi?"
"I don't know," she yelled back.
Smelling yew bush on my fingers, I imagined our house on fire, my parents beating at hot panes of glass. Scared at how clearly I could see this, I went to take a shower and made it as icy as I could stand it. Through the sheets of cold, I could still hear them.
The next morning, I walked gingerly through the house as if I were frightened of dislodging something. At school, it was nearly a relief to stare at an old map of the Soviet Union still whole. Science didn't meet today; I could cut math. Then in the midst of the year's last French test, things started to fall apart. Slapping at one of my first black flies, I realized I almost liked Maine. I liked the smell of pine and on windy days, ocean. I liked the drafty house and the row of spruce that lined the fence. I liked knowing Madame went to Lewiston on Tuesdays. It could have been home. In every blank, I wrote in large clear letters "merde."
In history, where we'd just emerged from Gettysburg, I thought that if we stayed, I might acquire an accent. Looking at my classmates, I thought I might acquire friends. I might have had conversations that went beyond "Mr. Feiken is such a dork" or "cool shoes." We listened to Mr. Lincoln's speech. So little, such an echo. I decided to go further. Not a single word at all. Nothing until they agreed to stay.
I'd never spoken much; it got you so involved. I was already tall and didn't need to draw more notice to myself. My thoughts were
 
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loud, but when I spoke, the noise seemed like a small rip in the silence. Not talking would mean sealing the quiet off, keeping it whole. Thinking of Jake and how much grace he could capture merely flipping to the next chapter in math, I decided to go further, to do without writing.
I left school early and went to the Purity Supreme, where the only lemons for sale were the sort Naomi never chose for tintings, lesser creatures, small and tough. I bought nine, the number of states that at one time or another we'd called home.
They were sitting at the kitchen table. The Doctor said, "Chloe," like he was surprised to see me. As if I'd been dropped fully formed into his life, instead of having been there all along, his child from the start. Naomi was peering at her fingers and seemed amazed they were still whole.
I put my sack of bad lemons on the counter and pulled out the cutting board. Slicing the first one into quarters, my hand shook. I took a wedge in each fist. Naomi still stared at her fingers. I put a lemon between my lips and bit hard. Pure acid washed my gums, my mouth pouched with a pool of spit. I swallowed, slick seeds and all. A shiver sang down my neck and spine. I slid another wedge between my teeth.
"What are you doing?" my father said. Naomi finally glanced up. I finished the first lemon and carved the next in fours. "What's going on?" the Doctor said.
"Stop it, Chlo," said Naomi. "Stop it, honey," she said.
But I had eight more to go. Chalky roughness coated my teeth, and I was getting used to the sour spray, the shiver of the cloudy acid. I felt cleaner than soap had ever made me, clean from inside. I couldn't stop. Juice sank into papercuts. My eyes streamed. I took bite after bite, cut lemon after lemon until thirty-six quarters lay like cramped yellow smiles on the red counter.
My parents just stared at me until Naomi finally said, "I'm sorry, baby," and went upstairs. Two days later, she was gone. No one noticed I wasn't talking. There wasn't much to say when you
 
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saw your father wrap your mother's pearls in chamois cloth. Or twitch a hair from her collar just to have a chance to touch her.
She was going to her mother in Omaha. Before, Naomi said "Nebraska" like she'd escaped from a prison but not without a cost. Now it was the only safe place. She pressed against me a few seconds, chin sharp on my collarbone. I was taller now and she had to reach to stroke my hair.
"Naomi's got some things to work out," the Doctor said as we watched her plane take off. He clapped me on the back so hard I nearly choked. He didn't notice 'til that night I wasn't speaking. "What's wrong here?" he asked when I refused to discuss my bad grade in French. We were at dinner, picking at omelets. I didn't think my body could say everything quite yet, so I wrote on a prescription pad that I wouldn't speak until he said we wouldn't leave here. I couldn't move again, and I underlined "move" twice. He started to cry. I couldn't eat eggs for a long time after that. At the sight of one, even whole and brown, I'd remember the jiggle of the salt shaker as his crying shook the table.
A week before Independence Day, the Loiseaus took off. I overheard Mrs. Marcotte say they were out West, as if it were a slightly criminal destination. Leaving Maine was suspect. When Naomi'd flown away, we'd found sacks of beans and carrots at our door, though neither of us ate a lot that summer.
The Doctor was too busy mending careless tourists. When he realized I really wouldn't tell him what I'd done all day, he'd grab Louis to show me which bones he'd helped to save that shift. Once he went inside to shower, I'd settle back inside of being quiet.
At night, I lay in bed and listened to the spirals of sound the crickets made. To the crunch of my father's feet on the gravel when he came home late and the suck of rubber on the icebox door as he opened it in search of beer. I'd keep an ear tuned to my body's own invisible flow and listen to my bones click longer.
I also nursed a superstition: if I ended my silence, Naomi would
 
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come back too soon and it would all start over. It was good to have a break. For once, the Doctor wasn't looking for a job and I appreciated my stillness, though I knew that when Naomi returned, she'd whirl through the house, banishing all signs that time had passed and we had settled. She'd start angling for a fresh start, scared, it seemed, of turning into a woman who just stayed and aged in one place. But for now, the house was ours. Even so, all the way from Omaha, I felt her watching as I made small moves to hunker in.
Despite the Doctor, we didn't own a first-aid kit. I went to town with a long list, but got distracted in the pharmacy by the loops of fake hair stapled to boxes on the shampoo shelves. Mocha and ginger, cinnamon and midnight. Tintings weren't dyes, Naomi insisted, they were enhancements. She called hair coloring shatteringly tacky. But what they were was gorgeous.
Then I spotted Mr. Dusseault in the aisle whose sign said Seasonal Values. I hadn't seen him since the amputation and tried to duck behind conditioners, but I was too tall. He raised his bad hand and ambled to my section. "Bonjour," he said, then pointed to a box labeled "Everyone Loves Scarlet." I lifted it high, waggled it in the air and dropped it in my basket. Silence made my gestures bigger, but Mr. Dusseault didn't notice. This was mostly how we spoke anyway. He smiled and invited me to visit.
I could tell he felt Naomi and I had rescued him. We were simply there, I could have said, and not in savory circumstances, but he knew that, and still he wanted me to come. It was a bond, I allowed, holding someone's severed finger.
Over milky tea, I learned he and Madam were from a village in the far north of the province. They showed me on a map. Their French rushed like cold water over big stones. We played rummy on a scarred table under a tree and Monsieur won, which he enjoyed. They didn't seem to care I didn't say a word.
Some of my happiest times had been with neighbors who didn't

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