Circle of Three (10 page)

“So do you want to hear about my new job?”

“Absolutely.” He pushed his plate away and put his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. Mom got up and started running water over the dirty dishes and puttering. “What’s it called again? I’ve seen the store but I’ve never been inside.”

“The Mother Earth Palace and Natural Healing Salon. It’s far more than a health food store, we provide many other services.”

“Such as.”

“Well, for instance, we do biological terrain assessments. That’s a saliva, blood, and urine test you can get to figure out your terrain, your baseline, biologically. We also do hair analysis, we do iridology, which is studying the eye, the iris, to see if you have a disease. Krystal does that, she’s certified as an iridologist and also a reflexologist, and right now she’s getting her craniosacral certificate.”

“So you’re liking this job.”

“I love it. I’m learning so much. Krystal’s letting me set up this aromatherapy, like, spa in the back of the store, where you can come in and lie down and smell soothing essences, which can change your whole outlook. This way you don’t have to buy them all yourself, the different aromas, you can just take a treatment when you need it. You should try it.”

“Krystal—she’s the boss?”

“She owns it. You don’t know her? Krystal Bukowski?”

“I don’t think so.”

“She’s a native, I thought maybe you knew her. She’s younger than you, though. She’s great. She lives over the store in an apartment. She heats it with a woodstove. She’s got three cats, and she has boyfriends who crash there sometimes. She’s a vegetarian, but she’s trying to be a vegan, which is not eating any animal products at all, not even milk, not even butter. She’s teaching me to do transformational breath, because sometimes I can get really, like, hyper and it can calm you down, just breathing correctly. What I like about her is that she cuts through the crap, she goes right to the center of stuff, right to what’s important, and it isn’t school or studying or taking the college boards.”

“No?”

“No, it’s living in the moment. Living a gentle life that doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s moving along a spiritual path like a butterfly, disturbing nothing in creation, leaving no destruction
in your wake. And treating God’s universe with the utmost respect and love and delicacy.”

Jess nodded thoughtfully. “Those are good goals. Can’t argue with a single one.”

“And of course it all starts with yourself, taking care of the body, which if you think about it is the only thing you have any control over anyway. Say, for example, you can take EDTA, which is a chelate, and it purifies your bloodstream of lead and mercury, which you probably have and don’t even know. Oral chelation, this is called. I’m taking it, and I can feel a difference already in one month. So—there’s all this stuff we can do, everybody should do. To keep ourselves well.”

Wow, I was talking a lot. For some reason Jess touched me on my hand. I smiled, and he said, “It would be nice.”

“What would?”

“If we could control things. Take a pill to make our lives work out.”

I pulled my hand away. “That’s not what I mean. I know we can’t do that.” Did he think I was stupid? “I’m just saying. There’s something for everything if you know what it is. You should just come into the store sometime.”

“I will.”

“Because we have everything. You don’t have to put up with all the stuff that happens to you. Take dry skin—which you have on your hands, I notice, along with damaged nails.” He looked down at his hands. “And this is just a for instance, the first thing that comes to my mind. Okay, we have Miracle 2000, made of collagen protein and grape-seed extract, and this can prevent and repair aging skin, hair loss, and damaged nails while increasing strength, endurance, and joint flexibility. Many customers have given written testimonials. I’m not making this stuff up.”

“No. No.”

“I’m just saying we can take action. We don’t have to be so passive.”

“Want some more hot chocolate?”

“No, thank you. You can lose weight while you sleep—we’ve got Night Slim, a blend of chromium, lipotropics, and special amino acids that break down fats while you sleep. Okay, you wouldn’t need that, but what about mucus? Did you know death begins in the colon?”

“Ruth,” Mom said from the sink, “did you want to take the car for a very short drive?”

“By myself?” I scraped my chair getting up.

“Will this work, Jess? I don’t want her on any public roads. Back roads only, and just on your property. And someplace where there aren’t any ditches.”

So I got to drive by myself! First time, and it was way cool even though the road was windy and bumpy so of course I couldn’t speed or anything. But just being by myself made it worth it, nobody watching my every move, telling me to start slowing down, turn on my signal, do this, do that. God, I cannot
wait
to get my license. How can I hold out for seven more months before my real life starts?

But when I got back, something was up. Mom and Jess were on the front porch with their coats on, and before I could even get out of the car she came over and got in on the passenger side. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Say thank you to Jess, honey, and let’s go. It’s getting late, he’s got cows to milk.”

“Did you have a fight?”

“No, no, everything’s fine.”

No, it wasn’t, she was upset about something. Jess came over and put his hands on the door on my side, leaning in the window. He looked sad, too.
I leave for fifteen minutes,
I thought,
and look what happens
. The dogs were circling the car, looking confused. “Well,” I said. “’Bye, Jess. Thanks, I had a really nice time.”

“Me, too. Come back soon.” He looked across at Mom.

“Jess—I’m sorry.”

“For what, Carrie?”

She waved her fingers in the air, giving this gulping laugh. “Being a mess. All my fault. I’ll see you—come on, Ruth.”

“Okay, okay.” The motor was still running. Jess stood straight and backed up. When he clapped his hands, all the dogs got away from the car and ran to him. I took off the emergency brake, shifted into D, and stepped on the accelerator. The car lurched forward with a screech—I jammed on the brake. Mom grabbed at the glove compartment. Whiplash.

I looked back at Jess, who was trying not to laugh. That made me laugh. Then Mom laughed! All of a sudden I felt giddy and happy, everything was so
great
. I almost gave Jess the finger! Instead I thumbed my nose, and he waved and sent me a big, tickled grin as we zoomed away.

“God, that was great, I had the best time.”

“I did, too.” Her nose was all stopped up; she sounded like she had a cold.

“So what happened?”

“Nothing happened.

“Come
on
.”

“Nothing, really, I just got sad for some reason.”

“Did Jess say something?”

“
No
. Yes—he asked me how I was doing. That’s all it took.” She laughed again, but I saw her squirrel a tissue out of her coat pocket and wipe her face.

“Shit. Are you crying?”

“No, I’m not, and don’t say shit to me.”

“Sorry. Mom?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” She flapped her hand. Then she buried her face in the Kleenex and stayed that way.

The country, the low hills and brown fields and whitish sky that had been pretty before, now they just looked cold and dead. I counted telephone poles, dotted yellow lines, bare trees. Shit, shit, shit, shit. I don’t think this is ever going to end. Can grief last for a person’s whole life? I
thought she was better, I thought the job was helping. “I don’t know what to do,” I said under my breath, too soft for her to hear.

“Hey, Mom?”

She sat up and started fixing herself, blowing her nose, wiping her eyes. “What?”

I had my Walkman in the nylon duffel I’m using for a purse these days. I found it at the bottom after some one-handed fumbling. “Put the earphones on.” Good, the tape was wound right, I saw. “It’s the first song. Press ‘play’ and listen to the first song. Listen to the words.”

“What is it?”

“Just listen. It’s a song.”

Jeez. It took her forever to figure out how the earplugs went in her ears, which button to press, how to work the volume.
It’s not brain surgery,
I wanted to say, but smart talk right now would’ve hurt her feelings.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Belle. She used to be with the Storm Sewer Troupers. This is her first solo album.”

“Belle?”

“Shh, just listen.”

“I can’t hear the words.”

“Turn it up higher.”

More dorky fumbling, then finally I heard the high, tinny crash of music over the car’s engine drone. The chorus is the best part.

And then the ghostly harmonies she does with herself
, Ah-eeeeee, oh don’t go, oh-weeeeee, stay in my soul,
over and over in that achy voice that goes straight to your heart,
right to the marrow of your bones. It gives me chilly bumps.

“It’s about getting over the pain of losing somebody,” I explained. “She’s saying they’re not really gone as long as you can remember them.”

Mom nodded slowly. She had her eyes closed again, but now she was smiling. In fact, she looked like she was going to laugh.

Belle is so great. She’s better than therapy.

S
TEPHEN AND I
met in a bar. Not very romantic, but I was so intrigued by what I took for his tense, brooding aloneness, I freighted our first meeting with the dark romance of a Brontë novel. It was Washington, the summer of 1981. I was twenty-three, living in Logan Circle, beginning to despair that I would ever be an artist—prophetically, as it turned out. He was in graduate school at Georgetown; a math student. If I’d known that when I saw him in Rainy’s, a hot, grungy tavern on M Street, I might not have found his melancholy so irresistible. I took him for an artist or a writer, for childish reasons: his intensity, the way he held his cigarette, the fact that he never spoke but wouldn’t stop staring at me.

I was with women friends, my housemates in a roach-infested duplex on Fifteenth Street. The hot-eyed stares, eventually mutual, went on until I seized the initiative, something I wasn’t accustomed to doing with men, particularly strange ones in bars. I didn’t smoke, but I did drink; that night I drank enough chardonnay to make slipping a cigarette from my friend’s pack of Winstons, taking it over to Stephen’s barstool, and asking for a light seem, if not quite natural, inevitable.

I remember the first thing he said to me. “Can you get away?” Such thrilling directness. I loved the implication
under it that we were fated, that we’d both just been waiting. We only went for coffee in a café up the street, but I’d have done more—probably anything he wanted. It was a long time before I understood that his heated concentration on me, his rapt, flattering regard, was as much an illusion as my cigarette.

I wonder if I tolerate Raven, Ruth’s friend, because I know so well what attracts her to him. It’s that same fascinating otherness, the romantic loner persona, that attracted me to Stephen—and before him, of course, to Jess. How clever women are at self-deception; we swallow whole the stories we’ve already told ourselves.

Stephen drew me as well because of the otherness of what he
knew
. He read books with titles like
P-Resolutions of Cyclic Quotient Singularities,
and I never understood a single thing he told me about them. I liked to hear him talk, even though he might as well have been explaining a concerto to a deaf woman. I ceded to him most of the power in our relationship because I thought he was a genius. I took his silences and abstraction for depth, evidence of realms of knowledge I could never enter, much less comprehend. And I was so restless in those days, easily sidetracked, unable to apply myself to my various art projects—no doubt because I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t think he loved math more than I loved art, but he had intensity and focus and I didn’t. I envied him.

He was a formal man, even a little straitlaced, and I found I enjoyed trying to seduce him in inappropriate places. I surprised him one afternoon in his carrel at the university library, and he started telling me about the formula or the problem he was working on. As usual it made no sense—but his attention to it, his absolute passion for it, excited me. Or maybe they made me jealous. I remember squeezing onto the edge of his desk, using his body and the carrel partitions for a shield, and unbuttoning my blouse, undoing my bra. He was angry, shocked, determined not to respond. But I made him. I could take him out of himself, and that made me
feel strong—I got some of the power back that way, I thought. We made love standing up behind the stacks that day, and it wasn’t the only time. I relished making Stephen lose control. I honestly thought it made us even.

I’ve been thinking about what sex was like later, after we were married. And what it means that I don’t miss it very much now. I know a lot of me has gone dead inside, but it’s more than that. Toward the end it was just sex, not much closeness, usually not even kissing. Toward the end? No, that’s not true, it started earlier. When Ruth was little. So I don’t miss it much. Or—no more than I ever did.

Something funny about Stephen. He always came up from behind to hold me or touch me. He would hardly ever put his arms around me from the front, kiss me on my mouth, my face. It was always from behind, pressing against my back, nuzzling my neck, my cheek. Sex was different—he could and did make love in the face-to-face position—but for everyday, standing-up, fully clothed affection, he literally couldn’t face me.

I hadn’t been lying to Ruth that afternoon at Jess’s; I honestly wasn’t sure what had set me off, made me red-eyed and teary again. The usual, I suppose: an excess of emotion and a loose cap on it, combined with too much sensitivity where Jess was concerned. I was like a garden hose shut off at the nozzle, and he was the hot sun: prolonged exposure caused ruptures.

I’d had such a nice time until then, drinking tea in his kitchen, half listening to Ruth’s rambling monologues. Meeting shy, shambling Landy after so many years and remembering why I’d always been fond of him. Just being at Jess’s farm in the winter quiet, everything fallow, gray, utterly still, smell of woodsmoke in the air. For once, with Jess, I felt relaxed, no forbidden attraction, no push-pull. No guilt.

Then Ruth went for a drive and left us by ourselves. I finished the dishes, and stared out the kitchen window at the
white, hilly line of a fence in the distance. “Is it snowing?” I said, and Jess came over to stand beside me. I thought I’d seen snowflakes, but he said no, it was ash; Mr. Green was burning brush today behind one of the barns. We gazed out at the occasional drifting speck, hip to hip, not speaking until he said, “Remember the first time you talked to me, Carrie? A snowy day. Eleventh grade—remember?”

I said yes, I remembered, and it struck me that there was something we had never done together: we’d never reminisced. The circumstances of our separation had cut off the possibility of nostalgia, at least the mutual kind. The truth was, I longed to tell Jess what I remembered best, what had stayed with me all through the years, and to hear him say what had meant the most to him.

“I remember what you had on,” he said, standing a little away from me on purpose—to make the conversation seem casual. “A red coat with a hood. Plaid hood. And boots—you made me think of folk songs. Spanish leather.”

“I thought you were wild,” I said. “I was afraid to speak to you. I’d heard so many stories.” He smiled, but it was true; by eleventh grade, Jess was famous for climbing the Cherry Street water tower to impress a girl, for almost drowning trying to swim across the Leap River on a dare. The best story was that he’d read about an Indian healing ceremony for casting out devils, and performed it himself,
nude and in the rain,
for the benefit of his crazy mother. A wild boy.

“But you did speak to me,” he said. “I remember what you said.”

“Not much. As I recall.” I recalled it perfectly. Over the Christmas holidays, his mother had died in a fire at Brookner’s, the psychiatric facility in Culpeper where she’d been a resident off and on for years. I’d heard the news in homeroom, along with excited whispers that there were
suspicious circumstances
. Had she set the fire herself? Had she meant to burn the place down or just commit suicide? Overnight, Jess Deeping became an even more interesting character. His mother’s sensational death seemed suitable
somehow, in hindsight, maybe even predictable. It was so much the sort of thing people had come to expect from him.

The kids who knew him were gentle with him in a shy, awkward way, while the kids who didn’t stared at him covertly, fascinated. I was one of the latter. I saw him waiting for his bus outside, by himself on a bench by the concrete walk that led to the school parking lot. Everyone else was either inside, crammed against the fogged-up glass doors in the vestibule, or huddled against the wind under the shallow eaves outside, puffing on forbidden cigarettes. Reserved, standoffish, especially around solitary boys I didn’t know, I can’t say what made me sidle away from my gaggle of laughing girlfriends and go outside to speak to Jess. His aloneness, I suppose. A sadness that hung around him like a coat. I went to him full of trepidation, breathless from my own daring, but with a vague sense that the inevitable was about to happen. I do remember that—it’s not retrospective romanticizing. I really did think, crunching my way across the crusty snow in my new boots,
About time
.

He watched me come with a deepening frown; once he even looked over his shoulder to see what else, besides him, I could possibly be headed for. His hair and his shoulders and his thighs were all white from snow. He must be freezing, I thought, with nothing but a hooded sweatshirt, not even zipped up. I stopped in front of him. “Hi,” we both said. He sat up straighter when it was clear I wasn’t passing by, I meant to stay and speak to him. His sharp knees poked out under the worn denim of his jeans. In my sixteen years, I had never seen anything as male as Jess Deeping’s long legs.

I’m sorry about your mother
—that was my only message, the sole purpose for my nerve-stretching trek through the snow, but now I couldn’t get the words out. My hand closed around a pack of gum in my coat pocket. I drew it out and offered it to him. Up close, his face wasn’t as slick and handsome as I’d thought; I could see flaws, pimples on his chin, a patch of beard he’d missed shaving. One eyebrow arched slightly higher than the other, making him look skeptical or
reckless. The nails of his big, dry, cold-reddened hands were chewed down to the quick.
Oh,
I thought,
he’s not for me
, and I felt relieved and disappointed.
He’s just a boy
. Then his mouth went wide in a sad, surprised smile, and that was it. A click in the brain. Yes.

“Thanks.” Delicately, he pulled a silver stick of Wrigley’s from the pack. He looked at it a moment, then slipped it in his sweatshirt pocket. These memories are so vivid to me. I feel the wet snow on my cheeks, I can almost smell spearmint.

A gust of wind rocked me. “It’s cold,” I said.

He looked away, beyond my shoulder. “Here comes your bus.”

Damn, I thought, watching it lumber up the narrow lane to the turnaround. Under the dismay, my heart skipped—
he knows my bus number
. “I’m sorry you lost your mother,” I said quickly. And Jess’s eyes filled with tears. I was covered with embarrassment. I felt feverish, then freezing. I stared at my feet, sick with distress, in over my head.

“She didn’t kill herself,” he said. He didn’t hide his face—crying didn’t embarrass him at all. When tears spilled down his cheeks, he swiped them off with the heel of his hand.

“She didn’t?”

“No. She didn’t, she was better, she was almost ready to come home again. She was smoking a cigarette in bed.”

“Oh.”

“That’s how it happened.”

“Oh.”

I glanced back at the knot of students queuing up to get on the bus, gauging how many more seconds I could stay before I had to make a run for it. “If my mother died…” But I couldn’t imagine it. “I don’t know, I don’t know what I’d do.”

He had a two-stage smile. The first was pained and gallant, a hero’s grimace; it came an instant before the real, glad, natural smile. It made him look as if he knew the world
was a sad and tricky place, but he was in love with it anyway. “You just do what you always do,” he said. “Only it’s not as good anymore.”

“Yeah. God, Jess.” Just saying his name made me dizzy. “I have to go now.” He kept his face alert, animated, but I thought, as soon as I was gone, it would sink back into that sadness I’d startled him out of. I didn’t want to go. The last two kids climbed into the school bus and disappeared. “I can’t,” I said, although he hadn’t asked me anything, and ran.

A coward even then.
Why did you miss your bus
? my mother would have wanted to know, and already I had misgivings about explaining Jess, anything about Jess, to her. That was no shrewd instinct, no flash of clever intuition. More like grasping a simple law of physics or chemistry: oil and water don’t mix.

“That was the second time you rescued me, Carrie,” Jess said, and I smiled, recalling the first—the sixth grade playground brawl. “No one else would say anything to me about my mother. As if it had never happened, she’d never died. I thought you were brave.”

“Me?” What a laugh. Jess was more than I could handle, I knew it in my bones even then. I was young, and I couldn’t stop seeing him through my mother’s eyes. He scared me. Fear and excitement, fear and wanting, fear and love—I twisted and swiveled and pivoted between them for the next two years. Then I lost my courage completely and ran away.

“Twice you saved me, Carrie, and you didn’t even know me.”

“Well, but that explains it. It was only
after
I knew you…” I swallowed. I’d started out playfully, and walked right into the truth. “That I turned into a chicken,” I made myself finish.

I walked to the bench under the opposite window, put my knee on it, looked around his kitchen with ostentatious alertness. “Your house is so different now. You’ve changed it so much, I’d hardly know it. From the old days.”

“I ruined it.”

I smiled uncertainly. “That’s a funny thing to say.”

“It’s true. It took a while, but I finally figured out why I did it. I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to laugh.”

“What do you mean, Jess?”

“Promise?”

“No—yes. I won’t laugh.”

“I was trying to make it a house your mother wouldn’t hate. I blamed you for giving in to her, but then, in a way, I did the same thing. I think it’s turned out that your mother was stronger than both of us.”

I could only stare at his pained, amused face. How like him to share the blame for my worst mistake.

“After my father died, and there was no more hope for you and me because we’d both married other people, I started changing my house. I didn’t understand why until it was finished. One day I looked around and it hit me. I’d taken all the country out of it and made it a house Mrs. Danziger wouldn’t be embarrassed to live in. Shit, Carrie, it’s an awful-looking place, isn’t it?”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“Don’t you laugh,” he warned, smiling the saddest smile. “My herd’s three times the size of my father’s. I lease farmland to tenants in Oakpark and Locust Dale. I’m prosperous and respectable, I’m a gentleman farmer. Hell, I’m on the town council. And I owe it all to your mother.”