Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (7 page)

“It's nice knowing you're nearby,” Brenna said, sipping the tea. “I have such nice memories of you in Florida. The beach. Uncle Vic taking us to look at all the jellyfish that had washed ashore. The man-of-wars with the purple tentacles. You remember?”

Alta remembered. She remembered Vic liked making up stories about the jellyfish, telling the kids that they were from a different planet, that once high tide pulled them back out to sea, they would find their mother ship and go home.

“Men-of-war,” Alta said.

Brenna had been an odd child. When she came to visit Alta and Vic, she would sleep in a sleeping bag on top of the covers, because she didn't like the feel of the sheets on her legs. She was a hoarder, too. She stockpiled candy and pocket change, and if you asked her what she planned to do with it, she would say, she couldn't have been older than nine, she'd say: “Have it.” She planned to have it.

Brenna said to Alta: “I'm getting married.”

“Well,” Alta said, studying the girl on the sofa, trying to calculate what this had to do with her memory of the girl. “That's good news. I met a man, too. I met him behind my apartment.”

Brenna stood up and walked over to Alta in her chair and hugged her. “I'm so happy for you, Aunt Alta. I love how everything's worked out.”

Alta had to lean forward to accept the hug, and when she did, her hand landed on the girl's backbone and she smelled a crushed-rose fragrance in her hair. The girl sat back on the sofa, straightened her skirt, and said she wanted to ask Alta for a favor. Her face became less animated, dumber. She said, “I was hoping you'd let me have your wedding ring. The one your grandmother gave you.”

Alta smelled the crushed-rose smell and still heard the girl's assessment:
Everything's worked out.
The girl was so young. She thought love was a door you carefully opened once, just once, and then you were there. Where? It didn't matter. Opening the door was the important part, making sure you locked it once you were through, and maybe the reason Alta loved Vic then Don then George was because she never thought to lock the door. She gazed at her apartment key on the metal hook and fought the urge to get up and lock the front door.

“I don't want to impose,” Brenna said. “I bet it still means a lot to you. I just want you to know I'd be honored to wear it.”

She'd be honored to wear Alta's
key
? Alta hesitated for a few seconds and then remembered that Brenna had asked about the wedding ring. She looked so earnest and inflated with anticipation.
I'd be honored
was rehearsed, which, more than anything, made Alta not want to give her the ring. But it was only a momentary impulse, an itch that Alta could ignore. Besides, she didn't need the ring anymore.

“Wait here,” she said to Brenna, and she went into her bedroom and opened up her jewelry box for the first time since moving to In the Pines. She found her engagement ring, two twisted gold bands studded with pallid gemstones.

When Alta brought the ring to the girl, she was smoothing the front of her skirt. She took the ring and, her eyes beginning to tear up, brought it to her face, her mouth opening slightly. “Don't eat it,” Alta said.

“I am so grateful,” Brenna said. Then, studying the ring, hesitating, looking pained: “I don't think it's the right one. Katie said it was silver, with sapphires along it?”

Alta looked at the ring and realized that this was the one Don had given her. He'd offered it to her at night while they were walking his dog. Don had picked a flower from a magnolia tree, given it to her, and asked her to marry him. All the way home he hummed an unidentifiable song:
hmm-hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm
.

When Alta brought out the correct ring, Brenna stood and said, with slightly diminished emotion, “I am so grateful.” She reached into her purse, pulled out a beige engraved envelope, and set it on the coffee table. She waited with a smile. Alta realized that this was the kind of moment when she was expected to say something vast and benevolent to solidify the exchange.

“Save a little of yourself,” she said to the girl. “Just a little. He'll never miss it.”

The girl nodded, as if to a song whose words she didn't know, steadily. “That's really wise,” she said. “That means a lot, for you to pass that along.”

“I don't think it's all that wise,” Alta said. “It just took me a long time to figure it out.”

“But still,” the girl said.

Afterward, sitting on her patio, Alta knew she could've told Brenna to eat corn chowder only on odd-numbered Thursdays and the girl would've said that means a lot. She, Brenna, wasn't going to dwell on anything that might muddy her happiness. From now on she was going to gather it up, hoard it, and keep it clean.

“I'm going to sit on my patio to enjoy my view,” Alta had said to her. “If you want, you can join me.”

“I'd love to,” the girl said. But she couldn't. She needed to go tell everyone the good news. She had brought an empty gray ring box with a plush little slit in which she secured the ring. The box made a croaking sound when she closed it, a swallowing-up sound.

Alta was a lifeguard. She sat on her back patio and scanned the grass for problem areas, never looking at the same spot for too long. She wasn't sure what she was guarding, but when the wind blew through, she could see banana peels and fruit cores in the low grass. Stray cats came through, birds, owls, foxes maybe, possums maybe, raccoons, squirrels, snakes, men.

Once, a pair of men with metal detectors and shovels wandered in and Alta watched as they slowly passed through, stopping every so often to dig. A different version of Alta might consider wading out into the grass and leaving a trail of coins to her patio door for the next metal detectors to come find. Taping a note on her sliding glass door that said:
BETTER TREASURE INSIDE
.

This would involve a major refashioning. Leaving a note like that meant fashioning herself into the sort of woman who would leave a note like that. A woman who wore scarves and costume jewelry. Who calmly told men, when they made mention of hand jobs, to go choke on a vitamin.

One afternoon, someone came up from behind her while she was on her patio and tapped a hand on her shoulder, trying to surprise her.

“Oh,” Alta said. It was the lieutenant, wearing not his hat and uniform but a pair of ironed chinos and a new-looking pearl-button shirt. His hair was sandy-gray. He looked older though somehow sturdier without the uniform. “You could scare a person like that.”

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked.

No, Alta didn't mind. She never minded, not once.

The lieutenant sat in the other chair and folded his hands in his lap. He smiled, hesitated, smiled again, as if crossing and uncrossing things off a list. “Well, war's over,” he said. “We won.”

“I heard,” Alta said. “It was in all the newspapers.”

“Now comes Reconstruction.”

“Then another war.”

“It never ends,” he said.

“I'm glad you came back,” she said.

She went inside and returned with two scotches and water, then went inside again and came back out with all the items he'd left on her patio. He sipped the scotch and talked about his days as a history teacher. There was a new earnestness to his voice, a cleaner pitch. He told her about a sign he'd hung next to the clock in his classroom, which said
TIME PASSES, WILL YOU?
It was meant to scare students into concentrating, but it probably had the opposite effect, like most of what he did in the classroom.

“How about you,” he said after a while. “You seem to be out here on your patio a good bit. Are you a bird-watcher?”

A fine question, which Alta thought about while gazing at the field. The night before was cold and she had dreamed she was making a quilt out of Vic, Don, George, and the lieutenant, sewing their legs and chests together while telling them to remain very still.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe? You aren't sure?”

A few seconds later, a crow landed near the edge of her yard, hunted around in the grass, and found a shriveled apple core. It picked up and dropped the core several times, trying to better its purchase. Two flaps of its wings and the crow was up, off.

“I wasn't,” Alta said. “Not until now.”

first marriage

T
hey noticed the odor outside Tucson the day after they got married. They were driving on a bleak stretch of highway and Tad thought they might be near a rendering plant or a dead coyote, but twenty miles later the odor hadn't dissipated. It was putrid and dense and seemed to be getting denser. Amy drove with her hand over her nose while Tad rolled down the windows and breathed.

“Don't worry,” he said. “We're not far.”

They were headed to Bisbee in a car, a Volvo, that belonged to a man named Gar Floyd, who expected them in Jacksonville, Florida, in eight days. This was their destination or, more accurately, their halfway point. The car was part of a program called Drive Way. In Florida they'd be given somebody else's car, which they would drive back to California.

“It's thickening on my tongue,” Amy said. “It's like we're being punished.”

The odor swelled. It ate at the air. It was as if some giant, blood-rancid bird had dragged itself into the backseat and spread its wings and roosted there.

I
n Bisbee the station attendant sat in the driver's seat and closed his eyes. A few seconds later, he stepped out of the car, coughed, wiped his hands on a blue towel, coughed again, and said, “It's animal.”

Tad and Amy looked at each other. Amy handed over the keys and she and Tad walked their luggage to their motel: a cluster of Airstream trailers decorated with atomic-print throw pillows and chintz curtains. Theirs was the Royal Manor. Tad rifled through the cabinets while Amy showered. He found an old saltine tin filled with condoms, a drawer of taped radio shows from the fifties. He found a book labeled
GUEST MEMORIES
. He looked through it, the road still humming under him.
Cactus wrens in the old cemetery. The shrine at dawn. Oni made her special beans!

He found a pen.
Today's the second day of our first marriage
, he wrote.
We have no special beans, but we've tasted victory and defeat and both were wonderful.

The last part was something he'd read in a book about the Civil War. It used to be his slogan, when he had a slogan. Now he had no slogan. He listened to Amy mashing shampoo into her hair. He felt consigned and content and resigned. He fished one of the condoms out of the tin, undressed, and got under the covers. He felt like a costume waiting to be worn, an odd feeling but not at all disagreeable, not at all.

T
hey climbed a rounded bluff to see the shrine, built by a father to his son. There were plastic carnations and school pictures of a smiling black-haired boy. On the east-facing side of the shrine the pictures had faded to beige in the sun. The shrine seemed cheap, disused. Noticing a shelf for offerings, Tad searched his wallet and found a punch card from the Sub Hut, which he parted with. “Enshrined,” he said. He lifted the collar of his shirt and smelled it. It smelled like shirt.

He looked over the town: laundry lines and kiddie pools and satellite dishes mounted to roofs and trained to the same remote object. Farther on, the copper pit, cactus and scrub, barrenness.

He sat down, closed his eyes, and listened to the click-and-advance of Amy's disposable camera. She'd been taking pictures since they left, gathering evidence of their good time. She was sentimental, discreetly. She saved birthday cards. She couldn't pass a Missing Pet sign without noting how tragic the child's handwriting was. Sometimes when Tad looked at her he saw someone stronger, more permanent and at ease with herself than he would ever be. And other times he saw something less certain, a question unanswered, a teetering pile of wishes . . .

When he opened his eyes, she was scrutinizing the camera. “Won't zoom,” she said. The abrupt way she spoke made it sound German. “Hey, maybe they'll take our picture.”

A middle-aged couple in khaki shorts and fanny packs approached, their voices seeming to speed up as they neared. The man said, “The clerk at the hotel keeps saying, ‘I'd eat the streets. I'd
eat
the streets.' He's trying to say the streets are clean.”

The woman accepted the camera from Amy. She held it to her face and counted, her top lip quivering like a dreaming dog's,
three, two, one
.

“We got married this morning,” Tad said after she returned the camera. “This is our honeymoon.”

“How wonderful,” the woman said. She surveyed her husband until his truculent expression softened.

“I just realized I left the bouquet in the car,” Amy said. She put her hand to her face tentatively. “It's probably ruined.”

“We can pick another one,” Tad said.

“No. Are you serious?”

He supposed he was. Unthinking, but serious, he supposed. “Of course I'm not serious.”

Amy watched him with puzzled amusement. She watched him like a child waiting for a top to spin itself out.

“We're so in love,” Tad said to the couple, “we could fall off this bluff and it wouldn't be tragic. It'd be romantic.”

“Poetry,” the woman said.

“Horseshit,” the man mumbled.

There seemed nothing else to say. Tad noticed the couple was dressed identically except for their fanny packs, which were as unalike as could be. This heartened him, the fact that they'd been unable to coordinate the fanny packs.

“Speaking of which,” the man said. “I believe one of us stepped in some.” They lifted their feet to check. Tad smelled his shirt again, a mixture of fabric and fabric softener. “Don't let Frank ruin your moment,” the woman said.

B
ack in the trailer, Amy lay down and Tad put in a radio show called “No One Left.” A man wakes to find that everyone has disappeared. At first the man, who lives alone and despises his neighbors, is thrilled. He goes to the beach, takes what he wants from stores. But soon he's lonely. Six months later, he's raving in the streets. “I can't do it anymore!” he says. “I need to be seen!” He goes into a pharmacy and swallows a handful of sleeping pills. Just as he does, a pay phone rings, rings again, again.

“What a cruel turn,” Amy said.

“It was probably just a telemarketer.”

She sighed, exasperated. “You're always saying things like that. Clever, insignificant things.”

This seemed excessively bitter, but he let it pass. Besides, she was right. She was almost always right. Recognizing this and conceding to it allowed him a little dignity, he hoped.

She sat up and rubbed lotion onto her shins. She'd packed a battery of lotions to fight the desert air, a lotion for each body part. Tad began kissing her stomach, arms, legs, neck, stopping to smell the different lotions. It was like a theme park, where you could visit eight countries in a single day.

“Are we really married?” she asked.

He held out his hand to show her the thin band of turquoise they'd bought at a souvenir shop near the courthouse.

“I mean, I'm still figuring out how to feel about it. I used to think it'd be like getting my ears pierced. Only, I don't know. More.”

“Don't try so hard,” he said. “Let's enjoy our honeymoon. We can always get divorced on the way home.”

“That's what I mean! You keep doing that, diminishing it. Acting like it's nothing special.”

“Finding each other was special, but we've been together three years. Getting married's just confetti after the party.”

“We should at least pretend.”

Tad felt like he was being led through a series of increasingly smaller doors. “Okay, let's pretend. Let's talk about all the things we'll do.”

“Sometimes it's like you're talking underwater.” With her thumbnail she scraped at the skin on her knee, then studied the results unfondly. “I mean, I know you're doing your best.”

“I always do my best,” he said quickly. Then, “What do you mean?”

“I don't know. I'm beat. I'm married.”

“Confetti,” he said. “Come here.”

She acquiesced. Her body was warm, moist, and unsurprising. Tad closed his eyes and pretended they were trapped on a Ferris wheel. It was their first date and they were nervous and then the Ferris wheel stopped. They held hands and soon began kissing and taking off each other's clothes. Tad imagined the Ferris wheel starting up again and spinning faster. Their trailer seemed to buck and sway, in tune with the scenario. Their inhibitions were brittle, they flaked off like skin.

T
hey'd gotten married the day before in Lake Havasu City. Lake Havasu City was the Home of the London Bridge, the billboards said, but they must have driven past it or across it without realizing it. They parked in front of the courthouse, went inside, and took a number.

Tad, wearing eel-skin boots and a bolo tie, looked like the brother of somebody famous. The judge asked him if he was in the military; it seemed like he was in a hurry, the judge said. The bailiff took pictures with Amy's disposable camera. Afterward he handed her a bag of sample-size dish soaps and detergents,
FOR A FRESH HOUSEHOLD
, the label said.

She drove while Tad read the owner's manual and reprogrammed the radio stations every hour or so. It felt good to be logging miles, to command something so imperative. They discussed Gar Floyd's likes and dislikes. Gar Floyd liked raggedy women, they decided. Gar Floyd did not like the idea of milking a goat. The rear armrest folded down to reveal an oval opening to the trunk and Tad and Amy tried to guess its purpose before Tad looked it up in the owner's manual. “Snow skis,” he told her.

They'd guessed it was where Gar Floyd stowed open beers when the police pulled him over. An airhole in case Gar Floyd was trapped in the trunk.

“Our first marriage,” Tad kept saying as they drove south toward Phoenix. They passed cinder-red rocks. Saguaro cactuses shaped like people being robbed. The wildflowers he picked for her bouquet were drying on the dashboard. “What are you thinking about?” he asked her.

“You,” she said. “Me. You and me.” She was wearing the white linen sundress she'd bought for the ceremony. She looked drugged, lovely. “I'm trying to decide what sort of life we're going to have.”

“Uh-oh,” he said. He reached over to her with an imaginary microphone. “What kind of life are you deciding to have?”

“I can't say really. It's more like a hue, a general mood.”

“What kind of mood?”

She peeked down at Tad's hand next to her chin. “Unfamiliar,” she said.

Parked between two snoring semis at a highway rest stop, they had sex in the backseat of the Volvo. They planned to do this in every state they crossed. Sex in Gar Floyd's car was a wonderful novelty, like life itself. Back on the highway, they passed a Tercel with blinking hazard lights and
JUST MARRIED
soaped on its back window. Amy honked the horn, Tad waved. Behind the wheel was a bearded man in a tuxedo, and next to him, a woman in a peach-colored dress.

Tad thought,
Right here, this moment, no before, no after.
He couldn't recall where he'd heard it. It was either from a philosophy book or an aerobics video. He felt a fierce contentment. He wished there was a way to ration it out to make it last longer. But there was no way. It ignited, it burned up, it was gone.

The man in the tuxedo lifted a can of Schlitz and toasted them as they drove past.

T
he Volvo sat in the garage, a fan perched atop a toolbox blowing into the open door. Tad approached the car and, leaning in, sniffed. The odor reached out like a slap, sharp and undiminished. It smelled to Tad like
membrane
or
groats
, not the things but the words.

“At first we thought it was on the engine block,” the mechanic said. “It happens, with kitties especially. They crawl up there to get warm. When you start the car, the fan belt just annihilates them. You would've noticed that.” He seemed pleased with his story so far. The odor still reached Tad from where he stood, or else it'd stayed in his nose.

“It was a snake, from the looks of it,” he continued. “Probably went in through your wheel well and couldn't get out. Starved. We pulled the backseat and there it was. Little old coral snake.”

The mechanic paused while the office door creaked open and a black dog trotted out, followed by an elderly man in spotless coveralls. The spotlessness of his uniform seemed proof that he was in charge. The dog lay down the instant he stopped walking. “It's a shame,” the man said. “It was a nice car.”

“Was?” Tad said, adding, “It's not our car.” He looked at his watch. The minute hand pointed to one number, the hour hand to another. “We need to be in Florida in eight days.”

The old man laughed noiselessly. “You're just about through with Arizona. All that's left is New Mexico, Texas, a few others. What takes you to Florida?”

“I don't know, what takes you to Florida?”

“I'm asking you. People often have reasons for going to Florida.”

“Oh,” Tad said. “The way you said it, I thought it was a joke.”

The old man laughed again. Just his shoulders shook. “It's no joke, son. It's a goddamn predicament!” The dog perked up when the man raised his voice, and the man patted him softly. “We'll keep air on it, but it takes time. Right now it's a scream. Might be down to a yelp tomorrow. Didn't you say you're on your honeymoon?”

Tad nodded. He was looking into the car at the bouquet, still drying on the dashboard, remembering something before he retrieved it.

“Why are we talking about snakes then? If I were you I'd be celebrating. Hell, I'd be back at your motel having fun. What do you say, Jeff?”

Tad waited for the other mechanic to say something, but it turned out that Jeff was the dog. Jeff didn't say anything. “This is ridiculous,” Tad said. “Can't you do anything else? This car belongs to a very impatient man.”