Our Town (8 page)

“What did you say, ma’am? I’m sorry.”

“That I don’t wanna see him or talk!”

She could hear them speaking from behind the door but couldn’t make out what they were saying; the music was too loud.

“He says he wants to apologize,” Eddy shouted over the noise. “He says he’s sorry.”

Dorothy sighed again, this time through her nose. Her brick-red tissue clot fell out into the sink and the blood ink ran along the porcelain. Blood continued falling from her nose and past her lips and she tasted it. Mixed with makeup, she didn’t mind. She balled up another tissue square and patted her face and then put it up her nostril. She looked at herself. She looked ugly. She hated herself, again. She’d forgotten about the executives.

“Fine,” she replied. She turned the lock counterclockwise—lefty loosey—and Eddy opened the door and peeked in. He was handsome. Tough handsome.

“You all right?” he asked. Real sweet.

“Yeah. It’s fine. Thank you.”

“No problem, ma’am. I’m gonna let him in, okay?”

She nodded.

Dale entered, his once slickly parted hair now hanging down before his eyes, covering the bump—his unicorn—he’d procured on his forehead. His shirt was more open than before. He sucked in through his nostrils and felt more energetic. Alive again. These days he only breathed through his nose.

“Let me look at you,” he said, quietly, and he grabbed her face again. He turned it from side to side in his palms. He was checking if he’d done enough damage. Then he held it straight and looked back at her, flat in the eyes. He let go with his right hand and he slapped her. Then he slapped her face again.

“Don’t ever embarrass me like that again,” he said, coolly, calmly. “I told these people we were coming here together. Coming together. As
man and wife. And then I can’t find you. And I ask someone. And they say you’re upstairs, talking to two guys.
Two
guys. Do you consider that acceptable behavior? As a married woman you think that that’s okay?”

Dorothy rested her face against Dale’s hand. She could feel her cheeks getting hotter. She thought she must look red. Redder than before, even. Tomato faced.

“Do you hear me?” Dale asked, and then let her go.

Dorothy turned toward the sink, away from him. She squeezed the porcelain in her hands until a fake nail cracked off and landed against the blood-clot tissue.

“Let’s hope so,” Dale affirmed. And then he opened the door and left. He left the door open behind him.

Dorothy looked up at herself in the mirror. She grabbed a new tissue and blew out the old tissue and threw them both in the toilet and watched them tie-dye the water as she flushed.

SHE TOOK A
cab home. Dale took the car. She was nervous as she entered the house and walked upstairs to the bedroom. The lights were still on. She crept through the door and saw Dale on the bed. He lay in his underwear and dinner socks with the TV remote in one hand and the rocks glass—the same rocks glass as before—in the other. An ice pack rested on his head. He looked up at her.

“I kind of hurt myself, if you can believe it,” he said, chuckling. Then he looked back toward the TV.

*
  
*
  
*

Months later—actually probably less—Dale woke up in the middle of the night. He wasn’t sure why. He hadn’t heard anything—instinct, I guess—but he was suddenly filled with energy. And, perhaps even more so, fear. He reached over to Dorothy’s side of the bed and felt for her, but no one slept beside him. He breathed in deeply. He pulled off the covers and stood up. He noticed the bathroom door was closed, but low light was streaming through the half-inch space
beneath the doorframe. He walked to it, quietly, with measured steps. He opened it. The shower curtain was pulled, but two pedicured feet stuck out the far end. There was a hand-painted antique lamp—an East Coast winter scene, children sledding in the park—which just yesterday was on the bedside table, plugged in, and lit, sitting on the toilet bowl. It sat perched on the lid. In the tub, one leg and foot was crossed over the other. Dale stepped two steps and opened the curtain. Dorothy lay sleeping. Peacefully sleeping, in an empty tub, with an avocado-green face peel, dry and cracking, still on her face. Her hair was pulled back in a bun on her head. Her hands were clenched just below her breasts, one of which showed through her bathrobe. Her breaths were soft and mechanical. Her heart rate was slow. Content. She breathed now only through her nose. In and out only through her nose.

Dale stared—disdainful—awhile, scratching the stubble on his neck and breathing, also, solely through his nose. His doing so, though, was because he was angry. His doing so, though, was because he wanted to control his breath. He realized his doing so, though, was because he’d lost control, and he wanted control, and he would do whatever it would take to regain it. He stopped breathing and opened his mouth and spoke.

“Dorothy?” She didn’t move. “Dorothy?” Louder. He grabbed her ankle and shook her leg.

She opened her eyes and turned toward him and smiled, before closing them and pulling her leg away and getting comfortable and attempting to regain her rest.

“Hi, honey,” she replied, eyes still quiet, as though he’d caught her catnapping before an oh-so-important soiree.

“What are you doing in here? Why the hell are you in the bathtub?”

“What do you mean?” She nuzzled. Butchie was on her and he nuzzled, too. “I’m sleeping.”

“I can see that you’re sleeping. Why are you sleeping in here?”

“I wasn’t cozy in bed.”

“What does that mean?”

“You kept hogging all the covers.”

She curled back into herself and looked quite comfortable. Dale left and went back to bed. The next day, Dale went out for a pack of cigarettes. And Dorothy was rather suddenly, in her eyes, all alone.

ACT 2

1970-1981

I ATE THE FROG FIRST

D
orothy met Seth about a year ago when she decided she wanted a pool. She’d gotten a good settlement from the divorce—it was decided that she’d take the kids; he could have a weekend a month, if he wanted—and they’d sell the houses and split the money. And with that money she bought herself a ranch in Reseda, with a few acres of barren, dry land—she’d, of course, find that out later, trusting her young, handsome real estate agent when he described the lot as “plush, revitalized, and a gardener’s delight! With some work, you can truly express your vision! With some work, this place will truly be yours!” And she thought his face was just so honest. Just look at him, she thought. He couldn’t tell a lie. But, in light of all that, Dorothy was getting by, attempting to enjoy her newfangled independence. Not yet forced to work, and with some money in the bank, she thought a pool might be good for the children. Might keep them out of her hair. When the pool men came for their consultation, though—Tranquility Pools, a father/son pool team she’d found in the yellow pages—she decided it unwise to spend so much money, given that she wasn’t such a fan of the water herself. Water’s no good for hair. Frays your ends. So she said sorry for the trouble to the father, and sent him on his way, but slipped her number, penned on the inside of a deli matchbook, into the back pocket of the son’s black dungarees. She knew he was
young, but she thought she was young, too, still. Even though her hair had started thinning, and she’d therefore started wearing wigs—she loved wigs!—she was still young, right? Thirty-one was still young. She was still pretty. So Seth called her back later that week, and since then they’d pretty much gone steady.

*
  
*
  
*

Dylan aligned and prepared his kill shot, far removed from his target. He hid behind a green-brown shrub. He kneeled in the dirt with his right hand on a splintered skateboard, and he rolled it backward, then forward. Forward, then backward. Backward then forward, again. Eight years old, he wore a ratty T-shirt and holey briefs. The top of a sport water bottle, with its long plastic straw, sheathed—a knight—between the underwear’s elastic and his freckled right leg. He counted upward in his head. He started at one and only planned to three, but got there and didn’t fire—too soon—so he continued counting. When he reached fifty-three he wondered if she’d ever start riding. “How long does it take to oil your hands?” he thought to himself, remembering the sight of his sister yesterday wearing their mother’s long, white prom dress gloves—lace and satin—lying asleep in a bikini on a round patch of dead grass in the sun. Tanning, baking. Coloring her pale. But today he was at the back of the driveway, and Clover was preparing herself at the front, and he felt the hot, tarry, sandpaper-tough top of the board as he glided it back and forth on uneven wheels beside him. He reached ninety-three, and then he put his head down, about to give up. But then—how exciting!—Clover mounted her turquoise bike and put her shiny hands on the pink tasseled handles. Dylan grinned. “Onehundredthree, onehundredfour, onehundredfive!” he whispered, angrily, and he pushed it off with all his might. And he watched, quietly, as the board flew forward in front of him. Straight as an arrow. Sharp like a sword. Hard enough to knurl up the bike’s wheelbase beneath her. Strong enough to really do some hurt. And, just as she’d begun to pick up speed, the board reached her
and jammed up under her front wheel. The rubber tires screamed and the board cracked in the spokes as she flew forward over the handle-bars and onto the hot cement. But she was strong and resilient—it was in her little genes—so she held on tight to the rubber handles, even when her instincts told her otherwise. She landed on her shins, instantly bleeding. Her spine was curved like a crescent moon over the frame’s front wheel. Her mouth hung open—limp and dogged. Her arms were raised. She still held on, though, but just barely. Just to the tassels. Dylan walked back to the house chesty. Like he’d won. For, when she was upside down in the air, he saw her feet touch the sky, momentarily, and beautifully, eclipsing the sun. And her hands still glowed bright white—her own personal stigmata—shining, glistening from the morning dew.

CLOVER EVENTUALLY MADE
it back to the house. By that time Dylan was sitting on his bed Indian-style reading pornographic magazines. The spine rested between his knees. Dorothy sat at the kitchen table halfway through a cigarette, nooning quietly on the phone.

“No, I can’t bring the car in to get serviced later ’cause I can’t get there without the car. So you have to come get me. I need you to come get me,” she said with a tone change. She said with a smile. “I could go for some servicin’, anyway, myself.” She stopped talking and nodded instead. “Okay. Bye, Sethy. Come soon.”

It made Dorothy giddy speaking in a manner that she deemed youthful—a bit crass—with her young boyfriend Seth. Made her feel vital. She was still alive. And the phone, itself, felt good. Cool, pressed hard to her ear, when her little ranch house was always hot. She put the handset back on the receiver, then hung the receiver on the wall.

“What happened to your legs, baby?” she asked, just noticing Clover. “You’re all scraped up.”

Clover stared down at her feet and held her hands—palms up—before her. She didn’t want to show Mama. She felt ugly. She didn’t reply. She put her head down and walked toward her and then Clover crawled up Mama’s legs to her lap.

“Are you okay, darlin’? Angel? This doesn’t look so good,” she said and rubbed her back.

“I fell, on my bike. I don’t know. Dylan made me fall.” Head drop. “His skateboard comin’ at me and it jammed under me and I fell over the bars.” She wanted to cry but she didn’t like to cry. “It all hurts. I just wanted to stay out there and ride my bike and tan my hands. But it started to hurt more,” she sighed. “And then it started to hurt a lot more, so I came in.”

“I’m gonna get you some ice.” Dorothy plucked Clover from her lap. She laid her down on the table and rested her dirt-blonde head—brighter in the summer than the winter—on a stack of paper plates. Then she went to the freezer to get some frozen peas. She turned and looked back at Clo. Then she turned back to the freezer. “What do you mean you just wanted to tan your hands?” she questioned.

“They’re all white.”

“Well, I know that. But so’s the rest of you.”

“Yeah, but when you put the oil on me yesterday, I fell asleep and forgot to take off your gloves.”

She showed her mama her hands. They were like ghost’s hands.

“Oh, my sweet. I’ve got ya. I’ll take good care of ya. Let me put this on your knee. Hey, you know what? Are you listenin’, baby? You know what?”