Oxygen (24 page)

“Flying planes and being a doctor is a long way from farming, is it not? How did you come to study the sciences?”

“My granddad considered himself a healer. He was Cajun—moved up from outside of New Orleans to Arkansas just after the Depression. He started planning for me to study medicine before I was born, I think.”

I lean back against the kitchen sink and watch Joe draw more words out of my father than I’ve managed to since I got here. I watch the two of them coasting above simple questions of social introduction into something that seems basic and genuine—an easy exchange of personal facts and interests unpolluted by decades of unmentioned injury, their conversation absent the awkward stalls of my obligatory questions and his recalcitrant replies. My father, this widowed scholar, who has always, always kept his mind so locked up from me; who has never, as far as I can recall, bothered to ask me why I, the daughter of a history professor, would prefer the calculations of chemistry and pharmacology, would choose a profession where mathematical models were applied to comprehend the human condition. He has never asked why I would choose to find my answers in the objective manipulation of facts and formulas instead of his own endless parsing of the fragmented scraps left by doomed populations groping to find godly design in random famines and plagues.

Joe leans back on the rear legs of his chair, balancing his glass on his knee, the damp circle of it bleeding in a dark ring. After looking forward so to Joe’s arrival—the first thing I’ve been actually happy about in weeks—I feel lonelier with the three of us than I did before he got here.

“Dad, I’m going to run to the grocery store now, while Joe’s here with you. Do you guys want anything? Besides beer?”

“Get me some more of those frozen pies, would you? A couple of the chicken pies. I’ll have one for my dinner.” He looks back over at Joe. “Not bad, those pies. Have everything you need for a complete meal right in the one tin.”

“I’ll make you dinner. Take a break from the frozen food while I’m here,” I say.

“I like frozen food.”

Joe drops his chair back on all fours. “Hey, I’ve had those pies. They’re really pretty good, Marie. The turkey’s even better—get him some of those. So did you ever fly yourself?” Joe turns his attention back to my father. I slip my purse over my shoulder and walk out the back screen door to the car.

An hour later I stand with my arms full of grocery bags and kick the bottom of the kitchen door hoping they’ll open it for me. After minutes of silence I slide one paper bag down and wedge it between my hip and the door jamb so I can wiggle my key into the lock. Inside, the kitchen is empty. Joe’s half-drunk glass of water sits on the floor beside his opened duffel bag, and the dismantled skeleton of a barbecued chicken lies on their empty plates. Through the living room archway I can see Joe’s leg stretched among stacks of record albums, my father’s brown wing tips planted below his upright recliner.

“Artie Shaw, now he was a great bandleader. You probably never even heard of him.”

“Oh, he’s heard of him. Joe, you look like you’re in garage sale heaven.”

“This is still in the original dust jacket. Even has the band’s flyer. Did you see this, Marie? He’s got a whole closet full of vinyl. No rock and roll, though, huh?”

He looks like Peter Pan awash in plunder. A tall and golden boy sprawled across my father’s filthy, sculpted pink carpet—a provocative mix of insouciance and potent masculinity. Even my father is charmed.

“It’s four forty-five you guys. What’s the plan for this evening? Should I start some dinner?”

“Good Lord, Marie. We just finished lunch. Why don’t you show this young man Houston after he flew all the way down here for a two-day junket.” Pushing himself up from his chair, he gyrates in a tiny circle before reclaiming his balance and stepping over a pile of Gene Autry and Jeanette MacDonald. He tugs at the waistband of his pants; a thinning clump of white hair sprouts from the V of his undershirt. He was Joe’s age the year I was born.

“All right. That sounds good. We can drive him around and then go out for dinner somewhere. Anywhere you want, Dad. My treat.”

He cants his head back to angle a look at me through the periphery of his glasses. “Hell, I don’t want to go. You go.” He raises his arm in some gesture between good-bye and disgust. “You go.”

“What will you eat?”

“Same damn food I’ve been eating for the last twenty years.”

Joe is holding a record between his palms as if it were a black diamond, tilting it back and forth to catch the few rays of sunlight coming between the perpetually closed living room drapes. “Johnny Hartman. Not a scratch or speck of dust on it. Amazing.”

“Where to?” We are stacked up at a red light behind matched convertible Jeeps filled with teenagers calling back and forth to each other over the roar of Friday rush hour traffic. A girl in groin-high cutoffs and a tank top is flicking popcorn into the backseat of the other car and bits of it catch in the evening breeze to settle on our windshield. She stretches over the gap to dump her red-striped paper bag into the driver’s lap just before the light changes, perfect curves and gilded hair arresting the cars behind her.

“Hey, I think I like Texas. What did you ask me? I don’t care where we go. Wherever you want to take me,” says Joe.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever been the one to take
you
anywhere,” I answer, jerking forward through the green light with a screech of tire.

“What’s bothering you?”

“What makes you think I’m
bothered
?” I ask, immediately wishing I could take back my sarcastic repetition of the word.

“Well, aren’t you?”

All I can do is shrug a shoulder. We weave through the racetrack of the freeway, a thousand cars flooding bumper to bumper at seventy miles an hour, each an instant away from an accident. I let the traffic push us up the ramp onto the massive cement loop that ensnares Houston like a belt straining against the paunch of the city’s middle age.

“It’s your dad, isn’t it? You’re annoyed at me for hitting it off with him.”

“I think it’s great you hit it off with him. You cheered him up more in two hours than I have in three days. You’re the son he never had! Why should that bother me?”

He just looks at me for a minute, then whispers barely above the volume of the surrounding traffic, “I didn’t grow up with him, Marie. He didn’t raise me. It’s easy for me to like him.”

“So now I need a psychiatrist in addition to a team of lawyers.” My eyes start to burn and I reach over to my purse and feel around inside it for my sunglasses, but after I put them on Joe closes his hand over mine and holds it quietly in his own. Our hands lie interlaced between us on the car seat. Joe watches the city, the sunset igniting the glass skyscrapers into beacons of commercial American triumph.

“Look!” he shouts, breaking his hand free to point at a green highway sign. “There’s the exit for Astroworld.”

I don’t answer.

“My one request. Seriously.”

“I can’t believe
I let you talk me into this. God, I haven’t been here since I was in high school. It’s gotten bigger. Disneyland may be cleaner, but Astroworld has a raunch factor that’s kind of hard to beat.”

“Raunch factor?” Joe asks, pushing through the metal turnstile behind me.

“Oh, you know, spilled beer and tight tank tops. Plenty of bare skin and Texas twang. Everybody wanted to come here on a date—all those scary tunnel rides where you could neck without being caught.”

“Who did you come here with?”

“Well, I mainly came with girlfriends hoping we’d leave with boys. I didn’t date much in high school.”

Joe stops walking and pulls me around to face him. “Really? I’m surprised. You must have been pretty, even as a gawky kid.”

“Not really. I didn’t think so, at any rate. I was more the type that won the blue ribbon at the science fair.”

He keeps looking at me, like he’s rummaging through the decades of my life before he knew me. Then his eyes move down to my neckline and he reaches out to press his thumb gently over the pink sapphire. “You’re wearing it. Thank you.”

“No, thank
you
.” I bring my hand up and cover his own at my throat, holding it there for a moment before swinging it back down to the more neutral territory between us. “I never thanked you for it, and it’s beautiful.” We turn to walk down the packed aisles of postcard vendors and game arcades. I jump at the sharp flack of gunfire where pimpled boys vie for plastic bears and girls’ affection. Joe wraps my hand in his large palm, calm and floating above it all, more relaxed than he was when we were driving in from the airport—like some broken fragment of himself has floated back into place, settling some internal argument with the world. If I hold his hand long enough, knit my fingers tightly enough into his, could I also come to peace?

“Hot dog?” We stand in the smoke of a massive iron grill, the heat of charcoal folding into the heat of the summer night and the alluring aroma of roasting meat. I pull my hand out of Joe’s and wipe my face on the end of my shirt. The cook, a black mountain of a man unflinching in the splattering grease, forks hissing sausages, peppers and onions onto two white buns. Joe slips ten dollars into his apron and takes the hot dogs, then leads the way to a patch of green grass sloping between asphalt pathways. I have to lean far over my crossed legs to keep the grilled onions from oozing onto my lap. Next to us a tattooed boy buries his face in his girlfriend’s neck. The lights of the midway flash against the darkening sky and the volume of all of it—the carousel music and laughter, the blazing neon and the smoky smell of sweat—pulsates. Arcing across the skyline, a mammoth roller coaster shoots cars filled with screaming riders like a jet of blood through the great vessels of the heart.

“Come on.” Joe grabs my arm. “We gotta ride that thing.”

“Uh-uh. I don’t do roller coasters, Joe. I hate roller coasters.” I plant my feet against the asphalt, blocking the crowd.

“Oh come on, you’re kidding. You can’t leave here without riding that! That’s like dying without trying sex.”

“No, no, no, no, no siree.” I lock both my hands around his wrist and throw my weight against him.

“Come on.” He slips his fingers through mine again. His voice drops to a supplication. “Come with me. Please.”

I tug against him once more, but then let myself be led to the line at the bottom of the concrete ramp winding up to the ride. My pulse is starting to race. It’s ridiculous. I know riding this roller coaster is safer than driving in my car, safer than swimming in the ocean or running alone in Lake Washington parks on early winter evenings—all things I would never give up. And I’m panicked.

Joe stands behind me and folds his arms across my clavicles, brings his head down to the crook of my neck to whisper, “I met my first girlfriend at a fair in Little Rock. Spent a week’s worth of lawn mowing money just to get her on the roller coaster, imagining she’d have to hold tight to me the whole ride.” The striped cotton sleeves of his shirt are rolled up over his forearms, exposing the ropy twist of blue veins braided over the muscles—so much power in a man whose work derives from the strength of his mind. His arms feel good around my neck, solid and decisive, like something that lasts, something that could bear a burden.

“And did she? Is that where you got your first kiss?”

He laughs. “She was my first kiss, as a matter of fact, but not on that ride. She got sick. Threw up on me right at the top of the third loop.” We laugh until we are folded over and the teenagers around us look as if we have infringed on something sacred to youth, we who are old enough to be their parents. And
this
, I remember,
this
is why, for at least a brief time in my life, I had wondered if I could let Joe change my life. The giddiness of it tumbles into the tremor of anticipation at catapulting along the spiraling tracks of the coaster, and I am abruptly drugged with life, drugged with the aliveness of the present, electrified and forgiven, temporarily, for the death of a little girl.

The silver railing hisses back and Joe steps into the car, clasps my hand and pulls me in beside him. A padded steel bar clamps down across my knees. Joe’s hand presses into the back of my neck as if he can read my panic. “You’ll be fine. Let your muscles relax.” His fingers massage the taut bands running parallel along my spine. “Look, do you trust me?”

“Sometimes.” I try to swallow, but my mouth is too dry. “Until now, maybe!”

“Let me cover your eyes.”

“Are you crazy?” I yell, my heart starting to pound so hard I’m lightheaded, and the roller coaster at a standstill.

“No, really. Lean against me.” He brings his palms up over my eyes. My eyelashes brush against his skin like butterfly wings skittering against a closed window. The world condenses into the cupped flesh of his hands. The train jerks forward and I try to pull his hands down. “No,” he says, his mouth just beside my ear so his voice comes from inside of me. “You’re all right. Focus on this one instant in time. This single split second.”

The car rolls smoothly into the first turn, a gliding arc that draws me deeper into the seat, swooshes the air against my arms and cheeks, feathers the hair back from my face. My weight melds into the sliding curve of the track, my stomach and intestines and liver and spleen drop deeper into my pelvis. Now the curve opens out into a straight line and now the wheels catch and grip onto a chain hauling us forward and upward, up to what must be the first plunge back toward the earth. I tense and reach up to Joe’s hands again.

“Ah, you’re thinking. You’re anticipating. Try to be right here, in this moment. You’re safe—it’s the perfect chance to let go.”

The car hovers at the top of the peak, teasing, then with a silent release of the brake it tips across the edge of balance. Screams rise up in a noisy plume, and I hear my own voice mixed among those of strangers. With my eyes covered the fall is endless. It is as terrifying as my worst repetitive dreams, scrambling to claw a purchase in the air, shrieking to the ground knowing this is the end of my life. I hate Joe right now. The car twists and dips in a spiral to the right and then whips back to the left, and I’m trapped here, choking with panic.

Joe is laughing, clearly having the time of his life. “Marie,” he says in a jovial scream that makes me want to push him over the side. “Try it. Just give yourself up to it.”

And so, trapped and blind beside Joe, I force myself toward the conscious act of letting go, and wind inwardly closer and closer, tighter and tighter into this moment, this fraction of an instant, this incandescent flicker of time even before the electrical synapse of thinking blisters into a concept of individual being. I exist only now. A now of atoms more vacuous than solid, transiently amalgamated into human form before splintering into mineral and water and air, like a personal diaspora, a random dispersion of all that was Marie. The completely profound senselessness of my own existence explodes into its own blissful freedom. There is no impending moment, no past moment, only this one, and without past there is no sorrow, and without future there can be no loss.