Uncross My Heart (21 page)

Ketch nudged me as if to say my frozen stance, as I stared at the kitchen sink, was boring even to a dog. I dumped dog food in a bowl for him, then fell back into bed with my clothes on, intending to rest for a few minutes, realization seeming to have sapped all my energy. I chose not to focus on the corollary—if I’d lived to please my father, then I had never lived to please myself.

I slept for a couple of hours, then Ketch’s whines woke me. His internal clock was often more reliable than my battery-powered one.

“We’re not going to campus. It’s Sunday,” I muttered, then reached for the phone and rang ICU. A nurse said my father was doing better and would most likely be kept there the remainder of the day, moved perhaps tomorrow morning. She said he was medicated and sleeping. I hung up and fell asleep again.

The next time I awoke it was noon and something strange had come over me. Perhaps it was just awaking at such an odd time, maybe it was the newfound thrill of having touched Vivienne’s body—being intimate with someone after so many years of being intimate with no one. I finally cared deeply about someone again.
Actually it’s more than
that, isn’t it? It’s lust and it feels fabulous. St. Augustine was wrong
to paint it as something ugly. Perhaps there’s beauty in the fact that it
can’t be controlled.
I smiled at that thought.

Ketch whined again, this time at a tapping sound on the door, and I staggered first to the front of the house and then to the back to find Sylvia looking furtive, this time without brownies.

“You’re never home at this hour. I just wanted to make sure you’re all right?” She looked worried in the way women use worry when it opens doors for them. Worry was her excuse to come and visit me, and even I was smart enough to figure that out. Of course, in true Midwestern fashion, I pretended to be grateful over her insincere worry, because that’s what mannerly people did.

“Thank you, I am. My father was hospitalized last night. He fell while visiting me—”

“I’m so sorry.”

“He’s going to be fine, I think.”

“What about you?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look like hell.” She grinned rakishly, as if looking like hell might be a good thing.

“Thank you.”

“Have you eaten?” She pushed her way past me into the house.

“You look like you could use a nice soaking bath. You go do that and when you get out, I’ll have your breakfast ready.”

“No, really—”

“Yes, really. I would like to. I do it for my husband all the time. It’s one of the skills I possess.”

I listened to her tone and examined her expression to see if this was a trap, but she looked completely neighborly.

“Okay.” I surrendered. “Let me show you where the eggs—”

“We keep ours in the fridge—silly city people that we are.”

I smiled at her lightly mocking me and was grateful to have someone take over. I locked the bathroom door behind me, not taking a chance on her walking in.

Thirty minutes later, I was a new person. Hot water had pummeled my lower back, then a brisk towel-drying restored blood flow, and clean hair seemed to make my brain work better. I put on a pair of slacks, a white shirt, and a burnt orange crewneck sweater, wearing Vivienne’s colors like a knight into battle.
Losing my mind
, I thought jovially. When I popped my head through the sweater, Sylvia was standing there.

“I’m stunned you own something that isn’t black. You have a nice build.” She teased me. “Eggs, bacon, toast…ready for you, madam.”

“Thank you.” I slipped past her to avoid being cornered in my closet.

“And you smell good.”

I thanked her somewhat shyly. The food was delicious, probably because someone other than me had cooked it, which seemed to be the way with food. Sylvia watched me eat and smiled when I looked up at her. “This is great.”

“I had an ulterior motive, you might have guessed, but you looked like you’d slept under a bridge, and I do have my standards.”

My face grew hot. “Good, my shabby appearance has saved my soul.” As the words came out they embarrassed me, and she reddened.

“I’d like to rephrase that. Any soul would be blessed to have you care about it. Mine, it just so happens, is recently…taken.”

“Really? The woman who was here—?”

“Yes.”

“Very attractive.”

“How could you tell?”

“Binoculars,” she said seriously, and I broke into laughter. “Well. You look better. And now that I’ve done my good deed for the week, I’m going back home to get ready to go to dinner with my husband this evening.”

I thanked her again before she left, only slightly less coquettish than when she’d arrived. As her pretty form receded from view across the pasture, I whistled to Ketch and gave him the last bite of toast.

“Have you noticed how many really gorgeous women God created?”

Ketch dropped to my feet and ignored me.

Monday morning I rang Vivienne and got no answer. I was certain she had caller ID and was screening my call, so I grabbed my car keys and headed for town, pulling into a shopping area with a pay phone and dialing her number. It worked—she answered.

“Don’t hang up.” I realized most of my conversations with her began with those words. “You can’t give up on me now. You’re someone I never let myself dream I could have. Something I never knew existed.

And you’ve admitted you love me, I have it in writing.”

“Loving you and being able to be with you are two different things, Alex.”

“Please, Viv.” But she had already hung up. My head clanged back against the wall next to the phone booth, and the person beside me stared at me.

I jumped back into the car and drove at high speed to her house, pulling into the driveway so fast and stopping so abruptly that my tires squealed, startling even me at the adolescence of my behavior.

I bounded up the porch steps and banged on her door. I could see her inside but she wouldn’t open it. I pounded on it louder and shouted for her to let me in. What the neighbors might think of a grown woman beating down another woman’s door must have crossed Viv’s mind, because she stepped out on the porch to silence me.

“I’m done, Alex.”

“You can’t be done, we haven’t even started.”

“And we never will. Between your Father in heaven and your father from hell—”

“We got into a fight after you left and he collapsed on the front steps. I thought he’d had a heart attack and I rushed him to the ER.”

She stopped her tirade. “I’m sorry. But I don’t see that his physical condition has any bearing on our issue. If anything, it just gives you more guilt to go with the inexhaustible load you already carry.”

“Is that all you think about me? A guilt-ridden person—”

“I think very highly of you, obviously. And I don’t want to continue this discussion and ruin that.”

“One disagreement would ruin that? If people are passionate about something, about each other, shouldn’t they fight it out? What do you want from me? Just tell me and I’ll—”

“I want nothing from you except for you to go away and leave me alone.”

“Oh, that’s so damned contained. You want nothing from me? I thought you wanted my love, my body, my soul in a relationship?”

“Not anymore.”

“Just like that? What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with
me
? You’re the one with the complexes.

Let me tell you something, Alex. You’re eaten up with it. Whenever religious people have a book, they beat you to death with it—only you’ve done them all one better. You’re beating
yourself
to death with it. Well, you won’t beat me with it. My God is fucking smarter than to hate people for who they love. And I like my God better than yours.”

I reached under the collar of my shirt and pulled out the black onyx cross, yanked it from my neck, and threw it onto the ground. “Is this what you want? To know that I’ll give up
anything
for you?”

“Very dramatic and frankly beneath you.” She turned to go. “And by the way, if He died for your sins, you no longer have any. That must make you completely insane—nothing to be guilty over.” She slammed the door in my face.

I got in my car and just sat, staring up at her house, wondering if she was staring back at me from behind the blinds. This would be my last trip to her door, that much I knew.

I drove to the hospital to see my father. He had been moved to a room and was complaining that he needed his own pajamas, a toothbrush, shaving cream and razor, and a dozen other items from his house. I told him I’d go get them, wishing with all my might I hadn’t been an only child and had someone else to share these errands with.

We didn’t discuss the fight that had landed him in the hospital. In fact, his tone was dispassionate and distant.

“What’s the temperature outside?”

“About fifty today. Sunny.”

“Hmm.” He mused as if he thought he might be going outside for a stroll. “Are the Bears playing?”

“It’s Monday. They played yesterday.” I picked up the remote and scanned through the channels since the set didn’t have a program guide.

I finally found a replay of a ball game—not the Bears, but he seemed satisfied. I told him I would check in with him tomorrow. As I kissed his forehead he remarked, “Do me a favor, Alexandra. Say a mass for me, for my health.”

“I’m not a celebrant at mass anymore, Father. You know that.”

“Do it for me.” His tone was flat, as if asking me to pick up bread at the store.

A dozen things popped into my head, among them that he was requesting this to torture me, to see if he could still command me as he had when I turned on the radio and turned off Vivienne. But I said only, “Sleep well and call if you need me.”

I fumed all the way to the car.
It’s as if he knows how it hurts my
heart, all of it, and he just keeps pounding away at an old wound. He
knows I haven’t celebrated mass in years, and now he thinks he’s killed
my relationship again and so mass should return.
How paranoid can
I be? Of course he doesn’t think that. The poor man is just asking for
healing.

I drove to my father’s house and used the key I kept on my key chain for emergencies. It was a brick colonial two-story with each room clearly defined. Dining took place only in the dining room, people were entertained in the parlor, and breakfast was served in the breakfast nook. No wonder my mother had always loved her family farmhouse with its ramshackle rooms.

I retrieved all the requested items as quickly as possible from his house, which was disturbingly immaculate—military tidy with a housekeeper to boot. It didn’t feel like anyone lived there. I looked around and for a moment tried to remember what it had looked like when I was little and my mother was alive. All I could see through the haze of time were lace doilies and cookie dough on the counter. And I could hear the radio playing the Andrews Sisters and my beautiful mother singing like an angel when just the two of us were together, and shutting down, silent and guarded, when his critical eye fell on us.

I could almost see her soft, fair face lit by the golden sunlight coming through the kitchen window, and a tear trickled down my cheek.

She must not have been very happy
, I thought for perhaps the first time in my life. I’d never stopped to let the image of her overtake my activities. Never stopped to ask what her life was like. All I remembered were fragments of suppression and fear and duty and tradition. And then she was gone.

I shook my head to loosen the grip those thoughts had on my brain, closed the door, and locked it behind me—locking away all those memories that I could do nothing about now. Like dust trapped in a corner of the closet no one can reach, better to leave it than move all the luggage.

I stashed my father’s items in the backseat of my car for a later delivery and drove straight to school to pick up my mail and check my phone messages and prepare for the next day’s lecture. The mere act of striding across campus among the familiar buildings brought me comfort, and I breathed in and felt better. Sally, my effervescent student, spotted me and fell briefly in stride with me.

“I’m Sally Jackson from your Sexuality and the Church class.”

“I know who you are, Sally.”

“How’s your dad? Father O’Shane put him on the campus prayer list.”

“He’s doing better, thank you.”

“I was in your class when Roger Thurgood asked you if that’s what dykes thought. Remember that?”

“How could I forget,” I said flatly, and kept walking.

“I didn’t like the way he talked to you. And I, uh…just wanted you to know that I really think you’re…cool,” she said quickly, and peeled off to her next class before I zeroed in too closely on her reddening cheeks.

“Thank you, Sally,” I said to her departing back and climbed the short stack of steps up to the McGuire Building and headed to my office. I unlocked the door and cracked the blinds open so I could see the courtyard, then scooped up the mail. A letter from the chancellor’s office was on top, which I opened immediately. It seemed the e-mail of my termination had been inadvertently sent because of a clerical error.

Hightower was apologetic and wanted me to know that no decision had been made either for or against my tenure with the school, but I would be notified in due time.
And now I too have a job based on serving in
silence.

I glanced up to see Dennis standing in the archway. “How you doing?” he asked wearily.

“I think I’m better off than you. What’s up?”

“They got him…Hightower.”

“What do you mean?”

“He got drunk and told someone he thought he could trust and it’s all out. The board stepped in and removed him an hour ago, rather than letting him retire gracefully at the end of the year.”

I tried to think of something profound to say but couldn’t. Cultural mores were what each country was built on. There might be a planet where a man could drive around wearing women’s underwear and it was fine, even expected and revered, but it wasn’t this planet.

“I’m sorry,” I said, seeing how hard Dennis was taking it.