What He's Poised to Do: Stories (9 page)

Jill scowled, then remembered who she was supposed to be. She smiled and excused herself. “I’m going to go powder my nose,” she said.

My mother took me by the elbow and pulled me down close to her mouth.

“You know who I’ve been hearing from?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Your father,” she said. “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to upset you. I know that he stopped writing to you a while ago.” She paused, gripped the arms of her chair as if she might stand, thought better of it, relaxed. “Letters from your father,” she said. “Will you get a load of that?”

“I am so sorry,” I said. The grief in my voice was real.

S
HE HATES THE WAY HE WEIGHS HIMSELF EACH DAY
. S
HE HAS
turned this into a kind of jingle. “She hates the way / He weighs himself / Each day.” It has the same melody as a commercial on television for a local car-repair shop. The repair shop’s song is “When something breaks / Just take your car / To Lake’s.” Sophie is thinking about the repair shop jingle while she drives along. Something has been rattling in the corners of the dashboard. Joe rarely rides in her car, and he won’t let her drive his truck, so the noise is her problem. “I’ll take a look at it,” he had said the night before, without a shred of conviction. Then he went into the bathroom to weigh himself.

He thinks that she doesn’t notice that he’s vain about his weight. She does notice, because when she was younger, she had a close friend named Peter who always used to complain about men who weighed themselves. “A man should only know what he weighs within five pounds,” Peter said. “And if he lies about his weight, he should lie on the high side. Being a man is about being a mass, at least in part.” Peter communicated his theories to her in rambling monologues that he wrote up longhand and sent as if they were love letters, which she supposed they were. He was uncertain about some of his theories, like the one about the faked moon landing or the one about feline telepathy. But he was sure about men and weight. “Look at me,” Peter said. “I’m two-twenty. You don’t hear me crying about my weight.” Peter was one-ninety, tops. She took his point.

Joe was two-twenty, most days. That morning he had come out of the bathroom with a smile on his face. “Down a pound,” he had said. Sophie was still in bed. She smiled back at his smile without thinking about why she was doing it. Since Joe had started weighing himself incessantly, Sophie had stopped weighing herself. There was some advantage to his compulsion and his weakness. Maybe that’s why she was smiling back at him.

Back when she was friends with Peter, he had wanted to date her, which was not something he had ever expressed in his letters. The implication was there, but he worked the edges and the margins, waited until they were together, at a movie, and just as it started, he touched her arm. “I want to be with you, you know,” he said. Peter was a very aggressive man, but when he told her that he wanted to date, he did not sound very aggressive. He sounded like he was holding an eggshell in his hand. During the movie, his hand dangled over the armrest and brushed against her thigh with a heartbreaking timidity. Sophie waited until the movie was over, and then she said no to Peter. She told him that he was just a friend, that she could not imagine them in a more romantic relationship. That was a lie. She imagined it often, and most of the times her imagination carried her through to a time when Peter would recognize that he did not care about her as much as he thought he did. Under the influence of that new epiphany, he would slowly drift away, or run off with another woman, and Sophie would be left behind to feel hollow or, more precisely, filled with nothing. That was her thinking as she told him no. He looked at her without blinking, then blinked, and that blink returned everything to normal, such as it was. The next day he sent her a letter in which he told her that plastic was a living organism hell-bent on populating the planet to the point where it crowded out all other species. “Frogs, toads, all,” he wrote, in large looping letters.

Joe has said that if Sophie ever left him, he would feel bereft. Joe does not know what the word means. Joe has also apologized for being aggressive. He does not know what that word means either. In fact, one of the reasons he was selected over someone like Peter was that he was not very aggressive. He was selected? She is removing herself from the equation even when she is the subject of the sentence. She hits herself with a nun’s ruler, mentally.

Sophie does not worry about Joe leaving her. Joe is not the kind of guy who leaves. He has told her that repeatedly. The night before, at dinner, after his third glass of wine, he bumped his knees against the table and said it again. “Once I was the kind of man who would leave,” he said, “but you cured me.” She put her hand out on the table, and he rolled his hand on top of it. “I feel full,” he said. “Like this bottle.” He tapped the wine bottle, which wasn’t near full anymore. He was too drunk to drive, so she slid into the driver’s seat and piloted his truck home. “We have to fix that rattling in your car,” Joe said, “but the last time that mechanic jobbed me for twenty percent more than it should have cost. Is there such a thing as an honest body shop? It’s good those guys aren’t doctors. You could be spread out on the hospital bed, just laid out, and the last thing you’d see was the dollar signs in their eyes.” He was still talking when they went to bed—this time, about an idea he had for a special kind of mail-box that would separate bills from the rest of the mail. They had sex, which stopped him talking. He buried his face in the pillow next to her head when he came. And then he was asleep, just like that.

When Sophie first came to America, she was twelve. Her father stayed in France with his new wife, who had been his girlfriend throughout the marriage to her mother. She was a black woman, American, everything her mother was not, and because of that her mother endured the infidelity, even the fact that when Sophie was four, her father had gotten the other woman pregnant. “He’s a musician,” her mother said, as if that explained everything. But then the other woman leaned on Sophie’s father for a wedding, and that was too much for her mother, and they came to America. Her mother worked two jobs, at a coffee shop and a copy shop. Given her accent, it was hard to tell the difference. Add to that the fact that they were one right next to the other, in a little strip mall. That was comedy. That’s where they lived, in an apartment building on the Near North Side of Chicago. Everything was within walking distance: her mother’s jobs, her school. Sophie slept in a narrow little room without a window. In the evenings and mornings her mother used to stand in the doorway and announce the time. “I am the sun and the moon,” she said. Eventually the sun and the moon took a job as a secretary in the art department at a local university. This proved to be a brilliant stroke, as it ensured that Sophie had a substantial tuition credit for her own studies. All she needed to do was drop by twice a week and take her mother to lunch. She did not mind. She loved her mother even if it bothered her that her mother refused to eat anything more than a small salad and a side of buttered bread. “These aren’t wartime conditions,” Sophie said. “And yet we are not at peace,” her mother said, with the mixture of twinkling irony and dead seriousness that Sophie recognized as a sign of pain processed in such a way that it did not become poisonous—or, as she preferred to call it, of intelligence.

Sophie did well in college, applied herself to studies rather than to boys or to art, though she was talented in those areas as well. She got work as a paralegal and was soon the head paralegal at a large firm. She always meant to go back to law school, but she had to take care of her mother, who was getting older and was sometimes in poor health. It seemed like the wrong time. Also, something tugged at her. She didn’t want to rise too far above her station, which was exactly 2.8 notches above her mother’s station. If her mother had been a lawyer, she would have been a more successful lawyer. If her mother had been a failure, that would have given her freedom. In her mind she marks off the distance from her mother. In her mind she marks off the distance from everyone. It’s what her mind is for.

Her mother knows this, though Sophie has never explained it. Her mother hates it. The week before, she had gone to sit with her mother. “I do not want you to calculate on me,” her mother said. “You are a strange child. You do so much for me that changes your own life, but when you sit here with me, you are cold like a decaying porgy.” It was something her mother had read and she clearly did not understand it, but she spoke with conviction. Peter had not liked her mother. “She is always so sure of herself,” he said. “Should a woman be that sure of herself?”

“What are some of the other choices?” Sophie said.

Peter did not quite laugh at her joke. Men were forever not quite laughing at her jokes. The night before, when Joe had told her that he felt like a full bottle, she had made another joke. Joe was asleep, or nearly asleep. “You’re the bottle,” she said to his motionless form. “Right? Well, sometimes I feel like the cork that goes down with the rest of the bottle when it’s tossed in the water.” He didn’t disagree, but he didn’t laugh either.

Joe was definitely asleep. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t laughed. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. Joe slept so soundly that he liked to call himself the decedent. He laughed at his own joke whenever he said that. Sophie could not sleep. She had a job that required her to lay awake for long hours retracing her steps, and nothing seemed to help. Sex did not put her to sleep but rather put her in a state of heightened awareness. While she was having sex with Joe, she found herself looking up into his face as he chugged along and wondering how it had come to this. His was the face of a child, shot through with a tragic lack of understanding of its own mortality. It was not the face of a man. Not really. She reached up and brushed his cheek and he mistook her touch for tenderness.

With Joe asleep, she found herself thinking of sex. What was it, exactly? What was pleasure? Had she felt it? Something had seemed to widen in the space behind her nose, to enlarge her, but was that pleasure? How would she know, exactly? Joe had put a finger inside her. What was he pointing at? What was that rivulet of fluid growing cold on her thigh? Was it her blood? And what was the point of Joe’s weight on her, exactly? Was he making a point about his bulk? Was he trying to remind her of his physical power? It was unlikely. He was not aggressive. Sex kept her up, thinking.

Her bed, too, kept her up. It was not comfortable. Something in the sheets gave her cause to itch. A bed should not be like that. If it was not a place of peace, then where was peace? She listened to the blood beat in her ears. Who else was awake? Her mother, probably. Her mother had never slept easily either. She was too often lonely, or afraid, or angry. Maybe sleep, or the lack of sleep, passed like knowledge or sadness from mother to daughter. Maybe all of this was her mother’s fault. She watched the time on the clock creep along and cursed her mother, her bed, her life. She cursed Joe. She cursed sex. She looked out the window and cursed the night sky. “If I never see you again,” she said to the moon, “it’ll be too soon.” She closed her eyes and thought of ways of changing things for the better. She must have fallen asleep eventually, because she remembered dreaming, though she did not remember any details of the dream. She called her mother in the morning to arrange a visit. “I love you,” she said to her mother.

“Will you bring Joe?” her mother said.

“Yes,” Sophie said.

“Well, it’s up to you,” her mother said. No one’s tone was convincing.

J
OE LOVED HER MOTHER
. He had an easy way with her. He told her jokes and she laughed. He got her drinks and she said thank you. Sophie resented this, not because she wanted there to be tension between them but because she knew that Joe was not touching her mother’s core. That core was a hot thing—hot and cold both, to be precise—and when it was touched in any way the result was discomfort for everyone. Joe kept her mother comfortable and he was comfortable in return. He smiled at everything she said, even when what she said was sharp or uneasy. He ate whatever she put in front of him, even though Sophie knew that later on in bed he would turn from his back to his side and sigh in a way that let her know he was worrying about his weight. If asked, he would say nothing bad about her mother. “I like going over there,” he’d say. “It’s a nice place.” And just like that, she was left to stay awake in the bed, where the corners of the mattress rose up slightly, where the equatorial bar bruised her back and shoulders.

That’s where she’s going this afternoon: to see her mother and then buy a new bed. She told Joe that she was going to the drugstore. This struck her as an acceptable lie. She didn’t want to get into a discussion with him about the bed, and whether it should be replaced, and what implications that would have for their relationship and the future of the planet. She just wanted to sleep. Joe seems to be sleeping more than ever. For more than a week he has been slack, like a clothesline strung indifferently between two buildings. The preoccupation with his weight is only part of it. He has been listless. He has started to drink too much again. He has complained that he does not know what he wants from life, that he cannot imagine going forward while he is in the grip of this inertia. “But inertia is what makes you go forward,” she says. They were both right, but she was more right.

The radio is playing Billie Holiday, a song called “You Go to My Head.” Sophie knows the song, knows it well. Here, credit is due not her mother but her father. He plays the trumpet, sometimes professionally, and when she was a baby he had been obsessed with American singers. A truck goes by with a picture of a ghost on the side, which reminds her of a line in the song: “Though I’m certain that this heart of mine hasn’t a ghost of a chance in this crazy romance, you go to my head.” She and Joe do not listen to music together very often. Mostly it’s in the car. A radio is never on as they are going to bed or waking up. When she was friends with Peter, they used to listen to music all the time. Peter was obsessed with Smokey Robinson. “These songs tell you who to love,” he used to say. “Whoever you think of while you are listening to these songs, well, that is who you love.” When Peter explained this theory, Sophie saw how brightly hope was burning in his eyes. She could not endorse that hope. Instead, she fell silent and stayed that way.

At the time that Peter had asked Sophie to date him and Sophie had refused, she had told Peter she was sorry, and while it was a lie, it was also a prediction, because that time did eventually come. She thought of him often and was sorry when she did. Now in the car, as she drives to her mother’s house, she wonders where Peter is. He lingers like a haunting refrain. The song ends. Next is another Billie Holiday song, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Sophie sings along. “The memory of all that, no, no, they can’t take that away from me.” She imagines her mother’s voice next. This is becoming quite a play. “Oh, but they can take that away,” she hears her mother say. “Can and will. So be careful.” Her mother loves Joe. He is often the first thing she asks about. “It is so important to pick the right man to marry,” she tells Sophie. When her mother speaks of Joe, she rarely has any irony in her tone.