Wide Blue Yonder (24 page)

“You can’t stand that, can you? Are you jealous? Huh? I bet you don’t even remember the last time you—”

The house enveloped her with its own sounds, air-conditioning, refrigerator rattle. In the bathroom upstairs she swallowed three Tylenol and wrung out a washcloth in cold water. Her reflection floated in the mirror but she resolutely kept her eyes from it because that would be the final defeat, to see all the ways her face had become that of an old woman.

In bed she tried to relax her toes, ankles, knees, bleeding heart, exploding brain. It must be a migraine, she never had them but she thought this was the way they were supposed to feel. One more bodily failure. She was coming apart like a cheap doll. Who needed sex when you had such a fascinating new hobby, dying by pieces? She wasn’t as wounded by Josie’s taunts as she might have been because she couldn’t hold the concept of sex in the same skin as her writhing pain. She couldn’t even remember the last time she did. That part of her life was probably over anyway. There were times she mourned this and other times she simply forgot to be mournful. Josie or anyone else young couldn’t be expected to understand.

A rolling wave of sweat and nausea seized her and even though she was lying down, the room revolved in a whizbang spin like a planet torn loose from its orbit. Josie was at the door, pushing it open. “Mom?”

She stood in the doorway, pulling the room even further off balance. Its edges threatened to flip, exchange places. “I’m sorry I said some of that stuff. It was really vile. There’s some of it I meant but not the stuff about you, all right? Mom?

“Go away.”

Josie closed the door behind her.

Elaine got out of bed once to throw up. A long string of filth that left her empty and shaking. Migraine. Had to be. Some kind of negative biofeedback, her hapless life trying to squeeze out through her ears. She rinsed her mouth and went back to bed and slept somehow and by the time she woke up and was able to move about the house it was already dark and Josie’s car was gone.

I
n the backroom of Trade Winds, Elaine sat on the floor leaning against the wall. All around her she had unfurled a dozen bolts of fabric and was trying to empty her mind of everything except their patterns and colors. There was a pale green paisley with a border of pink. Next to it, a crimson and blue batik. A yellow sunburst print. A turquoise and sky blue scroll. Stars of deep orange stitched together with silver. She took those holy deep-down breaths. She breathed in red and orange, breathed out blue and green.

For migraines the doctor said you should avoid chocolate, alcohol, smoking, and stress. The same thing doctors said about everything. The hypnotist guy suggested relaxation therapy. Apparently you could train your mind to fill itself with nothing, like a balloon, watch it float away on a current of pure spiritual ether. Elaine shifted her eyes out of focus so that the colors swam together. The fabric smelled of India, of sun and fruit and jungle and smoke and city sidewalks as dense as rivers.

She let the cloth drift over her head like a veil. Behind her closed eyes she saw the faces of the villagers, her villagers. Their dark walnut skins and white white smiles, both shy and excited, their slim brown hands and feet that kept endlessly busy with the most ancient and primitive sorts of labor. Planting millet seeds, tending cooking fires, making bricks out of mud, carrying bundles of sticks. It drove you mad that people were still made to live this way, that girl children were routinely given less food than their brothers, that you might spend entire days without meeting one literate person, that none of the villagers would be likely to ever travel fifty miles from the place where they were born, that such a country possessed nuclear weapons. And still they smiled, smiled and sang for her. She loved them, she knew that, of course, but she was not prepared for how much she could miss them at any given moment, half a world away, a longing that felt like a migraine of the heart.

So much for achieving nothingness. Elaine gave up the effort but remained where she was, the turquoise-and-sky cloth draped over her face. Josie. She didn’t want to think about her, but there she was.

These days they were being extremely polite with each other. Elaine didn’t try to make conversation except for the barest necessary minimum. Josie didn’t talk any more than she ever did. That meant they passed whole days like cloistered nuns, maneuvering around each other in contemplative silence. Josie came and went as she pleased. Elaine never asked questions anymore. She felt how thoroughly she had failed and was continuing to fail. She thought about talking to Frank, enlisting him in an effort to beat some sense into the girl. She congratulated herself on recognizing a truly bad idea when she had one. Besides, Frank was leaving on vacation, or maybe they’d already gone, she’d lost track. Right this minute Frank and Teeny were probably splashing
around in a hot tub, toasting the mountain peaks with vodka and tonics.

She’d lost track of things at work as well. There were payroll taxes, bank deposits, advertising deadlines waiting for her. She was going to have to get up, regroup, care about such things once more. But she couldn’t bring herself to do so just yet, which was why she was still sitting on the floor with a bolt of fabric tented over her face when Lyla, the part-time girl, walked in looking for her at the beginning of her shift.

Lyla emitted a faint, dismal shriek. Elaine tried to whip the fabric off her head but her hands snagged and she had to fight her way free. “Oh, hi,” she said blandly. “Is it two o’clock already?”

“I thought somebody tied you up and killed you or something.”

“Nope, just resting. Forty winks.” Elaine got to her feet.

Lyla’s look of alarm was turning to suspicion, as if she’d been left out of a joke. She was a short, heavyset girl, a year behind Josie in school. She had close-set eyes and light brown hair that she wore in lumps. Her mother worked in one of the grade school cafeterias and her father kept retiring from various small enterprises. They were the kind of household that always had a sign in the front yard advertising saw sharpening or small engine repair. Josie and Lyla were not friends. Girls like Josie were not friends with girls like Lyla. Even if they had been in the same class at school, they would have had no use for each other. It was probably just as well that Lyla was not more appealing, that Elaine felt no temptation to make her a kind of substitute daughter. Once Elaine had made the mistake of suggesting that a particular blouse would look pretty on her. Lyla, who wore dreary polyester turtlenecks winter and summer, thrust her jaw out and glowered mightily as if she’d been insulted, which she had, Elaine supposed. Lyla was sullen and stolid, but at least she was a reliable
worker. She did as she was told. Not one inch more. If Elaine said she should clean, she cleaned. If not, she could ignore smeared glass, muddy footprints, worse. Stolid, even grudging at times. The kind of girl who would just as soon stab you in the back as look at you.

So that when Lyla asked, “Is something going on with Josie?” Elaine jumped.

“What do you mean?”

Lyla shrugged and kept on unpacking a box of wooden hangers. “I was just wondering about her. If she was in trouble or anything. Did you want all these out? I don’t know if there’s room for them.”

“Lyla.”

She stooped to pick up a bit of the packaging material, and when she straightened up Elaine saw the spiteful, ugly step-sister gleam in her eye, the triumph of the despised and lowly. “Oh, it’s probably nothing. Just that the other night I was out at the Big Lots, kind of late, it was just closing, and I thought I saw her drive past in this police car.”

J
osie and Mitch met at his place most afternoons around four, and hung out until it was dark, when they started feeling restless. They’d go get something to eat and drive around listening to music and not talking much, because they would have done most of that earlier. They were better at talking, Josie thought, when their skins could help. Once it was time for Mitch to go to work, he would drop her off at her car. Josie would wait around to see if it was a slow shift, because then he might come back to see her again. She loved it when he did that, when they could sit together in the squad car with the radio sending out its messages of vigilance and danger, Mitch, as always, looked handsome and severe in his uniform. Even now when she’d seen him put it on piece by piece, she marveled. His service revolver was holstered on his right hip. She could reach out and touch it where she sat. She wanted to shoot it but so far he hadn’t let her.

At any moment the radio might break in to send him in pursuit of the drunk and disorderlies or traffic accidents or whatever else her fellow citizens were amusing themselves with that evening. He’d kiss her, in a distracted fashion, and tell her to keep the car doors locked on her way home. She worried about him all the time. Even in Springfield there were plenty of guns and plenty of fools who might not have the ambition to be serious criminals but who could sure as hell pull a trigger. She knew that the odds were against this, and besides, it was not the kind of town where anyone died tragically. But as she drove through the quiet streets she couldn’t help feeling a tide of grief building in her, the nerve she plucked when she imagined him dead, gone, murdered, the deep pleasurable shameful wrench she could give herself whenever she chose.

Some nights it was almost chilly, a reminder that before too long summer would give itself a nudge and start its long slow decline toward winter and school and everything else that was normal and hideous and inescapable. She wondered what would happen then with her and Mitch. It was so hard to imagine the two of them in winter coats, scraping ice off the windshield. It was hard to imagine them anywhere except on these summer streets with the hot roiling smells of asphalt and cigarettes and something cherry-sweet, like candy left out all day in the sun.

There were times she was brave enough to think about the future, what she would get him for Christmas and Valentine’s Day. When she was eighteen they could move in together because she’d be old enough and no one could stop her. They wouldn’t have to stay in Springfield. They’d be so gone. Everybody would talk about them the way you talked about famous people from dull places, trying to believe they’d ever lived there.

When she was alone, when she was forced to return to her own uninteresting bed for the few hours that remained of the night, she wavered. That persistent mutinous, sneering voice started up again in her head. He would get tired of her. Of course he would. It didn’t matter how much he liked her now, or said he liked her, or how many tricks she could do in bed. There might be a perfect moment between them, even a series of such moments strung together like a necklace, but that proved nothing, it was not a promise or a future or anything else. This was a fool’s paradise. A dream she happened to be walking through with her clothes off, a
sealed bubble of heat and delirium, a perverse fairy tale, a city of glass that would shatter whenever she took one step beyond its boundaries.

She asked him about his old girlfriends. Mitch groaned. “Why do we have to talk about this?”

“Because I’m a crazy jealous woman.”

“No kidding.”

“So?” Josie sent her finger traveling from his chin down the center of his chest, then further south. She was fascinated at having this wealth of body to explore. She couldn’t get over how hairy he was. Not in any disgusting way, just how a man was constructed. The nests of dark hair beneath his arms, the hair down his belly and around his penis, like it was grass planted from seed. Jeff had been blond. It made a difference. “Tell me how many there were.”

“Before you? There was really only one.”

“One. Sure.”

“Yeah, but she was really big and fat, so she counts for three or—”

She clobbered him with a pillow. They wrestled some. Wrestling just about always turned into having sex. He wound up on top. He raised himself up on his forearms so he could push into her harder. She was always sore these days. She wondered if men ever got sore, wore themselves out, or if they could just keep going until it fell off. There was some kind of bug that did it that way, she remembered, screwed itself to death, left its little bug part inside its mate. Mitch was using his fingers on her down there and she knew some girl had taught him that. Christ God. They were stuck together, slick and rocking. She was only a writhing pulse, everything in her balanced on a high shelf where she sweated and shivered and her vision turned blank, furious white, then she broke and fell down with him, their two hearts finally slowing, each pulling back into its own skin.

Josie waited until they reached a place where they were able to talk again. “Are you gonna tell me about them?”

“About who?”

“You know. Those fat girls.”

“I can’t believe you even want to hear about them.”

“I do. I want to know everything about you. I want to suck your brain and know everything you know. That didn’t come out right.” She’d already told him about Jeff. That had been embarrassing only because there was so little to tell. The dorky high school guy she used to sleep with. “Just tell me this one time and I promise I won’t ever pester you about it again.”

Mitch yawned. “They were just normal girlfriends, OK? I don’t know what to say about them. What you want to hear.”

“Were they pretty?” Josie asked languidly. And held her breath.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

She waited, but he didn’t say any more. She sighed. “What, you don’t remember?”

“You want me to tell you they were gorgeous or something?”

“No-oo.” Josie sighed again at his obstinacy and looked around the bedroom she used to try so hard and so hopelessly to imagine. Now she knew it as well as her own. The closet with some of his clothes, dress shirts and other stuff he never wore, on hangers, the rest in stacks on the floor. The bed was two mattresses piled one on top of the other so you had to roll yourself in and out of it. Magazines,
GQ
and
Sports Illustrated
and some weird martial arts kind, within arm’s reach. A plain pine dresser—she’d already sneaked a look through the drawers—with the usual jumble of keys and coins and matchbooks and gum wrappers and receipts on top. His sheets were a bamboo pattern and he didn’t use fabric softener. A weight bench in one corner of the room. A trail of sweat socks across the floor. His whole apartment was like that, neither dirty nor clean in any interesting way, nothing in it that
you couldn’t buy at a Wal-Mart. At the same time it was precious to her, because it was his.