Celia's Song (20 page)

The knock comes too soon. She opens the door. Her voice softens, and she is humbled by the picture of his frame, backlit by a full moon. Damn if it doesn't loosen the tide of tears lurking behind her eyes. Steve holds Stacey. Her sobs are so deep, so long, and so hard they worry him. He wants to ask what's bothering her, but he knows better. Stacey's great aunt Ella had told him that Salish women believe the less a man knows the better.

He waltzes her through the door when he hears the sobs calm into ordinary weeping, and sits her down on her couch. He isn't sure what he can do for her when the sobs end, but Stacey reaches for a cigarette and solves this for him. After a pull on it, and a few chuckles about how old that need to cry had been, Stacey recovers and relieves him of having to do anything.

“I think you came here to hurt me, Steve. You better do it and go on home.”

“Actually, I think I came here to get hurt. But you're right, I ought to do it and go on home. I want more, Stacey. Don't interrupt.” He puts his hand up to warn her not to respond before she starts. Most white men in their fifties don't have much hair, but Steve still has a full head and the yellow light works magic on the blond. She wants to touch his hair, to pull him down next to her, to ask him to love her just one more time before he hurts her.

“Stacey. I got married and it didn't last. I couldn't stop thinking about you and I think my wife had some kind of sixth sense because when she asked for a divorce she mentioned you. Not in any kind of a nice way. She was right. I saw you in the mall that day and it all came back just like I was still standing on the bridge watching fish swim upstream all over again. In the mall, you asked for my number. I never said anything about the kind of relationship you wanted because my daughter was young and I hadn't finished paying for the house. It's been ten years, ten years of making double house payments and socking away money for my daughter's education. My ex-wife phoned me yesterday and said she just made the last mortgage payment. I'm free. Suzy has a job. She starts college in the fall. Today I took her to the bank and gave her what I had. I don't have much saved up for my retirement, but I still have my medical practice. I have no debts and no obligations besides my daughter's future wedding — if she has one.”

The candle flickers. Stacey remembers their last day on the bridge. She feels the same hurt she had felt in her room that night after she left him there. The dark had settled in and the pain had scraped away at her. She remembers that she knew the decision she had made was the right one. He was so young and so white and she knew he would insist she move to white town, where she would get lost. She would be swallowed by her own lostness, become unrecognizable to him, and then he would divorce her. She was not like his ex-wife. She could not take him to court, insist
on child support and that she keep his house and child and make a new life for herself. She would have withered away.

“It's been five years of waiting for you to call, Stacey. I want … I want to see you every day, bent over the stove frying bread and fixing coffee. I want to see you troop off to Momma's and come back all tight and strained and tired looking. I want to hold you until it all melts away. I believe you want that too.”

The chair gives in to her body and his voice settles some unasked question deep inside. She does want it. She wants to see the back side of him retreat into the early morning light and head for some place in white town, and to have him return to this side of the bridge, day after day. She wants to hold him when his shoulders get rounded from whatever weighs on him. She wants to get excited about some small dumb thing and jump up and down telling him about it. She just isn't sure if he wants to be here with her. She never wanted to live on the other side of that river — where no one gives a shit about her, Stella, or that child — and he would not risk his career over some relative of hers he hardly knows. At least not willingly.

In the silence of her absence, if she didn't tell him where she was going and what she was doing, he would grow weary or suspicious and leave her; she would be left here in this house, feeling lonelier than she feels right now. She would never again have this easygoing kind of love from him. He had never said anything about wanting more of her before and she had not thought about where their secret affair was going before now. Now it is out there, playing
with her skin, dancing in her belly, teasing her in that deep down forever kind of way that wakes up hope, pulls up promise — the promise of them sitting on a rocking chair sharing one last breath, one last handclasp, one last look before their eyes close forever.

“Why did you have to go and do that?” The tears roll out as she laughs, her voice so gentle. He smiles at her. “Look at me.”

“I am. I like what I see.” And he winks, takes both her hands in his and finishes what he started. “This is a promissory ring. You get to keep it no matter what you answer. It means that I promise to get you an engagement ring and then I will marry you. If you can see your way to saying yes then I will get you the biggest gawdamned engagement ring white town has to offer.”

“You people get to take everything so lightly.”

“Don't call me ‘you people,' Stacey. You know I don't like it.” His voice tightens as his body stiffens.

“You know what I'm talking about, Steve.” He does not. He cannot. He sighs.

“I just don't want to be called ‘you people.' The name is Steve.” His earnestness makes her laugh.

“Okay, Steve,” she says, mimicking his tones.

“Okay you won't call me ‘you people,' or okay you'll put this ring on your finger?” He means to push the envelope right here and right now. The memories that had no pressure attached to them slip away. He is telling her he's always loved her and had married someone else because she'd turned him down. He's set his daughter and wife up with a house and investments. He's coming to her penniless, but still productive. She plays cynically with his words; she doubts he would set her up as neatly and cleanly if she was the one he was divorcing. He does not wish to be called “you people,” but she doubts that he treasures her in the same way he did his ex-wife. On the one hand, she doubts they could go forward as a married couple, but she also knows they cannot go back to that easygoing, come-on-in-stranger, long-time-no-see, take-yourshoes-off-and-stay-a-while arrangement after he's asked her to keep him. She feels an all-or-nothing tone in his voice.

Living with him would require extra care; he's white, different. She has no way to frame that difference without offending him and jeopardizing the future of the relationship. The situation would require carefully measured words. She would have to let him know where she was going and figure out how to get what she needs without saying too much. She would have to figure out what he needs and give it to him and still maintain her private world of family. There would have to be a separate world and a together world, which means life with him would be complicated. He has no idea that it would be this complicated, and she is not sure she can deal with it.

“Steve, you have no idea what you're asking of me.”

“Sure I do. I know you don't want to live on my side of town. I'm prepared to live here.”

“How mighty white of you,” she wants to say, but restrains herself. So arrogant, as though being prepared to live here were so decent and big of him. At best it is shallow and simple. She wants to scream at him and at the same time she wants to sink into some momentary sweetness of slow-burning desire.

“I guess that sounds arrogant. I am prepared to live here, since living there presents a whole different set of problems for you,” he catches himself.

He caught himself; maybe this isn't going to be as difficult as she imagines. She feels herself relenting, succumbing, and loving
him for catching himself.

Another voice nags: No more. Jump right in here under my covers. Let's just roll around for a while. I'll make you breakfast before you go. No more watching his back receding into the day knowing she didn't give him much. No more waking up and deciding to head over to Madeline's and camp out with her and her quiet girls for a day or two without saying a word to anyone. No more heading to the bank on Friday with Alice's gal and buying all kinds of makeup neither of them needs, then coming home and playing with it all night long. No more you're-welcome-to-visit-anytime with each of you knowing that to visit someone you have to leave. She hadn't had to think about him at all over these past five years. He's offering her a ring that brings with it a terrible tension; she feels too stuck to respond.

She needs to talk to Momma about all this, but she will have to wait until the crisis is over. She doesn't think Steve will wait out a crisis she does not wish to explain. He wouldn't understand and, like Judy, he would insist they call the police. Tears come; they slide over her cheeks and fall to her hands in her lap. Out of the blue, she laughs; she hasn't given one thought to how or what she would do without him. She laughs, because she knows she wants to keep this man without all hell breaking loose and only Momma can help her with that.

“Are you still an Owenite?” she asks.

“I am Steve, the man who loves you and makes his living as a doctor.”

Stacey's light goes on.

“Doctors have ethics, don't they?”

“Yeah, but what's that got to do with us?”

“Could you ever see your way to breaking your rules for us, for this sorry-ass village?”

He stops breathing to clear his throat. He wants to ask what regulation he would be expected to break, but thinks better of it. First of all, she would not think it mattered; secondly, she would not likely tell him. He figures she wants to know what he would risk for her and he remembers the epidemic. His father would not risk his medical practice for a bunch of scraggly assed Indians. He tells himself that things are different now, but would he gamble his practice for people that remain a mystery to him?

“If you insisted.”

“You do pick the damnedest times to ask me for things, Steve. The last time was long ago, in
'54
, during that flu epidemic. I hadn't slept for a week and you sat there in class discussing the unfairness of your own people not wanting to help, not thinking of what it
meant to us who were staying up all night trying to save the dead from dying. You never once asked me if I was sad, tired, or even if I wanted to fight that flu.”

“I was a kid then, Stacey. I was seventeen for Chrissakes.”

The words sting.

“You aren't any smarter now, Steve. You don't get smarter as you get older; you know more, but you aren't any smarter about what you know.”

There is some loathing in her voice, and he has to look at her hands and wait for the hurt to pass. She sees it, but knows that he had skipped over her hint about the crisis her family is caught in now, so she finds his hurt annoying.

“We are in the middle of a different crisis right now. My nephew killed himself. We don't have near the women left in our family to deal with it. Women leave to marry now. The vice of a hundred years of not being allowed is off, and some people are running around, crazed by the relief. And you're putting ultimatums at me. In the mall that day, you told me you were glad that we were finally having our rights recognized. It didn't occur to you that after a hundred years of no rights maybe our sanity had been twisted just a little. You look at my mom and don't see the forever-tiredness
that never leaves her. You have no idea what it's like to grow up and never see your mother anything but tired, dead-dog fucking tired. You don't see the sadness lurking under our smiles. You can't feel the hot tension wire of fear that never leaves me, not even for one second. It isn't fair, Steve. You don't know it. We still don't fully exist for you. So don't tell me you were dumb because you were young. And I don't want to hear any more about you being white.”

The sting of her raking slides away. The candle flickers light across her face. Quiet nestles around them. He can't go back to an affair, he wants more, and he can't alter who he is, change his history, and he can't see himself going forward without her.

He knows she's right and he suspects that he will never fully understand her. He's familiar with their history, but can't connect it to a response. He hasn't thought much about the effect that history has had on her or her family. Poverty is a word with no practical application to him. He knows her mother had crawled up and down those mountains, sometimes dodging helicopters with a load on her back, but he did not think about her being chronically fatigued until Stacey said it. He begins to realize that her loving him might be painful for her. He's known that she's been painful to know, but he's never thought about how painful it might be for her to be with him. But he knows he's not been happy with just bits
of her.

“I'm not that dumb. I have the good sense to love you.”

Stacey laughs. “I also know that I have got us both pretty stuck, haven't I?”