Dear Hearts (9 page)

And
fuck, what am I supposed to say?  I like dudes, get on board with
it?  So I'm drinking a beer and there’s a lady sitting across from us with
a guy next to her, oily haired, pony-tailed biker type.  She’s drinking
the same beer as me, and her lips curl around the glass shaft, and for an
instant I think like an ordinary man, a man that’s not doomed to be called a
fag for the rest of his life.  And as I drink and will the buzz to swallow
me whole, I thinks of her lips around my dick and call her Sheila, some bimbo I
picked up at a bar one weekend when I was supposedly working.  It could
fit.  I take another swig.  It does fit.  And when I look at my
wife
who’s
statue still, staring into the oily flames,
I think about her naked feet, her ruthless love. 
My
dismal life.

FOURTEEN

Elena

Secrets are no longer secrets,
except for mine of course.

Mitch
comes clean, but I hate saying it like that because when he tells me about
Sheila, I feel like I've taken a mud bath.

He
finds me out on the patio and I close my eyes when I hear his sound.  I
think
go, please just fucking go
, but the asshole scrapes the empty
metal chair across the concrete and sits in it. 
Looks
at me.
  There's no whiskey because we've already run out.

"What's
she like?" I ask.  There's a mai tai in my system, the only alcohol
I've had all day, but that's been quickly absorbed, slurped up by my blood and
now my shaky hands are taunting me.

"Not
you."

"No
shit."  Blonde, just some fling, he tells me.  I look up and
he's crying.  The asshole has the audacity to cry.

"Oh,
yes, this must be so fucking painful for you," I whisper.  It's
strange how quiet we are when usually we go at it so hard that our neighbor
pokes a glaucomic eye out through her blinds.

"Elena." 
That's all he says.  My father left when I was seven, Wren's age.  My
father left for a woman he met two counties over while taking our steer to
market.  Her name was Angela, burnt red hair, painted nails to
match.  She looked like one of the women in my brothers' dirty mags. 
He brought her over to meet us when he knew our mama would be cleaning over at St.
Ann’s, and I was actually grateful he did something so perverted like
that.  Teach the "we" master a lesson.

But
then it was time to go after he sucked down one of the beers he brought for my
brothers and after Angela glossed my cheek with her sticky red lips, it was time
for him to say goodbye.  He looked good. 
Handsome.
 
Happy.
 
Everything that comes
from leaving the ones that grasp your limbs and weigh you down.

"Elena,"
he had said, brushing my hair with his hand.  And then he was gone.

I
hear whimpering, and it's my husband.  He reaches for my hand but I smack
it like one the mosquitoes circling our head.

"Don't be such a faggot
," I say.

~

I
save up the money I get from Hattie's in an old jar of Jiffy peanut butter that
I keep in the empty spare tire well in the Grand Am.  I take it out for
oil changes or on the off chance that Mitch fills up my car which he hardly
ever does.  He knows the Grand Am is an extension of me, and you just
don't touch the extension.

I
think about Mitch now as I'm dressing the mannequins on the display near the
front of Hattie's.  Our weekend was a pretty rough one as far as actually
associating with one another goes.  He left, in fact.  Said he was
going to stay at a hotel which I know is code for "bang my on the side
slut."  But I didn't care.  I didn't want to look at his face
and frankly, I was afraid of what I'd do to him in his sleep.

"Thinking
deep shit thoughts, huh?" Tanisha says, dumping another box of warped
winter coats at my feet.  That's another thing about Hattie's, nothing is
ever in season, so I'm left to dress a series of blank-eyed dolls in soiled
jackets that smell slightly better than a fat man's armpit.

"Something
like
that.  Mitch left."  I say it
because I need to say it.  Pam and Jimmy know shit's hit the fan, but I can't
quite bring myself to talk to them about it, and as much as Jesus may have an
opinion on the matter, I really don't want to know about it.

Wren
knows, too.  Wren's bladder also knows because it kept me up half the
night, scrubbing sheets in our coffin of a laundry
room.     

"Ain't
that a bitch," Tanisha says and squats down, pretending to rifle through
the box because Hattie is sharking through the snow boots at the back of the
store asking customers if she can show them anything. 

Tanisha's
decked out in her gold lame pants, her "fancy pants" that she wore
the day I applied to work at Hattie's.  I was wondering why on God's green
earth Hattie hired someone who looked louder than a siren, but Tanisha knows
how to sell, and besides, most of the clientele are Tanisha look-alikes
anyways. 

"Yup.
  I'm
leaving him."

When
Tanisha opens her mouth I see the tiny glints of gold that match her
pants.  "Careful now," she says.  "I'm thinking maybe
we go with the purple windbreaker for the middle one," she adds for the
sake of two-ton Tammy who has a "Southern, Loud and Proud" t-shirt on
and is harboring close to our right. 
When she moves
away Tanisha hisses, "The kids.
  The kids feel it
most."  And I know that.  I've got Barbie sheets mildewing in my
washer as proof.

"What
do I do then?" I say.  "Just Another Manic Monday" is
leaking down the walls and I think of that word, "leak."  “The
whole world's leaking,” I say to him sometimes, and for us, that's a good
thing.  It means money.  And I think of my jar of peanut butter, my
measly lump of bills in it and my stupid TV in the storage unit that started to
depreciate the moment I bought it.  I can't raise Wren all alone.

"You
guys need time for yourselves.  That's what I do when shit gets heated
with me and Jonesy.  There's an old woman who lives on the floor below us
and I send Tasia down there to count pieces of butterscotch or whatever the
hell they do while we work our shit out.  Helps," she says.  I'm
not so sure seeing that Tanisha comes off as the type of girlfriend you get a
restraining order against, but I nod.  She might be right, and considering
she's the one doing this parenting thing solo, I figure she doesn't have the
time to be wrong.

After
work and after I start to smell faintly of old cheese, grab my purse and leave
my "Ask Me How I Can Help" tag in my locker in the backroom, I
consider how a Dr.Pepper and whiskey would change my life in the most amazing
way.  But I fight the tug by calling the one person who screws up my life
harder than any drug.  
My mother.

~

 Keeping
my eyes on the road ain't easy with the devil in my ear.   

"Well,
I'll b-"

"Save
it," I say.  "Tell me about Daddy."  I can hear her
breathing as I whip down Pyle drive and stop short at a light that turns red
way too fast.  Pain shoots down the back of my neck, but it it's nothing
compared to the way I feel when she speaks.  

"What's
there to say when nobody loves you?"  Ugh, her voice. 
Nails on the chalkboard of my life.
  It's at least
three octaves higher than most women's and she does this thing where she
whispers at the end.  Like she doesn't want me to know what she's really
saying.  I wave my finger around my head at the car in front of me that's
still idling even as the light turns green, but that doesn't even make me feel better.

"He
loved you.  You drove him away," I say.  It was pathetic to
watch.  Even at five, when Daddy was still at home, I could taste my
mother's desperation slick in the folds of her skin.  "Here's the
ham, Harold.  Glazed just like you like it, Harold."  Her words
gave me cavities.

"I
did no such thing," she says, and "thing" is barely
audible.  Here comes the guilt. 
Wave after wave,
pounding and breaking into me.
  But then I remember the nail polish
incident.  How after he said her pot roast tasted like an unwashed foot, I
went to her room and found her nail polish in an old, empty egg carton shoved
under her bed.  I took out the red and started painting my dolly's nails
in my room, door closed.  And after he had left to wash the taste of foot
out of his mouth at the bar, she found me and "the whore's paint" and
ripped it out of my hand.  She scrubbed me so hard in the bath I bled a
little between my legs that night and cried for Jesus to save me.

"You
drove everyone away," I say.  She laughs and it flutters about like a
mosquito.

"I
didn't drive you away.  You all left.  You all just got in your
trucks and zipped on out and here I am left to make stories up when the women
at Mass ask how my little Elena is.  How the hell should I
know?"  The cussing means she's scared.  It's like spooking a
rat into a corner, nudging it a little with a sharp stick.  So I nudge a
little harder.

"I
think the funniest part is that you didn't realize he was cheating on
you. 
Like you were just too stupid to see it."
 
I'm on the tail of the guy in front of me, Mr. Sleeps
At
Green Lights.  I'm so close I can taste his back bumper, and I think of
doing it. 
Slamming hard into him, running him off the
road.

"You
don't know what it's like."  She breathes "like" and I
inhale, break a little and let Mr. Sleeps
At
Green
Lights speed off.  This time his finger is the one making the rounds.

"I
do," I say and the break is real this time.  The TV floods out of me,
my secret job, the pain of raising a child whose face is the perfect blend of
mine and Mitch's and how hard it is to look at her sometimes, to know that one
day she could be in her car and have the relentless thirst to ruin the life of
the person in front her.  I don't talk about Mitch's affair.  

"It's
okay, baby, it'll be okay."  I'm crying so hard I have to pull over
into the parking lot of BJ's Buffet.  I wipe hard at my face, pretend I'm
tuning the radio dials so the black guy leaving Jester's Pawn Shop doesn't see
I'm crying.  I reach into the glove box for a left over McDonald's napkin
and make the mistake of looking in the rearview mirror. 
Just God awful.

"You
know, Mitch isn't your father.  And hell knows you aren't me," she
laughs. 
That laugh
.  That was always a good
thing, much better than her voice.  It was
real,
it was from somewhere low, deep. 
Maybe her spleen.
 
It came out that time I told her that I met a guy named Dave and was going to
shave my head so I could live as his wife at the commune.  She laughed so
hard, I thought she'd chipped her tooth.

"You're
better Elena.  You are.  And God knows your child has a better set of
parents than you did, so guess what?  She'll be better than you, and
she'll live her life knowing she has two parents that love her so much that
they worry about every little thing when it comes to her."  I nod to
no one, to everyone.  There's a couple walking into the pawn shop now,
barely twenty, I guess, and I think I'm being generous there.  She pushes
the stroller, one of those cheap contraptions and I can see the baby is only in
a diaper, naked feet.  But the guy's arm is around her shoulders and he
leans in, kisses her on the cheek.  The woman laughs.

"I
don't want to tell you what to do, and I've had more than enough experience
knowing you wouldn't follow my advice anyways.  But I just want to tell
you, don't be like me or your father.  Try, Elena.  Just try as hard
as you can."

When
the phone is quiet and my mother is where she should be, crying in her kitchen
in Helena and no longer in my ear, I think about the other time.  The time
we made blackberry jam, just me and her, and how out in the sunlight, the rays
spoking through the trees, she said I was the prettiest thing she'd ever
done.  That I was the prettiest thing she would ever do.

I
think of Wren and I already know.  I have to try.

FIFTEEN

Mitch

I'm
cocooned in the down comforter and my belly is full.  General Tsao's,
Aaron's favorite and mine now, too.  We don't eat out a lot besides the
occasional birthday dinner, Elena and me, so being wrapped in the blanket of
someone who calls The Dynasty Diner his "place" and who knows the
number by heart lights a thrilling match down my spine.  Right before the
guilt comes to snuff it out.

 
“Thoughts?”
Aaron asks me when he catches me in the
hallway.  He’s holding Top Gun in one hand, Risky Business in the other,
and I nod my head at the DVD case with Tom Cruise on the cover, his shades
pulled down and the young blond chick leaning against the hood of a car. 
“Tits on that one” comes hurling like a train and Jimmy's string of words sears
a path behind my forehead. 

I
told Jimmy the same story: some blond that didn’t mean anything.  But of
course I had to juice up the details for my sensory-obsessed friend: full
titties, little waist.  A mouth that was never fully satisfied.

“Damn,”
was all he said, and I knew it was meant as one part remorse, one part jealousy. 
“Is it over?” he asked, and I said it was, for Pam’s sake and for Elena’s who
would probably receive the squeaky clean version from Pam.  More fudged
details:
I’m in a hotel room in Shiloh.  I need to clear my head for
the weekend. 
No, but thank you, Jimmy, thanks for the
offer.
  But
  I’d
rather tough it out
on my own.  Yeah, I’ve got condoms.

He
did ask why I didn’t tell him and sounded wounded like a cartoon dog. 
While I plucked my tongue at a strip of chicken between my teeth on Aaron’s
king sized bed, I thought up an answer: “Because you’re like a brother,
Jimmy.  And I didn’t want you to have to shoulder the burden of lying for
me."

“Thank
you, Mitch,” he said and the whisper of guilt formed into a full-fledged wind
storm.

We
agreed to take the weekend off and shore up our repairs through the week before
starting St. Bonaventure’s roof leak next Saturday.  It seems a world
away, sitting next to Aaron in his boxers, his scar, an old friend on my mind,
my tongue.  I had tasted it, kissed it, the little mound of flesh where
past hurt braided into itself.  Reformed
itself
.

I
pad like a Greek in my white comforter toga to the living room where Aaron has
opened another bottle of wine.  He fires up the TV and we drink and watch
for awhile - Tom gliding his white socks across the wood floor - when Aaron
grabs the remote and dials down the volume. 
Green eyes.
 
They’re always a surprise to look into.

“How
are you really?” he asks.  The wine has warmed him up.  When I first
called him from the parking lot of a Chevron outside of Little Rock to see if I
could stay at his place, he didn’t ask any questions.  Just said, “Of
course,” and picked me up on his way home from work.   And we were
too busy with the Chinese chicken, the first bottle of wine, the way his sheets
felt as we tumbled under them to talk about it. 
Until
now.

“Like my wife caught me cheating.”
 

"She
caught us?"  I look up, but his face isn't concerned.  In fact,
there's a slight smile there, and I want to point it out, but the chicken, the
way the comforter is keeping me warm against the steady stream of air
conditioning, the fact that tonight is my choice and it feels pretty damn good
to make my own choices stops me.  And
it's
worse
knowing what that smile means: "I've won."

"No. 
Well, she thinks you're a blonde with big tits so in some insane, untrue way,
yes."

"I've
always wanted highlights. 
The boobs, not so much."
 
He leans in and kisses my neck and I close my eyes to the feel of it.  You
can do that with moments.  Block out the dirtiest parts of your world and
fall victim to the current rush of skin against skin.  I've built a whole
life around moments like these.

"It's
serious.  She kicked me out.  I mean, I let myself out for the
weekend.  I'm not sure what I'll be going home to."

"Then
don't."  Here's another moment, but it's not skin against skin. 
It's Aaron in his boxer shorts wanting me to redirect my entire life down his
path.  Stark flashes of future me: the doting husband at the Christmas
party, buying our first puppy, a Scottish
Terrier
I
think because Aaron mentioned once how he always admired Jock from Lady and the
Tramp.  There's love in the future me.  There's a lifetime of
"finally."  But
there's also quick jabs
to the heart when I think of Wren.

"Wait
here," Aaron says and it's just me and Tom in his underwear.  He goes
to the master bedroom, so I close my eyes.  I open them when I see Elena
crying against the back of my lids and now Aaron is standing in front of me.

"I'm
sorry for you, for your pain, Mitch.  But I'm also not sorry because I
love you."  I look again at the green in his eyes, and all I can see
is honesty.  There's his mother who doesn't love him anymore. 
And his father who doesn't love him anymore.
  And then
there's his heart, layer after layer scalpeled away, a twist of knotted skin
that proves the damage.  And then there's his truth: I am his Elena.

He
has a blue box, the top opened and the contents hovering in front of me. 
I look at them, the rings.  "Brushed tungsten," he says to say
something I guess, and then I look at the one already on my finger, old and
gold and inscribed with "TEAM ME," because Elena and I were drunk the
day we went to the jeweler's and thought it would be funny. 
Team Mitch and Elena.
 
Forever and
ever.

I
take off the gold band after a few awkward tugs and wait.

But
the moment's gone.

~

I
leave Sunday morning with kisses on my lips and a new ring on my finger. 
The car ride to the Chevron station is as quiet as when Aaron had picked me up,
but this time he's silent because he's satisfied and I'm silent because I'm
lying.

He
thinks I'm going to leave my wife.

"Until
this weekend," he says into the dusky Sunday evening.  He gives a
wave because there are people around, a black woman with a tangle of children
around her legs and a man who leaks a stream of gasoline down his pants and
hocks a "fucking shit" at the ground.  I wave back and off he
goes, back to White Smoke where in his head we're together and in my heart,
we're not.

I'm
not leaving my wife.

My
phone is choked with voicemails, all of them Jimmy, one from Elena.  She
wants to try, to start over.  My new ring burns my skin.

And
then there's the one from Wren.

"Hi, Daddy.
  I miss
you.  Come home because Mommy says when you came home we can have ice
cream."  Then there's a crackling like Elena is taking the phone and
I hear her breath for a moment like she's going to say something, but she
doesn't.

In
the cab of the truck, I spot a trash can over where the gasoline soaked man is
standing, an older gentleman with a longish beard and a belt buckle the size of
both my fists.  I walk over and he nods at me and the ring lands in the
belly of the barrel, rests on wadded up paper towels and the half-eaten
contents of a Taco Bell bag.

Scarred
skin, new rings,
green
eyes. I blink them all away.

Because I miss her, too.