Fast Lanes (10 page)

Ghost, my solitaire, I’ll say your father was a horse, a Percheron whose rippled mane fell across my shoulders, whose tight hide glimmered, who shivered and made small winged insects rise into the air. A creature large-eyed, velvet. Long bone of the face broad as a forearm, back broad as sleep. Massive. Looking from the side of the face, a peripheral vision innocent, instinctual.

But no, there were many fathers. There was a truck, a rattling of nuts and bolts, a juggling of emergencies. Suede carpenter’s apron spotted with motor oil, clothes kept in stacked crates. There were hands never quite clean and later, manicured hands. A long car with mechanical windows that
zimmed
as they moved smoothly up and down, impenetrable as those clear shells separating the self from a dreamed
desire (do you dream? of long foldings, channels, imageless dreams of fish, long turnings, echoed sounds and shading waters). In between, there were faces in many cars, road maps and laced boots, hand-printed signs held by the highway exits, threats from ex-cons, cajoling salesmen, circling patrolmen. There were counters, tables, eight-hour shifts, grease-stained menus, prices marked over three times, regulars pathetic and laughing, cheap regulation nylons, shoes with ridged soles, creamers filled early as a truck arrives with sugared doughnuts smelling of vats and heat. Men cursed in heavy accents, living in motor hum of the big dishwashers, overflowed garbage pails, ouzo at the end of the day. Then there were men across hallways, stair rails, men with offices, married men and their secretaries, empty bud vase on a desk. Men in elevators, white shirts ironed by a special Chinaman on Bleecker. Sanitary weekend joggers, movie reviewers, twenty-seventh floor, manufactured air, salon haircuts, long lunches, tablecloths and wine. Rooftop view, jets to cut swelling white slashes in the sky. And down below, below rooftops and clean charmed rhymes, the dark alleys meandered; those same alleys that crisscross a confusion of small towns. Same sideways routes and wishful arrivals, eye-level gravel, sooty perfumes, pale grass seeding in the stones. Bronzed light in casts of season: steely and blue, smoke taste of winters; the pinkish dark of any thaw; then coral falling in greens, summer mix of rot and flowers; autumn a burnt red, orange darkened to rust and scab. All of it men and faces, progression, hands come to this and you, grown inside me like one reminder.

He faced me over a café table, showed me the town on a map. No special reason, he said, he’d been here once; a quiet place, pretty, it would do. One geography was all he asked in the arrangement, the “interruption.” He mentioned his obligation and its limits; he mentioned our separate paths. I don’t ask here if they know him, I don’t speculate. I’ve left him purely, as though you came to me after a voyage of
years, as though you flew like a seed, saw them all and won me from them. I’ve lived with you all these months, grown cowish and full of you, yet I don’t name you except by touch, curl, gesture. Wake and sleep, slim minnow, luminous frog. There are clues and riddles, pages in the book of the body, stones turned and turned. Each music lasts, forgetful, surfacing in the aisles of anonymous shops.

Music, addition and subtraction, Pavlovian reminder of scenes becoming, only dreamed. Evenings I listen to the radio and read fairy tales; those first lies, those promises. Directions are clear: crumbs in the woods, wolves in red hoods, the prince of temptation more believable as an enchanted toad. He is articulate and patient; there is the music of those years in the deep well,
plunk
of moisture,
whish
of the wayward rain, and finally the face of rescue peering over the stone rim like a moon. Omens burst into bloom; each life evolved to a single moment: the ugly natural, shrunken and wise, cradled in a palm fair as camellias.

Knot of cells, where is your voice? Here there are no books of instructions. There is the planed edge of the oaken table, the blond rivulets of the wood. There is a lamp in a dirty shade and the crouched stove hunkering its blackness around a fiery warmth. All night I sit, feeling the glow from a couch pulled close to the heat. Stirring the ashes, feeding, feeding, eating the fire with my skin. The foghorn cries through the mist in the bay:
bawaah, bawaah
, weeping of an idiot sheep, steady, measured as love. At dawn I’m standing by the window and the fishing boats bob like toys across the water, swaying their toothpick masts. Perfect mirage, they glisten and fade. Morning is two hours of sun as the season turns, a dime gone silver and thin. The gnarled plants are wild in their pots, spindly and bent. Gnats sleep on the leaves, inaugurating flight from a pearly slime on the windowpane. Their waftings are broken and dreamy, looping in the cold air of the house slowly, so slowly that I clap my
hands and end them. Staccato, flash: that quick chord of once-upon-a-time.

Faraway I was a child, resolute, small, these same eyes in my head sinking back by night. Always I waited for you, marauder, collector, invisible pea in the body. I called you stones hidden in corners, paper fish with secret meanings, clothespin doll. Alone in my high bed, the dark, the dark; I shook my head faster, faster, rope of long hair flying across my shoulders like a switch, a scented tail. Under the bed, beyond the frothy curtain duster, I kept a menagerie of treasures and dust: discarded metallic jewelry, glass rhinestones pried from their settings, old gabardine suitcoat from a box in the basement, lipsticks, compacts with cloudy mirrors, slippers with pompoms, a man’s blue silk tie embossed with tiny golf clubs. At night I crawled under wrapped in my sheets, breathing the buried smell, rattling the bed slats with my knees. I held my breath till the whole floor moved, plethora of red slashes; saw you in guises of lightning and the captive atmosphere.

Now a storm rolls the house in its paws. Again, men are lost and a hull washes up on the rocks. All day search copters hover and sweep. Dipping low, they chop the air for survivors and flee at dusk. The bay lies capped and draggled, rolling like water sloshed in a bowl. Toward nightfall, wind taps like briers on the windowpanes. We go out, down to the rocks and the shore. The forgotten hull lies breaking and splintered, only a slab of wood. The bay moves near it like a sleeper under sheets, murmuring, calling more rain. Animal in me, fish in a swim, I tell you
everything drowns
. I say
believe me if you are mine
, but you push like a fist with limbs. I feel your eyes searching, your gaze trapped in the dark like a beam of light. Then your vision transcends my skin: finally, I see them too, the lost fishermen, their faces framed in swirling hair like the heads of women. They are
pale and blue, glowing, breathing with a pulse in their throats. They rise streaming tattered shirts, shining like mother-of-pearl. They rise moving toward us, round-mouthed, answering, answering the spheres of your talk. I am only witness to a language. The air is yours; it is water circling in like departure.

I
am in the basement sorting clothes, whites with whites, colors with colors, delicates with delicates—it’s a segregated world—when my youngest child yells down the steps. She yells when I’m in the basement, always, angrily, as if I’ve slipped below the surface and though she’s twenty-one years old she can’t believe it.

“Do you know what day it is? I mean do you
know
what day it is, Kay?” It’s this new thing of calling me by my first name. She stands groggy-eyed, surveying her mother.

I say, “No, Angela, so what does that make me?” Now my daughter shifts into second, narrows those baby blues I once surveyed in such wonder and prayed
Lord, lord, this is the last
.

“Well, never mind,” she says. “I’ve made you breakfast.” And she has, eggs and toast and juice and flowers on the porch. Then she sits and watches me eat it, twirling her fine gold hair.

Halfway through the eggs it dawns on me, my ex-wedding
anniversary. Angela, under the eyeliner and blue jeans you’re a haunted and ancient presence. When most children can’t remember an anniversary, Angela can’t forget it. Every year for five years, she has pushed me to the brink of remembrance.

“The trouble with you,” she finally says, “is that you don’t care enough about yourself to remember what’s been important in your life.”

“Angela,” I say, “in the first place I haven’t been married for five years, so I no longer have a wedding anniversary to remember.”

“That doesn’t matter” (twirling her hair, not scowling). “It’s still something that happened.”

Two years ago I had part of an ulcerated stomach removed and I said to the kids, “Look, I can’t worry for you anymore. If you get into trouble, don’t call me. If you want someone to take care of you, take care of each other.” So the three older girls packed Angela off to college and her brother drove her there. Since then I’ve gradually resumed my duties. Except that I was inconspicuously absent from my daughters’ weddings. I say inconspicuously because, thank God, all of them were hippies who got married in fields without benefit of aunts and uncles. Or mothers. But Angela reads
Glamour
, and she’ll ask me to her wedding. Though Mr. Charm has yet to appear in any permanent guise, she’s already gearing up for it. Pleadings. Remonstrations. Perhaps a few tears near the end. But I shall hold firm, I hate sacrificial offerings of my own flesh. “I can’t help it,” I’ll joke, “I have a weak stomach, only half of it is there.”

Angela sighs, perhaps foreseeing it all. The phone is ringing. And slowly, there she goes. By the time she picks it up, cradles the receiver to her brown neck, her voice is normal. Penny-bright, and she spends it fast. I look out the screened porch on the alley and the clean garbage cans. It seems to
me that I remembered everything before the kids were born. I say kids as though they appeared collectively in a giant egg, my stomach. When actually there were two years, then one year, then two, then three between them. The Child-Bearing Years, as though you stand there like a blossomed pear tree and the fruit plops off. Eaten or rotted to seed to start the whole thing all over again.

Angela has fixed too much food for me. She often does. I don’t digest large amounts so I eat small portions six times a day. The dog drags his basset ears to my feet, waits for the plate. And I give it to him, urging him on so he’ll gobble it fast and silent before Angela comes back.

Dear children, I always confused my stomach with my womb. Lulled into confusion by nearly four pregnant years I heard them say, “Oh, you’re eating for two,” as if the two organs were directly connected by a small tube. In the hospital I was convinced they had removed my uterus along with half of my stomach. The doctors, at an end of patience, labeled my decision an anxiety reaction. And I reacted anxiously by demanding an X ray so I could see that my womb was still there.

Angela returns, looks at the plate, which I have forgotten to pick up, looks at the dog, puts her hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Well,” I say.

Angela twists her long fingers, her fine thin fingers with their smooth knuckles, twists the diamond ring her father gave her when she was sixteen.

“Richard,” I’d said to my husband, “she’s your daughter, not your fiancée.”

“Kay,” intoned the husband, the insurance agent, the successful adjuster of claims, “she’s only sixteen once. This ring is a gift, our love for Angela. She’s beautiful, she’s blossoming.”

“Richard,” I said, shuffling Maalox bottles and planning my bland lunch, “diamonds are not for blossoms. They’re for those who need a piece of the rock.” At which Richard laughed heartily, always amused at my cynicism regarding the business that principally buttered my bread. Buttered his bread, because by then I couldn’t eat butter.

“What is it you’re afraid to face?” asked Richard. “What is it in your life you can’t control? You’re eating yourself alive. You’re dissolving your own stomach.”

“Richard,” I said, “it’s a tired old story. I have this husband who wants to marry his daughter.”

“I want you to see a psychiatrist,” said Richard, tightening his expertly knotted tie. “That’s what you need, Kay, a chance to talk it over with someone who’s objective.”

“I’m not interested in objectives,” I said. “I’m interested in shrimp and butter sauce, Tabasco, hot chilis, and an end of pain.”

“Pain never ends,” said Richard.

“Oh, Richard,” I said, “no wonder you’re the King of the Southeast Division.”

“Look,” he said, “I’m trying to put four kids through college and one wife through graduate school. I’m starting five investment plans now so when our kids get married no one has to wait twenty-five years to finish a dissertation on George Eliot like you did. Really, am I such a bad guy? I don’t remember forcing you into any of this. And your goddamn stomach has to quit digesting itself. I want you to see a psychiatrist.”

“Richard,” I said, “if our daughters have five children in eight years—which most of them won’t, being members of Zero Population Growth who quote
Diet for a Small Planet
every Thanksgiving—they may still be slow with Ph.D.s despite your investment plans.”