Going Away Shoes (24 page)

“She has never had a problem, “ Sally says, and for a brief second Marilyn feels Tom’s eyes on her.

“I used to,” Marilyn says.

“Yeah, she’d sip a little wine on holidays. Made her feel sick didn’t it, honey?” Sid is opening and closing cabinets. He puts on the tea kettle. “Mother likes tea in the late afternoon like the British. As a matter of fact,” he continues, still not looking at her, “sometimes we pretend we are British.”

She nods and watches him pour out some cheap Scotch he always offers to cheap friends. He keeps the good stuff way up high behind her mother’s silver service. “And we’ve been writing our own little holiday letter, Mother and I, and we’re going to tell every single thing that has gone on this past year like Sally and Rusty do. Like I’m going to tell that Mother has a spastic colon and often feels ‘sqwitty,’ as the British might say, and that I had an abscessed tooth that kept draining into my throat, leaving me no choice but to hock and spit throughout the day. But all that aside, kids, the real reason I can’t formally go somewhere to dry out for you right now is (1) I have already booked a hotel over in
Myrtle Beach for our anniversary, and (2) there is nothing about me to dry.”

By the end
of the night everyone is talking about “one more chance.” Sid has easily turned the conversation to Rusty and where he plans to apply to school and to Snow Bunny and her hopes of having a “little Tommy” a year from now. They say things like that they are proud of Sid for his effort but not to be hard on himself if he can’t do it on his own. He needs to realize he might have a problem. He needs to be able to say: I have a problem.

“So. Wonder what
stirred all that up?” he asks as they watch the children finally drive away. She has yet to make eye contact with him. “I have to say I’m glad to see them leave.” He turns now and waits for her to say something.

“I say, ‘Adios motherfuckers.’ ” She cocks her hands this way and that like the rappers do, which makes him laugh. She notices his hand shaking and reaches to hold it in her own. She waits and then she offers to fix him a small drink to calm his nerves.

“I don’t have to have it, you know,” he says.

“Oh, I know that,” she says. “I also know you saved the good stuff.”

She mixes a weak one and goes into the living room, where he has turned off all but the small electric candle on the piano.

“Here’s to the last drink,” he says as she sits down beside him. He breathes a deep sigh that fills the room. He doesn’t ask again if she had anything to do with what happened. He never questions her a second time; he never has. And in the middle of the night when she reaches her hand over the cool sheets, she will find him there, and when spring comes and the sticky heat disgusts her with pangs of all the failures in her life, he will be there, and when it is time to get in the car and drive to Myrtle Beach or to see the kids, perhaps even to drive all the way to Minnesota to see their grandchildren, she will get in and close the door to the passenger side without a word. She will turn and look at the house that the two of them worked so hard to maintain and she will note as she always does the perfect green grass of the front yard and how Sid fixed it so that there is not a trace of the mess she made. It is their house. It is their life. She will fasten her seatbelt and not say a word.

ME AND BIG FOOT

It is snowing
, a freak blinding storm that likely will shut things down for days. Thank God. Just last night under a clear winter sky, I had wished for a sign, or at least some kind of divine intervention from the matchmakers of the world —all those well-meaning friends who are far more upset over my single status than I am. They drop by unannounced to offer me comfort and advice and descriptions of various men as if they are hot entrees on a silver platter.

Now I look out my window to see a very large foreign object out there in the blowing snow, a big white rusty truck parked in my side yard. I put on my heavy coat and boots and go out there, circle it a few times. There are no tire tracks leading in or
footprints leading out. No license plate or inspection sticker. The front bumper is a two-by-four. A wet note penned on a coffee-stained napkin is under the wiper:
You, cute-looking owner of the little scrappy dog, please don’t tow or complain. I need you. Please
.
I’ll be back soon
.

I tug open the heavy iced-over door and climb up into the cab; as soon as I close myself in, all windows glazed in ice, I have the strangest feeling that I’ve been here before.
I’m not a complainer
, I imagine telling him,
and I hate to be around one
. No key. Only a flashlight and lighter in the glove compartment, a pair of gloves on the dash, the thumbs cut out, palms stiff with resin and dirt. I sit there in the cab, stretch my legs, and feel an odd sense of comfort and warmth.

The truck smells of mildew and woodsmoke. The floorboard is frozen and the seats are damp and frosted, as if he’d driven off road through the swamp. A thick-lipped coffee mug is wedged into the opened ashtray and I run my fingers around the smooth stained rim. Behind the seat there is a big pair of hunting boots covered in red mud and muck. I reach my hands down into those tall sturdy boots and feel the worn thick wool, my body heat slowly absorbed and held there.
I need you
. Had he walked up to my door?
Please
. If so he might have seen me through the sheers, painting my toenails and talking to my friend Sophie, telling her yet again about how I am not going to the Swinging Singles Sing-a-long at her church. She’s married —happily, she says —but has
made me her project. If he’d waited he might even have heard me there under the sky saying those same words —
Please, I need you
—to the powers of the great beyond.

I don’t know
what it is about a person alone that drives other people crazy. I’m thinking we all heard too many Bible stories coming along —Adam and Eve (that match made in heaven). Or Noah’s ark, desperate pairs scurrying onto the love boat, a lesson reinforced by that Irish song we sang to death in grade school about the poor unicorn left crying on a rock because he didn’t find somebody he wanted to live with for all eternity.

What’s more, people seem to really hate it if you say you’re
happy
alone. It makes Sophie so uncomfortable, in fact, that I finally confessed to her that of course I had a dream of my perfect match, but that I also would rather live alone than opt for just any old body who slid up next to me and took root. I talked fast so she wouldn’t think I was referring to Kyle, who she married in great haste after only three months. I went on to say that even in my most ideal dream match I would still require a lot of solitary time with limited interruptions from friends and family. I said this very directly since she drops by unannounced all the time and has implied several times that both my house and person need an extreme makeover. She said my bedroom was abominable, that it looked like a cheap motel, and that my clothes were too bad to even give away. Especially the olive-green velvet
dress I wore to their Christmas party. Especially since it was cold and I was bare legged. “Well, thank you,” I said, hoping to hurry her along, but she was hell-bent on connecting my poor fashion sense to the breakup with Scott months ago even though I have explained many times over that we broke up because I said that I would never marry him and
his
biological clock was ticking. I could not marry him, not now and not ever. We had nothing in common and the fact that I had trouble listening to what he was saying was proof enough that it would be a mistake. And why is that so hard to understand? Why do these people look out there and say:
Hetero and hetero, get on the boat and go. You both need to breathe to stay alive? Great, amazing, now get on the boat and go
. And you say,
I am not the least bit attracted to that person. I hate his politics, the way he chews, the way he finishes my sentence as I’m speaking it
. I can’t stand anything worse than a spoiled white boy trying to sound and act like he grew up in the ghetto or a trailer park. That was Scott in a nutshell: privileged gangsta wannabe driving a Hummer and canceling my vote nearly every time. I say,
I cannot live like that. I am better off alone
. And people like Sophie (as if deaf to all else) will say,
But he has such a good job
.

And yes, there is a perfect man in my mind and he has always been there, nameless, faceless, self-sufficient, and therefore free from all societal entrapments, and most important, more loyal than any dog as he remains fiercely rooted in my life. Does he exist? I want to believe that, like all the great abstractions, he
might, that with the right angle of the sun or direction of the wind, he could. And now as I sit in this frozen white truck, my warm breath trapped against my mouth by the wool of my scarf, it is like he is here, sitting right there in the passenger seat in his big tall boots, his hands surprisingly smooth for someone so outdoorsy. I close my eyes and he is there; I can smell and taste him, feel his hands pulling me close, and it is like every little pheromone and hormone in my body is waking after a long hibernation, a million little Rip Van Winkles eager to make up for a lot of lost time. I have what is called a major out of body experience. No one could be more surprised than I am.

I go inside
feeling like a new woman. I look in the mirror and I am younger, more alive looking than I have ever been. When Sophie calls, I tell her I’m snowed in with a visiting friend, that no, she’s never met him, that yes, I’ve known him forever. That I am hoping he will stay a few days and I will call later. I go and get his big nasty boots and put them by my front door so when the storm ends it will look like we never left the house. I put on some music, light candles, build a fire. The snow has quieted everything. The power is out. The phone doesn’t ring. My whole world pauses.

“Who is he?
” Sophie asks after a week, the truck still parked there. She is at my front door in bright yellow ski gear
even though little snow remains, and I motion for her to be quiet. “Still sleeping,” I say and point to my closed bedroom door. “He loves my bedroom. I can hardly get him to leave it.” She gives me a skeptical look, starts to speak, but catches herself. I whisper over coffee in the kitchen. I tell her all about him. His slow gentle movements and ability to sense my needs and wants before I even speak. I tell her how we’re reading things aloud at night —funny columns that make us laugh, political ones that make us mad, poetry that breaks our hearts. How we are working to train little Curly so he will fetch something other than what’s in the cat’s litter box. It all sounds so wonderful I can hardly believe it myself.

The truck is still
here when the crocuses surface and I like to think this can go on forever. I have gotten so comfortable with it all, the questions, the stories.
We love to just cook and sit by the fire. Take long walks in the woods. We watch lots of old movies. Exercise? Oh, we get plenty
. Wink wink.
Sure, you’ll meet him. But he does travel a lot. He works so hard and plays hard, too
.

Sophie says everyone has noticed how I often look glassy-eyed and rumpled like someone just rolled from the bed, that one day she would have sworn I had a hickey, which really did shock her. I laughed and blushed for real because sometimes —before going to the store or anyplace I might see people —I do pinch my neck and roll around and rub against the indoor/outdoor carpet on
my stairs. I have to confess I kind of like the way it feels there on all fours, so primal and earthy, like an animal following a scent. Sometimes I start laughing and can’t stop. The cat thinks I’m making fun of him and swishes off into another room but Curly sees my position as an open invitation to join in with some dog-like behavior and I just thank god he’s a ten-pound dust ball and not the 110-pound Rottweiler I once tended at a shelter.

Word is out that my man is kind of antisocial. The talkers tell how he always has been a little bit of a loner, and with good reason. He is wanted everywhere he goes. His advice, his expertise, his big strong body and intellect and winning ways. Besides, he’s an archaeologist out there digging around in the forests and riverbanks while they are sleeping. “He’s nocturnal,” I say. “And there are certainly worse things.”

Full spring and
I never tire of closing my eyes and seeing him there. He is the best man I’ve ever known. He never mentions if my legs are prickly or toenail polish chipped or if I look plumper or my breath smells of baked Brie or garlic. He doesn’t care that I don’t have much money and am not ready to have a kid, that I eat snacks in bed and keep the house cold year round so that I can wear layers and pile up quilts and blankets. He doesn’t care that my bedroom looks like the Days Inn. In fact, because we are so much alike, he
likes
it. And he
loves
that green fringed dress of mine, thinks it’s the sexiest thing I own.
He sometimes likes for me to wear it while I clean his big dirty boots and he washes the dishes and changes the sheets. He likes four-hundred-count sheets, which is a little contradiction about him that I just adore. We would rather have soft sheets than sexy shoes. And, of course, because he is that way, it makes me want to please him even more, to be as desirable as I can be. And there is the difference: desire.

My man was created in my image and then roughed up in a way I have always found very attractive. He
is
me only big and hairy and forceful in every way. He’s the man I’d want to be. At night when I get there under my warm quilts piled high like a cave, I am waiting for him to return. The anticipation of his arrival is all I need —I can’t wait for him to grab my hips and spoon up close to my backside or for the way I might wake and turn in his direction, nuzzling in like a heat-seeking missile to the comfort I’ve come to depend on, his desiring hands there in the darkness nothing more than extensions of my own.