Imaginary Men (23 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Literary Collections, #Literary Criticism, #test

BOOK: Imaginary Men
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longer leashes. Sometimes he had to reel her in ear-over-ass because she'd lift her head, open her mouth to scent, and then take off, running to the end of her rope, refusing his commands, whistles, and shouts to return. In May, he began working her tied to the back bumper of the truck.
''Isn't that dangerous?" I asked. I'd heard stories of hunters running over their own dogs. It was a common accident, especially at the end of the day when the men were tired and the dogs were eager to be put up in their boxes on the trucks.
"The last place BJ wants to be is with me." He scratched behind her red-and-white ears. She turned her head away, closed her eyes, and panted. "She's like one of those convicts at Raiford or Cross City, just waiting for an opportunity."
Dory and I spent that whole evening in bed. We made love, took a shower, had a snack, and made love again. He knew the names for all the parts of my body and liked to talk about them while we were making love. It was like receiving one Academy Award after another. Best nipples: Lavell Beacham. Labia majora: Lavell Beacham. Areolas, and so on. Even when we were just lying there, he kept on touching me, drawing pictures and diagrams on my belly and back. If I felt talkative, he'd listen all night long.
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A few days later Dory saw my new purple dress and knew something was up. "I guess you've decided to go?"
I was rummaging in the freezer for ground beef. That winter, Dory had shot a buck, dressed it, and wedged the long hind legs into my side-by-side. Every time I opened the door, a pair of lean silver legs leapt across packages of green beans and blackberries. "I'm thinking about it. You want to chop some onions for the burgers?"
"No. They always make me cry." He walked to the bedroom. I followed and sat down next to him on the bed.
I didn't want to be cruel. I was afraid that if I asked Dory to go I'd have such a terrible time explaining who he was that I'd never want to see him again. I'd always felt self-conscious in high school and had never really found a niche for myself. Too tall to be a cheerleader or a prom queen. Not smart enough to be a brain. I finished on the Business Ed track. I was a crack typist before word processors swept
 
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the country. Almost nothing I studied prepared me for the survey work I do now. The best thing that happened to me in high school was going steady with Fred Packett for two years. We broke up when he left to study business administration at college. The last I heard he took a job with a plywood manufacturer in Mobile.
"All right. I do want you to go with me."
He threw his arms around me. "You can say we're engaged."
"I don't have to say anything!"
After dinner, he produced a gift and a card that read "For Your Graduation," to which he'd added the word "reunion." I unfolded the tissue paper and pulled out a white shawl with rhinestones knitted into the pattern.
"I thought it was beautiful," he said, watching my face.
"Yes." I held it outstretched in front of me, a tacky triangle that threw off light like a disco globe.
"I was going to give it to you whether you invited me or not."
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From age eighteen to thirty I felt proud and sassy when I printed the word "single" on applications for Visa, homestead exemption, Avon. Then the years began to zip past. It's true that as you get older, time speeds up: when you're ten, a year is equal to one-tenth of your life. By the time you're fifty, it's one-fiftieth, so naturally it goes by five times faster. Suddenly, I was pressing forty. Christmas came round so often I felt like I was constantly buying gifts or packing up decorations.
As for dog years, I couldn't say. BJ was three. She had two hunting seasons to shape up or Uncle Jones would put a bullet in her head instead of retiring her. BJ was making progress. She finally understood that she was attached to Dory by a rope, now almost one hundred feet long. He never took her off it. The idea was to trick her into thinking the rope would always be there, that his voice was the rope, that the horn of his truck was the rope. One night, at the beginning of June, she began howling, piteously at first, then with the full belling of a hound on the scent of an animal. It was three o'clock in the morning. Dory went out and beat her with rolled-up newspapers. "She must have whiffed something real big. BJ wouldn't waste herself like that," he said.
 
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I'd never seen anything in our trailer park but rabbits, muskrats, and possums. Roadkill casserole, not fit for a hound to fiddle with. Besides, Frypan, her kennel mate, had remained silent. "Maybe she's howling to come inside the house," I said, though BJ never seemed to notice our company much. She wouldn't even look you in the eye. She wouldn't even let you that far into her dogsoul.
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I had thought a lot about what to call Dory at the reunionmy roommate? boyfriend? fiancé? Finally, I settled on "friend." It left room for interpretation and gave me a fresh perspective on him. Perspectivethat's what I love about going up in the one-engine mapping plane. I feel insignificant and important at the same time. I'm responsible for sighting landmarks while the aerial photographer lines up the shots and clicks away. Between us, we piece together the landscape like blocks in a quilt. From 6,000 feet the woods seem as stiff and artificial as those toilet-brush Christmas trees.
Fred Packett, my old beau, was glad-handing people at the door when Dory and I arrived at the reunion. His eyes were the dark green of magnolia leaves. I did a double take. They had been gray behind horn-rimmed glasses all through school. His hair was combed forward, but a small spot like an egg in a nest showed through on top. "It's real good to see you, Lavell." His arms felt meaty and familiar through his sport jacket. A gardenia leaked sweetness from his lapel.
I introduced him to Dory. "I'm divorced," Fred said, by way of a reply. "From a real nice woman in Mobile. No kids. She didn't want any."
"That's too bad," I said. Dory nodded in agreement.
Fred guided us toward the punch bowl. A big banner saying "Welcome Back Wildcats 1970" hung above the refreshment table.
Fred was as friendly as a long-lost relative, and before I knew it we were talking and laughing. Dory stood silently next to me, holding my elbow. "You're a lucky fellow," Fred told him, squeezing me into his shoulder.
While Fred and I danced, he told me about his divorce. He'd been married for twelve years. He and his wife went to Mexico at the end to try to patch things up. "Vacations are a true test of marriage," he
 
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said. "When you're in a foreign country you end up liking the person you're with a lot more or a lot less. We ended up practically hating each other."
"I've never been to a foreign country."
"You're not missing much." He grimaced. "All Lola wanted to do was visit ruins." He gulped down a cup of wine cooler. I told him how I'd worked my way up from clerk to assistant director of Maps and Surveys at the Farm Bureau.
I'd never seen Dory drink anything but beer, but he downed six glasses of champagne during dinner. He sat in a stupor, staring at the back of my neck, while the class president read our statistics. Three class members unaccounted for. Sixty-four college diplomas and eighty-two children. Three grandchildren. We bowed our heads as he read the names of the deceasedone girl dead of cancer and two more in car wrecks; three boys killed in Vietnam. We stumbled through the school fight song, and even though I never cared much for sports, I got teary-eyed thinking of all of us back then, so young and stupid and hopeful.
A bunch of us hit the ladies' room after the presentations. When I returned to the ballroom, I didn't see Dory anywhere. Fred, looking morose, was leaning against a column wrapped with orange and black crepe paper. He caught my eye and motioned me over. "What do you think about this business with Sue Ellen?" he asked.
"Where's Dory?"
"He went outside to get a little air. Actually, I think he felt like throwing up."
I found Dory on the balcony, leaning on the railing. He smelled sour and looked disheveled. He put a limp arm around my waist.
"Tell me about the week you went away."
"Sue Ellen and I" Tears collected in his voice, but he swallowed them down. "She had a baby. My baby."
Sometimes people talk and nothing gets said, and other times, using the same two-cent words, they say something so big it feels like an avalanche. When my daddy left us, all he said, according to Mama, was "I'm not coming back, Norma."
"She wouldn't get an abortion. I don't love her, Lavell. I was sure I did at the beginning. At first, I was as happy with her as I am with you. Then one day the feeling just vanished. It was horrible."
 
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"Oh God." I pulled away.
"You don't understand." He reached for me, but I hurried back inside.
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I don't believe in astrology, crystals, or liquid diets. My mother, though she went to church, was not a religious woman. She spent her free time bowling and canning. She was a kind of Benjamin Franklin of the kitchen, always entering recipe contests. I suspect she didn't win because she used quantities of fresh sage, lemon balm, basilherbs and spices that people can't buy except dried-up like mummies in those little bottles in the supermarket. Mama would cringe to see what Dory and I eat: frozen pizzas and quiches, canned corn, instant mashed potatoesthe food Dory grew up on. Brokenhome food. Loneliness food.
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Fred opened the sunroof of his car, and warm air fragrant with night-blooming jasmine blew through my hair. We passed Six-Pack Creek, named for all the beer the boys drank and peed into the water those hot summer afternoons we tubed down it. I didn't want Dory finding me. I'd grabbed Fred by the arm and asked him to drive me anywhere but home. He'd looked confused but eagerly agreed.
After we parked the car, we squeezed under the gate to the recreation area. We sat on the seawall and watched the moonlight reflecting across the current. Mosquitoes whined around my ears.
"I'll always remember this place," Fred whispered, as if testing to see if I wanted to talk. "We had some good times here."
"Yeah." In high school Fred and I went to the river to make out. It had taken months before I let him touch me below the neck. I'd never slept with him.
"Everything's so different now, except the river," Fred said. "The river's the same."
"Oh no it's not."
"Polluted, huh?" He lit a cigarillo.
"I don't know about pollution. I just know it's always changing a little. You know, Indians used to cook their food right here."
 
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"That so?"
"Who knows what people a thousand years from now will find of us."
"You've grown real philosophical, Lavell." He took the rhinestone-studded shawl off my shoulders, walked to a live oak tree, and draped it over a low limb. Then he spread his coat jacket on the ground. "Let's study the stars a while."
Cobwebs floated across my face as I knelt down. We lay back on the jacket and breathed deeply. "I'm up for plant manager," Fred said.
Suppose Dory couldn't tell the difference between teenage love and mature love? He might be falling in or out of love all his life. Or worse yet, suppose there was no difference between the two kinds of love? Mama always said that women were after love and men were after sex and they spent their whole lives angry at each other for an unavoidable confusion. I glanced from the star-studded sky to the shawl nearby, the rhinestones blinking in the tree. "What would they make of that shawl a thousand years from now?"
"They'd put it in a museum, I guess."
"That's the thing about time. Junk, I mean even real garbage can become valuable. Something you never thought about could be important."
"I know you're real upset, Lavell." He pulled me down by the neck and kissed me hard on the mouth.
I felt my face redden and the veins in my neck stand up. "That's really crude, Fred, especially if you know I'm upset."
Fred twisted away from me and flung his arms over his head. "You gotta overlook it if I'm awkward. Divorce really messes you up."
"I wonder if the Indians had it."
"What?"
"Divorce."
"Marriage is an unnatural institution," Fred sniffed.
"It must be terrible to fall out of love," I said. I wasn't thinking about Fred but about Dory. I'd never fallen out of love. I'd had a broken heart a few times. I'd fallen into love so hard that even the sight of shoes like my boyfriend's in a store window or a car like his in traffic made me giddy, as if they had eyes to watch me. But usually I lost interest by degrees so that the end was never a shock and I could hardly remember that crazy feeling. Now I tried to imagine worshipping a person one week, and the next week finding him ordinary,

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