Love & Darts (9781937316075) (15 page)

Just focus and find the floor. Test it for
rotten spots with your leading toe.

The coat. The drawer. The door. The stairs.
And another door to the porch. Fine. I’m okay. I’m okay. Just act
normal. No one even knows. No one even knows. No one even knows. No
one can see your glazed-cherry-blossom-broken-vase glue drying or
all the brain pieces held in place so carefully with direct
pressure. Just keep walking. Just be careful. Do everything the
right way. Look both ways. Cross the street when other people cross
the street. Give up when no one else seems to care. Just relax.
Relax. There is nothing emotional or psychological or pathological
or anything that needs psychiatric care between here and the
grocery store. The sidewalk can’t do that. It didn’t. So breathe in
again and just keep going. Sidewalks don’t move. Just keep going.
Breathe out again and don’t worry. It didn’t happen.

It might just be the pills.

Did I take my pills? Did I take them? Or was
that this morning? Or yesterday? Or did the pills go through the
wall to the teakettle sound where the floor fell down into the
sinkhole of a grass world impossible to traverse while dragging two
crippled limbs across the field of color that must be carpet
hanging like a pet-door trap that keeps out the elements with the
help of towels on clotheslines and quarters and breeze under foyer
tables on jewelry box floors from five years ago?

Just keep walking.

Don’t hold your breath. Don’t panic. Don’t
worry. Don’t cry. Just keep walking.

Nothing’s happening. Everything’s fine.
Everything’s normal. There’s no problem.

And some people do understand. A lot of
people have been through this. There were plenty of people in that
hospital. This is not just you. You’re just the only one in your
head. But you’re not the only one who this has ever happened to.
So. Breathe. Relax. Understand the biochemistry, the physiology,
the genetics, the statistics, the probabilities, the diagnoses, the
family history, the reasons why.

I remember someone’s telling me about a huge
revolving door in a supermarket with a tank of fish in the middle.
The tank is drained now. Broken. I wonder how they drained it. Hope
the fish got out okay.

Don’t worry about that. That doesn’t matter.
It’s not related. The money is real and it’s related to the
sandwich parts you still need.

Grocery store. The fruit is amazing, isn’t
it? Isn’t it? Where does it all come from? All this fruit to all
these grocery stores. Can it possibly be used, all this fruit? It
can’t possibly be consumed. I guess it just goes on sale. Is that
it? It’s not like the bins of screws at the hardware store. These
rot.

Don’t waste your time reading little
stickers of distant provenance and feeling sorry for soft
mangoes.

Mayonnaise. I don’t know where it is. Where
is it? Bread. And how about pickles? Yes, pickles. There is
definitely enough money with the coat and the drawer.

Don’t wander. If you can’t find the bread,
go back to the produce section and start over. Just go up and down
all the aisles. Focus. Concentrate. You’re looking for bread.

See? There it is. That’s where the bread is.
That’s how you do it. That’s how you find things you know must be
there.

You’re done. Now. Go pay.

Smile at the lady. Just smile at the lady.
Pretend. It’s all just pretend. Smile again.

Don’t look through her. She’ll know.

Say, “Thank you. Have a nice day.” And say
it like no awareness is cascading over you.

Push. Don’t panic. Fish don’t matter.

The sky seems more.

Back to the house. Back to the house. Back
to the house. And breathe. Breathe. If you know it, they know it.
So just breathe. Breathe. Carry the bag and breathe.

Up the stairs. There is a lock on the door
but the key is here somewhere. I live here so it’s okay. I have the
key. That’s allowed. So go ahead, just ease on in.

Sit.

Okay.

Okay.

Sit. Sandwich.

But the knife. No way. Not today. Just
fingers today. Just pull the chicken apart. And use a spoon for the
mayonnaise. It’s good enough. No knife. Not today. Maybe next time,
but not today. Knives are too full of potential. Too easy to take
off fingers and toes. Too easy to pull the skin off shins and
ankles. Too easy to peel away the eyelids and soft places next to
the ears. And so not today. Use the spoon today. Ignore the
tremor.

Salt.

Pepper.

And pickles, sitting in the chair by the
window.

Finally.

For five years, I’ve been Mommy. My husband calls me Mommy.
My daughter calls me Mommy. My mother and father call me Mommy. I
didn’t know we wouldn’t be able to pay for three kids. But now
we’re doing what we can for two daughters and a son.

There are more than two thousand hash-marked lines
on the beltway between my house and work. I get off at 5:00 a.m.
and the only way I get home is by staring at the hash marks off my
left front fender. I count them and stay to the right of them.

I don’t mind my job. I work nights at a security
booth for a gated community. The pay is ridiculously good for the
work because the community residents place such a pompous regard on
limited access. They value my ability to keep people out. But I
don’t keep anyone out. The motion-sensored gate does. Not that
anyone ever wants to come in who doesn’t live there.

My job is easy. There are two hundred gated
communities around here. If anyone really wants to get into a gated
community to kill people in their sleep, rape the women and
children, pillage, steal the pool table imported from Italy, or
drive really fast up and down the streets being obnoxious, most
likely they will do it somewhere else.

Mostly I get huge tips from high school kids to log
times ten minutes before they were supposed to be home. Some nights
I’m convinced the parents moved to the gated community just for the
logbook. A third party to settle disputes. Often in the early
morning there comes a mother in a silk robe driving an SUV. It
screeches to a halt behind my booth, and she shuffles up in
slippers to scrutinize my entries for the past twelve hours. I
don’t mind. I like the kids. But kids shouldn’t be tipping that
kind of money. And no woman who’s a mother should be wearing that
kind of robe.

I don’t tell my husband about my tips. That money
goes to the lunchroom at Chateau Neuf with me alone. I thought once
about taking Katrina, my oldest girl, for some special mommy time.
But I knew her sweet innocence would reveal all to her father. So I
let her have special time with him and I keep Chateau Neuf for
me.

More often than not after midnight there is no one.
And I sleep.

If I can’t sleep I look out the glass and stare at
the gated community’s sewage irrigation fountain. Every community
with a covenant has one. A little pond. A pretty fountain. A sign
not to swim or fish.

If I am asleep it is the sound of Mr. Hawthorne’s
running shoes which wakes me. He lives at the back of the
community, 10974 Eagle’s Wake Trail, Hawthorne, M & N. He runs
to the front of the neighborhood and then stretches near the pond.
My last duty before I am relieved by the computer is to release Mr.
Hawthorne into the world for his run. He is gray-haired and sweet.
He always smiles as he goes and shouts, “Thanks, Annie!” with an
arm thrown up to the sky.

I counted the hash marks and I’m home. I’m parking
my car.

I hear my husband inside the house. He’s screaming
at my daughter, “Wait for Mommy!” Then he screams toward me, “Hurry
up, Mommy!”

I’m sitting in the garage, in my car. I can hear my
husband calling. His voice holds so much. He thinks he’ll be late.
He’s convinced that it’s my fault. He was up all night with one of
the kids or the baby. If I was any kind of mother I would have been
the one there for them. After all they were calling for me, not
him. He can’t find the shoes he wants to wear. He forgot to pick up
the dry cleaning so he doesn’t have the shirt he wants. If I was
any kind of wife I would be the one ironing. There’s no food
because no one went shopping this weekend because we had to go to
that stupid christening/wedding/high school graduation
party/fiftieth anniversary celebration/work picnic/Christmas gala
and why should I miss the game just to get groceries?

His calling me says all of this
and more. It doesn’t always say
I
missed you, I still love you, I need you to work so we can pay for
the tree house that we bought on credit and then destroyed in the
assembly process.
And it never
says
Welcome home, dear. Did you have
a good day at work?

For some reason I go in. I stare at the fruit bowl
during our changing of the guard. He rushes past in a swirl of
resentment, late for work.

Hours later he is back. I hear myself say, “Welcome
home, dear. Did you have a good day at work?”

“You would never believe these assholes.” His voice
trails off as he walks down the hall. He keeps talking for two
hours from this point. Every day.

It’s not that I don’t care about his work. I guess I
do. I certainly should.

At the first hour into his monologue there always
comes a single line. It doesn’t vary much from this: “If I got a
decent night’s sleep once in a while I could handle it.”

We settle onto the couch. We turn on the TV.

What my husband doesn’t realize is that for all he
knows I don’t sleep. He has never seen me at work. He must assume I
am working. And yet he never sees me sleep at home. So the gall of
him; even uttering this line in my presence is unbearable. I hear
myself say, “I suppose so, honey.”

And then once he passes out, I leave for work. I
don’t count the hash marks. When I drive toward work I just feel
them pulling me in, closer, closer, closer, to that little hut.

I read a note that my boss has left for me in an
envelope. It says that I should not park my car in the driveway of
the sales model. Someone has likely complained. Though why I cannot
imagine. My car is parked there from ten thirty at night until five
in the morning. Who could possibly care whether there is a car
parked at the model during that time period?

I’m not sure whether I should move my car.

Where should I park?

I decide to leave it for tonight and will call my
boss tomorrow to find out where I should park.

I clock in and start my shift.

Hours do not help.

What helps are seconds.

I know that time is passing if I think about the
seconds.

I’m counting them when I hear the sound of familiar
footsteps.

There is one woman who comes to my booth almost
every night. She wears her robe and slippers. She comes with a
thermos and a radio and a deck of cards. Her husband is having an
affair and her children never obey their curfew. She sits with me
in my booth and we have a great time. She watches others pull
through the gate. She writes down the time and then we play cards
until she passes out in a heap on the cement floor. She has an air
mattress that she stows in my booth cubby. Rarely does she bother
to inflate it. When she does it fills up the entire booth. She sits
on it like a chair with part on the floor and part going up the
wall where the door is. It is hysterical. She always brings her
stainless steel thermos. Sometimes she just brings coffee but more
often it is filled with white Godiva liqueur, Kahlua, and three
cups of vodka over ice. She calls her thermos the Stealth
Bomber.

We laugh a lot about the thermos.

I have never known her name. Her address is 12488
Peregrine Falcon Lane. Her husband is William F. Fessner. She told
me once that she kept her maiden name. But she never told me what
it was. Interesting. I worry sometimes that I will read in the
paper that a certain woman has committed suicide. It will be her
and I will never know from her name.

But we both like the brilliant red leaves on the
Virginia creeper around the little gatehouse. We love how
unbelievably bright red they are before that first frost, that
driving October rain, that mess they become in the street once they
fall away.