One Day the Wind Changed (9 page)

But Judy ate hell up. One night, Howard heard her gargling marbles behind her bedroom door. Later, she told him she had been “speaking in tongues, discoursing in the holy language of the Lord.”

On Saturdays, Judy and her Jesus pals looked for dresses and shoes at a used clothing store called Second Coming, out by the cemetery and the abandoned railroad station. The place had a few boys' things, mostly mothballed suits, but Howard spent most of his time there spying on Shannon and Roni, Judy's best friends. They were “good girls”; this added a pinch of glory to their tanned shoulders and muscled calves.

Once, when Roni caught him staring at her legs from behind a rack of scarves, she smiled at him knowingly (the same smile Meagan had given him a while ago) and told him, “Our bodies are God's temples. Our beauty is his praise.”

“Praise the Lord,” Howard mumbled, and she laughed at him—a moment as dreadful as the Arapaho Ladies' Room Incident. He never wanted to shop with Judy and her cohort again, but his mother made him. He'd stand in the store with his eyes on the floor so he wouldn't be tempted by the good girls' flesh.

In her first year out of high school, Judy got a job at Second Coming. The long hours kept her from her friends; they drifted apart. Eventually, shopping lost its allure for her. She no longer went to church. She spent her evenings sitting, exhausted, on their mother's front porch swing, then with boys in the backseats of cars, on cheap couches in one-room rentals, and finally on the old spring bed where her daughter was born. By then, the father, a young roughneck from Midland, had migrated to Kansas. Or Nebraska. Some other wind-scoured plain.

Now Judy lived in Abilene with Howard's niece, Ava, a twelfth grader. Judy worked in a florist's shop where, she said, the customers were either “deliriously happy or devastated by grief. Nothing in-between. Makes buying simple.” In the past, whenever Howard asked her what happened to God, she laughed and said, “He needs a better road crew. Left a lot of damn dead-ends.”

Implicit in her bitterness was an indictment of the oil fields. Like their mother, like Mindy, she resented the late nights on rigs, the sweat and the stink, the dust and the mud, the unrelieved flatness of the bedrock. But God Almighty, Howard thought, staring at the stores-where do they think these fancy baubles come from?

He spotted Alina with Meagan and Leann, huddled together in a place called The Sleep Shop, sifting through a pile of yellow cotton nightgowns on a bargain table. Above them, the store's ceiling glistened with flat, metallic stars. The girls laughed, pressing the gowns against their bodies, patterns of candy-cane stripes on the sleeves.

They hadn't noticed him through the window, and he stood there … enchanted? Strangely flushed.

He turned and walked to the other end of the mall, past a statue of a pony. The pony appeared to be smiling—surely not the artist's intention. Or perhaps it was. Everything about the mall seemed designed to turn everyone into a grinning idiot, Howard thought. He came to a storefront offering “Bibles, Inspirational Calendars, Christian Gifts.” Three for the price of one—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. A poster taped to the window announced Sunday services in the Faith Complex, a megachurch (one-stop shopping) on Highway 20 by the Happy Pals Bowling Lanes and the old ARCO oil tanks.

Mindy. Naturally,
that's
what had rattled him just now: seeing Alina and her friends—kids—casually miming the sexy gestures, and remembering the old girl in a Victoria's Secret up in Dallas, on the last trip they had taken together. Trying on and modeling lingerie for Howard.

His legs went slack. He found his bench again by the fountain. Water stung his cheek. He held his hands on his lap, a gesture that felt like shame. That day in Dallas, he had been aware how far he and Mindy had come from the afternoon at Beasley's, when high heels seemed the summit of erotic life.

Had she been trying to save their marriage (their sagging sexual history) with her little nightie-show in the mall?

Sadness. Anger. What did he feel now? Humiliation, betrayal … but where did the betrayal lie? In Mindy? In him? The come-ons of the
New and Improved?

That afternoon in Dallas, he had walked through the mall thinking, “Morning in America”: the era's patriotic catch-phrase. The lush display windows mimicked the national gaiety. In those days, the President appeared often on television, denying American chicanery around the world.

Not that anyone cared. The malls had been full of bright, shiny Apples, VCRs, microwave ovens. Who gave a damn about the Soviet Union, Iran, Eastern Europe, about wasting more oil than the country produced?

Stop it, Howard said to himself. Asshole, just quit.

Because, goddamnit, those weren't the worst betrayals, were they? Nor was it the loss of Main Street, the destruction of the courthouse, the control of the Permian Basin by eastern giants, not even Mindy. He thought: let's forget it, old girl.

The worst was his mother's request. Yes, surely that was it. He glanced at the toy store. “Take me out,” she had ordered Howard, a near-whisper. “I want to buy something for Ava.”

By then—1985? ‘86?—she had outlived her sister, her husband. She had thrown away her sister's unworn moccasins (at least half a dozen boxes of the silly things, tucked in a closet), her husband's sweat-and-oil-stained work shirts. And she had stopped smoking because she was dying of emphysema. “I bought one too many packs of cigarettes,” she admitted.

She had come one Saturday to visit Howard in his cheap apartment east of town. This bland monstrosity—the super new Westgate Mall—had just been built. Howard had graduated from college and gotten his first menial job in Oil and Gas. He was saving to buy an engagement ring. As soon as she finished her marketing degree down in Alpine, Mindy would join him and they'd find a place together.

In the meantime, Howard's place was tiny. His mother had decided to stay the night, though she didn't live far away. These days the smallest bit of travel wore her out. There was no place for her to sleep, so she insisted he go to the mall and buy her an inflatable mattress, the kind of thing Oil Kings floated on in their backyard swimming pools. She'd put it in the bathroom, the only available space; if he needed to pee in the night, come on in, she said, it won't bother me.

Her appearance shocked him: withered and tight, like the apple dolls in the old Indian trading post. The dolls had been stacked like Auschwitz bodies in a wooden bin in the middle of the sales floor (he'd thought this even as a child, having studied holocausts—like that of the Native Americans—in school). Her bare feet were as twisted as turnips, her features pinched and soft. A bare suggestion of who she had been.

“I want to buy a doll or something for Ava,” she said. “Take me to the toy store.” The mattress sighed beneath her.

“Later, Mother. Rest now.” He tried to touch her shoulder, lost beneath the creases of her camisole. He patted her sleeves, feeling for anything he could recognize as the woman he knew.

Her eyes glazed. She smiled and drifted, wheezing. “Remember?” she said. Howard answered, “Yes,” and waited. He was used to waiting for girls.

“It was like they called your name.”

“What, Mother? What called your name?”

“Things, girl.” Did she think she was speaking to her sister? “All those marvelous
things
we could buy.”

“Yes,” Howard said. “I'll go to the mall again, Mother. This afternoon. You rest. I'll get something for Ava. From the two of us, okay?”

When he returned, she lay unconscious in the bathroom. Whatever he bought that day, hoping she'd admire it-some stupid trinket. He didn't even remember.

Yes. Best not to stir up desires, even a desire for memory, Howard thought, staring at a mannequin's faceless head.

I don't care, he thought. I don't want. Don't want. There is nothing here I want. All I ever wanted has flown away from me.

A man and a woman passed him, the couple he'd seen eating lunch-still arguing, but at least they were engaged with each other. Watching them, Howard wondered: What is it with me? What am I so angry about? Mindy's happy. Why can't I let her have that?

Leann approached his bench. She wore a white cotton sweater with a homely collar, and a hem that bunched around her waist. Her skirt was the color of mud.

“Hi,” Howard said. He kept his hands in his lap.

Leann blinked rapidly. “Hi.”

“Where are the girls?”

“Shopping.”

“Something wrong?”

“I'm not so into fashion,” said Leann. “I'm sort of. … you know. Not made for the stuff they sell here. Like, my weight, I mean.”

“I sec.”

“It's okay,” Leann said, slumping like a forty-year-old, a young woman in a rummage-sale body.

Something caught Howard's eye: Mindy, lurching toward him. Reckless. Fast. No: Alina, without her Seattle friend.

Leann pretended to ignore her.

“Leann, I'm sorry,” Alina said. “I forgot what it's like for you here.”

“It's okay,” Leann answered.

“Can we go somewhere else now, Daddy?”

“Where's Meagan?”

“I'll get her.”

“Sure,” Howard said.

“Thanks. Can I have more money later?”

Fake bells rang at the mall's far end. A child, laughing, hugged the base of a tree.

“We'll see,” Howard said. “Find your friend.” Just then, he looked up and saw Meagan on the floor above them, by the escalators. A happy, attractive young lady. She waved at them and Howard waved back.

Alina reached for Leann's fuzzy sleeve. “I'm sorry,” she said again. Howard glimpsed tears in his daughter's eyes. Desire leaped in his chest. Unspecific, unquenchable desire. The faceless is a lie, he thought before he
knew
it as a thought (well—isn't that the nature of desire?). “I've missed you,” Alina said to her friend. “I just forgot. Will you forgive me?”

Howard stared at his daughter's pretty, made-up face—at the worry that had started to change it. What a surprise, he mused. What a delight. The sharp particularities of girls.

O
n the day I became a literary critic, Suzi became a saint. Needless to say, our sex life was over. Oh, we kept at it for a while, but our abandon was never again total.

The decisive incident occurred in a priest's office, a dark brown cubicle smelling of American cheese and bologna just off the main sanctuary in the largest Catholic church in south Dallas. The year was 1975. Peter Frampton topped the charts: a pretty boy with curly blond hair. I should have known the future was bleak. (Suzi praised the singer's nasal tones on “Baby, I Love Your Way,” but then, she'd already developed a saint's forgiveness.)

The priest had spent two and a half hours hearing confessions. After that, he'd delivered an afternoon sermon to a sparse group, including Suzi and me. Was he an associate priest? An assistant? How did he get saddled with this piddly office? I'm not Catholic, so I'm not privy to the pope's pecking order. The man cleared his throat and waved us into plastic orange chairs beside his desk. “So,” he said. “You two want to get married?” I glanced at Suzi.

“
I'm
getting married,” she said. “He's—”

“Along for the ride,” I admitted. And for the first time I wondered why Billy wasn't here. Why wasn't he there last night, instead of me, when I flipped Suzi over in their bed and took her from behind?

“May God bless you,” the priest said, “but I don't understand—”

Suzi explained that she and Billy were engaged to be married, but Billy had music rehearsals all afternoon, so for moral support she'd brought a “friend.” I smiled at the priest. I didn't know how Billy spent his afternoons, but I didn't buy the rehearsal story. He played folk tunes, three sets of twenty songs each—Dylan, Judy Collins, Joan Baez—in the Greenfield Pub every night. By himself The same songs, six nights a week. How much rehearsal did he need? I remembered the first night Suzi took me to hear him. I'd just met her that morning, in a Faulkner class. In the pub, we sat at a table lighted by a sputtering candle. Between songs, Billy ordered Irish coffees and drank them like water. All evening, Suzi bit her bottom lip until it bled. “Isn't he good?” she said. She touched my sleeve, lightly.

About three weeks later, Suzi and Billy called me to eat pizza with them in their small apartment, to celebrate the delivery of their bed. Above it, they'd hung a charcoal sketch of Suzi, nude, made by an art student in an advanced class for which Suzi had posed. The figure's breasts were bigger than I estimated Suzi's to be. Billy joked that the bed's iron railings were perfect for handcuffs. Suzi raised her arms, spread-eagled above her bright red hair, and I choked on my Coors. Billy watched me, laughing.

“So what is it you do?” the priest asked Suzi. “You and your fiancé? He's a musician?”

“Yes. And I'm a grad student at SMU. Working on my master's.”

The good father turned to me. I said, “Me too. American literature.”

“Oh. So my little homily must have seemed silly to you.”

I smiled again.

“The Great White Whale,” he said, blushing. “I'm not really familiar with the novel. I just used what I've heard.”

“That's all right,” I said.

I hadn't listened to his sermon, his homily, whatever. I'd sat in the pew, picturing Suzi bottoms-up in bed. Christ writhed in agony in a dark painting on the sanctuary's front wall. After we left the priest, Suzi told me he'd used the Great White Whale as a metaphor for the spiritual life that will elude us and drive us insane if we approach it without the proper humility.

“Forgive me,” the priest had said. To me! “I shouldn't quote a book I haven't read.”

This was a stronger nod to my literary prowess than any of my teachers had offered me. I decided I liked being moral support.