Suspicious River (7 page)

M
Y UNCLE ANDY
tugs my mother’s arm, pulls her up from the couch, gentle but quick, and before he presses her to him she twirls, graceful, and laughs. He scoops one hand up under her breast, arm behind her, takes her hand in his other, and she scratches the back of his neck lightly with her fingernails as they dance barefoot in the living room to no music at all. Her nails are long and frosted, mother-of-pearl, and they make a dry sound as they move lightly across his flesh—a pencil scribbling numbers fast on a page.

She is in a red dress and black stockings, a string of fake pearls like small sea-teeth around her neck. My uncle Andy’s nice shirt is starched stiff and unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. He’s handsome, and young. He always has new clothes—pressed, pleated pants, skinny belts and ties. Tall and thin, but solid. His dark hair is combed off his forehead but falling, still, into his eyes, over and over. He pushes it back with a fast hand.

In the corner of the living room, the Christmas tree blinks like some stalled car’s hazard lights while, outside, the snow gets deeper, deeper, and more deaf. My father is out there somewhere on a two-lane road, trying to get home from another state, some place he’s gone to sell something to someone who wants it right away, who doesn’t care that it’s Christmas Eve. He calls every few hours to say he’s almost home, though still on the way, and it will take a long time in so much weather. I try to look out the window but all I see is their reflection in it:

My mother catches my uncle’s earlobe between her teeth. He opens his mouth, and only air comes out—pulling her closer, moving his hand down her spine to pull her hips to his. I press my face up against the black glass, and my breath leaves the shadow of ghost lips on the window, then disappears.

Out there, milk-blue hills of snow have rolled and drifted into smooth slopes, as if they’ve been butter-knifed across the front lawns along our narrow street, across the driveways, concealing sidewalks, front steps, all the frozen gardens and iced-over birdbaths on our block. All the plain houses, stuck like plastic cake decorations into a deep blizzard of cake, are identical to ours:

Two bedrooms. No dining room. A place in the kitchen to sit and eat dinner or to pay your bills. This rectangle of living room.

Here and there, a garage has been built. Instead of white, someone has painted the shutters red. But other than that, they’re exact. Each one with a dry green Christmas tree lit up, making the house a festive firetrap in December. A slow dance behind dark curtains. I hear them breathe behind me, and it’s a kind of music—all rhythm, just a drummer’s brush.

The lace around the wrists of my pajamas prickles. Pretty trim. Bric-a-brac with little, itchy teeth, nibbling.

I’m too young to be awake so late, even on the eve of Christmas.

When I got home that night, Rick was in blue boxer shorts and a plain T-shirt watching television in our living room. A handsome blond cop dropped to the concrete. Bullets whizzed above him. A mailman put his hand over the mouth of a screaming housewife, hysterical because someone’s blood had splattered her yellow dress. But on our television, the blood looked pink as the vacancy sign outside the Swan Motel—neon, phony, cheerful.

Rick turned the TV off.

“Hey,” he said, not smiling.

I leaned over the couch and we kissed with the sound of a thin book closing.

Our apartment often smelled like onions cooking in someone else’s apartment. Warm, though. Orderly. A few posters on the walls—a man playing guitar, a vase of blue flowers. A row of books on a white shelf.

I went into the bedroom and hung my jean jacket in the closet and then went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. As I leaned over the sink, mouth full of mint and spit, Rick came up behind me, put his hand on my waist. In the mirror I could see him behind me, his shoulders sharp as wire hangers under his T-shirt. His jaw looked different, too, more clearly a bone than it had been a few months before. My hair fell reddish into the sink, and I flipped it over my shoulder, twisting away, swishing, rinsing while Rick moved back toward the bathroom door.

“How was work?” he asked.

“No big deal,” I said.

“Many guests?”

“No. Hardly any. Real slow.”

“Want some dinner now?” His skin looked gray against the bright bathroom walls, but his hair and eyes were dark, and behind them I could see his mother as a teenage beauty queen. It was as though, losing weight, Rick had dug up his mother’s lost face, exhumed her delicately shaped skull.

“No. I just want to go to bed. Did you eat?”

“Yeah,” he said, turning into the bedroom.

I put my hands on my hips and followed him. “What did you eat?” I asked.

Rick shrugged, “I had a salad.”

I leaned against the bedroom wall and shook my head. “Why? Why don’t you eat something besides salad, Rick? You’ve lost forty pounds. I hate it.”

Rick looked away from me. He smiled, sort of. Again, he shrugged. “I feel really good,” he said.

“Jesus,” I said, under my breath. “Well, you don’t look good. You look
sick
. You look like you’re dying. What’s the
matter
with you?”

I didn’t sound upset, even to myself, though my voice was raised. Instead, I sounded as if I were reading something interesting out of the paper, and Rick just looked at my bald knees, not smiling. He said, “Can’t we talk about something else?”

“No,” I said. “We have to talk about this. Millie told me today she couldn’t
believe
how you looked when she saw you last week. So should I tell her you’ve lost ten more pounds since then? That you won’t eat anything but lettuce, but you
feel really good?
” At the end, I imitated his monotone, folding my arms against my breasts.

“You can tell Millie anything you want, Leila. Surprisingly enough, Millie’s opinion isn’t all that important to me.” He didn’t sound angry, either, just blunt.

“What about
my
opinion? Don’t you care that looking at my husband makes me sick? Don’t you care that this is driving me crazy, watching you evaporate into thin air?”

Rick sat down hard on the edge of the bed, as if he were exhausted, then looked up at me. Even his hair looked different—finer. His teeth were bigger and more white.

“Listen, Leila. I’m tired of talking about my body.”

“Well I’m tired of living with it.”

He smirked. “Well, that’s honest at least. Leila, you’re tired of living with
me
, and I’m tired of doing what other people tell me all day to do. I’m tired of my mother nagging and my father foretelling my future in pinball machines, and I’m tired of you telling me what’s best to do with my body.”

“Well, you’re killing your body. Is that O.K. to say?”

My hands had begun to shake when he’d mentioned his father, the future, the pinball machines. It was the one thing I’d never heard Rick complain about before, the one thing I thought didn’t fill him with despair and contempt.

“Well, at least it’s
my
body,” he said. “It’s
my
body—” he thumped his rib cage each time he said
my
—“and I can do whatever the hell I want with
my
body. Is that correct?”

When I opened my mouth to answer, it was empty. A wet hole full of wind. In fact, I had to squint: The exactitude of it stunned me, and I closed my lips against breath as he walked past me, back to the living room we shared.

I took my clothes off, put them in a neat pile in the corner of the bedroom, slipped into one of Rick’s white T-shirts, and got in bed. I could hear him in the living room. Laughter from the TV and the excited whine of children. I was still awake when he turned it off, came into the dark bedroom, balanced himself into the waterbed and curled against my body before he fell asleep. His breathing was deep, slow, and it made gentle waves on the surface of our bed.

Rick’s legs on my legs felt familiar, as if they were my own, as if we were a tree with tangled limbs. I thought about the man with the maroon suitcase, how he’d wanted to see my breasts, and I couldn’t remember that man’s face, just the pastiness of his body, how it had trembled like soft food when he came. When Rick, in his sleep, put a hand on my waist, I rolled over fast and pressed my breasts against the mattress, warm with water, and his hand ended up on my back. Soon he moved further to his side of the bed, turned away from me in a dream, breathing so steadily I could have counted the long dull minutes with it.

The dark was total, and it pulsed with purple snow and static when I focused my open eyes on the ceiling. Occasionally a bar of light from cars passing by would rise and fall on the wall or smooth its white glove over our dresser as if it were a ghost, dusting. I could hear the woman who lived upstairs run water in her bathroom sink, and I imagined her in red flannel or something slinky and black, ready for bed by herself. I’d only seen her once, climbing the stairs very slowly. She’d had long legs, must have been about forty. She wore sunglasses that day in the dim light of the stairwell, so I couldn’t see her eyes. But the woman’s hair was darker and longer than mine. She’d smiled and said nothing when I said hi.

Now that woman was getting into a bed above our bed. I could hear the springs squeak and settle, squeak. Then silence. I wondered if the couple under us could hear our bed so well, that swell of water as we got in and out.

They weren’t married down there, and they fought every night. Neither Rick nor I had ever seen the girlfriend, but we’d gone to high school with the guy, Bill, and Bill had been popular—a doctor’s son—and Rick had seemed to know him pretty well back then. They’d both been witty, athletes, more vivid against the high school’s gray cinderblock than I had ever been.

Still, I’d known Bill back then, too, and Rick knew it. Now the two high school football buddies never spoke at all, even when they passed each other in the hallway, at the wall of mailboxes, miniature steel keys popping them open. “Hey,” they just said, “hey,” under their breaths, dry as the whisk of a broom.

And though we’d never seen her, sometimes at night Rick and I could hear Bill’s girlfriend cry, high and wild.

“He’s a dog,” Rick said once while she was crying, “always was,” and he frowned.

Once, we heard her scream Bill’s name out the window and heard Bill shout up at her, “Cunt,” from the street.

I thought then about Gary W. Jensen. Not until I was nearly home from the Swan Motel, stopped at a four-way stop with no other cars around, did I count the money he’d slipped to me across the counter, and there had been three fifty-dollar bills in that drab green wad soft as a dog’s ear, hacked off.

Then I thought about standing up into that slap. How it numbed but hadn’t hurt me. I’d been ready for the second one, and I’d moved with it into its own curved momentum. I thought how it hadn’t even surprised me—the way the ice-skating instructor had said, years and years before, when our sixth-grade class had been taken on a field trip to the rink in Ottawa City, that the most important thing about skating was learning how to fall: white shavings on the sheen, circling, circling, and falling every few circles into a sting of solid cold, a steam of frost and ice-cindered wind in my lungs. Then, how he’d pushed into me while I was down, looking into my eyes, how he’d pulled out and come on the floor, the dull beige carpet, and my thigh.

Rick began to grind his teeth in sleep. I thought about Gary Jensen coming onto the floor beneath my body, and I rolled further to the edge of the bed, slipped a hand under the elastic band of my panties and touched myself until I was done. Then I fell asleep.

I woke heavy with sleep again when Rick began to toss and mutter in his dream, and I got up quietly then, feeling the groggy weight of my body as if all of it were on my back, and I felt my way in shadows to the couch where we always kept a blanket and a pillow now. I fell asleep again, into and out of a dream in which my mother’s grave was a vegetable garden covered over with snow. An inch or two under the snow, there were ten or fifteen beautiful red bell peppers, perfectly round and preserved. At first, while I was clawing them out of the snow with my cold bare hands, they looked like bloody breasts. But they were only waxy supermarket peppers, glossy and big, so many I didn’t know what I’d do with them all. But, in my dream, I thought Rick would know. Rick would cook something for me with them that he’d looked up in a book. Then I was in a department store, shopping for a coat. Then, I was wearing the coat, walking across water. And then I woke.

Morning buzzed under me somewhere, and when I opened my eyes I saw that Rick was already gone. I could smell coffee in the kitchen getting old. A fat ribbon of dust swelled and sank slowly in a crack of light between the curtains, and I opened them. The window was warm. The sun was just a mild yellow crown in the blurred sky, but high. I went into the bedroom and saw that Rick had made the bed before he left, had tucked the ivory eyelet cover into the bulged edges of the waterbed—a woman’s dress over too much flesh. The electronic alarm clock blinked 11:15. 11:15. 11:16.

Outside, birds bleated softly, sounding digital and sweet. Orange leaves shuffled on one big tree across the street like a man shaking his wife’s wig in his fist, and someone had set a pumpkin out on the front steps of the dentist’s office next door: Magic Marker smile. It was a friendly autumn squash the size of a small and limbless child.

I went to the kitchen—a shiny square. The Formica tabletop and the appliances were naked white. There were no dishes in the sink, just a checkered dishtowel thrown casually across the faucet’s arm and an electric pot of coffee. The kitchen I thought of as Rick’s and spent little time in it. After I poured coffee and picked my purse off the kitchen chair where I’d left it the night before, I took the cup and the purse back to the bedroom and I sat at the edge of the bed, coffee cup on the floor at my bare feet, purse in my lap. I unzipped it and counted the money again.

The bills felt limp and damp, but the coins were cold metal. I weighed them in my hands. A warm sun-bar of gold from the window moved slowly up my stomach, and I thought about what I wanted to buy with all that money.