The Lovebird (38 page)

I HAD GONE TO SIMON
, both the first time and the second, because he had demanded it of me in his warm way. What if I went to Jim, even though he had not demanded, not even asked, because it was what I wanted, because I desired it? Ever since the sweetness of the orange, and even long before then, I had been waiting, passive, nervous—waiting for something the way a girl waits.

All summer, I had loved to step into the bathroom when he was done and steep in the steam of the shower he had taken. Doing so reminded me of the feeling of the hill houses—a humid intimacy, so safe. All summer, I had listened for the sounds of him. I had catalogued each one in my mind—the friendly rumble of his truck approaching the house, the slow squeak and click of the screen door when he came through it, the jangly racket of his lunch pail and thermos when he laid them down for the night, his footfalls, which, in spite of his size, were only slightly heavier than his mother’s, his voice, his contented humming, and especially the rich mellow tone of his “hello,” because the last “o” sound was as round, full, perfect, and pregnant as the letter itself, and always lifted up in a lilt, as if the end of the word liked to take a few steps up a prairie hillock to stand a bit closer to the sun.

What was it, to pay such attention to the most everyday tokens of another person’s existence? Why could a clanging lunch pail carry such charms?

WE PULLED OUT OF THE HOTEL PARKING LOT
amidst a confusion of rabbits, who zipped around with the elated energy of prey awakening to find they had survived to see another day.
“Goodbye, War Bonnet bunnies!” Annette called out in her scratchy morning voice.

“Is there anything you want to stop and see on our drive?” Simon asked. I knew he meant landmarks or national parks.

“I want …” I said. I could not look at him, at his new eyes, at his hopeful face. “I want …” I could not say I wanted to see prairie dogs, grasshoppers, and Bighorns, that I wanted to see a lone old woman standing on a little hill in darkness to pray, to see lightning tearing through the sky, to see a full moon rising with a child jumping up to reach it, or that I wanted to see a man who was splattered with colors, a happy man suffused with the sap of life, and shy—I knew it, just like me—shy. “I want …” I began again. Simon and Annette waited. Simon even laughed. I took his hand. “I want to go back,” I said.

His face was like a still lake with a single stone thrown in.

“I know,” he said. “We’re on our way back—”

“No.
Back
.”

After a long pause he spoke. “Margie, I don’t understand. What could there possibly be for you in that place?”

“Please,” I said. “If you love me—and you’ve never said it, not once, and you didn’t write it in your letter to me, either.” Simon’s face crumpled, and I was instantly sorry I’d said those words. “But if you really love me, or even if you don’t,” I was crying then, “you’ll take me back.”

“Dad?” Annette said. She looked at me and back at him.

“I’m so sorry,” I cried. “I didn’t know for sure until I left. I never expected it. I think my heart really is there.”

They looked at me with confounded eyes.

“I’m knitted in,” I said.

HALFWAY DOWN THE DIRT ROAD
leading to the house, I asked Simon to pull over. I wanted to walk the rest of the way. I took
off my charm bracelet and put it on Annette’s wrist. “This is for you,” I said.

She examined the silver bird and the half of a heart. Then she looked up at me, petted my hair in the soothing way she sometimes had, preternaturally parental, and said, “All right, don’t be sad.” I kissed her.

I kissed Simon. I kissed his mouth, his cheekbones. I kissed the plump lobes of his ears, one after the other. I kissed both of his shut eyes. His salt and mine mingled. “I don’t have any regrets,” I said.

“Margie.” He choked on my name and sucked in his breath.

“It’s only because of you”—I couldn’t speak very well at all—“that I found it.”

WALKING TOWARD THE HOUSE
, I noticed something unfamiliar, something that hadn’t been there the morning before. Vivid patches of dark and light pink had emerged all over the land and lined both sides of the road, and a new, fragile fragrance was in the air. Looking closer, I saw countless five-petaled flowers of fuchsia and antique rose rising out of leafy shrubs, some exuberantly opened to face the sun, some still shyly hidden in tight buds; I realized they were wild roses, and that they had just begun to bloom.

ALL WAS CALM AT THE HOUSE
. I stepped past Jim’s truck, past the Pronghorn. Belly lay on the porch with the mangled remains of one of my lucky red Chinese shoes in her mouth. I patted her head, but she was in such a red-shoe reverie she didn’t look up. I took a few deep breaths, for I was afraid, and went inside.

The house was quiet. There were two coffee cups on the table
and some dry plates standing in the dish rack. Granma’s room was empty. I looked into Jim’s, and it was empty, too. In Cora’s, Daphne was the sole sign of life, snoozing under a blanket of cedar chips.

I walked outside. “Belly, where is everyone?” Maybe, I thought, I had been deluded in thinking I should come back, and we really were all of us Always Alone. Simon and Annette were each alone in their small red capsule, traveling overland at seventy miles per hour. It was a heart-piercing picture, and for a second I shut my eyes hard against it. I lay down on the hot hood of the Pronghorn, which was finally closed.

“Margie?”

“Jim—”

“Is everything okay? Where were you?”

“—where were you?”

“I was out back,” he said. He held a chicken in his arms, and he promptly put it down. Belly, feigning aggression she did not truly feel, so satisfied was she after my shoe, chased the bird around to the coop. “But what about you?”

“I was … confused,” I said.

“My mom and I were very worried. You can imagine what we thought.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Where are they?” I asked.

“With Josie. They went to watch the horse races at Crow Fair. I wanted to stay home.” He looked at my clothes—a pair of Simon’s trousers, which hung so long my flip-flops barely peeked out from under the hems, and Simon’s button-down shirt—but said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I said. He nodded with acceptance, but he had a discouraged look. “Jim,” I said.

“What?”

“Jim.” I pulled off my buffalo baseball cap.

“What is it?”

“I love it here. I love Granma. I love Cora …” Tears came with her name, tears and more of the awful gray shame.

“Margie, Margie.” He steered me into the house and down the hall into the one room I’d never actually entered—his. “Lie down,” he said. I sat on the edge of the bed, sniffling. I stared at him. “It’s okay to lie down. I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll be right back.” I fell back onto the brown woolen blanket. His buffalo skull regarded me from one corner of the room. His basketball rested on the dresser.

Jim returned with a handkerchief tucked in his hand.

“I missed Cora,” I wailed. “Dancing.”

“Here,” he said. “Blow your nose.” I turned sideways and blew, embarrassed by the honking sounds I made, and by what must have been—after a morning filled to the brim with tears—my disheveled appearance. And when my nasal passages were cleared, I smelled it again—the smell of both love and home, the smell of neroli, the same bright essence of orange blossoms that had announced itself so boldly when Jim walked through the front door on the night I first met him.

It confused me. I sat up, frowned, looked around. Was it coming from him? “Margie,” he said again. He pressed the handkerchief lightly, so lightly, to each of my eyes. They were badly swollen, and so was my mouth, and my face was hot, and having Jim’s big hands so close to it gave me an incongruous impulse: I wanted to kiss them.

“What happened yesterday?” he asked.

“Someone came for me.”

“Who?”

“An old friend. It was just like you said—there are old friends at Crow Fair. I thought I would go with him, but I couldn’t. I want this.”

I saw a brief blaze in Jim’s off-to-the-side eyes, but he quickly
extinguished it. “You need some water,” he said. “Your cheeks are so red. I’ll be right back.” I heard him in the kitchen, choosing a glass, running the tap. I turned to examine his uncluttered nightstand. There was an alarm clock, a lamp, and a simple wooden box with a hinged lid. I lifted the lid up to peruse the box’s contents. I had already embarrassed myself completely, I thought, so it would hardly matter if I got caught snooping.

There was a snapshot, curling at the edges, of Cora and Granma taken years earlier. Cora was hummingbird-small, only three or four, and wearing pink-framed eyeglasses with lenses no bigger than quarters. Granma had not changed at all. There was a handful of loose tobacco, redolent of leather and earth. And there was a twisted bandage made out of paper towels, the very one I had fashioned for Jim when he’d grated his hand in the kitchen. It was blotched with brown blood. When he rounded the corner into his room, I blurted, “Jim, you still have the bandage.”

He eyed the open box and froze for a moment. The buffalo watched from his corner. The basketball rolled forward a fraction of a millimeter. “Yes,” he said. “I saved it.”

I tasted the essence of orange on the back of my tongue. “But Jim,” I said, “you don’t even look at me.”

He sat on the bed. He put one hand on each of my cheeks. He dipped his head, low enough to hold my eyes with his. And he held them, and held them. “This way?” he asked. And then I saw it. I saw the spot where Jim’s pair of perpendicular lines met, where the vertical line between his eyes and the horizontal line of his smile intersected. It happened at the very center of his bottom lip. And what was buried there, under that place? Tobacco seeds shining like stars? I held it for a moment between my top and bottom teeth, then between my lips. There was warmth there, and health, and kindness—all the same qualities that inhabited his hands. Jim made a sound. Then the words came out.

“I have been looking at you, Margie, from the first night I came home and found you here. I may not seem like I’m looking, but I promise you, I am. I saw the kiss you drew on the ground between us that morning, not long after you arrived—”

“The kiss?”

“Yes, you made an X in the dirt with your toe while you stood next to my mom, talking about root digging—”

“Oh!” I cried. “But I didn’t know that I … I didn’t mean … or maybe I did?”

“I’m just nervous,” Jim went on. “You know, I don’t really have all that much experience with women. And being so close to the one I want—it’s overwhelming sometimes.” Watching him closely while he said these things, listening to his words, I lost my breath.

“But I’ve been looking at you,” he said, “looking with all of my senses. When I taste the food you make with me, you’re in it—you, you just melt into everything you do, you’re so tender. When you’re close enough for me to smell, what comes through your skin is pure, prairie pure, but unfamiliar to me, too, like California flowers, and it’s the most delicious”—he paused—“distraction. When I hear your voice, it’s like your soul’s right there vibrating under every word, and I could lie down and dream, listening to it—I’d dream of all your life, your experiences, the things I don’t even know about you, the sadness and the sweetness. And when I turn my eyes on you, when you’re looking away and I can study you that way, well, I see just what all my friends at Crow Fair told me they saw, what I’ve seen from the very start: a beautiful woman.”

“What about when you touch me?”

“When I touch you … when I touch you …”

We folded into each other. Minutes, skin, eyelashes merged. The grasshoppers outside grew louder.

• • •

AT DUSK, THE SECRETS OF ALL HEARTS
were once again suspended in the air. And what was suspended in the air between us? The tightrope that had so often hung there slackened, and that slackened rope turned to the softest of all yarns. And then I was found, and so was he, and for a while, Jim and I—just Jim and I and nothing else—were all of a piece. We were knitted together by that yarn.

“WHAT DID YOU THINK WHEN I CAME HERE
? And you didn’t even know me?”

“I thought that my mom wanted someone to keep her company, and that she also wanted someone for Cora. A young woman. Someone who could be a friend to her—”

“I doubt Cora will ever want me for a friend—”

“—and then, not long after you got here, I wanted you for myself. I’m glad you came back today,” he said. “So glad.”

LATER, JIM DID WHAT NO ONE
outside of dreams ever had. He held the back of me against the front of him in a spooning embrace. He was the dark-haired stranger of so many of my dreams, but I was not asleep.

15
GRASSHOPPER
(Asemoplus montanus)