Love & Darts (9781937316075) (12 page)

Mrs. B. laughed at Jeanie’s hypocrisy. She had never
taken anyone’s advice. Not even her grandmother’s even if she did
listen and learn. She always found a way to prove everyone wrong,
or foolish, and most likely had not even thought of the verse since
the day her grandmother was buried. But there were the words.
Jeanie knew they mattered once. Mrs. B. said, half aloud, “Hope
deferred makes the heart sick; like you, my poor child.”

She let her eyes pass over Jeanie’s high school
graduation picture. She glanced at a shot of Jeanie and her father
in front of Jeanie’s sophomore college dorm that overlooked a lake.
Mrs. B. looked for a minute at a picture of all her grown children
in front of the Christmas tree. There was another picture just like
it from the following year, only Jeanie wasn’t there. Mrs. B.
reached up and straightened the frame.

She remembered how Jeanie had
disappeared two weeks before Christmas. How when she had called her
children to breakfast that morning, Jeanie hadn’t come down. How
they had knocked on her door for over an hour, first annoyed, then
anxious, then worried and afraid. Mr. B. and one of their sons had
pried the door open with a crowbar, and Mrs. B. half expected to
find her daughter dead. It was more of a shock to see the bed
neatly made in an empty room. She remembered long searches with the
police. She remembered agonizing prayer-filled nights with a God
she did not know well enough. She remembered Mr. B. taking them all
to the movies to take their minds off things. She remembered
finding her youngest son crying in the backyard, and how their
oldest daughter did nothing but bake cookies one night. Mrs. B.
laughed remembering all the cookies that were made. Every possible
kind, six dozen of each. Everyone dealing with the unknown—the
excruciating weight of time—in their own way.

Then on Christmas morning, with the bright sun
reflecting joy off the snow, there was a phone call. A happy voice
filled all the eager receivers in the house with assurance. “Sorry
I haven’t called. We’ve been driving forever, and it seems like
every gas station’s phone is out of order. How stupid is that?
Who’s we? Oh.” She laughed and covered the mouthpiece to scream
something at someone nearby. Then back into the phone, “I’m in
love. Dad, don’t even say it. I know what you’ll say, and I say
you’re wrong. You can fall in love in two weeks, and besides I’ve
known him for almost two months. But the first time we talked was
two weeks ago at the bakery. He bought me a jelly doughnut, and I
swear it’s forever.

“Don’t you think it’s perfect that
I didn’t get in touch with you ‘til today? No. Well, I think it’s
perfect. It’s like a Christmas present for all of us. So Merry
Christmas!” She would have hung up, but someone asked, and she
replied, “Oh. Yeah. I’m not really sure. In Arizona somewhere. I’ll
let you know when I have a real place. Maybe you all can come and
visit or something. I can smell the turkey from here, Ma!” But
there was no turkey that year. No one had thought of it. They just
ate cookies and watched
It’s a
Wonderful Life.
And they took the
picture in front of the tree anyway that year, missing
Jeanie.

Mrs. B. took a few more steps toward the living
room. She stopped in front of a silly and playful picture of Jeanie
and her love. Mrs. B. had never looked at it without smiling, but
now she wrinkled her eyebrows and sighed. They must have been
camping in the desert. There was a tent and a Coleman stove and a
lawn chair. Behind them cacti and sagebrush dotted the landscape
all the way to the horizon. There were low mountains on the left
side of the picture. It was a joke. Just a snapshot taken by a
friend. They had all been drinking. Jeanie was pushing against her
love’s chest and he, though laughing, had started to fall over. The
picture was at least two years old. They had probably wrestled on
the ground long after the photographer had forgotten the shot. And
Jeanie might only have mailed it for the great smiles on both of
their sunlit faces, but in the hall that day, with this boy in her
husband’s favorite chair, Mrs. B. saw the picture again for the
first time. It was devastating to see it so clearly. Her daughter,
her mocking, playful, spritely, sarcastic, frivolous, immature,
temperamental, evasive, heedless, reckless, unforgiving, so young
daughter pushed him away.

Mrs. B. considered turning to the doorway and
saying, “Was that verse from Grandma’s funeral from Proverbs 13?”
But. She didn’t ask knowing there’d be no answer.

What must that boy think?

There was a picture that Jeanie had taken of
herself. She used a tripod and her father’s best camera which had a
timer. There was a dark purple thunderhead sky behind her and a
rainbow arched itself back over the spruce trees. Jeanie was
dressed from head to toe in yellow and stood—arms thrown up—where
the rainbow would have touched the ground. A loud statement and
strong opinion shouting, “I am a veritable pot of gold, priceless
and unattainable.” It was a summation. Jeanie with a personality
that is impossible to find. Jeanie with a transient confidence that
appears comfortable between the harshest, most contrasting
conditions, where blazing sun meets the million prisms of an
ineffable rain. Jeanie who is only a twist of light. Jeanie, a
promise easily broken in a dry Arizona summer.

No one could blame him for his love.

Mrs. B. drew herself up slowly and walked back into
the living room. He had gotten up from the chair and was standing
in front of the open door near where she had left him. It hadn’t
been that long. The mat under his feet said, “Welcome Home,” and he
stared at it.

Neither of them wanted to have to say anything for
fear of tears.

But. He was a grown man, not a child, so he said,
“Sorry about this, Mrs. B. I thought, well, hell, who knows what I
was thinking.” He glanced up at her. Her face changed quickly to
encourage him with a smile and bright eyes, but he saw her pity
first.

She wanted to pull him into some
hug that would be enough. But there he was with all the import and
fragility of his manhood.
Damn.
She restrained herself,
giving whatever support she could by leaving him alone.

He looked down at the shoebox he was holding. There
were several small treasures in it. Nothing fancy: a few smooth
stones, a picture or two, a blue wax figure of an elephant, a
foreign coin, and some other memories no one could possibly share.
He laid the box down in the chair he’d gotten up from exhausted
from holding such a treasure chest. His hands eased into his
pockets and fell asleep at the wrist. He cleared his throat and
looked at the clock. He knew that the motion of those hands should
mean something, but he didn’t see the time. He thought hard. Both
of them wished she would just get over it and come out of her room.
She didn’t. She wouldn’t. They both thought she must have fallen
asleep by now. They knew her best.

He laughed a little at his own
failure and shook his head. With aspiring, raised eyebrows he said,
“Well. No sense beating a dead horse, right?” He left before she
could see his tears.
Why don’t you
ever listen?
His car sped
away.

Mrs. B. shut the door. Her hand lingered on the
doorknob. She looked down at her wedding ring. She moved over to
the chair and picked up the box of trinkets. She sat down heavily
and picked through them carefully. She lifted out a framed picture
of the couple that was wedged in the bottom of the box and made the
cardboard sides bow out.

Sighing, she leaned her head back
against the chair and held it at arm's length to look at it. They
were happy. It was their engagement photo. The one they had taken
for the newspaper. The frame was separating at one of the corners.
Just a cheap frame from the drug store. Nothing special. Mrs. B.
pinched it back together. In a minute she stood up and went to a
drawer in the kitchen. She pulled out a hammer and a small nail.
She wiped her fingerprints off the glass over the picture with her
apron. She walked back to the hallway and found a spot just over
the light switch for the picture to hang. She held the tiny frame
between her knees and pounded the tiny nail into the wall
carefully. She hung the picture and backed away from it. She smiled
her own smile as a salute to the two in the picture and turned out
the hallway light.

I wish you
had known Marylyn. She tried crying alone on dry nights in the
attic. But no one came to ask her why there was all the sobbing and
moaning so there was little point in indulging such drama. She
forced herself to be sullen for a while, but she kept forgetting
and smiling anyway, regardless of having charity teeth.

She wasn’t much of a girl. She was the kind of
person who was afraid of standing on her own two feet. Not because
she didn’t trust her feet, but because she knew the world was
quicksand. That timidity was her presence. Her hair was a nasty old
brown color like shoes that have never been polished and have
walked miles and miles in the loose limestone dust alongside the
road. Long and straight, like any girl’s hair should be, but
stringy and hers had a habit of getting tangly. Brushing takes time
and patience. No one who’s starving knows time and patience.

One of the boys at school used to laugh at the way
her shoulders jutted straight out from her neck. He called her
Razorback Marylyn saying her spine and shoulder blades reminded him
of his daddy’s razor. It was just another mean name made from
harmless nothing and a bit of prejudice. You know how it is; she
was poor. And she knew it. Once you know it you can either give up
or move on.

I guess she sustained herself the same way desert
plants do. Conservative. Very conservative. Not heedless. She took
smiles from strangers in the supermarket as love, and made friends
with the people she saw from a distance on a regular basis. Shop
clerks, crossing guards, bus drivers—that sort of thing. Just like
a desert plant, never expecting too much and adapting, compensating
as a result. But not dead. Not at all dead, and in a slow scraggly
way moving on in life. No bitterness, no pain, but still dirt
poor.

High school was hard on Marylyn. There was no room
for her in the well-dressed crowd of whispers and giggles. No one
wanted to waste her time on a girl who didn’t have anything bad to
say about anyone. They called her weak and noncompetitive; said she
would not thrive. She had nothing against them.

She spent her lunch hour with her brother and his
friends under a sycamore tree near the baseball field. Every day
five or six of them sat there in the root dust smoking cigarettes
and talking about cars. In the winter, when they couldn’t sit down,
they’d shield themselves from the wind with that big tree. Their
wet feet coiling away from the slushy mud, they still smoked
cigarettes and talked about cars. Marylyn didn’t smoke. She just
sat, or stood depending on the weather, and listened. The boys
rarely paid much attention to her. They had too many different cars
to dream up and then smash to nothing in their minds using all
their reasons for impossibility.

Do you understand the desert? No. I suppose you
wouldn’t. You water your lawn and let the faucet run while you’re
brushing your teeth. Well, hold your mouth open for five or ten
minutes. Then put a drop of water on your lips and remember that’s
all you’re going to get. It’s hard to be poor.

Being alone is virtually impossible. I don’t know
what drove her. Instinct, I guess. There was nothing to her. She
didn’t speak, really. She had hardly anyone to care about or who
cared about her. That brother was always a little bit loose, if you
know what I mean. It’s strange really. But the way I look at it,
you can either give up or move on. I guess I already said that. The
point is, the only way to give up is to die. Marylyn never died
during those high school summers. Others did. Suicide and car
wrecks.

But Marylyn wasn’t stupid and
wasn’t a smoker. You might think she would have been. Her mother
was. When Marylyn was little her brother used to load cap gun
charges down in their mother’s cigarettes. The skinny lady would be
sitting with one foot pulled up underneath her on the chair in the
morning tracing a coffee cup with an absentminded finger and eyeing
a sparrow on the sill, all quiet and lonely,
then—
bang!
And the barefoot brother would scurry into the room laughing.
“Shouldn’t smoke, Mommy. It’ll kill you.” Sometimes the mother
would get up and chase him all over, saying, “Let’s hope it does,
kiddo!” but mostly after those infinitesimal explosions she’d put
the cigarette down and forget it. Sometimes the brother cried or he
screamed, “I hate you. I hope you do die, Mommy. You never let us
do anything fun.”