I tell them a story about a Bulgarian woman that ends with the shout, No matter, I must have it!
I say, This should be our motto. We clink our wine glasses and shout, No matter, I must have it! But the men go on with their conversation at the other end of the table. They are talking music, the different qualities a variety of sound systems offer.
Then Jessica says, I’m going through flux right now. Her eyes flit to her husband. I slam my hand flat on the table, the wine glasses jiggle.
Stop it, I say.
Stop what? The flux?
I won’t have flux at the dinner table, I say.
Okay, she says, and she laughs, but it’s more of a sly chuckle. We are twelve again, in the bloating, compressed heat of the canvas camper in her parents’ driveway. She and Louise are trying to convince me I have to come out now. One of her brothers noticed my new bra and made some remark. Sitting alone in the trailer, with my arms crossed so tight over my chest that the next morning my arm muscles are stiff and it hurts to pull a sweater over my head. Jessica full of worldly disgust. Louise obstinately refusing to make Jessica relent, which she could do with a single tilt of her chin. They are united in the desire to punish my vanity. They don’t have bras, but they have braces on their teeth, and that makes them a club.
Jessica says, Fine, if that’s the way you want it.
I start to cry, knowing it’s a gamble. Louise wavers but
Jessica’s scorn fulminates into a full-blown denouncement. She won’t let me ruin all the fun. It’s sunny outside and the camper smells of her brother’s sports socks.
They wander off, their voices fading, Jessica’s ringing laugh the last sound, not a forced laugh, they have forgotten me. Then I listen to the wind through the maples, straining to hear my parents’ car coming for me.
Jessica admired the characters of her Siamese cats, haughty and lascivious. She could suss out the swift-forming passions of the gang of boys we knew, and make them heel. She knew the circuit of their collective synaptic skittering and played it like pinball. She couldn’t be trusted with secrets, and we couldn’t keep them from her.
I ask her husband if he wants more soup. I won’t play a part in excluding him, though I’m sure everything is his fault.
He says, I don’t know what else is coming.
There’s dessert, says Louise. Lou wants to save him from the flux too. Save us all, because it’s a big wave that could make the panes in the French door explode and we’d be up to our necks with the soup bowls floating.
Then Louise’s boyfriend says, But pollution is a by-product of industry and we all want industry, so. He shrugs.
Lou catches my eye. She’s thinking, Remember the guy on the surfboard in Hawaii? I felt total abandon. An evanescing of self, my zest uncorked.
Yes, but if you had kept going, it wouldn’t have been abandon. He wouldn’t be a man swathed in the nimbus of an incandescent wave, muzzling the snarling lip of that bone
crushing maw of ocean with a flexed calf muscle. He would be one of these guys at the table, half drunk and full of mild love.
There’s my husband, heavy-lidded, flushed. The first time I saw him my skin tingled with the nascent what-would-come. Shane Walker. Red suspenders tugging at his faded jeans. The best way to make a thing happen is to not want it. I didn’t want him so bad that he strode right over to the table and dropped down his books,
Mexico in Crisis
and
The Marxist Revolution
. He rubs his hands down the front of his faded jeans.
I read your sexy poem, he says.
A sheet of water falling from a canoe paddle like a torn wing. That’s the only line of the poem I remember. So much bald longing in a paddle stroke. A torn wing, big deal, yet Shane Walker is blushing. Then I decided — No matter, I must have it.
Jessica taps her spoon on the edge of her cup. She’s furious — why won’t I have flux at the dinner table? It’s only emotion, everything blows over. What am I afraid of? Let Louise have her beach boy.
I think, What if it wasn’t abandon? What if some part of Louise stays on a surfboard in Hawaii forever when this guy, who considers the politics of pollution, wants her. Would Jessica have Louise long eternally for something that never existed? It’s perverted. And what about Jessica? How long can this last, this brave refusal to compromise? There’s redemption in submission. If Jessica wants to strut her charisma I’ll stand aside, but in the end she’s wrong and I’m right.
Why does the end matter, shrieks Jessica, there is no end. She doesn’t say anything, of course, she’s gone to the bathroom.
We’re only on the soup, there are several courses, whose idea was this, the plastic bag on my shin, her poster. Wouldn’t it be fun? How have we changed? I think, This may be the end.
She says, I’d rather die ignited than sated.
I realize now, totally zonked — Jessica has rolled three joints since she got here, I haven’t been stoned in years, it’s so pleasurable, so good, I can hardly collect the plates — that I have always believed the flaws of men are born of a stupidity for which they, men, can’t be held accountable. I recognize in a flash — I have balanced the sixth soup bowl, a spoon spins across the floor — that all my relations with men have been guided by this generous and condescending premise. I see now that the theory comes from the lack of courage required to face the truth, which is that men are pricks. They’re aware women like me exist, women who believe they have been shafted in terms of a moral spine, and these men welcome these women’s low estimation of themselves, and capitalize on it.
My neighbour, Allan, in the kitchen this afternoon while I was preparing for the dinner party. He was dropping off the flyers for the parent/teachers’ auction. It disturbs me that Allan has never flirted with me. He flings himself onto a kitchen chair, spoons white sugar over a piece of bread, which he folds and eats in three bites.
He says, Aren’t we all hungry?
I thought, Hungry for what? But I could remember a keening, an imminence. At certain hours it was strongest, at dawn riding my bike downhill, walking home from a bar at four in the morning.
I know I am, says Allan. I’m hungry.
I used to crave something, but what was it? Approval? It was bigger than the whole world approving, bigger than anything language could hog-tie. It compelled my every action, even eating a bran muffin I could tremble with excitement, thinking something might happen now, right now.
Allan certainly looks hungry, all shoulders and elbows splayed over the table.
I say,
I can’t help you
, Allan.
I wasn’t certain I’d spoken out loud. When I said /
can’t help you
, I meant, I wish you wanted me, and even, I’d like to climb on the kitchen table with you — but I didn’t say that, thankfully. What I said was terrible enough,
I can’t help you
. I had been unaware, until that moment, that I wished to be desired by Allan.
He says, But I don’t want you to help me.
Why wouldn’t he want me too? If he is so damn hungry?
Louise: Why don’t we unleash a primal battle screech, our friend is in flux for fuck’s sake.
I think, Oh yes, it would be great to be Jessica. Let’s all be Jessica, ready to burst into flame over an unpaid parking ticket. Ready, anyway, to sleep with the window washer who lowers himself to her office window on rope and pulley, blue overalls and cap, his powerful arms cutting slices of clarity through the soapy blur.
Fabulous, says Jessica.
We are very drunk now, it seems. Or I am, not used to
smoking, but Jessica has a bristling fixity. She flicks her wrist to look at her watch. I have to go downtown, she says.
But it’s our dinner party. We haven’t seen each other. We don’t know how we’ve changed.
Her husband says, I’ll come with you.
Jessica says, You have to relieve the babysitter.
I think, It’s too late. I didn’t do my part. I have forsaken the promises of our adolescence; hiding near the warm tires of parked cars while playing spotlight at dusk, holding still while curling irons burn our scalps, splashes of silver raining from the disco balls in the parish hall, mashed banana emollients, face scrubs with twigs and bits of apricot, ears pierced with an ice cube and sewing needle, and the disquieting loss of a belief in God. The saturated aura, a kinetic field of blue light, that surrounded a silent phone while we willed it to ring. Our periods. Dusk, all by itself, dusk, walking home from school after a volleyball game and the light withdrawing from the pavement. I look at my husband, I try to feel dissatisfied but I can’t, he’s a beautiful man.
Jessica’s husband wants her to give him money for the babysitter but she won’t. She’s angry he didn’t take care of it himself. The chink of a wine glass on the marble fireplace. Louise’s boyfriend rises from his chair and sways a little, he moves across the room and pats Jessica on the head.
Patronizing bitch, he says.
Jessica grins. She unfurls a peel of giggles tinny as a dropped roll of tinfoil bouncing across the kitchen tiles. She picks up her
leather jacket and fires up the zipper. She grabs me by the shoulders, presses me into her big breasts. Then she holds me at arm’s length.
You, she says, haven’t changed a bit.
She moves to Louise, lifts her from the couch also by the shoulders, gives her a big hug.
She kisses her husband on both cheeks and hands him forty bucks.
She says, I love you, even at this moment.
She says to Louise’s boyfriend, You, I’m not hugging.
She opens the French door and the window panes rattle.
Thank you so much, it was lovely.
The front door slams behind her. We each sit up a little, adjusting our posture, the draft from the front door sobering. Outside the dining-room window, we can hear her platform heels slapping the sidewalk, she has broken into a trot.
L
yle and Anna hardly speak on the way to the Ivanys’ dinner party. At a red light on Empire, Anna asks him what he thinks the Ivanys will serve. Lyle says he doesn’t know.
They drive past the graveyard. There’s a group gathered in the dark, huddled near a canopy covering an open and empty grave. A woman on the edge of the group holds a fat bunch of yellow roses wrapped in plastic, the blossoms hanging down toward the mud. Anna can’t think what they’re doing in the graveyard at night. The roses are vibrant against the woman’s black coat. They look like they’re floating. An angel grave marker near the chainlink fence of the graveyard has snow on her wings and in her eye sockets, on her bottom lip. The chainlink is furred over with snow too. The woman with the roses speaks to the man beside her. He tilts an ear toward her.
Lyle pumps the brakes and the car slides sideways, the rear swinging like a boat pushed away from the dock. A Cadillac,
grey and graceful as a dolphin, plows nose first through a deep, curving drift on the opposite sidewalk. Anna throws her arm over and back, grabbing for Pete’s car seat. Lyle stops just before they nudge the bumper in front of them. The light changes; they pass the graveyard.
Anna says, I know what I wish they were serving. I’d like a roast, a nice bloody hunk of meat.
Lyle says, That’s probably what it’ll be.
No, it won’t, she says. She feels so tired that she just wants to go home. She’s angry with Lyle because he’s enthusiastic about the party. He’s a herd of wild horses, he’s already abandoned her. Thrumming the wheel with his leather-covered fingers. They haven’t discussed who will stay sober, but it was decided long ago, perhaps when she discovered she was pregnant. He gets to drink; she doesn’t. He rolls down the window and wipes the windshield with an old newspaper. Cold wind and snow blow through the car.
Some night, he says.
She flips open the makeup mirror in the sun visor to check on Pete. He’s asleep, the snowsuit hood cupping his face, his tiny eyebrows bent with concentration.
He hasn’t been sleeping much lately. It’s an ear infection, or cutting teeth, Anna doesn’t know why. Wait it out, the doctor said. But she and Lyle have aged more in the last three weeks than they have in the last twelve years. Last night, at two-thirty, Pete started to cry and Lyle threw off the blankets and just sat on the edge of the bed, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands covering his face. Anna waited for Lyle to move but he didn’t.
I wanted to be doing other things at this stage in my life, he said.
What other things?
Sleeping, for one.
Anna felt for her glasses and put them on. Pete was standing in the crib, gripping the bars. Anna switched on the bedside lamp and she could see the lines of his tears shining in the bar of lamplight. Pete drew a deep breath, his body became rigid. He inhaled and there was absolutely no sound. His mouth wide open, his face getting redder and redder. Anna imagined the whole universe being sucked into his tiny body, she and Lyle, their eleven-year-old daughter, Alex, the telephone poles, grimy snowbanks, loose pennies, Christmas presents, the Atlantic, asteroids. Then it reversed. Pete tilted his head back and the world, ragged and inconsolable, came back out. She heard, from just below the bedroom window, a snowplow lowering its shovel, the arthritic grinding and ringing clang as the grizzled teeth of the plow hit the pavement, then the wheeze of brakes before the warning bell. The white blinds of their bedroom turning apocalyptic blue and underworld orange by turns. She hadn’t expected to feel old.
Anna said, Are you going to do something here, Lyle?
Lyle didn’t answer, so Anna got up and took Pete out of the cot. She switched on the overhead light.
What do you want me to do, Lyle asked. His hands had dropped from his face so they hung over his knees, but he didn’t lift his head. He was looking at the floor. She told him to go back to sleep.
But what about you? He sounded genuinely baffled. He had never wanted children, any children, but once they came he tried to do his share. He found Pete’s bottle in the blankets of the crib and went down the hall, stopping at his daughter’s bedroom.
Alex was sleeping with her arm thrown over the dog, whose back legs were hanging open, his penis distended and raw looking, the balls shiny with short, silvery hair, pink skin showing beneath. They needed to get the dog neutered; he was barking in the garden, even with the muzzle, and the neighbours were complaining. A crayon had melted onto the radiator and the room smelled of burning dust and wax, fusty and fruity, like cherries and velvet. The quilt had slid off Alex’s bed. Her pyjamas were printed with red umbrellas, the dye was bleeding so each gale-tossed umbrella had a pink aura. The window opaque with frost, Alex’s mouth parted — her bottom lip gleaming in the sepia light from downtown — all of this woke Lyle up. He was awake. Finally, irrevocably alert.