Authors: Mad Dash
It’s so funny how we’ve begun to acknowledge our differences. A stride forward from the time when, out of politeness, we pretended we didn’t have any. It’s a measure of intimacy, I think, how frank you are with another person about how foreign he can seem. “The broody”—how old-timey, how Farmer Brownish. When I happened to mention my book club not long ago, Owen kept repeating “Book club? Book
club
?” as if he’d never heard the term, and it turned out he hadn’t. “You read a book in a
club
?” It just wouldn’t compute until I compared it to Bible study, then the lightbulb went on. Now he teases me; he’ll pick up the newspaper on my kitchen table and say, “Did you read this with your club? What’d they think of the funnies?”
“How long do they have to stay in this here
brooder
?” I ask him, sitting on the floor by the ducks and crossing my legs. I’ve got on shorts; straw sticks to my thighs and I pick it off in a prissy, city-girl way. Owen hunkers down beside me, forearms on his knees. I bet he can’t even cross his legs—they’re too muscle-bound.
“Couple of weeks.”
“How do they learn to swim?” Motherless, fatherless, not even allowed to imprint on Owen. They’re like aliens set down on a new planet with no instructions.
“They can swim right now. They love it, the second they stick their foot in. You oughta see a duck’s first time, that’s comical.” He sees the question I’m about to ask. “But I keep ’em out of water till they’re a lot older, and they don’t miss it. Can’t miss what you don’t know.”
“That’s mean.”
“No, it’s not. A young duck can drown if you don’t watch it every second, which I don’t have time to do.”
“A duck can
drown
?”
“Sure. They’re like wads of cotton. Put ’em in water, they soak it up and sink. So you have to keep them warm and dry.
Dry.
”
“I doubt if Mother Nature keeps them warm and
dry.
What if you supervised them?”
He sighs. It’s fun to exasperate him. “If I had nothing else to do but play with ducks—like their mother—I’d fill a paint roller pan with warm water. That’s got a low slope, a ramp, see, so they could get out when they wanted a rest. And I’d watch ’em splash around in that all day.”
“But you can’t because you’re a busy man.”
“I’m a busy man.”
White smile lines fan out from the corners of his light-brown eyes. A slant of sun through the dusty window makes his blond beard hairs glitter. I told Mo I’d never be unfaithful, and she said, “What does desire have to do with principles? Passion isn’t in the head, it’s in the blood.” I was a wild girl twenty years ago—is that all gone? No, it is not.
But it’s not just lust. Owen intrigues me. Under his deliberate, easygoing manner there’s always a tension, something unsettled about him. He keeps his mouth closed, the jutting lips clamped shut, jaws flexed. Even when he smiles, his lips look defensive. Truthfully, I’m not sure what I want to do more, mother him or kiss him.
Beep.
It’s not a duck; it’s the pager he wears on his belt. “Damn,” he says, checking the readout. “I’ve got to return this call.”
“Go. I’m fine, I’ll just sit here.”
“Sure? Might take a few minutes.”
“No, go. You’re a busy man.”
Luckily I have ducks to distract me when he leaves. It’s so tempting to touch them. Two could easily sit in the palm of my hand. I would be a bad duck raiser, they’d make me their mama in the first five minutes of their lives. I want to touch one’s little bill, find out if it’s soft or hard; I love the two tiny nostrils at the top, on either side of the most delicate bend. Their eyes must see two completely different worlds, they’re so wide-set.
I must have some ducks.
I get up to check on the hatchlings, but nothing’s changed. The heat in here is starting to get to me. I step outside for some air.
The grown-up ducks waddle away from me or jump in the creek, burbling along between its low, grassy banks. Butterflies, buttercups, smell of fresh earth. Through the willow-tree leaves, I can see a mountain in the distance, another one hazy behind it, and a third hardly at all. The muted colors go from jade to amethyst as your eye sweeps the range, and then there’s the blue, blue sky.
Farm life. It has its ups and downs, I imagine, like any other life, but the satisfactions must go very deep. Tending the land, growing something from nothing, working the soil with your hands. The simplicity. I must tell Owen that my mother’s grandparents were farmers. In Lithuania. They grew beets and potatoes.
Rex is barking again, a monotonous repetition of the same boring, bored pitch. Following the sound, I come upon a small, upright platform made of plywood, the bottom half stained red. It has two red canvas conelike things nailed to it upside down. What could they be? I go closer to find out.
Halfway there I freeze in midstep, front foot poised just off the ground. I must look pretty silly. That’s not red canvas. It’s bloodstained canvas. I know why the cones are upside down. Owen sticks the ducks in headfirst. The feet probably protrude from the top when they’re snugly in there, their wings immobile. Do they quack? Unlikely; they’d be too terrified. They don’t know what’s coming, but I bet they can smell the blood. He chops their heads off, I suppose, and lets them bleed into the ground. What does he use, an ax, a hatchet? He’d make sure it was razor sharp—he’d want it to be quick.
What I hate most is that there are
two
cones, for efficiency. So one duck always dies and one always knows it’s about to.
I’m conscious of my hypocrisy as I shrink away from this killing place, a knot of revulsion cramping my stomach. “What did you think,” I mutter, “what did you expect?” Meat and laying, that’s what Owen said, but I only thought of eggs. The sunny side of farm life, baby animals, milking contented cows. Owen’s cattle, down in the lower forty or wherever they are—they’re
beef
cattle. I eat steak. I eat duck.
I watch my feet—my sandals and pink toenails look idiotic to me now on the trampled grass—and take the path back to the house.
O
wen’s talking on the telephone in the kitchen. Old-fashioned kitchen, everything almond yellow, lots of rooster-themed bric-a-brac, pineapple stenciling around the low ceiling. It’s as if his mother stepped out a few minutes ago to set the table in the dining room.
Owen holds up one finger, not to shush me but to say he’ll be finished soon. It’s a business call, something about kilocalories and the optimum ratio of phosphorus to calcium in gluten meal. He circles the finger in the air, which I take to mean “Make yourself at home, look around, go anywhere.” Good: I want to explore.
The house smells old, like a vacuum-cleaner bag that needs changing. In the living room, the floorboards creak at every step under worn sculpted carpet, two shades of green to match the flocked wallpaper. Heavy curtains with elaborate swag valances hang over mottled sheers at the front windows. The television’s new, though. It’s huge, one of those projection screens that take up half a wall. The couch across from it is plaid, well-worn, with cushions stacked at one end. I picture Owen sprawled sideways, flicking through hundreds of channels beaming in via the satellite dish on the roof. The local paper and the
TV Guide
clutter the coffee table, and plastic wrappers by a dish of hard candy, a can of Pepsi with a glass of melted ice on a coaster. A
coaster.
That gets me.
An old pump organ sits near the unused front door, its dusty top covered with photographs. In their formal wedding picture, Owen and Danielle look equally nervous and uncomfortable. I recognize her from pictures I’ve seen at Cottie’s, but she looks younger in the wedding shot, vulnerable and childlike. Scared to death, actually. Not a good start for a marriage, but then hindsight is everything.
Except for one picture of Owen with the Benders—he in his army uniform, practically bald, Cottie and Shevlin vigorous-looking in their fifties—all the photos are of Danielle, either by herself or with little Matthew. Here she’s in Owen’s kitchen, lazy-eyed, saluting the photographer with a can of beer; here with Matthew on the back of a horse, his thin arms clutching her waist from behind. Here a formal pose in front of an enormous yellow forsythia, high as it is wide, in her Easter Sunday navy suit and white pumps. She wears her dark hair shoulder-length but short on top, a style I’ve always disliked. She’s pretty. I think of her as a blonde, so there’s always an instant of surprise when I see a picture and remember, no, she’s brunette.
I never gave Owen the deer-in-headlights photo he took of me that day in my kitchen. It turned out about the way I expected. If I had given it to him, I know one thing: It wouldn’t be among these pictures on top of the pump organ. This is a shrine to Danielle.
I don’t know if she’d make him happy, but if she were here she’d wake this house up. This wouldn’t be a shabby, lonely, one-man room anymore. Owen wouldn’t fall asleep on the couch and wake up in the middle of the night with his clothes on, mouth sour, some kickboxing tournament playing on the giant TV screen. I think of her as a blonde, and I thought of him as a strong, sure man with endless resources and a soft-spoken, rock-solid self-confidence. But I believe he’s as sad and alone as any of us.
“Stay for supper?”
He’s so big and solid, yet he moves so quietly. He stands in the doorway with his fingertips in his pockets, watching me. I feel like a snoop, an unmasker. But it’s myself I’ve unmasked. I make my living with my eyes, and I’ve been looking at a complicated man through only one or two facets of a prism that has more sides than I can count.
Why do we feel so frightened when other people’s marriages fail? That’s what Mo asked me. “Can’t we learn? Don’t we see?”
I know why. Because we want it so badly. We’re not blind, we see people screwing up right and left, we know the odds are miserable. We want it anyway. If you were stranded in the desert you’d still want water, even knowing there isn’t any. We want love, a lover, because otherwise it’s too lonely. To care for someone else, to toss your lot in with theirs, to make their burdens yours, to try to make someone else happy, to have that be part of your job—it keeps your heart from darkening.
“Thank you, Owen. I don’t think I will.”
twenty-one
O
nce, when Chloe was four or five years old, I let her come into my darkroom while I was working. This was strictly forbidden, a taboo we had reached a grumpy understanding on after innumerable serious conversations and corrections. I don’t remember why I relaxed the rule on that day—a Saturday, Andrew’s day to mind her while Mommy did a million other chores that had backed up during the week and sometimes, rarely but sometimes, got to play in her darkroom. Maybe it was the sweetness of Chloe’s knock on the bathroom door, the poignancy of her entreaty, the fact that I was in the process of printing pictures of her recent birthday party and she knew it—whatever the reason, I broke the law and let her come in.
“Don’t touch anything, honey. In fact, don’t move. Put your hands in your pockets and just stand still.”
“Stinky,” she pronounced the room, wrinkling her nose. She loved the red light. “But I can’t
see
,” she complained when I got back to work at the enlarger. Good; I wanted it to be boring, so her lust to see what went on behind the tantalizing closed door would go away and leave us both in peace. But then, I also wanted her to understand the
process
as much as she, my ceaselessly curious child, wanted to understand it. I put my left arm around her waist and picked her up.
“Look. See how the light shines through the
negative
onto this paper and makes a…?”
“A…”
“A
positive.
” It was a photo of Chloe blowing candles out on her cake. Needless to say, she was spellbound. I managed to time an exposure one-handed before I set her down. “Now, watch.” The best part, gently swishing an eight-by-ten sheet of blank paper in a tray of developer and watching an image form. Absolute magic. It’s what it’s all about.
Chloe took it in studiously, matter-of-factly. It wasn’t magic to her. She was a child; everything was magic. All phenomena were at once amazing and just what you’d expect.
I had a system: developer on the toilet seat, stop bath on the toilet top, water in the sink, fixer in a tray on the edge of the bathtub. Very ergonomic; all I had to do was pivot. I was washing my miracle print in the sink when I heard a
whoosh
, followed by a shrill wail. Chloe had pulled the tray off the tub edge and drenched herself in fixer from the chest down.
Andrew’s footsteps pounding up the stairs. Me calling, “Wait a sec!” Andrew flinging the door open. I couldn’t help it, I was still in darkroom mode, it was a reflex—I yelled, “My papers!” I’d left the box open; Andrew had ruined them. They were expensive.
We had a terrific fight, Chloe screaming through most of it. “The fumes!” he kept saying. “She could’ve been burned!” No, she couldn’t have, but he blamed me so unkindly, so eloquently, and he was completely right—that was the ghastly part. I’d broken the rule out of foolishness and thoughtlessness and vanity, putting our child at risk. We bathed Chloe in the shower together, by which time Andrew’s anger had gone silent. (Much more terrible.) I could not bring myself to admit guilt yet, but I had no defense, none, so I went on the attack. He was never here, how dare he go all Father of the Year on me, I did everything, I took care of Chloe and kept the house and held down a job while all he did was stoke his ego by being charming nine hours a week to a bunch of undergraduates. We didn’t speak for days.
The past wasn’t really that long ago.
Who said that? Maybe I did.
This bathroom darkroom is even smaller than that one was, now that Owen’s put the washer-dryer in. Although that’s come in handy—I use the open doors of the washer and dryer to hold my chemical trays. The enlarger sits on a kitchen stool. Precariously. The acrid smell of stop bath is what’s bringing back these old memories, I believe. And giving me a headache, as usual, but I don’t mind. “You have the best job in the world,” Greta said during our quarrel. It’s possible. In any case, this is my lot. I take pictures.
Which is it, you’re good at what you love or you love what you’re good at? I hang dripping prints with clothespins from a wire in the shower and admire my handiwork. Pond studies, mostly, with slow black-and-white film, the old-fashioned way. The pond at dawn, full day, dusk, by moonlight. Mood pieces. They please me enormously.
So do my pictures of Sock. They’re really good. But, of course, as soon as you put a dog—or a child—in a photograph it’s not “serious” anymore. (Unless they’re starving.) Luckily I don’t care about any of that anymore. I could do fine art if I wanted, I’ve got the skill, the eye. But I like my children. My stinky darkroom. Maybe it was coming back to it, and back to film—coming back around to the beginning—that’s redeemed for me what I do for a living. I don’t know. But I find I’m anxious to get back to work, and I haven’t said that in a while.
I
f there were another great flood, I could build an ark and repopulate Earth just with the fauna living on, in, or around my pond today. There’s a turtle sunning itself on a rock; it’s got a dragonfly on its back. All the baby birds fledged and learned how to fly, and now they’re doing whatever teenage birds do—hang out, sing a lot. Ride in jalopies.
I’ve come down here this afternoon without my camera. That’s so unusual, it must be significant. Do I think I’ve photographed everything? What arrogance that would be, and besides, the evidence is abundant and everywhere that I haven’t. I don’t have the playful submerged mystery of a minnow school, I don’t have a frog’s inflated throat in close-up, I don’t have the shadow of a bird on the water surface, I only have about half the butterfly population and not a single real keeper among those. I could go on and on. Like, buttercups—I can’t get that brilliant acidic yellow. When a dragonfly stops short and holds still, tense and poised—I can’t get it, he just looks stuck in air. Oh, and I don’t have any shots of the mosquito bites on my ankles.
Still, I’ve come down here without my camera, and I think that means, or is connected in some way to, this sense of…not
completion
exactly—I mean, talk about arrogance—a step, I’ll say, a movement toward completion. It’s possible I might be finished here for the time being. It’s only a sense, certainly not a fact, because I haven’t come
close
to finishing all the projects I had lined up for my free week—although that wasn’t the point, of course, to finish projects. A few things have settled inside me, that’s all. I won’t make too much of it. The way it ended with Owen yesterday has something to do with this
finished
feeling. And this achingly beautiful spring, the most perfect unfolding of a season I’ve ever known—because I’ve watched it so carefully, lived so close to it, my
eyes wide open
—is nearly over and it doesn’t need me anymore. Everything’s begun, everything’s in progress. The mountain can take care of itself now.
“Hi, Mama,” I say, imagining she’s that bird up there, coasting so high in the sky it might be in another dimension. The difference is, when I talk to her now, I don’t feel so sorry for myself. The pain isn’t so harsh and jagged; it’s settled into an ache, and sometimes the ache is sweet, almost a comfort. She’s gone and not gone, and she will always be with me, and that’s the best I can have.
When did this change happen? I feel less frantic. Cottie has something to do with it. And time, prosaic old time. And Chloe…something about Chloe. When she tells me what she wants, what she hopes for, my first reaction isn’t fear. Or if it is, it’s fear for her, not me, and that’s a sea change. My baby is growing up, not abandoning me. Poor thing, she couldn’t abandon me if she tried. Not that I’m cured. If I could, I would keep three steps ahead of her for the rest of her life, hacking down trouble and heartbreak with my machete, making straight her path. Fortunately, I can’t. She can do it herself, and I even get to take some of the credit.
Mo told me that when Mark was a baby, she used to chant over his crib, “Let go, let go, let go.” In nature it’s simpler; the bird teenagers, the little goslings in the pond, they probably wake up one morning knowing the free ride’s over, this is the day they’ll have to find their own breakfast, use their own wits to hide from the scary predators. The parents are nothing but relieved. Good riddance, they think, now we can get back to the business of living for ourselves. Much less stressful.
I’m thinking some parent-bird wisdom got through to me this spring. That’s how it feels, as if I absorbed it through my skin. Osmosis, filtration, transmigration. Andrew learns with his brain; me, with everything but.
I might be ready to go home. Back. Home, back, whatever. Can’t stay here forever. It’s been lovely, but—security is when everything is settled and nothing can happen to you. You might say it’s the opposite of living. I miss talking! Friends, crowds, the Metro, noise, the Safeway. I look forward to teaching Sock how to walk on a leash. I look forward to being one of those people who follow their dogs down Columbia Road with a plastic bag. We can go to the park on Sundays, she can jump in the creek at Beach Drive. We’ll join a dog park and make all new friends.
Mo needs me, that’s another reason to leave. I’d like to slash a clear path for her, too, with my machete. She’s given up men! She said she was going to, but I didn’t believe her. But now it seems to be true, and I blame it on this we’re-all-ultimately-alone business she’s taking way too far. (Interestingly, she doesn’t want
me
to give up men. “When are you going to sleep with him?” she asked me the other day—meaning Owen. I was shocked. Well, I say shocked. Shock was on top of a squirmy hill of reactions I didn’t feel the need to examine closely.) Mo, levelheaded Mo, is going off the deep end with her self-abnegation and ego destruction and freedom from desire and all the rest of it. It’s fine up to a point, but where does it end? Belly breathing in a cave by yourself? I must save her. Who can I fix her up with? So that’s another reason to pull up stakes and go home. Back.
Which leaves Andrew. I sit down in my spot on the dock, my perch, and peel an orange. I’ve been saving Andrew for last deliberately, because he’s the hardest. I thought if I cleared the decks, got rid of everything else but him, I could see more clearly. With Owen out of the picture, that’s another distraction gone—if he was ever really in the picture. Now that he’s out, I like to think he wasn’t. Am I rewriting history? Well, it’s my history, I can write it any way I want to. The point is, I miss Andrew. That’s nothing new—I’ve missed him since I left him. But I’m trying not to trust every little emotion that comes along; be more like him, in other words. What I wouldn’t give for some clarity. Things have gotten
muddier
since I scooped Sock up and stormed out of the house, and I’m getting tired. I want resolution.
So I’m off—I’m charging up the hill through the thick, buggy grass, not even picking up my orange peels first. And I am smiling and frowning with purpose, because it’s good to know what I’m going to do about Andrew right
now
, at least: I’m going to call him up and apologize for never admitting I was wrong to let Chloe in the darkroom.
The past wasn’t really that long ago.
I couldn’t do it at the time, because it cut too close, would’ve pained me too much.
Bad mother.
There was for me then, and probably still, nothing worse. I was ashamed. And proud. Pride—I always thought that was Andrew’s sin. I forgot it’s mine, too, when the stakes are high enough. And where does pride get you? Look at us.
Inside the house, the answering-machine light is blinking. I almost don’t play the message back—I’m impatient now, dying to apologize. I love apologies. Most people don’t, but to me they’re like good medicine, or what confession must be like. Apologizing to Greta was positively therapeutic.
“Dash.” Andrew’s voice comes over the machine. “Call me when you get a chance. I’m at home.”
I’m laughing as I pick up the phone. What a riot if
he
were calling to apologize for something. But that’s silly. I rein in my expectations and punch the number.
“Hello?”
I pull the phone away from my ear and look at it. Like in a cartoon. “Elizabeth?”
“Yes?”
Elizabeth O’Neal is in my house?
“This is Dash.”
“Hello, Dash. I guess you want Andrew.”
Muffled rubbery sounds—her hand on the receiver.
“Hi. Em. Hi.”
“What’s she doing there?”
“Em—are you leaving?” Now it’s his hand on the receiver. I hope it’s sweating. More muffled squeaking, then he comes back on. “Em, hi.” It’s all he can seem to come up with.
“Oh, she didn’t have to go on
my
account.”
“No, it’s all right. She was in a hurry.”
“Why? Down a pint, needed a fresh blood feed?”
Shocked silence. I’m shocked myself.
“That’s not nice,” Andrew says, and he’s right; I hang my head. “Elizabeth is a troubled young woman. She doesn’t deserve your scorn.”
My
scorn?
That’s too much. Anyway,
my
scorn? I’ve been putting up with Elizabeth O’Neal’s obnoxious disdain since the day I met her. “You’re right,” I say, “she’s a very troubled woman, and she’s not that young. What the hell was she doing there?”
“She brought a shrub, a sort of tree. For a present. To plant in the yard.”
“Huh. Why?”
“I don’t know. People give people things. She just did.”