Sweet Talk (13 page)

“Thanks,” he said.

When I got to the bottom of the lane, I stopped the car to wave. He had come back through the house and was standing on the dark porch, legs evenly spaced, like a soldier at ease, the gold light of his house swooning in every window. Before I drove off, I slipped the envelope under the front seat with the road maps, thinking that someday I would remove it and decide what to do.

It was still there five years later, when I sold the car. During those five years, my father, always a weekend drinker, began to drink during the week. My grandmother broke her hip in a fall. My mother, a quiet woman, was now helped through her quiet by Valium. MacArthur finished restoring his rooms and moved to another farmhouse, in a different county. Finally, he took a job as a cook—a breakfast cook, doing mostly eggs and pancakes—and in this way continued to be a person without plans.

The boy I sold the car to was just eighteen years old and wanted to go west to California. He was tall, like my brother, and happy to be managing his own life at last. The cuffs of his plaid flannel shirt had shrunk past his wrists, and, seeing his large wrist bones exposed to the cold bright air, I liked him immediately.

“Are you sure you’re charging me enough for this?” Leaning under the hood, he looked like a construction crane. “This is one of the best engines Ford ever made,” he said. “Whooee!”

“Believe me. I’m charging you a good price.”

He wanted to celebrate the purchase and buy me a drink. “I bet this old Betsy has some stories to tell.” He winked at me. He could not believe his good luck, and he was flirting. The cold spring air seemed to take the shape of a promise, but then there was still the problem of the envelope under the front seat. In five years, I had removed it several times. I had thought of bureau drawers and safe-deposit boxes. I had even thought of getting Dixon’s address and sending it back. Again and again, I slid it under the seat once more unopened.

“Come on,” the boy said. “Let’s have a drink and tell some stories.”

“Really, I can’t,” I said. “I have to go somewhere.” I didn’t want to get to know him. I had meant to retrieve the envelope before I turned over the car, but, standing on the curb, signing the pink slip, I discovered it would be easier just to leave it there.

“Hey,” the boy said. “Look what you did. You made a sheep.”

“What?” I said.

“You made a sheep with your breath. Hey—there, you did it again.” Now I tried to see what he had seen in the frosty air, but it was gone. He gave me the money, we shook hands, and he got in the car. “Not many people can make a whole sheep,” he said. He turned the key. “Most folks just puff out a part of a sheep.”

“Wait,” I said.

He put the car back in neutral and leaned out the window. “You change your mind? You hop in and I’ll take you to Mr. Mike’s Rock-and-Roll Heaven.”

“No,” I said. “I have to tell you something. There’s something I didn’t tell you about the car.”

He stopped smiling, because he must have thought I hadn’t given him a good price after all—that there was a crack in the engine block or a dogleg in the frame. “Well, what the heck is it? Just lay me out then. The last car I had broke down on me in three weeks.” He was remorseful now and disappointed in both of us.

I paused a long time. “I just think I should tell you that this car takes premium gas.”

He was happy again. “Shoot, I knew that,” he said. He put the car back into gear.

“You be careful,” I said. “You have a good trip.”

He gave me the thumbs-up sign and edged away from the curb, looking both ways, in case there was traffic.

I liked that boy. I wanted him to get safely to California and find a good life and fall in love and father a large brood of cheerful people who would try to give you too much for a used car and would always wear their shirtsleeves too short. I watched him drive away and around the corner. I started back to the house but then turned to look at the cloud of exhaust that hung in the air. I wanted to see what figure it made. I wanted to see if it would be a sheep or a part of a sheep or a person or something else, and what I saw instead, before it unfurled into the maple trees, was a thin banner of pale smoke.

T
his is it: life lived in a holding pattern because the landing gear won’t go down, and Megan sips wine trying to think of jokes to crack; brave, witty exit lines. She has a husband, George, who has lost the art of conversation and never comes to their bedroom until she is asleep and talking in strange languages. This morning he told her that last night she said three times, quite distinctly, “The mummy orders enchiladas.” She has a good friend named Vera, running on hormones and Valium and a fear of all natural phenomena (the two minor earthquake tremors in the last five weeks, for example), who called her at work this morning with a luncheon invitation, saying, “There’s something I have to talk to you about,” to which Megan replied, “I have a business lunch,” lying, because words are like eggs—they can hatch into creatures with lives of their
own, the dove, the partridge, the yellow-winged oriole, singing sweet songs, but also the hawk, the eagle, the condor, tearing flesh away from the bones.

Instead at noon she left the industrial park where she works and drove west until she found a fast-food place selling overtenderized steaks—DES, BHT, and monosodium glutamate. The truth is: it tastes good and life is short. Megan has lost twelve pounds in the last month on George’s fish-and-vegetable diet. A few moments ago, passing herself in the plate-glass window, she agreed with herself that she was a person made too thin by good advice.

She ignores the salad, eats the steak, and sips the wine, and thinks about the embattled brain cells, how at this moment a thousand of them are turning over on their backs and sticking their little feet in the air. She smiles (always her own best audience) and now an old woman in a stylish hat, mistaking the smile for an invitation, takes the seat opposite. She says that she lives two blocks away in the Sunset Tower Senior Home and can never get a decent meal there.

“The dietician is shocking,” she says. “Some people get hors d’oeuvres before the meals and others of us do not.” The woman is an immigrant. She says she has no family except for a son in Sacramento who visits only every other month. Her roommate is a thief. She, the old woman, has written a note to the counselor, listing her grievances. She pulls the note from her purse and
hands it to Megan, who reads as she chews: “My roommate disrupts my things. I am suspect her of losing some of them, especially my toothpaste. I am frightened of her because she also interferes with my other things. In doing this she undermines my very poor health condition.”

Megan shakes her head sympathetically. What can she do?

“When I show this note to the counselor, the counselor says, ‘I think you get upset over a minor thing. Try to work it out.’ ”

Megan shakes her head again.

“There’s no protection. She stole my perfume, too. She doesn’t use it. I can only think she can throw it away.”

“How terrible,” Megan says.

“If I live there for longer I will die.”

Neither of them is eating now. The old woman stares at Megan with sudden indignation, as if Megan were the counselor who doesn’t understand, and then she picks up her tray and moves to another table.

The mummy orders enchiladas.

Everybody has problems.

Megan stands at the window with a cup of coffee and a cigarette while George does sit-ups on the carpet. He jerks three times before he reclines again on the floor.
Ah-pouf-pouf-pouf
. George has got a sort of dance
rhythm going with his breathing. George, Megan wants to say, I know what you’re doing. You’re making yourself into a person who has nothing to do with me.

For the last three months George has been remodeling himself along lines suggested by certain consumer bulletins and TV shows. He gave up beer and started sucking on licorice roots. He gave up meat and started lifting weights. He shaved his armpits in the manner of championship lifters on “Wide World of Sports.”
Pouf-ah. Pouf-ah
. George snatched and heaved on the exhale, contemplating his own mortality.

“George,” Megan said. “I do not want to go to the beach this summer with a man in naked armpits.”

His stomach flattened out. His arms and legs, once lanky and limber, took on the stiff glistening promise of a new topography. “George,” she said, amusing only herself, “you think Arnold Schwarzenegger is sexy? Arnold Schwarzenegger gets a rash where his big legs rub together.”

Tonight for supper they had fish sticks, which had been out of the ocean too long and tasted like small punishments. Now she looks at the view that is the standard view that comes with all apartments-with-a view south of San Francisco: telephone pole, four lanes of commuter traffic, some rooftops, more poles, and finally in the distance a glimpse of the mountains hiding the sea. On the telephone pole, only a few feet from the window, someone has nailed a sign that says that a cat
is lost and his name is Le Max. (Here Le Max? Here Le Max?) This morning before she went to work Megan went down to the pole and read the fine print: two-time Santa Clara County champion, long hair, black Persian, very rare. Now she notices on the far side of the street, near the curb, a flat, treaded shape.

“George,” she says. “Did you notice anything dead on the street when you came home from work?”

She turns to look at him. He is straining from the floor to touch his toes with his elbows, and he gives her a wild-eyed look to indicate that he can’t talk until he gets to number five hundred. “Three ninety-six,” he whispers. “Three ninety-seven.”

Recently she inventoried the contents of the kitchen: eleven knives, nine forks, seven spoons, three bread pans, three cake pans. Somehow they have contrived to own only odd numbers of things, which will be difficult to divide down the middle.

George and Megan are seated on the sofa watching TV. His arm is draped fraternally over her shoulder. She snuggles against his side and tries to think of neutral topics. His job, her job, how much they have put away toward a down payment on a house. The Vista View complex is that kind of place—one where all the residents are waiting until they can touch down in a neighboring suburb and begin their real lives, planting geraniums and coaxing the grass green in the summer.

“I think I’ll try to quit smoking again,” she says. Actually, she hasn’t given it much thought recently, but suddenly it seems an innovative idea, something she can do for herself and George. She waits for him to approve. He waves his hand to show that he wants to hear the program on TV, where a man is running across a rooftop. For some time now the spaces in their conversation have flourished. There is a parallel, in fact, between the diminution of their evening chitchat and the development of George’s new body, as if words are some kind of fiber diet George is using to pack the hollows of his triceps.

At the commercial break she says, “How do you think I should go about quitting?”

George shrugs, his eyes still on the screen.

“I mean, what do you think the first step should be?”

“Just throw the damn things away,” he says. “Use some discipline.”

“That’s a very good idea,” she says, enthusiastically, as if George has just outlined a complex strategy and offered to collaborate on the invention of the new Megan.

When the program resumes the man is still running across the rooftop. He is dressed in black. He is the celebrated Cat Burglar of Paris, who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Megan thinks of Le lost Max, a fugitive from the Vista View complex. Height, six inches. Weight, twelve pounds. Hair, black. Eyes, green. Presumed dead, but who knows? Maybe Le Max has faked
his own suicide, assumed a new identity, and is even now padding across El Camino Real, heading for a nice life in the mountains. Good-bye, Max. Good luck.

Megan has not smoked a cigarette for two days and has been sucking on lemon drops instead. She tried one of George’s licorice roots, but it was truly like eating a piece of a tree, too primeval. She has now eaten four bags of lemon drops, two bags a day, an extra four thousand calories of tooth rot, according to Vera’s calculations. “Your lungs will be fine, but your teeth will fall out,” Vera is saying. It is Saturday afternoon and they are walking along the shaded street of another suburb, looking for an empty lot Vera wants to photograph. “First the gums go soft and gray like dirty sponges, and then the teeth let go.”

“I know,” Megan says. “I can feel them right now hanging on to the bone with their little fingers and crying for help.”

Vera smiles but says, “It’s not a joke. You should try carrots.”

“You can’t smoke carrots.”

“I’m serious. Think of radishes. Think of celery.”

“What am I eating already? Every day two big salads and some smelly fish.” What she wants to say is, Vera, don’t make me into a trivial, inferior person whom you can take lightly. What she says instead is, “Don’t pick on me.”

“This isn’t picking. This is advice.”

“Believe me, it’s picking.”