A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (3 page)

“That's not a visit? What's a visit?”

“You wouldn't put your purse down,” I said. “You walked from room to room and the damn thing swung from your shoulder”

“I had things to do, people to see.”

“That boyfriend in Anaheim.”

“That's right,” she said, smiling, obviously reminiscing. “The podiatrist who loved Disneyland—talked about specific rides the way other people talk about movies or books.
‘The Pirates of the Caribbean, now that's a ride,'”
she said.

“You saw a lot of the park that summer.”

“I did.”

“You complained that it was all he talked about.”

“Russell talked about feet, too. Thought mine were especially healthy, not a bunion or corn anywhere, no dry skin, clear nails. He was very happy with my feet,” she said.

“I'm hungry. I'm going to cook something,” I said, but instead of turning around, I stood there, looking at her.

My mother picked up the wig. She spun the wig on two fingers. “Remember those toys that spun around?”

“Tops,” I said.

“You liked the wooden ones. If I brought home plastic, you'd scream. You were picky. You were so very picky,” she said.

And the word “picky” stayed with me even after I turned away from her and went to the kitchen. I was standing at the stove, watching the eggs bubble in the frying pan. I was thinking that a picky child does not necessarily grow into a picky adolescent, does not necessarily become a picky adult. She might move from boy to boy, from dark backseat to dark bar, from drowsy man to drowsy man. “Picky,” I said softly, deciding I'd write a poem later about last night's mess, about the flying boy and his minty chew. I picked up the saltshaker and tipped it this way and that, watching the grains fall through the air.

I was over thirty years old, living with my mother because she was sick and because I was poor. It was an exchange. It was love, yes, but need was a part of it too. I wanted to pretend I was still an adult, that returning to my mother wasn't an indication I'd gone backwards: thumb sucking, dependency, crawling, fear, and breast milk.

Later, while I showered, my mother stood at the bathroom sink, pulling an extra toothbrush from a shopping bag. She punctured the package with a fingernail and tossed the wrapper into the trash. She slipped the toothbrush into the ceramic holder shaped like a hand. I could see my mother through the clear curtain, giving the brush a slot. “For guests,” she shouted. “In case a good one stays.”

Her comment startled me and I nicked my calf. I slammed the razor down on the edge of the tub and looked out at her from behind the shower curtain.
“Mom,”
I said, in the same exasperated tone I'd used on her as a teenager. “Get out of here.”

My calf bled and bled. The cut was tiny, but deep. I propped my foot up on the closed toilet and stopped the bleeding with tissue and pressure. I placed a Band-Aid on the cut, wrapped a towel around myself, and sat down on the edge of the tub, staring at the new toothbrush. My mother had placed it in the thumb slot, while our own brushes occupied the pinkie and ring finger. It was blue, a boy's color, big and clean, with uneven bristles, better quality, more expensive, I could tell, than either of ours. I ran my finger over the bristles and thought about that flying guy and his fake ID, pretending.

I have a problem with my imagination. I might be doing something with someone and I'll be nodding or moving my torso or handing him a beer, but inside my head I am with someone else, doing something else entirely. Like skiing or surfing (which I've never been able to do) or bathing in a claw-foot tub with that husband I don't have. From far away, the husband is unique, an individual, but when I come in close to focus on his features, they are indistinct; he is anyone.

Sometimes I'll be
with
the person I am with, but I'll have scooted the two of us ahead in time so that we are better, tighter friends than we actually are, or longtime lovers, or maybe even on our way down the aisle, although it isn't an ordinary aisle, with sisters and mothers weeping to the left and right, and little girls dressed like grown women with glossy lips and elaborate hair, but an empty room that isn't a church, and my dress is black and tight and low-cut, and my legs are three inches longer than they really are.

Like right then, I was there, but I wasn't, standing at the kitchen counter, wrapped like a mummy, making coffee for Rex. I wanted it strong. It was one of the steps I was going to take, drinking one cup of strong coffee instead of four cups of regular. I'd save time, and perhaps with a little less caffeine I wouldn't be edgy and impatient. The men I met might have a better chance.

While I was scooping the fifth tablespoon of beans from the can, it occurred to me that I hadn't learned one damn thing in seventeen years of fucking. Since that first wrong boy on the bathroom tile took my new nipple between his teeth. I was worried even then about being unlovely, unloved, and on that black-and-white floor of his, everything was slick and cold. Within minutes of my first kiss I was stripped like a squid and knew he didn't care whether I was Carol from third period or Christine from sixth or bad Brittany who didn't even go to school anymore, and something inside me hardened, turned into a chunk of cement.

A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing. Even now, I am certain that the light coming from his parents' room was a warning that the sincere lovers of the world existed elsewhere, not where I was, and that it would always be like that, the light on the other side not seeping in enough to illuminate his thin cheeks or the stubble I felt with a curious teenage palm.

We couldn't see each other in that bathroom, and now, making coffee for a man I barely knew in my ailing mother's kitchen, I realized that I was stirred by darkness, bars and rooms and clubs, by movie theaters where my date's hand might rest on my thigh without responsibility, without complete admission—without light. And a man who was traveling interested me
because
he was traveling. I imagined Rex's plane waiting for him right now, the tunnel he'd move through as easily as he moved through me. He'd pull his bags behind him, and the tunnel would fill with people walking too slowly or too quickly, but no one—here's the thing—no one would match his exact stride. The flight staff would look like mannequins, would sound robotic, saying,
Hello, how are you?
and then one starched blonde would point her ridiculously long nail in the direction of his seat before he had the chance to answer, before he had the chance to even wonder how he was.

When the plane landed he'd be across the world from me, and we'd both be relieved. No chance of him interrupting me during a class. No chance of me having to explain who he was, what I was doing, to my students. No chance of me showing up at his studio, where he'd surely be annoyed. Where he'd answer the door with a paintbrush between his teeth, rubbing his palms on his jeans.
What are you doing here?
he'd mumble through the brush.
I mean, really, just what do you think you're doing?
There'd be spots of yellow, green, and blue paint on his T-shirt, splattered everywhere, on his walls, chairs, and doors, on his chin and forehead, those full lips, so that he'd look like just one more painted thing, a piece of furniture or art equipment, but with a face.

Sometimes I went with my mother to the radiation clinic and my imagination worked in another way. I kept my sunglasses on and tried not to look at people. I tried not to smell the Chinese noodles the receptionist was eating. I tried not to notice the few noodles hanging out of the girl's mouth. I tried not to hear the slurp as she brought the noodles inside.

I picked up that kids' magazine
Highlights
and followed the path to the defined words:
delusion, destruction, feline, reiterate, problematic.
I pretended I wasn't thirty, but younger, that my mother wasn't ill at all, that I was there for someone else, someone I loved less—a pushy friend, my slowest cousin, a dull and needy neighbor, and that's about the time my mother would come bouncing out of the double doors, all smiles and bright wig.

When the doctor came out of surgery six weeks ago, I asked him what the cancer looked like, what color it was. He tugged on a bushy eyebrow and looked at me. “What?” he said.
“Why?”

Four years ago, when he took my mother's first breast and a dozen nodes, I was twenty-six and fell to the floor after he spit out her prognosis. I was a panting heap, wiping my nose with the hem of my skirt. I was drooling and sobbing, an animal. This last time I was someone else, new, in Italian shoes and silk blouse. I looked directly at him. I was curious, wanted to see, wanted a color, a shape, a texture to the disease. “What color is it?” I said again.

“I remember,” he said, nodding. “You're the writer, aren't you? Your mother is very proud—” he began.

“Fine,” I said, cutting him off. “I just want to know what color it is.”

“It's gray,” he said.

“Light gray?”

He scowled.

“Pencil lead or lighter?”

“Just gray.”

“Cloudy-day gray or like metal?”

“Jesus,” he said, tugging on that eyebrow one last time. “Are you okay?”

2.

Rex had interviewed me just four days earlier about my first book of poems. He sat in the leather chair by the window. I sat on the couch. It was tense, sexy. He had me read my poems into a microphone. Rex drank a diet cola, crossed and uncrossed his legs, nodded while I read. From his body language and the small sounds he made in between poems, I knew he preferred the ones that mentioned parts of my body. Even when those poems dealt with cancer and fear, knives and cuts and fate, I sensed they turned him on. It was on his face, his excitement, and at the end of the reading I looked up from my book and caught it.

He blushed then, his already pinkish face going pinker, and looked out the window at the ocean and bike path below. “Would you look at that?” he said. “Bike riding in December. Half naked in the dead of winter. Families bobbing by in boats. The sun out, not one cloud. Some life you got here, Rachel. Some great life.”

“If weather was enough.”

“It's beautiful.”

“Sometimes it gets monotonous,” I tried.

“You don't like the sun?”

“I like the sun, it's not that.”

“What then?”

“Sometimes I want to be surprised.”

“Surprised?”

“I want to wake up and not know what sort of day it's going to be.”

“I don't think you know how lucky you are.” He was grinning, shaking his head.

“My friend Angela has allergies,” I offered. “She lives here because of her job, but the weather is killing her. She's got welts and hives—they won't go away.”

He wasn't listening. He was standing at the window with his glasses on now. He was pressed up against the window, watching. “People on skates,” he said.

“Rollerblades,” I corrected him.

“Rollerblades, huh? You do that, Rachel? You skate on those things?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I pointed at the red bike in the corner.

“Very good, then.” He leaned forward, hitting the button on the recorder.

I got up from the couch and went to the bike. I rang the little metal bell for him with my thumb. I was thinking about the weather, the envy coming at California from other lands, and I was thinking about my friend Angela, how in early November the hives completely covered the left side of her body, one arm, one leg, one breast, half her neck, one cheek. I was thinking about a few years ago when her lips swelled to ten times their normal size. Her doctor blamed Angela's allergies on the weather, the climate and moisture, the mold and thriving dust mites. I was ringing the bell and thinking about that.

“Wonderful,” he said.

“What?”

“Bells are terrific.”

I nodded.

“When do you ring it? I mean, on what occasion might you ring it like you are now?”

I looked down at my finger, which was still going at the bell. I wrapped my hand around the handlebars to keep myself from ringing. “When a kid doesn't know he's a kid, when he thinks he's a bike.”

“I don't understand.” He cocked his head like a puppy.

“One time I was riding by and a couple of little boys were playing jacks. Remember jacks?” I said. “Right on the bike path, two little boys in shorts, sitting there, playing jacks. I rang the bell that morning. My bell made those two jump.”

“What else?” he said.

“I rode over a jack and popped a tire. It was awful. Those boys pissed me off.”

He was nodding, leaning toward me. I wanted to lean forward too, but felt my body tilting backward, away from Rex. “The bell is like a horn, a warning,” I said, suddenly nervous, stating the obvious.