A Parallel Life (17 page)

“Thank you,” Cooper said. It didn't make any sense but he felt she wanted to reassure him and he could let her. Then he realized that she had seen the gun on the nightstand.

“I'll let myself out,” she said.

Cooper nodded. The dog's head was already heavy on his lap, pressing him down, pinning him to the ground, making him weightless.

M
YRTA PUT THREE
cubes in the glass, poured in the orange juice, and then the vodka—a light touch on the vodka. This was, after all, breakfast. Then because the air conditioner wasn't working, she went to stand by the open door.

The other trailers in the park were already shimmering like silver sausages on a griddle, and it looked to Myrta as if there were a half-hearted mirage between her and space seventeen across the driveway. Not even the bougainvillea held up on a day like today.

She barely had time for a sip or two when she saw Frank heading her way. She couldn't believe it. She thought she'd seen the last of him some years ago. But then, after a moment's reflection, she realized that she wasn't surprised at all. She knew his sign. He was a Cancer. He held on. But she was upset anyway.

Frank was trouble. She didn't need his kind of trouble either—hanging around her, wanting to fix her washer, buy her a blender, a new color television. Besides, now Will was hanging around and he was a lot easier to deal with. She pulled back from the door and sat down.

Except here was Frank, “Big as life and twice as ugly,” as he would have said. Frank. And yet . . .

“Hiya, kid!” he said into the open door.

“Well, shoot!” she said, pulling herself out of her chair and pulling the muumuu out and around her in a graceful way. She then reached up and fluffed her hair and was
glad she'd bothered to henna it just last week, even though henna was a big nuisance. “It's Frank, isn't it?”

He was already inside the screen door, though he'd had the sense to leave his suitcase outside. He knew how she'd squawk if he brought it inside the trailer.

He grabbed her and squeezed her hard, pulling her next to him, her bulk a cushion for his sharpness. His kiss was hard on her lips and his tongue was fighting its way between her teeth. And then she was his—just like always.

Later, when they were both naked on the bed, sweltering with the curtains closed because of the neighbors, he said, “You're the best, Myrta. I don't know why. I mean there are lots of women in this world and I've had my share. I'm not a young man, and, by and large, I've had my share, but you're the best.”

And Myrta shifted slightly and closed her eyes and just wanted to rest. She dozed a little. When she woke, she knew she'd snored because her throat was rough.

Frank was in his shorts. He'd found the vodka and orange juice and he was just sitting there on her bed drinking and watching her.

She turned over to look at him. “You got new teeth,” she said. She hadn't noticed before.

“The better to eat you with, Granny,” he said, putting the vodka down and reaching over to slide his hands under her breasts, which these days hung down almost to her belly.

So it began again.

And she forgot to tell Frank about Will.

Then someone knocked at the door of the trailer. She knew it was Will.

“Get dressed,” she whispered hoarsely to Frank, who was asleep.

Will was already inside with the refrigerator door open. He had his own bottle of vodka and he was stuffing it into the freezer where nothing was really frozen.

She had the muumuu on by then.

Will saw her and reached his arm around her and nuzzled his lips into the folds of her neck. She reached around him. He was ample—almost as wide as she was. She liked the feel of Will. He was substantial, and yet . . .

Frank was in the bedroom.

“Hi, honey,” Will finally said, when she'd let him go. “I had a hell of a day. Everybody in town went fishing today, it's so darn hot. Sold tackle and lots of bait. I'm bushed.” And he collapsed on the built-in sofa.

She mixed Will a vodka and 7-Up and handed it to him. He drank it gratefully in three gulps. She counted. Then she made another and sat down on the place he patted on the sofa beside him. He started hugging and nuzzling again.

That was when Frank came in.

“What the hell you think you're doing, Myrta?” Frank asked.

“Oh, for Pete's sake, Frank,” she said suddenly tired. “What do you mean?”

Will was on his feet, but not really ready for anything. He would as soon as offered his hand as not, Myrta knew.

“This here is Will Duggan, Frank,” she said out of the great tiredness. “And I gave him the block out of the Chevrolet.”

“Looks like you gave him more than the block,” Frank said.

Will sat down again as though accounted for. Myrta felt now that she was underwater, swimming somewhere out where she didn't want to be. She'd never cared for
swimming anyway. She'd always been too plump to move through the water quickly like the other girls.

“And besides,” Frank said, squaring off, “that's my Chevrolet and you can't give away my block.”

“That Chevrolet was totaled,” Myrta said, pulling herself to the surface and looking around, “and I didn't think you were ever coming back.”

“Well, I never knew that was your block,” Will said, on his feet again.

“Come outside and say that,” Frank said.

Will shifted his weight back and forth.

Myrta had surfaced now. She was floating, something she was good at, and she was watching them both.

“I knew you looked funny when you came out of that bedroom,” Will said to her and took a stance opposite Frank.

“Why don't you two go outside,” she said.

“Outside,” Will echoed and opened the door and went out. Frank, his eyes on Will, followed.

Myrta turned away and went to the sink and looked down at the glasses there. She heard them out in the dusk. There were blows that connected, and some that didn't. There were sighs and hard breathing. When she finally looked out of the window, they were out there where the mirage had been, hugging each other and rolling over and over, lean and thick, over and over in an embrace that, had she been able to envy anything at all, she would have envied.

She watched them from the steps of the trailer. Her red muumuu flared around her like a dark torch. She heard only the sobs.

In the end, she went back inside and put her hands over
her ears so as not to hear the sobs, which by now were not loud.

Then she placed her hand on her phone. Suddenly she wanted to phone “After Dark Dave,” who had the call-in radio show, and talk to him—talk to everybody with their radios on—let them hear her voice stretched and thin, floating away down the highway ahead of their headlights as they drove. She wanted to say, “I never did understand. I never did understand it.” But she didn't call.

The sobbing stopped and she turned and went back to the open door. She saw Will's back under the streetlight at the end of the row of trailers. He was going away.

Frank was standing in the shadow of the bougainvillea bush. The blossoms were a bright scarlet with the light behind them.

“Get a flashlight, Myrta,” he said.

“What?”

“I lost my teeth. Help me look for them.”

She got the light and together they searched until she found them lying in a deep shadow. The light from her flashlight showed them like two tiny pink sea creatures lightly coated with dust.

J
OAN OF ARC
stood in her cart on the way to her pyre, her eyes on the jeering crowd. They'd taken away her armor. They made her wear a gown. They weren't going to let her save them after all. It never occurred to either Isabel or me as we stared at the bright screen in the dark auditorium of Holy Redeemer School that Joan was anything but the kind of person we would want to be. We'd each donated a can of food for a benefit movie for the poor of our parish. I brought beets and Isabel brought spinach, and we were getting every ounce's worth of beauty, bravery, and martyrdom.

“I wonder what I'd look like if I cut my hair,” Isabel said as we blinked in the afternoon sun, startled not to be in France after all, but in Marigny, Louisiana, beside the rectory parking lot.

“No, not your hair,” I said. My hair was dark and curly and my mother insisted that I keep it short. Isabel's hair was long ropy blonde, the kind of hair only one person in a thousand gets. Isabel didn't look much like Joan. She had a tipped-up nose and an overbite, but the fact that she would even consider cutting her hair seemed like a step on a road somewhere. Everyone knew that cutting hair was the first stage to renunciation of the world. Nuns cut their hair.

“You could do it while my mother's at work.”

“Think about it a little first,” I said. Isabel's mother had beautiful hair, too. I didn't think she'd understand if I cut her daughter's. She wasn't the saintly type.

“I'm still thinking,” she said the next day as we stretched out on the sandy strip of beach by the lake. There Phillip Duvall sat, with the kind of egalitarianism we admired him for, not on the high chair for lifeguards but with his back against one of the supports of the chair. He was surrounded by everyone important in our world. There was talk that he'd get a football scholarship to LSU. He'd just broken up with someone, and now four senior girls lay on towels beside him. They were all shapely and beautiful and wise and wonderful enough to be kind to me and Isabel. I was eleven and Isabel almost twelve. They considered us pets.

It was flattering to have them know our names, but when I sat beside them I felt hopeless and unformed, like a lump of dough. The problem was, however, that I wasn't lumpy and neither was Isabel. We were tube shaped, completely without bumps or curves or mysterious shaded regions.

“Isabel's thinking of cutting her hair,” I told them.

“Oh, no,” one of them said. She had black hair that curled under at the ends and perfect teeth. The others echoed her.

“I won't marry you if you cut your hair,” Phillip Duvall said.

“Do you believe he's actually thought of marrying me?” Isabel asked. We were sitting in her bedroom with the fan on playing gin rummy.

“He said it.”

“But he was joking, wasn't he?”

“He wouldn't have said it if it hadn't crossed his mind.”

“He's the most beautiful man in the world,” she said. “I could be Mrs. Phillip Duvall—after he gets out of LSU.”

“He's seven years older than you are.”

“He'll wait if he loves me.”

“Suppose he wants to kiss you. Will you let him?”

“Oh, Holy Mary,” she said and put down the cards. “I don't know how to kiss. I don't want him to kiss me until I know how. We have to practice, Kate.” She leaned over the cards, her mouth puckered, her eyes on me.

“Girls don't kiss girls.”

“How do we learn then? Think about it.”

“It's weird—girls kissing.”

“What's weirder, kissing a girl, or not knowing how to kiss at all?”

As usual, Isabel made her point. I shrugged and closed my eyes, but I wasn't prepared for the aggressiveness of her mouth, for the muscular properties of lips. “Kiss back,” she said, taking a breath. I didn't know whether to tighten or loosen. “You're terrible.” We tried again, I relaxed this time and let her mouth take over, letting my lips do what hers did. We fell over backwards onto the pillows. “It's okay,” she said. “We're girls.”

That same afternoon we burned Bo Peep. In second grade, when we'd become friends, I'd been impressed by Isabel's collection of Storybook Dolls. She had a row of them lined up on a bookshelf with their full-skirted stiff dresses, wide-open eyes, and swirls of hair. Her aunt sent them to her. Isabel wasn't particularly interested in dolls, but she knew these were enviable. Their arms were jointed, but not their legs. They weren't made to be played with.

We stripped Bo Peep of her finery and dressed her in a tunic we made from an old sheet. When we'd bound the dress with a piece of dark twine, it was not unlike what
Joan had worn. We borrowed a small red wagon from the driveway of the house next door and put Joan into it and jounced her behind the shed where we assembled a pyre from fallen pine branches. We placed a fairly straight branch in the center for a stake and tied the doll to it.

The dried pine needles caught fire immediately. Flames lost no time licking Joan's feet and igniting her dress. The doll, celluloid, flared briefly, then caved in on itself, the small glass eyes bulging before they dripped away from the head. The hair smoldered at first, then shot into sparks and soon also disappeared into ashes. The whole event probably lasted no more than five minutes. We sat back on our heels amazed at what we had done.

“What's that smell?” Isabel's grandmother called from the back door. She was supposed to watch us, but she almost never left her room where she sat each day reading novels.

“We're getting ready to roast marshmallows,” Isabel answered, rolling her eyes at me.

“Don't set anything on fire!” The screen door slammed shut.

“Let's go to the store and get marshmallows,” said Isabel.

“And Coke,” I said. My throat was dry. I felt as if I had a fever.

We had the world to ourselves that summer. My own family faded into a benign pallor as Isabel's mostly absent family became mine. Her mother, who looked like an older, more assured version of Isabel, was divorced—a distinction of some kind in those days. She worked as a legal secretary for the district attorney and rarely appeared when I was there. Isabel's brother, Nick, who
was rumored to be the smartest boy in school, was gone for most of the summer visiting cousins in New Orleans. When Isabel's grandmother made a foray from her room, it was usually only to leave money on the table for Isabel to do the family shopping. She always left enough for us to buy Cokes and candy and a magazine—usually a
True Confessions
or a
Photoplay
.