Dear Hearts (2 page)

And
some nights it's all right.  We drink, not too much, just enough for the
buzz.  Just enough so when I feel under Elena’s shirt, I don’t mentally
whimper like I'm conjuring up some past that doesn't want to stick.  Some
nights it's all in good fun.

But
then there are the other nights.  And a little later, we find ourselves
smack shit in the middle of one of those.

“Fuck
you, you fucking…” Elena says out on our patio, stopping to drag on the
cigarette I left burning in the lopsided ashtray.  It’s the one Wren made
for me in art class, and when she had brought it home, I asked if it was a
coffee mug then watched her cry. 

“Fuck...she
was a good one right?  Let’s see, I remember, she always smelled like
apricots?  That’s what you said once. 
Apricots.
 
Jesus.”  Elena’s voice is quieter now, her toes are naked, the pudding cup
empty.  I told her to wear shoes, and she told me to stick my requests up
my ass. 

The
only relief is the fact that Mrs. McMorrow has turned off her kitchen light,
and I can’t see her cotton candy head peeking out her window anymore.  But
the downside’s a lot worse, that consequential lack of trust.

“I
was a stupid kid.  It wasn’t love.  I mean not like with you.” We're
having the same argument we usually do when things get this undefined, and as
soon as I say it, I know it's the wrong thing.  Her face prunes up, the
lips shrivel into themselves and the whimpering,
it
begins.  I know what this is now.  We've practiced this dance so many
times my feet have blistered a revelation of sorts: this isn’t the way it was
supposed to be.

The
fence behind Elena’s head is a solid block of light, the outdoor bulb above me
flickers until everything's on fire, and I feel like stepping into the flames.

“And
then these tittie bars.  I bet they don’t even have any goddamn
leaks.”  Her words are whispered with another drag, a tear encroaching on
wrinkled terrain.  When we do this, I blame the alcohol the next day
because it throbs along the ridges of my brain, but I know it's something more
for Elena.  I know she's hinted the scent on me for years, but she hasn’t
quite grasped what it is she's searching for, and if there's a God in heaven, I
pray she never does.  

The
flames seem brighter now.  I pour another double and it burns, burns,
burns, and so does the fence behind Elena’s head.  She's glowing, my
beautiful wife.  Barren and beautiful and counting her mistakes like dirty
coins. 

Elena
rubs her nose and a sticky mess of snot and tears stains her cheeks.  I
want to clean her and make her shine.  “Why?” she asks.

“I
just don’t know.”  And I don’t.  The girl went to high school with
us.  Her name was Virginia Sewall.  I know it like it's tattooed to
my eyelids.  Her chest was beautifully carved by God himself and there was
a rumor that she never wore panties.  And she liked me.  She liked
me
. 
Elena and I had been together for years by then, the kind of kids that get
married at three and can never sever that vein of understanding.  And I
didn’t sever it, not with Virginia with her cherry chapstick lips and dime
store pop rocks fizzling in the dark cave of her mouth.  But with a boy
named Brooks Lloyd who was Virginia’s cousin and came to work her father’s farm
the summer I turned sixteen.

The
bleach is still strong on Elena’s skin as she skims the top of her glass with
another generous pour.

“You
never do,” I think she says but can’t be sure because now her face is attached
to both her palms.  Noise comes that seems other worldly this far into the
bottle.  It's the glass door behind us sliding open.

“Again,”
Wren says, stepping outside, bringing the scent of piss with her.  Her
face prunes up just like her mother’s. 

TWO

Mitch

It's possible to love more than
one person at the same time.  This is what I can’t say to Elena.

“Trudy’s,”
my wife says in the morning after our whiskey soaked night.  We put on our
“happy parents” routine even though we're both throbbing in the head and neither
of us took a shower after de-pissing Wren’s moonlit sheets.

“That
should be fun,” and I look over at Wren, a questionable smile on her face.
 Her friend Trudy of the coke bottle glasses reminds me of a mosquito
bite, questions constantly
itching
my skin and no good
way to satisfy them. 
“Hey Mr. Reynolds, why does your
breath always smell funny?”
 
Years of regret.
 
Ba-dum-dum
.

Frozen
waffles, glasses of pulp-free juice - Elena places them at the table, but
doesn’t sit with us.  She wedges her small waist into the corner where
both counters met, her pink puffy robe snaking out around her hips.  Her
naked toes look at me accusingly.

“What
about you?” she asks. 

“Work.”

“The
whole world’s leaking,” she says and gnaws a little on a bone-chilled
waffle.  My waffle is chilled cold through the center, but I don’t even
think about confronting her at the microwave.

Dishes in the sink, bodies in the
shower.
 
Wren is wet-haired and sitting on the couch in our living room after Ive
dressed.

“No
cartoons?  It’s Saturday,” I say by way of conversation.  It's my
usual go-to with her, TV.

“I’m
sorry,” she says.  She’s crying, and it's a mirror image of the mess I've
just left in the bathroom.  Elena shouldered against the shower, sliding
down its glass face.  Her towel gave up and there was her cesarean scar
smiling at some silent joke.  “A heartbreak thing,” Daddy’s voice said in
my head, and it was the same thing he had said when he found out that my
sister, Tammy, was pregnant at seventeen and then again after she had the
abortion.

“Never
be sorry.”  My arm wraps around Wren’s small frame and like that - her
close to me and no words being made - everything makes a lot more sense. 
We sit still on the burgundy and forest green striped couch.  We sit in a
room with dried flowers on the mantle, half-burnt candles on the mantle that
smell like engineered vanilla.  I close my eyes and think about my younger
self, a boy with a quiet, gin-soaked Daddy and a Mama who took her anger out
with her hands, and I thought if I had a glimpse of this future, wouldn’t I be
happy to know I'm safe now?  The hardest part
is knowing
the answer.

“There
are my two favorites,” Elena says.  She's dried and dressed and her eyes
don’t betray her.  A boy seeking his future would say she was the most
beautiful woman in the world.  That boy would be right.

~

I
don’t have to work today.  If Elena asks Pam, they’ll be on the same page:
the Dynamic Duo working hard for the money, keeping White Smoke drip-free on a
Saturday afternoon.  Jimmy and I stash some extra cash on days like this
so we don’t go home empty-handed because if there's something both our wives
have in common, it’s that they don’t like empty hands.

In
reality, neither of us
are
working, and I know for a
fact that Jimmy is hightailing it across the Oklahoma state line to play a
little blackjack and shoot the shit with Darlene, a dealer at the Cherokee who
keeps her players happy and her shirts unbuttoned. 

It's
like they say, you’re only as sick as your secrets.  And I guess this
means Jimmy and I are practically invalids since I keep Jimmy’s secrets and he
keeps mine, even if he doesn’t exactly know what they are.

“Poker
tourney
again? I keep telling you the tables are hot
over here. Don’t know why you’re messing around with those white collar
jokesters. ‘Don’t trust a man who can’t get his hands dirty,’ like my PaPaw
used to say.”  Jimmy’s Pinto is growling through the cell phone attached
to my ear, The Beast eating Oklahoma’s dismally flat pavement. 

“Yeah,
well, they’re the dads of Wren’s friends.  Gotta do it for the kid,” I
mumble into the cell. 
“Pulling in now."

“See
ya chief.” I can almost see Jimmy next to me, wry smile on his face wondering
what color bra Darlene will be wearing today.

I
snap the phone shut and pretend I'm taking stock of a wall of brightly colored
cracker boxes.  There are too many to choose from: fat free, low fat,
low-sodium, taste-free…  I spy the clock above the double doors at the
Piggly Wiggly and even though I'm too far away to hear it, the ticking is
perfectly tuned to the beats in my chest.

It
isn’t the first time I've done this, but it might as well be because I
have a “
first time” sheen of sweat on my forehead that I
lightly press with the handkerchief shoved in my back pocket.  A fat woman
with hair freshly dyed the color of chocolate purses her too pink lips at me as
if to say, “Leave this shit alone, Mitch.”

“There
you are.”  Aaron's behind me now, facing the wall of cookies parallel to
the crackers.  I turn and watch him dip his head at the fat lady who
breaks out into a face swallowing smile.  He waits until she turns out of
the aisle to lightly brush my hand.

THREE

Elena

Sometimes I wake up and it’s just
a little headache.  Like if someone was pressing down too hard on my
temple with their pointer finger.  And then
other days
there’s
no headache but my stomach is sick, and I snap at Wren. 
“Get your bag, get your shit.  We’re late for school!”

Mitch
leaves early during the week, still dark most days so it’s easier to act like a
normal human being when he’s not in the room looking at me.  But on the
weekends, when he’s home, I work it like the Christmas play I did every year at
St. Ann’s back in Helena.  Remember your lines, remember your cues. 
Don’t fail because
there’s people
watching.

“You
are a sight for sore eyes!” Ronnie says when she opens one of the front
doors.  They’re wooden, six feet tall.  Their handles are brass and
curved into two ferocious lion’s heads and every time I walk through the
threshold, I imagine them roaring.

“Is
that what the Florida sun does?  Work the eyes a bit too hard?” I say in
my stage voice.  I kiss her cheeks like I’m supposed to.  I gulp her
expensive perfume, like I’m supposed to.  I pretend this has nothing to do
with charity.

“That
and then some,” she says, which really doesn’t make sense, but that something’s
I’ve come to gather after knowing Ronnie for the past two years.  You
don’t have to make sense when you have more money than God.

Her
feet are bare and they’re stationed in first position on one of the foyer’s
black and white tiles.  The tops are kissed with sun, evidence of their
return from Destin where the Gibsons keep a second home.  “A 900 square
foot condo,” Mitch always corrects me like he has an issue with the concept of
people living in more than one place.  

“So
how was it?” I ask.  Wren slides around me and meets Trudy at the bottom
of the curved staircase.  They rush upstairs giggling and their noise
pings off a mix of surfaces: marble in the dining room, the silver candlesticks
on the entryway table.  “Only you would notice crap like that,” Mitch says
somewhere behind the finger in my temple.

“Sun, sand, the usual.
 
Although Luke lost his trunks out in the surf.
  That
was new.”  Ronnie laughs and I join in, stacking my worn sandals one on
top of the other near the door.

“Shoes,
Wren,” I call up the stairs.

“Oh
don’t worry about it,” Ronnie says, although I know she’s exactly the type to
worry about it and complain to her Junior Leaguers later. 
But maybe not.
  I’m paranoid, always have been
really.  And the feeling’s been multiplied since meeting someone like
Ronnie who lives in Avon Estates, and has a maid who stops by weekly and has
enough money to make fun of the huge homes being built out near the golf
course, saying things like, “I bet they give off a new money stench.” 
She’s the kind of person I see when I close my eyes and look at the mirror in
my mind.  The person I’m supposed to be.

But
I’m not.

“Coffee’s
a-brewing,” she says.  Her kitchen is all white for except the floors, a
dark bamboo like the
coffee's
spilled and has soaked
through the planks.  There are pigs that line the counter, but they’re not
garish because they’re white porcelain and Ronnie told me how she had them
special ordered from France. 

“How’s
the bed wetting?” Ronnie says.  There it
is,
what
sums it all up: Ronnie has a second home and I have bedwetting.

“She’s
getting better.  Dr. Mailer found us someone to talk to.”  Not
“us.” 
Wren.
  The worst part was when it
happened at school, and I had to change her in the bathroom.  It reminded
me of the time she messed in her panties at the mall when we were potty
training, and I was at the nut stand, warm salted almonds in one hand, a child
leaking crap in the other, and I started crying until an older lady came by and
led me gently by the elbow.  She held the almonds while I cleaned up Wren
in the bathroom.  And at St. Bonaventure, in the tiny stall where I
removed Wren’s clothing to change her into a fresh uniform, she was small boned
in my arms, her breath warm like when she was younger.  But she was the
one crying this time.

“Good. 
If anyone’s going to help you out, Mailer’s the guy.  His wife used to
have a huge crush on Luke back in the day.  Total sorostitute,” Ronnie
says.  I realize for the first time as she lightly tugs on her short
ponytail at the nape of her neck, that she’s not a real kind of pretty, only
the type of pretty that comes with a hefty paycheck.  Her dress is
expensive, I'm sure, but
it's
Barny purple and light
violet flowers march down the front.  Her throat is choked with blue baubles
the size of my thumbs.

“Sorostitute?"

"Oh
right, a college thing," she says, like I can't even fathom what college
must be like in my little acorn of a brain.  That's not fair.  I'm
only in a rotten mood because my husband put me in a rotten mood.  Which I
guess really isn't fair either.  The same fight we always have played last
night on repeat and whiskey was the offending record player, as usual. 

There
was this girl, one of those types of girls who used to live in our town,
Virginia.  She was always up on Mitch, touching his shoulders, winking at
him and pursing her lips.  There was a rumor that she was assaulted by an
uncle
which
made the wires in her brain trip out, and
I used to feel sorry for her growing up.  But then she developed breasts
and just as the story usually goes, she developed a taste for men, specifically
mine.

"A
sorority girl who acts like a prostitute," Ronnie says.  She ducks
down and roots into one of the white cabinets.  She's lifting a lid off an
All-clad pot, and I know this because it's what's done every Saturday
morning. 
Our little ritual.

It's
strange, rituals.  Like how a lot of mine are fixed around the ankles of
the two people I love.  It's like I'm being dragged behind a truck, my
belly receiving the worst of it: pebbles, rocks,
the
occasional broken bottle.  All I want is to be fully in my life, like I'm
really in it.  No scripts.  No cues.  I want another baby. 
I want the past to stop chasing me.  I want to stop drinking and wear
pretty clothes and save up our money for a 900 square foot condo in
Florida.  I want to start over.

"Let's
stop pretending," Ronnie says, placing the peppermint schnapps and a
package of Virginia Slims on the marble island. 

Fine by me.