I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) (17 page)

Eummenia closes her eyes, throws back her head, starts to circle her hips.

Oh, oh, can my baby
dance
! she says.

The man in the wheelchair tips and jerks his head, moaning, his lips smiling around his thrusting tongue.

I envy these people. Wide-open suffering, their messes all hanging out. Lives boiled down to raw need—a near-holiness to it. And all of us driving our cars up and down the mountain—we'll go on forever trying to fool each other.

Your girl is a
fine
dancer, I say.

Then I start to dance with Eummenia. She grabs my waist and I hold on to her shoulders. I thrust my hips, circle my head around like she does. I sit down and take off my running shoes. My socks are bloody at the toes. I take them off, too. I watch the way Eummenia pounds the floor with her bare feet and try to do the same.

The men on the couch nod in time to the music, blowing smoke from their nostrils.

I could live here with you a while, I say to Eummenia when we stop dancing. It's the kind of place I need.

Extra bed in my room, Eummenia says. She sits down on the bottom step, panting. No sheets, though.

Now I've heard it all, the nursing girl says.

I walk over to the couch. Can I sit here? I ask her.

Whatever, she says.

I sit beside her. The baby is making little smacking sounds with its lips. I think about my own children, sitting on the couch at home. My husband will bring them blankets and cups of milk. He will make sure they don't watch too much TV and pray with them before they fall asleep.

I want to tell you a story, I say to the girl. Is that okay?

You'll tell it whether I say okay or not.

It's a short one, I say. It's the story I'll tell my children when they're your age. A woman leaves her home. She runs, long and far. And she finds out what, in all her life, is waiting when she goes back.

That's it? the girl says.

For now, I say.

Where're you going back to? she asks.

Lookout Mountain, Eummenia answers her.

Back up to rich people territory, the girl says. Back to holy ground.

Listen, I say. It's all holy ground.

Relatives of God

The day I released you: summer in Minnesota, late afternoon. I was in Wal-Mart, standing in front of Granny Smiths, Galas, Jonagolds. My husband was in another aisle, picking out steaks, and I was thinking how this small town
lacked progress,
needed to
get with the times,
leave off genetic modification and crop dusting and join the renewable sustainable movement like the rest of the country—and I remembered a moment three years earlier, back home in Tennessee, when you and I were still in love. I was shopping in one of those organic markets and had you on the phone (it was like that, wasn't it—
had you
) and in the produce department I said, Best thing about fall: the Honeycrisp
,
and you said,
I
adore
the Honeycrisp, and in the silence that followed, there was between us—what else to call it?—something like joy.

Later that day, my husband at work and the children in school, you listened while I brought myself to orgasm. It was the first time you were just the listener. When I cried out your childhood nickname, the one you'd told me your little sister used, you said, Don't ever call me anything else
.
It was the day my husband and I had argued about 69. I said I'd never liked it; that the simultaneous giving and receiving diluted the pleasure of both.

After we ate our Minnesota dinner, my husband and I took the children to Crescent Beach. We stood in the sand, watching the four of them slip around on the rock jetty, the setting sun turning the water a violent orange-pink. Our older son hopped from rock to rock, pulling off his shirt and shallow-diving into the lake, his boxers visible above the waistline of his madras shorts; his younger brother followed, cautious, all elbows and shoulder blades. The two girls sat at a safe distance from the water. We could hear the older sister talking the younger one out of jumping in. White T-shirt, she said, and the younger one nodded, grave, though her chest was still like a boy's.

My husband took my hand.

Look what we made, he said. We are relatives of God.

But I was picturing the children walking down the jetty and into the lake, one by one, oldest to youngest, the water closing over their heads. I was thinking how they would eventually disappear, how I would become resigned to their departure after years of hating the planet for spinning them away and leaving us more alone than we were before. I was thinking of Eve and her apple, or whatever kind of fruit it was; how she was driven by delight to share the taste with the one she loved, and it ruined them both, but God, knowing this in advance, loved them anyhow; and I knew, then, that I could forgive the boy and the girl on the phone three years earlier, the girl in the produce department holding an apple, saying, I think you would love this,
the boy saying, Darling, I already do.

My husband put his arm around my waist. We watched our children. Our children, in glances, watched us.

Acknowledgments

For their enthusiasm, expertise, patience and grace, deepest thanks to my editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, and to my agent, Anna Stein. Thanks also to my agent's assistant John McElwee, and to Jessica Monahan, Deb Seager, Judy Hottensen, Morgan Entrekin, and the rest of the remarkable team at Grove.

For their guidance and encouragement, I'm grateful to my teachers: Doug Bauer, Amy Hempel, Jill McCorkle, Melissa Pritchard, and especially David Gates.

Thank you to the editors who, in one way or another, ush
ered these stories into the world: Robert Fogarty, Michael Griffith, Ronald Spatz, John Irwin, Mary Flinn, Michelle Wildgen, Sven Birkerts, Bill Pierce, William Giraldi, Jill Meyers, Wells Tower, Cara Blue Adams, Margot Livesey, Nick Flynn, Ladette Randolph, Catherine Chung, Meakin Armstrong, and David Lynn.

For their friendship, support and eyes on my work, thanks to Megan Mayhew Bergman, Tom Bissell, Elizabeth Crane, Mary Vassar Hitchings, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Gayle Ligon, Dayna Lorentz, Nicola Mason, and Cal Morgan. Special thanks to Tim Liu.

I am indebted to the MacDowell Colony and to the Corporation of Yaddo for generously providing the time and solitude I needed to write many of the stories in this book. I'm also grateful to Wyatt Prunty, Kevin Wilson, and everyone else at the Sewanee School of Letters, and to Po Hannah, for bringing the magic lighter. Special hanks to Elena Quevedo for giving me a place to land in New York City.

For their love and support, thanks to my children, McKenna, Keaton, Hallie-Blair, and Hudson, and to my parents, John and Dani Utz. And to Scott: first reader, best reader, best friend of twenty-four years—you are my Home.

Note: The phrase “a wicked, unlovely, purely useful thing” in “Decomposition” is a variation of Will Barrett's description of the telescope case in Walker Percy's
The Last Gentleman.
Earnshaw's sermons in “Demolition” draw from the last chapter of C.S. Lewis's
Mere Christianity.
The Hebrew phrase in “Holy Ground” is from the Song of Solomon (by way of Joyce's
Ulysses
), and translates, “I am black yet comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.”

Finally, I would like to acknowledge Sherwood Anderson, Barry Hannah, Denis
Johnson, Gordon Lish, David Means, Steven Millhauser, Alice Munro, Tim O'Brien, Grace Paley, Mary Robinson, Christine Schutt, and Eudora Welty: Masters of the story form, all.