One Day the Wind Changed (8 page)

That October afternoon, twenty-three years ago, as Howard waited outside the shoe store, he looked up the street and spied in nearby windows transistor radios, portable hi-fi sets, chewing tobacco, saddle soap—none of which could be located today in the mall, just as none of the mall's treasures would have been offered, much less understood, on old Main Street. And back in the day, there were no unaccompanied women on the sidewalks.

He had felt fortunate, then, to stand near a girl who'd taken an interest, so much so that she'd adorned her feet to please him. That day, his approval of Mindy's footwear was his claim on her. Were he a high school junior now, he wouldn't dote on just one person (these kids and their freedoms!): he'd wallow in possibilities, the dreamy display of available beauties, alone or in small groups, all of whom wore tennis shoes or flimsy sandals: I can—and I will—fly away from you and back again into your arms.

O girls! O heart, O brain! I
am
still alive!

Moving toward him, toting a stark white Abercrombie and Fitch bag was a stunning young woman in a jeans skirt and black semisheer stockings, a beige sweater and a red silk scarf She caught his eye and smiled. Young woman? No, a child, about his daughter's age. Twelve. Thirteen, at the most. Astonishing, the power of camouflage: lipstick, eyeliner, rouge.

And in fact, here was Alina now, with Meagan, her friend from Seattle. Howard hadn't paid attention earlier, but watching Alina in the cool light slanting through the leaves of the fat, potted trees, he understood that she wore makeup too: a moderate blush in the cheeks, a hint of blue on her eyelids (of course, she refused to wear her glasses in public). The more she tried to distinguish herself, the more she resembled every other girl in the mall—jazzed by the bills in her purse.

Howard chastised himself for lusting after girls his daughter's age, children testing their power, practicing sexy smiles, being adults. He stopped staring after Abercrombie and Fitch.

Meagan grinned at him, and he made a solid effort to return her greeting. He'd had trouble warming up to her, though it wasn't her fault: somehow, he linked her to Mindy. A slight resemblance? The same distracted air? Each time he had phoned the old girl, planning to get Alina home for a visit, she was on her cell, rushing around a fabric store or a furniture outlet, bargaining with salespeople. “Alina could bring a friend,” Howard suggested to Mindy one afternoon. “She wouldn't have to fly by herself. Mindy, what if—”

“Yes, yes, the leather recliner,” she said. “That red one in the corner.”

In the world of her accumulated objects, there was little room for him now. “You're lucky she's moved away,” Gary, a friend from work, assured Howard one morning in the coffee room, before they set out together to inspect a series of wells. “There's nothing worse than the Ex-Wife Dinner, those awkward meetings to plan for the kids or to split the medical bills … and always, afterward, out of guilt or whatever, you feel obligated to buy her an after-dinner drink or an ice cream or a little something for her bedroom dresser, which used to be
your
bedroom dresser too, so the two of you go to a shopping center and you sit there in the Baskin-Robbins or you walk around the jewelry store and things get friendly again, like the old days, warm and flirty, and you think, ‘What the hell am I doing?' and you see she's thinking the same damn thing, and so pronto, you agree to call it a night and, I swear,
run away
from each other in the parking lot.”

In the abstract, an Ex-Wife Dinner sounded oddly fun to Howard. Maybe with a different ex-wife. Better than finding in his mailbox monthly Xeroxes of Mindy's charge card bills with half the purchases circled in red. In her light scrawl, which he remembered from afternoons he'd copied her high school homework, the words “Alina's Expenses”—meaning,
You
pay, pal.

So: best to relax with Alina and her friend, and try to stifle his desires, as he had after Mindy's flight, when he'd paced more fiercely than ever the porous rock that cradled oil.
Oil
, which made it possible to build a mall on this site, this bright hormonal incubator.

“Can I have five more dollars?” Alina said, skipping up to his bench. Meagan stood behind her, still grinning, shy-distantly fetching, the way Mindy used to be.

“Why? What did you do with the money I gave you this morning?” he asked.

“We had sodas and a hot dog.” Howard smelled perfume in the folds of her wool sweater: a bubblegum scent, faintly salty. “I want to look around some more, and I want to call Leann to meet us,” Alina said.

Leann, short, pudgy, studious, and polite, had been Alina's best friend before Alina moved away. Howard had always liked her. He wondered if Alina's desire to phone her now signaled boredom with the mall-its boxy simplicity must pale next to Seattle's rainy wonders-or if it meant trouble with her new friend, Meagan. Maybe
Meagan
bitched about Texas, the crappy merchandise, Alina's grumpy dad … but he hadn't been
w
bad, had he? He'd sat patiently, letting them wander at will, and laugh and flirt with the laggard boys hauling skateboards around the fountain.

“You don't know what you want,” he said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “You just want to buy
something.
”

Meagan giggled.

Alina snatched the bill from his hand. She pulled a cell phone from her purse. He'd bet the gadget matched her mother's (part of their “sisterly” pact since the family's split), sleek and blue, with a ring like dying crickets. “Thanks, Daddy,” Alina said. She turned away and punched a button on the phone. “Leann?” she said. “Leann, it's Alina! Yes, yes!
Here!
In Texas, in the mall! Come meet us!” Meagan followed her, glancing at Howard with a tilt of her head, an unmistakably coquettish gesture. Half-closed eyes under wild, blonde bangs. He was startled by a splash from the fountain, a wet little kiss on his cheek.

The girls headed toward faceless figures draped in sweaters in the windows of Buffalo Exchange, with Meagan chattering to Alina about “guerrilla sewing—you know, like, cutting the sleeves out of my dresses and stuff. Really cool.” Howard was saddened to see in Alina's skitter her mother's reckless movements, a dangerous approach warning others, I can't or I won't slow down, get ready. Or maybe it was just her shoes: tight, pink platforms that pitched her forward and quickened her pace.

Shoes—squeaking, sticking to gummy floors … Howard had a vivid early memory of shopping with girls: women, really, his mother and her sister. But they referred to each other as girls. “Girl, I don't know what to do with Howard,” his mother sighed to his aunt on the phone. “He's outgrown all his shirts and his shorts are in tatters. I swear, he's a weed! We're going out on Saturday. Want to come?” And so the three of them marched up the same street where, years later, he'd wait in front of Beasley's. No shoe store then. He was six or seven. Near the spot where Beasley's would open was an Arapaho Indian trading post. Howard figured the Indians behind the counter (there were two of them) weren't really Indians, though now he wondered what made him think that. What did he know about Indians? Maybe they
were
Arapahos and he couldn't face these disconsolate men in their white shirts and khakis, forced to wait on people as silly as his mother and her sister. The women traipsed up the aisles picking through fringed leather jackets and beaded moccasins: “Girl,
this
will slim you down!” or, “No, your face looks swollen in that hat, girl, put it back!” Maybe the men weren't “authentic,” but they seemed crushingly sad, stuck with all this stuff. Even a kid could see how rotten the merchandise was, rubber tomahawks and plastic headdresses with fake, dyed feathers.

One Saturday, after trying on shirts for two and a half hours, he followed the girls to the trading post—a “treat” for him after being so good in the clothing stores, his mother said. In fact, the place always depressed him. They were the ones who loved the gaudy trinkets. He desperately needed to pee, and a piece of paper taped to the men's room door said “Out of Order.” The girls forced him into the ladies' to “do his little business.” They said they'd stand inside the door, barring others from barging in. (Why not
outside
the door? What were they thinking?
Were
they thinking?) They'd turn their backs so he wouldn't be embarrassed. Fat chance! He stood above the toilet bowl, straining. Nothing happened. His bladder burned. “Hurry up, son,” his mother said gently, her voice muffled and echoey in the tiled room. It didn't smell like a place where a man would do his business: sickly sweet, like a field of dampened flower. His mother lighted a cigarette and offered one to his aunt. He looked up and saw on the wall, in delicate purple handwriting, the word “Fuck.”

“What's ‘fuck'?” he said, his own voice impossibly loud.

His mother rushed up behind him, digging her hands into his shoulders. “Howard, don't you
ever
use that word!” she said.

The surprise pressure of her fingers released the tension in his bladder, and he sprayed the room. “Howard, Howard!” his mother screamed.

“Girl, you're going to need new shoes,” his aunt said.

Back on the sales floor,
his
shoes, a pair of red, high-topped Keds, squeaked and stuck to the warped brown floor. The men behind the counter watched him quietly. He looked at his feet, avoiding their eyes, pacing the aisles. What lay beneath this waxy, cracked linoleum, Howard wondered. An Indian burial ground, bones and knives and arrowheads?

The clock at the mall's far end, above the JC Penney sign, struck noon, a recorded series of chimes replicating, flatly, the sound of the courthouse bell that once stood about four blocks from here. The courthouse had a giant clock the color of vanilla cheesecake, with big, chocolate hands. It faced Main Street from a turret atop the baroque brick building trimmed with wood.

The bell swayed in a small, square belfry behind the clock. When he was twelve or thirteen, Howard saw
Vertigo
at the two-dollar moviehouse downtown, next to the Indian trading post, and afterward he could never walk past the courthouse without imagining beautiful blonde girls in terrible peril in the belfry.

Ten years ago, state officials had declared the courthouse unsafe in the event of an earthquake. It was torn down to make room for a one-story strip shopping center. County offices were moved into a steel and glass storefront next to a new Japanese restaurant. Raw fish.
Another
eastern import.

Howard rose from the bench, his right sleeve and pants spattered with water from the fountain. He folded his hands over his lap. Where were Alina and Meagan? He'd give them another half hour. He was hungry, but he didn't want to eat the prepackaged food here in the mall. He passed a bar/café called Derrick's. A cardboard oil well stood in the window gushing crepe-paper streamers-as though it were a condiment bottle neatly dispensing its contents. Cardboard men in paper hard hats stood smiling around the well.

If Dad could have made it home each night from the fields, wearing fresh shirts, would Mama have been happier, Howard wondered, less inclined to spend the family's money? If
I'd
gotten home in the evenings, dapper and clean, would Mindy have chased her flying man?

Behind the Hard Hats, couples sat at small round tables eating salads.
Ground pepper, ma'am? Vinegar? A rubber tomahawk, to slice your tomato?

Stop it, Howard thought. Jesus, you're slipping, old fellow.

Most days, in the last six months—all right, five (four?)—he'd controlled these random bitter surges, the dregs of his sorrows with Mindy. He had rid himself of regrets. He told himself he was ready for a visit from his daughter. Alina's presence would settle him again.

But from the moment she'd stepped off the plane (losing one of her flip-flops on the exit ramp), he'd noticed Mindy in Alina's every gesture. Her plans for shopping with Meagan and Leann showed him how little space she'd left for Daddy in her brand-name boxes and bags.

His stomach growled. Maybe he
should
eat something. He glanced inside the cafe. At a table near the window, a man and a woman, probably in their thirties, appeared to be arguing. An Ex-Wife Lunch? The woman stared at him, her eyes on his wet pants. He turned away, feeling the burn on his face. In that brief glimpse, she had looked just like his mother that day in the trading post, and in the family's old Polaroids: squinting in the smoke from her cigarette, impatient with the world—especially with his father, out wildcatting on some old rig.

Howard saw his face reflected in a toy shop window: sullen, comic in its seriousness, superimposed over the blue, furry head of the Cookie Monster. He laughed aloud. A young mom, leaving the store, steered her little girl away from him.

It was true, wasn't it? Shuffling behind Mindy in the bargain aisles always reminded him of his mother's tedious sprees with his aunt.

And—oh hell—was
this
the toy store? It had to be. It appeared to be the only one in the mall. He walked on, past a loud group of teenage boys with purple highlights in their hair.

Another somber truth settled in Howard's gut: his resistance to bartering had hardened in adolescence, when his sister Judy, two years older than he, took him shopping with her friends. She didn't want him tagging along any more than he wanted to, but his mother insisted that she “get him out of the house, get him a shirt or two; he's a weed, an absolute weed!”

One autumn, in the early 1970s, after a revival meeting in the high school football stadium, Judy joined a Pentecostal church in town, a development that badly frightened their Methodist mother, who admitted that hell-talk “spooked” her. For the old girl, church was fellowship, arts and crafts … socials with other women whose husbands worked late in the oil fields.