Sweet Talk (5 page)

“So she had big ta-ta’s,” I said. “She had huge ta-ta’s and a bad-breath problem.” We had pushed on through the corn, across Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, and the old arguments rattled along with us, like the pots and dishes in the back of the van.

“She was a model,” he said. He was describing the proprietress of the slender cigarettes and red panties.

“In a couple of years she’ll have gum disease,” I said.

“She was a model and she had a degree in literature from Oxford.”

I didn’t believe him, of course, but I felt the sting of his intention to hurt. “In a few years, she’ll have emphysema.”

“What would this trip be like without the melody of your voice,” he said. It was dark, and taillights glowed on the road ahead of us like flecks of burning iron. I remembered how, when we were undergraduates attending different colleges, he used to write me letters that said: Keep your skirts down and your knees together, don’t let anyone get near your crunch. We always amused each other with our language.

“I want a divorce,” I said in a motel room in Columbus, Ohio. We were propped against pillows on separate
double beds watching a local program on Woody Hayes, the Ohio State football coach. The announcer was saying, “And here in front of the locker room is the blue-and-gold mat that every player must step on as he goes to and from the field. Those numbers are the score of last year’s loss to Michigan.” This was just before the famous coach was fired for trying to punch a Clemson football player during a nationally televised game. There are still people in Ohio who remember Woody Hayes with such fondness that they will tell you that that Clemson player was actually reaching down with his neck to hit the coach’s hand. I was saying, “Are you listening? I said I want a divorce when we get to Virginia.”

“I’m listening.”

“Don’t you want to know why I want a divorce?”

“No”

“Well, do you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea?”

“I think it’s a good idea.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

The announcer said, “And that is why the night before the big game Woody will be showing his boys reruns of the film
Patton
.”

That night someone broke into the van and stole everything we owned except the suitcases we had with us in the motel room. They even stole the broken radio.
We stood in front of the empty van and looked up and down the row of parked cars as if we expected to see another black van parked there, one with two pairs of skis and two tennis rackets slipped into the spaces between the boxes and the windows.

“I suppose you’re going to say I’m the one who left the door unlocked,” I said.

Sam sat on the curb. He sat on the curb and put his head into his hands. “No,” he said. “It was probably me.”

The policeman who filled out the report tried to write “Miscellaneous Household Goods” on the clipboarded form, but I made him list everything I could remember, as the three of us sat on the curb—the skis and rackets, the chess set, a baseball bat, twelve boxes of books, two rugs that I had braided, an oak bed frame Sam had refinished. I inventoried the kitchen items: two bread pans, two cake pans, three skillets. I mentioned every fork and every measuring cup and every piece of bric-a-brac I could recall—the trash of our life, suddenly made valuable by the theft. When the policeman had left without giving us any hope of ever recovering our things, I told Sam I was going to pack and shower. A half hour later when I came out with the suitcases, he was still on the curb, sitting in the full sun, his cotton shirt beginning to stain in wing shapes across his shoulder blades. I reached down to touch him and he flinched. It was a shock—feeling the tremble of his
flesh, the vulnerability of it, and for the first time since California I tried to imagine what it was like driving with a woman who said she didn’t want him, in a van he didn’t like but had to buy in order to travel to a possible job on the other side of the continent, which might not be worth reaching.

On the last leg of the trip, Sam was agreeable and compliant. If I wanted to stop for coffee, he stopped immediately. If I wanted him to go slower in thick traffic, he eased his foot off the pedal without a look of regret or annoyance. I got out the dictionary.
Operose, ophelimity, ophryitis
. He said he’d never heard of any of those words. Which president died in a bathtub? He couldn’t remember. I tried to sing to keep him company. He told me it wasn’t necessary. I played a few tunes on a comb. He gazed pleasantly at the turnpike, so pleasantly that I could have made him up. I could have invented him and put him on a mountainside terrace and set him going. “Sammy,” I said, “that stuff wasn’t much. I won’t miss it.”

“Good,” he said.

Then I said, “It was Harding who died in the tub.”

About 3
A.M
. green exit signs began to appear announcing the past and the future: Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Patrick Henry Airport.
“Let’s go to the beach,” I said. “Let’s just go all the way to the edge of the continent.” It was a ludicrous idea.

“Sure. Why not.”

He drove on past Newport News and over an arching bridge toward Virginia Beach. We arrived there just at dawn and found our way into a residential neighborhood full of small pastel houses and sandy lawns. “Could we just stop right here?” I said. I had an idea. I had a plan. He shrugged as if to say what the heck, I don’t care, and if you want to drive into the ocean that will be fine, too.

We were parked on a street that ran due east toward the water—I could see just a glimmer of ocean between two hotels about a mile away. “All right,” I said, with the forced, brusque cheerfulness of a high-school coach. “Let’s get out and do some stretching exercises.” Sam sat behind the wheel and watched me touch my toes. “Come on, Sammy. Let’s get loose. We haven’t done anything with our bodies since California.” He yawned, got out of the van, and did a few arm rolls and toe touches. “All right now,” I said. “Do you think a two-block handicap is about right?” He had always given me a two-block advantage during our foot races in California. He yawned again. “How about a one-and-a-half-block lead, then?” He crossed his arms and leaned against the van, watching me. I couldn’t tell whether he had nodded, but I said anyway, “I’ll give
you a wave when I’m ready.” I walked down the middle of the street past houses that had towels hanging over porch rails and toys lying on front walks. Even a mile from the water, I smelled the salt and seaweed in the air. It made me feel light-headed and for a moment I tried to picture Sam and myself in one of those houses with tricycles and toilet trainers and small latched gates. We had never discussed having a child. When I turned to wave, he was still leaning against the van.

I started out in a jog, then picked up the pace, and hit what seemed to be about the quarter-mile mark doing a fast easy run. Ahead of me the stretch of water between the two hotels was undulating with gold. I listened for the sound of Sam’s footsteps but heard only the soft taps of my own tennis shoes. The sea drew closer and the sky above it fanned out in ribs of orange and purple silk. I was afraid to look back. I was afraid that if I turned to see him, Sam might recede forever into the damp gray of the western sky. I slowed down in case I had gone too fast and he wanted to catch up. I concentrated on the water and listened to the still, heavy air. By the time I reached the three-quarters mark, I realized that I was probably running alone.

I hadn’t wanted to lose him.

I wondered whether he had waited by the van or was already headed for Newport News. I imagined him at a phone booth calling another woman collect in California, and then I realized that I didn’t actually
know whether there was another woman or not. For a wild moment I hoped there was and that she was rich and would send him money. I had caught my second wind and was breathing easily. I looked toward the shore without seeing it and was sorry I hadn’t measured the distance and thought to clock it, since now I was running against time and myself, and then I heard him—the unmistakable sound of a sprint and the heavy, whooping intake of his breath. He passed me just as we crossed the main street in front of the hotels, and he reached the water twenty feet ahead of me.

“Goddammit, Day,” I said. “You were on the grass, weren’t you?” We were walking along the hard, wet edge of the beach, breathing hard. “You were sneaking across those lawns. That’s a form of cheating.” I drummed his arm lightly with my fists pretending to beat him up. “I slowed down because I thought you weren’t there.” We leaned over from the waist, hands on our hips, breathing toward the sand. The water rolled up the berm near our feet and flickered like topaz.

“You were always a lousy loser,” he said.

I said, “You should talk.”

M
y theory of the universe is that it’s not moving outward from a Big Bang nor collapsing backward into the center. It’s moving back and forth, breathing in and out, just like lungs. Sometimes, when the universe is running uphill, it breathes faster, and the stars from our vantage point in the Milky Way whip left and right like windshield wipers. The universe, when it is in deep sleep at five o’clock in the morning, has a heartbeat of 124 beats per minute, the same heartbeat that an unhatched chicken has just before it begins to crash its head against the shell.

Last winter I wrecked my car during an ice storm on Interstate 17. I had a chicken in a cage on the front seat beside me. I had the cage strapped in with the passenger seat belt, and a towel draped over the cage, so that the chicken wouldn’t have to look at the weather.
I was on my way to a party, and I was wearing my only party outfit, a black satin dress with a giant silver belt that was actually a music box in disguise—when you pressed the buckle, it played “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The chicken was actually a young rooster who hadn’t yet learned his own music. When he tried to crow a cock-a-doodle-do, he made a horrible scraping metal sound that came out “er-err-errr.” It was early evening, black and snowy, the roadbed hissing beneath my tires, the chicken going “er-err-errr” every so often beneath the towel.

“So you don’t want to go to a party?” I said to the chicken. I knew by then that I was driving on a chancy road, and I was trying to keep myself going with the chicken talk. “So you don’t want to party?” I said. “You want to go back home and become drumsticks and Hot Buffalo Wings?”

“Er-err-errr,” the chicken said.

“Just kidding,” I said. The chicken was going to be a present for a man who lived in the country and owned ducks, geese, and a swan. One thing I knew about this man was that he liked his birds the way some people like dogs and cats, and he probably wouldn’t eat them. I was trying to picture the chicken in his new home when I crossed a bridge over the Susquehanna and encountered the silence of black ice. The tires lost their hiss, the chicken shut up, and about fifty yards after I hit the ice, I hit a Tioga County Sheriff’s Department
car. The car was parked on the road berm just beyond the bridge, and inside the car a sheriff was radioing for a tow truck, as if he knew I was coming and that when I got there, our two cars were going to need help.

My car did a kind of simple dance step down the highway on its way to meet the sheriff’s car. It threw its hips to the left, it threw its hips to the right, left, right, left, right, then turned and slid, as if it were making a rock-and-roll move toward the arms of a partner.

Before the impact, when my car was still grace on ice, when my car was no longer in touch with the planet but now sliding above a thin layer of air and water, four thousand pounds of chrome and steel, bronze metallic paint, power steering, power brakes, AC, AM/FM, good tires, fine upholstery, all the things you like to see in an ad when you’re looking for a big, used American car, when it was gliding through that galaxy of flashing lights, on its way through Andromeda, Sirius, and the Crab Nebula, it crossed my mind that surely it was against the laws of physics to hit a patrol car. If you were sliding above ice, you might hit a regular car, or a pole, or a fence, or an asteroid, but you could not hit the car of a man with a badge, a gun, bulletproof windows, citation forms in his pocket, handcuffs, the power to arrest you, a man working hard on a bad night.

Just about all of those things did really fly through my head and, recognizing the impossibility of the event, as my car slid sideways toward the side of the
other car, I felt weightless and invisible. I felt harmless and happy.

Even for a sheriff, Officer Mike Cook was very tall. Officer Cook was linebacker tall, he was Jack-and-the-Beanstalk tall, he was as tall as my desire to be back home. Looking up at him, at the black silhouette of his hat, at the crazed lights on the top of his car slinging snowfish around his head, I lost contact with my native language. He put his hands on his hips and waited. When he perceived that words for me were as ephemeral as snowflakes, he said in his deep patrolman’s voice, his made-for-TV-voice, “We’re not having a very good evening, are we?”

We
, he said. Officer Cook had embraced me with his pronoun.