The lean and hungry-looking workers in Becca’s backyard blast Banda music noon to night, big brass rhythm sections blowing country-and-western polkas over a bajo sexto backbeat.
Oom-pah-pah-pah, rum-pah-pum. Oom-pah-pah-pah, rum-pah-pum . . .
She should have approved the add-on blueprints three weeks ago. But Becca can’t seem to stop reworking the renderings. Two beds, two baths, and a great room for the grandkids to run rampant. What’s to decide, right? But once she signs that dotted line the future is fixed. The contractor, a friend of Ben’s, is ready to pour the foundation. He’s given her two more days to finalize the footprint. Otherwise he’ll have to regroup and send his men elsewhere.
She tapes onion skin over the scroll paper and reimagines the entryway. Something about the door. Under the table, as she draws, Becca’s toes tap a tranquil Cotton-Eyed Joe.
Oom-pah-pah-pah, rum-pah-pum . . .
A shadow eclipses her plans. Becca looks up and sees a stubbled face behind the bay window, peering in from the patio. A gaunt Mexican, one of hers, sweating bullets in the unholy heat spell. Her feet freeze. The man cocks his head. Runs ravaged fingers through blue-black hair. He says something in Spanish.
It takes her a minute: he’s preening. He hasn’t seen her. Is he here legally, Becca wonders? Or is he some kind of alien?
She tries the word on for size, says: “Alien.”
She savors the “l,” rolls it on the tip of her tongue.
The man grins at his reflection and disappears. Becca is left squinting into the brain-searing sun.
. . . she is alone at the breakfast table, spreading strawberry jam over hot buttered toast. Her feet don’t reach the floor. She slides down from her chair and clears her plate and walks into the bathroom. Already dressed for school, her hair pulled into pigtails. These are harder to do by yourself than she had imagined. She should brush her teeth. But they’re not here to remind her and so she decides to forget. She takes her lunchbox from the refrigerator and shoulders her book bag and unlocks the front door. She has seen them hide the key under the mat and this is where she finds it now. She locks the big red door behind her and replaces the key and walks to the corner where the school bus will be waiting. She can hear it idling even now, honking for her to hurry, oom-pah-pah-pah, rum-pah-pum . . .
The music delivers Becca into the present.
She blinks away the after-blindness blotting her vision.
She does not understand what is happening to her.
• • •
The mercury is twitching in the triple digits when one of the contractor’s hired hands demolishes the air-conditioning unit with a forklift. Becca calls up every HVAC repairman in the yellow pages, but summer in Oklahoma has them all working overtime. Three more days before the cooling can be put back to rights. Despite the ceiling fans helicoptering in every other room the heat permeates the house in a mean and implacable creep, and by midday the master bedroom thermostat reads ninety-two degrees.
Ben has a two-hundred-pound ice block and a galvanized tin washtub delivered. He jury-rigs a poor man’s air conditioner at the foot of the bed, a pair of portable fans blowing tepid zephyrs off the melt, and they lounge there in stupefied torpor, half-dressed, watching The Maltese Falcon with the sound turned down.
“Could you eat?” Ben says.
“Don’t,” Becca says, “talk.”
“I could eat.”
“Too hottttt.”
“I brought ice cream.”
“The diet.”
“The diet. The diet is a psychological double cross. It instills a Spartan sense of self-control enabling, coincident, the wheedling mindset of the hedonist.”
“You have no idea what’s about to happen when that mouth of yours starts moving, do you?”
“If it feels good to enforce the rules, why, how much better it must feel to break them! This is the bipolar reasoning of the diet.”
“It’s a kind of superpower you have.”
“The diet is a flimflam philosophy that can’t hold up in this kind of heat,” he says. “I say we jettison the diet for a day.”
“You are a bad, bad man, Benjamin Porter.”
“I stand accused.”
The ice cream comes in wacky packaging, neon pints painted in psychedelic swirls of purple and green and pink and bedecked with mock-poetic flavors like Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey or Dublin Mudslide or—and this one earns a belly laugh from the both of them—Chubby Hubby.
“Pick your poison,” he says.
“You should know by now that Chubby Hubby is the only one for me.”
They spoon illicit scoops of ice cream straight from the carton, watching the hardboiled gumshoe onscreen pursue his wasp-waisted femme fatale through the deliciously shifting trickeries of a mystery.
“Do they never remove the coffin nails from their mouths to, you know, breathe?”
“Movies were more fun before we discovered lung cancer,” Ben says. “Christ. I think . . . yes I do. I actually want a cigarette.”
“Benjamin Porter if you take up smoking I will divorce you this instant and send you packing back to Perkins and bunk with Cecil.”
“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” he sings. “Remember?”
“Oh! The Flintstones.”
“Right. Fred and Wilma lighting up after another long day in Bedrock.”
Becca remembers, when she first left for college in Stillwater, being bowled over by the sheer sprawl of it all. Oklahoma A&M in 1954 seemed bigger than life itself. But then she returned to Antlers one weekend and her hometown seemed to have shrunk. Her childhood room in Aunt Mabel’s house had been replaced with what looked like a model done in miniature. As that second semester started, everything seemed to be in a perpetual state of contraction. Becca would watch the clouds at last light and imagine she could see the world curling back upon itself.
It was in this diminishing landscape that she met her future husband. He was canvassing the campus, recruiting Young Republicans. Ben was commanding and good-natured and well-made, even a little dreamy in his beefcake shirtsleeves, never mind the slide-rule always holstered at his side. Taller than Becca, which seemed important at the time. And still is, now she thinks about it. She bought a diary later that same day from the Student Union bookstore and lay in the grass by Theta Pond and recorded her first secret and feminine insight which was, she remembers word-for-word: Today I passed out pamphlets for the boy I’m going to marry.
The sentence still sends a little thrill along her spine.
After Ben had talked himself into Aunt Mabel’s good graces their meetings took on an aura of inevitability. She had landed her man and wasn’t this the goal back then? To sally forth into polite society and secure that golden ring around your finger? Once she was pulled into Ben’s ambitious orbit, Becca didn’t stand a chance of escape. She was quickened by his country-boy charms, her collapsing world buttressed by those big-boned arms.
She takes another bite of ice cream.
“I had a daydream the other day.”
“Good or bad?”
“Hard to know.”
“Must have been good.”
“It was like a lost memory. Or a deja vu. I was small. I didn’t like being so little. Helpless. This must have been before my parents died. Before I went to live with Aunt Mabel? Anyway I was making myself breakfast. But the cereal was so high up on the shelf I had to stand on a chair. The house was deserted. Nobody was there to help me out. Then I left through the front door. But this wasn’t a house I remember. It was someone else’s. I locked the door and walked to the bus stop and then I woke up.”
His dead-mouthed expression says Ben is worried.
“It’s nothing.” She touches his tummy. “I’m getting a little stir crazy lately, is all. Being all alone in this big empty house, it makes me feel . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Have you called your aunt?”
“. . . not so safe.”
“Mabel will be able to explain some of this. You should get out of the house more.”
“I’m already volunteering at the Sunday school.”
“Take up a hobby. Something.”
When she doesn’t reply, Ben turns back to the television set.
“That’s a nice fedora,” he says.
“He’s got her cornered, I think.”
“No way. She’s too tough for mister milquetoast here. Deadlock at best.”
“Why milquetoast?”
“Look how thin he is.”
“Thin was in back then.”
“I don’t remember thin being in.”
“You don’t remember my birthday.”
“You will always be twenty-nine to me, my dear.”
There’s something a little off-limits in these tender nothings passing between the two of them. Kind of lower-class and dirty-sexy all rolled in together. Becca and her big bad Ben eating sweets in rumpled sheets, each trying to best the other in the sultry summer smother. Ben leans in for a supersized kiss and she wonders if he’s thinking the same thing but before Becca can wonder for long they have uncovered the answer together which is . . . oh, my . . .
Oh . . .
Yes.