Spinning the wrong way, knocking over chairs and slender floor lamps, smacking head into bar, losing balance, and disturbing the other dancers, I spoke with my body like my mother before me, her mother before her, and my younger sisters Tracy, Pia, and Valerie leaping off the fireplace. My family was fidgety yet agile, responding to music rather than words, bored with laughter, sick of jokes, and too afraid to cry. The women, at least, had practically given up on reading and conversation.
We were hip-and-thigh clashing in dark halls. Boombam! Just like that, we collapsed onto sofa or chair, callused soles still stomping to the beat. Sometimes we collided by accident, at night, thumping heads against battered walls. Music was never silenced (at least not by us), the radio never turned off. Even in sleep, our feet kicked up to a familiar chorus. Upon waking, our hands clapped to drums, and our hair flailed to screaming guitars. One sister was always calling to another, “Turn up the music!” even when one sister couldn’t hear what the other was shouting because the radio was already loud.
If the record player was broken and the radio was stolen, we danced to the music of ceiling fans, running water, toilets flushing, teakettles steaming, and wind rushing through open windows. We sang so loud our throats tasted of fresh blood. When we lost our voices and the water ran out and the electricity got cut off and the wind didn’t blow, we still had the memory of the old music in our heads, callused feet to stomp, pots to clang, and hands to clap.
Granted, there were noise complaints from the neighbors, just the standard “disturbing the peace” warnings that no cops ever bothered to enforce—for many reasons. My mother’s house was in the country, away from city lines where ordinances could be used against us. The police knew us well, and when they came to see what all the fuss was about, they liked what they saw—me and my sisters dancing in our underwear even though we were too old to go without clothes. Our bras were pretty with tiny bows, polka dots, leopard prints, and lace. We liked to show off. We would have happily been interviewed starkers while the police questioned us for their paperwork.
Once the complaints came to nothing and the police started coming by regularly for dinner, the neighbors stopped their bitching. At least for my family, the only thing that ever disturbed our peace was the silence and stillness of the sheriff’s sleep when I was oceans away from my sisters on his waterbed’s waves, and yet my hands were still moving in time to my sisters’ songs.
In the nights when there was silence because the sheriff turned off the radio, the songs were still running through my mind. I swayed my hips, twirling while we were apart. I obeyed a strange choreography while the sheriff turned away or left without warning, never becoming part of the music. Or, as my mother would say, the music never became part of Michael. He was gone too soon.
“So be it,” she would whisper in the short silence between songs. “We are who we are.”
There was a lot of truth to what she said, I suppose, even though it could mean something different to anyone at any time.
Little Bit, they called me at home because I had a butt smaller than two baseballs glued together. All that shaking kept me slender and nimble. Because I could dance without thinking, the hardest thing was to stay still. Maybe that’s why I could never learn much at school.
Pigeon-toed with slightly twisted fingers and wicked ingrown toenails that even cats were afraid of, a natural-born left-handed child converted to a right-handed writer, a dyslexic insomniac, and a chronic daydreamer, I had my challenges like anybody else. For one thing, it took me a while to learn to read so I was always behind the other kids in my class.
My childhood in South Carolina was a hoot, except for kindergarten where connect-the-dots and coloring were a problem because my left hand kept reaching out to take the pencil or crayon from my right. Since I was a sloppy writer and an unconventional colorist, creating purple sheep instead of white, I was one of those kids who had to be taken out into the hall, away from the rest of the class, so I could be watched by a special teacher who gave me blue candy I took home to give to Valerie, Tracy, and Pia. All of our mouths turned blue in the evenings after school. Even my mother’s mouth was stained.
Mrs. Defferies devoted her entire day to me on Mondays and Fridays of each week, making sure I kept my left hand tucked between my knees, always hidden in the folds of my skirt under the table. In a soft and patient voice, she explained to me why I should use the white crayon to color the white sheep a whiter white.
Maybe I wasn’t ever much of a student until she discovered I would do just about anything for candy. Nothing was ever easy for me. I did things the hard way and appreciated minor accomplishments like learning to tie my shoes in the fifth grade. Somehow, I always got by.
Eventually, even Mrs. Defferies had to admit I had done all right. At least that’s what she used to say before her son took out a shotgun and killed her one night at her home so she didn’t come back to school anymore. That was the end of the blue candy. But all this was several years ago, and her son isn’t even in jail now because he was young at the time. Being naturally curious, I kept wondering about what really happened. I wanted to know the story the newspapers hadn’t told, but once Michael showed me the crime-scene photos, I was sorry I had seen her because I realized it was a family matter and none of my business.
The letters are still mixed up in my head. I still have a problem with b’s and d’s and P’s and 9’s, but I remember what Mrs. Defferies taught me, so everything turned out okay. I remember her like no one else does because sometimes when I close my eyes I try to put her face back together the way I have to keep rearranging the letters in the words she taught me. I learned to quit thinking so hard, just to do what I was told. Then I learned to remember her face the way it was when she was still alive. That way, everyone would think that I understood and that I had done all right. And, as I soon discovered, if everyone thought that, then I had.
Perhaps because I had such a deep reverence for cops when I began high school, I started “looking at men for the wrong reasons” and for that matter, the wrong men, or so my mother said. “Cops aren’t dating material,” she often warned me. “You make one wrong move at the right time, and then you’ve had it.” If I was to have any man, she said, I needed a man who wasn’t afraid to dance, our way. I needed a man who wasn’t ashamed to look my mother in the eye and didn’t need to turn on his sirens when he drove away. The police light turned the trunks of the oak trees red and blue as we raced by, and I had the rush of feeling like a criminal while I turned him into one.
At the time, the sheriff’s dancing was the least of my worries. My sisters and I still danced so much that I often forgot Michael had no sense of rhythm. Because dancing was the farthest thing from my mind when I fell in love, I would have settled for any man who knew what it was to be a smart person who thought in backwards ways.
“Why do you dance?” I sometimes asked my mother. So embarrassed by the way she moved, I used to try to put my hands over my ears to shut out the music so I wouldn’t be tempted to do the same. Sometimes I just forgot to shut it out, and the next thing I knew, I was spinning and tumbling like her, kicking up my legs, one at a time, hoping my pointed toes would somehow reach above my head.
Secretly, I began to attempt her moves. There were ways to dance without being seen and ways to be seen dancing without having to try. The key was never to look into mirrors.
Tangling shadows blocked the dirt lanes at night. Anyone who visited our neighborhood besides us was usually doing worse than we were—talking in parked cars.
Michael Lilligh sometimes drove his sheriff’s car through darkness, then parked someplace close to my house, and called for me to join him.
Sometimes I hid where the tattered mimosas swayed and watched their hairy flowers drift inevitably toward the ground the way I drifted toward him. Sometimes I fell asleep with him in the fields after the ride even though I only wanted him to take me to his home.
In the mornings at his house as he dressed for work, I discovered the old Charlie’s Angels that came on at six. I loved watching women with guns and hearing the sound of Charlie’s friendly voice on the speaker box, the way he controlled everything without ever showing his face.
“Charlie’s a good man,” I made the mistake of telling Michael one day when I borrowed his gun without asking and posed in the lamplight to admire my silhouette on the living room walls.
He just looked at me.
My life was different once he knew how old I really was and wouldn’t take me to bars anymore or let me leave his house in daylight.
Inside his living room, I’m gazing out the dusty windows. “Don’t ask me why he won’t let me watch television anymore,” I say to my sisters on the phone, “because I won’t tell you.” My sisters are fascinated by television because my mother always refused to let us watch it. We never had a television at home, and our mother will probably never own one.
Mother isn’t talking to me much anymore. Somehow I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either, especially if I were her.
Michael bought me a walkie-talkie with a wide range and put the walkie-talkie in a little box on his desk so he could talk to me while he was away from his house. “Angel,” he’ll say on the speaker, “get ready for another mission.” Then he’ll ask me to do something I don’t want to do like vacuum the stairs or take out the trash or clean the gutters. He likes to see what I can do with one bucket of soapy water and a sponge in the hours before he gets home from work.
It’s easier walking through empty rooms, picking up Michael’s cigarette stubs and trying on his ex-wife’s tattered lingerie than leaving every morning to catch the bus to the high school. I hate biology and geometry, hate cutting up dead pigs and memorizing the equations for arcs and isosceles triangles. I’ll never go back to being a student unless the sheriff will be my teacher as long as I live.
Three weeks ago was the last time. Mrs. Cummings, with her huge, fake blond hair, said I had a damaged mind. Dyslexic, she called me. I don’t know if I was, but my eyes never wanted to move in straight lines. Goddamn my eyes! Reading forward and backwards, I got stuck in the middle of words I should have recognized, and I lost my place altogether. Whenever my teacher asked me to read aloud, I was terrified of what the other students would say about me. I tried to make them laugh, making up the words as I went along.
I’m an audio-visual learner. Michael used to say that the worst show on television is better than the greatest novel ever written, and he promised me that I’d never have to read again. But he couldn’t cure my nightmares or my insomnia—not even the late, late shows could do that.
I don’t know why Michael suddenly couldn’t stand to see me watching Charlie’s Angels. The actress with long dark hair that got tangled around her gun left a trail of dreams for me to follow along the highway. I had seen her shoot at men many times and miss, and her gun was too small to do much damage. Just the same, Michael must have been jealous of her. Maybe he thought I was in love with her, and maybe I was. I don’t know for sure, but I think I once called out her name when he touched my hair in the night. Jaclyn? I just don’t know.
During the day, I have Michael’s house all to myself. The roof and its gutters are covered with cottonwood seeds. I hear leaves rustling over my head. The house is three stories high. Of twin balconies, only one remains, lapsing into decay, its floors and gates soft and grimy. The two windowed doors give me nightmares. One leads to a place of treetops, hummingbird feeders, locusts hovering. The other opens onto a three-story drop past the arched windows over the lumber stack.
I could step through the wrong door and fall towards trembling shadows over the woodpile. I could dive into the pond at the wood’s edge, its brackish waters burning my eyes.
Flooded, again, the pond has encroached into the yard. Only the peaked roofs of the house and barn are visible below the treetops, their reflection wavering. Mallards roost on swollen shingles. Past cigarettes floating on the water, a gar swims deeper, gliding through the barn doors after writhing on the water’s edge.
I want to walk under the pond, where everything is still, a wall lost to darkness. Even though I couldn’t hear or see and might lose my sense of direction, unable to remember which way is up and which is down, I would remain calm, examining the cold metal of sunken cars. I want to reach through broken windows. I would be happy if the sheriff and I both swam under the water. Letting go of my breath, I would stroke his hair, his lips, his harsh, unshaven chin, even if he wouldn’t respond to my touch.
I’ve never told him about my nightmares before. The pond is Michael’s favorite place to go, and he would hate me for imagining us drowning in its waters, especially since the water has become my new obsession.
His old Mustang is his most valued possession. Three weeks ago, on his last drunken night, he almost drove into the water. Although he still calls me to ride with him and lets me sleep in his house, we haven’t spoken ever since.
The Mustang rests on oversized tires. Michael paid to have its windows tinted and its sides detailed in airbrushed designs, a woman with enormous breasts cloaked in flames under a caption that reads Light My Fire.
I really don’t blame the sheriff for loving his house and his car more than anything in the world. His parents died. His brothers and sisters married strangers and scattered, leaving him behind. They left the house and car with him.
“I hate this,” he said that drunken night, tossing the green knitted blanket into the car window. “After all that money, they never did it right.”
“What?’ I asked.
“Her.”
“Her?” I asked, pointing to the car.
“I gave the artist at the garage your picture from school. I said for her to look like you.”
“Why?”
“They did it all wrong. Look at the mouth. Look at the eyes.”
The sheriff searched his pants pocket for his keys, reaching for the longest one, then used its point to scrape the eyes away. He worked quickly, the paint flecks sticking to his fingers. “Fuck it,” he said, smiling as he scratched away her lips. “I guess we just can’t have nice things.”
Now the airbrushed woman burns without a mouth, without eyes. She and I are the only women who remain near this house. Of all those who have lived here before me, I am the only one to stay without sisters, without a mother. Besides the sheriff, my only company is my shadow, my reflection in windows, long hazy mirrors, and family portraits.
Michael’s family once made a living by breaking horses. It was a hard business, and in the photographs I can see the worry in his family’s tired eyes.
In tarnished frames, thin gray women with light hair brush the hips of black stallions. A boy holding a rope reaches out to a cow skull. A tiny girl caresses a one-eyed kitten. A balding woman grips a dead turkey by its legs, the loose head dangling on the ground. All the men have sun-darkened faces. Distant, unsmiling, they stand in front of the house I know, holding rifles.
The youngest children, both male and female, are barefoot and clothed in the same rumpled long shirts that match the light tone of the cracked dirt around the porches, no pants to cover their legs. Someone, maybe Michael, has gone in with a faint pencil and written names under the feet—Sarah, Haskell, Jo, Phillip, LeAnn.
“Potato sacks,” the sheriff called them, pointing to the long, shapeless shirts the children wore, whispering the words again and again as he looked away from the photographs and away from me to a place beyond the treetops outside the window.
His uncles suffered broken bones that wouldn’t heal. In every family of horse-breakers, there comes a sign to stop breaking. There comes a time when the horses begin breaking the men instead of the men breaking the horses. His father was paralyzed in a hospital bed, and the mares were running wild, coming closer to the house until the women inside were scared to go outside. The horses fogged the windows with their hot breath before running to the highway to be shot down by local volunteers after stopping traffic. But there are no horses near the house now.
On the walls covered in mauve paper, rows of painted teal pears are barely visible behind the imprints of small hands. Once bleached by sunlight, they are dulled by evening, erased by nightfall. Silverfish dart and scatter, silent over their vines. Above the ceiling fan, the shadow of a single blade keeps turning while the house slowly falls apart.
Once when the television became too loud, more plaster chips fell away, and the sheriff ripped the cords out of the wall and threw the television into the trunk of his car, white dust clinging to his hairy arms.
The television used to soothe me, women telling me I deserve to change the color of my hair. I have had straight white-blond hair, brown curls, and jet-black braids held together by blue glass beads shaped like dolphins and lions, mermaids and tangerines.
On Channel 13, I once heard a man with a peppery beard say that television makes people lonely. He looked at the camera with his small gray eyes and said, “If you are watching right now and you think I am talking to you, then you have a problem.” I never saw him again, but afterwards, I kept asking myself, what sort of problem? If he was saying “you,” there had to be a “you,” and since no one else was there, why couldn’t “you” have been “me”?
I stay silent when I hear the front door open and close with a sigh. The sheriff’s boots scrape the hall tiles. He calls my name before he walks into the living room, stinking of the gasoline he uses to wipe his hands. He is tall and slender with round glasses and a long, pointed nose. Although he is a heavy smoker, forty-nine years old, and not the type of man I had envisioned myself with, I suppose he is handsome, in his own way.
Michael taps a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lights it before I realize he has struck the match. He holds the mark of a good man, the constant ability to surprise.
“Now,” he says, touching the scratches made by knotted wood and metal rubbing against his arms, “you’ll have to look at me. We’ll have to start all over again, talking to each other.” He holds the cigarette expertly in his thin lips, never touching it although the ash grows long and keeps bobbing with every word he speaks. “You’re my little girl, aren’t you?”
“No,” I say, standing up to him so that our eyes are level. “I’m not little, not a girl.”
“You’re not?” the sheriff asks, taking in a deep drag, then slowly releasing the smoke, blowing into my face. I don’t let him get to me. I’m careful not to frown, back away, or squint my eyes.
“I’m a woman.”
The sheriff laughs and tries to kiss me while his chest rises and falls. I feel his stained teeth scraping against my mouth and try to pull away. We’re nowhere near the same height, and he’s stronger than I am. He grabs my wrist and twists my arm behind my back. I fall to my knees.
“What?” Michael asks, letting the ash drop on my hair. “I can’t hear you?”
“Nothing,” I say.
I lay down at his feet. He leans over me, stroking my back. “You’re my little baby-angel girl,” he says, “and always will be.”
His lips graze my neck. I put my arms around his waist. He leans back, the crown of his head resting against my chin. His hair smells of tobacco and earth rotting under tree shadow. With my polished nails, I unknot his tangles, mussing up the dark strands, imagining his badge in my hand, the way it would warm in my fingers.
Michael sighs, lighting one cigarette with another. He holds still for me while I ruffle his hair, searching for the white of his scalp. I wonder how long before he goes gray like his daddy in the photos, bald like his grandpa. He is strong now with muscled arms, but I need to know if he will still be strong in twenty years. I wonder if there was ever a horse that could have broken him like his father was broken. I never want to see a man that way. I left my sisters and my mother to be with the sheriff, and my mother fears I will stay with him forever, living as his wife, even if only by common law.
“Nice hair,” I say, trying to make my voice sound dusky, older.
“You’re the creepiest girl I know.”
The sheriff turns around to me, flicking his ash under the rug. I touch my mouth to his wrists and begin to kiss his hands. Michael tastes of salt and ashes, beer and burning leaves, good flavors that tell me he works hard even during summer evenings.
When the sheriff lies on top of me and falls asleep, I remain awake.
“You’re going,” he says if I wake him by shifting beneath his body. In my mind, I’m already gone. “I want you to stay. Just the same, you’re gone.”
“When?”
Tomorrow I could be back in my mother’s house with the music, bumping into my sisters in the halls. But I know if Michael and I fall asleep in each other’s arms we will be less likely to let go of each other in the morning.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Nothing . . . thinking.”
When I was a little girl, I used to feel sorry for dead butterflies and for my father. “Dad is dead,” my mother used to say to my sisters and me. Then the flood washed through the cemetery. “Mother told a lie,” she whispered, her bare feet sinking into the soaked ground.
My father was born on an Indiana farm in springtime, the oval pond iced over, broken windows floating on gasoline. The white-gray geese were simply gone. The flock left without warning, never to return. His sister’s scarves were rising to the pond’s surface, the leather gloves crushed and faded like wilted violets swirling through spilled oil and lipstick-stained cigarettes. He would not talk for years, would not look at a woman’s hands, and then he spoke to his sister only in dreams, decades later when he was married to my mother and I was his baby girl. Holding his hand in the dark, I watched Pia stand beside the cradle she rocked even in her sleep.
“Someone’s lying,” he would say. His hand was too big for my hand. In the bath, he would fit both of my hands and my feet in his hand to keep me warm in the water. His finger and thumb closed over my ankles, his eyes moving rapidly under their lids.
Mother sat shivering in a chair near the open window, her hands over her chest as she stared out at the trees.
“Don’t look at his eyes,” she said.
“Daddy?” I say without meaning to say it.
All night, beneath the sheriff in the stillness under the shattered window, while he sleeps, I dance without moving to songs he never hears. In the silence, I somehow learn to hold him like I once held my father, without disturbing his dreams.
As Michael wakes, he and I just stare at each other’s mouth, keeping quiet, and breathing softly in time as if we were prisoners in his house. Gazing at his thin lips, I wonder if in taking what I wanted I’ve somehow given too much of myself away.
I love his house’s high windows and its closeness to water and its dampness, the stench of his old cigarettes. I want to sleep here more than any place in the world. Even during my insomnia attacks, I know better than to tell Michael that I want to remain. If I did, he would think I want him to marry me and would probably want me to go away. So I pretend every night is the last, keeping my lipsticks and curlers in their boxes.
I stand on my tiptoes and put my hands on his shoulders. He yawns, and I follow him down the hall to his room.
“Scooch over,” the sheriff says when I finally climb into his bed. He reaches for a blanket draped over the quilt rack. The blanket is made of green yarn, knotted and torn by my fingers that have caught and tangled in the threads.
“Why do you have to tear things up?” he asks, gazing through the holes. “You’ve ruined so many nice things.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, although I have no idea what I’ve ruined besides the blanket. Then I start to walk around the house while he waits, and I see all the broken mirrors and shattered windows as if for the first time, realizing what I’ve done.
“Why?” is a question we never ask each other.
I ripped the blanket four nights ago. I didn’t even know what I was doing when I tore into the yarn. I was lying underneath Michael. He wouldn’t let me touch him, and I needed something to hold on to.
The sheriff doesn’t talk much at night. There’s nothing to say anymore. I usually wait for him to go to sleep so I can quietly slip away. Mostly, I only traipse the rooms above, my high heels clomping on the hardwood floors. I imagine I’m invisible, not even a reflection in the window.
My voice whispers to itself before my skinny legs in the mirror startle me and I stumble down the stairs. I hate the mirrors in his house as the reflections that they cast seem untrue—an awkward girl in women’s clothes so large they swallow her body, slipping off her hips and shoulders. Where did his ex-wife go in such a hurry that she didn’t need to pack any of her clothes?
I lean out the open windows near the high tree branches and look for new locusts, wet and green. I put them in glass jars then watch them escaping their shells. They are fragile and smell faintly of summer rain and leaves. I watch their filmy eyes harden and turn dark like amber glass. Their wings unfold as they dry into inky veins. When I open the jars, the locusts take flight. Later, I reach for the brown husks and drop them, watching as they spiral slowly down—brittle, hollow, dull, and lost to darkness.
Sometimes I sing to the new locusts in a whisper, wondering if Michael can hear me and if insects recognize my song. Whenever I dream of horses running from our shadows, I want to tell the sheriff, but I’m afraid of what he might say. I want to write the story of his life and mine, but I can’t write well. I only sit down with paper and pens and realize nothing interesting has ever happened to me besides him. The horses are just a second-hand memory, and the locusts are the only miracle I’ve ever known.