He had a couple of grown daughters, disappointers, with regretted curiosities and the heavy venture of having once looked alive. One night it was only the older who came by. It was photos she brought: somebody she claimed was more recent. He started approvingly through the sequence. A man with capped-over hair and a face drowned out by sunlight was seen from unintimate range in decorated settings out-of-doors. The coat he wore was always a dark-blue thing of medium hang. But in one shot you could make out the ragged line of a zipper, and in another a column of buttons, and in still another the buttons were no longer the knobby kind but toggles, and in yet another they were not even buttons, just snaps. Sometimes the coat had grown a drawstring. The pockets varied by slant and flapwork. The man advanced through the stack again. His eye this time was caught in doubt by the collar. A contrastive leather in this shot, common corduroy in that one, undiversified cloth in a third. And he was expected to make believe they were all of the same man? He swallowed clumsily, jumbled through the photographs once more.
“But you’ll still have time for your sister?” he said.
Her teeth were off-colored and fitted almost mosaicwise into the entire halted smile.
A few nights later, the younger. A night class was making her interview a relation for a memory from way back and then another from only last week. He was not the best person to be in recall, but he thought assistively of a late afternoon he had sat at a table outside a gymnasium and torn tickets off a wheel one at a time instead of in twos and threes for the couples and threesomes. He had watched them file arm in arm into the creped-up place with a revived, stupid sense of how things ought to be done. A banquet? A dance? He never stayed around for things.
He saw his words descend into the whirling ungaieties of her longhand.
“And one from just last week?”
Easier.
At the Laundromat, he had chosen the dryer with a spent fabric-softener sheet teased behind inside it. He brought the sheet home afterward to wonder whether it was more a mysticization of a tissue than a denigration of one. It was sparser in its weave yet harder to tear apart, ready in his hand when unthrobbing things of his life could stand to be swabbed clean.
(He watched his daughter wait a considerate, twinging minute before she set down the tumbler from which she had been sipping her faucet water.)
“Your sister’s the one with the head for memory,” he said. “You ever even once think to ask her?”
Most nights, the man’s hair released its oils into the antimacassar at the back of his chair. The deepening oval of grease could one day be worth his daughters’ touch.
He got the two of them fixed in his mind again.
The older went in for dolled-up solitude but was better at batting around the good in people. Her loves were always either six feet under or ten feet tall because of somebody else.
The younger was a rich inch more favored in height, but slower of statement. Men, women, were maybe not her type. But she was otherwise an infatuate of whatever you set before her—even the deep-nutted cledges of chocolate she picked apart for bits of skin.
They had tilted into each other early, then eased off, shied aside.
Then they were wifely toward him for a night, poising curtains at his streetward windows, hurrying the wrinkles out from his other good pants, running to the bathroom between turns at his dirt. The older holding the dustpan again, the younger the brush—a stooped, ruining twosome losing balance in his favor.
They were on the sofa afterward, each with a can of surging soda.
“Third wheel,” he said, and went into his bedroom to sit. Were there only two ways to think? One was that the day did not come to you whole. It was whiffled. Things were blowing out of it already. Or else a day was actually two half-days, each half-day divided into dozenths, each dozenth corrugated plentifully into its minutes. There was time.
He sat, stumped.
When he looked in on them again, they had already started going by their middle names—hard-pressed, standpat single syllables. Barb and Dot.
The next couple of nights he kept late hours, pulling his ex-wife piecemeal out of some surviving unmindedness. The first night it was only the lay of her shoulders.
On the next: the girlhood browniness still upheld in her hair—a jewelried uprisal of it.
The souse of the cologne she had stuck by.
Budgets of color in her eyelids.
The night it was the downtrail of veins strung in her arms, he had had enough of her to reach at least futilely for the phone.
It was the younger’s number he dialed.
It was a different, lower voice he brought the words up inside of. She had never been one to put the phone down on a pausing stranger.
“People shouldn’t have to be the ones to tell you,” he said.
One night, he went over their childhoods again. Had he done nearly enough?
Their mother had taught them that you can ask anybody anything, but it can’t always be “Do I know you?”
That you had arms to bar yourself from people.
That you had to watch what you touched after you had already gone ahead and touched some other thing first.
That the most pestering thing on a man was the thing that kept playing tricks with how long it actually was.
For his part, he had got it across that a mirror could not be counted on to give its all. If they should ever need to know what they might look like, they were to keep their eyes off each other and come right to him. He would tell them what was there. In telling it, he put flight and force into the hair, nursed purpose into the lips, worked a birthmark into the shape of a slipper.
Each had a room to roam however she saw fit in either fickleness or frailty.
Rotten spots on the flesh of a banana were just “ingrown cinnamon.”
The deep well of the vacuum cleaner accepted any runty jewelry they shed during naps.
The house met with cracks, lashings.
They walked themselves to his chair one day as separates, apprentices at the onrolling household loneliness. The older wanted to know whether it was more a help or a hindrance that things could not drop into your lap if you were sitting up straight to the table. The younger just wanted ways to stunt her growth that would not mean spending more money.
When they were older, and unreproduced, he figured they expected him to start taking after them at least a little. So he now and then let his eyes slave away at the backs of his fingers in the manner of the younger. He raised the older’s keynote tone of gargly sorrow up as far into his voice as it deserved when it came time again to talk about his car, any occult change in how the thing took a curve.
Some nights he saw his ex-wife’s face put to fuming good use on each of theirs. His failings? A waviness around all he felt bad about, a slovenry mid-mouth. Timid, uncivic behaviors that went uncomprehended. Before the layoffs, he’d been a subordinate with at least thorny standing among the otherwise harmable. He had left it to others to take everything the wrong way. (Tidy electrical fires, backups downstairs, wastepaper calculations off by one dim digit.)
From where they had him sitting, to see a thing through meant only to insist on the transparency within it, to regard it as done and gone.
But adultery? It was either the practice, the craft, of going about as an adult, or there had been just that once. Poles above the woman’s toilet had shot all the way up to the ceiling, hoisting shelves of pebble-grained plastic. The arc of his piss was at least a suggestion of a path that thoughts could later take. He went back to the bed and found her sitting almost straight up in her sleep. Her leg was drawn forward: a trough had formed between the line of the shinbone and some flab gathered to the side. It needed something running waterily down its course. All he had left in him now was spittle.
At home afterward: unkindred totes and carryalls arranged in wait beside the door. He poked into the closest one to see whose clothing it might be. His fingers came up with the evenglow plush and opponency of something segregatedly hers. A robe, or something in the robe family.
One night he paid a visit to the building where the two of them lived on different floors. First the older: buttons the size of quarters sewn at chafing intervals into the back panels of what she showed him to as a seat. He had to sit much farther forward than ordinarily. He gave her money to take the younger one out for a restaurant supper. “How will I know what she likes?” she said. Then two flights up to the younger, but she was on the phone. A doorway chinning bar hangered with work smocks blocked him from the bedroom. The bathroom door was open. Passages of masking tape stuck to the plastic apparatus of her hygiene, but unlabeled, uncaptioned. Everything smacked of what was better kept to herself. When she got away from the phone, he gave her money to pick something nice out for her sister. “But what?” she said. “You’ve known her all your life,” he said. “But other than that?” she said.
No sooner did he have the two of them turning up in each other’s feelings again than his own days gave way underneath.
The library switched to the honor system. You had to sign the books out yourself and come down hard when you botched their return shelving. (He gawked mostly at histories, stout books full of people putting themselves out.) He recovered a gorge of hair from the bathroom drain and set it out on the soap dish to prosper or at least keep up. There were two telephone directories for the hallway table now—the official, phone-company one and the rival, heavier on front matter, bus schedules, seating charts. You had to know where to turn. He began breaking into a day from odd slants, dozing through the lower afternoon, then stepping out onto the platform of hours already packed beneath him. It should have put him on a higher footing. He started collecting sleeveless blouses—“shells” they were called. Was there anything less devouring that a woman could pull politely over herself? The arms swept through the holes and came right out again, unsquandered. He tucked the shells between the mattress pad and the mattress and barged above them in his sleep.
The younger showed up with an all-occasion assortment of greeting cards from the dollar store. She fanned them out on the floor so that only the greetings would show.
“Which ones can’t I send?” she said.
“What aren’t you to her?” he said.
“I’m not ‘Across the Miles.’ ”
“Mail that when you’re at the other end of town, running errands.”
Then the movie house in his neighborhood reduced the ticket price to a dollar. It was a thrifty way to do himself out of a couple of hours. He followed the bad-mouthing on-screen or just sat politely until it was time to tip the rail of the side door.
He became a heavier dresser, a coverer.
The older called to say that while the younger was away, she had sneaked inside to screw new brass pulls into the drawer-fronts of her bureau.
“It’ll all dawn on her,” she said.
Before the week wore out, the two of them came by together one night, alike in the sherbety tint to their lips, the violescent quickening to the eyelids. Identical rawhide laces around their necks, an identical paraphernalium (something from a tooth?) suspended from each. Hair toiled up into practically a bale, with elastics. High-rising shoes similar in squelch and hectic stringage. They were both full of unelevated understanding of something they had each noticed on TV—a substitution in the schedule. He had noticed it too. It hadn’t improved him.
They were holding hands.
Each finger an independent tremble.
He had to tell them: “This is not a good time.”
How much better to get the door shut against them now!
His nights were divided three ways. This was the hour for the return envelopes that came with the bills. The utilities no longer bothered printing the rubrics “NAME,” “STREET,” “CITY, STATE, ZIP” before the lines in the upper-left corner. The lines were yours to fill out as you wished.
Tonight: Electric.
_______________
_______________
_______________
He wrote:
Who sees?
Who sees?
Who sees?
The night his car had to be dropped off for repairs, the older one offered to give him a ride home. He faced a windshield-wiper blade braced to its arm by garbage-bag ties. Come a certain age, she was saying, you start thinking differently of the people closest to hand. You dig up what you already know, but you turn it over more gently before bringing it all the way out. It might be no more than that she catches a cold at every change of the seasons. But why had it taken you this long to think the world of it?
He started listening to just the vowelly lining in what she said.
He skipped the casing consonants that made each word news.
It was carolly to him, a croon.
The daughters had wanted their ceremony held in the lunchroom where they worked. Other than him, it was only women who showed—a table’s worth of overfragrant, older coworkers. The officiating one, the day supervisor, wanted to first run down her list of what she was in no position to do. It was a long, hounding list of the “including but not limited to” type. (This was not “espousage”; it was not “jointure”; it was “not in anywise matrimoniously unitudinal.”) Then she turned to the daughters and read aloud from her folder to steepening effect that no matter where you might stand on whether things should come with time, it was only natural for you to want to close up whatever little space is left between you and whoever has been the most in your way or out of the question all this long while, and let a line finally be drawn right through the two of you on its quick-gone way to someplace else entirely. Nobody was twisting your arm for you to finish what you should have been screaming your lungs out for in public since practically day one.
The kiss was swift but depthening.
Then the reception. He was a marvel for once, waving himself loose from the greetings and salutes every time he realized anew that they were intended for the person beside him, or behind.