Three letters, postmarked from Springfield. Three sealed letters from her mother, thick with hidden words. Perhaps very important words. She could see the ink’s coiling shadows through the envelopes. She could even make out a word: evening. A word not so nerve-racking as tragic but not so dismissible as groceries. It could be a tragic evening her mother was relating to her. It could be a dismissible evening of groceries and guess what was on sale? How brave and optimistic of her mother to send the letters in a sealed envelope. Certainly she could have guessed that Jean would have no intention of opening them.
The letters’ thickness felt thicker than her skull. She was awake and no one was around.
The ramada, overhead shingles painted like palm leaves, had kept her in the shade, all except her feet. She had one shoe on and one shoe off. She almost felt cold. The three old ladies were gone. Their cleared table so empty, a white hole in the air. The muted clacking of poker chips, gone. She’d liked that sound. It had penetrated the blankness she had fallen into, for a few moments anyway, and then it had fallen away, too. Where was everyone? Where were her children? Her heart flared; then she remembered that Jo would be with them. She turned her head one way and smelled chlorine. She turned her head the other way and smelled the sandwiches. To the left she breathed in chemicals of possibility, flight, even happiness. To the right the tuna-fish odors of chores, decay, dereliction.
In her hand the three letters from her mother. Her own head, more papery than the envelopes. The envelopes were stiffened and thick from all the pages of words inside. Their contents, spilling with her mother’s verbosity, had strengthened the envelopes into a shield. There was that word, evening. What about evening? What had happened to her mother that evening?
Her mother had slept in the bathtub growing up. So far she had told only funny stories about it.
Her head all papery like something was about to jump out.
It was Jimmy Splendid who jumped out. He was suddenly there across the pool. The sun was in her eyes. He was a moving dark statue who blocked the sun, then posed before her. His silhouette: broad shoulders, big legs, a square face oblonged by a crest of thick hair and almost lantern jaw. She couldn’t see any of his features or the pockets she knew must be on his khaki vest—too darkened, she was staring into the sun— but it was Jimmy Splendid. Her brain had rushed ahead and identified him. Which made her think, He must be inside my head. I must be dreaming him.
“Are you all right?”
She decided not to answer. Or rather, she got lost in all the possibilities of answers.
With his sitting down came a rapid sunrise. The sun shot up from his head. So that’s how it happens, so easily, things jumping out of your head. Now she saw his features and they were mildly squinting at her and his head was tilted inquisitively.
He picked up the letters from the cement and laid them on her lap. His hands were warm and bulky, and as he said, “Do you remember me?” the hands locked around hers. There was something nurse-like in the way he squeezed both sets of fingers. His hands were hot, and she didn’t know if he was real.
“What in the world happened out there?” His tending hands had found their resting place on her knees. Her knees, which were close to her thighs. She was looking at him, trying to place his handsome face. He was in the movies. He played the fiancé the leading lady thought she was in love with until she met the far less handsome James Stewart. Was Jimmy Splendid as boring as his handsomeness made him out to be? Her knees, which she had previously thought of as all bone, turned into hot circles of flesh. She could feel her unprotected brain bypassing its usual routes. She was aware of her body in a way she hadn’t been for years.
Early in her marriage she had doubted very much that she should have married at all (the doubts lasting, to be honest, until she was suddenly cut off from marriage, widowed). Marriage seemed to attract the enthusiastically boring. Those who weren’t boring were unhappy. At any police lineup she could have picked them out: the young happily marrieds from the young unhappily marrieds from the young not married at alls. How completely divergent they all looked, how graded in allure.
She told herself that the twentieth century was different from, for example, 1800s England, her favorite period to hate, with everyone avoiding suicide by taking hours to dress, using up all of the morning so that they had only afternoon and evening to worry about getting through. A husband and wife slept in separate bedrooms and had coitus that produced issue, but blunt erotic need sent the man to someone else who was less boring by definition, who was wild, who might be a servant, and the adventure (for it seemed an adventure after what took place in the wife’s bedroom) might be with shocking dirty words on a game-butchering table in the bowels of the scullery.
But then she had children herself and she realized how this whole thing worked. The wife didn’t need the game-butchering table. Her need for eros was fulfilled by her children. There was no need for the husband anymore. And it was always a dance to keep the husband away.
That was a long time ago. She hadn’t thought about it for years. The strangled romantic needs with her husband had been satisfied by kindred erotic love for her children, and then something else, life and death, had rendered marital passion trivial. But now it was back, and by the end of this hasty route her brain could barely be bothered escorting her through, her thoughts had forged a new conclusion: desire. She was burning with desire for Jimmy Splendid. There was nothing that could hold her back, any more than she could stay his traveling hands.
Fortunately, a car pulled up and honked, and Miss Dazzle stepped out of the DeSoto. The children weren’t with her.