The Critical Three Minutes

By Mary Morris

MARNI STANDS AT the edge of the landing strip, gazing across the fields. It’s flat as far as she can see. Only the occasional tree interrupts the farmlands. A breeze blows, but it’s hot on the tarmac. She pulls the elastic from her ponytail, and shakes her hair the way a horse shakes its mane. Inside the nearby office her brother, Jamie, is trying to convince a pilot to take her for a ride. “She needs a distraction,” Jamie says.

When Marni called Jamie the week before to say she thought she was going to kill herself, he said, “Don’t. Come here instead.” Jamie has a summer job up in Lake Geneva at the Playboy Club Resort that had recently opened. He’s assistant tennis coach and the tips are good. “Stay a couple weeks,” he told her. “I’ll pay for it.”

Marni arrived two days later in a rental car she drove up from Chicago. His place was small. Just a bedroom and living room/kitchen with a pull-out couch. Jamie offered her his room, but she preferred the couch. She paced at night. Throughout the apartment large-breasted women leered from tossed copies of Playboy. Marni picked one up, glancing at the cover. “I get them for free,” Jamie said by way of explanation.

That evening he took her to the Dim Lit Lounge, which he referred to as “Dimwit,” where a leggy blond in a pink bunny suit and floppy ears brought Marni a few glasses of wine before she moved on to Scotch, and a crooner did a Patsy Cline imitation of “Crazy.” A close-up magician stopped at their table and performed mysterious tricks. “Imagine a card,” he told her. She closed her eyes. “Is this your card?” He pulled it from the deck. Still she was despondent.

“You want to talk about it?” Jamie asked when she was on her second Scotch. Though he was younger by three years, it seemed as if Jamie had gotten all the common sense. He was maybe the only one she could tell. If Marni called her mother with a problem, her mother had a worse problem. “If you think your weather is bad, you should see ours.” “If you think your back hurts, mine is killing me.” If she called to say she was sad, her mother would tell a story about someone who was worse off like poor Mrs. Dietschen from across the way who gassed herself, leaving five small sons. And she couldn’t talk to their father whose entire philosophy of life came from boxing. “Roll with the punches” was the only advice he ever gave.

“No, I don’t.” She looked around the room, and then changed the subject. “Those bunnies make me sad.”

Jamie shrugged. “Well, it’s a job, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.” She stared at the young women, her own age, in their pink and yellow and blue rabbit outfits. She saw broken-hearted parents in Nebraska, trying to believe that their daughter had a modeling career. There was a silence between them that Jamie was good at monitoring. The more silence, the deeper her despair. It took a few moments (“a long count” by Jamie’s estimation) before she raised her glass and asked, “Have you ever been on a train in a station when the train next to you starts to go forward and it gives you the feeling that you’re moving backward? But you aren’t moving at all. In fact you are standing still.”

“Yes,” he said slowly, sipping his beer.

“Well, that’s how I feel...” She poked at the ice in her glass. “All the time.”

Jamie nodded. “Have you considered medication?”

“I don’t need medication.”

“Maybe not but you do need to stop falling off cliffs. What if one day I’m not there to catch you?”

“Then I’ll crash,” she said to her brother. “I’ll burn.”

In the afternoons while Jamie gave lessons, Marni wandered the grounds of the resort or sat in Adirondack chairs, watching golfers hit balls. Once she rented a canoe and paddled around a pond near the resort until it was dark out and Jamie came looking for her. After several days of watching her moping around, he said, “I have a friend who wants to meet you.”

Marni was pretty certain that this was a lie, but she went along anyway. He drove out to a landing strip on the outskirts of large resort property. It was from here that Hugh Hefner shuttled his bunnies and cohorts and executives back and forth from Chicago. When they reached the strip, Jamie got out of the car. There was a small office off to the side and he walked into it. Marni got out as well and stood staring at the dull stretch of prairie.

Dave was busy, Jamie later told her. He didn’t have time to fly somebody’s sister into the sky. He was shuffling papers on his desk, checking his logs. The walls were strewn with maps, regulations, and the autographed pictures of centerfolds. One read, “Thanks for the smooth ride.” Only after Jamie stood there for a few moments did Dave’s gaze drift out to the runway where a tall, tan young woman stood with a mane of chestnut hair, blowing in the wind.

“Is that your sister?” he asked.

“Yes,” Jamie said with a sigh Dave couldn’t begin to fathom.

“That’s her.”

The plane is a Cessna 172 Skyhawk–a small red and white prop with four seats. As Dave touches Marni’s elbow to help her on board, she tugs away. “I’m not sure I want to do this,” she tells him.

But he made a deal that if Jamie went and got him an A&W root beer and a burger, he’d take Marni for a ride. “And I always keep my promises,” he says, foisting her inside.

She’s never been in a cockpit before. Marni feels as if she’s landed in the middle of an egg. In its womb-like quarters it seems as if they are heading on a mission into outer space instead of on a short ride above the Wisconsin Dells. “Strap in,” Dave tells her, pointing to her belt. He turns some knobs and flicks on some switches and the plane begins to whir. In profile he resembles the head’s side of a nickel with his square jaw, firmly set eyes, and thick lips. Not at all like Claude with his thin red lips and moist green eyes. His long white fingers and those wire-rimmed glasses he always took off last thing before bed. Dave gets on the walkie-talkie. “Tower, this is Geneva 219. Do you read me?”

Some kind of static replies as Dave requests permission to take off. He actually says, “Ten Four. Roger and Out. “ Marni thought people only said this on TV. He places one hand on the throttle and the other on the wheel as the plane sputters down the strip. As they taxi, a surge rushes through her groin the way it does when you’re standing on a high place looking down. The ground drops away. It’s as if she’s going to fall off the world. Just a sheer pane of glass stands between her and the abyss. Dave pulls back the wheel as the plane soars higher.

He’s quiet until they reach their cruising altitude of five thousand feet. Then he starts to chat, though it’s really shouting above the roar of the engines. He says something about the clouds. “I still see shapes in them the way I did when I was a boy.” He points to a billowy gray cloud and yells, “Like that’s a mushroom.” Marni thinks of mushroom clouds and Hiroshima. She remembers the co-pilot who looked back and lost his mind.

For a while they say nothing as the little plane cruises above the earth. Below stretches a checkerboard of farmland, some green, some brown. She sees the mouth of rivers. Hillsides dotted with farms, malls, parking lots, lakes, highways. Miniature cars going along the roads. Clothing hanging on lines. Smoke spewing out of plants. Cars motoring along as people scurry about their lives, doing whatever anyone ever does with their day. Go to the office, go to the gym, cook dinner, sleep. She can see into their cars and bedrooms, their schools and stores. The world is a terrarium and she’s gliding above it.

After a few minutes Dave’s bringing the plane in, and Marni realizes that for the first time in months she wasn’t thinking about Claude. In fact for the past fifteen minutes she’s forgotten he ever existed. Dave’s landing is smooth, almost seamless. Marni doesn’t even notice when they touch down. As the plane reaches the end of the runway, does a little spin, then comes a halt, Marni turns to Dave, “Teach me how to fly,” she says.

Somehow Marni had made it through the Sixties relatively unscathed. She’d done her share of drugs and listened to Jefferson Airplane for weeks on end. She’d been teargassed in DC along with everyone else. Now it’s the Seventies and, as she’s crossing the lawn to meet Jamie for dinner, a man stops and asks her to stand still. He’s wearing a khaki safari vest and has a camera around his neck. He puts a hand to his chin and proceeds to look her up and down. They’re standing on a slope of green lawn in daylight so Marni doesn’t feel threatened, but she’s not exactly comfortable either.

“May I help you?” she asks. The man seems to be studying her. He walks around her, checks out her side view, and tells her not to move. “I’ve gotta go,” she says as the man hands her his card. On it is the buxom silhouette of a naked woman.

At the Dim Lit Marni shows Jamie the card. “You should be flattered,” he tells her. “This guy photographs all the centerfolds.” Marni is trying to decide whether she’s flattered or offended (or both) as the same bunny with the pink ears waits on them again. The bunny has a good memory. “You like those Scotches, don’t you, Sweetheart,” she tells Marni in a Midwestern drawl as she saunters away.

“So how was it? In the plane?” Jamie asks — his eyes on the retreating tail.

“I don’t know.” Marni sips her Scotch as she tries to decide what to say. Should she tell him that it was spooky like an episode of “Twilight Zone”? That it was as if in the plane she crossed over into another world? A parallel universe where everything in this world — everything that holds people down or makes them sad — dropped away. She has seen how big the earth is. More vast and empty than she’d imagined. She floated above it like a hot air balloon. She doesn’t want to explain this to Jamie. She doesn’t want to see him cock his head and look at her as if she’s insane. She just knows that in the sky she felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time, and she can’t find the word for it yet. “I want to learn how to fly. That’s all.”

They stagger back to the apartment where Marni tumbles onto the pull-out sofa and proceeds in a slurred voice to tell Jamie about Claude. The day she came home early they’d been living together in Cambridge for almost a year. It was a fluke that she saw him at all but her professor was sick and her class cancelled. Otherwise she might have missed Claude, pulling out of the driveway. She called to him. She waved as he drove by without so much as a nod.

Inside she found the note, saying he was leaving, and a check for two months rent. He hadn’t even waited to say good-bye. A few weeks later she caught a glimpse of him, having brunch with a woman at a little bistro in Duncan Square. They were eating omelets and reading the Sunday paper.

And that’s what sent her into her latest tailspin.

It’s all about thrust,” Dave explains as they sit in the cockpit. “For the plane to lift off the thrust must be greater than the weight of the plane.” He is teaching her about the various buttons and controls. Marni is trying to listen as she gazes at his round, full face. His pale blue eyes. She bets he whistles when he’s changing a tire. “The heavier the plane the greater the thrust must be.” She’d always taken planes for granted. She just assumed that there was some law of the universe that an airplane was able to work its way around. Like a tax loophole. She’d never given it much thought. Now, as Dave is deep into the basics of aerodynamics, she struggles to pay attention. “When the thrust is greater than the pull of gravity, you have lift.”

“Lift.” Marni nods, but she’s wishing he’d stop talking. She doesn’t really want to learn anything. She just wants to do it. This feels like school and thinking about school makes her think about Claude. Because she met him in the library. And then, after he left, she dropped out of school because she found that Romance linguistics lost its appeal. Is he in France, sipping Merlot? Did he get that job with the World Bank? Are his parents relieved that he didn’t marry her? How good is the sex with that girl? “Can’t we just fly?” she asks.

“Sure,” Dave replies. “Let’s go.” He pushes the buttons and knobs. He’s flicking the switches and with the throttle moves the plane in to its take-off position. Marni can’t help but notice his hands. The fingers are thick, almost stubby, not at all like Claude’s. She knows what they say about a man’s fingers. But Dave’s grip is firm and there is something about the way he moves the throttle that sends a ripple through her. Once more the ground goes away. The nose rises and soon a tapestry of green and brown fields, pine forests and marble-blue lakes lie below them. Billowy clouds float by. The earth has no pull. She defies gravity. Claude has no pull on her up here as well. He’s a heavy weight she’s left behind.

“Okay,” Dave says as they reach their cruising altitude, “We’re good. Now you’re going to take over.”

“What?” Marni asks, “You’re kidding, right?”

“But you wanted to learn ...”

“Yes,” Marni protests, shaking her head, “but I didn’t think it would be this soon.”

He points to the wheel in front of her. “It’s like driving a car down the highway. Just keep the nose steady.” She grips the wheel in front of her as he lets go of his, and the plane responds to her touch. “You’ll do fine. It’s the landing and taking off that are hard. Almost all airplane accidents happen during these times. That’s the critical three minutes. Those moments when you take off and before you land. The rest of the time, when you’re in the air, it’s a piece of cake.”

So Marni flies. In her hands the plane feels like a horse. She’s galloping as she does sometimes in her dreams. A strange euphoria comes over her the way it does when her dentist gives her nitrous oxide as he’s about to drill. She never understood that whole Amelia Earhart thing, but now she does. She turns the plane. She heads into a cloud, then skims along below them until it is time to land. Dave leans forward. “I’ll take her from here.”

Dave’s trailer sits in the middle of a field with no other trailers around it. It looks as if a tornado came and just dropped it there. He’s invited her over for a drink after the lesson. “You’ll be home before dark,” he promises. She doesn’t see what harm it can do. Jamie has lessons until nine o’clock that night and it’s not like she’s a kid with a curfew.

Inside the trailer is narrow the same way the cockpit is small and Marni wonders if Dave likes to live in compressed space. If he’d do best in a cocoon. His trailer is tidy, devoid of clutter, but it’s more like a model home than a place where someone lives. He has nothing here that is his own. Not a picture, not a book, not even the requisite free copies of Playboy. He could put everything in a suitcase and be gone on a moment’s notice.

Dave opens the fridge which is empty except for a six-pack, some blocks of Wisconsin cheddar and a stick of butter. He grabs a couple cans of Bud, hands her one, and they settle down into his couch. “So ... you’re taking a vacation from your life, is that it?”

Marni leans back, taking a sip of beer. “Yes, that’s it.” She doesn’t want to tell him about the fellowship she walked away from or the bookstore she now works in, though at odd hours, filling in for the regular staff. And who knows if they’ll take her back when she returns?

“You probably don’t want to talk about school.”

“I don’t mind. I was majoring in Romance linguistics. I learned the grammar of ten languages. I can speak Logudorese.” Dave puts his hands up, indicating he has no idea what she’s talking about. “They speak it in Sardinia,” Marni explains, then wonders if Dave knows where Sardinia is. “In the Mediterranean.”

He nods. “I never was very good in school. I could never sit still.”

“Oh I could sit still,” Marni sighs. “I just couldn’t pay attention. My mind wanders. A lot.” Dave is quiet, listening, but in the lull she can think of little more to say. “I read palms,” she says apropos to nothing. “I have this theory that the palms are the end of the brain.”

He holds up his hands. “So what do you see?”

She looks at his clean, straight lines unlike hers which are fraught with crisscrosses. “You’re not complicated,” she tells him.

“That’s true.” Dave agrees. “I’m not.”

“And you’re living the life you are meant to lead.”

She sounds like a fortune cookie. Still he turns his palms to his face. “You can see that?”

She holds up her hands with their crazy lines like fireworks, a weird road map. “But I am complicated.” Examining her palms, Dave takes them into his own and warms them. He’s still holding on as she gets up, wobbly as a colt. The beer has made her tipsy. She can’t remember when she last ate and the alcohol has gone to her head. “Down the hall, first door on your right,” he says before she has to ask.

The bathroom like the rest of the trailer is long and narrow, and a little grungy. The sink has the remnants of a recent shave. There’s a bit of gunk growing inside the toilet and along the tub. The shower curtain with airplanes zooming across it is the kind you find in little boy’s bathrooms. The room itself, except for an electric razor, a bar of soap and a single cranberry towel is empty. In the hallway she hears Dave is rummaging around in the trailer, and it startles her. It’s almost as if he’s in the room with her. Looking down, she sees the wide gap between the floor and the doorjamb. She’s careful not to make any awkward sounds. But even the tinkle resonates. It isn’t until she’s done that she realizes there’s no toilet paper. “Men,” Marni thinks. She gropes around the back of the toilet and checks the sides for a spare roll, but nothing. She reaches over to the cabinet below the sink and opens it. The cabinet is messy. Cleaning supplies, a plunger, some bars of soap and a spare roll of toilet paper which she grabs are all jumbled together. Behind the spare roll is a box of Tampax. Size Super. It’s open and looks like it’s been sitting under the sink for a while. Marni files this away as useful information. Something to be mindful of as her shrink, whom she stopped seeing when she dropped out of graduate school, would say.

When she returns to the living room, the phone is ringing. Dave has put out a couple more beers and a plate with a few stale crackers and cubes of cheese. “ I’m not going to answer that,” he says. It rings a few more times, then stops as she sits down beside him. He reaches his arm across the sofa and pulls her to him. It is one continuous movement as if they’re performing a dance on ice. His lips are soft and warm like his hands. And they are thick and moist as a slug’s. Claude had such small lips. They were thin slits that barely moved. When they first met, she thought he was pursing them all the time, but they were just small. After he grew a mustache, his mouth seemed to disappear. But his tongue was long and slender as his fingers whereas Dave’s tongue is wide and almost plump. He has her face cradled in one hand, clasping it tenderly as if he fears it might fall off.

The phone rings again, more insistently this time. “Maybe you should get that?”

“If it’s important, they’ll call back.”

But Marni stands up. “I should head out anyway.” She tugs at her shirt, arranges her hair which she ties up with an elastic into a ponytail. As she leaves, Dave is picking up the phone. As she reaches her car, she can hear him say, “We’ve talked about this...” and then she can’t make out the words.

When she gets to Jamie’s, it’s still early. He won’t be done with lessons for another hour or so. Marni surveys his apartment, and realizes that it is a mess. She doesn’t know how she missed it before but her brother has been living in a pigsty and so has she. She opens the freeze that contains a fifth of vodka, pours herself a tumbler from which she sips as she sets to work. She rinses the dishes and scrubs the sinks, the toilet, and his grimy bathtub. She picks up discarded socks and T-shirts along the way. She tosses a load into the washing machine and, as it chugs away, she starts stacking up those old issues of Playboy. Then she opens one.

Inside topless women with huge cleavages strike seductive poses. Bare-bottomed girls bend forward., their dark nipples rising. Marni finishes off the vodka and pours a thimble more. In the mirror she thrusts her chin out and runs her tongue along her teeth. She takes down her hair, clutching it in a pile on top of her head. Stripping down to her underwear, she presses her breasts together and sticks out her rear. She’s never paid that much attention to her breasts but now she does. Men like them. They are soft but sturdy, pointy as traffic cones. Maybe she’ll give that photographer a call. She’s read that they put lipgloss on your nipples and down below too.

As the car pulls up, she’s yanking on her shorts and a shirt. When Jamie walks in, she is folding his laundry. He stares at a neat, pressed pile of his tennis whites. “Wow,” he says. “That’s nice of you.”

“It’s the least I can do,” she replies.

Today we’re going to work on take-off and landings. In fact,” Dave tells her as they situate themselves in the cockpit, “you’re going to take off.”

Marni turns to him, stunned, “I’m going to what?”

“I’ll handle the throttle. You’re just going to pull back on the wheel.” And soon they are taxiing, speeding down the runway. “Okay,” Dave says, “Now bring up her nose. You’ve got the speed. Okay pull her up. Come on, pull.” He coaxes her the way she assumes an obstetrician might, telling her when it’s time to push. The ride’s a little bumpy, but suddenly they are aloft. They’re in the sky, soaring over the lake. She struggles a little to even them out, but then she does. Below them it is all blue. The sky is blue as well. She’s heard that sometimes pilots confuse the sky with the ocean. Loons that crash into asphalt do so as well. She can see why.

When she was a girl, perhaps eight or nine, an airplane crashed into Lake Michigan not far from her home. The high school was turned into a morgue. That weekend as she was riding her bike to a friend’s, a car stopped and a woman, tears streaming down her face, rolled down her window. The driver leaned over and asked if Marni knew the way to the high school and she led them there on her bike. Though she has tried over the years, Marni never forgot that woman’s face.

Before she knows it, it’s time to come in. Dave helps her bring the plane around as they line up with the runway. Once again he places his hands gently on hers. “Now gently drop her nose. Just a little. Slowly, even.” His hand is warm and smooth and when he takes it away, she wants to grab it back again.

The plane is coming down and Marni’s not sure what to do so she just holds steady and it seems as if the ground comes up to meet them. The wheels make a skidding noise as they hit the tarmac. The plane bounces, then touches down again as if it’s bouncing on a mattress.

As she pulls the Cessna over to a side of the field, getting ready to jump out, Dave puts his arm around the back of the pilot’s seat. “Good job,” he says, patting her on the shoulder. In the office he hands her a slim blue volume. On the outside it reads “Pilot’s Log.” He has already written her name across the top along with the half hour of flight experience she’s logged thus far. He adds another half hour, then gives it to her. “Are you free for dinner tonight?”

He takes her to a local steak house in town where they both order the sirloin, baked potatoes, and creamed spinach. “Ah comfort food,” Dave says. Marni knows she is going to spend the night. She doesn’t really want to. She’s not ready for another man to make love to her. But isn’t this the only cure? Moving on? Moving ahead? On to the next. She can’t spend her life standing still. She orders more wine, then a Scotch. She needs to be drunk for whatever is ahead.

Back at his place she stumbles on his arm. He is a slow lover, one who likes to take his time, but she’s wishing he wasn’t. She wishes that he was quick and furious. She wants to take off. She wants to fly. Still he is patient with her. As patient as anyone has been in a long time.

In the morning Marni moves in to Dave’s trailer. “Isn’t this a little sudden?” Jamie who was worried when she didn’t come home the night before asks. “You could have called,” he told her when she wandered in just after dawn and flopped down on the sofa bed.

Marni frowns. “I’m sorry. I should have.” They both know she’d had too much to drink.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asks as she starts tossing her things into a duffel bag.

But Marni doesn’t care. “I’ll be fine,” she says.

“Well, you’re being a little impulsive.”

She looks at her little brother, standing there, arms crossed, that petulant look on his face. He could be six years old, angry about a borrowed toy. She has to resist the impulse to start making funny faces to make him laugh. She has to look away. “It’s a fling. Haven’t you ever had a fling?”

“Yes, I’ve had flings.” Jamie looks at her thoughtfully as if he is really thinking about this. “But I wouldn’t go from the pot into the fire.”

Dave makes her a little room in his closet and gives her a dresser drawer. She hasn’t brought very much and she takes up so little room. That afternoon he has a flight to Midway to pick up a famous movie director who is coming to Lake Geneva to buy a racehorse. Marni marvels at this. That you can fly on a private jet and purchase a horse. She goes along for the ride. On the flight down Dave gives her time at the wheel as they sail across Lake Michigan. Later he will add this to her log.

As they fly back the movie director never says a word. The sun is glaring, and the sky is on fire. Once her father wrapped her in a blanket and drove her out to a cornfield to watch the sun set. A sherbet sky of lemon, lime and rose. He held her on the hood of the car as he showed her that Midwestern sunset and all the promise and disappointment it held for him at the same time.

That evening Marni stands in the middle of Dave’s trailer, slicing zucchini and carrots, and a calm comes over her. It’s as peaceful as if she is lying on a beach, being washed over by waves. She can do this. Stand in a kitchen, preparing a meal. Listen to the hum of a man, straightening up, setting the table. She hasn’t really understood this before, but it is possible to just be in the moment. To live right here in the present and be content. She recalls the lines in Dave’s hands. Uncomplicated.

And she thinks of all that has been happening in her life. Her lack of direction. Her tormented loves. None of this seems to matter. It’s all drifted away. She is here in this trailer in Wisconsin, stirring a simmering pot of ground beef and tomatoes. The hic et nunc, that’s what her old philosophy teacher once said. The here and now. The past is over. The future unknown. She is experiencing the simple pleasure of chopping vegetables while contemplating her meal. She’s making dinner for her lover, her brother who says he’s bringing his new girlfriend. What more can a person ask of this world?

Marni gazes out across the expanse of prairie. There’s nothing much out there. Just a great swath of emptiness. And she’s a part of it. She’s a part of it all. Looking out the window onto the prairie, she feels something she hasn’t felt in a long time. It has taken her a while to put a name on it. That feeling she felt up in the air and, now, here, making a simple meal. It comes to her with a clarity that is surprising. Possibilities. That is what’s been missing. For the first time in a long time she sees that she has possibilities.

Marni smiles, picking up her knife again. Jamie said he’d bring up some wine. What about dessert? Maybe he could find some nice strawberries too. She’s wondering if strawberries are in season when the front door slams. Before she has time to turn, a hand grabs her from behind, takes hold of her ponytail and swings Marni around like a tetherball. Marni screams, clutching the back of her head, as an Amazon with piercing blue eyes drags her to the floor. She’s huge with tawny skin and ferocious eyes as she tries to hold Marni on the ground. Their breasts mash together as the woman straddles her. She reaches for the vegetable knife Marni had been using to peel carrots and prepares to draw it across her throat. “No,” Marni cries, struggling to roll away when suddenly Dave is upon them. He tackles her and she topples over, banging against the floor.

“Stop it, Kimberly. I’m not kidding. Stop it.” She’s slapping him, her fingers arched like talons, as he knocks the knife out of her hands and sends it flying across the room where it disappears beneath the sofa. Then he struggles to pin her to the floor. Marni sits up on the floor, touching her head to make sure her hair is all there. It is, but it hurts and she rubs the spot as Dave and Kimberly wrestle on the floor. He pins her down. She spits in his face and he slaps her. With her free arms, she slaps him back, then tries to claw his face.

Then he pins her back down as she spits once more like a venomous snake. “Kimberly, stop it.” Marni is stunned by the force of their passion. It’s odd , watching them slap at each other. It’s like watching two people make love, the way they grab and fight. The way they roll around as if they’re alone in the room, performing a private act that no one should see. Then it’s over. Dave rises from his knees and Kimberly is up. He grabs at her, but she skirts away. She’s six feet tall and entirely beautiful as she stomps out of the kitchen, goes into the bathroom, and slams the door.

Marni stares at Dave, waiting for an explanation as the two of them sit on the floor, huffing, not saying a word to one another. The trailer is very quiet. Dave rises slowly. Painfully as if she has actually hurt him, which she hasn’t, he makes his way to the bathroom door. “Kim,” he mutters, tapping, “you’ve got to leave.” Then slightly louder, “Kim,” he’s banging now, “you can’t stay here.”

But there’s no answer. Nothing greets him but silence. “You’ve got ten minutes. Then I’m calling the police.” Only a few minutes pass before he knocks again. “I’m calling them right now.”

Still not a word.

Marni sits sprawled on the floor. Her hair is down and the spot where her ponytail was yanked aches. She’s checking her neck for signs of blood when Dave comes into the kitchen, heaving a big sigh, “I’m sorry.”

“Who is she?”

He pulls up a stool and sits down close to Marni. “My ex-girlfriend,” he whispers. “ I broke up with her a couple weeks ago. But she’s been calling. I think she suspected something was going on.”

“Women’s intuition,” Marni whispers back. “What’s she doing now?”

“She’s locked herself in the bathroom.” He rests his face in his hands.

“Well, what should we do?” It seems odd to go on with a meal with an estranged lover locked in the bathroom.

“I don’t know,” Dave says.

Marni thinks about this for a few moments. “Maybe we should just make dinner like we planned. She’ll have to come out eventually.”

Dave nods. “There’s something wrong with her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, she’s sick, not in the head though she may be sick in that way as well. She can’t have children.” He hesitates. “There’s something wrong with her womb.”

“That’s terrible...I feel sorry for her.”

“Oh she can conceive, but the babies don’t stick.”

“They don’t stick?” Marni, who has retrieved the veggie knife from under the sofa, is turning it in her hand.

“You know, like Teflon. She has a Teflon womb.” A Teflon womb. Marni puts the knife down. She finds herself liking Dave less and less. “Yes, she only just found out. That’s sort of when she went nuts on me...” He pauses. “We’re going to have to use the bathroom sooner or later.”

Marni goes back to the stove, stirring the pot. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” she says.

Half an hour later Jamie arrives. He’s brought wine and peaches (strawberries being out of season) and a date who looks vaguely familiar. It takes Marni a moment to realize that the blond-haired woman in jeans and a tank top is the bunny who waited on them at the Dim Lit Lounge. “I’m Jennifer.” She wiggles her hands up around her head. “You probably didn’t recognize me without my ears.” She looks different in the light of day and out of her bunny outfit. Older than her years, perhaps a little the worse for wear.

“Nice to meet you,” Marni replies. “Well, formally meet you, that is.”

Dave hands everyone a beer. “We’ve got a little problem.” He explains that his ex-girlfriend has locked herself in the bathroom and refuses to come out. “So we won’t be able to use the bathroom.” Jamie and Jennifer stare dumbly at Dave.

Jennifer shakes her head. “This is very strange,” she says.

Marni nods. “I know. It is, but the pasta is ready. We should eat.” They sit down at the cardtable over which Marni has put a bed sheet as Dave piles the pasta into bowls and Jamie uncorks the wine. They sit with plates of steaming pasta before them, eating in silence. It is hard to know what to say over dinner with a woman locked in the bathroom. After a little while they hear the sound of water running. Dave gets up and presses his ear to the door, then returns to the table. “I think she’s taking a bath,” Dave says.

“Maybe she’s slitting her wrists,” Jennifer says, alarmed.

“I doubt it,” Dave replies. “I use an electric.” Marni nods. It’s true; she heard him shaving with it that morning.

“What if she brought her own razor with her? Jennifer keeps her head down, twirling spaghetti onto her fork. From the bathroom they hear the sound of water sloshing as if a big fish is swimming in the tub. Then they hear the gurgle of the drain. Dave has to take a leak. Jamie too. “We should’a held off on that wine,” Dave says. Both men go outside. From her seat at the table Marni can see their backs through the picture window as they piss, standing just a few feet away from one another, against a tree. Her brother and her lover look like Roman sentinels, standing tall, legs apart, guarding the walled city. Another sound like a motor comes from the bathroom. “She’s drying her hair,” Jennifer says.

“She must be hungry,” Marni says. She gets up and takes a cereal bowl from Dave’s cabinet because they are using all the plates. She heaps spaghetti with the meat sauce she made and starts to pour a glass of red wine, then thinks better of it. She pours apple juice instead. As Jennifer sits, watching her, Marni goes to the bathroom door and knocks gently. “Kimberly, I’ve brought you some food. Would you like to eat?”

Not a peep. Not a sound. But Marni sees her shadow, moving in the space between the floor and the doorjamb. In the small space Kimberly is pacing like a tiger in a cage.

“Okay, well I’m leaving the food right here at the door in case you’re hungry.”

As Marni returns to the table, the men come in. They all sit down to resume their meal. A few minutes later they hear a door open, then slam again. Marni peers down the vestibule and sees that the bowl is gone. “Oh, she’s eating. That’s a good sign.”

The two men look at each other. “She needs to leave,” Jamie says. Dave agrees.

“She needs time,” Marni offers.

Jennifer nods. “That’s right. She does.” The women gaze up at the men. The bathroom door opens, then slams again.

Marni goes to the corridor and sees that the bowl and glass have been left outside the way guests do in hotels when they don’t want to be disturbed. Marni goes to the door. Below Kimberly’s shadow pauses, standing opposite Marni on the other side of the door, then starts moving again. Marni presses her face to the door, then whispers, “Kimberly, I understand. I am sorry I’m here.” She waits to hear a sound. “If you come out, we can talk.”

Marni puts her ear to the door, but there is only silence. She hesitates for only a moment, then kneels down on the floor. Bending forward, she slips her fingers in the space beneath the door where the shadow keeps moving. She stays this way for a while. She’s about to give up when fingers make their way under the door until they touch hers. They are cold and red. The nails brittle. “Don’t leave me,” Kimberly says.

“I won’t,” Marni replies.

She’ll stay until Kimberly is ready to open the door.