for EKA
IN THE END, all she had was, well, the whatnots: doodads as odd and silly and, to use her daddy’s phrase, downright unnecessary as tits on a teacup, whatchamacallits useless and excessive enough to offend a soul as merry and rich as Old King Cole. To her, it was “stuff,” no more sensible to have than was a bikini at the North damn Pole. But afterward—-after he’d moved to Dallas, and July had turned into November, and there was scarcely an A, B or C about him she did not dream of—she found herself unable to junk any of it—which, as she told the plenty in Las Cruces who listened, was the problem, wasn’t it?
She’d met him, the lawyer, at the Southside Johnny concert at the Pan Am Center at NMSU, and later, when they knew each other by first name and she could see he wasn’t just a spiffed-up cowboy with spit for brains, he took her to El Patio, a bar in Old Mesilla, and, what with his talk about wrongful employer discharge and antitrust (plus an entire chorus of “It’s Not Unusual” he could hum the Tom Jones of), he succeeded in more or less sweeping her right off her too-damn-big feet.
At first he didn’t spend the night. He’d call her at the bank, Frank Papen’s ten-story eyesore on Main Street across from the Loretto Shopping Center, and say how about the greyhound races in Juarez. Or dinner at the Coronado Country Club in El Paso. Or let’s go up to Picacho Hills and play ourselves some golf. And she’d go, him the sort who watched his language and used his turn signals and was at pains to say “Excuse me” every time he went to the gents’. They’d bet the dogs, or eat high on the hog, or play nine holes of the most agitated golf in the desert, then he’d drive to her house on Calle del Sol, the three-bedroom piece of cardboard her old man had bought her after she graduated from ENMU in Portales.
They’d sit around watching Letterman or Leno and whatever shoot-’em-up TNT had on cable, maybe do a little reefer she kept in her nightstand, trade shots or just drink straight from the bottle, then they’d make love, as shy and solicitous and eager-beaver as what the word naughty tells us. But he never stayed over. You’d hear him in the A.M., clattering in the bathroom, getting into his pants, humming sha-la-la’s from the Beatles half of history, and next he’d be at her ear, saying, Goodnight, Cheeks. Or Babycakes. Or Sweet Chips. Crapola that there ought to be a law against using with an honest-to-goodness grown-up.
By Halloween, the stuff had started coming in. The Turdriffics first, no kidding. Miniature soccer and football players made out of, get this, sanitized horse manure.
“Whoa,” she said. “What the devil?”
But he raised his finger to his lips, storybook and sweet-as-you-please: “Shhhhh.”
Next arrived the leather ashtray. After that a plaster-of-Paris frog in polka-dot panties and brassiere. An argyle sock to fit King Kong. The USS Constitution in a bottle. Ex Libris bookplates. Then, yup, books: The Redneck Way of Knowledge, which was blank, and a pound of Nostradamus gobbledygook that should have been. A Beefeater gin refrigerator magnet. Sea monkeys. Ash from Mount St. Helens. Alvin and the Chipmunks reciting Hamlet, that section about being and not.
“What on earth?” she said. “What the heck?”
And each time, his face lit by that smile the white-collar teach the blue- in Disneyland, he’d say it was for fun. Gags to cheer everybody up. Laughter, medicine, all that jazz.
A week later he’d told her he loved her. Gosh: All those words, and without the singsong that gooey is. And she, caught off guard by the sixty-pound concrete candlestick sitting at her feet, asked him, please, pretty-please, to repeat himself. He got down on one knee, à la Valentino, clasped his hands across his chest, his an expression that shot right to the core of her.
“No kidding,” he said.
Around them—on the floor, against the walls, chockablock on the shelves he’d nailed up one weekend—were six months of UPS and parcel post: a game of Twister, a crackpot’s idea of the Eiffel Tower in toothpicks, a Bayer aspirin the size of a chafing dish, every color Pez candy in the universe, a papier-mâché Roman Coliseum, and here came those words again—and again and again, as remarkable as a blizzard in Panama. Wait, she told herself, and tried to. Wait. But she got only to three-Mississippi before she yanked him up by the necktie, her heart thudding in her throat, saying that, gosh Almighty, she loved him, too.
She really, really did.
Still the stuff came—each the each that special is. A wrought-iron Liberace. Three “Money Back Guaranteed” pennies from heaven. A state-of-Alabama-approved electric chair (batteries not included), an old-timey hat box that said DO NOT OPEN; CURSE IN EFFECT and an ooh-la-la nightgown that in block letters warned moms and dads everywhere to KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN—itself an hour’s worth of ha-ha-ha. And she supposed the stuff would be coming still if, of course, he hadn’t told her in July that he’d taken a new job. In Texas.
She was sitting and he wasn’t; then he was and she’d found the other dozens of places in the room to lean against. She felt like a juggler, tossing one apple—or a chain saw—beyond her limit—an absurd image.
It was an opportunity, he said. The chance of a you-know-what. Dewey & Howes was the yamma-yamma-yamma: After a moment she didn’t know what he was saying, only that, eyes fixed to the left of him or to the right or on what was reported to be a certified hairball from a certified Montana polled Hereford, she was saying yes, the do-or-die parts of her insides cracking or instantaneously drying up.
Yes, she did understand.
Yes, they would stay in touch.
Yes, this was rotten luck.
Yes, no reason this had to change anything. There was, after all, Trailways and American Airlines and her own Buick LeSabre. Yes, yes, yes—a hiss that, for all the difference it made, you could have heard in Zululand.
They made love that night, their last. They mumbled “pardon me” a lot. And “sorry.” And damn near tried to keep their give-and-take free of any chitchat that had an L or an O or a V or an E in it—trying, it seemed already, to reach each other across time and distance, plus whatever other dimensions heartache could be measured by.
As before he got up early and, courtesy of a Ronald Reagan night-light, he tiptoed around the bedroom, pulling on his loafers, tucking his shirt in, zipping his trousers. A minute later he stood in the bathroom, combing the hair he was proud of, brushing his teeth, gargling, and making the other sounds it was not possible to ignore—those ten or ten million notes the Rolling Stones had once upon a time used to assert that things were bad and might not get better. Then, appearing like a ghost beside her, he bent to her ear, the smell of him as hopeful and promising as the money she was around day after day after day.
“Goodnight, Oodles,” he said.
The first man after that was a polo player from that Hurd rich-boy bunch up the Hondo Valley near Ruidoso, a so-and-so as subtle in courtship as a thunderclap. Next was an Aggie assistant basketball coach, Irk Something Something: On the dance floor of the Roadrunner Lounge and to the wah-wah of Uncle Roy and the Red Creek Wranglers, he didn’t even make it to the bridge of “Loving on Back Streets” before he was whispering sweet blah-blah-blahs about Helen of Troy and Cleopatra, anybody from any age with the right chromosomes. So, while she waited for the tabs and slots of herself to fit together correctly, there wasn’t anybody.
Away from work, she felt lost. She didn’t stop at, say, My Brother’s Place. No Cork ’n’ Bottle. One time she went into Ikard’s Furniture across the street, but without him—the lawyer—it wasn’t the same. She didn’t know, for example, what the dickens could be done with a settee. So she went home. Watched Sam Donaldson pick on some undersecretary of whatever. She made it about a third into The Name of the Rose, always quitting where what’s-his-name, you know, found about the thousandth croaked monk. Jeepers, what a life, ratty and cockeyed and dull. She watched ESPN, the International Barefoot Skiing Championships, and then switched the channel to yell the questions at the boneheads on Jeopardy.
Sure, she and the lawyer talked, fairly often at first. He called her—what?—Sweetums or Honey Bunch, bragged about the Simon Legrees he’d saved a dozen good guys from, asked when she was coming for a visit.
“Six Flags,” he said. “The Texas Schoolbook Depository.”
That was his word, visit, as if she were one of his Lambda Chi brothers, as if he weren’t the only person she’d ever, ever, ever wrenched herself inside out for. He didn’t mean to be cruel, she knew, but there it was anyway—miles and miles of dirt and weeds and a big blank sky between what was and what most assuredly was not. It was a form of fate, she decided, forces as manifest as the Elvis Presley piggy bank on her bureau. Sometimes the bear this, sometimes the bear that—wasn’t that how love went? Yin for an hour, yang for two.
No, she assured him, she wasn’t mad.
No, not upset.
No, not at all.
And suddenly he was gone, in regard to love nothing to listen to except the crackle and buzz that hanging up sounds like.
One day she tried to get rid of his stuff, the goodies. In the kitchen, she sought to imagine the world without sixty percent of the doohickeys piled on her dinette table. Without the clamshell lamp. Without Christ on a Crutch. Without that glow-in-the-dark Thumbelina or Tinkerbell that some Taiwanese Wong Ho had snazzed up with a Scarlett O’Hara hoop skirt and a rhinestone wand.
From the utility room she dragged out a box, but, after coming oh-so-close to just plopping into it whatever she grabbed first, she thought what the hell and started wrapping each piece in newspaper—the dribble glass, the New Guinea witch doctor’s shrunken head—as if, like in the poem, so much depended on the relation of one object to another, and that to yet another, until all objects—this plastic piece of lunacy and that—were related exactly as, well, fate had intended.
An hour whooshed by. Down the street, the ice-cream truck was playing its chimes, “Popeye the Sailor Man.” An Uncle Sam know-it-all had come on NPR to say who was losing in Latvia, Estonia, among poor Baltic bastards everywhere. Another voice, this also sleepy and full of private schooling, repeated gossip about—who?—Johannes Brahms maybe. Christ. She poured a drink, Johnnie Walker, poked at a ham-salad sandwich, and then she found herself, chin on her hand, wondering what the dickens she was going to do. She had a box. It was full. Now what?
From the phone book she scribbled down the numbers of the DAV, the Salvation Army, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, and she was only two digits from a tax-deductible donation when she realized, as much with her heart as with her head, that by the weekend she could be telling a do-gooder named Tito or Floyd that what he had lugged to his truck was a genuine imitation-body-part chess set: toes, ears, eyeballs—the works. A token of affection.
That Friday she went out with the service manager for Lackey Chevrolet-Toyota. It was November, time not to be damaged anymore.
Grow up, she had scolded the self in the mirror. Pull the shoulders back. Put on a happy face.
They drove to the Double Eagle, where she ate, she had to admit, like a pig. Gulf shrimp the size of a fat man’s fingers. Chicken stuffed, rolled, dipped, and every other cooking verb from France. In the lounge, knee-to-knee in chairs so low you needed help to climb out, they had cocktails: a bourbon for him, for her a green thing with a paper parasol. He was her age, twenty-eight, and divorced but not nearly ruined from it. He was a Libra to her Cancer—the two of them, they agreed, as suitably matched as any with houses and cusps and sun-sign mumbo jumbo.
At her doorstep, she thought to invite him in—God, she did not want to call it a nightcap—but she wondered how to explain the, you know, stuff. The coasters from Triassic-period limestone. The shopping bag of Wacky Wall Walkers: The s-t-u-double-f.
It was late, he said. Big day tomorrow, Saturday, he had to go.
She started counting again—one-Mississippi, two—numbers enough to say or do anything that could be said or done in her condition. She imagined she was already in bed alone, staring at the two-person sombrero on the wall. She remembered the dreams she’d had—how weird they were, and the cold, the way they seemed to afflict a look-alike named Mary Jo.
He’d call in the morning, he said. Okay?
She considered his eyes, which weren’t a whit like the lawyer’s; and his hands-on-hips way of keeping his tummy in.
Why not? she said. That would be terrific.
And then, the second after she jiggled her key in the lock, he kissed her as she hadn’t been kissed since high school, lips too mashed to be anything but meaningful.
She tried to love him after this. Boy, did she.
At the bank, a mortgage application from a Greene or a Mendoza spread on the desk like gigantic playing cards, she’d think of the ways her service manager was good to her. He liked slow-dancing—the Conversation, the Quarter-Waltz—and even knew the “alibi,” a ballroom trick for getting out of a corner. He could boil Italian, he said, a joke. Raised a Baptist, he didn’t know what he was now (here his hands flew all over the place, like crazed birds), but he believed in something, if only the whole being greater than the sum of its widespread parts. He’d played football for the Aggies, but, not altogether engaged by the biology and American lit and Tuesday-Thursday sociology he sat through, he quit. He knew about flowers: zinnias, azaleas, the herb family. When he was going to be late, he called. He didn’t nag her about smoking, and, best of all, that first night he actually entered her house, the night they slept together, he didn’t utter one evil thing about the knickknacks she was the full-time mistress of.
“Neat” was what he exclaimed. He couldn’t believe it. Wow. He picked up the itty-bitty Hong Kong rickshaw, studied it as thoroughly as painstakingly pointless handiwork can be studied.
“Will you look at this,” he said. He touched the Popsicle-stick birdcage, the .44 Magnum cigarette lighter, the Texas jackalope. “Geez.”
It was clear, she thought, that he loved her—that his, too, was a world tilted and loose and loud—and she wished she could see inside him (as she could see inside her anatomically correct man doll) and thus find out what his organs were doing. His thumping heart. Those pink, wet wrinkles of the brain.
She took his hand, smelled on it the work he did, and steered him toward the bedroom. She would learn something, she hoped, and when they were undressed, his outfit more neatly hung than hers, she did.
“The lawyer,” she began.
Her service manager was holding her—his name was Bobby and he was blond, even his movie star mustache—and here she was, hers the tone best used for “true” and “false” in school, telling about a guy, the lawyer, who’d filled her up and set her spinning; a man who’d given her eight “because’s” for every event, good or bad, under high heaven.
She described a trip to White Sands—the national monument, not the missile range—and how the sun worked in that flat, wasted world, and what common animals the clouds were, plus who said what when, and why time went bang-bang-bang. She told Bobby about the afternoon the lawyer shampooed her hair, the nerves he’d struck.
Her service manager was holding her—his name, yes, was Robert Ray Dunbar and he could sew a coat button, he supposed, and spoke enough Mayfield High School Español to be understood in jail—and here she was, harebrained as any mad scientist she’d heard of, talking about, as it has been talked about to her, asset-based financing, as well as which Japanese sedan to buy and why. She told him about window-shopping with the lawyer, in particular sighing over a bed big as a wrestling mat and how scared or dumbstruck he’d been, as if humbled by what could be accomplished in that faraway corner or this. The lawyer hailed from Nebraska, she said. A Cornhusker. His parents were Ellen and Russell. He’d had a mutt named Moe, after the Stooge. He threw right-handed, hated brussels sprouts, read Stephen King and anything Time magazine said was funny. Salsa made his nose run. In eighth-grade shop he’d planed a mahogany table, kissed his first girl the night Jimmy Carter campaigned in Omaha—what else?
She was shaking. She had taken everything out, she believed, hook by hasp by hinge by nail, and now she was herself a million-zillion thingamajigs, each vital and tiny and dumb, and she guessed she had only four-three-two minutes to find them there and there and there and so make herself whole again.
“What else?” she said. “What?”
Her service manager held her—his name, Lordy, was Bobby, like a kid, a charter member of the Vic Tanny Health Club on the bypass—and here she was, watching her arms tremble and ordering herself, for crying out loud, to pay attention: There was much in life to know and maybe life enough to know it.
“It’s all right,” he was whispering. “Truly.”
Then, not with all his might, he squeezed her, this decent Bobby person, and she grew curious to learn what he might say, or do, if he discovered that beneath him now, wriggling and moaning “ah-ah-ah,” was not her at all but only the bone and hair and flesh of a fool using her name.
Each day, she thought, became a wall between herself and the lawyer. Each day a wall. She tried new food—Thai and Jewish—and this too became part of a wall. So did the clothes she bought: the too expensive espadrilles, a blouse a red she’d never seen before, underwear as wicked as she could stand without snickering. The wall, she told herself. She subscribed to Southwest Art and, more foolish business, to the Sporting News, aiming to lose herself in the mysteries unique to batting averages and Remington Indians on the warpath. She and Bobby went to the community theater at the old State movie house on the downtown mall, what had once been as bleak and windswept and jerkwater a main street as any she could conceive of, and, sitting in the front row, she willed herself into that September-remember world of The Fantasticks or into what woe-is-me drama eight bucks had bought. Another day. Another wall.
One weekend—was it already May?—they went to Albuquerque, driving almost without saying a word, nature racing past at sixty, sometimes seventy, miles per hour, Bobby’s pickup as quiet as a capsule in deepest space. He had something to tell her, he announced when they reached the Holiday Inn. She didn’t have to listen, he said, but he was going to speak his mind anyway.
She regarded herself and this place. There were no windup toys, no herky-jerky contraptions that chattered and squeaked and went snap-crackle-pop. There was a bed, not seriously meant to live with, and a too-high table and a too-hard chair and a Motorola color TV, plus carpet that must’ve been the ugly brown that easing cleaning is—but no felt cloth duck appliqué flyswatter. No coffee mug with elephants on it playing basketball. No four-leaf clover hunting hat for Bullwinkle the moose.
Instantly she knew what Bobby was hemming and hawing about, the exact words he’d use, what the entire unfair, stupid me-me-me sentence would be. Even if he took a half hour, even if he stood on his head (which he could), it would start with “I” and end a billion years later with “you.”
“Don’t,” she said.
He snatched up her suitcase, set it down, moved it twice more, then told her “Fine,” his expression sideways and not simple as one-plus-one anymore, and then—bless him—he said anew what a grand old time they’d have that night.
In July, she took her vacation, which, except for a weekend at her daddy’s cotton farm outside Portales, she spent at home. In the afternoons, content with himself and everything else under the sun, Bobby came over, usually with a six-pack of Bud Light, one with a bottle of Cuervo Gold that they quit before they reached the bottom of. Bobby fixed the grease trap in the kitchen sink. He barbecued, his a secret sauce with one part peanut butter. They went roller-skating, did the hokey-pokey with nearly one hundred other folks thrilled to be falling down. Oh, it was summer, the valley hot as those drugstore joke postcard scenes of hell, the sky too far up to be real or blue. She lay on her stomach in the backyard, her pillow a Scrooge McDuck beach towel, her bathing suit a two-piece she hadn’t worn since college.
“Bobby,” she said.
Two giant steps away, he was on his knees, painting an Adirondack chair he’d thought would be cheap to send away for, and immediately she didn’t know why she’d called his name or what, if anything, might blurt out of her. He was wearing Bike athletic shorts, splotched green from the bucket at his feet.
“Bobby Dunbar,” she said, at last sure what was going to be said next.
She had been thinking about the heat—the dry, close, mean kind this world was—and now his head came up, cocked, his hair so white you wondered how he got here to Planet Earth.
“Yes,” he said. Not yeah, not huh, not what. Yes.
So, given what was what and who who, she wondered the only wonder she could: “Are you happy?”
He looked—wasn’t this goofy?—high and low, as if he’d lost his wallet, and said at last, as she knew he would, “Sure”—an answer that came with a smile and shrug. “What about you?”
A neighbor dog was barking, Rex, somewhere a door slammed too hard, and way off Mikey-Mikey-Mikey was being hollered for.
“Yes,” she said. “I guess I am.”
And in a moment, the center of her still as night, she actually was. Happy. She had a thought, too fast to catch up to; then another, this the one to hold. In her bathroom, above the toothbrush holder, was a Siamese cat clock, its tick-tocks eyes that blinked each second. So was she really happy? On her dresser sat a wooden, hobnailed boot pencil holder. Was she? In her guest lavatory hung Esperanto wallpaper. Yes, she was.
Still on her stomach, she watched Bobby painting—swish, swish, swish. Here was a man who couldn’t whistle, who loved Fernando Valenzuela and every other Los Angeles Dodger, who was allergic to mustard. Here he was.
Eyes closed now, she was concentrating, a picture in her mind of gizmos tightened and arranged and sorted and swept clean away, of a room empty as the horizon, of surfaces shined and sterile and hard; of herself, strong and honest as a nickel, letting go of at least a year of stored-up laughter. And then the vision was gone—poof—and she had not jumped up squealing to give this man the hug of his very own life.
July. September. Thanksgiving. Happy New Year. This is how her year went—in chunks, in spasms. She’d roll over in bed and a month would be gone. She’d stub her toe and look up to see Lincoln’s birthday on the calendar. One night she kissed Bobby, and March, its raw wind and sometime frost, disappeared. April became an afternoon, May a day with no junk mail, June a doorbell going bong-bong-bong.
Soon it was July, and she knew, every cell and tissue and blessed thump-thump of her knew, that he’d call. The lawyer. She arranged to be home as often as possible. She had a project, she told Robert Ray Dunbar, busywork from the bank.
“A merger,” she told him. “Don’t worry,” she said. She needed a month, that was all. Everything was fine between them, she insisted. She used her daddy’s word: “Hunky-dory.”
He seemed doubtful, scratched his neck, looked near and far for help. “You sure?”
She smiled, smooched him as a mother might. “Of course, what’s not to be sure of?”
You could see his brain work, the clever gears and cogs of it.
“I’m getting a speedboat,” he said. They’d go waterskiing at Elephant Butte, okay?
After he’d driven away, after he’d honked bye-bye, she shut the door to wait. He wouldn’t call tonight. The lawyer. Her phone was a Coke can, but it wouldn’t ring. Not tonight. She just flat-out knew. It wouldn’t ring until between him there and her here, as between the moon and Mars, there was nothing, not even an idea.
So, patiently and deliberately, she began taking down the walls. Those many, many days. That western novel she’d chuckled to the rootin’-tootin’ end of. That kit to knit with. That color of hair she now had. A bottle of crème de menthe had to go out, as did a spider plant. Her Volkswagen wristwatch had to be set, her Tiny Alice tea service polished.
Oh, he’d call, bet your bottom dollar. And the conversation, sigh-filled and helter-skelter with why’s and wherefore’s, would rattle on for hours. I love you, he’d say, words never said before anywhere, anytime, words meant to stand for everything you could make or wish for. I miss you, he’d declare, and she would feel in him the holes and hollows she felt in herself—the backward time ran, the topsy-turvy. Again he’d say it. Again. The food of it, the warmth. The phone, its innards composed of wires and solder and miracles. A breath from her, deep as deep goes. Hello, she’d say.
“Honey pie,” he’d start, “is that you?”