We Come to Our Senses (2 page)

HELEN
called my house four times. She's coming into town this week and
Really wants to see me
and says I
Need to stop worrying
, etc. Her box-dye auburn hair is dry to the touch. Her eyelids sag and have tiny folds. I wonder if I should add her to my list of notes? Dad, Mom, Carla and Ray, and Helen. Maybe. What can I say? Can I say that she shouldn't worry about those road-to-nowhere veins on her legs? That I feel like I'm breathing under the ocean when she's around? I don't know.
Just call me back
, she says. The shows are on in seven minutes and I've got a broccoli and cheddar that must sit for 120 additional seconds before the cellophane can even be removed.

MOTHER
—

How difficult for you. Chocolate milk on the yellow sofa? Sabotaged cotillion? But you taught me so much. I'm sorry I was. I am proud at least that you would be proud of my home. Perhaps you can . .
.

HEART-RED
, quivering sun on white talc sand. Crimped emerald blade of fern. Chocolaty plowed earth. Ice-sheet blinding, sun-lit snow traversed by knotted tree shadow. Salty gray ocean smashes rocky shore in fall
.

The phone on my desk rings. I pray it is Helen. I answer,
and our West Coast rep yells that I was supposed to get a boxful of promos to Brendel's, then asks where the hell they are. I tell him that I sent them two-day; he calls me a dumbass for not overnighting. I tell him that the
Employees' Handbook
says No Overnight Packages Are To Be Sent unless either (A) an error has been made by the supplier's (our) end of things, thus causing a delay in shipment, or (B) the recipient provides their personal shipping account code for forward billing. He tells me that I should fuck the
Employees' Handbook
, because, as I very well know, Brendel's sells approximately 29 percent of all of our merchandise to all of the United-fucking-States, and that if product sales and revenue and placement like that is not important enough for overnight promos, he'll suck my dick. We fall silent. Seconds later he says, Well, you get my point anyways, Evie, and then tells me he's calling my supervisor, and hangs up.

These phrases are no kind of note for Helen. I'd been looking at the nature photos of my screen saver, desperate to list something pure.

THE
thing is, was, Helen and I sat Indian-style on that glazy wood floor, the window light gentle and lemony. The house was clean and bright and empty. We stared at each other, and into our own laps, her thumb and index finger gently kneading my knuckles. And that's when the memories blitzed the surface. I had never told her about the war. I'd been going so long with the men down inside me. For years I'd been shoving them into my gut, hustling past them best I could. Yet it, they, were all there again, their hands, their sweat, their greed. In
memory, I had even sought their comfort, when my unit first arrived in-country, when missiles sliced the sky. At first, at marshaling, the terror had driven me to abandon myself to them. When all there was on the horizon was death.

I trembled. Helen scooted over to me. As her hand slid over my back, I realized that the episode would be so easy for her to dispatch. I understood then that the shame was only mine, the terror and ritual, and that Helen would embrace it, and take it, and send it off in a truck. All I had to do was confess.

Yet I just couldn't break the habit of keeping. The past stayed clogged inside my throat, just there. Here, now. I'm addicted to rerunning this scene.

ON
the way in to work the gravelly sound beneath my car broke into a roar. The front end shook and the gas pedal mudded. I made it into the lot, hazards flashing, and told my supervisor I had to take it to the dealership service shop immediately. (Only the dealership service shop requires annual certification of every mechanic.) He said this was not a company problem, and that I had to do it on my own time. I called him sir, and reminded him that the dealership service shop would not be open on my own time until Saturday, and that I was sure the car wouldn't make it that long. He told me that I should look for a ride from a coworker. Or rent a car.

I had to sit down. I had to sit down as he took the last of the coffee from our station and then walked away, leaving the empty pot spitting on the machine. I could almost
feel
myself on the shoulder of the tar-stinking road, choking on the
emissions of commuters, all of them able to get home and watch the shows. I can't stomach the hot smells of anyone else's car. I won't ride in someone else's baby-seated, taco-wrappered, cola-ringed, faded-upholstery, dust-caked vehicle. And my rent is due and my cable bill is due and my phone bill is due and my insurance is due and my water bill is due and my gas bill is due and my electricity bill is due and I have to get to my VA appointment, and I have to buy some dinners and there's just no way. No way I can let my goddamn car die before I'm through writing my notes.

AFTER
a nap and a Swiffer and a brief hang-up on Helen's answering machine, I turned on the oven. I enjoy “Rooster” sandwiches, though without the tomato or lettuce that they always slop on at restaurants. Breaded chicken patties on a white hamburger bun, alongside cheese, a seep of mayonnaise, mustard and maybe ketchup, are mine. I realized as I sucked in the gas-blast that I was missing the season finale. I ran to the television while the oven hissed. Hit myself in the stomach, then below. It was already six minutes into the half-hour program! I ran back to turn off the gas, waved my hands around to chase the excess. Hit myself again. Bun crumbs on the linoleum had to be wiped. I turned the oven back on, preheated, positioned the patties on a nonstick tray, and slid it in.

At the climax of the program, the phone rang. I couldn't answer. Helen told the machine she was coming into town and wants to talk about how she screwed up both our lives and wants to change that and to please take a deep breath, and did I ever think about her suggestion that I adopt a cat? and . . .
I realized that I will be dead before she gets here, and more directly that these were my final finales. I pressed Volume Up on the remote.

The middles of the patties were uncooked, and strings of chicken slag lodged in my teeth. I ended up throwing most of the Rooster away, then waited for the commercials and rushed to the bathroom to vomit. As a child, I learned that you must flush the toilet to get low water before vomiting, to minimize backsplash.

CONVERSATIONS
swirl from beyond my partition. None of them are about the first six minutes of the finale. The clerk with the dirty pants is slamming the door of the copy machine. I have got to get a two-day package together for Brendel's before the end of the day. I have got to finish my notes. I have got to finish my notes.

Darla

THE HIGH SCHOOL
kids are out for summer, so all over this spit of a Mississippi town young women walk around in t-shirts over wet swimsuits. They cruise the Walgreens in coveys and type on thin phones, buy glamour mags and flavored water, their flip-flops slapping linoleum, their tan legs all over the place.

The boys in their wake call out Hey and Hey, y'all. They huddle up around hand-me-down trucks at the far end of the parking lot and trade licks. It's the worst.

YESTERDAY
afternoon, Darla came home, pitched her keys on the counter and asked what was for dinner. My response was to ask what
she
wanted, because she vomits so much I can no longer guess what'll stay down.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Taco Loco?” I said. “China Buffet?”

“No. But thanks for the healthy suggestions.” She took a big breath and looked out the window. “Sorry,” she said.
“Maybe I can go Taco Loco again. I just need to coat my stomach. God, it's burning up in here. Can we not turn on the air?”

“Sure, babe,” I said. “Just tell me what you want.”

“I don't know. Nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.”

“'Cause I'll eat whatever, Dar. I just don't have any money.”

And so forth. Finally, she just took her pills with a glass of buttermilk. We then sat and watched Animal Planet beneath the hot draft of the ceiling fan. I thought about asking Darla why her boss had called the house again, looking for her during work hours. Thought about asking until reflux crept up my throat. But I stayed quiet. Since moving to Mississippi, I've come to mistrust confrontation; I am no longer sure where her wrong ends and my right begins.

During a scuba segment, Darla described the feeling of hatchling sea turtles crawling over your bare feet. “Flippers like flower petals,” she said, her tone cottony and nostalgic. “Back in college, North Carolina, you'd go to the beach at night and shine a flashlight to guide them to the water. The light pollution, it—”

“You decide where you want to eat?” I cut in, not wanting any part of North Carolina, of Fort Bragg and that soldier she was with before me.

She didn't answer. At every commercial I'd ask again, and she'd say she didn't care. At some point I stood up from the couch, and went to grab a handful of quarters from the change-jar on my dresser. Darla could figure her own thing out; I was going to cash in for a set of two-for-one Walgreens pizzas.

I charged back through the den on my way out the door. “Since you can't tell me what you want to—”

She lunged up and ran to the bathroom to puke. This always makes me wonder if the pills even stick. I mean, what's the point?

An hour or so later, back on the couch, Darla said we didn't have that much romance left in us. In response I said, I love you, Dar, over and over, which was all I could think to say. I love you. But I love you. Gosh, I love you. How I love you. It felt like scooping water with a rake.

She was angry anyway. We were again watching television and she gave me positive news about her cell counts, and I only responded with, “That's great,” at the commercial. But I love you. The cat had pulled out all kinds of tiny loops in the faded red upholstery. Darla had been skipping work but not coming home. How I love you. Nobody could stand to put the dishes in the dishwasher until everything piled up and stank and had gnats.

“Enough,” I said a few minutes later. “Go get your suit on.”

She turned the television volume up.

“Come on, get your swim trunks,” I said. I held my gun finger to her head until I earned a smile. We no longer watched films. We no longer spoke of culture. Yet romance could still be rekindled by sneaking into the pool at High Cotton Apartments.

At the Quik Pik, I grabbed a twelve-pack, and Darla handed me the debit card, no problem. Things were looking up and we had plenty of gas in the car and she said she doesn't really mind my new little belly. We snuck into the complex pool and
found nobody there, so I stripped my t-shirt off. She pushed me in and shrieked. There was a pool light at the shallow end but the light at the deep had gone out. Most of the water was opaque in contrast. The purple-green evening darkened into moonless black and the stars began to pop in stuttered levels of bright. At the edge of the patio fence, magnolia blossoms unfurled in ivory, and a dim yellow light cast down the coppery pebble inlay of the restroom wall. Darla swam to me and dipped her head back to get her hair out of her face, and for a moment we treaded the dark water and just looked at each other. She put her legs around me and we kissed as we sank, soft and slick and wet and lovely. I started to bob us off the bottom and move toward the light of the shallow end; up and down, up and down, I moved us towards that light. When the water level hit our chests, Darla told me she loved me. It felt like buckets. I wanted so badly to be with her, and knew she felt the same. But we hadn't brought any condoms, of course, so we just half smiled and looked past each other.

“What's that?” she asked. She disentangled from me, then swam to the shallow end and stood up. The water was illuminated and alien there, and a cluster of small, ghost-white objects rested on the bottom of the pool. There were eight or ten of them, bulleted in shape, undulating in the current from our movements.

“They're flower buds off of that magnolia,” Darla said. “Sepals.”

“No, babe,” I said. “They're too white.”

She stepped toward the blossoms, her waist rippling the water. She trapped one with her toes, reached under and pulled it up.

“Oh,” she said, holding the object out to me. “It's a tampon. They're all just blanched-out, chlorinated tampons.”

I looked around and saw that someone had thrown the sanitary receptacle from the ladies' room into a boxwood hedge by the lounge chairs. I guess they'd ripped it right off the wall, then dumped it out in the water as a joke.

High schoolers, I thought. Fucking high school vandals fucking up my everything.

THE
Starbucks inside the Kroger sells the big paper from Jackson, and people leave sections lying around when heading off to work. Sometimes you pick up a Home and Garden, sometimes the Classifieds, or Religion. Sometimes those of us who
don't
head off to work pass the sections around and discuss. (Nobody ever talks about art or creative process, or the city, or the things Darla and I talked about when we lived
in
the city. No. That life got strangled out when we moved her back home.) All week long the Metro/State section has run installments about the last abortion clinic in the state. A group of lobbyists and politicians are trying to shut it down. From predawn to dusk that clinic is hemmed by evangels wagging posters of dead babies, alongside the Jackson PD and a PBS crew.

On my last day working at the Oriental rug shop over in Oxford, a leisure-class infant puked on the parquet floor. The mother then puppy-talked the baby while gauging a nineteenth century Persian Heriz. “Ow-noh,” she said. “Awuh-woh.” I refused to wipe up and was fired on the spot. Now Darla and I can't afford to blast the air-conditioning.