D
ale finds a motel just past Albuquerque that is only thirty-nine dollars a night for a single room. She’s been gone the entire length of her shift at Blockbuster as well as an extra hour, and she imagines her mother is probably just now starting to wonder where she is. She knows that her mother will not be alarmed, not at first. Sometimes Dale doesn’t come straight home from work. Most Fridays, she goes to the Domino’s that’s right across from the Blockbuster and waits for an extra large pizza with pepperoni and cheese sticks to be made. Then she walks home, balancing the hot cardboard boxes in her hands, a couple of complimentary DVD rentals from work teetering on top. Her mother may, at this very minute, be standing in the kitchen, staring at the innards of the refrigerator, contemplating what to drink, as she waits for Dale to come home.
Dale knows her mother’s first response to her tardiness will be anger. She’s come to expect these Friday night dates. Even when Dale moved out that one semester, she was with her mom on Friday nights. She knows it will take at least another hour before the anger dissipates and she begins to become concerned. She’ll call Dale on her cell then, and when Dale doesn’t pick up, she’ll call the Blockbuster, maybe even the Domino’s. It will take at least two hours before real worry sets in and her mother has to take a couple of Xanax to calm down. There will be a tall aluminum tumbler filled with wine and ice to wash down the pills. There will be an open freezer door. Spoonfuls of coffee ice cream and handfuls of the Raisinets she buys in giant plastic vats from Sam’s Club. And soon the Xanax will take over, calming, soothing. But with the absence of fear, her mother’s anger will return, blooming like a wilted flower that’s been placed in a fresh vase of water. She’ll start leaving messages on Dale’s cell then, threatening to call the police if she doesn’t hear back in five minutes. There will be another tumbler of wine and then she’ll start to cry. She’ll tug at her hair and cry, big tearless sobs, pacing around the house, turning the TV off and on. She won’t go looking for her, not yet; it will take another Xanax and another tumbler of pink Zinfandel before she gets in the car and starts to drive up and down the streets, with the windows rolled down, shouting Dale’s name. Dale knows this, because this is exactly what happened that night with Fitz last fall. Exactly. But that night Dale wasn’t in New Mexico. She was in Phoenix, and that night she had finally come home, shown up just as her mother was pulling back into the driveway after a futile search of Glendale’s nearly identical streets. And that night she needed her mother almost as much as her mother needed her. As they made their way together through the front door, theirs was a collective sigh of relief. Shared tears. And they’d sat together in the backyard under a starless sky and ate an entire party-sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and drank a whole liter of Coke, grateful to have each other. She squeezes her eyes shut, wills her mother away. She’s got at least an hour more before the tumbler comes out of the cupboard.
She parks in front of her motel room and starts to unload the Bug. She’s afraid to leave anything in the car; it only locks on the passenger’s side. Everything she loves is inside this car. By the time she’s brought in her backpack and the box of books she squeezed into the tiny trunk under the hood, she’s sweating. This is the kind of heat that feels like a spank, like a sharp slap against bare skin. A hand intent upon inflicting pain. Dale shakes her head, as if she can shake this memory away too.
Fitz
. Goddamned Fitz. It’s funny, she thinks, how he still manages to invade her consciousness like this. Most people don’t have any say what happens in their dreams, but they’re in charge of their waking thoughts. For Dale, everything’s flip-flopped. Thanks to Ambien, she’s got control of what happens when she closes her eyes. But the memories that pop in and out of her head during the day are unpredictable and arbitrary. She’ll be walking around the grocery store and he’ll round the corner, not really, but she’ll catch a glimpse of his hair, his elbow, the back of his neck.Then, just like that, she’s transported back to that studio apartment where she let him do things to her that no one should ever do. It’s those times all of a sudden her record slows down to a crawl, the needle deep and sluggish in the grooves, the sound a sort of moaning.
Fitz
. It started with a crush, one of those silly obsessions she’d had since she was a kid that she knew would never amount to anything. She’d had a hundred crushes, a thousand unrequited loves from middle school on. But they never came to fruition. She could fantasize all she wanted, but it didn’t matter. The boys never noticed her at all, and if she ever got up the courage to approach them, it inevitably ended with simple dismissal or downright cold-hearted rejection. But Fitz was different.
He sat next to her in her Women’s Lit class fall semester last year, one of only two guys in the whole class and the only straight one as far as she could tell. She loved the way he smelled, like clove cigarettes and dirt. Like a garden. Just smelling him made her insides knot up, moisture to seep between her legs. He wasn’t the kind of guy she would ever have spoken to first. He was intimidating: too good looking, too smart. And so when he offered her a ride home after class (she was making her way to the bus stop and he said,
Hey, I’ll drop you at home if you’d like, my car’s right here
), she couldn’t believe he was speaking to her. She remembers there was a lot of crap on the passenger seat, books and papers and some trash. He had to clear it off for her, but he was unapologetic for the mess. She would have been mortified for him to see her own mess (and she certainly had her own mess), but he was unconcerned. “Sit here,” he said, patting the threadbare seat.
When they pulled into her driveway, she half expected he’d come to a rolling stop and open the door for her to jump out. But instead he leaned over her, reaching for the handle of the passenger door, and stopped short, and his hand grazed her left breast as the door opened. Then his breath was hot in her ear. “I want to fuck you,” he whispered. At home that night she searched the place where his hand had made contact with her, as if there might be some lingering evidence of his touch.
She didn’t have class with him again until the following week. It was a graduate level class, and it only met once a week for three hours. By the time the week was over, by the time those excruciating three hours were over, she could barely take the anticipation anymore. This time, he pulled her by the hand as they left the classroom. They drove silently to his apartment, which was at the edge of campus, and then they were, suddenly, at the threshold. She thought about her mother then; she’d told her she was going out to a movie with a friend after class. Dale had known all along what she was doing.
He didn’t even bother turning on the lights; through the windows the halogen streetlights made everything in the tiny apartment bluish. Hazy. The sink in the kitchenette was full of dishes; there was clutter everywhere. She tripped over a box that was on the floor next to the bed, which was in the middle of the main room.
That night, the first night, it was over fast. He simply laid her on the bed, pinning her hands with his, kissing her neck with hard, wet kisses, and then he was yanking at her panties and unzipping his fly, not even bothering to take off his jeans. The zipper was cold on her bare thigh. And then he was doing what he’d said he wanted to do, the legs of the wooden bed scraping on the floor with each thrust. And then there was wetness and the stink of earth and the glowing tip of his cigarette. His penis limp and bathed in blue light.
For two months she told her mother she was going to a movie on Thursday nights, and instead went to his apartment, where he liked to hit her ass, to splay her. Each week, he added something new to the repertoire (pinching, biting, covering her mouth but not her eyes): something that made her a little more embarrassed, a little more shy each time. And this turned him on. He seemed to be falling in love with her.
They never talked about it.
She wanted to tell him she loved him too, but the timing was never right, and then one Thursday night he wasn’t in class. And then the next week he wasn’t either and someone said he dropped out of school and moved to Eugene with his girlfriend and her little girl.
That Friday night after work she decided instead of going home that she’d go to his house and see if it was true. She couldn’t believe he would just take off, that he would leave her after all they’d been through.
The closest bus stop was about four blocks from his apartment. It wasn’t a well-lit neighborhood, and she was nervous being there alone. But still, she made her way to the apartment building and knocked on the door. The lights weren’t on, but she swore she could hear somebody moving inside. She knocked again and again. When she stopped knocking, whoever was in there stopped moving. And so she leaned her forehead against the door and kept knocking until she felt the skin of her knuckles starting to crack. Until blood was running down the white door. Until a neighbor started screaming out their window, “Nobody lives there, psycho! Go the fuck home.”
She didn’t get home until after midnight, and her mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She was starting to feel that hot dizzy feeling she got sometimes, when her mother’s headlights swept across the pavement. Her mother’s speech was thick, like she was talking with a mouth full of cotton balls, and everything was blurry. But her mother didn’t ask her a single question. She just sprayed some Bactine on her cuts and filled a Ziploc bag with ice. Later, when her mom passed out on the couch, Dale tried to touch herself in her own bed. Face down, pajamas yanked down over her naked ass.With her other hand, she tried to hit herself, tried to pretend her hands were his. The tears made her pillow so wet, that when she gave up and rolled over, she had to flip her pillow over in order to sleep.
She glances at the digital clock on the nightstand next to the bed in her motel room. She knows she doesn’t have any choice but to call and let her mother know what she’s done. But her stomach is roiling, furious. The last thing she ate was a double cheeseburger at ten o’clock this morning. She feels jittery and weak. And, though she knows better, she closes the door and starts to walk toward the IHOP she saw down the street.
Later, full and strangely content, she walks back to her room, but it’s still so damn hot. There are fifteen messages on the cell phone, which she left on the nightstand.
“Mama?” she says.
The voice that answers is as thick as this heat. “Dale, where the hell are you?”
It’s as though the heat is not in the air at all, but that it’s inside her. Inescapable. Cradling the phone between her chin and shoulder, she runs cool water in the bathtub and turns the air conditioner to high. Then she tells her mother the only thing that can make this all right. “I’m looking for Daddy,” she says.
She stays on the phone until she knows her mother has passed out, and then sinks into the bathtub.
S
am has no idea what to expect from the book club meeting that Effie has arranged. She has told him very little about what to expect: ten members, only two of them men. They have spent the last two weeks reading
Small Sorrows,
his third novel. He’s not sure why they didn’t pick something more recent. He supposes it’s because it was his best-selling novel after
The Hour of Lead
. Its success was thrilling but undeserved, he thought. It’s a good book, but not the best. He remembers how confident he felt when he sat down to write it though. After the film and the success of his first and second books, he’d felt suddenly unstoppable. Of course, he wouldn’t have admitted to anyone, not even to Mena, but the success of his second novel had helped to eradicate his fears that
The Hour of Lead
had been a fluke. By the time he set out to write
Small Sorrows,
he wasn’t smug exactly, but confident. In his voice. In his ability to tell a cohesive narrative, to captivate his audience. To find the perfect words.
When he thinks about that novel, there’s a little part of him that is ashamed. It was cheap in a way, dashed off in less than six months. He’d barely edited it. The idea of reading aloud from it (Effie had asked if he’d be willing to read the prologue to the group) made him feel embarrassed. The heart of the book is true, but it’s a mess. Sloppy.
He stands looking at himself in the mirror in the bathroom. The paint behind the mirror is chipped, and so there are entire pieces of his reflection that are missing: left earlobe, right shoulder. A spot below his left eye. He’s fragmented.
God, he looks old, he thinks. Five years ago, when they were last here, he remembers looking in the same mirror and thinking he hadn’t changed so much from the first time they’d come to Gormlaith. He was unworried then about the slow toll that his age seemed to be taking. But he was thirty-nine then. Something happened to him when he hit forty.
Thankfully, he inherited his father’s full head of hair, though the color is definitely much more salt than pepper now, silvery at the temples.And his face looks so damned tired, just exhausted. He pokes at the plum-colored shadow beneath his one intact eye. His face is also thinner than it used to be. He grabs the copy of
Small Sorrows
he dug up for the event and studies the picture on the jacket. “Arrogant bastard,” he hisses at the photo of his younger self. This was the guy, the twenty-eight-year-old guy who used to pull Mena by the hand into the bathroom while the twins were napping and remove her clothes without saying a single word. This was the guy who would drop to his knees and make love to his wife with his tongue, and then with his entire body as they showered together. This was the guy who slept with his wife (who slept with his wife!) at least three times a week, even with one-year-old twins.“Cocky sonuvabitch,” he says, and slams his old face on the bathroom counter.
He runs his fingers through his hair and buttons his clean white shirt. He brushes his teeth and remembers how his old self would let the taste of Mena linger on his tongue all day: as he sat on the cliffs overlooking the beach, as he shopped for diapers at Rite Aid, as he wrote. He kept the salty tang of her there all day as a reminder of his hunger, their hunger.
He has no idea what to expect from the group, but he knows exactly what they expect from him. And so he puts on his author face, the confident, yet friendly, approachable, author face. He flips open the book and practices reading the first few lines:
Here are my hands. Look at them closely, and remember the knots. The rough skin and certainty of knuckle and fist. Not so different from yours. Not weathered any more or less than your hands. Look at them. It begins and ends here.