Steven and Margie thought for many years that I was lost. Sometimes I was but not in the way they feared. I was simply less settled than they were, less comfortable with consistency and predictability. I had always admired their respective even keels, but I also thought they should tip to port every now and then.
Peggy, my first wife, told me I never settled down even when I did. We got married young and got divorced when we weren’t much older, and though we were mostly poor and somewhat itinerant during our time together, I’ve never been able to say that we weren’t happy. I still dream of her, and the dreams are a mixture of fact and, well, dream.
Heat (mostly a dream)
“Christ, it’s hot,” Peggy says in a voice that is smooth and soft. She’s lying on her back beside me, and we’re both naked on the queen-sized bed; a damp white towel is stretched across her narrow hips. Her brown hair moves a bit in the tiny currents of warm air that the small fan moves through our apartment bedroom. There is no breeze outside—leaves on the tall, aging eucalyptus trees outside our window do not move at all. We are barely into June, and it has been hot like this for nearly two weeks. Central California’s summer has started early and threatens to be long.
“It’ll get cooler,” I tell her as I listen to the monotonous hum of the fan. “The weatherman I listened to this morning says that temperatures could drop by as much as fifteen degrees by tomorrow night.”
“That doesn’t help much today, does it?” Her voice is hardly above a whisper. She talks like that—cynical but quiet—when she’s tired of something.
“I suppose not,” I say, “but at least there’s some hope.”
“We have to get a bigger fan.” She looks at me sternly, talking a bit louder as if I were defying her or something. ”That one is worthless.”
“How can we manage that? We can barely afford gas for the truck, and you want a bigger fan? It doesn’t stay this hot for very long. Maybe only a few more days, then it will get better.” I want to tell her that I am not the cause of the heat, that I cannot be blamed.
I turn the pillow over, feeling for a cool spot with the side of my unshaven face. The linen sheet has been covering my feet, and I kick it off the bed. Air pushed by the fan works its way up from my ankles and across my heavy thighs, then to my chest; there it seems to stop.
“We shouldn’t make love on days when it’s this hot,” Peggy tells me, her eyes blinking quickly, her voice back to its near-whisper. “I work up too much of a sweat and it takes me hours to cool down again.” She traces my forearm lightly with long fingernails that she painted a light blue just this morning.
I find myself listening to the late afternoon traffic on the street running in front of our apartment building. Occasional diesels pass, working through their gears far down the street where the hill starts. The trucks strain by our apartment. For a moment the noise and the heat and the oddly sweet smell of diesel fumes combine, and I tense and hold my breath in an effort to shut them all out, to forget about the jobs we’ve lost and the compression I feel in this small apartment.
“Sears might have fans on sale this weekend,” I finally say. “We could charge it, I guess. And it isn’t as if we’d be buying a luxury, or anything. It would be something we really do need.” In Nevada, life was not just heat like this but the desolation of towns like Fallon and Winnemucca and Battle Mountain—outposts in the endless Nevada desert. And it was bad water pumps on the truck and Peggy’s pneumonia and always that slight imbalance of bad luck over good choices. Peggy made change for gamblers in a dozen casinos, and I emptied ashtrays and swept floors in nearly as many. Then the small casinos laid people off, and the large ones didn’t hire. For the five weeks we were In Winnemucca, nearly every day was full of dust and wind. My eyes dried out so much I couldn’t see well enough to drive at night.
“You said yourself we couldn’t afford a new fan,” Peggy says to the ceiling as much as to me. “And you’re probably right. If we can’t afford it, we shouldn’t use the charge card.” She has rested her fingers on the soft flesh above my elbow, pressing down just enough so I can feel my pulse against her touch.
“But we should do something. Maybe we can find one cheap at a garage sale.”
“And add to our wonderful collection of household goods,” she says wearily, her eyes closed now. She presses her full lips together tightly when she stops talking.
Nearly everything we have owned—and sometimes sold—seems to have come from a garage sale or a flea market: the bed we sleep on, the Hotpoint refrigerator, the small black-and-white TV. I think it must be hard on Peggy, having to live with used furniture. But I’m not rich and we’ve both learned to make do for most of our lives. It is the pattern our parents and grandparents followed, and I’ve often wondered how a person goes about getting blessed with wealth.
“Remember Illinois?” Peggy asks loudly, catching me by surprise. Her eyes dance beneath her eyelids like they do when she dreams at night, as though she’s watching something moving back and forth across some invisible landscape. “Remember how much we hated the cold winters? All that snow. God, what I’d give to be back there now up to my neck in a snowdrift. So cold. I don’t think I’d even wear a coat.” She runs her hands up her chest to her neck and throat, then rests them just beneath her earlobes.
“We could move back,” I tell her instinctively, seeing that she is happy with the thought. I move my arm closer to her, so the back of my hand is against the curve of her thinning waist. “If I could find a job. Maybe you could find something, too. I don’t know….” We grew up in northern Illinois, but it was thirty years of those dismal winters that drove west in the first place. We’d both thought that dealing blackjack would be a good way to earn a living, even if we had to work nights or in a small town for awhile.
But now we’re in this place, far from the peaceful suburbs we think we’d like, and I don’t know if I want to pack up and move everything back the two-thousand miles after just starting to learn about California. The work here is not always wonderful, but it is available. What if we go back and can’t get jobs or find a decent place to live? I’ve had enough of living in the back of a pickup truck like we did for nearly three months after crossing to the west side of the Mississippi and having the truck simply lie dead until we raised enough money for a rebuilt transmission. Any romance or sense of adventure in that sort of thing wears off quite quickly.
“Remember how the ice would cover the entire front porch of that house we rented?” Peggy continues. She traces her hands now across her belly. "And how we used to skate where the schoolyard flooded and froze?” Her fingers dance lightly on her narrow ribs. “I haven’t skated in so many years, and I used to be pretty good.”
“Let’s move, then,” I say. “I really wouldn’t mind. It would be hard until we found jobs, but we could make it, couldn’t we?”
“If we wanted to, we could make it. We could stay with my sister for a week or so until something turns up.” She lays her arms at her sides, so her fingernails are once more on my own arm.
“If it stays this hot much longer, I think we should move,” I tell her. I watch a glistening bead of sweat travel from between her breasts down to just above her navel, where the fringed edge of the towel is. I want to doze in the heat, but I force my eyes open.
“But if it’s not too hot, things aren’t so bad here. Just not Winnemucca or Reno again. Or Battle Mountain. Nothing in Nevada.” She wets the corners of her mouth with the delicate tip of her tongue.
“Maybe it will cool down, and then you’ll feel better. And maybe we can find a way to get a bigger fan. Things usually work out for us if we wait long enough. Things usually turn out okay."
“We’ll wait a week,” she says. “Okay? One more week. Then we’ll see how things are going and decide what we should do.” She tosses the towel to the floor. She brings her knees up toward her chest, then lays them flat again on the mattress, flexing her long, soft legs. My arm is sore where she has rubbed her fingernails harder and kneaded them into my browned skin. “Make love to me,” she says suddenly, her eyes wide open as she cradles my face between her palms. "I don’t care how hot it is. Make love to me again.” She shuts her eyes and grasps the laminated headboard. Her entire body shines with perspiration.
I roll onto my side and kiss her, and she puts her arms around my neck, pulling me closer. I open my eyes and look at the sweat that dots her face and between the hairs on her scalp, where the skin shows through. The fan drones on and on with a hum that seems to have gotten louder, louder than even the parade of diesels groaning by. When the fan turns toward the bed I feel warm air against my back, and I see that Peggy’s hair doesn’t move with the breeze anymore, that I’m blocking it out.
I kiss her harder, and she kisses me back.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment