Always Happy Hour: Stories(3)
He likes her skin clean and white.
It’s lonely here without you, she says. I brought The Road but I need you to read it to me. For weeks he has been reading The Road to her. As much as she likes it, she can’t seem to read more than a page at a time because it is lulling and repetitive and so beautiful that it puts her in a kind of trance. Only when he reads it to her is she able to translate the words into images and the images into meaning. She opens the book to their place: Crossing the grass he felt faint and he had to stop. He wondered if it was from smelling the gasoline. She wants to figure out how sentences this simple add up to something she can’t comprehend.
They talk for ten more minutes, all the while she is wondering whether to tell him that his cat has probably swallowed a razor blade and is going die. When she hears his voice change—he’s ready to get off the phone—she tells him. The blade popped off, she says, and I can’t find it. I think she may have swallowed it.
A cat wouldn’t swallow a razor blade, he says, but she’s not so sure. She is confused about what cats will and won’t do. They don’t get out of the way when she swings his kettlebells, for example, and one time she knocked the male in the head with a crack her boyfriend heard from the other room.
They say I love you and goodbye—I love you I love you goodbye—and it’s quiet again. She’s afraid her boyfriend will die in a car accident or will drunkenly fall down the stairs and break his neck. That she will never see him again. She turns on the TV and tries to find something to watch, thinking about the dream he had recently, how he woke her in the middle of the night to tell her about it: we were in a boat and there was a great storm, he said. And I lost my oars so I paddled with my arms. And the piranhas ate my arms, chewed them down to nothing but I kept paddling. I kept paddling and paddling, trying to get us to shore. And that was the end: her boyfriend paddling madly with his nubby arms in an attempt to save them. It was a dream about worry, she knows, as nearly all dreams are. He worries his love will run out. He loves her so much and it scares him because maybe their love isn’t sustainable—perhaps they should each find someone they could love less. Or maybe she simply isn’t the girl he thought she was, the one he wanted her to be. She has disappointed him. She has disappointed herself by disappointing him and she can’t stop disappointing him because she’s disappointed that he’s disappointed and so on. Everything is fine, she told him, smoothing back his hair and taking hold of his arm. We’re happy, she assured him. There are no great storms here.
THE HOUSE ON MAIN STREET
On Wednesdays there’s a farmers’ market downtown. My roommate Melinda bikes the three blocks to Town Square Park and returns with a bag of deer sausage or a whole chicken. She’s a small girl, about five feet tall with the tiniest shoes and panties I have ever seen, but she eats a lot. Other times, she brings home goat or dove or squirrel. She’s also here to get her PhD, but she’s from New York City and hates everything about this place except its strange meat and the proximity to New Orleans. I told her that my brothers used to hunt raccoons but they didn’t eat them—they gave them away to black people. She said that was racist, but it’s just the truth, that’s what they did, and I don’t really see how it’s racist. Perhaps just something I shouldn’t have mentioned.
I frequently feel compelled to confirm her worst suspicions of us because she’s always saying it’s too humid here and there are no dateable men, that people holler at her when she’s jogging or riding her bike, all of which are things I hate as well, but she makes me feel like it’s my fault. And where the fuck are the sidewalks? she asks me, as if I have personally decided that this town would be better off without them.
Today Melinda has brought home a chicken. She likes chicken best, boils the entire thing in a pot. I stand in the kitchen and look at it. The pot is full, the fat bird bobbing on the surface. I rarely eat meat now because I hate the bloody bags she carries up the stairs, leaking all over the place, and the flesh-colored bodies plucked clean. While her chicken boils, she has sex with a third-year PhD student, a guy who’s struggling with his religious convictions. He is blond and tall, which is my type, but he’s also Baptist and clean-cut and gets along well with everyone, which is not.
The water bubbles over, chicken fat getting everywhere. Melinda never cleans the stove. She’s opposed to cleaning entirely, so far as I can tell, and because I didn’t make the mess, I won’t clean it either.
I’m tense whenever she’s in the house, and the only way to ease this tension is by talking to her. She tells me how many pull-ups she can do, how the training is going for her next marathon. I ask about her poems, which are about apples and trees and never become more than apples and trees. I guess my main problem with her is that she doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything.
I take a beer from the refrigerator and sit on the counter, look out the window that she leaves propped open with a wine bottle. There’s a stray bottle out there on our flat roof, and I could easily climb out and pick it up, but it’s been there so long it has become part of the scenery. My previous apartment had the best counter sitting, a recessed window that made me feel like I was tucked away where no one could see me. I lived there alone and everything was mine, but my divorce money has run out and my ex-husband doesn’t think it’s funny anymore when I call him up and ask him to send me a check. I am no longer his responsibility, which is a great relief to him. It’s a great relief to me too. I don’t want his money. It’s like I was calling him up to ask for something he could never give me, was never able to give me, and was only doing it to offer him the opportunity to say no.