Blue Field(36)
Huh, she said. Is that right?
He kept working his jaw. Finally his voice seemed to catch up with the motion and he said, I’m trying to make this simple so you can understand. I am not babysitting you anymore. No. More. Get it?
Well now, she said, and twitched her chin with her thumb to pantomime thinking. She said, For a man of few words you suddenly have a lot to say. She said, Threaten? Don’t mind if I do.
35
The next morning Bowman said, Princess, don’t make me get on the blower with him.
She said, Try it, baller. I think there’s something you’re forgetting. She said, What? I tell you I’m going to dive Marshall Wall deep on air, no fancy gas mixes. And what? You think I should solo it instead?
A little later she slammed her car door. Rand had already left for the day but Bowman she couldn’t seem to lick—he was in her earpiece like cream in a Twinkie. Dickweed. Why she ever had to kiss him. Ugly did not begin to say. So she shut it and cranked the heat, then trammelled right then left and ran a yellow. Smile for the camera. Cool and bright today. Bowman croaked on—another story. She transponded the newest limits with their upstart municipal checkpoints gussied folksy—single-story cinder blocks with polyurethane-thatched roofs and guards in belled floral skirts and dimity slacks and purple-laced jackboots. When had all that happened? She roared past pillared entrances to the interconnected subterranean malls and finally coasted the old residential streets once wide as fields and now as doll-tiny as the old Jane and old Marilyn—such girls. She nosed the car by a life-sized woman wrestling some recycling curbside. Two boys sworded sticks across a narrow lawn. In Marilyn’s rearview they vaulted the narrow ditch and clambered into the road to remonstrate in her direction like miniature trolls. She cruised the main thoroughfare, every second or third bronzed doorway a restaurant or specialty market with storefront windows boasting signs in Cyrillic and Korean, Farsi and Franglish—as far as she could tell all saying You Should Eat. Her stomach rumbled. Resolute, she toured alongside the park she and Jane, once upon a time, practically owned—it appeared strangely unchanged save for being uninhabited. She buzzed down her window and stuck out her head, single-handing the wheel. Swings swung in the lilting wind. Sugar maples rustled their last few crimsons and umbers. Princess? Bowman said. Still there?
Still there. Here, barely. She pulled over. Sparrow, grass. She’d fallen behind. Her adipose cross-sections and abnormal thyroids modelled in cinereous hand-drawn pencil sketches, then software-remodelled—her bread and butter—lay half done and not done. Undone—ten days off for a little vacay south with the husband and all goes to hell? So much for her ancient history of steady-Freddy building relationships with clients. So much for all that, she thought as the engine ran and ran until she thought to cut it. She circled her wrist in the air, testing. Bowman continued to carp, nearly bleeding her auricles. Bad idea, he kept saying. Rand is right, princess, that is one bad idea. You do not need to do that f*cking dive now. Or ever. You have everything to lose. You. Him. You hear me?
She heard him. She knew. But she also thought, yes, but you’ve had your bad ideas. And survived them.
And this idea, she thought, is mine.
And losing? Don’t even get her started. For starters, she’d already lost and lost. And how could Rand know what it felt like to really lose someone? She remembered thinking this clearly for the first time maybe six months into their marriage. Came out of nowhere, felt like. They were in the kitchen and there was the broken bowl. Her mother’s. What was Rand’s grief—what were his griefs—by comparison? Adopted as a baby, he’d never known his parents. When she first met him he was already half a lifetime into surely a lesser state of grief than hers. How could he love what he’d never really had? He broke the bowl—an accident, apparently, always accidents—and she leaned her hip against the dishwasher and took in the blue shards on the maple floor. How could he? The broken bowl, his dim f*cktard apology. Or whatever he was calling it. Sorry!
In her car now she gripped her fingers around the wheel. Anger and pain jaundiced every chamber of her heart. Instead of the park with its swing set and fiery maples, she saw three people who together had hooked and crooked a big mess. Her mind flooded, just thinking. She licked her lips and buzzed up her window and peered through the windshield, longings fulvous as the rotting leaf piles that reminded her of sepsis and the mephitic whiff of sewers and sulfurous sinkholes to which she felt astonishingly drawn. Where Jane went. Where Marilyn now understood she might still go. How astounded she suddenly was by herself. In her wildest dreams in her old life of work and work, she would never have thought that who she was now was possible. That she could possibly think, Stupid crier, at Bowman’s yacking and clacking Hear Ye’s. That she could be this bored up here in the boring bounded world, a portly squirrel lugging a bagel beneath a red-and-blue teeter-totter, four black helicopters as usual fleeting the west as smoke plumed one or two mercantile citadels, evidence of incendiaries and injunctions and nothing and everything to do with her and hers. Business as usual on a day so ordinary she could puke, she pressed End Call.
She parked at the cemetery. Pardes Shalom. The car’s heater blasted. She undid her coat, hiked her dress to her hips and waited for Bowman’s callback. She traced the pattern on her thick tights as if memorizing the peaceful garden’s snaking ridges—as if her tight’s woven tattoo echoed the rows along the hill before her, lanes organized by affiliations and denominations here distributed under crusting and crimping sycamores and stalwart evergreens skirting the spiny arrays of east-facing headstones, including her parents’ double memorial.