Everything You Want Me to Be(13)
“Did you make a wish?” she asked.
“I thought that was for first stars.”
She shrugged. “Maybe it could be for first shooting stars, too.”
“Okay.” I linked our fingers together, happy to play along. “Star light, star bright . . .”
“No, you have to keep it a secret or it won’t come true.”
“Everyone knows that. I was just doing the prologue.”
She smiled and let me finish. Even though we didn’t talk for the rest of the drive, the tension had eased and it started to feel like the night I wanted us to have. I made a wish—silently—as we headed back toward the farm.
After five minutes of winding, gravel hills I pulled into the box of trees sheltering Elsa’s house and barns from the prairie winds. I turned the car off and let my gaze wander, in no hurry to go inside. Mary’s father had done a great job maintaining the place, but three years after his death signs of neglect were starting to show. Paint peeled off the corners of the main barn. Weeds overran the vegetable garden where green beans and peas used to grow in military formation. In the daylight you could see a few gnarled shingles scattered over the building roofs, caused by storm damage that no one who lived here anymore was capable of repairing. Elsa leased the fields to a neighbor, but the land, buildings, and chickens inside this windbreak of trees were still her domain. It made no sense why she wanted to stay here. My mother had moved to a condo in Arizona within a few months of my graduation. Why did Elsa want to grow old in a place that reminded her, with each broken fence and chipped windowsill, of her every disability? It was the worst retirement home I’d ever seen.
One of the barn cats ran through the yard as Mary sighed. I could feel the effect of the farm trickling into her, too, and tried to salvage the good mood.
“Hey.” I jiggled her hand playfully. “Come here.”
I was the one who closed the distance, though, kissing her lightly. She accepted the kiss at first, but her face tilted away when I would have prolonged it. For a moment neither of us moved or spoke.
“I wished that things were different,” she finally said. “On the star. I wished that Mom was healthy.”
“You’re not supposed to tell, remember?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to come true.” Her voice broke and automatically I reached up, rubbing her shoulder.
“You’re doing too much.”
She shook her head, looking out toward the fields. “They gave me everything. They loved me better than any child could hope for . . . and this is what I can do now, the only way I can show them that love back.”
“We need some help. There are other ways.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“You can’t even enjoy a dinner away from her. Look what this is doing to us.”
She looked at me then with an expression I’d never seen on her face before. It was cold. My Mary, my sweet and generous, vintage-loving, apple-cheeked Mary looked at me like I was some annoying stray begging for scraps.
“I’m sorry I can’t take care of you right now, Peter.”
“I don’t want you to take care of me. Jesus, I just wanted us to have fun tonight.”
“Don’t say Jesus like that.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” It wasn’t, maybe, the most eloquent response I could’ve made to an attempt to censor my language.
“My mom”—she shook her head, glancing at the house—“has gone to church every Sunday her entire life. Her faith is important to her. Can you please respect that while we’re here?”
“I don’t see Elsa here now.” But even as I said it, I knew she was. She was everywhere, sitting in the movie theater between us, sniffing at the prices on the restaurant menu, and pinching Mary’s profile tight and unrecognizable here where the ammonia stink of chicken shit seeped in from the yard.
“I’m just saying.”
“Fine.” I got out of the car and slammed the door, which brought squawks from the chicken barn.
The house was dark, with only the stove light on to welcome us back. Elsa must have gone to bed early, maybe trying to be considerate of our date night. Usually Mary tucked her into bed and brushed the wispy strands away from her face while Elsa looked at photo albums and told stories about people I didn’t know and the two of them laughed and reminisced. There was never a place for me during these nightly rituals.
“I’m going to check on her quick,” Mary said.
“Okay.”
Mary disappeared and I went upstairs to our bedroom. Soft voices drifted up through the heating vents and I could picture Mary perched on Elsa’s wedding quilt as they filled each other in on the last three hours, both of them refusing to look at the empty place on the other side of the bed.
My shooting star wish had been for Mary and me to be happy again. Maybe it would never be like before, but there had to be a new happiness somehow, a way for us to thrive that I couldn’t see yet. I got undressed and lay down, staring at the water-stained ceiling while waiting for Mary to come up, and that’s how I fell asleep. Waiting.
HATTIE / Monday, August 27, 2007
MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it’s a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it’s a show. They don’t understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don’t remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting. Sometimes I think acting is a disease, but I can’t say for sure because I don’t know what it’s like to be healthy.