Florida(36)

Helena’s hands flew out to stop the vision, and the nail of her index finger began to throb where she had hit the wooden doorway at her side. The wet street was again spread before her, the air still full of horrid bells. She sent one last rattled look inside the store and found the shopkeeper kneeling amongst his ruin. He held a can washed free of its label, a roll of undamaged toilet tissue in pink paper. His face was strange, as if it had collapsed into itself. He was making a low whistling sound through the gap in his teeth.

She took a step toward him without thinking, then stopped. She hated herself for her first impulse, to comfort. The caretaker of others wasn’t who she wanted to be—it was not her natural role—but it somehow had become who she was.

She watched herself as if from above as she moved back into the store, picking over the rubble. The shopkeeper stood as she neared. He smelled of wet denim and sweated-out alcohol and sour private skin. Up close, he looked at her face briefly, with a doggish expression, something both hungry and ashamed. Maybe he had a family, a wife who had worried when he hadn’t returned in the night. Certainly, he, too, was the child of a mother who was either very old or dead.

He looked up at her, then he closed his eyes, as if she, this morning, was too much for him.

She reached out to touch him, but in the end, she couldn’t. She took a step back and picked things up off the ground. A pen. A dustpan. A bath toy. She piled the items gently in his arms. And when he didn’t move, she stooped to collect more: pens, cookies, a hand of bananas. One perfect orange, its pores even and clean.





FLOWER HUNTERS





It is Halloween; she’d almost forgotten.

At the corner, a man is putting sand and tea-light candles into white paper bags.

He will return later with a lighter, filling the dark neighborhood with a glowing grid for the trick-or-treaters.

She wonders if this is wise, whether it is not, in fact, incredibly dangerous to put flames near so many small uncoordinated people with polyester hems.

All day today and yesterday she has been reading the early naturalist William Bartram, who traveled through Florida in 1774; because of him, she forgot Halloween.

She’s most definitely in love with that dead Quaker.

This is not to say that she is no longer in love with her husband; she is, but after sixteen years together, perhaps they have blurred at the edges of each other’s vision.

She says to her dog, who is beside her at the window watching the candle man, One day you’ll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.

The dog ignores her, because the dog is wise.

In any event, her husband will inevitably win, since Bartram takes the form of dead trees and dreams, and her husband takes the form of warm pragmatic flesh.

She picks up her cell—she wants to tell her best friend, Meg, about her sudden overwhelming love for the ghost of a Quaker naturalist—but then she remembers that Meg doesn’t want to be her best friend anymore.

A week ago, Meg said very gently, I’m sorry, I just need to take a break.

Outside, in Florida, there’s still the hot yellow wool of daylight.

In the kitchen, her sons are eating their dinner of bean tacos glumly.

They had wanted to be ninjas, but she had to concoct something quickly, and now their costumes are hanging up in the laundry room.

Earlier, she put her own long-sleeved white button-down backward on the younger boy, crossed the arms around and tied them in the back, added a contractor’s mask she’d slitted and colored with a silver Sharpie, and because he was armless, she pinned a candy bucket to the waist.

Cannibal Lecture, he is calling himself, a little too on the nose.

For the older boy, she cut eyeholes in a white sheet for an old-style ghost, though it rankled, a white boy in a white sheet, Florida still the Deep South; she hopes that the effect is mitigated by the rosebuds along the hems.

She also forgot the kindergarten’s Spooky Breakfast this morning; she’d failed to bring the boo-berry muffins, and her smaller son had sat in his regular clothes in his tiny red chair, looking hopefully at the door as mothers and fathers in their masks and wigs who kept not being her poured in.

She wasn’t even thinking of him at that hour; she was thinking of William Bartram.

Her husband comes in from work, sees the costumes, raises an eyebrow, remains merciful.

The boys brighten as if on a dimmer switch, her husband turns on “Thriller” to get in the mood, and she watches them bop around, a twist in the heart.

It’s not yet dusk, but the shadows have stretched.

Her husband puts on an old green Mohawk wig, the boys shimmy their costumes on again, and the three of them head out.



* * *



—

She is alone in the house with the dog and William Bartram and the bags of wan lollipops that were all that remained on the drugstore’s shelves.

It’s necessary to hand out candy; her first year in the house, she righteously gave out toothbrushes, and it wasn’t an accident that a heavy oak branch smashed her window that night.

She can almost see three blocks away into the kitchen of Meg’s house, where beautiful handmade costumes are being put on.

Meg loves this shit.

A week ago, when Meg broke up with her, they were eating ginger scones that Meg had made from scratch, and the bite in her mouth went so dry that she couldn’t swallow for a long, long time.