Trust Exercise(34)
“I’ll thank you not to mention my sainted mother.”
“I’m humoring you as the way to her heart.”
“Will you be my daddy then?” Liam grotesquely curls in the narrow front seat and paws Martin’s sleeve in the manner of an uncoordinated kitten. “Will you change my nappies? Waaahh! Waaahh!”
“Don’t I already?”
“Now, Martin,” admonishes Liam, leaving off his kitten act and sitting up. “I’m trying to impress this girl, aren’t I?”
All this witty repartee is shouted back and forth across the stick shift as if for the peanut gallery, as Martin drills the little car down the street like a man fully licensed, or perhaps never licensed. Sarah need not acknowledge what Liam has said. Had he not made the comment she would have felt sure they’d forgotten her. As it is she can’t be sure she’s the girl that he wants to impress; perhaps “this girl” is Karen. The force of the wind as Karen’s car speeds along isolates Sarah in the back seat, her tornado of hair intermittently blinding and gagging her. Concealed within these onslaughts she is able to contemplate Liam. He has the chiseled features of an idol, eyes so unlikely in their blueness and brightness as to suggest something doubtful, an improvised or artificial arrangement, hidden under his skin. Rejected as Sarah has been by Joelle—by Joelle, whom Sarah tried to reject—Sarah is unaware of Joelle’s verdict on Liam, and had she known it she would have surely contradicted it. Yet Sarah comes to much the same conclusion. Liam is within range, although she doesn’t frame it to herself the same way. But the impression of inexplicable deficit, of a queer gap between outward gifts—tall, handsome, lanky, flashing eyes, dazzling smile, the fringes of his hair tangling just the right amount with his eyelashes, one could go on and on—and inward integrity, this Sarah notices also. She envisions a cringing creature, some naked frightened nonhuman thing, having put on Liam’s body like a suit. Now it has to be vigilant, it has to keep watch on the humans around it, to see how to act, so it isn’t found out. And who was Liam keeping watch on? Martin.
The vision of the creature in the Liam bodysuit had to be forc ibly struck from her mind. Liam was exceptionally handsome. Sarah repeated this idea to herself as if it were a lesson.
Martin wrenched the steering wheel and Karen Wurtzel’s car dove roughly over a curb cut and into a small parking lot. Brief strip mall, a handful of storefronts, the retail totem pole at the parking lot entrance indicating Chinese takeout, shipping center, and TCBY, which stood either for The Country’s Best Yogurt or This Can’t Be Yogurt, Sarah wasn’t sure which. Karen Wurtzel was standing in front of TCBY wearing jeans and a kelly-green polo with TCBY stitched above the left breast. She held a white plastic tub about the size of a medium popcorn. Martin braked just short of running her over and flourished grandly with one arm. “Thine Chariot Beckons You.”
“Too Clever By Yards,” complained Liam.
“Testy Can Be Youth,” replied Martin.
Sarah watched a series of storms break across Karen’s face and disappear before the men had looked up from their wordplay. “Hi,” Karen said brusquely to Sarah without looking at her, as Martin and Liam got out of the car, Martin handing Karen her keys with a bow. Karen handed Martin the white plastic tub and Martin peeled off the lid and peered in. “This Can’t Be Yogurt,” he said.
With Karen driving, Martin took Liam’s place in the passenger seat, and Liam climbed in with Sarah. “How’s the water?” he asked. Their knees clashed in the inadequate space and Liam bent to study their conjunction. “They’re talking about us,” he reported to Sarah, who bent her head near his to hear him.
“What are they saying?”
“I don’t know. I don’t speak any Knee.”
“How do you know they’re not just making noises to fool you?”
“The way dogs do? ‘Woof woof woof,’ as if they’re saying something? Dogs must think we’re quite daft.”
“I don’t actually hear our knees talking.”
“It’s on a higher frequency, like a dog whistle. Perhaps dogs talk to knees. But they don’t have knees, do they? Do they? Look, Martin! Who am I?” Liam sprang onto his knees in the tiny back seat and let his tongue idiotically loll from his mouth as the wind beat his hair from his face. “Arf arf!” he shouted into the wind. The toes of his upturned shoes were digging into Sarah’s thigh; they were battered black lace-ups made of cheap or fake leather, sad-sack shoes yet he wore them as obliviously as would a little boy whose mother still bought all his clothes. He had fully committed to playing the pleasure-maddened dog and was barking and slobbering and nosing Martin’s shoulder as best he could around the impediment of Martin’s seat behind which Martin, twisting so as to face back, sheltered whilst whacking Liam’s “dog” nose with a rolled magazine he’d produced from his satchel.
“Bad dog! Bad dog!” Martin cried as Karen wordlessly drove and Sarah, seated behind Karen, rode while trying to catch a glimpse of Karen in the rearview, spotting only herself. Her grim expression repelled her and she forced herself to laugh with crazy energy at Martin’s and Liam’s antics.
Karen parked in the lot at Mama’s Big Boy and they filed inside, first Karen, looking at no one and speaking to no one, then Martin and Liam shoving and goosing each other, then Sarah, at whom Martin and Liam grimaced and clowned and for whom she felt herself performing as a mirror, laughing a laughter not her own, although it would become hers, she told herself. She would not mimic Karen’s wounded hauteur, the flattened line of her mouth.