Bark: Stories (18 page)

“Escaped clowns?” he asked.

“Escaped,” she said. “Sort of escaped.”

“Come in from the cold?” he inquired.

“Come in to sit next to each other.”

He nodded with satisfaction. “The past is for losers, baby?”

“Kind of like that.” She wasn’t sure that she agreed, but she understood the power of such a thought.

His stance grew jaunty. He leaned in close to her, up against the kitchen counter’s edge.

“Do you ever feel that no one knows what you’re talking about, that everyone is just pretending—except for me?”

She studied him carefully. “Yes, I do,” she said. “I do.”

“Ah,” he replied, straightening his posture. He clasped her hand: electricity burst into it then vanished as he let go. “We’re all suckers for a happy ending.”

The day following Michael Jackson’s death, I was constructing my own memorial for him. I played his videos on YouTube and sat in the kitchen at night, with the iPod light at the table’s center the only source of illumination. I listened to “Man in the Mirror” and “Ben,” my favorite, even if it was about a killer rat. I tried not to think about its being about a rat, as it was also the name of an old beau, who had e-mailed me from Istanbul upon hearing of Jackson’s death. Apparently there was no one in Turkey to talk about it with. “When I heard the news of MJackson’s death I thought of you,” the ex-beau had written, “and that sweet, loose-limbed dance you used to do to one of his up-tempo numbers.”

I tried to think positively. “Well, at least Whitney Houston didn’t die,” I said to someone on the phone. Every minute that ticked by in life contained very little information, until suddenly it contained too much.

“Mom, what are you doing?” asked my fifteen-year-old daughter, Nickie. “You look like a crazy lady sitting in the kitchen like this.”

“I’m just listening to some music.”

“But like this?”

“I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“You are so totally disturbing me,” she said.

Nickie had lately announced a desire to have her own reality show so that the world could see what she had to put up with.

I pulled out the earbuds. “What are you wearing tomorrow?”

“Whatever. I mean, does it matter?”

“Uh, no. Not really.” Nickie sauntered out of the room. Of course it did not matter what young people wore: they were already amazing looking, without really knowing it, which was also part of their beauty. I was going to be Nickie’s date at the wedding of Maria, her former babysitter, and Nickie was going to be mine. The person who needed to be careful what she wore was me.

It was a wedding in the country, a half-hour drive, and we arrived on time, but somehow we seemed the last ones there. Guests milled about semipurposefully. Maria, an attractive, restless Brazilian, was marrying a local farm boy, for the second time—a second farm boy on a second farm. The previous farm boy she had married, Ian, was present as well. He had been hired to play music, and as the guests floated by with their plastic cups of wine, Ian sat there playing a slow melancholic version of “I Want You Back.” Except he didn’t seem to want her back. He was smiling and nodding at everyone and seemed happy to be part of this send-off. He was the entertainment. He wore a T-shirt that read,
THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME
. This seemed remarkably sanguine and useful as well as a little beautiful. I wondered how it was done. I myself had never done anything remotely similar. “Marriage is one long conversation,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Of course, he died when he was forty-four, so he had no idea how long the conversation could really get to be.

“I can’t believe you wore that,” Nickie whispered to me in her mauve eyelet sundress.

“I know. It probably was a mistake.” I was wearing a synthetic leopard-print sheath: I admired camouflage. A leopard’s markings I’d imagined existed because a leopard’s habitat had once been alive with snakes, and blending in was required. Leopards were frightened of snakes and also of chimpanzees, who were in turn frightened of leopards—a standoff between predator and prey, since there was a confusion as to which was which: this was also a theme in the wilds of my closet. Perhaps I had watched too many nature documentaries.

“Maybe you could get Ian some lemonade,” I said to Nickie. I had already grabbed some wine from a passing black plastic tray.

“Yes, maybe I could,” she said and loped across the yard. I watched her broad tan back and her confident gait. She was a gorgeous giantess. I was in awe to have such a daughter. Also in fear—as in fearful for my life.

“It’s good you and Maria have stayed friends,” I said to Ian. Ian’s father, who had one of those embarrassing father-in-law crushes on his son’s departing wife, was not taking it so well. One could see him misty-eyed, treading the edge of the property with some iced gin, keeping his eye out for Maria, waiting for her to come out of the house, waiting for an opening, when she might be free of others, so he could rush up and embrace her.

“Yes.” Ian smiled. Ian sighed. And for a fleeting moment everything felt completely fucked up.

And then everything righted itself again. It felt important spiritually to go to weddings: to give balance to the wakes and memorial services. People shouldn’t have been set in motion on this planet only to grieve losses. And without weddings there were only funerals. I had seen a soccer mom become a rhododendron
with a plaque, next to the soccer field parking lot, as if it had been watching all those matches that had killed her. I had seen a brilliant young student become a creative writing contest, as if it were all that writing that had been the thing to do him in. And I had seen a public defender become a justice fund, as if one paid for fairness with one’s very life. I had seen a dozen people become hunks of rock with their names engraved so shockingly perfectly upon the surface it looked as if they had indeed turned to stone, been given a new life the way the moon is given it, through some lighting tricks and a face-like font. I had turned a hundred Rolodex cards around to their blank sides. So let a babysitter become a bride again. Let her marry over and over. So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time.

Someone very swanky and tall and in muddy high heels in the grass was now standing in front of Ian, holding a microphone, and singing “Waters of March” while Ian accompanied. My mind imitated the song by wandering: A stick. A stone. A wad of cow pie. A teary mom’s eye.

“There are a bazillion Brazilians here,” said Nickie, arriving with two lemonades.

“What did you expect?” I took one of the lemonades for Ian and put my arm around her.

“I don’t know. I only ever met her sister. Just once. The upside is at least I’m not the only one wearing a color.”

We gazed across the long yard of the farmhouse. Maria’s sister and her mother were by the rosebushes, having their pictures taken without the bride.

“Maria and her sister both look like their mother.” Her mother and I had met once before, and I now nodded in her direction across the yard. I couldn’t tell if she could see me.

Nickie nodded with a slight smirk. “Their father died in a car crash. So yeah, they don’t look like him.”

I swatted her arm. “Nickie. Sheesh.”

She was silent for a while. “Do you ever think of Dad?”

“Dad who?”

“Come on.”

“You mean, Dad-eeeeee?”

The weekend her father left—left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back—he had said, “You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.”

And I had said, “Are you on crack?” And he had replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, “Yes, a little.”

“Dadder. As in
badder
,” Nickie said now. She sometimes claimed to friends that her father had died, and when she was asked how, she would gaze bereavedly off into the distance and say, “A really, really serious game of Hangman.” Mothers and their only children of divorce were a skewed family dynamic, if they were families at all. Perhaps they were more like cruddy buddy movies, and the dialogue between them was unrecognizable as filial or parental. It was extraterrestrial. With a streak of dog-walkers-meeting-at-the-park. It contained more sibling banter than it should have. Still, I preferred the whole thing to being a lonely old spinster, the fate I once thought I was most genetically destined for, though I’d worked hard, too hard, to defy and avoid it, when perhaps there it lay ahead of me regardless. If you were alone when you were born, alone when you
were dying,
really absolutely
alone when you were dead, why “learn to be alone” in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

Maria came out of the house in her beautiful shoulderless wedding dress, which was white as could be.

“What a fantastic costume,” said Nickie archly.

Nickie was both keen observer and enthusiastic participant in the sartorial disguise department, and when she was little there had been much playing of Wedding, fake bridal bouquets made of ragged plastic-handled sponges tossed up into the air and often into the garage basketball hoop, catching there. She was also into Halloween. She would trick-or-treat for UNICEF dressed in a sniper outfit or a suicide bomber outfit replete with vest. Once when she was eight, she went as a dryad, a tree nymph, and when asked at doors what she was, she kept saying, “A tree-nip.” She had been a haughty trick-or-treater, alert to the failed adult guessing game of it—
you’re a what? a vampire?
—so when the neighbors looked confused, she scowled and said reproachfully, “Have you
never
studied Greek mythology?” Nickie knew how to terrify. She had sometimes been more interested in answering our own door than in knocking on others, peering around the edge of it with a witch hat and a loud cackle. “I think it’s time to get back to the customers,” she announced to me one Halloween when she was five, grabbing my hand and racing back to our house. She was fearless: she had always chosen the peanut allergy table at school since a boy
she liked sat there—the cafeteria version of
The Magic Mountain
. Nickie’s childhood, like all dreams, sharpened artificially into stray vignettes when I tried to conjure it, then faded away entirely. Now tall and long-limbed and inscrutable, she seemed more than ever like a sniper. I felt paralyzed beside her, and the love I had for her was less for this new spiky Nickie than for the old spiky one, which was still inside her somewhere, though it was a matter of faith to think so. Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether. When, in the last few months, Nickie had “stood her ground” in various rooms of the house, screaming at me abusively, I would begin mutely to disrobe, slowly lifting my shirt over my head so as not to see her, and only that would send her flying out of the room in disgust. Only nakedness was silencing, but at least something was.

“I can’t believe Maria’s wearing white,” said Nickie.

I shrugged. “What color should she wear?”

“Gray!” Nickie said immediately. “To acknowledge having a brain! A little gray matter!”

“Actually, I saw something on PBS recently that said only the outer bark of the brain—and it does look like bark—is gray. Apparently the other half of the brain has a lot of white matter. For connectivity.”

Nickie snorted, as she often did when I uttered the letters
PBS
. “Then she should wear gray in acknowledgment of having half a brain.”

I nodded. “I get your point,” I said.

Guests were eating canapés on paper plates and having their pictures taken with the bride. Not so much with Maria’s new
groom, a boy named Hank, which was short not for Henry but for Johannes, and who was not wearing sunglasses like everyone else but was sort of squinting at Maria in pride and disbelief. Hank was also a musician, though he mostly repaired banjos and guitars, restrung and varnished them, and that was how he, Maria, and Ian had all met.

Now the air was filled with the old-silver-jewelry smell of oncoming rain. I edged toward Ian, who was looking for the next song, idly strumming, trying not to watch his father eye Maria.

“Whatcha got? ‘I’ll Be There’?” I asked cheerfully. I had always liked Ian. He had chosen Maria like a character, met her on a semester abroad and then come home already married to her—much to the marveling of his dad. Ian loved Maria, and was always loyal to her, no matter what story she was in, but
Maria was a narrative girl and the story had to be spellbinding or she lost interest in the main character, who was sometimes herself and sometimes not. She was destined to marry and marry and marry. Ian smiled and began to sing “I Will Always Love You,” sounding oddly like Bob Dylan but without the sneer.

I swayed. I stayed. I did not get in the way.

“You are a saint,” I said when he finished. He was a sweet boy, and when Nickie was little he had often come over and played soccer in the yard with her and Maria.

“Oh no, I’m just a deposed king of corn. She bought the farm. I mean, I sold it to her, and then she flipped it and bought this one instead.” He motioned toward the endless field beyond the tent, where the corn was midget and standing in mud, June not having been hot enough to evaporate the
puddles. The tomatoes and marijuana would not do well this year. “Last night I had a dream that I was in
West Side Story
and had forgotten all the words to ‘I like to be in America.’ Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“Jesus, what is my dad
doing
?” Ian said, looking down and away.

Ian’s father was still prowling the perimeter, a little drunkenly, not taking his eyes off the bride.