Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

A Private State: Stories (4 page)

Page 16

Sven revs up nicely. "Great car," says Dawn. She yawns and shivers at the same time. It is past midnight and windy. Mary Ellen tells her there's something she has to pick up at the house before she can drop Dawn off. Dawn nods. They are halfway there when the young woman says, "Murray's not your real name, is it?"

Mary Ellen agrees. "No," she says, "that's just a nickname. My real name is Juliet." A third self slips in to join Mary Ellen and Murray. Sven is getting full.

"Juliet," says Dawn. "That's pretty. You don't hear it a lot."

Dawn asks her about her family and they tell each other who was oldest and how things were. It's remarkable how comfortable it is. Mary Ellen doesn't even feel jealous anymore; she's just sort of curious. Maybe Juliet is less prone to envy.

Mary Ellen realizes, as she's listened to Dawn, that she's taken a series of wrong turns. She is on the outskirts of town, a neighborhood she doesn't often frequent, where developments replaced lumber yards, which replaced woods. Mary Ellen squints through the light haze of flakes on the windshield and sees they have just entered a community called Deer Springs. "I'm lost," Mary Ellen says. She slows the car and cuts the ignition, letting Sven's nose angle softly into a drift on the empty street. Satellite dishes, cones of snow sitting on central antennae, cast shadows the shape of angular overgrown flowers on the white lawns.

As flakes drift down, it seems to Mary Ellen she and Dawn might never get out of here. They might become a permanent fixture in Deer Springs, another thing the children could play on instead of swing sets and plastic slides in primary colors. Startlingly lifelike sculptures of a separated woman and a girlfriend. A hunter and prey. One woman on the cusp of despair, the other on the brink of voting age. There were lots of ways to look at it.

"Juliet, would you change your name if you got married?" Dawn asks her.

Mary Ellen hadn't, even with the short, tough link of a hyphen.

Page 17

Marten and West, it said on the mailbox Frank had built. Brisk as lawyers. Their lives were so distinct she felt hugely betrayed when he said he had to leave because he was lonely. Didn't that just happen? Wasn't that how they'd arranged it? Hadn't it been safer like that?

"Why can't you try?" Mary Ellen had asked then.

"I have tried. I have," Frank said, as he took a buck's head from the wall. "I have," he said, stroking the muzzle. It was true. She remembers one night last winter, when Frank won Scrabble with "torque." Turning tiles to their blank side, he told her about stitching together a German shepherd that afternoon. A leg torn from a hip socket, fractured ribs, a ruptured spleen, nasty injuries. Critical, not fatal. Frank looked at the animal, the glint of his tags, the sweep of the tail, and all the bloody tangle in between and felt a strange sensation in his chest. "What's he called?'' he asked Carlos.

"Fritz," Carlos said. For an instant, even knowing his name, Frank wanted to let the shepherd die. It wasn't the thought of sparing the dog a painful recovery. It wasn't that the animal was old. It was knowing he could nudge him to either side. It wouldn't have taken much, Frank said. A nick with the knife, a slight clumsiness, the heart would gush then stop. The only reason Frank picked up the scalpel and started to carve away the leaky spleen was the sight of Carlos stroking the animal's neck.

Mary Ellen hadn't known what to say then. She sat there, in the living room, drifts the size of polar bears pressing against the windows. She thinks now she murmured something about how they'd never made the word "torque" before. Maybe she'd asked if a bath would help him relax. Now she would have taken his hands and kissed them, knuckle by dry knuckle, and pulled him to their featherbed, warm and quiet in the gray light that filled their room through snowy winters.

"Yes," Mary Ellen tells Dawn. "I would change my name." She knows, too, that she has no idea what her true name might be. It

Page 18

comes to her, though, that it would be spelled in letters the language doesn't know. Letters that come from somewhere beyond
X, Y
and
Z
, ones that don't catalog the troubles that fall to doctors. Letters built from something as quick and sensitive as voltage. Letters with a charge.

"So would I," says Dawn. Sven is quiet under his fresh coat of flakes. "They'd been married forty-five years," Dawn says, and Mary Ellen sees the girl is crying. She snaps on the hazard lights, undoes her seatbelt and reaches for Dawn. As Mary Ellen wraps her arms around the girl's shoulders, a net of static crackles blue around them.

"This damn sweater," says Mary Ellen into the girl's hair. More sparks flare and die and Mary Ellen feels the wool become wet in the same place Tim's blood stained it. It would be nice to see an eight-point buck right now, sniffing and curious at the base of a satellite dish. It would distract Dawn, and Mary Ellen thinks of inventing an animal shadow so she can whisper, "Look, look!" Instead she strokes Dawn's hair and lets the damp spot on her chest grow a bit wider before asking Dawn if she's afraid of guns.

Dawn sits up and sniffles. In the glow of the hazards, she looks confused. "Of course I am." When the orange light hits the snow, it looks hot enough to melt ice, but of course it isn't.

Mary Ellen says, "Doesn't matter. You should learn to hunt. Frank would like that." She starts Sven, though at first she forgets the hazards. As she flicks them off, Mary Ellen suddenly remembers what's next for the juniors. It's Whitman. The body electric.

Page 19

Arizona

A guardrailrather flimsy, julia thoughtwas he only thing that kept her, Hannah, and the tourists clustered here from bouncing down the canyon's walls and into the dark river below. A Spanish family whistled and shook their heads. Mothers' hands hovered near girls with black ponytails. Julia knew the rock and grand shadows should make her feel austere and independent but in truth it only made her lonely. Even the trees out here were mavericks. A ponderosa pine to her right tilted into the ravine at an impossible angle.

But Hannah, Julia's older sister, appeared to have lived in Flagstaff long enough to be at ease with fragile edges. She'd been here a year, moving three months after their mother died of a heart attack. Hannah had recovered, it seemed. How else to read her pleasure at a horizon where a sunset the size of Rhode Island bloomed? ''Did you see the swallow?" Hannah shouted above the wind.

Julia wasn't looking for birds, however; she was trying to back away from the rim. She'd imagined seeing canyons at a remove, the way she'd seen Phoenix from the air: sharply angled but mild because it was so distant. The last time she'd traveled in the West, she'd been with Hannah and their parents. Their mother bought them each a chunk of turquoise and pointed out false lakes glinting above highways. This time, Julia at least expected signs alert-

Page 20

ing her to hazards, but the notices posted were low key. No Climbing. Stay on Paths.

Nudging through the Spaniards, Julia wanted only to be back in the damp, small-hilled East. She missed the foggy mess of her greenhousebulbs dumped in one corner, coils of hose in another. When her mother died, Julia left her slight job in New York publishing and moved home, to the outskirts of Boston. Her father had been too numb to notice she'd taken up with plants, although her mother would have sought advice on iris, even bought a flat of pansies.

Julia thought of her father and the gin bottles piling in the trash. She thought of Henry, her new boyfriend, and his pale hands. She hadn't told Hannah about either of these things and it was nearly time to go home. Tonight, Hannah was having a party and tomorrow they'd picnic at a swimming hole. On Sunday, Julia was flying back to Boston's steaming heat.

"Look!" Hannah yelled and took Julia's arm. Julia went still, conscious of her sister's fingers on her elbow. Hannah hadn't touched her much this week. Then Julia saw the bird: the tail of the swallow against the towers of rock stretched the perspective open. Vast was the only word, a word used back East to talk about the size of debts or fortunes, not scary gaps in the earth.

Julia was about to tell her sister she wanted to go when Hannah ducked below the rail. The Spaniards muttered. Hannah turned and motioned at Julia to join her. The mothers gripped their children's wrists and bustled off, leaving the American sisters to their craziness. People always knew they were sistersthe eyes, the long, mussed hair, like neither of their parents, but quite exactly like the other. "Come on!" Hannah shouted and sat down, legs dangling.

The whole rim was rotten with dryness. As they'd walked along, they'd sent down sprays of rock, widening the canyon with their sloppy feet. "Julia!" Hannah yelled. "Don't be chicken!" Living in Arizona had smoked out Hannah's soft, eastern ways.

Page 21

She didn't say please anymore and she'd acquired unusual new skills, like camping in the desert without leaving a trace.

Julia nearly shouted back, "Watch out! You were bad at the balance beam." Then she remembered that Hannah's last Christmas present was a family of three wooden armadillos, which had looked uneasy in their new home next to the schooner in a bottle. Hannah ate bulgur instead of turkey and spoke of vortices that generated healing winds. Their father drank a lot of martinis and shrank further into his chin. For him, life beyond New England already had a shimmer of unreality; he sniffed the teas and spices Hannah brought as if they might be illegal. Still, when she went back to Arizona, he said, "Hannah will miss foliage." He did not say she might miss them.

Unwinding her fingers from the guardrail, Julia wasn't sure if Hannah would be willing to admit to even remembering maples in October. Nor, when Julia called in June, had she seemed completely sympathetic to a visit. But Julia insisted. She'd just slept with Henry. She'd been having long dreams about their mother. The gin was getting worse. Julia had had a vision of herself and Hannah talking under antlered cacti in the twilight. She'd thought below the thin southwestern glaze, Hannah would still be Hannah, firmly rooted, deeply certain.

Julia eased herself down, not quite next to her sister, and became aware of the windy space below. From this perch, you could see the black river more clearly. It was dangerous out here, but Hannah leaned toward it. Julia saw that all her sister had to do was press her sneakers against the rock, gather tension in her legs, and she would tear through the sky, arms wheeling. Julia imagined Hannah dropping like a pebble in the Colorado, whose water, so dark and shining from up here, would tumble her smooth.

Then Julia realized she was the one who wanted to plant her shoes against the sandstone and fly toward the water. Maybe that would scatter the picture of their father sitting in the dark; Henry, nervous and waiting; their mother, padding to the garden. She

Page 22

wanted gravity pooling in her stomach and then the cleansing shock of fierce, cold water.

Hannah leaned over and said, "It'll pass. Sometimes people feel weird out here." It would have been fine if Hannah left it like that. It was actually kind. It helped Julia stop looking at the river in that mad, fixed way. But then Hannah patted Julia's knee, exactly the way their mother had to soothe a minor hurt. "Don't try and make me feel better!" Julia nearly shouted. But then wasn't that why she was visiting her sister? Because she didn't know what else to do, Julia sat there facing the wind, pushing hair from her eyes and mouth, not entirely sure if the strands belonged to her or Hannah.

Long brown hair, Julia thought later that afternoon in Hannah's kitchen. That's the only thing we have in common any more. What was this talk about
knowing
Hannah's friends? That was the excuse for tonight's barbecue. Hannah had met a lot of new people and wanted Julia to
know
them, as if the party were to last weeks as they lounged on cushions and nursed sangria. They were people from the newspaper, guys she hiked with, members of her women's group. Vivid, vegetarian and sensitive, Julia supposed. She thought of Henry's slanted smile and priestly fingers.

Julia watched her own fingers as she sliced lemons and oranges into sticky wheels. She'd nearly cut herself several times, remembering the moment on the rim which slid unaccountably into a vision of Henry's hands moving on her rib cage toward her breasts. Hannah poured bottle after bottle of Chianti into big pots, then knocked over some wine and laughed at the crimson ruin it made of the tablecloth.

Hannah had always been as neat as her name, which, if you turned it on its head, stayed the same. As opposed to what happened when Julia was flipped backward, making a sound like someone throwing up. Now Hannah laughed at permanent

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