Look at me: (24 page)

Yet still she was shackled to Rockford. Harris refused to leave—couldn’t, he said, his business was thriving and
Rockford is my business.
Harris wouldn’t leave and Ellen couldn’t leave Harris, not until Ricky was grown up and unquestionably healthy, or the stress could make him sick again. Paralysis: her punishment. Ellen half welcomed it.

She finished the cigarette, then brought both butts indoors and dropped them into the garbage disposal, grinding them until the faint smell of crushed nicotine had dispersed, then washed her hands with scented soap (Harris was a bloodhound), went to the kitchen phone and lifted the receiver once again.

For here was the diabolical thing: in the months since Ricky’s chemo finally ended, Ellen had found herself longing again for Gordon, longing to begin it all again, to start from the beginning and feel that thrill, that childlike sense of escape. There was so much to escape from! There had never been a “breakup” per se; Gordon had understood implicitly when she’d said, “My son has,” said it into the telephone, not even lowering her voice. Now she lifted the phone. Her heart clunked. She knew his numbers still, home, office, pager, knew his schedule by heart.

But she didn’t call Gordon. She called Moose instead.

Holding her lunch tray, Charlotte threaded among the tables past Melanie Trier, who called out, “Hey, Chari, sit with us.” It was the kind of girl she was. So Charlotte perched at a table lined with football players’ girlfriends and the players themselves, some of whom needed two trays to hold the staggering quantities of food their bodies required (Charlotte counted nine glasses of milk on one). She joined in their prognostications about the game, how the other quarterback was a head case so it was just a matter of wigging him out, saying something weird (How about a riddle? Charlotte suggested), yeah, or like maybe a poem … she half listened, her mind on two tracks. Certain words emanated a new significance: “night,” “teacher,” “foreign,” even “math,” and Charlotte looked for ways to say these words because each utterance gave her a bowelly pinch of pleasure, like plucking a string.

Now the words “kitchen counter” were rising in her throat, demanding to be said. “We’re having our
kitchen counters
redone,” she blurted to Melanie, and knew, from her friend’s blank response, that this had been a mistake. She was becoming a girl who muttered odd things in the lunchroom. Yet saying the words made her heart spin.

Tor turned his big, delicate face to Melanie and kissed her. The bracelets chattered on her wrists. And again the question rose in Charlotte: If this was love, did she have it too? Did you need to say “love” for it to be love? Michael hadn’t said “love” except once, about her lotion. His gaze felt so empty; he seemed to rest his eyes on Charlotte but see something else, or see nothing. After they’d done it, she would turn to him and place a hand on his stomach (he was so thin, thinner than he looked in clothes), feeling the sheathe of muscle behind his skin, and try to guess his thoughts. She wanted to ask, Do you feel the link of fate that connects us? Do you think about me during the day, like I think about you? Do you wish I came to your house on nights when I don’t come? Do you prefer small-breasted women, which you told me some men do? But instinct kept her from asking any of these things, lest his answers be wrong. “I should go home,” she would say instead, and pull on her clothes in the dark.

“Chari’s coming to the game,” Melanie told Tor, having apparently forgotten that she wasn’t.

“Cool,” Tor said, and Charlotte felt the adjustment of his gray eyes as he envisioned her beside the field, watching him.

“Positive thoughts,” Melanie said.

“Positive thoughts,” Charlotte agreed.

Kitchen counters
, she was thinking.

Moose leapt from his living room couch, which was covered with maps of Rockford, and lunged for the telephone, anxious that it not wake Priscilla, who had worked the night before and was asleep in the bedroom.

“Ellen,” he said, surprised; he and his sister rarely spoke. “Is everything all right?”

“Oh, fine,” she said, sounding nervous. “I—I was calling to talk about Charlotte.”

“Oh,” Moose said. And then, very slowly, “What. About. Her?”

He spoke with utmost care, because the invocation of Charlotte caused a black umbrella of guilt to open inside him: guilt over the sense of obligation that dragged at him when he thought of his niece. Some weeks ago he had set her free in the woods behind Winnebago College, yet in no time at all she was back, essay in hand, and the surprise of her unwonted reappearance had spurred in Moose his first real irritation with Charlotte: How long did this have to go on? When would he be free of the obligation? What could—

“Moose?”

He was on the phone. Talking to his sister. About Charlotte.

“… can’t get a word out of her …,” Ellen was saying.

“Hmmm,” Moose said, and closed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate.

“It could be nothing, but I have this sense that …”

“Hmmm.”

“… she’s in the grip of something.”

This got his attention. Moose opened his eyes.

“And I thought you might, since you see her regularly, you might have …”

“Grip of what?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t know.”

Moose fixed his eyes on the sliding glass door, beyond which lay his small balcony, the autumnal grounds of Versailles, Rockford, Illinois, and the world, whose immensity the glass door thus synechdochally invoked. In his years of teaching, there had been five or six students who had seemed, if only briefly, only partially, to be edging toward something that might have been a first, glimmering suggestion of the vision he wished to impart. For Moose, the experience of their proximity had been a sweet agony whose nearest analog was love, a love more coiled and hopeful and desperate than any he had known in his amorous life. Male or female, it made no difference. Had Moose been told, at such a time, of such a student, that said student was
in the grip of something
, he would have experienced a catastrophic excitement. But Charlotte was not such a student, nor faintly reminiscent of one. Even those more promising kids had never really seen it; they had graduated from the college and drifted away into the service industries, and occasionally Moose would glimpse one hauling children through Media Play or buying soil at Home Depot, at which point he hid himself urgently, flailingly, ducking behind racks of lawn mowers, lunging around walls of frozen food, desperate to avoid the mundane and mortifying aftermath of his hope.

Still.
In the grip of something.
It intrigued him.

“I’ll watch her, Ellen,” Moose promised. “I’ll look very carefully today, this afternoon. She’s coming to my office at four.”

“Thanks, Moose.”

There was a pause. “And how are you?” he asked.

“Not bad.”

Moose heard a falter in his sister’s voice, and was moved to declare with feeling, “It’s good to talk to you, Ellen,” meaning it despite the labyrinth of discomfort that had interposed itself between them, a hangover from so much time spent together long ago, when he was someone else. He felt a deep, awful tenderness for his little sister.

“Thanks,” she said shyly. “Same.”

And Moose heard her happiness then—Oh, the joy that came of dispensing happiness to others, of entering happiness’s interlocking circuitry! Yet even now Moose felt the persistence of whatever worry he’d heard in Ellen’s voice
before
the happiness his remark had occasioned, and no sooner was the phone back in its cradle than he was felled by a crash of despair on his sister’s behalf. We’re all alone, he thought, crumpling back onto the fragment of living room couch that wasn’t draped in maps of Rockford. We are all alone.

After several minutes of gloomy reverie, Moose was distracted by the sound of Priscilla turning over in bed, a sound that induced in him a twang of good luck at being married to someone who could sleep until—he glanced at his watch—ten-forty-five on her days off, who slept as if sleeping were a sport. He left the couch and went to look at his wife. She was dozing, her hand in a book, a trill of lavender visible above the bedclothes, one of the silken undergarments that tangled around her in bed and around Moose, too, who slept in the nude. They smelled like flowers. Before Priscilla, he’d hated to sleep because of the nightmares—closing his eyes was like jumping off a cliff—but sleeping with her was like slipping into a warm sea and floating there, the nighties coiling like sea anemones around his wrists and ankles.

Priscilla opened her eyes, saw Moose in the doorway and held out her arms. He lay down beside her, mute while she kissed his face, his big strange face that appeared monstrous to him in the mirror sometimes, filled with hues a face should not have—green, purple, chartreuse—kissed him and said, “How’s it going, silly?” and he said, “Okay,” which seemed the most accurate summary he could muster of the gusts of happiness and unhappiness that had buffeted him so far that morning.

“Are you working?” she asked.

“Sort of.”

“I’m reading
Moll Flanders,”
she said, sleepily.

“So I saw,” he teased. “With your eyes closed.”

She smiled and rose from the bed, slender legs still brown under the short hem of her lavender chemise, though it had been months since she’d lain on the balcony in her bikini. Moose followed her into the kitchen.

“You were tired last night,” he said.

“Ugh, it was craziness. Not to mention we were short-staffed—Andy took another sick day.”

“The dolt,” Moose muttered.

“Meanwhile, I’m starving,” Priscilla said. She was adding milk and eggs to powdered pancake mix, blending it all with a large metal whisk. She always ate pancakes or waffles or French toast on her days off, yet she stayed thin—lissome, even. “Want to hand me that pan?”

“I’ve got it.” Moose buttered the pan and placed it over the burner. Then he gathered Priscilla into his arms, enfolding his slender wife in his gigantic embrace, inhaling the light, peppery smell of her underarms.

This was the secret life. For most people, Moose assumed, the secret life was more terrible than anyone could imagine. These couples one saw barely speaking—their lives looked bad enough in public! And yet, would anyone guess at his? Of course, it was unlikely to last; Moose expected this. He had proceeded through the years along a massif of shifting plates, his steps growing more fearful, more tentative each time the ground buckled under him. But for now Priscilla was happy, remained happy, in part (Moose sensed) out of sheer relief at being emancipated from her marriage to Wes Victor, a local root-canal specialist who’d called her a lazy cow and demanded that she sell Amway products, who’d been disgusted by her failure, in three years, to produce even one child. Wes had remarried within months of their divorce, and now took evident relish in herding his copious progeny past Moose and Priscilla’s table at the Cherryvale food court, where they went sometimes on a Saturday. Moose watched his wife’s face very carefully during these encounters, attuned to the smallest flicker of regret or remorse as Priscilla saw her former and much more wealthy husband pass with his new wife, who tugged one kid by the hand, pushed a second in a stroller, carried a third in a drooping sack attached to her back and a fourth inside her womb, which led the way at a salute. But Moose saw only relief. “Look how he doesn’t even help her,” Priscilla said once, in the wondering, reverent tones of someone who, through a minor fluke of rescheduling, has avoided a plane crash.

Priscilla poured batter into four hissing pads. “Go. Work,” she said, patting Moose out the kitchen door. “I’ve got my book.”

In his living room, Moose was greeted by the major nineteenth-century surveyors’ maps of Rockford—1858, ’71, ’76, ’92—along with an array of twentieth-century maps extending to the present day. The Rock River spasmed identically through the middle of each, accentuating the changes around it: the gradual accretion of factories in the last century followed by their gradual dissolution in this one. Moose stared at the maps. It was all right there, the narrative of industrial America told in these glyphs: a tale that began with the rationalization of objects through standardization, abstraction and mass production, and concluded with the rationalization of human beings through marketing, public relations, image consulting and spin. Yet were Moose to invite a student to look at the maps (as he’d done many times), they would not be able to see this. He marveled and puzzled and raged at the awful gap between his vision and other people’s, at his own consistent failure to bridge it. Yet what could he do but try? And keep trying, in hopes that someone, at last, would look back at him with recognition.

At the sound of the shower, Moose rose from the couch. Priscilla was in the bathroom, lifting the lavender nightie over her head, pink toothbrush dangling lazily from her mouth. Steam floated up from behind the shower curtain, mingling with the smell of pancake syrup. Moose stood behind his wife at the sink and slipped his hand down that hard, slightly brown belly, kissing her neck. She laughed, rinsing suds from her teeth, then led him by the hand back into the bedroom, the bed still tussled and fragrant with her sleep, led him there and encircled him with her brown arms and legs. They made love quickly.

Afterward, Moose watched Priscilla’s sleeping face while “Dancing in the Moonlight” played softly on her small transistor radio in the kitchen. At Cherryvale last year, he’d noticed her eyeing a poster for package tours to Hawaii: a couple thrashing through creamy surf, the man vigorous and young, unlike Moose, the woman slender and elastic, like Priscilla. “Would you like to go there?” he had asked, but she’d shrugged this off, knowing they couldn’t afford it, knowing Moose hadn’t boarded a plane since his return from New Haven twelve years ago. But Moose had resolved to take Priscilla there—to Hawaii, yes he would—and in the months since then he’d lain awake many nights, trying to acclimate himself: Fruit drinks. Coconuts. Saltwater. Happy people everywhere, people like Priscilla—Moose longed to be in their midst. But the trip frightened him, too, and he hadn’t mentioned it.