Authors: Mary Helen Specht
Why not say it aloud? “I wish Kunle were here.” While she was allowed to roam the globe, he was still a prisoner to his country.
“They'll give your boy the visa. Why wouldn't they?” Brandon tapped her lightly with one hand, the other gripping the steering
wheel. She saw him glance in the rearview mirror at Molly, smile their private smile.
Flannery didn't feel like telling them about how few Nigerians made it past the consular officer sitting on the other side of the desk, attempting to judge whether each applicant could be trusted to return home. “Yeah.” She sighed. “Why wouldn't they?”
They should have applied for a fiancé visa, she thought. Those visas took months longer, but there was a better chance for approval. Of course, though she would never admit it to Kunle, this way of doing things was a win-win. If he didn't get the visa, people would understand why she had to go back so soon.
There was a saying in Nigerian pidgin: “Body no be firewood,” meaning that a body is not meant to be put through all the searing pains and horrors of this life. But when she'd first heard Kunle use the phrase, she'd thought he was talking about romantic sparks, the burn of physical attraction. Love turning your body into sticks of firewood. Flannery told herself she would not forget what it was like waking to the call to prayer each morning, dawn light illuminating a tree of egrets standing sentinel at the edge of the campus pond. She would not forget the burn of her body when she woke in his arms.
Eventually the car drove over a cattle guard, a metal roadrunner soldered onto the open gate, before continuing for what seemed like forever down a curving caliche road. They parked adjacent to a white ranch house. Before Flannery opened the car door, Molly popped her head over the seat, kissing her on the cheek. “You're home.” Then, Brandon wrapped his arms awkwardly around them both, kissing the opposite cheek until even Flannery's face betrayed a small smile.
F
lannery's boyfriend is coming to visit.”
Molly announced this abruptly to the people sitting closest to her at the picnic table, including Alyce, who dipped tostada chips into habañero and mango salsa and drank a strong margarita from a plastic cup, letting the sweat bead on her forehead and neck. Even in the shade of the oak tree, languid afternoon turning to dusk, the summer Texas heat was brutal. Alyce turned toward Flannery, her best friend, but was not particularly surprised, merely raising an eyebrow at her to say:
Well, tell us about it, by all means.
“He's applying for a tourist visa,” Flannery said, shaking her head. She seemed withdrawn, and Molly, fingers fluttering nervously in the air, was in a state Alyce could only describe as forcibly cheerful.
“Then, they're going to buy a house down the street and stay forever,” said Molly, sweetly, jokingly, sporting red rectangular glasses and a black T-shirt. “Even if I have to keep them tied up in the basement.” She was trying to be funny, but there was a tenor of desperation in her voice. It was no secret that Molly was unusually attached to her older sister, which was why she'd ended up at Marsh for college, becoming part of their coterie despite being two years younger, even marrying Brandon, who at this particular moment announced, “And then we can barbecue every Sunday and finally start drinking martinis and sleeping with each other's wives.”
“Finally,” said Santiago, swirling goopy queso with a spoon. The whole spread disgusted Alyce, who let the flies land on her untouched plate without bothering to shoo them away.
“Glad you guys have it all worked out,” said Flannery, sitting bronze cast beneath the sun's rays as they sliced through tree branches, her brown hair and the freckles covering her body adding to a sepia effect. Alyce let her head loll onto Flannery's shoulder as two vultures glided on wind currents far above them, and she tried to feel happy that Flan was home.
The party was made up of old friends, mostly from their college days, many of whom Alyce didn't really see on a regular basis anymore. Kids. Work. Life. Breath.
Steven and his girlfriend, Lou, walked over to the picnic table, and Alyce stood to make room for them, gathering up dirty napkins so they wouldn't blow across the yard and lodge among the dense patch of cedars lining the fence.
“You started gardening.” Steven pointed to the small eight-by-four raised bed.
“Harry's idea.” Everything was Harry's idea, she almost said. Alyce felt like an outside observer watching people she knew, in that way you know familiar television characters, on an old Zenith. Why was she required to respond? How was it they didn't realize she wasn't one of them anymore?
“Just say no to chemical fertilizers.”
“I'm glad you brought that up,” responded Harry from across the table. “I actually invited you all out here so you could each take a dump in our compost pile.” A whoop came from the porch as someone turned up Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean” on the stereo.
“You should put up a fence to keep out armadillos. They like to eat roots.”
“I found an old book in the ranch house that claims armadillos taste like sea turtles,” said Harry, eyebrow raised.
“Let's trust the literature.”
Alyce had known Steven for as long as she'd known her husband. Steven had been Harry's roommate freshman year and later lived with all of them at Dryden House, the dumpy, ramshackle clapboard perennially rented to upperclassmen on one of the muddled but tree-lined streets bordering Marsh College. After graduation, Steven had been recruited into the vast and ambiguous Dallas consulting industry, the lucrative late-1990s catchall for aimless humanities majors with good grades, but he was laid off after the tech bubble. He'd used his small savings to buy a piece of land near the Austin airport that he named Heavy Metal Farm. Now he raised chickens and grew heirloom tomatoes and other organics (“consulting for the soul”) to sell at the farmers' markets, which had become popular since locavores had infested the city. But with the recession, even the fat of the land had gone anorexic. The last time they'd spoken, he'd told Alyce he wasn't sure the farm would last through next year.
Steven turned to her. “Snow White, why are you wearing a jacket? It's scorching,” he said. Hair black as ebony, skin white as snow, lips red as blood. Barely five feet tall, Alyce kept her black hair tied in a ponytail these days; she hated the way blue veins had begun to show, a vampiric map, betrayed by her translucent skin.
Alyce looked down at the worn leather blazer she wore over a T-shirt and mismatched cotton pants. “It's part of my ensemble.” But really she imagined the sting of the sun like a whip.
“My woman runs cold,” said Harry, coming to her rescue as usual. “Her internal thermometer is one of our age's great scientific mysteries.”
Beers were wrenched out of ice. Silverware clattered. People
hugged Flannery and complimented Alyce and Harry on the food, though Harry had done it allâprepping the house, manning the grill, breaking up fights between the kidsâbecause she was so exhausted. Flannery leaned into Alyce's ear at one point, asking, “Everything okay?” Flannery's homecoming was the only reason Alyce didn't feign illness and just disappear back inside the house.
Alyce tensed, willing herself to act normal and say something, anything. “Steven, aren't you going to tell everyone the real news?” she asked, because she'd been surprised when Lou called her out of the blue two weeks ago, wondering if she had time to make a wedding shawl (“Silk?” “No,” Lou had said, “White chenille with eyelash lace. You know. Like yours. Well, not exactly like yours.”).
Now Alyce sat still, the attention of her friends successfully deflected.
“Yeah, sure,” said Steven, looking at Lou, who absentmindedly picked globs of paint from her cutoff jeans. “I'm in the market for some groomsmen and was wondering if you all knew any good ones.”
Soon, everyone huddled around the table, giving their congratulations, jockeying for information. “When? Why now? Is Maya excited?” Steven and Lou had been living together for years. Their daughter, Maya, was almost four years old.
“Instead of groomsmen,” said Lou, turning her head so that one long feather earring brushed her right shoulder, “I was thinking of having y'all come down the aisle with Steven in a dancing procession. You know, like the Baraat in Indian weddings?”
“With the Cherokee Nation smoke-signaling Pachelbel's Canon,” said Santiago, grinning. Alyce watched late-afternoon light dapple his arm as he reached for one of the napkins stacked beneath a rock. Thin and fine-boned, Santiago had begun shaving his
head three years ago when he could no longer disguise his sharply receding hairline.
Some people laughed at Santi, others turned to chat again in pairs and threesomes. They passed around plates of shish kebabs and German potato salad and chunks of crusty bread. They refilled their drinks. Alyce tried to remember what it had felt like when she'd loved these people more than anything.
Watermelon was the only perfect fruit.
Cool and wet. Sweet but not so sweet one felt sick after eating it. The Christmas contrast of the green of the skin and the red of the flesh. In grade school, Alyce and her best friend, Jessica, carried a small watermelon as “provisions” when exploring the back alleys of their Phoenix suburb. Afterward, they would each hold a piece daintily by the rind while red juice dripped stickily down their mouths and chins, pushing tiny black seeds around with their tongues.
But chopping a whole watermelon was a bitch, and there in the kitchen that afternoon, during Flannery's homecoming party at Roadrunner Ranch, she had to press the dullish blade from both ends before the bulging middle finally cracked open. She held up the knife and imagined bringing it down, carving herself into pieces instead. Releasing the pressure to coordinate her limbs as one cohesive body.
Slicing the fruit into smaller and smaller chunks, she watched a pair of finches through the refractive bottles lining the windowsill. The birds at the feeder had recently exchanged their winter camo for summertime, yellow-feathered bellies, and the color caught her eye, jarring and garish. (Her brain automatically calculated the dye combination it would take to re-create.) The feeder was already there when they'd moved in, and Harry kept it filled it with seeds from the feed store off the highway. Now, one pair had built a nest beneath
the overhang of the porch, balancing their home precariously atop a rafter.
When Alyce was growing up, her whole family had been so obsessed with birds that being sent into the wild with a pair of binoculars and a laminated identification guide was a rite of passage for every twelve-year-old in the Buckle clan. Letters and, later, e-mails always began with a list of recent sightings (“WOW: A pair of painted buntings made three appearances at the pecan tree feeder last week!!! We're also happy to announce that Ruth is pregnant.”); vacations were planned around at least one reported nest of a rare or striking species. Alyce almost fell to her death at age ten when her father encouraged her to climb “higher, sweetie, higher” up a rock embankment where a great blue heron had supposedly laid eggs.
Out the window, the ranch finches were uncharacteristically calm considering all the activity: Steven and Lou trying to dance the tango in the grass, three steps in one direction, dramatic head turns, three steps back; the clank of metal echoing across the yard indicating Brandon and Molly were in the process of losing a game of horseshoes to Harry's cousin and his boyfriend; and the kids, her own two boys and Steven and Lou's little girl, crushing and crowding into the oversized blue-and-green hammock Alyce's parents had brought from Mexico a few years ago as a Christmas present for Harry, who, along with the other guests, was not in immediate viewâperhaps off on a walk, she thought. Clouds hung bored in the sky.
Alyce used to adore parties, with this group of friends in particular, but really any sort of party. At one time she thought herself a natural hostess who crackled to life when there were other people drinking, pairing off to gossip, sneaking cigarettes out of view of their partners. Unlike marriage or parenthood, hosting allowed her to dip in and out of various currents, no obligationâthe spotlight
of attention dispersed through the group like light through a prism. But in time Alyce saw this for what it was, too. Just a party. As transitory and insubstantial as bird-watching. A way to pass the time. Drinks emptied and refilled. Dishes dirtied and then cleaned, dirtied again. Stories told, retold, forgotten. Did you hear the Flaming Lips are playing at Stubb's? Have you read the story in the latest
New Yorker
? How about them Cowboys? Nothing that she'd hoped would fix herâlove, motherhood, artâever had. It was enough to make you want to curl up in bed and go to sleep and never wake up.
But Alyce couldn't hide in the kitchen forever. Sliding the perfectly sliced pieces of the paragon fruit onto a platter, Alyce noticed a walking stick insect lying still along the white door frame, trying unsuccessfully to blend in with the wall. For the creature's sake, Alyce looked away and, in the way all of them had learned to do in one way or another, pretended not to see it.
Just before sunset, Harry was corralling everyone in order to usher them to the small cliff that rose from the other side of the creek. Alyce took him aside, sitting him down gently on the porch next to their sons, who were eating more watermelon, faces a smear of pink. Their boys were both good eaters and Ian, the youngest, liked to give people names based on food. Usually, Harry was “strawberry pancakes” and Alyce “fried eggs.” At the moment, she felt her yolky goo leaking like an open wound.
“Harry, do you mind if I stay here? I'm just not up to it. I'm sorry.”
Her husband pursed his lips. She could see him trying not to snap at her.
Taking a deep breath, Alyce shook her head to indicate that she was just being silly. She forced herself to stand. “If we're quiet, we might see deer.”