Shorts - Sinister Shorts (30 page)

This morning I stepped on an anthill. The ants were deflected only momentarily from their purpose. All of them together seem to make up one body.

A long time ago I read that the greatest evolutionary step occurred when primitive spirochetes swimming around encountered the precursors of sperm. They attached themselves to the end of the sperm and their flailing tails allowed the sperm to move. Which is how human reproduction became possible, but that is not what interests me. What I think about is that my millions of cells are descendants of free swimmers banding together into an organized and complex universe. I am not trivial; I carry many beings within me. I deserve to survive.

AUGUST 24

It is hot even in the mornings now, hot blue above, hot yellow below. I go out now before the sun tops the black Nevada mountain range on the horizon. In the afternoon the wind whips the sand into stinging clouds and I stay inside.

I give the maid a few extra dollars. She thanks me in Spanish. Spanish is a very courtly language, musical, like water over stones. Leo always complained that the Latinos were trying to take over his college. I wonder why he hated them so much.

In the quiet evenings, the air-conditioning whirring and the shades drawn, I lie on the bed and think about the college. I think how we trained people to become just like us. This kind of thinking is very hard work, but when I have a thought it sticks to the grain of sand that is my soul.

AUGUST 26

Leo and my husband are at the door. When I open it, they look stunned and step back.

They are looking at me. I see myself their way, disheveled and plain. No mask of makeup, no curls, no shoes. My legs are brown now and strong.

They are both sweating in their suits.

“We've come to take you home,” they say. My husband starts to cry. They follow me into my room and sit on the bed, their eyes raking around the furniture, looking like tarantulas. My husband is still crying angrily.

“Who do you think you are?” he asks.

Leo says, “The new school year is starting next week. Everything is a mess. I'm willing to overlook this irresponsible behavior.”

They do not wait for me to speak. They rush on, whining.

I shake my head, and I hear the tone change, becoming sinister. They are talking about nervous breakdowns. My husband says I can't abandon my children. Molly is back and she needs me.

I shake my head.

Leo takes my arm. He says I need a doctor, and tells my husband to help him. My husband looks at him, at me. Now he is the one who smells of brandy.

“Go away,” I say. They pick me up and carry me to the car. Leo drives and I am firmly strapped between the two of them in the front seat. We drive out the long flat highway. It's got to be a hundred ten degrees out here. I see my cactus receding in the distance. The wind is blowing up a real sandstorm.

Leo turns on the wipers and peers out the front window, going slower. My husband is telling me that they had to do it for my own good.

SEPTEMBER 10

I am back at home. I am seeing Dr. Bernstein three times a week. My eyes feel gritty, as if sand were blowing through my head. My soul may already have blown away. My father asks on the phone, “When are you gonna get me out of here?” His voice sounds weaker.

I don't think anymore. Dr. Bernstein says it would hamper my recovery.

SEPTEMBER 12

I am back at work. Leo has started an affair with his secretary. My husband says I better get with the program and start cooking again.

I wake up with a start, my throat dry, my eyes stinging. My husband is snoring. He has drunk a lot of brandy.

I'm rushing into the sandstorm. The wind shrieks and picks me up and tosses me into the howling chaos.

I tumble out of bed. I blow into the kitchen, past the sandy, dirty pots and pans and the sandy, filthy floor, and out the door to the garage.

Wind is roaring through my head. I tote the can of gasoline into the bedroom and pour gas all around the bed. Then I climb up quietly and take the batteries out of the smoke detector. I light the match and toss it toward the bed. There is a blast of heat and more wind.

I have made my own desert.

I force the bedroom door shut on the flames. I walk out into the night in my nightgown, but now the desert is gone, only the darkness remains, there's only confusion, confusion, confusion.

My body gets into the car, carefully setting the can of gasoline onto the passenger seat.

Where are we going? I ask, turning the keys in the ignition.

A siren sounds in the distance as I turn onto the boulevard.

It seems that we are going to Leo's.

Tiny Angels

“Look, Danny! Can you see? This is so fabulous.” Laura leaned back. Her neck cranked around like an alien's, all the way behind her and to the left. They were seated over the wing. Daniel assumed she could see better out the window behind her. He couldn't see out and he didn't care.

He wanted to say shut up, but his wife's excitement kept him kind. For so many years, Laura had stayed home taking care of the kids while he worked and traveled. This time, for the first time, when she asked to come along, he had said yes. He had agreed for reasons other than timing: a woman who took women's magazines too seriously, that night when he got home she had removed her robe to reveal a sleek black nightie that slid like oil down her ample curves. Wrapping creamy thighs around him, mouth cold and sweet as chocolate ice cream, she had made him beg, and she had made him promise.

He had no trouble begging, no trouble promising, because he had another motivation. Laura made good cover for this trip. He was a husband taking his pretty wife down to the islands for a vacation. Their wool coats were stuffed in overhead bins. He wore a rayon shirt with palm trees splattered across it, and she wore heeled sandals and a sleeveless cotton shift sprinkled with minuscule blue flowers, hidden at the moment under a sweater against the airplane's chill.

“All that snow, see it? Going, going… Gone! Good-bye miserable cold! Bye-bye, irksome children.” She let out a giddy laugh. “I can't believe your mom took them. Has she ever before?” Her head cocked to one side. “I don't think so,” she answered herself. “She was willing-almost. I'd suspect you put her up to it but you wouldn't do that just to take me on a trip, or else why would it be three years since we went anywhere alone together?” Possibly to soothe the sting of this implicit criticism, she wound her husband's arm through her own and gave his wrist a squeeze.

Laura spent most days wrangling the kids like an expert cowboy on horseback, cracking the whip without ever harming a hair of their valuable pelts. He never saw her read a newspaper, he never saw her relax, yet she seemed remarkably tuned-in. She knew current movie stars, and cannily guessed outcomes for the Friday night video rentals he usually slept through. Maybe she listened to public radio in the daytime. Maybe the kids connected her to deeper meanings, or some earthy mom-blood-dirt-detergent-kid link he couldn't comprehend. She continued to have the one thing going for her he had always admired, the ability to say things that surprised him, a good thing, since her chattering need to include him in the running drama of her thoughts often drove him crazy.

He called what he felt for her love, but differentiated it from what he felt for his children. That feeling, aroused a few times when they were little-when one ran ahead in the store or got away on a busy street just long enough for him to feel desperate, animal, and basic-growled in him, sharpened his teeth, revealed an ungovernable violence within. How could he use the same word for the sexual thrall that kept him with Laura?

She'd had trouble giving birth to Joey. When he entertained, for one second, the idea that she might not make it, he became efficient rather than terrified, resigned rather than angry. He didn't think he could have been so philosophical if Corinna were the victim. No, he didn't.

So call what he had with Laura a loving connection rather than the intense, crazy aura of fun he had once fantasized surrounding marriage. Their tie now only allowed him a certain amount of leeway before it dragged him back. He needed her, appreciated her abilities as a parent and as an easy, sometimes ingenious lover. Without her, there would be no flowered curtains on the windows, no soap-smelling, happy children running to greet him at the door when he did come home. There would be no tease, no mystery. She kept the mysterious machinery of their marriage oiled and operating. He played worker bee. Somebody had to.

But here today, once again, Laura had shown her strong suit, intuiting correctly. He had, in fact, intervened with his mother, Olga, telling her she had to watch his children at their house in Lincoln for the very short time they would be away or Laura wouldn't feel comfortable going. He needed Laura, ergo, Mom had to comply, but Mom never gave in without a fight. He'd had to hire her full-time help for the duration, and had promised to pick up the cost of her housekeeper for three months.

Too bad he had to keep Laura in the dark about the brevity of this trip. She expected a week away; he planned to finish his business by the time they got off the plane in Puerto Rico. Guilt burned his stomach, a feeling so familiar he barely registered it. He would make it up to her somehow, which was always the follow-up thought, which didn't stop the pain but weakened it like drinking milk. He pushed hair off his forehead and felt sweat beading on his brow, so he reached up to twist on the plastic fan over his seat.

He wondered if he could declare Mom an expense. Picturing Curtis Patchett in the accounting office of the bureau scrutinizing his report, he felt as giddy as his wife sounded. Curtis, formerly a field agent like himself, would chop him into a hundred pieces and hang the bits on the wall as a decorative advance warning to any potential future jokers.

The plane ascended through a soupy, oatmeal-colored mass of cloud. Settling in, Laura said, “Olga had her hands full raising you, and you were only one kid, but I read ours the riot act and told them if they didn't behave, I'd make them stay until they got it right.” She giggled. “Not that they don't like your mother. But she can be a pill.” She pulled down her tray table, then pushed it back into place, clicking the lock in place with a satisfied, “Ah. I can't wait to eat.”

Daniel glanced around his newspaper at the woman with frizzy brown hair, whom he had already mentally named “Curly.” Tall and lean, her head way up on the seat headrest, she adjusted a pair of black corduroy slacks she was wearing that matched a fitted black blouse as she jiggled a baby's hand in her own. The baby made long, up and down sounds like the beginnings of a song sung off-key and minus rhythm. After a while, Curly pulled a windup musical toy out from her carry-on to amuse the child, then played peekaboo with a black and white killer whale puppet that resembled one his kids had when they were little that they had dubbed “Shamu.”

Laura bent over him to look. “A little over five months old,” she noted. “Good age for a traveler. They can smile and almost sit by themselves, but they're tied to Mama. They can't escape.”

Daniel pushed her gently back into her seat, resisting an urge to shout at her. “When was the last time you ate a meal on a plane, honey?” he asked her. “Don't expect gourmet. The food stinks.”

“If someone else cooks it and puts it in front of me, well, I call that delicious.”

He had a good view of the three women and their babies. Due to the arm-wrestling contest his boss had won with the airline, they sat in rows close by but in front of him. They all had the putative mom's own requirements: getting in and out to change or walk the babies would be easier. He could observe relatively discreetly, since the plane, an Airbus A300, held two seats on each side, four in the middle. There weren't that many places to look, and the movie would play soon, offering him unlimited, anonymous viewing pleasure.

The three drooling babies, roughly the same age, appeared happy and well-fed, so distinctions were going to be subtle. None of the mothers was breast-feeding, which would have provided a definite clue that they were not the bad one.

The bureau had identified a few other people with small kids on this flight, but the kids were too old or too young, or the father was along to help. They knew the target was traveling alone with a baby who was not yet crawling. They also knew the mom was white and that Daniel had to identify her before she left the terminal in San Juan so that the locals, who had been alerted by the bureau in advance, could help him grab her before she disappeared into the forgiving sunshine of the Caribbean. She could fly right out of their grasp from San Juan. She could run for Tortola, St. Croix, Nevis, any number of welcoming islands.

Daniel peered up the aisle.

Without tearing her eyes away from the airline magazine she seemed to be studying, Laura said, “That one's sitting up already. Six months old, I'd say. But then, our two were so precocious. Joey sat up earlier than Corinna. Hard to tell if it's a boy or girl, all wrapped up like that.”