Hard Mouth Page 7

  “I’m not sure that’s exactly my style—”

  “Well you don’t have to go to Cyprus. There’s loads of places to go. Someplace with more Americans, maybe? Saint Martin or Jamaica, or maybe a cruise? They have all those cruises now for young people, not just moldy retirees.”

  “I do have a nut socked away,” I said, slowly cottoning. It was true that there was only so much money that Ma would allow me to contribute to the family fund, only so much that I spent on beer and wine while hanging out with Ken. Rent was not so much. My debt, too, was wan: A confluence of in-state tuition, income-based repayment plans, and lucky employment had made me in this way exceptional. In my account there was a modest overage: fiscal responsibility by chance and luck. I was not planning for the future, anyway.

  “Smart girl,” Monica said. “If you wanted something more low-maintenance, you could go hiking, the Appalachian Trail, or, that’s a bit dramatic, maybe just part of it? I had friends in school who did that on summer break, they came back all fit and tan with the funniest trail names . . .” When I didn’t say anything for a beat, she continued. “It’s a thing, now, isn’t it?” she said or asked. “For a young woman such as yourself or even myself to go on a great adventure?” She grinned and the perfection of her teeth seemed to me horrible.

  “I’ll have to see,” I said. “It may be hard to get away right now, but it’s possible, I guess.” The idea hung there in the air and neither of us spoke.

  Monica stroked one side of her hair with both hands at once, a sort of vain but absentminded gesture. “Well,” she said finally. “I think I recommend it. At the very least, if you really won’t see Mark again, that’s your business, but you have to promise to be my friend.”

  I realized two things: that I did not believe her, and that I felt that she had some ulterior motive. I was not interested in uncovering it. There was nothing from Monica I wanted. For example: in her presence, I was pretending to be digestible. This fatiguing act wasn’t worth an encore.

  I pictured myself raising up and away from the table. In the corner, the mother with the phone was trying to feed her ginger toddler, while her girl ran through the aisles brandishing a plastic wand. At once the toddler spit up on himself, all down the front of his shirt, and the little girl tripped over somebody’s laptop case and began to cry miserably. Everyone looked up for a moment at the noise, like some herd of hunted animals, and then, evaluating the situation as nonthreatening, dipped their heads back down to attend to their sandwiches and pastries and spreadsheets and books and beverages.

  Monica’s phone chirped from her purse and she withdrew it, glancing at the screen. “I’m afraid I’ve got to jet,” she said, balling her napkin and dropping it into her half-full cup. I watched the paper succumb to the liquid; to amuse myself I winked at it. “I told Omar I’d pick him up from the mechanic in Bethesda. His Saab is on the fritz.”

  “Okay,” I said, summoning some bright smile.

  “I’ll be working on a deadline all next week,” she said, rising. “But the first weekend of every month I get together with a bunch of other women—don’t worry, it’s not all hen-clucking, if that’s what you’re thinking—it’d just be nice to have some new blood in the group, especially since I already know I like you.” She stood over me. “You’re an original, Denise.”

  I had no idea what she meant, except that I was different from her.

  “It’s a date,” I said, and she stooped to kiss me on the cheek and said goodbye, moving smoothly and elegantly away. I wouldn’t go to the women’s group, I already knew. But she was right about something: I needed an out. Even my imaginary friend had said so. I’m not thick: I understood that his obsession regarding escape was my own.

  Though later in the car I found I couldn’t imagine where I would go, nor for how long, nor how I would explain it to frantic Ma, or dying Pop. An image popped up in my mind, and it was ole Van Winkle, unbidden, his confused young-old face beseeching questioningly into upper air. I imagined I would stay. I did not yet understand that courage was unrequired in making such a decision. Only a dynamic cycle of folly, and an inability to break same.

  Once home, I took a shower and washed the plate and cup in the sink. This was a game of delay. For soon I found myself back on the loveseat, searching internet listings on my laptop for house rentals at random. It was that day, or maybe the day after, or even one week later, that I found the listing. For a while I held the secret of my plan in a determined, dusty part of my mind. GET AWAY the listing headline read:

  Old cabin, running well water, no electricity, working wood stove, outhouse. Perfect for a quiet stay. Must travel by air or hike several days. This is not a convenient location. I have spent a lot of time talking to people who don’t realize there is not a grocery store down the block or cell phone reception. So I would appreciate it if you thought first before contacting me.

  Feeling like I was on a kind of drug, I dashed off an email, said I was an artist. Needed solitude, etc. Collaborators would come in spring. Federal grant. Good wilderness experience. Basic water safety training. Was there water nearby? How could I get there, and how soon?

  Meet me at the outfitter, the guy wrote back the next morning. Here’s the address. Here’s my number. For an additional fee, I’ll fly you up soon as you want. He attached pictures of the cabin but I didn’t open the files; they seemed like a trick for which I didn’t want to fall. I didn’t know if or when I would go, but having those unopened files was almost enough. To see a door did not mean you had to go through it. The man said I could take my time. That the calendar was open and he’d let me know if anything changed. I sent him a deposit and wondered whether I’d follow. In the meantime I memorized the digits of his telephone number, repeating them in an incantation, an inexact effort to self-soothe.

  THE REST OF August drained out with a slurp. Pop worsened, a boat straining toward the horizon line as Ma tethered him ever closer. I couldn’t stand to be with them. I hardly spoke to Ken, who forgave me daily, while I thought less of him for it.

  Each day I thought of the remote cabin. The thought of it condensed in me until I was unable to ignore it. I’m sure I did things, fed myself, and slept, commiserated with my loved ones in a foot-out-the-door sort of way, told Gene not to bother me. I did not look for a job. Instead I read discussion forums on the internet about how to live in the woods, sewed over the seams of clothing and bags so they wouldn’t rip under stress of use. I went to used bookstores and bought outdated wilderness guides for a dollar apiece. In a dresser drawer I located my knife. Its handle was shaped like a hummingbird, with a rainbow titanium finish.

  Compulsively I gathered supplies: dry foods, several cases of meal replacement bars in “berry blast” and “mocha buzz” flavors, outerwear and thermals, a tarp, some flares, a compass, a case of applicator-free tampons, a good carbon steel knife, plastic tubs to put it all in. I made an inventory list, and found an ad for a truck and traded in my sedan. I put the list in the glove box and felt pricked. Gene laughed at me, holding his belly. “Whaddya think you’re doing?” he asked. I ignored him and he took it personally like I wanted him to.

  When Ma asked why I’d traded in the sedan, I reminded her how I’d always wanted a pickup. I never had. There were no follow-ups: to help with the medical bills Ma had taken a part-time job in the administrative pool at the county offices. She had no time to afford me extra scrutiny. Pop declined, and quickly. I blossomed into a private nut. My escape plan thrummed in my chest.

  I began to divest myself of any unuseful possessions. I got rid of it all quietly, surely; the box of personal stuff, I burned one night on a picnic area grill in the park down the street. The filial bric-a-brac I secretly dropped into decorative boxes at the family home: some 3×5s, a bracelet, a medal. While doing so I purloined a vial of Pop’s pain pills, just in case. Lest you think me cruel, he had many other such vials, and refills to spare. Internet aided, I sold most everything else, called Purple Heart to pick up th
e rest. Not once did I think about how it would be, once I was there.

  When it was September I gave my landlord a month of notice. She shrugged, or whatever the vocal version of that is, on the phone over a shitty connection from Delaware where she was taking care of her own sick father, who had dementia. Everywhere in my periphery parents expired or were expiring. Meanwhile I found my skin sensitive, my feelings changeable. I woke up with a rosy rash across my sternum. I burped meals I couldn’t remember chewing. Any noise made my heart flop, scare, shimmer.

  Meanwhile I attempted to look like I was staying put. I said yes to things I would’ve rather said no to, just to keep this up:

  I watched, one day, as inside the old Hecht’s department store Ma riffled the bedding displays in a manner more intense than I would’ve liked. “It’s a gloomy kind of blue, yeah?” Ma asked, holding a pillow in front of her face. We stood at a display by the escalators.

  I had to admit that it was gloomy. “Gray undertones.”

  “Yes, gray. Gray green. Very ‘painting of a stormy sea.’”

  “But not just a stormy sea?”

  “No, a bad painting of one. Just slightly more yellow than the real thing.” I had not known she was so sensitive about color. Or maybe she had not before been. Pop was trying out a newly hired nurse. We were trying out a newly hired nurse. Figuring out if we could tolerate a stranger. I could. But I was leaving. She’d asked me to accompany her on this errand. I had consented, knowing how soon I hoped to betray or relieve her with my departure.

  We had decided to go to the bad mall instead of the rich mall, because there was better parking and fewer aggressive consumers with nowhere else to put their anger and dissatisfaction regarding the vagaries of contemporary life as humans residing in the suburbs, U.S.A. In the county’s northwesterly portion, closer to the lab, we could have expected a wide selection of upper-tier chain restaurants, sports utility vehicle dodging, a constant parabolic titter of teens wielding credit cards the balances of which they would never see. In the early days of the first cancer, Ken and I had gone there occasionally, to bum cigarettes from the uncaring adults dragging by the seasonal topiaries, then roll through the interior luxury, our brains buzzing slightly.

  In the one-level-plus-basement mall Ma and I had chosen, there were a few manicure places, an eyeglass store, a place to buy midrange wedding bands, an “urban footwear” boutique, a Sears that always had appliances on special. There were often stores in the process of closing (a camera shop, a by-the-pound candy store with twenty-four flavors of jelly beans—each flavor’s contents having massed together by age, heat, and dust) or opening (a teen clothing place that seemed to specialize in man-made fabrics, an international imports boutique). This mall often had a serene, ghost town feeling. It was somewhere we could feel inconspicuous and/or at home.

  Near the bedding display there were two sales associates chatting, taking turns holding up blouses for each other’s appraisal. A bent-over elderly man was working his way at a traffic jam pace from the outer entrance toward the central floor. I picked up another blue bolster pillow and tossed it into the air. There its center of gravity stuttered. I fumbled it on the way down and it landed beneath the stand-mixers. When I came back from retrieving it, Ma was still hugging her own pillow, looking somewhere in the direction of the shoe department. “Ma?” I asked. “Earth to Ma.”

  “Ma to Earth,” she replied without looking at me, and put the pillow down.

  We were fetching the perfume she liked. When she and Pop had first been married, he had often surprised her with small gifts. This perfume had been one of the most common selections. It smelled of musk and amber and orange blossom, and came in a faceted diamond-shaped bottle, its bottom blunted such that it could sit flat. Now I imagine it on dressers and bathroom counters and nightstands across the universe. An intimate thing, duplicated so many times.

  “What do you need? Do you need anything?” Ma asked, as we moved to the cosmetic area. “Do you need a scent? Do you need a pair of boots before winter?”

  “A scent?” Everything around us was beige or chrome or gold or glass. The floors were dirty but the lights were bright. “No, Ma, I don’t need anything, I told you.” I pictured Pop asleep. I pictured the stranger watching him. I tried to tell if I could worry about it. I wondered what was Ma thinking. “I don’t need anything,” I repeated.

  “Okay, okay.” She sauntered through the environs of commerce, as if she were any woman. I allowed myself to feel briefly ambivalent, then remembered: GET AWAY. The clarion call of the oversaturated and truly cracked. All over again I lit up and thrilled.

  We floated to the appropriate counter. The woman behind it wore a flatteringly cut lab coat and a full face of makeup. Her lab coat hardly cued a thought about the one I’d previously worn. My thrill regarding the future was munching my near-past. I wondered what the saleswoman’s face would look like in sunlight, with all that lacquer. I never wore makeup and imagined those who did were hiding, not accentuating.

  The woman in the lab coat led my mother to the fragrance area as the employees giggled, plucking and replacing blouses in plaids and dots and stripes. I wondered what it would be like to live in the woods. My phone vibrated. It was a text from Ken, wondering if we were even friends anymore. Would I reply; I replaced my phone in my pocket.

  “This one has notes of lavender, which is very calming.”

  “It always makes me sneeze.”

  “Okay, yes, that’s common. What about this one? It’s earthy, very seasonal.”

  “A little too much for me, I think. I like a delicate smell.”

  “This one’s based in rose. Very feminine.”

  “A little too young, maybe.”

  “It reminds me of walking through the garden.”

  “A lovely notion.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’ll just take this one, the two ounce, the eau de toilette. Just a little treat.”

  “Nice,” the woman in the lab coat said. “Nice.” She didn’t seem to mean it.

  There was no more speaking and I looked up to see Ma and the woman both agog in the same direction. It was a slow fist of seconds as they began to take action, moving from the counter. Only then did I think to look in that direction also, where the old man was now stomach-down on the walkway. His body wrenched and twitched; I wondered why I hadn’t heard the fall.

  Ma and the woman and the nearby employees all entered the frame jogging. One or another flipped the old man over. The perfume woman cradled his head, snatched a blouse from a nearby rack and stuffed its polyblend into his mouth, told someone to call the EMTs. My mother held his legs; it was a kind and exciting position; I stood ten feet away. I was shaking.

  “Come get his arms!” the perfume woman called. They were swinging from his sides like combines. I sauntered to his spasming body. From closer up I could see his eyes rolling back into his head, his face flushed. He smelled of talc and rot and this filled my nostrils as I tried to hold his wrists at his sides.

  An EMT showed up and asked us all to stand back. She removed the blouse and rolled the man to his side. “Don’t ever put anything in a seizing man’s mouth!” she yelled. “And don’t restrain him!” She was my age and seemed genuinely angry at us, had on strict navy garb. From the margins we watched the old man’s spit come in threads from his mouth. It made a small puddle on the smudgy linoleum.

  “Do you think we can go?” Ma asked into my ear, right beside me.

  “Do you think we should stay?”

  “What can we do? We helped when we could.” Then Ma began to walk back to the outer entrance.

  “That was weird,” I said, once we had exited the store into a heavy heat that set upon our edges.

  She said: “I’m sorry not to have gotten the perfume.” I told her I’d pick it up on the way from work one of these days. I wouldn’t. “Better go to the other mall,” Ma said, not really looking at anything. As if wealth guarded from infirmity. I wondered wha
t her finances were like. It occurred to me that I should know something like that.

  IT WAS ONLY later, while stopped at a red light, that I saw Ma was crying quietly. “Oh, Ma,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m okay.” She seemed aggravated I was paying her mind. Or was I imagining this, hoping?

  The whole way back to the house I asked inconsequential questions. “Do you want the radio on?” “Are you too cold?” “AC down?” “Windows down?” “Want to take my sunglasses?” I drove cleanly along familiar suburban routes. There was the bank, the bank, the post office, the fire station, the fruit stand. The carpet store, the church, the church, the temple. The office plaza, the apartment buildings, the fast food joints. “Want me to come hang out?” I asked, when I pulled into the driveway. “I just have a few errands to run later.”

  Ma’s eyes were no longer watery. Her face was a windless thing. We said goodbye.

  “How did Pop like the nurse?” I asked the next day, via phone. Ma said he liked her fine.

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER Ken went away to visit his mom and sister in Fayetteville, where they’d moved after we’d finished high school. Now I didn’t have to lay out so much time dodging his calls. It’d be easier, I felt, if I left before Ken returned. Meanwhile Pop got worse. Ma called to tell me she’d hired the nurse for good. The woman gave her a deal, she reported—“I think she pities me.” I told her people in that line of work don’t traffic in pity like that. She asked, “When did I become someone to pity?”

  Since always, I thought. This sounded cruel even to me. I had everything packed in the truck bed, under a cap. My apartment was empty, move-in ready. I said bye to Ma and began to pace the place studiously, as if in the market for a rental. “What are the utility bills like, per month?” I asked an imaginary agent. “Is there any history of flooding?” I ran my hands along the clean old laminate of the kitchen counter. I turned the bathroom faucets on and off. “Good water pressure. That can be hard to find.” I scanned the tub, saw the chips in the tile floor. “Do they allow pets? I was thinking of getting something small.”