As she steps down from the tub the lizard catches her eye, the same lizard she discovered a couple days ago, right after her night with Sam. While she’d brushed her teeth a movement had caught her eye and made her bend around the toilet to see the stricken lizard clinging to the bowl. “Damn,” she’d said with a foamy mouth, spitting into the sink. The lizards in the kitchen crawled under the stove or refrigerator and that was the last of them, but this bathroom lizard would have to be dealt with.
And yesterday as she stepped from the shower it had darted from behind the wastebasket. “Lizard,” she’d said, crouching down naked, determined to move it outside to the rocks and sun. “Go out the way you came.” Two whole days in her bathroom, she thought.
Now it gazes up at her from the tiled floor. It seems paler. “What can I do?” she says. In the kitchen she spins the lazy susan and opens all the cabinets before finally grabbing a piece of rye bread and a paper bag. Back in the bathroom she waves the bread at the lizard, saying, “In the bag you go,” and she places the bread in the bag with the opening facing the lizard. It hesitates with one shy foot poised in the air. “Please,” Georgeann says. Three days without food or sunlight. “Eat some rye bread,” she instructs the lizard, “and when I come back I’ll take you outside to the yard. All right?” The little lizard arches its slender neck and then dashes behind the toilet bowl. Georgeann shakes her head and sighs.
She hurries to the car and before the air conditioner has a chance to kick in she pulls out of the driveway, watching Sam’s front door as if he might suddenly appear. Yesterday, as she hung the wash, he stood in his yard cooking hot dogs while his two beagles waited by the grill, wagging their tails and looking up at Sam with a mixture of restraint and zeal. Georgeann said hello and stood with her back to him, feeling like a teenager as she emptied the washer and contemplated her underwear and bras and the grayed, stretched-out T-shirts. She rolled the wet pieces into a ball and then proceeded to hang the better-looking laundry when Sam, holding a paper plate, climbed the small fence and presented her with a hot dog in a bun, a handful of potato chips and a carrot stick.
“Oh, no thank you,” she said.
“Think about it.” He smiled and rested the plate on her washer.
“Really, no thanks.” A fly buzzed near the hot dog and she shooed it away. “I just ate,” she lied.
He shrugged and turned. “I like you,” she said, intending to infer a “but,” though the sentence ended cleanly, simply.
“Good.” Sam climbed the fence into his yard. “I’m over here,” he said, looking back at her.
Safeway is only two miles away, but Georgeann speeds along River Road with the windows wide open, and when she pulls into the parking lot she’s sweaty and windblown. It takes her a moment to realize something is wrong with Safeway. The grocery store is completely dark. The automatic doors are propped open with shopping carts, and behind the darkened storefront the cashiers use flashlights to ring up customers, who lurch through the open doors and stare down into their bags, checking out their purchases. Yes, they seem to be thinking, I did get the Salisbury steak dinner and these oranges aren’t half-bad. The deli woman, a chunky woman with a Safeway smock and a bright beehive hairdo, stands on the curb smoking a cigarette. Georgeann drives up and lowers the passenger window.
“Transformer blew, hon,” the deli woman says.
“Can I shop?”
“Got a flashlight?”
“I think so.”
The beehive shrugs and places her hands on her wide hips. “Just be careful back by dairy. The floor is kind of wet and you could slip and land on your ass.”
Georgeann nods and swings the car into a parking space. In the trunk she finds a rusted, working flashlight. She then joins the deli woman on the curb and peers into the store, catching a glimpse of herself in the chrome of the doors; she sees her Levi’s and a sleeveless denim shirt, and her silvery shoulder-length hair tucked behind her ears. Flushed and dreamy-looking, she looks like a person who possesses a secret.
“Weird, huh?” beehive says, lighting another cigarette and offering the pack to Georgeann. It has been nearly thirty years since Georgeann has had a cigarette, but on impulse she accepts and gets lightheaded from the first drag. She takes another drag and feels the churn and sink of her bowels.
“Go on, it’ll be an adventure.” The beehive touches her arm; for such a stout woman her touch is delicate. The store looks inviting, cavernous. Georgeann nods and unhooks a shopping cart from the line-up.
Inside the store it is hushed and calm, except for the chug of a generator next to a checkstand. The air heavy on Georgeann’s skin, and it no longer feels like a late afternoon. The cash registers make small dings and trills. Georgeann slowly pushes past the manager’s specials, her flashlight illuminating piñatas—a big-mouthed fish, a mariachi, a shaggy sun and the Swiss Miss girl, who winks at Georgeann. Georgeann flashes her light in the doll’s face, and the happy, braided head stares blandly back at her. She stands still and lets her eyes adjust to the low light.
In produce, water drips from the sprinklers onto the heads of lettuce and sprigs of parsley. The vegetables still look alert, almost hopeful under the beam of light. A skinny female shopper sticks a pineapple into her backpack, and Georgeann hears the zip of a zipper as the woman hurries past her with wide eyes. Georgeann, too, feels inspired to loot a little something, and she drops a ripe avocado into her purse.
“Tomatoes, corn-on-the-cob, honeydew,” she says, thinking about what she needs. She is now alone among the fruits and vegetables. The arrangements seem just right under her yellow light, tomatoes next to assorted lettuces next to cucumbers next to peppers, all cousins together. She holds an eggplant, feeling its hollow bulk and wondering if she has ever really considered an eggplant—its purpleness, its prehistoric shape. She clicks off her light and stands holding the eggplant, feeling pleasantly immobile. I love, she thinks slowly, the words filling her head with the heaviness of sand…but what?
Georgeann tosses everything into her cart, loose and free—the perfect honeydew, several ears of corn, three rugged Idaho potatoes and a snarly turnip. She gazes into the cart, realizing this is all too much, but she can’t resist tossing in two tomatoes, a peach, a plum, a nectarine, half a watermelon. The romaine smells green, a deep earthy green. She bites into an expensive yellow bell pepper, spitting a seed from the side of her mouth. The pepper tastes sweet and cool. Here in the dark she allows herself to wonder what Sam is doing. Sam’s skin is bronzed and lined like the dry stream beds. He’s a cabinetmaker and one-quarter Cherokee. When his dinky clothesline is full he hangs his wet laundry in the pomegranate tree. Something slithers across the loose carrots. Lizards everywhere, she thinks.
When her son Aaron was home for spring break, he and Georgeann had sat on the front stoop one night drinking margaritas. Aaron, newly in love with a freshman from Tennessee, had whispered, “Go for it, Mom,” as Sam Bailey and his two beagles climbed into the pickup. Sam was tall and broad with dirty blond hair hanging into one eye. He had moved into the adobe next to hers eight weeks before, around the time the prickly pear and ocotillo went into bloom. Since then Georgeann had watched him come and go so often she had decided things about him—that he was easy to be with and spirited in a low-key way, that he was a man of his word though sulky when hurt.