I found Tony in the kitchen, eating a plate of sausages with a knife. His hair was slicked back neatly, but his face looked warmed over, gray circles and bags under his eyes, deep wrinkles, and I realized he was older than I’d thought, forty maybe, fifty even.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“You, too,” I said.
“Well I’ve been there. What’s your excuse?” He speared a sausage. “Cheryl’s at work. Left you a twenty in case, and some lemon bars in that Ziploc. Or you can stay, she said. Woman’s a saint.” I made myself some tea, and held its warmth in my hands, watching the steam. “A saint,” he said again. “I swear I’d be lost if she hadn’t picked me,” he said. “I’d be a goner.”
A little girl padded into the kitchen. She had on one enormous bunny slipper, and she skidded across the linoleum to the fridge, pushing off with her bare foot, using her single slipper like an ice skate. She took out orange juice, drank from the mouth of the carton.
“Dalia, this is a nice lady. Nice lady, this is Dalia.”
“She’s your daughter?” I said.
“Last I checked. Cheryl’s and mine.”
She skated over to Tony and buried her face in the front of his shirt. “Come here, booger,” he said, squeezing her. She had a mess of dark hair. I reached out and put my hand on the back of her head. There were snarls nested under her curls.
“Cheryl’s at work?” I said.
“Yep. Lobster pound, twelve hours a day. She’s the one who sticks those little bands on ‘em. Those suckers cut her up good.” For all I’d inspected her, I’d never noticed her hands.
It wasn’t until I’d paid the taxi driver at the hotel that I realized I didn’t know where Cheryl’s house was, couldn’t even remember which station she was close to. Her train was on the way to Braintree, I know, because I had pictured a brain, its folds like a winding maze, gently afloat in clear, pink water.
I never found Cheryl again, but I looked for her — broad shoulders like my mom, my mom’s anxious laugh, her army green — and sometimes, many times, I thought for a second I spotted her. I searched the faces of the women in the motel parking lot by my apartment, the hookers and drug addicts. They stared right back like they knew me, all thinking I wanted something from them, all of them familiar.
Homecoming
I moved back to my hometown with my husband, which was my first mistake. Actually at that point he wasn’t my husband, though we’re married now. I wanted to be claimed as a wife for the sake of my own tenuous survival. In those early days in Maine, I often envisioned walking into the bay, but that sounds more poetic and energetic than what I really felt. Mostly I wanted to slip down the shower drain or hibernate for the next five years until I was prepared to be a wife and mother, and was used to the fact that all my friends lived elsewhere and it was just me and Bruce making meal after meal and eating them on the couch for the rest of our lives.
Right after the move I started to wash my face with oil, thinking that since I was back in rural Maine I should milk goats and throw away my harsh facial soap. The oil cleansing covered my face with tiny bumps that I spent hours researching online. My research suggested that the phase I was in was generally considered a purging phase so I kept washing with the oil through fall, until the texture of my skin was completely altered. In my phone’s photo album, hundreds of pictures of my own face, taken to document the purge, replaced pictures of friends and beaches and Bruce and me on mountain summits.
These were the pastimes of that fall — the oil, and watching a show about brides-to-be trying on wedding dresses while Bruce worked at a wine shop where they’d get him drunk sampling wines and then he’d drive the hour back to my town weaving. The couple of times I got up the courage to confront him about being drunk he hadn’t actually been drinking. I wasn’t any good at telling the difference between Bruce sober and not, and he’d seemed drunk to me.
For exercise and sunlight I dressed each afternoon in a pair of men’s jeans that I imagined a Maine farming woman might wear, slathered my erupting skin with makeup, and braided my hair so I could walk to the end of the driveway and collect the Rite Aid flyers from our mailbox.
When I envisioned my wedding I saw my bare feet, walking up a petal-strewn path. I would carry a bouquet of bluebells. The weekend after we arrived in Maine Bruce planned a surprise for my birthday, a surprise he told my family about and described to me as “an elephant,” and I felt sure and sharp in my chest that the surprise was a proposal. We drove four hours, my mouth dry imagining how the proposal might play out, and then he untied my blindfold in the parking lot of the University of Maine at Fort Kent, where an upright bassist was to perform all six of the Bach cello suites.
I had mentioned to Bruce that I liked the cello suites, which I did, but I’d only heard them once and basically I just liked the cello more than other instruments, like trumpets or flutes, which I didn’t like at all. The second surprise was that the bassist, who was playing by memory, forgot his place and had to search his mind for the next notes in front of the few of us gathered in the tiny auditorium, which during the day was a science classroom, as evidenced by the periodic table of elements above the stage. The bassist sent the professor who introduced him running backstage while he stood clutching his bass, and once the music stand was set up and the book of sheet music propped open precariously before him he closed his eyes and resumed playing for one lovely, sonorous second before the score flipped of its own accord to the wrong page. The audience knew this had happened but the bassist did not. When he opened his eyes there was nothing for him to do but stop playing to hunt for the correct, lost page, while we sat watching. It went on like this all the way through 136 minutes of cello suites, and afterward he struggled the bass offstage. Bruce and I went out to Applebee’s, where I ordered a burger even though I’d been a vegetarian for years and we talked about the lesser mistakes the bassist had made, which even I, without knowing the Bach cello suites or classical music, found obvious — whole swaths of music were missing, or improperly timed.
* * *
Back then I woke up every morning and looked out the window at the empty driveway of our subdivision and then rubbed the soles of my feet on the soft deer hide my parents had gifted us, receiving from it the kind of comfort one might get patting a dog. With each passing day I wondered when I would feel returned to myself. The days got dark earlier, and I got out of bed later, stopped eating meals when Bruce wasn’t around, and often changed from my pajamas at dusk, knowing he would be back soon. Then in early October a red Jeep went cruising by. I remembered a similar red Jeep from when I was little and living across town in the big yellow house that I had started referring to as my parents’ house instead of as my home, because now my home was meant to be the prefab Cape house I shared with Bruce. Whenever I called my parents’ house my home Bruce corrected me.
A summer girl named Nancy had driven the red Jeep twenty years before, which caused a stir in our two-hundred-person town where nobody drove a red car with the top down, and mostly nobody was young. I remembered her as prim and polite, her hair wet from a fresh permanent that smelled like fruit and poison, helping me onto the back of a fire truck at the Fourth of July lobster bake. I was six years old. When she graduated college, her sorority picture was printed in the summer paper — she wore a black velvet cloth draped over her shoulders and white pearls. Her tiny hands were cupped beneath her chin. She looked like a president’s wife.