SHE WAITS, SEETHING, BLOOMING
SHE IS A SINGLE MOTHER and has no interest in any men but her son, who is fifteen and has not called. It is 2:33 am and he hasn’t phoned since 5:40 that evening, when he said he’d be eating dinner out. And now she is watching Elimidate, drinking red wine spiked with gin, and is picturing hitting her only son with a golf club. She is picturing slapping him flat and hard across his face and is thinking that the sound it would make would almost make up for her worry, her inability to sleep, the many hundreds of dire thoughts that have torched her mind these past hours. Where is he? She doesn’t even know where he would go, or with whom. He’s a loner, he’s an eccentric. He is, she thinks, the sort of teenager who gets involved with deviants on the Internet. And yet somehow she knows that he is safe, that he is fine but has for whatever reason been unable to call, or has not even given it much thought. He is testing his boundaries, perhaps, and she will remind him of the consequences of such thoughtlessness. And when she thinks of what she will say to him and how loudly she will say it, she feels a strange kind of pleasure. The pleasure is like that enjoyed by the passionate scratching of a body overwhelmed with irritation. Giving oneself up to that scratching, everywhere and furious — which she did only a month earlier when she’d contracted poison oak — that was the most profound pleasure she had ever known. And now, waiting for her son and knowing how righteous will be her indignation, how richly justified will be anything she yells into his irresponsible face, she finds herself awaiting his arrival in the way the ravenous might await a meal. She is nodding her head. She is tapping a pen against her dry lips. She tries to order her thoughts, to decide where to start with him. How general should her criticisms be? Should they be specific only to this night, or should this be the door through which they pass in order to talk about all of his failings? The possibilities! She will have license to go anywhere, to say anything. She pours more gin into her tumbler of merlot, and when she looks up, at 2:47, his headlights are drawing chalk across the front window. This will be divine, she thinks. This will be superb. It will be florid, glorious; she will scratch and scratch and bloom. She runs to the door. She can’t wait for it to begin.
QUIET
THE LAST TIME I told this story, I ended it with a conversation I had with the nickly shimmer of the moon on a black lake on the Isle of Skye. It went like this:
“You are a lucky one, Tom, to have Erin and others like Erin.” The voice of the nickly reflection of the moon was not as deep as you might expect. It was a singer’s voice, though, a tenor, one that loved itself without reservation.
“Thank you,” I said. “I feel blessed.”
“I often think of coming down to live among you, to make a big mess of it all,” he said. “It always looks so messy, and I think I might like that.”
“It is messy, I guess.”
“It looks awfully messy. It looks almost impossible to survive, to tell you the truth. The pain of it all.”
“It’s not all that painful,” I said.
“But Tom,” it said, “the swinging of your pendulums! Everyone’s pendulums swinging, to and fro, and always you’re getting hit by someone else’s swinging pendulum. You’re minding your business, but someone else’s pendulum is swinging around, and pow! you get it in the head.”
“That happens, yes.”
“I saw you and Erin by the shed.”
“Oh.”
“I was there.”
“That makes sense. I saw you, too.”
“I watch you often, Tom. I have time on my hands. Time is different to me than it is to you.”
I was still thinking about what the nickly shimmer had seen. He, however, was warming to the sound of his thoughts.
“I feel time like you dream. Your dreams are jumbled. You can’t remember the order of your dreams, and when you recall them, the memories bend. Faces change. It’s all in puddles and ripples. That’s what time is for me.”
Three days earlier, at the airport, I was stunned that Erin had actually shown up. That she’d really come. That she had a car. “And you can drive on the other side? Do they do that up here, too?” “They do. I do.” She looked good. Pale. She had a long nose, bent a bit, seeming almost broken, working in perfect concert with her exquisitely thick chocolate hair, hair like it had been brushed a thousand times by magic elves.
I have always been the good friend. I have been harmless, listening, waiting.
“You look so much better,” she said to me.
“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what she meant.
I had flown out for a long weekend, and she and I planned to drive to the Isle of Skye. We hugged and I groaned into her sweater, pulled back and looked at her more. Her eyes still the blue of oceans on maps. She still had dark freckles, almost spots, really, round and discrete, sprayed over and around her nose and cheeks. I depended on those, and loved her old coffee-colored jeans, flared a little, faded over her bold, assertive backside — she’d been in a college production of a play about Robert Crumb’s women. Such a triumph she was — and so how had I, with my shapeless torso and oily neck, been allowed to get so close? I stood and bounced on my toes and tried not to sweat or scream or lift her and carry her around on my shoulder.
Edinburgh was raining and dark at noon. I was baffled that Erin — Erin Mahatma Fullerton — was so confident here, when she’d left me and D.C. only a year before. That she could drive on the wrong side of the road with such confidence.
“You’re incredible,” I said, about her driving. “How do you not mess it up? How are we not dead?”
“I guess I’m just used to being good at everything.”
She was good at everything. I couldn’t remember anything she couldn’t do well. I wasn’t jealous about this. I was not threatened. I should be able to just make a statement like that without being judged.
She drove with her hand on the wheel, not really gripping it, her wrist resting on top. I reached over and squeezed her knee.
“This is so weird,” she said, then laughed by throwing her head all the way forward. It was the first time I’d seen her do that.
“I know,” I said. “But good, right?”
“Yeah, good. It’s good.” She laughed again the same way. Each time she did this she almost hit her face on the steering wheel. It was a new and fake habit — at what age do we stop acquiring affectations like that? I hoped she wouldn’t do it again, because if she did I would have to ask her to stop.
We’d met at a protest, or on the way to one, a confused and desperate event. It was supposed to be an anti-IMF/World Bank march, but had been fashioned into an action against the potential bombing of Afghanistan. This was in September.
Blocks away I first caught sight of her pants, violet-blue, and followed her quickly and asked if she were heading to Freedom Plaza. She said yes. She was friendly enough, accepting my companionship for the walk there. She said she was curious only, didn’t want to get too close to the demonstration, being an employee of the Treasury and all.