I make a connection now, late in my present night, alone before my New and Improved panels. I have always felt a tender thing for the quickness of the tears of my wife Edna Bradshaw. I realize that this trait in her has inevitably stirred — in the deep, singing part of me, the wordless true part of me — a memory of Minnie Butterworth on the night that she flew.
Minnie said to me in a faint voice, “Is it possible?”
I replied, “The World is Your Oyster. This is the New Thrill in Travel Planning.” And I passed my hand over the navigation panel before Minnie and it came alive. I lifted her hand and laid it palm-to-palm against mine. Her breath caught again, and I folded my eight fingers around her and let her take in the beat of my heart, to reassure her. I said, “You need only move your hand above this light.”
And she took her hand and she moved it and she saw her planet slide easily under her and she laughed and she wept and she flew. She flew around her planet many times that night and out into the darkness, out past her moon and around and back again. Minnie Butterworth flew farther and faster than anyone had ever flown in the history of her species and I sit now quaking in the dark at the thought of her and I feel that I am close to understanding something. Close. But farther away at the same moment. And the voice of Edna Bradshaw is near me.
“Darling spaceman,” she says. “Come to bed.”
4
I still cannot sleep. So Edna forgoes sleep herself. She sits reading beside me in the bed, radiant in her Antique-Pink Bare-Essential Babydoll with the Eye-Catching Uplift of Underwire Cups and the Adorable Enticement of Cleavage Ribbon Ties. Her book has a woman showing much the same great swath of her chest, as she is bent back by a man with a three-corner hat and a black eye-patch. Our bed is Awash with Swashbuckling Passion, but the suckers on the tips of my fingers are clamped tight from my sleeplessness.
Edna Bradshaw is a very good wife. Her eyelids droop from her own weariness but she has turned aside my sincere urgings to retire ahead of me. It would take only a wave of my hand — there is energy field enough in it, even this late — to encourage a roll of words from Edna. I feel a little guilty, having heard Minnie Butterworth tonight, not to become part of Edna’s voice, at least briefly. Of course, I never felt for Minnie the way I do for Edna Bradshaw, not as a husband for a wife. But still, the voice is an intimate thing. Such an intimate thing, really. And I did secretly break one of our prime operational directives for Minnie Butterworth. I let her keep her memory of us when I returned her to the surface of her planet. She promised to hold our secret close and I knew I could trust her and I wanted her always to know what she had done. She came to me as she was about to go and she gave me a kiss on the cheek — the first such, I believe, that any of us had ever received from this species.
Ah. Listen to me. I say “species” and this word that rationally and precisely denotes the concept to which I was referring suddenly sounds, in my deepest part, stridently out of tune. I become, with simply the use of that word, a creature of ghastly aloofness, a Monster from Outer Space. My hands go up and grind at my face now.
“What is it, Desi?” Edna’s voice sings softly into my mind.
I do love this woman.
And it happens again. As soon as I categorize Edna Bradshaw with that word, I have a terrible feeling inside me. Yes, she is, of course, a woman. I do love this woman. But to use the word sucks the warmth out of her, stacks her, naked and pink and wrapped Freezer Fresh Every Time on a shelf, with all the other women of this world.
I say, “Would you know my hands if I came up from behind and put them on your knockers?”
“Of course,” she says. “You’ve got eight fingers on each hand.”
“No,” I say. “I ask something more than that. If I had only five fingers on each hand. Would you know me by my touch? If I came up and put my hands on you and squeezed?”
“I’m sure I would, Desi honey. I know every little thing about you.”
I am happy beyond reason for that, though I realize there are still unanswered questions regarding this process. But I have gone quite floppy-fingered.
I am Edna Bradshaw’s husband, officially, by the customs of my home planet, and I am Edna Bradshaw’s Spaceman Lover, by the customs of her former colleagues at Mary Lou’s Southern Belle Beauty Nook in Bovary, Alabama. My hands are ready to initiate the actions that are most commonly associated with intimacy on this planet, given either role. But my cute-enough-to-eat Edna seems very tired and I choose instead to place her nearer to her dreams and, as intimacy is understood on my planet, even closer to me. Though on my planet we do not use the prophylactic of words with our voices. Be Safe, Be Sorry. I wave my hand and she sighs and drifts and I bring forth her voice to put inside me. I suggest a direction, gently, though this is not always effective: “Tell me about the sadness you feel at the pride in your sausage.”
Edna looks about and then finds my eyes and the sounds begin, my own mouth moving in synchronicity. The party went so well, don’t you think? At least until the gun went off. It’s not easy to cook for strangers, especially when they could be from all sorts of places other than Alabama. Sausage. Oh my. So much depends on sausage. You take a one-pound roll of sausage and there are so many things to consider. Spicy or mild, for instance, though if there’s strangers with foreign tastes, you should always err on the conservative side. You choose the mild sausage, and if you’re making it into sausage balls, Kraft American cheese. If they want a sharp cheese, then you can let them find that somewhere else along the table, if it’s big enough, or for their next meal. If all they’ve got is what you’re giving them and all you can give them is one thing, then better safe than sorry when it comes to spice.
You need a good biscuit mix, and that’s a choice right there, though I’m partial to Bisquick. And when you put all that together, you’ve got to have the stomach of a brain surgeon, I tell you. You can only do it with your hands. You try to make sausage and dry biscuit mix and grated cheese blend together — blend, you understand — it’s like getting your daddy and your worthless ex-husband and your best friend at the hairdresser to lie down together naked in the town square of a Sunday afternoon. You got nothing to do but put your hands in it and they end up coated with grease.
This isn’t what I’m trying to say, exactly. I am — well, let’s face it — a little over forty years old, and I still don’t know what happens when I start talking. Do you think I actually want to have a picture in my head of my own flesh-and-blood daddy and my gone-to-seed ex-husband and Ida Mae Pickett, who is the dearest girl in Bovary but maybe also the largest, lying buck naked in the grass under the statue of the South’s Defenders? These are thoughts no human being should ought to have. But don’t I also know that all three of them aren’t near as hurtful to me there in the grass than if they’re still talking to me in my head like they can do? Isn’t that why when we tell things, they get bigger than life, all bent out of shape? So you can look at them and not have to take them so real?
How many mornings of my life was it just a frying pan and my daddy sitting in his undershirt with his chest hairs sticking out and his sausage patties frying there in front of me. Grease is grease. And so is sausage. Nothing bizarre about that. And my daddy talking in a long unstoppable sizzle of words about how I was too fat and too lazy and too much like my dead mama and too liberal in my thinking and did I get the brand of sausage without the monosodium glutamate this time, he wasn’t having anything Chinese in his morning sausage, he was an American and proud of it. My daddy was a difficult man, but he wasn’t ignorant. He knew how to read a label on a package and figure out what it meant. As far as I was concerned, if a thing was Chinese and made the flavor better — even of your country sausage — then it was okay. Even Tennessee Pride has that MSG in it, and they’re still proud.