I would be summoned from school to school, grade to grade, and I would advance through a class, a subject, a unit, by picking on yet another nobody undergoing youth, and I would peer into her worried homeliness, let a trait or feature advocate itself for half an hour’s discrediting endearment.
Eyes, maybe; eyes of a sticky green that looked fuddled with the world and its ongoing insistence that things, people, remain detailed and unalike.
Or an unblunt arm unsleeved in late autumn and within esteeming reach, though I had come to believe miserably in seeing arms not as the pathway to a person but as the route the body took to get as far afield of itself as it could.
Evidence pointed directly to other evidence, never directly to me. What influence did I have? I spoke from notes.
When you are no good at what you do, it does you no good to triumph at whatever you might come home to, either. My husband was in fact my second one. I should be making a case for the first, for the avenues of feeling I must have taken with him, though he mostly just roved from room to room between charley horses, was studious in his insults, twidged a slowpoke finger into where I still trickled against my will.
Let me remember him, at least, for being the one to teach me that there was only one polite way left to say “yes,” and that was “I’m afraid so.”
I am admittedly leaving out a kid I left eventually with an aunt, my one uncornering aunt, but I imagine I did later write a letter to be given to the kid when the kid finally aged overnight.
I wrote it in emotional accelerations of my pen on hotel stationery on an evening when the fitness of the word evening struck me for once, for isn’t it the business of that first reach of the night to even out any remaining serrations of the day?
I was a woman heaping all alone into her thirties.
Things allowed me mostly lowered me.
My young woman, then: she was technically out of the nest, but there was a parent she reported to, and I must have known there were other goads.
In the nightlight, I could see where she had been C-sectioned. A weak grief usually strutted her up. She sometimes thumbed an hour aside with habits, practices; brought an abruptly feared finger down onto the pricket of a candleholder, maybe, to gloat over dribbleting blood. But the nail of the finger had been cheered an opera pink, or a mallow purple, and there was nothing uncourtly in her intonations.
I was thus kept milling in her feelings still.
For a living, she banged about tables in a downstairs restaurant scaled back now to only breakfast and a rushed late lunch. She would settle her stomach with formally forked portions of what had unsettled it in the first place.
But how best to be usefully afraid for her? I could never get a sense of where others might be perched in her affections.
Her name — I dare not draw it out here — was a huddle of scrunty consonants and a solitary vowel, short. I should have done a better job of learning how to say the thing without its getting sogged somehow.
A family? That was where you got crooked out of childhood.
I had been sixteen when I grew into my mother’s size — an already tight and terrible ten. Our wardrobes overlapped for a while, then no longer got sorted at all. We would pick a day’s dark attire out of the dryer, and had to go from there.
Or you could go back even further, to when you are barely untucked from childhood and finally get the full run of your body, and feel secure in all its workings, then learn that everything on it will now have to be put to dirtier purpose.
But my brother? I was in kilter with him, a little.
I turned on him, then turned back.
There was already wide plight to my tapering life.
One night, though, I had to use her bathroom. It was mostly men’s things in there — shaving utilities, drab soaps, an uncapped deodorant stick with a military stink to it.
When I came out, the phone rang.
“Let it sleep,” she said.
(The handset had, after all, a “cradle.”)
Then later, someone slapping away at the door.
The slaps were all accumulating at one altitude at first, but then traveled unmightily down the door panel to the knob.
Then sudden, fretful turnings of the knob.
We listened, hands united, until the commotion at the door was a gone-by sound, followed by the gone-by sounds of feet in the hallway, then of a car entered, roused, driven expressively away.
Prescription oblivials gave her an assist with her moods, veered her toward a slow-spoken sociability sometimes, sometimes made her meaner.
We would sit down dearly to a dinner of whiskery import vegetables, close-cropped meat gone meek in the sauce, everything on side plates, everything a lurid obscurer of itself.
But why lie when the truth is that the truth jumps out at you anyway?
Before me, so she claimed, it had been a narrow-faced shopmaiden with a muggy bosom and a catastrophal slant to her mind.
To hear her tell it, there were girl friends (two words), there were girlfriends (one word), there were friend girls, and there were women. Women were never your friend.
Baby talk like that must have put the lacquer back onto my life for a while.
I stood up quite handsomely now to my husband’s entire, perspirant heights.
One morning I thumbed out most of the teeth from a comb of his, stuck them upright in rough tufts of our carpet — whatever it then took to get a barefoot person hurt revolutionarily.
But the days arched over us and kept us typical to our era. It was an era of untidying succors, follied overhauls.
Her manager gave her more hours.
Her feelings came down to me now in just dwindlements of the original.
She started showing up in the snap judgments of a glass-blowing uncle, and was an aunt herself to two nieces already girthed and contrarious.
We had them over, those two, to her place, our table. They had been lured through youth with holiday slugs of liquor, had put themselves through phases but always stopped short of complete metamorphosis.
The younger was the more bridelike. Skewy eyes, a dump of dulled hair. A sparge of moles on the neck, the shoulder.
The older’s shoe kept knocking against my own.
She picked a hole in her biscuit, didn’t seem to have any tides dragging at her.
They each later took me aside to tell me what they had had the nerve to collect, study, and forsake. Thick books read to detriment; tiny, frittery animals — need I say?
Afterward, the woman and I alone, the night gone quickly uninfinite: I kept seizing things — household motes and the like — out of the broad, midbody bosh of her hair.
But if I say I felt something for her, would that make it sound as if I felt things in her stead, bypassing her completely?
Because that might too be true.
When you’re a renter, a tenant, an apartment-house impermanent, you make do without cellarways, attics, crawl spaces: there’s little volume your life can fill.
So you take it outside to the open air — into thin air, you’ve already corrected yourself.
The eye doctor started calling my husband a “glaucoma suspect.” There were drops and a dropper on the nightstand, pamphlets of attenuated portent.
I got better at tugging away the context from around every least thing. Something as unchaotical, I mean, as the compact she had suddenly stopped caring for. It no longer made the daily dainty descent into her purse.
I got alone with it, unclamped the clamshell casing.