"If we closed," I continue, "could we get sued for false advertising? Perpetrating a public fraud?"
"Littering," says Gerard, and he points to the lavender teddy again.
"Boy," says Eleanor, oblivious. "I hate it when someone comes by and pokes through a box of clothes that you always thought were kind of nice, and they just poke and stir and sniff and then move on. I mean, I wasn't even sure I wanted to get rid of the Liz Claiborne skirt, but now that it's been pawed over, forget it. There's no way it's going back inside my closet."
I go inside and Magdalena follows, stays, lies down on the linoleum of the kitchen floor where it's cool. I grab the remaining six-pack in the refrigerator and bring it outside. The pop and hiss of cans comforts me, the starchy bitterness bubbling under my tongue. Gerard strolls around the yard with his beer can. He is pretending to be a customer. He struts past the tables, past the birch trees, spins, and in some Brooklynesque, street-kid voice he picked up from the movies, he says, "Hey. How much will you pay me to take this stuff off your hands?" We laugh, resenting him for being cute. I swallow beer too quickly; carbonation burns and cuts my throat.
Eleanor jumps up, deciding it's her turn. She grabs the fiberglass insulation and models it like a stole. She scuddles and swishes up and down the sidewalk, a runway model on drugs. "Dahlinck, don't vurry about tuh spleentairs," she is saying. "So vut, a leetle spleentairs."
Gerard and I applaud.
my new apartment might be in a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?"
"I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.
"your turn, benna," Eleanor and Gerard are saying. "Be somebody," they are saying. "Do something," they are saying. "Some feat of characterization. Some yard sale drama. We're bored. No one's coming."
The sky has that old bathmat look of rain. "Some daring dramatic feat?" I don't feel quite up to it.
"Three feats to a yard." Gerard grins, and Eleanor groans and smacks him on the arm with a People magazine.
I put my beer can, carefully, on the ground. I stand up. "All right," I exhale, though it sounds edged with hysteria, even to me. I know what hysteria is: It is your womb speaking up for its own commerce. "This is your sex speaking," it says. "And we are getting a raw deal."
I walk over and pretend to be interested in the black skirt. I yank it down out of the tree and hold it up to myself. I step back and dance it around in the air. I fold back the waistband and look at the tag. I point at it theatrically, aghast. I glance over my shoulders, then look front at Gerard who is waving and at Eleanor who is laughing. I make a horrible face. "Liz Claiborne?!" I yell, pretending to be outraged. I toss the skirt off toward the street; it lands on the curb. "Liz Claiborne's nothing but a hooker!"
And then there is a guffawing, hiccuping sort of laughter, but it seems to be coming mostly from me, and I have collapsed, squatted on the grass, holding my stomach, this thing that might be laughter coming insistently, in gulps and waves. I lift my head, and in the distance I see Eleanor and Gerard — Eleanor worried and coming toward me, Gerard afraid and not coming toward me, and jutting into my line of vision is the edge of my own body, fading from the center first like a bloodstain or a bruise, only my outlying limbs, my perimeter lingering. That is all I can see, the three of us, here, small and vanishing, and caught in the side yard, selling things.
Water
"so, you don't like the life you're leading?" asks Gerard, unbelieving as the police. He is an art history graduate student, a teaching assistant of Benna's, although they are about the same age. They are sitting in Benna's office, which could use some potted plants and more books. The art history department, she thinks, must be wondering about her empty shelves, whether this suggests an attitude problem. She has tried to joke and say that she's going to fill the shelves with Hummels and porcelain horses with gold chains connecting their hearts. But no one seems to find it funny. "You're Impressionist scholarship's new golden girl," Gerard is saying. "I don't get it."
Benna considers this. Leading a life always makes her think of something trailing behind her in a harness, bit, and reins. "You can lead a life to water, but you can't make it drink." She smiles at Gerard. Her books are all at home, still in boxes.
Gerard's grin is a large plastic comb of teeth, the form his fury has taken. "You're being ungrateful," he says. Benna has what he hopes someday to have: free pencils, department stationery, an office with a view. Of the lake. Of the ducks. Not the glamour bird, she has said. How can Benna suggest she's unhappy? How can she imply that what she's really wanted in her life is not this, that her new position and her oft-quoted articles on Mary Cassatt have fallen into a heap in her lap like, well, so many dead ducks. How can she say that she has begun to think that all writing about art is simply language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind?
"Maybe I'm being ungrateful," bristles Benna, "but you're being insubordinate." Yet she likes Gerard, is even a bit attracted to him, his aqua sweaters and his classroom gift for minutiae; like a Shakespearean's pop quiz, he surprises everyone with years, dates, the names of dogs and manservants. Now Benna regrets a bit having said what she's just said. Even if Gerard is behaving badly. Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.
"Well, I guess that's a signal I should leave," says Gerard, and he gets up and does a stiff swagger out of her office, without even saying good-bye, the blues and greens of him bleeding like Giverny lilies.
benna takes a bus home, which she usually resents, tending, as she does, to think of buses as being little more than germs-on-wheels. But today, because of the October chill, the peopled humidity of the ride is comforting. In the city back east where she went to graduate school, everything was within walking distance: school, groceries, laundry. She lived in a house with a large group of friends and was known for her carrot soup and her good, if peculiar, sense of humor. Then in August, she packed up her car and drove out here alone, feeling like a map folded back against its creases. She stopped overnight at motels in Indiana, Nebraska, and Montana (where she danced in the cocktail lounges with truckers), and blinked back tears through prairie after prairie and towns that seemed all to have the same name: Watertown, Sweet Water, Waterville. She came to this California university for one reason, she reminds herself: the paycheck. Although every time the paycheck arrives the amount taken out in taxes for a single woman with no dependents is so huge it stuns her. The money starts to feel like an insult: For this, she thinks, I've uprooted my life? Whatever money she might save, moreover, she usually spends trying to console herself. And it is hard to make any job financially worth its difficulties, she realizes, when you're constantly running out to J. C. Penney's to buy bathmats.
BENNA MISSES EVERYONE.
Benna misses everyone she's ever known and spends her weekends writing long letters, extravagant in their warmth, signed always, "Lots of love, Benna." She used to pay attention to how letters people wrote her were signed, but now she tries not to notice when the letters she receives close with "Take Care" or "Be Well" or "See you Christmas" — or sometimes simply "Moi." Look for "Love," she jokes to herself, and you will never find it.