She was in the kitchen. At the table were two chairs. She pulled one out and sat down. Pouring whisky into a glass, the bottle clinking against the rim, she stared at the salt and pepper shakers that rested on the flowered doily, using a finger to tell herself when to stop. The finger-in-glass trick was a long-lived habit inherited from her mother.
She drained the glass and reached to fill it again. She knew that in mere fingers and more minutes, maybe most of the bottle, her brain would light up in a soft glow and would slow enough to ease the day and slide into sleep. The glass was half full and she drank again—each swallow a sweet gastric agony.
The whisky wasn’t the worry. The worry was how to unfold minutes into years. What next when the brain wouldn’t stop and the body wanted to descend. Sometimes her body wanted to sink into the coolness below, not gone, not quite forgotten, but in perpetual coma perpetual care perpetual forever and ever amen slowly dreaming into eternity. Silent. Seeping into trees. Coating rocks. Devolving back into component parts—a liquid soup of chemicals and fragile grey calcium frameworks. What would happen when what kept her above and buoyant became strange plastic and glass bell jar graves?
She placed her palm on the doily, pulling it to her slowly. She traced lace with her fingertips, eyes closed—tiny flowers bloomed in her mind. The sensation of little threaded loops and curls under her fingers was not unlike the landscape of a lover’s skin—old scars, a mole, soft hair, smooth flesh. Her fingers kept moving ‘til they numbed. When her fingers were quiet she picked up the shakers. They were shiny crystal pyramids—her mother’s favorite wedding gift. And now they were hers. She’d only ever refilled the pepper, as she never used the salt anymore. Pressing the cool crystal against each cheek, exhaling slowly, her pulse slowed. She turned each onto another side, pressing crystal to flesh ‘til all sides were warmed and her cheeks had cooled.
She was drunk now and in that small room of pleasure that was the refuge of the wasted. Breathing deliberately, she put them back down and got up suddenly to wash her hands again.
He heard her in the kitchen and went downstairs. He was lonely. She was sitting again, slowly drying her hands with paper towel. She wasn’t beautiful, but he loved the scar that ran down her right cheek and ended in a period-like pock above her lip. He picked up the bottle and held it to the light for a few seconds, gauging what was gone, before putting it back down. He reached behind him and grabbed a glass off the counter, spun the bottle top, and poured his own.
“How are you?” he said. “How was the day?”
“Eh.” She shrugged.
He got up and stood behind her, leaning over and down, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, clasping his hands across her chest.
He spoke quietly. “I would have gone with you, if you’d wanted. I mean, I would have gone with you anyway.”
She silently counted to five. “It’s hot, babe. Get off me.” She tried not to wipe her face where his forehead had touched her cheek, and then did, quickly. After she rubbed her hand hard along her leg, thankful for the roughness of denim that erased greasy sweat.
He turned on the fan and moved back to his chair, pretending not to notice, but color rising in his cheeks. He took a drink, wanting to stretch time, and waited, looking only at his hands. They were not large. She picked at her chipping red polish, little blood colored flecks splattered over the table.
She got up. “I’m going to bed.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No. I want you to sit. We can just sit.” He picked up the bottle and poured more. She sat back down.
Not wanting to think about him, she thought about Alan Alda. When she was a little girl, watching M.A.S.H. with her mother was a six o’clock weeknight ritual. Hawkeye would appear on the kitchen TV screen in shades of black and green and grey. The smell of garlic and onions and oil in a hot pan would fill the house and time ‘til dinner was measured in commercials. Mom called Hawkeye a “salt of the earth kinda fella” which made her younger self laugh and smile in agreement even though she’d no idea what it meant. Salt of the earth salt of the earth the earth is dirt so dirt must have salt salt of the earth how is that a compliment so salt makes things better but not always fruit but sometimes watermelon ‘cause that’s always good and sometimes tomatoes do they count are they fruit or vegetable the dictionary I forget and what does that even mean? Mother would drink gin after making her a “kiddie martini.” They liked to pretend they were having a drink with Hawkeye—her with sprite in a martini glass and a little bowl of olives as a snack—and she would imagine herself into that tent. Hawkeye would be waiting for her in his red satin robe with a martini in one hand and a wilting flower between his teeth. They’d talk and dance and drink and after a while they’d be in love.
“How will you know when you’re in love?”—she never had an answer for Mother’s questions, just flushed cheeks and giggles, all the while thinking that love comes when you can tell another person who you really are and they think it’s okay that you love to lick the butter off breadsticks or that it’s not weird when you apologize to plants as you pick their flowers. Mom would tell her about Galileo and how fell so perfectly in love with looking and distance he figured out how the sun and the moon and the earth worked—his obsession for the planets was a kind of love, a love made perfect in obstacles and impossibilities. “If I were Galileo and you were the sun I would sing the wondrous workings of your system til the wind blows and water flows along,” Mom would say, “that’s the kind of love you want, proud and open and singing.”
She loved M.A.S.H. but sometimes she’d wondered if Hawkeye was really wonderful. He was funny and smart but he was an asshole sometimes, like his was the only reflection worth studying. There were a lot of nurses he kissed and none of them seemed real happy about it by the second commercial break. She thought about men who could eat everything—deep dish pizzas, baskets of slick orange wings, ribs sticky with fat—who stayed hungry and empty and lean. Any time one of the nurses would ask Hawkeye for anything, just something little that wasn’t only his pleasure, that wasn’t just a dance or a joke, he’d disappear with over-the-shoulder apologies that were never really sorry and that “fuck you” kimono. The nurses would come and go and never had last names or hometowns or childhoods. No boyfriend she’d ever had remembered where she’d grown up or that she used to ride her bike home from school with a book, open, in one hand. She grew great seas of flowers in the backyard because there were never any delivered from the store on Valentine’s day and she always had to do the cooking.
She gave in first. “My mom used to love Alan Alda. Said he was salt of the earth, which used to confuse the hell out of me, but I loved sitting with her before dinner, watching M.A.S.H. in that green pratfall pitfall light. It’s the only thing she loved that much. That and popcorn. And those two things together? She would have left us for Hawkeye if he’d offered her a bag of Orville. No ring or knee needed. No way. And she’d say that, too, when she was drunk enough to say anything she really meant. I always sat with her until that happened.”
“Aw babe.”
She reached out her hand to touch his, but stopped short of touching him, leaving it placed on the table, remembering the heat.
“I was always more into Trapper.” She lied.
“Your mom sounds like she was sweet.”
“Maybe. What she really wanted was goddamn Alan to come through the door, dressed in those shitty fatigue pants and striped bathrobe, martini in hand, a bowl of salty popcorn, all set to sweep her off to a tropical tent on an island where everything was like the end of a PG-13 Disney movie. I mean, so did I, back then. I don’t know if it was Alan Alda or if it was Hawkeye or if it even mattered or if she even really cared if the two were different at all.”
She knew she was drunk and should love him just for trying to talk about anything, but she couldn’t. She wanted to find it charming, but she just wanted to go shower to rinse off his nearness. It wasn’t even so much the sweat from his forehead tightening her cheek, but the idea that what was inside you could seep out against your will. She imagined herself dead and buried in a oven box in New Orleans, an apartment building for the body, where the heat and the sun slowly cremated the corpse, leaving dry bones and nothing else.
She poured another three ounces into her glass. Downed it. Left the room. Her voice carried back down the stairs, “Stay up or not. I have to sleep.”
He put his head down on the cool formica of the table, pressing his left cheek flat against the surface. It stuck to the tabletop and he wondered if she had wiped it down after dinner. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t tacky enough to matter either way. Not anymore. The pressure against his cheek was comforting and he fought to stay awake. The soft breeze made by the fan raised the fine hairs on his shoulders and neck, erasing the slight sheen that seemed unavoidable this summer, and suddenly his chest felt tight.
When they’d met it was fall, and he realized now that the weather had helped. One doesn’t sweat much when it’s zero humidity and 50 degrees. She’d been okay with more touching then. They could have cocktails and sit pressed thigh to thigh and it was okay. After sex she always rose first thing to shower immediately, but that he could live with. And she wasn’t always washing her hands so much. Now she had to rinse off in the shower and then would stand in front of the fan in the “DaVinci” pose, arms and legs outstretched for maximum exposure. She wanted nothing on her.
He took another drink without sitting all the way upright and spilled on the table. He put his head back down. He would wait ‘til the whisky was gone.
Sheila Arndt is a reader, writer, and Ph.D. candidate currently living in the Midwest. She cares deeply about place, process, the modern and postmodern, critical theory, Americana, New Orleans, saltwater, old blues, and new dreams. Her poetry has been published in Gravel and Black Heart Magazine. www.sheilamarndt.com
