She had groomed every inch of her body that morning, from toenails to hair, shaved her legs and under-arms, sugar-scrubbed every limb and moisturized with Moroccan oil. The house, too, was in flawless order. Every closet and drawer organized down to its stray components – tacks, rubber bands, handball rackets, old shoes and unwanted sweaters and every sock matched up and displayed in colorful rows, winter clothes and red wool blankets dry-cleaned and folded into cedar boxes, and all her bills paid in what had become a run-away cycle of self-improvement.
Last night’s chilled air lingered in the rooms of her mountain cottage, but she could smell the day’s heat as she opened the kitchen window. She washed the spoon she’d used to empty the tin of cat food and dried it on a freshly laundered dish towel before nestling it with the other spoons. That feeling of having everything in its proper place, of solidity and forward momentum came so rarely, she wondered how long it could last. She pressed a gold star on the fridge calendar. A gold star for every day she resisted the urge to drink. Every square, every page of the calendar went back five months and she flipped through it to view the dazzling pages.
How many times had she tried to pick up the pieces and begin again, struggling past the grief before being consumed by a bottomless well of sorrow that left her on the floor, howling like a gut-shot animal.
She vowed to herself, “Not today.”
After laying down a new rug in her yoga room, lighting candles and making herself a cup of coffee, she applied to be a Lyft driver to help offset the cost of a new generator. Not that she needed the money, but she hated to see such a mundane purchase gouge her savings. She took a selfie to fulfill one of the Lyft application requirements and looked at it.
“Oh my God.”
She took another selfie, and then another. Everything about her face was off, beginning with the strain in her eyes and the awful way her right eye rode higher than the left. Is this what people see when they look at me? A fucking cock-eyed Picasso? And the stringy neck, fleshy cheeks, bony forehead. Mousy, she thought, unimportant.
And her head. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
No matter how many selfies she took it was always tilted as if she had no will to hold it upright. As if literally – stupidly – her head wasn’t screwed on right. Her phone buzzed. A call from the mechanic telling her the belts for her car were in.
“I’ll be right there.”
With relief, she deleted the entire Lyft application and forgot about it. She packed up her computer, expecting it to be a light work day – just a simple press release for a client that sold nasal cannulas. On Wednesdays, her boss, Nicholas, booked development meetings, so that meant she might have some time to spend on her latest poem. It was called “Boxcar Children” and it was, indirectly, about her father’s infidelity.
She climbed into her recently detailed car – ground zero in her bid for perfection. She loved the way it smelled now, so spotless and clean. Like new. That’s what she longed to be – new. She vowed no more piles of junk mail or crumbs or accumulation of dust. How hard could it be? From now on, she thought, everything will be optimal, perfect and sustained.
She drove down the big hill, taking in the slopes of the mountain, the harmonizing shades of moss and dusky grays. Steam rose up through the trees, marking the river’s serpentine path as if the water were sending up a message in its ghostly vapor.
Wind blasted a fine yellow dust across the main drag through town. Not a town, exactly, but a stretch along a mountain road winding its way toward the highway – the source of a constant distant drone of trucks. There was the old hardware, grocery store, diner and a couple of dollar stores vying to put the grocery store out of business – an idea she found deeply distressing. In the grocery store parking lot a handful of “Pocono husbands,” as they were known, sat in their idling pick-up trucks -- baseball caps, wraparound sunglasses, goatees. Their only responsibility in life, apparently, was to drop their wives/girlfriends/daughters/mothers off at work and pick them up again at the end of the day.
She passed John’s house, but there was no sign of him. She had met the old man one day about a year ago while jogging. His sickly old black lab had come lumbering out of his house, barking at her, and John, also sickly and old, had come struggling out after the dog, yelling “Boomer, get on back here now,” as he struggled to pull his oxygen tank behind him.
John had about 16 broken down cars in his yard, and piles of junk and boxes crushed up against the grimy windows of his porch as if someone had tipped up the house and shook everything to the front. You saw these conditions everywhere in this part of the world, and she always wondered about the type of person who kept junk cars in their yard. A neighbor once mused that it indicated a desire to leave behind a dead-end life, but they could never get the cars to run. So, they’d give up until they got the itch again and bought another junk car, and this went on and on. The more cars in the yard, her neighbor said, the greater the ambition.
About once a week, John would be on his porch with his oxygen tank looking for her to pass his house on her run so they could talk a bit, first about the weather and then about everything that was wrong with people. It was kind of a ritual the way they agreed passionately about the most mundane of topics but danced lightly around topics that would lead to contempt had they been honest with each other. Sometimes she’d see a light burning in a back room and imagine him in there listening to the conservative radio station he liked. That’s all he did, he’d told her, was listen to the radio. When she’d learned he had emphysema, she asked if he’d like to read a few articles she’d written about it for their cannula client and he’d said, “Sure, why not? Doctors don’t tell me nothing.”
Sometimes, she’d drop off a plate of brownies or a chew toy for Boomer.
John would tease her sometimes about how much she ran. “By God, who is it are you running from?” Or, on days when he felt low he’d say things like, “It’s good to talk to you, daughter.”
Sometimes he talked about his sons. “My oldest boy, he’s got into some trouble with drugs.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Heroin.”
“Oh, boy. That’s sad when that happens.”
“Went to the doctor for a bad back…”
“Opioids?”
He nodded. “It got a hold on him.”
For about a month now she had seen no sign of John, and the light at the back of the house was never on. Some of the cars had started to disappear, and then one day his newspaper box was gone, and she figured he’d died.
She glanced at her face in the car’s rearview mirror – and thought she looked okay. Better than the selfies. This stretch of road took her by a series of houses that confused her -- toilet seats as decoration, an old TV with flowers growing out of it, an overturned bathtub with Merry Christmas sprayed across it.
“Why?” She asked herself every time. “Why, why, why?”
The town attracted ex-cons from a nearby prison who came to live at a motel turned SRO right across from the grocery store. She’d learned this from a handyman who later stole her refrigerator. (She’d called the sheriff who’d made him give it back). She passed the Sanctuary Church where recently its congregation had renewed wedding vows armed with AR-15 semiautomatic rifles two weeks after a bloody school shooting in Florida. They claimed they were following God's will to honor the Second Amendment.
“Why, why, why?”
Her mechanic’s garage sat in the middle of a cement lot. Neon sign, a giant paper butterfly in the window. It was owned and run by Peggy, a beleaguered New Jersey transplant who burned vanilla-scented candles in the shop’s office/sitting area.
Kyle, the sole mechanic, was the quiet type with a deep tan, graying hair and solemn blue eyes. His almost preternatural stillness suggested to her a dark, deep wisdom that drew you in with its silence. When she entered the shop, Kyle was standing at the desk, frowning and scribbling across a clip board. He did not look up.
“Where’s Peggy?” she said, knowing that he wouldn’t respond to anything as off-hand as “Hi there.”
“Gastroenterologist. Won’t be back til tomorrow.” He glanced up finally, unsmiling, but looked past her as if someone else had walked in. As he bowed his head back down to the clipboard, she studied his hands. Dark from the sun and dirt and grease, they had an assured quality and the fingernails were smooth perfect squares of almond-white. He reeked of smoke and body odor, both fresh and stale, but she didn’t mind. Maybe she was a neat freak, but body odor did not repulse her. In fact, she preferred it to perfumes or cologne – or any artificial scent like those nasty vanilla candles.
Kyle’s dusty overalls looked as if they hadn’t been washed in years, but none of this bothered her either because she liked to imagine that Kyle had untapped depth. He seemed smart, and maybe contained in his quietness startling insights that required nothing more than the right questions.
While waiting, she tapped a note into her phone reminding herself to rearrange all her books by color. When she looked up again, Kyle was gazing right at her with those intense blue eyes – the color of a bluebird -- set deep in his well-seasoned face. The skin smooth and solid as if he’d been put together by a ship’s carpenter.
“Sorry, what?” she said.
“I say, it’s gonna be a hot one.” Kyle spoke low, monotone – as if every word cost him.
“Oh, yeah.”
She liked that he never smiled, never seemed desperate to please or get a laugh. Her dead husband had lived for recognition and spent an inordinate amount of time wringing insult from the most innocuous comment.
The heat was getting to her, and Kyle was taking a very long time with his clipboard. The first hot day of the season was sweeping down on them like a scirocco. Gusts of arid wind now scattered garbage down the road and spires of dust coasted across the parking lot. You could hear drag racers on the highway, their engines whining. The sound brought back those nights at the end of school when she’d been sent to bed in day light and lay there in agony banging her leg against the walls and sweating into the sheets.
“Sit tight.” Kyle hugged the wall to get by her, still looking down at his clipboard before disappearing into the door marked Employees Only, No Exceptions!
She headed out into the day’s pale bluster, walking the short way to the grocery store to pick up a few things – seltzer, asparagus, cat food. She tried to think of what else she needed. The other women in the store wore mostly tight, stretchy clothes in bold, almost blinding colors. A curious number of them dressed exclusively in a stretch fabric of pink or aqua top and black bottom or pink or aqua bottom and black top, floating up and down the aisles like bobbers. Many of the shoppers came from the woods, from trailers or old shacks that lay end-to-end like grounded train cars along the road. Once prosperous resort communities left to rot during the Great Recession had in recent years come alive again with furtive dwellers who seemed to do 8
nothing but collect empty beer cans and old tires and dump their garbage bags out along lonely stretches of road.
When she arrived back at the shop she found it empty, the garage door creaking with the incessantly dry wind that fluttered noisily among the fliers and posters pinned to the walls. The sitting room felt like an old Western set after all the lights, cables and liquor bottles had been removed.
Her phone buzzed. “Shit.” Her boss wanted to “hop on a call” to discuss the PR release.
“You got it.” she texted back. Die. Burn in hell. Muttering “goddamnit,” she swept a stack of Motor, Barbie and Reader’s Digest magazines off a chair and plopped down with a sorrowful sigh. She opened her computer and plugged in her headphones and called in. The vanilla scent shot deep into her nasal cavities, striking at the flinty bone of her skull to spark a headache that would begin to beat in time with her heartbeat as her boss raved in her ear a series of feverish and futile questions. “We used thought leader already. Right? What about visionary? Have we used that yet? Let’s change catalyst to fulcrum. That’s better. And let’s stop using perfect storm already. And start talking about the paradigm, you know. And let’s…hang on. You know what? Let’s work blue sky scenario into the lead graph. I like that. I like that a lot.”
And this went on until she fell into despair because this was her life, all day, every day for the rest of her life until, she imagined, the authorities would find her muttering corporate clichés to herself while drooling over her computer, mice scurrying across her fingers and spiders weaving traps in her armpits.
She remembered the bottle of cognac in her garage. She’d left it there months ago when she’d decided to quit for good – it’s poison, why am I drinking poison? She was amazed both that she had forgotten it and that she had just now remembered it -- like finding a water fountain in the desert. Her boss’s voice and the wind and candles leaked poison into her, and she began to cry, quietly behind her sunglasses. Had she been alone in her house this would have spiraled into a wail of vast sorrow, and she imagined her life as seen from space. The great nothingness of it. A smear on Google maps, a forgotten no-man’s land that had been pixilated because of its sensitive nature.
Her boss spoke inside her head, “We on the right track?”
She recovered her voice enough to say, “Yes, uh…right on track.” A tear bounced warmly off her cheek, and she wiped the spot against her shoulder. Is this it then? Is this what I wanted to be when I was a little girl? A fucking PR hack? When and how had it all gone so wrong?
The meeting ended finally and after a few minutes of polishing, she sent the absurdly red-lined release to the client, feeling shell-shocked and woozy. Unable to understand the words on the posters about bulbs and emission control. Unable to perceive any chronology of time as her thoughts unraveled like film out of a canister. A forgettable B movie. In any case, now, after the call, she felt like she had a brain lesion or something. As if the day had not started with so much promise.
One weekend while meeting a friend in the city at the Algonquin she had met a man with a dry wit and regal profile – exactly like the Jack of Spades. He’d also had a limp that had turned out to be cancer. After an evening of listening to jazz and drinking too much champagne they fell in love and spent three days together at the Chelsea where the plaster in the shower had crashed down on her head. She still had the room key.
He had died in winter in the rental house given to them by his mother, who was an absentee landlord living in Miami. His mother had a soft spot for hard-luck cases who were “nice” on the phone. These nice hard-luck-cases turned out to be meth addicts who almost destroyed the house and who let runaways live in the garage on mattresses. Sometimes she’d still find tiny vials with sharp smelling resin under carpets and floor boards.
As crushing as her job was, it paid enough to transform the pink-walled crack house with its fly stripped ceilings into a cozy cottage. They’d repaneled the walls with old barn wood, and she loved the grain of that wood, the way it made you feel, its beauty as primal and complex as the natural highlights in a child’s hair or the rippling bands of a bonfire.
The salt of her tears began to tighten and sting the skin of her cheeks. And she was parched. She rubbed her face and took a few deep breaths to oxygenate the red out. Another blast of dry wind sent a paper bag scampering across the narrow parking lot. The walls fluttered brazenly, and she wondered what in hell was taking Kyle so long.
She brooded about the cognac until finally he appeared, and then felt nervous about how she must look. Not that he ever really looked at her. He could have been an actor, she thought, one of those great, underrated tough guys that Quentin Tarantino liked to rescue from the 1970s.
Kyle was holding a package in his thick grimy hands, and a single greasy thumb print darkened his right ear. “They sent the wrong belts.”
Why’d it take you so long to figure that out, she thought.
“Darn,” she said.
“Yeah.” He pulled at his ear again leaving a second, lighter impression of his thumbprint slant-wise across the earlier thumbprint. “So, two options.”
She liked the sound of this.
“I got the car all pulled apart in there. I could put it back and you could bring her in tomorrow. I mean do you need it tonight?”
“Um…no.” She hesitated, thinking if I say no too fast he’ll know I have absolutely no life, and if I lie and say I need it he’ll know also that I have absolutely no life. And then she thought cognac poured over a pile of cracked ice with a splash of grapefruit juice sounded pretty good.
“Ok, so I’ll hang on to it,” he said. “We’ll get them belts first thing in the morning.”
His irises were the powdery blue of a night moth feeding in her hair, and the whites of his eyes were made radiant by the griminess of his face. And she was reminded of the old barn wood of her house in those streaks of fresh and old grease and sweat that created a delicate powdered patina of smoke and dust and grit across Kyle’s face. She wanted to study him, the way she sometimes studied the walls of her house, seeing bizarre faces and animal shapes. Her father had been like that. A visionary who saw faces in the wood paneling of the den. Sometimes he’d take a pen and fill in what he saw, so for years Richard Nixon’s wooden face stared out at them from over the TV set.
“I’ll need a ride home,” she told Kyle.
He had picked up a rag and was rubbing his hands with it – the kind of business an actor would seize on. “Whereabouts do you live?”
“Top of the hill. Straight up Tweeker Hill to Tranquilizer Falls.” She’d called Break Hill Road and Tranquil Valley Estates by the nicknames she and her husband had used, but Kyle seemed to know exactly where she meant.
He tossed the rag aside and looked at a clock wall. “I’m gonna pull my jeep around the front and you hop in. How’s that sound?”
I can’t believe this is happening, she thought. “Fine.”
She’d have only a few minutes in which to peel away the layers of the mysterious Kyle the car mechanic. Because today was the day. Today was the day that everything was meant to align in perfect harmony and stay that way. And even though her throat hurt from breathing the candle oil and she could feel sand under her eyelids, she felt restored again.
His jeep kicked up gravel as he sped around from the back of the shop and when he hit the brakes, the tires spit chalky dust into the air in a tattered curtain that drifted across the parking lot and settled with the soft static sound of an old vinyl record.
She got in and set her feet down on a four-inch layer of junk mail, magazines, bank envelopes, Styrofoam coffee cups and crumpled Pall Mall boxes.
“I’m real sorry about the mess.” Kyle looked stricken by the sight of the garbage at her feet.
“It’s absolutely not a problem.”
“ACs busted. Sorry.”
“You from around here?” She landed the tone of the question squarely between bald curiosity and shooting-the-shit.
“Yeah, I grew up on…actually on a dairy farm not far from here.” He said this as if he was surprised to hear it himself.
“Oh yeah?” She’d hoped for more, something along the lines that he’d been in the military, got PTSD and traveled the world in search of what he had lost. But a dairy farm, not far from here. She didn’t know what to do with this homely piece of information, and they were already cruising up Tweeker Hill – so called because everyone drove up it too fast.
Two deer crossed the road.
“Deer in the day,” he said as if he’d never seen anything like it.
“Yep.” She started to panic. They were almost at her house and she hadn’t cracked his code, found common ground or at least some interesting seam of conversation.
As they headed into the soft dirt roads and deep shadows of Tranquilizer Falls they passed the first house near the mailboxes. A very old, incredibly pale man, a WWII vet, had lived here for decades with a woman he’d liberated from a concentration camp.
“See that woman in the garden?” She said, thinking this would be the thing to draw Kyle out. “She was in a concentration camp.”
“Uh huh.” He was more interested in the house. “I trimmed that house. And that house and that one and that one there. Wish I was still doing that, to be honest with you, instead of getting stuck on engines. What can you do? It’s all a struggle, isn’t it?”
“I’m on the left past the blue house.”
The eggshell blue split-level was her neighbor’s house, and she hated the sight of it. The owner was a stocky man who had married a reformed crack addict he met at his church. He’d 14
spent a lot of money to get her teeth fixed and then divorced her a year later. Now he had a new wife who was thinner, although not thin, and had most of her teeth, as far as anybody knew.
“Thanks for the ride, Kyle.”
“Yup.”
She wasn’t sure what she was expecting in this moment. Maybe she was giving him a chance to ask her his own questions or crack a joke, if he was capable of such a thing, or comment on the trim of her house. Staring straight ahead, and into his own thoughts, he absently touched the fresh pack of Pall Malls in his breast pocket and clicked the jeep’s lighter into the socket. Other than the radio buttons, everything else on the console was covered in a thin layer of dust. She realized she had lingered next to him for an embarrassingly long time, so she fumbled with the door.
“Take care,” she muttered and didn’t wait for a response just plunged head long up her driveway, face burning, as she tried not to wonder what he was thinking. The plants in her garden looked freeze-dried by the day’s white heat, and she looked for rattlesnakes on the stone fence as she climbed the porch steps to her front door. Inside her cool, pristine rooms, she felt so alone and restless. So stranded.
She wandered over to her book shelf. She took down the new Bill Knott collection and realized that trying to understand these poems would be like taking apart a jellyfish to see what made it so beautiful.
She opened a window. That hot Sirocco-like wind was still grinding down across the Poconos Plateau. She’d once read about the drifts of red Saharan sand that would fall across villages in Ireland and wondered where today’s wind had fetched from to make it so malevolent,
turning the sky a jaundiced complexion and leaving her brain as jangled as a guitar left in a hot car.
The thought of the cognac calmed her nerves a little, and she decided to clean the garage. Her work overalls and red bandanna made her look like Rosy the Riveter as she headed outside with her bucket of rags and cleaning solutions. The big oak in the back yard shivered and the blueberry bushes bobbed against each other, their spindly branches tapping against the wire fence where the grass had come in thick for the first time that year. When they’d first got the house, the back of the garage had been an ash heap of cans and cigarette butts.
Three deer grazed in the field beyond her yard, and she thought of Kyle. Poor Kyle who pined to be a carpenter. Or whatever.
She went into the garage to organize the utility shelves and swept out a winter’s accumulation of dust and salt and bits of garbage. She’d have a little cognac, she thought, but only as a means for finishing the poem about her father. The cognac would give her heart, help her become the person she was meant to be. And, of course, getting the garage into shape would help, she believed. It would be the one thing, from now on, that would make all the difference.
She checked her work mail. Nothing. “Thank Christ the Feng shui’s already working.”
She found the cognac in a blue plastic milk crate, but left it there, thinking, “Not yet.”
She worked until exhaustion set in, ignoring her headache, and locked the garage door, feeling pounds lighter in spirit, the cognac tucked under her arm. It was an expensive brand in a bottle shaped like something from a Catholic mass, with a gold Spanish cross embossed on the front. She showered and climbed into a pale blue dress that made her look Amish, ready to be productive. She fixed her drink and settled down on the couch. Finally, everything was perfect again. All the disappointment of work, and the dust storm and boring old Kyle.
She took a sip of the smoky amber liquor and savored the tingling sensation as it shot lead weights into her legs. It’s poison, she thought, but such lovely poison. The only thing missing now before she began her new, more meaningful existence was to burn some sage to chase away any lingering darkness in her life and cleanse the house of spiritual demons.
She got everything arranged on a brass tray, candle lighter and sage stick, while taking dainty sips of the cognac that soon became lip-numbing gulps. The liquor went down fast, and she topped up four fingers worth to, as she saw, save a trip to the kitchen.
“For the journey.” She sloshed her drink in a toast to the barn-wood walls.
She lit the candle and blackened the loose bundle of sage leaves until several of them spewed a fragrant grayish olive smoke. Four or five warm, spicy spirals rose in straight lines and then spun out in their own directions with balletic precision. She walked from room to room with the burning sage, waving the errant smoke into the corners and inside closets and under sinks to drive away whatever it was that kills husbands and ruins lives.
She chanted, “I am the only one who can save myself,” tossing the smoke, the smoke whipping out from the orange-tipped leaves. “I am the only one who can save myself.”
Now she hardly tasted the cognac, the liquid barely registering as wet on her lips as she saged room after room, and floated up the stairs and back down again, the smoke trailing behind her more furiously now, no longer in strands but a thick mass pouring out its magical disinfectant. Back in the kitchen she splashed a little more – “just a smidge” – into the glass because she wasn’t finished yet. She took the burning stick outside and the smoke trailed behind her like a blue veil ripped by a multitude of sharp claws. She felt like a priest bestowing benediction as she circled the house, marking the perimeter of the property in a wreath of smoke. She repeated her mantra, softly to herself as she entered the garage to smoke its dark corners and fly-heavy webs. She went out behind the garage to the blueberry bushes stunted by the rocky soil. The sun was setting, she was surprised to see, and she stopped to admire the thick orange shock of light at the edge of the field, the horizon slicing into the delicate, watery blue of the fading day. Even in the persistent wind, the night had begun to cool and cleanse the mountain, scrubbing its shadows with an inky wash that made her feel sleepy.
She sat down in the grass to bask in the night colors and listen to the field crickets. She heard the distant sound of dishes and silverware landing on a table, and it made her think of being a child in summer and walking the uneven sidewalks of her suburban neighborhood, and how the roots of trees pushed the concrete up. Little foot paths formed around these abutments and became a fact of your journey to the corner store. Became important features of the ride around the block because you learned those slick little detours by heart and always looked for them, and sometimes she’d take these tiny pathways with a deft swoop of her bike, but mostly she’d pop a wheelie over the big crack. And the thing she knew, the thing she counted on, was that the cracks in the sidewalks would never get fixed.
Someone was still mowing in the half light, and the air now smelled of sweet hay, and she let the gentle hands of the cognac pull her head across the grass she had grown from ash.
She began to cry softly. At first for no reason, but then the reasons came to her the way animals seek fresh water. Her dead husband, of course. Like an axe, the cognac opened wide that bursting cataract but soon it hushed down into a trickle of sorrow. An unexpected sadness for John who would never, for the rest of her days, come out with his fat old dog and oxygen tank to greet her and pretend with her that they could ever really be friends. She imagined that he went to his death un-mourned by his drug addict son who, for all she knew, had been the one who had turned off the oxygen tank while John slept. She could even hear John complaining to her about it.
“Saw me as nothing but money for drugs cuz it got hold of him, and there wasn’t nothing we could do about it.”
She remembered something John had told her, how years ago his youngest son had died in a car accident. Those cars rotting in his yard, the piles of garbage at the windows -- she realized all of that had been John’s grief. Grief had been their common ground, the two of them suffering together in their own way. He let his grief pile up around him, while she tried to scrub hers clean every day. But it was always there, waiting for her.
She woke later to the sound of sirens and men shouting and saw red and blue lights flashing against the trees. The blueberry bushes and the enormous canopy of the big oak above her glowed orange, and the smell of burning barn wood reached her in crackling waves of heat. My house is on fire, she thought, but it’s okay. It will be okay. But somehow John dying, his permanent absence from this earth, was too much to bear, and what hurt the most was that never again would he or anyone call her “daughter.”
