Winter’s Final Friday

When she began speaking, her voice was a low cello moan, Within a few minutes, she poured the tears of today’s life , sobbing out the the bitterness of an inhaled breath of misery. As she talked, her voice became a viola, then a violin, then a bass, then back to the cello, but always, always, the pulling of the dusty bow across the singing strings, the overeager squeak of the changed strokes, the whisper of her engraved finger-pads on the stretched strands of gut. The etude, the very composition itself set down in dots and flags of salty water on the staves for the sheer purpose of challenge and expression. And so she played for me.

Married threescore years, and now she watches him stand before the bathroom mirror, staring at himself, unsure of who it is peering back, the slack undershirt hanging across the bones of once-beefy shoulders, the distended belly, the oyster eyes, the frizzled and standing hair. She watches him mutter and shake his head, then turn and shamble to the bed with its slick polyester comforter, the bed in front of the television, the bed next to the small, circular table with its room service menu in a plastic stand, the bed with its pair of nightstands and their remote controls and clock radios and note pads and cheap pens and gidjin’s bible, and plastic cups sweating onto the veneer tops.

It happened. Oh, yes. It happened. And she knows how, but she doesn’t understand how.

All she can say for sure is that the nice man with the shining skin and the African accent gained entrance to their home with a snowy smile and a pink-palmed handshake, and he wanted to talk about home prices in the area. She listened for a while, sitting on the camelback sofa they’d bought the second year of their marriage, and she thought the nice man was very knowledgeable, and when she grew bored with the droning of numbers and dates and predictions, and she excused herself and went upstairs to fold laundry.  And so began the hour of the serpent, the dark hyphen where something slithered in, something smelling of old wet logs and spiderwebbed moss and gleaming, watchful, rheumy eyes. She got  lost in her chores, finishing one and then moving to another and then starting another and thinking of another, and by the time she went downstairs, she was muttering to herself and trying to remember what she was going to ask him and hoping he could prod her, as he had so many times, back to her own lilac-and-bath-powder-scented intentions.

But when she descended to the living room, he wasn’t there. And the nice black man wasn’t there. The room was silent, the house was still, the rooms were hushed. The papers that the young man had carried in were gone, and she could see the indentations from his alien buttocks in the easy chair, shaped like Moses’ own stone tablets, and she went to the front window and swept the curtain aside and looked into the yard and the street beyond. No one was there, and no one was behind her when she turned around, her face creased with worry and confusion. She went to busy herself with other matters, but her mind was screwed to the empty living room and the empty yard outside.

When her husband returned, he had a sheaf of papers, crumpled and foreign to the tidy interior of the home. He dropped them onto the glass surface of the coffee table and wandered off, pulling his shirt from his waistband. She picked up the pages and shuffled through them, squinting through her glasses at the paragraphs, frowning at words like sale and final and settlement. She sat down on the edge of the sofa and read through the papers more slowly, glancing up every now and then at the easy chair where the smiling stranger had perched while he talked and chuckled and hawked his wares. And then it came to her.

Sold.

She called to her husband, but there was no answer. Listening hard, she discerned the sound of the shower upstairs. She chewed her lip, the lip her husband had nibbled on their honeymoon night in Fort Worth, and she cupped her own elbows in trembling hands and waited. She waited and she stared with her sapphire eyes at the easy chair, and then at the pile of papers, and then at the carpet, and she remembered that she had forgotten. She had forgotten to remember, to remember to vacuum the nubby green carpet, to sprinkle the deodorizing powder on its surface, the push and pull the whirring machine across the patch of fabric they walked across every day.

Sold.

When he came down the stairs with the slow care he’d developed in recent years, she struck at him. Where did you go? What did you do? What do these forms mean? What have you done? And he told her, in his halting way, about the wonderful opportunity they’d been offered by the smiling stranger, about the freedom they had achieve with a few strokes of a borrowed pen, about the new vistas open to them, about the traveling, laughing, bubbling money coming towards their married life. And she sat and listened, and then she asked some questions, and then she shouted some questions and some accusations, and then she went to the kitchen and picked up the phone and tried to call their son, but his voice came on the line and told her that he wasn’t available to take her call right then, but that she could leave a message and that he would call her back. She started to say something into the electronic hiss, but she ended up putting the phone down and sitting in the chair at the kitchen table. Her stomach ached, and she was nauseous at the smell of the cold coffee in the pot from that morning, and she put her forehead in her hands and whined like an injured dog. She stayed that way for hours and hours.

Her son finally called her back the next day, and he screamed at her, and she put her husband on the phone, and he took the brunt of the son’s screaming for a while, and then he did a little shouting of his own and pounded the receiver down onto the base and gave her a long, edged look, and wandered up the stairs and found something up in the bedroom with which he could distract himself. And the long hours began, the hours that hissed at her, reminding her that all had changed, that all had been ruined. The ruination became reality in ten days, when she answered a phone call from a woman who congratulated her on the sale of her lovely home, and when could the realtor expect to be able to take possession and begin what she called “upgrades and improvements?” And oh, the strangers arrived, and her husband wandered among the boxes and the tubs and the garment bags, sometimes not even wearing a shirt, and he laughed with the strangers who had come to assault his life, and they were all pleasant, and his face shone with good will while he talked the hours into dust, and his wife watched it all with not a calorie of resistance to spare, but her brain burning with why, why, why, and how, how, how, and it was a ballet of good intentions and bad outcomes, and it all ended up in the slamming of a truck’s descending segmented door, and a dark wrist twisting a lock into place, and yet another sleek stranger handing her a clipboard and a pen, and her angry son over there by the limelight hydrangeas with his fists on his hips, scowling at his father, looking over and imploring his mother with his father’s own eyes and shaking his mother’s own hair out of his furious and frightened eyes, and the afternoon passed, and they were in their son’s backseat, headed for the nice motel to sit and wait until their son sorted things out and they could find their feet and their voice and their strength.

Bad day, bad life, bad choice, and why didn’t she stay in that room that day? The love songs he had once sung to her had become whimpered apologies, and damn him, he didn’t even know what he was apologizing for. Here were the new days, the segments of sitting and waiting for pitying family members and friends to express their horror and their promises, their vibrating objections of the unfairness of That God, their sighs from a distance, their refrigerated concerns. Here were the new days, the long stretches of remembering their real life, their now-dead life, all they once had, all they could have had.

She is sitting now at that little round table with the ugly knock-off Tiffany lamp suspended above it, and the brown curtains on the windows, shielding her from the parking lot and the dumpster, and there are no more coffees in the bright kitchen, and no more bank accounts, and no more afternoons at the hairdresser’s with the other women, and no more Friday night fish fries, and no more coupon clippings, and no more spring cleanings of her rooms, no more inventories of her things, her talismans, her life. She looks over at him, him staring at the television, him massaging the bridge of his nose with his contract-signing fingers, and his wilted eyelids, and she wonders. She wonders. But she loves him because she chooses to. And when he looks at her, he points at the television with a smile and a conspiratorial wink, and she remembers the things that are helping her to tread the deep waters in which she finds herself.

I came back to myself, shaking off the absorption in her story. I listened again to her cello voice, to her soft sobs, her pauses.

I grieve for her, for them.

But none of my energies can return anything to them, to her.

The coming warm air will bleed the chill from the winter sky, and the angle of the sun will change, and mildness will return.

But she sits now in a motel room, fists in her lap, and she waits and wonders. She wonders how a marriage ever came to this day.

~ S.K. Orr