The Ancestry of Objects Page 7

  The hot light echoes on the white foam that gathers around David’s shoulders. What if he were a good man? Not what if he is, but what if he were a man who could be good for/with/to us? There is a sickening emptiness at the center of us. We burrow our feet into the sand and the pastor says,You can fill the void with the teachings of the Lord and righteousness, or you can allow the world to fill it for you, but it will fill. We ignore the pink shell of a tampon applicator a few feet away and force ourself to look out across the water, to try to see the land on the other side.

  A strand of hair tickles our neck and we swat it away, the anxious certainty of our own inevitable ending so palpable that even our body feels as though it is creeping up on us. Now, we say, but it is lost in the hiss of the waves and wind and the abrasive call of seagulls. Now, now. The endless blue fills us with dread and we have never been so pathetic, have never confronted something so much larger than ourself.

  He comes back dripping and wiping silty water from his face. Come in, he says, pulling our hand.

  Not yet. We shrug.

  Not yet! He laughs at us—absurd, hot, our skin turning a tender shade of pink already. But it feels so good, he says, and loops a cool, wet arm around our waist and leads us in as our skin pricks in the oily water.

  I don’t know where I’m going, we admit.

  He says absently, You’re fine.

  We try to protest but it comes out foolishly.

  David turns, tucks the hair blowing around our face behind an ear. What’s wrong?

  I don’t know how to swim, we say, and shrug. It’s true enough to stand in for an explanation of our fear.

  Why didn’t you tell me? he asks tenderly, and we shrug again.

  The water laps our thighs and we sway in the current as things we cannot see move against us in the water. We gaze beyond him to the beach, solid, baking in the sun. There is something seductive about the terrifying depths. The possibility that there is nothing we could do to save ourself. That a lake may as well be an ocean, that there would be no use in struggling.

  Try floating on your back, David suggests, holding us tight against him, dragging us farther from shore. He relaxes his hold, leaving a hand at our back to help us perform the trick of suspending our body like a corpse on the surface of the water, his other hand behind our head. Keep breathing, he says, and we do as he says. An arm slithers under our legs and we shiver. We move like a bottle out to sea, David all the while getting shorter, closer until we float by his shoulders and he leans to kiss our mouth. You’re fine, he says to our lips. His voice fills and drains from the kiddie pool of our ears, a hand slides over our stomach and cups water to pour over our thighs.

  How are you? he asks.

  Fine, we repeat, a mechanism of fear, cleaning the words of our own mind with his, but our breaths come in short bursts and we involuntarily bite our lips together when we think a wave might pull us under.

  We see nothing but the pale blue of sky and his face in shadow as we bob on each small crest of water. He turns to look up and down the beach and we do not lift our head, do not strain to sit on the water, as if it would grow firm under us as under the feet of Christ, though we are hungry just to see the beach still secure against the horizon. Ye of so little faith, He says.

  There’s no one out here, he says with disappointment, as if the empty beach were a commentary on our decision to come.

  So if we die, no one will even know. We try to joke but are comforted by how much we mean it.

  David laughs, I had no idea you would be so afraid. And again: Why didn’t you tell me?

  It’s hard to imagine how terrifying things are before you’re in them, we say flatly.

  David fingers the cloth at the crotch of our suit, pulling it aside to thumb the pink of us. Relax, he coaches, a hand at the small of our back to help us stay afloat, fingers spread in the faint pattern of a shower on our back. I won’t let anything hurt you.

  We know he is promising things outside of his control, and he bends to lick the flesh he’s exposed.

  The water at the corners of our eyes burns salty, our own. We bite our tongue until it tastes metallic like an old spoon, like the teeth marks inside our lips after sucking David; we don’t insist that it is because of him that we will be hurt. His tongue falters and we imagine he will drown and leave us or he is fine and will let us drown or we will both live but the delicate flesh of our cunt will burn in the sun/the filthy ecosystems of the lake will seep into us and poison us slowly.

  David replaces the fabric and with some magic floats next to us, smiling to himself, reaches out and touches us lightly as we struggle to breathe.

  The uncomfortable pull of our burnt skin against the sticky leather of the car’s seat is a nagging reminder that we have done something wrong, to the woman to ourself to the women rotting in boxes who would say we should know better and their voices, and the voice of David of all the Davids so loud we cannot hear our own or begin to imagine what it might say. There is a vague but growing malcontent that makes us feel petulant. The trees burst by in streaks of dead branches and green life and David changes the radio station. We notice the minutia of his existence, the dark hairs on his wrists and way he holds the steering wheel at ten and two like a student.

  We are silent as we drive through small towns toward the interstate but once, as we gain speed as if escaping the day and the performance of being together, he touches our thigh briefly, the fingertips brushing sensitive skin with caution, we look from the contrast of his tan skin against our pink to his face, the brow furrowed with fleeting evidence of concern and replaced quickly by the trail of his lips tightening into a resigned smile.

  Though the fear of missing him fills us with a silent alarm, we leave the house. We take a circuitous route past the cemetery to get to the park, and through the park to the woods, and once in the woods down a road that leads past hidden maintenance buildings and tunnels with graffiti. It is a place easy to be afraid, and this is what gives us hope that something beautiful and untouched lies on the other side.

  A glittering mass in the path ahead lures us. The undulating waves of reflected light make the object seem out of focus. We come close and stare at it for many long moments. Like the hazy dizziness of standing too quickly, our brain struggles to make meaning of what we’re seeing. Then we see teeth. And the stretched holes that once held eyes but now release a cascade of larvae, like a waterfall of individual tears. The white, writhing bodies spill infinitely from every hole in the rodent’s small carcass. We are repulsed and think of our own corpse—found one day in the house, months decomposed—that this is not how we would like to be found. But almost immediately we think that this is how we want to live. So full of life that it spills from every orifice. And for the first time we understand our grandparents’ blind pursuit of the Holy Spirit, a longing to be inhabited and consumed by it. We think it must look like this.

  We know that Lara has returned when David does not appear in the evening or the one after. The terrible flood of the obvious replaces the logic of waiting. It is said that man cannot know the day or the hour of the return, but we do.

  The days come long and distinct, ticking by in clean hours recreated by hash marks on skin, no trails of blood, just the white ash of a fingernail against an arm, leg, the pink trail of the growing nails scraped across the meat of a shoulder. And like the superficial scrapes, each hour disappears into the next and always the next hour comes empty and defined, marked by the thunderous tick of a clock, as if always we rest with our ear to a timepiece.

  On the fourth day, David is on the cement step, a button missing on his shirt, and it opens into a cave so we immediately wonder who he has become in those long hours while we hoped/waited, scolded ourself not to hope/wait. He is disheveled, knocks and enters quickly; in a few weeks he believes he belongs and he enters and we are standing by the table and he comes to us his shirt open distractingly where the button is missing and we see the chest we have looked at so many time
s naked, but half-hidden we feel we are stealing glances and he says with none of the shyness of his first visit that Lara is back and he’s been busy (and we have stopped being the other but the thing, a regular life hard to maintain, we should be something easy. A thing that needs nothing. But we are instead old, requiring maintenance, and do not solve the problems of loneliness and are so much more difficult for being hidden, unacceptable). And as we fall from waking dream to the sad, yellow light of our life, we watch David fall reluctantly from lust into the reedy panic of regret, guilt rubbed out by our hand on his cock and reawakened by Lara’s appearance in their home. Home the thing they make in the clean, white walls of their easy but empty lives, and she needs so much to be comforted now, after her exhausting trip. So cruel of her family to wait to start dying until she is so accustomed to them being there. But for David the excitement of the other, of us, must be fading already into a question of practicality, a calculated value of the affair, of us, like a tab, a too-low return on investment.

  David says he has not talked about Lara for our sake, what might happen when she returns, how much she needs him. And we don’t ask, Whose life has been made easier by the convenient absence of Lara?

  David does not stay the night—cannot stay more than a moment—but wants to know How are you? And we know that he does not want to know how we are, about the constant weight around our neck that feels like sleep, he wants only to find some new place to leave a part of the burden of being himself and so we say Fine. We are fine. And we guide the man to the couch and we rub first the graying hairline and the lines around the eyes and mouth and the man closes his eyes and we rub the pale fabric of his dress shirt, our fingers slip in the gap where we see the chest hairs and touch them with our fingers, long and straight hairs, a nest, we think: But—

  and: I love you—

  and take it back immediately.

  We kneel before the man and undress him, so familiar the weight and movement of his hips as he lifts them to let us, his absence of expression expressing the folds of feeling he is carrying in his stomach like a briefcase. We kiss the hairy flesh around the soft cock and there is a flicker, and we knead the muscles of the man’s thighs and David pets slowly our head, and we take the cock, still only half-hard, into our mouth, and David relaxes into an extension of the couch, a pillow where we rest our head, only to lift and lower again to rest, and he furrows his brow, trying to concentrate, but he is with Lara, a sound comes from his throat like weeping but his jaw clenches. He pulls our hair and presses us down onto the cock and we follow the strained lifting of his hips and when finally he is done, we are done, and he is crying the notcrying of a man. He fastens his pants, ashamed, and kisses our mouth full of his come and, standing, pulls us to standing and holds us for a moment very tightly, the come still the loose wet muscle of an oyster in the shell of our mouth.

  David says I have to go./(Lara.)/I’ll see you soon./I’ll see you.

  The sun bakes first the rain from the streets then roof then moisture trapped in the grain of every chair wall floor bedpost dries to the dusty lightness we remember. The house recovers the desert, its bones the same powder white of the bones recorded to our ears, cracks and fissures easy to see and held tenderly inside its imperfect shell. David is mysterious, absent, and in the empty spaces we find more empty spaces—each place the place he has or hasn’t touched. Did all the generations of us feel the absence of David? Was that what drove the great-grandparents from their farm into town, and grandparents to church, and the parents to their unforgivable behavior and to our own adolescent longing that pinned our weak body to the floor with a weight like too much gravity. The sluggishness now in our bones like the lethargic movements of youth. Useless mix of restraint and bursting inside ourself against the itchy carpet of the bedroom until a light knock and the soft voices of our mother’s parents. And so in this new sort of weakness we are the dust storm moving nothing; dust shining in batons of light dry our throat, and we sit in the unnatural glow of a single light bulb like a spotlight for a performance we have not rehearsed.

  In the mirror above the bathroom sink, haloed in yellowing bottles of lotion, bubble bath, powders long discontinued, we see though we sleep fitfully through the night that there is no rest. Lines of worry furrow our brow and the pain inside our head/breasts/pit of the stomach create a new cloud across our face—the face the only thing in the house that ever changes, we consider the difference: the more or less we never always want to cry or eat or sleep and we wonder about these tides as they move through the house, through us. They are the cobwebby movements of slippered feet against old floor hovering above darkness within darkness.

  In the night we stare at the ceiling, believing in everything that has crashed against the sand of our home. To leave. What leaves us? Who belonged to us so that they could leave us anyway? What tired stories had we believed so that we’d thought the house: ours, and the man: ours, and the growing discomfort in our body and the weather and glint in the sun: ours? In the quiet and hum of electricity, David is in everything, is now the much larger nothing in the house like the grandparents dead, and parents finally dead, and great-grandparents gone, and as they all decompose in their vaults, the dried bugs and embroidered napkins and evangelical pamphlets in their final resting place under armchairs and in the corners of bookshelves and quietly growing powdered like bones.

  We trip through the house in bare feet, a moth in a shoe-box, midafternoon sun poking holes in the windows like a cardboard lid, and the world has lost finally its luster. We are full and empty and terrified and like jerking awake just before sleep, the steep slope always ready give way as we fall, we are ready to die when our swollen breasts imagine David, sucking, and we think of the gray and brown hairs as we stroke his head in our mind, the head to breast, and finally, we miss him.

  We are amazed by his distance, as if he’s recovered from us like the momentary hallucinations of a fever. But where does the fever go when it stops shaking the lungs? Where do we go now?

  In the woods, a woman jogs by. Pets are on leashes. Men stand with fishing poles. The world becomes a cast of characters with accessories to prove their belonging. Only we seem aimless and empty-handed. As we amble along the path we forgive the smokers their cigarettes and the old women their perfume. We forgive the dog-walkers who leave feces in their wake that will work its way into the intricate patterns on the soles of shoes. We forgive David his carelessness. We forgive Lara her existence, her mother her recovery. We believe that we, too, will recover. We believe in some sort of future. We choose a bewildered optimism because, if nothing else, it smacks of pragmatism, and practicality, if unremarkable, still seems respectable.

  We round the bend and the sweater is gone.

  The emptiness that has gnawed at us all week takes on a crippling permanence. There is no way to reach out. There is no number to call. There is no one waiting for us.

  We ask its ghost: Is there something else on the other side of misery—another body to wrap yourself around?

  When we give in to the gravity of our irreparable situation and the monotonous drone of our malcontent, we return to the floor of the living room. We stare at the dusty plaster we watched over David’s shoulder and think of the doctor and her sure voice, the words stretched tight by the waves of pain in our head and the sluggish, milky consciousness that has replaced the sharp edges of our longing. The reflection off all our glittering trash has lost its golden hue and shines instead with the awful fierceness of sun on a used-car lot: a million windshields, a skyscraper, the white glare of summer on endless water, the ocean, the lake, a million of someone else’s childhood creeks all gold sun, white in dizzying reflection. The stained tile, David’s stained tile, always his even before he was born when the great-grandparents first laid the tile for him to stand on, waiting generations to soak up the blood-red of wine, the house dying now around this wound.

  We sit or pace or stand idly, an animal, a vulture, waiting, maybe always waiting, to
understand the senseless trajectory of the past and its evidence.

  We pick things up, move them as David might, and are struck by the rings of dust and faded colors of paint left in their place, and we follow the trail of these things, the dolls we never touched pulled from a shelf, better hidden in a drawer still full of cone-shaped brassieres, wide elastic flaking into blond curls of dolls falling out of their plastic heads when touched or bumped shut into the drawer. Vases not filled with roses from the garden not maintained and lace made and draped carefully and records and cassettes and radios broken like arms, their electrical cords thin, brown veins waiting to catch fire from two weak prongs trailing behind green fake leather recliner, plastic and cracked, and jam jars printed cartoon or floral and the thick jelly of bath soap. We carry all of these things below to the cool emptiness of basement, the fearful place becoming a shelter from the sweltering indifference of the house. All things like David wade further from our shore, and we abandon them there in puddles that have formed from rain in the corners. Everything blue-black like a bruise. We fill the model of the house with the house’s belongings, bulletins on wildlife preservation and a Christmas church service, we abandon table runners and phone books, pans and pots fill with dog figurines, old tools, and cologne. Old mattresses and wood stove and hammer and saw and curious stringed instrument and typewriters and filing boxes and photographs and men’s boots. All of these things disguise themselves in the basement as David—as nothing.

  For the first time since the last funeral, we open the door to the grandparents’ room. It smells more of them than even the house. Roses and wood and dust. A time capsule of an ordinary life that no longer exists.