Another date. Sylvie sipped her water and studied the dark, half-moon shape the
bottom of the glass left on the tablecloth, crunching the ice between her molars
until they ached. She didn’t want to go into it, didn’t want to labor
over the same details, so rote by now it felt like a story someone had told her,
like a poem she’d been forced to memorize or the lyrics to a song she’d
unwittingly committed to memory in seventh grade, the year she’d been compelled
to recite Poe’s The Raven before her fourth-period English class.
They always looked at her, even then, one looking at her, one turned away, so she
wondered if that constituted some kind of fundamental pattern in a person’s
life or if it were only her own. Bryce Miller, who cornered her by her locker every
lunch period, who lived with his grandmother and smelled of the tuna and onion sandwiches
the old woman packed into a brown paper sack for his lunch, and Casey Johnson, who
didn’t know she was alive, sat like the twin poles of her existence on either
end of the front row while Sylvie blushed to the roots of her hair and stared at
a crumpled yellow wrapper someone had left on the floor under the corner of Mr.
Greene’s desk, her voice hardly more audible than a whisper.
She didn’t know he lived with his grandmother, and she never would have treated
him so wretchedly if she had. She never would have slammed the locker door in his
face, would have spoken to him, said something pleasant. Except she understood that
would have given him the wrong idea, so it was impossible not to be a little cruel,
and she understood now that was why she’d been so angry with him, because
he’d put her in a position where it was impossible not to be cruel.
If he lived with his grandmother, something horrible had happened. Whether his parents
had died in a car crash or divorced, whether they’d orphaned or abandoned
him or were serving concurrent life sentences, one sensed the tragic dimensions
behind a story like that. He couldn’t help himself. He broke out in a sweat
at the sight of her, as much a prisoner of his hormones as she was of hers. “Try
flossing,” she’d told him one morning by her locker. Now, she imagined
weekend visits, maybe the promise of a furlough in twenty years, empty words breathed
across circular holes cut in Plexiglass in the penitentiary visiting room. Bryce
just kept smiling at her, however she abused him, leaning against her locker in
the wine-colored corduroys he wore to school, his buck teeth protruding under a
shag of blond hair. He kept smiling at her, even while she watched the beads of
sweat spreading across his brow.
“Sylvie, could you speak up, please?” Greene cleared his throat, and
a hush fell over the room. He wore a daffodil-colored shirt with chalk dust on the
shoulders and the cuffs of the sleeves, and she had to keep from giggling at the
white smudge under his nose. Bryce propped his face in his hands, as if he meant
not to undress but to dissect her with his eyes, while Casey sat sideways, so he
could pass notes to Gretchen Shannon, a redhead who wore Benneton shirts, played
field hockey, and covered her braces when she smiled. Sunlight fell through the
windows, and the shadows of the leaves on the oak on the lawn moved across the linoleum
floor. Sylvie touched Greene’s desk, and she remembered that sensation more
than anything, the way her fingernails glided across the laminated wood and the
way that had brought her mother back to her, a steely lock of chestnut hair framing
her mother’s cheekbone while she sat behind the wheel of their Saab. The smell
of cleaning products lingered in the room. Greene spoke her name again, but gently,
as if he sensed the girl was about to cry.
She thought she’d managed to blot the poem out of her mind, though she
supposed it lingered somewhere. Sometimes, with the phone cradled under her ear
while she talked to her best friend Margie in Pasadena, it appeared on the tip
of her tongue. Only William Blake emerged instead—“Tyger, Tyger,
burning bright”—while she scandalized Margie with the affair she’d
broken off with a married lawyer that winter.
“You rely on me,” she’d told Margie, who’d run off to California
with a truck driver the year they’d both graduated from UVM. Their freshman
year remained fixed in Sylvie’s mind as one long vista of brick buildings
buried like impacted molars in the snow, of bars that looked like ski lodges, and
of the grating sound the radiator in the dorm made when she took some boy to bed.
Margie had a third on the way, and neither she nor Sylvie had turned thirty. “You
need me to have your fun for you,” Sylvie said.
Now she might perceive her mother’s profile, the side of the woman’s
face framed like a marble bust by that graying lock of hair, in the cornice of a
tenement glimpsed from the early train while Sylvie drummed her fingers on the glass
and glanced at her watch, as if she could will the train to move faster out of sheer
anxiety. One morning when she was seven, she’d woken to find the coal stove
in the kitchen empty, the cinders burned to ash on the grate. Out the window lay
fields of snow, powder white under a gray glare. In memory, she could see every
jagged crystal. The tops of the apple trees, the seedlings her father had planted
two summers ago, poked through the snow like fish nosing out of a stream. She reached
for the pot-bellied stove in the kitchen. Her teeth chattered. Her knees knocked.
She knew from the moment she heard her father crying what had happened and why.
“My mother drank herself to death,” she said, with a hearty shrug, with
a shrill note of accusation she couldn’t keep out of her voice. “And
my father died of grief.” She sipped her wine and watched herself replace
the glass on the table, where the bits of cork and the stain the wine made on the
cloth seemed as composed as a still life. She picked at the hem of her skirt, and
she folded her arms across her chest. Some men put their hands over hers on the
table. Others nodded, as if to say they’d been through the same. This one,
a Harvard-trained psychologist who’d moved to Boston from San Francisco in
the middle of a divorce, whom she’d met Zydeco dancing two weeks ago in Cambridge,
who stood too close when he talked and closer still when he listened, so Sylvie
wondered whether he was hard of hearing, leaned across the table, made a tent of
his hands, and scrutinized her.
As the candlelight caught on the gold cross dangling from his ear, she imagined
herself making love with the psychologist, imagined him saying, “Sylvie, tell
me about your mother,” in a Viennese accent. In the restaurant, R.E.M.’s
“Orange Crush” played on the stereo. Send your conscience overseas.
Before he could say anything, Sylvie changed the subject: “I haven’t
heard this song in years.” He licked his lips. He didn’t seem to know
what to do with his hands. A waiter moved past the table, balancing an empty wine
glass atop a stack of dirty plates. The snow banked against the picture windows
in front of the restaurant made Sylvie feel as cozy as if she’d curled up
on the sofa with a book she’d read fifty times. “You can’t wait
forever,” a woman at the next table barked into her cell phone, and she stared
in horror at her cuticles. Sylvie imagined the beads of sweat dripping from the
end of the psychologist’s nose while he crooned to her, and the mahogany headboard
she’d bought last Christmas smacked the wall. “It was the Quicksilver
Messenger Service for me,” he offered, grinning at her over the remains of
his double-cut pork chop. “They were this jam band,” he explained, and
he laughed. His hand shook as he tipped the rest of the merlot into her glass. Sylvie
watched a droplet of wine spread into the tablecloth, aware of what she could only
assume was a maternal feeling spreading across her lap.
He ended up crying, sobbing into her chest while they parked in front of her building
and ran the heater in his silver Tercel wagon. “Baby,” Sylvie called
him, smoothing the hair from his temples and clutching him to her chest until he’d
soaked her blouse. “It happens,” she told him, when he’d recovered
sufficiently to apologize, wiping his eyes with the heels of his hands. It was December,
and she’d just turned twenty-eight. That fact landed on her with utter clarity
as she watched the fingerprints—his wife’s? his daughter’s?—surfacing
on the windshield, and she reached up and drew a single fat line on the corner of
the glass as he played with her breasts, pinching her nipples until they stood erect.
Sylvie felt outside herself, outside her own desire, so the way his goatee prickled
the corners of her mouth woke in her not longing, but the sensation of floating,
of moving through her own life like the snow that drifted down past the corner of
her building in the wind, and when she did take him to bed, it was more out of pity
than drunkenness.
Writing by Tom Andes has most recently appeared in Harp & Altar,
Cannibal, and Best American Mystery Stories 2012. He has
interviewed musicians and writers including Todd Snider, Boots Riley, and
Thomas E. Kennedy for
The Rumpus and other publications. He lives
in New Orleans.
[See also
“Thomas E.
Kennedy’s Dangerous Songs,” in SHJ-8.]