Читать книгу Small Acts of Sex and Electricity - Lise Haines - Страница 9

Sometimes Mona just started spinning. For no particular reason. While Mike took his shower, I watched her spin in Franny’s living room. Her hair flew out, her feet made a dish in the carpet, her skirt ringed the planet of her body.

Livvy came downstairs in her blue silk kimono. She looked like she should be filmed that way, with her blue hair. The Gaugin light on her face. I don’t think she wanted to be a presence like her mother. But she was. She straddled the Aldo chaise lounge, her legs draped over the wooden frame. The cat, Trader, curled at the end.

Mona flew onto the couch, pulled herself up, and started spinning again.

On the fifth effort at revolution, Livvy patiently said:

—I think we’re all getting a little dizzy.

This time Mona dropped to the ground, her eyes fat and shiny as hard-boiled eggs.

—Did you see how fast I went, Mattie?

Livvy tried not to smile. Mona wobbled to her feet and began to spin again. Whether I stared right into the center of events or looked out to the frayed edge, she was time out of control. Certainly out of mine, perhaps out of Jane’s. I don’t know if I can speak for the rest.

Livvy hit the remote and the barking laughter went off and the screen went gray. Just then, Mona lost her balance and went flying, landing hard against Livvy’s right leg, pressing it against the chaise lounge. The cat launched off the end.

—Mona! Livvy complained.

—Can I get a bandage? I asked.

—No, I’m all right.

I crouched beside Livvy and asked if she wanted ice. Livvy had Jane’s complexion. Sometimes I stared at it too long. She had Jane’s energy, and Mike’s eyes, constantly framing. But she had her own blue hair, select piercings.

Before she could say anything, Mona told me:

—You have to crush the ice cubes.

I couldn’t find the hammer in the pantry. I tried pounding the ice with a jar of dry-roasted peanuts, but knew it might shatter. I got a box of Popsicles out of the freezer. Back in the living room, I looked at the bruise coming up and wrapped a dish towel around the box.

—It’s really okay, Livvy said.

—Can I have a Popsicle? Mona asked.

I had to list the flavors for Mona more than once to be understood in TV-time, since the set was on again. She picked raspberry.

—Can you peel off the wrapper?

Livvy said she’d do that and I went off to the kitchen to make the girls’ breakfast. I knew they liked the croissants that pop out of a tube and bake in an oven. Livvy and I appreciated the golden look, Mona wanted hers pale and doughy. Jane had picked up several tubes, which she had stored in the vegetable chiller. I made eggs, whipped up orange juice in the blender to give it the froth Mona wanted, and called the girls.

At the table Livvy pushed her eggs around with her knife. Periodically, Mona gave her sister’s plate a little bump.

Livvy didn’t react. Mona did it again.

As I lifted the glasses to wipe up the orange-juice rings on the table, I told them their mother had gone on a short working trip to keep up with her Peter Pan deadline. Mona stopped what she was doing and watched Livvy’s unbroken stare as she tracked my cleanup job. Livvy asked for details. I made up a couple of things to satisfy her. I couldn’t tell if she knew something, or suspected something.

Mona revved into a conversation about Peter Pan, saying she loved Tiger Lily, stressing the importance of the clock inside the alligator’s belly, the way it hypnotized Captain Hook. She loved the cartoon.

—Dad knows how to hypnotize people, she said. I asked him to hypnotize me, but he said it’s too powerful.

—I understand, I said, wiping down the stove.

—He can even hypnotize someone while they’re driving.

Mona poked her index finger into her croissant while I was left to picture this.

Livvy went out to the deck. She had barely touched her plate.

......

Mike overshot breakfast by a half hour. I had already opened my laptop and logged on to the Internet. An e-mail from my former employer, closer to making that job offer. Trying to move some money around to pay me.

Pop-ups. Urgings to gamble, to save, to insure myself, to lose weight, to find a car. One e-mail from a prospective human being, a leftover from a time when I had rashly listed myself with a dating service. He was a tall, bearded man who had answered most of his survey questions with: I’ll tell you later.

Do you have children? I’ll tell you later.

He wanted to know in this, our first and only exchange, if I’d consider relocation overseas. He had so much love to give, he said.

When Mike came downstairs I blanked the screen. Sometimes he exuded a manic, survivalist energy, as though he needed to get back to a delivery truck and all he wanted was a signature in the right place. That was how he hit the carpet in the living room. Maybe he was looking for something but didn’t know what to lift, how to pry it up. He gathered the mail and put it down unopened.

Mona tossed a red throw pillow at Livvy’s head.

—Mona. Settle down, Mike said.

—She’s driving me a little crazy, Livvy said to her father.

—We’ll go for a swim in a while.

—Mona, you need to go for a swim, Livvy said.

Mona went off to look for her swim noodles. Mike stood by the French doors. I couldn’t see his expression with the backlight. I didn’t understand his wavering movements, as if he were standing before a carnival mirror. He came back to where I was seated at the table, supported his weight on his arms, his back to the girls. He looked as if he wanted to say something.

Just then Mona returned to the living room, noodleless, and threw another pillow at Livvy’s stomach. I went off to the kitchen so Mike could work it out. There I curled my toes around the handle of a bottom drawer. The girls’ documents were still where I had buried them, under the cloth napkins; I hadn’t gone entirely mad. When I came back to the living room, I handed him a cup of coffee and some sugar packets.

Then I lifted one of Mona’s legs to get to the marble box on the coffee table. Some filtered cigarettes, some menthol, probably all stale. I think he took one to please me.

—I’ll be right back, I said.

I threw together the kinds of food stocked for such occasions: a couple of easy spreads for the leftover croissants, smoked salmon, strawberries with stems in place. The cheese I put on the breadboard with a single slice cut off. I tied on one of Franny’s party aprons before I realized what I was doing and returned it to its hook. I primped in the downstairs bathroom, where I found the old cosmetics. The pressed powder smelled of overuse, a skin slicked on its surface. The lipstick was a hideous gumdrop-red. I gave up and returned to the living room, still in Jane’s robe. I thought about true and false radiance.

The girls had gone to suit up. I watched Mike blow on his coffee, and look at me. We both noted the boxes. I tried to think about the chaos of sorting, but my mind began to stutter and misfire as we stood there. I fantasized him sending the girls out to the beach in a little while, that he would draw the blinds, climb out of his clothes, look halfheartedly for his swim trunks. I thought of objects from Pompeii. The bowl of a pipe carved into the shape of a man. I wanted to take a long draw from the pipe.

I started to hand him something to eat, but one of the strawberries rolled to the edge of the plate. I tipped it back toward the center as if I were trying to get a tiny silver ball into the dip of a child’s game. Watching it come to rest, I realized I had become awkward with him.

—What are you doing? he laughed.

—Balancing.

I said something about the beach being empty. Not a dog out.

Nearly everyone along the row of beach houses had a dog; at least it seemed that way when they were driving the non-dog owners insane. Every now and then the strays. The fog had moved out to the islands. I became aware of pelicans diving into the ocean. A whole division of them climbing and bombing in straight vertical lines.

—Look.

But he was looking.

—I’m not much of a help, he said. I’ll get with it.

I forgot that I still had the food extended toward him until I felt the plate drop from my hands.

Trader lifted his head from the spot where he had curled, expressed little interest. Mike helped me pick up the food. He briefly took one of my hands. I felt the pressure of his ring against my bones.

He leaned into me, put his mouth next to my ear, and said:

—You’re doing that thing.

—What thing? I asked.

—Search and rescue.

—Maybe.

He whispered:

—She wouldn’t rescue you.

We broke apart before Livvy started down the stairs. She seated herself in front of my laptop and refreshed the screen. I realized that she was looking at the men I had once spent hours poring over, reading through heights and weights and drinking habits. She smiled to herself and pulled the lid down so the screen went cold and then she went into the kitchen. Mona appeared and slumped on the couch. Mike gave her a kiss and stepped onto the deck. I joined Mona.

—I wonder what it feels like to not be alive, she said.

—There are theories on that, Mona.

—I mean, before you’re in your mom’s belly, just before you get inside.

—Ah.

—I wonder what that’s like, she said.

—Yeah, me too.

Mike stood with his feet far apart, which gave him the appearance of stability, a lowered center of gravity. He had had an affair years ago, which Jane said he mostly regretted. She said he’d changed after that. Focused more intensely on his work. Restrained, she called him. I sometimes think she missed his wilder self. But it was hard to sort out. He had never changed the way he was with me.

His pants and jacket flapped against his body as he looked toward the harbor. It was Wet Wednesday: the sailboats would be racing. I don’t believe he was talking to me but I thought I heard him say something.

But then I’ve caught his voice before, when he wasn’t around. It’s come through Jane in their dark living room back in Boston. If she called, it was after her family had gone to sleep. She’d have a sudden urge to read a paragraph from one of his old letters to me. Or she’d talk about the film he was working on or what they’d said over dinner. It felt as if she were trying to convince herself of something. I pictured her sitting on the couch in her robe, gazing at her own reflection in the glass doors that lead out to their backyard. Staring long enough for a natural split to occur. I imagine she saw the part of herself capable of rolling the sliders back and taking off out the side gate, leaving her sandals where she’d stepped out of them. Then she’d let her eyes go weary and see the woman who was fixed there, pairing and folding the girls’ socks as we talked.

Maybe she really did want my seminomadic life.

Once, driving through central Illinois, on the lookout for a motel with air conditioning, I found a small circus in an open field. The tent had so many holes the lights beamed from it like bright worms in the dark. Parking my car, I stepped into the flight of frantic insects. The show was half over. Many of the benches were empty, the toys unsold.

The tent fluttered, and the smell of overcooked hot dogs rose into the air. It was the knife-thrower and his slender redheaded assistant who intrigued me. She was fastened to a huge crimson wheel at the ankles, wrists, and waist. The man gave the wheel a mighty crank. The woman spun faster and faster until she became nothing more than a bull’s-eye. The audience gasped each time he threw a knife at the wheel. When it came to rest, she was silhouetted with knives—one blade even pinned the edge of her dress. He released her and they kissed.