Licorice Read online

  “St. Louis?” asked Emily. “When?”

  “Oh, ‘78 or 9.”

  “’79? When? Summer?”

  “Early summer around June. The humidity was awful.”

  “I was there. In ’79 in St. Louis in early June. For one day. There was a crafts fair under the arch, it must have been a weekend.”

  “The centaur was on a weekday,” I recalled. “I know because I was coming home from work.”

  “Oh.”

  Collective disappointment. We felt it not just between the two of us but among the other people surrounding us on the lawn, as if everyone were momentarily chagrined by Emily’s and my missed connection. The party was a potluck on blankets and lawnchairs, with two wading pools, a volleyball net, and music spewing from a corner of the patio. Looking back, there really did seem to be a lull, the beer cans held midway between lap and mouth, the hot dogs oddly silent on the grill, the volleyball pausing above the net. But then the watermelon seeds started flying again, and Marty Miller tripped into one of the inflated pools. Nobody laughed. We all knew that Marty had found a better job. He’d be leaving town. We could laugh about it when he was gone; his submerged eyeglasses, his drifting, floating hamburger bun, the pale undersides of his knees.

  Emily and I decided to take a walk. We headed for the reservoir, and discussed what we liked about life in this town. “It’s so easy to live here,” we agreed. “Nothing ever quite happens. It’s comfortable. It’s like wearing old painted-up clothes.”

  We passed a moving van parked on the road near the reservoir, then turned and walked out to the gravelly edge to look at the view. It wasn’t really a view, we agreed, but it was pretty. The sunlight made sparks on the water, and on the far side a dog nosed around in some Queen Anne’s lace.

  Soon we sat down on the bench and began talking about our mothers. Once, mine went with my father, a pediatrician, to see the movie, Psycho. Just as Janet Leigh stepped into her last, hot shower, my father was called to the hospital, leaving my mother alone. Emily’s mother, far away in another dark theater, grabbed the hand of a stranger and clutched it tightly until the movie was over. She never found out who the stranger was. He wore a large pinky ring whose ghostly imprint she rubbed from the palm of her hand each time she related this story. Emily’s mother is wistful, musical, and leery of showers. My mother’s never wistful, but she’s scared of showers too. Still, just to look at Emily and me, how opposite we are. My hair is a butch, and I come just about up to her shoulder. She’s of average height, blonde and so wholesome I expect cheerleading pom-poms to materialize with every one of her good-natured exclamations.

  We walked back to the party, split up, mingled. I saw her talking with my husband at the outskirts of the volleyball game. Hip to hip, they were sharing Bing cherries from a big, glass bowl.

  “What did you think of her, anyway?” I ask him now.

  “Who?”

  “Emily. My new friend. The one who’s not calling me back. You met her at that party. You were eating her cherries.”

  “Describe her.”

  I do. Daniel never notices beauty in women. Now he says, “Blonde? I don’t know. She was nice. I mean, everyone I talked to at that party seemed nice. I didn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t, so she must have been, too.”

  “A cheerleader type,” I say, redialing her number. “Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “We have a lot in common.”

  “What you have in common with a cheerleader type I would really like to see.”

  Daniel grins, pulls up my shirt, clamps moist wet lips on one tiny breast, then the other, makes his way down my belly, has trouble, momentarily, with the buttons of my jeans, turns back for the nipples again. My breasts, he once told me, remind him of early frost; flowers trapped in the bud, unopened for eternity. Perhaps Emily imagines I am jealous of her talking with my husband. Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t answered the phone. If so, I have every right to be insulted by her inane speculation.

  Still, I don’t hang up the phone, I let it ring and ring and ring. It occurs to me that she might not be home, she might be out, playing tennis probably, or horseback riding. Emily must ride horses; she has bowlegs, she’d look perfect in a riding hat and jodphurs, carrying, in lieu of an ordinary riding crop, a gentle sprig of honeysuckle. Maybe I’m in love with a woman again, which is something that happens to me. Not a sexual love, but a hopeless, careless passion. Daniel already knows. He has pulled down my jeans, has parted my thighs. Through his tongue he feels the ringing of Emily’s telephone like the purring of a cat.

  THAT WAS the first week of summer. Now our town is caught in time as at the center of a whirlpool – all the days feel alike, all the mornings, noons and nights. The students are gone, the sidewalks and bike racks empty, the abandoned cats hungry for milk and affection. One brought us an offering; a mole half-alive on our doorstep, squint-eyed, belly quivering beneath the messy fur. With a dishtowel I shielded the mole, shooed the stunned cat back to the road. After an hour, when the mole had crawled off, I wanted the cat to come back; I stood at the door and called “Cat! Cat!” then listened for the padding of its feet along the sidewalk. Had it come I would have heard it; in the motionless air, small sounds thrived. Daniel was out conducting research in the field, Stevie had learned how to spin his new Astro-Top. On the hardwood floor, the toy made a cosmic whirring, while at the drop-off in town, the back doors of the airport limousine slam-banged shut. From so very far off, it made a sound like the shutting of a suitcase, a fastening of zippers, buckles, and locks. Every time I hear it, I know someone’s leaving. Hardly anyone visits; they say there is nothing to do. My own sister said, “No Tex-Mex? Forget it.” She lives in Santa Fe in relentless sunlight crisscrossed by drunk drivers on whose pick-up trucks are strapped loaded shotguns. Here we have peace, and are drunk on air. Evening is redolent with dangling, overripe blossoms and with the songs of cicadas, a combination so dazzling as to displace the usual air with its own, unusual volume.

  I tried enticing my sister with such descriptions.

  “We take walks every night,” I told her. “And we always run into someone we know who’s just leaving town. The other night we had six people sitting on our lawn drinking beer and saying goodbye and listening to our neighbor Nikki playing her music, and we could smell the cherry trees a mile away.”

  “Where can you go dancing?” my sister inquired.

  “In this town called Vermilion up by the lake.”

  “I didn’t know there was a lake.”

  “Well, we never go there.”

  “And what if we felt like sightseeing during the day?”

  “There’s always Amish Country. You can get quilts and cheeses and have lunch and sightsee.”

  “Oh. Is it fun?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve never been there either. We like to take walks. The other night we walked around the reservoir and saw a real goldfish. You know, the Chinese kind. Somebody’s left-behind pet, probably. Then we walked to the supermarket and it was gone.”

  My sister sighed. Apparently she had little desire to spend her yearly vacation in a town whose one supermarket vanished overnight. I told her I’d exaggerated. The building itself, with its brick exterior, its tape-scarred windows, its automatic doors, its L-shaped parking lot, even its gum machines, was still in place. But the doors were locked tight and the gumballs were gone. The food, too, was gone, the aisles dismantled. On the soiled linoleum floor lay half-coiled cash register receipts like limp albino creatures asleep in the twilight zone of a cave. On the far wall the Fresh Produce logo-a cut-out of grapes, bananas, and plums-loomed over bare, slanted shelving littered with romaine leaves. A few freezers were still lighted in what had been the ice cream aisle but cast only ghostly glows.

  “Let’s get away from here,” I said to Daniel, surprised by the hoarseness of my voice.

  But tonight we go back, perversely, needing to see it again. We had all known this was coming–the
store was slated to close, but somehow I envisioned something less cataclysmic; gradual close-out sales, I tell Daniel, and maybe a farewell party for veteran shoppers, the cashiers handing out sample keilbasa on toothpicks. Nothing prepared me for this vast catacomb in whose sudden, closed-off reaches the butchers’ helpers might still be de-boning breasts of chicken, ignorant of the store’s closure like soldiers unaware of the end of the war. I press my face to the glass, peer in, bang twice on the door, give up, and press the lever on one of the gum machines. Out slide whole handfuls of pennies that dance on the concrete among the wheels of Stevie’s stroller. I push the lever again; more pennies, and more. Hundreds. We have no place to put them, no pockets, no bag, no shoes, even, for we are wearing rubber thongs. Finally Stevie consents to be carried and we load the pennies in his stroller. The canvas sling seat swings rhythmically under the weight of the copper as we head home. Halfway there we find Simon, Ben and Leah scanning Plum Creek from the Morgan Street bridge, looking for baby woodchucks. All they’ve spotted are muskrats, so far.

  “You can smell them,” says Leah, wrinkling her nose and stepping down toward the sluggish water. “They smell bad, not like the woodchucks. They smell metallic, almost.”

  “You’re smelling our pennies,” said Daniel, who gestures at the coin-laden stroller and jokes, “The bank folded, and this is all they would give us.”

  “Jesus,” says Ben. “Thank god we don’t have any money saved up. Anybody seen Harley around, by the way? Gotta thank him for my zoom.”

  “Oh, Ben,” I say.

  “Excuse me?” says Daniel, feigning ignorance. But when he raises his eyebrows, Ben catches on. This is not a thing we like to talk about, if we can avoid it.

  “Shit,” says Ben. “When?”

  “When what?” asks Leah, from her place on the rock. How tall she is, even sitting like this, her knees drawn up to her chin, her bony ankles bare beneath the loose, flapping hems of her pants. Between the spaghetti straps of her blouse can be seen the knobs of her vertebrae and the firm sinews of her musculature. Leah is, I have always imagined, stronger than any one of us.

  “When does Harley get back from Bloomingham?” asks Ben. Bloomingham’s one of Ben’s jokes; whenever anyone disappears, he says they’re sightseeing in Bloomingham. It’s a town not far from here where hardly anyone lives at all. There’s not even a cemetery. Just an old railway trestle and, underneath, a rocky stream bed where the teenagers gather to drink. Up a weedy slope and across the single road is a gas station selling sticks of beef jerky, and a dingy, mysterious storefront displaying God’s eyes in its window. The God’s eyes stare past the trestle into damp forest, and that’s Bloomingham.

  Now Leah darts a foot into the creek, quick as a waterbug, and withdraws it with a single plum blossom caught dripping between her toes. Ben doesn’t see this; he’s distracted by Simon, who appears suddenly from under the bridge.

  “Hamburgers?” shouts Simon.

  “Bugga bugga?” says Ben. “When will this kid learn to talk?”

  “Not bugga bugga,” I tell him. “Ham-” But something roars in the creek down below. Our pennies, like a sudden Niagara Falls. Stevie, gripping the handlebars of the stroller, has dumped it; he flops back down on his bottom, terrified, as the creek flashes copper. Twenty dollars for the muskrats. Stevie starts to wail, then stares past the railing, bewildered.

  When we get home at ten p.m. there’s someone swinging on our porch swing around the corner of the porch in a rectangle of shadow. The porch is wrap-around; it spans the whole, narrow front of our house before following the side wall all the way to the end, where the swing hangs perpendicular, facing the street.

  Creak creeeeak, creak creeeeak, it swings, and we know it’s not the wind; it sounds far too imperious.

  It’s my long-gone friend, Gail.

  GAIL’S DEPARTURE from our town was especially protracted, and in those months, two years ago, when she was not quite gone but still moving from hideout to hideout, it was nearly impossible to find her. When you did come upon her, always at the door to some building-the post office, the travel agency, the bank-it seemed as unclear to Gail as to anyone else whether she had been on her way in or out, and her hesitant, somewhat breathless greetings all had the depleted, melancholy substance of weary goodbyes. She had just broken up with the man she’d been living with. Rather, George had just broken up with her. Rather, he had broken off with her long ago but had simply failed to tell her in as many words, so Gail, who was kind of spacey, hadn’t picked up on things until George’s new girlfriend moved in with the two of them. For a while after that, Gail stubbornly slept on the couch in George’s living room within earshot of their shared orgasms, and later seemed to think that by lurking secretively for a while on the fringes of her ex-lover’s awareness she might later find herself granted access to its center. Our town was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, and Gail seemed intent on excavating its desperate routes and solitary havens. Those days, she smelled faintly of mothballs and dust, or of cedar, dry leaves, and motor oil. I know some people whose attic she slept in for a couple of weeks, and someone else knows of a janitor who put her up now and then on the miniature cot in the infirmary of the elementary school, and when I pass a certain house on a corner in town I remember the time Gail led me inside to the room where she was staying that particular week. Then I followed her along numberless, dim hallways lined with closed doors. The house, pale green trimmed with darker gingerbread, appeared charmingly Victorian, the shutters on its narrow windows stenciled with fanciful cut-outs. Inside we might have entered a series of subterranean tenements whose intersecting passages pulsed here and there with obscure, seismic repercussions. Broken pipes, Gail said. Once, we passed a window, and there, surprisingly, was the yard I had seen from the street before entering, the sewer pipe exposed among the flipped, raw slabs of a still-flowering garden.

  Tacked to several of the doors in these hallways were notes on scraps of paper that I longed to pull down and read. Instead I paused in my footsteps and peered over my shoulder when Gail had turned a corner up ahead.

  The first was a sort of love note, I supposed.

  “I came by, I came by,” it read.

  And the second, “Meet me at Tracées.”

  Tracee’s was a bar that had closed years earlier; the note on that door was four, five years old.

  Gail led me past the bathroom she shared with eight people and up a tall flight of steps to a hallway lit with Day-Glo posters. Then she turned to me and said, “Well, I guess we’ll go in here,” as if talking about any old door, but it was the door to her room.

  She was thin, too thin, with stooped shoulders, no bra, so her breasts dangled under her thin beige sweaters. For years she’d had ulcers, colitis, diarrhea, but she never complained. She never even complained about George. George the intellectual. When he removed his eyeglasses and perched them on the desktop, their wire frames mimicked precisely the stiff composure of his fingers. He wore caftans to work, in the bookstore, and made passes at someone named Candy who managed somehow to choose titles he admired. Gail didn’t know. When Candy left town for a couple of days, Gail of all people was entrusted with the care of her houseplants and cats. I went up there with her once, and carried the watering can. The houseplants were herbs and the cats were affectionate sorts who slept peacefully on piles of antique clothing. When we entered the room, the cats rose and stretched, trailing lengths of black lace and white feather boas. In a way I couldn’t blame George at all. It was cozy and sexy up there, like a movie set, with camp trunks and beaded throw pillows. There wasn’t a bed. There was a velvet, fringed love seat, too small for serious loving, but on the floor under a table was a comforter scattered with books, so I suppose that’s where they did it. Gail said, later on, that George sometimes made love while reading; when he came, the pages of his book slammed shut around his thumb, and he’d fall asleep holding it there. Everybody who knew him believed this story. He was selfish, cruel, and
ridiculous. Gail had lost fifteen pounds by the time she moved out but still wore the clothing he liked on her, the beiges and buffs that made her look like straw. Those days she sighed even while riding her bicycle whose wheels clicked and spun with a tick tick tick that seemed to emanate from her rib cage. Her friends, myself included, became increasingly annoyed with her willful air of irresolution. If we met her for breakfast, at the diner where Gail ordered without fail one slice of toast, a cup of tea, a glass of orange juice, and a glass of milk, we wore our brightest, loudest colors calculated to elicit her famous reaction, a deliberate squint followed by a fit of helpless sneezing. Those were the Underground Railroad days. I saw her belongings, once: an ample straw bag stuffed with papers, recordings, books, clothing, and a ceramic canister containing wiry clumps of hair elastics and other toiletries including a razor on which she sliced her finger now and then while reaching in for a comb. When she led me to her room, it was to find a cassette that she wanted to bring to my house and play. That was the first time I saw Joe close up. I’d been noticing him a while, but only from a distance, and now here he was, on a flat, brown couch in a hallway, eating a deli sandwich whose second half he fed bit by bit to his dog. In Gail’s room I asked Gail what she knew about the man on the couch.

  “What man?” she asked.

  “The one with the bald head. Wearing the painter’s cap,” I said. The one who looks like he never evolved, I almost said out loud, but didn’t. The one who looks like an ape. The unmodified man. Pure, unadulterated testosterone.