Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

Later, the lights were out, but the streetlight sent an orange glow into her mother’s bedroom. Irene had changed the sheets, had changed the pillowcases, but the laundry soap was lavender, the fabric softener lavender, and lavender permeated the room. Irene shut the door and closed the blinds. Belion was naked on the bed. His huge bulk sank into the center of this bed, made of high-density foam, conforming to his irregular contours, embracing him. Irene walked over to the bed. She slipped a ponytail holder around her hair and pulled it high and tight on her skull.

“Is it too soon?” he asked her. His words sounded like a prayer, thin and hopeful.

Irene didn’t respond, but climbed onto the foot of the bed and approached him on her knees. She smacked her left hand onto one meaty thigh, her right hand onto the other thigh, and pushed his legs apart sharply. She hooked her elbows under his knees.

“Oh, God,” said Belion. His hand shot out and grabbed a lacy pillow, pressed it against his face.

“Go ahead and yell,” said Irene, making words against his skin. “Alarm the neighbors.”

He stiffened under her, this huge block of flesh that was following her around. If she was being cruel, driving into him only to pull herself away, she felt it was justified, with him being so bold. He brought himself here with his legs wide open, her mother not even buried. So she was cold with him, pulling back just when he needed her most, but in the end she became merciful and sweet. She felt herself unspool inside, a warmth emerging, a generosity of spirit, and she got softer, she let her understanding take over. Then her hesitation wasn’t mean but thoughtful, her mouth not full of teeth but full of tongues.

Why not? She felt herself standing on the side of the bridge, her hair blowing this way and that, looking at the water. Why not unloose her tongue, let it wrap around the first thing that could save it?

“This is all about control with you,” one guy had said, who wanted to feel her breasts against him while they slept.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up,” she had said. And then she’d dumped him for a guy with a little less enthusiasm for introspection and analysis.

When she was done with Belion, she left him sprawled on the bed and went to the bathroom to clean up. Irene had a saying about mouthwash: “Know Listerine, know oral sex. No Listerine, no oral sex.” It wasn’t snappy, and it wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker, but it went through her head every time she spilled the burning liquid into her mouth and imagined all the little germs popping like balloons. She could hold Listerine in her mouth forever. But then she spit it out. It was full of alcohol.

Irene loosed her ponytail, washed her face, and went back to bed. When she saw Belion, he had pulled the sheet up. She thought he was asleep, and tucked herself as quietly as possible into a corner of the bed. But he was not asleep.

“Babe please, can I feel inside you?”

“No,” said Irene. She imagined a large, blunt finger scrubbing around in her underwear. Pushing itself against her pubic bone. Thumping away at her.

“I’ll make you feel better, I promise,” said Belion.

“I don’t feel bad,” said Irene. “I feel glad.”

In the morning, when Irene opened her eyes, he was still there. That night, at a welcome banquet for new faculty and students, he would be her date. The institute would announce her addition to the staff, welcome freshmen and new graduate students. She was content with taking Belion as her date. With him in town, she felt more like herself. She was Irene Sparks, girlfriend of Belion, virgin from the neck down, scrapper, chewer, magic bean eschewer.

She got up, opened the blinds. Belion lay inert on the bed.

“Get up, Belion! Time to wake up!”

Irene stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower, then began to count in her head as she brushed her teeth. Irene finished brushing her teeth and put her hand against the glass shower door. It was still cold.

Belion had rolled over to her side of the bed and had buried his face in her pillow, her mother’s pillow.

“You know what’s funny,” he said. He rolled over again and was lying on his back. “Is when people say, like, ‘He took it in the shorts’ or ‘I stabbed you in the shorts.’”

“Those aren’t real phrases,” said Irene.

“Yes, they are,” said Belion. “You know, ‘He took it in the shorts.’”

Irene stopped fiddling with things on the sink and stood with her hand on the shower stall’s glass pane. Just waiting for it to heat up so she could get inside. Belion giggled to himself. She could see his balls, so ponderous, lolling against his thigh.

“Belion,” she said, “there is no such phrase.”

“There is so,” he said belligerently.

“No, there’s not,” she said.

“Fine,” said Belion, “let’s do a search on ‘took it in the shorts.’”

Belion reached his hand over to the floor and pulled his laptop up onto the bed. He rolled over onto his stomach, so she could see his furred butt and the broad expanse of his back as he typed into the tiny machine. One thing about Belion: for a big fat guy, he was really very lithe.

Irene felt the glass get hot. She shed her robe and slipped into the shower. She could no longer see him.

“Here it is,” hollered Belion, “Listen to this: ‘As a consequence, I think the foxes kind of took it in the shorts. They ended up getting persecuted by coyotes.’ And that’s on the PBS Web site!”

Irene poured shampoo into her hand. “You’re making that up!” she said.

“Here’s another one,” he called to her. “‘Needless to say, fame was not to knock this time around, and the boys took it in the shorts!’ Two is proof! Your rule!”

There was a pause. “OK, well, I must have made up ‘stabbed you in the shorts’ because there’s nothing on that. But it would be funny, if there was.”

Irene rolled her eyes.

“Baby, can I take a shower with you?”

Irene said nothing.

Scrabbling through her mother’s desk, looking for the keys to the garage, she found this poem:

How did I get you? I’ll tell you.

I bought an old crock at an auction, a brown crock marked with a five, for five gallons. I paid twelve dollars for the crock. The crock was dusty inside with cobwebs and plaster, and I reached in, down deep inside, and I felt you in there. You were warm and dry, curled in the bottom. My hand touched your back. I wanted to see what was in there, and so I found you. Dust in your eyelashes and spider web sticking your eyes shut tight.

I knit you out of my own hair. I made you out of three hundred daisies strung together. I collected your pieces for years, and then put you together, click by click, until you suddenly cried.

Out on a farm there is a long line of sunken spots where an underground spring runs down the hill underneath the grass and topsoil. In the middle of summer, I found deep holes in some of the spots, damp and mossy—not animal holes. And I lay down on the grass, and stuck my arm down deep inside, to see if I could touch the water. But I touched your hair, stuck with earth to your head, and you were damp, and when I brought you out, there was water on your face that looked like dew.

That’s how I found you.

Irene looked at the artifact in her hand and found herself wondering who the woman was who had written this poem, and for what child it had been written. Even as she wondered, she knew: it was written by her mother for her. Death is final, and there is no going back to ask questions. Her mother was gone from the world and gone from the dreamworld. But Irene had questions, questions she could never ask the drunk woman who was her mother, but maybe when she was dead, and they were both just dead people on equal footing, Irene would be able to ask all the questions: Why set a fire, and burn down our house? Why have a baby, if you didn’t want one?