David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

'I hit Prosopopeia just as the sun goes seriously down and all sorts of crepuscular Maine life begins rustling darkly in a spiny old section of forest I am happy to leave behind at the corporation limit. I detour briefly to stop at an IGA and buy some cold Michelob as a bit of a housewarming present, something my mother had suggested and financed. Michelob is a beer my uncle loves and does not really drink so much as inhale. It's practically the only thing he can inhale. He has emphysema now, advanced, at fifty-five.

Even the few steps from a chair to the kitchen door and a hearty handshake and the appropriation of one of my light bags is enough to make him have to begin his puffing exercise. He sits heavily back in his chair and begins to breathe, rhythmically, with concentration, between pursed lips, as my aunt hugs me and makes happy sounds punctuated by "Lord" and "Well" and then whisks all my luggage upstairs in one load. There's not much luggage. I keep my bent receptacle with me. My uncle goes for a wheezer of adrenaline spray and resumes puffing as hard as he can, smiling tightly and waving away both my concern and his discomfort. He blows as though trying to extinguish a flame — which is perhaps close to what it felt like for him. He has dropped more weight, especially in his legs; his legs through his pants have a sticklike quality as he sits, breathing. Even thin and crinkled, though, he is still an eerie, breast-less copy of my mother, with: gray-white hair, an oval high-cheek-boned face, and blue pecans for eyes. Like my mother's, these eyes can be sharply lit as a bird's or sad and milky as a whale's; while my uncle puffs they are blank, unfocused, away. My aunt is an unreasonably pretty sixty, genuinely but not cloyingly nice, a lady against whom the only indictment might be hair dyed to a sort of sweet amber found nowhere in nature. She has put my portable life in my bedroom and asks whether I'd eat some supper. I'd eat anything at all. A television is on, with no sound, by an ancient electric stove of chipped white enamel and a new brown dishwasher. My uncle says I look like I was the one carried the car out here rather than the other way around. I know I do not look good. I've driven straight for almost thirty hours, a trip punctuated only by the filling and emptying of various tanks. My shirt is crunchy with old sweat, I have a really persistent piece of darkened apple skin between my two front teeth, and something has happened to a blood vessel in one of my eyes from staring so long at distance and cement — there is a small nova of red at the corner and a sandy pain when I blink. My hair needs a shampoo so badly it's almost yellow. I say I'm tired and sit down. My aunt gets bread from an actual bread box and takes a dish of tuna salad out of the refrigerator and begins stirring it up with a wooden spoon. My uncle eyes the beer on the kitchen counter, two tall silver six-packs already spreading a bright puddle of condensation on the linoleum. He looks over at my aunt, who sighs to herself and gives a tiny nod. My uncle is instantly up, no invalid; he gets two beers loose and puts one in front of me and pops the other and drains probably half of it in one series of what I have to say are unattractively foamy swallows. My aunt asks whether I'd like one sandwich or two. My uncle says I'd better just eat up that tuna salad, that they've had it twice now and if it hangs around much longer they're going to have to name it. His eyes are completely back, they are in him, and he uses them to laugh, to tease, to express. Just like his sister. He looks at the Sears receptacle by my place at the table and asks what I've got there. My aunt looks at him. I say memorabilia. He says it looks like it had a hard trip. The kitchen smells wonderful: of old wood and new bread and something sharply sweet, a faint tang of tuna. I can hear my mother's car ticking and cooling out in the driveway. My aunt puts two fat sandwiches down in front of me, pops my tall beer, gives me another warm little hug with a joy she can't contain and I can't understand, given that I have more or less just appeared here, with no explicable reason and little warning other than a late-night phone call two days ago and some sort of follow-up conversation with my parents after I'd hit the road. She says it's a wonderful surprise having me come visit them and she hopes I'll stay just as long as I'd like and tell her what I like to eat so she can stock up and didn't I feel so good and proud graduating out of such a good school in such a hard subject that she could never in a dog's age understand. She sits down. We begin to talk about the family. The sandwiches are good, the beer slightly warm. My uncle eyes the six-packs again and goes into his shirt pocket for the disk of snuff he dips since he had to stop smoking. There is cool, sweet, grassy air through the kitchen screens. I am too tired not to feel good.'

'I felt so sorry when he said he was going to have to go out of town, maybe for the whole summer. But I got mad when he said now we were even, summer for summer. Because him leaving this summer is his choice, just like last summer was all his choices, too.

He stayed in Cambridge, in Boston, last summer, to work on starting his project, and he got a research job in his engineering lab, and he didn't even ever really explain why he didn't want to come be in Bloomington for the summer, even though I'd just got my B. A. here. But he sent me a big arrangement of roses and said for me to come live with him and be his love in Boston that summer, that he missed me so much he couldn't endure it, and I went through a lot deciding, but I did, I used my graduation present money to fly to MIT and got a job as a hostess in Harvard Square at a German restaurant, the Wurst House, and we had an apartment in the Back Bay with a fireplace that was really expensive. But then after some time passed, Bruce acted like he really didn't want me to be there. If he'd said something about it that would be one thing, but he just started being really cold. He'd be away at the lab all the time, and he never came in to see the Wurst House, and when we were alone at home he didn't touch me for a week once, and he'd snap sometimes, or just be cold. It was like he was repulsed by me after a while. I'd started taking birth control pills by then. Then in July once he didn't come home or call for a day and a night, and when he did he got mad that I was mad that he didn't. He said why couldn't he at least have some vestige of his own life every once in a while. I said he could, but I said it just didn't feel to me like he felt the same anymore. He said how dare you tell me what I feel. I flew back home a few days later. We decided that's what I better do, because if I stayed he'd feel like he had to be artificially nice all the time, and that wouldn't be any fun for either of us. We both cried a little bit at Logan airport when he took me on the bus. In Bloomington my family threw confetti on me when I got home, they were glad to have me back, and I felt good to be home, too. Then a day later Bruce sent arranged roses again and called and said he'd made a ghastly error, and he flew back home, too, and said he was very sorry that he had got obsessional about all sorts of exterior things, and he tried to make me understand that he felt like he was standing on the cusp between two eras, and that however he'd acted I should regard as evidence of his own personal shortcomings as a person, not as anything about his commitment to me as a lover. And I guess I had so much invested in the relationship by then that I said OK that's OK, and he stayed in Bloomington over a week, and we did everything together, and at night he made me feel wonderful, it could really be wonderful being close with him, and he said he was making me feel wonderful because he wanted to, not because he thought he had to. Then he went back to Boston and said wait for me till Thanksgiving, don't sit under apple trees, and I'll come back to you, so I did, I even turned down friendly lunch invitations and football tickets from guys in my classes. And then Thanksgiving and Chrstmas felt to me like the exact same thing as that bad part of the summer in the Back Bay. My feelings just started to change. It wasn't all him. It took time, but after time passed I felt something was missing, and I'm selfish, I can only feel like I'm giving more than I'm getting for so long, then things change.'