James Hannah - Sign Languages

She closed her brown eyes but remembered them and saw herself seeing Todd’s body on her sheets, his smooth penis encircled by a pink ribbon she’d tied there. Happy Birthday to us all, they’d said earlier at the party. We’re all twenty-six. Marvin Waters was thirty-three and owns us all, they’d laughed. Old Marvin, the old sport. Himself thin and muscular — that exciting combination. And opening her eyes, going to lie down for a moment, her face covered with herbs in some fantastic decoction of mint and chervil and gelatin from sheep’s feet and glacier water, she saw Marvin’s penis too. Thicker like the pony’s she’d once seen. That before nine and therefore with her handsome but pale father before he failed to float to safety in Laos.

There was Madelaine Woo at the office. Such power in the moon face. Like some brown full platter. All cheeks and such hair. Brilliant and coarse as the pony’s.

She left the mirror and now she lay still in her warming bedroom. It is almost dark, she said to herself, and looked outside at the sugar-fine snow on branches.

She would not read anything on her bedside table; she didn’t turn to the magazines or poems from newspapers her mother clipped and mailed. They were alike, so why think about her now? There’s her picture, too, beyond my bare but hosed feet. Nice toes, he’d said. On a bus trip once, his fingers beginning there. You two are like twins, people said. And they were. Olive. Browns in eyes and hair. Once they’d changed roles at home for a whole weekend. Like that movie Freaky Friday , except there were no misadventures. She liked that word from one of her magazines. For her there never were. She knew she was only a bit too tall at five eleven. And a half, okay? A half. Not at all fat. Not thin, though. Not the anorexia of those hideous models.

We are just right, aren’t we, she told the photographs as she flexed her toes.

And she turned on the bed when Ms. Bojangles leapt to the window ledge, meowed through the double glass. “Not now,” she said. I’m going to rest. And yet once turned on her side away from the darkening day, she smiled. Comfortable in her clothes, the skin perfect now from mare’s butter and summer savory. Smiled because we’re alike, Ms. Bojangles and me here in my warming room. Not curious, that’s all silliness. But active, energetic. But now after work, she decided not to drive this Friday night to exercise, and not to feed the cat now or herself, though on the edge of sleep that flowed like an exotic liquor Todd offered or like semen or some full-page ad all colors and promise, she remembered her duties and answered them like she always had — who had taught her that? — with miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. Then, his house is in the village though.

Now there was a knock far away and she turned on her back and tried to listen for her own snore. That’s what he’d joked. Like a bunkhouse. And she’d remembered movies. Old and distasteful men. Her grandparents dead long ago in a car wreck. She’d never seen them in photographs; oh, perhaps. But they were in their twenties and wearing fantastic clothes.

At the side door she said “Yes?” to the head made level with her waist by the three cement steps down to the carport. She pulled the thick robe around her, felt the chill on her ankles and up her calves.

“Hello, Nancy. Sorry…,” he said, and as he turned his face up into the light weakened by the filter of the screen door, she saw it was his unfamiliar face. The skin rough, raw on his left cheek, the one now turned north. The dark spots heightened by the cold. They looked at his hand on the doorknob. His other one at his collar, closing the material over white hairs like the snow-dusted grass near his feet. A large crumpled shopping bag sat on the bottom step.

“Sorry to bother you. I’ve left something in the shed. It’s okay, I have a key.” He dug in his pocket and lifted it. Shook it as if they were both deaf. Or children. Though she, nodding, saw he wasn’t. Go away, she thought. And nodded vigorously, the updraft all over her now and robbing her of a lot of work on knees and buttocks.

Someday she would buy her own house, she thinks, and closes him out. I am a realtor after all. They turn back-to-back and she won’t bother to watch him walk down the hill to the shed. Because she doesn’t now consider him at all. Mr. Warrant. Her landlord; this house’s owner. And later, eating something ultralight and microwaved though she always agrees, one, she doesn’t have to watch her weight and, two, they really don’t do food justice, she despises him and this rented house. Todd says live in the country. There he has a house and two ferocious fighting cocks. Why not uptown? Madelaine Woo asks. Forget a car and parking hassles. But this was truly one of the best deals in the city. And though it was a small house, the location wasn’t so bad. She had moved here four years ago from college and only occasionally considered moving.

Later, the TV off, all the house gone from toasty to chilly, the red eye of the electric blanket reflected off mother’s faces, father’s face, everyone at the office in exotic costumes as bears and pigs all in great fun. The day someone said you can get your pussy tightened on group insurance and they’d laughed though she’d wondered if it were all a joke. She awoke and considered Mr. Warrant. And got up and out of bed and walked past the snoring Ms. Bojangles.

Wrapped in bathrobe and leg warmers and mittens, she hurried across the frozen yard and fumbled the shed door unlocked. She had never been curious. In school she was polite and attentive and knew, though such things weren’t important really, she only loved activities that brought her to the attention of people — a few, a hundred at pep rallies. I was always beautiful, she knew, taking the flashlight from her robe pocket. And that was only eight years ago, less than eight really. Her fuller hips and breasts filled the robe now as she didn’t wonder, wasn’t curious about her curiosity about Mr. Warrant. Though there in bed in the chill far warmer than this dark shed, she remembered that he hadn’t lived here in years and years. Before she had rented there had been the Squires, then someone else. He’d told her once — and now she surprised herself by recalling it — how he only had this and one other rental house. What had he done for a living? she thought, hurrying the beam over her scant holdings — yard tools she had bought once and now let the black boy use in the spring and summer. But what would he have left and now needed? She stepped gingerly over rakes and cakes of mud, the smell all frigid oil and metal. Old, she thought, disgusted with greasy red shop towels and the yellowed refuse of newspapers someone had used for moving plates and vases. Maybe me, she thought. On a shelf at the back, the wind on her face through a knothole worrying her — she felt it on her drying lips; she envisioned spreading cracks, the deep furrows at too early an age — there was a box opened and empty. The gray duct tape having taken off layers of cardboard with it.

In the bathroom later, she looked at her face and decided on an emollient. And in bed she was as sure as she could be, having paid little attention to all that “out there,” as she referred to it when the cute little black boy showed up biweekly, the box was his and had once been sealed tightly. She felt very tired. I’ve taxed my brain tonight, she said. She wished for someone. She moved in bed feeling, seeing, their two bodies all muscle and motion. His tanned skin on hers. The long shiny tube slowly inside. All oil and cream, sex the smell of spermicide, redolent of hospital corridors.

A week later there had been more snow and it had fallen wet and thick. Then there was a northern blast. From the top of the world, they’d said on TV. She liked that phrase. And there was a new man at the office. He was young and lonely. His hair lay on his neck in gorgeous tight curls. She talked to him and so did the others. Madelaine Woo almost swallowed him whole once at lunch.