Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

“Stop asking questions,” she said to him, kissing him again. “That breaks open your windows, doesn’t it?” And the motherfucker felt he could crush her, because she happened to be right, and he shut up and his house grew smaller, smaller than he was used to, and she didn’t smile or run to the bushes, so hers grew smaller, smaller than it had ever been, and then smaller, and then smaller, until she fit inside, gloved, a house of desire the exact size and shape of her. She thought she might wheeze away but then his hands touched skin, and her throat cleared and lifted.

The next morning, a dry clear day, the starlet made the motherfucker banana pancakes. Her son wandered in in pajamas and got some pancakes too. The motherfucker took a shower in her gourmet shower and used shampoo made from the placenta of sea urchin. He came out as fresh and clean as an underwater urchin infant. She was a yield sign, all sinews and mush, and he sat down and she whispered, “That was a wonderful night,” and he said, “It was,” and he meant it and he meant it too much and he said, “I think I have to go now.”

She called him a motherfucker, but in a teasing way.

He said, “It’s true, though.”

He didn’t call her that day. He didn’t call her the next day. She realized she did not have his phone number, could not tell him that she had to go on location to shoot the movie about people with problems but would miss him. During her movie the director asked her to smile but she said no. “This movie,” she said, “I am going to stay in my house.”

On the screen, she was so luminous in her seriousness, she made the whole cinema fill with tension, so much so that every cinemagoer went home charged up like an electrical storm, fingers in sockets, so much so that she got nominated for seven awards. The motherfucker, who never called again, watched her win from the quiet of his small bedroom. She was wearing a dress the color of the sky before it rains and had become, suddenly, beautiful. She had been something else before, but now she was something else from that. She thanked her parents most of all, her father the train conductor, her mother who rode the trains back and forth across the country to be with him. The motherfucker held his own body close. His apartment was very plain. “This is the house of your desire,” he whispered to himself, looking at the small walls behind him, and when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.

So there we were, Steve and I, smack in the middle of the same fight we’d had a million times before, a fight I knew so well I could graph it. We were halfway down the second slope of resignation, the place where we usually went to different rooms and despaired quietly on our own, and right at the moment that I thought, for the first time in seven years, that maybe things were just not going to work out after all, that was the moment he suggested we drive to Vegas right then and tie the knot. “Now?” I said and he nodded, with gravity. “Now.” We packed as fast as we could, hoping we could pack faster than those winged feet of doubt, driving 100 miles per hour in silence, from sand to trees to mountains to dry plains to that tall, electric glitter. Parked. Checked in. Changed clothes. Held hands. Together we walked up to the casino chapel but as soon as Steve put his nose in the room, well, that’s when those winged feet fluttered to rest on his shoulder. Reeling, he said he had a migraine and needed to lie down. An hour later he told me, washcloth on forehead, that he had to fly home that instant and could I drive back by myself? I stood at the doorway and watched him pack his nicest suit, folding it into corners and angles, his chest and legs and back and butt in squares and triangles, shut and carried.

“Goodbye,” we said to each other, and the kiss was an old dead sock.

I spent the day there floating in the glowing blue swimming pool in my brand-new black swimming suit, cocooning myself in a huge white towel that smelled of sunshine, walking past tigers and dolphins. I slept diagonal on the king bed. After checking out, I went to the car, which was boiling hot, and put my bag in the trunk and geared up the engine and turned on the air conditioner and pulled out of the parking structure. The road extended through the desert, a long dry tongue. I didn’t feel like listening to music and was speeding along, wondering if to all people the idea of marrying felt so much like being buried alive, as in particular the idea of marrying this man did. Anticipating the talks we were going to have, to get to the point where we both admitted we were only in it out of loyalty and fear, my mouth dried up and I had a sudden and very intense craving for a mango.

I’d never eaten a mango in my life. But the craving was vast, sweeping, feverish.

Great, I thought. It is not mango season and it is not mango country. And I knew those bright flavored gums would not cut it.

After half an hour, the craving was so bad I stopped at a gas station and tried anyway, bought a pack of orange-pink candy-Mango Tango! — but the taste of each flat circle, so sugary and similar to all other sugar flavors, made me long for the real one even more. I stopped at every market I saw but the fruit they had was pathetic: soft mealy apples, gray bananas, the occasional hard green plum.

The road was quiet and empty of cars. I sped past gas stations and fast food.

I was thinking, seriously, of driving straight to the airport and emptying my savings to fly myself to Africa so I could find one there, easy off the tree, the gentle give at the touch of my thumb, when far ahead, several miles up the road, I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a shack. It was part of a tiny commercial strip facing a doughnut store and an oil lube filter station. From a distance it looked colorful and lively and as I got closer and closer, I thought I might be hallucinating from the heat because as far as I could tell, the front of the shack was full of trays and tables and shelves and piles of ripe beautiful fruit. My mouth started to water and I pulled over and parked my car on the shoulder of the road.

The highway was still empty of cars and the fast food doughnut chain was empty of cars and the oil lube filter was closed, so crossing the street was a breeze. The awning of the store was a sweet blue-and-white gingham and sure enough, there were huge tables burgeoning with fruit: vivid clementines, golden apples, dark plums, swollen peaches, three patterns of yellow and brown pears.

The awning said fruit and words.

I went inside. I found a tan woman behind the counter perched on a stool, dusting a deep red apple with her sleeve.

“Hello,” I said. “Wow, you have such beautiful fruit here!”

She had a flat face, so flat I was scared to see her in profile.

“Hello,” she said mildly.

My hopes were swelling as I walked by a luscious stack of papayas, surging as I passed a group of star fruit and then, indeed, next to a humble pile of four, I found the small sign that said what I wanted to hear. And there they were, gentle and orange, the smell emanating from their skin, so rich I could pick up a whiff from a distance.

She nodded at me. “They’re very good,” she said. “Those mangoes are excellent quality.”

She placed the polished apple in front of herself like she was teacher and student all at once. I scooped up all four and took them to the counter. I felt a wave of utter unearned competence. Ha ha to everyone else. Finding fresh mangoes fifty miles out of Las Vegas seemed to me, in no uncertain terms, like some kind of miracle.

“You have no idea how wonderful this is,” I told her, beaming. “I have been having the most powerful mango craving. And here we are, in the desert of all places!”