Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

“Hope you had a wonderful vacation,” Dr. Dave wrote by way of a postcard that arrived on a Thursday afternoon. He signed his name “Dr. Dave.” There was a photograph of a winding river in some exotic locale. What river it was, I didn’t bother to look, because I didn’t care. The arrival of the postcard shocked me into something resembling the present. I had two days to pack and leave. Two days to put the house in order, the state of which was distressing. One and a half days really, since it was already midafternoon.

I began by cleaning the stairs, the carpet, the master bathroom. On my hands and knees, I scrubbed the tub and toilet. Somehow I had left a dark ring around the tub, even though I’d only taken one bath. There was a small trail of moldy spots above the shower which I could only reach by perching precariously on the edge of the sink. When I was finished, my neck ached, but the bathroom shone. I stayed up past midnight doing the best I could. The house was big, though, and the more I cleaned, the more I realized how much needed to be cleaned. If I had plundered Dr. Dave’s privacy before, now I plundered his cleaning products: Lysol and Ajax and Pledge furniture polish. That night I slept on the couch because the sheets and blankets were in the laundry.

It was fortunate for me that Molly and Lola arrived the following afternoon. They found me standing in the foyer wearing rubber gloves and holding a brush. “The lease has expired,” I said. There would be no painting that day.

To Molly’s credit she helped without complaint. Lola helped too, loading and unloading the dishwasher. She liked pushing the buttons. The three of us cleaning made me feel like we had come together as a family again, like there was hope for us again.

In the pantry, I found Molly bent over sweeping crumbs into a dustpan. I grabbed her from behind. Her ass was soft and round.

“Come and help me make the bed,” I whispered.

“There’s still so much to do,” she protested, but she followed. In the bedroom, the gray afternoon light was coming through the window one last time.

“So this is the master bedroom,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed. She had never been in it once. The realization was painful. Still, I took some pride, as if the room belonged to me.

We lay down on the bare mattress and made out. She let me unbutton her shirt. She let me feel her breasts. Her breasts were smaller than I remembered. I liked them small. We would finally have sex on something other than a futon.

“Lola,” she whispered, “Lola is here.”

Lola was always here, always somewhere nearby. She was the sentry that stood between her mother and me. She was the thing her mother never left home without.

“She doesn’t know,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “she does.”

What did she know? She was innocent and oblivious. What could she know about what was happening between the adults? She could not possibly define what was going on. It was a mystery to everyone involved, including us.

But perhaps it was possible the little girl did know something . Something more than us even. Perhaps she only needed a few more years to be able to find the right words that would help her explain the thing — at least to herself. Twenty years from now she’d recall this as the summer she spent playing in that strange house with that strange man. She wouldn’t even remember my name. I’d be a memory by then.

Molly was on top of me. Her bra was off but her pants were on. I grappled with her belt. “No, no, no,” she kept saying, even as she pressed down on my chest with her hands, bearing down as if she wanted to push me through the king-size mattress. She looked so beautiful in the gray light. “I love you,” I said. I love you. I waited for her to rejoin.

And shortly there came the reply, from Lola of course, shouting up three flights at the top of her lungs, “THE DISHES ARE DONE!”

The efficiency was small again and reentry was painful. Fred the subletter shook my hand and said “Till next time, Jake,” but there wasn’t going to be any next time . He gave me the last month’s rent in cash again, but I didn’t bother to count it. I had more important things to do, like get ready for my first day of school. There wasn’t much to prepare, of course, what with my recycled lesson plan, but I was determined to start the year off right.

The next morning I came around that familiar country bend driving fast, with the school in the early light, two stories in red brick with a chimney. I parked and got out and walked briskly. Fall was in the air. “Welcome to the history of the world!” I planned to say to my students. I had rehearsed it. It would be a dramatic opening line and it would get their attention. They’d look at me with eager, anxious eyes, not knowing what to make of me. Then I’d launch into the great migration out of Africa where it all began, thousands of miles away, thousands of years ago. We’d be allies not enemies, my students and I. In the end, they’d adore me.

As I neared the main entrance, I was surprised to see Dr. Dave standing there beneath that eternal school motto, “Give your best …” Here comes the soldier-teacher! He looked tan and rested in his blue jeans. He would have stories to tell me of his adventures. “Thanks for getting the mail,” he’d say. We’d laugh about it.

“Welcome back, Dr. Dave,” I called. But he didn’t respond. He only stared as I approached. I thought of his house, the disorder that I had wrought over the summer, the disruption, the transgression. But I had been meticulous in restoring everything to its proper place — all secrets were safe. I had made sure of it.

On the last evening, I had stood in the garden looking up at 14 Misty Morning Way, sentimental and forlorn. The only house I had ever lived in … Had I lived in it? Or had I merely stayed . Molly and Lola had already left for home, and I spent my last few moments watering the garden one final time. The poor and ravaged garden, beguiling, chaotic, struggling to stay alive. No amount of water could have offset the terrible effects of such a dry summer, but I had tried my best. These were my thoughts as I turned off the hose and squished across the soaking lawn and through the sliding glass door to get my bags of clothes. My bare feet had left little wet footprints on the carpet, but those would dry soon enough.

It was only now, walking up the stairs to where Dr. Dave stood waiting, that I realized with great and unbending certainty that it was not the heat that had killed the plants and flowers. I had drowned the garden.

It was in January that Wally came back from the war. He came back to great fanfare that I felt was undeserved. He had departed to great fanfare too — which also was undeserved. I didn’t tell anyone what I thought. Instead, I said what everyone said. I said it was a shame that after everything he’d been through, he had to come back to such cold weather.

It was cold that winter. It was getting colder. Each morning when my clock went off, I would lie in bed with my eyes closed and the covers pulled up around my neck, listening to sounds and thinking about life. Life in general, life in the abstract.

I could hear the salt trucks on the street below and the sound of the wind whistling through my apartment as if the place were haunted by ghosts from a thousand years ago. It was twenty degrees outside. It was fifteen degrees. It was ten. It was going to get lower before it got higher. Everyone was saying that this was the worst winter they could remember. I had asked the landlord to weather-strip the windows but he didn’t have the time, plus it wasn’t in the lease, so one weekend I took matters into my own hands and did it myself, trimming the sheets of plastic, sealing them around the window frames, and blow-drying them so they tightened like a drum. But I must have been careless with my work, because the plastic sheets expanded and contracted whenever the wind blew, as if the windows were taking deep breaths. Lying in bed with my eyes closed, with the clunking and creaking all around me, I would try to puzzle out my dreams from the night before, dreams full of symbols — lightbulbs, doorknobs — dreams that seemed to ride the cusp of nightmare and lingered in the background the next day.