Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

When Austin got the news that his aunt had left him a house in the desert, suddenly it was if they were being called to the place where excitement was. He embraced Delia as if trying to squeeze some secret meaning out of her. Delia saw the way Austin had become more and more afraid that he was, in fact, the sort of person who would not do anything great, that he’d become the very person he’d tried to ward off by saying it out loud. Delia saw that Austin equated the movement from the East to the West with accomplishment. The house was something to move toward, something to move into. Now Austin is impatient with the way she doesn’t unpack her bags or send out change-of-address cards. He is frustrated by the way she will not look for a job and the way she reuses one cup, one plate, and one set of silverware like some timid guest. He is anxious for her to adjust, as if it is she who is keeping them from the greatness and excitement that is due Austin. So he brings her bright cactus fruit. Certain Indian tribes make jam from this stuff, he says, and she knows this is something he was told by the man in the nearby plant store where he goes to get his facts straight.

Delia is made uneasy by the hostile thorns of the plants that surround this home. She does not want to live with spiders and lizards that crawl into the teacups for cover. The sun shines constantly over all of it, blindingly cheerful. “You worry yourself needlessly. Don’t think in such grand proportions,” Austin says as he leaves to sort the cotton-combed towels from the extra fluffy. He explains to her that studies have shown that sunshine cures depression. Delia wonders about this on the days that she watches her leathery-faced neighbor sit in her gravel yard, sprawled in a beach chair so far from the ocean. Every day Delia watches her neighbor turn her face to a sun that can no longer penetrate her rough skin.

Delia hasn’t always been afraid. As a child, she yearned for horrible things to consume her body and her life. She envied the little girl in her second grade class who went suddenly deaf and was kidnapped by her stepmother. When the little girl was returned to her rightful home, people looked at her with concern, unable to ask how she was except with futile hand gestures that meant nothing in the sign language that the girl was still struggling to learn. The little girl smiled in a way that showed she was braver than anybody. Delia would have liked the attention this girl received as someone who knew something of the world. Now Delia’s body swells to protect itself from its environment. Her skin seems thicker. Now she spends hours at a time waiting for the sound of a surprise — a popped cork, a crumpling bag as someone unpacks a cake — to tell her their new life is just distraction leading up to the surprise, something to tell her this is a practical joke and not really her life.

Outside there is the chirring of a bug that Austin does not yet know the name of while inside Delia sways tremulous like a flame before reaching for the broom. In the mornings she sweeps up the tracked-in dirt. The dirt is everywhere. Here, everyone’s yard is dirt. Delia has noticed that her leathery-faced neighbor sometimes arranges her dirt with a broom, brushing it back and forth, stirring it up into a small brown cyclone around her. The dirt sticks to Delia’s damp, hot skin and she tastes grains of it between her teeth.

Delia turns on the radio as she sweeps, to a news program about two brothers who both play classical guitar. Delia listens through the swish of the broom to the announcer, who says that the brothers perform one piece together, one brother’s arms wrapped around the other from behind as they both pick at the same guitar to play the same song. The brothers, according to the announcer, start and end the song at exactly the same time with no apparent signals. Delia pokes at a thick cobweb as the announcer says that even the brothers find it strange. She imagines this is what a good marriage should be and searches in her mind for a moment like this between her and Austin, but all she can come up with are the terra-cotta hands sticking out from the wall in the News and Gifts airport shop. Delia and Austin’s flight from the East had stopped in Denver, and they had stepped into the shop to buy a newspaper. The terra-cotta hands reached out from the wall on shortened forearms, offering books from some anonymous source. This is what Delia is reminded of as she brushes at her face with her own quick hands for something that isn’t there.

Delia steps out the door to go for a walk so that she can find something to bring back to Austin to say that she has left the house. As she shuts the door behind her, she has a vision of Austin, almost unrecognizable, prancing from one foot to the other on her side of the bed. He points at her with first one index finger and then the other, smiling wide like a clown in what seems like a dream and which Delia now recognizes as the dream that she had several nights ago. Next door she sees a curtain in a front window move and knows her neighbor has watched her venture out. The dirt in her yard is in a flurry from her sweeping; gold flecks sparkle in the sun that has wrapped itself around the day. Delia goes left instead of right when she reaches the end of her street because she has never gone that way before and because she worries that if she goes right, it will disturb her not to recognize what she’s already seen. Jesus rises up all around her, black and brown and yellow, in the painted murals of her neighborhood.

Delia kicks a stone that someone has painted blue, past festively colored stucco houses guarded by dogs that give a few obligatory barks and then lie down again. She kicks the stone down the middle of a street with no cars and feels the sweat run down her back in salty streams. She feels certain that she once felt passionately about her life but pictures only a girl she glimpsed in a china store where she worked before she met Austin. The girl carefully touched a small china elephant under a sign that read PLEASE DO NOT HANDLE. She touched it with her long fingers like delicate tentacles, sensing something important about not only the object but the gesture itself.

The blue-painted stone disappears into the open doorway of a creaky one-story house like any other on this street. SNOWCONES, TOYS, ANTIQUES reads a sign over the door, and Delia remembers that she must bring something back to show Austin. She nearly trips over the hose that runs from a spigot on the front of the house around to a side pen where it shoots water into a bucket already overflowing. The water runs over the sides and floods the yard with puddles that turn dust to dirt. Chickens perch carefully on stones while two ducks sit in the puddles, trying to float. A brown and white goat trails his long beard through dirt and water alike.

A tall, thick man with hair parted at his ear, thin strands swept over his head, appears in the doorway. “Houdini,” he says, nodding his head toward the goat, who now lowers himself into the mud. The man bends at his trunklike waist to pick up the painted-blue pebble. He slowly puts the stone into his mouth and rolls it back and forth between his cheeks before offering it to Delia. “This is not really blue,” he says.

“Are you looking for something in particular?” a woman’s voice asks before she appears to push the man out of the doorway with a familiar aggressiveness. He steps back laughing and pinches her arm with fingers that know just when to stop. She takes the blue stone from his hand and holds it up to the light. “This means you will travel.” She takes it back to the counter where there are several rows of stones and a small book titled Fortunes.

“I’ve already traveled,” Delia says, but still she looks into the front room, at the novena whose candleholders are filled with precariously balanced, dusty red goblets. Nearby is a dresser with drawers pulled out and filled with candy wrappers, pencils, and silverware. The floors of this room slant into another room stuffed with a vanity scattered with cigar boxes and atomizers made of different-colored tinted glass. Empty frames cover the wall over a TV that sits on wooden crates, turned on with no volume, as if someone almost lives here or has just left the room. On the screen an older woman and a younger woman gesture furiously at each other as their mouths open and close without a sound. Tiny feather dusters hang unused, for sale.