Amelia Gray: Threats

He washed his hands upstairs, looking at the beauty products that still surrounded Franny’s side of the sink. One bottle claimed to be a vacuum device for blackheads. He opened it and found a pump mechanism that dispensed an opalescent cream. Dabbing the cream on his forehead, he picked up another jar, a moisturizer with royal jelly. He wasn’t sure how a jelly could be royal, but he removed its lid anyway and spread the cream under his chin. He picked up the tube of retinol eye cream she kept behind her toothbrush and smeared it over his eyes. He removed his clothes and sprinkled acetone-free nail polish remover on his pubic hair and worked it in at the roots. His eyelids stung. He opened a precious-looking prismatic glass jar with a clear gel inside and smeared the gel on his testicles.

He sprayed her perfume on the back of his tongue. It made him retch, and he gripped the sink, coughing and spitting toward the drain. The perfume’s fragrance was of flowers and some kind of light powder, but it tasted like cheap gin. It coated his tongue and cheeks and sank into his body. He splashed water into his mouth, but it served only to spread the flavor. He regarded his face in the mirror. Red welts were rising on his eyelids and neck. He resisted the urge to touch them.

Crouching down, he opened the cabinets under the sink. He pulled out bottles of cleanser, gallon jugs of shampoo and conditioner Franny had borrowed or taken from work, the box of Franny’s pills. David counted ten months’ worth of pills, ten stickers bearing Franny’s name, twenty plastic hinges, hundreds of tabs of foil behind which hid hundreds of pills that meant nothing at all. A dental water jet attached to a turquoise-colored plastic box whirred when he plugged it in. David lay down and pressed his hands against the blind underside of the sink. He opened a jug of shampoo and emptied its contents over his body. The shampoo was a translucent blue and felt cold at first, but it warmed protectively and lathered a bit when he rubbed it. It covered his body and held him. He tried to crawl under the sink but could not fit his shoulders through the door. Instead, he lay with his head inside the paper-lined womb of the cabinet, its frame a wooden pillow under his head, the dental water jet whirring like a lullaby.

DAVID STOOD beside his wife at their wedding reception. The event was well attended, in part because it was held at an Old Country Buffet during the dinner rush. Their invited guests didn’t seem to mind the $7.99 charge. David had just taken on more debt by buying his dental office, in addition to what he paid monthly for his mother’s care, in addition to her old legal bills. Franny and David had been married by the justice that afternoon, and she was still wearing the white lace skirt that made her knees look like the speckled hams under heat lamps at the buffet. Patrons of the restaurant wandered into their corner to shake David’s hand and tell Franny that she looked lovely. A child gave Franny a fistful of gummy bears from the ice cream station.

The young husband of one of David’s dental hygienists brought a cooler of beer. David’s father returned from the dinner line with a plate heaped with meat. “Pig to pork,” he said. He shook his son’s hand and picked up a rolled silverware napkin from the table. “Live with meaning and die old.”

Three empty plates at a table held corsages as symbols of Franny’s parents and David’s mother, who had moved herself into a women’s home when David was very young. He couldn’t recall exactly when his mother had gone to the home, and he and his father rarely visited. When they did, she always gave David something she had made, a card or ornament, out of the same type of construction paper her son had used in his kindergarten class. Once, the keepsake was a picture she had drawn of David in red and blue marker.

His mother had been a math teacher and was the only truly calculating element across the entire course of David’s life. She expressed no interest in ever meeting Franny. On their wedding day, his mother called the Old Country Buffet and the newlyweds passed the phone back and forth while standing at the hostess station.

Everyone got a little too drunk and kept eating. They put away plates of meat and baked beans and iceberg salads with ranch dressing. A distant cousin ate only creamed corn. David and Franny sat at the table with his father and the hygienist and her husband. David’s father lifted a spoon of mashed potatoes. “Once, this was all underground,” he said. The hygienist’s husband ringed his big arm around David’s neck and told him it was good to marry a strong woman who could get herself out of trouble. David imagined Franny pinned under a grain thresher, hefting it overhead into a hayloft.

At the end of the evening, Franny placed a dish of pudding by one of her parents’ memorial plates and started to cry. The guests had mostly left, save for a patron of the restaurant named Chuck who produced a flask of whiskey and sat with his back to the wall. Franny wiped her eyes with her mother’s memorial napkin and took a pull from the offered flask.

That night, Franny and David lay in bed together, immobile from the pleasures of the buffet. She slept, and he examined the muscles twitching under her skin. In those early years, Franny’s body lacked the twin mysteries of scent and softness that had initially allured and eventually drove him from the bedrooms of his few previous girlfriends. His wife’s scent that night was of a wet rock, as if she had been created from the stream that ran behind his childhood home.

OVER A LIFETIME of experience, David’s mother learned that institutional food was more or less the same, regardless of the location, purpose, or quality of the institution in question. If they could make a fruit out of a chunk of Styrofoam, they would do it. David’s mother felt certain that she had once eaten a synthetic pear served to her by the institution. She could discern the pear’s flavor but it registered only vaguely, as if she was experiencing the pear under sedation or in a dream. Its texture was of a wet sponge soaked in chemicals.

She fumbled to peel the crimped foil on her orange juice container. It evaded her fingers, which felt thicker with every year’s birthday card she opened from her son, her old fingers failing even to separate paper from adhesive. He sent old cards, even a few she had given him for his own birthdays. The other ladies read them to her. David sometimes sent the letters her sister had written before she passed. This was before she settled into a less-demarcated timeline of growth and weakening. Her hands lost their power to the point where she had trouble turning a doorknob.

David’s mother fantasized about being able to turn doorknobs. There was the unyielding chill of metal under her strong hand, which gripped and turned so easily, feeling through her fingers the internal mechanism of the door. Her blindness heightened her sense of touch, allowing her to experience an even purer form of pleasure. Each joint in her body moved with a similar efficiency and silence. Shoulder and elbow, wrist, knuckles, fingertips; synchronous. She slowed down the motion in her memory of it, fingers grasping, tucking under the metal with such precision. She could feel the seam where metal met turning metal, the knob’s joints meeting her own. In her fantasy of it, she felt so strong that she could rip the knob off the door and hold it in her hand like a stone.

The women at this particular institution guided David’s mother through open doors in the distant way that they would guide an old woman at any institution. They sat her at empty tables and helped with her playing cards. The ridges and grooves in the cards greeted the sense of touch in her hands, which she still refused to admit was dimming.