Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

Five-twenty now, and she was hot all over. Soon I’ll be sweating, she thought. Her wrists twisted loosely inside their cuffs. She felt the tingle between her belly and her spine. Almost by accident she noticed the buzzing voices and shifting images of the TV. She had forgotten it, so busy she was staging herself, trying to decide where to put the keys (between her legs), what position her legs should be in, throwing them around to find an alluring pose. But now she realized she’d left it on the twenty-four-hour news channel. It’s fine, she thought. Something mindless to distract from the waiting.

She had to hold her head a little to the side, peer around the bedposts, but she could make out what was going on. What was going on was war. Which war was difficult to say—the sound was barely audible, so she only had images to go by—but it was a wintry place, close-up shots of soldiers showing icicled mustaches and beards. The men looked pale blue and dirty and tired, more tired than she could imagine. Some of the faces were talking to the camera, and though she couldn’t hear any words, she could see their beaten faces, resigned to something beyond sight. A village peppered with bodies, bloody snow. A dog sniffing at potatoes spilled from a bag clutched by a bulky bundled woman, her head shrouded in a flower-printed scarf. All perfectly dead, fallen where shot, knee-deep in snow in the middle of their lives.

Whatever war it was, it soon gave way to panels of heads and mouths and waves of commentary. The mediascape of winners and losers and statistics, of men and women in suits, as if their pin-straight hair had wiped this week’s war off the screen.

She closed her eyes and bit the inside of her cheek, because it was 5:40 and he wasn’t home yet and she suddenly realized she was freezing.

She looked up at the ceiling, down to her nipples standing up against the cold, over to the window now black with night, but the TV kept pulling like a hungry child. Five-fifty and she had to concentrate, had to distract her imagination to keep it from slipping into the nasty mind-wander of paranoia when your lover is not in the doorway. Now a tingling in her flesh: Was her own skin trying to tell her something? She jerked her wrists in a kind of death rattle against the slow fear crawling up her spine. He’s stopping to buy a bottle of wine, a rosé. He’s getting cash to take her to dinner. He missed the first train, he ran into a heavy crowd, the sky opened up and thickened the air, everyone outside is walking in slow motion.

By six she was really cold, and the shivering was taking all her energy so that her brain wouldn’t work right. It kept stuttering and lurching, and out of frustration she went back to the TV. But the TV hadn’t changed at all, it was the same news, or different news with the same faces, as if all over the world the news had the same actors: gaunt, icy faces, bulky women falling into death, sniffing dogs, eyes that were always black, buildings blasted beyond architecture. Why hadn’t the news changed since she last looked? Who were these actors in wars that never ended? She grew agitated over the repeating images, until she finally decided she would stare at the set until they changed. There must be sports news, after all. Or bad weather. Weather always changed the picture.

But they just kept coming and coming, six-fifteen, six-thirty, and when she finally closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to shut them out, she realized she was shivering. At seven she wept, slowly at first, but by seven-thirty she had snot running down her trough and all around her mouth. She was saying his name in low, whimpery wails, she was losing the feeling in her arms, her fingertips were prickling, she was quivering and hiccupping and shutting her eyes from the TV, the awful twenty-four hours of news, the news and the cold and the cuffs and the loss of circulation and the waiting that could be the rest of her out-of-control life. And he kept on not coming home, and if he didn’t, then what?

How’d you get the name Eddie?

She’s eyeing my name tag. From the get-go I feel her contradiction. She says her husband usually brings the car in, and sure as shit she’s got a stupid diamond on her ring finger, but she’s also all lash extensions, lip stud, push-up bra, and full sleeve of tats on her right arm—classic femme. Maybe the husband is a cover story.

Father gave it to me, I say, continuing my work. Edwina.

She moves closer. Most people drop their cars off, throw their hands up, walk away with that please please please don’t let this cost an arm and a leg. I don’t know what she wants, but I already like the way she wants to stick around and watch, to see what’s going on, even if she doesn’t get it. I mean, when she came into the garage, she told me, The car makes a strange sound when I shift the gears. What kind of sound? I asked. This is usually where people make asses of themselves, trying to sound like a sick motor. But she said, You know that noise you hear when your alarm goes off in the morning, only you’re not awake yet so you don’t exactly hear it, you sense it, something between a buzz and a ring, and for a moment you don’t know if it’s a hangover or a dream or the phone or the alarm or an insect or a snore? I had to admit I knew what she meant. I overslept a lot. Didn’t help me worth a shit to guess what was wrong with the car, but it did make me curious. She knew what she was talking about, even though she didn’t.

So when she came over to where I was under the hood, I said, Could you hand me that lug wrench? She picked the tool up and looked at it a long time before she handed it to me. She got some oil on her hand, and she looked at that too.

I worked on her car. She stayed very near. So, she says, how long did it take you to learn to be a mechanic? Now she is making circles with her ring finger in a blob of oil near the battery. She’s leaning right under the hood with me.

Better watch all that hair, I said, then answered: I picked it up real fast. Think I had a knack for it. I’ve been around a garage all my life, it seemed natural. My dad owned a garage. The oil, the smell of gasoline, the chrome, the black innards of an engine. I was helping with repair work by the time I was twelve.

Were there other girls helping with the repair work? she wants to know.

I laugh. Nope. Just me.

Now she’s fingering the tools. She’s asking me their names, what they’re used for. It’s the sort of conversation that makes you feel good about what you know.

I kind of start enjoying the company. I mean, I still think she’s a little weird, like when she starts asking me about the engine parts. She says, Don’t you think they’re a lot like body parts, like that tube over there that curls underneath that other thing looks like intestines, and that thick curved thing like an arm with a flexed muscle, that big thing in the middle with all the compartments could be the lungs, it even looks like it’s meant for air, and all of it together here under the hood, and us inside it tightening and screwing and greasing.

So now we’re both oily and curious, I guess.

When you were a kid, did your dad teach you other things? You know, like how to throw a baseball?

Not really. Just mechanics. He was real busy. What about you? You look athletic. Those are some shoulders. But I’m lying. My father taught me how to be the man of a house.

I was a very good swimmer.

Good for you.

I guess I was a tomboy. I didn’t have many girl friends. Except for two. One was a cheerleader. The other was a girl nobody else talked to. She had red hair and glasses. She used to sit by herself under a tree all through recess.

I just keep working, even though by now I’m getting horny. I guess it’s the weirdness, the unexpectedness of her. Everybody gets excited by things they aren’t expecting. Not that she scared me, not really, except that now I see she’s holding the lug wrench and swinging it a bit. I’ve read stories, you know? Women are doing strange things these days. I think, Don’t be silly, don’t be so paranoid. She’s weird, not crazy.