Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

He could not make her laugh. She told him frankly that he was not in the least bit funny.

Another glass of wine, a nice big brimmer.

Good thing she chose Comp Lit over Women’s Studies. Wasn’t a victim? Now she has the stomach to finish washing the saucepan from the soup misadventure, and she tips the thin vomit down the drain with a tap water chaser.

As if her status were determined by whether or not she enjoyed it. One girl claimed he was hung like a goat, and thereafter they all called him Billy. Boarding-school girls sardined together, marinating in each other’s fishiness, became experts on whatever is the opposite of awe. Awfulness. The girls on her hall pored over magazines with pink-toned photo shoots of uber organs. He liked a certain degree of slickness, and so he had Marguerite come before he entered her. “Come, little girl,” he would say, and she would, immediately. She crushed her own breasts against her chest as if someone were hugging her.

She liked imagining herself adult enough to keep a secret. She thinks now, all of a sudden, that she didn’t like him, and he must have known that.

The front door of his apartment opened straight into the living room, the kitchen alcove was on the left, with the rather crumbling bathroom behind it. His bedroom was behind the living room, with an illicit washer and dryer in the closet, stacked one on top of the other. Never once did he offer to do Marguerite’s laundry. One evening there was a knock on the door as they were feeling each other up on the sofa. In fact they sat facing the door, the world, like the farmer and his wife in American Gothic . Outside the frame, perhaps, if indeed they were a painting, Marguerite was naked on the bottom and he was one-handedly, rhythmically, spreading her open. She made a clicking sound that was only slightly distracting.

It seemed as if the knock was right there in the room with them, and they both recoiled. Marguerite’s first thought was that it was her mother. She stuffed her heart back down like a jack-in-the-box and grabbed his damp T-shirt to cover her fuzzy triangle. Maybe because of her ever-increasing and self-perceived ease with sex she had been lulled into forgetting the danger. Maybe it was the head of school. The police. Or just an unwitting neighbor. Did someone want to borrow a cup of sugar? she whispered. He motioned for her to stay quiet.

Finally the knocker ceased, discouraged, and Marguerite turned to her lover. “When are you going to make an honest woman of me?” she said, almost without thinking.

One weekend, James took Dinah to New York City.

She stood between the double doors that divided one room of their suite from the other and watched him unpacking. It seemed to her he’d brought everything. A suit for the opera, flannel pajamas, shirts for morning, afternoon, and evening, professionally folded. He looked up at her and flinched. She noticed his thick, wood-colored hair was clumped and almost matted where he had a cowlick in the middle of his forehead.

He said, “I’ve forgotten something important.” He was rummaging through the suitcase. But he seemed more surprised than bereft, and it was forgotten.

He couldn’t get enough of her. All weekend he kept bearing her back to the bed. They skipped the opera, the bed had its own brocade curtains. Every time she woke up, in the morning or in the middle of the night, James was propped up on one elbow wiggling his foot and gazing at her. “I love you so much I can’t sleep,” he whispered.

But by Sunday afternoon he had fallen silent. It was almost as if he would have forgotten to get in the car and drive back to Providence if Dinah hadn’t said it. Then she had to drag their suitcases out to the hall and shove them in the elevator by herself, and how would she know how much to tip the concierge or the doorman?

The car seemed enormous, a cold, echoing chamber. Dinah realized she had no idea how to drive it. “What is it?” he mimicked. Only she hadn’t actually said anything. He looked at her triumphantly and the car swerved and fishtailed, throwing off gravel.

“Scared you. Scared us both,” James said, mildly. “You know, we could keep going. I could drive you all the way to—” Dinah saw that he was trying to locate something. Where she was from, that’s what he couldn’t remember. For a moment she believed that she couldn’t remember either, and that was love, wasn’t it. Being unable to remember where you came from.

Very quietly James started, “I’ve just lost it—”

He walked around the car and opened the door for her in front of her residence hall. He placed her luggage on the ground beside her. His picked up her hand as if it were a blank and squeezed it.

Another scene: he teased her, If she went back to California, he’d freeze the harvest! Oranges, avocados. Brightly flowering ice plants lined her childhood walk — he said, ice plants?

There was a Bird of Paradise with a spiked orange comb that stalked the house’s shadow. She showed him a playful snapshot: back to back with the prehistoric-looking flower, her arms crossed tightly over her stomach.

Blue-flowering rosemary, whole hedges of it.

As a child Dinah had put her thumb over the round tinny mouth of the hose and sprayed water into the hibiscus. In spite of her father she let the water dump down on the bleached, thirsty sidewalk. The sun was like white noise in Los Angeles, and the trees and the hibiscus were outlined in heat. Her wet footprints on the walk must have sizzled and evaporated.

Another Webb cousin was coming for the weekend. All was well again: “I’m going to show you off, darling,” James hooted. Henry came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and another around his shoulders. How had James described those men of his father’s generation? Festooned in scarves and bowties and ascots. Henry scuffed into his heel-bitten moccasins.

James had scribbled pages of notes for the final paper in Economies of Power. The notes were rolled into a tube and rubber-banded. James shot a rubber band at Henry.

“The boy has had those damn slippers since when, Henry?”

“Since my mummy gave them to me,” said Henry. James snorted.

“Have the whites come back? I didn’t leave you any towels,” said Henry.

James looked through the tube of notes. He passed the tube to Dinah, perched on the desk beside him. “Have at it.” He was failing out of college and going to work for his father. “I’m that kind of son,” he had explained reasonably. “There’s always one in every batch of us.”

James said, “Let’s make it a Christmas party for Ol’ Charley.” They were eating ham sandwiches they had made for themselves for dinner. There was only a week left in the semester. James wouldn’t bother with finals. Threads of snow had begun to blow about in the afternoons when the sky, it seemed to Dinah, became simultaneously dark and pale.

That afternoon he’d blundered into the bathroom drunk when she was washing her armpits. She’d taken down the top of her dress in front of the mirror.

“Goddamn it, Dinah,” he said loudly, but also peevish. “Don’t they have showers in your dormitory?” He put his hands on the doorframe to steady himself.

There were often no towels even though they subscribed to a laundry service. She had never seen one hung to dry or air after a boy had used it. They paid for the heat themselves, and so had decided simply not to use it. Once Henry had taken her hand and pressed it on a cold radiator when James wasn’t looking.

Dinah’s dress was tight, binding in the armpits, which had made her sweat in the first place. She couldn’t pull it up easily. She had thin arms and full breasts. Indeed her breasts seemed to push against her clothing lately. She was hot even though the weather was getting colder, even though she was from California. She had dark freckles on her torso, a neatly tucked-in belly button. Now James covered his eyes impulsively. From behind his mask he said, deadpan, “My strangely alabaster Californian.” He grinned and took his hand away from his face. She was still naked.