Amber Sparks - May We Shed These Human Bodies

Grandma's heart wasn't very strong, he tells her. It was a good heart, but it wasn't very strong.

His daughter is three and solemn as a poet. She nods, though she doesn't understand. She watches cartoons and always equates good with strong. She doesn't have the capacity to undo metaphors. Glen should really know better, but then Glen has never really been good with children. He's better with dogs. He's better with soil and rocks.

It's probably a good thing, then, that eventually Glen's wife and daughter leave him, after he is caught with Jenny in the teacher's lounge. Glen could blame his idiocy on his fear of getting old, of growing up and dying young. It's what people do in his family. But he doesn't blame anyone except himself. His wife and the judge blame him, too.

Glen gets fired and divorced and charged and convicted. He has to pay a lot of money and spend half the year at a workhouse. Then he goes to live with his brother Peter in San Antonio. He has to leave the Golden Retriever behind, and his small daughter is unwilling to speak to him — at least, that's what his wife says. Ex-wife says.

Peter is married to a woman named Nanette. Nan is right out of a novel, dressed in peasant skirts and stilettos with teased, Texas-sized hair. She smokes long, thin cigarettes and is always rolling her eyes at everything Peter says. But she's pretty and small and Glen lies awake at night and listens to her squealing, Ooh, Peter, ooh, Peter, while the bedposts scrape and thump against the floor.

Peter is a teacher, too. Nan works from home; she makes jewelry and sells it online. Beaded turquoise stuff that Glen's wife would call 'tacky.' He likes the way it lies cool against Nan's warm brown skin, swinging away from her collarbone as she navigates the classifieds and helps Glen try to find a job. It's difficult enough to find work these days, never mind the felony conviction on his record.

Then there's a day when the phone rings; it's the school, for Nan. Peter's had a heart attack. They've taken him to the hospital, and Nan drives Glen there, fast. She is a terrific driver, like an FBI agent in a movie car chase scene.

Glen watches Nan cry into Peter's hospital gown. I told him to drink more wine, the stupid fool, she wails. Red wine is good for the heart, that's what I told him.

At the funeral, people ask where Peter's parents are. Glen tells them he is the only one left. Glen's ex-wife is at the funeral, too, with his daughter. He hugs his daughter tight and sits her on his lap; and although her mother glares at him, she allows the little girl to stay there throughout the service. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't Peter, his ex-wife keeps saying. Peter was a much better person than you.

Nan wears a black lace skirt, like a widow in a Western, and she cries into a handkerchief and everything. Without her, the service would have no dignity at all. The priest speaks in a dry Texan drawl, and Peter's students chew gum and flap their programs and talk in whispers that bounce off the church walls.

His daughter puts her little hand in his sweaty palm. Glen lets it lie there, limp, until Nan reaches over and closes his hand around the child's. She smiles at him around the handkerchief, and smears her mascara with the back of her other hand. Glen feels the warmth of his daughter's hand, like a damp little bird, feels a life ticking and nudging against his own.

Ruby can’t stop driving, because if she stops she’ll be somewhere. If she’s somewhere, she’ll be real. All the Ruby atoms in the vicinity will come to a screeching halt in the general shape of her. Then she’ll have to deal with all of the issues real people deal with.

No thank you.

So she does another loop around town and ends up sitting in traffic, watching a traffic cop in a florescent green vest wave cars through the intersection. A mosquito flies in and examines the vinyl seats of her car. She smacks it sharply and watches it crumple against her dashboard, shudders at the bright scarlet smear on her palm. She can’t stand the sight of small amounts of blood. Big blood, no problem. Buckets of blood, rivers of it, that’s okay. But it’s the little bits that freak her out, remind her that you bleed and you bleed and you bleed and eventually that will kill you but so slowly you don’t even notice until you’re dead. Then while you’re rotting, you wonder when you could have stopped it, what you could have done to stanch the little bleeding bits. Death by a thousand tiny cuts.

Now, finally in front of her apartment, she has to stop. She hates Home, ever since the boyfriend, Randy, more or less moved himself in. Or not really Home. It’s just Here. Just another Here she finds herself in for a while. She parks behind his hideous station wagon and sighs; he must be inside waiting for her. She has explained to him before how much she hates this. It’s my apartment, she always says. I need my privacy. He doesn’t understand the word my. He eats her privacy like most people eat popcorn.

He is sitting in her favorite chair, the big maroon and gold striped monstrosity left over from her dumpster-diving days. He is sipping Coke through a straw because his dentist told him the soda was rotting his teeth. This makes her crazy, crazy, crazy. He is watching the Home Shopping Network. He is laughing at what the host of the Home Shopping Network program has said. He is the only person she knows who could laugh at the host of a Home Shopping Network program. Take my cubic zirconia, please, she says, and flings her purse onto the couch.

He looks up, smiling and puzzled, his face a fleshy question mark.

Never mind, she says. She touches the couch, the table, the coffee cup left out from last night. She gives these things names in her head: Couch, Table, Cup. They don’t seem to fit, the names with the things. She wonders if this is what people mean when they talk about losing your mind. Perhaps bits of her mind are spinning away from her now, the bits containing Couch and Cup and Table and also Boyfriend and Conversation and Paying Attention to What I Am Talking About.

Are you paying attention to what I’m talking about? he asks.

No, she says truthfully. I’m sorry. She is, too. Sorry for him. She sits on the couch next to the chair, her favorite chair. Chair. Talk.

You’re thinking of other things, he says.

Yes, she agrees. Yes, probably.

Please, he says. His eyes look shiny, like marbles. Can we just have a normal conversation for once, Ruby? Just talk like people do? We can do that, just talk like people do, right?

Okay, she says, and looks out the window. She knows she’s not people but she does not mention this to him. His eyes are too blue; they remind her of Blue Moon ice cream, her least favorite flavor after Bubble Gum.

Are you cheating on me? He blurts it out and stops, looks embarrassed, but doesn’t take it back.

She doesn’t say anything.

Well, he says, are you? Are you seeing anyone else?

She pauses, wishes she could say yes, wishes she could be so cruel. No, she tells him.

He stands up then, his denim work shirt not quite covering his thin wrists. His wrists are thinner than hers. I don’t know what this is, he says. This isn’t a relationship, is it?

She decides not to answer. She wouldn’t know how to, anyway.

Caleb, her imaginary best friend, calls on the space wires from Chicago to complain about the weather. The best part about Caleb is that he has a direct line into her head so she doesn’t incur any long distance charges. Ruby has made Caleb an actor, big and blond and very gay, and she loves him more than anyone else in the world. He is not-people and she is not-people. They work well together. He is gay because sex is more exhausting than marathons.