John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

Soon as he touched her, she tackled him. Just erupted from her chair and tackled him. Her ankle clipped a table-leg, and the clatter of furniture behind them was pain as well, but she put it all into her bolt and grab, into a squeal of delicious need and power. She intended to kick over a lot more than tables and chairs. She’d had enough of everything boxed up and subtle: same old, same old. By the time the trip peaked she wanted a free fall. She wanted a revolution. No more lies forcing her into formal talk, strict posture, aching feet. Alden didn’t tell; she’d get to tell. She’d get to tell; nothing else was going to take over for her after all. That was her relief. If Stanley couldn’t handle the freedom, she’d find some place where no one so weak and ordinary could ever touch her again.

They were halfway across the living room before they fell. Nonie’s nose was full of rug as she hauled herself upright. She straddled his tummy, she wanted him pinned, she needed a moment. The grating on the space heater loomed at her side like a tin net, while the trip lifted off in rushes that carried her awareness higher each time.

Stanley looked stunned but grateful. His cap was gone, his hair so wild it covered his bald spots.

“Stuntzie,” she began, “Stuntzie…”

No good, the love name sounded mean. Past the giddiness, this new level was trouble.

Stanley…she thought through the words, she said some of them at least. Always remember, I was in love with you. Honestly I was—

“Hello? Are we in the right place?”

Was that him? She blinked but couldn’t ask; unexpectedly she was almost crying.

“Hello? Oh! Oh, sorry . We were told the place was empty.”

The front door was open. The chill proved this was real. In the brief entryway, bordering the living room, stood a man about Stanley’s age. Other than that his looks were dark. Nonie let her face shrink again. She fisted her skirt together behind one leg and lifted herself off Stanley. But this man had a whole army with him. A woman as dark and striking as himself, and a boy and a girl. They all were burdened with soft, bright luggage. Though the children still fiddled with their grips and shoulder straps, their looks were even worse than their father’s, honestly frightened. Nonie butted against the space heater and fell into a squat. Too close, the grate buckled against her spine. But she couldn’t let on how the tin thunder shook her, and she could only cross her arms against the wind ripe with the coming of rain.

The man’s name was Anthony Marcella. He’d arranged the rental with a realtor. Stanley got to his feet grinning, apologizing: Man, we never thought we had to check first with the realtor . Not in this market. The father didn’t smile. He said he and his wife were with the movie, they needed a quiet place to unwind. The movie! Stanley did a big chinny take, he slung his thumbs in the scoops of his undershirt, he was onto a party wavelength already. Did you hear that, Nonie — the movie! Anthony Marcella interrupted before she had to answer. His look was the opposite of Stanley’s, his voice ragged with smoke: So who are you guys?

“Tonight’s the only night we need the crib,” Stanley began. “And we’ll be cool, we’ll be just fine.”

He had to fish out Nonie’s license. See man, Winona Burnslides. But her father, man, get this: he was Joshua Burns Old Hides. Nonie couldn’t believe Stanley’s willpower. He’d made an instant commitment to ride out the complications. But she’d gone into this thinking it would be simple. Buying the acid had been less trouble than buying liquor. Nobody’d asked for ID; there’d been no whispering. Now however the mother pulled the father back into the doorway. And Stanley was making another offer, something about dinner. They wouldn’t need to haul the kids around, they’d have a couple slaves for the night.

The parents’ gestures at the children left fleshy trails that turned brown after the first second or so. When Anthony Marcella frowned, Nonie thought of a Disney stevedore. His whole family was that way, dark on dark. The mother, Lucy, might have had Indian blood herself. The boy was named Tonto, the girl Posey. Except their mouths didn’t look Indian. They pouted somberly, their lips were twitchless staring tropical fish. Then it appeared an agreement had been reached. The parents handed Stanley the plastic card with her name.

He hefted a pair of suitcases. He led them past Nonie towards the stairs. A ripple of smiles and satiny backpacks: she suffered another surge of giddiness. She cupped her mouth and nose, she choked.

God, how had she ever handled living here? The stairs were so narrow that the troop had to go up single file, clomp-clomp right over the open snout of her giddiness. The place was a shoe box with gables. And when she’d lived here, there’d been family all the time. Clomp-clomp a lot louder and more regular. She’d been one of those girls who could spend forever perched on the bedroom window sill. In the spring she’d actually sit out on the brief gable downslope, she’d watch for the ghostly night visitors: the baby spiders that rode their webs on the breezes. But it was autumn now. Autumn, and upstairs they were dragging round furniture.

Nonie scooted away from the space heater and stood. The blood-rush triggered another kind of openness, a terror spasm. The time remaining till her trip peaked yawned ahead out of control. A chatter from the edge of sleep rotated the living room clockwise round the treetops and scrap of sky visible out the front door. Nobody had thought to close it.

She had more important things to do, herself. While the room settled she got her face in line. Forget the stretching: she went into her workshop program.

She went for the holding pattern. Nonie wanted to be up there again, up where she could judge distances and keep count, while the movement and noise around her were no more than radar. And the withdrawal seemed speeded by the drug. It started to come over her even as she finished her first brief jeté. Yes brief; too long a jump would carry her right out of the house. The space was better suited to the sauté. Nonie turned, she skipped back and forth between the fallen kitchen chairs and the facing sofa. She slipped further onto her safety level each time she repeated the chorus she and Stanley had sung in the car on the way up. Another of his favorite blues: You got to move, you got to move .

By the time she began her fouettés she’d broken a sweat. The chill from the open door was a useful control. Kept her from getting giddy again, because she’d always been best at fouettés, her body snapping round prettily, prettily, while one leg remained locked and extended as if the foot were netted in mid-air. Her body was a perfect match for the line-drawing across the walls of keeping count. There…there. The inward tuck she was after.

Upstairs the noise got worse. They must have been moving the beds, oh Stanley. Up in her holding pattern she could see him so clearly. Him and all the men in her life: they didn’t dominate her, they didn’t tie her in knots. Just her being here proved she wouldn’t be pushed around. She’d had a session scheduled for this afternoon, and the director had warned her last time, if she skipped again she was out.

But Stanley now, he was pushed around. When he went on staff at Sunset for instance, all he could talk about was the money, how it would help with her tuition. And even after she graduated he remained a slave to the dollar. Sometimes he took assignments that meant he had to be gone all weekend. When she’d begun to work with the company from New York, there’d been no one to pick her up but Alden. She’d come out freshly complimented and ready for a drink, and there would be Alden. Even then she might have been able to handle it if Sunset hadn’t run only the most routine and soulless shots. Stanley would go through four rolls of film over a weekend, and the one shot they’d print would be of a kid leaping after a butterfly. Caption, The Never-Ending Joys of Childhood . How could a grown man allow himself to be used like that? She still had a hard time understanding, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. If it had been her, she’d have kept more of what mattered untouched.