Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I took the phone and tried to speak, could not, and cleared my throat.

“Hello?”

“What are you doing up there?”

It was Glynn’s voice, fussy and querulous. I had not heard that tone since she left childhood.

“I’m listening to Sunnyland Slim and fixing to wash dishes,” I said, trying for lightness. My voice sounded like dull old sandpaper in my ears.

“What’s up with you? You having a good time?”

“No. I’m having a shitty time. I have to leave, tonight, right now. You have to come get me. When can you be here? I have to tell Marcie’s stepmother—”

“What on earth? What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is Marcie’s horrible, shitty mother,” my daughter snapped. “She just called and said Marcie and Jess have to come home first thing in the morning, on the eight o’clock plane. She didn’t get her child support check and Marcie’s dad promised it would be there by now and he says he sent it and she says he’s lying and if he doesn’t put them on that plane she’s calling the sheriff. Of course I can’t stay. So when will you get here? I want to tell them—”

I could not think. My ears were ringing and my mouth was numb. The other Merritt had gone far away indeed; I could not seem to find her. Finally I said, “Let me ask T.C.”

“Why do you have to ask him, for God’s sake? He’s not your keeper. Why can’t you just come yourself and let’s get this over with? I don’t want to have to talk to him and laugh at his stupid jokes.”

Pure, red rage swept me like wildfire.

“Your tone stinks, Glynn,” I said, trying not to shout at her, “and I will ask T.C. because it’s his Jeep and because he has been extraordinarily nice to both of us, and because I do not want to drive down the mountains in the dark by myself. Not that it’s any of yours business. We can start…”

I looked over at him. He sat slumped bonelessly on his spine on the desk, studying me, his face closed and calm. He held up five fingers.

“We can start in five minutes,” I said. “We’ll be there when we get there. Have your things out on the porch ready to go. And get your act straightened out. Neither one of us wants to cope with you in that mood.”

“Well, that’s just too bad about neither one of you,” she said nastily. I could hear the tears under her voice, and my anger abated, but only somewhat. But then she added, “What would please either one of you? For me just to vanish and let you keep on doing…whatever it is you’ve been doing up there?”

The red anger soared.

“You are way out of line,” I said coldly. “Be ready.”

And I slammed the phone down, and stood there, thinking that I had no idea what move to make next.

He came over and stood in front of me, but he did not touch me.

“I’m sorry, Merritt,” he said softly. “I wasn’t ready, either. I thought there would be more time.…”

I began to cry, dully and hopelessly, the tears running down my cheeks and dripping off my chin.

“T.C.,” I sobbed. “T.C.…I wanted to know what your second-grade teacher was like. I wanted to know where your folks went on vacation every year. I wanted to know if you hate boiled okra—”

“We knew from the beginning that it wasn’t going to be one of those loves, didn’t we? That kind of context, that kind of resonance—that’s for the long loves, baby. That’s for the loves that raise children and pay income taxes and look after old people and cuss the lawn service. We couldn’t have had that. You already have one of those, a perfectly good one, and I already had one. This one is separate and different, and apart from that other kind. This one makes up in depth what it lacked in width. But I’ll tell you this. Whenever you feel like you need to know something about me, stop and think a minute. Whatever comes into your mind will probably be right. Because I’ll be there telling you, always, and all you have to do is listen.”

I put my arms around him and scrubbed my face into his shirt and cried and cried. It was a soundless, wrenching sort of crying, endless, uncathartic. He held me very close, but softly, and kissed my hair and my wet face.

“You’ll have to stop crying now, Merritt, because I simply can’t stand it anymore,” he said presently.

So I did. I still don’t know why it was so easy. I suppose that there just has to be an end to tears sometimes, even when there is no end to pain. I looked up at him, and his dark eyes glistened wetly, and he let me go and turned away. I think it was then that my heart truly broke. After that there was mainly dullness and loss, and that was better than the raw grief. But only just.

We put Curtis in the backseat of the Jeep and went down the winding, dark mountain road in silence. It was still very hot and thick; Curtis panted restlessly in the backseat, and kept turning around and resettling himself, as if he caught the sense of pain. Once or twice he whined, and touched his nose to the back of T.C.’s neck. I felt the tears prickle again both times, but knew that I would not cry anymore. We did not speak until the lights of Palo Alto lay below us.

“We could meet,” I said. “You’re coming East in October, aren’t you? To see your boy in his season opener? We could meet somewhere in the middle; I could come over to…where? Birmingham, maybe.”

He was silent so long that I looked over at him, and saw that the white ghost of a grin flashed in his dark beard.

“A night in the Birmingham Days Inn? Dinner and a drink and a song or two around the piano bar? Condoms from a machine in the men’s room? Would you want that, Merritt?”

“It might be better than nothing.”

But I knew that it would not be; that it would be terrible past imagining.

“Don’t settle, love,” he said mildly and took my hand, and we rode the rest of the way in silence again, joined only by our intertwined fingers.

Glynn stood on the porch of the big Victorian. Her duffel and several shopping bags stood around her. She was alone. The yellow porch light spilled down on her, and even from the driveway I could tell that something about her was very different. Then it hit me: her hair. She had cut her hair, and it was curled around her small head in a medusa-like tangle of stiff-sprayed curls and whorls. For a moment she looked as if she was wearing a strange hat, a bright, complicated straw. Then I realized that she had bleached it, too.

“My God,” I said, and T.C. laughed. It was nearly the old laugh.

“How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Palo Alto?” he said, and to my surprise I laughed, too. There was more pain in it than mirth, but it was a laugh. I thought in sudden, swift agony that laughter was going to be his last, best gift to me. He had saddled me with a new sense of absurdity.

Glynn picked up her bags and duffel and stomped toward us. She was wearing pink sandals that tied around her ankles and had very high platforms, and she teetered perilously. It spoiled the effect of what might have been a fine, angry prowl. She wore spandex tights down to her knees and a T-shirt cropped so that it cleared her waist. Every bone and knob and rib and hollow showed, and automatically I assessed the thinness. It was less than it had been, but it was still grotesque under the straw curls and the cerise spandex. When she got close to the car we could see that she wore vivid vermilion lipstick, and slashes of mauve blush, and her eyes were so thick with makeup that I could not see anything but spiky lashes and violet shadow in the dim light. I did, though, catch the gleam of gold in one of her nostrils. A ring. My daughter had a ring in her nose.

She should have looked entirely ludicrous, but in an odd, eerie way she was beautiful: instead of a young medieval martyr, a painted Mexican madonna, a hectically theatrical actress from a forties play. I could not speak.