He is a playwright in New York and talks about his mother and likes to cook. I tell him over the phone I want to host Thanksgiving and ask if he can come. “Karen, you know I will cook the meal for you. The turkey the cranberry sauce the mashed potatoes and the cheesecake.”
Paul, he is melodramatic. I imagine his arms flailing as he describes the meal. He probably wears one of those yellow cable knit sweaters. And I love him. But he is gay. So, we decide he’ll come for the entire week. And when that late November arrives, with the geese overhead flying south and away in the gray sky, he pulls up in a Volkswagen van. He jumps out and embraces me. He says, “Darling, do you have a fag?” This is a joke. He knows I quit smoking years ago.
I have lived here a year now in my little house, cinderblock with deep red siding, a bit dilapidated, across from a butcher. I did not even know they had butcher shops anymore. My first Thanksgiving in three years, my first Thanksgiving here. I moved because my therapist said I needed the air to breathe. The ocean and beach are an hour drive, but I never go. There are too many bikinis. I have scars and can no longer bear to see my own body. In the summer, I can smell the salt on the breeze, heavy like too much perfume. And my neighbor raises chickens and told me I could have all the eggs I wanted if I didn’t report her to the city. She sets an unmanned table in her front lawn with the eggs, trusting people will just pay. I leave a few dollars for the ones I do take, normally on the days I have nothing in the fridge, and those days, lately, have been coming more frequently.
My friend opens the fridge. He sees the half empty ketchup. The mustard with a dubious expiration date. A couple Samuel Adams turned on their side and shoved to the back. He frowns. I show him where I keep the coffee, an indulgence, a simple, local roast. “This is what you have been living on — fumes?”
I nod, show him his room. In the morning, he wakes before me and listens to Tibetan singing bowls. I am in my bathrobe. The bathrobe is shabby and blue and hangs off my breasts lopsided. His dress is immaculate with skinny jeans and a cardigan. A shock of white hair slicked back on his head. He is starting to bald but not so much anyone really notices. I pour my coffee and pretend I burn my hand.
He takes my hand into his. He turns my hand, inspects my fingernails. Looks at my palms. “This past summer I met a lady in the theatre who taught me how to read palms. Would you care if I read your palms?”
I am not into all that psychic jazz.
Paul takes me shopping. We buy off-brand wine and a turkey. Canned cranberries because, though I prefer fresh, the canned jelly is what I remember from my childhood. Robert, a high school mate from Michigan, arrives a few hours later. And although Robert and I had reconnected via Facebook, it’s been nothing more than the occasional like or sad face emoji, nothing more than a passing wave because I cannot bring myself to share online anything that is real. I am unsure what Robert is doing so far from Michigan. Why he is here in this bleak New England autumn with the sugar maples and paper chestnuts almost bare, the unswept olive and gold dead leaves at my doorstep. He is an unexpected, uninvited guest. I feel for him about the same way the Indians felt for the Puritans, seeing them struggle through the winters. He asks about the television. He wants to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I have not had a television for about as long as I have not smoked.
I also invite people I know from the college—shabby haired professors, a few MFA graduate students because they think they are artsy. An actual artist, a painter of stilt-legged cranes and abstract cows; he travels down from the wiles of Maine. I invite the real estate broker who sold me the house. My neighbor who raises the chickens. I invite Johnny and his wife and their teenage daughter. Johnny brings an apple pie.
The artist from Maine tells me about his strange relationship to yellow. How he hated yellow and refused the color access to the canvas. How then for years after he forced himself to put somewhere anywhere on a painting the yellow, even if the color was a little dab. And now, yellow screams across his paintings. One of his pieces hangs above my mantel—cows tripping over windmills planted in yellow-tipped grass. I have surrounded myself with people I do not really know.
My last lover died in my arms. The MFA students tell me that is a cliché and want details. But I do not want to say how he died. I do not want to talk about the port, how even when we were not at the hospital that round disk in his chest was always a reminder. I had expected him to lose his hair. I watched how his hair fell out in large clumps, clogged the shower drain, and looked similar to what a cat would cough up on a living room floor. I do not want to discuss in detail how I bought him blue Bic razors and asked if he wanted shaved clean. He shook his head and allowed the stuff to fall out until no hair remained. I do not want to talk about the morning we woke in bed, making slow love, and I stopped because his eyebrows had disappeared. I do not know where his eyebrows went. No one prepared us for that. No TV shows, no support groups. And his face was being erased, falling out and sinking into the shower drain.
When I moved, I brought with me all the left-over orange pill bottles with his name printed along the sides, some of them childproof. And I remember him not being able to open those, so he hacked away at the bottles with a steak knife and threw the caps into the garbage. The bottles—some of them empty, some of them still full—they are crammed beside the basket with the nail clippers and Q-tips and hairspray, and I cannot throw them away.
Robert comes out of the bathroom excited and holds one of the bottles between his fingers. “What are these? What do they do? Can I have a few?”
I scream and beat him in the chest with my fists. Everyone stares. Paul, my friend, pulls Robert away, and takes him outside. The scene is too much for Johnny, and he smokes two packs a day. He slips out for a moment and returns with the cigarette smoked to the nub and field stripped. He asks where I keep the garbage. I pour him another glass of wine. I pour myself a glass of wine. It is maybe my third or fourth glass. I am not sure, and I do not care. I tell Johnny not to bother with the garbage, just to put the butt in the sink.
I lean into Paul, press my head into his shoulder, and he strokes my hair. If I could purr like a cat, I would.
The professors are all from the biology department. One studies the declining New England lobster population. The other, an entomologist, his specialty is the American Burying Beetle. “Most bugs don’t mate for life,” he says. “This one does. It finds an animal carcass and burrows underneath the dead bird or whatever it has found until the body drops into the ground. The two adults then mummify the body, have babies, and feed on the body until the kids are grown up.” He tells us this while we munch on our turkey and stuffing, our canned cranberry. We listen to Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit on Pandora. The MFA students act academic while they listen to the entomologist talk about the beetle and nod and hum affirmative grunts and murmurs with their last syllables on a downward note.
Johnny comes in from another cigarette. “You know,” he says, “the other day I was out on my front porch. Not near anyone. These two joggers are running by. I am fifty feet away from the sidewalk. Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe it’s only twenty. But here they come, and they are running in their sweats and headbands. I think they wore headbands. You know, the kind from the eighties that are frizzy and red. They have iPods strapped to their arms. Probably they’re listening to Tony Robbins or some other motivational speaker. Keeping their pace up. Real yuppie types. They are running, and I’m sitting and smoking. Not anywhere near the sidewalk. On my porch by the door. They start fake coughing and waving at the air as they pass me by. The thing is, one of them lives across the street. And I see him sometimes in the mornings on my way to work. He stands at his door and sucks down joints. So now I smoke in secret. In the backyard under the trees. I’m killing the trees with secondhand smoke. And I’m there. In my backyard. Smoking in secret. What I want to know is, when did marijuana become more acceptable than regular old tobacco? Why is there death attached to one and the whole crazy idea of health and wellbeing with the other? When did that happen here in America?”
I have more wine. One of the MFAers, they read a poem. It’s not their poem. It’s William Carlos Williams going on about a wheelbarrow and white chickens. It’s a lame poem. I don’t see what is special about it, just rain and chickens.
“I could probably paint that,” the artist says. “I’ve never painted chickens. Or wheelbarrows. I’d make the wheelbarrow yellow.”
“Did you ever have formal training?”
“No. Never took a single art class. I used to work the docks. Unloading cargo ships. We got in once a whole shipping container of t-shirts. Mustard yellow but not the bright Heinz kind. More of a spicy Dijon. A Grey Poupon. They were just thrown in. Tossed in big heaps. I don’t know why because we never did anything for anybody else, but I had to sort all those shirts by size. There were six sizes, went all the way to eight-x. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an eight-x sized shirt, but they are huge tents. I didn’t know people ever came that big.”
“You ever watch My 600-Pound Life?” Johnny asks.
The painter shook his head. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Hoarders is my favorite show,” the real estate broker says.
“Anyway, I had to sort these shirts. I was halfway through, and I thought, what am I doing? Like a what am I doing with my life kind of question. I was always working these jobs. Working seven days a week. Raising kids and where was I going to be in ten years? The same place I was then, ten years from that moment in my life? Was that where I was going? I walked off that job, and I don’t know why but found myself inside a Hobby Lobby staring at canvas and brushes and paint. I bought a bunch of that stuff. Filled my car with it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I researched a lot on painting and the color wheel on Wikipedia. The first thing that comes up is a picture of the Mona Lisa. I thought there was no way I could do that. I thought for years my paintings looked like what a four-year-old would scribble on walls. Now I have a studio. An eBay account. And who thought I’d love this, who thought I’d be able to feed myself on badly drawn cows.”
“That poem was weird. Kind of a painting. I wonder sometimes if instead of the table I should use a wheelbarrow for the eggs. I plant tomatoes every year and have a surplus of tomatoes. I always end up giving so many tomatoes away. Too many to eat myself. I should set those out with my eggs too.”
I am a phantom in these conversations. I do not think I am drunk enough yet. I hear whispers in the corners of my house, snippets of conversation hovering around my ferns where the old World War I love letters had been pasted onto the wall in a collage. I found the letters in the attic in a shoe box. A soldier’s lament on yellowed paper. Stamps from across the ocean. Paper so worn thin from age, a small lamp’s light smeared the meaning of the words.
“Is he still out there? Robert?” Johnny asks. The house is full of these old forgotten things. New Yorker magazines piled in the basement with fifteen-cent cover prices that I have not yet decided whether I should frame, throw away, or donate.
“Sitting in his car,” Paul says.
“Just in the street like that?” Johnny asks. Frayed rag quilts made from patches of mismatched cloth thrown in bedroom corners that I folded and stored away in a drawer.
“What’s going on with Karen? Is she okay?” A collection of mason jars colored blue with age that I stored away in the detached garage.
“Yes, yes.” Paul shrugs off the question with his fingers. “You have a couple cigarettes?”
In high school, in Michigan, Robert tried to grope me by the boy’s locker room. He was awkward and unsuccessful. Always asking me out. He asked me out at least fifteen times. He was never successful. His wife left him. He hadn’t seen his kids in years. He’s unemployed. All he owns is in that car. He drives from town to town, taking showers at truck stops, Love’s and Pilots, TravelCenters of America. Eating Subway and Wendy’s. Begs on corners and in front of Walmarts with a cardboard sign that reads Anything Helps, God Bless. Even though he is an atheist. The idea of heaven confuses me. He is in the street because he has nowhere to go.
“I sold a house this last weekend that I think has a haunted well.”
“A haunted what?”
“Yep, you heard that right. A haunted well. Way back in 1778, a young girl, eighteen years old, snuck out of her house by the bedroom window to meet her boyfriend, the story goes. Her parents hated the boy she dated. He was a redcoat. A British spy in the Revolution. She never returned home. Her body was never found for years and years until 1809 at the bottom of the well. Morticians or whatever discovered strangle marks on the bones of her neck. They think she was murdered by her boyfriend. I was showing the house, telling the buyers about the well and the ghost because of the full disclosure laws. Old Pepsi and Coke bottles lined a window sill in the kitchen. I was removing them, you know. Trying to stage the place and running late when the buyers came to look. And those bottles I hadn’t gotten to yet, they flew off the window onto the linoleum and shattered. Believe it too; that’s actually what sold the house. They were going to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast or something. A restaurant? Marketing they said.”
“What do you do for a living?”
Johnny’s wife sighs. “An accountant for a charter school.”
“Funding’s probably tight.”
Johnny’s wife nods.
“Your daughter go?”
The daughter shakes her head no.
“She’s a cheerleader at the regular high school.”
I step out the front door. The sun has long since gone away. I am left with the moon, a pale shadow of the day obscured in dusky clouds streaming across the night sky. A bright sulfur yellow shines from the streetlamp. The air is cold. There is rain on the wind. I huddle my shoulders together, rub my hands and breathe into my palms. The earth rises in damp cidery scents, the last crickets are singing. I tap on Robert’s car. He cracks the window. “We have not served the apple pie yet.”
“I don’t understand what I did. What upset you?”
I offer him a weary smile. “Come inside. Where it’s warm. And there are people.”
He follows me to the house. I open the door.
Paul is in the middle of a story. “And my mother, she is the most amazing woman I have ever known. She bought a town in South Dakota. An entire town. Not a grocery store or a bit of real estate. But the entire town. Several miles from Wall Drug. And as you know, all roads lead to Wall Drug where they sell free water and homemade pie and have that ridiculous jackalope statue. But my mother, she’d argue with you every time. Every road actually leads to her town.”
“What’s the name of the town?”
He shrugs because he either does not remember or the name does not matter. I have heard this story before. I fall into a chair and open another bottle of wine.
“You know, she was so kind to me. She was my best friend. She knew from a very young age I was gay. This wonderful way of being, you know. When I was five, I found her collection of dildos. I stole one. A small one. Kept it underneath my bed.”
Johnny’s wife asks their daughter to serve the pie. Probably to get her out of the room, but she handles everything with aplomb. Smiles at the right times, passes out the plates and forks.
“My father was a hateful person. He beat me you know. And he died in that horrible car accident when my mother ran him down and drove over him three times in her 1960 Mercury. It was a shabby blue thing. I could lay across the back seat from head to toe, and I never knew what happened to that car. Some of the townspeople, I think, buried the evidence, really.”
The bells from the church down the way ring out the late hour. The church is empty and slated to be replaced with Section 8 housing. The butcher shop will open on Monday. I may purchase some steak. The MFAers, the shabby professors, Johnny and his family, my neighbor, the real estate broker, they trundle away. I am left with Robert asleep on my couch.
Paul and I, we sit on the back stoop in my little patch of yard. Three, four in the morning. The leaves are strewn about because they have no place to go. He takes my hand in his and studies my palm.
“Darling, your life line is very long.”
“Paul, why are you gay?”
“Because being gay is as American as apple pie and secret smokers.” And he hands me a cigarette.
“Seriously. We could be something.”
