It's All Very Satisfying
Edmond Stansberry
Cul-de-sac was an unpleasant word and I repeated it
aloud standing on the grass next to the driveway.
-Cul.de.sac. Cul.day.sac.
My wife was picking up boxes from the truck bed that wasn’t ours and carrying them in fast. Her breasts were outlined by the sweat that soaked into her shirt.
-Carol, do you need anything.
There was no reply.
I promised I would help her with the next truckload.
-I’m going to look at something in the yard.
I slowly backed away. She was fierce with the boxes. Sweat splattering on the edges of the truck bed. She hated moving. This was becoming apparent. But it was her bastard child to move here to begin with.
There were perks to living outside of downtown. Yards are nice. Big areas to be outside and put your feet in the grass without feeling strange or being thought of as someone who takes their shoes off in nature. This house was our new house, and one of 33 in the rows that ended here at ours, the most tan house at the end of the street.
Each house was probably made by the same engineer, or developer, or carpenter. I didn’t really know the difference. Very few had anything other than the usual playground set, or swimming pool, or screened in porch that overlooked a garden.
Our house had a large structure something bigger than anything you would call a shed. It looked like an aged modern greenhouse with opaque plastic looking glass and a large “open” sign on the big front door. I walked around the outside of the building not yet ready to go in. In the back and overlooking an immense countryside of undeveloped land was a small built out platform just wide enough to hold a single chair and just large enough to be called a porch.
When I came back in it was dark, the truck was gone, and a light was on at the top of the hall in an office like area where boxes with my name on them had been stacked.
It was 6:30 and Carol wasn’t back from work. She was always home at least an hour before this. There were only four or five things that would keep Carol from driving straight home. Sometimes she would pick up groceries, but only things that were immediately needed for dinner, namely ice cream. Dry cleaning was possible. The post office made the list, though she liked to take care of that during the lunch hour if she could. And sometimes there was something out of the ordinary, like a renewed license plate or one of those business end parts of life that Carol was far better at than I was and tended to tell me about after they were finished. She liked to save the weekends for things that took time if she could help it.
I opened the door and sat down on one of the adirondack chairs on the porch to wait for her to come home. Eventually I slipped into my third nap of the day in the armchair head of Kansas’ July.
The sound of Carol pulling in to the driveway woke me up in what I assumed was sometime much later. The sun was gone. It was a strange new car that stopped and I wondered what she had done with mine. I made no motions and said nothing as she walked up the stairs to the front porch.
She looked beautiful. She always did. Carol was the most beautiful woman of any of the 33 houses filled with slightly to moderately overweight women. She was the most beautiful woman in our downtown apartment too. Especially after she’d cleaned up. She wore a floral dress that fell and rested halfway up her knees with each stair step. It was a pleasure to see and I wondered if I could convince her to sleep with me.
She said nothing and with a stupid smile sat next to me on the arm of the chair and rubbed my head with her short fingers, softly and slowly, until I forgot about any curiosity or anger about where she’d been and was only thinking about the trail of goosebumbs she left behind on my scalp like some comet tail.
When she could tell I was almost asleep again she placed her head under my chin and laid her strange smell on me.
The house was more or less shuffled into place quickly. In the kitchen I searched for simple things; plates and spoons. Every cabinet that would have held these things before now held other things. Blenders were where the bowls should have been. There was a set of dining ware that she had inherited from her ex-husband’s family on display on a shelf above the sink.
-Carol! Where are the spoons!
I heard her rustling in what was probably the closet upstairs. I thought about the swarm of clothing, piles and acres, all being chronologically ordered by purchase date and with a delicate violence shoved into a massive line of hangers. I could go without the spoon.
With the new house I had my own office it seemed. I had been sort of sleeping there since I hadn’t really started unpacking. Since Carol wasn’t showing any signs that she felt horny, wearing big t-shirts and putting her hair up like she did when she was feeling sick, the office floor worked just fine.
My office had carpeted floors, the kind in dentist waiting rooms. All of the cables and wires and computer pieces sat on the desk. Some cheap piece of Ikea white bread desk. Carol had a habit of bad taste. She spent her money on matching towel sets, pulp television season box sets, cell phone covers, big flat screen TVs, prefab asymmetrical coffee tables, desks with 18 pages of instructions, fourteen screws, and a little ratchet specially designed for each hole. It was a strange way to live.
I looked through her pill bottles looking for anything that might be abnormal. Back in our old apartment there was always at a least a few bottles of prescriptions that were mistaken for recreation when there was nothing else around. Now there was nothing but cold medicines.
She was the only child of her lawyer father and a second-wife who had been flown in to the United States at her father’s request. Carol attributes this to her lack of decision making, her obsession with prescription medications, and the rough skin on all of her knuckles. She had used these excuses in middle school, and high school, in college, and in several reserved occasions in her adult life after discovering the need to appear random in your mistakes. On Carol’s 28th birthday she had not shown up to her own birthday party and the next morning had said she had miscalculated how many relaxants could be taken when drinking heartily.
With no sign of the new car and feeling bored I felt like masturbating. Since the move we hadn’t had much or any sex. I lay back on the carpet with my pants pulled down to the tops of my shoes and tried to picture Carol doing things we didn’t do in bed. I matched fantasies or things I had seen in porn with Carol’s body and voice. After short stints of this I’d find myself mindlessly twirling and stretching myself. Only when I focused on things that had happened, positions from angles I remembered her in did it go anywhere.
-What are you doing?
Carol was home.
-Just thinking about you?
-That is repulsive.
Carol sat on the office chair and stared at my body with a look of disgusted curiosity.
-What do you think about? In your fantasies, if they really are about me. What is it you imagine?
I didn’t know how to answer, but eventually she smiled at me and smiled back. Carol pulled up her dress and sat over me and we did the things we usually, always do.
-He thrusts her weakly and with the caution of someone who might come too soon.
-What are you doing? Shut up.
Groups of people were showing up at the house regularly. There were dinner parties and holiday parties and days when people came to watch an important game. Tonight groups of people pulled into the driveway carrying bottles of wine and little dainty pathetic plates of food - true markings of people with pointless lives who had come to loudly say nothing at each other for many hours. I left for the back porch to smoke cigarette before the hellos and once there kept walking the fifteen miles to the nearest gas station.
The gas station sat just off the highway’s on-ramp and was tucked into a strip mall of cell phone stores, fast food restaurants and cheap haircuts. I bought a beer, four packs of cigarettes and a corn dog, paid in change, and sat down on the curb outside to smoke and drink cans of beer wrapped in newspaper.
A group of boys were sitting in trucks in the back corner of the lot facing the highway making of line of trucks from one end of the lots to the other. It must have been the weekend. Most of them sat on lowered tailgates, swinging their legs underneath. Heads followed the self-aware walk of high school girls parading themselves into the gas station. One walked passed me. Once their eyes left her I found some of the boys staring at me. Wide eyed and curious and confused.
A slightly less waxy car than the boy’s trucks pulled into a spot next to me where I sat on the curb. The letter jackets started to whisper and high five each other. It was a cool night and fall was turning faster than I remembered it doing. One of the boys got up off his tailgate and walked towards the new car next to me, smiling at nothing. He came up to the driver, a black man in early thirties with reading glasses and a messenger bag, and said hello.
-I’m Kevin. I think you know my friend, Brad?
Kevin turned his body back towards the line of trucks and pointed to a hulk of a teenager with a meat chunk of a forehead the size of a tail light.
-Brad?
-He said he met you last week? Said that I should talk to you?
Kevin touched his nose with his thumbing trying to be tough.
-So, what’s your name?
-What?
-Sorry, I said what’s your name? What should I call you?
-Oh, Jesus.
Jesus rubbed his eyebrows.
-Jesus?
I laughed and they both turned to look at me, stepping over a bit together to scowl at me down the curb below them.
-A name. Angel Davis.
-Cool. Angel Davis. So look Angel, you think you
-Angel Davis.
-Sorry, my bad. Angel Davis, you think we could do business?
Kevin put both palms up in the air and cocked his mouth to the side. He looked back just enough to make sure the boys were watching. He had a cocky body. Too stupid to be timid, but not enough not to be scared. He tried to speak more Ebonics than Angel.
Angel Davis listed off as many Varsity drugs as he could, both to impress Kevin and to establish his credibility as the guy who could charge too much for the right thing. There were the pills, the name brand marijuana types, the aderol, acetylcholine, Molly, Mccp, Oxy, Xanax, Klonopin, and more and more until I was dizzy. Kevin listened closely as if weighing his options, though boys in letter jackets always knew what they wanted and weren’t much for experimentation. Finally Angel Davis said the right word or combination of words and money exchanged hands more awkwardly than if Kevin had just walked up to him arms extended and straight handed it to him.
-Right on bro. Thanks for the hook up. – Keven walked back to the boys as they watched him with the corner of their eyes, shocked and terrified and being calm.
Angel Davis gave a pathetic nod and forgot about the whole thing.
A long haired man came around the corner and went straight for me and Angel Davis. They knew each other.
-The name’s Blind Billy. What can I do for you?
-Andy.
Billy sat down on the curb and stuck out his freckled hand. Angel Davis sat down on the other side of him. Across the street was a long building full of falling stones and rows of the same windows and we all gave it a long look. The whole thing was paint chipped and window cracked. It didn’t seem like it had been built to do anything but sit across from the gas station.
The sun settled a bit further down the line and Blind Billy gave me a thorough look.
-Andy, you look like there’s something you’re needing.
Blind Billy had a way with words that I liked and made me feel relaxed. He talked too much but it didn’t seem to matter at all.
-I’ve stopped looking at the moment, Bill.
He had wild eyes. There were puddles on the ground from snow that had melted by the day’s sun. Billy stood up and paced a bit, walking on the water before he sat down again beside me.
-And why’s that, Andy?
-Lord. I don’t know. Women tell me I need limits and moderation.
-Limits.
-Moderation.
Blind Billy and Angel Davis talked to themselves and I watched the boys eye the high school girls. They all turned together as each one walked by, nodding to the pulse of hip-hop that pounded out of three or four trucks in unison. Kevin sat on the tailgate of black truck again, this time with a girl rubbing his head.
Blind Billy looked happy. His smiles weren’t big but he seemed content. Billy and Angel were using their palms to drum on the curb and the sidewalk making pretty, smacking noises.
-So what do you think of your new rules, Andy?
Angel Davis drummed on, hardly looking at me with his big smile.
-Some things are just necessary.
I hummed to the drumming.
-Rawwwww hiiiiide!
I couldn’t help myself. The sound of their drumming seemed to match a song from my childhood.
-Very nice, cowboy.
-Thanks, Billy.
We both hummed the theme song together, Angel Davis slapping his palms down hard to the syncopated beat.
-So you’ve got yourself a new job that requires a specific kind of focus?
-Not so much.
-You’re needing to stay put together for something like a child or a health deal?
-No kids.
-So you’re wife has moved here and you’re workin’ on figuring out this new way. But I guess I just want to know what you’re doing here sitting like a farmer in the diner at dawn.
Blind Billy smiled bigger.
-Maybe you’re finding it all a little on the strange side?
-A little.
-I’ve always thought the best way to get a good grip on something was to step really far on back and take a good long look at the whole enchilada. You know what I mean, Andy?
The boys honked their horns to the beat of the chorus. Kevin was lying down in the back of his truck working his hands up a girls shirt so that you could see the bottom of her breasts rising up from her stomach from across the gas station parking lot. The boys stood around the edge of the truck, their arms resting on the truck bed or tucked into their jeans, calling each other fags for watching him.
Angel Davis leaned over Billy’s lap to watch my face.
-It’s just not all that serious, Andy.
-What do you have right now?
-An assortment of things.
-I’ll take it.
In the gas station I circled the islands of packaged food, slowly debating the possibilities of food. The melted plastic cheese, slow roasted hot dogs, doughnuts, premade sandwiches, and the frozen burritos. In front of the hot dogs was a sign. ‘Get two hot dogs get a free drink,’ advertised as a picture of a hot dog vertical inside a Styrofoam cup. I made my way into the cup, wrapping my arms around the soggy mustard stained buns.
The shop outside our house was filled. Not just with tools and lumber stacked on shelves with litter and scraps everywhere like I would have expected or understood. The shop was full and abandoned. Each shelf that lined the entire perimeter save the entryways and the windows, was delicately organized by type of job. All drill bits lined an entire shelf in a block of wood with pre-drilled holes and markings for each bit. 7/16ths, 1/2, 17/32nds. Every drill bit was there. Power tools were divided into sections based on function. There were the teethy finger lobbers, the trim makers, the plumbing cutters, and probably tools for electrical work. The shop floor shone up from some smooth green marble concrete. There was a large glossy island work area in the corner farthest from the door with cubbies below holding ostensibly all things needed at a workbench . Underneath I could see books and clamps.
On the workbench there was a single board. Next to it was a small jigsaw still plugged in, threatening to start. I waited for it to start now that it knew I was in the room. There are some people that think it’s quite possible that their relative, who has been dead for at least three days, might just pop up out of the casket at any moment. I didn’t see a difference.
The sound of her people gnashing their laughs came from the living room. I walked in and sat next to Carol. I could handle them. The only interesting person was a girl whose voice sounded almost exactly like Carol’s. Some couples shared storied concerns of their pregnancies. The over boiled excitement. Carol’s hand was on my knee and she squeezed her fingernails into me at the truly difficult moments. The couple with matching haircuts didn’t know the best way to conserve their funds in order to best save for their child, asking the table whether they thought canceling their tennis club membership or not going on a vacation they had planned was a better sacrifice. They lived three houses down and across the street in a house much like ours but in a pale yellow. Carol dug two fingernails under my kneecap and tapped her feet in threes. The overwhelming advice was that studies were currently leaning that overseas travel added a increase percentage of miscarriages. This was finalized when the husband with the frosted tip comb-over thought he also had seen the article.
Carol told a story to the guests about having strange tendency to do a triple foot stutter right before butchering a backhand on the tennis court. I didn’t know that she had ever played tennis. It was almost endearing.
Two guests stayed. Carol placed them in the master bedroom and came into the office, crawling under the blankets.
Carol said nice things. We lay down on the carpet and I could see the lines of the gas station parking lot. We talked about moving my stuff into the master bedroom.
-Please stop moving your feet. Your toenails are digging into my heals.
-Sorry.
-I moved my feet. We both heard the strange sound of the woman with Carol’s voice start to hum and maybe moan a little from the master bedroom.
I slid my body into all of Carol’s soft lines. I wanted to kiss her and moved to try. Carol’s Voice was getting louder and more convincing in the next room. Carol grabbed me behind the ears and slowly pulled her mouth into mine with her old talents. Then we did our choreographed double pants down dance, which is complicated and was executed with the same grace as when we first tried it some three years ago. When we started the voice of Carol’s husband was just starting to get into an impressive rhythm. I waited for Carol’s breathing to be the right smell and made a thrust forward as she backed up and onto me. The sound of the boy’s hip-hop echoed from the trucks in my closed eyes. Carol lifted her head up underneath my chin and whispered to me.
-I love you.
-Who owned this house before us? Did anybody leave anything about them? Was he a carpenter?
Carol moved forward and said she had to use the bathroom. In the silence Carol’s Voice and her husband screamed out the cadence of an orgasm as I finished for myself to her voice. It was almost beautiful.
Carol’s dinner parties were becoming more frequent and almost expected. We had become equally annoyed by the couple dinners. Not that I had attended any after the first one. Now there were groups of men that came over and stayed later. In the office I heard them. I sat on my bed inspecting myself in the small mirror that lay against the wall grimacing at the sound of Carol’s voice and a group of men, maybe co-worker’s laughter. They stayed much later than the couples, driving off to pick up more alcohol. They sat in the living room, splayed on couches.
During one of these I walked past the living room on my way to the kitchen. I saw four men and Carol. Each centered around her. She sat with her bare painted feet on the couch leaning back against the arm rest. I knew what she was doing. How when she wanted sex she would drop her eyes and bait for a moment, then quickly raise them and center deep in your own eyes. How her eyebrows became shields to protect the swords. She would stretch her body from side to side until she knew that you were watching and giggle at you with a large innocent smile, something that looked like it needed tending, she would wait for you to say something that she knew you genuinely cared about, giving you sharp focused nods and tell you how interesting you were when you finished by placing her hand on your leg.
I could see how close the ball of her foot was to a man with corduroy pants and a strong jaw. When she laughed or used her body to gesture her feet would graze and rest on his leg, testing and reassuring the boundary. The man looked down using only his eyes to watch her soft red toenails dance. I went outside to vomit or smoke.
Slowly things from the office started to move themselves to the shop. It was small things at first, one hand at a time. First it was a book, then a lamp. A radio and an ashtray. My skin looked paper white around the eyes off the mirror. I dragged a small refrigerator from the garage that had been left there when we moved in. When I finally got it to the shop there were two crisp lines of ripped grass from garage door to shop door.
Carol brought food or a drink out sometimes. Though this seemed more out of curiosity, trading me to see what I was doing.
After months of poor sleep in the office I took two blankets and a pillow to the shop, closing the now empty office save the computer and desk.
Perfectly stacked in height and length were at least twenty boards. Maybe they were 4 x 4’s. They were old and would have been rusty if that was possible. A deranged piano solo played on the radio and I sat in a beat floral patterned armchair that I had found in the neighbors dumpster and smoked cigarettes until they made my fingertips hot, then lit another one with the butt of the last cigarette and thought maybe it would be nice if I made something I could give to Carol.
It was a slow start. First I glued four boards together in a row, cutting them down after they had dried to fit between the floor and the surprisingly high shop ceiling and nailed them to the rafter that ran along the top of the shop. I sat down and drank to that. My fingernails were black from this. I was sleeping better on the large work bench that faced the undeveloped fields.
In the evening after I had cut and glued the final boards I felt hungry. There were four rows of four glued into what now looked like a massive support in the middle of the shop. I went inside to find food.
Inside there were voices like playful, giggling children. I had not knocked when I came in. I found some fruit and a leftover sandwich. Carol never ate leftovers. She would carefully fold them into plastic wrap and place them in a tupperware container. If she bought four apples three would rot and be thrown out. This is how she worked. I
The kitchen door opened and a large nude man with Carol’s arms around his waist walked in. I stood very still and examined his ample features. He grabbed a bottle from the shelf, being careful not to look at me. Carol silently closed the door behind them, looking back in my direction briefly before turning out the kitchen light leaving the glow on her rear from the street lights before the door closed behind her. I remembered the sandwich and the bruised pear in my hands again only after I dropped it on the floor.
In the shop I drank with persistence, adding an extra gulp as if I were practicing or training. The pear had gone down with struggle and soon it was peeling back my stomach. I sat down in the chair smoking replaying the kitchen. The nude man. Carol’s arms. Street lamp ass. Fingers in the grooves of abdomen muscles. Nude man. I felt bad for not knocking. I hoped she wasn’t angry.
I threw up pear and sandwich on the back porch of the shop. I both wanted them to hear and didn’t. There is a fine line between trying to induce guilt and being pathetically ashamed.
At first I didn’t know what I wanted to carve or how to carve, but the man who left the shop had big wooden cases full of carving tools. They looked expensive and after a test run across my palm I found them razor sharp. I decided to use the one that had made me bloody, not bothering to clean up the increasing drops. Maybe I thought it was some sort of an offering, something to the wood block.
I didn’t know what I was carving but soon the pear and the alcohol and the nude man were moving the wood gouge for me. I found the tool stayed sharp and big curved chunks of wood and occasionally patches of dried glue surrounded the base of what was becoming a sculpture.
It seemed natural to carve out human figures. The human figure is something we know well. And most of the carvings I had seen were human or duck. The first thing that started to take shape was an elbow emerging from the square and rough block, sharp and shapely. I found new carving tools that made small grooves, ones that cut small lines, and ones that made triangular trenches in every size. The owner of the shop had either collected tools, meticulously sharpened them, or had vanished before he had the chance to carve with them.
The night the first carved figure looked like a figure I slept soundly curled up on top of the work bench surrounded by the smell of small chunks of wood chippings. I heard the shop door open. Carol stood looking at the wood in the light of a single lamp I kept on. She hefted herself onto the workbench, spooning me from behind. She had gained weight. Her breath hurt my neck and killed the sweetness of the woodchips, which I had decided was walnut. She rubbed my back in slow circles, using the heel of her hand and her fingernails alternately with about the same amount of time for each. In the afternoon when I woke up she was gone.
Wood chippings fell faster and faster until I was wading in them.
Carol’s favorite flowers were poppies. I carved them like tattoos on the figure’s arms and legs and feet. There were four figures now with the final small figure at the peak appearing to hold up the ceiling as it stood on the shoulders of the third figure.
I had learned to sharpen the tools after reading the leaflet in the carving tool’s box.
Carol had stopped coming out to the shop after the first snow and I only saw her when I would stand outside and look in the kitchen window while I smoked. It was almost time to give her my gift. I sanded all the slight burrs from the surface using small pieces of folded up sanding paper. All the rough patches had been removed and it stood in the center of the room as pride.
I sat down in my chair covered in wood chips and smoked while I looked at the finished sculpture. I wasn’t sure that I had carved it at all. It stood there, alien and obscured in a small flood of woodchips.
Carol’s voice on the phone sounded like she had been sick. And when she walked into the shop later in the day she looked different. Through the glass of the kitchen window she was blurred slightly and unnaturally lit.
-This is for you, I said.
Carol didn’t stop looking at me.
-When was the last time you showered?
She picked up her foot and lightly shook off a few woodchips.
-This is for you, I said again, becoming upset.
Carol never took her eyes of me, refusing to look.
-Look at what?
-Look!
She became frightened in a way I didn’t recognize. There were now lines on her forehead and a turn of her mouth that usually meant she was chewing on something that she wanted to spit out. I walked to her, grabbing her and pushing her into the chair.
-Sit.
I walked back to the sculpture, slapping it repeatedly with a hard fwump that echoed.
-See? See this? What are you looking at?
Carol reached her hand into her coat pocket and retrieved a packet of cigarettes.
-When did you start smoking?
-Can I use this?
She gestured at a lighter. She picked it up out of the ashtray where it was slightly buried and lit her long and slender cigarette.
With the largest carving gouge I could find I attacked my beard that had grown. The tool cut quickly and didn’t hurt. I pulled the hair out with my knuckles and it must have looked like I was about to punch myself right before I slid the gouge between my fist and cheek into the tightly pulled hairs and cut them away.
Carol sat in her chair, a bitch. I cut and cut at the hairs until they were a pile on the floor at my feet.
-Look at it please. I’ve been making it for you.
I hated her right then. With her whole body she was against me. Since we had met, even in the biggest fights, she had always opened her body in a way that said it was okay to put my hand on her neck, or put my hand into hers. Now she was closed and tight. Inconsiderate. There was no love in her face.
-This is the same thing, every time, she said.
My beard was almost completely gone.
-It’s always like this. Every time. I’m tired of being embarrassed.
I turned back to the sculpture and rubbed my eyes hard with the palm of my hand and fingertips, squeezing out the wet frustration from my eyes. My eyes burned from the cigarette residue that had built up on my fingers. I looked back to the chair to find Blind Billy sitting there with his big smile, reaching down to scoop up piles of wood chippings that he heaped on himself like a child in a leaf pile.
My eyes were blurred and stung, but Carol was gone.
Blind Billy nodded at me and past me to the totem.
There was no sound of a door and no trace of shoes in the wood chips. I opened the tool cabinets. It was possible that she would hide herself away. She wasn’t with the saws. There was no Carol under the long line of shelves that held the hand tools.
-What are you lookin’ for, Andy?
Blind Billy had a small leather bag on his lap, that he clutched like an old lady on the bus with his arms awkwardly raised and his hands pointing down to hold the handle, feet and knees together as he showed his teeth to me. When I didn’t answer he lost interest and began to see the sculpture. His eyes moved from floor to ceiling and ceiling to floor.
-Where is she?
Billy didn’t answer me but picked up the lighter off the armrest of the chair, flicking on the flame a few times to test it. He stood up with the lighter in hand, leaving the bag behind him, and walked to the sculpture.
I ran past him, kicking up wood shavings as I did, and opened the door to thick, slow snowflakes that fell into the backyard of the house. There was a trail of crisp footprints in the snow. I followed them out to the yard into the silence of the all the pretty houses and sat down in the snow, leaning forwards and backwards. There was the faint smell of smoke as Blind Billy began singing Rawhide from the bottom of his lungs. I rocked forwards and backwards, looking down the rows of houses and their back yards. Leaning back I could line up one house with another, and then leaning slightly more back I could line up three then four houses, until all the houses lined up, their porches and the pitches of their charcoal and burgundy roofs, all being numbed by the snow.
My wife was picking up boxes from the truck bed that wasn’t ours and carrying them in fast. Her breasts were outlined by the sweat that soaked into her shirt.
-Carol, do you need anything.
There was no reply.
I promised I would help her with the next truckload.
-I’m going to look at something in the yard.
I slowly backed away. She was fierce with the boxes. Sweat splattering on the edges of the truck bed. She hated moving. This was becoming apparent. But it was her bastard child to move here to begin with.
There were perks to living outside of downtown. Yards are nice. Big areas to be outside and put your feet in the grass without feeling strange or being thought of as someone who takes their shoes off in nature. This house was our new house, and one of 33 in the rows that ended here at ours, the most tan house at the end of the street.
Each house was probably made by the same engineer, or developer, or carpenter. I didn’t really know the difference. Very few had anything other than the usual playground set, or swimming pool, or screened in porch that overlooked a garden.
Our house had a large structure something bigger than anything you would call a shed. It looked like an aged modern greenhouse with opaque plastic looking glass and a large “open” sign on the big front door. I walked around the outside of the building not yet ready to go in. In the back and overlooking an immense countryside of undeveloped land was a small built out platform just wide enough to hold a single chair and just large enough to be called a porch.
When I came back in it was dark, the truck was gone, and a light was on at the top of the hall in an office like area where boxes with my name on them had been stacked.
It was 6:30 and Carol wasn’t back from work. She was always home at least an hour before this. There were only four or five things that would keep Carol from driving straight home. Sometimes she would pick up groceries, but only things that were immediately needed for dinner, namely ice cream. Dry cleaning was possible. The post office made the list, though she liked to take care of that during the lunch hour if she could. And sometimes there was something out of the ordinary, like a renewed license plate or one of those business end parts of life that Carol was far better at than I was and tended to tell me about after they were finished. She liked to save the weekends for things that took time if she could help it.
I opened the door and sat down on one of the adirondack chairs on the porch to wait for her to come home. Eventually I slipped into my third nap of the day in the armchair head of Kansas’ July.
The sound of Carol pulling in to the driveway woke me up in what I assumed was sometime much later. The sun was gone. It was a strange new car that stopped and I wondered what she had done with mine. I made no motions and said nothing as she walked up the stairs to the front porch.
She looked beautiful. She always did. Carol was the most beautiful woman of any of the 33 houses filled with slightly to moderately overweight women. She was the most beautiful woman in our downtown apartment too. Especially after she’d cleaned up. She wore a floral dress that fell and rested halfway up her knees with each stair step. It was a pleasure to see and I wondered if I could convince her to sleep with me.
She said nothing and with a stupid smile sat next to me on the arm of the chair and rubbed my head with her short fingers, softly and slowly, until I forgot about any curiosity or anger about where she’d been and was only thinking about the trail of goosebumbs she left behind on my scalp like some comet tail.
When she could tell I was almost asleep again she placed her head under my chin and laid her strange smell on me.
The house was more or less shuffled into place quickly. In the kitchen I searched for simple things; plates and spoons. Every cabinet that would have held these things before now held other things. Blenders were where the bowls should have been. There was a set of dining ware that she had inherited from her ex-husband’s family on display on a shelf above the sink.
-Carol! Where are the spoons!
I heard her rustling in what was probably the closet upstairs. I thought about the swarm of clothing, piles and acres, all being chronologically ordered by purchase date and with a delicate violence shoved into a massive line of hangers. I could go without the spoon.
With the new house I had my own office it seemed. I had been sort of sleeping there since I hadn’t really started unpacking. Since Carol wasn’t showing any signs that she felt horny, wearing big t-shirts and putting her hair up like she did when she was feeling sick, the office floor worked just fine.
My office had carpeted floors, the kind in dentist waiting rooms. All of the cables and wires and computer pieces sat on the desk. Some cheap piece of Ikea white bread desk. Carol had a habit of bad taste. She spent her money on matching towel sets, pulp television season box sets, cell phone covers, big flat screen TVs, prefab asymmetrical coffee tables, desks with 18 pages of instructions, fourteen screws, and a little ratchet specially designed for each hole. It was a strange way to live.
I looked through her pill bottles looking for anything that might be abnormal. Back in our old apartment there was always at a least a few bottles of prescriptions that were mistaken for recreation when there was nothing else around. Now there was nothing but cold medicines.
She was the only child of her lawyer father and a second-wife who had been flown in to the United States at her father’s request. Carol attributes this to her lack of decision making, her obsession with prescription medications, and the rough skin on all of her knuckles. She had used these excuses in middle school, and high school, in college, and in several reserved occasions in her adult life after discovering the need to appear random in your mistakes. On Carol’s 28th birthday she had not shown up to her own birthday party and the next morning had said she had miscalculated how many relaxants could be taken when drinking heartily.
With no sign of the new car and feeling bored I felt like masturbating. Since the move we hadn’t had much or any sex. I lay back on the carpet with my pants pulled down to the tops of my shoes and tried to picture Carol doing things we didn’t do in bed. I matched fantasies or things I had seen in porn with Carol’s body and voice. After short stints of this I’d find myself mindlessly twirling and stretching myself. Only when I focused on things that had happened, positions from angles I remembered her in did it go anywhere.
-What are you doing?
Carol was home.
-Just thinking about you?
-That is repulsive.
Carol sat on the office chair and stared at my body with a look of disgusted curiosity.
-What do you think about? In your fantasies, if they really are about me. What is it you imagine?
I didn’t know how to answer, but eventually she smiled at me and smiled back. Carol pulled up her dress and sat over me and we did the things we usually, always do.
-He thrusts her weakly and with the caution of someone who might come too soon.
-What are you doing? Shut up.
Groups of people were showing up at the house regularly. There were dinner parties and holiday parties and days when people came to watch an important game. Tonight groups of people pulled into the driveway carrying bottles of wine and little dainty pathetic plates of food - true markings of people with pointless lives who had come to loudly say nothing at each other for many hours. I left for the back porch to smoke cigarette before the hellos and once there kept walking the fifteen miles to the nearest gas station.
The gas station sat just off the highway’s on-ramp and was tucked into a strip mall of cell phone stores, fast food restaurants and cheap haircuts. I bought a beer, four packs of cigarettes and a corn dog, paid in change, and sat down on the curb outside to smoke and drink cans of beer wrapped in newspaper.
A group of boys were sitting in trucks in the back corner of the lot facing the highway making of line of trucks from one end of the lots to the other. It must have been the weekend. Most of them sat on lowered tailgates, swinging their legs underneath. Heads followed the self-aware walk of high school girls parading themselves into the gas station. One walked passed me. Once their eyes left her I found some of the boys staring at me. Wide eyed and curious and confused.
A slightly less waxy car than the boy’s trucks pulled into a spot next to me where I sat on the curb. The letter jackets started to whisper and high five each other. It was a cool night and fall was turning faster than I remembered it doing. One of the boys got up off his tailgate and walked towards the new car next to me, smiling at nothing. He came up to the driver, a black man in early thirties with reading glasses and a messenger bag, and said hello.
-I’m Kevin. I think you know my friend, Brad?
Kevin turned his body back towards the line of trucks and pointed to a hulk of a teenager with a meat chunk of a forehead the size of a tail light.
-Brad?
-He said he met you last week? Said that I should talk to you?
Kevin touched his nose with his thumbing trying to be tough.
-So, what’s your name?
-What?
-Sorry, I said what’s your name? What should I call you?
-Oh, Jesus.
Jesus rubbed his eyebrows.
-Jesus?
I laughed and they both turned to look at me, stepping over a bit together to scowl at me down the curb below them.
-A name. Angel Davis.
-Cool. Angel Davis. So look Angel, you think you
-Angel Davis.
-Sorry, my bad. Angel Davis, you think we could do business?
Kevin put both palms up in the air and cocked his mouth to the side. He looked back just enough to make sure the boys were watching. He had a cocky body. Too stupid to be timid, but not enough not to be scared. He tried to speak more Ebonics than Angel.
Angel Davis listed off as many Varsity drugs as he could, both to impress Kevin and to establish his credibility as the guy who could charge too much for the right thing. There were the pills, the name brand marijuana types, the aderol, acetylcholine, Molly, Mccp, Oxy, Xanax, Klonopin, and more and more until I was dizzy. Kevin listened closely as if weighing his options, though boys in letter jackets always knew what they wanted and weren’t much for experimentation. Finally Angel Davis said the right word or combination of words and money exchanged hands more awkwardly than if Kevin had just walked up to him arms extended and straight handed it to him.
-Right on bro. Thanks for the hook up. – Keven walked back to the boys as they watched him with the corner of their eyes, shocked and terrified and being calm.
Angel Davis gave a pathetic nod and forgot about the whole thing.
A long haired man came around the corner and went straight for me and Angel Davis. They knew each other.
-The name’s Blind Billy. What can I do for you?
-Andy.
Billy sat down on the curb and stuck out his freckled hand. Angel Davis sat down on the other side of him. Across the street was a long building full of falling stones and rows of the same windows and we all gave it a long look. The whole thing was paint chipped and window cracked. It didn’t seem like it had been built to do anything but sit across from the gas station.
The sun settled a bit further down the line and Blind Billy gave me a thorough look.
-Andy, you look like there’s something you’re needing.
Blind Billy had a way with words that I liked and made me feel relaxed. He talked too much but it didn’t seem to matter at all.
-I’ve stopped looking at the moment, Bill.
He had wild eyes. There were puddles on the ground from snow that had melted by the day’s sun. Billy stood up and paced a bit, walking on the water before he sat down again beside me.
-And why’s that, Andy?
-Lord. I don’t know. Women tell me I need limits and moderation.
-Limits.
-Moderation.
Blind Billy and Angel Davis talked to themselves and I watched the boys eye the high school girls. They all turned together as each one walked by, nodding to the pulse of hip-hop that pounded out of three or four trucks in unison. Kevin sat on the tailgate of black truck again, this time with a girl rubbing his head.
Blind Billy looked happy. His smiles weren’t big but he seemed content. Billy and Angel were using their palms to drum on the curb and the sidewalk making pretty, smacking noises.
-So what do you think of your new rules, Andy?
Angel Davis drummed on, hardly looking at me with his big smile.
-Some things are just necessary.
I hummed to the drumming.
-Rawwwww hiiiiide!
I couldn’t help myself. The sound of their drumming seemed to match a song from my childhood.
-Very nice, cowboy.
-Thanks, Billy.
We both hummed the theme song together, Angel Davis slapping his palms down hard to the syncopated beat.
-So you’ve got yourself a new job that requires a specific kind of focus?
-Not so much.
-You’re needing to stay put together for something like a child or a health deal?
-No kids.
-So you’re wife has moved here and you’re workin’ on figuring out this new way. But I guess I just want to know what you’re doing here sitting like a farmer in the diner at dawn.
Blind Billy smiled bigger.
-Maybe you’re finding it all a little on the strange side?
-A little.
-I’ve always thought the best way to get a good grip on something was to step really far on back and take a good long look at the whole enchilada. You know what I mean, Andy?
The boys honked their horns to the beat of the chorus. Kevin was lying down in the back of his truck working his hands up a girls shirt so that you could see the bottom of her breasts rising up from her stomach from across the gas station parking lot. The boys stood around the edge of the truck, their arms resting on the truck bed or tucked into their jeans, calling each other fags for watching him.
Angel Davis leaned over Billy’s lap to watch my face.
-It’s just not all that serious, Andy.
-What do you have right now?
-An assortment of things.
-I’ll take it.
In the gas station I circled the islands of packaged food, slowly debating the possibilities of food. The melted plastic cheese, slow roasted hot dogs, doughnuts, premade sandwiches, and the frozen burritos. In front of the hot dogs was a sign. ‘Get two hot dogs get a free drink,’ advertised as a picture of a hot dog vertical inside a Styrofoam cup. I made my way into the cup, wrapping my arms around the soggy mustard stained buns.
The shop outside our house was filled. Not just with tools and lumber stacked on shelves with litter and scraps everywhere like I would have expected or understood. The shop was full and abandoned. Each shelf that lined the entire perimeter save the entryways and the windows, was delicately organized by type of job. All drill bits lined an entire shelf in a block of wood with pre-drilled holes and markings for each bit. 7/16ths, 1/2, 17/32nds. Every drill bit was there. Power tools were divided into sections based on function. There were the teethy finger lobbers, the trim makers, the plumbing cutters, and probably tools for electrical work. The shop floor shone up from some smooth green marble concrete. There was a large glossy island work area in the corner farthest from the door with cubbies below holding ostensibly all things needed at a workbench . Underneath I could see books and clamps.
On the workbench there was a single board. Next to it was a small jigsaw still plugged in, threatening to start. I waited for it to start now that it knew I was in the room. There are some people that think it’s quite possible that their relative, who has been dead for at least three days, might just pop up out of the casket at any moment. I didn’t see a difference.
The sound of her people gnashing their laughs came from the living room. I walked in and sat next to Carol. I could handle them. The only interesting person was a girl whose voice sounded almost exactly like Carol’s. Some couples shared storied concerns of their pregnancies. The over boiled excitement. Carol’s hand was on my knee and she squeezed her fingernails into me at the truly difficult moments. The couple with matching haircuts didn’t know the best way to conserve their funds in order to best save for their child, asking the table whether they thought canceling their tennis club membership or not going on a vacation they had planned was a better sacrifice. They lived three houses down and across the street in a house much like ours but in a pale yellow. Carol dug two fingernails under my kneecap and tapped her feet in threes. The overwhelming advice was that studies were currently leaning that overseas travel added a increase percentage of miscarriages. This was finalized when the husband with the frosted tip comb-over thought he also had seen the article.
Carol told a story to the guests about having strange tendency to do a triple foot stutter right before butchering a backhand on the tennis court. I didn’t know that she had ever played tennis. It was almost endearing.
Two guests stayed. Carol placed them in the master bedroom and came into the office, crawling under the blankets.
Carol said nice things. We lay down on the carpet and I could see the lines of the gas station parking lot. We talked about moving my stuff into the master bedroom.
-Please stop moving your feet. Your toenails are digging into my heals.
-Sorry.
-I moved my feet. We both heard the strange sound of the woman with Carol’s voice start to hum and maybe moan a little from the master bedroom.
I slid my body into all of Carol’s soft lines. I wanted to kiss her and moved to try. Carol’s Voice was getting louder and more convincing in the next room. Carol grabbed me behind the ears and slowly pulled her mouth into mine with her old talents. Then we did our choreographed double pants down dance, which is complicated and was executed with the same grace as when we first tried it some three years ago. When we started the voice of Carol’s husband was just starting to get into an impressive rhythm. I waited for Carol’s breathing to be the right smell and made a thrust forward as she backed up and onto me. The sound of the boy’s hip-hop echoed from the trucks in my closed eyes. Carol lifted her head up underneath my chin and whispered to me.
-I love you.
-Who owned this house before us? Did anybody leave anything about them? Was he a carpenter?
Carol moved forward and said she had to use the bathroom. In the silence Carol’s Voice and her husband screamed out the cadence of an orgasm as I finished for myself to her voice. It was almost beautiful.
Carol’s dinner parties were becoming more frequent and almost expected. We had become equally annoyed by the couple dinners. Not that I had attended any after the first one. Now there were groups of men that came over and stayed later. In the office I heard them. I sat on my bed inspecting myself in the small mirror that lay against the wall grimacing at the sound of Carol’s voice and a group of men, maybe co-worker’s laughter. They stayed much later than the couples, driving off to pick up more alcohol. They sat in the living room, splayed on couches.
During one of these I walked past the living room on my way to the kitchen. I saw four men and Carol. Each centered around her. She sat with her bare painted feet on the couch leaning back against the arm rest. I knew what she was doing. How when she wanted sex she would drop her eyes and bait for a moment, then quickly raise them and center deep in your own eyes. How her eyebrows became shields to protect the swords. She would stretch her body from side to side until she knew that you were watching and giggle at you with a large innocent smile, something that looked like it needed tending, she would wait for you to say something that she knew you genuinely cared about, giving you sharp focused nods and tell you how interesting you were when you finished by placing her hand on your leg.
I could see how close the ball of her foot was to a man with corduroy pants and a strong jaw. When she laughed or used her body to gesture her feet would graze and rest on his leg, testing and reassuring the boundary. The man looked down using only his eyes to watch her soft red toenails dance. I went outside to vomit or smoke.
Slowly things from the office started to move themselves to the shop. It was small things at first, one hand at a time. First it was a book, then a lamp. A radio and an ashtray. My skin looked paper white around the eyes off the mirror. I dragged a small refrigerator from the garage that had been left there when we moved in. When I finally got it to the shop there were two crisp lines of ripped grass from garage door to shop door.
Carol brought food or a drink out sometimes. Though this seemed more out of curiosity, trading me to see what I was doing.
After months of poor sleep in the office I took two blankets and a pillow to the shop, closing the now empty office save the computer and desk.
Perfectly stacked in height and length were at least twenty boards. Maybe they were 4 x 4’s. They were old and would have been rusty if that was possible. A deranged piano solo played on the radio and I sat in a beat floral patterned armchair that I had found in the neighbors dumpster and smoked cigarettes until they made my fingertips hot, then lit another one with the butt of the last cigarette and thought maybe it would be nice if I made something I could give to Carol.
It was a slow start. First I glued four boards together in a row, cutting them down after they had dried to fit between the floor and the surprisingly high shop ceiling and nailed them to the rafter that ran along the top of the shop. I sat down and drank to that. My fingernails were black from this. I was sleeping better on the large work bench that faced the undeveloped fields.
In the evening after I had cut and glued the final boards I felt hungry. There were four rows of four glued into what now looked like a massive support in the middle of the shop. I went inside to find food.
Inside there were voices like playful, giggling children. I had not knocked when I came in. I found some fruit and a leftover sandwich. Carol never ate leftovers. She would carefully fold them into plastic wrap and place them in a tupperware container. If she bought four apples three would rot and be thrown out. This is how she worked. I
The kitchen door opened and a large nude man with Carol’s arms around his waist walked in. I stood very still and examined his ample features. He grabbed a bottle from the shelf, being careful not to look at me. Carol silently closed the door behind them, looking back in my direction briefly before turning out the kitchen light leaving the glow on her rear from the street lights before the door closed behind her. I remembered the sandwich and the bruised pear in my hands again only after I dropped it on the floor.
In the shop I drank with persistence, adding an extra gulp as if I were practicing or training. The pear had gone down with struggle and soon it was peeling back my stomach. I sat down in the chair smoking replaying the kitchen. The nude man. Carol’s arms. Street lamp ass. Fingers in the grooves of abdomen muscles. Nude man. I felt bad for not knocking. I hoped she wasn’t angry.
I threw up pear and sandwich on the back porch of the shop. I both wanted them to hear and didn’t. There is a fine line between trying to induce guilt and being pathetically ashamed.
At first I didn’t know what I wanted to carve or how to carve, but the man who left the shop had big wooden cases full of carving tools. They looked expensive and after a test run across my palm I found them razor sharp. I decided to use the one that had made me bloody, not bothering to clean up the increasing drops. Maybe I thought it was some sort of an offering, something to the wood block.
I didn’t know what I was carving but soon the pear and the alcohol and the nude man were moving the wood gouge for me. I found the tool stayed sharp and big curved chunks of wood and occasionally patches of dried glue surrounded the base of what was becoming a sculpture.
It seemed natural to carve out human figures. The human figure is something we know well. And most of the carvings I had seen were human or duck. The first thing that started to take shape was an elbow emerging from the square and rough block, sharp and shapely. I found new carving tools that made small grooves, ones that cut small lines, and ones that made triangular trenches in every size. The owner of the shop had either collected tools, meticulously sharpened them, or had vanished before he had the chance to carve with them.
The night the first carved figure looked like a figure I slept soundly curled up on top of the work bench surrounded by the smell of small chunks of wood chippings. I heard the shop door open. Carol stood looking at the wood in the light of a single lamp I kept on. She hefted herself onto the workbench, spooning me from behind. She had gained weight. Her breath hurt my neck and killed the sweetness of the woodchips, which I had decided was walnut. She rubbed my back in slow circles, using the heel of her hand and her fingernails alternately with about the same amount of time for each. In the afternoon when I woke up she was gone.
Wood chippings fell faster and faster until I was wading in them.
Carol’s favorite flowers were poppies. I carved them like tattoos on the figure’s arms and legs and feet. There were four figures now with the final small figure at the peak appearing to hold up the ceiling as it stood on the shoulders of the third figure.
I had learned to sharpen the tools after reading the leaflet in the carving tool’s box.
Carol had stopped coming out to the shop after the first snow and I only saw her when I would stand outside and look in the kitchen window while I smoked. It was almost time to give her my gift. I sanded all the slight burrs from the surface using small pieces of folded up sanding paper. All the rough patches had been removed and it stood in the center of the room as pride.
I sat down in my chair covered in wood chips and smoked while I looked at the finished sculpture. I wasn’t sure that I had carved it at all. It stood there, alien and obscured in a small flood of woodchips.
Carol’s voice on the phone sounded like she had been sick. And when she walked into the shop later in the day she looked different. Through the glass of the kitchen window she was blurred slightly and unnaturally lit.
-This is for you, I said.
Carol didn’t stop looking at me.
-When was the last time you showered?
She picked up her foot and lightly shook off a few woodchips.
-This is for you, I said again, becoming upset.
Carol never took her eyes of me, refusing to look.
-Look at what?
-Look!
She became frightened in a way I didn’t recognize. There were now lines on her forehead and a turn of her mouth that usually meant she was chewing on something that she wanted to spit out. I walked to her, grabbing her and pushing her into the chair.
-Sit.
I walked back to the sculpture, slapping it repeatedly with a hard fwump that echoed.
-See? See this? What are you looking at?
Carol reached her hand into her coat pocket and retrieved a packet of cigarettes.
-When did you start smoking?
-Can I use this?
She gestured at a lighter. She picked it up out of the ashtray where it was slightly buried and lit her long and slender cigarette.
With the largest carving gouge I could find I attacked my beard that had grown. The tool cut quickly and didn’t hurt. I pulled the hair out with my knuckles and it must have looked like I was about to punch myself right before I slid the gouge between my fist and cheek into the tightly pulled hairs and cut them away.
Carol sat in her chair, a bitch. I cut and cut at the hairs until they were a pile on the floor at my feet.
-Look at it please. I’ve been making it for you.
I hated her right then. With her whole body she was against me. Since we had met, even in the biggest fights, she had always opened her body in a way that said it was okay to put my hand on her neck, or put my hand into hers. Now she was closed and tight. Inconsiderate. There was no love in her face.
-This is the same thing, every time, she said.
My beard was almost completely gone.
-It’s always like this. Every time. I’m tired of being embarrassed.
I turned back to the sculpture and rubbed my eyes hard with the palm of my hand and fingertips, squeezing out the wet frustration from my eyes. My eyes burned from the cigarette residue that had built up on my fingers. I looked back to the chair to find Blind Billy sitting there with his big smile, reaching down to scoop up piles of wood chippings that he heaped on himself like a child in a leaf pile.
My eyes were blurred and stung, but Carol was gone.
Blind Billy nodded at me and past me to the totem.
There was no sound of a door and no trace of shoes in the wood chips. I opened the tool cabinets. It was possible that she would hide herself away. She wasn’t with the saws. There was no Carol under the long line of shelves that held the hand tools.
-What are you lookin’ for, Andy?
Blind Billy had a small leather bag on his lap, that he clutched like an old lady on the bus with his arms awkwardly raised and his hands pointing down to hold the handle, feet and knees together as he showed his teeth to me. When I didn’t answer he lost interest and began to see the sculpture. His eyes moved from floor to ceiling and ceiling to floor.
-Where is she?
Billy didn’t answer me but picked up the lighter off the armrest of the chair, flicking on the flame a few times to test it. He stood up with the lighter in hand, leaving the bag behind him, and walked to the sculpture.
I ran past him, kicking up wood shavings as I did, and opened the door to thick, slow snowflakes that fell into the backyard of the house. There was a trail of crisp footprints in the snow. I followed them out to the yard into the silence of the all the pretty houses and sat down in the snow, leaning forwards and backwards. There was the faint smell of smoke as Blind Billy began singing Rawhide from the bottom of his lungs. I rocked forwards and backwards, looking down the rows of houses and their back yards. Leaning back I could line up one house with another, and then leaning slightly more back I could line up three then four houses, until all the houses lined up, their porches and the pitches of their charcoal and burgundy roofs, all being numbed by the snow.
