waving what might be hallucinatory flies away from her face.
His house is an old converted mobile home in a neighborhood called Sun Valley or “Scum Valley” if you’re lucky enough not to have to live here. It’s your typical white ghetto with rusting car parts on the front lawns, underwear on the line, last year’s dead Christmas wreaths still hanging on the doors.
I hear the music coming from the half-light of the small basement window near the ground. A deep thudding, like the rhythm of my heart.
His mom works hard, when she can get work, and she’s working now at Casa Bianca, a gourmet restaurant, possibly mafia owned because no one can figure out why they’d put it here except to launder money or feed gangsters after they bury their debtors in the woods.
There’s a heaviness inside me as I peer at that window and imagine him inside. I want to be with him there, underground forever, and melt with him into the earth. I’ve never felt so heavy and deeply rooted. I want to grow roots and vines from my body and ensnare him forever in my branches. No wonder we scare men away.
As much as I’m feeling a density and gravity and rootedness, a deep pulling need to stay and absorb him into my body, Zoe is feeling the opposite. She is feeling the flighty lightness from the adrenaline of her escape. “Come on,” she says from behind me, pushing me through the door. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Enough for a quickie.”
“Right,” I mutter. I tiptoe across the foyer toward the entrance to the kitchen and take a left down a dark hallway. It is home to a gallery of sepia-toned, sun-damaged school portraits of Danny and his sister at ages five, six, seven, and eight. I study him. It’s strange how he looks exactly like himself. How everything, the crookedy nose, the crinkly-eyed smile, was there from the beginning, just waiting to reach its full glorious Danny potential. I find an open door after “ DANNY, AGE 8 ,” and it leads to the stairs of the basement.
“Hello,” I say into the doorway, but he can’t hear me over the music. “Danny,” I say a little louder.
I start down the stairs, sliding one hand down each wall as I go. I am about to bend over and peek beneath the ceiling of the finished basement when I hear it. It’s quick, but it is a distinct slurping, spitty inhale—air whistling around too many teeth, followed by a short nasally goose honk. Rebecca’s laugh.
I think maybe I’m hearing things. Maybe it’s just some improvisation in Jimi Hendrix’s
Blues
blaring from the stereo. I stay where I am on the stairs, but I get the courage to dip my head down so I can see into the dimly lit basement.
I see an old indoor basketball hoop arcade game surrounded by a net. I see an entertainment center along the wall with an old stereo and an even older television. The speakers on either side vibrate with the bass. I see a few basketball trophies on the windowsill, and then I dare to look at the plaid, skirted pullout couch along the wall . . . and there she is.
She has her feet on the couch with her knees bent up on either side of her, exposing her crotch to the room. Her crotch is clothed, though, in tight dark-wash jeans that come just to her pudgy hips.
She is very comfortable here. It is her couch, says her posture. The couch she and Danny have christened. And she sits like she has a right to it. There is no awkwardness. No wondering what Danny thinks of her. No newness to this relationship. It runs deep, and I suddenly don’t know what I’m doing here.
The intense anticipatory throbbing that I was feeling beneath my diaphragm and in my nether regions begins to climb. It moves up and pounds against my rib cage. Then it climbs higher and strangles my throat. It finally lands behind my eyes, where it stays and threatens to make me cry.
I let out a gasp and run up the stairs.
I keep running out across the sharp crackling thirsty dead grass and across the street to a wooded lot, where
His house is an old converted mobile home in a neighborhood called Sun Valley or “Scum Valley” if you’re lucky enough not to have to live here. It’s your typical white ghetto with rusting car parts on the front lawns, underwear on the line, last year’s dead Christmas wreaths still hanging on the doors.
I hear the music coming from the half-light of the small basement window near the ground. A deep thudding, like the rhythm of my heart.
His mom works hard, when she can get work, and she’s working now at Casa Bianca, a gourmet restaurant, possibly mafia owned because no one can figure out why they’d put it here except to launder money or feed gangsters after they bury their debtors in the woods.
There’s a heaviness inside me as I peer at that window and imagine him inside. I want to be with him there, underground forever, and melt with him into the earth. I’ve never felt so heavy and deeply rooted. I want to grow roots and vines from my body and ensnare him forever in my branches. No wonder we scare men away.
As much as I’m feeling a density and gravity and rootedness, a deep pulling need to stay and absorb him into my body, Zoe is feeling the opposite. She is feeling the flighty lightness from the adrenaline of her escape. “Come on,” she says from behind me, pushing me through the door. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Enough for a quickie.”
“Right,” I mutter. I tiptoe across the foyer toward the entrance to the kitchen and take a left down a dark hallway. It is home to a gallery of sepia-toned, sun-damaged school portraits of Danny and his sister at ages five, six, seven, and eight. I study him. It’s strange how he looks exactly like himself. How everything, the crookedy nose, the crinkly-eyed smile, was there from the beginning, just waiting to reach its full glorious Danny potential. I find an open door after “ DANNY, AGE 8 ,” and it leads to the stairs of the basement.
“Hello,” I say into the doorway, but he can’t hear me over the music. “Danny,” I say a little louder.
I start down the stairs, sliding one hand down each wall as I go. I am about to bend over and peek beneath the ceiling of the finished basement when I hear it. It’s quick, but it is a distinct slurping, spitty inhale—air whistling around too many teeth, followed by a short nasally goose honk. Rebecca’s laugh.
I think maybe I’m hearing things. Maybe it’s just some improvisation in Jimi Hendrix’s
Blues
blaring from the stereo. I stay where I am on the stairs, but I get the courage to dip my head down so I can see into the dimly lit basement.
I see an old indoor basketball hoop arcade game surrounded by a net. I see an entertainment center along the wall with an old stereo and an even older television. The speakers on either side vibrate with the bass. I see a few basketball trophies on the windowsill, and then I dare to look at the plaid, skirted pullout couch along the wall . . . and there she is.
She has her feet on the couch with her knees bent up on either side of her, exposing her crotch to the room. Her crotch is clothed, though, in tight dark-wash jeans that come just to her pudgy hips.
She is very comfortable here. It is her couch, says her posture. The couch she and Danny have christened. And she sits like she has a right to it. There is no awkwardness. No wondering what Danny thinks of her. No newness to this relationship. It runs deep, and I suddenly don’t know what I’m doing here.
The intense anticipatory throbbing that I was feeling beneath my diaphragm and in my nether regions begins to climb. It moves up and pounds against my rib cage. Then it climbs higher and strangles my throat. It finally lands behind my eyes, where it stays and threatens to make me cry.
I let out a gasp and run up the stairs.
I keep running out across the sharp crackling thirsty dead grass and across the street to a wooded lot, where
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