Dear Hearts (4 page)

"Park,"
I say.  Let's go to the park.

~

I
don't hate having a kid as much as I hate that other people have kids. 
Other women, really.
  Besides Ronnie, I don't hob knob
with the local vaginas
who
all seem to congregate at
the holy church of Target.  Instead, when we go to the park, I sit on the
bench while Wren swings on her belly like Superman, and I pretend to read a
tattered copy of Great Expectations.  I've stop-started this book roughly
forty-five times in my life and a lot of it I blame on conversations like the
one happening right next to me.

"Oh
right, yes, totally.  I practically shit a brick when Trenton told me
that.  I mean, who does that little brat
Henry
think he is telling Trenton not to touch his stuff.  Free
country."  I side eye the talker and she's thin, with a long shiny
pony tail and a face that screams late thirties although, I'm sure she's closer
to my age. 
Sun damage.
  I apply SPF so
often that I sometimes sweat it.

"It's
the mother, always the mother.  Abby, Gabby, whatever the heck. 
She's always talking about boundaries so the kid thinks he has license to be a
jerk."  The woman next to McSkinny is bigger boned and her drawl is
more noticeable.  She's wearing a Razorbacks sweatshirt and yoga pants,
but the diamond in her engagement ring is about the size of my knuckle.  I
hate that.  I hate the "I'm a bum for a day” look and I hate it even
more when I glance down at last year's wedges.  The red leather tops are
scuffed and there's a chunk of cork missing on the inside heel.  "You
look nice," Mitch said last weekend before we went out to Red Lobster with
Jimmy and his heinous wife, Pam.  He was wearing that stupid Polo of his,
the green one the color of a Christmas tree with his black belt and brown
shoes.  And I was wearing these busted up wedges and a white blouse that
has a light ketchup stain near my belly because Wren hugged me right after meatloaf
a few nights before.   It kept digging at me, the Christmas tree
polo, the stained up blouse, so when we finally got to the restaurant, I washed
my hands so hard in the bathroom that the side of my thumb began to bleed.

"Sometimes
I wish I could teach a course on how to be a good mother," McSkinny
says.  And I think she glances at me when she says it, but I can't be
sure.  Oh I get it, I'm supposed to be pushing my child on the swing or at
least looking lovingly on from afar or gabbing it up with a big boned
sweatshirt wearing best friend to be a "real" mother.  My mind
breaks a little and the pieces scatter at the base of my skull.  And I
feel like I'm inhaling the pieces, choking on them.  I have to get out of
here.

"Wren,"
I say and she looks up, but I don't wait for her.  I beeline it to our
GrandAm and ignore the stupidly shocked faces of Big Bones and McSkinny. 
I can only breathe again when I'm inside the car and hours old French fry smell
replaces the pieces stacked high in my lungs.

"I
thought we were going to play," Wren says when she gets inside and buckles
herself into her booster seat.

"You
thought wrong."  I back out of my sandwiched spot between their cars,
an SUV on steroids and a brand new Prius, and I try to fragment together what
Big Bones and McSkinny must be saying now.

Some
people just shouldn't have kids.     

~

At
home Wren plays with her Barbie who she’s made the Dad.  I can hear her
telling it to take out the trash while she makes the spaghetti, and I remember
to grab the camera that’s always shoved in a mystery drawer whenever I’m
looking for it.  But when I get to her door, she’s given up her game and
is curled up on her comforter, her breath heavy.  She does that sometimes,
just runs out of battery and her body goes still with sleep.  I sit on her
bed and lightly scratch her back, and I start crying until it hurts even
farther into my brain than where the finger in my temple is.

Sometimes
when I call my brother Gary, and I talk to his wife Belinda, I use the same
voice I use with Ronnie, the “my shit don’t stink” voice that gets on my own
nerves.  And I can hear it in their own voices, that tiny shred of pity
they have for a grown woman who’s playing out her childhood dream even though
her reality is a short fall from a nightmare.

Fuck
them all. 

Wren
stirs a little and I stop my fingers that are digging too hard in her
back.  I kiss her temple, shut the door.  I go and get the bleach.

I
did Wren’s bathroom yesterday, so I do mine today.  It’s not just the
scrubbing I like but the burn I get from inhaling.  Now don’t get it
wrong, this isn’t about getting high.  This is about cleaning what’s
dirty.  What’s very very
wrong.

I
do such a thorough job, that my brain starts singing that B-52's song and I
can't shut it off.  When I’m done, I strip and change into my robe. 
I put the bleach back, my grout scrubber back and put my clothes into a trash
bag that I put in the garbage at the side of our house.  Sometimes I’m not
careful and that stuff takes the color plum out of everything.  I used to
worry that Mitch would notice, but God love my husband.  He never notices
a damn thing.

The
shower is hot and I make it hotter until I whimper, and then I make it colder
again.  My brain feels clean, and I feel better.  My headache is
gone.

I
grab the phone from the kitchen and let my wet hair dry from the overhead fan
in our bedroom.  I blast it high and listen to the ringing and wonder if
he can hear his phone or if he’s water blasting and maybe the sound is lost on
him.  But he picks up and when he talks I know he’s inside somewhere
although he pretends he’s working.

He’s
cheating on me, "spending a little Mitch time" as Ronnie would put
it.  It’s been going on a few Saturdays now, and there’s a switch in me
that just won’t click over.  I’m supposed to be angry, but I guess it’s
more like I’m sorrowful because I know now that it's not just me.  He sees
it, too: this isn't the way it's supposed to be.

But
it doesn’t matter because that’s not why I’m calling.

“I
want to quit drinking.  AA,” I say, and at first he says we’re fine, and I
want to laugh.  But I know I've planted the seed in his brain and that
he'll come around.  And he does, saying he'll go at the exact same time
that I look in the mirror on our dresser, and when I see myself, I see my
future self in a 900 square foot condo on the beach, my beautiful bare feet
caressing the bamboo flooring in the living room.

My
TV will look lovely in there.

SIX

Mitch

“They bought a new car,” Elena
says.  Dinner is a sloppy pot roast, potatoes drowning in a thinned out
sauce.  She’s a good cook, my wife, but when I think about the
roquefort
served with the nuts and honey on the sideboard in
Aaron’s dining room, a dish I still can’t pronounce but I’m mentally holding on
to because Elena’s meat is a brick wall in my colon.

“Color?”
I ask. 

“BMW,”
is the reply which tells me what kind of evening it’s going to be.  I
sometimes think when you’re dirt
poor,
you end up in
either two camps: wants for nothing and wants for everything.  I know all
too well which one Elena is in.

“Some
people work hard and get BMWs in this life.”

“You
work hard,” she says.  She plops another dose of potatoes onto Wren’s
plate although she doesn’t ask for them.  Our daughter sits between the
two of us, her chair slightly closer to me.  I notice her mimicking me
sometimes, not in a silly laugh out loud way, but as if she were trying to
commit me to memory.

“Did
you see Trudy’s new car, honey?” I ask Wren, ignoring Elena’s stab.  You
work so hard, Mitch, but it’s like we don’t even get to see any of it. 
That’s the plight of owning a small business, I always tell her when there’s
still energy in my lungs. 
Bills, car insurance, health
insurance, clothes for school, clothes for dance, food on the table.
 
If I were the type to scream “god damn it” on the top of my lungs, I’m pretty
sure Mrs. McMorrow would have called the cops by now 

“Blue,”
Wren says, already anticipating my follow up question.  I smile at her and
it hurts my cheeks.  I watch, and she smiles the very same way.

“Blue,”
Elena says quietly and takes a bite of her pile of bricks.

~

I
expect to meet her at the kitchen cabinet later after the dishes and Wren are
put in their proper places, but Elena’s not there.  The whiskey’s left out
though, so I find an old cup from Floyd’s, the Razorback worn to the point of
looking more like a hedgehog and fill-er-up.  No more need for chasers, just
a quick hot swallow.  I think of all the times Jimmy has tried to get me
to drink during lunch, and I always shake my head and say, “One of us has to be
able to run this business.”  Like refusing a drink mid-day makes me any
less of an alcoholic.

The
thought burns down with the whiskey and pounds my cranky gut awake.  It’s
one of those things I don’t talk about, how drinking this much is giving me an
ulcer - not even to Elena because we have to be in tip-top baby making
shape.  The hypocrisy of it all is likely to kill me before the alcohol
does.

I
take one more before gliding quietly down the hallway.  Our bedroom door
is closed and, and I calculate the percentages of getting my ass chewed out if
I go in.  But I open the door anyway out of habit.

She’s
naked on the bed.  I’m embarrassed thinking of how long she’s been like
that, waiting for me to find her.

“It’s
time?” I say, trying to remember the ovulation schedule but the whiskey makes
it and everything else a little murky.

“No,”
she says.

“Then?”

“Can’t
we just make love?” she asks and rolls to her side.  Her hair curls around
her shoulder and I can tell she’s put on lip gloss.  I fall into bed next
to her, just like that.  I place my head into her neck, and right now she
smells like vanilla.

“Are
you crying?”  She lifts my face and shame washes my cheeks, makes its bed
in my stubble.  She rubs my skin dry as I close my eyes, and we’re
fourteen again.

“I’ll
love you forever,” she had said once up on my daddy’s tractor.  She was
behind me, her arms tight like a belt as we pulled the planter along, cotton
seeds diving into the furrows.  The cows with their bulbous eyes were
watching us, and I remember thinking,
Y’all
are my witnesses
.

I
don’t know what it’s like for other men.  But I do know when your heart’s
wired wrong and your mother hits you because she knows it, too, it’s an easy
feeling being loved. 
Even if it is by the wrong person.

I
take in the clean earth scent of that day again as I unbuckle my jeans and
touch her naked back.  I pay Elena every ounce of kindness I owe her.

~

At
St. Bonaventure there’s a penny in one of the brick posts that support the
covered entrance.  Our group gathers here after Sunday Mass: me, Elena,
Wren, bottle-lensed Trudy Gibson and her parents.  The topic of discussion
is the new BMW, and I grind my nail into Abraham Lincoln’s face as Wren watches
me, her thumb nail grazing the pad of her pointer finger to match my rhythm.

“Ever
gotten behind the wheel of a Beamer, Mitchy?” Luke asks.  His hair is
fashioned after one of Wren’s Ken dolls and he smells like a perfumed paper ad
in the pages of Elena’s Cosmo.  He also has a thing for nicknames.

“Well,
Lukey-boy, I have to say that’s a negative.”  Elena shoots me a look and
Luke clears his throat and nods.  The other parishioners buzz around us
and my bare arms brush against blouses and sport coats too hot for this
weather.  “You should wear the coat,” Elena had said earlier, supporting
her reasoning with the reliable, “I’m sure Luke will be wearing one,” which
made me automatically reach for my polo.  Clips of the homily (what love
thy neighbor means in the twenty-first century) play at our shoulders but a
good portion of talk is centered on deer season, led by Father John, as if he
believes I need yet another reason to hate church.

“Not
everyone’s thing but that engine - wooh does she purr!”  Instead of
slapping Luke, I smile and nod back solely for Elena’s sake.  She’s all
roses this morning, flushed cheeks, last night’s gloss making
a reappearance
.  But I can tell by the way she’s
grinding her black sandal into the stone walkway - like she’s killing a
cigarette - that last night’s “I love you” won’t be.

“Well,
we better head to Luke’s parents,” Ronnie says, brushing back her sleeve to
reveal a gold Rolex with a face the size of my head.  “They’re time
sticklers,” she adds, dramatically whispering behind a manicured hand.

“I
heard that!” Lukey-boy says and squeezes her shoulder.  I glance at Trudy
who has her finger jammed up her nose.

“What
about you guys?  Heading anywhere special?”  Now this is the shit
that annoys me about Ronnie, the questions she asks like she didn’t see us roll
into the parking lot earlier in a ‘99 Dodge Dakota.  And then there’s
Elena, who makes it even worse by pulling the good student act, reciting the
acceptable answer.

“Oh
probably just grab brunch at New Hampton.  I love the omelets.”  And
it’s embarrassing because I’m sure the Gibsons go there weekly and have
realized by now that we’ve never set foot in the place.  But Elena’s still
grinning like the prized pupil, and I hate myself for somehow making omelets so
goddamn unattainable.

“So
do
we
!  Well you all have fun, all right?” 
Ronnie smiles and places a hand on Wren’s shoulder, an act of kindness I’m sure
people pay kids with delusional, underpaid parents.

“We
will!”  Elena’s glossed lips are stretched so wide, I’m afraid they’ll
snap like rubber bands.  As soon as the Gibsons are out of sight she sighs
and her eyes go to Wren and she sighs again.

“You’d
think that girl would have the decency to remove her finger from her nose for
two seconds,” she says.  She keeps looking at Wren and I know what she’s
thinking.  Here’s a beautiful girl, a girl that deserves omelets and
ponies and two parents that don’t fuck everything up for her.  But Wren
has this pleasant look on her face like today’s just Sunday.  Today’s just
another day she gets to hold her parents’ hands.

When
I look up, I see Elena looking at me this time, and again, nineteen years
loving the same person, it’s like Elena’s thoughts send a drum beat through my
brain.  AA, she’s thinking.

Fine.
  I’ll go.