Still Life with Plums (5 page)

That sometimes fathers escape, and mothers too, even when they stick around.

And there are darker truths—or lies that I have bought into but
good—that I barely have the courage to admit to myself, let alone to another human being.

Peggy’s eyebrows crinkle and her head cocks to the side, because I’m sure I look as if I am about to deliver a weighty admission, some non-smartass reality coaxed out by the sweet safety of this strong-armed woman I may never see again. Popsicle juice streams down my hand and I feel like a five-year-old again struggling for the right words, any words. Even before I have them, I open my mouth and lean forward, not yet sure what will spill, my own chopstick fingers thrumming like mad.

You are a meticulous groomer. Every morning you crouch under the showerhead for eighteen minutes, spray of hot water baptizing you as you untangle the Old Spice soap-on-a-rope from the hot water faucet handle, your father’s scent. A nostalgic indulgence that is getting harder and harder for your wife to procure and wrap up every Christmas, or so she claims. You wonder if she has stockpiled. Found a rich supply the year you married and has been doling them out ever since. She is a faithful woman.

You stroke a plush washcloth against the Old Spice, like rubbing a magic lamp that conjures your father’s presence, though he was never really present, always out saving someone else’s life. Pulling mothers and babies from burning houses. Dousing flames, windows shattering, embers flying, smoke seeping into his hair, his skin. Such a noble profession. Which explains the Old Spice, the only balm that eradicated the smell. You close your eyes and pretend he is shaving at your sink, performing his own morning ablution while in the kitchen your mother makes oatmeal and slices oranges and stirs extra milk and sugar into your father’s hot tea. You can hear her yelling at you: “Hurry up in there, Cal!”

You scuff the washcloth down your arms and legs, leaner now without the muscle of youth, a much flatter behind, ankles as skinny as a girl’s. Shampoo twice with Head & Shoulders, groaning at the tangle of hairs slipping toward the drain, so few left now and you imagine that the abundance of foam whipping up in your fingers is your original coif, your locks once so full and lush barbers sighed when you plunked into their chairs.

You rinse, massage the soap from your underarms and crotch, more hairs sloughing off along with dead skin and your vigor. The faucets turn off easily, no straining today since you replaced the rubber washers yesterday. Your faithful wife’s complaint. She can’t sleep with the unrelenting splat though you never hear it. You doze like a child. Innocent as a lamb. She, however, grunts and grinds molars and tangles sheets with her frigid feet because she brings her work home. All her clients’ emotional baggage rammed into her skull along with recipes and the grandkids’ birthdays and the hiding place for those medallions of Old Spice. You wonder what secrets your wife has tucked away along with the soap, what wounds her clients reveal, what tragic pasts that she cannot divulge, though you have wheedled and pried because it doesn’t feel right that she keeps things from you, even if those things do not belong to her.

The bath rug is plush, the heartbreaking tickle of silky fibers on the soles of your feet as you dry off with an oversized towel. Another insistence. No thin, rough terrycloth for you. You pack your own towels on vacations because hotel towels are like sandpaper against your delicate skin. The family joke. You’re so thin-skinned you never could wear starched collars or wool slacks.
Sweet Pea
, your father called you.
Ought to send you to the army and see what military cots feel like
. You know something about army cots though you never enlisted.

You wrap the towel around your waist and squeegee steam from the mirror with the side of your hand, glass squealing as you then
swipe the slick surface with the end of a towel so you can examine your torso, count the moles on your chest, create constellations with freckles and skin tags. Stalking lion. Howling wolf. A universe expanding year by year on your pasty skin. You suck in your belly and turn sideways to gauge girth, only slightly thicker than when you played high school football. A swift running back with nimble fingers and
the grace of a panther
, Coach Simpson said.
You are a perfect specimen
, Coach said. To him you were neither soft nor delicate. You were lithe and virile and the most promising athlete he’d seen in years.
Decades
, he said, and you believed him. How you ached to believe him. So did the other players who resented you for it, the special attention, particularly when you got the girl: the perfect unplucked high school sweetheart who could barely look you in the eyes. Your alliterative wife, Connie. Cal and Connie Corbin. You used to attend high school reunions: tenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, spending months in advance doing sit-ups, lifting barbells. How you appraised your pot-bellied teammates who had gone all doughy, particularly the linebackers.
Sweet Peas
, you wanted to call them. And maybe would have after a few more reunions until Andy Barth with his humorless humor. Gripping your shoulders, smothering you in all that fat, your face in his armpit. Him smelling like fried grease and pungent B.O., introducing you to his third wife as
Dr. and Mrs. Corbin
. You being the
Mrs
. since your wife holds the Ph.D., a title you still can’t quite wrap your mouth around.
How’s it feel being a kept woman?
Andy taunted at the last reunion you ever attended in 1975. That was ten years ago when all the other wives were still cooking pot roasts and baking homemade pies while you were heating up TV dinners.

You re-wipe the mirror and finally look square at your face, older than you imagine. Every single time you are stunned by those sagging jowls, the puffy under eyes, skin so pale it’s nearly translucent.
Though at fifty-five, not at death’s door. Unmoored, is the word your Engine Company No. 6 buddies use. All those retired firemen who gather on Saturday mornings at the Waffle House for coffee and bear claws. How they pine for those adrenaline-gushing alarms, those heart-thumping, siren-soaked rides and you miss them, too, because you followed in your father’s footsteps. You also climbed ladders to pull mothers and babies from burning houses, ran into engulfed apartment buildings searching for tenants, sweating in your gear, muscles straining under the weight of it all. Such an incongruous occupation given your innate need for cleanliness. But the Waffle House men dipping their donuts are sixty-five, seventy, much older than you, the baby at the table because of your disability. Your last fire ever when the ceiling collapsed, snapping your legs like brittle twigs.
Lucky for you your wife works
, they said when you closed your locker for good.

You squirt a dollop of Barbasol onto the tips of your fingers and slather it onto your cheeks and neck, craning your head this way and that, squinting at the row of six lights over the vanity, 100-watt bulbs so your wife can see to do her makeup. Luminescence you don’t need because after all these years you have mapped your cheekbones, jaw, cleft chin, Adam’s apple with the precision of a cartographer.

You rinse your hands and pick up the razor. How you hate the cool feel of the blades against your flesh, detest the scraping sound it makes as it rasps down your cheek. Sandpaper. So you shave quickly, methodically, sliding the razor from sideburn to chin in incremental swatches so you don’t miss a single hair. Because even if you hate the feel, the sound, you must have a smooth face that won’t scratch, won’t mar tender skin should you offer a slight kiss, a brush of lips against a velvety cheek. Between strokes you submerge the razor in a sink filled with hot water and tap it against the bottom, watch the cloud of foam and stubble float to the surface. Each day a new Rorschach.
Yes,
Connie, I know what they are
. You try to interpret them: meringue pies your mother used to make; boyhood snow-banks steep enough to sled down; rumple of itchy white sheets on an army cot in a supply closet; tumble of starched shirt on a cold tile floor.

You wonder what white ink blots your father made, if that memory of standing chin high by the sink watching him shave is real or concocted, because you need a memory or two, regardless. Did you really bolster the nerve that chilly morning and ask him to teach you to shave? Did he really say yes and haul in a stool from the kitchen, drape a hand towel over your chest like a bib and slather your face with shaving foam he whipped up in a mug, let you use the back of his comb as a pretend razor so you could copy every stroke, tapping the fake razor in the bottom of a water-filled sink? Or did he in fact say
Not now
, meaning, ultimately, not ever.

At the sink, you unplug the stopper and let the cloudy dream-water gurgle down the pipes before twisting the hot water knob on. You wait for the steam to rise before holding a washcloth underneath, let the fabric soak in the heat before holding it to your face to wipe off excess shaving cream and open those pores so that after the coarse shaving you can slather on the Keri lotion that makes your skin shine. You love the slick cream on your fingers, the tacky feel as you coat your cheeks and neck. The clean smell that doubles as aftershave because after all that Old Spice and Head & Shoulders you don’t want to overpower anyone. Subtlety is your preference. You imagine yourself walking by some sullen girl sitting on a park bench, eyes on a pile of leaves at her feet. She hears only your footsteps, feels the air whirling in your wake, smells the hint of lotion, clean and innocent as a newborn. She will lift her chin and moon over your retreating figure which you are certain is not threatening in the least.

You pick up the black comb from the sink and rake it across your hair, the plastic teeth raising welts on your scalp because you refuse
to reduce pressure, so little resistance to plow through now. Once the hairs are flattened, you shape waves in the remnants to form a wispy outline of the pompadour you sported in your glory days. And then the routine you hide even from your wife—because if she can have secrets, so can you—you grab her unscented hairspray and offer a few pumps to secure your efforts.

The phone rings and you flinch. You should race to the bedside table before the phone screams again and disturbs your dozing wife, but you don’t, because it’s undoubtedly for her. The office. A client’s mental meltdown, yet again. More rescuing, more secrets to keep, giving you less and less to discuss at the dinner table on those nights when she is home.

At times you wish you had been more forceful in squelching her college-bound plan. The children were in high school and didn’t need her anymore, she claimed. How you fiddled with your leather watchband and warned her that it would be hard going, she would probably quit, and that would be okay because you loved her that much. Still needed her that much. But she didn’t drop out and now her practice is thriving. She is a different woman than the spindly eighteen-year-old you carried across the threshold. As ignorant as a peach. She’s not ignorant now, but neither are you, she always insists at those fancy dinner parties and cocktail hours where she has received so many accolades.
And what do you do?
guests ask when they pump your hand.
He’s a voracious reader
, Connie offers, which is the truth. You read Dostoyevsky and Joyce in high school.
But what’s your line of work?
those suit-clad guests probe so they will know how to rank you, at least that’s how you always felt.
He was a fireman
, your wife says. She blathers on about your heroics, listing your awards, your accolades. And there have been plenty. You have had trees planted in your name, park benches installed by grateful families.
But what do you do now?
they prod.
I’m on disability
, you answer, and it’s
nothing to be ashamed of you assure yourself as your wife slips away through the crowd. You pretend she is not wearing your father’s exact expression every time he glared at your legs that could no longer bear the weight of fighting fires.

Which is why you started tutoring at the high school, because you had to do something. Not at the same school you attended, but the sprawling, consolidated version that pulled together your school and your rival’s across town. But the kids don’t mind, not anymore, since they have new adversaries to worry about. When the school opened officials pleaded for volunteers to help tutor lagging children in reading and math. Particularly the jocks. You felt the urge and didn’t even bother to ask your wife if it was a good idea. When was the last time she bothered to ask you anything?

That first day you shaved extra close, the sandpaper excruciating but you endured it because this was important. Your first big impression. You chose your dress wisely, soft sweater and slacks, and wound your way through the labyrinthine halls toward the football coach’s office, such an odd feeling in your gut. He was pleasant enough, Coach Boggs, no scratchy five o’clock shadow that Coach Simpson sported even in the morning. This new coach wore tidy Dockers and a Polo shirt. No whistle around his neck. No supply closet behind him with a narrow cot for catnaps. No bathroom of his own with the metal paper towel dispenser, those coarse, brown paper sheets that nearly rubbed you raw.

And then the cutting news that where you were really needed with your well-read history was in the library. The apparent dismay on your closely-shaven face. You slogged down the hall feeling demoted until Miss Wallace, the antiquated librarian who could barely see, rose to clasp your hand and usher you to a carrel in the back corner where your first pupil waited. And there she sat, Brenda, a sloop-shouldered girl who barely peeled her eyes from her shoes,
anxious for you to open up to her the world of books.

But she opened up to you, too. It was an accident, really.
Great Expectations
, poor Pip, and how chapter by chapter, week by week, Brenda discovered how cruel adults can be to children, even fictitious ones. How finally one day tears rimmed Brenda’s eyes and you surprised even yourself by confessing your own inner wounds. That’s all Brenda needed, that small door opening and she walked right through it. All tears and hiccups and bangs in her eyes, her head on your shoulder, hand on your wrist, your fingers stroking her silky hair. So excruciatingly soft.