The Kissing List (21 page)

T
he next morning, Deirdre goes into the bathroom off the master bedroom. Here, the light is good, and there is a full-length mirror on the back of the door. She looks like she has eaten a large meal, but otherwise nothing is different. She probes her stomach with her fingers, trying to find the small thing, but it seems to have folded itself up and disappeared into a tight nook.

There is another mouse in the bathtub, a gray one, just like the one trapped earlier in the week, trying to climb the slippery walls. She wonders whether mice have suicidal impulses. She imagines this one darting along the edge, gathering speed, then veering into nothingness, its tiny paws still moving.

“I put water out for you,” she scolds. “Why didn’t you drink it?”

The phone rings. When the answering machine clicks on, Dale clears his throat. “Deirdre, are you there?” He pauses. “Uh, well, I just wanted to tell you that the crystal cat burned a hole in the wooden table next to the window. I guess she’s like a magnifying glass. I smelled something burning and thought I’d left the stove on. Well … I feel dumb talking into the answering
machine. It would be easier telling you this in person. Anyway, when I came back, I saw smoke curling up from the table. That cat really heats up. I burned my thumb. Can you imagine what would have happened if we’d both been away?”

Our apartment would have burned down, Deirdre thinks. Or, like the cabin, it might have been infested with mice. She has an irrational urge to pick up the phone and yell: “Things happen, Dale. They just happen.”

He pauses again, his breath raspy and audible. “Well, okay, then. Good-bye.”

S
he walks. It is easier to leave the cabin to the mice, and the upper island is crisscrossed with trails to explore. She laces on her hiking boots, packs herself a lunch—two bologna sandwiches, slices of cheese, crackers, orange soda, apples. Beef jerky for a snack. A liter of water. The lower half of the island was cleared fifty years ago, but the upper island is thick with Douglas-fir, cedars, spruce, and other trees she doesn’t know. Halfway up the big hill, the pavement ends, and the road turns first to gravel and then to dirt. She passes the hulking metal water tanks where the water that is piped from the first lake is purified, the small electric station, the road to the old dump. At Horseshoe Lake, she sits on the steps of a small cabin that was built by loggers, the island’s early inhabitants. She spots something floating in the middle of the lake and moves down to the small dock. It’s a canoe. “Hello,” she calls out, because it’s just far enough away that she can’t see it clearly. “Is someone out there?” Something rustles, and she feels a tinge of fear, but
a deer steps out of the trees and gracefully lowers its head to drink. She wonders where the boat will stop.

T
he next day, she hikes all the way to Spencer, the second lake, where the island’s oldest families keep their rafts for picnicking and fishing. Her family’s sank several years ago. She passes the one-room schoolhouse. “In 1934,” it says in spidery cursive on the old chalkboard, “the last year the school was in use, Miss Jean Davidson was the teacher. Five children were enrolled: two second graders, one third grader, a fifth grader and a ninth grader.” This has been posted for the past twenty years, since Deirdre was a girl, and yet every year, she stops to admire the wood-burning stove, the old-fashioned desks connected to each other like beads on a string, the upper- and lowercase alphabet stenciled in cursive around three sides of the room. Standing against the blackboard, careful not to touch the writing, she thinks about how she first met Dale—they like to joke it was at a bowling league for left-handed singles, but really it was just a bowling club. For a nanosecond, bowling was hip, and they were hip, Deirdre in her platform Pradas that she’d reluctantly exchange for clumsy bowling shoes, and Dale in his orange corduroys, his wool newsie hat. They’d both grown up in Seattle, gone away, returned. They knew the same dive bars, the crumpet shop in the market, the deli where the owner cured his own meat. They both rented top-floor apartments in Victorians, invested in the notion they could walk away whenever opportunity called. After a while, Dale came to the alley with wonderful snacks: wild rice and hazelnut salad, miniature
chèvre tarts, stuffed grape leaves, chunks of fresh lamb skewered on rosemary branches and grilled over mesquite. Back then, he cooked anything.

She glances around the schoolhouse again. How can it remain exactly the same year after year? It doesn’t seem right. There is a thick piece of chalk in the tin cup on the teacher’s desk, and in a corner of the board, she writes in a ghost hand, “I was here.”

O
n the third day, she does something she’s never done before. She heads for the wooden bathtub house. Walking up the big hill is easier, or perhaps she’s grown more patient with the pace of walking. A man in a truck passes and shouts, does she want a ride, but she smiles and waves him forward. He’s only the second person she’s seen all week. There may be other people on the island, people who are hiding out as she is, or people who just seem to be hiding but are actually going about their quiet routines. She passes the first lake and the pasture where the lonely black horse grazes. She passes the big organic garden where she has, in years past, snuck in and stolen raspberries. She passes the road to the summit. When she was a teenager, it was a great adventure to try to ride up there in the dark on motorbikes. Finally, she reaches the turnoff to the wooden bathtub house. Perhaps she visited as a child, or perhaps she has just heard stories about the place. The road is deeply rutted, and when she isn’t paying attention, mud squishes over the toes of her boots. Trees stand at strange angles, and she sees an astonishing sight—six saplings, almost evenly placed, growing
out of the trunk of a toppled-over tree. She’s not thinking about anything. She’s not thinking about Dale, or the problems of their relationship, or the mouse in the bathtub, or whether the wooden bathtub will be teeming with mice. No, she is deeply engrossed in the rutted road and the beautiful mess of the forest, where things are rotting and growing in equal numbers and moss stubbles everything in shades of green, including some she has never noticed before.

The road turns, and she spots the cabin through the trees, but when she draws closer, nothing is there, except for a small pond guarded by cattails. Deirdre trips. It’s a terrible feeling, falling forward as the body automatically recalibrates, shifting weight backward and trying to outfinesse the insistent grip of momentum and gravity. But it’s too late. She lands heavily. She doesn’t even get her hands out in time to break the fall. She lies still for a few moments before gently touching her stomach.

T
he mouse is dead. His once wiry and sleek body is lumpy and swollen now, and his face looks bruised and tormented. He has been dead for days, but now that he is rotting, Deirdre can no longer peer down at him in the bathtub’s bottom and pretend he is dreaming of nuts and seeds and small dark places and stuffing. The smell makes her vomit. Her hip has a purple bruise. The small thing—her baby—is holding itself very still right now. She calls Dale. “I’m pregnant,” she blurts out.

He is silent for a moment. “Are you leaving me?”

“But maybe not.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I fell.”

“What are you telling me?” he demands.

She feels sorry for herself. She is so irresponsible. Is it really possible to stop loving someone for no good reason? “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I killed another mouse,” she says.

“What?”

“I left it in the bathtub,” she says. “I didn’t rescue it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “But you’re not listening to me. I let the mouse die. I didn’t do anything.”

He is silent for a moment, though Deirdre can hear his anger and frustration drawing the phone line taut. How can you know someone so well, and also know so little? “Never mind,” he says. “What matters right now is whether the baby is okay. Are you bleeding?”

“No,” she says, “there’s no blood.”

She listens as Dale tells her the arrangements he’ll make to bring her back to Seattle. “I’ll call back in five minutes,” he says, and she thanks him and adds that she is sorry. On the railing of the deck, there is the cup, there is the small creature curled in the bottom. She flings the dead mouse into the darkness and flies with him, not knowing where her toss will take her, or whether she is still light enough to touch down softly, or how she’ll feel when she finishes turning into something new.

W
hen I first hitched my pony to Burt’s treat truck, I assumed that he was just like the other guys I’d been dating, guys who were still finding themselves: treat truck employee by day, aspiring rock star by night, or something along those lines. Under his white apron, Burt wore skinny jeans, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica T-shirts, and clunky boots, and he was never without a funny old-man hat. He’d bought the truck with money he earned putting a perfect sear on New York strip and creaming spinach during the week and running
an underground supper club out of his Williamsburg loft on the weekends, and he dreamed of someday managing a whole fleet of trucks, each one with a different menu, sensibility, and soundtrack.

On our fourth date, Burt told me he wanted to take me someplace special.

“Where?” I said, guessing he meant the old wooden roller coaster out at Coney Island or a dive bar in Red Hook.

Then he named a French restaurant I’d read about in the
Times
.

“No way,” I said.

“I’ve been saving up for months,” he said. “This is French, but without the sauciness. The chef is foaming everything. Picture it: Beet foam! Wasabi foam! Turkish coffee foam! And then he’s got all these cool tricks he does with liquid nitrogen.”

Burt’s enthusiasm was contagious. “Are you serious?” I asked, referring to both the food and the invitation. At this point, we hadn’t even slept together. Our dates culminated in increasingly long sessions of stoop kissing that left my legs the consistency of firm Jell-O. (Burt believed that homemade gelatin in exotic flavors had great market potential.) But I didn’t invite Burt up to my apartment, and he didn’t press for an invitation. His hesitation seemed to match my own. We had no shared context, since we’d met in the cookbook section of the Strand, where we were both hunting for Julia Child’s bible on French cooking. He was buying a copy as a wedding present for his best friend, and I was embarking on self-improvement in the most predictable way possible. I was doing a lot of self-renovation
in those days, trying to turn myself into a person with spacious, light-filled interiors.

“As serious as you want me to be,” Burt said.

“What?” I felt my face turning red.

Burt’s eyes locked on mine. “I just mean I like you.”

“I like you too.” Even though I’d said these words—and more serious ones—to half a dozen guys whom I probably liked less than Burt, they sounded hollow, other things I didn’t care to hear rattling around inside of them. Once you gave voice to your feelings, things could get so complicated.

Burt laughed. “You’re a conundrum, Sylvie. Sylvie-who-has-fun-until-the-end-of-the-evening-and-then-disappears.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, already taking a step back, losing my balance for just a second because of the doormat.

Burt sighed. “It’ll be my treat, by the way.”

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t let you do that.”

“Well, we’ll see,” he said before taking his own step backwards. He held my hand until too much distance opened between us. Then, after smiling hopefully, he turned and walked away. This never happened. Usually I took the stairs by two. Usually I arranged things so that I was the one who left first.

B
efore Burt, I had only dated guys who were not Lance. It’s hard to explain what Lance had meant to me. There was the Lance before we dated, the Lance who’d been my doctor when I was a teenager, whom I’d liked because he was the rare adult who listened, who seemed to find me worthy of regular conversations and not the kind of watered-down attention that
adults manufacture for younger people. Then there was the Lance who knew me as a young woman, who just happened to be passing through wherever I was living and sent me tickets and took me places and introduced me to experiences: Lebanese food, canyoneering, left-wing magazines, salsa and merengue, the man with whom I had long philosophical conversations, the man who seemed to want to know me, who could appreciate my wanderlust, who treated me as his equal and was, according to my mother, my hometown’s most eligible bachelor. In my early twenties, I didn’t see myself as grown up and couldn’t imagine competing with real women (whatever that meant) for the attention of a man they wanted. This was why for many years I didn’t think he could like me, even though the tension was palpable, even though I thought I’d made my feelings clear by sending him flirtatious postcards that I addressed to my “Western Muse” and making him heartbreakingly silly things, like a ceramic jar that I filled with fortune cookies: “If you look in the right places, you can find some good offerings.” Hint. Hint. “Soon life will become more interesting.”