At the moment they were
silent in the car, a rented bottle-green PT Cruiser that must have looked,
Elena reflected, like a giant scarab crawling around the sandy curves of the
desert road. Everything outside the window was arid and broken, as though the
earth had exploded and settled in to jagged and monumental heaps of dry rock.
Or, maybe, like their marriage, there hadn’t been any upheaval at all, but just
a tumble here, a crumble there, until the terrain was all quite different.
Once she and Harry had
traveled well together, taking off for a two week jaunt into the Canadian
Rockies when they had known each other barely a month. Then, the mammoth
sheets of mountains had redefined her, making her marvel at the possibilities
of a daily existence with this man she didn’t really know and yet succumbed to,
almost minute-by-minute, and certainly at night. She felt reassured in his
acceptance of things, his insights, the books he had read. The Rockies had been lush with melting snow; water tumbled abundantly into turquoise rivers and
falls.
That was twenty –five
years ago. Rivers had given way to sand.
“Well, it was
good to see the kids,” Harry said, as though she had just suggested the
opposite. The kids. Harry’s son Paul and his wife were in their forties, the
same ages Harry and Elena had been when they’d first met. Harry’s mother, to
their amusement, had then referred to them as “the kids.” “You kids get in the
back,” she’d say, directing the car seating. She liked Elena. Once, at a
picnic, Elena pulled Harry onto her lap. He was a big man and she liked to
hold him, liked the way his weight smashed her thighs. She’d wrap her arms
around him and press the side of her face against his back, large before her,
wanting to take in his full sense of self. “What are you doing!” the mother
had exclaimed, as Elena cradled Harry, but you could see she was pleased.
Elena turned from the
view of sooty sagebrush to gaze at the voice, husky now, sometimes almost
annoyingly whispery. “Yes,” she acknowledged. “It was fine.”
“They’re doing well,”
Harry said. “I think so. They’re doing okay.”
“Yes.” She didn’t
care. Maybe Paul would have Harry. As visiting parents, or one and a step,
she had toned down their carping into a humorous routine. “What I have to look
forward to?” the wife had laughed, looking from Paul to Harry. “Two of a
kind?” Elena wondered whether the wife actually feared such a thing.
The rock formations
were getting bigger, rock upon rock against the sandy hills, cubistic
sculptures of the human condition. Five big fat eggs in a row like fat blank
faces, a squared pair of buttocks, several phalluses. “Like big penises,” she
said. “Out there.”
“What?” he said. “Phoenix?”
I’m going to
leave your father. Paul would have been surprised if she’d said that. We’ve
stopped connecting. The problem was she didn’t know where she’d go if she
left; she liked the idea of the option, the unvoiced threat.
“What?” he said again.
“Nothing! It
doesn’t matter? Do you want some water?” she said, attempting amends.
“I’m really dry,” he
announced. “Do you have any water back there?”
“I just asked you.”
She unbuckled her seat belt and pulled a tepid bottle out of the Styrofoam
box. The car announced her freed status with an alarming boing, boing,
boing, boing, until she righted herself, fastened up. “It’s warm. We
need ice.” She felt something was out of her control—no more choices, youth
gone. She might as well hold Harry responsible. “And I have to pee.”
“Well, when we see
something,” he said, leaning forward and peering through the top of the
windshield.
“Stop! Stop!” she
cried out, spotting the tourist center down a roadside drive.
“Where?” he said.
“What? I just can’t stop—it’s a road.”
“There aren’t any other
cars.”
“Here comes one.” He
waited on the shoulder, sitting straight with his momentary upper hand, then
swung a wide U, grinding the tires into the sandy gravel before leveling off
again. “Okay. We’re stopping. We’re stopped.”
The sun was searing as
they traversed the short space from parking lot to visitor’s center, an airless
room with a few taxidermied animals—a roadrunner, an eagle, a hare—desert
survivors. They stared at the map on the wall outside.
“321 to Joshua Tree,”
she said.
“I can see that,” he
said. He took a map out of his shirt pocket. “But maybe it’s 88.”
“Harry!” she started to
whine, “It’s so hot!” She leaned toward him. “There’s a spot on your shirt.
Blood? What from?”
He looked down.
“That’s where I hit myself with the car trunk. At Paul’s house.”
She tried to
remember—some little outcry at the back of the car—as she was throwing hats on
the seats. “Let’s see.”
“What for? As if you’d
do anything!”
She started to protest
his truth, gave it up. “I need to get out of the sun.” Her heart felt heavy,
like one of the rocks out there. “Anyway, what can I do?” she asked,
knowing that, since she had turned away, Harry couldn’t hear her.
The next day the
Joshua trees appeared speculatively at first, reaching out like sad broken
lyres toward the road where Harry and Elena drove through the hot sun in the
green rented car. Behind Elena, in the little Styrofoam box, were thick
sandwiches they had purchased at a supermarket, shoved against cold water bottles.
Behind her in another sense was the sustenance of highways that held such
stores, and she felt a mild alarm. Earlier they had seen picnic tables
plentifully placed among boulders that were as pink and inviting as fake ones
in an amusement park, but now they couldn’t find any others. The Joshua trees
got thicker and statelier, then spiteful looking, twisting in mean contortions
farther from the road, before they petered out altogether into dry gravelly
mountains.
“There’s a cactus
garden coming up,” Elena announced, striving to find the value Harry claimed
existed in what she saw as the despair of the desert. “The map shows we can
park. It doesn’t show a table, though.”
“I’m sure there’ll be
one,” Harry said, hungry now. But there wasn’t. They parked in the dusty lot
beside an expanse of short spiky plants sprouting out of that dust. The road
marker next to the rock they sat on, unwrapping their sandwiches, warned about
getting too close to the plants, cholla they were called; they could get spiked
and not be able to remove the needles.
“Some garden,” she
observed, shooing flies that had appeared out of nowhere.
“Still, it’s
interesting,” he said. They both waved to another car joining them in the
dust. An old man unfolded himself from the passenger side. “Long drive,” said
Harry.
“She’s doing it.” He
looked like a caricature of an old man—his hair in white tufts, his back bent,
his legs spindly between his hiking shorts and walking shoes. “Her turn. I was
asleep.” The “her” was an old woman, in the same outfit, who read aloud and
loudly about the cholla. Single file, they started the dismal garden walk,
disconnected and together. Could they—Harry and Elena—look that way? Elena
stared off at the blue blank sky rimmed by her hat. Across gray sands and
rusted sagebrush the horizon stretched with nothing there. Nothing! Harry, a
disproportionate bookend beside her, was looking off in the other direction.
Behind her, there were the decrepit cholla scattered on a path of dusty gravel,
the ancient couple in their nondescript khaki shuffling through. It was too
much! It was too little.
“More water?” she
asked. “There’s more cold. It gets warm so quickly.”
He looked at her
steadily for around thirty seconds, as though waiting for faraway strands of
thought to come together. “Yeah, good,” he said, patting her thigh.
“Thanks. I could use something wet.”
She stood and wiped a
crumb from his moustache; he drew back, annoyed, then elaborately wiped down
his whole face with his napkin. “Sorry!” she said and leaned into the car.
She’d have to be alone—or get used to some other old man!
“Get the camera,
too!” Harry called.
“Whatever for?”
“For this,” he
said, sweeping his arm in a wide arc. “For where we are.”
It was the next
afternoon when her accident occurred. Riding through the desert was
bearable—even interesting, as Harry said—by day, as long as there was the
refuge of a nice motel at the end of it, and they had found one. Even so, it
was wearisome to drag oneself out of the car every fifteen minutes, and so
Elena sulked when, late in the afternoon, Harry stopped again. She’d just sit
in the car and wait it out.
Even the fact that he
looked lonely walking across the expanse cacti toward the off-road marker
didn’t change her mind. She had to pee. “I’m coming, too!” she called and
pulled out the keys and caught up with him. The Mormons had crossed that way,
she read, next to Harry. Box Canyon, boxed in, here.
“The road’s a bit of a
distance,” she said. “Watch it anyway. Don’t watch me. I’m going to go—down
there.”
“No one’s here,” he
said. The silence made it true enough.
But she was
self-conscious, listening to her own stream in the dust, and scrambled quickly
back up the sandy mound, slipping, losing her footing. She fell headlong over
a huge cactus and screamed, then sobbed softly, suspending herself in an arch
over the spiky plant. Harry, who had started back toward the car, rushed to
her. “Are you hurt?”
She tried to
straighten. Blood dripped from her breast onto her sandal. She was afraid to
unfold further.
“My god,” he said.
She watched the
spectacle of herself, the blood dripping from breast to shoe. “I feel pierced
all over,” she said. “I’m afraid.”
“Wait—“he said. “I’ll
get some water from the car. Don’t we have that towel you stole, too?”
She didn’t know what
she had done. She saw her life turned around—nipples pierced by spikes,
breasts ripped apart. No plane ride home, stuck in a hospital somewhere,
maimed. She leaned on her hands into the sand, staring at the wet spot on her
shirt, not sure whether the stab in her left breast was as sharp as the image
of blood in the sand. She could hear—it took forever, it seemed—the beep-beep
lock of the car and knew he was on his way back. He helped her up. He
fumbled, trying to get her bra undone, the most unsexy of seductions, and yet
so comforting, to think that he could do it. The bra loosened, he pulled both
up, bra and shirt, and exposed the wounds, a huge one in her left breast,
another next to her armpit, both swelling around the punctures in aggressive,
unpretty ways, other points of blood, but just pricks. She felt throbs of
panic. Harry wet the towel—stolen, as he said, from the motel poolside-- with
a bottle of water and gently wiped her down.
Now she didn’t
care—didn’t think about it, really—that she was standing in the middle of a
large flat space bare-breasted.
“I don’t think it’s
really bad,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“I really hurt,” she
said, frightened that the pain might permeate beyond the punctures, relieved
there was no more blood. “Do you think it’s poisonous? That plant?”
“Probably not. I don’t
know.”
“There’s that medical
center we saw last night,” she said.
She drew a picture of
the plant for the doctor. Yucca, probably, he said. Not harmful. Except that
it had functioned as knives and she had the wounds; they would heal. Aloe,
Harry guessed, maybe even helpful. The plant turned out, when they
looked it up, to be a succulent, agave, one of the nurturers for the original
tribes. “They ate the stalks,” the tidy man at the tourist center told them.
“Also used the spikes to sew, to piece things together.”
“A sympathy wound,”
Harry said, taking her hand. “Now we both have chest wounds.”
She had forgotten his.
When they arrived
at Palm Springs a few days later, Elena, subdued by her subdued swellings
wanted to sit at the motel pool, mostly because there was a pool, a new and
lovely one, and she hated wasting something she had more or less paid for.
The vision she had arranged in her head, of her new green bathing suit with its
calla lilies next to the palm trees and blue water, was sabotaged by the
reality of the room’s vanity mirror, aggressively large and too illuminated. The
suit covered her recent punctures, but the flesh of her arms hung loosely
around the edges of the pretty print straps; she tugged at the leg holes,
wincing. The first time they slept together Harry, long and lean beside her,
had smoothed his hand over her firm belly, her tanned legs. “I can’t believe
you,” he had said.
She felt like
crying. Across the room Harry was pulling on a pair of puffy nylon trunks,
adjusting them under his big belly. “How’s your chest?” she said to the
mirror, his image as flawed as her own. Even from here she could see the
large wound on his right breast.
“It’s okay, I guess.
It’ll take a while.” He put his oxfords on, over his bare feet, picked up a
towel. He waited, in front of the TV unit, as she applied pink lipstick.
“That suit looks good,” he said, and she turned to see if he was being
sarcastic. She grabbed her lingerie robe, which he helped her into, like a
prom wrap, and they paraded down the carpeted hallway back into the sun.
Elena’s hat was in
the car. She wrapped her nylon robe around her head like a turban—the dryness
of the desert!—and awkwardly straddled the pool chair before she could find a
modest position. “If you’re not going in?” Harry said, setting his watch, his
cell phone, his glasses, his hearing aid carefully on the little patio table.
“It’s only four feet, tops,” he said. “You could walk across it.”
But she leaned back,
inhaling the pool’s refreshing wetness, its chlorine. Soon there were the
voices of young women behind her; they were discussing men and slapping sun tan
oil on firm flesh. She guessed they were shapely and pretty and under
thirty. Elena felt invisible, and peeked, once, from under her sunglasses, to
see what Harry was doing. He was just standing in the water, looking around,
then he’d stretch out and swim across the width and stand again, the black
trunks puffing out like underwater sea creatures. She felt divided from him,
as over an expanse of sea, as divided as the young women were from her, and a
little sorry. She could see the bruise. When he turned her way, she waved. He
waved back.
In their room again
and dressed, Harry sorted through the flyers he had picked up from the lobby.
“We need to stop for some wine,” he said.
Elena was unpacking
toiletries, arranging them in the nightstand drawer--her book, her eyeshades,
her lubricant. The packaging called the lubricant personal fluid. So many
euphemisms—after buying feminine hygiene products, you bought personal fluid,
even though you were still trying to be feminine, and hygiene was amazingly
easy—no odors, no fluids of your own.
“Let’s do the air-tram
thing,” she said, brushing her hair. She drew the brush gently across Harry’s
head
He ducked from under
it. He’d always been that way—one brush in the morning was enough for him.
Elena felt herself in constant need of fixing. “ The Air-tram? Now?”
“It’s only five
o’clock.”
“It’s miles outside of
town.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is.”
“It isn’t! Where’s the
map? Is one of those colored things the air-tram? Isn’t there a drawing?”
She could feel them drifting off, drying out again. “It’s just next door, I
think. I’ll show you.”
“Look,” he said,
blinking slowly with forbearance. “I know where we came in—the highway split,
remember. The highway split.” He put his hands together as though in
prayer, then opened them into a V.
She glared at him.
“Don’t do that! Look. I’ll show you.”
“Okay,” he said,
slapping the pamphlets down like a hand of cards. “You know everything. You
work it out.” He got up and went into the bathroom, but came out again,
calmer, wearing a fresh shirt. “Let’s go,” he said, standing at the door.
“Maybe there’s time.”
She grabbed her
handbag. “I think there is!” she assured him. “It’ll be nice up there.
Maybe there’s some snow left.” She hoped so, anyway.
What she had once
admired as Harry’s appreciative focus on all things, on even small things, had
now, to her, dissolved into fixations. There was still a road on the desert
park map they hadn’t driven and so would explore this last day, before their
return that evening to the airport and home.
“Look at the view,” he
urged, rounding the hairpin curves.
“I can see it! Don’t you
look until we stop!” The road was narrow, with no shoulder. He swerved across
it, to the pull-off going the other way. Her heart thumped. “Why did you do
that?” she panted. “There could have been something coming.”
“There wasn’t,” he
said. “Look at the view.” Browns and tans, swirling downward into a canyon.
“You’re too nervous all the time.”
They were perched on a
precipice.
“Take it easy,” he
said.
“I want to live to get
home.” As she said it, she realized it was probably true. She pictured them
back in the living room, in their matching blue chairs, the books scattered on
the floor, the TV clicker. It was almost impossible to imagine both chairs
empty, or worse, now that she thought of it, one.
He made a sound with his
tongue, suggesting sadness, a missed point altogether, or maybe one taken. “I
thought it was a view worth looking at.” The tires ground up the gravelly sand
as they pulled out and across the road again. She checked the map to see how
much of the squiggle was left to traverse. He beat it the map down with his
hand, crossing the car, briefly, over the centerline.
“Look out!” she
screamed.
“Jesus! You scared
me!” He yelled back. “Will you let me drive?”
“You’re not paying
attention.”
“I am paying
attention!” He sighed deeply, rounding the sharp curves. “Why do you—” He
didn’t finish; he gave it up, as though the issue were hopeless.
“Carry on,” she said.
“I’m getting some water.” Boing, boing, boing, boing warned the
unfastened seat belt.
“What?” he said.
“In the back,” she
shouted. “For water.” Boing, boing!
“What? What are you
doing?”
“Slow down. Ouch,
ouch!”
“What’s the matter?”
The car jerked and righted itself.
“Nothing,” she said,
settling back into her seat, fastening the belt, silencing the noise. “I
bumped my boobs.”
He glanced at her,
sympathetic: “But they don’t feel as bad?
“Not as bad as I
thought. Just sore. What about you? Your wound?”
She saw the truck
coming as Harry glanced down. “Look out!” she cried, grabbing the wheel and
pulling at it. She had jerked them from center to right, just as the truck
attempted to avert them—all so bizarrely quick she barely heard Harry cry out
“Let go!”
But it was too late!
The crash was resounding, so crash-like it sounded contrived, the worst sound
metal could make against metal, engine against engine. The glass splashed
around them like a waterfall. Elena bumped against the visor and sank back.
Harry was leaning over
the steering wheel, arms hanging. His head tilted toward her, his eyes were
open. A thin stream of blood ran sidewise across his forehead.
“Harry?” She was still
breathing, could feel her arms and legs.
“Harry!” She pushed at
his arm, almost punching it, and his head lolled in its own weight. A drizzle
of blood crept past her wedding band, and, when she tried to pluck out the
intrusive piece of glass, she saw the water bottle, wet and icy, still in her
other hand. “Har –ree!” she screamed. “Oh God, oh God!”
He was inert, his
mouth open, too. It looked dry. She poured some water into it –“Drink, Harry,
please, please drink!”--and watched his mouth fill like a cup and overflow,
dripping onto the mangled wheel. Through the crushed windshield s a pick-up
truck was wedged against them, black against the metallic green of their car,
the hood on Harry’s side crushed like a Japanese beetle.
There was frantic
pounding on her side window. “Lady! Lady! Are you okay? Can you open your
door?”
She found the handle
and he pulled. The man was slight, with thinning red hair and mechanic’s
overalls, Cameron embroidered in red script on the pocket. “I’ve called
for help,” he said. “Can you move?” He held the door and indicated, with a
hand that shook with tremors that she should get out. “What about him?”
“He won’t move,” she
said. “I can’t get him to. I don’t know what to do!” She held up her
bottle. “I need more, in the back.”
The man Cameron slid
into the seat she vacated and pressed a shaking thumb and fingers around
Harry’s wrist. “Christ,” he said, letting go. He seemed to sink into
himself. “He’s had a heart attack, I think. He doesn’t seem to be breathing.”
The sun hurt her head.
“It’s too hot,” she said. “I need to sit there.”
He looked up at her,
his small head arched like a bird’s. “I’m sorry, lady. Jesus! He was on my
side--.”
“I did it,” she said. “It
was my fault--.” She sat back in her seat. The man stood holding the door
open, almost embracing the car door. She couldn’t imagine what would happen
next. “What will happen?” she asked. She’d have to call the airport. What
of the car rental? And then what?
“I don’t know!” he said
in anguish. “Come wait in my truck. Someone will be here.”
She flicked him away
like the flies around the sandwich—she thought of them with her gesture—just a
few days before. Her eyes welled; she shook her head and closed the door.
A hot breeze from the
broken window stirred a few strands of Harry’s hair. They made Elena sob.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am so sorry!” It was strange to think of who she
was, now in this mangled heap with the silent Harry. “Honey, really, I didn’t
mean any of it! I never even said anything, did I? Did I? Why did
you leave me?”
She was so dry!
She poured water into her mouth, swallowing some, letting the rest run down her
neck and into her shirt. She opened another bottle and poured water over
Harry’s head, then over her own, leaning her wet head against Harry’s. She
wanted to lift him, position him heavily onto her lap, but he wouldn’t budge.
She reached one arm around his hunched shoulders, the other around his middle,
the pressure of the embrace forcing her own left breast to revive its painful
wound. She held tighter. She wanted to feel that wound. She wanted to wait
here with Harry for as long as it took.
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