False Positive

The young husband sat at the table and she watched him there, drinking his coffee with his coffee-brown hair and his eyes that she remembered were gray, though she hardly saw them anymore; lids covered them mostly as he gazed down at books and papers—news or research or essays to be graded. He certainly was young for a professor. But then, she was young too, for whatever she was. A twenty-year-old girl-woman-thing; a female thing who wrote and read and painted sometimes, and other times watched the young husband at his work, as she did now. What was she? Whatever it was, she supposed she was young for it. Twenty seemed young for most things, things that were not silly. Young for marriage, some thought. Don’t you want to finish your degree first? Why tie yourself down so young, they asked her. You will change; he will change. You will see. So far she had seen, a little. Her puzzle of a man; as she watched him he only seemed to grow more mysterious. He was to her a crossword in a dead language. She would fit all the pieces into the places she knew them to belong but still she did not understand. He will change, they said, and she watched, fascinated. She watched him shift like colored sands and was mesmerized, lonely as she was. Whoever he was now—however different from when they first met on the pier—whoever he was becoming, she loved him still, though she did wish that he would take her into his arms more often. You’ll change, they said. But she had not. Still no career, still no college graduation. The little pink plus sign, but no showing yet. And no telling either; no telling though it had been weeks.

The young husband took a sip of his coffee—black—and his brow was furrowed. Or maybe that was just his brow, though she thought she remembered it differently far off at the pier. When she spoke his brow furrowed further—or furrowed in the first place; she couldn’t tell anymore—and though she knew it was only with the weight of the world’s injustices she had taken to speaking less, and about lighter things. Things that would make him give a satisfied nod toward his paper or book, for that was as close to happy as she had seen him in a long while.

She wondered what he was reading about, and weren’t his eyes gray? Maybe there had been some blue once; or maybe it was the light.

She was tending his bacon and eggs in the skillet but he did not seem to notice when she slipped away to vomit as quietly as she could in the bathroom in the back of the little house. She returned just as the bacon was burning, but this also passed unnoticed under the young husband’s nose. His lips brushed past her cheek and the door closed behind him.
Where was his mind? It was like an insect to her; one like a mantis: so curious and strange but so very, very still. She wanted to get up close and study it but she was afraid of sudden movements. She was afraid to touch it; if she held it, would she crush it in her hand? Or would it bite her and draw blood? Safer maybe to pin it to a board, well-labeled in a box with moth balls in the corners. Safer maybe then but empty, and he still had in him some of the man she had met on the pier.

The pier.

The day they met she had soaked in the tub until her fingers and toes had wrinkled. She lay mostly submerged, patches of skin cold where they peeked out from water. The tops of her thighs, the soft swells of her stomach and breasts; they rose gently from the surface like so many smooth islands. She had used all the hot water; she knew she would have none left for rinsing off. She had known the risks and kept running the water anyway, fully aware of her tendency to overindulge in the present despite future consequences. At that moment she hadn’t cared; that moment was all there was to her, until the next one.

For she was like a breeze, maybe, or like a train station. So much bustling about within her but never the same things; always different ones in and out and gone to new places where they might be better suited. What stayed for any length of time did so still briefly, and restlessly.

She grew restless too, there in the tub, and soon her boots scraped the sidewalk strewn with crackling dead leaves and twigs. The sky was gray and her coat was new; stiff, with brass buttons. The cold wind bit at her scalp where her wet hair separated in tangled yellow clumps. When she reached the place where the sidewalk ended, she sat on the edge of the concrete above the landfill. This was the place they called “The Pier” in the small town of Louisburg Kansas, two miles south of the abandoned houses where the high school students with artistic aspirations liked to take tired photographs. Natural light, black and white; film and dark rooms, so young and yet they only liked old things.

She had been there and she had taken pictures, too, but to her the light did not come so naturally anymore. It had gone out of her and nothing developed within the roomy darkness of herself.

He sat next to her on the pier and offered her a joint. Though she had never smoked before, she took it, and they talked. They talked all year; they talked and they got married. They talked another year. They talked less. He had fascinated her, with his silence and his words. And she supposed she fascinated him too, otherwise why did he marry her? They didn’t really talk about that.

For all that they talked about, she supposed now that there was more that they didn’t. She never told him of her little brothers toddling in off the sand on Dolphin Island, the tops of their downy heads smelling of the cool salt breeze and she never told him of the red-net bag of oranges sold to her by a man on the street in Mexico and how her mother had scolded her for paying too much. The nicotine on her uncle’s breath and the hole where there was no father, around the edge of which she balanced every day. One foot in front of the other, swaying, round and round, trying so hard not to be swallowed up by the emptiness he left behind. Oh, the young husband knew there was no father, but of the hole he was not aware. He had known her thoughts and opinions once, she supposed, on the things that people say should matter, but he never knew what it was to be her.

She supposed she never knew what it was to be him, either. She had asked some things. She had asked what his mother was like when he was a child; was she strict or was she doting? His father; was he always so serious?

She knew that there must be things about the young husband that made him human. Pictures he drew with his eyes on the ceiling as a child perhaps, connecting the dots. The smell of his grandmother’s perfume; a chore he hated? Sometimes she felt that these things—these tiny, small things—were all she had to connect herself to reality and so she believed others must have them too, buried somewhere in their memory. But the young husband, his conversation drifted to philosophy always; to history and ethical theory and the power of myth. These things she did not understand and thus she assumed that they were more important than the things she did understand, the things she carried with her day and night.

Never a straight answer from him; never a statement of how he himself felt. And so now, when it came to it, she felt she did not know him. Surely it was because her mind was not as lofty as his that she did not know what to do with the little pink plus sign, but then, she was afraid to ask. What did she want? Did it matter? Was there a theoretical answer that trumped all? What would he want? Must she do it, because he knew more than she did? Because they were married? What mattered? Who mattered? Who was who to decide? Certainly not she for it still did not feel real to her. She felt nothing; it was nothing. She knew nothing; she knew no one. No one knew. And what would be expected of her anyway, this twenty-year-old girl-woman-thing from twenty untamed acres in a small town where no one who left was ever heard from again? The young husband had whisked her away in a daze and here she was, dazed still and in the kitchen with the bacon grease and if there ever was a plan, this was not it.

Where did things go wrong? What exit could she have taken?

The answer always was The Pier. The second their fingers had touched as he handed her the joint, his mantis-mind had her and she was taken in, too much a floating, unanchored soul to do anything else.

The Pier.

She would go back to The Pier and, after a stop or two on the way, she would pretend none of this had ever happened.
If he came for her, maybe it was fate.

If he didn’t, maybe that was fate too.
But for once in her life she was going to take action, for good or ill.

For once in her life…was that a butterfly…?