Alligator - Lisa Moore [71]
You store your saddest memories in your feet, she’d said.
The dress was low-cut and her bra was the same colour as her panties and when he closed his eyes he could still see the colour on the inside of his eyelids. It was hot in the garden and he thought of the dentist’s widow, how her baby had cried all night behind a rag of a curtain. He had tasted the widow’s breast milk, sucking hard on her nipples, though she had tried to slap him away. In the morning when he got up he saw the house was surrounded in every direction by a field of lavender and the wind brought the scent to him and he thought the woman’s breast milk had tasted like that, like the flowers.
Isobel pressed her thumbs into his arches and she talked, as if to herself, about how things were in St. John’s and perhaps every town or city in the western world. She talked about an inside and an outside and she said she was on the outside, had always been on the outside, and the outside wasn’t safe for a woman her age.
She said she could have done something else, but perhaps she couldn’t have done anything else. There was a vast spectrum of emotion and she had, at one time or another, fallen prey to all of it. She had felt; it was her special gift.
Perhaps we are made a certain way, she had said. She kept talking and she was impassioned and soft-spoken and he could not follow her. There was no logic in what she said or else he couldn’t translate it.
She said she was getting old and she had put nothing away. She’d had a faith in simply having faith. And it had turned out to be true, there were advantages to being outside, she’d said. But look at her now. She was lost. Financially, anyway, she said. She’d laughed and dug into his foot so hard it caused a cramp and he had to stand and shake the foot.
She’d put her hand over her eyes to block the sun and when she looked up at him her eyes looked too bright. He felt he had walked over a thousand miles of broken rock and that all the smallest bones in his feet had been crushed. She was talking about fate. He would never accept that any single thing was the way it was because it had to be that way. He would not accept it.
I have nothing to fall back on, she said. He saw tears come to her eyes. She had once cried for him on demand. She said she could do it in less than a minute and he had timed her.
They had been sitting at the kitchen table over breakfast. She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands and she became very still.
Go, he said. He watched her nose and cheeks and chin grow pink; he saw her chin crinkle a little and her lower lip tremble and then he saw tears drip from both eyes quick, quick down her cheeks. She had accomplished this in less than forty seconds.
She should have sprayed the worms, Valentin thought, as he waited by her front door. There was a suffocating laziness about her; she was too easily overwhelmed. If she had taken care of the worms he might have married her. He didn’t care what she thought about, or who she was, she probably didn’t know herself. Most people had no idea what they thought. He had a rigid, generous notion of love; it was without guile, full of sacrifice. It was fearful sex followed by overwrought, motherly tenderness. It was true he and Isobel had had sex like that; merciless, raw, religious sex they had passed through the way a plane passes through a bank of dark cloud to come out in the blinding red sun; but outside of the sexual act he knew she was keeping something in reserve. He might have married her, but at her core she was no more substantial than a soap bubble.
The night after Isobel had massaged his feet he’d woken in sweat, his heart tearing through his chest, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He had dreamt that someone in the mall had handed him a cellphone and his mother had spoken to him. It was her voice, just as if she were in the room.
Sometimes it wasn’t a life at all, she’d said.
He stayed awake, thinking about his mother,