Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [75]
“It’s no big deal. Sorry. Forget it.”
“No, it is a big deal.” He stared at the painted headboard of my bed, rather than at me. “You think I’m a TV Indian. Tonto Schwarzenegger, dumb but cute.”
I pulled up the covers. For a bedspread I’d been using the black-and-red crocheted afghan, Hallie’s and my old comfort blanket. “And what is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“If you said it, Loyd, you meant it.”
“Okay, I did.” He got up and began to put his clothes on. I reached over and caught his T-shirt when it was halfway over his head, and pulled him to me like a spider’s breakfast. I kissed him through the T-shirt. He didn’t kiss back. He pulled his head free of the shirt and looked at me, waiting.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.
“I want more than I’m getting. More than sex.”
“Well, maybe that’s all I have to offer.”
He still waited.
“Loyd, I’m just here till next June. You know that. I’ve never led you on.”
“And where do you go after next June?”
“I don’t know.” I poked my fingers through the holes in the black-and-red afghan, a decades-old nervous habit. He held eye contact until I was uncomfortable.
“Who do you see yourself marrying, Codi?”
I could feel my pulse in my neck. It was a very odd question. “I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. But he’d have to be taller than you, smarter than you, more everything. A better job and more damn college degrees. You’re like every other woman alive.”
“Thanks very much,” I said.
“Your height alone kind of limits the field.”
“If that’s supposed to be an insult, you’re way off. I always wanted to be even taller than I am, taller than Hallie.”
We sat not looking at each other for a minute. I took his hand and laid it, limp, against mine. It felt like a pancake or something. “This isn’t about your deficiencies, Loyd. It’s just me. I can’t stay here. There’s a poem by Robert Frost about this pitiful old hired hand who comes back home when he’s run out of luck because he knows they won’t kick him out. The poem says, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’” I stroked the tendons on the back of Loyd’s hand. “I don’t want to be seen as pitiful. I came here with a job to do, but I have places to go after this. I wish…” I turned my face toward the window so he wouldn’t see tears. “I’d like to find a place that feels like it wants to take me in. But this isn’t it. At the end of the school year my time’s up. If we get attached, you and me, then it’s hard.”
“That’s your game, not mine, Codi.” He got up and walked into the living room to make his hourly call to the depot; he was expecting to be sent to El Paso soon. I was stunned that he would walk away from me when I needed to be taken in. Though I guess that’s just what I’d asked him to do, walk away. His T-shirt was inside out, and he took it off and switched it around, still managing to keep the receiver cradled against his ear. He’d been put on hold. I watched him through the doorway and realized that the muscles in his back were taut with anger. I’d never seen Loyd mad, and was surprised he was capable of it.
I felt lost. I got up, throwing back the afghan and draping the flannel sheet around me like a sari, and went into the living room. The floor was cold. I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling vaguely like the Statue of Liberty. Jack on the front doorstep was scratching his neck vigorously, jingling his tags. That dog had the patience of Job.
“What’s going on?” I asked, when Loyd hung up the phone.
“I’m five times out. Plenty of time for a fuck.”
“That’s not what I meant. Loyd, I don’t think you’re dumb.”
“Just not anything worth changing your plans for.”
I laughed. “As if I had plans.”
He looked at me, his eyes searching back and forth between my two pupils as if he were trying to decide which door concealed the prize.