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By Root 4349 0

riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, coastlines, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?”—starts panic in his heart. Coldness spreads through his body and he feels detached, as if at last he is, what he’s always dreaded, walking on air. The details of the street—the ragged margin where the pavement and grass struggle, the tarry scarred trunks of the telephone poles—no longer speak to him in a child’s intimate, excited voice. He is no one; it is as if he stepped outside of his body and brain a moment to watch the engine run and stepped into nothingness, for this “he” had been merely a refraction, a vibration within the engine, and now can’t get back in. He feels be is behind the windows of the houses they walk by, watching this three-cornered family walk along solidly with no sign that their universe has convulsed other than the woman’s quiet tears. Janice’s tears have come as gently as dew comes; the sight of the morning-fresh streets seems to have sprung them.

When they get inside the apartment she gives a sharp sigh and collapses against him. Perhaps she didn’t expect the place to be full of sunshine; buttresses of dust drifting in milky light slant from the middle of the floor to the tops of the windows and touch everything with innocence and newness and hopefulness. The door to his closet is near the entry door so they needn’t go very deep into the apartment at first. He opens the closet door as far as he can without bumping the television set and reaches far in and unzips a plastic zippered storage bag and takes out his blue suit, a winter suit made of wool, but the only dark one he owns. Nelson ranges through the apartment, going wee-wee in the bathroom, finding an old rubber panda in his bedroom that he wants to take along. His exploring drains enough of the menace from the rooms for them to go into their bedroom, where Janice’s clothes hang. On the way she indicates a chair. “Here I sat,” she says, “yesterday morning, watching the sun come up.” Her voice is lifeless; he doesn’t know what she wants him to say and says nothing. He is holding his breath.

In the bedroom there is a pretty moment. She takes off her skirt and blouse to try on an old black suit she has, and as she moves about in her slip, barefoot on the carpet, she reminds him of the girl he knew, with her narrow ankles and wrists and small shy head. The black suit, bought when she was in high school, doesn’t fit; her stomach is still too big from having the baby. And maybe her mother’s plumpness is beginning. Standing there trying to get the waist of the suit skirt to link at her side, the tops of her breasts pushing above her bra as she bends into the effort, the space between them dimpling into a dark crease, she does have a plumpness, a sweet plumpness that pleases him. He thinks Mine, my woman, but then she straightens up and her smeared frantic face blots out his pride of possession. She becomes a liability that painfully weights the heaviness already below his chest. This is the wild woman he must steer with care down a lifelong path, away from yesterday. “It won’t do it!” she screams, and jerks her legs out of the skirt and flings it, great twirling bat, across the room.

“You have nothing else?”

“What am I going to do?”

“Come on. Let’s get out of here and go back to your place. This place is making you nervous.”

“But we’re going to have to live here!”

“Yeah, but not today. Come on.”

“We can’t live here,” she says.

“I know we can’t.”

“But where can we live?”

“We’ll figure it out. Come on.”

She stumbles into her skirt and puts her blouse over her arms and turns away from him meekly and asks, “Button my back.”

Buttoning the pink cloth down her quiet spine somehow makes him cry; the hotness in his eyes works up to a sting and he sees the little babyish buttons through a cluster of disks of watery