by Faith Gardner
First thing I notice about Sue isn’t her cried-out eyes, or the parenthetical wrinkles around her mouth, sagging that forever baby face with a hang-dog expression. No, it’s the sneakers on her feet. Hideously new running shoes with blindingly fresh laces. Sue was a sometimes sandaled, mostly barefooted girl when I knew her. One glance at those ridiculous marshmallow-white shoes and I know Sue’s probably changed as much as I have in the past – what, now? Two years? Three?
…..“I look old, don’t I?” she says. “Stop staring and just own up to it: I’ve aged.”
…..“No, not at all.”
…..“You look old,” she says, shaking her head. “Your hair’s all gray now. You gained weight, too.”
…..“It hasn’t been that long.”
…..“You still hate me?” she jokes. When I don’t answer right away, her smile falls.
…..My eyes are still scanning her figure, trying to locate pockets of change. She’s darker, tanner. More freckled. Still, she dresses the same. The broomstick skirts that blow in the wind, the kind that flow like they’re made of paisley water when she moves, the soft, thin skirts the sun shines through to highlight the golden, glowing curvature of shapely legs. The pale undershirt, sans bra, flat chest and dark bumps of nipples. The crude stick-figure sun tattoo on her arm, an O with barbs sticking out of it. She’s still bone-skinny. But those shoes.
…..“Say something,” she sniffs.
…..“Where’s Niko.”
…..She shakes her straw-blond hair. “Dead.”
…..“You’re kidding.”
…..“What kind of sick asshole would I be, to joke about that?” She stamps her whiter-than-white sneaker on my welcome mat.
…..“Come inside,” I say, flooded with disbelief that feels like embarrassment, the way it settles, hot, on my cheekbones. Niko died. Jesus. Bring the poor girl inside, get her some lemonade, sit her down on a patio chair in the backyard. Let her fight tears as she compliments the birdhouse, the fountain, the herb garden. Niko died.
…..“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask, sitting across from her.
…..“No.”
…..Small talk proves to be much easier. Those too-compact-to-be-truthful sixty-second summaries of months, years. I mention my disbarment, pad it with a yawn and an explanation of how much I’d wanted to retire anyway. She answers with an angry tirade about her online bead store enterprise, which recently folded. Beadazzled, it was called. Since Niko’s been gone, Sue’s been living out of her van again, using Wi-Fi at various coffee shops and public libraries to check Beadazzled.com frequently. Her van’s transmission died somewhere near Lodi last month and she hitchhiked back to Berkeley to see her twin sister, Elaine. A physical fight between the sisters erupted. It concerned, once again, the infamous incident that happened before I even knew Sue, when Sue flashed Elaine’s then-fiancée, now-husband Dirk and asked, genuinely curious, “whose tits were nicer.” Sue and Elaine have not gotten along well since, although somehow I suspect they never got along. Elaine has cropped hair, is Baptist, has a half-dozen exotic birds and runs marathons. Even though they are biologically identical, somehow Elaine has always struck me as so common she’s nearly ugly, while Sue was immediately delicate and lovely to me the first time I saw her.
…..“Why’d you come here?” I ask, sipping lemonade, stretching out my legs and relaxing into the patio chair. “Not that I’m not excited to see you, but …”
…..Sue sits in her chair across from me and pretends to smoke a twig she found on the ground. “…but you’re not. That’s fine.”
…..“No, no, I just – I’m just surprised.”
…..She throws the twig into the grass. “I flipped a coin.”
…..“You –”
…..“Right, yeah, I flipped a quarter. I said, heads, I go see him, and tails, I don’t.”
…..“Where would you have gone if you’d flipped tails?”
…..“Enough, Mr. Prosecutor.”
…..“Defense,” I correct her.
…..“Huh?” she asks. She pulls her skirt tight over her thighs and then lets it loose again. “Anyways I guess I’ve been – I don’t know what the word is. Afraid or something. More complicated, though. Like, afraid you’re afraid of me.”
…..I look at my lemonade, the yellow fog and sweat on the glass.
…..“Are you?” she asks.
…..My mouth opens.
…..“Of course you are,” she says. “Nevermind, drop it.”
…..There it is. That buzzing iciness of my own body, the hollow-feeling ache in my pants as I watch her lips move. Her big pouty lips with the crescent scar above the bow. I look away, at a hummingbird as it stops to drink nectar from a trumpet vine along the fence.
…..“You still taking pills?” Sue asks. She takes a drink and makes a face and pours her lemonade in a potted geranium.
…..“No.”
…..“Shit, that’s great, that’s really something.” Her pale eyes light up but they still look cheerless and tired. An invisible joy left them, sometime between the last time we saw each other and right now. “Hey, me neither. Imagine that. Clean for eleven months now. It hasn’t been easy, I’ll say that much. Been hell, actually. NA?”
…..I shake my head. “Rehab.”
…..She nods. “Good for you.”
…..Niko. I’m thinking of Niko and how to bring it up, but I decide, she’ll tell me on her own time. Jesus, I just can’t believe that – snap – Niko’s gone. Of what? How? Was it pathological, was it something tragic, accidental? She goes to peek at the fat red roses, yelling a screw you at a garden spider whose web gets in her way. She shivers and then looks at me, wide-eyed, her irises moon-blue, and admits that even though she wants to love all creatures she just can’t stand spiders. I close my eyes, and let the sun sink, warm and golden, into my eyelids.
Sue and I met on a street in Berkeley, only about four, five blocks from here. It was after Angelina and I divorced. Angelina fell in love with a man ten years younger, one of her Psychology students. The salt on the wound: they rented a house in the same neighborhood and I ran into them constantly as they walked their big sloppy Saint Bernard. They would wave and smile at me whenever we saw each other. I would nod and grin back, and as soon as they’d pass my eyes would burn and I’d clear my throat for a minute until the feeling forgot itself.
…..I’d recently had shoulder surgery and was hazy-headed from overusing my pills. It was dusk that day. I walked around my neighborhood and stared wistfully at kids playing basketball in their driveways, wondering if my shoulder would ever be the same. It was the first time in my life that certainty struck: I would be an old man. Soon. Me. How quickly it had overtaken me. How unfair I’d never noticed until now, when it seemed too late to do anything but surrender to it. I was a few years away from being eligible for Denny’s senior breakfast menu. Once, when my car was in the shop and I rode the bus to work, a young man in headphones stood up and offered me his seat. I distinctly remember the weighty feeling as my jaw dropped. The night I met her, I thought of this. I thought of how my choices had already been made, or my choices had already made me, as I walked down King Street, behind the small girl in the broomstick skirt with the guitar strapped to her back.
…..The moon and the sun sat on opposite edges of an indecisively blue sky. Late summer. The plotted trees hissed as I strolled beneath them. That’s all I heard. There weren’t any cars, or other people, or dogs barking or children squealing. It was like the world paused a moment and all I saw was her, ahead, with the dark shape of the guitar on her back. She stood on the street corner staring at the sloping roof of a church. I neared, my gaze stuck on her. When she turned around I thought I saw a flash in her pale eyes, a visible shock, blankfaced surprise. I thought, for some reason, this blankness was fear in her and I liked it. To this day, I don’t know what compelled me to do what I did. I blame the pills, the surgery, Angelina. Really, it was a bit of random antisocial curiosity combined with my own weakness and wretchedness. My hand was in my jacket pocket and I showed the shape of it to Sue, saying, “Give me all your money.”
…..“What?” she said, and snickered. “Fuck off.”
…..Then I burst out laughing. The laughing hurt. I took my hand out of my pocket and showed it to her. I shook my head. She had this look on her face, like she wanted to slap me. But then she reached out and touched my hand, poked it once.
…..“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asked.
…..“So much,” I remember laughing. “So very much.”
…..She had told me, later that night, after I took her back to my place and she marveled at my wall-to-wall shelves of books, and she flipped through musty encyclopedias and smoked joint after joint, lying barefoot on my Persian rug, the sun streaking in on her like a spotlight and illuminating her shape beneath her broomstick skirt, she had told me that she felt no fear at that moment on the street corner. Just pity.
…..“I was sad for you,” she said, licking the rolling paper, sealing up another doobie and fishing around her patchwork purse for the matches.
…..“You weren’t scared I might be a mugger?”
…..“What mugger looks like you, with glasses, old enough to be my dad? I mean, you’re, like, injured, you’ve got a sling. You’re only like three inches taller than me.”
…..“You think I’m – I’m unintimidating?”
…..“What?” She just laughed at me and shook her head.
…..I remember sleeping with her that night – not the sex itself, actually, which I imagine was fine. She was loud and passionate and flexible. But what I remember is lying conscious and still for hours, my arm draped around her waist, the sound of her quick, light breaths. It brought tears to my eyes. It made me hate my job, my stagnancy, my growing old even more than I already hated it. It made me feel like a closed door.
…..After a week, she was still there. I welcomed her. I bragged about her to everyone, my little twentysomething hippie girlfriend. A month later it turned out she was pregnant. Rudimentary mathematics determined it couldn’t be mine.
“You know, for someone who quit drugging, you still space out a lot,” Sue says loudly, bending down and flicking my knee with her finger.
…..“I’m sorry,” I say.
…..“What’re you thinking?” she asks. She spins on her big white sneaker. I smile at her. She appears thoughtlessly girlish, twirling in the sun. When I laugh she stops and drops her hands at her side.
…..I shrug.
…..She walks closer to me and puts her hand on my face. It feels lukewarm, her palm is slightly sweaty. “I’ve missed you,” she says.
…..“Don’t – do that.” I stand up and clear my throat.
…..She takes a step back. “That bad?”
…..“Please.” I put my hand in my pocket, because maybe it’s trembling. “Sorry.”
…..When I ask her if she’d like me to make her dinner, she decides to flip a coin.
…..“Heads I stay,” she says. The silver quarter leaps, somersaulting and catching the glint of the sun, and finally lands on her dirty palm.
…..“‘Heads,” she says.
I mean what I tell her: I’m delighted to have a dinner guest. No one has been here since Angelica and Richard came through last month on their visit. They live on a vineyard now in Napa. They’re fulfilling a life dream of Angelica’s I never even knew she had. I really am happy for them. Of course, I’m envious. Of course, when confronted with it, their joy reminds me of my own emptiness. But I can’t stand to be bitter, to lose friends. I find bitterness so much more intolerable than pain.
…..“Wow, this is just so delicious-looking,” Sue says. She serves herself a plateful of salad and grabs her fork. No salad dressing. She just shoves forkfuls of foliage in her mouth like she hasn’t eaten in days, crunches the lettuce between her teeth. The sound of it sends goosebumps up my spine. She mmms and closes her eyes. Same noise, same exact tone she used to use when we made love. Her lips part as she swallows and my heart races.
…..She opens her eyes, flashes an embarrassed smile. “Watching me?”
…..“Yeah.”
…..“You like what you see?” she asks, rolling a cherry tomato around her plate with the fork.
…..“It’s good to see you again, Sue,” I say in what I hope is an upbeat tone.
…..She nods. “So … I actually came, I mean, in part I came, for a bit of lawyerly advice.” She watches me carefully, biting her lip, and then releases the lip and goes on. “So – so what if, say, a preschool planted a poisonous plant on its property. And a kid happened to eat it, and later, at home, the kid died. Whose fault is that, legally?”
…..My middle feels like it plummets and I put my fish stick down.
…..“I mean, could – could I sue the school? Is there some kind of, whatsitcalled, statute of limitations on that?” she asks. She’s staring at her salad, her eyes unblinking, glazed over. “Could I get some money?”
…..“I don’t know,” I say softly. “What kind of plant?”
…..She squeezes her eyes shut. “It’s called an oleander.”
…..I think of at least a dozen things to say to her. I could go to her and hug her, let her clutch at me and cry. I could dig for more details to cure my curiosity. But I just fold my hands into a little triangle and nod. “I’m so sorry,” I tell her.
…..“It’s a very pretty plant,” she says. “I mean, you’d never imagine what it could do to a person.”
…..“What can it do?”
…..She shakes her head. “All I see, when I think of him, is him curled up on the grass in that backyard. In the weeds, near the broken bottles and the shed. Back there. All rashy, gasping. Laying there for hours. Three years old, so many happy times, you know? But that’s all I see.”
…..“You were there when it happened,” I say.
…..Sue pushes her plate away. “I wasn’t.”
…..“Where were you?”
…..She just shakes her yellow head. “What does it matter? Not there.”
…..I stare at the spokes on Sue’s blurry blue tattoo. “I loved him like a son,” I tell her, hoping this will cheer her up. I wipe my eyes with a napkin. “Wow, Jesus,” I say, surprised and embarrassed.
…..Sue’s not crying at all. But she has a wild look in her eyes as she stares at the air, like she’s seeing something horrific.
…..“Sue?” I ask her. “You want to stay here tonight?”
…..She takes out a quarter. “Heads I stay,” she says. Flips it and catches it in her palm. She nods.
…..“Yes?” I ask.
…..“I stay,” she says.
As I’m clearing the table, Sue tries to come up behind me and shove her hands down my pants. I drop a plate on the floor.
…..“Sorry,” I say, my hands shaking.
…..“Let me make you happy,” she says. “Remember how happy I used to make you?”
…..“Please,” I ask her. “Let me finish clearing the table.”
…..“I’ll be gentle,” she says.
…..“No, thank you.”
…..She slinks off to watch TV and I sweep up the broken dish. Afterwards I join her in the living room. She’s staring at a muted infomercial for hair implants. It’s strange how naturally she fits back in here. There, right there’s the exact space in the corner where a crib used to be. I remember – I shudder and, on second thought, don’t. I want to focus on what’s here, now, in front of me. Sue takes off her sneakers. When I ask about them, she just shrugs and says something about them being comfortable. She rolls a joint and lies along the Persian rug, and I get high with her and watch her from the couch.
…..Sue and I were once quite content. Like all couples, we had our issues. We slept too much and fought too much. I worked too much. She didn’t work enough. We didn’t have enough friends. A lot of these problems, in retrospect, I blame on the pills. I shouldn’t have carped. I shouldn’t have harangued what I called her “scatterbrained mothering.” That really was an exaggeration, now that I think about it. All because she left Niko at a mall once, once. Something my own mother did to me, actually. And sure, on occasion, Sue hired babysitters so she could go to parties, score drugs, attend all-day music festivals. I berated her for that. I should have confronted her differently about it, because it only made her hard-shelled and furious, throwing things, angry. She resented criticism. But I’m making it sound so bleak. It wasn’t. There were weeks on end without any snags or fights. We were a little makeshift family, it was normal and smooth. Sue would play her guitar for Niko. She would stay home with him for days, fingerpainting, baking bread, cleaning the house and singing Mary Poppins songs. She could be a very good mother.
…..“You’re stoned,” she says to me.
…..I nod. “I have to confess, it’s been a long time since I smoked.”
…..“How many years?”
…..“However many years since I last saw you.”
…..She smiles at me coyly. She’s lying on the carpet, and she hitches up her broomstick skirt, exposing a tight plain pair of white panties. I sigh and look out the window. I look out the window for a long time, somehow expecting to see Angelica and Richard walk by with their monstrous dog. But instead a man trundles by with an oxygen tank on wheels, stops, looks up at the maple tree with the yellow-red leaves, and shuffles along and out of sight. When I look back down at Sue, she’s sitting up cross-legged. She’s pulled her skirt back down and her frown wrinkles deepen.
…..“I’m sorry, okay?” she says. “I’m sorry.”
…..“It’s okay. We don’t have to –”
…..“It’s not like I bit it off,” she says. “Christ.”
…..“No, but –”
…..“It’s, like, the only thing you remember about me.”
…..“That’s not true,” I say.
…..“Things ended badly. I know, okay? How many fucking times do I have to apologize for doing that? Are you really that traumatized?”
…..“You drew blood.”
…..She gets up, rolls her eyes and puts her ugly colorless sneakers on again. “I’m going. Thanks for dinner.”
…..“Don’t go,” I say. But my body feels heavy and I sit, with my hands on my knees, not moving. “Where are you going to go?”
…..“Maybe I’ll kill myself,” she says.
…..This is an old game of hers, one that I had forgotten, but that floods back to me instantly. I see flash after flash of Sue saying nearly the same thing. Whenever she can’t find an exit out of an argument, she threatens suicide. But it’s never worried me. Besides a few chicken scratches on her arm with razor blades, I don’t think she’s ever tried. Just a melodramatic gesture, like when she used to say she would leave. After all, it took me kicking her out, turning a cold shoulder to her son, putting all of her and Niko’s belongings outside, to get her to finally go. The memory, filled with weepy, screaming voices, is one of my least favorites. Love’s beginnings never warn of such noise to come.
…..“I’ll kill myself.”
…..“Oh, Sue,” I say, and shake my head.
…..“I mean it.” She stands up and approaches me. “I’m flipping a coin. Heads I live. Tails I die.”
…..“I’m too tired for this,” I say. My heart beats quickly and I close my eyes. I lean back, dizzy, my own living room a merry-go-round. I hear Sue toss a coin. When I open my eyes, she’s heading for the door.
…..“Sue,” I yell. “Sue, come on. Sue.”
…..When I finally get up, I expect her to be standing on my doorstep with the hanging geraniums, arms crossed. But she isn’t. I walk out into the sidewalk and into the street. I wander around the block. Sue isn’t anywhere.
Lying in bed that night, covers pulled up to my chin, I stare at the bumps and curds in the ceiling. Wow, I hope Sue doesn’t actually go out and kill herself. I wonder where she is. Maybe she made it back to Elaine’s. Do I even have Elaine’s phone number? Would it be too late to call, even if I did? My worry, amplified by the effects of the pot, which I decide I am too old to smoke ever again, reaches its pinnacle as I imagine the feeling of Sue’s teeth. The sharpness of the memory makes me gasp aloud. But then the intensity of it fades, and when Sue’s face floats to my mind, somehow, I’m filled with a blithe and boundless feeling. There were good times. Why doesn’t my mind remember the good times first, and the bad as an afterthought? Like our road trip across the Pacific northwest, Niko behind us in a car seat, the open windows and the smell of pine trees and oceans. See? I’d forgotten that, the string of B and B’s and national parks, the neverending slough of green city signs, the songs we’d sung together in the car along with the staticky radio. I don’t recall us fighting once on that trip, or pill-popping, or Niko crying. I remember playing with him, tickling his belly, on motel beds printed with flowers. Then there was the period of time when Sue had a job teaching art to preschoolers. How happy she’d seemed, coming home with streaks of paint on her face and macaroni bracelets clattering on her arms. We assembled ourselves into a little makeshift family, and I considered myself lucky to be loved by such bright young things. Even my job, which ended so sourly, wasn’t all rotten. That was what made it so hard to have to leave. Once, I took pride in my work, I made a better-than-decent living. It was adventurous to be in the thick of it. I met so many people, won – and lost – so many cases. There were dark times indeed. The ending still sticks in my mind, the anticlimax as I emptied my office of all its belongings and removed my framed degrees from the walls. How unspeakably vast the scope is, of anything. How unfathomably wide the spectrum.
…..All fall, I worry, on and off, about Sue. I finally reach Elaine who swears she hasn’t seen her in months. The internet has no news of Sue. Some days I feel positive she’s dead somewhere. Others I’m sure I know Sue, I know her through and through, and she’d never intentionally hurt a thing, not even the self she seems, at times, to loathe. When I think of the word Sue, I try to imagine her face before the frown creases and the weary eyes. The first time we met, awkward, laughing in the street. Or the first time she lay with me in my bed, and kissed my bunk shoulder, and told me she loved to be alive so much it hurt. It hurt, she said, because it was finite.
…..When the New Year rolls around, a postcard appears in my mailbox. I hold it in my gardener’s glove. It has a picture of a Mayan pyramid on the front. The faint pink postmark reveals it was mailed from someplace in Texas, about a week ago. I flip it over. All that’s written in the blank space is a crude picture of a sun, the word “heads,” and the letters XOXOXO.
…..
…..
Faith lives in Oakland and has stories in or forthcoming in PANK, Defenestration, and Word Riot. She can be found at By Faith Alone.