Promenade

by Sharon Mollerus

Stephanie was swinging over the porch just as the evening fog swept out the remnants of daylight and wrapped her bare legs in a chilly whirl. The smoke curls from her cigarette were inhaled by the brume sweeping through the street and squeezing out all sight. With her good right ear, she heard the shriek of brakes hit too late and a smashed car a block away. The wailing sirens of two or three invisible emergency vehicles followed, and their lights pulsed a pink tint across the thick murk.

She wore a grape ribbed tunic and tight-fitting black capris over her petite form, and her hair was clipped short around her neck so that the gray strands had a sandy effect in her auburn hair instead of the rusted metal impression given at shoulder-length. She was waiting for the girls to get back from the hairdresser’s in the white limousine with their dates, who were being picked up along the way.

Earl was probably still sitting at the computer, a dome of light shining over his bald spot, where he always retreated after the dishes, and before dinner and before work and the livelong weekend days. She had wanted to go to the Mexican restaurant after the kids left. He said they’d been out twice already this month. So she was the one who had to scramble through the freezer looking for something to cook. There was a package of hamburger which she zapped to a mushy brown texture and fried up with a packetful of taco seasoning; she tossed the meat over some lettuce and slices of tomato and spattered it with pre-shredded cheddar cheese. They forked the food into their mouths and washed it down with canned beer, while he sat staring at the newspaper creased into long quarter sheets and she paged through Kelly’s new copy of Cosmo. No one got up to turn the lights on as the last of the weak daylight rolled off the kitchen table. He picked up the plates, scraped them and put them in the dishwasher, while she wiped the table.

Finally a pair of yellow eyes crept forward, the fog lights of a long white limo which stretched out along the front of the house. Her daughter Kelly wriggled halfway through the sunroof with her well-endowed torso in a lavender strapless gown, testing the buoyancy of its wire loops. She was waving at her mother and bouncing in hysterics, like her boyfriend Geary was tickling her from below. The chauffeur with the tight orange curls of Vern’s widow got out and opened the door, standing stiffly in her black tuxedo with an orange carnation in her lapel and nodding to Stephanie. They had never met, but Stephanie happened upon the couple once in the grocery store. It was last Halloween, almost a year ago, and she startled on seeing Vern, dropping a small pumpkin which rolled up to his toes, bare in leather sandals; he laughed and handed it back to her with a loving and warning glance. She replaced it on the stack, turned her back on them, and handled the potatoes, looking for eyes. She left the sprouting spuds there and retreated as Vern and his wife shucked corn husks together, and that night she instead served dirty rice with the fried chicken.

Stephanie put out her cigarette on the underside of the swing. Kelly came out first, having reattached her body like the woman sawed in half in a magic show. Her blonde spiral coils were streaked with pink dye, and her nose ring was flashing white gold under the streetlamp. They were laughing and talking, and inside the TV was blaring at Stephanie’s volume with indistinct, mournful evening news.

“Mommy, look,” Kelly said up close to her, shaking her curls in a semicircle. Her daughter was standing next to Geary, who held onto the slim fabric tie around her waist, as if ready to spin and unravel her. He was wiry and dark-haired with deep brown eyes in shadowy lids. He hadn’t slept apparently, nor would he.

“You know Joanne and Mark.” She indicated the other couple just bending out of the car.

“Nice to see you, Mrs. Trumble,” Mark said as soon as the couple walked up to her. Kelly prompted friends to stand near her mother’s good ear when talking to her. Mark shook the hand she offered to him. He had bleached highlights and sky blue contacts. Joanne gave a cheery “Hi” and was still laughing from that last joke in the car. Her lipstick matched her maroon hair, and she wore a lime green gown with a cream crepe bow in the back, like the top of a showy present.

“Pictures. Pictures. We’ll have to go inside. We won’t get anything in this fog,” Stephanie said. She hustled them in, and they rustled through in front of her, as the prom dresses swept in full and caught in the narrow door jamb. The girls gathered them up and tottered in on high heels like skinny stilts that clicked on the linoleum floor.

“Are you coming, Earl?” Her husband ducked out from under the bright den light which spilled from his office into the hallway, and he joined them in the living room.

“Well, well, so beautiful, my dear,” he said to Kelly, kissing her.

“Aren’t you getting the cameras?” Stephanie asked.

“Yes, I am.” He disappeared into the den again and returned to ask for batteries.

“You don’t think of anything ahead, do you?” Stephanie asked, rolling her eyes. “Double-A’s over the frig.”

“Mom, is there anything to drink around here?”

“Soda, honey, diet and regular,” Earl answered. “Which one do you want?” he asked his wife, holding out the camcorder and digital camera.

“I’ll take the camcorder; you always jerk it around too much.” Stephanie started shooting the four seniors.

“Daddy, we’re not driving,” Kelly said at Stephanie’s right; she always stood where she could be heard by her mother, but Earl either forgot or dodged the good ear, depending. He answered something as he focused the lens of the camera.

“What did you say?” Stephanie snapped.

“I was talking to Kelly.”

“He said he’s not serving,” Kelly said. “But Mommy, can’t we have a teeny bit of champagne? We’re not even driving.”

“I said no,” Earl answered up close. “The school made it very clear.”

“Oh, give me a break, the school,” Stephanie said. “It’s not going to hurt anything.”

Stephanie put down the camcorder, popped the cork of a champagne bottle in the kitchen and poured out six glasses. Of course, he knew she had stocked the bottles for this. The bubbles fizzed up over her hand as she poured too much in a glass. She passed out the pale airy drinks, to the kids first, and one to Earl, and she drank hers down before filming again. Earl saw that she saw him pour his drink out as she panned the room, ending with his backside at the sink.

Stephanie lined them up in front of the fireplace. Kelly by herself. Kelly with her father, then her mother, as the camera was switched between husband and wife. Kelly with Geary. The girls. The boys. The couples. The family picture taken by Joanne. The picture with Kelly and her terrier Jack, then Kelly brushed the gown for the dog hair and washed her hands.

Stephanie popped another bottle while Earl went back to the office with the camera. The camcorder dangled off her elbow. The kids drank more. Kelly spilled some over Geary. They laughed as Stephanie rolled the film.

“Isn’t she gorgeous, Geary?” Stephanie asked, with bubbles in her throat. “I hope you appreciate Kelly.”

“Oh mother,” Kelly laughed lightly.

Geary said something and smiled. His hand may have slid along Kelly’s butt; she’d have to check the tape later—but how sweet. Mark sat on the couch, his arms folded, and Kelly sat with Geary, while Joanne rustled around the room, drinking her champagne and gesticulating about somebody she must have been imitating, a geeky girl with glasses. Joanne gave her a limp and was bumping into things with the girl’s short-sightedness, until she fell over the couch onto Geary. He smiled and pulled her down onto his lap, and she got up and fell on him again and this time kissed him on the lips, saying something the whole time, while he pulled Kelly in with her and smooched them both, and Kelly was laughing, and Stephanie moved in close with the lens. Outside the frame, Mark’s left leg bobbed over his right as he stared at the unlit fireplace. Stephanie opened another bottle and poured it around and around. Mark declined after his first. They turned on the music and danced. Mark obliged. Joanne and Geary bumped at the hip. Geary twirled Kelly around and around until she fell to the floor in an hysterical heap.

Earl was somewhere--he’d gone back toward the bedroom. Then he returned and yelled something. He grabbed his windbreaker from the front closet and left the house with the keys in his hand. Stephanie shot frames as he thrust his open hand between his face and the mechanical eye, and she let the camcorder slip to her side as she watched the red lights blink back in the fog from the front window as he wheeled the car down the street.

“We have to go; we’re already late for dinner,” Geary said as Stephanie was sitting on the couch, after another bottle was drained and the camcorder was put away. He was pinching Kelly’s side, or her hip, or lower, in the dimple where her slim leg met hip bone.

“Where did Daddy go?” Kelly asked as her mother got up and stood at the stairway, waiting for the girls to find their wraps and purses.

“To the bar, I suppose.”

“We’re off now, Mommy,” she said. Stephanie kissed her daughter. The teenagers tumbled out the door in their tuxes and billowing dresses, and Vern’s widow opened the door for them. As Stephanie leaned against the door jamb, they disappeared into the snowy limo which rolled forward into the mist. Stephanie sat on the porch and smoked one cigarette after another, lighting the next with the glowing ashes of the last.

* * *

Stephanie was lying on her stomach on the couch, waiting up, drinking hot milk and brandy sprinkled with cinnamon and nutmeg. She had finished the other champagne bottle they hadn’t opened and the rest of the Chardonnay in the frig.

--Do you like him? Geary in and out of the house, days and nights; she ran into him in the upstairs hallway at all hours. --Who he? Kelly combing her long hair, putting on her makeup, spraying perfume on her wrists and rubbing them together and up the sides of her neck.

--Geary, of course. --Yeah, doh, don’t you mom? Earl on his best day—when would that have been?--never looking that good. That wiry build, fluid, the deep eyes, careless tousled hair, the way Geary looked at Kelly, at Joanne, even at herself, and at her age. He was a looker who looked. But also she saw, felt, he was a toucher. He fingered Stephanie’s long flaxen hair; touched his ten fingertips against hers like twin spiders on a mirror; butted his forehead against hers, joining bone to bone at their cocked eyebrows; and he even brushed up against Stephanie as she stood at the stove in the kitchen. Always moving, flowing, nudging, and the wheeze of his breath up close. In the vertigo of indiscernible sound, she needed a rope slung to the base of the world, to compensate for that murky noise that was more disconcerting than silence. She had to breathe of a person, of shampoo and stale just-out-of-bed breath; she had to grasp onto the brush of a hand against her arm or an elbow against her ribs; and she gathered up the click and clatter of heard words next to her. Kelly knew it, but Earl understood nothing. Stephanie strained to listen for doors opening and closing with her half-hearing. She lay in her bed next to inert Earl, straining toward anything she could still hear, not knowing if Geary was there or gone, in Kelly’s bedroom or she gone to his.

--Do you think he should be staying over like this? Earl turned toward her and asked her, looked at her. She feigned sleep and feigned waking. --Like what? Be quiet, she wanted to say. She was so irritated she couldn’t hear the doors over his chatter. A woman always knows, or needs to, who is coming and going in her house.

--Like at night. Like in her bedroom? --Shh. I think we should trust Kelly, don’t you? She puts her cup down on the rug and grits her teeth again, like then.

--Why wouldn’t I? Cautious Earl, always answering a question with a question. Never venturing something that might start a string of screaming O’s from her mouth. She never completely heard her own outbursts, but the rest did, all the fully-hearing in her house. –Because you wouldn’t be asking all these lame questions otherwise.

--Trust. OK. Trust her to know what to do?--Why not? I’m her mother. Don’t you trust me? Stephanie questioned back. She tosses her head again, this time hitting the stiff gold couch pillow.

--Of course. –Good. Mind if I go back to sleep? As usual, this is going nowhere. Nowhere. Nomore. Neverwhere. Earl’s “of course” echoes through the unlit house and out into the fog swallowing up the house, the neighborhood, the city, all the perceived world mired in a mute marsh of viscous gray.

“Trust me, trust you,” she thought then, but didn’t say, and says now, smothering the spoken words into the pillow so they are still mere thought. She gets up, has to drive. Slams the front door which no one, not even her, hears. Takes her car out of the garage. Back it up carefully, slowly. Just around the neighborhood. A couple of blocks. Stop at every sign. Signal. Wait. Turn. Look. Go forward. Fog like the mist of a steambath taken together, like smoke in the woodstove rising out of the cabin, like walks in the balmy night in the deep woods with far tiny stars blinking at the lake, and the moon flitting in and out behind the trees and the clouds, as clandestine as they themselves. That weekend at the conference that was no conference with Vern, older, discreet, considerate, very considerate, always whispering straight into her good ear, his frizzled gray hair and white lumpy body, his lean legs and dimpled rear, his hairy arms encircling her and the chain swinging over his chest. They moved in circles, like in his boat on the lake floating on an eddy, the two of them cradled in the keel, and later rolling in the flouncy double bed with the naked windows bright with moonlight, gliding in a steady rhythm against the irregular pacing of Vern’s warm and flawed heart. Earl now at the bar. Where he goes, where she goes. The lights are off in the houses, the yellow street lamps are blown out like candles by the blanket of fog. A red or green globe pops up in her face just after a curb bends. The dogs are inside now, the children long in bed. Couples are embracing, throwing an arm over a back, a leg over a stomach, sleeping, or waking out of dreams to the prod of nighttime desire. She creeps along in her car; it’s thick here, impenetrable, there’s no piercing through it, dense as sound for her, the sounds that others hear. The funeral she couldn’t attend and wouldn’t have heard, that she imagines like a gothic ghost story, with the fog shrouding the hill, the priest and his mumbled sermon, the orange-haired widow, grown children and grandchildren all weeping and standing, slanting down the hill toward the casket and the gaping plot, grasping hands to hold each other back, knowing they will each one day tumble into that same abyss. And she at home wringing her hands, stifling her sobs in her sleeves, sitting on the closed toilet seat in the locked bathroom with Earl in the den and unleashing the dammed tears and running the shower full to mingle with their drop and splash, to wash salty with fresh water across her outstretched hands, leaving her face corrugated with interrupted weeping. Where is Earl? Maybe gone to the bar, one drink at Cappa’s, another at Montaigne’s, the next at Bliss, a beer and a beer and a beer, sitting near the black-lidded women who hunt for men. He’ll sit quiet as he always does, never engaging with strangers. The more drinks, the more taciturn. She’s followed him before under night cover, borrowing her neighbor’s car—have to get some cough medicine, mine’s in the shop, thanks a lot. No women for him. Just solitary repeated drinks in crowded dives with the smoke following him out and clinging to his clothes, his hair, until he smells like her, the smoky smell he says he hates. Finally the bright twin lights in the driveway announcing he’s home, parallel streams of implacable light like the searchlights of police helicopters or advertising beams. He’d turn them off and slide the car into the garage and come in the back door in his stocking feet, his shoes dangling from one hand by the laces. And her screeching, her mouth an O. About anything. Kelly. The stifling unairconditioned house. The lost money from the great stocks he had. The job she couldn’t hang onto. The useless headhunter conferences. Where he goes night after night. One scream following another, the words swallowed up in the shrieks she hears as hollow from the inside of her, the sharp shards of sentences falling over him like glass cracked by the force of her voice, as he cowers and ducks under the covers, hiding in the dark. The O’s she never screams in Earl’s ear for the pure pleasure of love.

* * *

Stephanie woke with a headache on the couch, in her clothes, jabbing her nose into the tough pillow. Her mouth was dry, and she had a sticky sweet coating on her teeth. 6:30. Earl wasn’t home, nor Kelly. She snagged a toenail on the trim between carpet and linoleum as she walked into the kitchen to start the coffee without turning on the light. She lit a cigarette and tried to blow the smoke out the window with the fan on full, and she sprayed the room with air freshener after the coffee was made.

From the front doorway with her steaming coffee in hand, she stood peering through the morning mist which sparkled in droplets over the porch, watching for the lights of the limo or of Earl’s car. A cab then flashed into the driveway with the golden taxi sign pulsing at the top, and Kelly emerged, bent over and weeping. She was being helped to the house by the cab driver, that same bright orange-haired widow of Vern’s with powdered cheeks creased with wrinkles and red rimmed eyes too; both their faces were running with shining pink and black streaks from their melting makeup. The woman was holding Kelly up as she guided her down the walk, and Kelly was hobbling, having lost her heels, the arches running downhill and backward. Blonde-lashed Mark followed her out of the cab, like a golden retriever that has taken to a new owner and can’t be shaken. Stephanie opened the front door for them, and the widow tipped the listing girl over to her mother with a nod as Stephanie handed over some bills. The wailing went on inside as they sat on the couch with Stephanie holding her.

“OK, stop and tell me,” her mother said. “I can’t understand a thing. Starting with the shoes first. Say it so I can hear you.”

“One heel fell off at the dance,” Kelly sobbed into her good ear, “and I took the other down with it so I could still walk.” Her ankles were lined red at the straps from their desperate hold as Stephanie unbuckled them. The back of one heel had a rising blister.

“What happened to the limo?”

“Geary took us to a hotel. We sent the limo back. After we were in our room for a while, we had —, you know, and after that he went in the other room to party with Joanne. He said Mark wasn’t giving her a good time. He started hitting on Joanne, and Mark came back to our room—Geary’s and mine—and Geary and Joanne stayed together. Mark just sat with me while I was crying and waiting for Geary to come back, so I could really yell at him, and then Mark went down and pounded on the door, and they wouldn’t come out. And the assistant manager came to the floor and told us to knock it off. So Mark called a cab and came back here with me.” Then Kelly went hysterical, screaming, her mouth an O, picking up all the champagne glasses which were crowded along the table and throwing them one by one against the fireplace. She stuffed her face into the already damp couch pillow and stretched across the couch. “Where’s Geary now?” Stephanie asked. Kelly sobbed.

“They’re still at the hotel. We’re not going back there,” Mark answered for her. “Never mind them, Kel.” He sat down on the rug with his back against the couch near Kelly’s head while she sniffed out the end of her tears; he closed his eyes and nodded.

Stephanie saw the headlights of another car emerging from the fog, the midnight blue BMW, and she stood in the front hallway, waiting. Earl stepped in the front door and tried to sweep the gray fog off his head and jacket, which clung like thick terrier hair. He was rumpled by the mist, his hair had sprouted a thick fuzz over his bald spot, and his eyebrows were covered in gray like a layer of dust, as if he had been painted; he looked as if he had been dipped in fog. His shirt was damp and his leather jacket was shining, as were his eyes, which were moist and bright and somehow nearly black instead of their native blue.

“The front door today?” Stephanie asked as she looked him over. Where could he have gotten a toupee? But it looked like his own hair, filled in as before, but now aged; it was full and fully grayed. She thought it must have been the fog, but he was out of it now--doesn’t fog dry? Kelly was still whimpering on the couch.

“Yes. What happened?” he asked gently, up close to her good ear.

“I need a smoke,” she said.

Stephanie and Earl sat on the porch swing. She wasn’t going to start yelling with polite Mark there in the house with his two good ears.

“Where the hell were you this time?” she growled low.

“Several places. I’ll tell you about it, but first…”

“What in the world happened with your hair?” she asked, touching the top of his head. It was silver gray and soft, curly; the bald spot which had been cut out at the center like a donut hole was now closed up. “Some new product you got over the TV? Restores hair and grays it at the same time? Weird.”

“I met someone tonight at the bar, a friend,” Earl said to her. His voice was soft, tender in her ear, not loud in the way he would make a point or from his usual reserve or accusation. And it wasn’t a question.

“An old friend?” The dawn was finally silent. The cars had all landed somewhere or other, ditch or driveway. The night revelers were now asleep. Only the paperboy was out, wheeling down the street on his bike and flipping the papers out with fast slaps against the walkways.

“Older than us.” Earl was solemn, and she thought he must have dropped weight lately; maybe she just hadn’t noticed. She startled, while he relaxed. His usual nervousness seemed to have been wrung out of him, like the sweat after a hard workout, long enough to breathe deeply and have that good sore feeling of muscles stretched and supple.

He looked into her eyes, and they met gray on brown, black pupil to black pupil; each scanned the other’s eyes, one and then the other alternately, until the pairs settled at the right distance and fused, fixed, as if to forge some new understanding between them, some message that couldn’t be carried across a string of discrete words. She wondered when they’d last actually looked, seen each other. They usually focused over or around, or spoke to each other from side to side, or just glared from one edge of their crumbly-looking stucco house to the other. And this time she was the first to look away. Then she wondered what he knew. She could only think of Vern, gray, aged, dying suddenly. Nobody Earl met could have told him, and she was more certain of Vern’s silence before, and certainly now, than of her own shaky truce of a marriage.

“Where did you meet this friend?”

“At the Dolores Bar on 29th.”

She was more surprised. He never admitted where he was or what he did. His silences on that were consistent. She could pound on his chest, scratch his face, and he wouldn’t say a word in answer to her demands. She was once sure it had been women, many women. She’d imagined them all, red-haired with beauty marks, frizzy blonde vacant-eyed women, brunettes with a creaking in their needy bones and the snap of taut flesh. But she’d followed him and had him followed and nothing. Sitting at the end of a counter, nursing a beer. Moving to another counter, another stool, another establishment, cycling through the town and never talking to anyone. Until this supposed friend showed up.

“Woman or man?” she asked.

“Man. Let’s go up to bed. She’ll live,” he said. They walked inside. Mark was now sleeping on the couch, sprawled under the plaid throw with the pillow over his head, the morning light filling in the shadows of the room. Kelly must have gone up to her bed. They walked up the stairs hand in hand. Stephanie’s mouth was dry, and her head was pounding, but she was quiet. No more O’s in the house, just sleeping and silent musing. She was listening hard for an answer, and answers she usually didn’t catch because no one seemed to toss them straight to her. She thought she heard Vern’s breath, always uneven, a little excited, off-kilter, those unrhythmic rasps that she would listen to after he fell asleep at her right side.

Earl undressed, as did Stephanie. A new gold pendant hung from his neck, something like Vern’s, Vern’s gold chain which must now be melding over his dear cold decaying flesh. Vern was wearing it over his poor lopsided heart as it ticked out its last counted beats. This one was just like it, except for the gold cross attached, two slender fused bars of gold on a circle of linked chains.

“You never wore one of these before,” she said. Her questions dangled in the silence.

He smiled. She palmed the cross to his saggy breast and bent her ear down over his lungs. His heart no longer paced the steady beat that she could always count on, at least when she could hear nothing else. Now it loped weakly with a hop and a skipping step, and she heard it as an answering sound. Tears ballooned from the twin wells of her fondness. She looked up, and their eyes flared in the darkness; seeing, each of them peered through her shimmering pools of tears. They wrapped their knees together in the darkness, and her breasts shone against his frizzled gray chest under a smiling arc of moon in the bare window. They embraced, loved with her O’s in his ear, and slept a last heart-rending night together.

2005