expression is surprised, pleasantly surprised, her wide eyes, her long black hair on her bare, smooth shoulders as she stands next to that bamboo ladder, her right arm glistening, still wet.
The pot was boiling over! Natalie turned, angry, impatient with herself. She dialed down the burner, tried to find the foil packet. What if someone were watching this, through the windows? What would they understand? She went to close the blinds at the windows—the windows frozen shut in their screeching tracks—and there were no blinds so instead she turned out the lights, and then switched them back on, and returned to the stove. Mostly, she felt as good as she ever had, better, but sometimes she did only the things she found herself already doing, and she only wished she could anticipate the days she’d be sharp and the days she wouldn’t.
Boiling again. She boiled curries and potatoes in foil packets. She ate dried fruit roll-ups, energy bars. Astronaut food. She thought of it as her astronaut diet; she never sat down to eat; like now, she bounced around the kitchen, imagining she was in zero gravity. Her throat, the cilia there, had to work extra hard to keep all the food from jerking back out of her, floating around the room. As she floated, as she chewed and swallowed, she held open the magazine with her free hand and read, and looked closely at the bamboo ladder next to Denise Michele. It’s lashed together, not nailed—that would be inauthentic, but it is authentic, as real as Denise’s expression, her face so hopeful, she has freedom and can taste it, the future impossible to know and yet unavoidably delightful, a limitless promise; and she’s proud of her breasts with good reason, round and high and full, the undersides pale (the same bikini), the dark nipples that she is eager to share. She is innocent, surprised without her clothes, but happy to be surprised this way, naturally, not at all ashamed.
The phone was ringing. Natalie did not recognize it, at first. It took a moment to find it, beneath another magazine.
“Natalie,” the man said. “Did you have success, this evening? My sources at the facility saw no new wire there.”
“Holy crow,” she said. “I forgot—”
“I can’t have you forgetting.”
“No,” she said. “Yes. I mean, what I meant was that I didn’t forget, that I did have success, that I only forgot to drop off the wire. I got caught up. I had success. It’s still in the truck.”
“You know what to do, then,” the man said. “And when I’d like you to do it.”
Natalie hung up the phone. She looked at the beads of water on Denise’s breasts, her throat, at her glistening right arm, trying to figure it; past the waterfall, the grand piano—two pages back, there, she is in the bath; a bubble bath that is another reason to be hopeful, for anticipation—not that she isn’t always clean; she washes for fun, for pleasure, the way she wrings the washcloth so the bubbles catch here and there—
The phone rang again, just once, as if to remind Natalie, startle her loose.
—and yes, there were things to do. Yes, yes. The food she’d been chewing was suddenly tasteless in her mouth. The wire. She had had success. Miss April! She set Denise Michele aside, they’d meet another time, no doubt, back in 1976, in Hawaii. Denise is Hawaiian after all, the forty-ninth state and the freedom more recent, fresher, more appreciated and demonstrated, as she herself demonstrates it; she’s been working as a Polynesian dancer, had a bit part in an episode of Hawaii Five-O. She has a fiery temper, but she can also be affectionate and sensual, and yet Natalie had to put her aside, had to get out of these sandals, into those boots, and out the door, across the yard, toward the truck.
She opened the back, jerked the tailgate so it bounced open, flat. Crawling inside, she reached out to touch the four balls of wire her children had harvested for her. Three were ordinary, only average, but the fourth ball, the last wire, was of a different grade—completely different and wonderful, still humming deep within. She pressed her cheek against it, then felt for the sharpened, cut end, then unwound the thinnest strand, thin as a hair yet stronger, for twenty inches; she bent it back and forth until it loosened, weakened, gave way; then she twisted it into a loop, tied it around her neck for strength.
She had to drive! What was she doing? Outside again, closing the back, climbing into the cab, she found the key, fired the ignition, accelerated out onto the dirt road. The truck roared, jerking sleeping dogs awake, back out through the neighborhood, retracing her path up MLK. She twisted the rearview mirror. The balls of copper wire were still waiting, anxious. She had forgotten, almost. The man had reminded her. Forgetfulness wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it could make things difficult. What did she really need to remember? In the trailer she had a drawer of facts—her name, her bank accounts, a calendar where she marked down the times the man told her, the places. Sometimes she even forgot about the drawer, and then opened it by chance and surprised herself, and remembered. Forgetfulness disconnected the past from the future, took her in a different direction, and she suspected that this was not something she could always deny. For the temptation was not to remember, to really forget, to embrace her best days, like lately when she felt as free as her girls look free, moving forward, her energy multiplying, never lapsing.
Could she forget to forget? Fall into habit and routine? Was forgetting to forget actually remembering? She had to be brave! To move forward, not to circle back. Yet in her pocket she still carried her address, though she almost never forgot that, and her phone number. The man had called, to remind her. How did he find her? Did she find him? That was back in those early, difficult days, right after she’d moved to Portland. After a night when she went out, when she had lost some time, where she woke up the next morning with a phone number in her pocket. He had opportunities for her, he’d told her. He understood her situation. He didn’t want any commitment, they would never meet, he would always call her and not the other way around. She’d tried his number again, weeks later, and it had been disconnected; still, he knew how to reach her and did. He paid her promptly, too, with a receipt, as if this were all legal.
THE THREE RODE THE MAX, the blue line, the train sliding west out of the city and speeding through the dark buildings. It was just after midnight, and Kayla sat between Leon and Chris, her knees knocking each of theirs. The boys had to lie to be out this late, but not Kayla; she lived with her father, who worked the night shift and slept most of the day. Her freedom was rarely compromised.
On buses, the three always sat in the very back, shoulder to shoulder; on the MAX, they went as far to the rear as they could without having to face backward. They liked to be able to see where they were headed.
“So I heard this story,” Kayla said. “No, forget it.”
There was only one other passenger on the MAX, five seats ahead of them—a tall, skinny man with his long legs bent out into the aisle, his narrow, black leather shoes stretching to sharp points. His black beard was also pointed, hooking down his jaw, meeting in a sharp V beneath his mouth. He may have been sleeping; he may have been watching them through the slits of his eyes.
“Tell it,” Leon said.
“No,” Kayla said. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Whatever,” Chris said, “but you can’t come halfway like that, you know we have a policy—”
“All right,” she said. “Anyway, I heard about this guy, somewhere down in California, whose dick was so long it would drag on the ground when he walked—”
“Who told you this?” Chris said.
“Don’t interrupt,” Leon said. “Remember, Kayla decided we had to hear this.”
“So,” Kayla said, “this guy, just to walk down the street, had to wrap his thing around and around his leg, tie it there. But then one day he saw something that made him get a hard-on, and you know what happened?”
The two boys just stared at her, faces serious, trying to appear bored.
“It broke his leg in three places,” she said.
No