Magic

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Because your husband is far away. He is in another country, and you don’t even want him to be your husband anymore, but you can’t say that because he’s a soldier. To say that is un-American. And this is why you stay with your parents now, in your old twin bed, while your house sits empty and silent thirty miles away in a town where you don’t know anyone. Because your husband is far away.

There is the issue of the magic powers. That you think you have them. You ride your bike, your old red ten-speed down the middle of the street in the middle of the night and you feel like a kid. You pump and swerve around somebody’s old Toyota parked on the curb where it shouldn’t be overnight, and for a second there’s the flight of doubt in your belly, the feeling like you are falling, that you’re about to fall, that you’re about to lose control of everything.

You could lose control of everything and the powers would not leave you. What you do with your body, say with your mouth, even think, it shouldn’t matter. But it’s like you’re in the center of a tight web, like everything you do reverberates out on some other tough string, vibrating. Way out, where you can’t see it. Someday, you think, it’ll kill your husband. It’ll be the string that detonates the road side bomb. Most of the time, it’s the string that unhinges your brother.

Because he too lives at home. Not because his wife is far away, he doesn’t have one. And you wonder how long it will go on like this, the two of you home, hovering around thirty, with the mother and the father under the same roof, a nuclear family, just aged, bigger, older than it should be. If your mother will start driving you both around in the station wagon again. In her folded down ankle socks, Keds.

You are looking for a job. Your brother Lee is looking for a job. He plays your grandpa’s records, Dorsey and Prima. You watch Home and Garden on mute. Your mother plants geraniums in flower boxes under all the windows. At night you ride your bike to the intersection, leave it stashed in the bus shelter, and then walk to bars. You stay out til four. Or when it’s just getting light, the sky a color that exists only right then, changing from black and white to Technicolor with a slow leak over the tops of buildings, a Burger King, a bank, a dollar store.

You went to school for art. How you ended up with a soldier is beyond your parents. That the men in your program were dick-wads does not quite explain it to them, either.

You go to the bar and test it. You don’t go for a few days, and then you go back, to test. You order blue UV and lemonade in a tall cup with a straw. It takes about two minutes for someone to talk to you. He is tall, but not dark, or handsome. He has a goatee. Asks what you are drinking.

You offer the straw. You don’t have oral herpes, do you? you ask.

I have an oral fixation, he says, licks his lips. He sips. Too sweet, he says.

Then you can’t handle me, you say. Tonight, you drawl. It sounds right.

You tell them you are different things: a nurse, a teacher, a travel writer, a lab technician, an interior decorator.

I’d like to decorate your interior, he says.

You fuck in the parking lot, in between cars, leaning on one of them, near but not under a street light that is yellow, an energy saver, or a bug light, not bright, but sick looking, and mosquitoes bite your legs, up high, near your ass, and around your ankles where the skin is thin and the blood is right there. You do it for nothing. You could at least be making some money. But you don’t. You don’t even face him.

See ya, you say.

I hope so, he says. But you won’t. You go home and wait, for letters, for the military to come to the door, but in two days it’s your brother Lee who doesn’t get out of bed. Your mother sends you to the store to get his meds, because they’ve run out, because he doesn’t pay attention to the dwindling supply until it’s too late. You have to spoon it into his mouth like a baby, the tiny two-tone capsule tipped into his mouth. You have to hold his head, make him drink. When he lies back, his eyes close and the lids are purple, are webbed and frail and thin like light can shine right through them.

You think about what it might be like to fly out of there, to float up to the ceiling and out the window, like a slip of paper through a mail slot, out over the yard, where you and Lee ran through the sprinkler, and then down the street, over the elementary school, the grocery store, the bars that you go in and out of, the parking lots. From there, the parking lot’s a grid of perfection, straight lines, right angles, swept clean, black and yellow and hot and smooth.

If you go back to that bar, you’ll be somebody else, a nurse, a teacher, and if you see him, the tall unhandsome one, if he recognizes you, if he tries to talk to you, you’ll say it was someone else. Your imaginary sister. Or   your fucked up friend, totally unpredictable, or else completely predictable, going out all the time, never know what she’ll do or say, or who she’ll end up with, what she’s drinking, dancing to or saying to someone to get attention. You’ll shake your head a little, blink, real kind. Yeah, that wasn’t me, you’ll say. You’ll have to start going someplace else. And it’ll feel just like flying or like you’re the only one on the moving sidewalk, moving without effort, gliding past the slow trudge of everyone else around you, on and up over the bank and the Burger King, into a color like ink. Like the center of a deep bruise.