What We Were

I.

Georgia wanted to cook me dinner. I agreed to it. There are worse things in the world to agree to. She probably hadn’t cooked for anyone in a while. I was happy to humor her.
It was a Thursday night. I asked what I should bring and she said nothing. I stopped by Leo’s and picked up a loaf of split-topped honey white. I presented it to her at the door. I hadn’t been there since—

She wore an old apron over her jeans and red ribbed sweater. A gold necklace in front. I can’t remember her ever wearing it when Jake was around. Her hair was pulled back, and she looked a lot older. The girl I’d gone to high school with was gone. The one who’d married and lost Jake.

She made some kind of pasta and poured wine into two tall glasses.

She was serious when she asked, “Red or white?” I laughed. I didn’t know the difference.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“No occasion,” she said. “Does there always have to be an occasion?”

It wasn’t good. I shouldn’t have expected it to be. It could have been that I was drunk. That I didn’t remember it right. That she was amazing—blew my fucking head off—and I just can’t get the memory straight. But that’s not it. It wasn’t good. I wasn’t. She wasn’t. The angle we started at against the breakfast bar wasn’t. The weak construction of the bed frame later in the night wasn’t. The way I couldn’t keep my balance. The way she laid there, barely alive, not making a noise except for quiet breaths she tried not to take. How I knocked the lamp off the nightstand. How the noise it made, breaking, was like an IED going off in an empty chamber in my head.

I thought fucking her would be like explosions going off—the good kind. Like letting things out. Creating space. It wasn’t. It was like stuffing every terrible thing about ourselves into a box so small it was too heavy to do a damned thing with.

I tried avoiding her, but we were so tangled we couldn’t resist the gravity between us. We came face to face unexpectedly at basketball games, fundraisers. I was trying to date Melanie then. Melanie was supposed to help. It didn’t. Melanie was another thing to put into the box. Encounters at fish fries and American Legion baseball in the summer. I tried to box her out, but Georgia was inescapable. The Studebaker on Tuesday nights—Tuesdays are my days. The Post Office. On the street in her car. On the sidewalk on foot. Inside her little house. Her Volkswagen. My fucking truck.

The pasta was replaced with frozen dinners. The wine with cheap whiskey or tall malts. The headaches got worse. The memories. The sex less adventurous and more angry.

We started going to The Studebaker again. Together. When we stayed too late we said terrible things to and about each other. Things that sealed the sound up in the room like a tomb. Like, the pussy’s so bad Jake would have wished he was dead. Like, he’d been overseas—of course he was seeing a prostitute. Like, at least Jake was a real man. At least he never cried.

And later the sound erupted in howls inside her house—always her house. On the queen bed on top of the comforter. Under the cover of darkness. Manufactured sounds like they were synthesized in a studio in California. Sounds like pain. Because we knew the further we moved away from his death, the closer we got to ours. Sounds so far removed from the ebb of our bodies that the distance was the only true thing we had.

It outlasted everything. It outlasted Melanie. Georgia and I spent most of October fucking the grief away. I don’t think any of the books told her to do that. It was the therapy of choice. Jake was nothing more than a jersey framed in the high school gym.

Sometimes his name appeared out of nowhere. Someone painted a banner that read, “We’ll Miss You Jake!” Someone else stuffed Styrofoam cups into the fences, spelling “RIP AMBLER.” Things like that.

We fucked every time any part of him came back. We fucked with her wedding ring on, with her wedding ring off. With his photographs out or laid face-down on the end tables. It didn’t make a difference.

On the couch, an inflatable mattress, a table. All the regular places. And everywhere there were her books. Books with eyes. Books open and looking at you. Books worse than Jake. Books I made her close and put away.

We weren’t always old and tired and grieving. We were young once, breathing, and we’d drive to the water tower. The town name spelled out in red letters on the west side, facing the interstate: T R E N T O N. On the east, facing the town and high school, it’s blank. Nobody cares. Either you’re just passing through or you’re never leaving. No one here needs a guidebook.

It was a good place to take girls. It still might be. Jake and I’d alternate weekends with the truck, and sometimes we’d leave each other things. Jake tacked one of my skin magazines onto one of the tower legs. I had to pretend I didn’t know how it got there. An almost full Colt 45 with god-knows-what floating inside.

I tried to get even. I made a point of lifting one of his mother’s old nighties; I was at their house from time to time. I hung it on a nail, smeared some of my mother’s lipstick on the collar. He said he recognized it, that it ruined the whole fucking night. I caught a beating for that one. It was worth it.

It was a good place to take girls. Dark and secluded and scary enough to entice all the right feelings. After a while I stopped leaving little presents there. Jake never stopped. He replaced that Playboy with a Playgirl. I tried doling out a beating of my own, but it didn’t work.

Eventually I stopped going. I never found those last gifts.

His was a large and easy shadow to dwell in. There were other places to take girls. Other places to get kicks and trade tales. Sometimes in another town, in an empty A&W parking lot. The Blake County Wilderness. Somewhere when the crops were up, along a little-used road, half-expecting to get caught.

These days it’s easy. We can go anywhere. It’s hard to get caught by a dead man.

One night, she said, “You know what I am?”

I could’ve said a lot of things. A tease. A slut. I could’ve called her a two-bit whore, turned it around and asked her how she would have liked it if Jake had gone screwing around on her?

Did it matter that he had?

I was getting tired of the games.

“What?” I said. “Tell me.”

She said it so soft I could barely hear:

“A widow.”

II.
Iraq looked different on television. Before he died, Georgia read us Jake’s letters at The Studebaker, and the way he described it, you’d have thought he was on vacation somewhere. All this talk of sunshine and taking it easy. I guess he might’ve been lying. It never occurred to me then. The only other thing I remember from those letters is how he’d always complain about dumb things. Never about a firefight or the heat. “I got this button that keeps coming loose,” et cetera, et cetera.

We talked about vacations. I needed somewhere warm to go in winter, like Fiji or Tahiti. Georgia asked about cooler places we could stand in summer, like Alaska or Iceland. Somewhere she could walk in the sun at midnight. Ass-backward places we had no chance of making it to.

It never occurred to us that the whole fucking thing might have been a vacation. Where and from what we were never sure. But I think we had the feeling this wasn’t the kind of life you lead day-to-day. Drinking till you say the most terrible things at the most terrible times. Fixing the boxed in anger with sex. Solving the grief by coming up with even worse things to feel sorry for.

We made and recited lists of things we hated about her dead husband. Then things about ourselves. Our bodies. I hate how your tits sag.

I hate the way you touch me, like I’m broken.

I had this mangy little fleabag named Tabby, and she got hit by a car. I was young and sad. I wrote her a letter. Dear Tabby, I wrote. Why are you so bad? You are a bad, bad cat and I don’t like you anymore. You shouldn’t have gone out in the street. You need to look both ways. You are a bad, bad, stupid, bad cat and I hate you. Sincerely,

Jake was not a cat. No one—not his parents or hers—tried convincing us he was not dead. There was no replacement to purchase, similar in height and build, same name, same vague pattern of identifying marks. We could have dealt with the inconsistencies.

We could have taken out a discrete ad in the classifieds. In search of white male, 5’11” — 6’1,” 23-25 years of age. Must be athletic and alive. Patriotic and unfaithful.

There were days she rode her high horse. “He fucking died for his country, you know. I bet you’d never even enlist in the reserves.”

She was right.

Then there were days I rode my own horse. Quiet, unprovoked days. Days we never made it to The Studebaker. Days we sat home with frozen dinners watching Thursday night reality TV. Days some hack advertised his newest gold coin or American-flag-enameled china.

That’s what got me going.

“He didn’t die for his country. He didn’t die for anything. He died because he couldn’t find a real job in this stinking shit-hole of a town. Because he couldn’t pay your fucking rent.” I might have been too stupid to hold down a regular forty-hour, but I wasn’t stupid enough to die. “So fucking come off it already.”

I’m not sure she ever saw me. Maybe she did. Maybe she knew I was there each and every time. Maybe it did as much to comfort her as it did to comfort me.

Squeeze-and-squinting my way through the four-way-stops, the drunk couple of miles to a point on the overpass overlooking her house. Watching the dome light in her navy Golf go on and off after The Studebaker. Then the lights inside.

Sometimes she beat me there. Sometimes I had the privilege of watching her pull in, jerking the car a little at a time, worried like me she might overdo it and slam into the house. Maybe get arrested.

Some nights she never pulled in. Not while I was watching. I’d doze off and find her car there when I woke. Or not.

It never scared me. There was never the apparition of Georgia slipping off the road somewhere dark and steep. Nothing worse than her forgetting the four-way at Cinder Way Road and getting lit up by Patrolman Davies. There was only a very narrow realm of possibilities. Death would have been too good or easy for either of us.

It never scared me that some nights Georgia had a drink she hadn’t bought sitting in front of her when I arrived. It never scared me that I didn’t know whose it was. Why would it? Who could possibly be interested in the damaged-goods, three-quarters-ugly widow of a washed-up ball player? Casualty more of bad circumstances than the road-side-bomb itself.

Sometimes she beat me to her house. Some nights she never pulled in.

Last night I watched the dome light in her navy Golf go on and off. Then the lights inside.

Last night I saw the man in his long truck join her.

Figure that about wraps it up.