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Reaching
By Arwen Brenneman They sit at the breakfast table, each with their coffee and paper – she the Globe and Mail, he the local daily. He asks for the sugar. The bowl arrives unceremoniously at his elbow – no glance, no smile, no pause. The air lies between them like a body of water, trapping and distorting sound. What a crazy game of telephone they played, talking into this air. In fifteen minutes, the radio is turned on, and a flurry of morning activity dispels the quiet the way a lit TV quells the fears of a teenager home alone. A smile is reflected and answered in the bathroom mirror. A kiss, quick and dry, floats between them as they get in separate cars and head to work. When he gets home, she is not there. Instead, a note on the fridge. Gone out, it says. A friend is in crisis. She is called into these crises, a swirl of solutions and listening and patting. In the years they have lived in this house, the living room has seen tears and anger and laughter. He has witnessed it, outside the room, offering tea from the door. His couch has been a shelter for battered women, homeless children, angst-filled teens; a detox unit for alcoholics, shopaholics, and drug users; a place of angry words for divorcees and psychotics. Adult children, needing bandages and kisses on their scraped lives. Once, he imagined actual children there, in the living room, in a fort made of couch pillows. Laughter and Santa Claus invited in; welcomed, the agony of not making the team. The children have refused to come, eggs stubbornly resisting fertilization, sperm turning their backs on commitment to the long journey. He goes for a walk. The sun slips towards the earth’s embrace, amid a chorus of chattering sprinklers. Passing the park, he sees her, her arm around her crisis. He stops, the way the sight of her has stopped him since the first day, his heart only remembering after a beat that it is not allowed to stop, too. She is beautiful. Auburn hair, hastily pinned up, is working its way free, defying gravity and order. She would say a mess. He knows different. She is electrified, he thinks, her hair reacting to that dance of electrons by stretching from her head. As a child, he had stood on a rubber platform at a science fair and his hair had stretched away like that, given life by his hand on an electron generator. Suddenly, she looks up. She sees him, and he sees her eyes are filled with tears, which warp the blue the way old glass warps the sky. She smiles at him, and the smile spreads over her face like melting butter. The both make small hand movements, and then suddenly she is gone, her head turning back to her crisis. It is late when she comes in. He catches hold of her hand. He wants to talk, arms around each other. There between them, words in the air. There are no words that he knows to speak, and as she stands blinking, he reaches to his experience, to his thoughts: the words slip from his grasp. He lets go of her hand. She is tired. Snuggling under the goose down, she turns her back to him. A questioning hand is laid softly on her shoulder. The shoulder dips away, turning inward. The hand is removed. He watches the shadow lace of tree leaves on the ceiling, describing half arcs, drawing back to center. It takes a very long time for the trees to rock him to sleep. Later, on a train to nowhere, to away, his suitcase fisted tightly in one hand and resolve as tightly fisted in the other, he misses her. |
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