{"id":213,"date":"2016-06-19T01:49:28","date_gmt":"2016-06-19T01:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=213"},"modified":"2016-06-19T01:50:55","modified_gmt":"2016-06-19T01:50:55","slug":"story-of-the-month-one-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=213","title":{"rendered":"Story of the Month: One Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"samplex\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When you can only peck out words a letter at a time with a long metal rod taped to your forehead, you learn to be succinct.\u00a0 Not that I had far to go.\u00a0 Maybe it’s an occupational hazard.\u00a0 I never thought of it like that before.\u00a0 Wonder if OSHA’s got it listed in their manuals—WARNING: the construction of crossword puzzles can be hazardous to the health of your communication skills.\u00a0 I make up for it by thinking conversationally.<\/p>\n

Martha probably wouldn’t buy it.\u00a0 She’d say it was the other way around, that I went into writing puzzles because I was such a close-mouthed, evasive bastard to begin with.\u00a0 Wives are like that.\u00a0 They won’t let you blame your shortcomings on anything external.\u00a0 And they don’t understand how your mind works even if you try to describe it.\u00a0 All they know is it’s not like theirs, and that makes it automatically suspect.<\/p>\n

You’d think that with Martha being in insurance, she’d be more open to the idea that a lot of what happens in life is unexpected and unexplainable, and that such things can shape your personality, or at least color your outlook for a while.\u00a0 Like how our marriage started\u2014oldest story in the book.\u00a0 I stayed even after she lost the baby, though.\u00a0 That ought to have counted for something.\u00a0 But Martha said it was just my outmoded sense of duty, or maybe laziness or fatalism.\u00a0 She stayed with me, I think, because she couldn\u2019t face getting back into the spin of baiting and dating and waiting.\u00a0 Plus, I do believe she actually loved me.<\/p>\n

It’s ironic, but now that I can’t speak any more, I’d like to talk to her about it.\u00a0 And about the puzzles and how they make me filter everything through fragmentary meanings, through puns and synonyms.\u00a0 The synonyms are especially insidious.\u00a0 They lead you to believe one thing is just about as good as the next.\u00a0 You begin by treating words as interchangeable, you end up treating people that way, too.\u00a0 They’re all the same in the dark, a friend of mine was fond of saying.\u00a0 He had a hare-lip and had a hard time getting girls, so he usually ended up with losers.\u00a0 Sometimes he even went with hookers.\u00a0 The dark was his friend in more ways than one.<\/p>\n

I only had a hooker once.\u00a0 My father got her for me.\u00a0 On my eighteenth birthday.\u00a0 He drove a delivery truck for Bond bread.\u00a0 That night, he pulled up to the corner where I was milling around with some guys and told me to get in.\u00a0 That meant riding in the back of the truck, because it was one of those old, squat panel jobs with just a stool for the driver up front.\u00a0 She was back there.\u00a0 She’d dumped out God knows how many trays of hamburger buns to make a mattress.\u00a0 I guess even whores have some regard for their working conditions.\u00a0 She was eating a jelly doughnut, and she made me wait ’til she was done.\u00a0 I didn’t argue with her.\u00a0 I was an embarrassed virgin and a polite kid anyway.\u00a0 My father drove us around for two hours.\u00a0 Thank Jesus she was quiet about it.\u00a0 I’ve preferred quiet women ever since.\u00a0 Mostly.\u00a0 And to this day, I’ll only eat a hamburger if it’s served on rye bread.<\/p>\n

Martha’s due any minute.\u00a0 Though she has missed a day here and there, and she left early yesterday and the day before that.\u00a0 Or was that last week?\u00a0 I don’t blame her.\u00a0 A deathbed’s a dull place when death comes too slowly.<\/p>\n

Lou Gehrig cried when they took him to Yankee Stadium for a fans’ farewell.\u00a0 He was a man of the body, and the withering grip of the sclerosis must have terrified him.\u00a0 An ending before the end.\u00a0 But the brain is an organ, not a muscle, and as a man of the mind, I should be able to handle it better.\u00a0 Theoretically.\u00a0 I am managing, at least, to continue to build my puzzles, interlocking words like some reverse Tower of Babel.\u00a0 I climb steep black staircases and traverse neatly partitioned white hallways, where each step must be precise.\u00a0 Every meaning is distilled from a host of associations, yet it must hint at those associations, too, reverberate with the memory of them, if you will, like a perfume extracted from a rare, bog-born flower or from the sexual glands of a small African cat.\u00a0 Good clues don’t come as easily as they used to.\u00a0 I find myself falling back on fill-in-the-blank song titles or the names of European rivers and ancient cities.\u00a0 The brain’s not a muscle, but it can tire out.\u00a0 It can tremble and refuse to obey.\u00a0 Maybe these bouts of mental indolence are akin to what Gehrig felt when the bat first began seeming heavy and resistant in his hands, when his fingers couldn’t clench the thick leather of his glove quite as carelessly any more.<\/p>\n

Never thought I’d go like this, by inches.\u00a0 Never thought about it at all, really.\u00a0 If I’d been pressed, I guess I’d have said I’d go\u2014or that I’d like to go\u2014in media res, especially if the res were the nether regions of some young piece with few inhibitions and only enough sense to make her presentable in mixed company.\u00a0 I always liked a girl who was ready.\u00a0 Big legs are a plus.\u00a0 A pretty, photogenic face, not a beautiful one.\u00a0 Beauty can be like quicksand.<\/p>\n

There’s the door now.<\/p>\n

Only the nurse, come to take the rod off my head.\u00a0 They don’t like me to overexert myself.\u00a0 What do they think I should be saving my energy for?\u00a0 I’d like to pinch her ass.<\/p>\n

A fine, broad ass it is, too.\u00a0 I’d like to give her a good pinch and maybe a swat, as well, just to let her know there’s still a man in here, inside this scarecrow’s body.\u00a0 Couldn’t scare a crow if I tried, though.\u00a0 Couldn’t try.\u00a0 If a crow were to fly in through that window that’s never opened, he’d be free to strut right up my chest, shit on my face if he wanted, perch on top of my head and caw his crow news on all sides.\u00a0 Quoth the raven, Nevermore.\u00a0 But if I used “raven” as a clue, it wouldn’t be so obvious an answer as “crow.”\u00a0 I’d go for “devour” or “despoil,” the “short a” meaning.\u00a0 That’s the thing about clues without modifiers: they can point you in a completely erroneous direction.\u00a0 Context is everything.<\/p>\n

Where is Martha?\u00a0 Maybe she meant it after all.\u00a0 I didn’t think she had what it takes.\u00a0 To face down people.\u00a0 I mean, she’s the kind of woman who sends a thank-you note when someone gives her a ride home in a rainstorm or buys her a cup of coffee and a croissant.\u00a0 My remaining friends are few and far between, but even disinterested parties would consider a wife who walked out on her failing husband to be a cold-hearted witch.\u00a0 Failing, there’s another one.\u00a0 Intransitive, as in “losing strength, fading away,” or transitive, as in “disappointing the expectations of trust?”\u00a0 Martha would say I fit the bill, whichever.<\/p>\n

But those letters she found are so old.\u00a0 The one fluent outpouring of my life, and look where they’ve landed me.\u00a0 That is, look where I’ve landed if she really has the nerve to go through with leaving me.\u00a0 Christ, what’s the point of marriage if you end up dying alone?\u00a0 Where’s the pay-off for all the dull dinners, the spurned temptations (there were some), the discretion when temptation won out, the compromises on vacation destinations, on living room furniture and movies?\u00a0 In sickness and in health.\u00a0 She meant those stale words.\u00a0 It wasn’t a shotgun wedding in her eyes.\u00a0 It was “meant to be” or some such crap.\u00a0 But one test, and she crumples.\u00a0 One last test, anyway.<\/p>\n

“The last straw,” she said yesterday, or the day before, or whenever it was.\u00a0 God, I wish they’d leave the blinds up on that window\u2014then at least I’d be sure of day and night, have some sequence to count.\u00a0 Last time I typed “up,” though, the nurse propped me with four pillows at my back and disappeared for as many hours.\u00a0 Felt like four hours, anyway.\u00a0 Four hours is the tag my mind seized on, the way I sliced that particular afternoon (or morning), like Martha slices thickly iced cakes with a knife dipped in hot water so the pieces come out clean and smooth.\u00a0 Time will never be like that again.\u00a0 A philosopher would say it never was.\u00a0 Not knowing where I lie in the temporal flow, the philosopher might insist, is not the fault of the closed blinds, but is only natural reality asserting itself.\u00a0 Two more good ones: blinds and lie.<\/p>\n

I had a friend\u2014not the guy with the hare-lip; this guy was wet-panties good-looking and a real sharp mover, too\u2014this friend, he had a working theory about last straws.\u00a0 He said you could get away with anything with a woman who loved you as long as you didn’t lay on the last straw.\u00a0 Now, this could be different things in different instances.\u00a0 He applied it to practical situations and to his own particular ideas about karma.\u00a0 For example, you could, he said (and did), have it off with another woman as long as you avoided the old in-and-out.\u00a0 (That still leaves a lot of room for some very satisfactory maneuvers.)\u00a0 Or if there were extenuating hardship circumstances, like your wife was out of town or on the rag (he hated seeing blood on his dick).\u00a0 Secrecy was a kind of code of honor with him.\u00a0 He truly believed he was protecting his wife rather than deceiving her.\u00a0 He even told me he chose to suffer rather than hurt her\u2014suffer by denying in silence the attachment he had a few times felt for what at other times he called his “side dishes.”\u00a0 He was a real piece of work, no two ways around it.\u00a0 But it pays to have a point of view.\u00a0 He successfully argued his way out of several dicey scrapes.\u00a0 An artist of sorts\u2014artisan, at the very least.<\/p>\n

It was vanity, I suppose, that made me keep the letters.\u00a0 Adrienne’s to me.\u00a0 What was it made me keep mine to her?\u00a0 It had pissed me off at first that she brought them back to me.\u00a0 She could have just thrown them out.\u00a0 Quietly, without the melodrama.\u00a0 But even though I was pissed, I couldn’t destroy them.\u00a0 Especially not after that night I sat and re-read them all, hers and mine.\u00a0 Rented a goddamned hotel room just to do it.\u00a0 It was stupid to keep them.\u00a0 My friend with the code of secrecy would never have done it.\u00a0 They were some kind of proof, I guess\u2014evidence that I could feel deeply and, what’s more, that I could tell it.\u00a0 Get out of this head for once, past the fence of hints and clues and gimmicks.\u00a0 Then, after the accident, it seemed indecent to get rid of them, like burying Adrienne twice.<\/p>\n

You wouldn’t believe Adrienne and Martha were sisters, and not just because Adrienne was brunette and Martha blond.\u00a0 Two women couldn’t have been more different.\u00a0 Martha’s serene and pale and open, like the full moon.\u00a0 Adrienne was like a forest.\u00a0 You could get lost in her.\u00a0 You could go to her again and again and never know what you’d find, but it’d always be good.\u00a0 Usually always. \u00a0God, though, she could make me laugh.\u00a0 The things she said, the quick comebacks, the little, unexpected asides.\u00a0 She even made me laugh out loud once right as I was coming\u2014I can’t remember now what she said\u2014and the laughter convened every inch of me into one long, smooth, rushing sensation, like I was a divining rod jerked down into the sweet promise of water.<\/p>\n

I was a good husband to Martha.\u00a0 She never wanted for anything.\u00a0 Got the house she wanted, the two kids, the engraved Mr. and Mrs. Stationery\u2014a picture-perfect Christmas card life.\u00a0 I wonder what got to her worse\u2014Adrienne being her sister or Adrienne being older.\u00a0 Martha never said it in so many words, but I know she thought being 15 years younger than me was some sort of lucky hex against my “roving ways,” as she quaintly put it once during our short engagement.<\/p>\n

She had her charms, my Martha, certainly.\u00a0 Still has.\u00a0 One of them being her blandness, her stillness, like a Communion wafer.\u00a0 I could never have lived with Adrienne.\u00a0 It would have been like breathing pure oxygen or staring at the sun.\u00a0 Oh, the tantalizing sting of her!\u00a0 Just to hear her voice slow down and waver on the phone when she was about to shift into sex talk, to see the turn of her wristbone as she reached across our kitchen table for the salt or the way she scooped her thick, dark hair off her neck and pinned it up with the carved tortoise shell clip I brought her from Isla Mujeres.<\/p>\n

It frightened me, sometimes, what I felt for Adrienne.\u00a0 It wasn’t an obsession, exactly, nor quite love, nor mere lust.\u00a0 With Adrienne, in snatches as brief and exhilarating as lightning, I was my pure self, and nothing else ever felt as dangerous or as calming.\u00a0 She could be difficult, though\u2014carefree and seductive one day, petulant and challenging the next.\u00a0 She was so strong and direct, yet there was something wounded about her, and the wound seemed basic to her nature, like the little hole some people need to have cut in their throats so they can breathe.\u00a0 I think I staved that wound, but I know I never healed it, and Adrienne both didn’t expect me to and held it against me that I couldn’t.<\/p>\n

It started at a parade, of all places.\u00a0 Martha was marching in it, with the girls’ Scout troop.\u00a0 I’d thought they were getting old for that sort of stuff, but Martha was set on instilling a sense of civic duty or stick-to-itiveness or something in them.\u00a0 They’d refused to join the Future Homemakers of America, but Martha had managed to keep them in Scouts.\u00a0 Adrienne was covering the parade for her newspaper.\u00a0 It wasn’t her regular beat; she was doing a favor for a hung-over friend.\u00a0 Normally, she covered petty crimes, fires, high school stabbings, things like that.\u00a0 She was good, too.\u00a0 She could take you inside someone’s head just at the moment when their emotions were the most keen or just at the pinpoint of a realization.\u00a0 She had the sensibilities of a diamond-cutter.<\/p>\n

It was a sunny July day, and after most of the parade had gone by, we slipped into the inviting gloom of a nearby bar to cool down with a beer.\u00a0 It was like a cave in there.\u00a0 We sat at a booth of padded leatherette.\u00a0 The other patrons were on stools along the bar, a line of pot-bellied men and women who leaned in close to one another when they spoke, the men occasionally daring to rest their hands across the women’s shoulders.\u00a0 During lulls in conversation, the men stroked the sides of ashtrays and played with their change, and the women took slow sips of their drinks, letting the edges of the wet glasses linger on their lips.\u00a0 It was Adrienne who said it first.\u00a0 That there was a dense air of sexuality in the room.\u00a0 She wasn’t even looking at me when she said it, and she may not have meant it as a signal, but when I put my hand on her thigh under the table, she didn’t push it away.\u00a0 Twenty minutes later we were locked in the bar’s tiny bathroom at the end of a long hall lit by a single orange light bulb in the ceiling.\u00a0 And it kept just as urgent and just as hot between us every time after that, too, for five years running.<\/p>\n

There’s the door again.\u00a0 Good thing, too, ’cause my eyes have been falling shut the past few minutes, and sleep’s pressing in like an August fog on Cape Cod.\u00a0 Does that mean it’s night?\u00a0 Can’t be.\u00a0 Martha doesn’t come at night.<\/p>\n

I hear her skirt rustling.\u00a0 Taffeta.\u00a0 Maybe it is night, and she’s on her way out to a party.\u00a0 I can smell her perfume.\u00a0 A familiar scent, but not her usual, perhaps one she used to use long ago.\u00a0 Musky.\u00a0 Maybe one Adrienne gave her.\u00a0 Adrienne was always giving Martha perfumes she had concocted herself from essential oils.<\/p>\n

I hope Martha puts the writing rod back on me.\u00a0 I’ve got to make her understand.\u00a0 Come up with a word or two or three.\u00a0 Important and necessary.\u00a0 Essential.\u00a0 They were both essential to me.\u00a0 I’m not a man who can be wholehearted, but that doesn’t mean I’m heartless.<\/p>\n

Why hasn’t she spoken? \u00a0 I’ll have to force my eyes open so she doesn’t think I’m asleep.<\/p>\n

That meddling nurse must have slipped in while I was dozing and dimmed the overhead lights.\u00a0 Martha’s standing in a grove of shadows.\u00a0 Makes her hair look as dark as moss.\u00a0 Ah, better.\u00a0 She’s moving closer, her hand outstretched.\u00a0 She’s trying to forgive me.\u00a0 Take me back.\u00a0 That’s what I’ll type when she gets me my rod: take me.<\/p>\n

She’s bending over me so slowly, it would be erotic if I weren’t so weak.\u00a0 Her face is entering the little zone of light from the night lamp at the top of the bed.\u00a0 Musk and taffeta.\u00a0 Glints.\u00a0 Glints.\u00a0 Dark brown eyes.\u00a0 The sheen of a smooth wave of brown hair.\u00a0 A tortoise shell clip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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