Nightwork: Stories

SEE IF YOU CAN LIFT ME

I walk around to the other side of the bed we are sharing, and I put my face up close to hers and say, “Ann, please. Please,” I say, and her eyes open, and Ann sees me, I think, and she says, “Sorry” in a loud, steady voice, and she knows. She knows she has been talking in her sleep. In the morning, she will ask me, “Did I scare you?”

The dog, sleeping next to Ann, sleeps through it all. Good, loyal dog he is — this dog and all the others, for as long as I have known her. Ann holds the dog so close, I itch just looking at her bare arm slung around. The bareness of it, that is what snags me, and how she wears these slippery nightgowns — must be cold. Her arm, around the dog, looks very cold and white and dry to me. The dryness especially, I notice this, in contrast to the tops of her breasts, where the skin, I think, is damp. No matter what Ann says, anyone would want to touch her here, but Ann tells me no, only the dog keeps her warm.

Ann says, “You do not know my kind of loneliness.”

Ann says, “You have a child.”

And so I have.

I used to say my skin smelled of girl from so much touching of my own. Ann remembers. Ann says, “That’s when I got my pooch,” and she takes his head up in her hands — Ann does this, all the time — and chuffs behind his ears.

Or else she says, “Don’t get near me. I smell of dog.”

I cannot smell a thing. In this bed again, on my back, I am not near enough to anything other than me; Ann is turned away. She is tucked against the dog, dog pressed against her hollows, which is not the right word for Ann there. Ann is full there. Ann can take hold there, and sometimes does, slapping herself in that place, which, when I am pressing on my own bones, I think of as hollows. The word is hollows, but what I see is the flatness of girls.

I see cow skulls.

I see hurtful blue sky and desert, cholla in bloom, places I have never been to but sometimes think I would like to live in with Ann: New Mexico, Arizona, parts of California. We talk about living in these places. Ann says she can see us now at a long table, feeding lots of children. We are feeding some women like ourselves, and some men, too. This part makes us smile, Ann and me, talking about all the people we will feed. “And not only that!” Ann says. “Not only that. You can buy your girl a horse. Think about it,” Ann says.

I do.

I lie next to Ann in this bed and think about us in the houses Ann says belong to grown-up friends, houses with rooms unused for days, houses with two and three of everything, blenders and televisions — closets full of coats of every size. I think about Ann with a man in such a house and doing some of the things she has told me she once did with a man, and I have done, too. I think about breasts — his, hers, mine. I think hard on these breasts or else my mother’s breasts come into view, long and unmuscled, and sometimes my grandmother’s breasts or my grandmother’s shoulders or the way my grandmother hitched up her brassiere to show off her strap marks to me. My grandmother’s shoulders are polished nobs of bone and smell of — but I can only see the cream she is using.

Ann’s drinking, now this is something I begin to smell. I put my face into the back of her neck and shut my eyes and see it wavering off her arm like the oily heat that rises off the roads we hope to take fast and sober.

Some team we would make.

Ann drinks through much of the night and likes to eat bread for dinner. She picks at the soft center and dangles the crust for the dog. “I wish you would eat something, pooch,” she says; or else to me, “Are you sure?” Ann’s nails are the off-white of old candles or honey. They are not always clean — from keeping her hand on that dog all day, taking that dog with her everywhere. I understand that she is tired, but I do not eat her food.

Sometimes Ann says, “Let’s have cookies for dinner.”

She says, “We are too old to be living like girls!” and we laugh because we are girls.

We are eating cereal at midnight.

We are sleeping together in the big bed and keeping a space between. We are still as stones, I think, and dumb as only girls are dumb to how most anyone wants it, someone’s breathing.

Ann always says, “Stop looking at me” when I am looking at her, and she pinches me, but I go on looking, smiling this big dumb smile.

I am smiling now.

I am thinking of Ann.

I am thinking of all the women I have seen stepping out of water. Mother, grandmother, sisters, cousins, all different, some remembered. Strong white legs and a black sex worn like a shield; I remember the impulse to kneel. I wonder, Is my cousin still red, and how have men treated her? I look at the way Ann sleeps, curled up against the dog. The last man Ann knew left her with sores. “What a dirty trick!” is what Ann says.

My mother again; I see her hoisting up her panty hose. She is saying, “Is that all you girls think about?” She is getting dressed or undressed or standing at the sink. Mother is saying, “It has been so long since, the parts are grown together.” And that is how it looks to me, my mother’s smeared gray sex, my grandmother’s bones.

Sweet Jesus, I am cold.

Just looking at Ann, the sheet only to her waist and the rest of her pressed to the dog, makes me cold. How can she sleep like this? Why not just use the blankets?

It is cold under the sheets is what I tell Ann, but Ann says, “We are not in college anymore. We are grown-ups. We sleep under.” Then she asks me — she does this — for a pillowcase — maybe from the last time? But I am sleeping on last time’s, so I give her new, and she hardly sleeps on it, she sleeps so close to the dog.

I shut my eyes and listen for sounds of her, but the only sound is of the dog. The dog is the noisy one. I have heard the dog talk right along with Ann, who lies so still now, I must lean to feel her small adjustments, elbowing a pillow, pulling close the dog to warm herself, as Ann says she wants to warm herself against a person, someone, anyone else; then she laughs at herself. She says, “What an embarrassing story.”

“Yes,” I say, now lifted on my arms to see if she is sleeping. “Yes. Please.”