FICTION   OCTOBER 2006 – NO. 9




The Moved

by Rebecca Peters-Golden

The second original story selected by our third Guest Fiction Editor, Nicholas Montemarano.


Someone has dropped a potted plant just inside the doorway to the otherwise empty apartment. No one has cleaned it up yet and its dirt has been tracked in. Luke and I find Leigh and Cade outside where they have their things in boxes, have begun to load the truck they've rented for the day. Leigh's parents are there to help too, her mother heavy and silent, her father balding but confining it to the scalp and fit in the inexplicable way some men have of reigning in age. When we were younger and Leigh did things he didn't like, he would grab her by both shoulders and steer her into the kitchen where I could hear but couldn't see. After, he would smile at me apologetically and look at his daughter to say What must Nora think of you? She would never meet my eyes. My parents whispered things about Leigh, using words like flinch and nervous and control. Today, the deep opening of the moving truck is inviting against the hot sun and scorched grass we walk through from the back door of their apartment. The grass looks like the sun has eaten it up and laid down straw. It crackles under our feet while we carry.

As the truck clunks off, its back dips down toward the road. Leigh's father is driving and he isn't good with a manual. The truck is going to a manufactured home. Leigh and Cade told us this embarrassedly over drinks, acknowledging the stigma of houses that ride the highway. We'd all seen them. Strapped to a flatbed, sides encroaching into other lanes, a person behind them drawing attention to the oversized load. I've seen the perforated siding, the rooms behind the windows, and I've imagined families there — I've seen playing children run too close to an edge that overhangs the flatbed and tilt the house into the median. I've pictured couples making love in beds in those rooms behind the windows, rearing and thrusting with passion as the truck takes a curve too tightly and they tumble apart as the bed crashes against a wall. There are dogs and cats who learn to open doors and spill out on the highway; there are babies rocking calmly on counters, and they giggle and coo and fly right out a window that hasn't been glassed in. I have seen these houses on the highway but I have never seen one lived in.

As the moving truck lurches and stalls, Luke and I, the friends, the movers, follow. We are nervous that the house will be everything we fear, so we make jokes with words like hick, rube, hayseed. After stalling the truck on the street, Leigh's father leaves the house to us, kissing his daughter then nodding his thanks to us. And the four of us carry in boxes. The plates and bowls are heavy clay worked smooth and glazed thick in dark and mid-tone blues, colors that comfort a person while eating. I carry a crate of candles which, if I could touch with particular ability, might show me images of a night they fought over Cade's drinking and, after, fell into each other as the candle wax reformed itself from heat. There are bags of clothes labeled neatly by season, one bulging with thick sweaters bought against a Michigan winter three years ago that seemed colder than Leigh could bear. Wrapped around the stereo is the quilt, now worn, that her mother made four years ago when Leigh left for college, the panels of greens and white whipped together with stitches so fine they are invisible. After the boxes there is furniture, heavy enough that we all lift together. In goes the couch they pushed aside last year for Thanksgiving dinner. Leigh insists on carrying her cello. She has wrapped the bed in plastic to protect it from the move. It takes us hours and by then it is raining. Luke trips over the curb, drops the poster he is carrying, a framed print I got Leigh for her birthday, years ago. He swears when he sees the broken glass.

Behind the house where the sod turns to real grass, dry and sparse, holes have been dug down into the earth for electricity. The holes are still open, waiting to be filled, and I see a small girl crouching next to one, looking in. What are you looking at? I ask, and she says Bunnies. Two of them, brown and squirming, rub their noses back and forth against the plastic coated power line. The larger one is half on top of the smaller, anchoring it to the dirt. The girl reaches out a finger and runs it lightly across the larger rabbit's head, smiling privately. Then, glancing slantways at me, she grabs the animals, stuffs them in her shirt, and runs off toward the road as the rain turns to mist.

The weather cannot be counted on for ten minutes' constancy. This is a real Michigan summer and meteoric indecision seems more exciting out here than it does in town, where I live and where Luke lives and where Leigh and Cade used to live. There is nothing out here and I wish for a violent storm that will keep us a little longer.

I take a few steps in the direction the girl ran, but she's slid between the houses. The house next door sits on lower ground, and from where I'm standing I can see in the side window. If the houses are as identical inside as they are out then I know I am looking toward the washer and dryer, just off the kitchen. There is a woman in the window, I can see her head and round shoulders. When she sees me I look away toward Leigh and Cade's house, putting out one hand to touch the plastic siding. She opens the door and steps out onto the poured cement. You just move in there? she asks. No I tell her. My friends.


*


When Leigh and I left for college together she was convinced she shouldn't go. She had been accepted to the University's School of Music and heard a rumor that most students practiced nine hours a day. She vomited twice the morning of her first day. She moved into an apartment building with Cade while I moved into the dorms. When I would go to their apartment for dinner or to watch movies, relieved to be away from my box of a room, the cello was always out, always warm and just played. She had gotten it used years before and she kept it immaculate. She polished her fingerprints off the fret and kept the bow loose and rosined when not in use. If I arrived while she was playing I would hear music from the stairwell.

Sometimes she played pieces I liked when she knew I would be coming over; it was the only indication that she noticed my presence. I would knock softly and Cade would answer the door, greeting me with a hug and leading me into the kitchen for a drink. Leigh never looked up at my entrance. She didn't mind being watched while she played and sometimes Cade and I would sit in the hallway and watch. She was prettier with the cello, her light brown hair pulled into a low ponytail, out of the way. Her eyes were unfocused and she never looked at the strings or at anything in the room either, but it seemed she watched some delicate change in the air to see if her music was working.

One evening Cade called me and asked me to come for dinner. I could hear Leigh playing in the background. It was nothing I recognized and I asked Cade what the piece was. She's been having this one out for weeks now he said. She wouldn't even stop to call you, but she really wants you to come. I knew Leigh wrote music, but she had never let me hear it. When I stepped into the stairwell of their apartment building I could hear her playing and I was sure it was the piece I'd heard on the phone. The notes sounded torn and thin and I leaned against the door to hear, my backpack bumping the molding. The playing stopped like I'd scratched a record with the needle and I took a step back as the door opened a minute later. Leaning out of the apartment, Leigh hugged me tightly and whispered Nora, I think I'm pregnant and Don't tell Cade.


*


Inside, we paint, clean, unpack, lug, arrange. After a few hours this thing built elsewhere and plopped on a plot of dirt and sod looks more like a home than anything we movers have ever had together. Mathematically it makes sense:  there are simply more walls. They are orangey now, the walls. A dark shade of terra cotta that, with the greenish carpet and lighter orange ceilings, looks like the pottery I've studied in my art history classes. They, the moved, make up their bed and arrange clothes in the closet and folded
in drawers. They watch each other and touch in a way that says mine and ours.

We order pizza from the only pizza joint this far out, and I volunteer to pick it up; they do not deliver here. The rain is still only a mist but tree branches bend in the wind. Cade says It's blowing up out there. Leaving the house, I realize there is something terrifying about this location. The other manufactured homes look dingy and gray; the children playing around them are dingy and gray. I can see the girl with the rabbits sitting cross-legged on her stoop with her back to the street doing something in her lap. The subdivision is at the bottom of a hill with a graveyard on top. There is the theory, I must tell them when I return with the pizza, that the Brontë sisters died in a place like this — at the bottom of a hill. It is said they drank water that ran through earth that held graves.


*


Three months ago my boyfriend cut his wrists with glass. When I got to Luke's apartment he was lying on the bathroom floor, losing blood slowly but in quantity. There was his vomit in the toilet. When I woke him he said Don't call anyone and Don't take me away from here. I led him into bed like a little boy, in the T-shirt he was wearing, smears of blood on his underwear and I climbed over him and lay down beside, breathing a little finally and could only smell on him not his smell but the blood and vomit and in it something he had eaten. There was no light in the bed and no clock but I kept looking for one, never sleeping but drifting from myself to him to me again, thankful every time they were not the same. I could not move to get up and could not sleep, could only hear his breathing and the quiet sleep sounds that meant he was alive. In his sleep he turned over to me, said, Come in. He didn't make sense, not for days. Sometimes I could feed him some bread and some water, but nothing else. He wouldn't go into the bathroom, just pissed in the wastebasket.


*


I pull into the parking lot to pick up the pizza and no one else is there. Inside, the only one working is a pimply boy, maybe 14 or 15, who touches the ingredients nervously with pale hands as he waits for the oven to beep. He does not speak to me, but must know who I am as he seems to have no other orders. When he takes the pizzas out of the oven and slides them into their boxes, he leans in close and smells them, his nose so near the cheese that he pulls back from the heat. It's gonna storm the boy tells me, and it is beginning to rain harder.

Sometimes I want things so badly I fear I might die if I don't get them. There is no logic to these things, only what I think might be need. I could eat the pizza myself, all of it. I could drive home and lie under the blankets and watch the rain and eat the pizza. I could run the shower so hot that my skin would seem cold under it and stand there until feeling is blasted away. If Luke came looking for me and rang the doorbell, knocked, shouted, I could turn the music louder, the water hotter, pull the blanket tighter. I know after not too long I would open the door, unable to take not knowing if things could be better.

Maybe the storm will keep us at Leigh and Cade's. Maybe there is a chance we can stay together in the home we have carved out. And then I want only to be allowed to stay; to curl up on someone else's couch the way Sunday nights are better if you aren't at your own home. And I could not be lonely with Luke in the new home of the moved:  there is so much orange and green, so many possessions. I ease the car onto their street, past the hill where, if the rain ran through the graves and into the homes of their subdivision, everyone would weaken, maybe produce something great before dying by 30.

When I push open the door with my shoe, hands full of pizza and keys, soaking wet, they are all sitting on the floor in front of the couch with the candles, listening to the storm. The door slam extinguishes a few candles and Leigh leans away from the cold I bring in with the pizza. The hot food is like the new house. There is candlelight and music from the battery-run boom box in the background, and we eat. Afterward, we turn on the radio and listen to the weather report. Storms here all night.

It is unsafe to drive home, so we have been invited to stay. Luke and I will stay on the futon in the spare bedroom. In the small second bathroom I take my clothes off slowly, dropping jeans and bra on the toilet seat to wear tomorrow, underwear and shirt on the floor to wash. As I'm wetting my hair the bathroom door opens and Luke comes in. Can you hear that? he says. The rain is louder than the shower. Can I get in with you, Nor? The water is too hot and I feel dizzy. I let Luke wash my hair and I lean against the tile. He turns me around and his dark hair hangs dripping around his face.

When I met Luke he was asking for a cigarette. It was raining and his hair was just the same. When I said I didn't smoke, he smiled at me sweetly, and said Good. You shouldn't. It is an old thought and looking at him I am afraid I will let things stay the way they are forever. Luke gets out first and closes the door as I stand under the water.

I can smell Leigh's shampoo in my hair as I dry myself with Leigh's towel. It is like she is my mother and my best friend and the person I want to be just like. I want her to pat my head and giggle with me and take my place in bed so I can watch what I should do.

If I can remember anything of blood and piss and vomit here in these clean sheets with the smell of paint and rain, the wind skimming the hill of graves and this house and probably the pizza place, and maybe all the way to my apartment thirty miles away and my bed that stands empty, I can forget it in the smoothness and roughness; in the soft sounds from their room next door. The futon is hard, but we are warm and his body is something I know. Leaning closer I can smell what I want to smell, soap and shampoo and detergent; here there is soft hair, here eyebrows, lips, jaw; here I can feel fingers and kneecaps and ears, neck, back. This is something I can do as myself, and there is no real desire here to be other things.

But I am afraid to sleep. It is a fear like catching a reflection in glass where you don't expect one. Outside, the storm is tearing things apart, picking up dirt and branches and flinging them down again. Later, I start awake. My hands are tangled in the flat sheet and Luke's ankles hold my feet to the bed. I take a deep breath and pull away.

I can tell it is morning but the sky is not as light as it should be. I walk to the window and open the blinds. Outside things have been ruined. Garbage cans litter the street, and broken lawn chairs, their metal legs akimbo, their woven seats unthreaded. There are drifts of sand from children's sandboxes, and a sluice of silt, dark and thick, has run down the hill to the road. I pull on my jeans and Luke's sweatshirt and walk outside. The air is so still I can hear the water trickling slowly to the flood drains. Leigh and Cade's side door is hanging by its bottom hinge and their sod is bunched. They don't have a mailbox yet, but if they did it would be broken like the rest. I wander down the street toward the main road, and I cannot keep from glancing at the hill and the graveyard. As I climb the hill it occurs to me that such a storm could have disturbed the graves and maybe I shouldn't go in just in case, but the graves all seem as they should. Under my bare feet the grass is slick with water and dirt, and the air is not so still:  I can hear the sounds of small animals and birds.

It has been years since I've been in a graveyard. There are colors in the headstones. The grass up here is real and green, thinner than the sod I can see down below, and softer. As I turn to walk back down the hill to the house, I see a patch of red in the grass. The red is too unnaturally bright to grow here. I kneel down and see that it is a hair ribbon sticking out from a flap of earth. A sudden fear — I am kneeling on a grave — but of course it must have been put here. I pull the dirt up by the grass to free the ribbon, and under the dirt is a hole dug a foot or so down into the soft dirt of the grave. Huddled together inside, shivering, are the brown rabbits. I can imagine it:  the little girl consulting with the rabbits until she is called in for dinner, knowing she cannot keep them, but not wanting to let them go. She runs quickly up the hill — she is not afraid of graves — and digs a hole down into the earth with her hands, the rabbits heavy in her shirt. She can make the hole wide enough only for one before she must get back. She kisses the rabbits, rubs their soft heads, then puts them in the ground. She pulls the ribbon from her hair and leaves it so she can find the place later. I put the dirt down, leave the ribbon sticking out.

As I open the front door I can hear Leigh's cello rounding out the house. I hum softly, wiping my feet on the mat, and move my arm as if I held a bow, the way I've seen her do a thousand times and think of sliding back into bed with Luke, erasing the night. The music is coming from their bedroom. Leigh is sitting on the edge of her bed, her back to the open door, playing slowly. Cade is kneeling behind her, both arms wrapped around her waist, his face in her hair. They sway just the tiniest bit from the motion of Leigh's arm and the bow. I walk quickly back to the kitchen before they notice me, and begin making pancakes. As I'm heating up the skillet Cade sticks his head around the wall and drawls Mmm, thank you, Nora on his way to the bathroom. The running water drowns out all but the highest notes of the cello. When I pour the thick batter onto the skillet it spits and smells of milk. All of a sudden Luke wraps his arms around my waist. I haven't heard him come in and I jerk, touching the inside of my wrist to the hot metal. Fuck I say you scared me and I run cold water over my wrist. I didn't mean to he says, touching my hair. I dart back over to the stove to turn the pancakes before they burn.


*


Leigh had been right about being pregnant, but Cade said they couldn't keep the baby. After, she asked if she could stay with me for a while; she couldn't be near him. In my dorm bed that night, Leigh curled around her stomach but she didn't sleep and didn't cry. She told me I feel twisted up so tight I might stay that way. I wanted it, Nora. This time I actually wanted it. After a few days she asked me to bring her cello. I didn't want to face Cade, so I cut class and went when I knew he'd be working. I felt like a thief. Standing in front of the cello I realized I had never touched it before. I picked it up slowly with the hem of my shirt, not wanting to leave a trace of myself. I gathered the bow case, rosin box, and some loose sheet music. Walking past the bedroom I thought I'd get clean clothes. Even with permission, even with no one home, it seemed sneaky, and I pushed the door open slowly. Lying on his back, staring into the closet, was Cade. He looked at me. I thought you'd be at work I stammered. He said nothing. I backed out of the room and closed the door. On my way to the car with the cello I remembered the change of clothes but I didn't go back.

For the next week Nora played the cello. When she wasn't sleeping, she played. She never used the sheet music, but played from memory or made the music up as she went. On the seventh day, I heard familiar music when I approached the room. Opening the door, I recognized the piece I'd heard on the phone weeks before. Leigh said she was ready to leave. When I took her home, Cade opened the door. He didn't ask me to come in, just let out a small sound and picked Leigh up. As he carried her toward the bedroom, she looked back at me and waved.


*


The burn on my wrist throbs as I set the table. It stands out, red against my skin. Leigh comes in and kisses my cheek when she sees the pancakes. She pours orange juice and sits down at the table across from Luke. Cade comes out of the bathroom in a blue robe, his hair darkened by water. He smiles toward Luke and kisses Leigh on the mouth. We eat pancakes and syrup that makes the juice taste bitter. We talk about the storm and the damage it inflicted. We joke: it's good that mailbox never got delivered. We joke:  this house is so used to moving, thank goodness it stayed put. I say nothing of the little girl or of the rabbits, but think of them, curled together in their hole in the ground. I can see the girl:  waking, she will rush out of the house without breakfast or shoes. Perhaps she will have dreamt the storm hurt her bunnies. She will run up the hill, thinking, I'm coming, don't worry. She will see the red and breathe again. She will pull the dirt up, as I did, by the grass, and look down. She will reach in and pull the rabbits from the ground, holding them close against her. Stroking their heads and backs and ears, she will murmur I'm here now. I've come.


Original art courtesy Rob Grom.


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AUTHOR BIO:

Rebecca Peters-Golden, M.A., grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and is currently a doctoral student in Literature at Indiana University. Her poetry won Academy of American Poetry prizes in 2002, 2003, and 2004.


Where loss is found.

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