Vignette #13 - Visitor

Figure I might as well finish them out, since I only had a few more to go to complete the #15.  OK, so I'm nearly three weeks late and it's really a little too long to qualify.  Oh well.

I think this one may grow into a short story.

Norman was waiting for Amanda when she got home, sitting on the bottom step with his knees drawn up and the old blue coat she'd given him last time pulled tightly around him.  The coat was much the worse for wear: filthy, the edges of the cuffs hanging in ragged, sodden tatters.  Duct tape patched a hole in one sleeve; greyish stuffing spilled out on one side where the tape had pulled loose.  He jumped up with an open grin as she approached, revealing a new gap--one of his top teeth was missing.  "Heya, sis!"  For a moment, he seemed about to embrace her, and she drew back involuntarily.  A shadow crossed his face; he held out a rough, black-nailed hand instead, and she grabbed on, swallowing her disgust.
"Norman," she said.  "It's been awhile."  His hand was not only dirty but also cold as ice and clammy.  It took all she had not to pull away immediately.  "I gave you gloves," she said.  "Two pairs."
He shrugged.  "I get by."  Which meant, of course, that he'd given them away.  He always did.  It was a wonder he still had the coat.  Probably no one else wanted it.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
He looked away.  "Just wanted to see you."
"Really."
He raised his head to look at her, his grey eyes thoughtful, but said nothing.  She sighed.
A neighbor pulled up in the drive next door; the woman stared at Norman with alarm as she climbed out of her car.  Amanda felt her face flush, and felt simultaneously angry with herself for her shame and with Norman for shaming her.  She managed a weak smile and a wave.  "'Afternoon, Marie!" she called out.  Marie smiled back uncertainly, and hurried up the stairs and inside, glancing back over her shoulder, her face pinched.
"Thinks I'm going to mug you or something," Norman whispered cheerfully.  He knew--that was the worst of it.  He knew, and yet...
Amanda pursed her lips and turned away.  "You'd better come on in," she muttered.  She stepped past him up the steps, unlocked the door and banged it open, switched on the light, dropped her keys with a clatter in the tray by the door, and went into the house, Norman following silently at her heels.  They'd done this often enough to have a sort of ritual, she thought bitterly.  No words were needed.  Norman waited with his hands folded in front of him while she dug out some clothes she'd picked up for him in the interim; he took the shirt and pants, underwear and socks, pulled a plastic grocery bag from the bin by the laundry room, and went up to the upstairs bathroom to clean up.  Always the same thing.  And as always, when he came down, shaven and scrubbed, carrying his dirty clothes in the grocery bag, she asked her usual question: "Have you eaten?"
And as usual, he tried to make light of his situation.  "Depends on what you mean by that.  I couldn't possibly have arrived at my current age and state of being if I'd never--"
"Norman," she said sharply, "are you hungry?"
The half-smile faded and something like sadness flickered in his eyes for a moment.  "Yes," he said quietly.
"OK, then."  She slammed the refrigerator door open and started taking out containers of leftovers, banging each one in turn down on the counter as Norman stood silently waiting in his clean clothes and his stocking feet, blinking a little at each impact.  Why was she being this way? she asked herself.  To punish him?  For what, exactly?
When the last option was set out, she turned around, leaning back against the counter with her arms folded and demanded, "Which one?  And don't say it doesn't matter.  That doesn't simplify anything.  There's chili, tuna casserole, turkey for sandwiches, or I can heat you up a burrito or make an omelet.  Which?"
He gazed at the containers, swallowing.  "Chili," he said finally.
"Fine."  She snapped the lid off, set it loosely on top, and shoved the container in the microwave. "And sit down, why don't you?" she said, pointing at a chair.  "You're making me nervous."

Chapter One

Not sure exactly where I'm gonna go with this...it just kinda happened. I'm like to never get around to transcribing and editing older stuff....

It was the day my world caved in; the day of the big rain; the day I burned the cutting board. My sister Laura had stopped by to comfort me. On the phone, I’d told her not to bother, so she claimed she'd just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought she’d stop by and return the shoes she’d borrowed for the wedding. It was a pathetically transparent excuse. As if I would believe in a million years that she’d had the shoes tossed carelessly behind the driver’s seat of her immaculate little black Mazda Miata for days, just in case she happened to be in my neighborhood. Still, I was glad to see her.

She hugged me, murmuring I’m sorrys, and I greeted her in an automatic sort of way. She frowned at me, concern making a thick wrinkle between her eyes, but I only blinked at her silently, not trusting myself to speak. “Why don’t we have some tea and chat a bit?” she said finally in a forced cheerful voice, pretending it was an ordinary day. As if I could think of tea right then. But tea is Laura’s solution to all the ills of the world. I swear, if someone were to show up on her doorstop at two in the morning, missing an arm and dripping blood everywhere, she would cluck her tongue, guide them into the kitchen and say, “Now, you just have a seat for a sec while I make us some tea.”

Laura has one of those fancy electric tea kettle jobbers at home: there is a stand that plugs in, and you set the kettle on top of the stand, press a button, and wait almost no time at all. It makes a noise like a tiny little steam engine—or so I imagine, never having seen or heard an actual steam engine—and hey presto, your water’s hot. Me, on some level I cling to the notions my father drilled into us as we were growing up. He scorned most kitchen devices aside from plain pots and pans and plain honest knives, especially those that were really only good for a single purpose. Although he’s softened up in his old age and now has things he wouldn’t have allowed in the house when we were little, like a garlic press and a toaster, I still hear him in my head whenever I shop for kitchen accoutrements. So even though it takes forever, I still use a regular old tea kettle: a blue enameled one that whistles frantically when it reaches the boiling point, so I don’t leave it to boil dry. Since I’m not a real tea maven, it works for me.

Laura sat down and waited, letting me play hostess, and I rummaged through the cabinets looking for the kettle. When we’d moved in less than a month before, Mark had been the one to put away the odds and ends we didn’t use every day, things we only needed within reach but not within easy reach, so it took me awhile to find it. As I searched, I thought numbly, “Mark was the last one to touch it.” Finally I spotted the blue of it, in the cabinet up above the fridge. We had a cabinet in the same spot in the house where I grew up. My mother never put anything in it but birthday candles and Christmas ornaments: things you practically never needed to get to. But Mark is almost a foot taller than me—six-foot five in his stocking feet—and his idea of “within reach” is a little different from most. It was so him, finding it up there, that it made me momentarily dizzy, and my eyes stung. But I didn’t cry. I gritted my teeth, steeled myself, got a chair and got the blue kettle down, trying not to think of Mark’s big hands setting it up on that shelf, of Mark so close and yet so far. I filled the kettle from the sink, feeling Laura’s eyes on me all the while. I was determined not to fall apart. It wasn’t me. I, Sharon Peters, had never been one to fall apart. I’d never been one of those women who cry at work because someone looked at their dress funny, or one to mope for ages after a break-up.

Sharon Young, I corrected myself suddenly, swallowing hard. I still wasn’t used to my new name. And maybe it was just as well.

I put the kettle on the front left burner, which fit it best. My new green cutting board, the one I’d bought to go with the soothing green and white colors of our kitchen, was laying across the back burner behind it: a bad place for it. Mark had done that as well, I thought, just the night before: he’d put it aside after using it while he used the counter space for something else. I laid my hand on it for a moment, but left it where it was. It was well back, not in the way of the kettle. I think a part of me felt that if I left it alone, he’d come back to wash it and put it away. I switched on the burner to heat the water and turned away from the stove. Laura still sat expectantly at the table. “Well,” she said, “are you OK?”

“No!” I wanted to scream. “Of course not. I’ve been married just over a month—a month!—to the most incredible man I’ve ever met, and this morning he was gone, just like that. How could I possibly be OK?” All of a sudden, despite the cutting board, despite the tea kettle’s high-rise storage location, the house felt so empty, so full of Mark’s absence that I couldn’t breathe. “Let’s go outside,” I said. “The water will take awhile to heat.”

Even the weather had betrayed me. After weeks of gorgeous early summer—all sunshine and blue skies and big puffy clouds—that day dawned cold and grey. It was the day of the big rain, I said, but the torrential downpour hadn’t started as of yet, didn’t come until evening. In the early afternoon, it was just a dense drizzle. We stood on the porch where it was dry, but were still surrounded by the cold breath of the rain. It clung to our clothes and pulled our hair down, plastering it to our cheeks; it made me shiver even in my heavy blue cardigan—the oversized square-shouldered one Mark used to tease me about. He said it made me look like a big US Mail Box. “Tell me again what happened,” Laura said, though I had told her all I knew twice on the phone already.

I took a deep breath of the misty air, clutching my elbows. “There isn’t much to tell. Last night everything was just as usual, so far as I can remember. Mark made stir fry for supper. I dished up raspberries and vanilla ice cream for dessert. We sat and read for awhile. We each had a glass of wine. At eleven, we watched the news.” It was too much detail, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d missed something. I must have missed something. If I thought hard enough—

“And then?” Laura prompted gently.

I shrugged. “And then we—we went to bed. There weren’t any phone calls or anything that I know of. I don’t remember Mark getting up in the night. But when I woke up—” I had to stop and take a deep breath again. “When I woke up he was gone, with just a few of his clothes, and there was a note on the kitchen table.” Held down by his wedding ring. I couldn’t bring myself to reveal that fact. Not yet.

Laura looked distracted, which made me angry. If she was going to insist on my telling the story again, she could at least have the courtesy to listen. Her nose wrinkled. “What’s that smell?” she asked.

“What smell?” I said, but then I caught a whiff of it too: a thick, waxy smoke smell, like extinguished candles. It came from the kitchen. I rushed in, and found the cutting board smoking. Everything was still so new to me, I was still so unfamiliar with my new house and my new kitchen that I’d turned on the back burner instead of the front. Without stopping to think, I switched off the burner, snatched up the cutting board and ran outside with it, holding it out in the rain. In my mind, I revisited the day Mark and I, just back from our honeymoon to Nova Scotia, picked out the kitchen things. We went to a big box store that had everything you could think of: the usual pots in pans in prices from ground level to the stratosphere, knives in every shape and size and material, towels and pillows and curtains and comforters, grapefruit spoons, cutesy covers for spare toilet paper, place mats shaped like slices of fruit. We went through every aisle, picking out what we liked, ridiculing some of the sillier items, laughing, laughing. I remembered how I’d fallen in love with the color of this particular cutting board, even though it wasn’t the wood board some fancy chefs recommended. It was a pale green plastic, like new leaves, with little golden-brown speckles. It made me think of springtime, of new beginnings. In my mind, in an odd sort of way, I suppose it represented our marriage. I pulled it in out of the rain, dripping wet. One side was still OK, but on the back, there was a spiral-shaped scorch mark melted into the plastic, an enormous blemish.

“Well,” said Laura, “At least you didn’t burn the house down.”

I burst into tears.

'Nother excerpt

"Make me a word," I said, "A word of my very own."

Grandma was forever making up words - words that sounded like what they meant and words that didn't; words rootless and words that would turn out to be not new and not made up at all, but something ancient she'd caught gently, cupped in mind fingers like some little feathery thing, to hold for just the right safe moment before letting them flutter off free.

"Make me a word," I said.

Monday random excerpt (from NaNo '09)

"And as for you," she shrilled into Zach's face, "Don't quit your day job!" She turned, a five-foot two-inch whirlwind in pink faux fur boots and a puffy white jacket, and stormed out the door, slamming it behind her so hard that Zach's diploma and a framed Jaco Pastorius LP came crashing to the ground, shattering the diploma's glass. For a moment, Zach and Jake just stood there, blinking, looking at the destruction. They turned to one another in shock. Then the corner of Jake's mouth crept up into a smirk and Zach broke down into peals of helpless laughter. He dropped onto the shabby sofa and slouched back.

"Man, you sure know how to pick 'em."

Jake slid down on the other end of the couch and stretched his lanky legs in front of him. He grinned, shaking his head. "Now how could I have predicted *that*? You saw her Craigslist ad - young female vocalist, experienced in blues and jazz genres, looking for other musicians for jamming, eventual gigging.' All spelled right and capitalized and punctuated and everything. How was I supposed to know she was psycho?"

"Obviously grammar isn't everything."

Monday random excerpt

That day was pretty typical, the day we met. Typical for me, anyway. We’d just been let out for morning recess – the older kids on their side of the yard and we on ours. As usual, I started a ruckus. One of the littlest kids had taken out a candy bar, so I ran up, yanked it away and pushed him down. Then I ran off, and turned back to taunt him with my mouth full of chocolate. All seems pretty stupid, looking back. And a pretty rotten thing for me to do. Like I said, I was a rotten brat. And I knew the teacher who was supposed to be watching us wasn’t there and figured I could get away with it.

What I hadn’t realized, though, is that the little kid I was bullying happened to be the baby brother of the biggest guy in school. Don’t recall the guy’s name now, but I couldn’t forget his face. Or his fists, for that matter. He was a big hairy brute of a guy – one of those guys that had to start shaving before they were out of grade school – and built like a gorilla: thick-necked and broad-shouldered with long arms and fists like nine-pound hammers. He caught sight of me picking on his kid brother and rules or no rules he came charging over the fence between the yards like an enraged bull. Before I could run or duck out of the way – I was quick; it was my only defense considering what a puny runt I was – he had me flat on my back on the ground and those hammer-fists of his were coming down and coming down. I’d had the snot whupped out of me before, but I think that was the first time I actually had my life flash before me. For once I was actually sorry there wasn’t a teacher on watch. And being as how we were on the little kid side of the fence, no one else did anything but watch and snivel.

I don’t know how long the guy would have kept on. Until he busted my head in, I figure, and though I’ve got a good healthy skull, his fists were healthier. Luckily Alan risked getting in trouble himself, jumped the fence, and pulled the guy off me before he knocked the ever-loving tar out of me. Like everyone else, the big guy respected Alan – everyone did, even people who didn’t like him – so he grudgingly went back to where he belonged, glaring back over his shoulder as he climbed the fence.

Alan helped me up. I had a black eye and bloodied nose, which wasn’t so terrible considering, but I must have looked pretty bad. He said, “You OK, kid?” And I spit on his shoe. That’s the kind of ungrateful wretch I was – I spit on his shoe. He’d shown to everyone that I’d gotten myself into a mess I couldn’t get out of. He’d embarrassed me; that’s how I saw it.

Monday random excerpt (from NaNo '09)

It wasn't that he'd never been in love. He knew all about being in love, in the heady, over-wrought, nervous sense so often meant by the term. He was always in love; hardly a week had gone by in his life when he wasn’t in love, since the time in first grade when Christine Rock--she of the long gold hair and long white eyelashes--had smiled at him and given him a Reese’s peanut butter cup one morning on the bus. For two weeks he had followed her, longing for her presence with an intensity of feeling hitherto unknown to him. He imagined castles in the air with her as queen; he composed brilliant speeches he was afraid to deliver; he planned to save every penny of his allowance to buy her the beautiful things she deserved; he admired her from afar when separated from her by the width of the classroom--her desk being in the front row, so that all he could see of her was her shining crown of golden curls.

Then came the day when she finally turned on him, and placing chubby hands on her little hips, she said, "I don't have any more candy, you know!"

He was appalled that she should suspect him of such caddish motives (at the time, of course, his thoughts were phrased in simpler terms: "She thinks I'm a jerk. I'm not a jerk!”), and in an instant, the feelings he had nurtured for her were gone beyond recall, leaving nothing behind but a bewildering emptiness. It was a bitter, bitter end.

It did not, however, prevent him from falling for the next girl to speak a kind word to him or present a pretty face. Hundreds of them there had been over the years, in all shapes and sizes, young and old, good and bad, beautiful and homely, the kind and the cruel. It seemed he was always either in the throes of that first white-hot obsession--anxious, distracted, more miserable than uplifted--or he was in the confusing, aching state of need left behind when the thing ended. And it always ended, usually in one of two ways: either he came at it far too hard and fast and frightened or angered the girl herself into telling him off, or he built her up in his own mind as he had little Christine Rock until she became a model of perfection, a glorious vision--and when the girl herself broke through, his obsession shattered upon the hard reality.

Meanwhile love--real love, sure and fast love of the sort that was more conviction and covenant than sheer emotion--had always eluded him. Or perhaps he had eluded it. Looking back, sometimes he now wondered if love had waited at many corners along the way, only to be thwarted by his own shallowness. Perhaps he had always pulled himself back from the brink of any real commitment, before love could truly develop, out of fear or selfishness or apathy. How many times had he dismissed someone for some petty fault: untidiness, a single instance of tardiness, an interest not shared? Had this doomed him to a life lived alone? Or was he truly incapable of what others called love--were these excuses his subconsciousness used, a way of saving him from himself? He hardly knew. He only knew that the endless cycles of tormented desire and hollow loss left him soul-sick, heart-exhausted; he was tired of it all--so tired. He wanted off the roller-coaster. To hell with those who claimed it was better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all--more than anything, he wanted to merely value people for who they were, to live on an even keel, to like without desiring anything more. For a few months he had almost managed it, and then she had walked out that door and collided with him, and he was once again lost, once more adrift, once more in the grip of the waves, the swing of the sea. He had no hope that things would be different this time around; he was well beyond hoping for the future now. He would hurt her or she would hurt him, and he would lose her even as a friend. He rubbed his eyes wearily, mourning that friendship lost before it could really begin, right at a moment when it seemed both of them could use a friend; and he fell asleep there where he lay.