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GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY, A NOVEL
Installment Number Sixteen
The pretty Rain from those sweet Eaves
Her unintending Eyes--
Took her own Heart, including ours,
By innocent Surprise--
The wrestle in her simple Throat
To hold the feeling down
That vanquished her--defeated Feat--
Was Fervor's sudden Crown.
---Emily Dickinson
It was an August morning, not the best time to take a hot bath. But Carla sat with her legs stuck straight out in front of her soaking in the bathtub anyway. She pushed the soap filmy water to make it curl and ripple around her hands and fingers. Droplets of sweat dripped from her nose. The nobs on the rubber no-slip mat poked her bottom. She felt dull, like the time in the sauna at City Spa in the capitol when she'd thought she would melt.
Her languor was punctured by the ringing of the telephone. She paused to be sure of what she was hearing, as energy flowed back into her. Then she leapt from the water. She wrapped herself in a fluffy towel and padded to the living room to answer the phone, leaving a trail of water in her wake.
"Is Rosemary Brandon there? May I speak to her?" asked a soft female voice.
"Oh, yeah, just a second....Leah, someone's on the phone for you!" Carla laid down the receiver and dripped to the den doorway. She could barely see Leah across the room and through the dirt-darkened back screen door. It opened a few inches.
"Who is it?" Leah asked.
"I don't know, but it's someone who calls you Rosemary."
Leah pulled the screen wide open and walked with celerity past Carla to the black phone waiting in the sunken seat of the pink floral reading chair.
"Hello?" She didn't speak after that but listened, nodding, frowning and shaking her head. She stayed standing and tilted her head back, to look upwards.
Carla followed Leah's roving line of sight to the cobwebbed corners of the ceiling. She'd imagined there was an army of spiders sharing the adobe with them, but she'd only rarely seen even a small brown or translucent white one. The webs dotted by silken egg cases proved the spiders were there.
She went back and unplugged the tub, and, accompanied by the gurgling and sucking of the water as it drained, and by Leah's voice, which she now heard like a loud whisper, she went to her bedroom to dress. When dressed, she joined Leah on the back porch. She stood behind her waiting for her to speak.
Leah loosely crossed her arms and pointed one pink-stockinged toe over the edge of the porch. The barking of a dog echoed across the valley, and bevies of twittering, bark-tinted sparrows swooped between the bushy elms that dominated the almost colorless sky. Leah lifted her chin exposing her neck to the warm breeze and closed her eyes as she splayed a hand over her throat. She would touch her words as well as hear them.
"That was Zena, " she said.
I should have guessed, thought Carla. "Yeah, so what's going on?"
Leah had continued to receive letters from her sister-in-law, but since the identification of Zena as their author, Carla had found no more of them available for her inspection. The door she'd begun to feel closing then had nothing behind it, she'd decided.
"I expected this. It's what I wanted." Leah dropped her hand to her side. "Carla, do you know my brother?" she asked, and she stood almost rigidly still.
"Your brother?"
Leah spun around.
In her best melodramatic mood, Carla thought.
"I despise my brother."
"You do? How could I know your brother?"
"You've known lots of men."
"True."
Sometime around the Fourth of July, Carla had begun accepting an extra client on the days she went into Chassen. Without intending to, she was pushing against the closing door, and she was pushing so hard she was hurting herself. Picking up new clients was her natural reflex for pain. She was briefly engulfed by remorse, having bypassed guilt, but she recovered and rapidly ticked off the men she'd seen lately. She wouldn't have necessarily known someone was Leah's brother. Some of the men had been anonymous, and men often lied about their names.
How does she know what I've been doing?
"I have to tell you, Leah. I'm sorry. I've taken on new clients. Maybe he--"
"He told Zena he knows you."
"Okay, maybe he--"
"Never mind that. Do what you want, Carla."
She doesn't care.
"How would I know him?"
"You don't know him, do you? Zena says Gary has left her. I say she shouldn't be alone."
Leah was acting from within an airy helplessness that was hardening into an anger that had nothing to do with Carla.
What about me? "What's going on, Leah?"
"I don't know until I talk to Gary. He's coming here."
Wheels of apprehension began whirling in Carla. When will this stop? How will it end?
Gary didn't arrive that day or the next. Carla and Leah picked bowlsful of wildflowers in a wet meadow where Carla knew of a profusion of late-blooming plants.
"Gary doesn't know what he wants," Leah kept telling her.
It was blisteringly hot, but it had rained the night before, and the earth steamed. The flowers were easily extirpated. Bugs flew into Carla's face, and she felt drugged and heavy, and Leah was excitable. They picked narrow, leaning handsome sprays of creamy, cup-shaped hollyhock along the stream behind the adobe. The large flowers bloomed all around the stems and looked like corsages. At the edge of the meadow on the other side where the ground was driest and hardest, although still moist, they gathered milkweed, batting away a couple of butterflies with orange-stained wings. The crisp carcass of a bug that had been too weak to pull free from a web in the deep red, lilting skirt of the milkweed flower hung by a yarn of matted cobweb from a petal.
"Gary's sometimes cruel, and he's spiteful 99 per cent of the time," Leah said. Her words fell like pearls at Carla's feet. "But at this moment, I feel an unwarranted benevolence toward him, and when I'm with him, Carla, I call on God to help me. I'm inebriated with sexual energy." Her words fell like toads. Carla was shocked and humiliated.
Leah loved her brother, but she doubted that he would admit it or that he would admit it mattered to him. She was elated by the truth she thought she'd unearthed: Gary was more closely tied to her than to anyone else. She thought that for Gary Zena was an extension of herself. Her feelings for him amounted to a passion.
Gary was two years younger than Leah, who used to tell him his ears were the theme expressing the unity of his being. They were large and well-shaped, like his sister's and father's hands. Each one tapered from the top of a tenderly scalloped, oversized pinna to a pendulous lobe that barely showed beneath his hair. His ears were his most distinctive feature, yet Leah favored his coffee-colored hair, as straight as prairie grass and cut square to conform to the shape of his face. Gary had complained that straight hair lacked character, and Leah had wasted her breath reassuring him that that wasn't true. ("You're wrong!")
The skin of his slightly concave cheeks stretched tautly like a drumskin from his narrow and prominent cheekbones to his jutted chin, and his eyes were such a light blue that, despite their subtle menace, they added to an immediate impression of mildness. If they hadn't had a cruel incandescence, they might have cast a sagacious look. They were washed-out sage's eyes and harbored an hysterical light. He was of medium height with a compact build.
Gary's freely given view of his sister mimicked that of their father, a man of uncomfortable, rumpled discontent. Mr. Brandon was, except for his incongruous beetled eyebrows, of a refined, almost delicate appearance. There was a thin dryness about him. He was a moderately successful salesman of women's blouses. Thin cotton, silk or synthetic sample blouses showed to advantage falling and slipping between his graceful hands, ideal for the task they performed. His wavy brown hair, not yet grey the last time Leah or Gary had seen him, had receded, leaving the impression, one that applied to the exudation of his soul as well as to his hair, of the flora dying behind the drought.
He had begun by praising his daughter and championing the rogue self-confidence she displayed. He'd been the one most pleased by her indomitable and independent spirit although father, mother and brother had all had a high estimation of these qualities in her. But their regard for indomitability and independence became depressed, most markedly in her father, after boys, car dates and cantankerous rebellion emerged, subtly, and then all at once.
Mel Brandon was a fear-filled man and had been triumphant of his daughter's fearlessness. But he looked angrily and with distaste upon her cold stream of suitors and the sexual experimentation he suspected her of. He hoped she was intelligent enough to not become pregnant, and the fact that she was made a difference in his judgment of her--it worsened it. He thought she behaved like a slut, but he never said that to her. He alluded to loose morals and to the way things were with young girls. None of it had any effect, and he ended up avoiding Leah as he would have any woman with a reputation for loose morals. Leah mockingly dubbed them her loose molars. All the love the man could muster had gone to her.
Ultimately, Gary's father's opinions of Leah made as little difference to Gary as Leah's sisterly plaints of love for him did. His and Leah's entanglement inhered in rockier and deeper ground. Leah provided Gary with emotional cues and refreshment, as if she were a spring dispensing an elixir that gives not just replenishment of life but ichor, gods' blood, life itself. His sister, the watery snake oil doctor of his heart, was his most unwavering companion, and this was exactly a thought Gary had had once, but only once.
Thinking like this must be guarded against, he'd warned himself. Gary's passion was to take revenge on Leah, but he concealed this ugly desire, which freed him to feel superior to his supercilious sister.
(Geography of the Body will continue with Installment Number Seventeen on the last day of November. Enter webspawner.com/users/fictioncookie2 into the ADDRESS BAR of your web browser to see Installment Number Fifteen.)
Geography of the Body is written by S. Plant and is copyrighted.
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