Your mama let you grow up to be a cowboy, I’d tell you, keeping true.
If the rest of the world disappeared in some melty, apocalyptic flash. If we had to live in that bar with those taxidermic timber wolves and red foxes watching us drink and move through candlelight. And after making hot ham and cheese sandwiches over fire in the kitchen and me, standing on the table singing Patsy Cline, would you call me woman and promise not to leave? Tell me you’re not like other men? Hold my chin, kiss my honey mouth, lay me down on the pool table? I can get chatty and anxious after cold coffee, and I’d ask you where you thought everyone else went. Heaven? Hell? No way would they all make it into heaven. No way would they all burn in hell.
What a relief to not be scared to death of you, here alone, I’d tell you. That’s why the only men I give my heart to live in my TV.
Woman, I’d never hurt you. I’d die first, you’d say.
And if we were the last two people on Earth, I’d go cold knowing you were a liar, but I would have to love you anyway. Like all the women who came before me—back to Eve caught in the cool copse. It’s sick, I promise.
Surreptitious, Canary, Chamomile
We’d moved to Arizona because of my allergies. It wasn’t working so far, but I lied to Luke when he asked. And I lied to myself when I turned the air filter knob from three to one.
Luke’s morning breath smelled like rust. I didn’t mind it in my face.
“You should start to feel better. It’s drier here,” he said from his side of the bed, as if he were discovering gold—holding out a crinkled, thin pan of nubby nuggets. “It’s the desert air.”
I didn’t have any friends yet. I got so bored while he was at work painting houses, while the twins were at school—before the three of them came home in the afternoons smelling like their days.
Luke: coffee, paint, and sage.
The girls: fruit-scented erasers, crayons, and hand sanitizer.
Sometimes I’d stand at the kitchen window, take forever to do the dishes, watch the homeschooled brown boys swimming next door. They were halfway through high school, as slim-jim and long-legged as colts. Sometimes I’d take forever to water the Kool-Aid-colored geraniums and lantana. Watch the woman across the street come out at the same time every morning in her visor and flowery garden gloves, her collared shirt and pale candy-heart-pink pleated shorts.
I wandered in the dry heat, went shopping. Bought a hat.
“It’s good for the sun,” the man at the store told me. I had lived long enough and been married long enough to know men were always telling women what they already knew. I nodded kindly and wouldn’t let him give me a bag. I put the hat on before I left—the brim so wide it made me feel like a mushroom.
I stopped for allergy medicine. Beer and a pair of new sunglasses too. I tore the tag off and put them on, pointed to the blackheart lenses.
“They’re good for the sun,” I said to the cashier without smiling. That’s what I always did when I was annoyed, passed it off to someone else. Like, tag you’re it. Gave it away like it was the Cheese Touch.
I chased the antihistamine down my throat with a smooth river of so-light-it-was-basically-nonalcoholic beer I’d poured into an empty coffee cup. I sat in carpool and waited for my babies to come out of the school gym, to fill the back of the car with their secret language and giggle-bubbles.
* * *
Over oatmeal dinner, I told Luke I wanted to have another baby.
“If it’s a boy let’s name him Gunnar. Or Shotgun. Make this whole desert cowgirl thing a reality.” I blew off my finger guns and laughed, looked across the table at our twin second-graders named after twinkling jewels.
“I’m already jealous of the new baby,” one of them said.
“I’ll hate him,” the other one said.
“Don’t say that,” Luke and I said at the same time.
“Jinx!” the girls squealed.
We drove out in sunset-glory, got Jinx Coke Slushies for dessert.
I sat on the edge of our bed wearing nothing but a pair of lust-red suede wedges and my new hat. The air filter, a peaceful plastic monster in the corner, humming and humming. I was reading one of Luke’s nature books, underlining the words I liked with a hideous yellow pen. Surreptitious. Canary. Chamomile. I meant it as an act of aggression. Rebellion. Claiming my territory, pissing on a bush. Luke never wrote in his books. I whispered the words to myself. Surreptitious. Canary. Chamomile. I loved how they made me feel…my tongue and lips and teeth, quietly tip-tapping.
“Hey, Brooke,” he said. He rarely said my name. Hearing it bloomed my heart, creeped fresh yellow-green ivy up and around the bone cage protecting it.
“Hey, Luke,” I said as he closed the door. I’d already checked on our sleeping girls to make sure they were still breathing.
“Do you want to stay out here or go back home?” he said. Was he sad? I didn’t want him to be. Selfishly, I wanted to see him smile. Wanted to light the firecracker-swish of his happy face. The sex was always better when we were both in a good mood. I wanted to do this right. I wanted my Arizona Baby—to have him cowboy-swagger right out of me with a tiny gun on his hip. I was ovulating. Maybe that was why I was feeling so dizzy and lonesome.
“I’m naked and you’re asking questions.” I pouted.
“I’m sorry. I’m worried about you,” he said. Cloying. I told him to stop. Told him he was giving me a headache. I shut him up by writing surreptitious, canary, chamomile in his mouth with my tongue. He pushed me back and I spread across the bed slowly. Like a flag unfurling on the Fourth of July. Like every damned army in the world was watching, standing to salute.
Winona Forever
Limerence. As if someone had smeared my life lens with dewy Vaseline, I got this dreamy, floating feeling around Crystal. I loved that her name was Crystal. Like, her mom thought the word crystal was pretty so she named her that. Crystal’s sister was Amber. Of course her sister was Amber. Was. Because Amber’s boyfriend got drunk one night two years ago and drove his car into the river with Amber in it. No one knew exactly what happened, but everyone knew two eighteen-year-olds shouldn’t die. That kind of thing never made sense anywhere, to anyone. Crystal wore a necklace with Amber’s picture in it and sometimes when it was late and we were in bed together talking and making lists with the TV on, I would touch Crystal’s neck and open the locket and look at Amber staring back at me with glossy lips and those same Winona Ryder–brown deer eyes Crystal had. And we’d cry and cut ourselves together sometimes. Go to her bathroom window and open it, hang our heads out far enough so we could share a cigarette.
I was obsessed with Winona Ryder and got my hair cut the way she had it in Reality Bites. It’d come out the year before and Crystal and I had been to see it three times already at the cheap theatre. My mom had taken us to see Mermaids in the theatre when it first came out. Amber went with us too and when we were walking out, my mom had told the three of us we reminded her of Winona and we told her she reminded us of Cher, because she did. I didn’t have any siblings and Crystal and Amber were the closest things I had to sisters. When Crystal and her family lost Amber, I didn’t feel outside of them like it was something I couldn’t understand because I wasn’t blood-related to them. Crystal and I had been friends since kindergarten, I’d known them both almost my entire life. It was like I lost my sister too. Crystal and I both got obsessed with Winona Ryder because seeing her onscreen made us feel like we’d been hanging out with Amber again.