The Laws of Average Page 2

  The red drill team had its halftime performance—a glowstick routine set to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”—cruelly postponed when the pressbox cassette player ate the tape right at the moment Richie Sambora climbs into his wicked guitar solo. The pair of them long gone from the stadium and its huge suns of floodlighting. They slid into the stadium’s big shadow where it was ten degrees cooler, where the last of the sunset was still smearing the horizon, where the sweatshirt clung to her shoulders, chest and forearms, where he had his hands shoved in his pants pockets, where the harvest moon made no pretense about its creep into the purpling sky, where the clouds had already turned in for the night and the stars were taking their spot.

  The sounds around them softened to a murmur. He extracted his hands and rubbed them together; the seams of his pockets formed a pale band over the backs of both hands, the denim stretched too tight and cutting off the circulation. She instantly reached for them and wriggled the cuffs of her sweatshirt over his cold hands, holding the tips of his fingers above her thumbs. He clamped down and after a few seconds she freed her own fingers just enough that she could work them up to his wrists, then to his forearms, and eventually all the way up to his elbows. His hands released, slacking within the cocoon of cotton. The air between them and the night around them thickened. She slid her hands up and down his arms a couple of times before looping one of her index fingers and a tag-along middle finger over the thin bones and veins in his wrist. His pulse leapt to the surface of his skin to meet her fingers there. He looked into her face and she looked into his face.

  “You don’t intimidate me, Mister Kent,” she said.

  They’d played this game before and the rules were simple. Be the first to blink and know it and own it.

  She sterned her brow and pretended to be serious, her chin locking into her jawline. He said nothing, did nothing.

  “Go,” she said, already fixated on his eyelids before uttering the sound. This was her cheat, her hack, why she always won: the illusion she was looking all the way into his retinal wall and he simply couldn’t tell the difference.

  He held her gaze for a full 10 seconds before pulling his eyes away, first to the right and then up above and into the air, where the night had scoured out the last pesky bits of daylight.

  “Gotchoo.”

  She smiled. He said nothing, but she felt the muscles in his arms tighten and she instinctively pulled her hands away. The cuffs of the sweatshirt deflated as he withdrew. His gaze remained overhead, his hair angled in near parallel with the ripening moon.

  “Oh, don’t pout because you lost again,” she said, her eyes still aimed into his sockets. She gave The Move a good try but he remained silent and motionless, neck arched up and away from her. She flattened her toes into the ground and went up on the balls of her feet, bouncing on them, trying to snap back into his frame of reference. It wasn’t working.

  “Hey space cadet,” she said, her voice a lower gear of serious. She waved an arm of the sweatshirt up in the air, raking his chin with a soft blow that was more petulant than playful.

  “Stop.” He gripped her arm. Her face fell into a real frown. She lowered herself back to the grass and stood flat-footed again as he continued to hold her arm. She watched him raise his other arm and drag his index finger through the night, past the tip of her peripheral vision, pointing almost directly behind her.

  “Look.” He released her arm.

  She turned and raised her eyes, scraping his shoe as she went about, and stumbled a bit. She reached behind her to touch him quickly to make sure he was still there. She said nothing as she panned across the sky, its big field anchored by the plump orange moon and well-meaning twinkles of stars.

  “You see it?” Arm and finger rigid like a clock hand, motoring across the curve of the night, a dull yellow streak. She raised her own arm and pointed her own finger, pushing his out of the space around her.

  “Oooooh.”

  She traced its path with her eyes and moved her shoulder to keep pace; she could feel the slow burn in the sky replicating itself in her deltoid. The nephew dropped his arm and watched her do this: the creep of her arm and slight twist of her torso, shuffle-steps with her red Keds in the green grass, hips rotated, her hair and face and ribbon defuzzing back into focus. The extended arm landed softly on his shoulder and the other flew up to rest neatly on the opposite side. She locked her fingers together and stretched a big stretch. He saw she wasn’t looking up anymore.

  “You saw it, right?” he asked. The sweatshirt enveloped him, chest to shoulder blades.

  “Saw what?”

  Little shake.

  Slight wrinkle.

  Lean forward.

  Hold breath.

  Close eyes.

  Feel.

  On their rides home they said nothing, did nothing but scour the night for the trace of that moment, streetlamps splashing against their windows as they strained to see that they were merely passengers.

  Here

  Here is the beach and here is the car and here is the face that brought the other face here. Here is the wine and here is the glass and here is the glass and here is the clink of them together here. Here is the chair and here is the chair and here is the shrinking space between them here. Here is the candle and here is the candle and here is the candle and here is the candle and here is the candle and here is the candle here. Here is a red rose and here is a red rose here.

  And there is the haystack of rock swelling into the sky. And there is the sky muscled over in cloud. And there is the cloud blurring the horizon. And there is the horizon all around us. And there is us.

  If Only

  Even though it was July, she chose black—head to toe, under and over—for the occasion. She spun a big bracelet over her right wrist, one segmented into white and black triangles shot through with an elastic cord to keep it all together, thin steel flourishes trailing off it like signal flares between the thick vinyl chips. The shirt she’d chosen flowed freely down the shoulders to her elbows and framed the top curves of her with a wide net lace.

  She wanted to be sure she wouldn’t give off the wrong impression, but she wasn’t necessarily opposed to the idea. Because if that were the case, she wouldn’t even be up yet, and she certainly wouldn’t be dressing in the med closet.

  She slid her contact lenses into place and blinked vigorously. The supply room washed into focus, its sunlight-bright overhead lamps burned the space completely free of shadows. This is why she preferred doing her makeup and hair and finer touches here rather than in the dim recess of her master bathroom, that and the fact she owned—not leased—the building in which she stood, her floral-print sandals firm against the thin industrial-grade carpet. Ten years ago she’d temped here as a receptionist. Five years later she returned with an SBA loan and MSPAA license and literally took shit over, the real way, the way it matters. Ownership society. All that.

  Authorizing the office’s satellite radio subscription was her first official act of legit responsibility, and all country all the time every since, the more pop stuff, the less jangly-twangy stuff, the stuff marketed with music videos and Stetson hats and designer jeans and lighting rigs, shot with RED cameras in the absolute highest high-def, shoulder-shrugging models lip-synching in front of empty amusement park rides or in vast stretches of meadows without even a whisper of human population. Outside: her parking lot, her asphalt, her rectangle marked in bold yellow lines, her gunmental gray GMC Yukon Denali towering above it all. Climate-controlled seats. Speed-sensitive volume control on the Bose stereo. Power everything. Tailgate camera wired in closed-circuit to the thick LCD screen always hovering just in front of her. Her past all about the future, and the future right here, right now.

  Yet. If only.

  See, it could have started like this: a memory triggered inside a hope chest stored in the garage, separate from the house and the pebbled concrete of its driveway, the one spilling over with stuff and never big enough and the family fle
et parked thereupon or perpendicular to the concrete curbs just beyond. The chest an army surplus grenade crate, shallowed out and kept shut with thick metal arms, banal keylocks on the handles about as secure as airport luggage. This is where she’d deposited trinkets from her grade school days: doll clothing, plastic snap barrettes molded into benign animal shapes, ballet slips and toe shoes. From her teen years: small clumps of cartoony characters overstuffed with cotton filler and sewn shut, smears of ink on the backs of wallet photos from her old boyfriends and randomly curated hand-scratched notes from various whomevers. From her first wedding: dust. From her second wedding: a wristlet corsage of plastic callalillies set against bulbs and sprigs of green somethings. All of the above so reactionary and lacking a master plan and really just forgotten.

  She was meeting him for lunch in an hour, just a couple blocks away from her asphalt and her med closet and her employees and her employees’ paperwork. It was one of their jobs to deliver the labwork blood sealed up tight in plastic vials, in turn sealed up tight in a vinyl bag clamped shut with a yellow and black biohazard sticker that upon closer look resembled the snub nose point of view of the .38 she carried in her purse, its chambers always open and breathing back at her at the practice range where she was a crack shot. She really did pay someone else to do this delivery job, someone who didn’t drive a Denali, someone who didn’t own asphalt. Someone who wasn’t her.

  She spun through the restaurant parking lot, the bag propped up and chilling in the huge temperature-controlled seat next to her. She had to see. Parked at a 90 degree angle at the very back of the lot, nose pointed into a fence. The LCD lit up and she watched intently for any movement behind her.

  Once, she’d hoped, she’d be a superspy and double-agent herself. But the only movement in her secret camera was a delivery man unloading giant metal barrels onto a handtruck and disappearing behind the restaurant’s small service door. The door the employees had to enter after walking from all the way across the parking lot—the other side—the one “reserved” for them because they were forbidden to park closer to where they spent a healthy chunk of their lives every day before returning home to rest up just enough to return the subsequent day and park there all over again.

  One of three cellphones twinged in her purse, stirred by its jangly-twangy ringtone. Because she knew the first notes so well, she didn’t even bother to reach for it. Toby Keith. She’d been married to him for 14 years so there wasn’t anything she needed to discuss with him. Not during daytime. Not right then for sure. Toby knew better and Toby had his own asphalt to watch over and Toby knew better and Toby had his own pretty power-stroked vehicle to rev and Toby knew better and Toby had his own employees to tell where to park and Toby knew better and Toby knew better.

  Once, she’d hoped, she’d be a famous singer and record companies would have a fierce bidding war for her. But then all the record companies got greedy. And then there weren’t any records anymore. And then there weren’t any singers anymore. And this meant there wasn’t any point anymore. In that fateful year when American Idol jumped the shark, she watched with the volume turned all the way down, studying the models’ choreography and how they gesticulated to the carefully-filtered crowd around them, their flat renditions of other models’ songs and other choreography, toggling the mute button only when Paula Abdul effervesced with her myopic pandering-praise; Paula Abdul, drunk or high or both; Paula Abdul, ogling the beautiful boys out loud and crushing on the rocker chicks in secret; Paula Abdul, backstage both before and after the show, with hugs that always lasted just long enough to get uncomfortable.

  Once, she’d hoped, she’d be a dancer, and her instructors taught her okay enough, but they were far more interested in her parents’ monthly tuition payments than being honest in the way that mattered. The day she realized that was quite possibly the worst day of her entire life.

  Yet. If only.

  The first time Toby painted her belly, it was already too late. They had been married for at least a decade and she’d birthed three of their children. To say it didn’t mean anything would be a lie; to say it didn’t matter was much closer to the mark. For weeks Toby wore the T-shirt he’d used to clean her up with, day after day, wore it like a crown of achievement, faint lines of his stain bleeding through the purple cotton. She had washed and rewashed and rewashed the filthy thing and thrown it away at least four times, but Toby retrieved it from the garbage each and every time she tried to dispose of it. Once, she’d hoped, she’d be an actress. But not this kind. She just couldn’t pretend hard enough when her sister-in-law pointed at Toby’s chest and drew a big circle around the stain with her index finger and then crossed an X with her fingernail right through it, slashslash, yelled “SEX MARKS THE SPOT!!!” so everyone at the family reunion could hear her, just like always. Toby grinned widely before hoisting his PBR into the sky with the other hand, other fist balled and already above him, arms stretched all the way up now so the hem of the shirt bisected his big navel, exclaiming at precisely the same volume of his sister “AND I HAVEN’T WASHED HER SINCE!!!”, his pronoun usage deliberately slack so as to carry the full weight of what Toby had imagined to be the double-entendre of the entire weekend. And, of course, he wasn’t wrong.

  In her LCD screen she watched two primly-dressed people slip out the employees’ entrance and pop the doors on the matched pair of convertibles parked at slant angles to both each other and the door, a man and a woman in argyle sweatervests and pastel golf shorts, each disappearing inside their vehicles to simultaneously ignite their fuel-injected engines, each making the same tight left turn around and then away from the restaurant, then making the same right turn onto the busy boulevard. When they rode off her LCD for good, she turned and looked out the big glass window all the way at the back. They weren’t there. She wondered if they were ever really there at all. Trust but verify, her mother always told her. Don’t believe it just because you see it. Her mother practiced these things for real, and even 38 years later, at no point did her mother not know where she was at any given time, what she was doing, who she was with. It had always been this way and always would be; it was the reason she and Toby moved in right next door and filled that corner of the block with grandchildren, SUVs, fifthwheel trailers, ATVs, jetskis, snowmobiles, seasonal swimming pools and patio furniture. See you later: Trust but verify. I’ll be over soon: Trust but verify. I need to pick up x at y: Trust but verify. I can’t, I have yardwork to do: Trust but verify. He is leaving me: Trust but verify. I am leaving him: Trust but verify.

  Her purse tipped over when a different phone rang inside, spilling her lipstick and emery board out on the floorboard amongst its other whatnottery. Her second official act of legit responsibility was to purchase this particular phone, and that’s what necessitated her answering it. She cradled the handset in the crook of her shoulder, craning her head into the face of it, simultaneously reaching between her sandals to retrieve the bowels of her purse. The lab. It needed its blood if she was going to deliver on her promise of same-day results, the one she’d personally made to the teenager with the weeping eyes, the one where she said she understood, the one where she made an exception to the whole parental consent thing. Trust but verify. Once, she’d hoped, she’d be an OB-GYN, or at the very least a birthing nurse. She would, she thought, see the other side of this just for once.

  Yet. If only.

  She put the phone back in her purse, straightened the biohazard bag on the seat next to her, sighed, snapped the big triangles on her wrist one-two-three times, sighed again, and brought the Denali back to life with the slow flick of her wrist. She selected R and the metal strands of her bracelet clinked against the steering column. The LCD faithfully attempted to powercycle and refresh itself but she quickly flicked it off. She pushed her head around and away, stared back through the big glass window again, and slowly crept back into what she already knew to be true.

  The third phone, the one FedExed to her office from out of state, out of t
ime zone, outer space, she left it on the floor ringing. When she didn’t pick up, its sender from far away understood and didn’t attempt a second call, let alone a third. Or thirtieth.

  Once, she’d hoped, she’d have had the nerve. And it could have started just like this.

  Dear James Frey

  I just found out you and your publisher worked out a deal with readers who are pissed about your novel A Million Little Pieces not being a novel. Apparently you will be giving refunds for the full cover price to anyone who claims he is the victim of consumer fraud by purchasing your book.

  God. I just totally fucking hate you.

  But before I get into that, let’s talk about Oprah Winfrey. What’s she like in person? And by “in person,” I mean in front of a daily national audience of 40 million? Because I saw you on her show apologizing for your novel not being called a novel but really being a novel anyway, and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the two of you. I was especially sorry for the way both of you had to sit there and explain this like you were Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky copping to playing peek-a-boo with the cigar, frowning and sighing and shifting in your chairs and wringing your hands. It’s not too often we get to see Oprah apologize and actually mean it. And I’m wondering if that was your sense of the situation. I mean, she really looked sorry anyway, when she rumpled up her face and stared into the camera with those big, liquid eyes. Don’t you think?

  Now let me explain where I was when I heard about this consumer fraud settlement thing of yours. My wife and I were watching Supernanny on the Tivo, and there was this stay-at-home mom whose major problem was she smiled too much. According to her, people who smile all the time are usually trying to hide how miserable they are. During a break, a teaser commercial came on for a local morning talk show, and one of the topics was going to be how you and your publisher pulled this shit about giving people their money back. I googled it and sure enough it was true.