The Grip of It Read online

  James rolls his eyes and I know why: because this is precisely a thing that would bring me joy, boring to anyone else, but thrillingly efficient to me. He’s about to look back at his phone when his eyes stop in the dining room. “Is that it?” He nods toward the table, and sure enough, there is the missing vase.

  “You fink.”

  James laughs. “I didn’t move it.”

  Could I have set it there and forgotten? Could I have had it in my hand on the way to the kitchen and put it down? This seems like the only answer, so I accept it. “I don’t remember doing that at all.”

  “Ooo, so spooky,” James growls because he’s sure I must be wrong, that I must have placed it just so, that my habits of organizing and arranging are so second nature, I needn’t even think to make them happen, and, really, that’s exactly the definition of a habit, right?

  “You moved it. I know you did,” I say, setting myself on the arm of the couch. I run my hands through his dark hair, longer every day. First it was job searching, then night after night of goodbye drinks with friends, then packing: so many reasons a twenty-minute visit to the barber wasn’t possible. I tuck a lock behind his ear and let myself admire the rakish quality he acquires when his hair grows to this length.

  “I know, I know. I’ll get it cut soon.” He doesn’t look up.

  “It does have its charm when it starts to curl like this.” I let my hand wander down to his chin, lifting his face from the screen.

  His eyes glint and he sits up. “Oh, it does, does it?”

  “It does.” I feel my mouth buckle into a grin and keep my eyes trained on his.

  “I should make the most of this power before you Delilah me in my sleep.” He turns to kneel on the cushion of the couch. “Should I use my magic for good … or for evil?” He reaches around to squeeze my hip.

  “Good.”

  “Very well. Maybe a christening of our new home then?”

  “A prudent idea.” I lean close. “We wouldn’t want to risk ending up in limbo.”

  “Definitely not worth the risk.” He closes the distance.

  4

  ON MY FIRST walk through the woods, I find neighbor kids playing a game called Murder. One kid has to hide and think up a way to have been killed. Then, the others have to guess how it happened. I can see only one of the children, hanging over a high branch. I hear the others below trying to determine how the body has gotten into the tree. I try not to get too close, worried I’ll interrupt.

  I walk through the woods to the beach. I try to place odds on the different ways a dead body would arrive in the branches of a tree. My therapist said I should turn thoughts of gambling, odds, even mathematical ratios, away when they come into my mind. I look instead at the way the private sections of beach form one long, uninterrupted strand, comma’d with rowboats and picnic tables. I unmoor myself and wander back to the house. I look for the children, but they have finished their game.

  At the edge of the trees, I am surprised by how far away the house seems. I had remembered the yard as smaller. I trek through the long grass. I find Julie making a salad in the kitchen. “I was thinking about how we found this place. Already I can’t remember,” I tell her. I kick off my shoes. I rest a hip on the counter beside her.

  “Oh, I have the clipping.” She sifts through a pile of papers: signed contracts, first utility bills, a bevy of gaudy coupons. “I know it’s here somewhere. I kept all of this stuff together. The language was odd, something like the right house has found you, and it talked about all the storage, needing updates, nature nearer by than you could dream.” She pages through again with no luck.

  “Not to worry. I was just surprised I’d already forgotten.”

  Julie gives me a look full of sly skepticism. “James, you wouldn’t remember because I was the one doing all of the hunting.” She rests her long arms on my shoulders. I feel her wrists cross behind my neck. “But that’s the way I wanted it.” She kisses me.

  I want to argue. I want to say that I remember finding different listings in the real estate sections. My only memories, though, are of her rejecting my suggestions. She covers up her slights with sweetness. I give up. I kiss her back.

  5

  JAMES AND I met on a blind date when he answered my personal ad—a situation that horrified my friends. I’m not talking about a hygienic online dating website. This was a time when your best bet was to put an ad on Craigslist. My ad was simple, asking if anyone wanted to hang out—an act that, to an outsider, seemed desperate and unsafe and strange.

  The flood of responses was to be expected, as any woman willing to post a picture is sure to receive a good many suitors no matter her looks or the content of the ad, and I got satisfaction from the attention, even if most of the responses were from tired creeps and the socially catastrophic.

  I met several men for a drink in the following weeks, sometimes three in a night, but there was no pressure to succeed, even when a particular man’s powers of persuasion were high. I did a good job of weeding out the weirdos at the email stage, but I kept talking to all of them until they stopped talking to me, except James, who kept calling.

  Connie—an old friend, recently minted as coworker—and I catch up on each other’s lives over a lunch break down the street from my new office. “But don’t you feel like that’s settling?” she asks. “Letting the man have all the control over whether or not the relationship continues? Weren’t there men you liked more than James?”

  “No,” I say, full of honesty and endangered pride, “because it worked out perfectly: he’s the one I wanted and I was the one he wanted.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the Julie I knew before. You were so precise and rational about everything. I remember a spreadsheet evaluating the boys in the psychology department based on different metrics.” She reaches across the tiny table to clear the hair that’s fallen over one side of my face and to cup my cheeks. “Hello, Julie? Are you in there?”

  I bat her away and she snorts. “I felt like that was the way to be sane in a situation like that. Where did those charts get me? Anthony? He was not a prize. People get so carried away. Not to mention, it’s only after that dating bender ended that I recognized the pattern, that I understood why it worked. I mean, I was attracted to James from the start. His body was so solid. He was so dusky eyed and unkempt. He had a certain confidence to him, but it wasn’t arrogant. There was a silliness about it. So much mischief in him. I think I was looking for someone very different from me and it wasn’t worth thinking about rationally, because I’d cut myself off at the knees every time evaluating the ways the men fell short. Maybe it was me who stayed tuned in to him and so he’s the one who ended up sticking around.”

  “Okay, enough about how much you love your husband.”

  Connie tries to change the subject, but I pull it back. I want to push her to consider a different way of being. “But I do think there could be multiple soul mates for a person, you know? People are beautiful and complex enough that I believe I could find multiple people in the world to love.”

  Connie drops her mob of curls into her hand, exasperated. Her whole face opens up. “Really. How can you be married and believe that?”

  I swat her hand. “Isn’t it more romantic that I could be with anyone I want, but it’s James I pick? Isn’t that beautiful?”

  “That’s not a soul mate, though,” she replies.

  “Sure it is; I can’t imagine life without James, but I can imagine life with someone else.”

  Connie hurries away with the conversation to talk about her half-hearted despair at what she’ll wear to an upcoming event—anything to get away from willingly recognizing the limit of her point of view.

  I play along. “I swear, that has got to be the one-hundredth stroller that’s passed this window in the last hour.”

  “Welcome to Normal Town.” Connie clinks our glasses. “This is really where you want to be?”

  “It is!” I don’t want to tell her about James�
��s gambling problem. Not yet, at least. I want to believe that we can get past it and start fresh and that it’s possible for it not to matter, and so I say some things by way of explanation that aren’t untrue. “I was so into trying new restaurants and scouring event listings for the hottest tickets in the city, but at some point I said to myself, ‘If I order one more cocktail named after an old Western, I’ll shoot my own horse.’”

  Connie laughs and so I name a few. “Lonesome Dove, Purple Sage, Death Comes to the Archbishop. When I saw one called Wounded Knee, I knew we had to get out or else.”

  Connie’s eyes are wide with horror, but she keeps the joke up. “But you! You wanted a little piece of that homesteading life for yourself, so you set out for small-town America.”

  “There is a lot more land out here.” I shrug.

  “But the company is a bit more … limited,” she says, hinting.

  I deliver her the compliment she’s asked for. “But who needs variety if a high-quality selection is available? I was ready for a change of company. It’s good to get out of your comfort zone. And those people knew all of my secrets. Too many ways information could leak out. I was ready to go into hiding.”

  “I’m happy to be your only security risk.” We laugh and another baby rolls by. She points and says, “One hundred and one.”

  6

  I GRAB A beer with my coworker Sam on my way home from work. He’s not a friend I would pick on my own. In the economy of work compatriots, though, he will do.

  We drive separately to the bar closest to the industrial park that our office hides inside.

  “Stellar to have you on board, man. Right after I got hired, they appointed a female CEO and she’s hired only women since. I thought I was going to have to file a discrimination suit. Where my bros at, ya know? I mean, the office has some nice scenery now, but I want someone to enjoy it with.” He chucks my arm a little too hard. I battle with whether I’ll share his worldview with Julie when I get home. Is the commiseration worth turning her against my one friend in this town?

  The bar is exactly what I expected. Tin signs and faded motel art cover the faux-wood paneling. A fat folder spilling customer tabs is wedged beside the register. Bottles of liquor aren’t lined up neatly on display; they’re wedged behind tchotchkes. A bottle of Wild Turkey peeks out from behind a bas-relief placard showing a lady leaning against a stove with the saying THE KITCHEN IS CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS. I’M SICK OF COOKING. Peach schnapps rests between a taxidermic fox’s legs.

  We take turns buying a round each, then Sam says he has to get home to watch the game. I compliment his choice of teams; they’re doing well this season and I’d have bet on them if I hadn’t promised Julie I’d stop. He high-fives me and punches my arm again. I will myself not to flinch.

  Sam checks his reflection in a Bud Light mirror. He pinches his goatee to no noticeable effect and straightens the collar of his polo. “Later, man. Hasta mañana.” He heads for the door.

  I order one more. The old bartender, who’s been silent until now, tells me my face is new. “Where’re you from?” he says without much interest. He reaches across the bar to wipe down the area where Sam was sitting. I notice the wrong way the last joints of his fingers bend.

  “We’re from the city. We moved into the big house at the end of Stillwater.”

  He looks up sharply. “The end of Stillwater, you say?”

  “With the wraparound porch, yeah.”

  “Well, they’ve all got wraparound porches over there, so you’re not helping me much, but you’re saying the last one before the woods, is that right?”

  “That’s the one.” I take a sip. “Why?”

  “I know a bit about that house. Do you?”

  I pause. “I know I live there. What else is there to know?”

  “A family lived in that house for a long time, parents and a handful of kids—little slices of people, they were. Pale. Fuzzy.”

  “But what about ’em?”

  He runs his thumb inside the waistline of his jeans, inching up the flesh of his belly behind his thin T-shirt and then letting it fall. “Well, the boy child was seen so little people wondered if he was real. Shined like a shaded bulb, if you know what I mean. Now the girl, I knew a bit because my buddy dated her back in high school. She had troubles. My friend was never allowed in the house, but he was enamored for a short while until her father told him not to come near her anymore.”

  I ask the bartender for more pretzels. He refills the bowl with a warning: “Careful, those suckers’ll make you thirstier, and then you’ll be wobbling your car home like the road is a tightrope.”

  “No reason to reveal the trade secrets. I’ll take a glass of water, too.”

  The bartender fills a pint glass for me. “Now, the girl had a habit. When they were out, she’d keep scribbling in a notebook or on a napkin or any little scrap of paper she could dig up. My buddy said he didn’t even think she knew what she was writing most of the time. She’d fill up a piece of paper and then flip it around, start writing the other way. Layers. He said he’d wonder if she was listening to him when he talked, but she could carry on a full conversation while she wrote. I’d say he was a little relieved when her father forbade him from coming round. He wanted to understand, and he was getting the idea he couldn’t.”

  “So what happened to her?” I catch sight of the clock in the mirror behind the bar. I realize I should get going.

  “Oh, she ran away from home not long after that. Her parents died, and then the state tried to track her down but couldn’t, so they ended up putting the house on the market.”

  I ask for my tab. I thank him. “I’ll be back in case you think of any more stories.”

  The bartender looks at me as if I’ve misunderstood.

  I drive on the four-lane highway, until the heavy trees thin and side streets offer themselves. I look for kids running around after dinner. I hunt for the lights of TVs in windows, but still, the neighborhood is silent. It’s later than I think, I tell myself. You wanted quiet. This is what you wanted.

  7

  JAMES IS LATE getting himself home from work one night, and I consider looking up the location of the nearest OTB parlor, but stop myself. He might still be working or maybe he’s made a friend. I wonder why the living room looks so clean and realize James’s boxes are gone. The lower shelves of the bookcase are solid now with his collection of crime novels, urban histories, sports biographies. I hunt through the house, wondering what he’s done with the rest of his stuff, if he’s stashed it in closets. His movies are tucked into the video cabinet. The board games are stacked, haphazardly, in a cupboard in the basement. The desk in the guest room is piled with office supplies. I peek out the back door and find the flattened cardboard boxes slid behind the recycling bin. Granted I’ve been nagging him to do this for days, but in the end he’s finished unpacking before I have. I feel a wave of guilt, and then joy that I won’t need to bring it up again, that I can praise him when he arrives home, and then I claim his productivity as my own and give myself the night off from unpacking my lingering boxes.

  I wander the yard, surveying what needs to be done. Behind the house, where the birches are dense like teeth in a mouth, I find a spot where the foliage grows weak. A row of stones lines the short end of a patch of dirt. Memorial. What I’m looking at is a grave. I try to talk myself out of it, but I circle the spot, hunting for clues. It doesn’t even seem like a secret that’s trying to be kept.

  A large bird circles overhead, but I know it’s my imagination that makes it a vulture, and I look back to our house and then the house next door and see the old man in the window for only a second and I wonder if he knows something about this.

  Could there be more of them? I wander, rooting with my eyes, in the backyard first and then through the woods with no luck, and on the other side, where the forest meets the beach, I stop looking down and lift my head to the water, and my windpipe is overwhelmed by a gale, and my breath clogs with the forc
e of it, and my mouth fractures into a grimace as I gasp, and I squeeze the meat of my arms, and I try to harness my heartbeat to calm myself, and my nostrils feel full of sand, and the potential of the moment paralyzes me.

  For a second, running into the lake feels like an irreversible decision I should make, but I don’t recognize the voice suggesting this, and in this way I haunt myself until I turn back to the house and let my mind peer from above, like a camera strung on a wire, through the branches. Sometimes I am hidden from myself by the foliage, but then I pop into view again, veiled and then revealed until I reach the edge of our yard and stop, still surprised at how close our home is to the woods, dwarfed by the size of it, adjusting to the new scale of the box I contain myself within.

  I am feeling unusual, not in a way that I can explain, but preoccupied with the sounds the house is making and unnerved by the space that fills each room and surprised by how quickly I’ve become accustomed to the wilderness surrounding us, but more than the combination of all of this: I feel like I’ve turned a full circle inside myself, like I am due to unwind, like I am a spring coiled tight, waiting. I wonder if moving here was a mistake, but then I nudge that idea away and replace it with thoughts of the stress of uprooting our lives, of starting new jobs.

  I want to tell James about what I’ve found—in the yard and in myself—but wonder if I should delay until I know the ending. I dash that thought away quickly, too, wondering why I would want to wait, how I would bear it on my own.

  I pinch myself tightly through the back door as if something might sneak in behind me, and there in the kitchen, I kick off my shoes and luxuriate in the way my feet grip the evening-cool tile. I pull open the fridge and let the contents shine on me, warm, like a spotlight.

  8

  WE EAT DINNER. I tell Julie I’ve made a friend at work. I keep the details vague. She tells me that Connie just broke up with her boyfriend. She lives on the other side of town, near the high school. Julie’s excited to spend more time with her again. The office is fine—nothing special. She can tell the operations manager is going to drive her bananas. When she got home, she says, she took a walk through the woods. She describes a mushroom she saw, and I tell her I’ll look it up. I sense a secret in the misses of the conversation. Something hides beneath her skin. Like a mouse running under a fitted sheet. She keeps shifting in her chair and itching.