Meeting my niece’s wife was a pleasure. She was charming, maybe the same age as my niece, maybe younger. She spoke of her work as an art instructor at a small liberal college, of her students. I was shocked she could be teaching already. She looked so tight and fresh, so new. There were no lines in her forehead or at the corners of her eyes or lips, no suggestion of jowls. She said, frowning: If I were another department’s lackey, I’d die. To have to publish, to pony the administration on my back. Instead I work, like any student except with the title of instructor. She shrugged her shoulders, then said: We have a wall to throw disasters against, a punching bag hung in the corner for release. Here she mimed jabs left and right, a quick roundhouse swipe of her foot, up near my throat, all the time grinning wildly. I wanted to reach out and pinch her mouth closed, crimp it securely to her face. To corral her joy a place it couldn’t be fiddled with. How happy she’d stay! How unencumbered by disappointments!
Next, she and my niece recalled the sculpting professor’s seduction by a student on the night of a bronze pour. These two women, eyes eaten by mounding cheeks, mouths rowdy with teeth and indulgent shrieks, together acted out a scenario that, through peals of laughter, they informed me was representative of the sculpting professor and the seducing student groping each other through the protective space-like suiting required when dealing with molten materials.
Like two retarded Emperor penguins forgetting their fatness, my niece gasped, then said: Trying to grab. Searching for touch.
The area around us had cleared. I could see my sister glancing over from a different room, through the doorframe. Beyond her, windows showed the gray street, leaves fallen and slicked to rot, a car’s window unrolled and drizzle flicking in.
For several minutes we doted on the silence between us. They stopped their acting and began only to hold each other, little finger clutches at first, then the press of a hip against an ass, finally my niece’s wife encircling my niece with her arms, spreading her legs so my niece could relax against her. They stayed like this for some time, seeming to forget I was there, intent only on the pulses of their bodies, aligning them in order to hear more clearly their love for one another: these two women – one of whom I was so closely related to yet knew almost nothing about – and then this tiny extra beat fluttering inside my niece. They gripped what grew between them, determined to protect it so long as they could.
I never married. I have no children of my own. What few children I played parent to briefly have by now all disappeared, repeating my own vanishing from their early, imprintable lives. My two cats are the only beings I still believe I might succeed in caring for, however poorly. Together they survive, flourish. Their teeth remain white, their breath tolerable, coats thick and shining. To them I’m a mere furniture piece, which in the end suits us all.
Halfway home from my sister’s house, I took my car off the road. The shoulder was nothing, a strip of crumbled asphalt, brown glass litter, the soft remains of fast food bag. Scrubby grass angled steeply into drainage ditch. On the ditch’s far side spread a recently shorn hayfield, random strips of uneven stalks, new bales bound to bursting. Far away, machinery sat beneath a tin shed, dark and hulking in the lean evening light. Already a great pile of bales was stacked. The wind had begun and from the mountains galloped clouds, violet gray herds that would later stop to piss en masse.
At the pile, workers attempted to tarp, to beat the storm and its battery of rain. The distance turned their bodies to toys. I watched while gusty air tumbled loose pieces of grass across the road, sent a puffed plastic bag into somersaults. Watched how the workers, each time a new breath blew, held tight their tarp edges while the enormous sheet inhaled. Again and again these inhalations came into the canvas, gray like a swollen tick, until the workers were lifted to their tiptoes, were nearly airborne. Slowly, slowly, stakes were driven and ties anchored, corners folded and tucked and pinned into place by the taut pulls of bungees. In the airtight car, I strained towards the far windows, those nearest the action, as though to hear from so far away the snapping and cracking of material, the calls and cries of its people. I waited for a body to be tossed by the wind, to see the arc of flight and the smash of landing, the crumple that would come. I waited beyond the time this could still happen. How they broke such a wild, snorting thing. How no one, not even once, let go.
While my sister prays for silence, I hope to startle from this surrounding soundlessness, so like that snowstorm years ago. I’ve walked myself into a blank, my blood going mute, everything colorless, vanished. In this muffled place I’ve picked the ticking carefully, fluffed it to incredible width and arranged it around myself. I’ve sat in its center willingly, almost eagerly. Perhaps just now I believed my sister to be the key. That our reconciliation, her daughter in our midst, would smother the silence. Finally all the clicks and snaps and bangs of a live, working body would be heard again. I would hear myself again. I would be found.
The last I saw of her, my sister held some stranger at the elbow, leaning a side of her head towards his moving lips, tilting her ear to better funnel his words. I watched her finally look up in time to see other faces laughing. An infant learning cues, she followed suit. The fabric of the man’s jacket bunched in my sister’s hard grip. His cheeks’ shelving shined as he glanced down at her hold on him, then to her face, then down again. He never, not even in a deeply taken breath, shifted any weight away. He leaned closer, cradled my sister’s tense hand with his own soft one, and held himself still, a patient, quiet island.
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