I am ready _

Skinny Dipping

My wife came back from a three-day nurse’s retreat—camping on the shore of Lake Michigan—with poison ivy on her hips, her thighs, her breasts.  I was behind her in bed, discovering the blisters in all the places my hands wanted to go.
“I was in the wilderness, Jim,” she said, pushing my hand off the dip of her side onto my own leg.  “These things happen,” she said.
We couldn’t afford air conditioning then. We have it now, and a house.  We sleep in pajamas that we renew for each other each Christmas.  Our old pajamas become rags that we use to clean the house.  They accumulate on the edges of old soap smelling buckets and along the clothesline out back, between our pants and shirts, the colors and patterns of flowers and stripes and polka dots.  We find them tucked into the back corners of drawers and in random loads of laundry.  We use them to clean our boy’s face while he eats.
We don’t talk about this anymore.
We were living in a one bedroom a half-mile from the railroad tracks.  I was a security guard at the retirement home where Sarah worked as a nurse. The pay wasn’t great, for either of us, but we made rent and drove up to Chicago every now and then.
We couldn’t afford more space.  We shared a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom.  We heard our neighbors fighting, making love, and sometimes the softness of a conversation through the floor or the walls. It took sleeping naked in the summers, windows wide open with the train coming through; the kids from in town thumping bass and bad mufflers at all hours.  The smell of tar from the railroad ties used to blow in the windows during the summer.  But we had no place to hide from each other and I knew how her back should have felt on my chest.
Reaching over her shoulder to the bedside table, I turned on the lamp and then pushed her away.  Blisters poked out, embedded like tiny strings of pearls laid across her shoulder blades.
“How did you get it on your back?” I said.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and put her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands; she was crying.  That was Sarah; she hadn’t known to lie.
He was some Rick I’d never met, a doctor who made calls to the home.  Sarah, in the kitchen, wrapped to her chin in her robe, told me how he looked like me while I fastened the button on a pair of pants and pulled my belt tight.
“It was a drink,” she said.  “It was supposed to be one drink before we went back to our tents,” she said.  It had rained the night before and they couldn’t get a fire going.  How many years of education around that cold fire pit and they hadn’t known that wet wood wouldn’t burn.
“Rick handed me this drink,” she said, holding out her free hand as if it held a tumbler.  Her other hand held the robe shut.
“He said it was the best thing next to a fire,” she said, and I wanted to roll my eyes and throw her tumbler at the wall at the same time.
“He asked me how work was, if I thought we could be doing anything better,” she said, letting go of the robe and gesturing with the hand.  The neck of the robe fell away and I saw blisters twisting across her collarbone like vines.  “I thought he was interested,” she said.  “The way he asked me.  It seemed like he cared,” she said.
One thing led to another, one drink became three.  It was dark, the hush of the waves on the shore.  The moon was in the water next to them and they were under a birch tree, on soft ground.
“It didn’t feel good,” she said, looking at me for the first time.  I could see it, such a simple setting.  The slippery, fumbling momentum of the hard stuff in the doctor’s hands.  Sarah looked down at her own hand and saw it still holding Rick’s tumbler.  Spreading the fingers as if they’d been cramped, she shook them and pulled the robe closed.  It was this pink robe I’d bought for her out of a catalog because it looked like it would be fun to slide off her shoulders at night.  “He didn’t kiss me,” she said.  “We didn’t kiss.”
“I remember,” she said, her face filling for a cry, “winding my fingers into the leaves.  Into the sand.  I felt the roots I went so deep.  Poison Ivy roots, I guess.  And I held myself down,” she said.  “I didn’t like it,” she said.
Outside, a breeze picked up and it blew through the window behind Sarah, ruffling the coupons pinned to the fridge, through the kitchen to the window behind me and I could smell the tar and how the lake had been tanned into her hair; that drift wood smell.  Her skin, beneath the blisters, dark with a new tan.  I was Rick, for a moment, watching her lying under the sun in the sand.
“So he forced you?” I said.  One of the coupons slipped free of the magnet and spun to the floor.  Slowly, Sarah crouched to pick it up but I stepped on it before she reached it.  It was a free two-liter with purchase of a large pizza.
“Because it doesn’t sound like you tried to fight him off,” I said.
Standing from her crouch, she looked at me and her lips got all twisted together.  It wasn’t how I’d seen her cry before.  We’d heard a lot of fights, on the street and through the walls.  Early on, while she was hanging a piece of cloth she’d bought for a curtain and I was watching the news, we heard a kid start crying in the apartment below us.  Then a mother, crying louder, but not really crying, teasing the kid then telling it to shut up, just shut the hell up for once.  It had made Sarah cry.
She’d turned the volume up on the news, filling the apartment with the voice of a newsman reporting some new suicide bomber in Iraq; the stock footage, that dull brown light reflecting off the white shattered wall of a market onto the wall of our apartment.  So odd because she hated all that, the hard glares through the camera, the way they reached through the television with empty hands holding grief she couldn’t see.  She didn’t have to know you to love you.  That was how Sarah was.  And the tears in the kitchen weren’t like those, they didn’t make her pretty.
“Christ, Sarah,” I said, “you haven’t even said you’re sorry.”
That got her crying hard, holding her face in her hands, wearing her right hand like a blindfold.  She caved in—doubled over and sunk back against the counter.  Grabbing the counter, her wedding band ticked on the edge of the sink and I remembered my grandfather and his cures.  How, when I was twelve, I’d reached into a patch of poison ivy by his cottage to get a Wiffle ball my cousin hit and, three days later, my arm was burning with blisters.  Grandpa took me around back; to an old metal sink he used to clean fish, and told me to hold my arm over it.  The sink stank of blood and rust, all the little blue gill scales sparkling like sequins.  Then grandpa pulled out a filet knife he kept wrapped in a towel under the sink, and rested the thin blade on my arm.  It’s gonna’ hurt, he said and, with the lightest pressure, he dragged the blade down toward my wrist, opening all the blisters.  He walked in the house and came back with a bottle of cider vinegar and a towel.  This burns, he said, then held my hand and poured the vinegar over the sores, wrapping the towel around when he was done.  Grandpa and his cures, how he dried those blisters gone.
And this pressure was building in my head, like my body would shake apart if I didn’t do something.  It was her crying like that, how it made me feel like I’d been beating on her.  I scratched my neck and looked out the window behind her, outside through the tree limbs, at a man sitting on his back stoop.  He was on his phone; smoking a cigarette and talking to someone he didn’t have to see.  Sarah was still crying, maybe thinking about Rick and his hands.  She looked around my shoulder to her duffle bag, still sitting by the front door packed full of clothes.
I walked to the window and slammed it down, pulling the curtain shut behind her.  She finally looked at me, her eyes all red.  I pushed the robe back, off her shoulders and down to the linoleum.  I stepped back.
My imagination showed me his hands all over her, cupping and holding her.  She melted in front of him; he held her up, held her close, held her together.  Rick leaking out of her where the blisters broke, amber oils holding bits of pink fluff.  Her navel was wreathed with blisters; they buried her shoulders.  She backed away from me; she tried to cover herself.  I wanted to strip her of more, to pull her skin down and see what was underneath, see what Rick saw.
“You could have lied,” I said.  “You should have told me that you dropped your towel in a patch by the beach,” I said.  She looked at me and I could see the tears drying on her face, something loosening in the way she was standing.  Her lips set in a straight line.  “I’d be rubbing calamine lotion on you right now,” I said, reaching out and scraping a string of blisters on her sternum with my fingernail.  She winced.  “You use a cotton swab so it doesn’t hurt,” I said.
The way she was, in the corner, I could see her back reflected in the face of the microwave.  Where Rick’s hands clamped and burned.  Her hip was right next to the knife drawer, but not blocking it.  Steak knives, I thought.  And vodka would dry the blisters in a pinch.  You could use the lotion to ease the itch or the knife to cure it.  No more Rick.  I’d have grabbed her arm and cut the blisters away and followed them all over her body, leading with the blade.  I would make her show me.
But she did a funny thing then.  She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me on the side of the mouth.  “I’m sorry,” she said over my shoulder, her lips by my ear, her skin in my hands, slick and pocked where the earth had pushed her up and Rick had pushed her down.  The blisters weeping.  We were quiet because neither of us knew what to do.  This woman I love, she kept leaning into me but she let her hands slide down my sides to my belt.  Little tugs at my waist, her breath in my ear, then we both stood naked in the kitchen.
The night I met Sarah, I was sitting out back with Jeannie, one of the cooks at the home.  If I just sat at my desk and told my supervisor I was on break, she gave me a look.  I don’t smoke but out back, on the picnic table with the ashtrays, you were on break.
I’d worked there for a year and I’d only talked to Sarah a couple of times.  We lip smiled each other in the hallways and that was it.  One of the times I saw her, when I got this crush for her, was because of Jeannie.  Jeannie wears this wedding band wrapped in one spot by a thin roll of electrical tape.  After she’d lost all that weight, the ring had slipped off and she’d accidentally baked it into a tray of brownies.  Sarah got everyone to play it off like a game.  When one of the residents found it, we gave him this big bag of Oreos.  Sarah held the ring up for everyone to see. You win, she told this man, then gave the ring back to Jeannie.  Jeannie spun it around her ring finger with her thumb after that to know it was there.  That night, it slid up and down her skinny finger like an abacus bead while she spoke, knocking against her knuckles with the tape facing up like a jewel.
For as long as her cigarette lasted, she was always telling me about love, about her husband, about how she’d moved him out one night when he hadn’t come home.  She’d put all his stuff into boxes and taped them shut, then set them out on the curb.  She said that the six years since had made things better; she went to his bar on the weekends to make sure he got a ride home and he came by every week to keep things up around the house.  They were friendly; she still wore the ring.  Love, she said, was saving what you could.
Over Jeannie’s shoulder, I’d watched Sarah walk out the door and look at the sky. She pulled out this red fake snakeskin sleeve with a pack of smokes inside and a little pocket for her lighter.  I’d never seen anything like it and she caught me staring.  She waggled her fingertips and smiled at me, then slid a cigarette out and lit it, blowing the smoke over her far shoulder as she sat on the other end of the picnic table.
After more talking—Sarah had smoked it down to the filter—Jeannie looked over her shoulder and saw what I had been looking at.  She grabbed my wrist, that wedding band cold, and smiled, mouthing the words “she’s cute.”  Loud, she made a big deal of how she had to get back to her casserole, then walked in.
“That’s some pack of smokes,” I said, standing up as if I had some business inside as well.  My hands decided to sweat and I put them in my pockets, making fists around the fabric to dry them out, in case we would finally shake hands.  She held the pack up to me, offering me a cigarette, and I took one and pulled the lighter out of the sleeve. I lit it and puffed at it, finally inhaling because she was watching me so close.  Then I had to sit down.  I guess I looked pretty bad.
She chuckled through that smile.  “You poor man,” she said.  “You don’t smoke, everyone knows you don’t smoke, why would you smoke that?” she said.  If I squinted, I could keep the table and the building and Sarah from washing together.  I fixed her face, her smile, between my eyelids.  I smiled and swayed.  Sweat bubbled up on my back and upper lip.  She dropped the butt of her old smoke into the ashtray then took mine from between my fingers.  An inch of ash fell off and broke on the back of my hand.
She glanced over her shoulder at the door then reached across the table, brushing the ash off my hand with the back of hers then holding it and giving it a squeeze.  My hand was sweaty anyway but my head began to clear.
“I feel bad,” she said. “That wasn’t nice,” she said.  “How about we go get a coffee after the shift.  I can tell you about my cigarette case.”
I wiped the sweat off my forehead and looked at it.  “And I can be less charming,” I said.
We ended up naked that night.  I took her back to the apartment I had on the edge of town.  We talked into the evening, about her cigarette case and other things. It stayed hot even after it got dark and we had to leave the apartment to get some cooler air.  My landlord, Marty, kept a stocked trout pond for all the kids at the bottom of the hill behind the apartment complex.  There were willow trees along the bank that the kids used for shade while they fished and Sarah and I sat beneath one of them and watched the surface of the pond boil with feeding trout.  Insects were hatching along the shore and we could hear the slaps little trout made as they leapt clear of the water to eat the bugs, then landed on their sides.  There were lightening bugs and stars and, for a while, we didn’t talk.  Sarah smoked two cigarettes and then stood.
It was her idea, skinny-dipping.  I’d never been; it was something I’d never do on my own.  We took off our clothes with our backs facing.  We both peeked.  Then she told me to close my eyes, that she would close hers, and we walked into the black water.  The shore dropped away after a few steps in the rocks and sand and we swam out to the middle of the pond, treading water because we didn’t know what else to do.  Trout rolled just beneath the surface, turning and lunging for the bugs.  I felt the tiny currents of her hands and feet, the slick hungry bellies of the trout slipping by in the dark.
That was the start of it.  Two weeks later, she quit smoking for me.  I thought it would be some big thing, that we’d break a pack’s worth of smokes in half and throw them in the garbage together.  She just gave me her cigarette case and said she was through.
I thought of Jeannie, of moving Sarah’s stuff out.  Her clothes were already packed.  I could put them outside and shove her out the door naked.  I could pack her stuff into boxes, and put it all out on the curb. I’d seal them tight with clear tape so her smells wouldn’t get out; the lavender smell of her clothes, the spent wick and wax smell of her hair, all sealed in.  I’d put them out on the curb with her name printed on each box.
“You should have lied,” I said.
“You would have known,” she said, rubbing her eyes.  “Things wouldn’t have been the same.”
“I don’t see how they can be,” I said, stepping back.  The blisters would go away; they wouldn’t even scar unless she kept picking them.
“And I never would have known,” I said.  “I never thought.  Not even in my wildest,” I said.  She stepped toward me and slid her arms around my waist, pinning my arms to my sides.  She rested her head on my chest.
“You know your bag is still packed,” I said.
Her shoulders tensed.  Looking down her spine, I saw these raised plumes of blisters, bright red and weeping.  There wasn’t a place he hadn’t touched.  Through her arms, I dropped to a crouch to look at her feet.  With my pointer finger, I traced a line of blisters that started on her big toe, winding back to her ankle.
“Christ.  Here too?” I said.  Rick was some kind of poison blanket she’d crawled under.
“Why?” I said, standing up.
Sarah pinched her temples with one hand and put the other hand on her hip.  She walked back toward the closed window.
“I was in sandals,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
There was this pattern on the small of her back, like stitches, like she’d been torn and half and pulled back together.  She pushed the curtain back and opened the window.  She crossed her arms over her breasts.
“It’s nothing I can explain,” she said.  “I didn’t even like it,” she said.
She turned toward me.  Where her shoulders met her neck, blotches of red from his hands or lips.
“I mean, where does he have it?” I said.  The kitchen light came out of an old fishbowl fixture that turned it yellow, like everything was bathing in olive oil.  It made her look awful, sick, and so tired.  She shook her head.
“No,” I said, “I want to know.  If I could see his back, would I see your hands?  Did you hold him like that?”
I held my hands up, holding Rick close.  Sex was two people pulling themselves together.  She wanted me to see this as gravity.  Her eyes softened; this little bulge on her jaw went slack.  She uncrossed her arms and let her hands hang at her sides.
“I mean, your bags are still packed,” I said.  I looked down at the linoleum and counted six checkered squares between us.  We could hear moths bumping the light fixture, their wings beating ragged against the glow.  Over and over, they couldn’t get enough of it.  I looked at her, the little moth shadows floating across the room, across her face and chest, and her hands opened toward me.
“This is it,” she said.
“What would you do,” I said, “If I came home how you are?”
The moths kept at the light and some kid drove by thumping his bass.  She picked up her robe and folded it, setting it on the counter.  She picked up the coupon and put it back on the fridge.
“I don’t know,” she said.  She looked so tired.
I turned off the light and walked toward her, the black shape of her in front of the window.  Out back, the flint-flash and glow of the man on his phone as he lit another cigarette.  I held her close and we stood in the dark, her hands sliding over me.