She’ll Be Back

[title subtitle=”Words: Marla Cantrell”][/title]

She was wearing a dark blue velvet dress, cut low at the neckline, a slit running up the right side of her long skirt. Her hair, black as night, was in loose curls past her shoulders. What I remember most is that she smelled like cinnamon gum, and when I slipped the wrist corsage of roses and daisies over her small hand, it wouldn’t stay put, and so she tied it in place, using her teeth, pulling the silver ribbons taut against her pale skin.

But it was after the dance, after we’d gotten in trouble for dancing too close —“Couldn’t get a piece of notebook paper between you two”— Coach Devo said, that I got to know her. As I drove her home in my car that could carry eight adults easily, she pointed down a dark road I wasn’t familiar with. “Long cut,” she said, and then slid closer to me, making me crazy when her thigh touched mine.

There is something about velvet, the way it feels when you touch it. There is something about a dress that comes to a girl’s ankles, but then has that one slit that reaches well above the knee. It was too much for me, and in the car on that night on that back road that led to the river bottoms and then straight out of Arkansas, I fell irretrievably in love.

When I look back, I see how it couldn’t be held together. The way we were when we were together made the planet spin too fast, and when I stood next to her my heart beat irregularly. At times, in my car, all I wanted was to marry her, but we were young, and older guys kept coming around when I was not with her, and after a while she started to consider what her life would be without me.

What I want to say here is that she was broken in a way I never quite understood. She had a father who hit her sometimes, I know that, and a mother who seemed eternally angry. Once, standing on her porch, the clock about to strike midnight, I heard noises coming from inside, scraping and cussing and the sound of glass hitting the hardwood floor. It was her mother, ripping the drawers from her daughter’s dresser, dumping clothes on the floor, taking her hand and swiping everything off the dresser top. Her face went white when she heard the ruckus on the other side of the door. “Go,” she said, and she wouldn’t even kiss me.

When she married someone else, I sat outside the church and revved my engine as the guests arrived. I played Willie Nelson’s “Always On My Mind” loud on my car stereo once the church doors closed, until her older brother came outside, lit a cigarette, shook his head, and mouthed the word “loser” to me.

A year later, she called me up. “I need to lay eyes on you,” she said, and we arranged to meet late one night, on the baseball field near her house. She had lost weight and her low-slung jeans looked as if they could fall at any minute. She wore a red silk blouse and her hair was up in a ponytail. I stood on home plate and watched her walk over to me.

We didn’t say one word. We stood a foot apart and we assessed each other. She had her hands in her back pockets. I had my arms crossed. Finally, I reached up, I put my hand on the back of her neck and I pulled her close enough to kiss her forehead.

You can’t take another man’s wife. That’s what I felt. But I wanted to. I had a thousand dollars in my pocket. I had a bag packed in my car that I’d hidden in a scrub of pine trees a few yards away.

What do you do when you love somebody the way I loved her? You marry someone else. And so I did. On my wedding day, I thought of her. I wanted her outside my church. I wanted her to sit in her car and regret every move that took her away from me.

You can love someone and lose them and your life can go on. It’s not what those sappy movies tell you, but you can. I had a good wife, and then I had two good kids, and for a few years I was happy. If I thought about her, I didn’t dwell on it. If she called my house, I never knew.

I might have stayed married forever, but my wife grew tired of me. I wasn’t a bad husband, but I worked a lot at this garage I owned, and when I wasn’t working I hunted whatever was in season. We went to counseling and took tests that indicated I was not “all in” the marriage, and that I had “trouble truly seeing my wife.” While the counselor, who seemed to be draped in tie-dyed scarves, said this, I watched my wife. She crossed her right leg over her left knee and swung her right foot up and down, and she nodded so hard it looked like her head could pop off.  That’s what I saw. Who knows what else I was missing.

In my new place, a warehouse that I turned into half garage and half apartment, my life started feeling like my own again. The kids were teenagers, and they’d spend about half their time with me. I had a string of women bringing by casseroles, leaving their phone numbers, asking for help lighting their gas fireplaces.

On Halloween, the air turned cold. I walked outside and leaves whipped across the streets. My two kids were at a party. I’d planned to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre, drink a few beers, maybe call the woman who’d dropped off a sack filled with candy corn and popcorn balls.

When she called, I knew her voice instantly. “There’s a hole in my heart,” she said, and for a minute I thought she was sick, but she just laughed at me. Twenty minutes later she was at my door. Her hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, and she had a few lines around her mouth when she smiled. She was dressed in black: jeans, leather jacket, boots, and she wanted to ride.

How she knew I had a motorcycle, I don’t know. I’d only gotten my first motorcycle — the Ducati Monster — three weeks before I’d been taking it on the back roads, driving faster than any responsible man would, almost laying it down at times.

When she climbed on behind me, she said, “I like the old-school mirrors,” and I laughed. “That’s what you like?” I teased, and she slapped me on the shoulder. She leaned into me as we made our way through town. She slipped her hands beneath my jacket on Temple Road, when I started showing her what the chopper had, when I started showing off, and the feel of her hands so close was like sight to a blind man.

Nothing moves the way a Ducati does, and nothing feels like she did on that night, her chest against my back, her knees pressing into my legs as we rounded bend after bend. When I finally slowed down, she let go, she held her arms straight out from her sides and she rode like that, fearless, through the darkness.

What I wanted most was to lift her off that bike and put my arms around her and feel her head on my shoulder. But she was still wearing a wedding ring, and I still wasn’t that kind of guy. So I kept driving and when we got back to my place, I asked, “Why do you stay married to him?”

Her hair was wild from the ride, her dark eyes bright. She looked ten years younger than she had when she arrived, and I regretted bringing him up.

She shrugged. She looked away. “I’m not worth much,” she said. I tried to protest, but she raised her hand. “I know you think I am, but I’m not. I don’t know how to be with anybody. Not really be,” she said, emphasizing the word be.

“That’s no way to live,” I said.

“Maybe not,” she said. “But I’ve wrecked every good thing that’s come my way, everything except you. You got out just in time,” she said, and then she laughed, a hollow laugh that hurt my heart.

I opened two beers and handed her one, then downed mine. She sat in my recliner, the one piece of furniture I took from my house. “I don’t remember getting out,” I said. “I remember being asked to leave.”

“All the same,” she said, and her mouth turned down. I’d never seen her cry, and I wondered if this was as close as she came.

I poured myself three fingers of whiskey, and she stood and walked to the window. I’d yet to put up blinds. “Sorry your marriage didn’t work out,” she said.

“It worked for a good long while,” I said. “It worked well enough.”

I had tried for years not to say what I said then. “I wish you’d leave him.”

“Oh, I have,” she said, “but I don’t stay gone long.”

“If you ever leave for real, come here to me,” I said, and I took another drink.

“I had one perfect night in my life,” she said. “Me in velvet, you in that ridiculous tux. I’ve had a thing for tuxes ever since.”

My glass was already empty. I could hear a group of kids outside, trying to make Halloween last, probably on their way to toilet paper somebody’s yard.

“And I have a thing about velvet, but only if you’re in it.”

The wind whistled across the metal roof. A car zoomed by with the stereo up. I was treading on treacherous ground. I was sinking into the past.

She stood, handing me her beer bottle. She touched my cheek and her hand was cold. “I’ll try not to come back,” she said, and she turned to leave.

“I want you to come back,” I said, “but without the ring.”

She didn’t turn around. She shook her head and walked out into the night. I watched her until she disappeared around the corner. It seemed as if the moon was shamed by her beauty, so inadequate it was that it hid itself behind a passing cloud, waiting until she was well into the shadows before it dared show its face again.