"Pet Shop" Chapter x

I waited up by my window most of the night. He never came.

I kept vigil long after my eyes were weary and the school day lay only hours away before me, still thinking, hoping he might show. So many times I saw the phantom, bleary headlights outside of my peripheral vision from the position I held against my bedroom window: chin resting on knuckles, back of head leaning against the cold weather-proofed window, trying to prop inside a pose that wouldn’t pull my hair by the pressure of the weight of my head. The inevitable hair pulling saved me from a crooked, feverish fragment of sleep which would have awakened me in a state of discomfort that I would carry the next day to school. Trying to concentrate on algebra with a crick in my neck on a Wednesday morning: trying harder to figure out why he didn’t think it worthwhile to come to my house, as he had said he would, than the effort I would give to trying to figure out the quadratic equation which meant nothing when compared to him, meaningless and flat on the white page. Algebra meant nothing when compared to the way he looked at me.

“You gonna be at home tonight?” he had asked in the midst of my scrubbing down of the feeder mices’ overcrowded aquarium home.

“Should be,” I answered, trying to sound casual, as if I was not shaken by his unexpected overture.

“Billy and I might come by”…he paused…”tonight.”

“Sure. Ok.” I took one of my yellow bleach-scented rubber gloved hands and wiped away the dangling stray bang that threatened to block my view of him as carefully as I could without making contact with the parts of my fingers which had touched the rodents’ urine-saturated home. It was a funny thing. I was cleaning up after mice, mice who would be eaten by unforgiving reptiles, and in the midst putrid odors and small-animal squeals that would make most people cringe, I felt pretty. Maybe even a little desirable. The feeling was not an intentional one – perhaps more accidental, like any other moment in which one is not prepared for something nice to sneak up and find us in the middle of an unflattering daily task.

“Ok, so maybe we’ll see you.” He looked down, my view of him now of only his white cap, like there was more he wanted to say, and as if he wanted to explain to me exactly why he had decided to invite himself over to my house on a school night and out of the clear blue sky almost as much as I wanted him to explain it to me.

A pause.

“Hello,” someone called from the front of the store. “Is anyone able to answer a question? I’ve got a sick fan-tail goldfish who needs some help.”

His eyes met mine again, and we half-smiled at the interruption, like some sort of pseudo-defining moment had been interrupted. I held up my gloved hands like a doctor does after surgery. “Guess this one is yours,” I shrugged with a smile.

“Yeah.” A tipping of the white Pet Pros cap and one last short gaze of intensity into my eyes, and then he was gone.

After the Visitors

Watching my father drive away, crouching in the right direction to see through the window of the front door; seeing the slow, deliberate movement of his small, white truck roll over the gravel; feeling the tears burn against the pink of my eyes, and then turning around and deciding now what do I do. I cry because I can hear the phantom laughter of my sisters’ children who no longer roam these halls, scouting out toys with funny sounds and which are easy to tip over. The depression is instantaneous and engulfing. I am surprised by its swiftness.

I run a slight fever – left behind by family with a head cold and a lingering fuzziness behind my eyes. So I lie down. Seems like the logical thing to do. Daughter is in day care. Husband at work. I pine away for days like these to be alone, and yet today, I grieve the absence of others.

Lying in bed, looking up at a towering, white ceiling which has loomed down and looked out over other people’s history, other people’s families’ flaws and secrets, I trade my relief at renting the house – no ownership responsibilities – for apprehension of its void. For me, it is a black hole, a nothingness of history. For it holds the history of several generations, but it does not hold mine…

The tears fall, each one a lost memory of a house sold off to another family, who treat it better than we did. My memories are locked inside there, nonrefundable, nontransferable to this older, whiter, quieter rented house…