Pretty Girl, Pretty Girl

“Here,” Andrea says as she pushes a spoon upon the lips of her husband Danny. The applesauce enters easy but bubbles up at the corner of his lip. There is a gray stain on his fading Toledo football shirt where the food has been collecting. Andrea cannot catch all the drippings, but this one she does, flicking a hand at the yellowed air without much focus behind it. The television hums a story that she is not following.

Andrea goes for another scoop, but drops the spoon when she hears a knock in the living room.

“Be right back,” she whispers. Standing in front of him is an activity she used to feel guilty doing, but over time Andrea has adopted a silence so elegant that her husband rarely opens his eyes to her leaving. Only when he is awake, as he is right now, does Andrea revert to her old gait, the slender, storky steps of her high-school self. She does not know why this happens, but the scenario is so infrequent that she feels naked when it does occur. Andrea flattens the backside of her sundress as she walks away, her cheeks burning like the Indian paintbrush on her patio. He is a happy vessel and couldn’t stop her from leaving if he tried.

She can see the visitor’s outline as she approaches, the long petals of his dark cassock cut blurry against the blue afternoon. The door creaks and lets the breeze in.

“Thanks for coming, Father.” Andrea says, filling the doorway. Her painted yellow toenails peek over the sill. They are fresh and glisten as if dipped in rain.

“I appreciate all the house calls,” the priest says. “We have a quota, you know.”

“Hush,” Andrea says, her lips turned upwards. They take a moment to observe one another. Andrea sees the early chips of age that she herself has come to deal with- feather threaded hair and thin sketchings across the skin. It is not a bad look on him, very much the alternative. Men fear it, those simple pronunciations of midlife, and fear is what makes them look ugly. Yet Father Boone does not care about these issues. He is God’s trumpet, and God’s music is much louder than vanity. So when the priest does nothing, just keeps his hibiscus nose and graying sideburns as-is, the result is so fantastic that Andrea applies a layer of rogue and lip gloss before his every visit.

“Apologies for my coming early. There was a baptism at St. Francis, and you live so close by, I figured a stroll could be coaxing.”

Andrea smiles and moves aside. “Beautiful day for it.” Her body curves with the cedar doorframe, her hips flush against the hinges. “What do they say about the weather in heaven?”

Father Boone laughs, stepping up the ramp. The tail-end of his sleeve drags gentle against her right hand. He does not notice or look back as he moves toward the kitchen.

“The Lord promises conditions better than this,” he says, motioning a hand to the windows. “But how that is possible, I am not quite sure.”

Andrea joins him in the kitchen. It is separated from Danny and the living room by cabinets and light orange drywall that her husband installed himself. A cold lasagna sits on the table. She made it last week and she will not be able to finish it before it goes bad.

“If history repeats itself, you’ll be singing different in July,” Andrea says. “That’s when the Devil gets ahold of the wheel.”

Father Boone crosses his legs, leaning his back against the countertop. His arms dip backwards, holding him up, and there is no need to show her what is beneath his sleeves today, for the priest has been here in warmer garb, and she has not forgotten the sight of his living muscle, the damp under-arm smell, the pearling veins. He left two sweat streaks on the granite patio that summer day, and Andrea could not believe they existed. She dragged a finger through it and held it to the light. It swallowed the sun and then it was the sun, loud against her skin, white and ethereal. She rubbed it on her opposite palm, hoping to steal a fraction of what he’d left her.

“I don’t love speaking of the Devil,” the priest says. He fixes his boxy green eyes around her. It fits like a collar. “There are more important and pressing topics. Like yourself.”

“Thank you, Father,” Andrea says. “I appreciate your visits. I really do.”

He pulls a small leather bible from his pocket, and places it on the countertop. He never reads it to her, but the presence of it is enough to stave off weaker discussion. “Another month comes and goes,” Father Boone says. “Any changes?”

“Danny is eating better. A little more all the time, I like to say.”

“That’s good.”

Andrea looks at the cabinets, twisting a piece of blonde hair with her finger. She can see Danny without a window, just knows the torque of his body and his twiggy limbs like a fever knows darkness.

“Can you hope for much more than that?” Andrea asks.

“Certainly,” Father Boone says. “Hope is God’s way of showing himself. We had a case last year of bacterial meningitis with Lorraine’s child. Most serious, by word of the doctors, but we prayed before him and Lord have mercy, if I didn’t catch that boy playing soccer in the lawn as I passed this afternoon.”

Andrea steps towards the priest. He is a panther with tan fur and twitting whiskers. She is much less than that, but she is something.

“It has not been just a year, Father. In November, it will have been seven.”

“And I pray every day, Andrea. The Lord does not assign many obstacles more substantial than this.”

She observes his hands, black hair between the knuckles. The booster fan blows it to life. She imagines those freshly shagged meadows in Oakdale, the ones she and Danny used to lay in fifteen minutes off the utility road. He knew she liked wildflowers, and it was the only place you could smell them all at the same time, blue bonnets and coriander and yellow dandelion and Mexican hat cannibalizing a fifty-foot lot.

In the middle, surrounded, she would breathe deep with Danny on top of her. He was her boyfriend then, yet at the time foreign as rain, all damp and runny and heavy. His lips would part just slightly when he was about to burst, and that is when she would kick him off, and in his absence was the holy breath, one that chewed up the season and placed it atop her lips. There were yellow petals in her hair and ants on her skin and birds in her lungs. It was not an orgasm, but it had the same effect- goose flesh and heightened taste and a primal desire to be less than what she was. Panting, Danny would ask to go again, and Andrea always shook her head sideways, her toes batting up and down like they do against the sill. It was enough to lay there like that, with vanished usefulness, drifting into a backdrop of invisible skin and black clod dirt.

“I am not sure,” Andrea says with a pause, “he will get better at this point.”

“I understand.” Father Boone is flat, without smile or frown, and it is this area of the man where Andrea does not know what to do with herself. “He very well may not. Sometimes God’s decisions don’t make sense to us down here.”

“It wasn’t God. It was Danny’s decision. Maybe God had a hand in it, but it was Danny, mostly.” Andrea looks up at the fan, the tendons of her neck faint. “Or maybe God put him in that gas station back then to test him. Sending in those kids and telling him to give it his all. Maybe saving that nobody soda clerk was more important than Danny’s own future. Like, if he grows up and becomes the next super brain and gets us to Mars. Rescues our entire species.” Her voice is far away, probably echoing in Danny’s room. She swallows the rest of her speech. “Danny made God proud, I think, but it was expensive.”

“Sacrifice,” Father Boone says. He stiffens up and catches Andrea’s eye as she drops it. “He’s a great man, Andrea. I know you know that.”

Andrea feels her tongue turning, feels how it yearns to slip from her lips and singe the good air between them. She wants to tell him he wasn’t that great, really, he was just great that one time, that one day in Morristown as he stopped for Coors and smokes. She wants to tell Boone the true man she married was the man sitting in that flower patch, heaving bare chested, begging for more. Panting for just a bit extra, an extra hit of her, as if she could carve all his needs from her sternum and hand it to him on a dinner plate. Sacrifice, Andrea thinks. Across Danny’s entire life, he only made one, and the rest of the world built his story around it.

“Of course,” Andrea says. “But it is not an issue of knowing. It is an issue of living.” She looks at the priest, and typically he is shrouded in some bright stained-glass fluorescence, but here he is coated in the yellow glazed glow of the skylight. He is like a good piece of pottery, Andrea thinks. Navajo nation, 17th century, charred and serrated in a mud hut kiln. She takes a step towards him. In high school ceramics Andrea cracked every piece she ever burned. Some things her hands shouldn’t be allowed to touch. “I’m not sure I can continue caring for him,” she says. “In the way he needs caring for.”

Father Boone smiles, his back teeth shimmering gold. “You are doing an excellent job, Andrea. Anyone can see that.” He takes a step closer to the sink. They are just two meters separated.

“When I speak with you, I know you lead with the Lord in mind. Kind. Reverent.”

Andrea’s face lifts for a moment. It lifts too long and then it evaporates. Tears well up and threaten the mascara she brushed on before Father Boone’s visit. “You don’t know me well enough then,” she says.

“I do, Andrea. I do.”

He holds her hand. It is warm, beating, with a thin layer of condensation at the tips. Andrea married Danny post-accident, groping his hand from the wheelchair, and it was the antithesis of this moment. His hand hung dead as if it were a symptom of the rest of their life together, and the priest was wearing pearl-colored stoles, and instead of privacy it was the opposite, it was a dissection, a hundred families and journalists and the soda clerk consuming her with their eyes, cutting her into bite-sized chunks like Danny would if he wasn’t so far away inside himself. She was all alone up there, and she could live with that. But it was improper to wear that loneliness, improper to mourn what she was giving up, and when they kissed to seal it all, she was frightened to hear them clapping- crying, some of them! – as she left the building rolling her freshly tightened handcuffs.

She squeezes back, shifts her chin upwards. “I didn’t have a choice,” she whispers.

Her sundress is topaz, and it draws static from Father Boone’s black linen chest. Andrea can count the motes of sunlight between them, thirty or forty swirling woolies, turning, and speaking in atomic proximity. If he wanted to, he could look down her shirt and he would see everything, the soft collision of her breasts and the mole parallel to her right nipple. She doesn’t want him to go for less.

He puts his free hand on her shoulder, the elbow locked but not hard against her. His thumb taps against the bone, and the tempo is her heartbeat, slow and constricted.

“People like us,” he says, “never really get to choose.”

“And God is OK with that?”

“That’s the only conclusion we get to make,” Father Boone says. “If we believe his plan is for the best.” He says this and does not move. The pressure in his right hand is gone.

Andrea holds his gaze as the words scatter across the kitchen tile. For a moment it feels like they’re dancing; one hand together, the other overtop. She thinks of her high school ballroom, with canary tissues taped to the stage lights. A far away memory, one where Danny vaguely stands over her. That’s why she had been attracted to him all those years ago. He blocked the light so effectively, allowed her to hide within that shadow. It was safe, a foot below him. But where had that gotten her?

She moves onto her yellow toes and kisses the priest.

It is nothing. She knows this immediately, feels the weathered skin of his lips tighten as she presses against him. The force on her shoulder reappears, firm, little more than a kickstand for the priest, and she is horrified to see his green eyes wide, the pupils growing as if to eat her, a vision she once desired but now rings melancholy, so opposite her expectations. She doesn’t wait to pull away.

Andrea hasn’t even apologized before Father Boone says, “It’s alright, Andrea.”

He walks backwards, his face locking up, each latch and wrinkle audible to her. It is like the bible on the table is reeling his soul away from her. “I’ve taken an oath with the church, as you know, and unfortunately these situations occur once in a while.”

Andrea has nothing to say- her lips are still open and parted. She watches him, the sun curling her hair up and around the room like fire.

Father Boone reaches the countertop, and with the hand that once held her own, stretches his fingers across the leather bible. He pauses, looking at it, his body outside the skylight now. Andrea cannot tell if he is trembling in his cassock- the material is thick and holds too much excess in the sleeves.

“I must go,” he tells her.

“OK,” Andrea says.

She doesn’t follow him. She cannot move, really, but there are footsteps down the hallway, and the sound of cicadas and a breeze that pulls the scents of her garden into the kitchen. She thinks of Danny as the nectar billows in the door, Danny, her wildflower lover, her hulking piece of shade. She cannot hear him, but he is there, always there, her only decision.

Danny.

Danny.

Danny.

Click. The door shuts in the hallway and Andrea is alone again.

She looks up, blinking, not knowing her breath, not understanding its speed. She follows the box of light from the window above her, follows it to the lasagna on her countertop. Andrea did not notice it shift as afternoon faded away, but the newly positioned heat has begun to warm the mozzarella and send tomato reflections into the sink.

She pauses, as if she has never known its existence, its creation, or its utility. But then it strikes her. It is so very clear. Andrea grins and grabs a spoon.

“Dinner!” Andrea cries triumphantly.

----

In the living room Danny has not moved. His life is simple now- it had always BEEN simple, but since his confinement things had become even more so. He liked it that way, at least that’s what he believed, though belief and liking were two actions he wasn’t sure he was capable of anymore. Thoughts were strange in his condition. Instead of cadenced, linear thinking, Danny lived in a daily egg scramble of memories, emotion, and thinly pieced logic with no beginning or end.

Take, for example, his thoughts as Andrea enters the room with her lasagna:

Girl. Pretty girl. I think she is closer now.

Yes. Closer now. Smiling. Mealtime.

It is not that time.

I have eaten dinner with this pretty girl. When I was fourteen and we went to Bob’s On The Water and we saw pelicans.

I am not hungry. I am tired of eating.

Here it comes.

Cold. It is cold.

Swallow. Full. No more.

There are flowers on her sundress. I have seen pretty girl make flowers out of clay. She must be a flower.

Another bite. I am tired of eating.

Bigger. Swallow. Hard.

More has come, more is in my mouth. The metal is cold. Salty.

Cheeks are big. Like pelican. I must be pelican.

Another bite. Teeth are stuck, everything is stuck. What is wrong with me again?

Accident. Accident is what’s wrong with me.

Please, pretty girl. No more.

Hand upon my mouth. Across lips. She knows I do not want more.

Thank you, pretty girl.

I remember you, pretty girl.

I cannot swallow, pretty girl. Please help me.

My nose. She holds my nose. Thank you, thank you.

That will definitely help. I am tired of eating.

Can she release her hand? Is she stuck like me?

She is stuck. We are stuck.

It is cold. I am cold. No more dinner.

Pretty girl. I cannot see you.

Pretty girl. What is that noise?

Pretty girl is stuck.

Stuck.

She must be a flower.