THINGS FILLED ME IN
Sam Michel
My feet turned blue. That’s because the beans were black. I didn’t care. The top was down. It was hot. My feet were burning up on the floorboard and he told me—he was just a boy—he said, Stick them in the beans! I thought we must have looked so wild, waved at anybody passing. I thought with the wind that it would look to anybody we would see like we were screaming. Of course, we were screaming, yelling, anyway. That wind would come around and box your ears and then you couldn’t hear and then you could, and when you heard yourself you started laughing. We could have died. The car was rusted almost out. Some junker from Wisconsin. Had three-on-the-tree. We laughed at that, too. Almost anything, we laughed at. Or we cried. The world seemed like a broken wire then, like anything I touched would give me a fantastic shock. Once I ran away from him, through a field. I felt like I felt when I was little, being chased, wanting to be caught and tickled. There were dandelions. When he caught me he loved me. The dandelions were taller than we were. I think he might have been asleep, on top of me, and I was watching over him at those dandelions and it made me cry to see them scatter when the wind blew. Another day, before that boy, and after, I would have known better than to cry. There would be some part of me I held inside to keep me back from laughing. Nights, or days we stopped and walked around to take some time with what we thought was pretty, he would wash my feet. Creeks and lakes and rivers, sinks and motel baths until he’d got the blue out. Sometimes, even when he washed my feet, or we were lying out at night and being quiet, still it felt to me like he was screaming. I thought if he would ever stop that he would break into a million pieces. He was for me, I thought. He was for me to keep from stopping, and if he ever stopped, and broke apart, then he was for me to pick his pieces up and put him back together. We ate those beans. Cooked them one night all night long, in a silver thrift-store pot, over an open fire. Was that love? I hardly knew him. We always drove so fast, never with the top up, always with our hair down. Nut-colored hair, that was him. I knew him in bits of eye and teeth. That’s where I saw myself. Broken wires. How much more was there to know? Who could I stand to love better? Only that was never really what a person wanted either. I was too afraid. We wanted too much to live. We didn’t want to die of it. Sometimes, I thought another kind of man would come to me, less breakable, more quiet, and that would be the man I’d want to live with. A man who figured miles-per-gallon. One who set-aside. If you wanted orchids, then he bought you orchids, and if your feet were hot, then he rolled the windows up and turned the AC on, said he’d have the radiator looked at. When I met him, I didn’t know it then, but I was on my way back home. I had been as far away as I would go. I didn’t know anything. What I wanted. Mr. Set Aside, if maybe he just once would not have showed up Fridays on my porch step with the flowers I had asked him for on Wednesday. Somehow if you ask for an orchid and you get an orchid it’s like getting socks. He made me fat. Around my heart, a human being’s purest muscle, if anybody cut me open, he would have seen a half-inch casing grown around my heart of fat. I thought I would drown in my own fat. If I had thought to ask him once to let me be alone, and he had left me alone, I think I would have drowned for good, or hanged myself, or stuck my tongue in a socket just to feel what I had felt when I was living. I was dying. That’s how I stopped wanting. I asked him would he take me for a drive, and rent us a convertible. I told him about those beans. I was mean, but I was exciting myself. Maybe if he would have hit me. But he understood. He must have thought I wanted understanding. He took me to the shore. I was dry. I said I wanted him to kiss me so he kissed me. I told him to love me, but I was dry. He pushed away at me anyway, had his pants around his ankles and his elbow jabbing in my shoulder and his hand down there to help himself until I told him stop. So he stopped. I did it for myself and said for him to watch me. Take a lesson. I let him know that I was thinking of my feet, and dandelions, and then I said that I was ready, and so here he came and didn’t seem to mind it that the name I used for him was never his but was the boy’s. A dog had more desire. I could have been a whole lot kinder to a dog. I understand, he said. And you know I think he did. That man was a murderer. He drowned me. He was good to me. In the end I think he got all he was wanting. He was pretty old. I was too pretty for him. He caught me out, and then I left him. Coming back, I made myself some rules. Rule number one was that I wasn’t back to stay. I thought that I might stay until I could remember better what I missed and left here wanting. Hardly long enough to rent, I thought. And if I meet someone, I told myself, then another rule must be to leave him just as soon as I start telling myself he’s good for me. If it’s understanding he is giving me, then I don’t want it. I thought I wanted it, understanding. I thought I partly left here because I wasn’t being understood. I know I had a bad feeling I was getting too old for myself. I didn’t know what flavor gum to chew. I know I wasn’t ready yet to switch my lipstick. Any girl I saw in town I went to school with I would try to duck. I could see them, if I saw them, how they looked at me like they were sorry for a girl who didn’t know that it was time to get her hair cut. All the best boys here are happy men and married and I’ve got one—that’s what you could see them saying by their hands when they were picking through the peaches. Maybe it was me, but the question I kept hearing was, Where’s yours? I paid two months rent here, and if there had been a place in town a girl could get a ring hooked in her nose, I would have got one. Some days, I would tie my hair in pigtails with those silly bands. I wore boots and played at being cheerleader. I felt good. I was remembering how home could make a person feel her least familiar. I liked having those women wonder had their best boys happily married men been happier some night with me. I thought I was ready to leave. But then I packed, and then I couldn’t finish packing. I wondered would I always feel like I was being pushed. What if I wanted to stay? I thought I might be being silly. I got all turned around inside myself, decided to try wanting not to want what I thought I wanted. A person who did and didn’t understand me? What was that? I stayed put. Where would I go? Who could take me? From where I sat, I was seeing too much cardboard. A full box, an empty box, a bad smell from a skinny, oatmeal colored carpet. What I learned of moving was you had to learn all over where to go to buy your stamps or find a ripe tomato. I thought I saw how a person came to never knowing which drawer was the one she kept her scissors in. And I didn’t want to spend my life on spackling someone else’s picture holes. And I thought how anywhere you went the people there would never care so much for you as they could care about each other. Anyway I liked it here, in the desert, didn’t I? I took drives at night, all by myself, way outside of town, on the other side of any mountain, where you couldn’t see a single light except what light you saw out in the sky. I’d stretch out on the roof of the car, or on the hood if it was cold, and I would think and just remember. I did like those fires. I didn’t care much for the pep squad, but when we stacked those pallets and we got them burning up as high as they would go, that was something I could watch with feeling pretty lucky. I felt different. I saw a picture of myself a little older then and gone away, maybe walking somewhere in a city. Maybe I was sitting in a room with fifteen other girls, waiting to be interviewed for a position, and I could likely know I was the only one of us who ever saw a fire burn so high and far away as I had. I told myself that I had two good feet, good skin. I had strong arms and a lovely bust. There were worse places to be. I don’t know what awful thing I thought had happened to me that I didn’t want to ever be here. I love the sage, the smell of it. I love how dark it gets and bright and thick the stars shine. I thought some nights if I could make myself simpler to myself, narrow myself down, if I could make myself as simple as a star. Wouldn’t I find what I wanted? Didn’t people still have something jump inside them when they really saw a star? If I could make myself that simple thing, I thought. If I had a diner I could go to, maybe Grace’s place, if I could go to Grace’s every Sunday afternoon and have her say my name as like she’d practiced it inside her head and waited all week long to have me hear her say it. But then I lost my sight of what a simple thing might be, or I never had it, or I was afraid to be so small and all alone, lost-feeling, up there in the dark, if that was me down here, a simple, lonely light of all the others. I didn’t trust myself. Not that small of a self. Something knocked in me, I couldn’t hear myself and wanted out. I couldn’t be so small, I thought, I was a mistake, I thought I was my parent’s fault, anything they might have fed or told me, what clothes they sent me off to school in. I felt buried. Too filled in. It came to me to blame my sex. Things filled me in, between my legs, my mother, felt like, and my father, gum and pigtails and those pompoms and that bowl of beans—I couldn’t stop them—that boy, I thought if I could be a man, have a stick between my legs, then I could trust myself to be much simpler. I could take myself in my hand and point myself in the direction I wanted to be headed. I would be all out. Except I wasn’t. I was all unsteered. The stars, when I remembered I was looking at the stars, they came out to me all blurry. I was crying. I let myself. I made myself. I couldn’t see. I hoped I wanted to be here. I said, I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope. That was a simple thing. It wasn’t much. It helped me to cry. Some night, one night, I knew that I would never leave. I hoped. I knew. I was here.